In 2013, an Australian teenager ordered a “foot-long” sandwich from Subway, pulled out a ruler, and found that it measured a scant 11 inches (28 cm). His photo went viral, and triggered a major public relations headache for the fast-food chain, along with a class-action lawsuit for deceptive marketing practices.
Marine biologists from the Vancouver Aquarium and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), used drones to photograph wild killer whales for the first time last year. This year, they’ve done it again, deploying a remote-controlled hexacopter to check on the orca families they saw in 2014, over the waters around the San Juan Islands near Seattle, Washington, and to study a different orca population called the Southern Residents.
After Americans in South Carolina banished the increasingly unpopular Confederate flag from their capitol grounds this summer, attention turned to Mississippi—the last state in the union to incorporate the racially divisive signage on its own state flag.
US vice president Joe Biden held an unexpected press conference at the White House today (Oct. 21) to say that he has decided not to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.
A restaurant owner in Israel is trying to bring a bit of a peace—one dollop of hummus at a time—to a country where violence between Israelis and Palestinians has surged in recent weeks. ”50 percent discount on hummus to a table where Arabs and Jews sit together,” wrote Kobi Tzafrir, the owner of Humus Bar, on his business’s Facebook page, which has since received thousands of shares and likes.
Among the many deadly creatures native to Australia, one of the scarier is the ”extremely aggressive“ funnel-web spider: Its bite can kill a person in 15 minutes.
Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit against 1,114 unnamed individuals who it says have been writing fake reviews of products and services in its online marketplace. This is a continuation of the crackdown the retail giant began in April, when it sued a handful of website operators who facilitated the sale of such reviews.
Last week, a regulatory agency in California said SeaWorld San Diego would only be allowed to begin a major construction project if it agreed to stop breeding or acquiring killer whales—effectively putting an expiration date on the marine park’s main attraction. SeaWorld called the move an “overreach” and now says it intends to sue the California Coastal Commission.
The Indian government recently introduced new regulations aimed at streamlining the process of adopting children in the country, but the administrators of India’s most famous orphanages don’t agree with the changes.
A year after zookeepers in Copenhagen received death threats on account of their plans to terminate a healthy giraffe, another Danish zoo animal is generating controversy. This time it’s a young lioness—or rather, the corpse of a young lioness.
This post has been updated with comment from Connell’s attorneys.
Approximately six months ago, Lisa Jaster and 18 other women entered the US Army Ranger School, the grueling training course that had become open to female soldiers for the first time. Of those 18, only Jaster and two others—Kristen Griest and Shaye Haver—passed the first stage. On August 21, 26-year-old Griest and 25-year-old Haver became the first women to graduate from Ranger School. Meanwhile, 37-year-old Jaster was just beginning the course’s third and final phase. She passed it last week and is now set to be the third woman in history to receive a Ranger tab.
The Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) has published conclusions from its investigation of the crash of MH17, the Malaysia Airlines flight that went down in eastern Ukraine in July 2014 on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The report (PDF) confirms what was suspected already: that a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile hit the plane and caused it to explode in midair.
SeaWorld has been taking a major drubbing from animal rights activists and the broader public in the last few years, and the marine theme park is now running into major opposition from California regulators.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) has released a new report predicting that the world is on track to generate 26% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020. Renewable energy production has been ramping up in just the past several years, and the IEA says 45% of overall additions to the world’s energy supply in 2014 came from renewables.
Kosovo’s lawmakers are getting feisty again. A heated argument in parliament today ended with one minister detonating a smoke bomb. Opposition leader Albin Kurti is the alleged miscreant, and he reportedly kicked at least one smoking canister (emitting what may have been tear gas) around the room until two of his fellow ministers fainted.
What to watch for today
Cracks began to show this week in a newly-opened glass-bottomed walkway that snakes around the edges of 3,500-feet-high cliffs in a scenic park on China’s Yuntai Mountain. The U-shaped attraction is now closed for repairs, though officials say there’s no danger.
Volkswagen dealers in India were instructed today (Oct. 7) to hold back all Polo vehicles until further notice.
A majority of local lawmakers in Washington, DC, are backing a new bill to give workers 16 weeks of annual paid leave to accommodate family needs such as welcoming a new baby or taking care of a sick relative. The measure, which crucially would include a huge number of federal employees based in the capital, would create the most generous family leave policy in the United States.
The US and its allies are already uneasy about Russia’s air strikes on Bashar al-Assad’s enemies in Syria—especially since Moscow has targeted groups supported by the US-led coalition. Now it appears that the Russian planes conducting those strikes have been taking detours into Turkish air space—a sign that Moscow is not willing to abide by no-fly zone rules.
Air France executives were run out of their own meeting today (Oct. 5), by employees protesting at the airline’s headquarters at Charles de Gaulle airport, just outside Paris. The meeting had been called to discuss nearly 3,000 job cuts—the airline’s first outright firings since the early 1990s.
So successful was Paris’s first ”day without cars” on Sept. 27 that the city’s mayor wants to expand the effort to help clean up the city’s terrible air quality. The single-day initiative made 30% of the city’s roads off-limits to automobiles, but even that minor reduction in traffic was enough to cut pollution levels—and noise—significantly.
A hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, was apparently “collateral damage” in a US airstrike on the Taliban in Afghanistan early this morning (Oct. 3). At least nine MSF staff members were killed, among other not-yet-totaled casualties including patients and patients’ family members.
