Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
The leaves came off the last trees — a crabapple, a willow and a hardy Norway maple — during the first week of December this year, surely the latest I can remember seeing leaves on trees since we moved to the Philadelphia area 18 years ago. But it’s not just that. A rhododendron bush beside the house has huge blooms …
It is 70 years since large parts of Europe lay in ruins. Great power aspirations, nationalism and fascism made the continent the focus of two world wars, which together claimed nearly 100 million victims. Now, these same tendencies are spreading once again. Everywhere in Europe, the ruling elites are moving sharply to the right. They are boosting military spending, taking …
Economic forecasting is a mug’s game. One thing that has been learned from the financial crisis and Great Recession is that even those equipped with the most sophisticated models get it wrong, sometimes spectacularly. So it is with both humility and trepidation that I will try to fulfil a promise made last week and make predictions for what is going …
As the TRAI decides the fate of Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg is in India with ₹100 crore, in pocket change, for advertising. Facebook’s Free Basics is a repackaged internet.org, or in other words, a system where Facebook decides what parts of the internet are important to users. Reliance, Facebook’s Indian partner in the Free Basics venture, is an Indian mega-corporation with interests …
Did you know that there are 5 “too big to fail” banks in the United States that eachhave exposure to derivatives contracts that is in excess of 30 trillion dollars? Overall, the biggest U.S. banks collectively have more than 247 trillion dollarsof exposure to derivatives contracts. That is an amount of money that is more than 13 times the size of the U.S. national debt, and …
Blowing the pro-water-fluoridation argument out of the water, a new studyby Harvard and University College London just found Brits — notoriously crooked smiles and all — actually have better dental health than people in the United States. No, seriously. Despite a water fluoridation rate of 66%, and 74% for those who rely on a public source, Americans’ dental health simply doesn’t match up …
The United States Marine Corp has abandoned plans to use a robotic mule in combat situations, claiming that the amount of noise it makes risks giving away the position of troops to the enemy. The LS3, or Legged Squad Support System, had been the centre piece of a significant push by the US Army to integrate thousands of robots into …
Climate News Network, 30 December, 2015 – The global humanitarian system, designed to save those at risk of dying because of human or natural disasters, faces unprecedented demands in 2016 from levels of strain it has never before had to face, a leading development agency says. With more than 10 million people in a single African country expected to need …
The brains of children who suffer clinical depression as preschoolers develop differently than those of preschoolers not affected by the disorder, a new study shows. These children’s gray matter—tissue that connects brain cells and carries signals between those cells and is involved in seeing, hearing, memory, decision-making, and emotion—is lower in volume and thinner in the cortex, a part of …
It might not seem so in the middle of a day’s news cycle, especially with that news always being about Donald Trump, but 2015 marked a year of change in a progressive direction. And the country is solidly behind this move. Progressive Victories In 2015 The country is moving in a progressive direction. In November, OurFuture.org’s Terrance Heath wrote in Progressive …
