Similarly, in other countries where the social network first gained purchase, user numbers dropped. As Business Insider notes:

It also lost 1.52 million users in Canada, dropping to 16.6 million -- that's an 8% drop -- and 100,000 each in the U.K., Norway, and Russia. Total Facebook users were still up 1.7% thanks to growth in countries where the service got popular later, like Mexico and Brazil.

Both April and May saw Facebook's growth slowing, prompting questions as to whether the online leviathan might actually reach a saturation point. According to Inside Facebook, once 50 percent usage is reached in a given country, growth tends to stop (suggesting, perhaps, that Facebook can take over just half the world).

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The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.

U.S. attacks in Yemen are nothing new. A diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks in last December's cache dump revealed that Yemen had been covering up U.S. drone strikes targeting al-Qaida suspects within Yemeni borders. According to the Times, these covert air strikes were paused for most of the past year, owing to "concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths." Attacks resumed in recent days, as the Times reports:

American jets killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel Qaeda operative, and several other militant suspects in a strike in southern Yemen. According to witnesses, four civilians were also killed in the airstrike. Weeks earlier, drone aircraft fired missiles aimed at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who the United States government has tried to kill for more than a year. Mr. Awlaki survived.

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Facebook may have just surpassed itself in the creep-stakes. On Tuesday, security firm Sophos issued an alert that Facebook has been activating facial recognition technology on accounts without fully informing users.

In December the social media leviathan announced the technology, which is designed to learn  faces as they are tagged in photos. The site then makes tagging suggestions if it recognizes your face on your friends' photos in the future. Users are by default opted in to the Tag Suggestion tool and have to choose to opt out. The technology is not new -- and has been in the U.S. for months -- but the fact that it has been gradually rolled out to accounts across the world for months without users getting full warning has perturbed critics.

According to I.T. news site the Register, Facebook responded to Sophos' warning, admitting:

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We put that question and others to Dr. Jonathan Bernstein, a political scientist and author of "A Plain Blog About Politics":

First, could you explain for the lay person a little bit about how the confirmation process actually works, and how it's tripped up appointees? Why is it that so many positions continue to lay vacant?

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On Saturday, Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh departed the country for Saudi Arabia to be treated for injuries incurred during an attack on his presidential palace; powers were transferred to his vice president. Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the street Sunday to celebrate Saleh's departure after 33 years of ruling: they chanted celebratory chants and held signs hailing a "New Yemen," the Guardian reported. But Yemeni government officials are already promising Saleh's return within days.

As Time's Jeb Boone reports from Yemen's capital city, Sana'a:

Yemeni officials are now insisting that Saleh's visit to Riyadh is only a temporary one and he will return once he is healthy enough to resume work. "The president will return to Sana'a after he has recovered from his medical procedures. There is no doubt in this," said one Yemeni government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

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The river basin is currently grappling with historic levels of flooding, from Missouri down through the Gulf. The Mississippi crested at a near-historic height of 48 feet in Tennessee on Tuesday. Yesterday morning it rose to 58 feet in Natchez, Miss. -- a record -- and appears likely to swell to 64-feet before topping out. By the time the crest reaches Red River Landing in northern Louisiana, probably on May 22, it could eclipse previous records there by more than 3 feet, according to Jeff Masters at Weather Underground. Red River is significant, because it's the site of a major floodgate system called the Old River Control Structure that helps keep the Mississippi on its current course. If the ORCS fails in the face of this month's floods, some worry it could cause epochal shift in the path of the river -- one that would irrevocably alter the face of Louisiana.

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Maybe you've already encountered the literature: pamphlets, subway ads, billboards on the side of the highway. "Judgment Day is coming" reads one billboard, which features a man praying in silhouette against a sunset backdrop. These are the works of a peculiar breed of Christian activists who've taken to the road to preach their belief in the fast-approaching End of Days. The self-appointed harbingers are not tied to any particular church -- they claim organized religion has been corrupted by the devil -- but rather to Internet- and radio-based ministries. And their lone mission is to tell anyone and everyone that the end of days is May 21. That's when, they insist, God's true believers will be lifted into heaven and saved, during a biblical event widely referred to as the Rapture.

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The U.N. attributes the additional billions in part to faster-than-expected growth in Africa -- whose population could triple in the next 90 years -- even as fertility rates in the developed world continue to decline. The figures raise questions once more about the sustainability of such a massive population growth.

English journalist Fred Pearce argues in his recent "The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future" that the world's population is peaking -- and that the "population bomb"  has been defused. (He argued the merits of his theory in an interview with Salon last April.) And despite the U.N.'s new theories, Pearce is sticking by his thesis. We spoke to him by phone Wednesday afternoon.

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The most likely choice to succeed bin Laden is Ayman al-Zawahiri, longtime al-Qaida second in command. The Egyptian surgeon is often considered the "real mastermind" behind al-Qaida, the man who urged bin Laden to adopt suicide attacks against Western targets. A 2009 State Department report stated that bin Laden had been effectively rendered a figurehead by years in hiding, and that Zawahiri -- though also in hiding since Sept. 11 -- emerged as the network's "strategic and operational planner." Zawahiri's whereabouts remain unknown, but in the days following bin Laden's death, he's already assumed the mantle of world's most wanted terrorist -- with a $25 million bounty on his head.

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Smears claiming Barack Obama doesn't have a birth certificate aren't actually about that piece of paper -- they're about manipulating people into thinking Barack Obama is not an American citizen. The truth is, Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii in 1961, a native citizen of the United States. Next time someone talks about Barack's birth certificate, make sure they see this page.

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The BP oil spill flushed upwards of 4 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico between April and July, 2010. But by August, the once-vast sheen of rust-colored muck had mostly disappeared from the ocean's surface. Official reports claim that marine life is returning to normal.

According to an optimistic Weekly Standard:

If there was an unexpected hero to the story, it was Mother Nature...The Gulf oil spill is, indeed, much less of a calamity than most people expected. Said one environmental scientist in late July: "Mother Nature is doing what she is supposed to be doing and we're losing most of [the spilled oil] to microbial degradation in the open ocean."

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Under the newly issued criteria, Alzheimer's classification now exists as a spectrum, where dementia marks the acute, terminal stage of the disease. A second, less severe stage now included under the Alzheimer's umbrella is a condition called Mild Cognitive Impairment -- a disease that sometimes, but not always, signals Alzheimer's. Finally, at the earliest stage of the disease is something called the pre-clinical phase. During this phase, biological markers could signify a nascent presence of the disease, even though no outward symptoms exist.

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But does this actually mean anything? After all, since 1955, a multiplicity of family types has proliferated, with many different earning situations. Does "family of four" mean anything like what it meant back then?

In 1955 "family of four" described a single-earner nuclear unit: a married man and woman with two children.

"We're certainly more heterogeneous these days," New York University's Wayne Professor of Taxation, Daniel Shaviro, told Salon.

Yet, look to the footnotes of the Census Bureau information, and you will note that despite demographic changes, a "family of four" today still means the very same thing it did over 60 years ago: Mommy, Daddy and two kids.

"All calculations are for a married couple and income is assumed to be earned by one spouse," the Tax Policy Center website notes.

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This has prompted a barrage of questions about the possible consequences of the continuing crisis. We turned to  Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofit organization focused on nuclear security issues, to understand the severity of the current situation, and potential end-game scenarios in Japan.

I think it alarmed a lot of people that now suddenly the Japanese government is saying the nuclear crisis is on par with Chernobyl. Is that characterization accurate?

I think the Japanese authorities finally were forced to publicly recognize the severity of this disaster. They were trying to keep the public calm, to preserve some credibility for the nuclear power industry, so they tried to use reassuring language in their statements, and were hesitant to compare what was going on at Fukushima to Chernobyl. And, of course, it's not Chernobyl. It's different.

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Salon talked to Stephen Frantz, director of the Reed College Research Reactor, about the threat.

What does radiation in food do to people?

When you ingest radioactive material, as the material decays, some of the radiation will hit the cells in your body and perhaps do damage and increase the chances of cancer -- if there's a sufficient amount of materials. "Radioactive" does not mean it's deadly or dangerous. We've been eating radioactive materials all our throughout human history. It's the levels you have to worry about.

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The reports of violence have triggered a strong U.S. response. Gen. David Petraeus said Sunday that Jones' actions have compromised U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Senate leaders on both sides of the aisle have suggested that formal action be taken against Jones. 

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Since nearly every state has long offered 26 weeks of coverage, the move makes Michigan one of America's stingiest states when it comes to helping the unemployed. But when you look at the whole picture -- including the amount of money recipients are eligible for, which varies widely by state -- it isn't actually the stingiest. Several states offer far less to recipients than the $362 per week maximum that Michigan offers its laid-off workers. (Thus, an unemployed worker in Michigan receiving the top amount can collect a total of $7,240 over the 20 weeks of coverage that the state guarantees.)

Here, then, is a list of the five least generous states in America when it comes to aiding the jobless:

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Still, we wondered, just how big is the men's rights movement?

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University and author of such books as "Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776-1990" and "Manhood in America: A Cultural History." We spoke to Kimmel today about the men's rights movement -- its origins, central tenets and current role in the debate over American gender roles.

So what's the background behind the men's rights movement?

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