From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bullet analysis used to justify the lone assassin theory behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is based on flawed evidence, according to a team of researchers including a former top FBI scientist. Writing in the Annals of Applied Statistics, the researchers urged a reexamination of bullet fragments from the 1963 shooting in Dallas to confirm the number of bullets that struck Kennedy.

Official investigations during the 1960s concluded that Kennedy was hit by two bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.

But the researchers, including former FBI lab metallurgist William Tobin, said new chemical and statistical analyses of bullets from the same batch used by Oswald suggest that more than two bullets could have struck the president.

“Evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed,” the researchers said in their article.

“If the assassination (bullet) fragments are derived from three or more separate bullets, then a second assassin is likely.”

Full story.

From The New Yorker:

Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.

A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.

Full story.

From The Guardian:

Endangered, hunted, smuggled and now abandoned, 5,000 of the world’s rarest animals have been found drifting in a deserted boat near the coast of China.

The pangolins, Asian giant turtles and lizards were crushed inside crates on a rickety wooden vessel that had lost engine power off Qingzhou island in the southern province of Guangdong. Most were alive, though the cargo also contained 21 bear paws wrapped in newspaper.

According to conservation groups, the haul was discovered on one of the world’s most lucrative and destructive smuggling routes: from the threatened jungles of south-east Asia to the restaurant tables of southern China.

Full story.

From Slate:

As we head into the late ’00s, the wave of ’80s nostalgia is receding quickly. We’ve pretty much exhausted British New Wave. Enormous, dazzling-white Nike Air Force 1s have long since reconquered street fashion. And, in a bout of what can only be called collective insanity, a few beautiful young women even dare to don leg warmers. So, before Generation Y’s fast-growing purchasing power displaces ’80s nostalgia forever with platinum-plated collector’s editions of Britney Spears’ Oops! … I Did It Again, the culture industries are gearing up to sell us the decade’s detritus. I’m talking about Patrick Swayze, white denim, and Fletch—the last just repackaged in a special “Jane Doe” edition that unapologetically includes some of the worst special features ever stamped onto a DVD.

Full article.

From The Onion:

New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

From The New Yorker:

The Bush Administration has come close to perfecting the art of unaccountability. Tenet’s memoir shows just one of several styles of evasion lately on display: last month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s admission that mistakes were made in the firing of eight United States attorneys had the air of a schoolboy hoping that bogus contrition would get him off the hook. “I accept full responsibility,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning only that he was sorry he had allowed the matter to become such a nuisance. He spent the next five hours explaining—through repeated memory failure and a steady refusal to acknowledge the contradictions and lies in which he kept entangling himself—why he bore no responsibility for anything else. Afterward, the President praised Gonzales for his “very candid assessment” and said that it “increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.” This is unaccountability as pure chutzpah, and so far it seems to be working.

Read article here.

From Real Time with Bill Maher

From Pharyngula:

Brian Benson, an eighth-grade student who won first place in the Life Science/Biology category for his project “Creation Wins!!!,” says he disproved part of the theory of evolution. Using a rolled-up paper towel suspended between two glasses of water with Epsom Salts, the paper towel formed stalactites. He states that the theory that they take millions of years to develop is incorrect.

“Scientists say it takes millions of years to form stalactites,” Benson said. “However, in only a couple of hours, I have formed stalactites just by using paper towel and Epsom Salts.”

Read all about why this is ridiculous, here.