Category: Trends

A massive winter storm that could bring “life-threatening” conditions is set to sweep across the U.S. this week, threatening to affect travel for millions of Americans ahead of the holidays. Weather forecasts predict heavy snow, frigid winds, and bitter cold temperatures. Almost 50 million people nationwide are under winter storm advisories, watches and warnings and […]

President Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for 40 million Americans is stalled—ensnared in conservative legal challenges that could block debt relief for months, or even for good. But the Department of Education has launched a separate program that could reduce the student loan burden for up to 3.6 million […]

Nobody knows for certain what the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi did or didn’t say at the lunch with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that took place in 1950. But as the perhaps apocryphal story has it, Fermi was holding forth on the sheer number of stars in the sky […]

A new federal law requiring that sesame be listed as an allergen on food labels is having unintended consequences—increasing the number of products with the ingredient. Food industry experts said the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product—and to label it—than […]

It’s been an unpredictable year in the world of cinema. Major Hollywood releases like Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick and James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water were predictable hits at the box office, with the former earning $1.488 billion worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing film of 2022, and the latter opening to $441.7M globally. […]

Gender equality saw an unprecedented reversal in the past 12 months. Reproductive rights were dismantled in one of the world’s largest democracies; the Covid-19 pandemic lowered protections and upped threats to women’s health in developing nations; and human rights defenders across the globe continued to face gendered assaults. Still, women continued to spearhead new laws […]

Sheltering from Iranian kamikaze Shahed drones in the Kyiv metro in October, I tried to hide my extreme nervousness while simultaneously scrolling through social media videos of antiregime protests in Iran, where relentlessly courageous crowds of women were ripping off their shawls in defiance of the ayatollahs who sell the Shahed drones to the Kremlin, […]

North Wildwood, a picturesque resort town of 5,000 on the Jersey shore, says it is about to lose its war against coastal erosion. Since the 1980s, the Atlantic ocean has washed away some 1,500 ft. of beach that once sat in front of North Wildwood’s boardwalk, with rising sea levels and increasingly violent wind and […]

Comment on this story Comment NAIROBI, Kenya — International pressure is growing on Rwanda as France and Germany are the latest parties to openly accuse the country of supporting armed rebels in neighboring eastern Congo — with possible repercussions for foreign aid that Kigali has long enjoyed. For months, renewed attacks by the M23 rebels […]

Comment on this story Comment NAIROBI, Kenya — Somalia’s government says the first group of 5,000 Somalis who were sent to Eritrea for military training has returned home, to the relief of parents who had alleged their sons had been recruited under false pretenses. Defense Minister Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur on Wednesday confirmed the first group’s […]