This is one of the saddest news stories I have heard in quite some time.

[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/06/19/otto-warmbier-dies-days-after-release-from-north-korean-detainment/]Otto Warmbier dies days after release from North Korean detention[/url].

My best guess is, his captors believed he was at death's door, and released him simply so that he would not die while still in their care.

How he came to suffer the extensive brain damage that killed him is unknown, except possibly to his captors. Their purported explanation of botulism and a sleeping pill does not seem plausible. There was no explanation for why they let Mr. Warmbier languish in such a state for over a year without even informing his family. There were, apparently, no signs of broken bones.

His offense was trying to steal a propaganda poster from his hotel room. I think it is fair to say that in most countries, the most a visiting foreigner might reasonably expect for such a thing is to be kicked out of the country. His punishment was fifteen years hard labor. This seems to me to be almost a defining instance of "cruel and unusual punishment," in the sense of being "so disproportionate to the offense as to shock the general moral sense."

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;461618]This is one of the saddest news stories I have heard in quite some time.

[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/06/19/otto-warmbier-dies-days-after-release-from-north-korean-detainment/]Otto Warmbier dies days after release from North Korean detention[/url].

My best guess is, his captors believed he was at death's door, and released him simply so that he would not die while still in their care.[/QUOTE]

I understand that NK has very good reasons to distrust the US (which dropped more ordnance on their country during the Korean War than it did in all of WW2 as well as supporting a series of little-less-brutally-repressive S. Korean regimes until the late 1980s "Seoul Olympics thaw" set in), but this sort of over-the-top thuggishness is not helping their cause.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;462021]I understand that NK has very good reasons to distrust the US (which dropped more ordnance on their country during the Korean War than it did in all of WW2 as well as supporting a series of little-less-brutally-repressive S. Korean regimes until the late 1980s "Seoul Olympics thaw" set in), but this sort of over-the-top thuggishness is not helping their cause.[/QUOTE]I think that this is a country where the distinction between the people and their government is as stark as it gets. If the regime's thuggishness toward foreign guests is lamentable, consider for a moment how its own people are faring. Beyond political oppression, they are literally starving. The members of the regime are a tiny elite headed by a maniac who aught to be on trial at the Hague for his haircut alone.

Once upon a time, long long ago, I downloaded a satellite image from NASA entitled "The Earth at Night." It used imaging techniques originally designed to detect moonlight reflecting off cloud tops. It was fascinating in the details of infrastructure it revealed. Cities. Towns.

And, there! A long, long east-west linear feature lit up across Asia. Ahh - the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the cities and towns it makes possible. But wait a minute! What's that large island west of Japan? My geography is poor, but I'm pretty sure there's no island nearly that big there! Where exactly is it? Hmm, the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, that should be Vladivostok. OK, that's near North Korea, so... That's it! That large "island" is South Korea. North Korea is so little electrified, it looks like a stretch of open water...

[URL="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0638824/?ref_=nv_sr_1"]Michael Nyqvist[/URL] 56 years old. He was male lead character in the Swedish versions of the "[I]Millennium series[/I]" of movies:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

and later he was in several american movies and series.

[QUOTE=ATH;462395][URL="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0638824/?ref_=nv_sr_1"]Michael Nyqvist[/URL] 56 years old.
...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest[/QUOTE]
I recently watched 'The Girl in the Book' (a film with no apparent connection to that series) ... and he was in it, too!

[SPOILER]But then again, in a few years to come we are going to see a dozen more films that start with 'The Girl ...<bla>' -
it is obviously the new shtick, like all those 'American ...<bla>' after the success of 'American Beauty'.[/SPOILER]

[URL="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40617094"]Maryam Mirzakhani[/URL]

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;463462][URL="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40617094"]Maryam Mirzakhani[/URL][/QUOTE]

Ya beat me to it - first female Fields medalist, dead of breast cancer at age 40 only a few short years after receiving said award. Very sad. Here is her [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani]Wikipedia entry[/url].

[QUOTE=ewmayer;463498]Ya beat me to it - first female Fields medalist, dead of breast cancer at age 40 only a few short years after receiving said award. Very sad. Here is her [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani]Wikipedia entry[/url].[/QUOTE]

Terry Tao wrote something.
[url]https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/maryam-mirzakhani/[/url]

Liu Xiaobo
 

[url]https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/xiaobo-lecture.html[/url]

[QUOTE]Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal[/QUOTE]


[url]http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40617094[/url]

[URL="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/movies/george-romero-dead.html"]George Romero (Zombie movie father)
[/URL]