In 1822, a ragtag band of eight inmates escaped from a brutal penal colony in Tasmania, Australia. They descended upon the island’s hostile pine and myrtle forests, but quickly found themselves lost and starving.
No excuses, no exemptions, no opt-outs: Scottish schools will soon be required to put LGBTQ history on the curriculum, after the country’s ministers accepted the full recommendations of the Time for Inclusive Education (TIE) campaign. Students will learn about the history of LGBTQ equality, how to tackle homophobia and transphobia, and the nuances of LGBTQ identity, in all its forms, going beyond the LGBT-inclusion to be introduced in sex education in Wales.
Turkish investigators have found traces of hydrofluoric acid and other chemicals in a well at the Saudi consul general’s home in Istanbul, a source at the Turkish attorney general’s office has told Al Jazeera.
Now that the US midterm elections are over, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp is finally resigning from his post as the state’s top election official.
This year’s costumes at the Quartz office Halloween party tended towards the classic: a Girl Scout, Princess Leia (and Yoda the dog), Weird Al Yankovic. (The costumes of visiting children, lured in by the promise of desk-side trick-or-treating, were similarly wholesome—a tiny fireman, a human strawberry, BB8—albeit rather more adorable.)
By the end of this month, people over the age of 21 will have the right to recreationally smoke, eat, or otherwise ingest marijuana in 10 American states, following successful state propositions in yesterday’s midterm elections. In a further 22 states, the drug is now legal for medical usage.
Voters in five states today (Nov. 6) had the opportunity to have their say in a number of state-based propositions relating to recreational and medical marijuana use. The success of such bills may be seen as supporting evidence for federal legalization down the line, even while states such as North Dakota made their misgivings known.
After the results of one of its stranger ballot initiatives, Florida will be revising its state constitution to ban two seemingly unrelated bad habits: fossil-fuel drilling and the use of e-cigarettes in indoor workplaces. With more than 80% of the votes now counted, well over the required 60% of voters said yes to the state’s Amendment 9.
Rudy Booker, a New York voter, has visited the same polling station for 15 years. But on the day before the Nov. 6 election, she received a text from the voter-registration organization TurboVote, telling her the voting location had changed. She ignored the text. At the station, Booker encountered dozens of angry people who’d been sent a similar message, and were now in the wrong place.
This year, Americans really, really want to vote. An estimated 40 million people have already cast their ballot via early voting, according to the U.S. Election Project, up from 27.5 million early voters in the 2014 midterm elections. But high turnout at the polls has today (Nov. 6) caused headaches for voters and poll workers alike, with polling stations reporting hours-long lines, full ballot boxes, or running out of ballots altogether.
It’s hungry work, waiting. But there’s a sliver of light for voters standing in line to cast their ballot today—and it comes with hot cheese.
The day of the US midterms is upon us, and the world is watching to see whether Democrats will be able to break Republicans’ stronghold on Congress. But voters will also be making a lot of important decisions at the state level, weighing proposed legal changes that could affect everything from reproductive rights to minimum wage. Here are a few of the most important topics on the ballots:
If you’re voting in the US midterm elections and you aren’t sure where to go, there are ample options to find out where your polling station is. You could check out HeadCount’s Polling Place Finder, while individual states such as Texas and California have guides as well. And there’s another, even simpler way: Google it.
With just hours to go before the midterm elections, US President Donald Trump was tweeting up a storm about some of 2018’s most hotly contested races, as well as those the Republican party is most afraid that it may lose.
To gain control of the House of Representatives during tomorrow’s midterm elections, Democrats must win a minimum of 23 Republican-held seats. It’s an ambitious goal, but more and more polls suggest they’ll achieve it.
Donald Trump’s tweets about television usually focus on the current-affairs programs he likes, such as Fox and Friends and Hannity, and those he does not, as in all others. (Occasionally he’ll gripe about Saturday Night Live, the show he once called a “guilty pleasure.”)
For the past two years, Elon Musk has been fielding calls from “the Saudis” about the possibility of Tesla going private, he says. In August, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, finally bit, buying an approximately 5% stake in the electric car maker, worth as much as $3.2 billion.
Even as Venezuela has descended further into economic crisis, its gold sector has remained surprisingly robust—until now. In the first nine months of this year, the country exported some 23.6 tons of the precious metal to Turkey, worth $900 million, to generate the hard currency it desperately needs. But new sanctions introduced by Donald Trump seek to stymie the industry—and turn up the pressure on president Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian regime.
A thousand years ago, a monk and revered healer known as Qisan Zhang died after allegedly starving himself to death. His remains were preserved and then placed in an unusual golden casket, in the shape of a sitting, smiling Buddha. For centuries, townspeople in the eastern Chinese county of Yongchun, in Fujian province, worshipped at his feet—until, in late 1995, the mummy, and its casket, were stolen.
In 2018, central bank reserves across Asia and Eastern Europe have become a whole lot shinier. In the year’s first half, Russia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan began buying gold in bulk. In the months since, India, Hungary, and Poland have followed suit. This year, Russia has added about 20 tons to its reserve each month, on average.
Venice is ordinarily pretty watery. But the worst flooding in a decade has left the Italian city completely submerged, after ferocious storms caused small tornadoes and hurricane-force winds. At least 11 people have died, with many more injured. At its highest point, on Monday (Oct. 29), the high tide rose to more than 61 inches (156 centimeters) above average sea level. (The record high was in 1966, when sea levels rose to 76 inches above the average.)
In the first official statement on how Jamal Khashoggi died, Istanbul’s chief prosecutor reveals chilling details about the Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident’s murder.
James “Whitey” Bulger was found dead yesterday in a high-security West Virginia prison, where he was serving two life sentences for 11 murders, and had been recently transferred from a Florida facility. The notorious Boston-area organized crime boss was beaten to death by mob-affiliated inmates, the New York Times reports, citing unnamed prison officials.
If you believed the anxious parents and journalists of the 1980s and 1990s, video games were going to ruin our lives—and they might have been right (kind of). It’s still unclear how the future of gaming will change our relationships with both leisure time and each other, but one thing’s for sure: Our addiction to games hasn’t brought the economy to a grinding halt, as one scientist predicted. At least, not yet.
