The true story behind England’s tea obsession

Imagine the most English-English person you can think of. Now I’m fairly certain that no matter what picture you just conjured up, that person comes complete with a stiff upper lip and a cup of tea in their hand. Because that’s what the English do. They carry on and they drink tea. Tea is so utterly English, such an ingrained part of the culture, that it’s also ingrained in how everyone else around the world perceives that culture.
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Sunrise at Yellowstone Lake

Sunrise through steam from thermal features along the shore of Yellowstone Lake. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
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How Detroit’s Mayor Became Unbeatable

Mike Duggan pulled a symbol of American decline back from the brink. Now, he wants to finish what he started.
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Sparks Lake, Oregon

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TIL: Outcome of terrorist groups

Ways that terrorist groups end: Converted into a legitimate political process. (Negotiation) 43%; Law enforcement took out 40 percent. Ten percent won. Only 7 percent, were taken out by military force.
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Why Those Floating Fire Ant Colonies In Texas Are Such Bad News

Ants didn't take over the world by being stupid and cowardly. Case in point: Rafts of fire ants have been spotted floating around floodwaters in Houston, Texas, colonies banding together to weather super-storm Harvey.
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My week in Lucky House: the horror of Hong Kong's coffin homes

Benjamin Haas joins the retirees, working poor, drug addicts and convicted criminals who live crammed into the city’s tiny plywood cubicles
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A year-long observation reveals the secret life of a tree and its animal visitors | Aeon Videos

‘There are trees where to lay your eggs or where to find a safe cover; trees on which to look for food or, simply, to scratch your back and thus leave behind a trace of your passage’ – Bruno D’Amicis and Umberto Esposito
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How Does Two Feet of Rainfall Become Ten Feet of Flooding?

Hurricane Harvey and its remnants have managed to dump likely record-setting amounts of rainfall across Texas. The Weather Channel expects that some locations could see accumulation totals of 50 inches before the weather finally lets up. Some locations around and outside of Houston have already have seen floods higher than 15 feet.
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What Led Benjamin Franklin to Live Estranged From His Wife for Nearly Two Decades?

A stunning new theory suggests that a debate over the failed treatment of their son's smallpox was the culprit
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Nazis, The Internet, Policing Content And Free Speech

I'm going to try to do something that's generally not recommended on the internet: I'm going to try to discuss a complicated issue that has many nuances and gray areas. That often fails, because all too often people online immediately...
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How to live to 100 and be happy (by those who have done it!)

There are now a record number of centenarians in the UK. We asked six of them what they most enjoyed and most regretted in their eventful lives – and what tips they have for the rest of us to join them in the 100 club.
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Jaw-dropping places that people can't believe are actually in Michigan

That waterfall, that overlook, that incredible freshwater sea: Yes, this is Michigan.
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The Work that Confederate Monuments Continue To Do

One of the most common questions that I received from reporters this past two weeks was why so many Confederate monuments were dedicated within such a short period of time (1890-1930). It’s a…
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Texans Brace For President’s Response To Hurricane

HOUSTON—Battening down the hatches as the potentially disastrous situation unfolded, Texans braced themselves Friday for President Trump’s response to Hurricane Harvey.
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‘The Lees Are Complex’: Descendants Grapple With a Rebel General’s Legacy

Even within the family of Robert E. Lee, there are divisions over what should be done about Confederate monuments and what their ancestor stands for now.
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Marc Goodwin photographs Ningbo's construction sites.

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In Warsaw, With Chopin as Muse

Through the great Polish composer, finding a deeper understanding and appreciation of a city that is an oft-overlooked gold mine for budget travelers.
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Megaupload execs’ extradition may be at risk after new spying revelations

GCSB couldn't say more without jeopardizing the national security of New Zealand.
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GCHQ Knew FBI Wanted To Arrest MalwareTech, Let Him Fly To The US To Be Arrested There

It looks like the UK found an easy way to avoid another lengthy extradition battle. Its intelligence agency, GCHQ, knew something security research Marcus Hutchins didn't -- and certainly didn't feel obliged to tell him. Not only that, but...
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The striking temporary palaces of Burning Man

Photographer Philippe Glade has captured the unusual and ephemeral architecture of Nevada's Burning Man festival.
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This Street Artist Is Painting Fake Shadows To Confuse People, And The Result Looks Too Real

If you take a stroll around Redwood City, California, you might get the sense that something isn't quite right. Pay particular attention to the shadows. Notice how they seem to misbehave? Flowers sprout from the shadows of bike racks, mailboxes turn into shadow monsters, and shady monkeys hang around atop parking meters. What's going on?
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Long Before Photoshop, the Soviets Mastered the Art of Erasing People from Photographs — and History Too

Adobe Photoshop, the world's best-known piece of image-editing software, has long since transitioned from noun to verb: 'to Photoshop' has come to mean something like 'to alter a photograph, often with intent to mislead or deceive.' But in that usage, Photoshopping didn't begin with Photoshop, and indeed the early masters of Photoshopping did it well before anyone had even dreamed of the personal computer, let alone a means to manipulate images on one.
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My Life at a Russian Propaganda Network

I thought they’d let me be a real journalist at Sputnik news. I was wrong.
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Scooter has had enough of its owner

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Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington

Was President Trump’s richest adviser focused on helping the country—or his own bottom line?
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The Bearer of Light

By Reza // For nearly 20 years, the legendary Afghan resistant Massoud led his people, first against the Russians, and later against the Taliban, in order to liberate his country. Fifteen years after his assassination on September 9, 2001, this is my tribute to a man of rare intelligence and profound sensibility.
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Christine and The Queens - Christine

2014
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The haunting magic of ghost buildings.

A ‘ghost building’ isn’t a haunted mansion or a spooky house.. in fact it isn’t a building at all. But rather, ghost buildings are the outlines of a demolished building that is no more, but you can still see their imprints preserved on a shared party wall.
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Nobody Knows What Lies Beneath New York City

Before a single raindrop fell, Alan Leidner knew the waters could rise and throw the city into darkness. On this point, the maps were as clear as a crystal ball. All you had to do was look. It was 2010, and Leidner was consulting for the government services company Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., contracted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical infrastructure. Leidner was examining a region that included New York and New Jersey. One day he was thinking about the area’s electrical power grid.
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Why There Are No Nazi Statues in Germany

What the South can learn from postwar Europe.
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Why Was an Italian Graduate Student Tortured and Murdered in Egypt?

The strange twists in the case of Giulio Regeni’s disappearance in Cairo.
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Skylon: The Plane That Can Fly Anywhere In The World In 4 Hours

British aerospace firm Reaction Engines Limited (REL) is working on an aircraft that will be able to transport passengers anywhere in the world in just four hours, while also being able to reach outer space.
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Climate change costs India $10 billion every year: Government

Extreme weather events are costing India $9-10 billion annually and climate change is projected to impact agricultural productivity with increasing severity from 2020 to the end of the century. In a recent submission to a parliamentary committee, the agriculture ministry said productivity decrease of major crops would be marginal in the next few years but could rise to as much as 10-40% by 2100 unless farming adapts to climate change-induced changes in weather.
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8-bit Animated GIFs of Japan by Toyoi Yuuta

Ordinary moments in Japan translated into pixel art by Japanese illustrator Toyoi Yuuta based in Kyoto.
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Life Aboard the Longest Train Ride Through India

Beneath the relentless churn of steel, wood, and dust, the Indian railway is made entirely of stories.
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A Statue of St. Pantaleon Is Headed Back to Italy After Decades in Philly

The patron saint of physicians is going home.
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Antipodes Map - Tunnel to the other side of the world.

Ever wondered where you'd end up if you started digging to the exact other side of the world?
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"What kind of society do you want to live in?": Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing

With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased, but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.
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The World Trusts Putin More Than Trump on Foreign Affairs, Pew Says

Russian President Vladimir Putin inspires little confidence when it comes to handling world affairs, a Pew Research Center survey showed. But he still outshines his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump. “Although confidence in Putin’s handling of foreign affairs is generally low, in many countries he is more trusted than American President Donald Trump,” Pew wrote in a survey focused on Russia’s power and influence. Pew is a Washington-based non-partisan research group.
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Mythbusting Ancient Rome -- did all roads actually lead there?

Today the phrase 'all roads leads to Rome' means that there's more than one way to reach the same goal. But in Ancient Rome, all roads really did lead to the eternal city, which was at the centre of a vast road network.
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Trump state visit must be cancelled after he 'nakedly' backed neo-Nazis, activists say

The British Government must withdraw the invitation to Donald Trump to pay a state visit to the UK because he is “nakedly sympathising with neo-Nazis”, activists have said. The US President caused uproar after saying a group of people he described as the “alt-left” shared the blame with members of the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists and neo-Nazi for violence that erupted when the latter attempted to hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Poor Ontario families getting poorer: new report

The poorest families in Ontario are earning less than they were in 2000, while during the same period richer families have watched their income grow, according to a new economic report. The analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) describes an increasingly "polarized" Ontario labour market that is shifting away from stable manufacturing jobs to more precarious service sector work and rewarding higher-earning families while punishing poorer ones.
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The Snopes Fight Is Even Way More Complicated Than We Originally Explained

If you read our post a few weeks ago about the very messy legal fight between Snopes and Proper Media, you may recall that we spent many, many words explaining how the story was way, way, way more complicated than most in the media were portraying it...
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Making Sense of Robert E. Lee

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The Polish Doctors Who Used Science to Outwit the Nazis

The fake typhus epidemic staged by Eugene Lazowski and Stasiek Matulewicz during World War II saved thousands of lives.
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Trans-national America ( JULY 1916 ISSUE)

As World War I unfolded in Europe, intensifying ethnic antagonisms, native-born Americans became increasingly suspicious of the pockets of immigrant culture thriving among them. In 1916, critic and essayist Randolph Bourne challenged such attitudes with an essay—now considered a classic of forward thinking—calling for a new, more cosmopolitan conception of America and a reconsideration of the "melting-pot" theory.
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Free AF - Greetings from Canada!

This one's for all the Canadians who are Free AF.
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Ten tips for raising tech-savvy and tech-safe kids

From screen time to online privacy — how can you as a parent ensure that your child develops a healthy relationship with technology? We asked you to share your experiences and an expert for her top pieces of advice.
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The Euro Area Is Due for a Reboot. Here's What Is Being Proposed

When France elected Emmanuel Macron in May, the prospects of mending the euro’s inherent flaws suddenly brightened. Adopted in 1999, the common European currency was intended as a political project to foster unity, but the crisis in Greece a decade later exposed the euro’s inability to enforce shared rules, principally on government debt and spending.
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