A Paralympic medal winner who spent half her life in a wheelchair has made a miraculous recovery, and now hopes to represent her country in the Olympics. Monique van der Vorst had been paralyzed from the waist down since the age of 13, and won two silver medals as a hand-cyclist in the 2008 Paralympic Games. But the 27-year-old Dutch athlete […]
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What’s most important—and troubling— is the decades-long, systemic expansion of the economic distance between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, and the long, backward slide for the majority of those in-between.
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A New York City hotel is offering wealthy guests a chance to go “glamping”—glamorous camping—so they can experience the outdoors with four-star amenities. Guests at New York’s AKA Central Park can spend $2,000 a night to sleep on a queen bed on the terrace of the hotel’s penthouse. “It’s basically being able to sleep under the stars in a luxury […]
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Number of Academy Award winners in the past twenty years who thanked God in their acceptance speeches: 7 Who thanked Harvey Weinstein: 30
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Self-awareness, after Donald Trump attacked conservative pundits George Will, Jonah Goldberg, and Stephen Hayes for mocking his Republican presidential candidacy, calling them “boring” and “dumb as a rock” and their publications “dying.” Said Trump: “The weakness of conservatives is that they destroy each other.”
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Percentage of Americans and Chinese, respectively, who believe their government is “on the side of average citizens”: 12, 80 Who believe their government is “on the side of corporations”: 73, 17
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52: Number of unprovoked shark attacks in the U.S. last year (compared with 20 elsewhere in the world). None were fatal. 28: Number of attacks in Florida, the most of any state. Runners-up were Hawaii (seven), South Carolina (five), California (four) and North Carolina (four). 65%: Percentage of attacks involving surfers (or people doing other board sports); 32% involved swimmers. The rest involved […]
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The European Space Agency’s incoming director general, Jan Worner, wants to build a village on the moon. Other nations have similarly out-of-this-world ambitions: Japan Launched a probe to mine an asteroid in 2018 China Plans to build a huge solar-power station in space Russia Hopes to send probes to Jupiter, Mars and Venus India Is exploring sending a rocket to […]
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Portion of China’s carbon emissions that is produced by manufacturing goods for export: 1/4
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Wearing only his underpants, a Chinese beekeeper set a new Guinness World Record this week after he covered himself in 240 pounds of bees. Organizers placed several queen bees on Gao Bingguo, 55, to attract the workers, and then dumped boxes of bees on Gao until he was wearing a buzzing coat of 1.1 million insects. He smoked a cigarette […]
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