Comment on Constitution Reading Interrupted

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Among other false and misleading claims in U. S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration addresses on Tuesday, his declaration that Americans “split the atom” prompted vexed social media posts by New Zealanders, who said the achievement belonged to a pioneering scientist revered in his homeland. Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United Kingdom. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The achievement is also credited to English scientist John Douglas Cockroft and Ireland’s Ernest Walton, researchers in 1932 at a British laboratory developed by Rutherford.

The mistakes of the U. K. and Germany this winter serve as a wakeup call for policymakers worldwide as they consider their own energy policies.

Trump did not sniff, grope or try to bite any children—or women.

These last-minute pardons will stain the Biden record like nothing else.

There may be other buyers, now that the issue has come to the fore.

President Donald Trump on Monday granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people who joined in the January 6 attack on Congress that he himself caused. Hours after returning to office, Trump announced he was giving “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to nearly all “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Trump also announced commutations of prison sentences for the handful of January 6 convicts not given full pardons—14 top members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and Proud Boys—freeing them from lengthy prison sentences. These actions mean that Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader who was sentenced to 18 years in prison following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for planning violence on January 6, is a free man.