Sen. Ron Wyden is seeking an investigation into whether the program, which obtained about 6 million records from people in several Southwest states, was constitutional.

The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable? Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of, on average, nine years of life at the lowest end of estimates and 17 at the highest. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly. Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver. Many people were denied the familiar rituals of mourning—bedside goodbyes, in-person funerals. Others are grieving raw and recent losses, their grief trampled amid the stampede toward normal. “I’ve known multiple people who didn’t get to bury their parents or be with their families, and now are expected to go back to the grind of work,” says Steven Thrasher, a journalist and the author of The Viral Underclass, which looks at the interplay between inequalities and infectious diseases. “We’re not giving people the space individually or societally to mourn this huge thing that’s happened.” After many of the biggest disasters in American memory, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, “it felt like the world stopped,” Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters, told me. “On some level, we owned our failures, and there were real changes.” Crossing 1 million deaths could offer a similar opportunity to take stock, but “900,000 deaths felt like a big threshold to me, and we didn’t pause,” Peek said. Why is that? Why were so many publications and politicians focused on reopenings in January and February—the fourth- and fifth-deadliest months of the pandemic? Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?

Authorities say a 28-year-old New York man needed to be rescued twice on consecutive days while hiking in northern Arizona.

Why I do declare, these giant spiders are injecting me full of more venom than a yankee abolitionist!

The actor's new spiritual adviser seems pretty interesting

For the writer Casey Johnston, weightlifting isn’t (just) about getting huge—it’s about building a completely different relationship with your body.

Three Wheel of Fortune contestants last night took a staggering 10 attempts to solve a puzzle that was missing only four letters: “Another feather _n yo_r _a_.” One woman guessed “Another feather in your hat,” “Another feather in your lap” and “Another feather in your map,” to no avail. Another contestant guessed the wrong consonant twice and then spun “Bankrupt.”

During the past decade, private equity-backed firms such as Greystar have stormed into the multifamily apartment market, snapping up rentals by the thousands and becoming major landlords in American cities, according to ProPublica’s analysis of National Multifamily Housing Council data on the nation’s biggest owners of apartment buildings with five or more units. Private equity is now the dominant form of financial backing among the 35 largest owners of multifamily buildings, the analysis showed. In 2011, about a third of the apartment units held by the top owners were backed by private equity. A decade later, half of them were. Private equity-backed firms in the top 35 cumulatively held roughly a million apartments last year, the analysis showed. That is likely an undercount, because private equity giants like Blackstone, Lone Star Funds and others don’t participate in the National Multifamily Housing Council’s annual survey. Private equity firms often act like a corporate version of a house flipper: They seek deals on apartment buildings, slash costs or hike rents to boost income, then unload the buildings at a higher price. The influx of private equity comes during a national affordable housing crisis and has dire consequences, tenants and their advocates say. Such firms use economies of scale to more aggressively squeeze profits from their buildings than traditional landlords usually do, tenant advocates say. The firms’ tactics can include sharply increasing rent or fees and neglecting upkeep. Sometimes landlords force out existing tenants and replace them with those who can pay more. The companies’ size allows them to influence market rates and lobby against reforms that could dilute their power. And their goals — quickly hiking a building’s profits so they can sell it at a premium — are often at odds with those of the tenants who need to live in them. In contrast, so-called mom-and-pop landlords usually look for steady streams of rental income over time while their buildings grow in value.

Legend says that the stone is actually the transmuted corpse of Tamamo-no-Mae, a nine-tailed fox demoness who took the form of a beautiful woman as a ploy to murder the Emperor Konoe on behalf of an evil feudal lord. When she was slain by the famous warrior Miura-no-suke, her body was transformed into the stone. Because of this, contact with the stone is believed to be cursed, leading to hauntings and calamity, so the breaking of the stone has understandably spooked many with the idea that the demoness has been freed to cause greater disaster.

WHITEFISH POINT, MICH.- The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society (GLSHS) is excited to announce the discovery of the 172-foot schooner-barge Atlanta. The Atlanta was found 35 miles off Deer Park, Mich., in 650 feet of water in Lake Superior. (With video)

Ominously, the infection trend may now be going the other way. A recent Canadian study raises the possibility that deer — one of the most ubiquitous large mammals in North America — may have infected humans with COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. That would imply the virus circulated for a while in deer, reproducing and occasionally mutating on its way, before jumping back into people.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that modern humans met the Neanderthals and decided to just live and let live. If nothing else, population growth inevitably forces humans to acquire more land, to ensure sufficient territory to hunt and forage food for their children. But an aggressive military strategy is also good evolutionary strategy.

Things to do in Denver when you're heads.

The Sessho-seki, a famous rock in Nasu, Japan that was said to have imprisoned the evil nine-tailed fox demoness Tamamo-no-Mae, was found broken in half. After nearly 1,000 years, the demon vixen is presumably once again on the loose. https://t.co/Fz3yRLy4qQ

A key for those who already drink alcohol is moderation. Moderate drinking is defined as one glass of wine or other alcoholic beverage daily for women and up to two glasses daily for men.

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President Biden urged for an end to remote work, framing the much-delayed return to the office for millions of white-collar workers as necessary for the United States to move beyond the pandemic.

CEQA is the primary tool that empowers this ouroboros of inaction. And if you go back to what was happening when it was signed into law by then California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t at least partially designed that way. Much like today, environmentalism in the late ’60s and early ’70s was defined by a doomsday ethos that posited the end of the world was nigh. Instead of concerns over climate change, however, Malthusian fears over the impacts of overpopulation dominated the day, stemming largely from the success of Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich posited the coming emergence of an overcrowded planet with more mouths than it was capable of feeding and cited the packed slums of New Delhi as a cautionary tale for what lay in store for most of human civilization. (Echoes of Ehrlich ring loud in Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods President Phillip Bokovoy’s warnings that his city will “end up like Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur” should it allow too many people to live there.) These concerns weren’t just limited to a coterie of Berkeley hippies; They were entirely mainstream. Just months before CEQA’s inception, the Republican Nixon administration created the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future to study, among other things, the impact of population growth on environmental pollution. The commission’s ensuing 1971 “Rockefeller” report pushed back on the American idea that growth was inherently good — and could in fact cause severe local harm. “Population stabilization” was trumpeted as a priority, which manifested in some good ideas (family planning and abortion rights) and some dubious ones (a de-emphasis on growth in large cities). A survey of prevailing attitudes in the report found that over 50% of Americans felt that governments should “discourage further growth of large metropolitan areas” and “try to encourage people and industry to move to smaller cities and towns.”

After striking a plea deal with prosecutors, a onetime Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was accused of repeatedly raping a 14-year-old girl over a period of 20 months will serve no time in prison and does not have to register as a sex offender.

WASHINGTON — The White House hasn’t publicly detailed exactly how it’s spent the more than $4 trillion Congress authorized for Covid-19 relief — and now, that lack of transparency could imperil its request for more money to fight the pandemic and buy therapeutics. Amid heated negotiations over a government funding bill, three dozen Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are refusing to consider more Covid-19 relief funding unless the federal government provides a full accounting of how funds have been spent. The White House disputes the accusations that there has been a lack of transparency, and an administration official said the White House briefs Congress on a regular and bipartisan basis about details of the status of relief funding. If lawmakers aren’t able to reach a deal for more Covid-19 funding, that’s a big problem for the Biden administration. The White House on Thursday acknowledged its Covid-19 response money has nearly run out and it needs $22.5 billion more, or it won’t be able to secure treatments, vaccines and tests for the future. And the budget crunch is even more severe than the administration has let on. The White House has held off on buying millions of courses of Pfizer’s highly effective antiviral drug that the White House already committed to buy due to budget constraints, according to public contract disclosures and the Department of Defense, which issues the contracts. In January, the White House announced that it was doubling its order of Pfizer’s antiviral, named Paxlovid, committing to buy an extra 10 million courses. But according to public contracts, the White House has only actually contracted for 835,000 of those courses to date.