A glimpse through the wire into the exercise yard of Guantanamo Bay

Television’s newest legal drama could be the rawest one ever. It comes later this fall, beamed in from the courtroom near the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Only you won’t get to watch it.

Right now, there is only one way to witness a so-called military commission for an accused terrorist: ask the Pentagon to let you travel to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Be warned: only journalists and representatives of human-rights groups get approved. And those lucky few civilians admitted to the island have to pay several hundred dollars...

1898: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko is born in Karlovka, Ukraine. As dictator Joseph Stalin’s lapdog and top scientist, his influence will almost single-handedly retard the course of Soviet science, especially the fields of genetics and agronomy.

Early Soviet propagandists often relied on “miracles of science” to boost the status of their fledgling state. The young plant breeder Trofim Lysenko seemingly provided them with a whopper in 1927, reporting that he had developed a method of fertilizing fields without actually relying on fertilizers or minerals. The spinmeisters at Pravda had a field day,...