Baby names are becoming increasingly adventurous - often inspired by characters and figures from the world of entertainment. More than 300 girls born in England and Wales last year were named Arya, sharing their name with the well-known Game of Thrones character. That's more than the number of children who received traditional names like Mary (204) and Catherine (163).

f animals are our other, there is nothing quite so other as the octopus. It is the alien with whom we share our planet, a coeval evolutionary life form whose slithery slipperiness and more than the requisite number of limbs (each of which contains its own “brain”) symbolise the dark mystery and fear of the deep.

When Jocko Willink‏, a former US Navy SEAL who is now an author and occasional Business Insider contributor, was asked on Twitter how he would handle the North Korean crisis, he gave an unexpected answer that one expert said just might work. Willink's proposal didn't involve any covert special operation strikes or military moves of any kind. Instead of bombs, Willink suggested the US drop iPhones.

There's a playbook for committing atrocities and being absolved of them. It wasn't written by George W Bush, now a retired painter of dogs in the US state of Texas, but it was popularised and legitimised by his administration at the dawn of the 21st century. And the world today, with its multiple bloody wars on terror fought by allies and foes of Washington alike, sometimes begrudgingly together, reflects this bequeathment.

Sweden is set to deport a blind 106-year-old Afghan refugee who is believed to be the world’s oldest asylum seeker. Bibikhal Uzbek was 105 years old when her son and grandsons carried her on their backs as they traversed rock-strewn mountain paths from Kunduz in northeastern Afghanistan through Iran and Turkey in the hope of seeking refuge in Europe in 2015.

Japan is planning for a possible mass evacuation of the nearly 60,000 Japanese citizens currently living in or visiting South Korea in the wake of North Korea’s latest nuclear weapons test. “There is a possibility of further provocations,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned Monday at a meeting with lawmakers, the Nikkei Asian Review reported.

A little bit of nature can calm even the most stressed populations of people, according to a study conducted on prisoners in solitary confinement. In the experiment, researchers found that prisoners who watched videos with nature scenes felt less stressed and weren’t as violent as those who didn’t. The team, led by ecologist Nalini Nadkarni at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, published their findings on 1 September in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The U.S. Energy Department on Thursday released 1 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and a White House adviser said more could flow after Tropical Storm Harvey inundated Gulf Coast refineries and drove up motor fuel prices.

The company behind the Essential Phone, while selling a nice looking phone with some pretty high end specifications, have made some pretty questionable decisions. We wrote an article detailing our problems with the device and the company behind it. What’s more, not even a day after we published that article Essential seemingly messed up again, leaving a small number of customers in a potentially dangerous position.

Imagine the most English-English person you can think of. Now I’m fairly certain that no matter what picture you just conjured up, that person comes complete with a stiff upper lip and a cup of tea in their hand. Because that’s what the English do. They carry on and they drink tea. Tea is so utterly English, such an ingrained part of the culture, that it’s also ingrained in how everyone else around the world perceives that culture.

Iowa Cubs catcher Taylor Davis has an innate talent for finding the cameras and staring into the lens until it becomes uncomfortable, so the team celebrated that skill with a two-minute compilation. Davis does it from the dugout, behind home plate, in the bullpen, during a bullpen visit, and even while standing for the national anthem...

Another new Switch game from Team17 has been revealed for Switch outside of today’s Nindies Showcase. Included in Nintendo’s assets are screenshots for Worms W.M.D, which was originally released last year. Unfortunately, aside from those screenshots, nothing else was included. We don’t have a fact sheet for this one or anything else.

At a steel factory dwarfed by the adjacent Auto Club Speedway, Fernando Esparza is working toward his next promotion. Esparza is a 46-year-old mechanic for Evolution Fresh, a subsidiary of Starbucks that makes juices and smoothies. He’s taking a class in industrial computing taught by a community college at a local manufacturing plant in the hope it will bump up his wages.

“If I start crying, I’m so sorry,” Ashley Yell began. Yell, a resident of Dickinson, Texas, evacuated her home early Sunday after Tropical Storm Harvey brought massive flooding to Gulf Coast cities. Harvey touched down as a Category 4 storm Friday, and rescue efforts are still underway in Houston and the surrounding area. In an interview, Yell described how her family evacuated their flooded home, relying on strangers driving boats to ferry them to higher and higher ground until they final...

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced. The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

A police constable saved lives of school kids by running away with a 10 kg bomb tucked in his arms. The head constable who discovered a 10 kg unexploded artillery shell near a school in Chitora village of Sagar district, in Madhya Pradesh, saved lives of as many as 400 school kids.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned the U.K. on Saturday that it would have to pay a settlement to leave the EU, denying that the obligation amounted to a “fine.” “This is about obligations that Great Britain has entered into and that naturally must remain on the books,” Merkel said in her weekly podcast published Saturday ahead of the latest round of talks next week, Bloomberg reported. “It’s not about the cost of divorce — that makes it sound like fines. We’re still at the v...

Landslide sent mud, rocks and dirt flooding into village of Bondo, near Italian border, and forced evacuation of about 100 people.

China launched nearly 8,000 water clean-up projects in the first half of 2017 with projected total investment of 667.4 billion yuan ($100 billion), the environment ministry said on Thursday. The projects were devised as part of a 2015 action plan to treat and prevent water pollution, and cover 325 contaminated groundwater sites across the country, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) said in a notice.

One organizer said he’s “definitely” not coming back soon after tens of thousands drowned out 50 people and him in a gazebo. Hours after he had been escorted from Boston Common in a police van, one of the organizers of the “free speech” rally was still shaken up. “I honestly thought I was going to die in there,” Steven said of the “paddy wagon” in which he and 16 others were escorted from a gazebo that hosted the “Boston Free Speech Rally.”

British retailers have called for the government to take tougher action on tackling obesity and consider mandatory measures to ensure more companies make their products healthier. Public health bosses have urged food manufacturers to make chips, pizzas, crisps and burgers healthier, and ministers are expected to issue “strong guidance” on how to reformulate products popular with children.