VIDEO: What’s behind allowing felons to vote? PJTV alums Whittle, Ott, and Green take their show on the road.

Full disclosure: I’m Green.

MODERN PROBLEMS: I want all the perks of maternity leave — without having any kids.

Author Meghann Foye calls it “me-ternity” time, and of course Salon thinks it’s a swell idea.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Robots Must Be Able to Say ‘No’.

Does that include sexbots? And if a sexbot becomes self-aware, and then self-identifies as differently gendered, is it entitled to sex-reassignment maintenance?

21ST CENTURY PARENTING: Thais adopt life-like baby dolls, take them everywhere.

THE EX-SPEAKER SPEAKS: Boehner Uncorks on ‘Lucifer’ Cruz, Says He Wouldn’t Back Him in Fall.

“Lucifer in the flesh,” Boehner called Cruz on Wednesday during a talk at Stanford University, the student newspaper reported. “I have never worked with a more miserable son of a b—h in my life.”
…
This isn’t the first time Boehner has unleashed on Cruz: He’s previously called him a “jackass” and a “false prophet,” and his loathing of Cruz is legendary inside the Capitol.

Boehner always worked better alongside Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

EDIT: Ed Driscoll is apparently reading my mind…

WALLS WITH FRICKIN LASER BEAMS: India Installs ‘Laser Walls’ at Border With Pakistan.

India is setting up the laser walls to “plug the porous riverine and treacherous terrain and keep an effective vigil against intruders and terrorists” in Punjab state, the state-run Press Trust of India reported.

Earlier this year, peace talks were suspended when India accused Pakistan of allowing militants to cross over and attack an Indian air force base in Pathankot on Jan. 2.

According to the PTI report, around 45 laser walls will be installed in Punjab state.

Nothing deadly — the lasers merely trigger an alert.

THAT’S A RELIEF: Climate Change isn’t Gloom and Doom Issue, says Climatologist Richard Somerville

Undoubtedly, climate change is a real phenomenon and our planet is warming rapidly. Due to climate change, many changes in weather patterns have been noticed across the world. Many studies and climate scientists have shown a fearsome forecast of climate change. However, climatologist Richard Somerville offers hopeful outlook for the planet’s worsening conditions.

Warming rapidly? But I had been assured that there was a pause in global warming.

Maybe — just maybe — the science isn’t quite as settled as we’d been told.

CHANGE: Defense bill would require women to register for draft.

A better bill would remove the requirement for men.

CRIME OF THE CENTURY: Woman arrested after falling through ceiling of Big Lots in Springfield.

THE CRUZ-KASICH ALLIANCE: Is it impacting Indiana voters?

Kasich agreed to quietly stop competing in Indiana, hoping to clear the way for a Cruz win here.

In exchange, Cruz is deferring to Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico, again, to try and boost the “Stop Trump” effort in those state contests.

In the run-up to the election, lots of people are showing up at library locations around Allen County to take advantage of an early voting option.

We asked some folks voting at the Dupont branch if they took note of the alliance, and did it change what they did at the polls.

“I thought it was smart on their part, you know. They tried to do what they could do to get one of them elected,” said early voter Carol Zook.

“I really like Kasich, but I didn’t think he had a chance. And I liked what Cruz said, but after their deal-making I voted for Trump. It had a big impact. I just thought the insiders are dirty, same old thing,” said Karen Geels.

Political arrangements like the Cruz-Kasich alliance rarely work as well as hoped.

VIDEO: Are you Never Trump or Never Never Trump — PJTV alums Whittle, Ott, and Green take their show on the road.

Full disclosure: I’m Green.

DON’T DO STUPID SH*T, DPRK EDITION: Kim Jong Un reportedly launches missiles at random when US provokes him.

There’s a certain rationality to his madness.

A PLEA FROM NATO’S EASTERN FLANK: The alliance should renew its vows in Warsaw – loudly and clearly enough to be heard in Moscow.

OLYMPIC FEVER: What Brazil is worrying about with 100 days to go.

Completion of the subway link has long been in mild jeopardy. Should it fail to materialize, travel during the Olympics may become daunting. In a cost-cutting drive, organizers slashed the number of Games-time transportation vehicles from 5,000 to 4,000 (losing 20,000 of the initial 70,000 volunteers in the process — fewer ways to get there, fewer people to give you directions).

An International Olympic Committee (IOC) team says the venues are “98% complete” but test events in gymnastics and swimming have been hit by power outages and a number of other minor gripes.

The issue of water quality in Rio’s Guanabara Bay, home to sailing events and polluted by raw sewage, has been without a clear solution — so to speak — for so long that athletes accept they must come armed with precautions against illness.

“What we see now is that 60% of the surface is clean,” IOC president Thomas Bach said last week, trying to look at the bay and find a bright side. “Without the Games it would be zero.”

More seriously still, a newly-built elevated bike path, one of the mayor’s projects aimed transforming the city ahead of the Games, partly collapsed last week, killing two people — on the same day as performers lit the Olympic torch in Greece.

And then there’s the small matter of the impending impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

Often under threat, the Olympics eventually work out somehow. The lead-up to the 2004 summer games in Athens was especially sweaty, but Brazil seems determined to top even that.

SCIENCE: An orbiting ‘Microscope’ is about to discover if Einstein was right.

According to Einstein’s theories, two objects in perfect free fall should move in exactly the same way. There’s only one place where you can keep something in permanent free fall, and that’s orbit.

So scientists loaded two different pieces of metal – one titanium and the other a platinum-rhodium alloy – into a satellite called Microscope and sent it into orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Arianespace’s launch pad in French Guiana over the weekend.

“In space, it is possible to study the relative motion of two bodies in almost perfect and permanent free fall aboard an orbiting satellite, shielded from perturbations encountered on Earth,” said Arianespace.

If the two objects move identically then Einstein was right and we can chalk up another victory for humanity. Nice. If they behave differently, however, then that’ll be even more exciting – it’ll “shake the foundations of physics”, according to France’s CNES space agency, which financed 90% of the project.

What’s also remarkable is that a French-built satellite is traveling onboard a Russian rocket launched from a South American facility to test a century-old theory of a German-born Jewish physicist.

NEW TRUMP: ‘My Thought Process is the Same’

“You know, when I speak to a group of 10 people in a conference room, I’m not going to be speaking the same way I spoke in Pennsylvania yesterday to 25,000 people,” Trump said during the event at Trump Tower. “It’s a very different thing, but I’ll be saying very similar things.”

Paul Manfort, a top Trump aide, told Republican National Committee officials just last week that the bombastic candidate will tone down his rhetoric in time for the general election.

However, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski promised that Trump “will never change” in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier Tuesday.

The bombast is what many voters like best about him.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Man Robs Wife’s Pet Store, Gives Monkey to Prostitute.

Nathan McClain is currently under arrest at the nearby Lane County Jail, awaiting trial on prostitution charges. Police did not disclose whether the sex worker will be charged for prostitution, or how she planned to care for a bushbaby, which requires an extensive enclosure and frequent social interaction, in her hotel room.

Rigging an enclosure might prove tricky, but the frequent social interactions shouldn’t be a problem.

RUNNING IN PLACE SPACE: British astronaut Tim Peake just ran a marathon on the International Space Station.

Peake completed the London Marathon, which took place Sunday, in 3 hours, 35 minutes and 21 seconds, and he did it many miles from London on the International Space Station, according to various news reports and a statement from the European Space Agency.

That time was good enough to set the record for a marathon in space, according to Guinness. The British astronaut had actually completed the London Marathon on solid ground back in 1999.

He was one of 39,000 runners to participate in this year’s London marathon, but obviously the only one to do it in space. Peake was strapped into a harness and tethered to a treadmill for the duration of the run.

There was a previous space marathon record?

UNEXPECTEDLY: Rebound in U.S. durable goods orders below expectations.

AUTOFILL OF THE DAY:

Is Bing News trying to tell us something?

WELL, THAT WAS FAST: Cracks in Cruz-Kasich Alliance.

The deal announced late Sunday night started to show cracks by Monday morning. Kasich declined to direct Indiana voters away from him and toward Cruz. “I’ve never told them not to vote for me – they ought to vote for me,” he told reporters while campaigning in Pennsylvania, which hosts its primary on Tuesday. “But I’m not over there campaigning and spending resources; we have limited resources.”

Kasich scrapped an event in Indiana slated for Tuesday, but is still planning on attending a fundraiser in the state. Their campaign staffs struck the deal; the two candidates have not spoken directly to one another about the strategy and don’t have plans to do so.

Marriages of convenience are rarely happy.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Editor of LGBT magazine hacked to death in Bangladesh.

A group of assailants stormed the home of Xulhaz Mannan, a staffer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, stabbing him and a friend to death, police told The Daily Star. Mannan was a senior editor of Roopbaan, the first gay rights magazine in the country.

The second victim was identified as Tanay Majumder. Police said five or six assailants stormed Mannan’s first-floor apartment about 5 p.m. local time.

The State Department condemned the slaying. “We’re outraged,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “An act like this is simply beyond words, it’s inexcusable, and heartfelt support goes out to his mother, his family and his friends.”

The killings followed Saturday’s hacking murder of Bangladeshi English professor Rezaul Karim Siddiquee for the “crime” of atheism. ISIS claimed responsibility for Siddiquee’s death.

CHANGE: Saudi Arabia Approves Economic Reform Program.

The program’s overarching objective is to diversify the Saudi economy, in which oil still makes up more than 70% of revenue.

Prince Mohammed on Monday presented a broad overview of what has been billed as country’s most extensive economic shake-up in decades. Speaking to reporters on Monday he said the project—dubbed “Saudi Vision 2030”—includes plans to set up the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, to sell less than 5% of state-owned oil giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and to implement reforms aimed at boosting revenue from non-oil sources.

“By 2020, we’ll be able to live without oil,” Prince Mohammed told Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya in an interview aired earlier on Monday. Details of the plan are expected within six weeks.

Riyadh will be able to substitute the 70% of its budget made up from oil revenues in just three years from now?

Color me skeptical.

QUESTION ASKED: Has Hillary Clinton Outstayed Her Welcome?

PEACE IN OUR TIME? Ted Cruz and John Kasich to Coordinate Against Donald Trump.

In a statement late Sunday night, Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said that the campaign would “focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Governor Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico.”

Minutes after Mr. Roe’s statement, the Kasich campaign put out a similar message. The Ohio governor’s chief strategist, John Weaver, said that his campaign would shift its resources to states in the West and “give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana.”

Both campaigns said they expected allies and third-party groups to follow their lead, and a representative from the “super PAC” supporting Mr. Kasich confirmed late Sunday that it would not advertise in Indiana.

Coordinating would have made more sense in January or February.