When were Homer’s works written? One of literature’s oldest mysteries is a step closer to being solved after a recent study that dates the The Iliad to 762 BCE and adds a quantitative means of testing ideas about history by analyzing the evolution of language. The epic poem The Iliad, set amid the final year [...]
The modern day Four Horsemen continue to ride roughshod over the people who can least afford it. Crises are converging when governments, religion and mainstream economists have stalled. 23 international thinkers come together and break their silence about how the world really works and why there is still hope in re-establishing a moral and just [...]
Much of the debate about the interrogation of suspected terrorists has been about whether the methods used, such as waterboarding, could be described as torture. Historian Julian Putkowski examines how a German Luftwaffe interrogator used persuasion rather than punishment to get prisoners of war to talk. During the latter part of World War II lots [...]
Pakistan’s Malala Yousufzai, girls’ rights champion who escaped assassination by Taliban death squad, nominated for top international honor Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani advocate for girls’ education, who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, has been nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize by three members of the Norwegian parliament from the ruling Labor Party. She [...]
Spain has decided to offer automatic citizenship to anyone who can successfully prove their Sephardi origins. Spain has decided to offer automatic citizenship to anyone who can successfully prove their Sephardi origins, Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz Gallardón announced during a ceremony last week at Madrid’s Casa Sefarad-Israel. Presiding over the ceremony was Casa Sefarad-Israel director [...]
Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently (something Techdirt calls Censorship Crazy), appears to have quite a bit of dirt in his baggage. This morning, @Kanarieman pointed me to an article of my own from 2010: just under two years ago, another very strange [...]
People in the Netherlands have reason to celebrate today, following the expected passing into law of new net neutrality regulation. The legislation in question was agreed upon back in June last year, but it’s only on Tuesday that the nation’s second legislative chamber gave its blessing to the move, making everything official. Under the new [...]
America’s losing battle of the bulge shows no signs of abating, with obesity projected to cost a staggering $550 billion in health expenses by 2030. Researchers at Duke University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated on a linear time scale that 51 percent of Americans will be obese by then, Duke Health [...]
Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday. “Drive-by attacks” in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report. [...]
It’s almost two years since BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, scientists say they have found deformities among seafood and a great decline in the numbers of marine life. Eyeless shrimp Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp. “At the height of the [...]
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