It was as if Eric Adams was going out of his way to pick a fight. In July, as small groups of asylum seekers started arriving in New York City, Mayor Adams began castigating Texas Governor Greg Abbott for sending migrants to New York City. Except Abbott hadn’t actually begun sending busloads of migrants to New York—instead, Customs and Border Protection agents had been listing New York addresses on asylum seekers' paperwork after they crossed the border. When these migrants got to New York, either after they were bused by Abbott to Washington, D.C,. or if found their own way from the border, they learned that the addresses weren’t actually shelters or places they could stay—so they began filing into the City’s already woefully understaffed shelter system. Once Adams began calling Abbott out, the Texas governor answered, and now thousands of asylum seekers have been bused by Abbott to New York City in recent weeks. But the arrival of asylum seekers to New York City isn't a new phenomenon. For years, as migrants have crossed the border in record numbers, many of them have come to New York City to either reunite with family or find work, and the City has been accommodating them in the shelter system while they seek more permanent housing. "These are issues we've been working on for a very long time, and while the volume has increased over the past few weeks, this is not entirely uncharted territory," said Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Homeless Rights Project. In the past four months, driven by the arrival of asylum seekers, New York City's shelter population has gone up by more than 25 percent. The number of arriving migrants, bused from Texas and other border states, continues to increase, leading the Adams administration to consider reviving a Bloomberg-era idea of housing people on cruise ships. But as recently as 2019, the City was sheltering several thousand more people than it does currently. So what changed? Before leaving office, the de Blasio administration closed down thousands of substandard scattered site units, in an effort to improve conditions for shelter residents. That decision was predicated on the idea that those beds would be replaced by new and more centrally located shelter sites that would have dedicated services and adequate space for families. Except a funny thing happened to those new units—many of them never opened. Faced with community resistance, the incoming Adams administration chose to abandon them, leaving the amount of available shelter beds seriously diminished just ahead of the arrival of the most recent wave of asylum seekers. At the same time, the expiration of pandemic-era eviction moratoriums led to formerly housed New York families once again filling the City's shelters, as rent in the city reached record highs.

Finally, in February, after pursuing Kurt for more than two years, I flew from Europe to Detroit, where border guards had a hard time believing I was entering the U.S. to interview a stone skipper. Then I showed them a video of Kurt’s magical record throw, and before long a group was gathered around a computer screen, counting the skips and hollering “No fucking way!” before letting me through. From the moment I met Kurt in Erie a day later, it was clear that his hibernation had ended. By 10 p.m. on our second evening, when he fashioned a can of Monster energy drink into a makeshift bong, we’d spoken for 12 hours straight.

A narrow niche in the digital-payments world, fuel cards like those offered by FleetCor are credit cards that companies with vehicle fleets can issue to employees for on-the-job purchases of gas and and other travel-related expenses. Totenberg said the FTC’s evidence showed that FleetCor engaged in “pervasive and long-lasting” violations aimed at deceiving customers. She noted that FleetCor’s ads made glowing promises that its cards carried no transaction or annual fees, but the actual terms-and-conditions contained a string of nebulous charges like “convenience network surcharge” or “minimum program administration fee” that often kicked in without prior notice. The judge pointed out that FleetCor’s own internal documents stated that the most of its customers were small businesses that held fewer than 10 of its cards. A company study described them as “fairly unsophisticated” and “business owners not business people.” For many of them, “English was not their first language,” the study said. Many of these customers simply didn’t have time to review documents “with a microscope, spend hours on the phone with customer service representatives trying to pay a bill on a system that does not function, or get a refund for an improper charge,” Totenberg wrote.

Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program. In late July, Norman Otey was rushed by ambulance to Richmond Community Hospital. The 63-year-old was doubled over in pain and babbling incoherently. Blood tests suggested septic shock, a grave emergency that required the resources and expertise of an intensive care unit. But Richmond Community, a struggling hospital in a predominantly Black neighborhood, had closed its I.C.U. in 2017. It took several hours for Mr. Otey to be transported to another hospital, according to his sister, Linda Jones-Smith. He deteriorated on the way there, and later died of sepsis. Two people who cared for Mr. Otey said the delay had most likely contributed to his death. “He should have been able to go to the hospital and get the treatment he needed,” Ms. Jones-Smith said. “He should have been saved.” Ringed by public housing projects, Richmond Community consists of little more than a strapped emergency room and a psychiatric ward. It does not have kidney or lung specialists, or a maternity ward. Its magnetic resonance imaging machine frequently breaks, and was out of service for seven weeks this summer, said two medical workers at the hospital, who requested anonymity because they still work there. Standard tools like an otoscope, a device used to inspect the ear canal, are often hard to come by. Yet the hollowed-out hospital — owned by Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of the largest nonprofit health care chains in the country — has the highest profit margins of any hospital in Virginia, generating as much as $100 million a year, according to the hospital’s financial data.

Nearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy with abortion pills obtained at a Phoenix clinic, she finds herself mired in an ongoing lawsuit over that decision. A judge allowed the woman’s ex-husband to establish an estate for the embryo, which had been aborted in its seventh week of development. The ex-husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors in 2020, alleging that physicians failed to obtain proper informed consent from the woman as required by Arizona law. Across the U.S., people have sued for negligence in the death of a fetus or embryo in cases where a pregnant person has been killed in a car crash or a pregnancy was lost because of alleged wrongdoing by a physician. But a court action claiming the wrongful death of an aborted embryo or fetus is a more novel strategy, legal experts said. The experts said this rare tactic could become more common, as anti-abortion groups have signaled their desire to further limit reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Arizona lawsuit and others that may follow could also be an attempt to discourage and intimidate providers and harass plaintiffs’ former romantic partners, experts said. Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in tort law and reproductive rights, said the Arizona case is a “harbinger of things to come” and called it “troubling for the future.” Finley said she expects state lawmakers and anti-abortion groups to use “unprecedented strategies” to try to prevent people from traveling to obtain abortions or block them from obtaining information on where to seek one.

A song’s journey from a Trump video to online forums and back to Trump rallies shows the melding of the MAGA and QAnon movements

Military-aged men fled Russia in droves Friday, filling planes and causing traffic jams at border crossings to avoid being rounded up to fight in Ukraine following the Kremlin’s partial military mobilization.

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.