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The “zoo” is located near the town of Gyumri in Armenia “[The animals] display all the signs of creatures slowly being driven mad by their unnatural existence.”—Allan Hall “The World’s Saddest Zoo” Cruising the “Drudge Report” yesterday, I noticed the photo of a forlorn looking bear peering out from behind bars with the accompanying headline “The World’s Saddest Zoo,” which linked to an article by Allan Hall in the UK’s “Daily Mail.” News headlines often depict a crazy and cruel world, and perhaps I’ve become too jaded and cynical regarding the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – but Hall’s...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- Elizabeth Banks, Retta, Dascha Polanco and other actresses came together to tell real abortion stories as part of the Center for Reproductive Rights' Draw The Line campaign. In the clips, published Wednesday, the actresses, including Mary McCormack, Amy Brenneman, Mercedes Mason and Bellamy Young, retell stories from women who have had abortions to represent the myriad of reasons why everyday women choose to undergo the procedure.

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul's (R-TX) SAFE Act asked that the director of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence confirm that refugees from Syria and Iraq pose no threat to the country. Senate Democrats apparently thought that those terms were too radical and have blocked the common sense measure.While the SAFE Act seemed to scream bipartisanship, it did not gain enough votes during a procedural vote Wednesday. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid dismissed the legislation as nothing more than a "divisive platform" modeled after Donald Trump's controversial rhetoric. An infuriated Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)...

LONDON — A high-profile British inquiry into the poisoning of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer turned critic of the Kremlin, concluded in a report released on Thursday that his murder “was probably approved” by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the head of the country’s spy service. The finding by Robert Owen, a retired High Court judge, in a 328-page report, represented by far the most damning official link between Mr. Litvinenko’s death on Nov. 23, 2006, and the highest levels of the Kremlin.

The Wall Street Journal recently printed an excerpt from "The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large – and Perhaps Close," printed in the Aug. 28, 1998 issue of Science magazine. According to a study from the International Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "sometime between 2010 and 2020 the gush of oil from wells around the world will peak at 80 million barrels per day, then begin a steady, inevitable decline." Well, not quite. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 1998, when the article was written, global oil production was 75.7 million bbl/day. In 2014...

Frankly, I'm surprised the US is ranked as high as it is in this firest ever US News and World Report survey of the best countries in the world. Is it ironic the Germany is #1? When you consider the history of the last century, you have to think so. Canada ranks #2 and Great Britain #3. The survey, conducted by the magazine and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and global brand consultants BAV Consulting, took into account 24 factors to make their determinations. Washington Post: The new project ranks 60 countries across 24 categories and is based on a survey of more...

"Trump's candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic, the ramifications of that betrayal of a transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enabled it, O.K.?" Palin told the crowd at her big announcement endorsing Donald Trump. ... Still, Trump has been having a super week. Palin wasn't even the high point. That came when Iowa's six-term Republican governor, Terry Branstad, urged voters to reject Trump's main competitor, Ted Cruz. "Ted Cruz is ahead right now. But what we're doing is, we're trying to do is educate the...

The world’s first scientific renaissance took place not in Italy, but in the Arab world. The period between the 9th and 11th centuries AD, when Islam took hold of a band of territory strategy from Spain in the West through to what is now Pakistan, saw an extraordinary intellectual flowering. Scientists in the Arab world during this period made important advances in fields as varied as astronomy, mathematics, medicine and optics – advances that fed into and stimulated the later European Renaissance. Which makes it all the stranger that modern Islamic nations have such a lamentable record in science. Where...

As a political journalist, you never forget the first time you stop just covering a politician and start identifying with her. The first time you wed your high-minded vision of what politics should be to a real candidate's perishable breath. My first time arrived in 2008. It lasted only a short while. Her name was Sarah Palin. Let me explain. That spring, in between the Republican primary and the fall campaign, my friend Reihan Salam and I had published a book called "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream."

A Swedish school described as being ‘good’ ten years ago is now in “chaos” and prone to rioting as order among the ‘diverse’ student body has broken down. The condition of the Sjumilaskolan school in Gothenburg, Sweden, has been revealed in a shocking government report based on visits conducted at the end of last year by the school inspectorate. While the Swedish main-stream media has stuck to reporting the one million kronor penalty the local authority faces if they don’t turn the school around, and the seriously low academic achievement of the institution, examination of the report itself reveals a...

Now the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy has its anti-Clinton tentacles all the way into the Obama administration. At least, that's the new excuse from Team Hillary on why the email mess keeps getting worse. Fox News this week got its hands on a damning letter from President Obama's inspector general for the US intelligence community, Charles McCullough. In it, he notes that some of the stuff the ex-secretary of state kept on her home-brewed email server wasn't just classified, but more-secret-than-top-secret stuff. At least two emails were at the beyond-top-secret level of "special access programs," or SAP. So secret is SAP...

Syria conflict: Islamist rebel named opposition chief negotiator 20 January 2016 A Syrian opposition committee has named an Islamist rebel as its chief negotiator at peace talks that the UN hopes to convene in Geneva on Monday. Mohammed Alloush is the political leader of the powerful, Saudi-backed group Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam). Both the Syrian government and its staunch ally, Russia, consider Jaysh al-Islam a terrorist organisation. The opposition committee also warned that it would pull out of the talks if a third party was invited to attend. Russia wants opposition groups tolerated by President Bashar al-Assad to participate...

A 95-year-old man who worked as a paramedic at Auschwitz will stand trial next month as an accessory to the murder of 3,681 death camp inmates, a German court announced Monday. Hubert Zafke, accused by prosecutors of serving as an SS sergeant in Hitler’s killing machine, is set to face justice Feb. 29 in Neubrandenburg state court. Zafke was stationed at Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944 and would have been on duty at the notorious death camp when diarist Anne Frank and her family were sent there on Sept. 5, 1944, authorities have said.

(How will people act out driving when Minority Report & AI - Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence come true?) How will the Left move us from Big Br'O's Al Capone Chicago 1924-1932, to Spain 1936? (For Whom the Bell Tolls had no heroic images of liquidating 4,000 bishops, priests, brothers & sisters.) The Left Will Have to take a screeching u-turn on its anti-gun rhetoric if it will ever finally succeed in making blood flow in America's streets. Imagine a liberal NRA.

What we learned from Hurricane Katrina: No matter what happens, it's never the governor's fault. What we've learned from the contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich.: It's always the governor's fault. A bit of background first. Flint has relatively high levels of lead in its drinking water, a cause for legitimate concern. This is a result not so much of the source of its drinking water, the Flint River, as of the city's failure to treat the water, which, without the proper additives, leaches lead and other contaminants from pipes. Prior to and separate from the current water crisis, Flint...

At a campaign event in Salem, New Hampshire this morning former President Bill Clinton hit Republican candidates, particularly frontrunner Donald Trump, for taking the "emotionally bruised" and channeling their anger into blaming and hatred. Clinton said some anger is justified as people "are living on the same or less" than they were when he was president in the '90s. [Snip] Clinton took a shot at Trump for turning Hillary in the "embodiment of all evil." "And after years of working with Hillary and praising her to the heavens, she all of a sudden became the embodiment of all evil," Clinton...

Obradovich: Branstad puts ethanol over caucus futureLink only

Four million migrants could reach Europe by the end of 2017, the International Monetary Fund has warned. In new forecasts, the organisation adjusted its estimates to conclude 1.3million people could move to Europe every year between 2015 - 2017. It added the Middle East refugees should boost European economic growth over the short term, but their longer-term impact would depend on efforts to integrate them.

One of the most destructive environmental subsidies in the United States has found an enthusiastic supporter in Donald Trump. "The EPA should ensure that biofuel . . . blend levels match the statutory level set by Congress," he said yesterday in Iowa, adding that he was "there with you 100 percent" on continuing federal support for ethanol. "You're going to get a really fair shake from me." The ethanol lobby has rigorously courted Trump since April, arranging to speak at least weekly, including at least three in-person meetings, in addition to an ethanol-plant tour, the Wall Street Journal reports. Trump's...

There is an economic mystery I've been struggling to understand for quite some time, and I'm not the only one who's confused: Among financial experts, it is often referred to as a conundrum, a paradox, a puzzle. The mystery is as follows: Collectively, American businesses currently have $1.9 trillion in cash, just sitting around. Not only is this state of affairs unparalleled in economic history, but we don't even have much data to compare it with, because corporations have traditionally been borrowers, not savers. The notion that a corporation would hold on to so much of its profit seems economically...