A project of The Nation Institute TomDispatch.com Archive Authors Books Press About Contact Support Us Tomgram: Nick Turse, Special Ops, Shadow Wars, and the Golden Age of the Gray Zone EmailPrint Don’t think the fad for “draining the swamp” began on the campaign trail with Donald Trump . It didn’t,…

An image of a Hyperface pattern, specifically created to contain thousands of facial recognition hits.Photograph: Adam Harvey The use of facial recognition software for commercial purposes is becoming more common, but, as Amazon scans faces in its physical shop and Facebook searches photos of users…

Costa Rica ended 2016 on a particularly green note. The Central American nation ran entirely on renewable energy for more than 250 days last year, the country's power operator announced. Renewables supplied about 98.1 percent of Costa Rica's electricity for the year, the Costa Rican Electricity…

Africa has seen the most dramatic growth in the deployment of America’s elite troops of any region of the globe over the past decade, according to newly released numbers. In 2006, just 1% of commandos sent overseas were deployed in the U.S. Africa Command area of operations. In 2016, 17.26% of all…

Baltimore officials said they cannot provide the emails of a top police commander who oversaw a controversial aerial surveillance program this year because his email account was not configured properly and the records were not retained as required by state law and city policy. The lapse is now under…

(C) ​ s.imeon In what may be the biggest sign of hope for elephants since the current poaching crisis began, the Chinese government, today, announced a one-year timeline for its promised domestic ivory ban . According to the notice, China will begin phasing out registered legal ivory processors and…

As right-wing politicians around the world gathered power by scapegoating immigrants for the economic struggles of working people, the world’s richest people got nearly a quarter trillion dollars richer in 2016. The 500 wealthiest individuals on a planet of roughly 8 billion humans gained $237…

Mobile is today as important, if not more important, than desktops when it comes to the internet and apps. A clear reminder of that comes with news of a report claiming that Google’s Android has overtaken Windows as the internet’s most used operating system. Research from web analytics company…

B y the time the cop called “Lisa Davis”, I’d been sitting in the hard wooden pew in New York City criminal court for two hours. The courthouse swirled with diminished beauty: cracked marble, tarnished brass. It seemed so unlikely that it could feel like an actual hall of justice, that hope could…

The Wharram Percy excavation area as it looks today.Photograph: Pete Horne/Historic England/PA A study by archaeologists has revealed certain people in medieval Yorkshire were so afraid of the dead they chopped, smashed and burned their skeletons to make sure they stayed in their graves. The…

On the grassy slope of a fjord near the southernmost tip of Greenland stand the ruins of a church built by Viking settlers more than a century before Columbus sailed to the Americas. The thick granite-block walls remain intact, as do the 20-foot-high gables. The wooden roof, rafters and doors…

Dirty jokes and NSFW GIFs. Snaps of unsuspecting colleagues on the trading floor. Screenshots of confidential client positions. All that -- and, on occasion, even legally dubious information -- is increasingly being trafficked over the new private lines of Wall Street: encrypted messaging services…

After more than two years of landing its rockets after launch, SpaceX finally sent one of its used Falcon 9s back into space. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this evening, sending a communications satellite into orbit, and then landed on one of SpaceX’s drone ships floating in the…

Contractors work on the roof of a new residential apartment building in Sandy, Utah. Photographer: George Frey/Bloomberg Photographer: George Frey/Bloomberg Urbanists often lament that developers no longer erect the small apartment buildings that were once a staple of city neighborhoods. Instead,…

A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment. It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University…

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast Taylor Huddleston woke early on December 6th, hours before the Arkansas winter morning would stir to life with the sound of roosters and dogs. Since selling off the last piece of his software business two months earlier, Huddleston had nothing in…

W hen you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times,…

By Moshe Y. Vardi Communications of the ACM,January 2012,Vol. 55 No. 1, Page 5 10.1145/2063176.2063177 Comments (9) Chess fans remember many dramatic chess matches in the 20 th century. I recall being transfixed by the 1972 interminable match between challenger Bobby Fischer and defending champion…

A tax law professor tries to change the way we pay our taxes, so it is easy and painless. His system has been tested and it works. But when he tried to convince California to adopt it, he had to square off with well-funded lobbyists and political power brokers. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: This year,…

The Scottish island of Eigg has a precarious connection to the outside world – which I experienced first-hand when a storm forced the cancellation of my ferry and I had to wait two days for the next boat. But largely because of that fragility, the tiny island – 15 miles (24km) west of the mainland –…

California's SpaceX company expects to make a piece of history later when it re-flies a Falcon rocket. Traditionally, rockets are one-use only - all the elements of the vehicle are discarded in getting a satellite payload into orbit. But SpaceX has become adept at landing its boosters safely back on…

On a desert-cold, moonlit night just over two years ago, Amir Taaki stepped off the Iraqi sand into a rubber dinghy floating in the Tigris River. The boat was just wide enough to fit his compact body next to the much larger American ex-Army machine gunner sitting next to him. Taaki and the dozens of…

Doctors are on the cusp of launching the first new male contraceptive in more than a century. But rather than a Big Pharma lab, the breakthrough is emerging from a university startup in the heart of rural India. Years of human trials on the injectable, sperm-zapping product are coming to an end, and…

Enlarge On March 25, security researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered something very unfortunate on Docs.com , Microsoft's free document-sharing site tied to the company's Office 365 service: its homepage had a search bar. That in itself would not have been a problem if Office 2016 and Office 365 users…

Majority Leader McCarthy Confirms House to Immediately Act on Behalf of the Cable and Telephone Industry Following the Senate Vote Yesterday, the U.S. Senate by a razor thin margin of 50 to 48 voted to take away the privacy rights of Internet users as a favor to the cable and telephone industry. Now…

Unless you’re a golfer, you probably don’t think about golf balls. But a new US lawsuit about these little dimpled spheres has an economics lesson for all shoppers, showing why consumers have cause for concern when companies use court for sport. Costco, the wholesale membership club, rocked the golf…

Amy Adams in Arrival . Paramount Pictures Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival makes being a linguist look pretty cool—its hero Louise (Amy Adams) gets up close and personal with extraterrestrials and manages to save the entire world with her translation skills ( and lives in a chic, glass-walled modernist…

Tara Flynn, a rising star at a TV production unit of 21st Century Fox, walked into her boss’s office last August and told him she was quitting and joining streaming-video giant Netflix Inc. The news was not well-received. “Netflix is public enemy No. 1,” said Bert Salke, the head of Fox 21…

Regina Elsea was a year old in 1997 when the first vehicle rolled off the Mercedes-Benz assembly line near Tuscaloosa. That gleaming M-Class SUV was historic. Alabama, the nation’s fifth-poorest state, had wagered a quarter-billion dollars in tax breaks and other public giveaways to land the first…

AMAZON is an extraordinary company. The former bookseller accounts for more than half of every new dollar spent online in America. It is the world’s leading provider of cloud computing. This year Amazon will probably spend twice as much on television as HBO, a cable channel. Its own-brand physical…

Energy 8 pictures The Synlight artificial Sun is made of 149 7-kW arc lights (Credit: DLR ) View gallery - 8 images Germany isn't exactly famous for its sunshine, so to help with the country's commitment to investigating renewable energy, the German Space Center (DLR) has constructed the world's…

Second-graders work on iPads at Park Lane Elementary School in Sandy, Utah. (George Frey/Bloomberg News) Senate lawmakers voted Thursday to repeal a historic set of rules aimed at protecting consumers' online data from their own Internet providers, in a move that could make it easier for broadband…

Going up, up, up. Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images As rents and home prices in the most productive megacities continue to climb, the obvious question is whether this is sustainable. Will New York, San Francisco and London become unstoppable juggernauts,…

Matthew Travis / Reuters On a balmy night in late October 2014, Rachel Lindbergh and dozens of others stood on the grass at the end of Arbuckle Neck Road in Virginia, staring across the bay. Their eyes were trained on a spot on Wallops Island less than two miles away, where a 14-story-tall Antares…

What's the first thing you do upon waking up? If your answer's brushing your teeth or taking a shower, chances are you're already using a product developed by Givaudan. The Swiss firm is the world's largest player in the flavour and fragrance industries. It develops scents and flavours across food…

Photo: The Voohees Among the Stanford Research Institute’s many classified research projects in the early 1970s was a contract supported by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Technical Service, a division headed by Sidney Gottlieb, perhaps the most notorious scientist ever to work for the…