In a hilarious appearance on John Oliver’s HBO show, the famous physicist muses that robots could “outsmart us.”  don’t want to frighten you. I’ll leave it to Stephen Hawking to do that.

The famed physicist made an appearance last night on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” and had a deep and meaningful conversation with host John Oliver. Well, at least Hawking’s side of the conversation was deep and meaningful. MORE

Last week’s Pew Research Center report detailing the partisanship that increasingly defines American life showed the average American is much more likely to choose to live near people of similar ideological bents. Liberals like living in urban areas, within walking distance of shops and neighbors. Conservatives prefer the wide-open spaces outside the city that puts more distance between themselves and the next-closest house. MORE

CDC: Cases Confirmed In 15 States, Including N.Y., With 25 In Florida Alone – First there was West Nile virus. Now health experts are warning about another virus carried by mosquitoes. MORE

Residents of Pilger braced for a massive cleanup after a storm with dual tornadoes tore through their tiny northeast Nebraska town, killing a 5-year-old and damaging more than half of the community’s structures. MORE

President Obama announced on Monday evening that US ground troops ‘equipped for combat’ are being sent to Iraq – just days after claiming that no American soldiers would be deployed to the war-torn country.

In a letter to Congress, the president said American troops will be returning to Iraq only three years after they left and their deployment began on Sunday. MORE

Invoking the words of Pope Francis with regard to gays and lesbians, she wrote, “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?”

The goal of the second annual March for Marriage is to draw thousands of supporters of what they call “traditional marriage” to walk from the U.S Capitol to the Supreme Court. Conservative former presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, as well as Cordileone, are being billed as the star speakers. MORE

Russia on Monday cut gas supplies to Ukraine as a payment deadline passed and negotiators failed to reach a deal on gas prices and unpaid bills amid continued fighting in eastern Ukraine.MORE

Israel recently announced a plan to retire 33 Textron (NYSE: TXT  ) AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships. News reports suggest that the Cobras’ role will, in the future, be taken over by unmanned “drone” aircraft — armed to the teeth with air-to-surface guided missiles. Already, one former Israeli Cobra squadron is said to have been equipped with Israeli “Hermes 900” unmanned aerial vehicles.MORE

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming. MORE

…a study published by the University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that in nearly half of U.S. counties, female mortality rates actually increased between 1992 and 2006, compared to just 3 percent of counties that saw male mortality increase over the same period. MORE

“[The British oligarchy’s] religion is not the Anglican Christianity they publicly profess, but a hodgepodge of paganism, including Satanic cults such as Theosophy and Rosicrucianism [neither is genuine]. The central, syncretic ideology of the oligarchy’s inner cult life is the revived Egyptian drug cult, the myth of Isis and Osiris, the same anti-Christian cult that ran the Roman Empire. And like the ancient Isis-worshipping Egyptian dynasties, the British ruling family networks have maintained power for centuries by keeping the secrets of their intrigues within the family.” [2] MORE

The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its ruling in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby on June 26, and the closer we get to that date the more frantic liberals become. Their fear of a decision in favor of the arts and crafts chain, whose owners have challenged the constitutionality of Obamacare’s contraception mandate on the grounds that it violates their religious liberty, has reached such a pitch that they are making claims that transcend the merely portentous. MORE

“Iran’s supreme leader is promising a world free of infidels and nonbelievers with the coming of the Islamic messiah, Mahdi, a 9th-century descendant of the prophet Mohammad whom the Shiites refer to as the 12th Imam,” writes Reza Khalili, the former Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps operative who became a double-agent against Iran for the CIA. MORE

The gloves are off. The White House has now unequivocally designated Israel as the scapegoat and is meting out punishment for the disastrous outcome of the peace negotiations it initiated. MORE