Bales' attorney Emma Scanlan, however, asserted that her client was not "lucid" at the time of the crime and was under the influence of alcohol, steroids and sleep aids. Another lawyer for Bales has complained that his client's post-traumatic stress disorder has not been sufficiently explored during the trial. Scanlan also claimed that her team had not been given enough time to ready themselves for the trial, before it even began.

There are some who have welcomed the possibility. In March, National Veterans Foundation founder Floyd Meshad told Reuters that, “It would probably be best for the military if they could execute Bales right now and send his pieces to Afghanistan.”

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“This is no time for finger-pointing. It is time for us to mourn the sad and black moment we experienced as a country,” Phiyega said.

Previously, the New York Times featured video footage of the shooting.

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“Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello begins, before asserting that Romney's V.P. pick is actually “clueless” about the band. While the guitarist concedes that fans respond to his music in “different ways,” he has a hard time coming to terms with Ryan being a fan while also being a conservative Republican. In one striking passage, Morello discusses what Ryan truly rages about:

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Tang was released from custody on Aug. 10, as the Wall Street Journal reported, not long after “an outpouring of support of her on Chinese microblogging sites.” But she still hasn’t returned home. In the meantime, China Daily reported, a group of 10 prominent lawyers have written a public letter to China's Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of Justice urging changes to a system that allows even modest offenders to be held in labor camps for years without a trial.

China Daily’s coverage of the news was “remarkable,” reported Lilian Lin of the Wall Street Journal. Essentially the government’s “central English-language mouthpiece newspaper,” China Daily typically avoids criticizing policies “without high-level approval.”

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Monthly stipends can near $900 and are intended to boost “often meager retirement income.”  To qualify, writers must be 60 or older, have lived in Buenos Aires for 15 years, and written five or more books of fiction, poetry, plays or literary essays for established publishers. What's more, independent publishers in Buenos Aires are eligible for subsidies and the city offers “tax exemptions on book purchases.”

The program was reported as Mitt Romney revealed to Fortune Magazine his plans for reduced spending, taking sharp aim at prominent cultural institutions.

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In Ireland, Adrian Hamilton of the Irish Independent praised Ryan’s ability to boil down economics for the masses, but seemed anxious about belt-tightening:

"A Washington professional, he lacks broad experience of life outside politics and has made his name more as a policy wonk than a populist. But he has an easy manner with people and a gift for presenting economic issues in simple terms of American values and optimism. ... At a time of faltering recovery in the world's largest economy, we can ill afford a lurch back to the contraction and the social strains that heavy cuts in public expenditure would bring."

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Under the current Obama budget, $30.5 billion would go toward Pell Grants in 2014, $24.5 billion of which would be pulled from “discretionary spending” and $6 billion from “mandatory spending,” as Ezra Klein explains. The Ryan budget reduces by 19 percent “the category of discretionary funding that includes Pell grants,” leaving two possible outcomes: funding for Pell Grants could be reduced by $12 billion (a full 19 percent cut) or Pell Grants could be cut by “somewhat less than 19 percent” with additional significant cuts to other undisclosed “domestic discretionary programs.”

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• We were looking for authentic genuineness and simplicity and we found them in our punk performances. Passion, openness and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, cunning and a contrived decency that conceals crimes. The state’s leaders stand with saintly expressions in church, but their sins are far greater than ours. We’ve put on our political punk concerts because the Russian state system is dominated by rigidity, closedness and caste. Аnd the policies pursued serve only narrow corporate interests to the extent that even the air of Russia makes us ill.

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Ryan, a staunch conservative and Roman Catholic, has drawn ire from followers of his own faith. While Catholicism emphasizes caring for the poor, Ryan's proposed budget would cut many of the programs that do so. As The New York Times reported, Ryan's plan would trim "$3.3 trillion from low-income programs over 10 years," dropping Medicaid coverage for 14 to 28 million people and eliminating 17 percent of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which covers food stamps.

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Luckily, there's a professor who has studied our exact rude question.

“The evidence is not clear at all,” said Dr. Robert M. Malina, professor emeritus in the department of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Malina has studied the growth of young athletes for decades, including at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Last year, he was part of a committee organized by international governing body Federation Internationale de Gymnastique to address the effects of training on gymnasts’ growth, particularly sexual and skeletal maturation.

Malina’s team analyzed numerous studies conducted over the past four decades hoping to draw some conclusions. Instead, they realized that most studies were confusing or inaccurate, often neglecting to consider age and genetic factors.

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Not quite, according to two sports psychologists who spoke with Salon. But the perfectionism and obsessiveness that tend to course through Olympians’ blood does leave them vulnerable.

“That obsessive compulsive person is awesome up to a point,” said Dr. Judy L. Van Raalte, a Springfield University sports psychologist who works with college and professional athletes. “You’re willing to train, to commit, and it feels comfortable to you; it doesn’t tire you out.”

Yet, just like anyone else, athletes do have weaknesses that can be triggered by stress – a theory called the diathesis-stress model of mental illness. Elite athletes confront distinct, sport-specific challenges, which can wreak mental havoc when presented in moments of extreme pressure, like Olympic competition.

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So it made us wonder: Since toilet trips can be a hassle – especially for those immersed in water and sheathed in nylon, might letting loose in the pool just be easier, particularly for elite swimmers in the thick of training? What's really going on underwater? More than you might want to know, it turns out.

“They don’t want to get out and miss the set,” said Bill, 28, a Canadian swimmer who raced at the Olympic Trials this year and spoke to us on the condition that we wouldn't use his last name.

Bill spent his childhood swimming for club teams and raced for a Division I school in the U.S. before returning to Canada to train for national-level butterfly and freestyle events. Although he did not admit to peeing in the pool, he knows others who did – in secret, mostly.

“No one talked about it,” Bill said.

One longtime teammate revealed his covert ritual to Bill after years of swimming together.

“He would jump in the pool, swim one lap, pee and then continue with practice,” Bill said.

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The July cover of Scientific American, titled "The Evolution of Cooperation," touts an outline of a human head with a brain represented by tangled blue bodies. The art is nearly a mirror image of the April 19, 2009, cover of the New York Times Magazine, which featured the same illustrated head.

The only difference? A cluster of green, rather than blue, bodies represents the brain on the Times’ cover, titled “The Green Mind.”

Jonah Lehrer's career hit a speed bump when he was discovered to be recycling his own material from earlier stories on his New Yorker blog. But Wilkes says he isn't engaged in self-plagiarism. He says Scientific American asked him to replicate his own work for their cover.

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It envisions the city overrun by 210 Wal-Mart stores, with a yellow sad-face icon representing each would-be location. That figure, representing 21 percent of the L.A. grocery store market, was derived from a 2011 report stating that Wal-Mart owns 21 percent of the grocery stores in rural and suburban America.

“The fact that any national market share we currently enjoy took five decades to achieve is somehow lost on them,” Wal-Mart’s senior director of community affairs Steven V. Restivo wrote in an email.  Yet Wal-Mart, currently the biggest company in the world, clearly intends to bulk up its L.A. presence.

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