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Death is different, according to the US Supreme Court. Capital punishment—execution—is an extraordinary measure, reserved for the worst criminal offenders. It raises the toughest ethical questions for American courts, and there’s no unanimity on the answers, especially not when it comes to lethal injection. The US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibits the infliction of “cruel and […]Read More

After five parched years, an unusually wet winter has officially ended the drought in 83% of California, according to figures released this week from the US National Drought Mitigation Center. Rain this year has filled most of the state’s major reservoirs above average pre-drought levels. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which supplies 30% of California’s water, […]

It’s the year 2042. The birds have long ago left us. US supreme leader Barron Trump reigns over his dominion with an iron fist. Masked marauders patrol the empty streets, killing for water. New Orleans and Miami have already begun to sink into the sea. But most horrifying of all: There’s nothing to watch on […]

Todd Starnes is a patriot spurned by The New York Times. So he’d have you believe. The Fox News radio host has a new book out called The Deplorables’ Guide to Making America Great Again, released Feb. 7. And the book is not a New York Times bestseller. The Deplorables’ Guide did make the bestseller […]

Boris Johnson, foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, met up with his Australian counterpart Julie Bishop yesterday (Feb. 23), who before attending to business had to stop and fix Johnson’s necktie. In photos of their meeting in London, Johnson appears to have put on his necktie in a bit of a rush, with the narrow […]

It’s a good time to take a few minutes and reset some passwords. Cloudflare, which provides web security and performance boosts to millions of websites including Fitbit, OkCupid, Uber, and Yelp, has been leaking user data since September 2016, the company announced on Thursday. The leak meant that login credentials, cookies that track users around […]

Loyalty pays, and Shyam Kumar is proof. When Mumbai-based mobile wallet startup Citrus Pay was sold last year to PayU, the payments subsidiary of South Africa’s Naspers, it made a millionaire out of many of its staff members—including one low-level employee who had been with the company since its inception in 2010. After his father […]

At the behest of the Trump administration, NASA is figuring out if it makes any sense to fly humans on an untested rocket. Two executives at the US space agency said today they were conducting a study for the White House to see if two astronauts can fly on the first launch of a next-generation […]

It’s been a rough few weeks for Uber. A blog post published yesterday by Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out of Google (now Alphabet)’s X research lab, outlined what it believes to have been an organized excavation of its intellectual property by one of its previous employees, Anthony Levandowski. Levandowski started Otto, an autonomous […]

Indians who considered Trump’s America a safe haven are in for a nasty wake up call. Like Muslims and Jews, Indians are not immune to racist attacks. On Thursday, a Kansas man open fired at a bar in the city of Olathe, killing 32-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla and injuring his colleague, 32-year-old Alok Madasani. Both men […]

Arrival is a science fiction film, but it sure wasn’t shot like one. The Oscar-nominated movie about a linguist who communicates with aliens was shot and edited to look like a typical Tuesday, said colorist Joe Gawler, who graded the film. “The stuff leading up to the ship was supposed to feel like a normal, […]

The sharing economy already allows people unfettered access to cars, apartments, and pets. Why not add grass-fed beef cattle to the list? That’s exactly what Crowd Cow is doing. By working with seven beef ranchers along the West Coast, the company allows earnest foodies to pool their money and purchase a cow together, pick the […]