In 1968, a pair of scientists from Stanford Research Institute wrote a report for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for America’s oil and natural gas industry. They warned that “man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth” — one that “may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”
The scientists went on: “If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis.”
That 48-year-old report, which accurately foreshadowed what’s now happening, is among a trove of public documents uncovered and released Wednesday by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law. Taken together, documents that the organization has assembled show that oil executives were well aware of the serious climate risks associated with carbon dioxide emissions decades earlier than previously documented — and they covered it up.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Science can explain a lot of things — why women need more sleep; why waist trainers are bullshit; why you should be sleeping naked; why certain foods can make you better in bed. But it can’t explain everything. There are a number of commonplace phenomena that continue to stump scientists.
The Golden State Warriors have broken what for two decades was seen as one of basketball’s most iconic records, going 73-9 in the 2015-2016 regular season to claim the title of best regular season record in NBA history.
“I’m part of the best team ever,” forward Draymond Green said after the game.
With a 125-104 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies on Wednesday night, the Warriors narrowly eclipsed the previous record holder, Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, who went 72-10 during the 1995-1996 season on their way to Jordan’s fourth NBA Championship.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Former New Orleans Saints star Will Smith was intentionally gunned down by a “rageful” driver who ignored his wife’s pleas to leave the couple alone and then shot them over and over without remorse, the family’s lawyer said Wednesday.
The Orleans Parish coroner confirmed Wednesday that Smith suffered eight gunshot wounds — seven in the back and one in the lateral chest wall. Toxicology results aren’t expected for six to eight weeks.
Suspect Cardell Hayes “actually stood over Will Smith’s dead body as his wife, who had crawled away because she couldn’t walk, was cowering and hiding,” Peter Thomson, an attorney for the Smith family, told reporters Wednesday as he recounted his version of the slaying in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District.
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Coroner: Former NFL Player Will Smith Was Shot 7 Times in the Back
Tennessee legislators on Monday passed a bill that could jeopardize access to mental health treatment for LGBT individuals, part of a string of recent anti-LGBT legislation in the South.
The GOP-sponsored bill, which now goes to Gov. Bill Haslam (R), allows therapists and counselors to reject patients they feel would violate “sincerely held principles.” Haslam hasn’t indicated whether he will sign the bill into law.
Gay rights and mental health advocacy groups have protested the bill and urge Haslam to veto it because it could permit mental health professionals to discriminate against LGBT patients without legal liability.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Hospitals are full of old tech — clacking keyboards, dated operating systems, pagers — essential to saving lives and keeping people safe. Those high stakes make them easy hostages.
A tiny virus spread through the computer systems at Methodist Hospital in Henderson, Kentucky, on Friday, after sneaking in via a spam email. The hackers behind the attack demanded four bitcoin, or about $1,670 at time of writing, to be securely transferred before they’d give the hospital control over their own information.
Instead, the hospital decided to lock its systems down and fight the virus, posting this notice to its site:
“Methodist Hospital is currently working in an Internal State of Emergency due to a Computer Virus that has limited our use of electronic web based services. We are currently working to resolve this issue, until then we will have limited access to web based services and electronic communications.”
Finally, on Tuesday morning, Methodist Hospital reported that it had successfully fended off the attack without paying a dime.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida with a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station on Friday, and its reusable main-stage booster landed itself on an ocean platform in a dramatic spaceflight first.
The liftoff at 4:43 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral marked the resumption of resupply flights by privately owned Space Exploration Technologies for NASA following a launch accident in June 2015 that destroyed a different cargo payload for the space station.
About 2 and a half minutes after Friday’s launch, the main part of the two-stage SpaceX rocket separated, turned around and headed toward a landing platform floating in the Atlantic about 185 miles of Cape Canaveral.
It looked like an episode of Gilligan’s Island, but it was a real-life plea for help.
On Thursday, the United States Navy and Coast Guard rescued three shipwrecked mariners from a desert island after they wrote the word “help” on the beach using palm fronds, the Washington Post reported.
The men’s 19-foot skiff overturned on Monday night, leaving them to swim over two miles to the shores of “the tiny Pacific Island of Fanadik, several hundred miles north of Papua New Guinea,” according to the Post. They remained there until Thursday morning, when a Navy plane noticed the letters on the beach.
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.
He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
In the past four years, people working for the organization have smuggled more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many of them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought to the group’s headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned, assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat poison.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
More than three months before any ballots have been cast at the Republican convention, Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again consigliere, has delivered the campaign equivalent of a severed horse head to delegates who might consider denying Trump the nomination. Trump’s supporters will find you in your sleep, he merrily informed them this week. He did not mean it metaphorically.
“We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal,” Stone said Monday, on Freedomain Radio. “If you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them. You have a right to discuss this, if you voted in the Pennsylvania primary, for example, and your votes are being disallowed,” Stone said.
Over the years, I’ve covered elections in Iraq, Iran, and Burma. Stone’s taunt is every bit as threatening as anything I heard in those places, which have far less experience than America with democracy. Such is the moment we currently inhabit.
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Even before he was a candidate, Trump displayed a rare gift for cultivating the dark power of a crowd. Credit Photograph by Edmund D. Fountain/The New York Times/Redux
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.
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
