Sunday December 8th the world was hit with a massive surprise. The government of Syria had fallen. Syria’s dictator for life, Bashar al-Assad, had fled to Moscow. In a mere eleven days, rebels had swept through the cities of Aleppo and Hama and had taken Syria’s capital, Damascus. Syria had been in the hands of dictators from
howard bloom
Joe Biden’s nightmare of a wider war in the Middle East is coming to pass. But the war is not widening because of Israel. It is widening because of Iran. On October 7th, 2024, Hamas broke a cease-fire deal and started the Gaza war with the rape, torture, and slaughter of 1,200 Israeli civilians. On October 8th,
Tuesday the world was shocked by one of the strangest war stories of the century. Between 2,800 and 4,000 pagers went off in the hands or pockets of Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon as the fighters went about their daily lives. Yes, pagers, old fashioned pagers, exploded. In fact, pagers blew up from Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and
Education Week reports that we are in a student mental health crisis. So does the surgeon general. Will taking cellphones away from kids while they’re in school help us get out of this crisis? I asked the science search engine Consensus to do a survey of studies on school cellphone bans and mental health. Consensus reviewed ten scientific
In January, eight months ago, Nikki Haley said, ‘The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election.’ Nikki Haley may be right. The Democratic National Convention that took place at the United Center in Chicago the week of August 19th demonstrated something no one may have
We are waiting for the other shoe to drop while Iran is lining up its ducks. Hamas’ political leader Ismael Haniyeh was assassinated on July 31st, just over a week ago. Iran’s Supreme Leader vowed to “avenge his blood” and said that Iran would hit Israel with a “severe punishment.” The head of one of Iran’s
Wednesday morning, July 31st, at 2 am Iranian time, Israel appears to have assassinated one of Hamas’ top three leaders, Ismail Haniyeh. Apparently Israel nailed Haniyeh with an explosive that blew up a few rooms of the luxury government apartment building in which the leader of Hamas was staying. Why was Haniyeh in Iran’s capital,
Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech Wednesday, July 24th, was more powerful than those who hate him may realize. It was powerful for a simple reason: it focused on the importance of four forgotten American virtues: truth, character, decency and democracy. It was a speech about what Joe Biden ran on in 2019, saving the soul of
The space race of the 21st century is not between nations, but between China and one man: Elon Musk. As CEO of SpaceX, Musk has revolutionized space travel, achieving milestones once thought impossible. His relentless drive has put SpaceX at the forefront, far outpacing NASA, not to mention Russia, China, and India. In contrast, America’s
The headline in a CNN story that appeared a little after noon on Wednesday, June 26th, was brutal: “Children are dying of starvation in their parents’ arms as famine spreads through Gaza.” The details were heartbreaking. One nine year old boy, said CNN, is “clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue
Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields is working. The biggest stories in Gaza War news in the last few days have centered on two purported Israeli strikes in Rafah killing civilians. On Sunday May 26th Israel dropped two small 37-pound bombs to kill two Hamas leaders. These pinpoint bombs killed precisely the leaders they were
Two days ago a story showed up in the New York Post, AOL, Yahoo, The Indiana Gazette, Reddit, and a dozen more media outlets announcing that 38% of American workers never felt more uninspired at work. Yes, uninspired. And the pollsters recommended refreshing workers by providing them with exercise space. Even though the poll indicated that
The standard story in the Western media right now is that Israel has proposed a ceasefire deal that American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken calls “extraordinarily generous.” And that is true. The Israeli deal proposes to give up over a thousand Palestinian prisoners—in many cases men who have murdered Israelis—in exchange for only 40 hostages. For
On Wednesday, April 24th, the Senate passed a TikTok bill. And Joe Biden signed it into law. The new law says that ByteDance, the company that founded and owns TikTok, must sell TikTok to an American purchaser within nine months or TikTok will be banished from the Apple and Google app stores and will no
We have reached a dire moment. At 2 am Sunday morning, March 14, Iran launched a swarm of between 300 and 350 suicide drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles at Israel. Israel’s Stunner missiles, Arrow missiles, and Iron Dome missiles, with help from the French and Americans, knocked 99% of these weapons out of the sky.
What started as a marketing gimmick may have revealed something important about your happiness. True Lemon is a product created in Baltimore in 2003 to put the flavor of a lemon slice into a powder that you can pour into your drink. True Lemon is what its creator, David Schleider, calls a “water enhancer.” To
The TikTok issue is one of the biggest damned if you do, damned if you don’t problems on America’s agenda. On April 14, 2023, nearly a year ago, Montana became the first state to try to ban TikTok, but a US District Judge put a temporary halt to the ban, saying it “oversteps state power,”
On Tuesday, February 20, at 1:54 pm, an American Airlines flight took off from Albuquerque’s International Sunport headed for Chicago, a three-hour flight away. Roughly half an hour into the flight, a passenger, Emma Ritz, says that a man whose seat was next to the emergency exit “cracked open the window that was protecting the
There have been a series of accidents over the last few months that can easily make you leery of autonomous cars, self-driving automobiles controlled by artificial intelligence. Waymo is a self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet. CNN reported on Wednesday, February 14th, that sometime at the end of 2023 in San Francisco a
On January 30th, the board of supervisors in California’s San Mateo County, a county across the bay from San Francisco and next to Silicon Valley, did something ground-breaking. For what is probably the first time in American history, a governmental body voted unanimously to declare a health emergency for something very strange, a health emergency
The Senate Judiciary Committee, under Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham, held a hearing Wednesday, January 31, that the Committee advertised as “the first time a group of Big Tech CEOs will testify on online child sexual exploitation.” The CEOs included Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Chew, X’s Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and
“The Korean peninsula is dashing toward the cliff of a nuclear war,” says the North Korean government publication Rodong Sinmun. Here’s why. For 73 years, the goal of North Korea has been to swallow South Korea in a “peaceful reunification.” On Monday, January 15th, that changed. Forty-year-old North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un gave a speech
England’s Morrisons, a 470-store British supermarket chain, has tried something innovative but disturbing. In a few of its stores over the Christmas season, it installed a robotic intrusion detector designed to act as a night watchman on construction sites, in mines, and on farms. Morrisons tried this machine to detect, not trespassers, but shoplifters. The robotic
The big question is whether it will cause World War III. Early Wednesday morning, at 3 pm in the afternoon Iranian time, a suicide bomber a mile from the modest grave of Lieutenant General Qasem Soleimani in southeastern Iran’s Kerman province blew himself up. Then, 20 minutes later, as people crowded to the explosion’s site to
A new survey from LendingTree, the online loan comparison service, looked at accident rates of 30 auto brands and found that the brand with the most accidents per 1,000 drivers was Tesla. Other brands high on the list of accidents per 1,000 drivers were Dodge Ram and Subaru. When it came to driving incidents, a
Norman Lear died Tuesday, December 5th, at the age of 101 at his home in LA. The headlines mourn his passing. What they miss is his victory. Norman Lear lived to be 101 years old. That’s a startling achievement. Why was Lear able to live so long? In part, because he cherished the joys in life. He said, “Life is made
Hamas has successfully convinced activists from LA to Tokyo that Israel is committing genocide in its attack on the Gaza Strip. But the real maker of genocide in Gaza is Hamas. The latest story on the Hamas War is a blockbuster from the New York Times that ran on Wednesday November 7th. In it, the Times
We all know what happened Saturday. Or we think we know. Gaza fired what it said were 5,000 rockets at civilian targets in Israel. And Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel using a massive bulldozer to tear a hole in the smart fence draped with razor wire that separates Gaza from southern Israel. Over 1,500 invaders streamed through. Some of
This is a story of the prizes and the prices of fame. At 8:00 Wednesday morning, September 20th, Donald Trump Jr’s X account proclaimed, “I’m sad to announce, my father Donald Trump has passed away. I will be running for president in 2024.” Then the account burped out a Tweet about Joe Biden complete with a
One of the world’s most fabled neighborhoods for the rich and famous is Beverly Hills, the home of Taylor Swift, Jennifer Aniston, Adele, Jack Nicholson, and Eddy Murphy. And in Beverly Hills is one of the most luxurious and expensive shopping areas you have ever seen, Rodeo Drive. But is the allure of Rodeo Drive