Record monsoon rains have blown floodgates off their hinges as Trump's border wall breaks down.

The only person Twelve Minutes hates as much as its protagonist is his wife

Authorities in rural northern counties spread misinformation and launched aircraft surveillance in response to false rumors about antifa ‘infiltrators’, according to records obtained by the Guardian

The Biden administration is trying to move on from the pandemic, instead of effectively ending it, leading to unnecessary deaths.

The Food and Drug Administration action marks the first licensing of a vaccine for the coronavirus, which that has swept the United States in repeated waves since early 2020.

The East Coast may have invented rap, but today the Lone Star State rules the hip-hop world. Here’s a song-by-song history of how that happened.

A new report alleges Captain, a three-year-old Northern Inuit mix, was left behind in the governor’s mansion

Wall Street firms are again packaging and selling mortgages that the government-backed firms can’t or won’t back.

It’s all very embarrassing to have your sassy colleagues constantly drawing attention to Ann’s affairs with a hysterical out-of-work actor from Lyme Regis or whatever, but without an Ann, George cannot properly interpret the world. This is romance! This is the purpose of being alive, to find someone who sharpens the corners of the world for you and allows you to peer into the souls of your fellow man! Sorry if you believe that you can fully participate in the human experience without sometimes wishing you could just flush your head down the toilet, but you cannot, and George knows this instinctively. It’s not necessarily that he enjoys being publicly cheated on (he maybe enjoys this a bit), but that he has understood and accepted the key facts about love, which are that it is humiliating, and something to be endured while closing your eyes in the back of a taxi and having the word “SUFFERING” scrawl across the front of your skull. What is the alternative? To cheat on your wife? To just change your mind and love someone else? To not love anyone at all? Please. Let us be real, and submit to the fact that love is agony, pain is unavoidable, and that the presence of an Ann is what makes life worth living.

Good time for promotions and advancement in the AM talk radio field: The pandemic has sparked interest in low-dose radiation as a possible treatment for COVID-19. But that's not the same as radon gas, doctors warn.

You go woke, you go broke’. Could this be The National Party’s new, 6-word slogan? Matt Canavan no doubt thought he was mega clever for coming up with it this morning, when asked about The Wiggles’ decision to diversify its lineup. The globally popular children’s ensemble, announced over the weekend that they’d be adding four new members to their existing group to better reflect Australian society for a YouTube exclusive, #FruitSaladTV. New members will include, Tsehay Hawkins, 15, originally from Ethiopia who will don red, 24-year-old, Indigenous woman Evie Ferris, who will wear blue; Kelly Hamilton, 45, an Asian-Australian who will wear yellow; and 28-year-old John Pearce, who has Filipino heritage and will wear purple. Blue Wiggle and one of the founding members of the original Wiggles, Anthony Field told NCA NewsWire he felt “morally, we have to do this”. “I looked around the world and I thought: ‘We have to reflect our audience’. Our audience is not just one culture, we want children to see a mirror of themselves. I hope people, mums and dads as well, will feel included.” Most Australians, I’m sure, would feel good about this decision. As the parent of an 18-month old boy (who’s obsessed with the Wiggles), I certainly do. I’ve long wondered when The Wiggles would take the necessary step to be more inclusive and culturally representative– particularly given they originate from a country where one in four people of our 22 million population were born overseas. But, apparently, Matt Canavan doesn’t like it one bit. It’s left a bitter taste in his mouth– unsurprising really for a politician who seems perpetually perturbed by progress. “The Wiggles are free to do what they like. It was nice while it lasted. But you go woke, you go broke,” Canavan said. He was swiftly shot down by countless Aussies across social media who mocked the Senator’s beef.

When Santiago Genovés set sail across the Atlantic with 10 attractive people, he didn’t imagine it would end in hurricanes, epiphanies and murderous scheming. Marcus Lindeen’s new film retells a remarkable saga.

Private contractors cost taxpayers millions while demonstrating few clear results and papering over weaknesses in the country’s public health system. When Gavin Newsom outsourced key components of California’s vaccine rollout to the private sector during the pandemic’s darkest days last winter, the Democratic governor promised the changes would benefit the most vulnerable. His “number one” reason for handing the reins to Blue Shield of California, an Oakland-based health insurance company, was “equity” — delivering vaccines to those at greatest risk, many in communities of color, he said in February. But the $15-million contract with Blue Shield, plus another $13 million for McKinsey, did not deliver on that promise, according to state and county officials, as well as public health experts. “Equity is a useful catchphrase, but the work was either nonexistent or completely nontransparent,” said Kim Rhoads, a health advocate and physician researcher at the University of California San Francisco. About 45 percent of eligible Black residents and Latino residents are fully vaccinated in California, according to state data, compared to nearly 60 percent of the eligible White population. “The numbers speak for themselves,” Rhoads said. California wasn’t alone in using private contractors to manage the vaccination campaign. At least 25 states, along with federal agencies and many cities and counties, hired consulting firms, according to a Washington Post tally. The American vaccination drive came to rely on global behemoths such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), with downsized state and local health departments and even federal health agencies relying on the private sector to make vaccines available to their citizens, according to hundreds of pages of contract documents, emails and text messages obtained through public records requests. McKinsey’s role extended beyond California to other states, including Ohio and New Jersey. Deloitte worked in 10 states. BCG received millions of dollars from the federal government to coordinate vaccine planning, while at least 11 states also worked with the company, in some cases paying it to address gaps in federal planning. Consultants say they helped save lives by supporting overextended public servants with specialized expertise. “Our work helped state decision-makers quickly size up key factors impacting the effective distribution of vaccines,” said McKinsey spokesman Neil Grace. “All our work was based on state-defined priorities, and the data we analyzed was provided by state and local public health authorities.” But critics question whether such contracts improve government performance, arguing the arrangements are costly and difficult to oversee. Taxpayers have no way to know what precisely they are getting under no-bid contracts worth millions of dollars because the internal documents of private consultancies are not subject to public records laws. “California has chosen to pay Blue Shield and other consultants millions of dollars to do the job that their public health workforce was already doing, while on reduced salaries due to pandemic-related budget cuts,” said a state health official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.

The killing of red wolf 11768f was the beginning of the bad times for this country’s most critically endangered canid. It was mid-2015, and 11768F was a six-year-old matriarch with a mate and a large family. She’d already given birth several times before, and the evidence suggests she may have been caring for more newborns in the wet coastal forests that flourish near North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She and her family were supposed to be safe, thanks to the strong protections of the Endangered Species Act, which makes it a crime to harm or harass listed animals like red wolves. But then, in a foreshadowing of events to follow, the federal government issued her death warrant: It gave a private landowner permission to gun her down. By late June, she was dead. She was the first-ever federally listed red wolf shot and killed by a private individual with explicit government consent.

This year, the federal government ordered hospitals to begin publishing a prized secret: a complete list of the prices they negotiate with private insurers. The insurers’ trade association had called the rule unconstitutional and said it would “undermine competitive negotiations.” Four hospital associations jointly sued the government to block it, and appealed when they lost. They lost again, and seven months later, many hospitals are simply ignoring the requirement and posting nothing. But data from the hospitals that have complied hints at why the powerful industries wanted this information to remain hidden. It shows hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services: procedures as simple as an X-ray or a pregnancy test. And it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world’s largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers. In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all.

A few days after Phil Valentine announced he had tested positive for Covid-19 on July 11th, the conservative talk-radio host wrote on Facebook that he was “doing my patriotic duty for natural herd immunity.” Valentine, whose nationally syndicated Phil Valentine Show aired on 100 stations from 2007 to 2019, had questioned the vaccines on his current show on Nashville’s SuperTalk 99.7 WTN and online, mocking the U.S.’s inoculation campaign in the song “Vaxman,” a parody of the Beatles’ “Taxman.” “I certainly am not getting the vax now,” he replied to a commenter on Facebook on July 14th. “I have full immunity.” Valentine died Saturday from complications related to Covid-19, according to a tweet from his station. He was 61.

The social-media platform’s Saturday evening acknowledgment comes after a lengthy internal debate over whether to share data.

Thursday's decision by the creator platform OnlyFans to soon stop hosting a wide swath of sexually explicit content is sending shockwaves through the internet.

Rasheed Walker was always passionate about bringing the most out of others. Now, his friends want to carry on his legacy after he was fatally shot.

An explanation for Apple’s controversial decision to begin scanning iPhones for CSAM has been found in a 2020 statement by Apple’s anti-fraud chief. Eric Friedman stated, in so many words, that “we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn.” The revelation does, however, raise the question: How could Apple have known this if it wasn’t scanning iCloud accounts… ?