Ethiopia, in the midst of a severe drought, could run out of food by May, triggering another deadly famine. Can these people ever catch a friggin break??? Help them out, if you can.

At long last, Cool Pope “Francis” (a pseudonym) has released his much-anticipated encyclical on climate change. **SPOILER ALERT**: He’s against it. What does this mean?

The water wars that will, in short order, come to consume our nation and the world are growing in intensity. In the earthquake-and-drought cocktail that is California, humans and fish are already locked in a pitched battle for survival.

The current UN food ration for hundreds of thousands of African refugees is just 850 calories per day—fewer calories than there are in five TGI Friday's mozzarella sticks.

Eight people died on Monday when a building in Gyeongju, South Korea, collapsed. At least 65 more were injured.

Last week, a chemical company poisoned a major West Virginia water supply so thoroughly that FEMA has been dispatched to clean things up.

On this New Year's Day in America, 2014, the nation's typists ("thought leaders") are required to use their long-dormant psychic abilities to designate the next 12 months as the Year of Something or Other, whether that be "accidental mass suicide" or "wearable automobiles" or "raccoon-sized talking spiders." Such predictions will generally be wrong, yet there is also the remote possibility that the simple act of making a prediction will cause it to happen, no matter how ridiculous or vile.

A Boeing 737 has crashed in the Russian city of Kazan, killing all 50 people on board.

Four days ago, areas of the Philippines were destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest storms ever recorded. The storm slammed into Tacloban, a city of 220,000 in the central Philippines. Evacuation has finally begun, but many residents remain in the region without food, clean water or shelter—all were destroyed by the typhoon.

Though the official death toll from Typhoon Haiyan now stands at 1,563, officials in the Philippines believe as many as 10,000 people were killed in the city of Tacloban alone. The typhoon, which struck the Philippines on Friday, is now being called the largest storm surge in modern history.

Reports from Tacloban suggest that survivors, desperately trying to stay alive in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, have begun raiding and grabbing supplies wherever possible. Amidst reports of wide-spread looting, President Benigno Aquino III is reportedly considering declaring a state of emergency in the city of Tacloban.

The devastation of Typhoon Haiyan became clearer Sunday morning, with officials believing one of the most powerful storms ever recorded left a death toll that exceeds 10,000.

The Philippines are reeling after a massive typhoon produced waves more than 40 feet high on Friday and devastated several islands. Rescue workers have counted 1000 dead, with officials hoping that mass evacuations helped avoid more human loss.

Gawker's Max Rivlin-Nadler goes deep on Americorps for The Nation: "AmeriCorps is at once a real opportunity and a symptom of austerity. Its members are either being offered a pathway to a career—or they’re being used to lower the cost of social services for a government devoted to budget-cutting. Or, more likely, both."

A newly released document, obtained by journalist Eric Schlosser, details that a nuclear bomb 260 times as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima almost detonated in North Carolina, when a B-52 bomber crashed in 1961.

Up in the High Sierra of Yosemite National Park today, a monstrous wildfire is racing through 200 square miles of dense piney forest. The "Rim Fire" is only one of about fifty major wildfires across the American West today, but everyone has at least heard of the majestic Yosemite Valley with its glacier-carved Half Dome and summer traffic jams of vacationers seeking waterfalls and hamburgers, so this is our official Natural Disaster of the week.

A state of emergency has been declared in San Francisco as a wildfire 150 miles away threatens both power and water supplies to the city.

Lava gushed from a volcano in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia early Saturday morning, killing six residents of a sleeping beach village.

Carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are at a three million year high. Scientists tell us that global warming is leading to "the worst of all possible worlds." And don't imagine this is all your grandchildren's problem. Doom is coming soon. So soon.

When the whole global economy teetered on the edge of failure a few years ago— remember that?— one of the reasons was that insurers had insured lots of things that they could not, in fact, afford to pay for, when the bill came due. Now, they're marching down that path once again.