A devastating wildfire continues to spread in northern Alberta, Canada, across the heart of the region’s oil sands—home to the world’s third largest reserves of crude oil. As of this writing, about 16% of Canada’s crude oil production has been halted due to the fire.
The earthquake in Nepal on April 25, 2015, destroyed thousands of lives and entire villages throughout the country. But it was the posh seasonal community full of foreigners at the base of Mount Everest whose travails attracted the most attention in the immediate aftermath.
China appears to be changing its tack on North Korea, announcing plans to impose UN-recommended sanctions aimed at stopping Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
The health of the world’s largest coral reef is worse than ever, and you can tell just by looking at it from far away.
Billionaire Elon Musk and his second wife, the British actress Talulah Riley, are divorcing, again—seemingly for real this time.
The Super Bowl, which takes place this Sunday (Feb. 7) in Santa Clara, California, is already going to be unique because of a heavy influence from Silicon Valley tech firms. And it’s the half-century anniversary of the world’s largest annual single-league sporting event. But the man who spearheaded the Bay area’s bid to host the American football championship hopes it will be remembered for something different, as “the most philanthropic” Super Bowl ever.
This post will be updated as more information becomes available.
The US military is one of the world’s largest employers, and now it wants to be known as a family-friendly one. Last week defense secretary Ashton Carter announced a slew of new benefits for service members across the military’s branches, including 12 weeks of paid maternity leave and increased child care provisions.
In a gesture that American Muslims say they’ve long waited for, US president Barack Obama visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore, Maryland, today (Feb. 3) to make a statement opposing bigotry and supporting religious freedom.
This Monday (Feb. 1) was the Nobel Committee’s deadline for accepting nominations for its annual Peace Prize. As usual, it didn’t take long for rumors to start circulating about the nominees, including US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
More than 20,000 big-game hunting enthusiasts will be in Las Vegas today (Feb. 3) for the annual Safari Club International (SCI) convention. The main events on the four-day agenda are auctions for hunting excursions around the world, including opportunities to kill African elephants, Australian water buffalo, and Alaskan bears.
Benoit Violier, the 44-year-old head chef of Le Restaurant de l’Hotel de Ville in Switzerland, was found dead in his home this weekend. Police are treating his death, which apparently came from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, as a suicide. Now Violier’s colleagues and admirers in the international community of haute cuisine are speculating that he may have been overwhelmed by the pressures of culinary perfection—even though, by all accounts, he had reached its greatest heights.
The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that the Zika virus is a global health emergency, escalating the level of alarm the agency signaled last week when it announced the creation of a special committee to evaluate the threat.
Motorists in Bolinas, California have been baffled and sometimes scared by coyotes on a local highway this winter, and psychedelic fungus may be to blame.
What the US government’s space agency lacks in funding, it makes up for in buzz. NASA has made itself “the darling of the internet” through humble-yet-shrewd use of more than 500 official social media accounts.
The Tatoosh, a 300-foot yacht owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is reportedly responsible for wiping out a protected coral reef in the Cayman Islands this month. This is an embarrassing development for Allen given his philanthropic foundation’s investments in ocean conservation.
In the face of “overwhelming” objections from alumni, the University of Oxford’s Oriel College has nixed a proposal to remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes. The decision angers current students, who say the statue glorifies a racist imperialist.
The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) considers it ”deeply concerning” that the Zika virus— the mosquito-borne illness suspected of causing severe neurological birth defects—is “spreading explosively” in the Americas.
As the world’s elephant and rhino populations dwindle, wildlife advocates are putting pressure on Japan to curb its ivory trade. And activists are accusing Yahoo Japan, a hotspot for online ivory commerce, of facilitating illegal transactions and enabling poachers and smugglers.
This week, Sri Lanka became the 16th country in the world, and the first in South Asia, to publicly destroy a pile of ivory as a symbolic gesture against elephant and rhino poaching. It was the first public ceremony of its kind to incorporate religious prayers as a formal apology to the animals that had been killed for their tusks.
Hollywood writer and director Woody Allen has a famous formula for his feature films: One quirky script, equal dashes of comedy and romance, a starring role for himself, and another starring role for a young woman—always an attractive actress in her twenties or thirties who, especially if she’s appeared in an Allen movie before, is inevitably dubbed his latest muse. Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, Charlotte Rampling, Mariel Hemingway, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Naomi Watts, Frieda Pinto, Cate Blanchett, and Emma Stone have all played the part, and now it’s Miley Cyrus’s turn.
Former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld is launching a mobile gaming app based on an obscure version of solitaire that Winston Churchill used to play. Churchill’s solitaire is more challenging and complex than other popular styles of the single-player card game, and Rumsfeld is advertising it as “the most diabolical version,” which would have been “lost to the ages” if not for his new app.
Washington, DC is bracing for an epic blizzard that is about to wallop the metropolitan area with between one and three feet (0.3-0.9 meters) of snow. And the mayor of Boston, which such storms are much more common, isn’t totally sure the notoriously snow-averse US capital can handle what’s coming.
Here’s a shocking consequence of our love for plastic, according to a new report (PDF) from the World Economic Forum: We’re putting so much of the cheap, non-biodegradable packaging material into the ocean that by 2050, ocean plastic will literally outweigh ocean fish.
