On Jan. 4, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Cole memo, a 2013 document that limits federal enforcement of marijuana laws. This opens the door for a crackdown in the nine states with legal recreational marijuana. The Cole memo is one of two documents that prevent the U.S. Justice Department from treating marijuana as a...
Seriously cold: The ‘bomb cyclone’ freezes a fountain in New York City. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan Damage from extreme weather events during 2017 racked up the biggest-ever bills for the U.S. Most of these events involved conditions that align intuitively with global warming: heat records, drought, wildfires, coastal flooding, hurricane damage and heavy rainfall. Paradoxical, though,...
Women’s empowerment recently got a big boost at the Golden Globes, but the United States isn’t the only place having a feminist revival. In 2015, two years before the #MeToo campaign got Americans talking about sexual harassment, Brazilian feminists launched #MeuPrimeiroAssedio, or #MyFirstHarrassment. In its first five days, the hashtag racked up 82,000 tweets detailing...
The innocuous photos of two Nigerian Islamic clerics shopping and relaxing in London sparked a fierce debate on social media platforms in northern Nigeria in early December 2017. The photos were quite unremarkable. One showed the two men sitting on a park bench; another showed them in a clothing store wearing cowboy hats. In both,...
A series of urban uprisings in Iran that began on Dec. 28 in its second-largest city shocked the country’s Islamic regime, as well as much of the world. Although the Mashhad protests were spearheaded by conservative opponents of President Hassan Rouhani to discredit his economic policies, the organizers lost control of the crowd. Protesters angrily...
When my mother was in her final months, suffering from a heart failure and other problems, she called me to her bedside with a pained expression. She took my hand and asked plaintively, “How do I get out of this mess?” As a physician, I dreaded the question that might follow: Would I help her...
The sting of the premature death of 27-year-old Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, is still fresh. On Christmas Eve, Erica Garner suffered a massive heart attack which caused extensive brain damage. She died on Dec. 30. This latest loss emphasizes something we have known: Black women are dying from the trauma of police violence...
A decade after the global economic collapse, urban development is booming. This is good news for architects. Indeed, 2018 promises to be a favorable year for the profession: A spectacular array of sleek museums, posh hotels and some of the world’s tallest towers are slated for completion. But income inequality is on the rise in...
Rural areas across the United States are increasingly offering telehealth services to improve access to quality healthcare for residents who are unable to visit a hospital due to cost or accessibility. In St. Robert, a town of 5,000 in southern Missouri, the telehealth network has been connecting patients to healthcare providers since the 1990s. Improved...
Defense Secretary James Mattis said last Thursday that the United States will continue to work with Pakistan to coordinate military supply routes needed to combat terror networks in Afghanistan, despite the Trump administration’s earlier remarks that it would suspend funds for security assistance to Pakistan until the country takes action against the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani...
