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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think we can all agree that Silicon Valley needs more adult supervision right about now. Is the solution for its companies to hire a chief ethics officer? While some tech companies like Google have top compliance officers and others turn to legal teams to police themselves, no big tech companies that I know of have yet taken this step. But a lot of them seem to be talking about it, and I’ve discussed the idea with several chief executives recently. Why? Because slowly, then all at once, it feels like too many digital leaders have lost their minds.

IN 2016, I bought two voting machines online for less than $100 apiece. I didn't even have to search the dark web. I found them on eBay. Surely, I thought, these machines would have strict guidelines for lifecycle control like other sensitive equipment, like medical devices. I was wrong. I was able to purchase a pair of direct-recording electronic voting machines and have them delivered to my home in just a few days. I did this again just a few months ago. Alarmingly, they are still available to buy online.

It’s open season for environmental crimes in the U.S., a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) suggests. Prosecutions under environmental law fell 10 percent for the 2018 fiscal year from their 2017 levels, which were themselves a substantial drop from prior years. Overall, federal prosecutions for environmental crimes are now down 40 percent from 2013 levels.

Imagine for a moment that a big, admired multinational corporation, one selling a beloved product, was employing large numbers of male pedophiles and rapists, operating in rings all over the world, and that their crimes had been uncovered in Australia, Ireland, Canada, the Philippines, Belgium, France, Austria, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Britain, Germany and the United States, and, further, that senior executives had systematically covered up and suppressed evidence, transferring and enabling hundreds of predators, betraying thousands of victims.

If you've had a bad experience on the 737 MAX, with it's super small bathrooms and teeny tiny pitch, here's how you can avoid booking on thier routes.

Could we stop worshipping rich men who are jerks? On Tuesday Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, took to Twitter once again with bizarre comments, saying how “strange” it is that the cave diver who rescued the Thai boys didn’t sue him after he called him a pedophile. The notion that the diver might not want to get into a legal battle with a mean-tempered billionaire seemingly hadn’t occurred to him. (Though the diver’s lawyer is now reportedly preparing a libel suit.)

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

American filmmaker S. Craig Zahler is back at Venice Film Festival for a second year running, this time with his Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn cop drama Dragged Across Concrete. Screen caught up with Zahler at the festival to talk about working with controversial figure Gibson, getting projects made outside of the studio system, and why he won’t compromise on the runtime of his films.

A refurbished electronics seller is trolling Apple with a parody ad that argues that, if the Cupertino company said it was an amazing phone back in 2015 it still has to be amazing three years later — and they are making a very good point.

Billionaire Richard Branson is pushing business leaders to embrace the idea of flexible work arrangements, claiming that with today's cutting-edge technology, there is no reason people can't work less hours and be equally — if not more — effective. Hard work is key, but enjoying what you do and having fun is just as crucial, said the adventurous, fun-loving founder of Virgin. In his international best seller "The Virgin Way: If It's Not Fun, It's Not Worth Doing," he wrote that "fun is one of the most important — and underrated — ingredients in any successful venture."

Twenty-one months into the Trump presidency, how far has the country rolled down the road to autocracy? It’s been such a distracting drive—so many crazy moments!—who can keep an eye on the odometer? Yet measuring the distance traveled is vital. As Abraham Lincoln superbly said in his “house divided” speech: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

Has American democracy been hijacked by the passions of its people, now a dangerous and untamable majority undermining the republic? In a new issue of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Rosen, head of the National Constitution Center, says yes. “[James] Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.”

For those who believe in the distinction between high art and low, video games have long been near the bottom of the pile. Fortunately, that has not stopped some of the world’s great art museums from putting on exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, began acquiring games in 2012 and a year later invited visitors to play some of them in a show called “Applied Design”. The most recent video-games exhibition, “Videogames Design/Play/Disrupt”, takes place at an even grander instituion – the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, in a house near a dead end, which my parents bought in 1992. They paid for it with a conventional mortgage that they had the misfortune of refinancing in January 2008. A series of disasters followed, all of which would have been previously unthinkable. Within a matter of months, investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed from having taken on too much risk, predominantly in the housing market, and by the fall of that year both of my parents had lost their jobs.

Two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn has opened up about the #MeToo movement, saying it divides men and women and "it's too black and white." Penn, 58, and actress Natascha McElhone, 48, who co-star in the new Hulu show "The First" about a dangerous mission to Mars, had a frank discussion about the movement empowering women, with Natalie Morales on TODAY Monday.

Urged on by the oil and gas industry, the Trump administration is moving to drastically weaken the Endangered Species Act. But the act, writes a former U.S. Interior Secretary, has saved hundreds of species that might now be extinct, while allowing for well-managed development. 

Earlier this summer, John Oliver called Facebook “History’s Most Profitable Data-Harvesting Machine,” which was charitable compared to Sunday night’s 20-minute takedown on the company’s hate speech policies and content moderation, especially in countries that are newly getting online. Oliver compared Facebook unfavorably to toilets, which “make shit go away, whereas Facebook retains shit, disseminates shit to your acquaintances, and reminds you of shit from seven years ago while allowing corporations to put their shit in front of you. What I’m saying is there’s a purity and integrity to toilets that Facebook seriously lacks.”

Going into this series, I hoped I’d get back to the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream and be able to romantically wax about where Android came from. How the G1, though dated, still held up the promises made by Google's first Android effort back in 2008. Analytically, it's all true, but time has not been kind to the phone, and using it has made for a pretty rough week, even by my recent standards.

The story of Telltale Games paints a fascinating, depressing picture of a company that found success and seemed to immediately encase itself in amber. The road to its devastating shutdown is what it looks like when a company finds a winning formula, and thinks that winning formula will win forever.

It’s remarkable: The more women accuse of Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, the more committed to his confirmation conservatives become. On Monday, after Deborah Ramirez became the second woman to accuse Kavanaugh of wrongdoing, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted that among conservatives, the belief that Kavanaugh is innocent “actually gained momentum and support on the basis of the second allegation.” Over the course of Thursday, conservatives responded to the allegations of a third woman, Julie Swetnick, by again doubling down.

Beliefs can be hard to change, even if they are scientifically wrong. But those on the fence about an idea can be swayed after hearing facts related to the misinformation, according to a study led by Princeton University. After conducting an experimental study, the researchers found that listening to a speaker repeating a belief does, in fact, increase the believability of the statement, especially if the person somewhat believes it already. But for those who haven’t committed to particular beliefs, hearing correct information can override the myths.

Amazon just hit a $1 trillion valuation, but some of its workers feel poorer than ever. Jeff Bezos’s tech giant is the second U.S. company to be worth thirteen-digits on the stock market, following Apple, which hit $1 trillion in August. That’s all well and good for Bezos, whose net worth exceeds $150 billion. But workers at the growing network of Amazon-owned companies say they aren’t seeing the money and Senator Bernie Sanders rolled out a new bill that would penalize Amazon for leaving workers dependent on public assistance. The next day, The Wall Street Journal reported that employees at Whole Foods...

The masters of the universe, it turns out, are losers. The Brett Kavanaugh hearing was a kaleidoscope of family and God and prestigious clerkships spliced with boofing and ralphing and brewskis. It was a thorough dressing-down. In the end, one was left with the impression of an unremarkable guy who was born on a conveyor belt to power, without much obligation to distinguish himself from his peers.

Judicial temperament is one of the most important qualities of a judge. As the Congressional Research Service explains, a judge requires “a personality that is even-handed, unbiased, impartial, courteous yet firm, and dedicated to a process, not a result.” The concern for judicial temperament dates back to our founding; in Federalist 78, titled “Judges as Guardians of the Constitution,” Alexander Hamilton expressed the need for “the integrity and moderation of the judiciary.”

The U.S. Government doesn’t care about your losses. They don’t care if you get scammed. What they care about is their own power, keeping it, and controlling you. There is no better illustration of that than in the disparity in the sentences of Ross Ulbricht and Joshua Homero Garza. It’s been three years since Garza’s actions and even longer since Ulbricht’s arrest so a recap is in order. Joshua Homero Garza, better known simply as Josh Garza was the CEO and founder of GAW Mining, which initially sold mining hardware.

Readers around the world cooed last month when a Welsh bookseller announced he was giving away his shop to a regular customer. It was a lovely story, but as an ex-bookseller of five years, I could only dwell on the harsh realities this unsuspecting man would inherit: slow days, stocktaking and, unavoidably, a few regular oddballs.

The German philosopher has been adopted by the alt-right, but he hated antisemitism. He has been misappropriated and misread, argues his biographer. Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted.

Climate change is a hoax. Climate change is happening, but it’s not man-made. Climate change is man-made, but doing anything about it would destroy jobs and kill economic growth. These are the stages of climate denial. Or maybe it’s wrong to call them stages, since the deniers never really give up an argument, no matter how thoroughly it has been refuted by evidence. They’re better described as cockroach ideas — false claims you may think you’ve gotten rid of, but keep coming back.