REMEMBERING NORMAN BORLAUG: He Saved A Billion Lives.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: “American warplanes began airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Tikrit late Wednesday, finally joining a stalled offensive to retake the Iraqi city as American officials sought to seize the initiative from Iran, which had taken a major role in directing the operation.”

WE’RE #1! It’s always nice to be number one.

MONEY: House passes $3.8 trillion spending plan.

UH OH: Pilot Locked Out of Cockpit in Germanwings Plane Crash: “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

Related: Could Plane Cockpits Be Too Secure? Should pilots be allowed to lock themselves in the cockpit?

So over spring break we scored an upgrade to first class, and I saw something I hadn’t seen before: When the pilot left the cockpit to use the bathroom, the two flight attendants up front (1) barricaded the galley/lavatory/cockpit area with a cart; and (2) one of them went into the cockpit while the pilot was gone. Maybe this happens all the time, but I’d never noticed it before. Presumably the flight attendant went into the cockpit so that no one was left alone in there, just in case. Apparently, at least at American Airlines (the airline I flew out to LA), that has been a worry to be secured against. I asked a stewardess later if this procedure was new, but she just said they’re not supposed to talk about it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: International Students Stream Into U.S. Colleges. Somebody on Twitter was presenting this as evidence that there’s no bubble. I think it’s more like evidence that tuitions have reached the point that there aren’t enough Americans willing to pay full-freight, and schools are having to look abroad, and in fact the story supports that take: “Amid rising costs, shrinking state support and student resistance to tuition increases, foreign students have become crucial to many public universities. Some hire foreign consultants to recruit students overseas, while others send their own staff on scouting missions.”

WE TRADED FIVE HIGH-RANKING JIHADISTS FOR A DESERTER: Bergdahl Charged With Desertion.

Related: Jen Psaki said Obama was “familiar” with the desertion accusations before making the deal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law School Dean Average Tenure Is 2.78 Years, An All-Time Low. At Tennessee it’s been roughly double that since I arrived. But we get a new Dean next year.

AT AMAZON, take 30% off sunglasses. Summer is coming.

Plus, big savings on Storage & Organization Solutions.

FRONTIERS IN FEMINISM: 10 Struggles Of Women With Big Thighs. Male privilege is everywhere! “6. You often find yourself comparing your thighs to thighs of the opposite sex. And when a guy has smaller thighs than you (which is pretty standard), you immediately want to curl up in a ball.”

SCIENCE: Men’s preference for certain body types has evolutionary roots. “This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or ‘in the eyes of the beholder’ as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic.”

FLY-FREE CORRIDORS: How Ancient Cattle Herders Avoided Sleeping Sickness.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: An Exoskeleton That Acts Like a Wearable Chair.

AT AMAZON, 20% off Women’s Dresses and Separates.

Plus, New Releases in Blu-Ray and DVD.

SPACE: Bigelow Aerospace’s Inflatable Habitat Ready for Space Station Trip.

Also: Virgin Galactic Opens Rocket Plant to Build Satellite Launchers.

CLEANUP: 6 Ways to Solve Our Dangerous Space Junk Problem.

Here, by the way, is a piece Rob Merges and I wrote for the Environmental Law Reporter on this topic back in 2010.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Grant Dossetto, The Hopping Bird, a baseball novel.

FOR MUSICIANS, survival in the age of Spotify. Hey, ASCAP just wrote me a couple of weeks ago to say that I’d never cashed a check from many years back — I don’t think I ever got it — and my thought was, hey for this $29 I’d have to have like twelve million plays on Spotify. . . . .

THE HILL: Clinton hit with racketeering lawsuit over emails.

DICK CHENEY: Obama to blame for Islamic State in Iraq, warns against nuclear Iran.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday night said President Obama “abandoned” Iraq despite warnings of chaos from Pentagon advisors, and the result is that “now you’ve got [the Islamic State] controlling a third or more of the country.”

In a forceful foreign policy address that was cheered at a fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Cheney also declared that America must never let Iran get a nuclear weapon.

Just a reminder: As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.

Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?

Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.

Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.

And who can forget this?

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012

AUTHORS AND the Kindle Unlimited program.

STEPHEN GREEN PROPOSES THE HOUSE OF DEMOCRATS: “All the trappings of power and none of the responsibilities? I say: Give them what they want.”

“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: Austin Bay: Yemen 2015: From Success to Cesspool.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The vast Empire of Censorship in Europe – and how to fight it. The best cure for censorship is to punish a few censors. Like all bullies, they’re also cowards.