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.

In a Texas Democratic primary between an anti-abortion Democrat whose home and office were raided by the FBI and a young, progressive, pro-choice woman, top House Democrats—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi—are going with the former. Even after it became clear this week that the Supreme Court is apparently planning to overturn Roe v. Wade. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a longtime Democratic congressman from Texas’ 28th Congressional District, won a plurality of support in the March primary over Jessica Cisneros, a progressive 28-year-old immigration lawyer whom Cuellar narrowly defeated in 2020. They’ll face each other in a runoff election on May 24 to decide the Democratic nominee, which Democrats view as key to their slim chances of maintaining a House majority next year. The conservative Cuellar is avowedly anti-choice, one of the few Democrats left in the House who fits that description. Last year, he was the only House Democrat to vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would protect abortion access as a matter of federal law and was passed after Texas banned abortion after six weeks. “It’s called conscience: I am a Catholic, and I do believe in right to life, and it’s just a conscience,” Cuellar told reporters in October. “Sometimes people vote because of [politics], they think just because [it’s a] Democratic or Republican issue, for me it’s just a matter of conscience.” Cuellar has been endorsed by top House Democrats including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, as well as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose campaign arm funded attacks on Cisneros in 2020. Pelosi’s political action committee gave Cuellar $4,000 in December, according to FEC records, Cisneros, on the other hand, is vehemently pro-choice, and has been endorsed by reproductive rights advocacy groups such as NARAL and EMILY’s List, as well as progressive politicians such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cisneros slammed Cuellar after his vote last year. “Once again, Henry Cuellar has refused to stand up for South Texans’ reproductive freedom and the constitutional right to abortion care,” Cisneros said in a statement to the Texas Tribune. “Even after our state’s Republican leaders just passed the country’s most extreme ban—ending almost all abortion access in Texas with no exceptions after 6 weeks—our Congressman refuses to defend us and our reproductive rights.” Cuellar has also been plagued by questions about his integrity. In January, the FBI raided his home and office in connection with an investigation into ties between Azerbaijan and U.S. companies and groups. Records related to Cuellar and his wife were subpoenaed, ABC News reported in January, but his lawyer told Fox News last month that Cuellar is not the target of the investigation. But even with the FBI raid and his almost total opposition to abortion rights, Cuellar is continuing to receive enthusiastic support from the House Democratic leadership. Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat, who wields major influence in national Democratic politics, is set to campaign for Cuellar in a get-out-the-vote event on Wednesday in San Antonio.

Activists are mobilizing in preparation for the weakening or end of Roe v. Wade. That's the subject of Jessica Bruder's new cover story for The Atlantic. "There are lots of people who want to keep abortion accessible for everybody who might want access to abortion, regardless of what the Supreme Court does," she says. Bruder is also author of the book Nomadland, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews Sea of Tranquility the new novel by Emily St. John Mandel.

Data from more than 18,000 canines show that pedigree is not destiny.

A year ago, the elevation of Marcia Fudge to secretary of housing and urban development created a vacancy in Ohio’s deep-blue 11th Congressional District in Cleveland. Progressives saw it as another prime opportunity, similar to ones they took advantage of in a series of 2020 primaries. The idea was to take shots in favorable seats, challenging moderates and moving the center of gravity within the party. A revitalized progressive campaign infrastructure, candidates that fit the districts in which they ran, and a nationally energized donor network made this possible, and for a minute, the long-term outlook was pretty positive. But the race in the 11th District saw the first successful counterattack to this strategy, from a group of outside donors who represented the old-guard establishment. Though Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) was active in campaigns prior to 2021, including supporting Joe Biden and the ultimately losing campaign of former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Eliot Engel, OH-11 is where they made their stand, getting behind Shontel Brown in a race against former Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner. Like in the New York campaign pitting Engel against Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Democratic Majority for Israel’s ads in Ohio had little or nothing to do with Israel. The ads pulled messaging directly from an unmistakable banner on Brown’s campaign website, focusing on Turner’s divisiveness and some choice negative comments she made about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. DMFI spent around $2 million on TV and other advertisements in the race, and that was enough to help Brown secure a comeback victory. The PAC almost single-handedly took over the reins of a lifeless campaign and turned it into a winner. Funding for this effort largely came from a collection of oil company executives, investment fund managers, and the former chairman of multilevel marketing firm Rodan + Fields. And DMFI’s vendors also work for Democratic Party groups like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and Senate Majority PAC.

Protests have taken place in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) against plans for the UK to take direct rule of the territory following the arrest of its elected leader. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside of Government House in Tortola, the residence of the governor-general John Rankin, on Monday, after an inquiry led by British judge Sir Gary Hickinbottom into corruption recommended the islands be governed from London for two years. It is being proposed that Mr Rankin, who represents the Queen, should assume the position of premier in place of an elected government official. However, many BVI residents are resisting this suggestion which has been described as “colonial”, particularly in the context of the region’s history as a former British slave colony, and undemocratic as there are no plans to put the matter to the public.

A petition has been launched online by National Trust Cymru, asking people what their thoughts are on the potential removal of Dobby’s grave from…

In late March, a 72-year-old woman took the jacket from an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris. She was caught upon a return visit.

"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.

A body inside a barrel was found over the weekend on the the newly exposed bottom of Nevada’s Lake Mead as drought depletes one of the largest U.S. reservoirs — and officials predicted the discovery could be just the first of more grim finds. “I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains,” Las Vegas police Lt. Ray Spencer told KLAS-TV on Monday. The lake’s level has dropped so much that the uppermost water intake at drought-stricken Lake Mead became visible last week. The reservoir on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam has become so depleted that Las Vegas is now pumping water from deeper within Lake Mead, which also stretches into Arizona. Personal items found inside the barrel indicated the person died more than 40 years ago in the 1980s, Spencer said. He declined to discuss a cause of death and declined to describe the items found, saying the investigation is ongoing. Police plan to reach out to experts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to analyze when the barrel started eroding. The Clark County coroner’s office will try to determine the person’s identity. Boaters spotted the barrel Sunday afternoon. National Park Service rangers searched an area near the lake’s Hemenway Harbor and found the barrel containing skeletal remains. Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.

The deplatformed CEO tried to slither his was back onto Twitter following news Elon Musk plans to acquire the company for $44 billion.

Otter would likely not have survived without intervention of goldendoodle Gus, officials say.

He took her breath away and changed her life forever.