eath threats, bullying, mental torture, privacy invasion, election rigging, fake news, monopoly abuse: as was said of a medieval pope, this is merely to suppress more serious charges. It is hard to recall the social media of 15 years ago and its offer of universal love, democracy and global peace. Britain’s parliament has finally caught up, and today’s Commons report is at least unequivocal. A menace stalks the land, and must be curbed.

Cannabis is the most commonly used recreational drug by teenagers worldwide. In Canada, among youth aged 15 to 19 years, the rate of past-year cannabis use is 20.6%, while in England, 4% of adolescents aged 11 to 15 years used cannabis in the last month. While there has been a lot of focus on the role of cannabis use in psychosis, there has been less attention on whether cannabis use is associated with an increased risk of common mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety.

Last month, it was reported that a coalition of activist groups had sent letters to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, petitioning that they do not sell facial recognition technologies to governments. They issued the letter on the basis that the technology would undermine people’s security and public trust. Now, Microsoft President Brad Smith has said withholding the technology would be “cruel”.

Hours after Donald Trump associate Roger Stone was indicted for lying to congress about his communications with the transparency organization Wikileaks, the organization disavowed its ties to the longtime Republican political operative and argued that the indictment was proof that there was no “back channel” between it and the Trump campaign.

If an asteroid were to head toward Earth, we would be quite defenseless, as we have not successfully developed a method that could reduce — or entirely avert — the impact of a devastating collision. However, that may be about to change. NASA has approved a project called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the aim of which is to throw a "small" asteroid off course in October 2022.

A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work. When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness ratin...

Eminem has broken a slew of records both huge and trivial in the months since releasing his surprise new album, Kamikaze. This time, however, he's broken a record thanks to one of his most beloved classic albums: The Marshall Mathers LP just surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify, making Eminem the only artist to have seven albums cross that threshold , according to Chart Data.

Mega-storms the size of England are increasingly savaging countries across the Sahel, a five-year project backed by the UK government has found. Already a troubled region, the Sahel – which hugs the Saharan desert from Senegal to Eritrea – has seen a threefold increase in mega-storms over the last 35 years. The ferocious storms – which produce roughly the same amount of energy in 12 hours that the entire UK consumes in a year – can devastate everything in their path with powerful winds ...

President Donald Trump personally directed his longtime former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project, two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter told BuzzFeed. The law enforcement officials told BuzzFeed that Trump directed Cohen to claim negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended months earlier than they actually did. The law enforcement sources told BuzzFeed that Cohen confirmed to special counsel Robert Mu...

New research from Harvard University finds that Americans' unconscious bias on the basis of sexual orientation and race dropped dramatically over a decade. The study in the journal Psychological Science looks at more than 4 million online tests for implicit bias — bias people aren't aware of — taken from 2007 to the end of 2016.

To the surprise of absolutely no one paying attention, Paramount/Viacom has discreetly pulled the plug on the fourth chapter in their rebooted Star Trek movie franchise. This tidbit was buried in a Deadline article about the new Game of Thrones prequel spin-off, as the pilot episode is to be helmed by SJ Clarkson. Clarkson was set to direct the sequel to Star Trek Beyond, and her attachment to the HBO fantasy prequel series is tied to Paramount pulling the plug on the...

The head of Thailand's immigration police said Monday that an 18-year-old Saudi woman who was stopped in Bangkok as she was trying to travel to Australia for asylum to escape alleged abuse by her family will not be sent anywhere against her wishes. The woman, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, was allowed to temporarily enter Thailand under the protection of the U.N. refugee agency, which was expected to take at least five to seven days to evaluate her case and claims for asylum status.

As if battered post-Christmas finances, a looming disorderly Brexit and the prospect of a fresh nuclear arms race were not enough to dampen spirits, astronomers have declared that a nearby galaxy will slam into the Milky Way and could knock our solar system far into the cosmic void. The unfortunate discovery was made after scientists ran computer simulations on the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the many satellite galaxies that orbits the Milky Way.

It’s a common problem: You’re off to Le Mans with your new 400 bhp engine and you discover that it won’t fit in the airplane's overhead compartment. This week, Nissan showed off the answer to this traveler’s nightmare with its ultralight DIG-T R 1.5 liter, three-cylinder petrol engine that is small enough to fit in carry-on luggage and boasts a power-to-weight ratio better than the engine of a Formula 1 racer.

Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka co-founded BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1995, shortly after graduating from medical school. Its first game, Shattered Steel, was a modest success, but the second is the one that put it on the map: Baldur's Gate was a major hit that led into an even bigger sequel, other much-loved D&D-based RPGs, two of the best Star Wars games ever, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and more.