What if your daughter didn’t dream of owning the latest busty Barbie doll, but a tiny, tiny Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg donning her signature lace collar, or a smiling justice Sonia Sotomayor? Wouldn’t that be great?
Newly compiled satellite images show how Syria has descended into darkness over the course of its four-year conflict, both literally and figuratively. 83% of the lights in the country are out, according to analysis by scientists from Wuhan University in China in cooperation with the international #withSyria coalition of NGOs. In some of the worst-affected areas, the black-out is nearly total: In Aleppo, 97% of the lights have gone out.
Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent address to the US Congress was a hot ticket in Washington, but the speech did no favors for his reputation in America. According to a Gallup poll, the Israeli prime minister’s “favorable” rating among the American public fell by 7 percentage points after his address, while the number of people with an “unfavorable” assessment of him rose by 5 percentage points.
Your income can severely impact your health, even if you live in a highly developed country like the United Kingdom.
This post has been corrected.
Women of the world, today’s your day. Your one day out of 365, so enjoy it while it lasts.
The dress that took over the internet last week has been put to use in a striking campaign against domestic violence.
A group of men marched around the Afghan capital of Kabul Thursday wearing the characteristic blue burqa to show their solidarity with the country’s women, whose rights continue to be assailed. They call themselves the Afghan Peace Volunteers and said they held the protest ahead of the International Women’s Day on March 8, Reuters reported.
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Heroin is claiming more and more lives in the United States. Since 2000, deaths related to heroin poisoning have risen nearly four times, says a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And more of those dying are likely to be younger white men compared to the older black men demographic that was prevalent before 2000.
If anything is emblematic of Russian cuisine, it’s vodka—sipped along with a meal or gulped down in a shot (or several). But the country’s iconic booze is losing ground to beer, according to government data released this week (link in Russian).
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has just finished speaking at the US Congress today, trying to convince lawmakers to oppose a deal with Iran on the country’s nuclear program unless the constraints on Iran are much stricter. The Republicans, who control Congress, invited Netanyahu, sparking controversy among prominent Democrats, more than 50 of whom boycotted the speech. Despite the boycott, the speech attracted a lot of attention in Washington.
Manmade climate change helped spark the Syrian Arab Spring. That’s the conclusion of a new study that shows how global warming caused an unprecedented drought in Syria starting in the winter of 2006-07, and contributed directly to the popular uprising in that country in 2011.
As US Secretary of State John Kerry met Monday with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Geneva for talks aiming to end the fighting in Ukraine, the United Nations released a report announcing that the death toll in the country surpassed 6,000 since April 2014.
In the fall, a viral video followed a woman down the streets of New York City, where she experienced constant, intrusive, and threatening catcalling from the men that passed her. The clip, part of a campaign aiming to raise awareness about street harassment, struck a nerve, with many women relating to the experience of being clucked at, followed, and dubiously complimented.
Turns out that there are plenty of people who want to spend five months in the bitter cold, sleeping little, isolated from the world, and are “happy not to shower for up to a month, live in close proximity to three people and 2,000 smelly penguins.”
Russia is in the midst of a crippling financial crisis, its economy is in tatters, and it’s become an international pariah, but its citizens continue to admire their president. Vladimir Putin’s latest approval ratings are sky high, maintaining the peaks reached after it annexed part of Ukraine a year ago. According to the latest poll from Levada Center, an independent polling organization, 86% of Russians approve of their president, compared to 69% at the same time last year.
Her piercing green eyes are instantly recognizable, even three decades later. Sharbat Gula was the subject of arguably the most famous cover of National Geographic magazine, and today her photo makes headlines again.
We’ve known that carbon dioxide concentrations have been dangerously high, and rising, for a while now. We’ve also known that the gas gets trapped in the atmosphere, causing the so-called greenhouse effect and leading to rising temperatures. But in new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists show for the first time the link between the rising CO2 and the rising greenhouse effect on the surface of the Earth, not just in a laboratory. And they directly attribute their findings to fossil-fuel emissions.
Russian president Vladimir Putin may be assuring the world that he is working to secure peace in Ukraine and that it is “unlikely” he will wage war with the country, but events on the ground tell the real story. Kremlin-backed rebels ignored a ceasefire, continuing their fight with the Ukrainian army, and Russia refuses to stop carrying out snap military exercises on its territory.
What to watch for today
The gruesome images of killings by ISIL (a.k.a. the Islamic State), including some of US citizens, evoke scenes from a time when similarly vicious and warrantless executions happened on a regular basis on American soil.
One of the biggest consulting and accounting firms in the world, Deloitte, announced Monday that its next CEO would be Cathy Engelbert, the first woman to run the company, and the first female CEO at any of the “big four” global consultancies.
As Russian president Vladimir Putin once again blasted the US and Western Europe for their handling of the situation in Ukraine, a poll showed that his fellow countrymen’s opinion of the West was at its lowest since the fall of the Soviet Union.
