Former Texas governor Connally talked with Middle Eastern leaders in 1980 trying to convince Iran to hold on to the US embassy hostages, so that Reagan would win the 1980 election.

This is according to Ben Barnes, who worked for him and accompanied him on the trip.

Officials of various countries have affirmed, over the years, that Reagan made a deal with Khomeini to refuse to free the US embassy hostages before the 1980 presidential election. Here is Greg Palast's report on Ben Barnes.

It accuses him of a lot of nastiness, but doesn't answer the questions it raises: why did Barnes not say this before, and why does he say it now? But, it doesn't cast much doubt on his recent statement.

As for calling "Dubya" a "draft-dodger". that term should not be used. I rebuke Dubya for many wrongs, including the crime of starting a war of aggression against Iraq. But there is nothing wrong in trying to escape from being conscripted into an unjust war.

That includes the Vietnam War, which the US ramped up based on fabricating the fictitious "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin.

And it includes Putin's invasion of Ukraine. We should support Russians who are doing whatever it takes to avoid fighting in the Putin forces.

(satire) *Prisoner Given 10 Extra Years For Good Behavior To Serve As Role Model For Fellow Inmates.*

Exxon scientists in the 1970s and 1980s presented executives with a fairly accurate projection of what global heating caused by fossil fuels might do to the world in a few decades. But they presented it as a possibility;

with all the gaps in the scientific knowledge of that time, they could not determine whether those things would really happen.

By around 2000, the science had resolved the uncertainty and fossil-fuel executives could not honestly deny the damage they were going to cause.

US gun fanatics have won the battle of competing pressures on US business,

They have even passed state laws to boycott banks that reject gun companies as clients.

In news coverage of homicides in the Boston Globe, from 1976 to 1984, stories where the victim was black were less likely to use language that would encourage seeing the victim as a human being than stories about white victims.

This must reflect racism in some way or other. I'd be very interested in whether it is the result of racism of the writers, or some sort of systemic racism.

I am puzzled that the article says that this used "artificial intelligence", but it doesn't say what that is meant to refer to. I am dubious that something as complex as reasoning software or machine learning was needed to categorize the stories.