The major U.S. investment bank acknowledged that a changing climate is linked to a raft of social and economic issues.

After previously declaring there was no economic rationale for Arctic oil and gas drilling, Goldman Sachs now says it will go a step further and refuse to finance new oil projects in the region, in part on environmental and social grounds.

In updated corporate environmental guidelines published Sunday, Goldman Sachs, one of America's "big-six" banks, said it "will decline any financing transaction that directly supports new upstream Arctic oil exploration or development. This includes but is not limited to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

The change comes after Goldman Sachs, earlier this month, said it "has not and would not expect to finance oil exploration" in oil-rich, but environmentally sensitive section of Alaska's North Slope area.

Imagine a building where drug-sniffing dogs roam the corridors, air-quality sensors alert officials if anyone is inhaling a controlled substance, using the bathroom is a privilege rather than a right, clothing is searched in case anyone is hiding contraband up their sleeves, and those who are caught breaking the rules could face life-derailing punishments.

You might be imagining a prison. In fact, I have just described a public school in Texas, where the authorities are so obsessed with stopping teenagers from vaping that they are perfectly willing to treat them like inmates.

That's the only conclusion one can reach from this eye-opening Texas Tribune article, which details the state's draconian efforts to crack down on the vaping scourge. This year, Texas raised the vaping age from 18 to 21, and schools are pulling out all the stops — including installing "vape-detecting" sensors in the hallways — to prevent underage usage. The Tribune reports:

Germany's police and its domestic security service, the BfV, are to be beefed up with 600 new staff members tasked specifically with tackling right-wing extremism, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has announced.

Unveiling his plan in Berlin on Tuesday, the minister warned that more than 12,000 potentially violent right-wing radicals are on the loose in Germany, adding that half of all politically motivated acts of violence in Germany are committed by such people.

Seehofer also decried the "ugly blood trail" left behind by right-wing extremists over the last couple of decades, specifically mentioning a series of murders committed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2001 and 2006. The minister also referred to the assassination of Walter Luebcke - a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, who actively supported her immigration policies - in June 2019 as well as a shooting attack in Halle in October, which left two people dead.

Pope Francis has abolished the obligation of secrecy for those who report having been sexually abused by a priest and for those who testify in a church trial or process having to do with clerical sexual abuse.

"The person who files the report, the person who alleges to have been harmed and the witnesses shall not be bound by any obligation of silence with regard to matters involving the case," the pope ordered in a new "Instruction On the Confidentiality of Legal Proceedings," published Dec. 17.

In an accompanying note, Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, said the change regarding the "pontifical secret" has nothing to do with the seal of the sacrament of confession.

"The absolute obligation to observe the sacramental seal," he said, "is an obligation imposed on the priest by reason of the position he holds in administering the sacrament of confession and not even the penitent can free him of it."

The instruction was published by the Vatican along with changes to the already-updated "Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela" ("Safeguarding the Sanctity of the Sacraments"), the 2001 document issued by St. John Paul II outlining procedures for the investigation and trial of any member of the clergy accused of sexually abusing a child or vulnerable adult or accused of acquiring, possessing or distributing child pornography.

In the first of the amendments, Pope Francis changed the definition of child pornography. Previously the subject was a person under the age of 14. The new description of the crime says, "The acquisition, possession or distribution by a cleric of pornographic images of minors under the age of 18, for purposes of sexual gratification, by whatever means or using whatever technology."

Some of the biggest technology firms in the United States have been accused in a lawsuit of complicity in the death and maiming of hundreds, if not thousands of African children who mine cobalt, a mineral vital to the production of the lithium-ion batteries in everything from smartphones to electric cars. The defendants named in the suit are Apple, Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla.

The lawsuit was filed Sunday in the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. by the non-profit organization International Rights Advocates, on behalf of 13 anonymous plaintiffs from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The complaint accuses the tech giants of "knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in Democratic Republic of Congo ('DRC') to mine cobalt."

The suit demands a trial by jury for the plaintiffs, who include maimed child miners and the families of others killed in the cobalt mines.

Human rights Lawyer Terry Collingsworth of International Rights Advocates told CBS News that his organization "traced the supply chain back from the mine where the children were either killed or maimed and have traced it back up to these companies."

The lawsuit calls for the companies to take responsibility for child miners in their supply chains, and change the way they source the metal.

"Congrats @travisscott on the premiere of #lookmomicanfly," Instagram influencer and artist Miquela wrote on one of her latest posts, apparently after attending the red carpet premiere for the rapper's new Netflix series. "I laughed, I cried, I almost fell out of your jet."

Miquela, who goes by @lilmiquela, has racked up 1.6 million followers on Instagram since she materialized out of thin air in 2016. As soon as she appeared, her posts were met with intrigue and questions about her robot-like appearance.

The truth is that despite Miquela being dubbed one of the 25 most influential people on the internet by Time magazine in 2018, she isn't really an influencer, a musician, or a model. She can't be, because she's a digital image.


The influencer market is huge and lucrative. According to a study by InfluencerDB, $5 billion was spent on Instagram influencer marketing in 2018, and the trend only continues to rise. The report estimated that 39% of all of Instagram's accounts are run by influencers. Considering there may be a billion active users on the platform, that's a lot of influencers to compete with.

So it makes sense that with the rise in both quality and accessibility of 3D imaging and computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology, digital figures would come for a piece of the action.

Spain's public broadcaster has inadvertently carried an interview with the exiled Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont after hackers hijacked its online news channel and substituted its content for that of Russia's state-backed RT network.


The hack, which happened last Thursday, meant Spanish TV's +24 channel showed RT's interview between Puigdemont and the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa.

In the interview - one of RT's series Conversation with Correa - Puigdemont again insisted "there's no solution to the Catalan problem that doesn't involve independence".

For the first time since the media launched the Ukraine Hoax, support for impeachment is underwater in the average of all the polls.

Although support for impeachment never went over 50 percent, a plurality in favor of impeaching did stubbornly hold the lead in polling averages — at least, until Monday, the start of the week when the Democrat-controlled U.S. House is expected to pass two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.

One week ago, according to the RealClearPolitics poll of polls, 48 percent of those polled supported the impeachment and removal of Trump, while 45 percent were opposed. As of today, though, those numbers have flipped around: 46.7 percent support impeachment, while a plurality of 47.3 percent are opposed.

To the surprise of no one who watched the impeachment hearings, it was precisely those hearings that killed support for impeachment. Once the hearings launched, support began to face the pull of gravity that comes with having no evidence to back up your wild accusations.

These are the ancient Silk Roads the Taliban will never be able to reach

This is arguably the ultimate road trip on earth. Marco Polo did it. All the legendary Silk Road explorers did it. Traveling the Pamir Highway back to back, as a harsh winter approaches, able to appreciate it in full, in silence and solitude, offers not only a historical plunge into the intricacies of the ancient Silk Road but a glimpse of what the future may bring in the form of the New Silk Roads.

This is a trip steeped in magic ancient history. Tajiks trace their roots back to tribes of Sogdians, Bactrians and Parthians. Indo-Iranians lived in Bactria ("a country of a thousand towns") and Sogdiana from the 6-7^th centuries BC to the 8^th century AD. Tajiks make up 80% of the republic's population, very proud of their Persian cultural heritage, and kin to Tajik-speaking peoples in northern Afghanistan and the region around Tashkurgan in Xinjiang.

Maajid Nawaz is a British political commentator and self-described "Muslim reformer" who runs Quilliam, a prominent anti-extremist think thank in the UK. He used to be a member of the extremist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, until he was imprisoned in Egypt and subsequently became an anti-radicalization activist. He has very little standing in the Muslim community in Britain. A reason for this is, in part, because his think tank made a financial deal with the anti-Muslim extremist Tommy Robinson; "I use you, you use me," Robinson said of the arrangement.

In 2010 he compiled a secret list of nonviolent Muslims - including well-known Muslim human rights activists - and accused them of sharing the ideology of terrorists, and submitted the report to the Conservative government. He has worked closely with torture apologists Sam Harris and Douglas Murray, and has been a vocal advocate of the Prevent strategy, a government counter-extremism strategy which has been condemned by the National Union of Teachers for encouraging surveillance of Muslim schoolchildren. Despite this, he is treated as a serious and credible voice in the UK; he is a weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, has his own radio show on LBC and has written for a wide range of mainstream British news outlets.