History's so interesting.
For centuries, Americans have eaten horse meat -- both out of necessity, and for its unique taste. And at times, didn’t just eat it: they loved it, savored it, and treasured every last morsel. Our strange relationship with horses goes beyond companionship and into the realms of culinary enjoyment...
This Tuesday, Jan. 20, President Barack Obama will honor an American tradition as old as George Washington: the State of the Union. The constitutionally ordained address to each new session of Congress has been a presidential ritual since 1790. It’s a chance to check in on the present and make some pledges for our future.
It’s that future bit that got us thinking: If all that talk had come true, even the crazy, far-out pledges—especially the crazy, far-out pledges—what would our world look like today?
Underclassmen in high school should never, ever play with substances that reach 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit; things like that should only be handled by trained professionals, with stockpiles of licenses and safety gear, under strictly controlled conditions. That said, we're glad that 15-year-old Tyler Barlow decided to stick an old barbecue in a grassy field and ignite 5 pounds of thermite on top of it, because the resulting video is super cool...
Good. Hopefully this will be properly and officially overturned.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.
Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.
The program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. It allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.
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The decision follows a Washington Post investigation published in September that found that police have made cash seizures worth almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others without search warrants or indictments since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
I'm not surprised, given the slowly falling wages of the lower and middle classes in the US, over the past few decades.
For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.
I'd love to know how this trend of hyper-concern originated. Is it really that much less safe for children? Have too many people watched too many crime dramas? Overall crime rates in the US have been falling for decades. Have abductions risen?
I would be quite surprised if the investigation moved much farther than this step:
Prosecutors at the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) will open a preliminary inquiry into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, the first formal step that could lead to charges against officials there and in Israel, the court has said.
They will determine whether preliminary findings merit a full investigation into alleged atrocities, which could result in charges against individuals on either the Israeli or Palestinian side.
"A preliminary examination is not an investigation but a process of examining the information available in order to reach a fully informed determination on whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation pursuant to the criteria established by the Rome Statute," the court's statement said on Friday.
ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.
At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.
In Syria, ISIS “has not any lost any key terrain,” Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War who studies the Syrian conflict, explained to The Daily Beast.
Even U.S. military officials privately conceded to The Daily Beast that ISIS has gained ground in some areas, even as the Pentagon claims its seized territory elsewhere, largely around the northern city of Kobani. That’s been the focus of the U.S.-led campaign, and ISIS has not been able to take the town, despite its best efforts.