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Minecraft, Mojang.

The special filled right now at Union Square Donut is jam, in case anybody was curious.

“The Trial Of A Time Lord, Part 4: The Ultimate Foe” (Season 23, episodes 13-14. Originally broadcast Nov. 29-Dec. 6, 1986.)

This is the way the Sixth Doctor era ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. Offscreen, the show loses the script editor who was, for better or worse, the driving force behind the grim, violent, and often misanthropic vision of mid-1980s Doctor Who, and it would very soon lose Six’s actor, Colin Baker, who was fired after season 23 was over. Onscreen, the 14-episode “Trial Of A Time Lord” arc limps past the finish line with the final segment, “The Ultimate Foe.” 

It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that after a dozen episodes of mediocre buildup, the final two half-hours wrap up the story in a less than satisfying way. But given the behind-the-scenes chaos that plagued this season and particularly the making of these last two ...

The brutal force-feeding process that Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike endure twice daily has been called torture. But as part of its defense in a series of recently unsealed legal documents, administrators say that at least inmates are able to watch TV and play video games during it. In a statement submitted for a lawsuit against the facility on April 17th, Colonel John V. Bogdan defended the program. Among other things, he said, a small group of long-term strikers who were compliant during feedings were given a soft chair instead of the normal restraining chair, after a policy change in late 2013. "The chair reclines, and the detainees may watch television or play video games while being enterally fed." Another statement defends the system by saying that compliant subjects can be fed "in a cushioned recliner chair while watching television."

Guantanamo officials have said that force-feeding by tube is necessary to stop detainees from dying, but a US judge has described the procedure as "painful, humiliating and degrading," though she recently allowed the facility to keep force-feeding Dhiab out of fear that he would die of starvation. Two feeding sessions take place every day, and the tube is usually removed between feedings, then reinserted. Documents describe the detainees attempting to delay the feeding by urinating or defecating on themselves, biting the tube in half, inducing vomiting, or attacking medical personnel. The lawsuit alleges abuses beyond the force-feeding itself, saying that staff deliberately ignored detainees' requests and laced the food with laxatives to cause diarrhea. While statements from Guantanamo say that leaving tubes in for long periods of time can cause infections, the suit accuses staff of ignoring the pain caused by frequently inserting and removing the tube. One inmate said he vomited blood after a tube was repeatedly inserted incorrectly.

The current force-feeding procedures began after a 2005 hunger strike. Officials justified restraining inmates in order to stop them from vomiting up food afterwards, but the implicit goal was to end the hunger strike by making it painful to continue. In mid-2013, over 100 of the camp's 166 inmates were said to be on a hunger strike, in part because of Obama's failure to close the facility. 45 were being force-fed. These unsealed documents are part of lawsuits by multiple detainees attempting to end what they say is an inhuman and tortuous system. Last month, in an unprecedented decision, a judge ordered staff to temporarily stop force-feeding inmate Abu Wa'el Dhiab, though that decision was later reversed. In a statement to Polygon, attorney Jon Eisenberg — who represents one of the prisoners — called the television and video game privileges "grotesque window dressing."

A flown SpaceX Dragon capsule.

Megan Geuss

Back when it was still flying its own vehicles, NASA primarily relied on contractors to maintain and operate them. The agency's current plan takes this approach a bit further, paying private companies a fee for service to take materials and, eventually, people into low-Earth orbit. SpaceX and Orbital Science are already taking cargo to the International Space Station, and three companies—Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada—are currently receiving money to develop crewed vehicles.

But this plan doesn't have uniform support from Congress, and the Houston Chronicle's Eric Burger has found that one of the Congressional detractors has slipped wording into a NASA funding bill that could potentially derail the whole process. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has added a small clause that would require all the competing companies to engage in a specific form of cost tracking. Doing so is far more easily dictated than done, based on this description of the accounting methods.

Boeing, as a regular government contractor, already has a system in place for tracking costs in a compatible manner. The other two companies, however, do not and would have to face the costs of adding it. Berger also suggests that the new requirement might force the entire contracting process to be repeated.