Microsoft aims to simplify with Windows 8.1

    

MICHAEL LIEDTKE - AP Technology Writer - Associated Press

 

Microsoft is trying to fix what it got wrong with its radical makeover of Windows. It's making the operating system easier to navigate and enabling users to set up the software so it starts in a more familiar format designed for personal computers.
The revisions to Windows 8 will be released later this year. The free update, called Windows 8.1, represents Microsoft's concessions to long-time customers taken aback by the dramatic changes to an operating system that had become a staple in households and offices around the world during the past 20 years.
Microsoft Corp. announced it plans for Windows 8.1 earlier this month. The first details about what will be included in the update are being provided in a Thursday post on Microsoft's website.
The Redmond, Washington, company gave The Associated Press a glimpse at Windows 8.1 Wednesday. A more extensive tour of Windows 8.1 and several new applications built into the upgrade will be provided in San Francisco at a Microsoft conference for programmers scheduled to begin June 26.
With the release of Windows 8 seven months ago, Microsoft introduced a startup screen displaying applications in a mosaic of interactive tiles instead of static icons.
The shift agitated many users who wanted the option to launch the operating system in a mode that resembled the old setup.
That choice will be provided in Windows 8.1, although Microsoft isn't bringing back the start menu. That menu that could be found in the left-hand corner of a computer screen by clicking a Windows logo on all other versions of the operating system since 1995. The lack of a start button ranks among the biggest gripes about Windows 8.
Microsoft is hoping to quiet the critics by allowing users start the operating system in a desktop design with an omnipresent Windows logo anchored in the lower left corner of the display screen. Users will also be able to ensure their favorite applications, including Word and Excel, appear in a horizontal task bar next to the Windows logo.
The switch should ease the "cognitive dissonance" caused by Windows 8, said Antoine Leblond, who helps oversee the operating system's program management.
Windows 8.1 will lean heavily on Microsoft's Bing search technology to simplify things.
As with Windows 8, the search bar can found by pulling out a menu from the right side of a display screen. Rather than requiring a user to select a category, such as "files" or "apps," Windows 8.1 will make it possible to find just about anything available on the computer's hard drive or on the Web by just typing in a few words. For instance, a search for "Marilyn Monroe" might display biographical information about the late movie star pulled from the Web, a selection of photos and video and even songs she sang. Anyone who want to hear a particular song stored on the computer or play a specific game such as "Angry Birds" will just need to type a title into the search box to gain access within seconds.
The redesigned search tool is meant to provide Windows 8.1 users with "pure power and instant entertainment," said Jensen Harris, Microsoft's director of user experience for the operating system.
Applications also can be found by sorting them by letter or category.
Other new features in Windows 8.1 include a built-in connection with Microsoft's online storage system, SkyDrive, to back up photos, music and program files; a lock-up screen that will display a slide show of a user's favorite pictures; larger and smaller interactive tiles than Windows 8 has; and a photo editor.
In an effort to avoid any further confusion about the operating system, Windows 8.1 also will plant a tile clearly labeled "helps and tips" in the center of the startup screen.
Microsoft made the dramatic overhaul to Windows in an attempt to expand the operating system's franchise beyond personal computers that rely on keyboards and mice to smartphones and tablet computers controlled by a touch or swipe of the finger.
But Windows 8 has been widely panned as a disappointment, even though Microsoft says it has licensed more than 60 million copies so far.
One major research firm, International Data Corp., blamed the redesigned operating system for worsening a decline in PC sales by confusing prospective buyers. Meanwhile, Windows 8 hasn't proven it's compelling enough to put a major dent in the popularity of Apple Inc.'s pioneering iPad or other tablets running on Google Inc.'s Android software.
Microsoft, though, remains convinced that Windows 8 just needs a little fine tuning.
"We feel good about the basic bets that we have made," Leblond said.
It's crucial that Microsoft sets things right with Windows 8.1 because the outlook for the PC market keeps getting gloomier. IDC now expects PC shipments to fall by nearly 8 percent this year, worse than its previous forecast of a 1 percent dip. IDC also anticipates tablets will outsell laptop computers for the first time this year.
The growing popularity of tablets is now being driven largely by less expensive devices with 7- and 8-inch (17.5- to 20-centimeter) display screens. Microsoft built Windows 8 primarily to run on tablets with 10-inch to 12-inch (25- to 30-centimeter) screens, an oversight that Leblond said the company is addressing by ensuring Windows 8.1 works well on smaller devices.
If Windows 8.1 doesn't stimulate more sales of PCs and tablets running on the operating system, it could escalate the pressure on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Although the company's revenue and earnings have steadily risen since Ballmer became CEO 13 years ago, Microsoft's stock performance has lagged other technology companies. Investors, though, appear to becoming more optimistic about Ballmer's strategy. Microsoft's stock has risen by 25 percent since Windows 8's release last October, outpacing the 17 percent gain in the Standard & Poor's 500 index during the same period.

Moscow’s Gay-Bashing Ritual

By MASHA GESSEN NY TIMES

MOSCOW — I arrived at the edge of Gorky Park as one arrives on a red carpet: A score of photographers surrounded me and started clicking away. I was the first person to show up for an L.G.B.T. rally scheduled for 5 p.m. Saturday, one of three pride events held in the city that day.

For the last couple of years, gay activists have been using an old dissident tactic: scheduling several events in different locations on the same day and making sure information about them travels through different channels. In the Soviet era, this was a hedge against secret-police informants, though it was rarely effective. In the age of social networks, the police usually know where to expect the protesters, but on a couple of occasions the tactic of dispersed protests has served to protect participants from gay-bashers who frequent all L.G.B.T. events.

A concerted effort by Moscow activists to secure a legal permit for an L.G.B.T. pride parade resulted, after several years, in a 2010 European Court on Human Rights ruling that directed the city authorities to allow the event to be held. Though Russia usually complies with E.C.H.R. decisions, this time the Moscow City Court responded by banning gay pride events for the next 100 years. That, and the pending legislation against so-called propaganda of homosexuality — passed in a number of Russian municipalities and likely to face a final vote in the national Parliament as soon as this week — have pushed L.G.B.T. issues to the foreground of Russian politics and L.G.B.T. organizing deep underground.

With the ban on gay pride parades in effect, organizers of Saturday’s events planned modest actions that were strictly legal: one-person pickets and a rally in a cordoned-off corner of Gorky Park that is dubbed “Hyde Park” because it’s specifically set aside for free speech. (This is a recent invention of the Moscow authorities, who are apparently unaware that it serves to underscore the fact that the rest of the city doesn’t condone free speech.)

Earlier in the day, a young woman stood up in front of Parliament with a poster and was attacked by a self-identified Orthodox believer before she had a chance to turn the poster to face the onlookers; she was then detained by the police. Then another woman unfurled a poster with the words “Love Is Stronger Than Hate” and had barely had time to say, “This is a legal one-person picket to protest the homophobic laws” before two policemen grabbed her and dragged her away. In all, at least 25 people were detained by the police in the early afternoon. Because what they had been doing was legal, they were eventually released without charge — but not before the 5 p.m. rally was over.

The organizers had secured permission to hold the rally in “Hyde Park,” but two days before the scheduled event that small square of sidewalk on the Moscow River embankment was closed for reconstruction. Some pipes were laid on the sidewalk, apparently to justify this claim, and a chicken-wire construction fence was erected. Unaware of all this and thinking I had simply taken the wrong route to get to “Hyde Park,” I climbed the fence with my bike before landing in front of the throng of reporters.

Then about 20 activists appeared seemingly out of nowhere and unfurled banners that said things like “Children Need Day Care, Not Laws Against ‘Homosexual Propaganda,’ ” and within a few minutes were attacked by men with shaved heads, who knocked men and women over and proceeded to kick them and shoot pepper spray into their eyes at point-blank range. The police swooped in, pushing the attackers aside to get to the protesters, whom they then hauled into prisoner transport vehicles. Some of the attackers were detained too — but only if they continued to try to beat the activists even as they were being led away by the police. One of the gay-bashers objected to being transported in the same vehicles as gays and lesbians, and the two groups were separated, with about half a dozen people in each van.

“That’s probably a good thing,” said a young woman activist. “Last time we spent two hours driving around Moscow in the same vehicle as the gay-bashers, and that was really unpleasant.”

A reporter asked me when efforts to legalize gay pride in Russia might succeed. The woman with whom I had been chatting could not contain herself and burst out laughing at this question. “Probably no sooner than efforts to topple the regime succeed,” I responded.

About a dozen of us stood around for another quarter-hour and dispersed. It is a ritual: We show up, they beat some of us up, and the next year we show up again — just to prove that we will keep showing up.

 The Day Boston Felt the World’s Pain

 

by Paul Theroux The Daily Beast

When the travel writer returned to his hometown after the Marathon bombing, he found the mood of the city transformed, unified with a trauma that he has seen elsewhere in the world.

For several decades, starting in the early 1970s, I traveled regularly from London, where I lived as a Resident Alien, to Boston where I grew up; and each time it was like a tumble through the Looking Glass. Boston was so mild, so confident, still the joyous and even innocent city of my youth. The noteworthy Boston tragedies, vividly recalled by my father—the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (21 killed), the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inferno of 1942 (492 killed)—were over, and such infernalities seemed unrepeatable.

Arriving in Boston was like landing upon the bosom of serenity from the derangement of a war zone. Britain at that time was in the grip of a bombing campaign by well-funded and feuding nationalists in Ulster who were driven by spite, folklorism, religious bigotry, and were tribalistic in their antique grudges, absurd in their speechifying.

　

London was weary and anxious, and by the mid-1970s there had been a number of bomb outrages: the Old Bailey bomb of 1973 (one death, 200 injured, shattered buildings), the Guildford bombing of 1974 (five killed, 65 wounded), the pub bombings in Birmingham (21 killed, 182 injured), the Regents Park nail bomb of 1982 (the death of seven musicians playing selections from "Oliver!", and many injuries), the Chelsea Barracks’ cluster bomb on the same day (11 deaths, many dismemberments, seven dead horses), the bombing at Harrods Department Store at Christmas 1983 (six people killed); and five people dead and many injured in an attempt on Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984.

　

The astonishing fact is that these unspeakable events in England were not as hideous as the everyday horrors in Ulster. Belfast was full of no-go areas and bomb craters throughout the 1970s and 80s; and the mildest country town was not spared. In August 1979, Lord Mountbatten and two youths were blown up on his yacht—and the IRA took credit and crowed over it. I traveled to Ulster in the ‘80s and found it a province of roadblocks and abject fear. A few years after I passed through the lovely town of Enniskillen, as wreaths were being laid on the town’s cenotaph on Remembrance Day in 1987, a 40-pound bomb was detonated in the market square, killing 11 people and maiming and injuring 63. As late as 1998, a wicked bombing in Omagh caused 29 deaths, with 220 injured. Militant protestant paramilitary groups planted bombs and schemed in murders, but the explosions that I mention were admitted to be the work of, or attributed to, the IRA, the Provos or splinter groups, like the one in Omagh, which called itself the Real IRA.

　

Boston seemed innocent of the terror, or else conniving in it, making a conscious political statement, to the extent that one of the notable features on Boston roads were the bumper stickers supporting the IRA. It is well-documented that a proportion of the money collected in the U.S. by Noraid (the Irish Northern Aid Committee) was used to support the IRA bombing campaigns, and in another grotesque irony, some of the money used to buy weapons from the U.S. came from Libyan bagmen sent by Muammar Gaddafi, one of the colonel’s many hobbies being the propagation of mayhem.

　

Except for such efforts as the Boston College oral history project documenting the Irish Troubles, this history of violence has been little discussed in recent years or else strenuously justified as legitimate by, among many others, the long-time IRA supporter and unapologetic congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York.

　

After the two bombs on the day of the Boston Marathon, it seemed from the howls of pain, the cries for vengeance, the massing of troops and police, with tanks and helicopters, and the city’s paralysis, that Boston had lost its innocence. Such a bomb outrage had never happened in the city. But with severed limbs and three corpses outside the Boston Public Library, and pools of blood on one of its oldest and happiest streets, the mood of the city was transformed—besieged, panicked, and ultimately unified—suffering in its trauma, in a way I have seen elsewhere in the world, yet painful to see in a city I love.

　

 

Boston did not deserve this; no city does, and it is lamentable that Boston has come to resemble the wider world of wreckage and bereavement.

 

 

The Looking-Glass effect is routine for many travelers returning from a distant place. Not long ago I came back to Boston from Angola, which is still plagued by landmines that were scattered all over the country in its 27 years of civil war. It is estimated that 20 million land mines were planted in Angola, by all sides in the long conflict.

　

Over a recent 10-year period, 2,000 land mines have been found on the route of the Benguela Railway and removed by a British charity called the HALO trust (in all, 68,000 mines in Angola have been cleared by this gallant organization). One effect of the decades of the Angolan civil war, which ended only in 1992, was that the animals which had not been eaten by starving people had been blown up by land mines. Cows in pastures are still shredded by the explosions now and then of forgotten land mines, and so are children playing and people taking short cuts through fields.

　

These were mainly Chinese and Israeli landmines planted by Cubans and South Africans, and similar kinds of landmines are made by any one of a number of American companies, such as Raytheon Corporation, based just outside of Boston.

　

And then there are cluster bombs. In my travels, people from the Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, and Uganda have told me horror stories of the effects of these diabolical bombs, and on my return from these places what do I find on the other side of the Looking Glass? The shameful fact that Textron Defense Systems in the town of Wilmington, on the outskirts of Boston, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cluster bombs. The danse macabre of so many unlucky countries is a billion-dollar business, part of the Massachusetts economic miracle.

　

When the surviving suspect of the Boston Marathon bombing was charged with using "a weapon of mass destruction," I mentally compared the two pressure cookers in the assault to an advanced cluster bomb, the so-called Sensor Fuzed Weapon made by Textron Defense Systems. As The Boston Globe reported, this little marvel is designed "to spray 40 individual projectiles of molten copper, destroying enemy tanks across a 30-acre swath of battlefield." And not only enemy tanks, but humans, too.

　

After the bombing in Boston, a banner was lifted by rebels in Syria: BOSTON BOMBINGS REPRESENT A SORROWFUL SCENE OF WHAT HAPPENS EVERY DAY IN SYRIA. DO ACCEPT OUR CONDOLENCES. That banner which reminded me of life in the Belfast of recent memory, could be also raised in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo, South Sudan, in the Red Corridor of India bedeviled by the Naxalites, or in Assam under assault by the bombers of separatist movements, where almost every day is another day of heartbreak, of lives destroyed, bodies maimed, families torn apart. Boston did not deserve this; no city does, and it is lamentable that Boston has come to resemble the wider world of wreckage and bereavement.

　

The Looking Glass exists for everyone who travels back from violent places of the earth. And it contains another paradox. Just before you pass through the Looking Glass you are looking at your own reflection. I was struck by the recognition of the Israeli spymasters, sadder but wiser, in the recent documentary The Gatekeepers, when at the end of that powerful film they reached the conclusion that in observing the Palestinians, they were looking in the mirror. "We have won already," they’d been told by their enemy. "Victory for us is to see you suffer."

 

 

 

Paul Theroux is a travel writer and novelist whose best known work, The Great Railway Bazaar, is a travelogue about a train trip from Britain through Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and then back across Russia to his point of origin.

In Barbara Walters’s Highlight Reel, TV’s Rise and Fade

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY NY Times

Pope Benedict XVI retired.

And so, soon, shall Barbara Walters.

The announcement on “The View” on Monday that Ms. Walters will leave ABC in 2014 was less a farewell than the kickoff of a drawn-out abdication ritual.

“I plan to retire from appearing on television at all,” Ms. Walters, 83, said after a slick highlights reel spanning 50 years of “gets” (Fidel Castro, Monica Lewinsky) was played. “There will be special occasions, and I will come back — I’m not walking into the sunset — but I don’t want to appear on another program or climb another mountain.”

And that star turn on “The View” was a helpful reminder of two things.

Obviously, Ms. Walters’s remarkable ascent from the secretarial pool of the “Mad Men” era to anchor desks and presidential yachts serves as a timeline of the women’s movement.

Just as significantly, however, her career mirrors the trajectory of television. Intuitively, knowingly or just luckily, Ms. Walters has moved — and is moving — in concert with tastes and audiences and real influence. She defected from nighttime to daytime just as many viewers were doing the same. For politicians and newsmakers, a loosey-goosey appearance on “The View” under her watch took on more value and resonance than a hard-hitting interview on any network evening news program.

And now, as more and more viewers leave broadcast television altogether, so does she. If she followed this road to its true conclusion, there would be a Barbara Walters video game for the Xbox.

Network news long ago began losing viewers and prestige. But now broadcast television itself seems ready for pasture. Every network has lost ground with the viewers most coveted by advertisers, those ages 18 to 49. Some of the best — and most watched — shows are on cable networks like AMC and FX. Netflix, Amazon and other companies are all getting into the production game.

In the era of Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when the networks considered the evening news too important to entrust to a woman, and paired Ms. Walters with a more authoritative-looking Harry Reasoner. The year was 1976, and many critics complained that Ms. Walters’s rise represented the fall of respectable television journalism, that her focus on personality and personal lives was too soapy and shallow for serious-minded viewers.

Now, of course, the pendulum has swung so far toward celebrity gossip and news-you-can-use on “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “World News” and “CBS Evening News” that Ms. Walters seems like a pillar of old-school journalism. But she pioneered the blurring of news and entertainment for a half-century without losing her authority. She put the Kardashians on her list of the 10 most fascinating people of the year in 2011; that year she also interviewed the embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad about his country’s uprising.

The current chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, Robert A. Iger, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York appeared on “The View” on Monday. Even though those men were paying homage to a television legend, it didn’t seem as if Ms. Walters had grown too old to keep working; it seemed as if the television legend had decided that the medium was too old to contain her drive.

Evening newscasts are clearly no longer the pinnacle of network prestige; for important newsmakers they are now a flyover between the hubs of morning talk shows and late-night comedy. There was a big to-do when Ms. Couric left NBC for CBS in 2006 to become the first woman appointed to be a permanent solo anchor of a network evening news show. That historic milestone quickly faded. After five years Ms. Couric left behind the sagging ratings and growing irrelevance of evening news and is now back in favor with an afternoon talk show, “Katie,” that was renewed by ABC for a second season.

Even daytime talk shows are on the losing side of entertainment history. “The View” is one of the leaders, and its ratings are in decline. “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” at its height in the 1990s, had 12 million to 13 million viewers. Even during her latter years on the air, Ms. Winfrey averaged about 6 million; Ms. Couric is holding her own with about 2.5 million.

Cast members come and go, but Ms. Walters is not just the creator of “The View,” she’s television personified, and word of her retirement was the subject of leaks weeks ago. Her plans for a farewell tour include specials and retrospectives and one last Oscar pregame extravaganza. It seems that the ever-ratings-minded Ms. Walters delayed a formal announcement until May to coincide with a sweeps month.

On Monday she playfully asked Mr. Iger, who is planning to retire in 2015, what they should do with their free time. He used the occasion to plug an ABC hit show that, like so many other network crowd pleasers, is also losing steam. “The two of us love to dance,” Mr. Iger said. “I say we go on ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ ”

Network television is in its twilight years.

Ms. Walters is quitting at the top by letting others bottom out.

Suspect in Cleveland Kidnapping Had Contact With Police

By TRIP GABRIEL and CHRISTINE HAUSER NY TIMES

CLEVELAND — The police had been called two times to a house where three young women from Cleveland, who disappeared about a decade ago and who friends and relatives feared were gone forever, were found on Monday, the authorities said on Tuesday. In 2000, the owner of the house, Ariel Castro, had called the police about a fight in the street. In 2004, the authorities interviewed Mr. Castro, a driver, after he “inadvertently” left a child on a school bus.

Neither of those visits by the authorities resulted in any arrests, nor was there any indication about the dramatic discovery for which Mr. Castro is now being held. But at a news conference on Tuesday, the police and investigators said that they were slowly starting to unravel the thread of events that led up to the escape of the women after one of them, Amanda Berry, tried to force her way through the front door of the house on Seymour Avenue.

On Tuesday the authorities said Mr. Castro, 52, was one of those arrested in connection with the case. Two of his brothers, Pedro, 54, and Oneil, 50, were also arrested.

The saga started to unfold on Monday when Ms. Berry told a dispatcher that she had been kidnapped and pleaded for the police to come before the man who was holding her captive returned. The 911 call was released by the authorities to local news media.

“I’m Amanda Berry, I’ve been on the news for the last 10 years,” she said.

Angel Cordero, 32, was heading to his car when he heard a woman scream, “I need help! I need help! I have been kidnapped for 10 years.” A neighbor, Charles Ramsey, told local television reporters that the screams drew him to the house as well.

“She had the door open a crack, but there was a chain she could not open,” Mr. Cordero said.

Mr. Cordero said that both men kicked through the door as a woman screamed, “Open the door, open the door, he is coming back.” Ms. Berry came out with a little girl in plastic shoes and ran to a house across the street.

“She looked dirty and was screaming,” Mr. Cordero said, referring to Ms. Berry. “She had on green pants and a small white shirt and old-looking shoes. Her teeth were yellow and dirty and her hair looked messy, as well.”

“The baby was crying a lot and was very nervous,” he said. “She probably never saw a car or anything before.”

The police arrived shortly thereafter.

“I did not go inside the house because I thought he would kill me,” Mr. Cordero said.

On Tuesday, the police in Cleveland said they still had to fully interview Ms. Berry and the other two women, as well as the suspects, to get a complete picture of why and how they ended up in the house. Gina DeJesus, who along with Ms. Berry had been missing since she was a teenager, and Michelle Knight who was 20 when she vanished, followed Ms. Berry out of the house after the police arrived.

Chief Michael McGrath, of the Cleveland Division of Police, said it was because of Ms. Berry’s “brave actions” that the other two women were able to escape as well.

Also in the house was the girl, a 6-year old, believed to be Ms. Berry’s daughter. The authorities did not release the identity of the child’s father, nor did they reveal more details about the condition of the women, saying that they were concerned with their emotional well-being.

Ms. Berry, who is now 27, was last seen leaving her job at a Cleveland Burger King in April 2003. Almost exactly a year later, Ms. Dejesus, now 23, disappeared as she was walking home from school. The police said on Tuesday that Ms. Knight had not been seen since August 22, 2002, and that a missing persons’ report was made by a family member the next day.

The police said they were executing a search warrant at the house, at 2207 Seymour Ave.

The authorities said they discovered the previous calls to the house after they combed through their databases following the discovery of the women. Martin Flask, the director of public safety in Cleveland, said there was no indication of criminal intent by Mr. Castro in relation to the school bus incident, and as far as the authorities could determine, there was no record any of the neighbors, bystanders or other witnesses or anyone else had ever called about the women in relation to the house where they were eventually found.

The women appeared to be physically unharmed, the authorities said shortly after they were discovered.

On Tuesday, they were released from MetroHealth hospital, where they had been taken to the emergency room and described as in “fair condition,” the hospital said. It said they were reunited with their families.

“The nightmare is over,” Stephen D. Anthony, special agent in charge of the Cleveland division of the F.B.I., said.

On Monday, television images showed neighbors lining the streets, applauding as emergency vehicles whisked the women away.

Mike Iwais, 35, a grocery store owner who lives near the house where the women were found, said he would see Mr. Castro strolling around the neighborhood, in nightclubs or restaurants. Mr. Iwais, who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years and like Mr. Castro went to Lincoln West High School, said Mr. Castro played in a Latin music band at a club called Belinda’s.

“But I never saw anybody going in or out of his house except him. Not even one person,” Mr. Iwais said. " We all thought he lived alone because he was always by himself going in and out of the house. Sometimes he would sit on his porch and drink beer.”

“He would have beers with people, other guys in the neighborhood, in their yards or on their porches, but he would never invite anyone over,” Mr. Iwais said. “And sometimes, you would say hello to him and he would not acknowledge you. It was strange.”

 

Trip Gabriel reported from Cleveland, and Christine Hauser from New York. Serge F. Kovaleski and Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from New York.

A comment from a serious woman

http://www.rachellucas.com/

 

 

They can’t find a place to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Apparently there are issues. I’m not even quoting the articles; basically, no cemetery is willing to take the corpse because it would require increased security, because there will probably be protests or vandalism. People have already “protested” in front of the funeral home that has the corpse.

I would like to know why, exactly.

Why is there increased risk of public acting-out or of stigma with this particular corpse compared with others who, in life, killed far more people? I’m as revolted and disgusted by what this piece of shit did as anyone else is, but no more revolted and disgusted by him than by, for example, the Newtown murderer of 20 little kids and several adults, who also was a corpse by the time I knew his name, but about whom I never saw any similar articles about protests against funeral homes and cemeteries. I remember no similar uproar when Timothy McVeigh, murderer of 168 souls, was executed and his body presumably handled by someone since I doubt it vanished into thin air. And I suspect we’ll not even see similar articles when the Fort Hood “Allahu Akbar!” murderer of 13 military service-people, Nidal Hasan, dies and needs burying, or when any other screeching psychopath who has killed and maimed innocent people in grotesque ways dies and needs burying.

So I just want to understand why this guy’s corpse is so different from the corpses of other mass murderers, even other terrorists. Where do we usually bury murderers in the U.S.? Why is it such a big deal with this particular one?

Honest questions. I’m genuinely baffled by what gets people interested and/or outraged and what doesn’t. The selectivity is astonishing, and honestly, it just seems really, deeply stupid.

For the record, if it were up to me what would be done with this maggot’s remains, I’d burn him up and toss the bucket of ashes in a landfill. I couldn’t possibly care less what happens to this corpse. I just think it’s dumb that people are acting out about it, or that the news media is sensationalizing whatever acting out is going on, when we don’t collectively give a flying shit about the disposal of any other murderer’s corpsemeat. My point is that it just seems like another opportunity for people to engage in that creepy display of public outrage or grief or whatever they call it, but which really just seems like a diversion from things that, in fact, matter.

Like how this particular homicidal maniac and his family were handed many thousands of dollars in American taxpayer money while plotting jihad. Or why and how the entire mainstream press is blatantly downplaying the Islam angle to this crime, and what that says about our society and its future. Or, how about those Benghazi whistleblowers, right? Or how about any number of other things that an adult citizen should care a whole goddamn lot more about than where a dead body spends the next few years turning to dust.