“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." These are the words of a woman whose acts of charity and kindness earned her sainthood – Mother Theresa. They exemplify one of the most baffling aspects of the human response to the plight of others. While most of us will see a single death as a tragedy, we can struggle to have the same response to large-scale loss of life. Too often, the deaths of many simply become a statistic.

When Jolanda Woods was growing up in North St. Louis, in the 1970s and early ’80s, she and her friends would take the bus to the stores downtown, on 14th Street, or on Cherokee Street, on the South Side, or out to the River Roads Mall, in the inner suburb of Jennings. “This was a very merchant city,” Woods, who is 54, told me.

Recently, I saw a friend post an alarming pro-Police copypasta and say that “White Privilege” isn’t real. In response, I have written an essay that addresses Systemic Racism that I think everyone can benefit from. You will find the text of the copy pasta and my rebuttal including sources for my claims below. This is long but I implore you to be an active participant in the discourse.

Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products. Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?

Last weekend, a boat with cadaver dogs and sonar puttered around a small lake in Seffner, searching for the body of Tampa multi-millionaire Don Lewis. The search was organized by a group devoted to solving his disappearance. Video of the search, posted to Facebook, showed a black German shepherd barking animatedly in the middle of the lake as a crew filmed for Netflix. But divers plumbed the murky brown water and didn’t find anything.

Ifirst became an economist in the early 1970s, at a time when revolutionary change still seemed like an imminent possibility and when utopian ideas were everywhere, exemplified by the Situationist slogan of 1968: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ Preferring to think in terms of the possible I was much influenced by an essay called ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,’ written in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes, the great economist whose ideas still dominated economic policymaking at the time.

The impact of ­COVID-19 on the physical health of the world's citizens is extraordinary. By mid-May there were upward of four million cases spread across more than 180 countries. The pandemic's effect on mental health could be even more far-reaching. At one point roughly one third of the planet's population was under orders to stay home. That means 2.6 billion people--more than were alive during World War II--were experiencing the emotional and financial reverberations of this new coronavirus.

Last week, my family and I attended an interfaith rally in Los Angeles in defense of Black life. We performed a group ritual in which we made noise for nine minutes to mark the last moments of George Floyd’s life. My wife, my oldest daughter, and I played African drums to mark those nine minutes with the rhythm of a beating heart. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, over and over again.

In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes, growing in the armpits and groin, which gave the disease its name: bubonic plague. The last stage was a high fever, and then death.

Venezuela used to be one of the richest countries in South America, but it has spent the last 10 years engulfed in a political and economic crisis. What started as the gradual crumbling of the country’s economy in 2010 snowballed into a devastating avalanche of crime, corruption, and mass starvation, leaving millions of people in the country unable to feed themselves or access basic medical supplies. Ninety percent of Venezuelans are now living in poverty, and one of the most extreme and sustained periods of hyperinflation ever recorded means that people working minimum wage jobs are earning the equivalent of $5 a month.

Phillip Lafayette Gibbs met Dale Adams when they were in high school, in Ripley, Mississippi, a town best known as the home of William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who ran a slave plantation, fought in the Mexican-American War, raised troops that joined the Confederate Army, wrote a best-selling mystery about a murder on a steamboat, shot a man to death and got away with it...

Raul Razo and three buddies were knocking out their daily situps and pushups in their 72-man tank at the Harris County Jail in late March when they were overcome. All four were gasping for air. “Uno por uno. Uno por uno,” Razo told his wife in a phone call punctuated by dry coughs. One by one they’d abandoned their workout and slogged off to their bunks.

In a crisis, what was once unthinkable can suddenly become inevitable. We’re in the middle of the biggest societal shakeup since the second world war. And neoliberalism is gasping its last breath. So from higher taxes for the wealthy to more robust government, the time has come for ideas that seemed impossible just months ago.

To lure Sears into a Chicago suburb, officials crafted the largest tax break package ever awarded to a company in Illinois. It resulted in revenue shortfalls, disappearing jobs and unexpected tax burdens, a Daily Herald and ProPublica review showed.

Regina Brave remembers the moment the first viral picture of her was taken. It was 1973, and 32-year-old Brave had taken up arms in a standoff between federal marshals and militant Indigenous activists in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Brave had been assigned to guard a bunker on the front lines and was holding a rifle when a reporter leaped from a car to snap her photo.

Twenty-five years after the United Nations’ Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action pledged to take the necessary steps to “remove all obstacles to gender equality and the advancement and empowerment of women,” support for gender equality is strong around the globe. Across 34 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 94% think it is important for women in their country to have the same rights as men, with 74% saying this is very important.

Peaches, a brown-and-white Jersey cow weighing 1,200 pounds, was amiably following Edward Towers through a barn on a sunny March morning when the 6-year-old dug in her front hooves. Mr. Towers, a 28-year-old-farmer whose family owns Brades Farm, near Britain’s rugged Lake District, slapped Peaches gently to move her along. She didn’t budge. Already muddy from a morning herding hundreds of cows to a milking session, Mr. Towers leaned all his weight into Peaches’ ample backside, until she finally stepped through a metal gate that would hold her head still for an exam.

How did the biggest cluster in the US emerge in a corner of South Dakota? Infections spread like wildfire through a pork factory and questions remain about what the company did to protect staff. On the afternoon of 25 March, Julia sat down at her laptop and logged into a phony Facebook account. She'd opened it in middle school, to surreptitiously monitor boys she had crushes on. But now, many years later, it was about to serve a much more serious purpose.

Just like our education and healthcare systems, our information supply has been heavily commercialised in the past decades. Truth has become a product, aimed at satisfying a need. The advent of digital capitalism turned truth into whatever makes you click.

One of the ultimate symbols of luxury and affluence is private jet travel. From the dawn of the Learjet-era to today’s ultra-long-range large-cabin jets, the most wealthy people in the world enjoy the unparalleled freedom and privilege that private jets provide. For such an intriguing and vaunted domain, there are a lot of misconceptions about it and the finances required to play within it. With this in mind, we dive into what traveling on and even owning one of these flying 'time machines' really costs and why they are so popular.