I’m on a narrow road punched with potholes and uneven gravel. To both sides of me are fields of water stretched to the far edge of the horizon. If I were on an airplane looking down, I’d see a gorgeous mosaic of mirrors, silvery and still, divided into perfect rectangles. Rice farmer Charley Mathews Jr.’s family has been working the land in California’s Sacramento Valley since the late 1800s. We’re standing near the water-swollen paddies that populate his 700-acre farm in Yuba County, an hour north of Sacramento proper. The soil is compacted, and the hardpan, a few feet beneath the surface, restricts fluid percolation. This is a good thing. The land, once regarded as wasteland, is perfect for rice farming, turning fields into giant bathtubs. Mathews’ great-grandfather, who came to California from Ireland, started his business growing produce to feed the miners in the gold fields. “Miners, all they had was gold dust. They were starving,“ Mathews says. Mathews is part of a network of 2,500 rice farmers in California, the second-largest producer of rice in the United States after Arkansas. In the Sacramento Valley, aka Rice Country, 97 percent of the state's crop is grown on more than 500,000 acres of semi-arid land. It is among the top 20 agricultural exports for the state, and the medium-grain Japonica (a Japanese variety), also known as Calrose, represents nearly 90 percent of the state’s rice production. Calrose rice is predominately used in sushi, and according to the California Rice Commission, the state supplies virtually all of the United States’ sushi rice. On a good year (the state’s ongoing drought has reduced this year’s crop by 25 percent), the California rice industry is a $5 billion business. The grain came to California, Mathews explains, with the state’s 19th century Chinese population. In the 1850s, roughly 40,000 immigrants, weary from the violence and economic turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion, arrived on the shores of California in search of gold. By 1855, the Gold Rush was over, but another one had quietly begun: the rush for rice.

The World Health Organization called on Wednesday for a moratorium on coronavirus vaccine booster shots until the end of September, so that vaccine supplies can be focused on helping all countries vaccinate at least 10 percent of their populations. The agency made its appeal to the world’s wealthiest nations to address the wide disparities in vaccination rates around the world. “I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the W.H.O., said in a briefing. “But we cannot — and we should not — accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected.” With the debate over booster shots heating up, the call highlighted a moral and scientific case long pressed by humanitarian groups: With the staggering gaps in vaccination rates around the world and cases surging as the Delta variant spreads, vaccine doses should be given first to vulnerable people in poorer nations. Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19 caused by the Delta variant. Of more than four billion vaccine doses that have been administered around the world, more than 80 percent have been used in high- and upper-middle-income countries, which account for less than half of the world’s population, Dr. Tedros said. Collectively, high-income countries have administered almost 100 doses for every 100 people, he said, while low-income countries have administered just 1.5 doses for every 100 people, mainly because of a lack of supply. African countries have administered five doses for every 100 people, compared with 88 doses per 100 people in Europe and 85 in North America, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

Hawaii officials wrongly arrested a homeless man for a crime committed by someone else, locked him up in a state hospital for more than two years, forced him to take psychiatric drugs and then tried to cover up the mistake by quietly setting him free with just 50 cents to his name, the Hawaii Innocence Project said in a court document asking a judge to set the record straight.

Several states ended pandemic-related enhanced federal unemployment benefits early this year over concerns that the extra $300 per week was preventing people from re-entering the workforce. But data from human resource software company Homebase, which CNBC economics reporter Steve Liesman says has provided good information during the pandemic, suggest that eliminating the benefits didn't contribute to re-hiring.

Rarely in our political spectacle have we encountered a man so well-prepared for his downfall

Out of office, Alan Grayson amassed $150K to investigate, sue, and impeach Trump—and spent it on trying to climb back into Congress.

Ryan Sawyer Mays is accused of costing the Navy billions of dollars in damage after dropping out of Navy SEAL training and enduring an embarrassing breakup.

It prompted thousands of insults, threats, and moral judgments.

Lochlan O’Neil was only 17 when she created the disastrous fan convention

What two new books reveal about the white progressive pursuit of racial virtue. ... But in her interactions with Black people, Martin gets tripped up by the paradox of anti-racist self-help: the challenge, as DiAngelo puts it, of “decentering ourselves as white people,” while also being constantly and humbly focused on white ignorance, complicity, built-in advantages, unshared experiences. Avoiding signs of unearned racial confidence (“credentialing,” “out-woking,” and “rushing to prove that we are not racist” are on DiAngelo’s list of white-progressive moves), all the while striving to be a model anti-racist, creates a double bind for the white ally. Martin strains to be transparent about her own “mistakes and shortcomings.” She even includes as footnotes the comments of her sensitivity reader and Black friend, an educator named Dena Simmons, as a way of “showing my work.” When Martin describes a Black man she meets as a “gentle creature,” for example, Simmons suggests, “Maybe let’s not call him a creature, especially from a White narrator.”

Customers were this awful long before the pandemic.

The cuneiform tablets and other objects had been held by the Museum of the Bible, founded by the family that owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, and by Cornell University.

The 82 year old is given a suspended sentence and fined €250,000 (£213,469).

Mark and Patricia McCloskey said they got their firearms out because they feared demonstrators who marched past the couple's home in a luxury enclave last year. The two pleaded guilty to misdemeanors.

"We're either going to have the votes now, or we're going to have the votes when we have a catastrophic tsunami of evictions," she told Insider.

A new member of the liberal "Squad" stepped to the forefront this week, leading a Capitol steps sit-in that forced the White House to act.

Blizzard's president is leaving the company in the wake of the ongoing lawsuit over sexual harassment and discrimination against women.

Zoom users to get $15 or $25 each in proposed settlement of class-action lawsuit.

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.

Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords. A fix is rolling out.