In early 2012 , Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria, while reporting for London’s Sunday Times . She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and…

Depression was not widely recognised in Japan until the late 1990s When an advertising campaign called it a "cold of the soul" sales of anti-depressants boomed Now some have been accused of faking depression to get time off work I'm sitting on a psychiatrist's couch in southern Japan, turning the…

France's data protection commission has ordered Microsoft to "stop collecting excessive user data" and to stop tracking the web browsing of Windows 10 users without their consent. In a notice published on Wednesday, the CNIL said that Microsoft must also take steps to guarantee "the security and…

Brianna Wettlaufer, chief executive of Stocksy United, said that when the company began, “We realized we could do it differently.” She said, “We could enter the market with a model that ensured artists were treated fairly and ethically.” Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times The arresting…

Not long ago, at a resort in the Turkish town of Kızılcahamam, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stood before a gathering of leaders of the Justice and Development Party to celebrate both his country and himself. Erdoğan, a tall, athletic-looking man of fifty-eight, with a receding hairline and a…

Who’s Who Last week’s presidential debate was a surreal 90-minute episode of cognitive dissonance. On one side of the stage was Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, who, though a polarizing figure, is inarguably a serious and competent person who has devoted much of her adult life to…

Supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan wave Turkish flags as they gather in Istanbul's central Taksim Square on July 19, 2016. Photo by Kursat Bayhan/Getty Images Over the weekend, the Internet may have saved the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , as protestors organized…

Do you ever wonder how effective philanthropy by wealthy people really is? Do they sometimes throw their money around without much thought? I’m talking about mega-gifts to charities with fuzzy goals and poor track records or giving tens of millions of dollars to the richest universities on the…

The new UWP Skype client. Microsoft It has been a slow transition, but Skype is finalizing its move away from a peer-to-peer system to a cloud-based one. When it was first created, the Skype network was built as a decentralized peer-to-peer system. PCs that had enough processing power and bandwidth…

When more than 300 protesters assembled in May at the Holiday Inn in Lakewood, Colorado — the venue chosen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for an auction of oil and gas leases on public lands — several of the demonstrators were in fact undercover agents sent by law enforcement to keep tabs on…

DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB AND THE DISRUPTION OF EVERYTHING Posted on

SINCE the 1960s, whenever Turkey’s meddlesome generals have seized power, Turks have accused America of being responsible. After the botched coup attempt on July 15th by a cabal of mid-ranking generals and junior officers, the old reflex appeared again. Turkey’s labour minister, Suleyman Soylu,…

Many who have heard the melancholy cry of the mourning dove might wonder: Do birds grieve for their loved ones? For this Saturday’s Weird Animal Question of the Week Emilie Bouef commented via Facebook: "I heard that ravens do some kind of funeral when one of them dies. I’d love to know more about…

The prosecutor pacing in front of the witness was holding a toy gun that looked like a real gun, which was the same kind of toy the boy had been playing with the day he got shot. A rookie Cleveland police officer had fired twice at close range, and one bullet hit the boy just left of his belly…

An excerpt from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—atom by atom. (Image: Sander Otte et al., 2016/Nature Nanoscience) Researchers working in the Netherlands have developed an atomic-scale rewritable data-storage device capable of packing 500 terabits onto a single square inch. Incredibly,…

Each episode of the new series will be available in 188 countries, minus the U.S. and Canada, within 24 hours of its premiere. Netflix has signed a deal with CBS Studios for worldwide rights to CBS All Access' upcoming new Star Trek series. The streaming service will make each episode of the new…

DONALD TRUMP’S GHOSTWRITER TELLS ALL

July 18, 2016 Increasingly, browsers are taking on a central role in our daily lives. With web apps for everything, we have placed our most intimate data on online services such as Facebook, Amazon or GMail. This move to online services has required that we up the security of our online services,…

My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land

After years of political wrangling, the suppressed section of a 2002 congressional report that detailed possible ties between the Saudi government and the 9/11 terrorist attacks was released today. The classified documents have been the source of heated speculation for years, as they highlighted…

Editor’s Note (28 December 2016): Through the end of the year, BBC Capital is bringing back some of your favourite stories from 2016. Don’t do an IQ test after a full week’s work if you are 40 years or older. You could be disappointed. If you’re over 40, working more than 25 hours of work a week…

A man walks across the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at the lobby of the Original Headquarters Building at the CIA headquarters February 19, 2009 in McLean, Virginia. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) The architect of the CIA’s brutal interrogation program was hired for the job through a…

LEAVING vacuum-sealed bags, digital scales and stashes of marijuana lying around was a mistake. So was getting T-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with “Cali Connect”, under which name drugs were dealt online. Selling pot to an undercover officer was a further slip-up. All this is part of the…

Job seekers in Denver. 81% of US households saw incomes fall or stay flat, although tax policy and transfers have been used to ameliorate losses.Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images Half a billion people in 25 of the west’s richest countries suffered from flat or falling pay packets in the decade…

This June 26 image — made from Associated Press video — shows Iraqi troops turning the Islamic State flag upside down in Fallujah, Iraq. (Uncredited/AP) Even as it launches waves of terrorist attacks around the globe, the Islamic State is quietly preparing its followers for the eventual collapse of…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Chinese government likely hacked computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2010, 2011 and 2013 and employees at the U.S. banking regulator covered up the intrusions, according to a congressional report on Wednesday. The report cited an internal FDIC…

Nature | News Sharing The world that we hear shapes the music that we like. Ramin Skibba Article tools Rights & Permissions Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP Is Justin Bieber a musical genius or a talentless hack? What you 'belieb' depends on your cultural experiences. Some people like to listen to the…

Fifty years ago, if your television broke you could bring it to the local electronics shop to be repaired. These days, a broken TV likely means a trip to Best Buy for a new one. Electronics have become harder to fix. This is, in part, because they’ve become more complex. But some of the problem is…

Illustration by Davide Bonazzi for POLITICO If you’re looking to find a smashing Obamacare success story—a place where the nation’s biggest and most controversial new law in a generation has truly lived up to its promise—you might stick a pin directly in North Carolina. The central pledge of the…

Introduction ‘How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.’ Niels Bohr Autism is conventionally regarded as a neurodevelopmental disorder that involves deficits in social interaction and social communication, combined with restricted or repetitive patterns…

ILOVEDUST At six-five, Bill de Blasio is usually considerably taller than his conversation partners. But on a cold day in February, the mayor of New York City was on the corner of Third Avenue and 16th Street, interfacing with a nine-and-a-half-foot-tall slab, all sleek curves of metal and glass,…

© Provided by The Huffington Post North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed a bill into law on Monday that makes police dashboard camera and body camera footage exempt from the public record. House Bill 972 does make such video accessible to people who can be seen or heard in it, along with their…

Discarded food is the biggest single component of US landfill and incinerators, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.Photograph: Dan Tuffs/for the Guardian Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening hunger and poverty, and inflicting…

In 1250, the prior of a Cistercian Abbey reputedly tied a note to a leg of a barn swallow, which read: “Oh swallow, where do you live in winter?” The next spring, he got a response: “In Asia, in the home of Petrus.” This perhaps apocryphal story marks one of the first known instances of someone…

NEW YORK (Reuters) - For the first time, a federal judge has suppressed evidence obtained without a warrant by U.S. law enforcement using a stingray, a surveillance device that can trick suspects’ cell phones into revealing their locations. U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Tuesday…

After complaining for more than a week of severe stomach pain and vomiting, William Weintraub was found dead in the back of a private prisoner transport van in Georgia. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Graphic by Bill Marsh Additional research by Dartunorro Clark and Nick Tucker I n July 2012, Steven…

Forty-five years after an unidentified man parachuted from the rear of a hijacked jetliner and into folklore with $200,000 in cash, the FBI is officially closing its investigation into the famous "DB Cooper" case that has transfixed people around the world ever since.

Copyright from the it's-$330,000-by-the-way dept Yeah, so the Sony Pictures hack is basically old news at this point. People have gone through it for all the juicy details and it's been out of the news for quite some time. So, apparently, one Sony "legal affairs" exec decided that perhaps he could…