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…

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…

The Vanity of the Billionaires: Circuses and no Bread

I recently attended the Decentralized Web Summit where industry giants Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee spoke about designing a new architecture for the Web that was harder for businesses and governments to censor and control. This new Web would be self archiving, it would use Bitcoin as a native…

Chipotle’s annual shareholder meeting on May 11 was set to be a doozy. Angry activists and investors were poised to unload on the restaurant chain’s co-CEOs, Steve Ells and Monty Moran . Just two weeks prior, Chipotle had reported a $26.4 million quarterly loss—its first in a decade as a public…

On the morning of 1 October 1970, the computer scientist Viktor Glushkov walked into the Kremlin to meet with the Politburo. He was an alert man with piercing eyes rimmed in black glasses, with the kind of mind that, given one problem, would derive a method for solving all similar problems. And at…

I never really got a chance to play any pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up, so being thrown into a prison system in which such things as Dungeons and Dragons are relatively common constituted one of the silver linings of my 2012 arrest, along with not having to deal with an infestation of…

Jen Senko believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells it, her father was a “nonpolitical Democrat.” But then he transferred to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was…

In a very unusual case of genetic theft, a virus has been caught with a gene that codes for the poison of black widow spiders. The chunks of arachnid DNA were probably stolen by the virus to help it punch through animal cells. But its target is not the animal itself - the "WO" virus only infects…

‘Fifty years on, the legacy of the Panthers is particularly important.’ Black Panther supporters protest in 1970 while two members go on trial for murder, New Haven, Connecticut.Photograph: Barton Silverman/Getty Images O n 15 October 1966 Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther…

‘The figure for Stump’s exit hoard is currently valued around $134m million, a pretty plush parachute.’Photograph: Gary Cameron/Reuters F or former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, this will be his first weekend as a wealthy retiree. So it goes in a world where big banks can screw over customers and the…

Fire and smoke rise after a Saudi-led airstrike hit a site believed to be one of the largest weapons depots on the outskirts of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, on Friday.Photograph: Hani Mohammed/AP What if the United States went to war and nobody here even noticed? The question is absurd, isn’t it? And…

Sen. Rand Paul’s expression of opposition to a $1.1 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia — which has been brutally bombing civilian targets in Yemen using U.S.-made weapons for more than a year now — alarmed CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday afternoon. Blitzer’s concern: That stopping the sale could…

Pez Owen was joyriding in her Cessna airplane when she first spotted a giant X etched in the desert. "It's not on the [flight] chart. There just wasn't any indication of this huge cross," she says. Chuck Penson/Pez Owen Pez Owen was flying over the desert in her single-engine Cessna airplane when…

Brian Taylor Illustration The greatest one-off Simpsons character ever began with James Bond. When Greg Daniels worked as a producer on the show, he always wondered what it would be like to write an episode from the perspective of one of the dim-witted henchmen who populate the iconic British spy’s…

In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush is under way. 1 Method 2 Money 3 Life 4 Damage By Amos Chapple With the sale of elephant tusks under close scrutiny, “ethical ivory” from the extinct woolly mammoth is now feeding an insatiable market in China. This rush on mammoth ivory is luring a…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a proponent of strong financial regulation, turned up the heat on the country’s top securities regulator on Friday, urging President Barack Obama to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White. Warren, a Democrat, has often…

AscTec Intel continues to make inroads into the drone industry, announcing this week the company's first branded drone for commercial use. The Falcon 8+ system is a complete package designed for "industrial inspection, surveying, and mapping," and is built around an octocopter manufactured by Intel…

www.pitch.com Video footage showing Kansas City Public Library staff member Steve Woolfolk being arrested, May 9, 2016 Search the Internet for news stories about public libraries in America and chances are that, sooner or later, the phrase “on the front lines” will come up. The war that is being…

Methodology: How we compared internet speeds offered by noncable providers To analyze internet speeds that noncable providers offer in their service areas, the Center for Public Integrity combined these data sets: The Federal Communication Commission’s Form 477 Broadband Deployment Data, as of Dec.…

Guantánamo By Carol Rosenberg crosenberg@miamiherald.com October 11, 2016 10:11 AM Guantánamo Navy base hospital on Oct. 13, 2016. CAROL ROSENBERG crosenberg@miamiherald.com Guantánamo Navy base hospital on Oct. 13, 2016. CAROL ROSENBERG crosenberg@miamiherald.com GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba An…

The Man Who Stood Up To Facebook

Are you one of those people who are so involved with the U.S. presidential election that you anxiously visit election-forecasting sites such as FiveThirtyEight , the Upshot or the Princeton Election Consortium (PEC) to look at their latest numbers? These poll-aggregating sites use sophisticated…

W e live in an era of increasing automation. Machines help us not only with manual labor but also with intellectual tasks, such as curating the news we read and calculating the best driving directions. But as machines make more decisions for us, it is increasingly important to understand the…

W hen I see a liberal writer’s description of Donald Trump, or a conservative writer’s views of Hillary Clinton, I am embarrassed for them both. I wouldn’t let a 5-year-old child make such impolite and obviously extreme statements—and yet, today, extreme views are often applauded. They are a sign of…

Sean Gallup/Getty Images A Swiss journalist has created a Twitter bot that tracks dictators’ flights to and from Geneva, as part of a crowdsourced effort to shed light on potentially shady dealings. The bot, called GVA Dictator Alert , tracks planes registered to authoritarian governments and…

Zach Gage Last summer, game designer Zach Gage — best known for mobile titles like Spelltower and Ridiculous FIshing — went for a walk with a friend, and eventually the discussion turned to chess. His friend had recently taken up the game and become quite proficient, whereas Gage was never able to…

Instead of Trump's Wall, Why Not a Binational Border City?

On the third floor of the Fort Washington Library. Zach Gross There used to be parties in the apartments on the top floors of New York City’s branch libraries. On other nights, when the libraries were closed, the kids who lived there might sit reading alone among the books or roll around on the…

Adobe patched 81 vulnerabilities across Acrobat, Reader, and Flash on Tuesday, including a handful of critical bugs that if exploited, could allow an attacker to take control of a system. The lion’s share of vulnerabilities – 71 in total – exist in the company’s Acrobat and Reader platforms.…

Waterkeeper Alliance Oct. 12, 2016 03:22PM EST [This breaking news is an update to a post earlier today on EcoWatch: Millions of Chickens Feared Dead at Factory Farms in Wake of Hurricane Matthew ] Waterkeeper Alliance and Upper Neuse Riverkeeper are responding to and documenting the breach of a…

A US government spokesperson has struggled to answer questions put to him on why the US condemns Russian bombing in Syria , and supports Saudi-led bombing in Yemen , both of which have killed thousands of civilians. During a media briefing in Washington DC on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson…

For the past six months, at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, history has been made at one of the largest international gatherings of indigenous people in recent history. Representatives from well over 100 indigenous nations and thousands of people have camped, prayed, and taken…

ON AUGUST 31ST 1910 Theodore Roosevelt delivered a fiery speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. The former president celebrated America’s extraordinary new commercial power but also gave warning that America’s industrial economy had been taken over by a handful of corporate giants that were generating…

Dropping a malicious USB key in a parking lot is an effective attack vector, as demonstrated by our recent large-scale study . This blog post follows up on the study by showing how reliable and realistic-looking malicious USB keys can be created. After discussing the pros and cons of the three types…

Photo: Michael Buholzer/AFP/Getty Images A paraplegic Cybathlon athlete got out of his wheelchair to compete in the exoskeleton race. Advertisement Editor’s Picks Demo: The Ekso GT Robotic Exoskeleton for Paraplegics and Stroke Patients Get Ready for the World’s First Cyborg Olympics ReWalk…

(Amy Cavenaile/The Washington Post; iStock) The Intersect ran a little experiment a few weeks ago: During the work day, we’d check in with Facebook each hour, on the hour, and record which topics were trending for us on the platform. The resulting daily pop-up newsletter gave us some interesting…

Joi Ito, Scott Dadich, and President Barack Obama photographed in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on August 24, 2016. IT’S HARD TO think of a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than artificial intelligence . As machine learning enables our computers to teach…