Perhaps not specifically what you're looking for, but I've always found Wikipedia's current events portal to be a good source for info on major events.
> I run my own mail server, create a unique address for each vendor and ban the address if it is abused
I do the same and it's immensely useful!
I find it's also a great indicator of how well that vendor protects my info... if there's a sudden surge of spam to an address only that vendor knows, there's a chance they leaked/sold my info and I know it's time to change passwords and/or reassess my relationship with the vendor.
It's hard to tell from images available online, but it may have been anthracite or bituminous coal, which are both surprisingly hard - more like a brittle rock than, say, the charcoal you'd use in a BBQ.
For those who are required (or prefer) to use a Chromium-based browser, you might want to give ungoogled-chromium [0] a shot.
I switched recently based on a recommendation from a HN reader, and so far it has been a surprisingly seamless transition. I have yet to encounter any issues aside from being unable to install extensions directly from the Chrome Web Store, which was easily remedied by first installing the chromium-web-store extension [1].
My biggest gripe is that there are no 'official' binaries, so you'd either have to build your own or trust the user-submitted builds, though apparently the project owner is currently working on setting up an official build server [2].
Would you please elaborate on this?