Local
- Rochester is losing the LPGA Championship to New York City after this year.
- One of the world’s premier jazz events fires up at the end of this month – the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival. Catch the lineup here.
- UFOs over Greece, New York!
Sports
- The NCAA is crumbling, and the current market for “college student football players” is going to have to change. Andy Schwarz explains why worries over competitive balance are an invalid reason to withhold payment from athletes – college football is already imbalanced. Meanwhile, the most promising lawsuit aimed at breaking the NCAA cartel was just settled for $40 million.
- The International Tennis Federation is testing new technology to accurately measure the speeds of various court surfaces. If you are a tennis fan, this nerdy insiders look at the game is fascinating stuff.
- At Friday’s England-Peru soccer friendly, a paper airplane tossed from the upper deck by an English fan struck Peruvian defender Hansell Riojas in the head.
- A gorgeous photo by Cardinals’ photographer Scott Rovak.
National
- On average American taxpayers pay for Wal-Mart’s “low, low prices” by subsidizing the average store $900,000 per year in public assistance for its employees. “I get by off of hope, prayer, and strength.”
- The current installment of “what new thing should scare me this week?” – the food industry is putting nano-sized particles of metal in all sorts of foods, and the FDA has done little to study or regulate the use of metals in foods.
- A longform video compilation of the first decade of news coverage of the AIDS crisis beginning in 1982.
- Gun porn at its finest. And a fascinating perspective on open carry supporters versus Not In My Backyard conservatives.
- Asshat Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) finds a way to make the wonderful release of American POW Bowe Bergdahl about himself.
- Police in Miami Gardens, Florida, have systematically preyed on minorities, labeling a 5-year-old and a 99-year-old as “suspicious”, and stopping and frisking the same man 258 times – arresting him 62 times for trespassing at his job.
- Texas Equusearch finds 127 cars submerged in Houston’s bayous; Houston police tell them to shut up about
it.
- In an effort to make even more money at the expense of a major publisher, Amazon is “understocking Hachette books so as to create shipping delays, cutting discounts, suggesting alternative titles to buyers, and even refusing to take pre-orders, foreclosing a major sales opportunity.” Consider shopping elsewhere.
- Thanks to ESPN, the National Spelling Bee ran out of words.
- It’s not that she had a baby out of wedlock, or that she had a newborn participate in her wedding. It’s how she included the infant that got everyone upset.
- From the May 1967 issue of Popular Science, John Steinbeck explains why “camping is for the birds.”
International
- Many news outlets reported on the escalating violence in Iraq that led to the deathsof at least 799 Iraqis in May, “underlining the daunting challenges the government faces as it struggles to contain a surge in sectarian violence.” Not mentioned: the 2,500 firearm deaths per month, every month, in the United States, and our non-existent struggled to contain the carnage.
- The United Kingdom threatens to bolt from the European Union over the choice of the next EU Commission President.
- What everyone expected now appears to be true. Qatar, a country of 2 million people that is smaller than Connecticut, bribed its way to the 2022 World Cup.
- Qatar has nearly as many migrant workers as it does citizens, and the absolute monarchy is expected to kill more than 4,000 migrant workers in the process of World Cup construction.
- In just 25 years, The Great Forgetting has erased Tiananmen Square from the collective memories of an entire generation.
- Cyprus held the country’s first gay pride parade on Saturday. (For some reason, the Washington Post felt compelled to first illustrate the story with a photograph of an anti-gay protester.)
- The alleged killer of three at a Jewish museum in Brussels has been captured in France.
- Thailand’s military struggles to control the country after ousting the government in a coup. Democracy is not expected to be “restored” by the military junta for at least 15 months.
- A wind turbine suitable for urban apartment dwellers.
- Photographer uses 130-year-old camera to take wonderful photos of London.
Interstellar
- SpaceX passes a critical environmental review from the FAA en route to building the first commercial orbital launching station near Brownsville, Texas.
- A whopping five planets will be visible after sunset on evenings in early June. Head out to see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in all their glory in the coming days.
