Events

Earlier today, Komen's head of public policy, Karen Handel, resigned from the organization, mischaracterizing her opponents as having mischaracterized her: Karen Handel, the charity's vice president for public policy, told Komen officials that she supported the move to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. She said the discussion started before she arrived at the organization and was approved at the highest levels of the charity. "I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the...

A man accused of rape in Alabama got into an online argument with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office on the office's Facebook page: U.S. Marshals took Dustin McCombs into custody today in Ohio, said Chief Deputy Randy Christian. The U.S. Marshal's Gulf Coast Regional Task for in Birmingham shared information with their counterparts in Ohio who tracked down the fugitive. McComb's was featured on the Jefferson County Sheriff Department's Facebook page as its "Creep of the Week" because of an...

Writer Matt Glassman wrestles with why Bradshaw didn't take a knee on the 1 in yesterday's game: League wide, 99.4% of extra points were made this year. The Giants were 45 for 45. You think Brady has less than a 0.6% chance of leading a TD drive with a minute and two timeouts? Not a chance. According to the NFL win probability stat, the Pats had a 4% chance to win when they got the ball back. And they only had 1 timeout as it turned out. And win probability doesn’t take into account the individual team...

The Superbowl starts in a little over an hour, with weather in Indianapolis no one expected: clear skies and 9°C. In Chicago it's just a smidge cooler, but still a beautiful afternoon for February. Or for March, for that matter. Parker gets one more walk before the game. Go Giants! (For why, see Robert Wright's decision tree on the subject.)

Erin Ryan at Jezebel put together a brief outline of the Susan Komen Race for the Cure public relations disaster over the past week: We reported that the timing of Planned Parenthood's defunding seemed oddly coincidental, seeing as less than a year ago, Komen appointed a woman named Karen Handel to serve as the charity's Senior Vice President of Public Policy. Handel had run unsuccessful for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-choice platform that cited as one of its central tenets the necessity of...

The international airline consortium oneworld, which includes American Airlines and British Airways, this week lost one member and had an applicant postpone membership. On Thursday, Hungarian flag carrier Malév suspended operations: Malev, the state-owned Hungarian airline, ceased flying with debts of €205 million after the government withdrew financing. The airline, which was placed under bankruptcy protection earlier this week, stopped operating all fights at 06.00 this morning. Ryanair today...

Sure, I've posted photos of the moon before, but it never gets old to me: Well, all right, at 4½ billion years it is old to me, but you know what I meant. On a side note, I just Googled "age of the moon" and discovered that many of the top results are from outside the reality-based community. For example, the second item on my results came from the Institute for Creation Research ("Biblical. Accurate. Certain."), in which one Thomas G. Barnes, D.Sc., begins with the assertion: "It takes but one proof of...

The thing I like most about February: at the end of it, Chicago has an hour and a quarter more daylight than at the beginning of it. Today we have 10 hours of daylight, the most since November 10th, and on the 29th we have 11 hours and 14 minutes. I notice this every year around now, just as I forget every year how grim December can be.

With yesterday's temperatures more like April than January, Chicago magazine's explanation of it is timely: So what is going on? It's the warmest La Niña on record. That brings the global temperature down, but causes different effects in different places. Chicago is going through a near-record warm spell—strong La Niñas correlate with above average temperatures, like the 18°C we hit in 1989 when the mean January max was 11°C, 2°C higher than this month's mean. Meanwhile, Alaska and northern Europe are...

The normal temperatures in Chicago for January 31st are a low of -8.3°C and a high of 0°C. Right now, the temperature is 13°C; the low last night was 7°C The normal temperatures in Chicago for April 9th are a low of 2°C and a high of 13°C. That is all.