Presented in no particular order.

A lot has happened in the last decade — including a lot of things being called racist, sexist, offensive, or insensitive.

Here, in no particular order, are 24 of the most absurdly politically correct moments of the decade:

1. A college diversity-training course taught that it was culturally insensitive to expect people to be on time.

A Clemson University training course taught its attendees that it is offensive to expect people to be on time, because "time may be considered fluid" in other cultures.

Surveillance video footage from outside the jail cell of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during his first reported suicide attempt in July has been inadvertently deleted, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday.


Prosecutors, in a filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said the video was deleted as the result of a jailhouse computer error about the location of Epstein's cellmate at the time Epstein tried to kill himself.

A lawyer for Epstein's former cellmate said that it was "deeply troubling" to learn that the footage no longer exists. That lawyer, Bruce Barket, has been trying since July to obtain the video.

The Report, a new film from Vice Studios starring Adam Driver, feels somehow both timely and late. It tells the story of American Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Driver), who was tasked with investigating the U.S. government's "enhanced interrogation" program in the late 2000s. The program, which many denounced as torture, was used to extract intelligence from suspected terrorist detainees at CIA black sites after Al Qaeda's attack on September 11, 2001. It ended years ago and is no longer even legal — the McCain-Feinstein Amendment restricts prisoner interrogation techniques to those listed in the United States Army's field manual, and it passed the Senate with a 78-21 vote in 2015, backed by majorities in both parties.

Among the general public, however, the topic remains controversial, with almost half of Americans saying they think torture could be used to obtain "important military information" from "a captured enemy combatant" and only a little more than half saying they think torture is "wrong." During and after his 2016 campaign, President Donald J. Trump, ever-sensitive to divergences between "elite" and "popular" opinion, promised to revive and even expand enhanced interrogation, claiming that waterboarding is a "minor form" of torture and that "we should go much stronger than waterboarding."


Jones worked for Senator Dianne Feinstein (played in the film by Annette Bening) and was deputized by a bipartisan Senate committee to lead a team of six — three Democrats and three Republicans — to find out exactly what the CIA program had entailed. In the flash-forward that opens the film, we learn that his obsessive dedication to the report cost him his romantic relationship, but as we return to the report's inception and watch events unfold chronologically, we also see that this kind of personality was required to pursue the investigation to completion and release. "Do you ever sleep?" a security guard asks Jones at one point. "I used to," he replies, "but it got in the way of the work."

One person was injured and thousands evacuated as a huge blaze occurred at an oil refinery in the Republic of Komi west of the Ural Mountains. The fire and a column of thick black smoke could be seen for kilometers around.

The fire at the diesel processing unit of the plant in the city of Ukhta, population circa 100,000, was preceded by "two bangs of a technological character," a source in the Emergencies Ministry said.

The blaze spread quickly, covering around 1,000 square meters at its peak. It was assigned the highest category of difficulty, with around 80 emergency workers and 15 firetrucks involved in extinguishing it. A fire train was later sent to help put the blaze out.

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp's revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California's fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world's almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp's hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. "My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives," he says.

Deep snow drifts, skating along frozen rivers and weeks of sub-zero temperatures used to be normal features of a British winter, but they are rare today. However, in an ironic twist, global warming may help conditions like this to return in the coming decades, by disrupting the Gulf Stream - the warm ocean current responsible for taking the chill off north-west Europe.

The Gulf Stream is part of a larger ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), which moves warm water northwards in the upper layers of the Atlantic Ocean, and colder waters southwards at lower depths. Previous research has shown that a slowdown of Amoc appeared to trigger a global cold snap 13,000 years ago. In 2018 scientists revealed that the Gulf Stream was at its weakest in 1,600 years.

By investigating the impact of Greenland meltwater and rainfall on Amoc, researchers found that thankfully there is very little chance of a complete shutdown in the next 1,000 years, but instead they show there is a 15% chance of a temporary shutdown in the next 100 years, which would likely trigger cooler conditions in north-west Europe. But acting fast to limit global warming will reduce the chances of being thrown into a chill.

A Brazilian judge on Wednesday ordered Netflix to stop showing a Christmas special that some called blasphemous for depicting Jesus as a gay man and which prompted a bomb attack on the satirists behind the program.

The ruling by a Rio de Janeiro judge, Benedicto Abicair, responded to a petition by a Brazilian Catholic organisation that argued the "honour of millions of Catholics" was hurt by the airing of The First Temptation of Christ. The special was produced by the Rio-based film company Porta dos Fundos, whose headquarters was targeted in the Christmas Eve attack.

Netflix told the Associated Press it would not comment on the ruling. Porta dos Fundos also declined to comment on the judge's decision, which contradicted an earlier decision rejecting censorship of the program. The ruling is valid until another court orders otherwise.

Philadelphia police say a man who opened fire on parole officers serving a warrant was shot and killed during a shootout with SWAT officers. The deadly standoff happened on the 4600 block of Hawthorne Street in the Frankford section of the city on Thursday afternoon.

A Syrian-born Swedish politician has been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking after a damning hidden-camera interview published in October showed him bragging about smuggling people into the country for money.

Former Ljungby politician Rashad Alasaad, 27, was arrested by ten undercover police officers during a raid at his home on Wednesday morning.

"The person was taken for questioning and subsequently arrested. He is entitled to a public defender and that is being arranged," said police spokesman Ewa-Gun Westford.

Swedish paper Expressen recorded Alasaad with a hidden camera joking about how he had smuggled several people into Sweden for money, after entering the country along the smuggling route from Turkey, and offering to help smuggle a child from Greece to Sweden.

Two blasts have reportedly been heard in Baghdad, followed by the sirens of emergency services. The apparent explosions come hours after US President Donald Trump walked back from military action against Iran.

Air raid sirens can be heard in video footage presumably captured in the Iraqi capital on Wednesday night. Multiple journalists in the city reported that two explosions rang out, apparently coming from the direction of the heavily-fortified 'Green Zone,' home to the US embassy.

Iraq's military said that "two Katyusha rockets fell inside the Green Zone without causing casualties." Police sources told Reuters that the rockets came within 100 meters of the US embassy, and caused a fire.