The Sunni militants who now threaten to take over Iraq seemed to spring from nowhere when they stormed Mosul in early June. But the group that recently renamed itself simply ‘the Islamic State” has existed under various names and in various shapes since the early 1990s. And its story is the story of how modern terrorism has evolved, from a political and religious ideal into a death-cult.

The group began over two decades ago as a fervid fantasy in the mind of a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A onetime street thug, he arrived in Afghanistan as a mujahideen wannabe in 1989, a year too late to fight the Soviet Union. He went back home to Jordan, and remained a fringe figure in the international violent ‘jihad” for much of the following decade. He returned to Afghanistan to set up a training camp for terrorists, and met Osama bin Laden in 1999, but chose not to join al-Qaeda.

The fall of the Taliban in 2001 forced Zarqawi to flee to Iraq. There his presence went largely unnoticed until the Bush administration used […]

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Bottled-water drinkers, we have a problem: There’s a good chance that your water comes from California, a state experiencing the third-driest year on record.

The details of where and how bottling companies get their water are often quite murky, but generally speaking, bottled water falls into two categories. The first is “spring water,” or groundwater that’s collected, according to the EPA, “at the point where water flows naturally to the earth’s surface or from a borehole that taps into the underground source.” About 55 percent of bottled water in the United States is spring water, including Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead.

The other 45 percent comes from the municipal water supply, meaning that companies, including Aquafina and Dasani, simply treat tap water-the same stuff that comes out of your faucet at home-and bottle it up. (Weird, right?)

But regardless of whether companies bottle from springs or the tap, lots of them are using water in exactly the areas that need it most right now.

The map above shows the sources of water for four big-name companies that bottle in California. Aquafina and Dasani “sources” are the facilities […]

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — About one in four adults worldwide — or roughly 1.3 billion people — worked full time for an employer in 2013. Gallup’s Payroll to Population (P2P) rate, which reports the percentage of the total adult population that works at least 30 hours per week for an employer, has not grown since 2012.

Gallup’s latest global P2P measurements are based on more than 136,000 interviews across 136 countries in 2013, in which adults were asked a battery of employment questions modeled on the International Labour Organization’s standards. Gallup does not count adults who are self-employed, working part time, unemployed, or out of the workforce as payroll-employed in the P2P metric, and it is not seasonally adjusted.

The countries with the highest P2P rates tend to be some of the wealthiest — or those with the highest GDP per capita — such as the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. Additionally, a number of countries on the list, such as Sweden, Bahrain, and Russia, rank toward the top because each has many people working directly for the government or government-owned entities.

2013 […]

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Writing in the Brookings Institution’s FixGov blog last week, political scientist Christopher Parker pondered House Republicans’ stubborn refusal to back immigration reform, despite support in the Senate and across wide swaths of the conservative commentariat. He surmises that House Republicans are balking because they “represent constituencies haunted by anxiety associated with the perception that they’re ‘losing their country’ to immigrants from south of the border.”

Recent polling backs this up. Significant numbers of conservatives, and white Americans in general, admit to feeling discomfort at the prospect of a non-majority white America. These views are even stronger among Tea Party-aligned conservatives. According to Parker’s polling, nearly two-thirds of Tea Party conservatives want to eliminate birthright citizenship, and 82 percent of Tea Partiers say they feel “anxious or fearful” about undocumented immigrants.

Another factor behind Republican recalcitrance on immigration and similar issues is the simple racial math underlying many House congressional districts. According to U.S. Census data, only 13 out of 234 Republican-held districts are majority-minority (that is, districts where […]

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The reports just keep coming in, each more dire than the one before it. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, published its latest report on the 13th of April. It’s tone is even more urgent than the one they issued in 2007. The panel speaks very plainly: ‘A rapid shift to less-polluting energy will be needed to avoid catastrophic global warming, because global emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases have accelerated to unprecedented levels…”

The panel is also very clear about the source of the problem-carbon energy-principally oil, gas and coal. These emissions-largely from the burning of oil, gas and coal-grew more quickly between 2000 and 2010 than in any of the three previous decades and will need to be slashed 40%–70% by mid-century, and the transition out of the carbon energy era must be nearly complete by century׳s end, or global temperatures will spiral out of control, says the report. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone. This increase directly correlates with the trend of growing development, particularly China, India and Brazil. And the panel is adamant about the time line. We have less than a century to complete the transition out of the […]

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