An exhaustive new review debunks the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression.

The 79-year-old, who is fully-vaccinated and has twice received booster jabs, is experiencing "very mild symptoms" and will continue to carry out all his duties, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

President Biden tested positive for Covid-19, as the oldest president in U.S. history was confronted with the latest wave of a pandemic that he has sought to move the nation beyond.

The New York State Health Department confirmed a case of polio on Thursday, the first known infection in the U.S. in nearly a decade. A resident of Rockland County, a suburb of New York City, tested positive for polio, according to the state health department. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the infection. Health-care providers should look for additional polio cases, state health officials said. The chain of infection that resulted in the New York case is believed to have originated outside the U.S. No cases of polio have originated in the U.S. since 1979, according to the CDC.

Even before the pandemic began, more people here were dying at younger ages than in comparably wealthy nations. Jacob Bor has been thinking about a parallel universe. He envisions a world in which America has health on par with that of other wealthy nations, and is not an embarrassing outlier that, despite spending more on health care than any other country, has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality, and fewer doctors per capita than its peers. Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, imagines the people who are still alive in that other world but who died in ours. He calls such people “missing Americans.” And he calculates that in 2021 alone, there were 1.1 million of them. Bor and his colleagues arrived at that number by using data from an international mortality database and the CDC. For every year from 1933 to 2021, they compared America’s mortality rates with the average of Canada, Japan, and 16 Western European nations (adjusting for age and population). They showed that from the 1980s onward, the U.S. started falling behind its peers. By 2019, the number of missing Americans had grown to 626,000. After COVID arrived, that statistic ballooned even further—to 992,000 in 2020, and to 1.1 million in 2021. Were the U.S. “just average compared to other wealthy countries, not even the best performer, fully a third of all deaths last year would have been prevented,” Bor told me. That includes half of all deaths among working-age adults. “Think of two people you might know under 65 who died last year: One of them might still be alive,” he said. “It raises the hairs on the back of my neck.”

We all know these busy insects are good for crops and biodiversity, but proof is emerging that they are also clever, sentient and unique beings

A Central Florida woman accused of running around outside a Publix store with a pitchfork and a black whip, while trying to sell teddy bears, was arrested Tuesday afternoon, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

On Monday, Dutch reforestation company Land Life started what has become a 35,000 acre forest fire in Spain. The fire started in Bubierca, a province of Zaragoza, the capital of autonomous community Aragon, when a Land Life contractor planting trees accidentally set off sparks that ignited nearby plant life. "The fire started while one of our contractors was using a retro-spider excavator to prepare the soil to plant trees later this winter," Land Life said in a statement on Thursday. "The operators alerted the emergency services. The emergency teams are working non-stop to control the fire and have fortunately established the fire perimeter. Nonetheless, we are devastated by the latest estimate that the damage will be around 14,000 hectares," or roughly 35,000 acres.” “While a contractor was working on forest restoration in the area, a spark from one of the excavators started the fire,” the company wrote in an earlier press release. Land Life is a carbon offsetting firm, which means that it plants trees to, in theory, make up for the carbon emissions of polluting industries. It’s not clear how many acres Land Life has actually planted trees in—one blog post suggested the company aimed to plant around 20,000 acres between 2020-2021. This forest fire has not likely wiped out the lion’s share of Land Life’s work, but it is also not the first forest fire caused by Land Life—on June 20, it sparked another inferno that wiped out 20 hectares. (49 acres). "It is not good that it happens once and that they continue working," the mayor of Bubierca told local media. "The Government of Aragon, instead of recommending that the activity cease, should have prohibited it, because there is time to repopulate these hills, where fire breaks out as soon as they throw iron on the stone."

A staple on the shelves of grocery stores and in refrigerators across France is in short supply, and an end to the shortage is months away.

Quadball is a reference both to the number of balls on the field and the number of positions in the game. The leagues and governing bodies hope the rebrand will also allow the sport to grow more.

Nicholas Bostic rescued a girl by leaping from the second story with her tucked under his arm.

Things were too fucked up to be explained by the slow drift of history, political dysfunction, and economic inequality.

This NSFW optical illusion reveals if the viewer has a dirty mind.

After weeks of complaints from evicted tenants, Detroit City Council has begun discussing ways to stop illegal evictions in the city. Certificates of compliance are required to legally rent out a property and evict tenants in Detroit. But in the past two years, almost 90% of eviction cases filed in Detroit were from landlords who did not have a certificate, according to a recent report from the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. Detroit Council Member Angela Whitfield Calloway said she wants a moratorium on illegal evictions or funding to enforce the certificate requirement. Several other councilmembers agreed that the issue is about enforcing Detroit's current rental ordinance rather than making a new one. "I went down to the 36th District Court and it’s packed with people being evicted, illegally, with the assistance of our police department. Something has to be done," Whitfield Calloway said during Detroit's Tuesday City Council meeting.

It may surprise you to learn, given the mood of the country — and indeed the world — about the pandemic that probably half of all Covid infections have happened this calendar year — and it’s only July. By December, the figure could be 80 percent or more. The gap between cases and severe outcomes is bigger than it has ever been, with the fraction of infections ending in deaths one-tenth that of the pandemic’s early stages. But simply in terms of infection, this year towers over each of the previous two. Between the discovery of the Delta variant and its takeover of America more than six months passed; with each of the new Omicron variants, we’ve barely had six weeks. Many of the once-authoritative guides to the pandemic, perhaps acknowledging their declining authority among the public, have withdrawn a bit. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed the standards of its local-guidance maps, raising the threshold for concern much higher, though with the rapid spread of the BA.5 variant, most of the country is now meeting it anyway. Mitigation policies, which had been mostly calibrated to local and national spread for two years, have disappeared as a pandemic signpost too.

The problem is it can be tricky nailing down just how much your assorted body parts are worth, so we did a little digging to find out.

The CHP is looking for the driver of a big rig truck who struck the I-80 overpass on Gilman Street then fled the scene, authorities say.

Texas lawmakers, frustrated with what they viewed as liberal political activism from some of the titans of American industry, banned banks last year from doing business with Texas municipalities unless they could certify to the state attorney general they don’t “discriminate” against the gun industry. The Legislative Budget Board, which estimates the costs of proposed legislation, predicted no significant financial impact on the state or on local governments. But in the first eight months since the law was enacted, local governments seeking to finance building projects through bonds — for instance school districts trying to build new football stadiums, cities looking to upgrade their airports — have already paid between $300 million and $500 million more in increased interest payments, according to a study from a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Federal Reserve economist based in Washington.

SACRAMENTO, California (AP) — After putting off routine health care for much of the pandemic, Americans are now returning to doctors' offices in big numbers — a trend that's starting to show up in higher insurance rates across the country. Health insurers in individual marketplaces across 13 states and Washington D.C. will raise rates an average of 10% next year, according to a review of rate filings by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Why Democratic power brokers won’t fight for public education Last spring, taking a break from waging conspiratorial campaigns against the republic, an assortment of luminaries associated with the Claremont Institute gathered to lay out a plan to foment a culture war against the nation’s schools. The Clubhouse event, entitled “Building A New Right: Red States vs. Wokeness,” featured a grab bag of Claremont fellows and friends. The star attraction was Manhattan Institute agitprop specialist Christopher Rufo, chief sower of the panics against critical race theory (CRT) and “grooming.” In a now familiar exercise, Rufo sketched out his campaign to make CRT toxic as part of a larger propaganda war against public institutions. The ultimate goal, he explained, was essentially to do away with those institutions and redirect school funding to families and individuals based on their “values.” Rufo waxed apocalyptic about the scourge of “wokeness,” and yet he struck a hopeful note. After all, he reminded listeners, it had only taken the country a few years to go from the Black Panthers to Nixon. In the ensuing months, Rufo’s propaganda campaign would grow increasingly lurid, but on this occasion, he urged his audience to raise the discussion to a higher level. Focus on “excellence,” he admonished them, and attack public schools for failing to meet that standard. Conservative communications guru David Reaboi, who helped seed a previous moral panic on the right against the sinister spread of Sharia law, weighed in with some messaging advice of his own: Go full bore against the teachers unions. Do damage. Today, this coordinated plan to wage a public relations war against the nation’s public schools is an undeniable success. Forty-two states have moved to restrict teaching about oppression, race or gender. According to one estimate, more than one third of students in the country attend school in a state where educators are now subject to some kind of classroom gag order. The achievement of Rufo and his allies is all the more astonishing, given the deep unpopularity of the policies they champion. Polls consistently show that voters across party lines are repelled by the GOP’s education extremism. Across the chasm of our current political divide, bipartisan majorities are largely in agreement that banning books and gagging teachers is bad. And for all of the insurgent right’s bold rhetoric about mining parent outrage for electoral gold, the polls that matter most have shown remarkably poor results for candidates running on scorched-earth education platforms. In New Hampshire, New York, Montana, Georgia, Wisconsin and beyond, voters are rejecting right-wing culture warriors, often by wide margins—a movement that might be summed up as “keeping the crazy away from the kids.” There’s just one problem, though: The leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.