Trump Wants 10-fold Increase In Atom Bombs But Is After Iran, Which Has None

As far as I can figure, the US presently has about 6,800 nuclear warheads, though it aims at going down to 4018 once it dismantles those scheduled to be decommissioned, by 2023. The Russian Federation has about 7,000 nuclear warheads, though it aims at going down to 4,300 once it dismantles those scheduled to be…

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Forget Trump, This Huge Volcano Could Literally Wipe Out Life on Earth

Yes, Donald Trump is president. And yes, he has access to the nuclear codes—a fact that has become all too vivid in recent weeks. But many allowed themselves to forget, if only for a brief moment, about the man in the White House on Thursday to hone their attention on what is potentially an even…

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UPDATED: In Latest Fit of Censorship, Facebook Deletes Video Detailing Brutal Legacy of Christopher Columbus

Update: Following pressure from the news outlet effected and public criticism online, Facebook has restored a short documentary-style video about Christopher Columbus that it had blocked earlier in the week. “Victory!” declared Double Down News, who had produced the piece. “Facebook have reinstated our video.” While the social media giant did not offer a reason…

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Biodiversity and the Society of Superlatives

Traveling through the jungles of Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon, it is difficult not to feel stunned by the amount of biological diversity in these forests. Writing about the experience, the difficulty lies in not succumbing to the exhausted turns of phrase and repetitive metaphors commonly used in attempting to depict the biological…

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Is Lorde About to Drop a Music Video for “Perfect Places”?

Ella Yelich-O’Connor, the 20-year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter better known as Lorde, is messing with our emotions today. Nearly two months after dropping her sophomore album, Melodrama, and five months after gifting us with the video for her lead single, “Green Light,” she’s back with something to obsess over. On Wednesday, Lorde took to Instagram and Twitter to…

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'No Such Thing as Cheap Meat': New Global Index Shows Industry's Failure to Combat Climate Crisis, Antibiotic Resistance

A new sustainability index found that roughly three-quarters of the world’s largest meat and fish suppliers are failing to manage their contributions to worldwide antibiotic resistance as well as their contributions to the climate crisis, “putting the implementation of the Paris agreement in jeopardy.” “There is no such thing as cheap meat—these industries have been…

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This Is Spotify’s Most Popular Song of the Summer

“Despacito” isn’t the song of the summer on Twitter, but it takes the cake popsicle on Spotify. The streaming service on Thursday announced its most-played songs of the season, and with 786 million streams since the first day of summer on June 21, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” remix featuring Justin Bieber tops the global list….

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Melania Trump Wears Black Stilettos as She Leaves for Houston

Melania Trump is headed to Houston. The First Lady joined her husband, President Donald Trump, on a trip to Texas to survey the response to Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall late last week as a Category 4 storm, hitting the region with devastating rain and flooding. Melania departed the White House on Tuesday in a…

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