Facts & Trends

Americans spend $100 billion annually on cocaine, heroin, pot and meth. Many users spend small amounts at a time—$10 may buy a day’s supply of heroin, for instance. But over time users may build a tolerance to a drug and ...

Neopagans in Iceland are erecting a temple dedicated to the Norse gods Thor, Odin, and Frigg for the first time in over 1,000 years.  The temple will be built by the Asatru movement, which was founded in the 1970s to revive ...

Twenty-five pilot whales beached themselves on Kice Island off southwest Florida in 2014. Sickness related to environmental problems can trigger beachings, which are on the rise ...

Nearly 10,000 desperate refugees were rescued from overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean this week, a record high, but another 400 are believed to have drowned when one of the boats sank, also a record.  Most of the migrants were from ...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, thought he was announcing the phone number of a meningitis hotline, but provided the number of a phone sex line.  Callers heard a woman say, “Hello, boys....” ...

The Commonwealth Fund ranked health care systems in 11 wealthy nations according to criteria such as quality and access. Below, a sampling of the rankings: ...

A Tennessee woman was banned from her lifelong church after she refused to publicly condemn her lesbian daughter.  The Ridgedale Church of Christ said it was exiling Linda Cooper for the sin of condoning homosexuality.  "They're exiling members for unconditionally ...

Astronomers have spotted the most enormous black holes ever detected, inspiring new theories about how such pockets of extreme gravity form. Together, the two objects, which are roughly 300 million light-years away, have more mass than 30 billion suns, University ...

141: The number of seasonal former IRS employees rehired by the agency between 2010 and 2013 despite having botched or failed to file their own tax returns, according to a February report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. 8.8 ...

The reason for the voters’ despair is plain, said Ron Fournier in NationalJoumal.com. The American dream of upward mobility seems dead, and neither party seems to have any plan to revive it. “For many, the Republican Party is becoming too ...