Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming - Renée Fleming and the Mormon Tabernacle C...

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Day of the Blizzard

It was probably just a fluke. Perhaps an accidental click of a mouse. I don't remember exactly how I got there. What I do remember is that at first I thought it was just a joke, a mistake, maybe fake news. It could be an old satellite image, I thought. Something from some long-forgotten hell centuries ago. I checked the page source. It was real. And it was happening right now. An ominous blob of — of what? Rain? Smog? Locusts? — was creeping up the Atlantic coast. I could only wish it was something so benign. But deep in my heart, I knew it wasn't. The colour code for rain is blue. Smog is yellow. Locusts are brown. This was white. And white can only mean one thing: snow. A death cloud of snow. And it was headed our way. I might be the only one who knows our collective fate right now, I thought.  Here in my little den in the east end of St. John's, I imagined other residents blithely chatting to workmates or shuffling around WalMart, oblivious to the impending doom. No ...
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On intoxication and consent

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In the past 36 hours, social media has exploded over a controversial headline in The Telegram. The story, by court reporter Rosie Mullaly, covered the first day of testimony in the trial of Carl Snelgrove, an RNC officer charged with sexual assault against a young woman to whom he offered a ride home in the wee hours of the morning. (Some have also condemned CBC's and NTV's television and online reporting of the trial.) Before we get to that, this is what's known so far through evidence presented in court. The constable saw the complainant on a street downtown. She was intoxicated He offered to drive her home. She accepted. After that, the woman says, everything is hazy. She vaguely remembers the officer helping her in through a basement window because she couldn't find her key. She evidently let the officer in the house. Then things go pretty well blank, although she has a fragmented recollection of him engaging in anal sex. And the man's DNA was found on her fu...
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Into the lion's den: respected climatologist survives attempted mauling unscathed

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Climatologist Michael Mann is barely able to hide his incredulity as he fends off asinine attacks in Washington on March 29, 2017. Last week's Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing in Washington should have been a sober discussion about the latest findings on climate change and the direction the U.S. should take towards mitigating the damage. Instead, it was about as productive as a World Wrestling Entertainment match. Lots of melodrama and smackdowns with no real winners, but one very real loser: the truth. At the bottom of the scrum was Michael Mann, a mild-mannered paleoclimatologist who works with proxy data to map historic temperatures. He and his colleagues produced a graph in 1998 that took the world by storm. It was dubbed the "hockey stick" graph because the sharp upward turn in the past century or so resembles the blade of a hockey stick. An extended version of the graph was incorporated into the Third Assessment Report by the UN's In...
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