The number of American children in poverty spiked dramatically in January after the expiration of President Biden’s expanded child benefit at the end of last year, according to new research released on Thursday. The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University said that the child poverty rate rose from 12 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent last month, an approximately 41 percent increase. The study found that an additional 3.7 million children are now in poverty relative to the end of December, with Black and Latino children seeing the biggest percentage point increases. “The overall monthly child poverty rate rose sharply between December 2021 and January 2022,” the study found.

Fifty years after he gave us "The Godfather," the iconic director is chasing his grandest project yet—and putting up over $100 million of his own money to prove his best work is still ahead of him.

If health care is a human right, who is human enough to have that right?

Most bald and golden eagles in the United States have been repeatedly exposed to lead throughout their lives, new research shows. The primary source of exposure is ammunition—as eagles scavenge on the carcasses of animals shot by hunters, they can ingest lead fragments from rifle rounds and shotgun pellets. In the study, published February 17 in the journal Science, researchers examined lead levels in 1,210 eagles across 38 states—the biggest effort of its kind to date in North America. They found that more than half of the adult birds had bone lead concentrations above 10 parts per million, which pathologists define as chronic lead poisoning. This level of lead poisoning is slowing the population growth rate of both species, says study co-author Vincent Slabe, a wildlife biologist at Conservation Science Global, a research organization based in Bozeman, Montana. Since both species are of conservation concern, anything that might suppress their numbers is therefore highly relevant, he says.

Recent updates have made it harder to read, shop, and publish on the U.S.’s most popular digital comics platform

The NYPD chose to delete a controversial tweet celebrating the arrest of 12 people who allegedly stole things like diapers.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has another secret company that he used to donate big money to Republican campaigns.

On Wednesday, 93-year-old Chilean Cristina Calderon, the last native speaker of the Yaghan Indigenous language, died to COVID-19 in the Magallanes region. "I have deep regret for not being with you when you passed away. Be sure that everything I do is in your name and in that of our people," tweeted Calderon’s daughter Lidia Gonzalez, who is Vice President of the Constitutional Convention. Born in 1928 in Isla Navarino, Calderon lived throughout her life in the Villa Ukika community, where she maintained the customs and beliefs of her ancestors, canoe nomads that for 6,000 years inhabited the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

A Cowboys representative says the team thoroughly investigated two alleged incidents involving Richard Dalrymple and found no wrongdoing. Two sources said the cheerleaders and their lawyers were not told whether images from security cameras, deployed all over AT&T Stadium, had been consulted or might have recorded any of the incident. One said the women were angry because they felt that team officials seemed to have concluded Dalrymple had done nothing wrong before the cheerleaders were formally interviewed eight days after the incident. "It was a 'he said, she said' -- and the team chose to believe Dalrymple's side of things," a source with knowledge of the allegations said about how the cheerleaders' felt. "But four women swore this happened." The cheerleaders were instructed by their bosses not to go public and not to tell their teammates what had happened, multiple sources said. Frustrated and angry, the women hired W. Kelly Puls, a Fort Worth attorney, later that month to represent them in a possible lawsuit against the Cowboys, according to sources. The cheerleaders "were upset and felt certain the team wasn't going to do anything about it," a source added. "They were told to just keep cheering -- and saw Dalrymple often at games and events."

Jane Doe, who filed her lawsuit last year, has accused the comedian of grooming her from the age of 15—and alleges that he often did so in front of his NBC colleagues.

The new Flying Dutchman is here.

President Emmanuel Macron welcomed African leaders for dinner in Paris Wednesday ahead of an expected announcement that France is withdrawing its troops from Mali after nearly 10 years fighting a jihadist insurgency.

PETROPOLIS, Brazil (AP) — The death toll from devastating mudslides and floods that swept through a mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro state has reached 78, Gov. Claudio Castro said Wednesday afternoon.

A 500-pound bear that pounces on properties with a craving for all things food has a community at odds with wildlife officials who want it dead.

The priest was beloved by his parishioners — yet for years he made a one-word ritual mistake, repeatedly, that has caused confusion and anxiety for thousands of Catholics in the Phoenix area now worrying that they were improperly baptized. Under scrutiny are baptisms performed by the Rev. Andres Arango, who served in Arizona for 16 years. Catholic officials estimate that thousands of baptisms are now presumed to be invalid because he used incorrect wording, and they say those affected may need to be re-baptized. Some may feel obliged to have other church ceremonies performed again, even including marriage. Arango’s error was in saying, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” when he should have begun the sentence by saying, “I baptize you.” The difference is theologically crucial, the Vatican ruled in 2020, because it’s not the “we” of the congregation doing the baptizing but the “I” of Jesus Christ, working through the priest.

The troops are organizing in response to a slew of problems with the state's border mission.

Lacking ink, the label-printing market has been spared the kinds of shenanigans that plague the world of inkjets…until now.

One year after historic storm Uri, a small yet remarkable group of people on the Austin food scene reflect on how they banded together to feed the city

Dr. Gina Sequeira first saw the protesters on a bright clear morning last September. A co-director of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic who provides gender-affirming care to young people, Sequeira had confronted ignorance about her medical specialty in the past. But nothing had prepared her to see people outside her office, waving signs and handing out flyers warning of the “dangers” of the work she does. “That was really, really hard for us as a clinic,” she says. “And I think it was really hard for the hospital’s patients and families who witnessed it.” Just a month later, protesters showed up again. Hers wasn’t the only clinic having a hard time in 2021. The LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has calculated that, last year, conservative lawmakers introduced over 130 anti-trans bills into state legislatures—including 35 that explicitly limited the ability of trans and gender-expansive youth to access gender-affirming care, a term that refers to holistic psychological and medical care that affirms a person’s gender identity. As of Feb. 11, the ACLU has tracked similar bills in at least 17 state legislatures this year. Only a small group of pediatricians provide such care in the U.S., and, in this political context, those who do are often finding themselves at the receiving end of growing harassment—even as research confirms the potentially life-saving nature of the work they do. Demonstrators have organized protests like the ones at Sequeira’s clinic at other sites across the country; in Ohio, billboards have been rented spreading disinformation about affirming care—including one near a children’s hospital. Pediatricians tell TIME they have received threatening mail, have been impersonated online and have feared for their safety. And they worry such harassment campaigns could have a devastating impact on the ability of young people to access crucial medical care. Roughly a month before the September protest, Sequeira had received an unmarked letter in the mail that gave her pause. She’d worried about the risk of anthrax, she tells TIME; of someone trying to hurt her. Eventually she gingerly opened the envelope. Inside, she found printed posters decrying gender-affirming care for children. “No child is born in the wrong body!” one read. “Who profits from this crime?” “I was taken aback, and really kind of fearful,” Sequeira recalls. She’d seen colleagues who provided abortion receive similar abuse. But she never thought her work could become nearly as controversial. “It really made me wonder what the future of our work looks like,” she says. “Is that the path we’re going down?”

Parents say their children’s education suffers when career and technical education programs are tailored to the needs of corporations. “It’s going to be great,” Houston entrepreneur Jim McIngvale told a reporter about the charter school he was planning to open in August 2020. According to McIngvale, known locally as “Mattress Mack,” the new school—named Premier High School—would be located inside one of his businesses, Gallery Furniture, and offer Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses in automotive, electrical, welding, and carpentry. While having part of a high school’s curriculum devoted to “valuable job training”—as McIngvale put it—might sound beneficial to students, some of that training is on-the-job at Gallery Furniture. McIngvale, in a pitch to prospective students, sketched out what this looks like in practice. His school is “going to train you for four days a week . . . . That’s going to be free. You work for Gallery Furniture one day a week to pay off the, ah, equipment that you might need, tuition, whatever,” he said in a program broadcast on a local morning radio show. So when McIngvale exclaims his school is “absolutely free,” what he really means is that he’s getting one day per week of free labor in addition to free workforce training, at taxpayers’ expense, for the students who graduate and decide to stay on as Gallery Furniture employees. It’s easy to see this setup as a racket; what’s less obvious is how Premier High School challenges the idea of a liberal arts education model, which consists of a holistic learning experience where students develop their creativity and critical thinking along with technical career knowledge and skills. Instead, the sole purpose of Premier, according to a local reporter, is to “get a job, keep a job, [and] help career advancement.” But it’s not just small entrepreneurs like McIngvale who see public schools as a potential source of cheap employee training. A 2021 New York Times Magazine article about Amazon’s influence in California included a section on career and technical education courses taught at a high school in San Bernardino. Here, students wear shirts “emblazoned with the Amazon logo” and learn in a classroom “designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility.” According to the article, “The lesson of the day was on Amazon’s ‘14 Leadership Principles.’ ”