Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
BANGKOK – The Guy in the Yellow T-shirt — long shorts, unruly black hair, thick dark glasses — arrived at the Erawan shrine in a tuk-tuk. No one may have noticed him; just another nondescript backpacker in one of the busiest crossroads in Asia. He may have come to pay his respects to the golden statue of Brahma at the …
In its July 27 print edition, Time magazine ran a full-page color ad for smokeless tobacco. But what really got our attention were all the drug ads, which continue week after week, and presumably keep the faltering publication alive. The biggest ad, an inside-front-cover three-page spread, was for Xeljanz (tofacitinib citrate), which is aimed at people with rheumatoid arthritis. As …
He’s trailing an openly misogynistic troll doll in the polls, but Jeb Bush has outdone his opponents in the “slavish praise for the government’s surveillance apparatus” department. Bush thinks we need more NSA surveillance, not less. “There’s a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job,” Jeb! said at a national security conference in …
When the banking crisis crippled global markets seven years ago, central bankers stepped in as lenders of last resort. Profligate private-sector loans were moved on to the public-sector balance sheet and vast money-printing gave the global economy room to heal. Time is now rapidly running out. From China to Brazil, the central banks have lost control and at the same …
More than 300 rabbis “from all streams of Judaism” on Monday sent a letter to all lawmakers in U.S. Congress urging them to approve the historic nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “the best arrangement possible given current international realities.” “As rabbis, we support the agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, Russia and Iran– The …
The world has been abuzz with the dramatic losses of cultivated honey bees due to colony collapse disorder1 as well as declines of native pollinator species across the globe.2,3,4 Scientists have recently begun calculating the extent to which food crops depend on animal pollinators including bees, butterflies, and bats,5 with one study assigning an economic value to the “ecosystem service” …
Population growth and fossil fuel use, seen on a time-scale of several thousand years. The dots are population estimates in millions from the US Census Bureau. Fossil fuel use appears as a spike-like curve, rising from almost nothing to a high value, and then falling again to almost nothing in the space of a few centuries. When the two curves …
Few things in life are as universally satisfying as a boycott. To the left, a boycott is the ultimate display of society in action; to the right, it confirms the market’s all-consuming power. To me, it’s just fun. It’s negging, basically – if you love something, ignore it until it comes cowering back promising to do better. My list of …
The US might carry out air strikes again in Libya, but it won’t improve the conditions on the ground, says Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire. The US would rather allow Egypt and the UAE to carry out certain aspects of this foreign policy in Libya, he adds. Battles between Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants and local …
Just as scientists announced July was the hottest month in recorded history, and ahead of a major climate summit in Paris later this year, an international group of Islamic leaders on Tuesday released a public declaration calling on the religion’s 1.6 billion followers to engage on the issue of global warming and take bold action to stem its worst impacts. …
