This April, Baltimore saw five homicides. That is the fewest of any month since 1970, when the city began tracking monthly homicide numbers. In the first six months of the year, homicides were down 22% compared to 2024, and non-fatal shootings were down 19%. This is the latest in a string of historic declines in violent crime. In 2024, homicides dropped 23% from 2023 numbers, and non-fatal shootings dropped 34%. In 2023, the city also saw record-breaking decreases. What has made Baltimore — which President Trump and other conservatives deride as a “filthy” Democrat-controlled “slum” — so successful in making its streets safer? Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), who was first elected in 2020, has brought the city’s homicide rate down by treating violent crime as a public health crisis. That means treating violent crime as a symptom of multiple factors, including racism, poverty, and past violence. Addressing violent crime as a public health issue involves going beyond arresting people after violence is committed and taking proactive and preventative measures.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions. But farmers complained — in words that echo today's headlines — that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn't want to do, and that the end of the Bracero Program meant that crops would rot in the fields. Wirtz cited this labor shortage and a lack of summer jobs for high schoolers as reason enough for the program. But he didn't want just any band geek or nerd — he wanted jocks.

‘A well-intended moment, it clearly went badly wrong and never should have happened.’ Clergy in the Archdiocese of Denver are divided over the handling of a controversial “blood oath” ceremony involving a vice rector and seminarians during a ski trip last year. A group of seminarians studying at Denver’s St. John Vianney Theological Seminary were taken on the trip in January 2024 by then-vice rector of the seminary, Fr. John Nepil, during which they were woken in the middle of the night and invited individually to swear a “blood oath” in a ceremony involving a dagger and a man in a yeti costume.

Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok have exploded in popularity as AI becomes mainstream. These tools don’t have the ability to make new scientific discoveries on their own, but billionaires are convinced that AI is on the cusp of doing just that. And the latest episode of the All-In podcast helps explain why these guys think AI is extremely close to revolutionizing scientific knowledge. Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI’s Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews. “I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”

Overall, this is the group of dinosaurs in which bird-like traits such as feathered wings began to appear, and in which flight evolved at least twice, and possibly up to five times.

It's easy! Choose an East Bay tale from an old newspaper. Turn that into a tiny model. Win respect — and maybe prizes too!

Sen. Ron Johnson’s hearing was a dangerous beachhead from which the movement stands to make unprecedented inroads into public health policy.

Hint: It’s not because they didn’t go on Joe Rogan.

A federal judge in Texas removed a Biden-era finalized rule by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would have removed medical debt from credit reports.U.S.

Marmots - commonplace and typically unremarkable - had rarely caught the attention of hobbyist photographer Taylor Borth until she discovered one so rotund in a park in Kamloops, B.C., it forced her to stop in her tracks. “As I was rounding the corner of a pond, I gasped, because I could see this mega-fat marmot sitting there, and I just couldn’t help but take a picture,” she says.

Exclusive: For roughly 100 days, Thomas says he faced harsh detention conditions, despite agreeing to deportation

In Gaza, aid is currently distributed to civilians through two systems: a militarised system operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), referred to here as the ‘GHF model’, and a civilian system composed of UN agencies, other international aid organisations, local government, and civilian security, referred to here as the ‘UN model’. The GHF is a US- and Israeli- backed organisation founded in the US in February 2025. Its background and operations remain unclear. The civilian aid system in Gaza has been systematically targeted and dismantled by Israel since October 2023, and today it approaches the point of collapse.

In Thailand, many young people mix traditional Buddhist beliefs with modern pop culture by incorporating new symbols and rituals into their faith.

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash. (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.) Sometime near the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, one current and one former employee at the agency told me. The biscuits, which cram in the nutritional needs of a child under 5, are a stopgap measure, often used in scenarios where people have lost their homes in a natural disaster or fled a war faster than aid groups could set up a kitchen to receive them. They were stored in a Dubai warehouse and intended to go to the children this year.

ICE attorneys fighting to deport immigrants are able to obscure their identities — no masks required.

ProPublica has obtained the blueprint for the Trump administration’s unprecedented plan to turn over IRS records to Homeland Security in order to speed up the agency’s mass deportation efforts.

It’s about elite impunity, the defining issue in America for more than two decades.

NONTHABURI: Police have arrested the woman at the centre of a sex scandal involving numerous senior monks on charges of enabling malfeasance, laundering money and receiving stolen goods. Wilawan “Golf” Emsawat, 35, was arrested at her house in a luxury housing estate in Nonthaburi after police found evidence of a 380,000-baht sum transferred to her by a senior monk from a bank account of his temple.

BERLIN — Arachnophobes beware: Customs officials on Monday released photos from a seizure of roughly 1,500 young tarantulas found inside plastic containers that had been hidden in chocolate spongecake boxes shipped to an airport in western Germany. Customs officials found the shipment at Cologne Bonn airport in a package that had arrived from Vietnam, tipped off by a “noticeable smell” that didn’t resemble the expected aroma of the seven kilograms (about 15 pounds) of the confectionery treats, Cologne customs office spokesman Jens Ahland said.

Household energy bills in some Republican-leaning states could rise by more than $600 every year, analysis of the so-called ‘big, beautiful bill’ finds