The coronavirus pandemic has taken a harsh toll on the mental health of young Americans, according to a new poll that finds adults under 35 especially likely to report negative feelings or experience physical or emotional symptoms associated with stress and anxiety. A majority of Americans ages 18 through 34 — 56% — say they have at least sometimes felt isolated in the past month, compared with about 4 in 10 older Americans, according to the latest COVID Response Tracking Study conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Twenty-five percent of young adults rate their mental health as fair or poor, compared with 13% of older adults, while 56% of older adults say their mental health is excellent or very good, compared with just 39% of young adults.

A federal appeals court has upheld a law denying voting rights to former felons in Florida if they have not paid off their court fees, even if they cannot afford to. Opponents of the law argue it creates a “pay to vote” system akin to the poll taxes outlawed in the 24th constitutional amendment. But in a 6-4 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that the requirement is not a tax and is constitutional. Like in many states, felons are not able to vote in Florida, which is considered a crucial swing state in the upcoming 2020 election. But in 2018, the people of Florida voted in a referendum to amend the state constitution and restore voting rights to former felons. Since then at least 85,000 people have applied to have their voting rights reinstated. Advocates say the total number of people whose rights are affected by the case is about 750,000. In May 2019, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 7066. The legislation only restores voting rights to former felons who complete all “terms of service,” which are defined to include paying off all financial obligations. These obligations include court fees, fines, and restitution orders that can run into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Some applicants then sued. They won an initial victory when a district court issued a preliminary injunction. On Friday, the 11th Circuit overruled that decision. In Florida, there are virtually no exemptions for people unable to pay court fees. Even hiring a public defender, a constitutionally-required service set aside for people without means, comes with a $50 application fee. In one county, the fees for each defendant who is represented by a public defender total at least $700.

A girls’ night at the Georgetown home of a prominent journalist, a lobbying push for soft-focus features in glossy magazines, a professional makeup artist and invitations to awards dinners and prestige panels. The smorgasbord that expensive consultants laid out for Seema Verma, President Trump’s Medicare chief and a new arrival in town, proved to be enticing. The tab — $6 million in less than two years — fell to the federal taxpayer. A yearlong investigation by congressional Democrats of Ms. Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, exposed not only a shadow operation to polish Ms. Verma’s personal brand but also the underside of life in Washington, where the personal and the professional often blend into a mélange of questionable interactions. Democrats said the report expanded on the findings of an audit in July by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services that criticized Ms. Verma’s use of outside consultants to perform “inherently governmental functions,” including strategic communications. Ms. Verma runs an agency with a $1 trillion budget and 4,000 federal employees, overseeing federal health care programs used by 145 million poor and older Americans. The report released on Thursday outlined in detail the efforts of a team of handpicked Republican consultants paid by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as C.M.S., to work on Ms. Verma’s personal image, obtain profiles and coverage from friendly reporters, escort her during travel, write opinion articles and even draft her Twitter posts. One of the consultants, Marcus Barlow, had served as Ms. Verma’s spokesman when she ran a consulting firm in Indiana. But the White House, objecting to Mr. Barlow’s disparaging statements about Mr. Trump during his election campaign, reportedly blocked him from the C.M.S. communications director post, the investigation found. So Ms. Verma hired Mr. Barlow on a contract that paid him for full-time work at a rate more than double the $179,700 annual salary he would have been paid as a federal employee.

We’ve heard a lot about the irreparable toll that the stress of the Covid-19 pandemic will take on our brains, but not everyone is pessimistic about the long-term effects. In fact, Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman says all this tumult may be good for our brains. The host of PBS’s The Brain, scientific adviser of the HBO series Westworld, and author of several books on neuroscience has recently published a new one. Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain is all about the extraordinary adaptability of that skull-encased, three-pound, jellylike mass called the human brain. In a year that has surely tested the limits of our adaptive abilities, Elemental spoke with Eagleman about what’s going on in his head and ours, cognitively speaking.

BuzzFeed News can reveal that in at least one instance during the summer of 2016, Thiel hosted a dinner with one of the most influential and vocal white nationalists in modern-day America — a man who has called for the creation of a white ethnostate and played a key role in an effort to mainstream white nationalism as the “alt-right.” And then Thiel emailed the next day to say how much he’d enjoyed his company. Among those on the racist right, Thiel’s outreach raised hopes that his financial bet on Trump would extend into the ascendant alt-right movement, which despite its prominence was a collection of small and often cash-strapped organizations. One avowed white nationalist privately speculated that Thiel’s money and influence could have made him “our George Soros.”

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried. "To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly." Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

Landlords can set special Alexa commands that will let their residents pay rent, submit maintenance requests, and manage other things that normally come with the territory of renting an apartment or other dwelling. And of course, it will still function as a regular smart speaker — dim the lights, get a weather report, all that jazz. Landlords can also remotely reset the device whenever someone moves out to give the device a clean slate for the next person. Amazon claims in its press release that it’s taken the steps necessary to protect the privacy of residents. There’s just one issue that Amazon doesn’t address in its announcement: the Drop In feature on Amazon Echo devices. Drop In allows one Echo user to connect to another Echo user’s device, as long as that user has granted them permission. They don’t even need to be in the same household. As long as both devices are connected to the internet, Drop In functions like a Zoom call. With this feature enabled, you will be able to hear anything within the range of the device, see anything on the other side, in the case of an Echo Show, and also transmit your voice or video feed to the other device.

Langan figured a forced shutdown by the state would qualify. He filed his claim the week that the stay-at-home order came down, for both the loss of income and his spoiled food order, rendered useless by the lack of customers. The claim was denied. “In the policy, there’s a clause about a global crisis,” Langan says. “I said, ‘I didn’t have to close down for a global crisis, I closed because my governor told me to close down.’” This did not move the insurance company. It reopened the claim as a courtesy, but for months, Langan has kept calling, explaining himself to different low-level customer service reps, leaving messages. “They have done nothing but ignore me,” he says. Langan’s troubles are not isolated. Hundreds of thousands of small-business owners have been denied business interruption insurance during the pandemic, despite the claims seemingly being tailor-made for the circumstances. In most cases, obscure language, unknown to the business owners or even the insurance brokers who wrote the policies, has been enough of a fig leaf for insurers to deny claims. In several cases, though there was no exclusion in the policy for a pandemic, virus, or global crisis, the insurance companies denied the claims anyway.

It is true, as Chang notes, that throughout much of the country, state unemployment systems were intentionally broken or neglected in order to discourage their use. But that is not really the case in New York, a high-tax, ostensibly high-service state run for many years now by conventional liberal Democrats. Here, it didn’t work because none of those conventional liberal Democrats have invested enough time and energy and care into making sure the machinery of government simply works.

Thanks to a growing movement against policing, this summer has been largely defined by its uprisings. Across the United States, people have taken to the streets to uplift the names and lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. Local and federal governments have not held back in their attempts to quell dissent. As a result, police have blinded people, federal agents have detained them, and numerous protesters have been hospitalized. Many photos of protests share one key feature: a thick, foreboding cloud of tear gas hanging over the crowd. Tear gas, classified by the United Nations as a chemical weapon, is so common that people often head to protests with gas masks or homemade solutions like a bandana soaked in water. But while tear gas's immediate effects are unpleasant enough — including crying, running noses, and vomiting — some protesters say it has damaged their reproductive health. In many anecdotal cases, protesters linked tear gas to early or otherwise unusual periods. Ray, who declined to provide their last name, tells Mic that they had their first experience with tear gas while protesting earlier this year in downtown Minneapolis. While marching, someone threw a bottle of water towards police, who responded by tear-gassing the entire crowd. "Probably two days later, I got my period — about two weeks early. My next period came four weeks later," Ray says. The full effects of tear gas on reproductive health, specifically for people with uteruses, are not fully known. This is partially because it can be difficult to study, and some argue that the stress of protesting itself can trigger a number of physical responses, including irregular periods. However, Dr. Zoey Thill, a family physician and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Mic in an email that "the usual 'stress response' of the menstrual cycle is for things to sort of 'shut down'. Ovulation can be delayed or can stop altogether. The complaints I’m hearing about with regard to tear gas exposure are of early periods, prolonged periods, or multiple periods in a month. These complaints can’t be explained by stress alone, and may be related to exposure to tear gas."

Scientists have been warning of the growing threat of climate change, and now those projections are a reality.

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An incident involving Future Farmers of America leader spurred a backlash and revealed a long history of inequity.

"I've always loved animals, fought those that abused animals and will continue to do so. In any event, have a great convention," Arpaio said.

More recently, Trump has moved to circumvent a decades-old arms-control pact in order to sell weaponized drones to the Saudis and to other countries in the region, from Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power. Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.

Democracy relies on an informed public responding to real-life facts. But a growing number of Americans are untethered from reality.

In the therapeutic context, it is rarely questioned why the traumatizing work of the military and law enforcement exists in the first place.

Amazon has picked up an eight-episode scripted series starring Nicolas Cage as Joe Exotic, the Oklahoma big-cat park owner whose story captivated a coronavirus-stricken nation in Tiger King. It will be the first television role of Cage's five-decade acting career. Cage's rep confirmed his role back in May but declined to go into detail about the show. Amazon Studios, which will produce the series, confirmed the pickup on Thursday. The series is based on the Texas Monthly magazine article Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild, by Leif Reigstad, and comes from Imagine Entertainment and CBS TV Studios. (Disclosure: ViacomCBS is CNET's parent company.) Cage, 56, won the best actor Academy Award for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas. His other films include Adaptation, Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Face/Off and the Ghost Rider and National Treasure films. His quirky persona and looks, as well as his unusual film choices, make him an apparent natural to play Joe Exotic, who's now serving a 22-year prison sentence in Texas. Cage's name often came up in dream casting articles for a scripted Joe Exotic story -- including CNET's version. The idea of Cage playing the troubled zoo owner captured fans' imaginations almost from the start. Late-night host Jimmy Fallon even donned a mullet and flashy shirt to mimic Cage mimicking Joe Exotic -- and it's pretty perfect. Dan Lagana, whose quirky Netflix mockumentary American Vandal was a Netflix hit in 2017, will serve as showrunner. After the March debut of Netflix's docuseries, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, the life and times of Joe Exotic turned into a hot Hollywood property. Netflix added an aftershow episode hosted by Joel McHale, producer Rick Kirkham offered a pay-per-view special, the Investigation Discovery network is planning a series, and there's even another miniseries. NBC Universal has optioned a popular podcast about Joe Exotic and has cast Saturday Night Live comedian Kate McKinnon as Joe's nemesis, animal activist Carole Baskin. And Baskin has now been cast on the new season of ABC's Dancing With the Stars, where her first song will be -- duh -- Survivor's 1982 hit, Eye of the Tiger.

The Treasury Department mysteriously started withholding parts of payments meant to cover medical services for FDNY members being treated by the department's World Trade Center Health Program, documents obtained by The Daily News revealed.