Patience: The FBI's Strategy to the Oregon Standoff and Nab Cliven Bundy

The story of law enforcement in the Oregon standoff is one of patience.

On the most obvious level, that was reflected in the 41 days that armed militia members occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns. It took 25 days before the FBI and state police moved to arrest several leaders of the occupation and to barricade the refuge. It took another 15 days before the last of the final occupiers walked out, Thursday morning Oregon time.

Each of those cases involved patience as well: Officers massed on Highway 395 didn’t shoot LaVoy Finicum when he tried to ram past a barricade, nearly striking an FBI agent, though when he reached for a gun in his pocket they finally fired. Meanwhile, despite increasingly hysterical behavior from David Fry, the final occupier, officers waited him out until he emerged peacefully.

Gravitational waves have been detected for the first time

TWO black holes circle one another. Both are about 100km across. One contains 36 times as much mass as the sun; the other, 29. They are locked in an orbital dance, a kilometre or so apart, that is accelerating rapidly to within a whisker of the speed of light. Their event horizons—the spheres defining their points-of-no-return—touch. There is a violent wobble as, for an instant, quintillions upon quintillions of kilograms redistribute themselves. Then there is calm. In under a second, a larger black hole has been born.

It is, however, a hole that is less than the sum of its parts. Three suns’ worth of mass has been turned into energy, in the form of gravitational waves: travelling ripples that stretch and compress space, and thereby all in their path. During the merger’s final fifth of a second, envisaged in an artist’s impression above, the coalescing holes pumped 50 times more energy into space this way than the whole of the rest of the universe emitted in light, radio waves, X-rays and gamma rays combined.

Deadpool: the pansexual superhero who has never had a non-heterosexual experience

Movies don’t come any more self-satisfied than Deadpool. From the air of smugness that pervades this Marvel adventure, you would think it was the first picture to break the fourth wall or feature a profane, badly behaved hero. In another sense, though, it has earned the right to be pleased with itself: it does break a small amount of new ground in the area of its hero’s sexual identity. In the comics from which the movie is adapted, Deadpool is pansexual – he makes no distinction between genders or gender identity in his choice of partners. The term “bisexual” would be too narrow for Deadpool, who has flirted with Thor, propositioned Spider-Man and wouldn’t rule out, say, unicorns. A pendulum moves in just two directions; he is more like a sexual swingball.

Carly Fiorina Peaked Early And Faded Fast

Carly Fiorina dropped out of the presidential race this afternoon, viaFacebook message, a day after her seventh-place finish, with just 4 percent of the vote, in the New Hampshire primary. The “And Then There Were None”-esque winnowing of the GOP presidential field continues.

Fiorina entered the campaign in May of last year, the only female Republican candidate, touting her leadership experience as the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. If there was a lane for Fiorina in what was once a 17-laneautobahn-style highway of a GOP race, then it was one for a hybrid vehicle: She was the outsider-establishment candidate, running largely on her businesswoman bona fides and having never held elected office, and a gender warrior to boot.

Fiorina garnered attention early in the primary season for her debate performances, particularly in response to personal attacks launched by Donald Trump. “Look at that face,” he said of Fiorina, according to a September Rolling Stone article. “Would anyone vote for that?” In a Sept. 16 debate, Fiorina fired back: “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.” Her performance was also notable for her claims about undercover videos of a Planned Parenthood clinic, which Fiorina wrongly said showed “a fully formed fetus” kicking on the table.

Not coincidentally, Fiorina’s support in the polls reached its all-time high in September:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to be eighth book

An eighth Harry Potter book is to be released this summer - containing the script for a new stage play telling the wizard's story.

A hardback edition of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Parts I & II will be released on 31 July, the day after the play has debuted on stage.

It sees Harry as a father and an overworked Ministry of Magic employee.

The play is from an original new story by JK Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will tell the "untold part" of the boy wizard's story, including the story of the lives of his murdered parents, Rowling has said.

It will pick up the story 19 years after Harry was last seen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, waving his two eldest children off to Hogwarts.

Fan appeals

The script's ebook will be published simultaneously with the print editions.

David Shelley, chief executive of the publishers Little, Brown Book Group said: "We are so thrilled to be publishing the script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

"JK Rowling and her team have received a huge number of appeals from fans who can't be in London to see the play and who would like to read the play in book format - and so we are absolutely delighted to be able to make it available for them."

The special rehearsal edition of the script book will comprise the version of the play early in the production's preview period and is therefore subject to being changed before the official opening.

Previews of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child begin in May at London's Palace Theatre, with both plays set to open on 30 July. The hardback and ebook will go on sale at 0001 on 31 July.

DMX’s Downfall: From Hip-Hop King to the Brink of Death

In 1998, DMX was the hottest rapper alive. Earlier this week, police resuscitated him after a possible overdose in a Ramada Inn parking lot. How the Ruff Ryder lost his way.

DMX was found unresponsive at a Ramada Inn parking lot in his native Yonkers, New York, earlier this week after suffering a possible drug overdose. The growling rapper’s long history of addiction and arrests is as well-known as his music at this point—perhaps even more so—so it’s not hard to see why many would jump to those conclusions. Varying reports claimed that cops gave him CPR and a medic injected him with Narcan, which is an anti-opioid used to reverse the effects of a heroin overdose.

It was reported that a witness at the scene said DMX had taken a powdered drug before he collapsed.

“We’re told when cops arrived DMX was on the ground in the parking lot next to a parked car,” reported TMZ. “Cops quickly determined he was lifeless, not breathing with no pulse and immediately began CPR.”

For his part, the man formerly know as Earl Simmons claims that he did not take any powder or drugs, and says all he remembers is that he was experiencing trouble breathing after a recent bout of bronchitis and then collapsed, while a family member reportedly told TMZ that he’d requested his inhaler for his asthma before falling unconscious. Asthma attack or drug overdose, it’s hard to know what to believe. Given DMX’s history, both are equally likely to be true. But every time his name pops up in the headlines, with mentions of drugs and health and this ominous, lingering feeling of impending tragedy, we’re reminded of how far he’s fallen—and how upsetting it is that he can’t seem to stop the spiral.

In the spring of 1998, there wasn’t an album rap fans like myself were more intensely anticipating than DMX’s debut. He’d been burning through hip-hop for months, with guest appearances on hits ranging from “Money, Power, Respect” and “24 Hours To Live” to “4,3,2,1” from flossy rappers like Ma$e and LL Cool J. His single “Get at Me Dog” had been released that winter and was a go-to track at parties on my college campus that year. I have fond memories of my college days, but in retrospect, that time was especially divided when it came to mainstream hip-hop fans on my small HBCU campus in central Georgia. Most of my peers fell into one of three camps: No Limit soldiers, Wu-Tang Clan disciples, and Bad Boy fanatics—not to mention those who were devoted to “artsier” fare from the Dungeon Family and Native Tongues/Soulquarians.

But everybody seemed to love DMX. He had the hardcore East Coast aggression, the radio-friendly hooks, and the “tear da club up” energy that resonated with all of the disparate camps at my school. We all had It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot that spring.

The Long History Behind Ash Wednesday Traditions

In the United States, the practice of wearing a cross on the forehead only recently became widespread

Ash Wednesday is inextricably linked to Easter. After all, it marks the beginning of the Lent penance period that ends on that important Christian holiday. But, even though the Easter story takes place in biblical times, the traditions of Ash Wednesday aren’t quite that old.

“The practice of Ash Wednesday dates back to the 11th Century,” says Lauren F. Winner, a priest and assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. “You see that in the book Daniel in the nine chapter there’s a line about associating fasting with ashes, so ashes are associated with penance, which is the dominant theme of Lent.”

And the most familiar Ash Wednesday observance—the ash crosses worn on the foreheads of many churchgoers—hasn’t always been acknowledged by all branches of Christianity, Winner says. It wasn’t until a few decades ago that the tradition became widespread in the United States.

In the 1970s, the practice matched up with a few wider trends in American religion, including the embrace of once-discarded traditions and the search for ways to connect the physical body to spiritual life. Ash Wednesday was an opportunity for a multi-sensory way of connecting faith to the body, so many American Christians at the time decided to begin wearing that outward physical mark of their spiritual lives. Winner says she thinks its popularity has endured as it offers those celebrating an easy way to prompt conversations about faith.

“We’ve seen the rise of a whole array of bodily practices and this is a very striking one for those who are not necessarily comfortable talking about faith,”she says. “The practice of this once a year is an organic way of drawing their faith into their lives.”