On Monday, the FBI said that all reported hate crimes rose in 2015, but ones targeting Muslims increased by a worrisome 67 percent over 2014, to their highest number since 2001, when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sparked a rash of anti-Muslim violence and harassment. The total number of reported hate crimes rose to 5,850 last year, from 5,479 in 2014, and 257 of those incidents were anti-Muslim, versus 154 in 2014 and 481 in 2001. Hate crimes against black people made up 52 percent of attacks based on race or ethnicity, while 18.7 percent targeted white people and 9.3 percent were aimed at Latinos. Hate crimes against Jews rose 9 percent.
Late last year, Islamist terrorists attacked Paris and San Bernardino, California, and Donald Trump proposed banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. "We saw a spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide beginning toward the end of 2015," Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, tells The Associated Press. "That spike has continued until today and even accelerated after the election of President-elect Trump." The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented more than 200 hate-crime complaints since the election; the FBI statistics rely largely on self-reporting from law enforcement agencies, leading to widespread belief that the actual number of hate crimes is significantly larger. Peter Weber
The popular pro-Trump Reddit community The_Donald has been quarantined due to posts that reportedly encouraged violence.
Reddit users who visit The_Donald, the subreddit for Trump supporters that currently has more than 750,000 users, will now first be presented with a warning message saying the community has been "restricted due to significant issues with reporting and addressing violations of the Reddit Content Policy," including "threats of violence against police and public officials." The subreddit has not been banned, and clicking "continue" will bring up the regular page.
According to Reddit's policies, while quarantined, The_Donald will not appear in the site's search or recommendations, and it will not generate revenue.
An announcement on the page from a Reddit moderator details the decision, saying there has been "repeated rule-breaking behavior" in the community and telling the subreddit's moderators there has been an "overreliance" on Reddit admins to remove content encouraging or inciting violence. The violent content in question reportedly concerned police and public officials in Oregon; Media Matters had recently detailed such posts in an article.
The admin goes on to tell the community's moderators that they must "unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable." This post attracted thousands of comments from users of The_Donald, who expressed outrage at the decision and suggested it was made for political reasons.
The_Donald is considered to be one of the biggest online hubs of Trump supporters, and the president himself visited the subreddit to take questions in 2016. He has also at times posted content that originated from The_Donald on his official Twitter account. Brendan Morrow
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humankind's first steps on the moon, they weren't just taking a stroll. They also collected 48 samples of lunar rocks, bringing them back home so that scientists could examine them ... eventually.
Now, 50 years after the first men walked on the moon, scientists are finally getting their hands on the original samples collected on Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. The lunar samples have been kept in a locked vault at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Fox News reports, waiting for the wonders that 21st-century scientific technology will be able to learn from them.
That was a pretty wise move on the part of NASA officials back in the 70s, said Ryan Zeigler, a sample curator for NASA's Apollo missions. "We can do more with a milligram than we could do with a gram back then," so we can still conserve most of the sample material gathered decades ago. The samples being sent out now range from the weight of a paper clip to so small "you can barely measure it," Zeigler said.
In total, 842 pounds worth of lunar samples were collected on the Apollo missions, collected by 12 astronauts — the only 12 people who have ever walked on the moon. But NASA's new plan will soon expand that number: By 2024, it aims to send more people to the moon's surface.
Until that happens, these moon rocks are the most tangible link we have with our closest satellite. And now, "a new generation of scientists will help advance our understanding of our lunar neighbor and prepare for the next era of exploration of the moon and beyond," said Thomas Zurbuchen, an administrator at NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
Read more at Fox News. Shivani Ishwar
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have united in hopes of defeating the final boss that is President Trump's proposed China tariffs.
In a joint letter submitted to the Office of the United States Trade Representative's general counsel, the video game companies speak in opposition to Trump's proposed tariffs, which they say would have an "enormous impact" and bring about "undue economic harm." Trump previously imposed a 25 percent tariff on $250 billion of Chinese imports and has threatened to impose tariffs on $300 billion more, per The New York Times. Video game consoles would be affected, and 96 percent of the consoles imported into the United States last year were manufactured in China, the letter says.
The companies say that these tariffs would "add significant costs that would depress sales of video game consoles" and that a price increase of 25 percent "will likely put a new video game console out of reach for many American families who we expect to be in the market for a console this holiday season." Consumers will pay $840 million more than they normally would, the letter says, adding that console sales going down would "unquestionably" lead to a decline in video game sales as well.
On that note, the companies warn that the tariffs will also harm game developers, accessory companies, and retailers and that, therefore, the "ripple effect of harm could be dramatic."
Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have asked the United States to remove video game consoles from its list of products that would be affected by the tariffs. Trump is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and hold trade talks this weekend, and he said on Wednesday that should the trade talks fail, "we'll do less business with them."
For the first time in three decades, deaths from drug overdose look like they're going to fall instead of rise.
Back in 1990, drug overdoses claimed 8,400 lives in the U.S.; and for every year afterward, the number of deaths has risen, especially in recent years, as the epidemic of opioid addiction takes a heavy toll on parts of the country. While the official total for overdose deaths in 2018 hasn't been confirmed yet, provisional data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention suggests that we might finally be in for a change. The CDC's data from Nov. 2017 to Nov. 2018 counted about 69,100 deaths from drug overdose, compared to 72,300 from Nov. 2016 to Nov. 2017.
But this isn't a sign that the worst is over, The Wall Street Journal explained. While health officials are eager to see any evidence that progress is being made in the fight against overdose deaths, "we shouldn't say oh, we've won," said Robert Anderson, a CDC official.
"The opioid crisis is in early remission, yet at high risk of relapse," said Jim Hall, an epidemiologist at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. But even if this doesn't mean we're out of the worst of the opioid epidemic, these numbers could be a sign that some of our methods for combating overdose deaths are working. In large part, broadened access to naloxone, a drug that can reverse the worse effects of overdose, has been shown to save lives that would otherwise be lost to drug overdose.
The picture is still bleak — overdose deaths are still much higher than "in the peak of the crack-cocaine crisis decades ago," The Wall Street Journal reports. But it's possible that our current methods will help to turn the tide. Shivani Ishwar