For almost 20 years, I’ve been spending time on a craggy stretch of British Columbia’s shoreline called the Sunshine Coast. This summer, I had an experience that reminded me why I love this place, and why I chose to have a child in this sparsely populated part of the world.

It was 5 a.m. and my husband and I were up with our 3-week-old son. Looking out at the ocean, we spotted two towering, black dorsal fins: orcas, or killer whales. Then two more. We had never seen an orca on the coast, and never heard of their coming so close to shore. In our sleep-deprived state, it felt like a miracle, as if the baby had wakened us to make sure we didn’t miss this rare visit.

The possibility that the sighting may have resulted from something less serendipitous did not occur to me until two weeks ago, when I read reports of a bizarre ocean experiment off the islands of Haida Gwaii, several hundred miles from where we spotted the orcas swimming.

There, an American entrepreneur named Russ George dumped 120 tons of iron dust off the hull of a rented fishing boat; the plan was to create an algae bloom […]

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In a world dogged by conflicts and wars, the key to peace and reconciliation lies in food, say chefs, small-scale producers and Slow Food campaigners at the world’s biggest food fair in Turin.

Among the thousands of stalls which line the fair with spices, fruits, wines and delicacies from 100 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, springs a huge African food garden with pumpkins, berries, bananas and trees.

The plot represents the 25 countries involved in the ‘Thousand Gardens in Africa project,

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According to new findings by the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems (NAPH), by 2019, safety net hospitals’ uncompensated care costs will be $53 billion higher than originally estimated if states don’t opt into the voluntary expansion of the Medicaid program under Obamacare.

Safety net hospitals serve areas where, on average, 14.9 percent of the population is uninsured and 32.5 percent of the population relies on government-provided health coverage such as Medicaid. Current Medicaid reimbursements often fall short of the full cost of care, so programs such as federal DSH funding help make up the difference. Obamacare cuts DSH funding in half by 2019 in an effort to reduce national hospital payments – but only because the cuts to safety net hospitals were intended be offset by the vastly expanded pool of newly insured low-income Americans. But Republican governors across the country are digging in their heels and refusing to expand the Medicaid programs in their states.

As a consequence, safety net hospitals that care for America’s most vulnerable could face significant financial burdens by 2019, and millions of low-income and disabled Americans may lose access to the medical services they need:

Now, the cuts to DSH […]

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Of all the methods of communication invented by humanity over the centuries, none has disseminated so much information so widely at such high speeds as the internet. It is both a unifying force and a globalising one. But, as this report has argued, its very ubiquity makes it a localising one too, because it is clearly not the same everywhere, either in what it provides or how it is operated and regulated.

The smartphone has liberated its user from the PC on his desk, granting him access on the go not just to remote computers and long-lost friends on the other side of the world but also to the places around him. If he lives in a city, as most users do, then his fellow city-dwellers and the buildings, cars and streets around them are throwing off almost unimaginable quantities of valuable data from which he will benefit. And although communications across continents have become cheap and easy, physical proximity to others remains important in creating new ideas and products-especially (and perhaps ironically) for companies offering online services. You cannot (yet) have a coffee together online.

This simultaneously more localised and more globalised world will be more complicated than the world of […]

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Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis of a conservative fundamentalist Christian organization, on Thursday speculated that designs on President Barack Obama’s wedding ring meant that ‘he may in fact be a closeted Muslim.

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