The CDC order allows U.S. border officials to expel migrants to Mexico or their home countries without allowing them to request asylum.

Ben Ray Lujan’s health scare provides a window into the grueling work it takes to run a 50-50 Senate.

This is strange

In 1999, a handful of websites gave the world a glimpse into the pros and cons of small internet communities for marginalized teen boys

The Duke of Sussex has said his goal is to provide every person around the world with access to a mental health coach as he discussed his struggles to maintain a daily meditation schedule alongside his duties as a father.

The head of the Bank of England has asked workers to avoid asking for big pay rises to control inflation, which officials expect to hit 7.25 per cent in April. (when are we getting a guillotines forum?)

A Missouri parent who fought for the ban of LGBTQ-themed books from school libraries is now facing a felony charge of second-degree child molestation. Ryan Utterback, a 29-year-old father from Gladstone, Mo., is also facing a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree domestic assault, and a misdemeanor charge of furnishing pornographic material or attempting to furnish to a minor in a separate case, KMBC-TV reported. Late last year, Utterback participated in a school board meeting in which he advocated for the banning of certain books from North Kansas City school libraries. Some of the books were deemed “pornographic” by the Northland Parent Association. Among them, there were two critically acclaimed titles: “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” George M. Johnson’s collection of essays about growing up Black and queer; and “Fun Home,” Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel that was adapted into the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name in 2015. A video of the meeting shows Utterback holding two enlarged pages of “Fun Home,” while Jay Richmond, president of the parents association, speaks out against the books. The books were temporarily removed from four high schools in North Kansas City in October 2021, but have since returned to the shelves. In November, after some students spoke out against the ban in another meeting, Utterback explained to KMBC why he was advocating for the ban. “You know, I definitely understand their struggles. It’s not lost on me,” he said. “Those conversations are to be had at home and only I have the intimate understanding of what is and isn’t appropriate for my children.” On Thursday, Utterback appeared at the Clay County Courthouse for a hearing, the outlet reported. One of the charges he faces involves a child younger than 12, whom Utterback allegedly fondled in December 2020, according to a probable cause statement. In a separate incident, Utterback allegedly stuck his finger through a ripped hole in a teenager’s jeans and proceeded to rub the teenager’s leg. A separate case alleges that Utterback used his cellphone to show pornographic videos to a child, who according to a probable cause statement, was 4 years old at the time. Utterback is expected back in court on March 10.

Fentanyl is devastating San Francisco, and many of the city’s dead have been found within blocks of each other in the Tenderloin and South of Market. The Chronicle followed people locked in its grip as they try to survive the sprawling opioid epidemic on their own.

Pam Moses took the stand and testified in her own sentencing hearing centered around an illegal voting case on Wednesday. She faces 4 to 8 years after being convicted of presenting false documents restoring her voting rights when she is a convicted felon whose voting rights have been stripped forever. “I accept full responsibility for my actions. I have been held accountable. I been in jail since December 10th,” Moses said. Moses maintained she thought her voting rights had been restored. “I did not falsify anything. All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me and the way the clerk did,” she said.

A 2015 federal report predicted the entire slowdown that’s come to pass. In July 2015, the Federal Maritime Commission, a federal agency with little name recognition and even less influence, released a report sounding the alarm about the state of America’s ports. A congestion crisis had been building for years and was fast becoming untenable; even the country’s relatively tepid economic-growth rate was straining against decades of disinvestment at its most critical trading hubs. Chassis weren’t available, trucks couldn’t get in or out, and terminals stayed perpetually clogged. That crisis had “resulted from events that have developed or emerged over a considerable period of time and from within the system itself, rather than being the result of external shocks, such as unanticipated surges in container volumes or management-labor issues,” the report surmised. “Many seem to think it is inevitable that embracing ‘business as usual’ will lead to significant further declines in the performance of the U.S. intermodal transportation system.” And then, of course, business went on as usual. Almost five years passed before the coronavirus announced itself on American shores, and another year after that before the disease gave an already fissured supply chain the nudge it needed to fully rupture. And while the circumstances of a global pandemic, its shutdowns and labor shortages, seemed exceptional, it was something as routine as a double-digit import growth, feared specifically by the FMC since at least 2006, that sent shipping container volume skyrocketing and brought the system to a grinding halt. A prophecy that few heard and no one heeded had finally come true. Before the Biden administration was even sworn in, the ports were already in a state of chaos. It got worse throughout the year, and by the time the administration appointed its ports czar John Porcari and began looking toward emergency intervention, only minor measures were even available to remedy decades of bipartisan mismanagement.

The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win. Proof of foreign interference would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,” argued the Dec. 18, 2020, memo, which was circulated among Trump allies. The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, laid out a plan for the president to appoint three men to lead this effort. One was a lawyer attached to a military intelligence unit; another was a veteran of the military who had been let go from his National Security Council job after claiming that Trump was under attack by deep-state forces including “globalists” and “Islamists.” The third was a failed Republican congressional candidate, Michael Del Rosso, who sent a copy of the memo to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who confirmed to The Post he received the document from Del Rosso. An aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also said his office received the document but declined to say who sent it. Del Rosso did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The previously unreported proposal, whose provenance remains murky, in some ways mirrors other radical ideas that extremists who denied Biden’s victory were working to sell to Trump in the weeks between the November 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol. Many of those proposals centered on using government powers to seize voting machines.

A SWAT officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office who admitted drinking a fifth of vodka just hours before driving his police car to a gun range for firearms training will keep his job, despite the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office's decision to fire him. Officer Nicholas Gifford was terminated by JSO in October after he showed up to the city's gun range with a blood alcohol level four times the legal limit. But two months later, the city’s Civil Service Board ordered JSO to reinstate him, saying the firing was “manifestly unjust.” As a result, Gifford will retain his $71,000-a-year job, likely in a diminished role.

[from September, but I hadn't heard about it] Instead researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School turned to what they call “an experiment of nature.” They used two decades of blood samples from more than 10 million young adults on active duty in the U.S. military (the samples were taken for routine HIV testing). About 5 percent of those individuals (several hundred thousand people) were negative for Epstein-Barr when they started military service, and 955 eventually developed MS. The researchers were able to compare the outcomes of those who were subsequently infected and those who were not. The results, published on September 13 in Science, show that the risk of multiple sclerosis increased 32-fold after infection with Epstein-Barr but not after infection with other viruses. “These findings cannot be explained by any known risk factor for MS and suggest EBV as the leading cause of MS,” the researchers wrote.

As Republican lawmakers push to ban critical race theory, here’s how the class changed the mind of one conservative Mississippian.

About a dozen officers picked apart their home looking for money and drugs, Irving said, while she and two of her children sat on the floor with their backs against the wall. Police let her now 23-year-old son sit in his wheelchair, she said. They found nothing, she said. As they were packing up to leave, Raleigh Police Detective Omar Abdullah, who appeared to be leading the investigation, handed Irving a search warrant for the first time. It had her address on it with a picture of an apartment door with a tree in front of it. “There is no tree in front of my door,” Irving told Abdullah. “He was like, ‘We are just looking for the drugs and money.’” “I am looking around, “ she said. “I am outside. Where is the tree at?” There was no tree because Abdullah — who has since been accused of framing more than a dozen Black men in a fake drug scheme — had the wrong house.

Newly renamed Meta is investing heavily in its futuristic "metaverse" project, but for now, relies on advertising revenue for nearly all its income. So when it posted sharply higher costs but gave a weak revenue forecast late Wednesday, investors got spooked — and knocked almost $200 billion off the valuation of the company formerly known as Facebook.

The Manchin empire extends to a nondescript nursing home in deep coal country. It’s a relic of a social welfare system that has collapsed. Until Tuesday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was listed as a corporate officer of a state-run nursing home in West Virginia, new reporting by the Prospect shows. The John Manchin Sr. Health Care Center is one of four nursing homes operated by the state, which has the largest population of people with disabilities in the country. In a study by AARP and the Commonwealth Fund, West Virginia’s long-term care received the second-worst ranking of all 50 states. The nursing home and an attached clinic serve Sen. Manchin’s home county of Marion, in deep coal country near the Pennsylvania border. The center opened in 1899 as a hospital for miners, and was renovated in the early ’80s by the senator’s brother, John Manchin Jr. On a filing with the West Virginia Secretary of State, the senator’s nephew, John Manchin III, is now listed twice as both a member and an organizer of the limited liability company (LLC). Sen. Manchin was listed as the LLC’s organizer until Tuesday afternoon. Then, less than 24 hours after the Prospect contacted the senator’s Washington, D.C., office for comment, his name was removed from the filing. A spokesperson said, “Sen. Manchin is not affiliated with this facility and any filing that indicates he is was done incorrectly.”

Figures behind deal include a politician linked to deforestation in the 90s and an associate named in the Panama Papers. A politician linked to wide-scale deforestation in the 1990s and his Panama Papers-named associate, a Singaporean shell company, and the owner of an agricultural consultancy in Australia are among the figures behind a controversial carbon trading deal worth an estimated $80bn in Borneo. The Nature Conservation Agreement (NCA) ostensibly protects 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of jungle in the Malaysian state of Sabah from logging for the next 100 years. But the deal, signed in October between Sabah state officials and a Singaporean shell company, was hammered out in absolute secrecy and without credible due diligence, a tender process or public consultation, according to Indigenous leaders, activists and NGOs that spoke to Al Jazeera as part of a months-long investigation. From the outset, the NCA gives 30 percent of Sabah’s revenue from carbon credit sales – estimated to be $24bn over the life of the contract – to a company in Singapore, Hoch Standard, with no obvious history in carbon trading. “It makes me sick to my stomach,” a whistleblower with firsthand knowledge of the deal told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

The Democratic president slammed but now backs a Trump ruling that could help private equity kingpins loot retirees’ savings.

The settlement suggests that police, who have a history of sympathizing with anti-abortion activists, can intimidate clinics and even get paid for it.