Events

It turns out, the King of the Netherlands has an air transport pilot certificate: King Willem-Alexander, reigning monarch of the Netherlands, revealed in an interview with Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that he'd regularly flown flights for a subsidiary of the Dutch flag carrier for over two decades. Calling the part-time role a "hobby," the King says that he'd taken to the cockpit as a co-pilot of KLM Cityhopper -- the airline's short-haul carrier -- flights for over 21 years. Being the co-pilot also...

Surprising everyone in Washington last night, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia. The Washington Post sees this as really bad news for the president: “The risk is that you lose control of your agenda,” added Robert Luskin, a Washington white-collar attorney who represented Karl Rove in the Plame investigation, as well as a pair of Clinton senior officials during Whitewater....

The Tribune reported late yesterday that the John Hancock Center is for sale: Chicago-based developer Hearn Co. plans to put the North Michigan Avenue tower's office space and parking garage up for sale, possibly by late summer, company President and CEO Stephen Hearn said. Hearn said he believes the real estate is worth more than $330 million, or more than double what his firm paid in 2013. Hearn has been in talks with companies interested in putting their name on the skyscraper since the structure's...

I just realized, 25 years ago today I graduated from college. To help you understand what that means, here's the Beloit College Mindset List for kids born back then. And there I am with my college radio colleague Renee Depuy: For context, this was my dorm refrigerator two days earlier (you can see the packing boxes to the left):

Via Deeply Trivial:

I'm sad that an urban area with 8 million people can no longer support two regional, daily newspapers. This makes me very uncomfortable: Tronc, the parent company of the Tribune, has entered into a nonbinding letter of intent to acquire Wrapports Holdings, which owns the Sun-Times as well other assets such as the Chicago Reader alternative weekly, the Aggrego digital content business and the syndicated column The Straight Dope. The announcement follows months of discussions between Wrapports and Tronc...

The New York Times yesterday published a chilling description of how Venezuela's democracy sputtered and died: Venezuela, by the numbers, resembles a country hit by civil war. Its economy, once Latin America’s richest, is estimated to have shrunk by 10 percent in 2016, more than Syria’s. Its inflation that year has been estimated as high as 720 percent, nearly double that of second-ranked South Sudan, rendering its currency nearly worthless. In a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves...

Just, I dunno, man. Did the president blab to the Russian Foreign Minister what our intelligence capabilities are? In front of TASS, no less? How about the Troglodyte General reversing the Obama Administration's efforts to target only violent drug offenders instead of corner boys? And the Grand Old Party abetting this nonsense? Or how to understand the Comey firing? Sleep is overrated.

A fossil found in a mine in Alberta six years ago is one of the best-preserved dinosaur specimens ever discovered: On March 21, 2011, Shawn Funk was digging in Alberta’s Millennium Mine with a mechanical backhoe, when he hit “something much harder than the surrounding rock.” A closer look revealed something that looked like no rock Funk had ever seen, just “row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.” What he had found was a 2,500-pound dinosaur fossil, which was soon shipped...

Laura Reston at New Republic has a good piece on how the Soviets Russian government is doubling down on its disinformation campaign against Western democracies: One of the most recent battles in the propaganda war took place on January 4, less than a week after President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election. The Donbass International News Agency, a small wire service in Eastern Ukraine, published a short article online headlined “MASSIVE NATO...