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BANGKOK, Thailand -- The anti-establishment winner of May's national election lost support to become prime minister on August 2 when his coalition dumped him, clearing the way for a conservative real-estate tycoon's possible nomination.

Parliament's House election winner on May 14, Pita Limjaroenrat, was ousted because he had virtually no chance to become prime minister after the Senate rejected him in July for demanding the monarchy's lese majeste defamation protection -- Section 112 in the Criminal Code -- be weakened.

Many in his eight-party, 312-member coalition also feared being perceived as anti-112 which could open them to dangerous, expensive, time-consuming -- and potentially punishable -- allegations and lawsuits, real and dismissible, filed by litigious staunch royalists.

Mr. Pita's departure from his hurriedly regrouping coalition also banished him and his new Move Forward Party (MFP) to the opposition.

His dramatic and embarrassing downfall came after the idealistic, inexperienced, yuppie politician won 14 million votes -- 38 percent of the total -- and 151 seats in Parliament's 500-member elected House.

As the heatwave intensifies across the country, as workers exposed to the heat collapse on the job in increasing numbers — some of them die — Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has signed a law nullifying local ordinances in the state that require ten-minute heat and water breaks for those who work in the sun.

Water is life! Yeah, so what, says Abbott and those who support this law. Critics call it the Death Star Law. Texas Rep. Greg Casar, who recently staged a nine-hour thirst strike on the steps of the U.S. capital in protest of such laws — such indifference to the health and lives of so many American workers — said that Abbott, along with other GOP governors like Ron DeSantis, “are participating in the cruelty olympics, trying to outdo each other.”

69 years ago an all-Christian bomber crew dropped “Fat Man”, a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of them Japanese Christians and permanently or mortally wounding uncountable numbers of others.

In 1945, the US was the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as Christian a nation whose churches overwhelmingly fail to sincerely teach or adhere to the ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).

Prior to the bomb exploding over St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral on 11:02 AM, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan. The Nagasaki cathedral was the largest Christian cathedral in the Orient.

The late Israeli commentator, Uri Avnery, wrote, "I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle … is assuming a more and more religious character."

 At first glance, the statement may seem baffling. If Israel is a 'Jewish State' that serves as a 'homeland' for all Jewish people, everywhere, does it not follow that the 'struggle', at least from an Israeli viewpoint, is essentially a religious one?

 If only it was that simple.

 Israel's dichotomy is that it was founded by an ideology, Zionism, which purposely conflated between religion and nationality.

The two nuclear reactors at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York were shut down in the late 1990s because they had been leaking tritium into the water table below, part of the island’s aquifer system on which more than 3 million people depend on as their sole source of potable water. 

BNL was established on a former Army base in 1947 by the then U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop civilian uses of nuclear technology and do atomic research.

BNL scientists were upset with the U.S. Department of Energy over the closures. BNL has been a DOE facility in the wake of the elimination of the AEC by the U.S. Congress in 1974 for being in conflict of interest for having two missions, promoting and also regulating nuclear technology.

The water table below BNL flows largely into a community named Shirley. 

Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir of an Atomic Town is a 2008 book by Kelly McMasters, a professor at Hofstra University on Long Island, who grew up in Shirley.