Julee Cruise, a singer who brought a memorably ethereal voice to the projects of the director David Lynch — most famously “Falling,” whose instrumental version was the theme for Mr. Lynch’s cult-favorite television show, “Twin Peaks” — died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. She was 65. Her husband, Edward Grinnan, said the cause was suicide. He said she had struggled with depression as well as lupus. Ms. Cruise was building a career off Broadway in the early 1980s when serendipity struck: She met the composer Angelo Badalamenti when they worked on a show together. “I was in this country-and-western musical in the East Village,” she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I was a chorus girl with a big skirt and a big wig, singing way too loud. Angelo was doing the music for the show, and we became friends.” A few years later, Mr. Badalamenti was engaged by Mr. Lynch, who was still early in his career, as a vocal coach for Isabella Rossellini in the 1986 Lynch movie “Blue Velvet” and ended up writing the score for that film as well. Mr. Lynch and Mr. Badalamenti had written a song for the film that needed a vocalist.

A new report shows the cost of renting a home or apartment is up 15% nationally to a new record high.

Rent control, while not a cure-all for the housing crisis, is a key component of any serious program to address the high cost of living.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the same conflict that it was earlier this spring. The Russian Army’s initial campaign, in February and March, was a three-front invasion with little coherence or military logic. Ukrainian troops mounted small-unit ambushes and used rocket-propelled grenades, antitank weapons, and drones to destroy Russian troop formations and armor. Viral videos show their direct strikes, with tanks disappearing in flame and smoke. Now the Russian military has regrouped its forces for a more targeted assault in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, drawing on its advantages in artillery and airpower. As Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at CNA, a defense research organization, said, “Russia is making fitful but incremental gains, and Ukraine’s position in the Donbas is more precarious than it once seemed.” I spent several days in the Donbas recently, where a number of officers and enlisted soldiers told me that Ukrainian infantry rarely see the enemy. Rather, battles are often fought at distances of ten miles or more. The war has become, as one soldier told me, a game of “artillery Ping-Pong.” In Bakhmut, a midsize town a few miles from the front, I met members of a Kyiv-based unit of the Territorial Defense, a voluntary military corps, who had been sent east in recent weeks; they looked ragged but cheerful. Since Russian forces had captured the nearby town of Popasna, in May, Bakhmut fell well within Russian artillery range; it was also on Ukraine’s main supply route to Sievierodonetsk, the city that is now Russia’s main target and the site of running street battles. One of the soldiers switched to English to describe the fighting: “Let me put it like this: very fucking awful.” He went on, “We want to shoot the enemy, but we don’t see him. An infantryman has nothing to do in an artillery war other than dig—and run.”

One morb time.

Criticized by law enforcement experts for slowness in taking out the shooter, Pete Arredondo described an agonizing wait for a key that would work. In an interview with The Texas Tribune, he said he hadn’t spoken out sooner because he didn’t want to compound his hometown’s grief or point blame.

Government plans to burn £4 billion of unusable personal protective equipment (PPE) to generate power have been criticised by MPs as potentially costly – both financially and to the environment. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) lost 75% of the £12 billion it spent on PPE in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic to inflated prices and faulty kit. This included £4 billion worth which could not be used because it did not meet NHS standards.

A horticulturalist who was fired for giving her boss the middle finger and telling him to “f*** off” has been awarded €6,300 in compensation for unfair dismissal.

Plus more highs and lows from the world of rap this week, including a review of Babyface Ray’s NYC show and an excellent new Papo2oo4 mixtape that will bring you back to the days of 50 Cent and ByrdGang.

ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. (WHTM) – A rescue was prompted at the Mars M&M factory in Lancaster County after two people became stuck in a chocolate tank. A Lancaster County 911 supervisor says the first victim was extricated from the tank at 3:10 p.m. and the second was out by 3:25 p.m. after both fell into the tank. The condition of both victims is unknown at this time, but both were taken to area hospitals. Authorities were called to help cut a hole into the tank to assist the rescue, according to a dispatch supervisor. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating this incident. A Mars Wrigley spokesperson said they were managing the situation and are “extremely grateful for the quick work of the first responders.”

Tee hee.

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — The superintendent of the Texas school district where 19 students and two teachers were fatally shot said Thursday that the district will hire more police officers in the fall (presumably to make sure no parents are able to get past the police blockade to rescue their children next time)

The parents have accused Miller of using "violence" and "intimidation" to control their child

The human or animal (or alien?) is difficult to identify.

The FBI raided the home of Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley on Thursday morning. The FBI executed both a search warrant and arrest warrant at Kelley's home in Allendale Township, spokesperson Mara Schneider told Bridge Michigan. Video reviewed by Bridge Michigan appeared to show FBI agents leading a man who resembled Kelley into a gray SUV shortly before 9:30 am. A real estate agent, Kelley rose to prominence in conservative circles in 2020 for protesting removal of a Confederate statue in his hometown and organizing a Michigan Capitol protest against COVID-19 policies. Kelley was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of former President Donald Trump breached the building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's win. Kelley has said he did not go inside the Capitol. Video from outside the building showed him climbing on scaffolding and encouraging other protesters.

San Francisco is a mid-sized North American city. It has almost exactly the same population as Columbus, Ohio. It’s about 15 percent larger than Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Those two cities, for good or ill, don’t captivate the national imagination. But this one does. You don’t hear about “Columbus values” or a “Winnipeg liberal,” but “San Francisco” does serve as a modifier. “San Francisco” is a metonym. Things happen everywhere, but in San Francisco, Things Matter.

The remains were found near the San José galleon, which was sunk by the British in 1708.

Residents say they have no idea when they may be able to return home.

It’s June again—that time of year when Americans wake up each morning and wait for the Supreme Court to resolve our deepest political disagreements. To decide what the Constitution says about our bodily autonomy, our power to avert climate change, and our ability to protect children from guns, the nation turns not to members of Congress—elected by us—but to five oracles in robes. This annual observance of judicial supremacy—the idea that the Supreme Court has the final say about what our Constitution allows—is an odd affliction for a nation that will close the month ready to celebrate our independence from an unelected monarch. From one perspective, our acceptance of this supremacy reflects a sense that our political system is simply too broken to address the most urgent questions that we confront. But it would be a mistake to see judicial supremacy as a mere symptom of our politics and not a cause. Contrary to what many people have come to believe, judicial supremacy is not in the Constitution, and does not date from the founding era. It took hold of American politics only after the Civil War, when the Court overruled Congress’s judgment that the Constitution demanded civil-rights and voting laws. The Court has spent the 150 years since sapping our national representatives of the power to issue national rules. These judicial decisions have destroyed guardrails that national majorities deemed vital to a functional, multiracial democracy—including protecting the right to vote and curbing the influence of money in politics. Even worse, the Court’s assertion of the power to invalidate federal laws has stripped Americans of the expectation, once widely shared, that the most important interpretations of the Constitution are expressed not by judicial decree but by the participation of “We, the People,” in enacting national legislation. In the decades before the Civil War, when national parties violently contested the constitutionality of slavery west of the Mississippi, the center of gravity was Congress. As the historian James Oakes recounts, when a border-state senator proposed asking the Supreme Court to decide the issue in 1848, other senators ridiculed his idea as implausible. “The Constitution was interpreted as variously as the Bible,” Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire responded. White southerners believed “the Constitution carries slavery with it,” while northerners construed the Constitution “to secure freedom.” As Hale and his contemporaries appreciated, resolving such a fundamental national disagreement could never turn on a court’s answer to which interpretation was more correct. Rather, the winning interpretation would depend on whether adherents could build sufficient political majorities to control the national government.

Following Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his supporters have pushed baseless accusations of fraud in the election process. The reviews those claims prompted have failed to unearth malfeasance. But Trump’s claims succeeded in two key ways: providing rhetorical support for sympathizers who doubt the U.S. election process, and encouraging targeted harassment against the poll workers and local officials who make U.S. elections work. Those people are mostly civil servants, minor officials and volunteers. Virtually all of them are strangers to the spotlight and unfamiliar with notoriety. The attention that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort has focused on these workers has been relentless and ugly, said Shauna Dillavou, a security expert and founder of Brightlines, an anti-doxxing service for elections workers. And, she said, it’s getting worse. “People would come and wait for them to get out of their precinct and get in their cars,” she said. “They’d follow them. They’d leave notes on cars. They’d copy down license plate numbers. They would sit outside and threaten people.”