Tag: Luke Ryan

Most people in the United States love dogs. They’re easy to love since they love you right back; when you come home they leap with joy just at the sight of you. And then you see people out and about with service dogs — wait, these people get to hang out with their dogs all […]

A firefighter in South Korea is part of an effort to save this woman’s life as she teeters on the railing, contemplating whether or not to jump and end her life. His solution may be a little unorthodox, but it’s hard to fault the guy for saving a woman’s life. While suicide is a widespread […]

Over 116,000 acres of California has gone up in flames, culminating in six raging wildfires and countless smaller ones that have burned well over 505,000 acres thus far. The largest of which is in Ventura County, where authorities found the body of 70-year-old Virginia Pesola, who died from “blunt force injuries with terminal smoke inhalation and […]

Approval ratings haven’t been around since 1776, they were developed by George Horace Gallup in the late 1930s. It is simply a regular poll that asks simple questions — not all of which are designed for the presidency. And while the Gallup Poll was the first system used to rate presidents by percentage, it was […]

As Congress just passed a bill, stopping the government shutdown from happening just one day shy of their deadline, everyone seems to be talking about the implications should another government shutdown actually occur. The last such shutdown happened in 2013, and though they passed a bill to pay military personnel that year, that particular bill […]

So I’ve done a couple of these that could be considered a bit of a stretch — the last one being Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” I included it because I really enjoy fiction that parallel’s an author’s personal experiences, be it in combat against man or combat against nature. There are just details and moments […]

The Rohingya — A lot of wars have been fought for so long that people just sort of forget about them. There’s a certain tug on the heartstrings when you hear about strangers in foreign lands experiencing impossible hardships, but that quickly fades once you start to hear the “same news” over and over. Alternate […]

The Naf River is a 39 mile long river that runs down the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar/Burma. It has recently been the last step in reaching the refugee camps for the Rohingya as they flee the documented atrocities in Burma, described as “textbook ethnic cleansing.” In their desperation, many Rohingya have tried to cross […]

Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) are named as such because they don’t tend to be high on the world’s priorities list. The World Health Organization (WHO), the CDC and other infectious disease experts around the world disagree on the specifics of what does and does not belong to the list of NTDs, but according to WHO […]

December 6, 1884: the largest piece of aluminum in history up to that point is placed onto the Washington Monument, marking its completion. It wouldn’t be open to the public until October, four years later, but it was at this time that construction was finished. At the time of its completion it was the tallest […]

Bangladesh/Myanmar Border — Recently, Bangladesh began a $280 million plan to relocate the massive influx of Rohingya refugees to an island that Amnesty International’s South Asia Director, Biraj Patnaik, has described as “uninhabitable.” He said pushing them out that way would be a “terrible mistake” as it is quite the distance from the other camps […]

Naf River, Bangladesh — Bodies turn up all the time on the Naf River, the water dividing the Burmese countryside from Bangladesh. Thousands of Rohingya have been fleeing the violence that has been described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Fleeing with just their […]