Woolly mammoths inherited many of their cold-adapted traits from even older mammoth species, according to a new finding revealed by million-year-old DNA.

The decision has come amid pressure from the business community, such as the CEO of Delta, which has pushed a change in guidelines in order to ease worker shortages and get sidelined employees back faster. Some critics have panned the CDC’s move as one that prioritizes corporate profits over public health. That may be true, but there’s also a tricky line for workers to walk — especially those without paid leave. For many people, missing 10 days of pay is an untenable proposition. If the US had paid leave for all workers, the scenario would be different — and brighter.

It seems we can add sexual dysfunction to the long list of unexpected and unpleasant effects of the coronavirus.

The emergency room doctor assumed that she died from depression. When I told him, “She wasn’t depressed, it was long Covid,” he looked at me with bewilderment and asked, “What’s long Covid?”

Initially, there was little incentive or encouragement for children to make money from their games – a feature fraught with potential legal complexities. Then something changed. Roblox began to advertise itself as a way for young game-makers to make money. On its website, it adopted the slogan: “Make Anything. Reach Millions. Earn Serious Cash.” The company encouraged users to create and sell costumes and accessories for Roblox avatars. These items, the digital equivalent of doll’s clothes, could be bought using Robux, the platform’s digital currency, which the company currently sells at a rate of about 80 to the pound (the exchange rate varies depending on the amount bought in a transaction). Roblox took a 30% cut from the sale of each pair of virtual sunglasses or sports car; the rest went to the original creator and seller.

Incarcerated men living in a jail facility on Rikers Island say they are on hunger strike, protesting conditions such as lack of medical care and access to other services that have persisted since last year due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic and a lack of staffing at city jails. While the Department of Correction pushed back on the severity of the strike, now in its fifth day, over the past year more than a dozen inmates have died in custody, violence has increased and backlogs in the courts due to the pandemic have kept people behind bars for longer periods. Detainee Ervin Bowins reported that his unit has been denied access to mail and packages, recreation, mental and medical services, and the law library to work on their cases. In a voicemail Bowins left with an attorney, he said these are “mandatory minimum standards for a human being.” The attorney, Christopher Boyle of the New York County Defender Services, estimated about 200 people at the Robert N. Davoren Center on Rikers Island have not taken meals since Friday at midnight. He said staffing shortages mean fewer services, and the unit where they’re housed is particularly cold during this week. “Everything is limited to a degree that’s never been seen before,” Boyle said. “And they’ve had enough. They’ve finally said this is what we’re going to do to get some attention.”

The Family Foundation School, closed in 2014, has long faced accusations of using improper methods. Decades later, lawsuits submitted under the Child Victims’ Act have exposed rampant claims of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The approach to the little reform school in the woods seemed to be from a storybook, a winding road bringing new students to its remote campus, with dormitories and a red barn perched beside a pond. Teenagers who weren’t in class sat quietly on porches or carried buckets across a broad lawn, part of the regimen of chores in a program that promised to rehabilitate — to cure. But a rash of recent lawsuits against the little campus in the woods, the Family Foundation School in Hancock, N.Y., a place of last resort for distraught parents from New York City and the surrounding region, tell a different kind of story. The buckets the students carried were filled with stones, on their way from one pile to another, and then back again, a meaningless punishment for a trivial or invented affront, former students said in court documents. The teenagers on the porch were in a social blackout, forbidden to communicate for days at a time, others said. And in the barn, a former staff member sexually abused at least one girl and several boys, while in a nearby kitchen, a cook sodomized a girl, the former students said in sworn depositions. The school, tucked in a leafy crook of the Delaware River on the border of Pennsylvania, has emerged from rural obscurity to become an example of abusive overreach within the so-called troubled teen industry, a nationwide constellation of schools and programs — many of which devolved into financial rip-offs or harmful sources of lasting trauma.

Oriol Bohigas, a Spanish architect and urban planner who helped turn Barcelona, his home city, into one of the main tourism destinations of the Mediterranean, died on Nov. 30 at his home there. He was 95. His death was confirmed by his son Josep Bohigas, who added that his father had had Parkinson’s disease for several years. Working for Barcelona’s city government, Mr. Bohigas was one of the masterminds of the city’s overhaul in preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games, particularly the transformation of its seafront, which had become a derelict industrial area.

Workers, farmers and the urban poor, battered by the pandemic, are demanding labor protections and structural reforms.

Biden’s COVID czar has gone from ‘Mr. Fix-It’ to grim reaper, steering the administration’s pandemic response to catastrophic lows. During the Biden transition, Denis McDonough, Barack Obama’s chief of staff and President Biden’s current secretary of veterans affairs, was bullish on the new administration’s soon-to-be COVID czar. He described Jeffrey Zients, then a member of the transition team, to The New York Times as “the ultimate firefighter … He runs into the burning buildings. He doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t ask when. He doesn’t ask who’s going with him.” One year later, McDonough’s description has proven correct, for all the wrong reasons. ZIENTS ISN’T A PUBLIC-HEALTH EXPERT: He’s a former corporate executive whose track record bolsters the worst possible impulses for a Biden appointee in command of the federal government’s resources. He cut his teeth at Bain Capital, the private equity firm Barack Obama ran against in 2012, which has erased pensions and health benefits for tens of thousands over decades of leveraged buyouts. Then he made a name for himself running a pair of management consultancies, where he advised CEOs to be blunt with their employees: “The social contract is never coming back, and your employees know it.” Another Obama-era grifter, Rahm Emanuel, hit on the key to Zients’s success when he glowingly described him and his cohort (including Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra) as “the McKinsey boys” for their slash-and-burn mentality toward government bureaucracy and spending under the auspices of managerial sagacity.

Three students overdosed at a Hartford school Thursday morning, one of whom had to be revived, a fire official says.

Union leader Bryan Kelly and more than 1,000 other coal miners in Alabama are picketing hedge-fund ownership over broken promises and cut pay. It’s another chapter in a long history of miners who pioneered the art of the strike — to the benefit of all

Reese Witherspoon recently asked: “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity... Are you planning for this?” Our answer: “Uhhh.....?”

The vice-president offers some illuminating thoughts on COVID strategy.

The Republican National Committee said Thursday in a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates that it is prepared to "prohibit future Republican nominees from participating in CPD-sponsored debates" unless the commission makes a number of significant changes to its procedure.

Whether they realize it or not, about 200 million people in the United States now likely have access to a Covid-19 digital vaccine card.

This is the second time that Beck has come down with COVID-19

Included in the data released by the NOAA are monthly comparisons between the warmth experienced globally and in various regions with the expected temperatures for those places in any given month. We measure global warming not simply by looking at the thermometer, but by comparing what we see on the thermometer with what we would have expected to see on our thermometers in the current month over the course of the 20th century. It’s not that last July was hot, it’s that it was hotter than any prior July on record, 1.67 degrees Fahrenheit above the average temperature in July from 1901 to 2000. By considering warming in this way, we can establish how warm the planet was in any month for the past 120-plus years. So we can establish, for example, how many months of your life the global temperature was below that 20th century average. Here’s a spoiler: if you were born in 1985 or later, you have never experienced a month that was cooler than that average. That’s everyone currently aged 36 and younger, or about 47 percent of the population. An interactive look at the new temperature normal.

The 20-ton buoy in Key West, Fla., is a shrine to the quirky city at the southern tip of the continental United States, a Cold War-era object that has long been a tourist attraction and the pride of residents. So community members were naturally upset when a pair of young men in shorts and backward caps were seen in security camera footage setting fire to the Southernmost Point Buoy in the dark morning hours of New Year’s Day. But the locals were outraged about something else that also violated Key West’s laid-back sense of island community: One of the tourists didn’t tip their bartender. The lack of gratuity on three separate drink orders was viscerally upsetting to many locals, especially since the regional economy depends on an army of low-wage workers in the service industry who are trying to live in an expensive tourism hub that is only two miles by four miles but welcomes about three million visitors a year. And it also appears to be what did the pair in. Video of the burning spread on social media. In it, two men can be seen rolling a Christmas tree up to the buoy. One glances around, and the other crouches and lights the tree. Within seconds, the tree is a conflagration. The man glancing around flashes a rock ’n’ roll salute in front of the fire as his companion appears to snap photos. Like many Key West residents, Cameron Briody saw the footage the next day. Mr. Briody, a bartender at Irish Kevin’s, a popular bar on the city’s main drag, Duval Street, immediately recognized the men. He did so because they were the only people Mr. Briody had served that night who did not tip him, according to a police report.

Early in the pandemic, nurses were celebrated as heroes, with nightly symphonies of clapping or banging pots and pans. Now, many are being asked to go into work despite positive Covid tests — or they say they are being told they must use their vacation and sick days to stay home when they contract the coronavirus.