June 18, 2013: Morning
By The Morning News
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- After leaking more files, Snowden seems to have plenty more to give, and may continue pegging releases to news events.
- Cosmopolitan magazine asks Snowden what message he'd like to leak to his girlfriend.
- Seventy percent of America’s intelligence budget now goes to private contractors; half a million of them hold top-secret security clearances.
- Reportedly, the Pentagon's highest paid officials are the football coaches at Army, Navy, and Air Force.
- U.S. Navy no longer demands communication to be in uppercase letters.
- Norwegians love particularly boring reality TV; programmers try to recreate the success of Train Ride to Bergen.
- Warner Bros. aggressively markets Man of Steel to Christian pastors, providing sermon notes and discussion guides.
- Related: Memorable moments from Superman's 75-year history, like when he defeated illiteracy.
- Very good car chases created with toy cars and stop-motion animation.
- Tens of thousands gather in Brazil's biggest cities, protesting everything from stadium projects to last week's police crackdown.
- Pictures of graduation ceremonies in Atlanta, Kiev, Annapolis, Afghanistan, New Haven.
- See also: Ghosts of shopping past—pictures of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores.
- How ads for Kraft salad dressing—"the least sexy of foodstuffs"—capitalize on the female gaze.
- Scientist tastes billion-year-old water "from time to time" and describes it as orange, brackish, syrupy.
- Jonathan Franzen on the life of birds in Europe, where "hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement."
- Science behind why it's possible to walk on lava, though it remains a very bad idea.
- Related: Report on what it’s like to slide down a volcano on a piece of sheet metal at 55 mph.
