Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg has had plenty of difficult days in the past year, but this past week was a good one for him. The Facebook CEO’s net worth jumped $5.5 billion in the week through Thursday April 25, mostly due to investor glee about the $2.4 billion in first quarter profit that the social media firm reported on Wednesday.
The 34-year-old is worth $71.3 billion, $20 billion more than at the beginning of 2019. He is now the 5th richest person in the world, up from No. 8 in March when Forbes published the annual world’s billionaires list. The positive quarterly earnings report overshadowed news that Facebook is setting aside as much as $5 billion to pay a fine to the Federal Trade Commission over privacy issues.
Zuckerberg’s gain was by far the biggest of the week, but he is in good company. The fortunes of Zuckerberg and four other tech billionaires, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, rose by a collective $13 billion in seven days.
A day after Facebook released its first-quarter earnings report, […]
Kansas capital
Credit: Stephen Koranda/Kansas News Service
Updated at 11 a.m. ET
The Kansas Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The landmark ruling now stands as the law of the land in Kansas with no path for an appeal. Because it turns on the state’s Constitution, abortion would remain legal in Kansas even if the Roe v. Wade case that established a national right to abortion is ever reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision turbocharged efforts among conservative legislators to ask voters to add an abortion ban to the Kansas Constitution. Lawmakers return to the capital, Topeka, next week.
The decision, in which one of the seven justices dissented, cites in its first sentence the first section of the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The decision continues: “We are now asked: ‘Is this declaration of rights more than an idealized aspiration? And, if so, do the substantive rights include a […]
NRA Audience listening to “Dear Leader” Trump. Do you think any three people in this picture would have a collective IQ of three digits
Donald Trump has announced that the US will withdraw its support for a United Nations treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade.
Addressing the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Indianapolis, the president said he would revoke America’s status as a signatory of the arms trade treaty regulating conventional weapons including small arms, battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships.
“My administration will never ratify the UN arms trade treaty,” Trump said. “We’re taking our signature back. The United Nations will soon receive a formal notice that America is rejecting this treaty.”
Trump added: “Under my administration, we will never surrender American sovereignty to anyone. We will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your second amendment freedom. I’m officially announcing today that the United States will be revoking the effect of America’s signature from this […]
An abandoned gas station in East Lynn, W.Va., a coal mining town.
Credit: Luke Sharrett/ The New York Times
“If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute.
The crowd laughed.
Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.
His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative […]
Penguins on Cuverville Island, Antarctica, designated as an important bird island.
Credit: AFP
The world’s second largest emperor penguin colony is believed to have been effectively wiped out overnight, with thousands of chicks drowning after an ice shelf in Antarctica collapsed. (emphasis added)
Since the catastrophic collapse of the ice sheet at Halley Bay in 2016, no breeding has been detected in the area, scientists say.
Usually 15,000 to 24,000 breeding pairs of emperor penguins flock each year to the breeding site – around 5-9 per cent of the entire global emperor penguin population.
The bay in the Weddell Sea was previously considered a refuge for penguins in one of the coldest parts of the continent, and was expected to remain suitable for penguins this century despite climate change affecting Antarctic sea ice.
Yet almost no emperor penguins have been there since, according to a team from the British Antarctic Survey, who used high-resolution satellite photographs of the birds’ guano over time, to reveal the findings.
“We haven’t seen a breeding failure […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
