German lawmakers voted by a wide margin to legalize same-sex marriage Friday, a landmark decision which came just days after Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped her longstanding opposition to a free vote on the issue.
The bill gives homosexual couples in Germany the same rights as heterosexual couples, and will allow same-sex couples to marry and jointly adopt children. It passed by 393 votes to 226, with four abstentions.
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The bill is likely to pass through the Bundesrat — Germany’s upper house — next week. The Bundesrat has previously approved legalizing same-sex marriage.
President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, “Morning Joe.”
The president’s unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika “neurotic” and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.
The president’s unhealthy obsession with “Morning Joe” does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs. Despite his constant claims that he no longer watches the show, the president’s closest advisers tell us otherwise. That is unfortunate. We believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to “Fox & Friends.”
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski arrive for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington in 2015. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Woolly mammoths won’t be trouncing through the Arctic tundra anytime soon.
Contrary to recent headlines, which herald the extinct beast’s coming resurrection, scientists are still a long way from figuring out how to revive the elephant ancestor.
Woolly mammoths roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years before they vanished about 4,000 years ago. Paleontologists say the culprit for the die-off was possibly overhunting, or changes in mammoth’s food supply after the last Ice Age.
A camp of scientists — known as “revivalists” — are dedicated to bringing mammoths back in the modern era for environmental and biological reasons. Some researchers have made important early progress, although nothing is close to leaving the lab.
Model Miranda Kerr has turned over more than $8 million worth of jewelry to the U.S. Justice Department — items that may have been purchased with misappropriated funds, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.
The pieces, including an 8.88-carat diamond pendant worth $3.8 million and a diamond jewelry set worth $2 million, were given to her by Malaysian financier Jho Low, according to the newspaper.
“From the start of the inquiry, Miranda Kerr cooperated fully and pledged to turn over the gifts of jewelry to the government,” her spokesman told The Wall Street Journal. “Ms. Kerr will continue to assist with the inquiry in any way she can.”
The author Michael Bond, creator of the hugely popular children’s character Paddington Bear, has died at the age of 91.
Bond died at home on Tuesday following a short illness, his publisher HarperCollins announced Wednesday in a statement on Facebook, calling him a “giant of children’s literature.”
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Bond was born in Berkshire, England in 1926 and began writing in 1945, after serving in World War II.
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He was working as a cameraman for the BBC when he came up with the idea of a small toy bear that he named after Paddington Station in London, near where he was living at the time.
I Am Not Your Negro, a film built around James Baldwin’s unfinished project examining the slayings of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., is not a pretty story. But it is an important one.
Both mesmerizing and deeply disturbing, the film mixes Baldwin’s writings and public speeches with visual footage from the 1960s civil rights movement and more recent racial incidents including the beating of Rodney King and protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The result is a compelling meditation on race relations in the United States and what they say about the moral foundation of the nation.
This is not an easy movie to watch, at least for this white woman. It made me flinch; it made me uncomfortable. It made me question my own approach to and position in the world. It made me wonder what James Baldwin would think of me.
For good or bad, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous.
Thanks to AI, Amazon recommends items based on your browsing and purchase history. Facebook presents you with targeted ads after crawling your online profile and learning your behavior. And artificially intelligent smartphone apps respond to queries, recognize faces in photographs, and help you remember where you parked your car.
But researchers don’t just see AI as a tool to predict and address our everyday needs. It can now be used to help solve some of the most important social and economic issues of our day. In fact, scientists are harnessing AI’s data-mining ability in the fight against poverty—what the United Nations calls today’s greatest global challenge.
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Scientists have used satellite images to get a feel for the economic activity across the globe. | NASA Earth Observatory
A Madrid court ordered Monday that the remains of Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali be exhumed. The move comes as a woman who claims to be his daughter filed a paternity claim.
The woman, born in 1956, claims she is Dali’s child as a result of an extramarital tryst with her mother, who worked as a maid.
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According to a statement from the Madrid Supreme Court, the objective of the exhumation is to “to get samples of his remains to determine whether he is the biological father of a woman from Girona (in northeastern Spain) who filed a claim to be recognized as the daughter of the artist.”
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A woman claims she is artist Salvador Dali’s daughter.
The Senate Republican health care bill would insure 22 million fewer people after a decade than current law, according to an analysis Monday by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Fifteen million more people would be uninsured next year alone.
The GOP bill, titled the Better Care Reconciliation Act, would save $321 billion in the same period by spending $1 trillion less on health care and using the savings to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s taxes, which primarily benefit wealthy individuals and medical companies.
Anyone who still supports Trump is simply in denial. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich decided to make a list of things Trump has done to help remind any remaining Trump supporters why the man is a crook.
Throughout Trump’s young presidency, Reich has been a vocal critic of Trump, and this may be his best work yet. The list was designed specifically to show hard headed Trump supporters the truth.
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.
Merkel votes no
Miranda Kerr
Michael Bond
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Scientists have used satellite images to get a feel for the economic activity across the globe. 
A woman claims she is artist Salvador Dali’s daughter.
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Donald Trump
