“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group … death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”

The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata in the New York Times of a stunning study by the husband-wife team of Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case.

You like superheroes.

I have friends who insist they don’t, picturing newsprint muscle-men in Mardis Gras outfits fighting villains with names like Doctor Atrocity and making little “BLAMMO!” signs when they punch. Those friends, though, inevitably turn out to like James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, or some other fictional hero doing things real people can’t do—superheroes in civvies. Every culture has stories like this; our forebears told them around campfires or mead-halls, 20th-century kids read them in comic books.

Authored by Pepe Escobar, Op-Ed via RT.com,

So foreign ministers from the 28 NATO member-nations met in Brussels for a two-day summit, while mighty military power Montenegro was inducted as a new member.

Global Robocop NATO predictably discussed Afghanistan (a war NATO ignominiously lost); Iraq (a war the Pentagon ignominiously lost); Libya (a nation NATO turned into a failed state devastated by militia hell); Syria (a nation NATO, via Turkey, would love to invade, and is already a militia hell).

Five years after the Fukushima tragedy, TEPCO's chief of decommissioning Naohiro Masuda admits that the company still has no idea exactly where 600 tons of melted radioactive fuel from three nuclear reactors is located.

China's hard landing has already begun, warns economist Richard Duncan as the nation's credit-fuelled economic boom ended in 2015 and a protracted slump lies ahead. He has published a series of videos explaining why China’s economic development model of export-led and investment-driven growth is now in crisis leaving "China’s economy resembles a spinning top that is running out of momentum. It is wobbling and gyrating erratically."