Damn, DK! You didn't have to do him like that

'Can you point to a policy decision...?'

News Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Snags Second Season; Tatiana Maslany Guest Starring in First The show has been renewed before its first season has even dropped By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on October 21, 2024 Screenshot: Disney+ Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Disney+ The first season of the upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is still in production in Toronto, but that hasn’t stopped Paramount+ from bequeathing a second season order for the show about a group of young cadets heading to the thirty-second-century school. Executive producer and co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman announced the news at New York Comic Con via video feed, and was joined by several cast members, including  Sandro Rosta, Kerrice Brooks, Bella Shepard, George Hawkins, Karim Diané, and Zoë Steiner. Speaking of the cast (which boasts Holly Hunter as the star), Kurtzman had one more announcement to make: Tatiana Maslany (pictured above in She Hulk) will be a guest star on Season One in an undisclosed role. She’ll join familiar Trek faces including Tig Notaro (Jett Reno in Star Trek: Discovery), Oded Fehr (Admiral Vance in Star Trek: Discovery), Mary Wiseman (Tilly in Star Trek: Discovery) and Robert Picardo (The Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager). Paul Giamatti is also on board the production and is playing the villain of the series. No news yet on when the first season of Starfleet Academy will make its way to Paramount+. It’s nice to know, however, that if those episodes end on a cliffhanger we’ll be guaranteed at least a Season Two to see how things play out. [end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i> Snags Second Season; Tatiana Maslany Guest Starring in First appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Rumours Rumours Responds to the Absurdity of Modern Life with Absurdity of Its Own Somehow, a movie featuring a GIANT GLOWING ALIEN BRAIN gave me hope for the future… By Leah Schnelbach | Published on October 21, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Rumours is a fascinating new sci-fi adjacent film written and directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson. It’s kind of about climate destruction, but it also touches on AI, self-immolation-as-protest, alien intelligence, and secret elite pedophilia rings, but somehow it all comes together into an experience that is frustrating and infuriating—in a good way. It’s also startlingly funny, in that it keeps veering in unexpected directions that function as cinematic rib pokes. I saw Rumours at the New York Film Festival a few weeks ago, and listening to a room full of film critics giggle when the movie suddenly presented us with a GIANT GLOWING ALIEN BRAIN gave me hope for the future. (Kind of.) I guess I’m trying to say that I like movies that are game. I like creators that grab their audiences by the hand and lead them down weird paths to tell their stories, and trust us to walk with them with wide open eyes. I try not to look at art as the eternal search for the new. It’s entirely possible to take a “love song” or a “war story” and make art out of it, even though people have been singing love songs and telling war stories for thousands of years. “Francesca” is a story about a boy and girl in love, based on a real incident that happened in the mid-1280s, and referencing Dante’s retelling of the story, written in the early 14th Century. And yet, if Hozier’s update on the story comes on my iPod, I will turn it all the damn way up. And possibly cry. Saving Private Ryan is a bundle of cliches and platitudes, but Spielberg and his crew and actors commit so utterly to the idea that these are real things, happening to real young men, who are really terrified unto death, that the film becomes harrowing to watch. I bring this up because Rumours is new. It’s taken me a few days to sort through my thoughts. There were points when I wasn’t sure if it worked, but now I think that doesn’t matter. It did things I didn’t expect, and it set up an outcome and went for it, and it talks about Real Things. I’ve thought a bit about Rumours in relation to Don’t Look Up, a movie I didn’t like too much because I thought it was a little too on the nose, particularly when dealing with what Jeff VanderMeer calls a hyperobject. In Don’t Look Up, writer and director Adam McCay wanted to talk about climate destruction, using the metaphor of an asteroid barrelling towards earth, to work through how a small group of activists try to save humanity while governments and officials and media elites ignored the problem until it was too late. It’s the film equivalent of Thom Yorke screaming “We’re not fearmongering—this is really happening”, and they’re all right. It is really happening. As I write this a hurricane that is as strong as it’s mathematically possible to get in the Gulf of Mexico is making landfall in the place I grew up. I don’t know if my hometown will be standing tomorrow. And maybe this sounds silly, or shallow, but I appreciate that Maddin, Johnson, and Johnson attempt to tackle both the despair and absurdity of life right now in Rumours. If you’re going to deal with something this huge, you have to swing harder. If you’re dealing with nuclear threat you gotta go full Oppenheimer—or full Strangelove. And I think Rumours might be a bit more successful than Don’t Look Up in dealing with climate destruction, because it becomes so absurd that it leaves room for the audience to come to it, and think about it, rather than feeling like they’ve been bludgeoned. (Not to bag on Megalopolis again, but I’ve been thinking about Rumours for two weeks now. I only think about Megalopolis when Demi Adejuyigbe posts another “go back to the cl-u-u-u-u-u-u-b” remix.) Screenshot: Bleecker Street The plot, if you want to call it that: A group of world leaders (and assistants, handlers, and cater-waiters) gather in a German manor for the G7 conference. Each leader becomes a stand-in for their respective country, and all are hilarious. Cate Blanchett is Hilda Ortmann, the Chancellor of Germany, hypercompetent and amused by the incompetence of most the others. Nikki Amuka-Bird is Cardosa Dewindt, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, hypercompetent and annoyed by the incompetence of most of the others. Roy Dupuis is Maxime Laplace, the Prime Minister of Canada, and he’s Bronte’s Heathcliff by way of an aging IKEA-catalogue hipster, with striking looks, flowing locks, and a poetic, tortured soul. (He’s had affairs with most of the female characters, and his career is threatened by a hilariously mundane “carried interest scandal”.) Charles Dance is Edison Wolcott, the President of the United States, ancient, exhausted, and sporting an inexplicable British accent. Denis Ménochet—as Sylvain Broulez, the President of France and a blustering academic with impeccable taste—spends most of the film being rolled around in a wheelbarrow. Rolando Ravello as Antonio Lamorte, the Prime Minister of Italy, is hapless, sweet, and carrying prosciutto for everyone to snack on. Takehiro Hira as Tatsuro Iwasaki, the Prime Minister of Japan, is the only one aside from the two women who actually at least tries to work on the statement, but his bullet list isn’t going to accomplish much. Finally Alicia Vikander plays the president of the European Union who turns up halfway through the movie to tell the others that they need “a new language” to usher in a new age, and it seems like she’s been possessed by an alien consciousness—until they figure out she’s just speaking Swedish. Now if you read all of the that and find it ridiculous in a good way, you’ll enjoy the film. The leaders have met to draft a statement that will address—notice I did not say “solve” or even “help”—the “current crisis”. What is the current crisis? Who knows. We never know. Because soon the leaders realize that they’re alone in the manor’s lakeside gazebo. None of the assistants or waiter are coming when they call. The booze is running out. There’s no cell service. It soon becomes clear that a catastrophic event has happened out beyond their elite bubble, but Maddin keeps it vague. There’s a giant brain—that’s in the trailer—but the meaning of the brain, and how he uses it, is surprising and really upsetting, to me at least. The leaders jockey for position, they talk in circles about what to do, and they spend most of the film wandering uselessly through the woods. As the film rolls along, Maxime Laplace emerges as the strongest of the group, shaking off everyone’s jokes about how Canada doesn’t really belong among the Seven. The Prime Minister of Italy develops a close bff-ship with the President of the United States. Hilda Ortmann might want more of a commitment from Laplace than he’s willing to make. Screenshot: Bleecker Street Rumours isn’t really categorizable. I found it very funny, and there are 1950s sci-fi/horror elements, a bit of political satire, and a pretty sharp subplot about AI. But in the end what the film does well is create a sense of despair spiked with gallows humor. I’ve thought about it constantly since I saw it, and I doubt there will be anything else like it this year. There’s one more thing I want to talk about, but it’s a HUGE SPOILER. I implore you, if you have even the slightest hint of an intention of watching Rumours, bow out now and maybe rejoin us later—I want you to get the same hit of glee that I did when the movie did this. If you don’t want to see any spoilers, skedaddle! We’re good? Join me beyond the GIANT GLOWING ALIEN BRAIN if we’re good. Screenshot: Bleecker Street … OK, so the President of France becomes a Bog Zombie. Let me back up: early on in the film it’s revealed that the manor staff found bog bodies on the grounds. Chancellor Ortmann takes the group to one of the burial sites, and as she tries to tell the group about them, President Broulez interrupts her repeatedly because he wrote a paper on Bog Bodies once and wants to be seen as an expert. Later, he falls into a pit with one of them, and it rolls around on him, infects him with Bog Body-ness (???), and his bones start to disintegrate (!!!). Or at least, he says they do—maybe he just wants to make the others push him around in a wheelbarrow. But his powers of communication definitely seem impacted, as he burbles allegory and poetry when he can manage to speak at all. After that the movie kind of becomes an extremely low-stakes Bog Body Zombie Movie, as the seven occasionally come across Bog People who have come back to some type of consciousness. But they can’t move very much, and just kind of make moaning noises and enact some sort of ritual ceremony around a fire, so they aren’t that huge of a threat. However, by their very presence, above ground, squishing around and moaning, they gradually become a weird, unsettling, utterly unique symbol of the film’s themes. Humanity is refusing to learn from its past, ignoring its present threats, pretending that releasing a strongly worded statement will create a friendly reality. Faced with something uncanny, and real, the people who are supposed to lead humanity into the future fall apart.[end-mark] The post <i>Rumours</i> Responds to the Absurdity of Modern Life with Absurdity of Its Own appeared first on Reactor.

For Kamala Harris, failure is not an option. It’s a governing principle. President Joe Biden has delegated at least four key responsibilities to his vice president. On each one, she has belly-flopped hard enough to empty an Olympic swimming pool. Border Czarina “I’ve asked her, the V.P., today … to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders,” Biden said about Harris at a March 24, 2021, White House ceremony. “When she speaks, she speaks for me,” Biden added. “She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along.” Defying Biden’s urgency, Harris did not visit the U.S.-Mexico border until June 25, three months after being crowned border czarina. After shirking her duties, Harris made her second, box-checking border journey this past Sept. 27. In the intervening 39 months, southern boundary conditions deteriorated dramatically: Since February 2021, the first 42 months of Harris’ rule saw illegal-alien incursions on the U.S.-Mexico frontier soar from 2,450,167 under Donald Trump’s comparable period to 8,326,109—up 339.8%. Add 1,664,203 detected-but-uncaught “known gotaways” from fiscal year 2021 through fiscal year 2023 (versus 384,439 from fiscal year 2017 through fiscal year 2019 under Trump (up 432.9%), and the number of illegal aliens who invaded America under Harris rises to at least 9,990,312. This excludes “unknown gotaways,” who went unseen and uncaptured. During Trump’s tenure, 11 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist were nabbed at the border. On Harris’ watch: 382 such illegal aliens got caught—up an explosive 3,472%. Czarina Harris lost 323,000 illegal-alien children. Where are those unaccompanied minors? Who knows? Monsters, quite literally, are exploiting thousands of them as slaves in sweatshops. Even worse, boys and girls are raped routinely as sex slaves. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that from fiscal year 2021 through fiscal year 2023, fentanyl (usually smuggled across Harris’ obliterated “border”) fatally poisoned 222,166 people in America, including those who thought they had consumed legitimate drugs. Maria Gonzalez, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin are just three among many who police say illegal aliens have killed. Even former President Bill Clinton conceded that Laken Riley, a slain Georgia nursing student, was a victim of Harris’ no-border policy. On Oct. 13, Clinton told Peach State voters about Riley, “a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” allegedly by José Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal alien who broke into America in September 2022, on Harris’ watch. Ibarra reportedly is tied to the deadly Tren de Aragua gang. Clinton added, “If they’d all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn’t have happened.” The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated in March 2023 that coddling illegal aliens costs local, state, and federal taxpayers $150.7 billion annually. Broadband Czarina During an April 28, 2021, joint session of Congress, Biden unveiled a rural-broadband initiative. “I’m asking the vice president to lead this effort,” he said, “because I know it will get done.” No such luck. “It appears that your performance as ‘broadband czar’ has mirrored your performance as ‘border czar,’” nine U.S. senators wrote Harris, including Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Deb Fischer of Nebraska. Their Sept. 18 letter continued: “Under your leadership, not a single person has been connected to the internet using the $42.45 billion allocated for the [Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment] program.”  That’s right: Despite Biden’s Nov. 15, 2021, signature, not one American has been hooked up via the BEAD plan, even after 34 months and more than $42 billion in taxpayer money.  As the senators explained, “burdensome climate change mandates” have stymied progress. So have a nine-step review process and a requirement that participating employers give preference to “individuals with past criminal records.” Consequently, Politico reports, “No actual construction projects are expected to begin until at least 2025.”  Bridge-Building Czarina Biden sent Harris to the February 2022 Munich Security Conference. Goal: Project sufficient U.S. and allied strength to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine. Vice presidential scholar Joel Goldstein told CNN: “I think this is certainly the most significant mission yet of her vice presidency.” The bridge-building czarina said at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof on Feb. 19, 2022, that “sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states must be respected” and “national borders should not be changed by force.”  Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.  Bus Czarina Harris and the Environmental Protection Agency have pushed the Clean School Bus program since September 2022. As Thomas Catenacci reported on July 19 at The Washington Free Beacon, this boondoggle deployed $965 million to ship 2,463 electric school buses to 389 school districts. Two years later, just 60 green buses serve only 27 districts. Fifty-five districts have fled the program. The House Energy and Commerce Committee reported last month that diesel-fueled school buses typically cost $100,000. Electric school buses average $381,190. This nearly 400% higher cost, limited driving range, and poor cold-weather performance have flattened the tires on Harris’ fantasy vehicles. Beyond dispute, Harris is the Czarina of Failure. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Kamala Harris, Czarina of Failure appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A preliminary report by the House task force on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump provides new detail about the lack of coordination between the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement officers that contributed to Trump nearly being killed and the murder of rallygoer Corey Comperatore. The report, released early Monday, also asserts that a local law enforcement officer said he fired at shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks before the Secret Service countersniper fired the shot that killed him, and that this first shot may have caused Crooks to stop shooting. But House task force investigators concluded that the order of the shots remains unclear. Crooks’ autopsy shows that only one bullet entered Crooks’ head and credits the Secret Service countersniper for firing that shot, the report states. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appointed the task force, headed by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania and Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, in late July. As part of its ongoing investigation, the panel interviewed 23 state and local law enforcement witnesses, received a series of Secret Service briefings, and obtained thousands of pages of documentation in response to federal, state, and local agencies. Many of its findings are similar to those of the interim joint report by two Senate panels, which released their initial findings in late September, and a bipartisan Independent Review Board, which unveiled its findings and recommendations last week. But a section on “fragmented lines of communication and unclear lines of communication and chains of command” provides new detail about the failures that led to no law enforcement officer engaging with Crooks until he was on a rooftop only 200 yards from Trump and the crowd. It also provides more information about why the threat Crooks posed was not communicated to the innermost ring of Secret Service agents protecting the former president on the stage so they could remove the candidate from the dais before Crooks opened fire. One law enforcement officer from the Butler Emergency Services Unit stationed inside the American Glass Research, or AGR, building, first noticed Crooks at around 5 p.m., more than an hour before Trump appeared on stage. That officer testified that he was alarmed because Crooks appeared to be examining the area of the AGR building occupied by him and other snipers. “One point that raised my suspicion is he was looking directly at the window I was positioned at,” the officer told investigators. “ … He looked up at the window I was positioned at and kept looking at it.” The officer surmised that Crooks was trying to see if anyone was inside the building. The officer told another officer from the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit about Crooks, and the second officer also observed similar behavior—that Crooks was “walking pretty close to the building, kind of looking up and down the building, and [I] just thought that was odd.” In the next 40 minutes the two officers tried to track Crooks, and one went to look for him, but both officers would intermittently lose sight of the 20-year-old shooter. At one point, the Beaver County ESU officer managed to take photos of him sitting on a wall scrolling through his phone, and then at approximately 5:10 p.m. witnessed him pointing a rangefinder toward the crowd. “ … When I noticed him looking through his rangefinder he was looking towards the stage and kind of just in different areas, general areas, looking out but in the direction of the stage,” the officer told the panel. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is not right.’” One of the Butler ESU officers went to look for Crooks from 5:15 to 5:40 p.m., and a group of officers texting the photos and descriptions of Crooks at 5:39 p.m. decided to inform its local law enforcement leaders that it had identified a young male acting suspiciously. Just one minute earlier, a Beaver ESU officer sent a text message along with photographs of Crooks to a group of local law enforcement snipers. “Kid learning [sic] around building we are in,” the officer texted. “AGR I believe it is. I did see him with a rangefinder looking towards the stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him.” The officer testified to the task force that he meant “lurking” instead of “learning.” Then, over the course of 13 minutes, from 5:38 to 5:51, local law enforcement officers and their bosses sent a series of calls and messages about Crooks’ description and movements to several members of the Secret Service, including to a Secret Service agent at their command post, which was separate from a different command post for state and local law enforcement.  At 5:47, Edward Lenz, commander of the Butler ESU, received the photos of Crooks and tried to text them to a Pennsylvania State Police officer, but issues with the cellphone service delayed the transmission. The photos weren’t forwarded on to a Secret Service agent in its Command Post until 5:51 p.m.  Despite this flurry of texts and phone calls, the report found “no evidence to suggest that the information was relayed to the USSS [agents assigned to protect Trump] near the stage, or to the USSS agents in charge of rally security.” Local officers grew more alarmed at about 6:06 p.m. when they noticed Crooks beside a picnic table with a backpack on the ground. An officer testified that Crooks “grabbed the backpack, and then took off running,” then darted in between the buildings where they could no longer see him. Shortly afterward, a Butler Township police officer radioed to all officers in the area that “someone’s on the roof,” and many local officers converged on the AGR building. At 6:09 p.m., Lenz called the Pennsylvania State Police officer in the Secret Service Command Center to update him that a suspicious person was now on the roof of the AGR complex. Around that same time, a Butler Township police officer tried to climb up on the roof with a boost from another officer but was only able to push his head up above the roof line. As previously described in news accounts and prior reports, the officer then saw Crooks, who reacted by pointing a gun at him. “I see Crooks facing downrange towards the stage, but his eyes are back at me as I’m coming up,” the officer told the task force. “And I would say, like, his facial expression was surprised. His eyes were very big, like, ‘What are you doing up here?’” That was the first time any law enforcement officer realized Crooks had a firearm. The officer lost his grip, fell to the ground, and “immediately” radioed to fellow local officers that the suspicious person on the roof was armed. That message also never reached the Secret Service. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe testified on July 30 that the agency trains its agents and officers to immediately consider an individual as a threat if the person has a firearm and is acting in a suspicious manner. “To date, the Task Force has not received any evidence to suggest that message reached the former President’s USSS detail prior to shots fired,” the report states. At 6:11 p.m., Crooks fired eight rounds before being fatally shot. He was on the roof for approximately six minutes prior to the shooting. “Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the task force concluded. The report listed several top findings, which include inadequate planning and coordination before the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and placing the AGR building and surrounding area outside of the secure perimeter that the Secret Service was charged with protecting. The report also states that the local sniper teams inside the AGR building had a narrow field of vision and were not positioned to monitor the building; there was no unified command center to facilitate communications between the Secret Service and its state and local partners; and Crooks did not use a ladder to access the top of the building, but instead climbed onto air conditioning units along the side of the building to easily scramble onto the roof. While the interim report focuses on the first assassination attempt, the task force has expanded its investigation to include a second attempt on Trump’s life, which took place at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sept. 15. The panel plans to complete its investigation by early December. This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire The post Report: Secret Service Didn’t Know Trump Shooter Was Armed Before He Opened Fire appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus used the UN agency’s Summit 2024 to launch into yet another tirade against online “misinformation/disinformation.” The WHO’s contribution against that threat, Tedros said, was countering it by “working” with a number of companies and other partners. In his speech, the WHO chief repeated the many-times heard accusations against social media as “turbo-charging” the spread of misinformation which then added to people’s skepticism toward vaccines and some other medical treatments. Tedros added to this the “stigma, discrimination, and even violence” toward health workers, but also “marginalized groups,” allegedly all a result of said disinformation. This one has also been heard many times from various politicians and affiliated media: that disinformation was “almost as deadly” as the virus (we’re talking coronavirus, not smallpox here). But still, Tedros states that disinformation regarding the pandemic, lockdowns, masks, etc. – or what he considers to be misinformation, was indeed “deadly.” Now that the problem has been presented in such a dramatic way, the “solution,” however drastic, should be an easier pill to swallow. And the solution is, basically, Big Tech and government(s) censoring free speech. Related: WHO Report Proposes Working With Social Media Providers and Law Enforcement To Control “Disinformation” Tedros speaks about the need for the WHO to be trusted, and trustworthy, but the way he proposes to go about this is baffling, as it involves calls to government and tech and social media companies “to prevent the spread of harmful lies and promote access to accurate health information.” Some of the biggest of them – and essentially all governments around the world – have been carrying censorship of this kind for years, pointing to the WHO as a reliable source and earnestly removing massive amounts of content as misinformation, even when it later turned out to be true. With that in mind, it’s difficult to understand what more Tedros would like done (and how), but it might have to do with shoring up support (by shutting up opponents) for the WHO Pandemic Treaty, which is currently being negotiated. The WHO director-general mentions “misinformation” as a factor that is undermining those negotiations, because of the claims that the end-goal of the treaty is to take decision-making during pandemics away from sovereign nations. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post WHO Chief Doubles Down on Free Speech Crackdown appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post When Your Car Becomes the Ultimate Witness: Data, Surveillance, and Your Rights appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Great Moments in Protection Racket Media: Attacking Mickey D's for Hosting Trump

Under a week after the New York Times dismissed Kamala Harris’s book plagiarism by attacking the “seizing” investigator Christopher Rufo as possibly racist for bringing it to light, the Times has gotten tough on a writer guilty of a very similar offense. It turns out that sometimes borrowing material verbatim is objectionable to the Times -- at least when its own words are the ones being repeated. The Washington Post has the story: “John Grisham poached material for new book ‘Framed,’ media outlets say.” Prolific author John Grisham has written a nonfiction collection about wrongful convictions, and it looks likely to join his oeuvre of legal thriller novels as another bestseller. Although the rude word “plagiarism” was not used, the Post made it clear the Times was mightily offended at the under-credited use of its work. But the New York Times and ProPublica now say Grisham went too far in his use of their reporting on a murder case in Texas, and they want changes made to the book. The Times says Grisham’s book “draws comprehensively and without appropriate attribution” from “Blood Will Tell,” a two-part series written by prominent criminal justice reporter Pamela Colloff in 2018. Colloff, who works jointly for the Times and ProPublica, reported on the disputed conviction of Joe Bryan, who was found guilty of his wife’s 1985 murder despite evidence suggesting he was 120 miles away when it took place. …. In the book’s acknowledgments, Grisham mentions reporters (including Colloff) by name. But Grisham’s use of Colloff’s work goes far beyond usual professional practices, according to the Times and ProPublica, with his writing veering close to Colloff’s in dozens of instances. For example, in her 2018 series, Colloff writes of Bryan’s wife: “Her pink nightgown was drawn up to the top of her thighs, and she was naked from the waist down.” Grisham’s version is reworded only slightly, swapping the two clauses: “She was naked from the waist down and her pink nightgown was pulled up to her thighs.” …. In an interview with The Post, ProPublica Editor in Chief Stephen Engelberg said his outlet had found more than 50 examples of close similarities between Colloff’s articles and Grisham’s writing. Engelberg pointed out that Colloff’s credit in the book comes after more than 300 pages, and says she should instead be mentioned at the start of the chapter on Bryan. By contrast, the Times wrote dismissively of Rufo’s findings, which numbered “more than a dozen” instances of plagiarism major and minor, according to Rufo’s researcher Stefan Weber of Austria: The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book….The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Similar limits apply to Grisham’s borrowings, as flagged by the Times. But it hasn’t stopped the paper and its ProPublica partner from making a public stink about the borrowing when it’s their intellectual property being published without proper credit.