Candlelight vigil in Trafalgar Square, London to remember those who lost their lives in the Westminster terrorist attack. Yui Mok/Press Association. All rights reserved. So, once again, we face a terrorist attack in the western world. And moreover, not only do we face the reality of the bloodshed, the violence and the affront we all feel in the sense of a violation of security, we also face the need to respond. Each time these attacks take place, whether in Brussels, Paris or London (but perhaps not Baghdad) the same messages, texts and narratives emerge across newspapers, television screens and social media. What is interesting to note is how these narratives,…

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: THIS GOAL HAS BEEN MET!  BUT YOU CAN GIVE TO ANOTHER WORTHY CAUSE HERE. From December 14 through December 25, GOOD Sports will feature the worthiest school athletic programs in need of funding.  The members of Tullahoma High School’s first-ever girls wrestling team currently share three caps and five pieces of headgear. The 18 students participating in the program currently must swap equipment between matches in order to comply with Tennessee athletic safety regulations.  Tullahoma High School teacher Jenna Morris and donorschoose.org are trying to remedy that, and you can help them do it. The team needs just $913 to cover all of their equipment costs, which will allow its…

On the second day of the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on building global support for women human rights defenders, the 100 participants delivered a sobering and urgent message: history is still repeating itself. Watching the military-industrial complex wreak havoc in the Middle East, reflected Shirin Ebadi, holder of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, is like ‘rewinding a movie’. Women human rights defenders from across the globe were in agreement: the incalculable suffering of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have taught us, once and for all, that bombs lead to suffering, and never peace. In her keynote speech, Shirin reflected on what a different world might have looked like…

Planning on having a kid? If so, you may want to plan on going back to a college ramen diet as well. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child from birth to the age of 17 now adds up to an average cost $233,610. That average spans a wide range of tax brackets and family structures, but the typical middle-income, married-couple family can expect to spend roughly $13,000 to $14,000 per year on “child-rearing expenses.” With its annual report, the USDA aims to help families with financial planning. But how do those estimated expenses break down exactly? According to the report, parents can expect living…

In Kathy Roberts’ AP environmental science classroom at Palm Beach Gardens High School, a section of the room is taken up by a table-sized contraption. On top, a piece of Styrofoam with vegetable plants embedded in it floats on a layer of water. Underneath, plastic buckets hold fish and tubing connects the two layers. The aquaponics system—a mixture of aquaculture and hydroponics—is a way to help students understand the nitrogen cycle, something already in the teacher’s lesson plan. But it’s also a part of something much more important: tasking high school students with the big job of figuring out how to feed a growing planet. The experiment is a cog…

Egypt completes construction of second lane of Suez Canal, July 2015. Demotix/Ester Meerman. All rights reserved. In echoes of Britain’s support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s along with the US, and Margaret Thatcher’s thanks to August Pinochet for “bringing democracy to Chile”, Britain will host Egyptian junta leader Abdel Fattah El Sisi on a state visit in November. This follows a trip by British Defence Secretary and MP for Sevenoaks, Michael Fallon, to Egypt to attend the 6 August function for the opening of a new branch of the Suez Canal. Fallon, writing an op-ed in the local Egyptian state paper, hailed the "rejection of authoritarianism" by the régime…

Every evening, when it’s time to kick back after a busy day seeing patients, pain management physician Daniel Cartledge of Delray Beach, Florida, relaxes in a comfortable club chair and turns on his NERVANA, a device with earbuds that’s both a music player and a transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulator. More plainly, the earbuds send gentle electrical pulses, synced with the listener’s playlist of choice, through the ear to one of the most critical regulatory nerves in the body. For Cartledge, using the NERVANA “takes away the background noise in my brain,” he says. “I feel relaxed and focused.” Along with his heart-surgeon brother, Richard, he developed the NERVANA, available to consumers in 90 countries. Cartledge’s invention…

The River Aire at Kirkstall, Leeds bursts its banks, December 26, 2015. Demotix/Steve Gaunt. All rights reserved.We have been lucky with the flooding where we live, at least so far. Kirkburton is in the east Pennines a few miles out of Huddersfield and the village was on the Environment Agency’s “risk of flooding” warning for twenty-four hours on the weekend of 26-27 December. Fortunately, while the rain may have been very heavy it didn’t persist here as long as it did up on the moors, but some of the Calder Valley towns like Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd and Sowerby Bridge were hit appallingly badly. Less than two weeks ago we had…

There was a time—as recently as the 2011 #OccupyMovement—when a humble flap of old cardboard with a hastily scrawled slogan was sufficient attention-getting signage to take to the streets. But the recent Women’s March showcased a stunning level of artistry and cleverness, transforming the typically austere protest aesthetic into next level pageantry that flooded our Instagram feeds. But the efforts here are far from frivolous. This new administration has already started the “carnage” (to use a favorite Trumpism) on the National Endowment of the Arts budgets along with his existing antagonistic approach to science. They say bad times make for great art. If these Women’s March images are any indication, there’s going to be a serious…

Photo used with permission of author.Europe’s crisis is only getting deeper. The middle class as we know it is rapidly vanishing due to the imperious force of neoliberalism and the social polarization that comes along with it. Change is in the air, but the scale is not necessarily tilted towards the positive side of democratic freedoms. New forms of authoritarianism are gliding over the continent. And it is not about, or not just about, the advance of far right parties and the national populism that vents its rage at migrants. The 13 November attacks in Paris, and all their subsequent effects, have opened the spigot of a form of governance…