August 8, 2012: Afternoon
- This election's critical "low-information voters": Romney supporters who must not know any better, according to Democrats.
- Philanthropist to spend his last $1.5 billion by 2020, then shut down his foundation.
- Reuters pulled into Syrian civil war, when its social media channels were hijacked by both anti- and pro-government hackers.
- Climatologists determined that the sheer likelihood of having a hotter-than-average summer is only getting higher.
- Recalling the politicized Olympics—most of Africa pulled out of the 1976 games after New Zealand broke the apartheid line.
- What it costs to raise an Olympian: "easily a six-figure 'investment'—with no guarantee of a 'return.'"
- As the three-drug protocol comes under scrutiny, states look for "more humane" execution methods.
- Texas executes developmentally disabled man, once cited Steinbeck in its criteria for who should be exempt from the death penalty.
- Locked-in syndrome survivor talks about having full consciousness and hearing doctors plan to take him off life support.
- Why computers have picked up the human quirk of seeing faces in everyday objects.
- Brigham Young descendant on her family's legacy, the silent suffering of Mormon women, and leaving the church in her 30s.
- Jason Novak illustrates Benjamin Franklin's ca. 1730 weird news clippings from the Pennsylvania Gazette.
- What makes an air-traffic-control mistake a "near-miss?"