For thousands of years, the Bramble Cay melomys, a small, mouse-like rodent, eked out a living on a tiny coral island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It was the reef’s only endemic mammal species, and survived on the few plants that grew on its island home.
But as climate change expedited sea level rise and increased storm surges that flooded the low-lying island, the Bramble Cay melomys and its food supply was severely threatened. In June, after years of fruitless searching, scientists announced that they could no longer find any trace of the rodent.
The melomys was posthumously bestowed the ignominious title of the first mammal to go extinct because of human-induced global warming. “Sadly,” WWF-Australia spokesperson Darren Grover told The New York Times, “it won’t be the last.”
Scientists say the planet is currently on the precipice of the sixth mass extinction, an event that could see the wiping out of at least 75 percent of the Earth’s species. The current extinction rate is at least 100 times higher than normal, according to a 2015 study. Humans have triggered an extinction episode “unparalleled for 65 million years,” the researchers said.
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University of Queensland
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One of the worst and most public email hacks in political history began with a typo, a report in The New York Times revealed on Tuesday.
An aide to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, saw a warning email in his inbox back in March, claiming to be from Google. Podesta needed to change his Gmail password immediately, the email said.
Most adult internet users know by now never to click a link in emails like this ― phishing is fairly common. Even unsophisticated tech types are hip to the scam. So, before responding, Podesta’s aide showed the email to another staffer, a computer technician.
And, well, what happens next should be a lesson to anyone who types and sends emails and texts without reading them first. (That’s everybody who emails and texts.)
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
A staffer’s typo led to the hacking of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails.
President-elect Donald Trump is staying on as an executive producer of NBC’s “The New Celebrity Apprentice” despite his impending responsibilities as leader of the free world, according to reports Thursday in The New York Times and Variety.
The popular program, which propelled the businessman to national prominence and paved the way for his eventual presidential win, is set to begin airing again in January with its new host, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The show went off the air during Trump’s presidential bid.
MGM, which produces the show for NBC, confirmed to Variety that Trump will still be one of the program’s executive producers, and that MGM, not NBC, will pay the president-elect’s fees. (MGM did not return a request for comment from The Huffington Post.)
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President-elect Donald Trump is staying on as an executive producer of NBC’s “The New Celebrity Apprentice”
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It’s no secret that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed more than 2,000 Americans, changed the course of history for the United States and the rest of the world.
But it also dramatically altered the identity of the island paradise of Hawaii, changing everyday life for the people who lived there and bringing tourism, one of the islands’ most important industries, to a halt.
Hours after the attack, Hawaii, a U.S. territory at the time, was placed under martial law, and all of the islands’ residents were under the dictatorship of the U.S. military, according to Honolulu Bishop Museum historian DeSoto Brown.
Since Japanese-Americans made up 37 percent of Hawaii’s population, it was impossible for the military to incarcerate all of them, Brown told The Huffington Post. Instead, all residents of Hawaii — white, Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese — were forced to live under strict military rule.
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Photo 12 via Getty Images
The West Virginia and Tennessee battleships are ablaze after the Pearl Harbor attack Dec. 7, 1941.
A Republican member of the Electoral College from Texas has promised to vote against Donald Trump during the college’s meeting Dec. 19, saying the president-elect “shows daily he is not qualified for office.”
In an op-ed published Monday in The New York Times, Christopher Suprun, a paramedic and first responder to the Pentagon on Sept. 11, laid out a lengthy list of concerns about Trump. He called on fellow electors to “do their job” and unify around an “honorable and qualified” alternative such as Ohio. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
The Federalist Papers, Suprun wrote, argue that the Electoral College is tasked with ensuring candidates are “qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence.” Trump, he said, does not meet these standards, and should therefore be rejected from the White House.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Republican electoral college member Christopher Suprun, pictured here before throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a Texas Rangers baseball game, has promised not to vote for Donald Trump Dec. 19.
A jarring incident at a restaurant that has faced violent threats because of an unfounded and preposterous conspiracy theory raises concerns about the real-world consequences of spreading fake news stories.
Washington, D.C., police on Sunday afternoon detained a man armed with an assault rifle at Comet Ping Pong, a popular pizza restaurant in a busy neighborhood of the city.
According to police, the man, later identified as Edgar Maddison Welch, from Salisbury, North Carolina, entered the restaurant with what police described as “an assault rifle”; there were conflicting reports of gunshots. There were no injuries, but police locked down the surrounding block, which includes other restaurants and shops, including a popular bookstore, Politics and Prose.
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The Washington Post via Getty Images
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When President Barack Obama was making the case for the Iran nuclear deal, he journeyed uptown to American University, where decades earlier John F. Kennedy had delivered a famous address on peace and the future of nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
Hoping to bathe himself in some of the glow of JFK, Obama framed the deal as another critical step forward in the march toward world peace. In 1963, Kennedy had offered the same sense of hope.
“Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament — and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude,” Kennedy said. “I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitude — as individuals and as a nation — for our attitude is as essential as theirs.”
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Barack Obama speaks about the nuclear deal with Iran on Aug. 5, 2015, at American University in Washington.
Amazon’s stranglehold on the U.S. economy is growing ever tighter, with devastating effects for the job market, says a report released Tuesday afternoon.
The group’s wide-ranging analysis details how Amazon, which recently saw annual revenue top a stunning $100 billion, has reshaped the way Americans shop and radically altered the job market.
After years of undercutting other retailers by selling products at a loss, funneling its customers into its super-convenient Prime service and ― essentially ― perfecting the art of online retail, Amazon is now synonymous with online shopping itself.
Taking into account goods sold through third-party retailers on its site, nearly $1 of every $2 spent online currently flows through Amazon, the report found. That’s had devastating consequences for retailers who simply can’t compete ― both online and out in the real world (remember Borders?).
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Ralph Freso/Reuters
Amazon’s massive warehouses have essentially displaced brick-and-mortar retailers around the country.
In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced a new painkiller it said carried a low risk of abuse or addiction. It called the drug “OxyContin.”
In reality, of course, OxyContin was extremely addictive — and Purdue knew it. A decade later, three Purdue executives, and the company itself, pleaded guilty to criminal charges tied to OxyContin’s marketing and agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines.
But the executives dodged prison time, and the prosecution did little to slow the rise of opioid use. The pharmaceutical industry had spent the past 10 years and billions of dollars pushing the medical community to ramp up the use of OxyContin and other opioids. By 2013, the number of annual opioid prescriptions, including short term and multiple, had nearly tripled, topping 200 million — in a country of just over 300 million people.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Monday asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), to look into President-elect Donald Trump’s financial entanglements and make sure he’s not breaking the law.
“The scope of Mr. Trump’s conflicts of interest around the world is unprecedented,” the 17 Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote. “Over the past two weeks, new revelations have raised serious concerns about the intermingling of Mr. Trump’s businesses and his responsibilities as president.”
Trump’s potential conflicts of interest are staggering, with business interests across the globe and no clear firewall between those businesses and the office of the presidency. Trump had said previously that he would enter into a blind trust, which would require him to sell many of his businesses and be unaware of his holdings, but he’s backed away from those promises. Trump also said he would step away from his dealings and have his children run day-to-day operations. But several of Trump’s children are intimately involved in his political operation ― Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr. are all on the presidential transition team ― and simply handing over the businesses to his children wouldn’t disassociate Trump from his enterprises. He still knows what businesses he owns.
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Alex Wong/Getty Images
Committee chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) waits for the beginning of a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, July 7, 2016.
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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.
President-elect 
James' World 2 