ASK A PRO: Dutch Inmates to Be Given Cold-Case Calendars in Drive to Solve Crimes.

The Dutch police announced the project last week after a pilot program that rolled out in five prisons in January coincided with a large number of tip-offs.

“We got 160 tip-offs in the first five months of this year and we normally get 160 a year,” Robbert Salome, a spokesman for the Dutch National Police told NBC News. Jeroen Hammer, who helped develop the calendar, told Dutch broadcaster NOS that the tip-offs had allowed police to reopen two cases out of the 52 featured on the calendar.

Salome said that while it was impossible to know how many of the tips had came from prisoners — because the informants have the right to anonymity — research has shown prisoners knew a lot about other crimes.

“We know that people in prison talk about crimes,” he said, adding that a study had shown that in 40 percent of court cases in the Netherlands, the perpetrators had told someone about the crime they had committed.

Officials had better do a perfect job of protecting prisoner anonymity, or the program will descend into payback and blackmail.

PATRICK POOLE: Is Washington Post’s Sessions-Kislyak Purported Intelligence ‘Scoop’ More Fake News?

SINCE MONDAY IS NATIONAL TEQUILA DAY: 10 Terms Every Tequila Drinker Should Know.

We started celebrating a little early this year.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: These Five Films Served Up Seriously Awful FX.

I’d have included any of the Transformers movies — not because the special effects were necessarily awful, but because they were often incomprehensible. For my moviegoing enjoyment, that’s a far worse sin.

VIDEO: Women burn burqas and men shave beards to celebrate liberation from Isis in Syria.

RICK MORAN: As Federal Court Rules for Sanctuary Cities, ICE Vows to Increase Enforcement.

Legalized lawlessness never ends well.

STEVEN G. CALABRESI: How Democrats stole the nation’s lower federal courts.

Read the whole, shameful thing.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Who’s Going to Win the Cold Civil War?

IF? What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?

DEAL OF THE CENTURY: Apollo 11 Moon Rock Bag Sells for $1.8 Million in Controversial Auction.

While Armstrong’s lunar bag didn’t break any records, it has been the subject of frenzied discussion since NASA accidentally sold it to a private collector three years ago. As Blakemore explains, investigators found the bag while searching through the belongings of Max Ary, the former president of the Kansas Cosmosphere. In 2005, Ary was indicted of stealing and selling museum artifacts, including ones that had been loaned out by NASA.

“[D]ue to an error in NASA’s system, the bag was confused with another space bag from a later lunar landing, and was then accidentally sold to an Illinois woman for just $995 at auction,” Blakemore writes.

The buyer, one Nancy Carlson, knew that the bag had been used during a space flight, but she wasn’t sure which one. So she sent the bag of to NASA for testing. The agency, realizing its cosmic goof, refused to return the bag. The item “belongs to the American people,” NASA said in a statement at the time, according to the AP.

But U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten ruled in Carlson’s favor. He said that while the bag should never have been put up for sale, he had no recourse to reverse the transaction. NASA was forced to return the artifact in February of 2017.

If correcting NASA’s screwup was so important, the government could have bid at the auction.

THAT’S WHAT SUBPOENAS ARE FOR:

Let’s investigate this fully, and let the chips fall where they may.

INCREDIBLE: Doctors Discover ‘Startling’ Brain Regrowth After Drowned Toddler’s Oxygen Therapy.

VIDEO: Dem Senator Refuses to Take Back Calling the GOP ‘Evil.’

Sometimes it’s easy to confuse the Stupid Party for the Evil Party.

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: Is Gen. Selva Right About the Dangers of Killer Robots Unleashed on Humanity?

DAVID HORNIK: Israel Says U.S.-Russia Deal on Syria Gives Iran a Win, Is Unacceptable.

RELATED? US ends CIA programme arming anti-Assad Syria rebels.

WELL, YES: CIA chief Mike Pompeo: Russia loves to “stick it to America.”

PEST CONTROL: To Shrink Mosquito Population, Scientists Are Releasing 20 Million Mosquitoes.

It sounds counterintuitive. But the plan is to release millions of sterile male mosquitoes, which will then mate with wild female mosquitoes. The eggs the females lay won’t hatch, researchers say.

The project is called Debug Fresno and it’s being undertaken by Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s holding company. It’s the company’s first field study involving sterile mosquitoes in the U.S.

Scientists say the goal is to cut the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — the species responsible for spreading Zika, dengue and chikungunya. A. aegypti have been present in California’s Central Valley since 2013 and have been a problem in Fresno County.

“It’s a terrible nuisance, a terrible biting nuisance. It’s changed the way people can enjoy their back yard and it’s a threat for disease transmission,” Steve Mulligan of Fresno County’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District told The Washington Post.

There must be an easier way.

NO MEANS NO: Trump Education Secretary DeVos Pressured to Keep Obama ‘Rape Culture’ Guidelines.

GOOD LORD: ‘Oh He Just Died’: Teens Laugh At Drowning Disabled Man In Disturbing Video.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT: Militant left-wing leader arrested for allegedly inciting violence at 2016 Sacramento melee.

Yvette Felarca, 47, was taken into custody in Los Angeles on Tuesday on charges of inciting and participating in a riot, and assault likely to cause great bodily injury, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office said Wednesday. The charges come after an eight-month investigation.

Felarca, whose name in public records appears as Yvonne Capistrano Felarca, has been identified as the leader and spokesperson for the anti-fascist group By Any Means Necessary.

She is among several people arrested this week in connection to the wild skirmish that broke out at the state Capitol in June 2016 when more than 300 counter-protesters confronted about 30 members of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which has been called a white nationalist group.

Felarca, who is a middle school teacher in Berkeley, attended the Capitol protest and gave television interviews after the melee. She was captured on video hitting a member of the TWP and calling a man a Nazi before punching him in the stomach repeatedly while shouting for him to “get the f*** off our streets.”

And here’s the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuWoQfZgW7M

MICHAEL WALSH ON AMAZON: “I think it needs to be busted up asap before Jeff Bezos destroys the country.”

But is there a moral argument to forcing people to shop at the mall?

ACCEPTANCE: 35% Of Democrats Say A Friend’s Vote For Trump Would “Strain” Their Relationship.

Three possibilities. One: There’s a sore-loser effect. Republicans bear Democratic friends no grudge because they won the election. Democrats do bear Republican friends a grudge because they lost. The left has to live with Trump for four years while the right is free from Clinton. No wonder one side has harder feelings than the other.

Two: The left is less tolerant of partisan disagreement because it assigns to its political beliefs the same moral weight that the right typically assigns to religion. Granted, that’s a simplification — there are many religious Democrats, albeit fewer than there are religious Republicans — but there’s a reason why campus Savonarolas feel impelled to extirpate interlopers like Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, and Ben Shapiro. The left’s favorite candidate has taken to measuring Republican legislation in terms of how many 9/11s it’s equivalent to, for fark’s sake. The right simply seems to offend the left more deeply than vice versa.

Three, the most Democrat-friendly spin: Trump is so uniquely odious a character (the “Access Hollywood” tape, the sexual assault allegations, a million other embarrassing moments) and his flaws are so intensely magnified by the media that of course one’s decision to vote for him will horrify Democrats. All I’d say to that is … have you ever talked to a Republican about Hillary Clinton?

Heh.

A FREE-SPEECH CRACKDOWN WE CAN AGREE ON? China Bans Enemy No. 1: Justin Bieber.

NO MORE HOSTAGES: US Urges All Nationals In North Korea To “Depart Immediately”, Bans Tourists From Visiting.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Trump Administration Still Doesn’t Have an Iran Policy.