Last week on 13.7, I cited a Washington Post op-ed from Bill McKibben that lifted up the possible link between extreme weather and global climate change.

(As it happens, a Yale forum was posted yesterday wherein eight climate experts comment on this possibility. It's an excellent resource.)

I then went on to ask the question "What motivates climate-change deniers?

The death of 13-year-old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, allegedly after he was tortured by authorities, continues to rock Syria.

Ratko Mladic, the former Serbian commander accused of genocide, has appeared for the first time before the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague. It was a preliminary hearing, and Mladic declined to enter a plea.

"Former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic told a United Nations war crimes court Friday he is 'a gravely ill man' and refused to enter pleas to 'obnoxious charges' alleging he orchestrated the worst atrocities of a war that claimed 100,000 lives," The Associated Press reports from The Hague.

The memoir had a boom in the past couple of decades; now it's facing a backlash. Whatever happened to the "lost art of shutting up," Neil Genzlinger lamented in a recent piece in the New York Times Book Review. It's a fair question: the genre that was once reserved for exceptional lives and exceptional writers (think presidents, prime ministers, Mary Karr and Joan Didion) now draws too many ho-hum accounts by people who don't seem to have lived much at all.

Power rates will rise.  That’s the bottom line of testimony in Frankfort on the costs of meeting new federal environmental standards for coal-fired utilities in Kentucky.  Representatives of several coal-fired utilities in Kentucky say meeting federal clean air standards already in the pipeline will require investments of billions of dollars.  John Voyles of LG&E and KU says their capital costs could rise by four billion dollars over the next ten years

Hundreds of Lexington citizens took the opportunity to view and discuss new plans for a large grass field in the middle of downtown. More than three hundred people crowded into the old courthouse inside the Lexington History Center for a public meeting on the long-delayed CentrePointe project. Chicago Architect Jeanne Gang and her firm, Studio Gang, presented their re-imagined ideas for the lot which has been vacant for nearly three years.

In Hollywood, now is the time summer blockbusters start being released. But some good smaller films work their way into the mix too. The coming of age story, Submarine, may be one of the best.

The Dallas Mavericks staged a late comeback to take Game 2 of the NBA Finals over the Miami Heat Thursday night. Dirk Nowitski scored the Maverick's last nine points, including a lay-up to give them the lead with three seconds left.