U.S. lawmakers convene Tuesday for a new era of divided government as Democrats relinquish control of the House after midterm election losses, with Republican Kevin McCarthy seeking to avoid becoming the first nominee for Speaker in 100 years to fail to win initial support from his own colleagues. McCarthy is in line to replace Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker for the 118th session of Congress, but he heads into the vote with no guarantee of success. Despite an endorsement from former president Donald Trump, still popular within the party, McCarthy faces entrenched detractors within his own ranks despite weeks of lead time to get hesitant members on board after the November midterm results became official. The showdown could very well devolve into a prolonged House floor fight and a spectacle that divides the Republican Party.

Elon Musk’s reputation as a genius took some serious damage in 2022 — almost as much damage as his personal wealth.

Celebrating a great year for bad ideas

Here it is

Sorry, but the misogynist influencer wasn’t detained because of a Romanian pizza chain

How does a microwave work to soothe single people’s woes? I tried some truly demented recipes from "Microwave Cooking for One & Two" to find out.

On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1  They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream.

The new Israeli ultranationalist government embodies an ideology that Israel once sought to ban for its racism and terrorism.

Jon Bois and his collaborators specialize in documentaries about seemingly unremarkable teams. Then he wields charts and graphs to spellbinding effect. Toward the end of “The History of the Atlanta Falcons” (2021), a seven-part, nearly seven-hour documentary, the writer-director Jon Bois describes a surprise 82-yard interception return by the Falcons cornerback Robert Alford, executed with just minutes left in the first half of Super Bowl LI, in 2017, as “one of the very most impactful individual plays in all of N.F.L. history.” Almost any other filmmaker would have been content to leave it at that. But Bois shows his work. On the sports statistics website pro-football-reference.com, Bois explains, there is a metric called expected points that “estimates how many points an offense should be expected to score on a drive before a particular play and after that play.” Subtract one from the other, and you determine the play’s overall impact. Alford’s interception return resulted in negative seven points for the New England Patriots on a drive that should have earned them three, for a differential of 10.7. Bois pulls up a chart graphing the differential “of all 8,982 individual plays in Super Bowl history.” The Alford touchdown, we can plainly see, ranks as the third biggest of all-time. This was not an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. When Bois says that a play is “one of the very most impactful,” he means it. Bois is the poet laureate of sports statistics. His documentaries, including the acclaimed “The History of the Seattle Mariners” (2020) and the recent Charlotte Bobcats-themed “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts” (both streaming on his YouTube channel, Secret Base), are packed with charts, graphs and diagrams scrupulously plotting wins, losses, points, home runs and field goals with a rigor that borders on scientific.

An international team led by ecologist Sarah Cubaynes of the University of Montpellier in France has determined that the often fatal canine distemper virus is the trigger that produces a higher number of black-coated wolves (Canis lupus).

BAMBERG, Germany (TND) — Police in Germany say they had quite the time attempting to pull over a Tesla driver who had fallen asleep behind the wheel. Bamberg traffic officers tailed the electric vehicle for about 15 minutes on Wednesday while on the country's Autobahn 70 (A70) after signaling for a traffic stop with repeated horns and sirens, according to a release from Polizei Bayern (Bavarian Police). The driver was driving on the A70 from Bamberg in the direction of Bayreuth around 12 p.m. when the police patrol wanted to subject him to a traffic check," police say in the press release, once translated. "He did not respond to stop signals or repeated horns from the officers." The Tesla vehicle noticeably maintained a speed of 110 kilometers per hour, which is about 68 miles per hour, according to police. Adding to this, the driver of the car was apparently asleep at the time.

“This research provides a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine," said co-author Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London and author of a recent book, The Mind of a Bee. "There are lots of animals who play just for the purposes of enjoyment, but most examples come from young mammals and birds."

Israel condemned and the Palestinians welcomed on Saturday a United Nations General Assembly vote asking the International Court of Justice to provide an opinion on legal consequences of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Friday vote presents a challenge for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who this week took office at the head of a government which has set settlement expansion as a priority and which includes parties who want to annex West Bank land on which they are built.

Fullilove, who is Black, has spent her career studying epidemics: first AIDS, then crack, then multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. She has seen how disease can ravage cities, especially in Black and working-class communities. From the beginning, Fullilove was skeptical of how the federal government handled the coronavirus pandemic. But these new recommendations from the C.D.C., she said, were “flying in the face of the science.” Not long after the announcement, she sent an e-mail to a Listserv called The Spirit of 1848, for progressive public-health practitioners. “Can we have a people’s CDC and give people good advice?” she asked. A flurry of responses came back.

So the most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

The janitors in question went on strike in early December requesting better wages, and Musk responded by getting rid of them altogether. As a result, according to the New York Times, "The office [is] in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said."

In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Court’s gilded seal. Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nation’s high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological bents of the justices bestowing them might vary, there is one constant: All the recipients have given at least $5,000 to a charity favored by the justices, and, more often than not, the donors have a significant stake in the way the court decides cases. The charity, the Supreme Court Historical Society, is ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government, but in reality the two are inextricably intertwined. The charity’s stated mission is straightforward: to preserve the court’s history and educate the public about the court’s importance in American life. But over the years the society has also become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation. The justices attend the society’s annual black-tie dinner soirees, where they mingle with donors and thank them for their generosity, and serve as M.C.s to more regular society-sponsored lectures or re-enactments of famous cases. The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors — and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available. At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.

Don Christopher, a California farmer who turned the humble, much-maligned bulb of garlic into a staple in millions of American homes and elevated the sleepy town of Gilroy into the garlic capital of the world, died on Dec. 12 in Gilroy. He was 88. His grandson Ken Christopher, the executive vice president of Christopher Ranch, the family business, confirmed the death, at a hospital. As prevalent as garlic is in American cooking today, for much of the 20th century it was considered an exotic, even déclassé, ingredient. Often called the stinking rose, it was found occasionally in Italian restaurants and frequently in vampire-hunting kits, but rarely in home kitchens — though there might have been a dusty jar in the back of the pantry, its contents dehydrated or packed in preservatives. “It used to be that a lot of people thought only the poor ate garlic,” Mr. Christopher told The Associated Press in 1994.

What is an atmospheric river? In California, the weather phenomenon can produce enough rain and snow to replenish water supplies and even end a drought. Here's everything you need to know.

Tulsa preacher Jackson Lahmeyer is building a movement to battle “demonic” Democrats and put Donald Trump back in the White House Lahmeyer leads the newly created Pastors For Trump, a 50-state organization that aims to revive evangelical support for the disgraced, insurrectionist former president as Trump makes his bid for the 2024 GOP nomination.  Lahmeyer announced the formation of Pastors for Trump on “The Stone Zone” podcast in early December. The group is ostensibly independent of the presidential campaign, but Trump blessed Pastors for Trump — sending Lahmeyer a “THANK YOU!” note in black Sharpie, and promoting the group on Truth Social. “Our registration numbers just spiked,” Lahmeyer tells Rolling Stone, “the moment he Truthed it out.” Pastors for Trump is the brainchild of an extremist in both religion and politics — and a man who celebrates the union of the two realms: “I will embrace Christian Nationalism,” Lahmeyer declared this fall on a stop of the ReAwaken America tour, “because… we are at war in this country; it is a spiritual war between good and evil.”  The emergence of a figure like Lahmeyer at the very beginning of the 2024 election cycle underscores two key trends. First: Overt Christian Nationalism — the ideology that America was founded on, and should be governed to enforce, conservative Christian morality — is becoming central to the GOP nominating process. And second: Trump, and his brain trust, are moving to lock in evangelical voters as a tier-one priority, before they’re tempted to decamp for candidates with more authentic spiritual convictions, like former Vice President Mike Pence, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.