When communities like San Francisco and Seattle began banning plastic bags, said Ramesh Ponnuru, it seemed like a public-spirited thing to do. But’ benign-seeming laws often have unintended consequences— and the plastic-bag ban is now producing a sickening result. The reusable shopping bags that people now use to bring groceries home turn out to be breeding grounds for bacteria carried […]
Read more
The graduating class of 2015 is the most indebted in history, owing a total of $56 billion in student loans. About 71 percent of college students graduating this year took out loans, at an average of $35,051 each. In 1996, just 58 percent of students took out loans, owing less than $20,000 each at graduation.
Read more
Delhi’s air now contains twice as much toxic matter as that of notoriously smoggy Beijing. The health impact has been disastrous, with children in Delhi now three times as likely as others in India to develop severe lung disorders.
Read more
Number of U.S. police officers who have been prosecuted in the past decade for shooting someone in the back: 28 Number convicted: 6
Read more
Parts of the Northeast received up to 18 inches of snow over Memorial Day weekend. Snow blanketed parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and upstate New York.
Read more
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum is already home to an artist’s rendition of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” made from burned toast, and now comes a recent version by Laura Bell of Roscommon, MI — da Vinci’s masterpiece made with clothes-dryer lint. Bell said she did about 800 hours of laundry of various-colored towels to obtain lint of the […]
Read more
Children and young adults who are bullied are more than twice as likely to consider suicide and two and a half times as likely to try to kill themselves, a new study has concluded—and those taunted online are even more vulnerable. The findings are based on more than 40 studies, involving more than 284,000 young people ages 9 to 21, […]
Read more
Americans own nearly 300 million firearms, a new national study found. This translates to nearly nine guns for every 10 people, a per capita ownership rate nearly 50 percent higher than any other country’s.
Read more
. . . a reptile experience, after a Michigan firefighter who’d handled snakes as a teen ran into a burning home and carefully rescued a 6-foot-long python. None of the other firefighters “wanted anything to do with it.”
Read more
Percentage of the average “knowledge worker’s” time that is spent reading and writing emails: 28
Read more