Secure transport services, a shadowy corner of the teen-treatment industry, is almost entirely unregulated. Parent-hired transporters can pull kids from their beds, handcuff them, hold them down or blindfold them.

Last year, with the federal government making available huge new sums of money for programs to feed needy children during the pandemic, a nonprofit organization called Advance Youth Athletic Development set up what it described as an enormous child care operation in northeast Minneapolis that could prepare 5,000 dinners each weeknight. Based on the group’s claims, the State of Minnesota channeled $3.2 million of the federal food aid to the program. But on a subzero morning in January, the F.B.I. carried out a series of predawn raids around the region. It revealed a sprawling investigation into Advance Youth Athletic Development and other groups like it — and the much larger nonprofit organization, Feeding Our Future, that was responsible for ensuring that the money provided to the smaller groups was spent properly. In court filings, the F.B.I. said it had discovered a “massive fraud scheme” among groups that Feeding Our Future was supposed to oversee, saying they siphoned off tens of millions of dollars by charging taxpayers for nonexistent meals. In affidavits filed in federal court, the Justice Department said it was investigating at least 15 different feeding operations. Together, the F.B.I. said, these groups — all of which were supposed to be overseen by Feeding Our Future — had received more than $65 million from federal food programs during the coronavirus pandemic. “Almost none of this money was used to feed children,” the government wrote in one filing. “Instead, conspirators misappropriated the money and used it to purchase real estate, cars and other items.”

Russia’s online propaganda and influence apparatus is not nearly as sophisticated or effective with non-Russian audiences as many thought (at least to this point). Russia’s early attempts to falsely portray Ukraine as a nation of neo-Nazis have been lazy, recycling old material, Higgins told me. “There’s been so much talk of how amazing Russia is at disinformation. But we see it’s not that they were good, but that the rest of us weren’t prepared for it. We weren’t good at verifying or debunking, and we confused our own incompetence for Russian genius.”

A Chinese tycoon who built a massive short position in nickel futures is facing billions of dollars in mark-to-market losses after this week’s unprecedented price spike, according to people familiar with the matter.

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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