A historian wants to name a new East Harlem parklet for the New York sewer alligator legend, which was inspired by a real-life neighborhood incident.

I was interviewed by many journalists in 2020 about the pandemic, and the question they kept asking me was some version of, “What exactly is going on here?” They were not clueless about COVID-19. Rather, they were trying to make sense of a strange fraternization they were witnessing in the middle of this public health crisis. Listening to these journalists, beards were being scratched over the phone, voices were hesitant, connections were painfully being enunciated in a sort of disbelief. They were witnessing a phenomenon for which they didn’t have a word. They were seeing right-wing libertarians protesting alongside yoga studio owners, who themselves were sharing in the chants for more “freedom.” The denunciation of public health measures and the fear of so-called “rushed” vaccines were coming from both MAGA Trumpists and wellness influencers.

A woman in Gaston County said her brother with Down syndrome was fired from his job at Wendy’s. She told WBTV her brother had been working at the Stanley restaurant for more than 20 years. She claims the manager fired him because she needed someone who could do more jobs around the store that her brother could not do. ”I work there a long time,” Dennis Peek, the person fired, said. Dennis said he always wanted to work at Wendy’s because of the food. ”A lot of food to eat. It’s good stuff. I love Baconator,” he said. “I love my job at Wendy’s.”

How a Decades-long Battle for Federal Recognition May Be the United Houma Nation’s Last Chance at Survival On August 28, 2021, as Hurricane Ida barreled toward her hometown, Lois Salinas, an elder of the United Houma Nation remained unfazed. When her daughter called from her house in Houma, urging her to evacuate, she managed to improvise a reassuring tone: “I'm getting ready to leave right now,” Lois told her. In reality, she hadn’t packed anything yet. “I wasn’t really ready to leave,” she remembers with a mischievous smile. She wasn’t scared. Like many of her Houma ancestors, 82-year-old Lois had spent most of her life in Dulac, a small community on Bayou Grand Caillou, 70 miles south of New Orleans near the Gulf of Mexico. While she was growing up, her father, a passionate tribal leader and activist, owned a small net shop where he sold and repaired fishing nets, and in 1955, her mother opened Annie’s, a cozy waterfront shack, located next to the home of Lois’s grandparents. Lois left Dulac only for a few years, when she got married and followed her husband to Texas but, after the marriage fell apart, she returned to her hometown with her five children to raise them near the water, surrounded by her siblings, nieces, and nephews. She went on to inherit her grandparents’ crumbling house and take over her mother’s restaurant.

In 1996, ecologist Debal Deb approached the West Bengal State Directorate of Agriculture’s Rice Research Station, where native or heirloom rice varieties are conserved. Deb had collected 152 traditional folk rice varieties by travelling to remote and mostly tribal villages of Odisha, West Bengal and some other states and wanted the institute to maintain the seeds. The institute, however, refused to accept the seeds, saying he was pursuing the “unscientific and retrogressive” goal of reviving the forgotten folk rice varieties.

On July 4, Independence Day, Alejandro Suarez packed his laptop, camera and some clothes into a book bag. He placed a handwritten note in the glove box of his blue Honda Civic and left the car in the parking lot of a Kendall church. He then hopped a Greyhound bus to Chicago to begin a new life. “I refuse to be helpless,” he wrote. “Be assured I am safe.” Odalys Heredia, the 20-year-old’s mother, wanted him back. She filed a report with Miami-Dade police saying Suarez was missing and endangered. She told news reporters Suarez functions at the level of a small child due to a diagnosis of autism in his childhood. And that he was friendless, and largely helpless. To authorities, she and her sister, Suarez’s aunt, offered a more outlandish sounding theory: that he may have been abducted by a dangerous band of transgender individuals seeking to harvest and sell his body organs. The result was a missing persons drama on steroids — TV spots, police bulletins and online articles, a GoFundMe account that raised thousands, the involvement of a probate judge and a lawyer-turned-university professor who specializes in the rights of people with disabilities — a reflection of how a compelling narrative can be amplified by media, social and otherwise. It was the kind of attention that missing persons reports don’t always get. All of it swirled around a 20-year-old college student who agreed with none of the characterizations of him and said he just wanted to quietly, unobtrusively follow his own path.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Billionaire Elon Musk, days after floating a possible deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine that drew condemnation in Ukraine, suggested that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing. Musk was responding to a question about China, where his Tesla electric car company operates a large factory in Shanghai.

When I returned home to San Francisco, where I was living at the time, I experienced my first pang of taco anger. At a house party, the conversation turned to where to get quesabirria tacos in town. To be honest, I’ve never liked birria tacos, at least not the way they’re done in the U.S.: lathered like an oil slick and over-cheesed. But it wasn’t just the choice of taco. Something about the whole experience felt jarring to me. Days before, I’d met with Mexicans so desperate for refuge in this country they were sleeping out on concrete in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere. Now, in San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the world, I was surrounded by non–Mexican Americans obsessed with trying Mexican food gone viral. It was a stark reminder of a fact I’ve recognized since I was a child: Americans can love Mexican food but hate Mexican people. The same kids I knew at school who used words like “beaner” would also talk excitedly about where to buy the best burritos in town. I think it’s perhaps because of this bitter paradox that the taco is both loved and ridiculed. Tacos are often the butt of jokes. At a relay race in which I ran this summer, there were at least two teams with taco puns as names—one of them was “Don’t Look at Our Tacos.” On Halloween, people wear taco costumes. I’m not the only one bothered by the taco obsession. When New York magazine did a review of a decade of swiping (Tinder was first released ten years ago) this August, writer Danielle Cohen proclaimed liking tacos to be one of the more odious facts people included in their bios. “The inclusion of tacos in your profile — whether in emoji form or under your list of hobbies — was supposed to indicate that you were laid-back but mildly cultured: cool enough to know about food beyond pizza and burgers but not so weird that you would stray outside the mainstream,” Connolly wrote. Liking tacos does to one’s personality what a jalapeño does for pico de gallo: it adds a bit of spice, but not enough to alienate white people.

The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks. Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or a bonus in their paycheck. Anthem, a large insurer now called Elevance Health, paid more to doctors who said their patients were sicker. And executives at UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest insurer, told their workers to mine old medical records for more illnesses — and when they couldn’t find enough, sent them back to try again. Each of the strategies — which were described by the Justice Department in lawsuits against the companies — led to diagnoses of serious diseases that might have never existed. But the diagnoses had a lucrative side effect: They let the insurers collect more money from the federal government’s Medicare Advantage program. Medicare Advantage, a private-sector alternative to traditional Medicare, was designed by Congress two decades ago to encourage health insurers to find innovative ways to provide better care at lower cost. If trends hold, by next year, more than half of Medicare recipients will be in a private plan. But a New York Times review of dozens of fraud lawsuits, inspector general audits and investigations by watchdogs shows how major health insurers exploited the program to inflate their profits by billions of dollars. The government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a set amount for each person who enrolls, with higher rates for sicker patients. And the insurers, among the largest and most prosperous American companies, have developed elaborate systems to make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment, according to the lawsuits.

It is too hard to become a doctor in the United States.

While metaverse platforms Decentraland and The Sandbox both have below 1,000 daily active users, they each have over $1 billion in valuation. So who's actually using the metaverse right now?

The sound of gentrification is silence. New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music. I remember, the summer before I left for college, lying close to my bedroom box fan, taking it all in. Thanks to a partial scholarship (and a ton of loans), I was on my way to an Ivy League college. I was counting down the days, eager to ditch the concrete sidewalks and my family’s cramped railroad apartment and to start living life on my own terms, against a backdrop of lush, manicured lawns and stately architecture. I didn’t yet know that you don’t live on an Ivy League campus. You reside on one. Living is loud and messy, but residing? Residing is quiet business. Within a few weeks, the comfort that I and many of my fellow minority students had felt during those early cacophonous days had been eroded, one chastisement at a time. The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. A boisterous conversation would lead to a classmate knocking on the door with a “Please quiet down.” A laugh that went a bit too loud or long in a computer cluster would be met with an admonishment. In those moments, I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. And in acquiescing, I accepted that.

The Uvalde school district said Friday that it's suspending the entire district police department.

Four men have died in one Alabama prison since last Thursday. Two of the deaths are being investigated as homicides.

In New York, the battle is currently raging through the West Village. Parents have compared the pickleball players to invaders.

The public has largely stopped paying attention to what’s happening inside shelters and other facilities that house immigrant children since President Donald Trump left office, and particularly since the end of his administration’s zero tolerance policy, which separated families at the southern border. But the shelter system remains in place under President Joe Biden. The numbers can fluctuate but, as of earlier this week, more than 9,000 unaccompanied immigrant children were in custody, according to data from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the privately run shelters. The vast majority are children and teens from Central America who entered the country through the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian. The shelter system is designed to house these children temporarily — the average length of stay is about a month — until they can be placed with a relative or family friend or, in some cases, in foster care. Last fall, ProPublica reported on one Chicago shelter’s failure to meet the language and mental health needs of dozens of traumatized Afghan children and teens who’d been brought to the country without family by the U.S. during its widely criticized military pullout from Afghanistan. Many of them had no one who could take them in; some tried to kill themselves, harmed others or ran away.

When news broke that scientists had developed an effective vaccine against Covid, Emile Hendricks was living in a deprived suburb of Cape Town and studying for a degree in biotechnology. He thought he and his community would not have access to such a vaccine, or at the very least would be at the back of the queue. He was right. By mid-April 2021, more than 32 million people in the UK had received a first dose of a Covid vaccine, compared with just 300,000 in South Africa, where the rollout was plagued by problems. “The vaccine wasn’t accessible to me or to anyone I knew,” Hendricks says. “It was something that was given to [people in the west] but not to the rest of us. I pushed it out of my mind, thinking we in Africa will have to find our own solution.” Two years later, Hendricks is a research technologist at Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a Cape Town pharmaceutical company, and part of a team that has successfully reproduced small quantities of Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccine as part of a plan backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop vaccines in the global south. Scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand worked with Afrigen to deconstruct the sequence of the Moderna vaccine and build it from scratch. Such reverse engineering is legal in South African law, which contains a provision for carrying out research and development regardless of patent protection. Its freedom to operate is also under threat. Moderna has filed several patents in South Africa and has refused to cooperate and share technology with the hub in Africa, likening the replica vaccine to a “copy of a Louis Vuitton handbag”. In addition, Moderna is suing fellow mRNA vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and BioNTech, which has raised fears that it could enforce patents against the hub regarding any future vaccines it may develop for illnesses other than Covid.

Students need more exposure to the way everyday things work and are made. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the teaching of math, where we persist in a rigid approach that rewards those who “get it” and leaves the rest—including those with the very kinds of minds our economy and our future most desperately need—with a sense of profound failure.

The world-famous cipher has been a must-see object for two centuries - but Egypt wants it back.

The private email accounts of two New York University law students have been subpoenaed by an NYU Law trustee over the circulation of a letter critical of him, DNAinfo is reporting. Second-year Luke Herrine and first-year Leo Gertner aided in the promotion and distribution of this letter that singles out school trustee Daniel Straus, owner of Care One Management, which is currently embroiled in a labor dispute and stands accused of numerous violations from the National Labor Relations Board. From the letter: The National Labor Relations Board has charged his companies, CareOne and HealthBridge Management, with violating federal labor law no fewer than 38 times. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny has held HealthBridge in contempt of court for failing to comply with an order to return 600 striking nursing home workers to work at their pre-strike level of compensation. Mr. Straus has manipulated bankruptcy and RICO law to punish workers for exercising their clearly established rights to engage in collective action. He has hired thugs to harass workers and NYU students who were protesting his actions.