When the rest of America is celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Alabama and Mississippi are observing a different holiday: Martin Luther King Jr./Robert E. Lee Day. And for a while, those states weren’t alone—Arkansas ended its joint holiday little more than a year ago. Bundling a holiday celebrating our nation’s most beloved civil rights leader with one for a man who fought to maintain slavery is one of the purest indications that our nation hasn’t truly reckoned with its history, so I talked to someone who is: lawyer, activist, and MacArthur “genius” Bryan Stevenson.

The good news is, our collective efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost have made San Francisco the most successful big city in America at reducing what goes to landfill. The bad news is, plastics have become a huge issue for all of us. “60 Minutes” recently aired a powerful segment on plastic waste and its impact on the environment, along with the (as yet unsuccessful) efforts to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A portion of that feature was filmed at Recycle Central at Pier 96 in San Francisco, which is Recology’s largest and most technologically advanced recycling facility.

“The Play That Goes Wrong,” a British slapstick comedy, finished a short run at the Kennedy Center this month, so most Washingtonians didn’t get to see its characters stepping on each other, getting struck by falling objects and stymied by stuck doors, forgetting their lines, missing their cues, and eventually having the whole set fall down around them.

Crises are a time-tested means of subverting democracy. From Getúlio Vargas and other better-known dictators in the 1930s to Indira Gandhi and Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and on to Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan more recently, autocratic-minded leaders have long used national emergencies — some real, some fabricated — to claim extraordinary powers. One of our greatest concerns about Donald Trump’s presidency has always been that he would exploit (or invent) a crisis in order to justify an abuse of power. Recent events have given this concern new immediacy.

Like many, I’ve been watching the developments in Boca Chica, Texas, with great interest. SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s companies, is building the “Starship Hopper,” a shorter and simpler version of a spacecraft that could revolutionize space travel. Seeing images of the mostly complete test vehicle, clad in shiny stainless steel, makes me feel like a kid again. These are exciting times to be alive. We are at the beginning stages of the electric car revolution. We have access to much of the knowledge of our species at our fingertips. Rockets are being launched, and they mostly return to the ground for the next adventure.

Last August the American Psychological Association (APA) released its first-ever guidelines for therapists working with men and boys. Nobody paid much attention to these for several months, but they went viral this week. This was largely due to the APA condensing its academic report into a tweet explaining that the key takeaway is that traditional masculinity is harmful and socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage. Suddenly everyone on the internet was an armchair psychologist and conservatives were up in arms about war on men.

What if it’s not we who are sick, but an entire society that is incompatible with humanity’s social needs?

Imagine during the Cold War that one political party, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Soviet Union was engaged in espionage against the United States, had a nuclear arsenal pointed at the United States, kept Eastern Europe under its thumb and imprisoned dissenters, refused to consider the Soviet Union a danger — of any sort — to the United States or other Western democracies. And they would offer no credible evidence to the contrary, but rather assert that it was all a hoax.

Two years ago, Apple killed the headphone port. I still haven’t forgiven them for it. When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would have no headphone port, I was pretty immediately annoyed. I figured maybe I’d get over it in a few months. I didn’t. I figured if worse came to worse, I’d switch platforms. Then all of the other manufacturers started following suit.

Morality exists only because we evolved the capacity to empathize. And empathy provides the best guide to moral action. But there are those who say that empathy is too selective to play such a central role in our moral system. People tend to empathize more readily with those who look, sound and behave like themselves. We feel the pain more acutely of those who resemble us. How then can empathy serve as a moral guide when it is morality’s role to lead us away from cruelty toward people outside our own group?

In the past few years, artificial intelligence has advanced so quickly that it now seems hardly a month goes by without a newsworthy AI breakthrough. In areas as wide-ranging as speech translation, medical diagnosis, and gameplay, we have seen computers outperform humans in startling ways. This has sparked a discussion about how AI will impact employment. Some fear that as AI improves, it will supplant workers, creating an ever-growing pool of unemployable humans who cannot compete economically with machines.

In April of 2017, the Iowa House of Representatives respected my religious rights when I delivered the first atheistic invocation in that body’s history. The Iowa Senate, however, has denied my repeated requests to perform a similar invocation. In so doing, not only is the Senate directly discriminating against me, it is violating the Constitution, which protects all faiths equally. In its upcoming session, the Senate faces a stark choice: Continue to limit religious freedom or protect it for all Iowans.

The veteran Democrat and former Senate leader Harry Reid said President Donald Trump was “amoral” and had “no conscience.” “Trump is an interesting person,” Reid, who was Nevada senator for 20 years until 2017 and was both Democrat minority and majority leader during that time, told The New York Times in an interview published today. “He is not immoral but is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn’t make a difference. No conscience.

Picture a system that makes decisions with huge impacts on a person’s prospects – even decisions of life and death. Imagine that system is complex and opaque: it sorts people into winners and losers, but the criteria by which it does so are never made clear. Those being assessed do not know what data the system has gathered about them, or with what data theirs is being compared. And no one is willing to take responsibility for the system’s decisions – everyone claims to be fulfilling their own cog-like function.

After Tuesday’s “More in the Making” event, Apple has officially rolled out its full suite of products for 2018 and beyond. It’s an impressive slate of Macs, iPhones, and iPads, and they will no doubt top many a wish list during the holiday season. Now that we know exactly what Apple will be selling for the next 12 months, a disturbing trend has emerged, one that gives new meaning to the word “more.”

The birthing of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has unleashed the next wave of innovation in the technology and fintech sectors but we are not quite there…yet. Bitcoin has just turned 10 years old. 10 years have elapsed since the 2008 financial crisis took hold of the global financial system. Satoshi had indicated that the genesis block and the birth of Bitcoin was a result of people’s loss of faith in the current financial system and the status quo.

They are the truly forgotten dead. Sixteen million animals “served” in the first world war – and the RSPCA estimates that 484,143 horses, mules, camels and bullocks were killed in British service between 1914 and 1918. Some died before they reached the western front: of 94,000 horses sent from North America in 1917, 2,700 drowned when their vessels were sunk by submarines. Trench dogs hunted for rats in the trenches. Others carried messages. The German army alone employed 30,000 dogs.

We know that most people can’t imagine life without cars, but we also know that time for cars has passed if we want to save the planet for future generations. The stopdrivingcar.club site is intended as a publication that should enable people from all countries in the world to facilitate their transport.

Newly elected Jair Bolsonaro, an authoritarian nationalist sometimes called the “tropical Trump,” has staked out an environmental agenda that would open the Amazon to widespread development, putting at risk a region that plays a vital role in stabilizing the global climate.

If you gauge the climate inside the Democratic Party merely by which candidates won its 2018 primaries, you might think reports of its leftward lurch are exaggerated. Despite the hoopla about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Ayanna Pressley’s upset victories in congressional races in New York and Massachusetts, not a single incumbent Democratic governor or senator lost a primary to a left-leaning challenger.

The Amazon HQ2 saga had all the hallmarks of the gaudiest reality TV. It was an absurd spectacle, concluding with a plot twist, which revealed a deep and dark truth about the modern world. Fourteen months ago, Amazon announced a national beauty contest, in which North American cities could apply to win the honor of landing the retailer’s second headquarters. The prize: 50,000 employees and the glory of housing an international tech giant. The cost? Just several billion dollars in tax incentives and a potential face-lift to the host city.

Bill Maher has been perceived to be a stalwart opponent of political correctness and the prevailing discourse since first making waves as the host of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in the early 1990s. Known to be a counter-cultural contrarian — famous for railing against the prevailing wisdom of the day — Maher would be no stranger to controversy throughout his decades-long tenure as a popular cultural critic.

A few weeks ago, William Sitwell, the editor of Waitrose Food — a monthly magazine published by a British supermarket chain — decided to leave the mag after an email exchange in which he wrote about hunting and killing vegans went viral. Naturally, this led a lot of people to weigh in on veganism. The general consensus on Twitter seemed to be that vegans do, in fact, suck. Like really suck. Like Hoover-manufactured-a-sex-robot levels of sucking. Because now they made some nice British man lose his job. Those non-flesh eating monsters!

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are brilliant at building businesses, but we shouldn't let them take control. For the sake of my health, I walk on beautiful Hampstead Heath at least once a week, and I get there via the revamped London Overground train service. It's clean, frequent and gets me there in less than 15 minutes. "So what?" you may be thinking; the significance is I get there by train rather than by flying car.

Love it or leave it. Have you heard someone say this? Or have you said it? Anyone who has heard these five words knows what it means, because it almost always refers to America. Anyone who has heard this sentence knows it is a loaded gun, pointed at them.

President Donald Trump is feeling the heat. That’s true legally, with regard to what we keep learning about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and the fact that Democrats in the House ― with outgoing Republican Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes no longer able to protect Trump ― will also now truly investigate the issue, even if Trump fires Mueller.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that Facebook executives withheld evidence of Russian activity on their platform far longer than previously disclosed. They also employed a political opposition research firm to discredit critics. There’s a larger story here. America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of innovations – railroads, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated in mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to drive out competitors and corrupt American politics.

Democrats won’t be able to do much policymaking over the next two years, because of President Trump and the Republican Senate. But they can still use their House majority to do more than investigate Trump. Democrats can hold hearings and pass bills that make clear their party’s vision for 2020 and beyond. They can figure out which ideas have the potential both to improve people’s lives and to win over voters.

With the value of bitcoin having fallen by about 70% since its peak late last year, the mother of all bubbles has now gone bust. More generally, cryptocurrencies have entered a not-so-cryptic apocalypse. The value of leading coins such as Ether, EOS, Litecoin and XRP have all fallen by over 80%, thousands of other digital currencies have plummeted by 90%-99%, and the rest have been exposed as outright frauds. No one should be surprised by this: four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) were scams to begin with.

Here they go again. The leaders of the euro zone are once more inching forward in their quest to form a fiscal union that will, they hope, shore up the common currency. At a time when Italy seems hell-bent on causing Euro Crisis 2.0, that might sound like a good idea. Upon scrutiny, however, the proposals, even if they pass, are risible. They are too timid to integrate the euro zone economically. Simultaneously, they are large enough to embolden Eurosceptics and populists.

After its October release, Red Dead Redemption 2 earned $725 million in just three days, giving it the highest-grossing opening weekend of any entertainment product — ever. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen this at this box office, it’s because it’s not a movie. It’s a video game. To put those numbers in context, this year’s biggest Marvel film, “Avengers: Infinity War,” grossed about $640 million worldwide in its opening weekend.

50 years after he first visited North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, veteran anthropologist, T N Pandit talks to Down To Earth about the Sentinelese people, other tribal groups in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and his legacy...

As a fourth-year medical student and future family medicine provider, I have a moral obligation ― as does any doctor ― to keep my current and future patients healthy and thriving. It’s for that reason I must speak out against acting Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler’s pending proposal, misleadingly named the “Affordable Clean Energy Rule,” to dismantle the Obama-era 2015 Clean Power Plan, which set the first and only federal limits on carbon pollution from power plants.

In New Delhi, the air has a dusty, burnt taste, says NPR's Furkan Latif Khan. And sometimes the air is so bad she wears a face mask.

Amid the gush of money and enthusiastic predictions being thrown at quantum computing comes a proposed cold shower in the form of an essay by physicist Mikhail Dyakonov published in IEEE Spectrum this month – The Case Against Quantum Computing. Whatever your view of QC’s prospects, Dyakonov’s commentary is worth a read. Error correction – or more accurately the inability to monitor variables and correct errors at the scale required – is the big stumbling block, he writes, but there is a good deal more to his piece.