In 2008, Iceland experienced one of the most dramatic crashes any country had ever seen. Since then, its recovery has been just as impressive. Are there lessons to be learned? SPIEGEL went to the island nation to find out.

What should one expect from a country in which the sentence, “What an asshole!” is a compliment? Icelanders say “asshole,” or “rassgat,” when they tousle a child’s hair or greet friends, and they mean it to be friendly.

While trudging through a lava field within view of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the guide says: “Iceland is the asshole of the world.” That, too, is a positive statement. It’s also a geological metaphor. In Iceland, which lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and thus on the dividing line of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, the earth has a tendency to relieve itself through various geysers, volcanoes and hot springs.

The island, an unlikely geological accident, has existed for some 18 million years, but has only been inhabited for 1,100 years. A pile of lava pushed out of the Atlantic that could eventually disappear again, it’s affectionately called “The Rock” by residents. Icelanders were traditionally fishermen and farmers until they decided to turn their country into […]

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BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announced that it has produced millions of watts of power with its breakthrough Solid Fuel-Catalyst-Induced-Hydrino-Transition (SF-CIHT) patent pending technology in its laboratories.

Using a proprietary water-based solid fuel confined by two electrodes of a SF-CIHT cell, and applying a current of 12,000 amps through the fuel, water ignites into an extraordinary flash of power. The fuel can be continuously fed into the electrodes to continuously output power. BlackLight has produced millions of watts of power in a volume that is one ten thousandths of a liter corresponding to a power density of over an astonishing 10 billion watts per liter. As a comparison, a liter of BlackLight power source can output as much power as a central power generation plant exceeding the entire power of the four former reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.

Our safe, non-polluting power-producing system catalytically converts the hydrogen of the H2O-based solid fuel into a non-polluting product, lower-energy state hydrogen called ‘Hydrino”, by allowing the electrons to fall to smaller radii around the nucleus. The energy release of H2O fuel, freely available in the humidity in the air, is […]

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — More Americans, 42%, say they are financially worse off now than they were a year ago, reversing the lower levels found over the past two years. Just more than a third of Americans say their financial situation has improved from a year ago.

Change in Personal Financial Situation Over the Past Year — 2005-2014 Trend

These results come from Gallup’s annual “Mood of the Nation” poll, conducted Jan. 5-8. Gallup has found that Americans’ economic confidence, self-reported consumer spending, and perceptions of job creation improved in 2013. Despite Americans’ more positive views of the overall U.S. economy in 2013, nearly two-thirds believe their personal financial situation deteriorated or was stable over the past year.

Though down from mid-2013, the percentage of Americans saying they are financially better off than a year ago is nearly in line with the historical average (38%), spanning 1976-2014. On the other hand, the share of Americans saying they are financially worse off compared with a year ago is, by historical standards, high — eight percentage points above the average. The record high of 55% occurred in May and September 2008, the year (and, in the latter case, the month) of the global financial meltdown.

Americans’ Assessments […]

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Studies demonstrate the world is becoming less violent, and that human warfare is on the decline. There is one aspect of the human existence, however, that continues to ignite humans to commit violence and atrocities against fellow humans. A major new study published by the Pew Research Center [3] shows that religious hostilities reached a 6-year high in 2012.

Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, ‘Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: ‘In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.

Religiosity, however, continues to play its part in promoting in-group out-group thinking, which […]

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At least 22 veterans commit suicide every day and young male veterans under the age of 30 are three times more likely to commit suicide when compared to civilian males in the same age bracket, according to a new briefing released Thursday by the Department of Veteran Affairs. The number of veteran suicides largely remained unchanged between 2009 to 2011, but the number of male veteran between the ages of 18 to 24 who committed suicide increased by a rate of 33 per 100,000 over the three year period.

Young veterans in the high risk age category had a suicide rate of 79.1 per 1,000, while other American males had a suicide rate of 25 per 1,000, as NBC News pointed out. The study found that overall, male veterans between the age of 18 to 24 and female veterans were most likely to commit suicide. About 70 percent of male veterans who committed suicide took their lives with firearms, while nearly 80 percent of female veterans died as a result of poison or firearms. What’s more, veteran suicides among those enrolled in the Veteran Health Administration (VHA) decreased by about 30 percent, but suicides among veteran non-enrollees soared by 60 percent.

Lead […]

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