“Which son of a bitch says that?” It was December 11, 1981 in El Mozote, a small town in El Salvador, and the major wanted to know which one of his men had refused to kill the children. The military had just spent an entire day murdering its hundreds of inhabitants. Now, just the town’s kids were…

The state says more than 600 pipes have been replaced in Flint, Mich., this year — but 30,000 suspect pipes remain. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images A year ago, Flint, Mich., Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency because of lead-contaminated drinking water , attracting national outrage and…

Briefly Stuff that matters big oil, big spills Shutterstock A pipeline operated by Belle Fourche Pipeline Company in western North Dakota was shut down following the discovery of a leak on Dec. 5. Cleanup is ongoing, and 37,000 gallons of crude oil have been recovered as of Monday, reports the…

The watchdog wing of Congress has quietly launched an investigation into the “integrity” of the Pentagon’s whistleblower protection program. The previously unreported investigation, started in late October, expands on an ongoing effort by the Department of Justice on this same issue. The Government…

The food industry is gaslighting us on the harms of sugar

Almost 40% of young Americans were living with their parents, siblings or other relatives in 2015, the largest percentage since 1940, according to an analysis of census data by real estate tracker Trulia. Despite a rebounding economy and recent job growth, the share of those between the ages of 18…

The Notes of Patrick Modiano A young writer finds his voice on the radio

The fruit of the Manchineel tree. (Photo: Hans Hillewaert/CC BY-SA 3.0 ) Throughout the coasts of the Caribbean, Central America, the northern edges of South America, and even in south Florida, there can be found a pleasant-looking beachy sort of tree, often laden with small greenish-yellow fruits…

Look at this amazing picture of Mars! I don't think I have to try very hard to convince you that it would be cool to stand in Gale Crater and look through the haze towards Mt Sharp. But to achieve our goal and send humans to Mars we have to convince a lot more people, and that's what I'm here to…

Organic Filmmaking and City Re-Imagining Oscar Boyson Dec 13, 2016 What does “the future of cities” mean? To much of the developing world, it might be as simple as aspiring to having your own toilet, rather than sharing one with over 100 people. To a family in Detroit, it could mean having non-toxic…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp has been awarded a $927 million contract to provide technical support to the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon said in a statement on Tuesday. Reporting by Mohammad Zargham Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Most Americans follow up their 21 st birthdays with a hangover; Stevie Wonder opted for arguably the greatest sustained run of creativity in the history of popular music. Wonder’s “classic period”—the polite phrase for when Stevie spent five years ferociously dunking on the entire history of popular…

I understand why rendering a complicated layout may be slow. Or why executing a complicated script may be slow. Actually, browsers are rather fast doing these things. If you studied programming and have a rough idea about how many computations are made to render a page, it is surprising the browsers…

In July 2012, Phil Ivey walked into the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, N. J. Over the next 17 hours, he would become nearly $4.8 million richer. A gambler by profession, Ivey billed himself as the “ Tiger Woods ” of poker; he had won more than $6 million from several tours on the World…

In first major post-Brexit judgment involving the UK, Court of Justice of the EU backs Tom Watson MP, represented by Liberty, in landmark challenge to Government surveillance Ruling effectively means significant parts of the new Investigatory Powers Act are unlawful and must be urgently changed The…

Does Apple’s tax arrangement with Ireland violate EU "state aid" rules? | Carl Court/Getty Images opinion Rather than addressing the merits of the case, the tech giant is playing the pity card. On Monday, an angry Apple appealed against an August ruling by the European Commission ordering the…

Peek into a tide pool along the shore and you may see a starfish clinging quietly to a rock. But that secure adulthood comes at the expense of a harrowing larval journey. Tiny starfish larvae – each smaller than a grain of rice – spend 60 days and 60 nights paddling the open ocean, feeding to…

Many people will disagree with this post, not so much because it's flat out wrong but because there are so many different approaches one can take. It's a very subjective realm but I'm going to put forward some suggestions, make some considered arguments and leave it at that. The context is twofold…

THE kingdom presented its shift from the Islamic to the Gregorian calendar as a leap into modernity. In April the dynamic deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman, chose to call his transformation plan Vision 2030, not Vision 1451 after the corresponding Islamic year as…

samazgor Facebook has been accused of misleading the European Commission over its $22 billion takeover of WhatsApp in 2014—when the Mark Zuckerberg-run company claimed that it wouldn't be able to knit together user IDs, thereby combining the data of the two services. Brussels' competition officials…

Why Are You So Smart? Thank Mom & Your Difficult Birth

Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. is pumping $1 billion into OneWeb Ltd., which aims to use hundreds of satellites to provide internet access in rural areas and developing countries, in a fundraising round that values the startup at roughly $2.5 billion. OneWeb’s current investors are also giving $200…

Cindy Mi leans forward on a couch in her sun-filled Beijing office to explain how she first got interested in education. She loved English so much as a child that she spent her lunch money on books and magazines to practice. By 15, she was good enough that she began to tutor other students. At 17,…

Bits A security camera on the side of a building in Manhattan. Credit Mark Lennihan/Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Earlier this year, I had a beer in one of the more budget-conscious bars in the Mission district. My wallet stayed a little later than I did. I didn’t notice that until 11 a.m. the…

The future is not good for oil, no matter which way you look at it. — Motherboard ***** Solar — it’s not just a clean power source producing zero emissions and almost no local water impact, it’s also now one of the best choices on the basis of how much energy you get back for your investment. And…

Image by Waiting For The Word / Flickr P resbyterian reverend Thomas Bayes had no reason to suspect he’d make any lasting contribution to humankind. Born in England at the beginning of the 18th century, Bayes was a quiet and questioning man. He published only two works in his lifetime. In 1731, he…

Egypt has blocked its residents from accessing encrypted messaging app Signal , according to the application's developer. Mada Masr , an Egypt-based media organization, reported yesterday that several users took to Twitter over the weekend to report that they could no longer send or receive messages…

On Dec. 5, 1952, the first hints of what would eventually become the United Kingdom's worst environmental disaster began to appear. "You had this swirling," funeral director Stan Cribb told NPR in 2002 of the grey wisps that began to drift down streets. "[It was] like somebody had set a load of car…

The U.S. Department of Education has two quite different roles in the lives of indebted former students. The same bureaucracy that must safeguard taxpayer dollars by collecting $1.1 trillion in loans also oversees the nation's largest-ever effort to forgive student debt. These dual roles have…

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The Obsessed, Feuding Searchers Still Looking for Amelia Earhart

Samantha Lee/Business Insider When a group of Snapchat employees got locked out of their building one Monday morning, they quickly realized their predicament was no accident. A top-secret Snapchat team had swooped in overnight and taken over the office, de-activating the keycards of the current…

Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth’s molten outer core. They describe it as a kind of "jet stream" - a fast-flowing river of liquid iron that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia. The moving mass of metal has been inferred from measurements made by…

Tossed aside in the ‘white gold’ rush Indigenous people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet Story by and Peter Whoriskey Photos and videos by Michael Robinson Chavez Video editing by Jorge Ribas December 19, 2016 In the thin air of the salt flats here, nearly 13,000 feet…

W ith the stroke of a pen, California Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation that gave prison guards, park rangers, Cal State professors and other state employees the kind of retirement security normally reserved for the wealthy. More than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in…

Mysterious ghost shark captured on camera for the first time

If you happen to live in one of the six million US homes that have so far purchased an Amazon Echo, you may think Alexa is just a voice emanating from a cylindrical speaker that knows a couple of tricks. It plays the Beatles on command. It can order more toilet paper. It has jokes, some of which are…

The strange effects of thinking healthy food is costlier