According to the article, the Aurora Australis has continued on its planned course (with the rescued passengers from the Russian ship). The stuck ships are a Chinese icebreaker and the original Russian ship. However, the Russian ship is not an icebreaker, and so the sensationalist headline is a bit wrong.

I am rather skeptical when it comes to the conclusions drawn from various studies in social sciences myself, but 18 months seems pretty quick for a follow up study. If you read the article (or the paper), you'll see that they first had recruiters judge the facebook profiles of candidates and then, 12 months later, followed up with the companies that hired students to gain information on their actual performance as perceived by the employer.

Clearly, you need to let a significant amount of time pass after them being hired to be able to get some data on their actual performance. A year seems quite reasonable hear, and that gives you a lower bound on the time it will take you to complete such a study. Giving them some extra time for study design, evaluating the results and publishing them (which includes a peer review phase), 18 months seems quite fast - they certainly did not waste any time!

What? cm is a perfectly good SI unit, and in fact seems to be the most reasonable ones for dealing with snow, since you'd most often not deal with more than a meter, and millimeter accuracy in measuring snow depth is illusory anyway.

Does it say which court order? Other comments indicate that they might just have interpreted the court order regarding the Pirate Bay a bit, um, widely.

"The world is a constantly changing place", the Google spokesman told AFP, "and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour."

In these circumstances that's a rather unfortunate sentence unless the spokesman is suggesting that the island just vanished.

This is about companies holding personal data of consumers. In the EU the legal point of view is in general that a person "owns" their personal information. They may entrust it to a company for some transaction, storage or whatever, but these rights granted to the company are limited, and can be revoked if there is no business relation anymore. Without the persons permission you would never even be allowed to store their personal data on your server! You have no inherent right to other peoples personal information.

That seems like a rather natural correlation: Presumably when there is a potential for a dangerous situation to arise, a two-officer vehicle would be dispatched. Concluding anything about the safety of one-officer vehicles vs. two-officer vehicles from this statistic would be on rather shaky ground.

I was also baffled that it isn't completely random US news.

The purpose of the Caps-Lock key is to remap it to Ctrl.

Why wait for someone to make it into a movie? If you are somewhat decent at writing and enjoy it, make a short story out of it.