There are a lot of reasons people love their AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, and it doesn’t much matter to them what the haters say.
For some, the gun is a tool, a finely tuned machine that can cut down an animal or intruder, or pierce a distant target, with a single precise shot.
For others, it is a toy, a sleek beast of black plastic and metal that delivers a gratifying blast of adrenaline.
And for many, it is a symbol, the embodiment of core American values — freedom, might, self-reliance.
“There are very few things that serve such a great form and function, and look cool,” said Daniel Chandler, 26, an AR-15 owner here in suburban Maryland. When he takes his AR out of its case at a shooting range, he smiles like he just unwrapped a gift. “There are few things you’ll find that are wonderfully appealing to look at, wonderful exercises in mechanical engineering, and that could save your life.”
This is the side of the AR-15 that many don’t see, or ever consider.
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Megan Hill, 26, is photographed with an AR-15 at the Nephi City Shooting Range in Nephi, Utah, on Dec. 1, 2017. Kim Raff / for NBC News
People across the United States rushed this week to pay their 2018 property taxes early, hoping to take advantage one last time of a federal deduction that will be scaled back under the tax-code overhaul signed by President Trump.
On Wednesday, however, the Internal Revenue Service announced that those prepayments could be deducted only in limited circumstances, a decision that appeared to invalidate many taxpayers’ efforts and raised the prospect that local governments could come under pressure to refund millions of dollars.
The announcement stoked confusion surrounding one of the most controversial elements of the tax law — a $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes that will disproportionately affect higher-tax, Democratic-leaning states. It also offered a glimpse of the kind of hiccups that could arise in coming weeks as the IRS releases guidance on other facets of the bill, the largest overhaul of federal tax law in three decades.
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Roughly 60 people stood in line midday at Montgomery County’s Department of Finance in Rockville, Md., to prepay their 2018 property taxes. (Rachel Siegel/The Washington Post)
The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) are the result of electrons colliding with the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. (Protons cause faint and diffuse aurora, usually not easily visible to the human eye.)
In his first interview since leaving office, former president Barack Obama didn’t mention President Trump by name, but he really didn’t have to: He told his host, Prince Harry, that leaders shouldn’t use social media to stoke division.
“All of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the Internet,” Obama said.
The interview took the form of a warm chat between the 44th U.S. president and Prince Harry, who was serving as guest host on BBC Radio 4’s popular “Today” program.
“One of the dangers of the Internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases,” Obama said. “It is harder to be as obnoxious and cruel in person as people can be anonymously on the Internet.”
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In an interview with Prince Harry that aired on Dec. 27, former president Barack Obama talked about the dangers of social media and his last day as president.(Reuters)
There was no pressure. It was just another day in the recording studio.
That was the key to writing Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” which has been on the Hot 100 since it was released on Jan. 6, and topped Billboard’s year-end singles chart. It’s a tale of romance sketched in mundane details — “now my bedsheets smell of you” — with four chords delivered in plinking, dancehall-tinged syncopation. The song has drawn more than 2.8 billion views on YouTube and is also the most-played track ever on Spotify, with more than 1.5 billion streams.
Mr. Sheeran thought he already had enough songs for the album he released this year, and he was pondering the final selections. As a diversion, he set up a recording session for his sideline: supplying songs to other performers. “I didn’t make this song to be mine to sing,” Mr. Sheeran said.
Over the past three decades, this increasingly prosperous nation has become the fattest country in Asia, with nearly half the adult population now overweight or obese. Several years ago, Dr. Tee E Siong, Malaysia’s leading nutrition expert, decided to act, organizing a far-reaching study of local diets and lifestyle habits.
The research, conducted by scientists from the Nutrition Society of Malaysia, which Tee heads, has produced several articles for peer-reviewed academic journals. But scientists weren’t the only ones vetting the material. One of the reviewers was Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, which financed the research.
Among the published articles was one that concluded that children who drank malted breakfast beverages — a category dominated in Malaysia by Milo, a sugary powder drink made by Nestlé — were more likely to be physically active and spend less time in front of a computer or television.
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RAHMAN ROSLAN/NYT
A worker stocks milk and juices at a supermarket in Kota Bharu, Malaysia, Nov. 6, 2017. Food companies are forging deep financial partnerships with nutrition scientists, policymakers and academic societies in developing countries like Malaysia, where sales of processed foods are exploding and nearly half of all adults are now overweight or obese. (Rahman Roslan/The New York Times)
In the search for ways to bring down American health-care spending, there are certain ideas that are close to dogma. Chief among them: If you provide health insurance to people, they will stop overusing the emergency room.
“A lot of people just didn’t bother getting health insurance at all. And when they got sick, they’d have to go to the emergency room,” President Obama said in a 2016 speech. “But the emergency room is the most expensive place to get care. And because you weren’t insured, the hospital would have to give you the care free, and they would have to then make up for those costs by charging everybody else more money.”
The idea that uninsured people are clogging emergency rooms looks more and more like a myth, according to a recent study published in Health Affairs. Uninsured adults used the emergency room at very similar rates to people with insurance — and much less than people on Medicaid. Providing insurance to people can have many benefits, but driving down emergency room utilization doesn’t appear to be one of them.
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The emergency room entrance at a hospital in Santa Clarita, Calif. (AP Photo/Jason Redmond)
As much as America loves her guns, she has never liked the idea of seeing them in black hands.
Before the Revolutionary War, colonial Virginia passed a law barring black people from owning firearms — an exercise in gun control as racial control. In 1857, in his notorious Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney summoned the specter of black people freely enjoying the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Surely, he argued, the founders were not “so forgetful or regardless of their own safety” to permit such a thing. When black people armed themselves against white supremacist attacks following the Civil War, Southern state governments passed “black codes” barring them from owning guns. After the Black Panthers open carried to signal to California police officers that they would defend themselves against racial attacks in the late ’60s, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a state ban on open carry into law.
In 2016, legal gun owner Philando Castile was shot after informing a Minnesota police officer that he was armed. Two years prior, Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police while holding a toy gun. John Crawford suffered the same fate in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart.
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HuffPost spoke with 11 black gun owners to figure out what gun ownership means in a country determined to keep its black populace unarmed.
Rahul Verma’s son was born gravely ill with digestive problems, but over years of visits to the boy’s endocrinologist, Mr. Verma saw the doctor grow increasingly alarmed about a different problem, one threatening healthy children. Junk food, the doctor warned, was especially dangerous to Indians, who are far more prone to diabetes than people from other parts of the world.
One day in the doctor’s waiting room, Mr. Verma noticed a girl who had gotten fat by compulsively eating potato chips. He decided he had to do something.
“On one side you have children like my son, who are born with problems,” said Mr. Verma, “and on the other side you have children who are healthy and everything is fine and you are damaging them giving them unhealthy food.”
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Mr. Verma filed a public interest lawsuit in 2010 seeking to ban the sale of junk food in and around schools in hopes of protecting children from an unhealthy diet.CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
President Donald Trump is probably right: he doesn’t get due credit for the volume of achievements he’s stacked up during a tumultuous political year.
But to judge his presidency so far simply on bills passed, regulations slashed, executive orders signed and campaign promises kept would be to paint a skewed picture of the most divisive and controversial new administration in generations.
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While Trump’s supporters approve of his actions and crusade against the establishment status quo, a majority does not, and it is Trump’s conduct and personality, more than his list of campaign promises kept, that is dictating how his first 11 months in office are perceived.
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Trump’s conduct and personality is dictating how his first 11 months in office are perceived
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
aurora borealis
Ed Sheeran Reveals How He Made ‘Shape Of You’
HuffPost spoke with 11 black gun owners to figure out what gun ownership means in a country determined to keep its black populace unarmed.
Trump’s conduct and personality is dictating how his first 11 months in office are perceived
