According to the database Mapping Police Violence, police have killed 1,129 people this year in the U.S., which was similar to the number of killings in previous years. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting tracker, officers fatally shot 976 people this year. In 2016, police shot and killed 963 people, and in 2015, officers fatally shot 995 people. Black people were disproportionately affected, as they made up 25 percent of those killed, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. Sixty-eight of those killed by police this year were unarmed. Out of the 1,000 people who died at the hands of police, several received high-profile coverage in the media. In June, Tommy Le was shot and killed by deputies in Washington state hours before his high school graduation. The deputies initially claimed Le was holding a knife or other sharp object, but investigators […] Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute The planet’s climate is incredibly complex, and scientists are still discovering the effects and consequences of a warming planet – such as a new study finding drastic changes in the chemistry of the ocean waters surrounding the Arctic. Researchers working near the middle of the Arctic Ocean have found that levels of radium-228 have shot up rapidly over the last decade, as vanishing ice leads to more sediment getting swept up into the water. Not only does it show how far-reaching and complicated the effects of global warming can be, this could have significant consequences for marine life and the Arctic food chain, according to the researchers, led by a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “We suggest that significant changes in the nutrient, carbon, and trace metal balances of the Arctic Ocean are underway, with the potential to affect biological productivity and species assemblages in Arctic surface waters,” write the researchers in their paper. Radium-228 has long been used to work out the flow of land and sediment into the sea – […] Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists, according to current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. The potential impact on national security is significant, they said. Headquartered at Fort Meade in Maryland, the NSA employs a civilian workforce of about 21,000 there and is the largest producer of intelligence among the nation’s 17 spy agencies. The people who have left were responsible for collecting and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the president’s daily briefing. Their work also included monitoring a broad array of subjects including the Islamic State, Russian and North Korean hackers, and analyzing the intentions of foreign governments, and they were responsible for protecting the classified networks that carry such sensitive information. “Some synonym of the word ‘epidemic’ is the best way to describe it,” said Ellison Anne Williams, a former senior researcher at […]
News headlines in 2017 were primarily dominated by coverage of President Donald Trump’s administration and tense party politics. But while most of the attention was focused on the president’s antics, officers in police departments around the country killed over 1,000 civilians.
The National Security Agency is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy service’s leadership and an unpopular reorganization, take higher-paying, more flexible jobs in the private sector.
Finnish port
Credit: Jyrki Lyytikkä / Yle
Minister of the Environment, Energy and Housing Kimmo Tiilikainen has proposed that Finland should move up its ban on coal-burning for power to 2025. The government had previously agreed on a 2030 date for phasing out the fossil fuel in the country’s energy market.
Finland’s Environment, Energy and Housing Minister Kimmo Tiilikainen wants Finland to rid itself of coal-burning power plants in the next seven years. The Ministry of Employment and the Economy is currently considering a 2030 cut-off date, but Tiilikainen announced on Saturday that he is going to spearhead efforts to bump up the deadline to 2025.
In an interview with the Finnish Broadcasting Company, the minister justified his proposal by citing figures from Statistics Finland that indicate that greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise. The state-owned number cruncher reported in December 2017 that Finland’s carbon dioxide emissions were up by six percent in 2016, compared with the previous year. The main reason for the increase was an unexpected rise in coal burning for electricity and heating.
