Five of Alabama's seven U.S. congressional districts are among the bottom 35 districts in the nation for average life expectancy.

He's our subway hero

"While there have been factual inaccuracies in recent reports about our work for Amazon, being involved in any way was a mistake."

Viral TikTok claims Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is blocking border trade to drive inflation and hurt Democrats in the midterms.

The actor/author was disappointed by the sexism and insensitivity of his 2004 memoir ‘Just a Geek,’ so he decided to revise it. He talks to MEL about getting a do-over, living with the anger of how his parents mistreated him and why he still stands with Chris Hardwick

Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. entered a plea of guilty on Wednesday to a misdemeanor charge of forcibly touching a woman at a New York City nightclub in 2018.

Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet as an NFT for $2.9 million last year. He listed the NFT for sale again at $48 million last week.

America conceives of itself as an “ownership society.” Nearly two-thirds of U.S. households own their home, and the idea of renting is inseparable from ownership in the U.S. context. Renting is given meaning by its relationship to ownership—it’s how you live if you can’t afford, or aren’t yet ready, to own. America treats renting as it has treated the minimum wage for the past several decades: unworthy of serious concern, just a phase in young people’s lives, and a long-term outcome only for those unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This perspective is a big part of why renters enjoy so few protections, and why the U.S. showers roughly $150 billion on homeowners each year but only a fraction of that on renters, despite renters having about half the median household income of owners. Yet look no further than the Great Recession—or the declining home values in much of the Rust Belt over the past half century—to see the tremendous drawbacks of homeownership. Those losses aren’t equitably distributed, either: Nearly 2 million mortgages are underwater in the U.S., and they’re disproportionately concentrated in Black and Latino communities. Tenants in coastal cities, meanwhile, know the pain of forking over more and more rent every year, unable to save for a down payment and living at the mercy of sometimes unscrupulous landlords.

NASA is planning to test an unconventional system for launching small objects to low Earth orbit. The system, which uses intense centrifugal force and a final propulsion stage, aims to make launches more affordable and environmentally friendly, but the concept remains unproven. SpinLaunch has been running tests of its system in the New Mexico desert for the past several months, and we certainly took notice of the California startup when it performed a successful first test on October 22, 2021, when the A-33 Suborbital Mass Accelerator—working at just 20% capacity—flung a 10-foot-long projectile to an altitude of tens of thousands of feet, according to the company. The current suborbital accelerator is a one-third scale version of the machine SpinLaunch would like to build—a gigantic kinetic launch system capable of hurling objects to the edge of space. Flung to an extreme altitude, the projectile’s propulsion stage would kick in, providing the final boost to low Earth orbit (LEO). The system, should it work, would introduce an entirely new means of delivering objects to space, as potential payloads could include small satellites, on-orbit scientific experiments, building materials, or even the ashes of loved ones.

It’s been a few years, and if you’ve been paying attention to things like commodities prices — and why would you if you’re a normal person, because, well, you’ve got a life to live — they’ve generally been rising. They’ve been rising because harvests have been failing. Everything from coffee to sugar harvests to wheat crops have been failing over the last few years. And that is because we live on a dying planet. This is an effect of climate change. Everybody in power is pretending to ignore this, by the way, in the way that these things go. Imagine a conversation between two investment bankers, or a Prime Minister and his Economic Advisors. “Hey, Steve, do you know why the harvests of everything are beginning to fail? Hmm, it almost seems like there’s a pattern here!” “Why, sir. It’s just a coincidence! A run of bad luck, if you will! Statistics prove that if you spin a roulette wheel a million times, well, you’ll lose ten times in a row sometimes!! It’s pure chance!!” “What a relief! You mean it has nothing to do with, say, us turning the planet into an inhabitable garbage fire made of microplastics and radioactive billionaire dust?” “Nothing to do with that at all!!” This is how idiotic our leaders actually are. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the following relationship. As the temperature rises, harvests will begin to fail. That is because formerly temperate zones begin to turn tropical or even desertify. Their water tables fail, the soil turns arid, and the ecosystems supporting crops and grains and so forth begin to wither. That is exactly what is happening to us on the highest economic level. We’re at about 1 degree and something of climate change — that’s all — but we’re already a planet where harvests are beginning to fail. And as harvests fail, obviously, prices began to explode. For food. For everything that depends on food, like labour. For all the byproducts of our food systems, like biodiesel and so forth. For commodities in general, because mining too, gets a lot harder as temperatures rise. The famous “chip shortage,” too, was largely an effect of climate change. It’s due to a fire at one factory, a drought in another, and a storm at another — and it’s caused the world’s electronics to suffer a long term undersupply. So let me say it plainly, since our leaders are terrified of telling you this, and maybe rightly so, because your next question is going to be, after gnashing your teeth in horror, so this isn’t going to end? This phase of inflation is about a dying planet.

By most metrics, Wednesday are a reasonably successful young band. Pitched at an odd midpoint between shoegaze and country-rock, the Asheville quintet’s third album, Twin Plagues, came out last summer and drew raves from major outlets, including Stereogum, which named it Album Of The Week. Just recently, Wednesday followed Twin Plagues with a very good covers album and a contribution to Secretly Canadian’s 25th anniversary celebration. On Spotify, the band has about 250,000 monthly listeners. If you’re a person who pays attention to emerging, guitar-based indie-rock, you’re probably paying attention to Wednesday. But in late March, the group’s lead singer, Karly Hartzman, offered fans a revealing glimpse of just how little indie-rock success gets you, financially speaking. In a much-discussed Twitter thread, Hartzman shared a list of income and expenses pertaining to the band’s tour through the South, which included a stop at South By Southwest, where Wednesday played seven shows but only got paid for one. At the end of the leg, the band’s earnings amounted to $2,084 and its expenses $2,182.39, meaning a net profit of -$98.39 — which is to say, not a profit at all.

In September 2020, 36 boxes of master reels showed up on Jim Varagona's front porch. They belonged to a dead man named Pep — Peter E. Parisi. The boxes were moldy. They'd sat in the possession of Parisi's girlfriend, Linda Vaughan, for eight years before her death in 2010. Some of Parisi's friends believe Vaughan locked him in a room for days, withholding his insulin, which induced a diabetic coma that ultimately killed him in 2002. (Vaughan denied these allegations and there was never an investigation.) Varagona moved the boxes into his basement "because having the remaining legacy of Pete Parisi in your living room, no matter how important we find it, can be overwhelming, especially for my wife." After Vaughan's death, the quarter-inch masters of Parisi's World Wide Magazine became the duty of Vaughan's daughters. The daughters reached out to Varagona's YouTube channel, and that's how they found their way to his porch. Varagona is the preeminent archivist of World Wide Magazine — a St. Louis public-access cable-TV show that was neither worldwide, nor a magazine.

This winter saw the most wolves from Yellowstone National Park killed in about a century. That's because states neighboring the park changed hunting rules in an effort to reduce the animals' numbers. At the same time, wolf biologists inside the park are finding out what losing the animals means. There's no wolf hunting inside the park itself, but when wolves set paw over the boundary into Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, they're fair game, at least during the hunting seasons that states are allowed to establish. This season, hunters killed 25 wolves — about 20% of the park's population. Smith says the wolf population varies throughout the year. Right now, he estimates the population is at something of a low point — likely numbering in the 80s. Federal protections for wolves were dropped about a decade ago, and it became legal to hunt limited numbers of them. Now, saying they have come back too strong, Montana and Idaho changed hunting rules to reduce wolf populations in both states. Montana now allows night hunting, trap baiting and neck snares, among other measures. Idaho eliminated limits on how many wolves that hunters could kill. There, it's now legal to shoot them from ATVs and snowmobiles.

Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have previously criticised Apple for charging developers a 30% fee for in-app purchases via the App Store.

A day prior to the glitzy world premiere of “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” Ezra Miller, who has a key role in the upcoming “Harry Potter” spinoff sequel, was…

FBI agents stumbled upon a house of horrors after raiding a body-donation company in Arizona, discovering a warehouse containing a refrigerator filled with penises, buckets of limbs, pools of blood, and a human head sewn onto another body “in a ‘Frankenstein’ manner.”

Some grain elevators are so full that farmers trying to sell their crops are being turned away. But at the same time, flour and animal-feed mills are halting production because they can’t get the grain they need. The issue? The lack of trains to move the grain. Federal regulators are holding hearings later this month to look into the causes of the dearth of rail capacity, which the railroads largely attribute to factors outside their control, like the broader supply-chain issues and widespread labor shortages. But shippers, regulators and rail labor groups say they believe the heart of the problem is that railroads cut too deeply when they eliminated nearly one-third of their workforce in recent years in the name of efficiency. “The cuts were too severe,” said Max Fisher, chief economist for the National Grain and Feed Association. “Now there’s no buffer capacity to respond to increases in demand or problems in weather or train derailments and things like that. That buffer capacity that used to be in place is no longer there.”

One week before an angry mob stormed the Capitol, a communications expert named Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., joined a conference call with a group of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters and made an urgent plea. After assuring his listeners that the 2020 election had been stolen, Mr. Sullivan told them that they had to go to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day that Congress was to meet to finalize the electoral count — and “descend on the Capitol,” according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times. While Mr. Sullivan claimed that he was “not inciting violence or any kind of riots,” he urged those on the call to make their presence felt at the Capitol in a way that would intimidate members of Congress, telling the group that they had to ensure that lawmakers inside the building “understand that people are breathing down their necks.” He also pledged that Mr. Trump was going to take action on his own; the president, he said, was going to impose a form of martial law on Jan. 6 and would not be leaving office. “Biden will never be in that White House,” Mr. Sullivan declared. “That’s my promise to each and every one of you.” It is unclear if the Justice Department is aware of Mr. Sullivan’s conference call; the department declined to comment. The House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 was provided with a copy of the recording some months ago by the woman who made it, Staci Burk, a law student and Republican activist from Arizona. Shortly after the election, Ms. Burk became convinced that phony ballots had been flown in bulk into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She eventually submitted an anonymous affidavit concerning the ballots in an election fraud case filed in Federal District Court in Phoenix by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. After becoming involved with Ms. Powell, Ms. Burk said she had been approached by several members of a right-wing paramilitary group, the 1st Amendment Praetorian, which was associated with a former legal client of Ms. Powell’s, Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Ms. Burk said that members of the group then placed her under unwanted surveillance, insisting on moving into her home in what they described as an effort to protect her from people who might want to retaliate against her for coming forward about voter fraud. It was a member of the 1st Amendment Praetorian, Ms. Burk said, who had joined the conference call that featured Mr. Sullivan. Ms. Burk said she recorded the call, much like she recorded other activities by the 1st Amendment Praetorian, because she felt threatened and unsafe by the group’s presence in her home.

The firm let consultants advise both drugmakers and their government overseers, internal records show. “Who we know and what we know” was part of their pitch. Jeff Smith, a partner with the influential consulting firm McKinsey & Company, accepted a highly sensitive assignment in December 2017. The opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, beleaguered and in financial trouble, wanted to revamp its business, and an executive there sought out Dr. Smith. Over the following weeks, he traveled to Purdue’s offices in Stamford, Conn., meeting and dining with executives. His team reviewed business plans and evaluated new drugs that Purdue hoped would help move the company beyond the turmoil associated with OxyContin, its addictive painkiller that medical experts say helped to spark the opioid epidemic. But the corporate reorganization was not Dr. Smith’s only assignment at the time. He was also helping the Food and Drug Administration overhaul its office that approves new drugs — the same office that would determine the regulatory fate of Purdue’s new line of proposed products. The story of Dr. Smith’s simultaneous work for Purdue and its federal regulator is told through previously undisclosed internal McKinsey records. More broadly, they contain evidence of a porous firewall between the consulting firm’s work for private companies and for the authorities that oversee them. A review by The New York Times of thousands of internal McKinsey documents found that the firm repeatedly allowed employees who served pharmaceutical companies, including opioid makers, to also consult for the F.D.A., the drug industry’s primary government regulator. And, the documents show, McKinsey touted that inside access in pitches to private clients. In an email in 2014 to Purdue’s chief executive, a McKinsey consultant highlighted the firm’s work for the F.D.A. and stressed “who we know and what we know.” The documents reviewed by The Times were obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which on Wednesday released initial results from its investigation into McKinsey’s work with the federal government, and by a coalition of state attorneys general as part of a 2021 settlement resolving an investigation into the firm’s work with Purdue. The records detail the firm’s work for Purdue and other opioid manufacturers over a 15-year period, from 2004 to 2019.

Secret IRS files reveal the top US income-earners and how their tax rates vary more than their incomes. Tech titans, hedge fund managers and heirs dominate the list, while the likes of Taylor Swift and LeBron James didn’t even make the top 400.