Two new CDC studies published Thursday found life expectancy fell to 76.4 years in 2021, the lowest recorded since 1996 -- mostly due to COVID and drug overdose deaths.

The “forgotten American” mythology of the POW/MIA movement continues to haunt our politics today. The Biden administration promised a return to normalcy, but one of its most telling acts of restoration passed with barely any comment. Early last year, the administration hoisted the POW/MIA flag above the White House, where it had flown for decades until Donald Trump abruptly relocated it to the South Lawn in 2020. In an era when even the most minor symbolic sparks can ignite endless outrage, few Americans noticed Biden’s gesture—and why should they? Reverence for the POW/MIA flag is a truly bipartisan position. Left, right, and center united when Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tom Cotton, and Maggie Hassan penned a letter asking Biden to “restore the flag to its place of honor” just days after his inauguration. The only non-national flag that any modern state has ever required to be regularly flown, the POW/MIA flag can now be seen above the U.S. Capitol, every military installation, and every single post office in the country. Most states have enacted similar requirements, steadily proliferating the venues in which the black-and-white silhouette of a gaunt American soldier announces its promise to Vietnam vets who are still prisoners of war (POW) or missing in action (MIA): “You are not forgotten.” But this universal piety sits awkwardly with the facts of the war. Since the 1970s, bipartisan congressional committees have repeatedly concluded that there is no evidence that a single American was held prisoner in Vietnam after the war’s end. Not only that, but far fewer soldiers ended up MIA in Vietnam than in other American wars: at least four times as many were never found after the Korean War, at least forty times as many after World War II. And all of these totals are dwarfed by the estimated three hundred thousand Vietnamese who went missing during the conflict. In terms of the number of American service members who ended up captive or missing, the Vietnam War was, sadly, unremarkable. Individual efforts to account for those lost to the war have been admirable, but their outsized impact on American politics merits close inspection. For decades after the war’s inglorious end, every U.S. president issued a full-throated pledge to undertake the “fullest possible accounting” for Americans who went missing in Vietnam. In the 1980s, the Department of Defense made it a matter of official policy that “at least some Americans” were still being held captive, despite Congress’s conclusions to the contrary. In large part due to this angst over the alleged missing, the United States refused to normalize relations and lift its trade embargo against Vietnam for more than twenty years after its military withdrawal. By the early 1990s, over 70 percent of Americans believed that U.S. soldiers were still being held captive by their one-time communist foes, and the government was spending over $100 million annually to close the books on the missing.

Matt Makens with CattleFax tells Brownfield wheat in parts of the Central and Western Plains don’t have a protective layer of snow to defend against sub-zero temperatures. “You’re allowing whatever wheat has come up already to be exposed to the dangerous cold. This is not temporary. This is not a three-hour flash freeze. This is a multi-day hard freeze that is going to last all the way into Christmas weekend.”

A man shot by police early Thursday was holding a sword during the confrontation, says the province's police watchdog.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Majd Ramlawi was serving coffee in Jerusalem’s Old City when a chilling text message appeared on his phone. “You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it read in Arabic. Ramlawi, then 19, was among hundreds of people who civil rights attorneys estimate got the text last year, at the height of one of the most turbulent recent periods in the Holy Land. Many, including Ramlawi, say they only lived or worked in the neighborhood, and had nothing to do with the unrest. What he didn’t know was that the feared internal security agency, the Shin Bet, was using mass surveillance technology mobilized for coronavirus contact tracing, against Israeli residents and citizens for purposes entirely unrelated to COVID-19. In the pandemic’s bewildering early days, millions worldwide believed government officials who said they needed confidential data for new tech tools that could help stop coronavirus’ spread. In return, governments got a firehose of individuals’ private health details, photographs that captured their facial measurements and their home addresses.

“Usually recessions sneak up on us. CEOs never talk about recessions,” said Zandi. “Now it seems CEOs are falling over themselves to say we’re falling into a recession. ... Every person on TV says recession. Every economist says recession. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The ship charges an additional $2,100 a month for all-inclusive services, which include food, drinks, alcohol, gym membership, routine healthcare check-ups, onboard entertainment and laundry.

The Huntsville Public Library (HPL) has been under fire since this summer, when a book display riled up city officials. Now, following the removal of two book displays at the public library, the city decided to privatize the library. Though officials claim the move to hire Library Services & Systems (LS&S) will reduce library operational costs over the next ten years, it comes on the heels of the city removing a Pride book display and a Banned Books Week display in September. City Manager Aron Kulhavy called for the displays to be taken down, temporarily closing the library. Following the removal of both displays, the library was told they could not create any additional displays, pending the city’s review of policies and procedures about them. The City Librarian was also placed on leave. When asked why the displays were taken down, Kulhavy said it was to “better respond to citizen concerns from all viewpoints.” In October, a library user identified additional suspicious behavior. A city police officer was behind the circulation desk reviewing books, reportedly taking one with him and approving the rest of the titles as ones that were okay to return to the collection. The library board has had no say in any of these decisions.

Chicago has experienced more frequent and severe storms in recent decades, putting immigrants and low income Chicagoans living in basement units at increased risk of flooding.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users' personal information.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A prominent California medical school has apologized for conducting dozens of unethical medical experiments on at least 2,600 incarcerated men in the 1960s and 1970s, including putting pesticides and herbicides on the men’s skin and injecting it into their veins. Two dermatologists at the University of California, San Francisco — one of whom remains at the university — conducted the experiments on men at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville that’s about 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. The practice was halted in 1977. The university’s Program for Historical Reconciliation issued a report about the experiments earlier this month, writing that the doctors engaged in “questionable informed consent practices” and performed procedures on men who did not have any of the diseases or conditions that the research aimed to treat. The San Francisco Chronicle first reported the program’s findings Wednesday. “UCSF apologizes for its explicit role in the harm caused to the subjects, their families and our community by facilitating this research, and acknowledges the institution’s implicit role in perpetuating unethical treatment of vulnerable and underserved populations — regardless of the legal or perceptual standards of the time,” Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Dan Lowenstein said in a statement. The report said further analysis is needed to determine the extent of harms caused to the prisoners as a result of the experiments and what the university should do in response.

This year, there were a few surprises.

A gunman has opened fire in central Paris, killing three people and wounding three others. The attacker targeted a Kurdish cultural centre and shot members of the local community. A possible racist motive is being investigated. A suspect, aged 69, was quickly arrested and it soon emerged he had been freed from prison recently. Clashes later broke out between police and a group who had gathered at the scene in the aftermath of the attack. Footage showed people starting fires in the middle of the street and smashing car windows, with officers in riot gear responding by throwing tear gas. The unrest came after a man, described by witnesses as tall, white and elderly, shot dead two men and a woman on Rue d'Enghien in the 10th district of Paris. Of the three people injured, one was said to be in a critical condition and the others were receiving treatment for serious injuries. There is no confirmed motive for the shooting, but Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the suspect had previously been charged with racist violence.

A Chick-fil-A restaurant in North Carolina will have to pay almost $7,000 after it was caught having child employees operate dangerous machinery and trying to pay teen employees in meal vouchers. After an investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) found that “Good Name 22:1 LLC of Hendersonville, N.C.,” the corporate name for a Chick-fil-A location, allowed three workers under the age of 18 to “operate, load or unload a trash compactor.” Because operating certain machinery is especially hazardous, federal child labor laws prohibit minors entirely from operating such equipment as part of their jobs. The dangerous work was not this particular restaurant’s only violation, either. The DOL also found that the same employer “also paid certain employees — who were asked to direct traffic — to work for meal vouchers rather than wages.” The substitute of meal vouchers for payment of $235 constitutes a separate violation of minimum wage provisions under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition to the civil penalties assessed, the employer will have to pay back wages to those employees.

"The blast radius here is huge, with national implications," said one observer. "The New York Democratic Party's ineptitude is fast becoming a national crisis."

Aides to the Arizona senator were expected to get her groceries, fix her internet, and learn her very specific preferences for airline seats, according to an internal memo.

Forbes first reported the surveillance tactics, which were overseen by a China-based team at ByteDance, in October. Asked for comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.

Other countries have successfully transitioned from strict lockdowns. Beijing has wasted the last three years.

Spain's parliament on Thursday passed a bill that allows anyone 16 and over to change gender on their ID card without the need for psychological or medical evaluation. The move could make Spain one of the few countries to allow the change with a simple declaration. The bill still needs to pass the Senate. If it passes, it will become law within weeks.

A Tokyo court on Thursday found guilty five members of a group claiming to be the Japanese arm of U.S. conspiracy cult QAnon for forcing their way into local coronavirus vaccination sites earlier this year. The Tokyo District Court sentenced Hiroyuki Kuraoka, 44, a member of YamatoQ, a group that strongly opposes COVID-19 vaccinations to 18 months in prison suspended for three years. Two were given one-year sentences and the other two were sentenced to 10 months, all with three-year suspensions. Presiding Judge Kiichi Hiraide recognized Kuraoka played a leading role in the incident and was the most responsible of those involved. The acts were "premeditated and greatly disturbed the peace at the vaccination sites. They cannot escape severe blame as they committed the crime to force their opinions on others," the judge said. According to the ruling, Kuraoka and other members of the group barged into vaccination venues in the capital's Shinjuku Ward and other areas earlier this year. The group has been waging a campaign against COVID-19 inoculations, denying that the coronavirus exists and claiming that the shots are dangerous. YamatoQ is an incorporated association, which says that its business is to better children's health and education as well as contribute to society. Its website says that it is the Japanese wing of QAnon, a movement spreading conspiracy theories in support of former U.S. President Donald Trump.