WHOA: Bahrain’s largest oil find estimated at 80 billion barrels.

Bahrain’s oil minister and energy executives detailed the find at a press conference, saying the tight oil was discovered in the offshore Khalij Al-Bahrain Basin, which spans some 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) in shallow waters off the country’s western coast.

The field also contains an estimated 14 trillion cubic feet of gas.

But: Bahrain Seeks Big Oil’s Help to Develop New Shale Discovery.

The amount of oil and gas that can be recovered from hard-to-reach pockets in shale rocks under the sea is uncertain, and development is potentially an expensive proposition. Halliburton Co. will drill two wells this year in the offshore Khaleej Al Bahrain Basin to appraise how much of the oil contained underground is actually recoverable.

“Only a fraction of the 80-plus billion barrels is likely to be recoverable,” Tom Quinn, senior analyst for Middle East upstream at consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd., said by email. “The oil will also be technically challenging and potentially high cost to develop,” while Bahrain’s previous oil contracts offered meager returns for international oil companies, he said.

American frackers are going to earn all-new fortunes selling their expertise to Bahrain.

OOPS: A woman says an Ancestry.com DNA test revealed her father — her parents’ fertility doctor. “The doctor recommended that Ashby undergo a procedure in which she would be inseminated with both sperm from her husband and an anonymous donor who matched the couple’s specifications, the lawsuit says. The couple requested a donor who was in college and taller than 6 feet with brown hair and blue eyes — and Mortimer told them that he had found a donor matching their description, the suit says. But the lawsuit claims that when Mortimer performed the procedure in the summer of 1980, he used his own sperm. He did not match the couple’s specifications. Ashby became pregnant and, in May 1981, Mortimer delivered his own child — never divulging the secret, according to the lawsuit.”

Plus: “After news of the lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com said in a statement Tuesday that DNA testing ‘helps people make new and powerful discoveries about their family history and identity.'”

TYLER O’NEIL: Larry Nassar Googled ‘Vaginal Massage’ and ‘Intravaginal Manipulations’ Before FBI Arrest in 2016.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END: Trump instructs military to begin planning for withdrawal from Syria.

GOOD: Quick-acting ‘injectable bandage’ developed from seaweed.

BLESS HER HEART: Former Obama Aide Jen Psaki Speculates That Trump’s Nickname for Obama Might Have ‘Racial Undertones.’

More or less than “golf,” “Chicago,” and well, “Bless his heart?”

CHANGE: Search is dead, long live the new search.

The writing’s been on the wall for a very long time.

Consumers are sick of being exposed to endless marketing, they don’t like their data being mined to provide advertisers and crafty political operators with tools they use to try to manipulate them.

They’ve read the stories about Cambridge Analytica and they are beginning to grasp what’s sexy about privacy and the need to make sure the sites, services and solutions providers they use are truly protecting the customer data they gather.

In other words, they want search services with new business models. Ad-blockers in Safari, the ultra-private Duck Duck Go search engine, and Mozilla’s Facebook Container Extension all reflect this emerging need.

This growing understanding will (I predict) eventually create a consumer blowback against firms that have not protected customer data responsibly – we’ve already seen the impact of that shift hit the fan to blow down the value of Facebook stock.

Faster, please.

GOVERNMENT SCIENCE: “I don’t f—ing care”: In wooing $67M from big alcohol, NIH nixed critical study.

FASTER, PLEASE: A Huge Gene Discovery Is Set to Improve The Lives of People With Blood Disorders.

BUT OTHER THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE WEBSITE, MRS FOX? Sadistic YouTube Deletes Channels, Demonetizes and Censors Content and Refuses to Respond to Press.

SNOWFALLS A THING OF THE PAST? EUROPE IS COLDER THAN THE NORTH POLE.

As Glenn would say, Fallen Angels is just a science fiction novel, right guys? Right? Guys?

BLUE WAVE? Expanding map creates tough choices for GOP.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) must decide how much focus should be placed on competitive and Democratic-leaning districts that Hillary Clinton carried — or if the party should put more energy into protecting solid GOP seats that could be in danger if a wave materializes this fall.

“Not every seat is created equal. … Ultimately, you have to decide what is the best path to holding the majority,” said Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist based in Texas. “You’re dealing with a chess board that has 30 or 40 pieces on it, and you’re trying to figure out how to get from here to there.”

“It’s a judgment call both sides have to make,” he added. “And it’s challenging.”

Republicans are bracing for tough midterm elections, with anxiety running high over whether anti-Trump sentiment could hurt the GOP at the polls.

The GOP election strategy has been further scrambled by Democrat Conor Lamb’s upset victory in a Pennsylvania special election last month, which suggested the GOP could even be vulnerable in areas of the country where Trump was strong in 2016.

Historically, the president’s party loses about 32 seats on average during the midterms. Democrats will win back the majority if they flip a net 23 seats.

As Glenn has written here several times: If you want to make a difference, spend less time online and more time volunteering for a local candidate.

2013 FLASHBACK: CDC Study: Use of Firearms for Self-Defense is ‘Important Crime Deterrent.’ “The $10 million study was commissioned by President Barack Obama as part of 23 executive orders he signed in January.”

ED MORRISSEY: Did Police Miss a Chance to Head Off Yesterday’s Shooting at Youtube’s HQ?

Police can’t simply arrest everyone that sleeps in their cars, even when families suggest that they may be a threat. Their range of potential options also depends on the specificity of the warning provided by her family too, which we do not yet know, and the constitutional requirement of probable cause before arrest. If they warned that Aghdam might be planning to attack YouTube’s offices, though, would the police have had the option of requesting her to come to the station for an interview? Should they have gotten a search warrant for the car and detained her at the scene until they got one, if the warning was specific? That could be a fruitful discussion in the aftermath of this shooting.

Read the whole thing.

I’m not sure if “sleeping in your car” is in and of itself sufficient cause for suspicion these days in the insanely expensive real estate market that is California: QED, this recent L.A. Times article which notes that “The number of cars, campers and vans serving as homes in the city of Los Angeles has gone up significantly, reaching more than 4,700 in 2017’s homelessness count.”

FORGOTTEN FACT: When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he was less popular than Donald Trump is today. “According to an early 1968 Harris Poll, the man whose half-century of martyrdom we celebrate this week died with a public disapproval rating of nearly 75%, a figure shocking in its own day and still striking even in today’s highly polarized political climate.”

CHANGE: Manufacturing Industry Has Strongest Jobs Increase in Three Years.

UH-OH: Russia’s Dangerous S-400 Air Defense System is Headed to China (And Maybe Turkey).

“A priority task in the sphere of military technical cooperation is the implementation of the contract for supplies of S-400 Triumf missile systems to Turkey,” Russian president Vladimir Putin said during of the Russia-Turkey Cooperation Council according to TASS. “We hope that the sectoral intergovernmental commission will look into the prospects for further supplies of Russian-made military hardware to Turkey at its next meeting.”

Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told TASS that Moscow would do everything possible to deliver the S-400 to Turkey—which has already made a down payment—by 2020. “Turkey did raise this issue. As far as I know, steps will be taken to meet Turkey’s wish,” Ushakov said.

Turkey, for its part, is determined to buy the S-400 despite the threat of sanctions by the United States.

“The U.S. understands Turkey’s desire to improve its air defenses,” a Trump administration official told the Hürriyet Daily News. “But we are concerned and have said so publicly about potential acquisition of Russian S-400 missiles, which would have implications for NATO interoperability and which would potentially expose Turkey to sanctions due to the new sanctions law recently passed by Congress.”

Program costs aside, if Ankara takes delivery of the S-400, we need to seriously reconsider Turkey’s participation in the F-35 program. The S-400 was designed in part to beat fifth-generation stealth fighters like the F-35. If Turkey were to field both systems, the operational intelligence they could provide to Moscow would be invaluable to the Russian military — and dangerous to us and our actual allies.

OH TO BE IN ENGLAND: London pensioner, 78, is arrested on suspicion of murder after ‘stabbing armed burglar, 38, to death in a struggle in his kitchen’ when two intruders woke him as he slept next to his wife.

Shades of the vignettes Mark Steyn described in his June 2000 American Spectator column, “In the Absence of Guns:”

No wonder, even as they’re being pounded senseless, many British crime victims are worrying about potential liability. A few months ago, Shirley Best, owner of the Rolander Fashion boutique whose clients include the daughter of the Princess Royal, was ironing some garments when two youths broke in. They pressed the hot iron into her side and stole her watch, leaving her badly burnt. “I was frightened to defend myself,” said Miss Best. “I thought if I did anything I would be arrested.”

And who can blame her? Shortly before the attack, she’d been reading about Tony Martin, a Norfolk farmer whose home had been broken into and who had responded by shooting and killing the teenage burglar. He was charged with murder. In April, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment–for defending himself against a career criminal in an area where the police are far away and reluctant to have their sleep disturbed. In the British Commonwealth, the approach to policing is summed up by the motto of Her Majesty’s most glamorous constabulary: The Mounties always get their man–i.e., leave it to us. But these days in the British police, when they can’t get their man, they’ll get you instead: Frankly, that’s a lot easier, as poor Mr. Martin discovered.

More here:

Between the introduction of pistol permits in 1903 and the banning of handguns after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, Britain has had a century of incremental gun control–“sensible measures that all reasonable people can agree on.” And what’s the result? Even when you factor in America’s nutcake jurisdictions with the crackhead mayors, the overall crime rate in England and Wales is higher than in all 50 states, even though over there they have more policemen per capita than in the U.S., on vastly higher rates of pay installing more video surveillance cameras than anywhere else in the Western world.

Steyn’s column is a pretty good sneak preview where America could be headed if the Parkland kids have their way.

(Found via Dana Loesch.)

AND NOT WITHOUT REASON: Men are concerned about what #MeToo is doing to men at work. Though the gender divide here is not that big: “Sixty-eight percent of Republican men and 59 percent of Republican women say it’s ‘harder’ for men to interact with female colleagues while 45 percent of Democratic men and 40 percent of Democratic women feel the same.”

Plus: “Few respondents from either party said the #MeToo conversation would improve women’s economic mobility: 28 percent of Pew’s sample said it would lead to more opportunities for female workers. (Twenty percent said it would decrease opportunities, and 51 percent thought it wouldn’t make a difference.)”

WINNING: Businesses added 241,000 jobs in March.

STEPHEN KRUISER: Top 10 Reasons Liberals Reflexively Blame the NRA for Shootings.

AND TYLER TOO: President William Henry Harrison died on this day in 1841, only 31 days into his term. He was the first President to die in office. Here’s the Constitutional quirk: In those days, the Constitution simply said that in case of the President’s death “the Powers and Duties of the said office” “shall devolve upon the Vice President.” It didn’t say that the Vice President BECOMES the President. Tyler, however, took the position that he WAS then the President, and got royally (or at least presidentially) pissed off when some people disagreed. It wasn’t until the 25^th Amendment, ratified in 1967, that it was made clear that the Vice President actually becomes the President upon the death, resignation or removal of the President.

SHOCKING NEWS: Baltimore’s population is shrinking for some entirely obvious reasons.

Super-high crime, confiscatory taxes, and horrible public schools. What’s not to love?

ANTI-ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Zuckerberg Abandoned By Peers, Mocked By Street Artists.

“There are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay” for a service, while having an “advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people,” Zuckerberg said. “If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford.”

No word if Cook has recovered from Zuck’s epic burn, though “rich people” have propelled Apple to revenues of nearly $230 billion in 2017 vs. Facebook’s $40 billion generated almost entirely from advertising – and as we have come to learn, letting app developers have their way with our personal data and helping candidates they favor.

Meanwhile, Zuck’s been Sabo’d.

While Facebook stock has been kneecapped to the tune of around 16% since the Cambridge Analytica story broke – and down 20% since February all-time highs, Mark Zuckerberg has been given “the treatment” by notorious conservative street artist, Sabo.

Banners reading “You can’t watch your kids 24/7, but we can” were put up in Times Square and several other public locations on Monday night – along with fake street signs warning “Caution, Facebook sells your data.”

Several of the signs feature a grotesque graphic of Zuckerberg’s face melting into Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) – along with other mentions of the Senate Minority Leader whose daughter works for Facebook.

I wonder how many in the Bay Area will get or care about the Schumer reference.