Here’s hoping there's rent control in China: Employees at a factory that manufactures apparel for Ivanka Trump’s clothing business earn just $62 each week, for 60 hours of work, it has been revealed. There are 80 workers at the plant, which produces clothing for Ivanka Trump’s eponymous brand as well as for Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, The Washington Post reported. [...]

Make no mistake: “Netflix and chill” is now the modern mating call. The art of Netflix and chill is simple and unsubtle. To the uninitiated, the idea is that you hook up in front of an film and perhaps order takeout if you’re lucky. On the surface being young and fun never seemed so easy. Netflix and chill promised to consign excruciating dates and awkward silences to the past. [...]

Maine resident Garry Godfrey spent nine years on a transplant list, waiting for a new kidney. Then he was abruptly bumped off because of a hospital policy that forbids transplants for smokers of medical marijuana. [...]

It sounds like something out of The Simpsons, a church that suddenly turns into a pub. Yes it is true - after every weekly holy mass service on a Sunday, the local church in a small town in Belgium, called Brielen, converts into a pub so that the parishioners can enjoy a glass of wine or beer with one another. [...]

Americans have shown that they strongly refute almost every aspect of the proposed budget of US President Donald Trump, a plan described as perfectly mirroring the agenda of his extremely wealthy cabinet members. A new Quinnipiac poll published Friday revealed that a wide majority of US citizens oppose the sweeping cuts proposed by Trump to popular long-term government programs. [...]

Stephen Hawking says he fears he "may not be welcome" in the United States during the Trump administration's time in the Oval Office, due to their contradicting beliefs on climate change. Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain with television host Piers Morgan on Monday, March 20, the eminent physicist expressed his concern over Trump's policy and added that Scott Pruitt — the head of t [...]

But in U.S., happiness is falling and Republican priorities stand to make it worse. Norway now holds the title of the world's happiest country, according to a new report that also outlines how Republican proposals to gut safety nets, enact tax windfalls for the rich, and attack public education—as well as bipartisan failures in terms of the global war on terror and campaign finance—are making [...]

One in three American kids live in poverty, according to UNICEF. With 32.2 percent of children living below this line, the U.S. ranks 36th out of the 41 wealthy countries included in the UNICEF report. The United States ranks near the bottom of the pack of wealthy nations on a measure of child poverty. Nearly one third of U.S. children live in households with an income below 60 percent of the nati [...]

The numbers are in, and according to the Internal Revenue Service, a record number of Americans expatriated in 2016. According to a report published Thursday on the Federal Register, 5,411 Americans renounced their citizenship or expatriated. [...]

Dark Times are truly upon us. There will be an acceleration of acts of violence under the Trump administration and the conditions for eliminating this new stage of state violence will mean not only understanding the roots of neo-fascism in the United States, but also eliminating the economic, political, and cultural forces that produced it. [...]

German pensioner Reinhard Dowe has been on hunger strike for five weeks. The 70-year old man doesn't want to pay the obligatory tax on television and radio, which, he believes, contradicts the German Constitution. Dowe has not paid the tax on TV and radio broadcasting (GEZ-Gebühr or Rundfunkbeitrag) for 1.5 years. [...]

The number of Americans seeking citizenship in New Zealand jumped by 70 percent in the three months following the election of President Donald Trump from the same time period last year, according to immigration records. Since Trump’s election, 170 Americans without a family connection to New Zealand have put in applications for a grant of citizenship to the island nation, versus 100 dur [...]

About 150 thousand people returned to Russia from foreign countries in 2016, the interior ministry said. State support for repatriates and the anti-Russia campaign in Western countries were the top reasons given. According to the report, quoted by Izvestia daily, the total number of people who returned to Russia from foreign nations in 2016 was 146,585. Most of them returned from former Soviet [...]

Over the past few years millions of people have been forced to leave Syria, a country still gripped by war. Thousands of Russian-speaking women were living in Syria with their husbands and hundreds of them stayed behind when the conflict erupted. Sputnik correspondent Mikhail Alaeddin met with one such family residing in Damascus. The sunny and cozy apartment in Damascus where a woman named Ev [...]

Nearly 150,000 Russian nationals returned to live in Russia in 2016, according to statistics obtained by the Izvestia newspaper from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the agency charged with monitoring migration trends. About 30,000 of them came from EU countries, marking a rising trend. [...]

Russian biologists from Moscow State University have successfully tested a medication that is capable of slowing cells aging. In particular, the researchers proved that the medication has efficiently worked on mice. During the experiment, the researchers divided the mice into two groups: the first group was fed normally, while the second one's fodder contained a SkQ1 molecule, a powerful antiox [...]

Again an interview of Chris Hedges which goes back to 2013, but is above all interesting because Hedges explains how he moved from wanting to be a pastor to becoming a war reporter. He explains why he considers "liberals" have no direct contact with what they "prestend" to defend from afar. His first hand description of working directly with young people for whom violence was a way of life and his [...]

Austria has proposed tough new anti-migrant measures, with its Defense Minister calling for a pan-European cap on migration, external application centers for refugees and “protective zones” to hold and deport illegals from the EU. [...]

A complaint brought by the FTC and New Jersey Attorney General exposed their creepy data gathering practices. If you have a Smart TV, you definitely want to know about this lawsuit against Vizio, who collected data on viewers' viewing and use habits and then sold it to marketers, because it goes way beyond what they ever disclosed to television owners. [...]