Earlier this year, the US women's team filed a lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation over years of alleged 'gender discrimination', seeking equal pay with their male colleagues.

The US Women's National Team has been paid more than the country's Men's National Team over the past decade: the women received $34.1 million in salaries and game bonuses, while the men were paid $26.4 million, the US Soccer president, Carlos Cordeiro, said in a letter released on Monday.


Cordeiro explained that the pay structures for male and female players are different but not because of gender. In fact, the women have a guaranteed salary plus bonuses for the matches while the men have no fixed salary and are only paid for the training camps they attend and the games they play, plus game bonuses. Apart from this, women players enjoy a package of benefits (for example, healthcare) that are not provided to the men, the US Soccer president said.

A host of Twitter commentators, including a popular CNN strategist, were apparently in such a hurry to put a sinister spin on the death of a long-time Kremlin critic that they 'buried' his son instead.

Condolences poured in following the death of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent Russian historian and TV journalist, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 59. His son, Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., 37, announced his father's passing on social media, without providing any details on the cause of death.

It was reported, however, that the late journalist, who rose to prominence during the 1990s, was in poor health prior to his death, having suffered several heart attacks.

While the two men do have the same first and last names and have strikingly similar features (they are father and son, after all), it was Kara-Murza Jr. who broke the news, which should have left little room for misinterpretation.

Harsh punishment meted out to two German backpackers for the 'crime' of brewing their own coffee at the Rialto Bridge in Venice is symptomatic of the way that public space is being eroded and profit being put before humanity.

Don't smell the coffee in Venice, at least not if you brewed it yourself on a portable mini-stove in the center of the historic city instead of paying for it at a coffee shop or café, or you could be in big, big trouble.

Two German tourists who did that recently were fined a total of €950 ($1000) and asked to leave the city.

The tourists made no mess. They caused no obstruction, but they were clobbered under regulations from Venice's city council. These regulations (detailed here) include a €200 fine for sitting down outside to consume food or drinks, except within designated areas. Can you imagine the mentality of the 'passer-by' who reported them to the police?

More than 4 million people in the UK are trapped in deep poverty, meaning their income is at least 50% below the official breadline, locking them into a weekly struggle to afford the most basic living essentials, an independent study has shown.

The Social Metrics Commission also said 7 million people, including 2.3 million children, were affected by what it termed persistent poverty, meaning that they were not only in poverty but had been for at least two of the previous three years.

Highlighting evidence of rising levels of hardship in recent years among children, larger families, lone parent households and pensioners, the commission urged the new prime minister, Boris Johnson, to take urgent action to tackle growing poverty.

A Missouri man cleaning out his mother's freezer last weekend made a horrifying discovery: a frozen human baby.

Adam Smith found the baby inside a box his mother had stored in the freezer for as long as he can remember, KMOV-TV reported.

"It still had skin, hair and everything; it was mummified," he told KSDK-TV. "After that, I freaked out, put it in the box and called police right away."

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have revealed findings from a study on the potential ways in which hackers could spread traffic chaos.

According to data gathered by researchers, travel delays might become the least of people's concerns in the near future, when tens of millions of self-driving cars are reportedly expected to be on American highways, according to the media report.

'Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences', assistant professor and study co-leader Peter Yunker of Georgia Tech's School of Physics said in a written statement about the research, cited by The Daily Mail.

Yunker and three co-authors simulated what a group of hacked autonomous cars could do to traffic in a place like Manhattan, where streets and avenues form a grid designed to reduce the potential for gridlock.

Fatal accidents and injured or sick people dying in ambulances stuck in gridlock are two potentially severe consequences of cyber-attacked vehicles connected to the Internet, according to the study.

To represent anything is to reduce and deform it, obviously, for even Leonardo's Mona Lisa is but a stick figure compared to the witty, voluptuous and redolent broad, whose repartees, smiles, jokes and burps, from moment to moment, can only increase her charm and terror, and that's why man never allowed himself to be engulfed by any medium, be it oil painting, music or literature. After the most satisfying page, he still looked up and walked outside. Traveling vast distances, Chekov discovered heaven in Ceylon and hell in Sakhalin, and Flaubert was only being reductive when he goofed, "The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy." He, too, had plenty of lust for the actual.

Well, a perpetual orgy is certainly here, but it has nothing to do with literature, or even literacy, and it's not voluntary. If pornography can be understood as a lurid usurpation of the real, then we're watching an endless pornographic movie. Most democratically, we're all trapped in this foul theater. An orgy of the virtual has taken over every aspect of our lives.

Pornography multiplies frequency, duration, angles, positions and sexual partners, an endless and eternal sexual buffet, except that none of it is really happening. Similarly, American democracy gives the appearance of boundless participation by all citizens, for they can't just vote in caucuses and elections, but cheer at conventions, march in protest, write letters to newspapers, comment on the internet and follow, blow by blow, the serial mud wrestling between opposing politicians. Pissed, they can freely curse Bush, Obama or Trump without fearing a midnight knock on the door. Alas, none of their "political activities" actually matters, for Americans don't influence their government's policies, much less decide them. It's all an elaborate spectacle to make each chump think he's somehow a player, in on the action, when he's actually all alone, in the dark, to beat his own meat, yet again.

He has railroaded, premasticated opinions on everything, but without the means to act on any of it. Only his impotence is real.

I moved out of Southern California in the summer of 1969. I was ten years old, and my parents were fleeing decadence and depravity in favor of the more wholesome Midwest.

Before our move, a story had circulated about some local (Newport Beach) high schoolers who had "gone on an LSD trip" and gotten caught by police. As I understood it, the teenagers had "taken LSD" and started leaping from rooftop to rooftop, "tripping" all over the neighborhood and waking people up to the sound of thundering hoofbeats overhead. At the time I wondered whether LSD conferred a miraculous leaping or flying ability, since the houses in Lido Sands, though rather tightly clustered, were mostly spaced perhaps eight or ten feet apart, which seemed like a long way to jump.

I vaguely recall this "LSD-fueled teenage midnight horsemen of the apocalypse" story having something to do with my parents' decision to move back to Wisconsin. Southern California circa 1969, a few years after the hippie movement had peaked and turned into a bad trip, didn't seem like a good place to send your kids to high school. (Little did my parents know that the 60s would hit Wisconsin high schools ten years late, putting me and my siblings directly in the path of the psychedelic hurricane.)

Years later, as an "experienced" (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) subversive teenage wannabe intellectual, I would read about the Manson murders and notice how convenient they had been for the Establishment. From the moment Charlie Manson's grinning, demonic face started leering from every front page and TV screen in America, the whole hippie-antiwar thing had seemed a whole lot scarier. I read the official version of the Manson myth, Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, and thought: This is too crazy to be true. None of the Wisconsin hippies I know are even remotely like these characters. Maybe it's something they add to the fluoride in the Southern California water.

An Afghan soldier has shot and killed two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar, officials say.

A spokesman for the Afghan military said on July 30 that the two soldiers were killed when a member of the Afghan National Army opened fire on troops inside a military base in the district of Shah Wali Kot the previous day.

The soldier who turned his gun on the Americans was wounded during the attack and is now in custody, said the spokesman, Ahmad Sadiq.

The U.S. military said on July 29 that two of its service members were killed in Afghanistan, but provided no details.

What may have been considered a prank by a group of middle-schoolers could have cost an art teacher her life. All of the students involved are just 12 and 13 years old, but school security said they were well aware their teacher had a serious allergy when it was used against her last school year.

"That could be attempted murder," a Columbus City Schools (CCS) security officer is heard telling Columbus Police officers in a body camera video. The call about the attack came from Starling K-8 school last November. On the video, the security officer is seen escorting police to the art teacher's door where signs stating "Banana Free Zone" are posted. Another sign instructs students to wash their hands if they've eaten a banana that day.