Earlier this year a young employee at a celebrity magazine explained to me a problem. The magazine was doing reasonably well, as was its website. But both were publishing photos taken from Instagram with increasing frequency. This was fine : the photos were good and people liked them. The problem,…

Loneliness has been linked to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's disease. Depression is common among the lonely. Cancers tear through their bodies more rapidly, and viruses hit them harder and more frequently. In the short term, it feels like the loneliness will kill you. A study suggests…

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W hen Warner Brothers animators wanted to include cutting-edge astronomy in a 1952 Bugs Bunny cartoon 1 they set a scene at an observatory that looks like Palomar Observatory in California. The then-newly unveiled Hale Telescope, stationed at Palomar, had a 5-meter-diameter mirror, the world’s…

A Guide to the Largest Ocean Carriers in the World

05 Dec 2015 17:26 Koos Jansen As part of the wide analysis of the Chinese domestic gold market I would like to share that since the seventies there is a special army in China dedicated to gold. It’s called The Gold Armed Police – if you can read Chinese have a look at this Wikipedia page . It’s no…

IMAGINE if, to collect your salary each month, you had to walk to the nearest town, perhaps tens of miles away, to congregate in a school or a football pitch or a church. There, you and your colleagues wait for a man to arrive from the capital, perhaps a thousand miles away, with a suitcase of cash.…

One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and…

Last May, Dr. Xiaoxing Xi awoke to find a team of FBI agents brandishing guns and screaming at him to put his hands behind his back. Agents slammed the 57-year-old Temple University physics professor against a wall and dragged him away in handcuffs — all in front of his wife and two daughters. The…

Email NASA has released a composite image of Saturn's largest moon Titan, constructed from photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft, that shows the moon's surface instead of its hazy atmosphere. The image shows terrain mostly on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan, including the dark, dune-filled…

There’s a very funny photograph taken by Brassaï of Pablo Picasso posing in his Paris studio. Picasso had acquired a giant oil painting of a nude woman from an antique shop, and he strikes an affected pose before it, his brush poised and his little finger extended, as though he’s preparing to make…

What motivates someone to be violent? This is a question many people are asking in the wake of the recent mass shootings in California. Most explanations tend to revolve around the core assumption that violence is wrong. If someone is violent, something must be broken in their moral psychology—they…

What does the FBI want when it comes to the encryption “debate”? At an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, FBI Director James Comey offered what he called the “good news” that it’s not a debate at all. In fact, he said, government and the tech industry all want the same…

Monsanto chief is horrible ... And I got to tell him that to his face after his interview on CBS This Morning . Approaching someone like this isn’t really my thing. But being so well behaved all the time doesn’t seem to be helping people. It made me really uncomfortable to do it. But that’s how we…

Venezuelan opposition supporters celebrate the results of the legislative election in Caracas early Monday. Luis Robayo /AFP/Getty Images Dealing a big blow to President Nicolas Maduro's Socialist leadership, Venezuelan voters handed a majority of congressional seats to a coalition of opposition…

Climate & Energy By on Dec 4, 2015 Get your daily dose of good news from Grist Subscribe to The Beacon In Louisiana Disappearing , AJ+ reminds us that for some communities, climate change is already here. Looking at two towns on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Slidell and Dulac (the latter is home to…

Friction between Russia and Turkey, on display at a Russian press conference this week, is drawing attention to ISIS’s murky oil-selling operation. Credit Photograph by Vadim Savitsky / Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP On Wednesday, at a press conference in Moscow, Russia’s defense…

Share Reddit Email Ma’an News Agency | – – BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — More than 12 million people in Syria — nearly half of whom are children — are in need of immediate humanitarian assistance before winter sets into the war-torn country, an international aid group said Friday. Robert Mardini, regional…

A federal appeals court on Friday challenged regulators to defend a series of strict new rules for Internet providers, asking them why it should allow the controversial regulations to stand in spite of an industry lawsuit that's become the centerpiece of a highly-charged battle over the future of…

When Bernie Sanders brought up Hillary Clinton’s prodigious fundraising from Wall Street at the Nov. 14 Democratic presidential debate, Clinton called it an attack on her “integrity.” And in an interview this week, she said that “anybody who thinks they can influence me on that ground doesn’t know…

From left, Fatima Berrahal and Educardo Burkhart, of West Palm Beach, listen to billionaire Donald Trump as he addresses a crowd at the 2011 Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party on April 16, 2011 at Sanborn Square in Boca Raton, Florida. (Photo by John W. Adkisson/Getty Images) For reasons hard to…

The end of the progressive cycle implies the dissolution of hegemonies and the beginning of a period of dominations, of greater repression against the organized popular sectors. Until now we have been commenting on the causes of the end of the cycle; now it’s necessary to start to comprehend the…

Chile’s Communist Party Rejects Intervention in Venezuela Nigeria: Early Tally Shows Buhari in Lead, Opposition Rejects 86% Votes For New Constitution in Cuba US VP Pence Leads Lima Group, Pushes for More Severe Blockade Venezuela: EU Spurns Violent Intervention for Peaceful Solution Campaign…

As vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended far beyond waterboarding ), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 people and more likely over a million . As…

Exclusive: President Obama has displayed a stunning lack of sympathy for the Russian civilians killed in an ISIS plane bombing in Egypt and for two Russian military men slain as victims of U.S. weapons systems in Syria, putting insults toward President Putin ahead of human decency, writes Robert…

0 Shares Media Options Download Video Download Audio Get DVD Other Formats This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate 0 Shares This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate The growing campaign for divestment from the gas, oil and coal companies reached a new…

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is asking why a small Department of Defense task force charged with developing the Afghan economy spent nearly $150 million on private villas, security guards and luxury meals while operating in the country between 2010 and 2014.…

Darwar Khan prays over the graves of relatives who were killed during a night raid conducted by the Khost Protection Force in the village of Gurbuz District, Khost province, on Nov. 4. (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post) TOR GHAR, Afghanistan — Months after the Obama administration declared…

Behind closed doors, speaking with investors and Wall Street analysts, the gun industry views mass shootings as an opportunity to make lots of money. Ordinary people are despairing about the frequency of tragic events like the murderous rampage in San Bernardino on Wednesday, or the Planned…

Exclusive: Inside Official Washington’s bubble, the Important People believe their “group think” is the envy of the world, but the truth is that their credibility has collapsed to such a degree that their propaganda can’t even match up with the head-chopping videos of the Islamic State crazies,…

The media-as-public-relations-machine was in full swing last week, abuzz over Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s public letter to their daughter that contained a $45 billion pledge to establish the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The mainstream media produced an avalanche of praise. “Mark Zuckerberg…

Credit Photograph by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty NEW YORK ( The Borowitz Report )—The billionaire Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States has sparked deep disappointment among his supporters, many of whom had hoped he was planning to ban a sizable number of other religions. In…

(updated below — Update II) Hours after a new poll revealed that he’s trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement advocating “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our representatives can figure out what’s going on.” His…

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel urged Saudi Arabia on Sunday to stop supporting religious radicals amid growing concern among some lawmakers in Berlin about the funding of militant mosques by the world's biggest oil exporter. The unusual criticism of the Gulf state…

Revolvers sit on display in the Smith & Wesson booth on the exhibition floor of the 144th National Rifle Association annual meetings in Nashville, Tennessee.Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images Firearms giant Smith & Wesson saw gun sales rise 15.2% to $124.9m in the past three months as…

Street life near the Capital building, Havana, Dec. 22, 2014. Photo by Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos Back in April, at the Nasdaq marketplace in Times Square, a few hundred interested parties gathered for a daylong conference. It was labeled the “Cuba Opportunity Summit: High-Velocity…

N OT LONG AGO I WAS LYING IN MY BUNK in the hole, just minding my own business as always and thinking about some of the video games I have known and loved over the years, when suddenly one of the guards shouted through the door grill that his fascist Bureau of Prisons overlords had just decreed that…

Chile’s Communist Party Rejects Intervention in Venezuela Nigeria: Early Tally Shows Buhari in Lead, Opposition Rejects 86% Votes For New Constitution in Cuba US VP Pence Leads Lima Group, Pushes for More Severe Blockade Venezuela: EU Spurns Violent Intervention for Peaceful Solution Campaign…