Researchers successfully transplanted genetically modified pig hearts into two recently deceased people connected to ventilators, the New York University team announced today. The surgeries are the latest step forward in the field of animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, which has seen a flurry of successes so far this year — raising hopes for a new, steady supply of organs to ease shortages.

As Biden courts Israel after the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, Rachel Corrie’s family is speaking out. Nearly two decades before Israeli forces killed Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, shooting a single bullet into her head while she was reporting from the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, an Israeli soldier drove a bulldozer over American peace activist Rachel Corrie, crushing her to death. Both killings left little real doubt about the dynamics at play. Abu Akleh was standing with a group of colleagues, wearing a vest clearly marked “PRESS,” nowhere near the fighting that had taken place earlier that morning. Corrie was nonviolently protesting the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home in Gaza. She was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket with reflective stripes and had been on the scene for several hours, at times speaking into a megaphone. In the moments before her death, Corrie was standing in the path of the bulldozer as other activists had been doing throughout the day. As the driver pushed the machine forward, she climbed onto a mound of dirt so she would be clearly visible, according to witness testimony reviewed by The Intercept. The driver kept advancing. When she fell to the ground, the dirt engulfed her, but the driver moved several feet forward before backing off, effectively crushing her twice. The possibility that he did not see her, as he later claimed, defies all credibility. Still, the Israeli government never took responsibility for her death, and while the U.S. government rejected the results of the Israeli investigation, it did nothing to ensure that such a killing would not happen again. So it did.

Social-media startup Truth Social has branded itself as the anti-Twitter and the exclusive home of former President Donald Trump. Its prospects, the firm’s financial backers have disclosed in public filings, depend on monetizing Trump supporters’ rage over alleged “Big Tech” censorship of the political right. As it turns out, it’s hard to build a social network to take on Big Tech without the help of Big Tech. The Trump venture’s pugnacious political approach has hobbled the company’s development from its inception, a Reuters examination of the origins of the secretive enterprise has found. Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) has struggled to develop its social media platform since its February 2021 founding because its managers have sought to avoid potential corporate partners and employees perceived as politically liberal in a Silicon Valley-based industry that skews left, said three people with knowledge of its operations. The feeling is mutual: Many engineers and tech firms won’t consider working with a Trump company, according to two of those people, two additional sources with knowledge of the venture and a May 16 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the investment company that plans to merge with TMTG, Digital World Acquisition Corp, or DWAC. The mutual aversion has severely restricted the pool of talent and corporate partners available to help TMTG build a competitive social network on an ambitious timeline.

“It’s hard to even see the mission right now, much less put your faith in it,” one Biden bundler said regarding the difficulty of fundraising for the president these days.

A circuit court judge said Monday that he will not halt a special grand jury investigation despite a filing by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to stop it.

Among consequences to the end of Roe vs. Wade: Rheumatology patients lose access to a crucial drug. Why? It can be used to end ectopic pregnancies. Six days after the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion, lupus patient Becky Schwarz got an unexpected message from her rheumatologist. “This is a notice to let you know that we are pausing all prescriptions and subsequent refills of methotrexate,” the message read. “This decision has been made in response to the reversal of Roe vs. Wade.” Schwarz was stunned. Methotrexate is a cheap, common drug prescribed to millions of Americans. Like her, many have rheumatic illnesses. Others take it to treat inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis or cancer. Yet few are aware that it is used off-label to end ectopic pregnancies, or that it could be restricted by doctors or pharmacists even in states like Virginia that do not ban abortion. The reasons are numerous, and muddy. In Texas, dispensing methotrexate to someone who uses it to induce a miscarriage after 49 days of gestation is a felony; that makes pharmacists hesitant to fill such prescriptions for almost anyone with a uterus. A new total ban on abortion in Tennessee will effectively criminalize any medication that could disrupt pregnancy past the point of fertilization, with strict exceptions for a patient who will otherwise die. And in Virginia, confusion over rules about who is permitted to prescribe drugs “qualified as abortifacients” may be blocking access to the medication. “That’s what was shocking to me,” said Schwarz, a 27-year-old who lives in Tysons Corner, Va. “In a state where I thought I was relatively protected regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, I found out I wasn’t.”

Despite outcry from Democrats and reproductive rights groups, Biden isn’t backing off plans to nominate Chad Meredith, a source tells HuffPost.

A Brooklyn Center man faces federal charges after he lit his own camper on fire to make it look like a politically-motivated crime, and then allegedly filed several fraudulent insurance claims.

Soon after boarding, Claudia noticed the first coughs. Once she tuned into the sound, it seemed to be everywhere. I can see these people are sick – anybody can, she thought.

Handgrip strength of less than 28 kg for males and 18 kg for women indicated sarcopenia or poor muscular strength, whereas individuals with a BMI of more than 25 kg/m2 were classified as obese

File under “two celebrity names you wouldn’t expect to hear uttered in the same sentence,” but here we are. This is fascinating simply because you’d probably not expect the avant-garde performance artist and front-person of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV to be on the TV funnyman’s radar at all, but in a recent episode of this season’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld and Margaret Cho have a discussion on identity politics which leads to Cho bringing up P-Orridge’s Pandrogeny Project. In the popular web series, Cho refers to P-Orridge as “punk rock royalty” along with h/er wife, the dearly departed Lady Jaye, and explains to Jerry their Pandrogeny Project in which the pair underwent body modification to resemble one another, in order to identify as a single pandrogynous being. Jerry takes it all in and suggests that a “new word” is needed to describe what happens when you, in his words, “transgender into your wife… and she…[turns] into him.” Upon careful reflection, Seinfeld dubs it a “do-si-do.”

A leading Dutch art detective was able to retrieve two lead vials containing “the blood of Jesus” after the thief dumped it into the ocean.

A multiyear search attempts to explain one of the most extreme, and baffling, cases of human survival.

SAS operatives in Afghanistan repeatedly killed detainees and unarmed men in suspicious circumstances, according to a BBC investigation. Newly obtained military reports suggest that one unit may have unlawfully killed 54 people in one six-month tour. The BBC found evidence suggesting the former head of special forces failed to pass on evidence to a murder inquiry.

In a move to reveal what is likely the first ever municipal statues honoring meth manufacturers, the city of Albuquerque is unveiling statues dedicated to Breaking Bad characters Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. According to a press release, the statues were originally commissioned from sculptor Trevor Grove in 2019 by series creator Vince Gilligan, who is donating the statues to the city alongside Sony Pictures Television.

Barry Enderwick is eating his way through the past, one pan bagnat at a time.

E.T. was jello in a T-shirt. The Mummy was scratchy potpourri. For Foley artists, deception is an essential part of the enterprise.

Proposal would give SFPD access to a huge network of private cameras, without any meaningful limits on how the data can be used or shared. It’s 2023, and dozens of states have criminalized abortion. Some have passed laws making it a crime to leave the state for an abortion somewhere else. Gov. Gavin Newsom has made clear that California will be a safe haven, and women from all over are arriving in San Francisco to go to clinics. But there’s a loophole in that safe haven: The San Francisco Police Department has developed a network of surveillance cameras that can capture people going to protests, marches, events—and even medical clinics. And while San Francisco officials say they will never prosecute a woman coming from out of state for an abortion, there’s nothing in city law that prevents the SF cops from sharing that video with, say, law enforcement in Texas or Alabama. San Francisco is a sanctuary city for immigrants, but that same video could be shared with ICE officers who are looking to find and deport refugees. Those, civil-liberties advocates say, are not impossible scenarios: If the San Francisco supes approve a new plan proposed by Mayor London Breed, the SFPD will have broad access to private cameras all over the city, from Ring doorbells to store security footage, with few limits on when and how much of that video can be viewed and when it can be shared with other law-enforcement organizations..

Longstanding weaknesses in the public health system are giving the virus a chance to become entrenched. As epidemics go, the monkeypox outbreak should have been relatively easy to snuff out. The virus does not spread efficiently except through intimate contact, and tests and vaccines were at hand even before the current outbreak. Yet the response in the United States has been sluggish and timid, reminiscent of the early days of the Covid pandemic, experts say, raising troubling questions about the nation’s preparedness for pandemic threats. The first cases of monkeypox were reported in May, but tests will not be readily available until sometime this month. Vaccines will be in short supply for months longer. Surveillance is spotty, and official case counts are likely a gross underestimate. There are already at least 700 cases in the United States, but experts say the real number is likely to be much higher. There probably will be many more infections before the outbreak can be controlled, if at this point it can be controlled at all. “Why is it so hard for something that’s even a known pathogen?” asked Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who first warned of monkeypox outbreaks more than a decade ago. “How many more times do we have to go through this?” With increasing travel and trade, new pathogens will emerge more frequently, Dr. Rimoin said: “We’ve been hitting the snooze button on emerging diseases for decades. The alarm is going off, and it’s time to wake up.” The obstacles to preparedness are systemic, at every level of government, rather than because of any one individual or agency, Dr. Rimoin and other experts said. Even as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third year, the public health system in the United States remains a hamstrung patchwork, an underfunded bureaucracy seemingly incapable of swift and forceful action. Its shortcomings have persisted for decades, through many administrations.

The scene at SF General on Friday afternoon was grim. “There’s 200-300 gays here,” my friend texted me. “I didn’t think there were this many gays left in SF. It’s like the worst circuit party ever.” The hospital was mobbed by people hoping to fit into the absurd two-hour window for receiving the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine, which San Francisco is in woefully short supply of. Others report still waiting more than a week for a call back about receiving the vaccine from Castro health center Strut, which is trying to fulfill a growing need, especially after two Pride parties informed attendees that they may have been exposed and SF cases rose to 40 by July 5. San Francisco is reportedly receiving less than 2300 doses per week from the state, and must choose where to deploy them. Currently, it is prioritizing people who may have been exposed, but the need is much greater than that—especially with the huge Up Your Alley leather/fetish fair coming up at the end of the month. (The CDC has great, refreshingly straightforward advice on sex and partying during this time.)