The earliest evidence of opium usage in the ancient world has been discovered at a burial site in central Israel that dates to around 14th century B.C., during the Late Bronze Age. Residue of the narcotic, which is made using the seed capsules of the poppy plant, was found inside more than a half dozen 3,500-year-old pottery vessels at the site, which is located at Tel Yehud just outside Tel Aviv, a region formerly known as Canaan.

Louise Fletcher, whose Oscar-winning performance as the sadistic Nurse Ratched in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest gave Hollywood one of its greatest all-time villains and provided the culture with a portrait of bureaucratic evil so indelible that the character’s last name could carry a TV series 45 years later, died Friday at her home in Montdurausse, France. She was 88.

Trump’s embrace of the conspiracy theory is growing stronger. An extremism expert is worried.

“We celebrate the rich heritage of the American story,” a narrator says, over footage of a drilling rig in Russia's Volgograd region.

Helium was touted as the best real-world use case of Web3 technology. But a Forbes investigation found that executives and their friends quietly hoarded the majority of wealth at the project's inception. ... “This is a recurring pattern in the crypto economy,” says Lee Reiners, Policy Director at the Duke Financial Economics Center, who teaches cryptocurrency law at Duke Law.

On Nathan Fielder’s 'The Rehearsal' and Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel 'Acting Class' I’d moved from Florida, and it was my first winter. I kept getting windburn on the walk to class. One of the teachers would bring in her kitchen recycling and the actors would have to use it to build sets. We would sit in chairs with our knees touching and ask each other probing questions — “When was the last time you had sex? How does it feel to be on lithium? Are you really ready to marry your fiancée?”. The playwrights could get the actors to kiss. The directors could get the playwrights to cut scenes. The actors could cry in the hallways, drawing sympathy, and then reveal they were just thinking through a scene for later. One of my teachers was supposedly the inspiration for the character of Loretta Castorini from Moonstruck. One of my teachers was on The Americans. One of my teachers got one of my classmates pregnant. I spent my weekends going to confusing puppet shows at La Mama. Twice – once for a rehearsal and once for a final performance – I brought nail clippers to class so that I could cut my nails in front of my classmates as part of an assignment in which my only job was to cut my nails in front of the others as realistically as possible. One of the actors grew his fingernails very long, seemingly in service of the clipping exercise — but soon it was revealed to be a symptom of a mental break, and after an ambulance collected him from the building late one night following a bad rehearsal, he left school.

The transgender students were bullied, the boysOn Tuesday, 2,100 Louisiana students were bussed from their Baton Rouge high schools to what they thought would be a college and career fair. Instead, they were taken to a church, separated by gender, and given two wildly different, disturbingly sexist experiences. The “girl talk” went first and consisted of three speakers, one of whom discussed the importance of forgiving a rapist or abuser. According to a high school student who attended the event, the speaker said that she forgave an ex-boyfriend who attempted to strangle her to death. Alexis Budyach wrote on Facebook that the speaker emphasized if she’d “waited for the man God meant for her,” then the abuse wouldn’t have happened. “She [used] this to essentially shame the concept of ‘dating around’ and took a soulmate-esque approach on the situation,” wrote Budyach. “In addition, she explained that she had forgiven her ex boyfriend for his attempted murder, even if he wasn’t sorry.” had to do push-up competitions for money, and many students reported being "traumatized."

When Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration needed a company it could trust to carry out a controversial program to transport migrants to other states, it chose an unusual option. Although Destin-based Vertol Systems Company is in aviation, its primary business is training pilots for the military and providing helicopters across the globe. But the company was familiar to a key member of the DeSantis administration: Larry Keefe, the state’s “public safety czar” responsible for carrying out the governor’s anti-immigration programs. The company also has a private jet that flew from Florida to San Antonio a week before charter flights took 48 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.

Under pressure to resign for declining to say whether he accepts the scientific consensus on global warming, World Bank President David Malpass said on Thursday it was clear greenhouse emissions are causing climate change and defended his record as bank chief.

The central Chinese province of Jiangxi has declared a water supply "red alert" for the first time after the Poyang freshwater lake, the country's biggest, dwindled to a record low, the Jiangxi government said on Friday.

When Greg Norman, CEO of the new Saudi-backed golf tour that’s disrupted the professional golf world, came to pitch a conservative House Republican caucus about the league this week, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett left early. He said he couldn’t understand what Norman was saying through his Australian accent. Besides, he said, the caucus should be focusing on real policy stuff, not hearing “propaganda” from a bunch of “billionaire oil guys” about a fledgling golf venture. “The food was terrible too,” Burchett said to reporters as he was walking away. “Put that down.” The new tour, called LIV Golf, visited the Hill this week as part of a public relations push to improve its image. It’s funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and it has lured numerous of the best golfers in the world away from the PGA Tour by offering contracts unbound by market forces. LIV’s emergence over the summer has created a nasty schism atop the game—the resolution of which could hinge on an antitrust lawsuit LIV players filed against the PGA Tour. Adding further combativeness to the situation is former President Trump’s partnership with LIV, which is holding several tournaments at courses Trump owns. (This came after other leading golf authorities stopped doing business with him.) The Trumpian politics of us against the establishment have, annoyingly, infiltrated the once staid business of professional golf. But not all Republicans are comfortable following his footsteps and embracing a league funded by the absolute monarchy of a petrostate whose human rights abuses are well documented.

One by one, the speakers approached the podium at the elections meeting to air their grievances. One person asked about alleged “phantom” voters who may be registered in Gwinnett County, their community just northwest of Atlanta. Another suggested officials count ballots by hand to avoid fraud. And yet another questioned whether the results of the 2020 election, the most secure in history, should have been certified in Georgia — and then cited the penalties for treason. “I highly recommend that each of you take your responsibility very seriously, because that time is quickly approaching,” that person said. The dozen or so speakers were gathered Wednesday night to watch local election officials discuss the fate of more than 37,000 voter registrations in the county after a group of election deniers challenged them last month. Similar challenges have arisen in counties across Georgia, as people who have embraced debunked conspiracy theories about the security of elections deluge officials with questions. They are eating up time and resources as election officials — a workforce predominately run by women — are finalizing the logistics for November’s midterms in a state that is in many ways the center of the country’s political universe. The elections they are running here could determine party control of the U.S. Senate, and include a historic governor’s race and other key statewide and legislative races.

J.R. Majewski has been under fire for sympathizing with QAnon and misrepresenting his military service.

Researchers from Gazi University and Ankara City Hospital in Turkey exposed 18 immature female rats to a spectrum of light predominantly emitted by our LED screens for relatively short or long periods each day, finding those bathed in the blue-tinged light for longer bouts showed the hallmarks of maturity sooner than the rest.

New York City’s migrant crisis has taken a tragic turn this weekend after a woman seeking asylum died by suicide.

On Monday, a Maryland judge overturned Adnan Syed’s first-degree murder conviction for the 1999 death of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. He exited the Baltimore courthouse to deafening cheers from a large crowd gathered outside. The 41-year-old is free for the first time since he was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 17, a saga memorably recounted by the smash-hit podcast Serial. The case against Syed hinged on the testimony of his friend Jay Wilds, who told the jury that Syed showed him Lee’s body after placing it in the trunk of a car and enlisting his aid in helping dispose of it in a neighborhood park. But Wilds, who was given a lawyer by the prosecution and never charged, made statements that varied over time and with respect to key details. Crucial to corroborating Wilds’s shifting, incentivized account were cell-phone records that purportedly proved that Syed received calls in the park area around the time that he claimed they were burying Lee. Twenty-three years later, prosecutors now concede that their case against Syed was little more than smoke and mirrors. Worse, they had cheated in their zeal to win, burying key evidence. If Syed’s freedom is cause for celebration, it is also cause for shame. He was not released because the American criminal justice system is fair. He was released despite its brokenness and corruption. For years, he remained in prison despite the worldwide attention brought by Serial and the relentless efforts of a core group of stubborn advocates. In the end, it took a random and quirky turn of events to unshackle him. There are tens of thousands of wrongfully convicted people in prison in the United States just like Syed. But because they are anonymous, unrepresented, and unlucky, they are likely to remain there. That is how the legal system was designed. Because of Serial, the world has long known that Syed’s conviction rested on shaky ground. The host, Sarah Koenig, meticulously documented how Syed’s trial attorney fell down on the job by failing to call a crucial alibi witness to the stand or to challenge the accuracy of the cell-phone records at the heart of the state’s case, which came with a cover sheet stating, “Any incoming calls will NOT be reliable information for location.” The prosecutors who put Syed on trial knew from the outset that, as they now admit, there was “overwhelming cause for concern.” Notes in the trial prosecutor’s own handwriting document powerful evidence pointing to two other viable suspects, one of whom threatened to kill Lee. Both suspects have criminal histories, one for sexual assault. Rather than turn these potentially explosive leads as the Constitution requires, prosecutors buried them. Again and again, judges and prosecutors in a position to undo Syed’s wrongful conviction doubled and tripled down to cement it, deploying procedural roadblocks, imposing exacting evidentiary standards, and failing to meaningfully review the evidence. This innocence-denying bureaucracy, supercharged by incompetence and indifference to the truth, doomed his repeated attempts to be exonerated. Disturbingly, nothing that happened in Syed’s case — including the gamesmanship — is particularly unusual. He is the 23rd Baltimore man to have his murder conviction thrown out because of official misconduct. Nationwide, police and prosecutor rule-breaking contributed to 72 percent of those falsely convicted of murder. As Professor Daniel Medwed explains in his new book, Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out Of Prison, “the system values finality and efficiency over accuracy.” He explains, “It’s about power and control. It’s about the ways in which those at the top keep those at the bottom from moving up.”

The stunning, colorful flooring depicts 17 iconographies of birds and animals

In Italy all you get is Italian and we win hands down on variety. That is, until you stop off at a motorway service station, writes Adrian Chiles

Police said a tip helped them stop a potential mass shooting at a Texas high school homecoming football game and led to the arrests of two 18-year-old men. Brandon Gipson and Isaac Cooper were taken into custody Friday after authorities conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle that was headed to the Everman High School game. An AR pistol and a 60-round magazine were found in the vehicle, Everman Emergency Services said on Facebook.

Despite the league’s end-zone pledge to “END RACISM,” Black coaches continue to be denied top jobs in a league where nearly 60 percent of the players are Black. It is a glaring shortcoming for the NFL, one highlighted by the findings of an investigation by The Washington Post. Black coaches tend to perform about as well as White coaches, The Post found. But while White candidates are offered a vast and diverse set of routes to the league’s top coaching jobs, Black coaches face a much narrower set of paths. They have had to serve significantly longer as mid-level assistants, are more likely to be given interim jobs than full-time ones and are held to a higher standard when it comes to keeping their jobs. Since 1990, Black coaches have been twice as likely as others to be fired after leading a team to a regular season record of .500 or better. Amid growing scrutiny of the issue, The Post compiled and analyzed three decades’ worth of data and conducted interviews with 16 of the 24 living current and former NFL head coaches who identify as Black, as well as dozens of other coaches, former players, team executives, agents and others.