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“If you are a white male—tough,” Tesco’s John Allan reportedly (paywall) told a group of aspiring corporate directors at a conference this week. “You are an endangered species and you are going to have to work twice as hard.” It was an impolitic comment, coming from the white, male chairman of the UK’s largest supermarket […]Read More

Time travel is possible, in a way. Astrophysicists are about to make the sci-fi fantasy a reality using a giant infrared telescope that can peer at star formations 13 billion light years away, seeing them just like they were that many years ago, and illuminating the recipe for the soup that is the universe. On […]

A leaked version of a US Environmental Protection Agency budget proposal sent out by the Trump administration last week is dominated by cuts that would ravage the agency’s ability to function, reducing funding for many of its core programs by 20-30% each and zeroing out others altogether. The proposed budget would also eliminate about 3,000 […]

Long before the world knew the contents of Hillary Clinton staffers’ inboxes thanks to Russian hackers, the country went after an even bigger US target, in a movie-worthy plot documented in Fred Kaplan’s 2016 book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and highlighted in a New Yorker article earlier this month. On Oct. […]

The Chinese government has announced its annual GDP target for 2017, projecting growth of “around 6.5%, or higher if possible in practice.” Though somewhat lower than 2016’s target, it’s still pretty high: The authorities want to keep growth bumping in advance of October’s party congress, a crucial opportunity for Xi Jinping, chair of the communist […]Read More

The optimism for Snap’s stock seems to be fading nearly as quickly as the average message on Snapchat. Just three days after the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Snap’s stock closed below the price it first opened at. Although Snap priced its initial public offering at $17 per share, the stock opened […]

A White House press release sent to reporters today (March 8) contained a paragraph identical to a paragraph in an ExxonMobil press release, published an hour before. The White House release, titled “President Trump Congratulates Exxon Mobil for Job-Creating Investment Program,” applauded the company for new oil refining and chemical manufacturing developments along the coasts […]

Black History Month just ended in the US. You can tell because president Donald Trump’s only African-American cabinet member just described slaves as “immigrants” with dreams of prosperity in America. “There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less,” said Ben Carson in his […]Read More

When Ying Zi heard her son utter the phrase, “Father put his penis into mother’s vagina,” she was mortified. Her son, a second-year primary school pupil, was reading from a sex-education textbook. “We weren’t given notice from the school,” said Ying, who proceeded to post images of the textbook on Weibo (her post has since […]Read More

India has not been a good mother to its girls—but one small village is trying to make amends to its grandmothers. The country has long been a hotbed for sex-selective abortion—specifically female foeticide. Fewer girls than boys are enrolled in school. The male literacy rate was 83% while women logged just 67%. Conservative and misogynistic […]

Taipei, Taiwan More than half of Taiwan’s universities may have engaged in self-censorship in order to attract Chinese students, according to a government investigation in Taiwan. According to the Ministry of Education, 80 of Taiwan’s 157 universities have signed agreements with Chinese universities that are primarily sources of short-term study-abroad candidates, vowing not to contradict […]

At the start of last year, Nigeria seemed on course to clock an important milestone: hitting 100 million mobile internet users. But that’s no longer the case. New data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) shows a steady decline the country’s internet user numbers, despite a fall in mobile internet data prices. Since mid-2016, mobile […]