Mother Russia, abusive parent

The correlation you can draw between the attempted assassination of yet another pair of Russian expatriates (in this case, former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia) and this ill-disguised threat on Russian state television is quite a simple one: cross Vladimir Putin and you'll end up dead.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world, a certain other demagogic politician possessing a good deal less intelligence than Czar Vladimir apparently continues to believe that his good buddy would never, ever attempt to interfere with American elections. At least that's what this unspent $120 million intended to prevent such interference in the future seems to indicate.

In Memoriam: Peter Nicholls, 1939-2018

His Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (co-edited with John Clute) will remain an indispensable guide to the SF-perplexed for decades after his passing; I can remember referring to a copy of it at the library at Northeastern Illinois University when I couldn't even buy a used copy, and the only book that might've caused me to check out the works of more SF authors was Baird Searles and Co.'s A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction, which I still own a badly dog-eared copy of somewhere; it's just that Searles' book comes off as a comparative light introduction while Nicholls' and Clute's comes off as definitive to the point of being obsessive.