BOMBER COMPARISON: StrategyPage’s WW2 aircraft series stretches out a bit with a photo showing the WW2 B-29 next to an XB-36. The B-36 was developed during WW2.

THAT’S SOME STRANGE BED TRUMP AND PUTIN ARE SUPPOSEDLY SHARING:

NEIN MEANS NEIN: German Judge Acquits Turkish Man of Rape After 4 Hours of Forced Violent Sex.

A German judge has acquitted a Turkish man of rape, despite the fact that he forced a woman to have sex with him, and left her incapacitated. The judge argued that in “the mentality of the Turkish cultural circle,” what the woman “had experienced as rape” might be considered merely “wild sex.” The judge refused to convict the rapist, because “no intention is demonstrable.”

It’s different when they do it.

THE PROS AND CONS OF CONCEALED CARRY REVOLVERS.

IT IS NOT MY FAULT; IT IS THAT OF MY NATURE: Tillerson considers adding North Korea to state sponsors of terror list, N.K. responds with more nuke threats.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Bernard Fancher, A Good And Gentle Man.

BECAUSE THEY CAN? Why Georgia Tech Built a Tarzan Robot That Swings Around on Wires.

IT’S COMPLICATED: North Korean ships dock in Chinese port despite coal embargo.

The ships docked Thursday and Friday at a port in the city of Tangshan in northern Hebei province, near Beijing.

All six North Korean ships were loaded with anthracite coal, according to a daily docking plan published on the port of Jintang’s website. Unloading times of up to six hours were listed for the ships.

Three of the ships — the Jin Hung 9, the Woory Star and the Kum Gang San 2 — had been due to dock since February, when China said it was halting all coal imports from North Korea for 2017 in accordance with a UN Security Council resolution passed last year.

It’s unclear what the ships unloaded. The three have since left the port.

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang said Friday that his country’s policy of not accepting coal imports from North Korea had not changed.

“There have been some reports that some coal ships have tied up in port. You are aware if these ships continue to remain out at sea, away from port, we need to make some humanitarian consideration for their crews,” Lu said.

China also reportedly has put bombers in the area on alert, which are probably a bigger threat to Pyongyang than to U.S./R.O.K forces.

AMERICAN SHARIA: More arrests for female genital mutilation in Michigan.

RENT OUR SOFTWARE, OR ELSE: Microsoft will cut services to standalone Office users so they’ll subscribe to Office 365.

When Microsoft launched Office 365 in 2010, Microsoft officials said then that customers were asking to move to the cloud. Beginning in 2020, some Office customers will need to buy Office 365 to do so.

In an update to Microsoft’s Office 365 system requirements released on Thursday, Microsoft said that consumers who have already purchased “perpetual”—i.e., standalone—versions of Office, such as Office 2010, Office 2013, and Office 2016, would be cut off from accessing the business versions of OneDrive and Skype after mainstream support expires. Those who have purchases those Office suites will be allowed to connect until Oct. 13, 2020—the day mainstream support ends for Office 2016, and the day the new support policy kicks in.

This software-as-a-service business model is irksome. I’d rather pay for software upfront and then own it outright until I’m ready to upgrade. Having bought-and-paid-for software held for ransom is worse than irksome.

OMAR MAHMOOD: Islam needs Islamophobia right now: In Pakistan, a mob killed a journalism student because he didn’t believe. That could have been me.

IT’S CUTE, BUT IT DIDN’T WORK: This Student Sent A PowerPoint To Her Crush Explaining Why He Should Date Her And It’s Hilariously Relatable.

Sadly:

WHEN THEY GO LOW… U Alaska Art Exhibit Features Painting of Captain America Holding President Trump’s Decapitated Head.

CLEANUP AT 600,000 FEET: As orbit becomes more crowded, risk from space debris grows.

EUGENE VOLOKH: No, Gov. Dean, there is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.

I’VE ASKED THIS QUESTION A LOT: Why Do Allergies Cause “Brain Fog?”

AMANDA MARCOTTE: Women still do most of the work in preventing pregnancy — does it have to be that way?

Women, a new study published in the Journal of Sex Research has shown, are expected to do the majority (and often all) the work required so that heterosexual couples can have sex without making babies.

In a paper titled “More Than a Physical Burden: Women’s Mental and Emotional Work in Preventing Pregnancy,” sociologist Katrina Kimport — who works as an associate professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco — documented the way that women are tasked with the majority of physical work required to prevent pregnancy and also expected to do most of the emotional and mental labor as well.

“While the biotechnological landscape of available methods may explain the assignment of the physical burden for contraception to women,” Kimport wrote, “this does not mean the concomitant time, attention, and stress that preventing pregnancy requires must also be primarily assumed by women.”

Until medicine advances far enough to give us that elusive “pill for men,” it seems that Marcotte believes women are too emotionally fragile to be accountable for their own uteri.

THE ART OF THE DEAL: Freed Egyptian American prisoner returns home following Trump intervention.

MORE POWER TO THEM: Power-starved Africa develops appetite for coal, dismisses environmental concerns in West.

The concerns about coal expressed by environmentalists and climate researchers in the West are voiced here mostly by white expatriates and foreign nongovernmental organizations. Coal in Africa is an abundant resource for a continent still hustling to catch up with the developed world. South Africa, the economic engine of the region, gets 93 percent of its electricity from coal, one of the highest percentages in the world.

John Owusu, a retired engineer originally from Ghana, worked for 50 years across all regions of Africa and was an early disciple of clean energy. He understands Africa’s appetite for a fossil fuel that is in decline in the U.S. and other advanced economies, as well as the reluctance to embrace alternative fuel sources.

“People think of this continent as jungle and sunshine, but we have a long rainy season in the tropics, more like a monsoon, and there’s no sun for days,” Mr. Owusu said. “That makes it hard to rely on something like solar. Wind turbines make more sense, but you still need batteries to store the power.”

Why do American gentry liberals have so much disdain for striving Africans?

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION: Google Chromebook is still spying on grade school students.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Special Operations Command Prepares to Test Airborne Directed Energy Weapon.

The directed energy weapon is “rapidly moving” from the conceptual to the practical, he said in late March. Webb recently visited MIT Lincoln Labs to view its advancements, and saw Naval Sea Systems Command Dahlgren’s latest efforts to network all of the various components within the aircraft.

He was impressed by the improvements that had been made.

“We’re no longer talking about bulky chemical lasers, but streamlined electrical lasers,” Webb said. “These pioneering scientists have honed the ability to combine smaller lasers into a finely-tuned, exquisite single laser. Beam control seems to no longer be an issue. Nor is the cooling technology needed … to keep the system operating.

“Believe me, this technology is quickly leaving the pages of science fiction,” he added.

A proof of concept for a high-energy laser on a gunship will help pave the path for AFSOC to pursue directed energy weapons on other aircraft, he said.

There’s almost nothing which can’t be made better by the addition of high-energy laser weapons.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Trump Voters Want Respect. Here’s How to Give It to Them.

After the election, shell-shocked opponents of Donald Trump divided themselves into roughly two camps. The first group wanted to focus on understanding and reaching out to the disaffected white working- and lower-middle class voters who had given Trump his electoral college victory. The second group wanted to focus on resisting Trump; their solution to the Democratic Party’s loss of those voters was, essentially, to wait for them to die off.

As you can probably guess, my sympathies are with the “outreach” folks rather than the “wait for them to die” folks. A strategy of demographically swamping your opponents is more often discussed than delivered, as followers of Israel-Palestine negotiations, Northern Irish politics, or recent American elections can attest. Also, those people are your fellow citizens, and it is not healthy — civically or emotionally — to rest your dreams on the deaths of millions of Americans.

The problem is, smugness and feelings of superiority are the coin in which the gentry liberals pay themselves for their politics.

KNOWN WOLF: Paris Gunman Was Questioned by Police in February.. “The attacker, identified by officials as Karim Cheurfi, a French national, had been convicted of shooting at a police officer in 2001, the police said. He was recently flagged to authorities as a possible threat but was released after questioning in February due to a lack of evidence, they said.”

SEC DEF MATTIS SAYS: Syria still has chemical weapons. Well, Obama lied, people died.