International News
GUNMAN KILLS 3 PEOPLE IN FRENCH CHRISTMAS MARKET, FLEES
Jerusalem Post
STRASBOURG - A gunman on a security watchlist killed three people and wounded a dozen others near the picturesque Christmas market in the historic French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday evening before fleeing.
Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said the shooter had evaded a police dragnet and was on the run, raising concerns of a follow-up attack.
"The government has raised its security threat to the highest level and is bolstering border controls," Castaner told a late-night news conference. "We will also reinforce security at all Christmas markets to prevent copycat attacks."
British PM Theresa May survives vote of confidence
Al Jazeera
London, United Kingdom - British Prime Minister Theresa May has survived a vote of confidence triggered by MPs of her ruling Conservative Party.
Two-hundred of the Conservatives' 317 members of parliament voted in support of May's leadership during the secret ballot, held within the UK parliament's lower chamber House of Commons on Wednesday evening. However, 117 of her colleagues went against her
Maduro accuses US of plotting to kill him
BBC
John Bolton has been assigned with the job organising my assassination, deploying foreign troops and imposing a transitional government in Venezuela," he told journalists at the Miraflores presidential palace.
The Venezuelan people were prepared to fight back, with the help of "friendly countries," he added,
Mr Maduro has previously accused the US as well as Colombia and the Venezuelan opposition of plotting to kill him.
Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist
vox
A new book by
Kristen Ghodsee, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that women have better sex under socialism.
If that sounds strange to you, consider this: A survey of East and West Germans after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women (the socialist side of Germany during the Cold War) had twice as many orgasms as Western women.
What in the world accounts for such a wide gap?
US News
As climate change bites in America’s midwest, farmers are desperate to ring the alarm
The Guardian
The changes have become more radical’: farmers are spending more time and money trying to grow crops in new climates
Richard Oswald did not need the latest US government report on the creeping toll of climate change to tell him that farming in the midwest is facing a grim future, and very likely changing forever.
For Oswald, the moment of realisation came in 2011.
Insurance claims at $9 billion from California fires
AP News
SACRAMENTO, Can. (AP) Insurance claims from last month’s California wildfires already are at $9 billion and expected to increase, the state’s insurance commissioner announced Wednesday.
About $7 billion in claims are from the Camp Fire that destroyed the Northern California city of Paradise and killed at least 86 people, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in at least a century. The rest is from the Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California.