CDC forecasts COVID deaths to rise for first time in months: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that the number of newly reported COVID-19 deaths will likely increase over the next four weeks, with 1,600 to 4,600 new deaths likely reported in the week ending May 28. The agency’s ensemble forecast shows that the U.S. will reach a total of 1,000,000 to 1,007,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths by that date. The figures mark the first time virus-related deaths have increased since February, following a steep decline after the winter omicron surge. Deaths in California are also expected to trend up in that period.

Wednesday's rate hike will push the federal funds rate to a range of 0.75%-1%.

The aim of the billions committed through the Lend-Lease plan could tip the geopolitical balance. History may be about to repeat itself, says Adam Tooze of Columbia University

Intuit Inc agreed to pay $141 million in restitution to settle claims by all 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., that it tricked millions of customers into buying online TurboTax products that the company deceptively advertised as "free."

The “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” star was performing at the Hollywood Bowl as part of the “Netflix Is a Joke” festival when the mayhem unfolded around 10:45 p.m. local time toward the end of the stand-up show, according to witnesses.

Wild hogs, which can grow to 220 pounds, have been a problem in the northern part of Italy's capital for years. One regional official says it's "now out of control."

Democrats are busy worshipping people while Republicans worship power

A quota system implemented in 2005 has meant economic and social trade-offs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday highlighted new figures showing the government's red ink will grow less than expected this year and the national debt will shrink this quarter as he tried to counter criticism of his economic leadership amid growing dismay over inflation going into midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.

The suit alleges a rushed takeover deal Microsoft to escape liability Activision CEO Bobby Kotick rushed to secure a takeover bid from Microsoft in order to escape liability for misconduct at the company, a new lawsuit from New York City officials alleges. Driving the news: The suit was filed in Delaware on April 26 by New York City Employees’ Retirement System and pension funds for the city’s teachers, police and firefighters. The groups own Activision stock and believe actions by the gaming giant's management hurt the company’s value.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The career-networking service LinkedIn has agreed to pay $1.8 million in back wages to hundreds of female workers to settle a pay discrimination complaint brought by U.S. labor investigators. The U.S. Labor Department announced Tuesday that it has reached a settlement agreement with LinkedIn to resolve allegations of “systemic, gender-based pay discrimination” in which women were paid less than men in comparable job roles. The settlement affects nearly 700 women who worked in engineering, product or marketing roles from 2015 to 2017 at the company’s offices in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California. It includes the time before and after Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016.

On trusting the process after it's openly failed Sometimes when I am explaining the somewhat eclectic variety of topics I write about in my newsletter, compared to the work I did at other publications for many years, l joke that “I just ran out of ways to say the Senate shouldn’t exist.” I say “joke,” but it’s also a fact. I was blogging this in 2010. Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the Senate “works” since George Packer wrote the damning portrait of a dysfunctional institution that I reference in that old Salon piece. More than a decade later, Senate institutionalists still make up the majority of the Democratic caucus, and they still believe the way to make the institution work is not to change its rules but to somehow change the nature of the opposition. So, in some sense, I gave up on the Senate. I spend less time carefully making the arguments for reforming it. I made them already, alongside lots of other smarter people with even better arguments, and the people in charge of the left-of-center party essentially tuned us all out, because they are institutionalists, and the institution can only be failed; it cannot be, by its very design, a failure. When we all learned that the far-right majority on the Supreme Court plans to gut the right to privacy that undergirds legal abortion access in the United States, a few patterns emerged in people’s responses. Most liberals were furious. Others in the media were outraged—on behalf of the Supreme Court, because they feared the leaking of a draft opinion could undermine the public’s faith in the “legitimacy” of the institution.

An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. This discovery, published today in Nature, could help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would allow major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level. “The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process,” said Hal Alper, professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin. “Beyond the obvious waste management industry, this also provides corporations from every sector the opportunity to take a lead in recycling their products. Through these more sustainable enzyme approaches, we can begin to envision a true circular plastics economy.”

Neal Katyal discusses what the shocking leak means for the future of abortion rights in America—and for the Court.

The Gates Foundation brought billions of dollars to the sector — and a business-friendly ethos consultants could exploit. When Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus took the helm of the World Health Organization in July 2017, his first speech at the headquarters in Geneva landed on a hopeful audience. WHO staff had seen a recent string of new bosses, each with a plan to reinvigorate and shake up the organization. The leaders’ reforms often involved bringing in management consultants, such as McKinsey, one of the world’s most influential and secretive firms. But every attempt had ultimately failed to solve the WHO’s most vexing — and decades-old — challenges, like the agency’s problematic financing structure and related chronic funding shortfalls. Tedros, as he’s known, suggested things would be different this time. He seemed to sense the staff’s reform fatigue and their leeriness of external consultants, reassuring his rank and file: “Any enduring change at WHO will come from the staff outwards. I do not believe in perpetual reform, and I think WHO staff are reformed out.” But Tedros appears to have embraced change, of a sort. Halfway through his five-year term, his reform — known as “the transformation” — is still in progress. And while he has offered WHO staff opportunities to engage in the process, the agency is also crawling with outside consultants, current and former WHO staffers told Vox. “The one thing that WHO staff didn’t want,” said a senior official who was involved in the reform process, “is a McKinsey type of reform,” using the well-known firm as a shorthand for what they’ve seen consultants bring to WHO and other health agencies over the years: “musical chairs,” “cost cutting,” and “debunked management fads.” In addition to McKinsey, the WHO confirmed they’ve worked with five other consultancies during the transformation: BCG, Deloitte, Preva Group, Seek Development, and most recently, Delivery Associates, which has a multi-year contract worth $3.85 million. The total value of the consultant contracts is about $12 million, at least a quarter of which has been paid for directly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the most powerful players in global health. Though the WHO is a public institution, the details of these engagements, and Gates’s involvement, aren’t available in the WHO’s budgets or financial statements. The information that is disclosed on the WHO’s website is incomplete. The WHO has a portal with data on contracts the agency processes — but it excludes those paid for directly by donors like Gates. It’s also missing information on what, exactly, consultants have been hired to do. For example, the portal shows the WHO’s headquarters awarded McKinsey with $4.19 million in contracts between 2017 and 2018 — but not whether those were reform-related. (The WHO declined to specify.)

Experts anticipated a Moscow-led cyber assault; instead unprecedented attacks by hacktivists and criminals have wreaked havoc in Russia

If the conservative justice’s draft opinion is adopted by the Court, key advances of the past hundred years could be rolled back.

A Vanity Fair investigation has revealed shocking new details about the Grey’s writers' room controversy. Also, there’s kidney stuff now.

A depression in volunteer energy in four swing states is a direct result of Democratic inaction on Biden’s campaign promises, organizers say.

It costs just over $160 to get a week's worth of data on where people who visited Planned Parenthood came from, and where they went afterwards.