The top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after a Catholic media site told the conference it had access to cellphone data that appeared to show he was a regular user of Grindr, the queer dating app, and frequented gay bars. Some privacy experts said that they couldn’t recall other instances of phone data being de-anonymized and reported publicly, but that it’s not illegal and will likely happen more as people come to understand what data is available about others. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill has since last fall been the general secretary of the USCCB, a position that coordinates all administrative work and planning for the conference, which is the country’s network for Catholic bishops. As a priest, he takes a vow of celibacy. Catholic teaching opposes sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage.

Before the pandemic, just 12% of low-income students in Oakland had a computer or reliable internet at home. Going into the fall, 98% now have them, according to Oakland Undivided.

By 2025, travelers who use La Guardia Airport may no longer have to fight New York City's notorious traffic to get there. A plan to build a $2.1 billion AirTrain to La Guardia cleared its biggest remaining hurdle with approval from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday. Preliminary work to construct the elevated rail link could begin before the end of summer, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport. The decision is a notable victory for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has championed the project as an integral piece of his plan to transform La Guardia from an object of constant derision to a “world-class” travel hub. The airport is in the midst of a complete overhaul, including the replacement of the main terminals and gates. The federal approval came over the objections of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens, and the environmental group Riverkeeper, both of whom raised questions about why the AirTrain was the only plan for getting people to and from the airport to survive the project’s review. Critics have also targeted the AirTrain’s indirect route. To get to Manhattan, which is west of La Guardia, travelers would have to go the opposite way first — riding east to connect to the subway or a commuter train at a station next to CitiField, the baseball stadium where the Mets play.

A bartender at Mathew’s Pub says he was fired for refusing to serve members of the violent hate group

The number of people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic in India so far is likely to exceed three million — nearly 10 times the official Covid-19 death toll — making it one of the worst human tragedies in the nation’s history, according to a new study. In a comprehensive examination of the true toll of the pandemic in the sprawling nation of 1.4 billion, the Center for Global Development, a Washington research institute, attempted to quantify excess deaths from all causes during the pandemic based on state data, international estimates, serological studies and household surveys. “True deaths are likely to be in the several millions, not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy,” said its authors, one of whom is a former chief economic adviser to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The official government numbers have been called into question repeatedly. Even as funeral pyres lit up the night sky and bodies washed up on the Ganges River, with death all around, the Indian government was widely underreporting the scale of the devastation. A chorus of experts have said the country’s official estimates are a gross understatement.

An expected funding loss of at least $100 million annually will soon drain front-line clinics, threatening the federal government’s pledge to end the HIV/AIDS. Tony Christon-Walker was determined to set up an HIV prevention clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, that would succeed where others have long struggled to combat the scourge of the virus among his fellow queer Black men. The director of prevention and community partnerships at the nonprofit AIDS Alabama, he spent much of 2019 hiring a clinic staff composed of people of color. They were trained to provide the kind of affirming care that, he said, “reflects our culture,” and that would encourage local men at risk of HIV to keep coming back. Even facing the headwinds of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fledgling clinic, which specializes in prescribing the HIV prevention pill known as PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis, made steady progress in realizing his vision. But now clinics like this that provide vital HIV prevention services to disadvantaged populations are facing a dire — and for some of these nonprofit groups, even existential — financial crisis driven by the vagaries of an arcane federal law governing prescription drug discounts. These safety net clinics are set to lose well over $100 million in annual HIV prevention funds due in part to a recent decision by the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences to cut off what has become an increasingly valuable revenue stream supporting these organizations in their grassroots efforts to prevent the virus’s spread. The consequences are expected to be most devastating to clinics in the South, due to the region’s disproportionately large uninsured population and the fact that half of HIV transmissions in the United States occur in those states.

The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions. An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.

The death was confirmed by President Joe Biden’s utter lack of interest in passing it. The carbon tax aimed to reduce carbon-dioxide pollution—which heats the air, acidifies the ocean, and causes climate change—by applying a commonsense idea: If you don’t want people to do something, charge them money for it. The tax would have levied a fee—ranging from $5 to, in some estimates, more than $150—on every ton of carbon released into the atmosphere. Such a cost would have percolated through the economy, raising gasoline and jet-fuel prices, closing coal-fired power plants, and encouraging consumers and companies to adopt cleaner forms of energy. It was a straightforward, perhaps even beautiful, idea—a bid to apply the economic precepts of the 19th century to one of the great problems of the 21st. Its poise was matched by its elite support. The carbon tax won acclaim from self-described socialists and red-blooded libertarians, Democratic senators and Republican secretaries of state, Elon Musk and Janet Yellen.

Today, the federal government issued guidance to insurers to remind them of their obligation to cover pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which are drugs that prevent HIV, at no cost to their beneficiaries. The guidance, in the form of an FAQ, also clarifies that associated services with PrEP, such as provider visits and HIV, hepatitis, and STD testing along with other laboratory tests, must also be covered with no patient cost-sharing. This follows previous guidance for the coverage of other preventive services that have associated services and costs, such as colonoscopies.

“The way he was able to put the reins on the horses show he knew what he was doing.”

During his 2017 visit to India as British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson failed to achieve a key diplomatic goal. Johnson was unable to convince India’s government to restrain its ally Mauritius from launching a diplomatic offensive against Britain over sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago. Among its islands, Johnson and the U.K. government were most concerned about Diego Garcia, which is leased to the United States as a base for significant military and intelligence capabilities. India stood with Mauritius during all the diplomatic episodes that followed, including at the U.N. General Assembly and the International Court of Justice. The international court’s opinion on the matter was unfavorable to the United Kingdom and the U.N. General Assembly followed it by calling for a swift end to U.K. control of the islands.

Unpredictable winds, fire clouds that spawn lightning, and flames that leap over firebreaks are confounding efforts to fight the blaze, which is sweeping through southern Oregon. A towering cloud of hot air, smoke and moisture that reached airliner heights and spawned lightning. Wind-driven fronts of flame that have stampeded across the landscape, often leapfrogging firebreaks. Even, possibly, a rare fire tornado. The Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon, spurred by months of drought and last month’s blistering heat wave, is the largest wildfire so far this year in the United States, having already burned more than 340,000 acres, or 530 square miles, of forest and grasslands. And at a time when climate change is causing wildfires to be larger and more intense, it’s also one of the most extreme, so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere. “The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s changing the weather,” said Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department. “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”

Khadija Ismayilova long ago learned to be paranoid. The Azerbaijani investigative journalist has been harassed, threatened, and jailed for her award-winning exposés into official corruption. Intimate videos, secretly recorded in her bedroom, have been leaked in an attempt to discredit her. She learned to use encrypted messaging apps and kept up with the latest technology to keep her and her sources safe. “It’s like a war,” she said of her efforts to stay a step ahead of her country’s authoritarian regime. “We’ve been recommending to each other this tool or that tool, how to keep it more and more secure from the eyes of the government.” But in late May, Ismayilova learned that she’d lost the arms race to a weapon she hadn’t even imagined. Forensic evidence showed that her phone had been secretly infected with spyware, called Pegasus, that could access every single one of its documents, photographs, messages, and contacts. Her entire life had long since been laid bare.

At least six men are serving life sentences based on testimony by jailhouse informants tainted by alleged inducements.

Six months inside St. Petersburg College’s police academy

Twitter users poked fun at the Florida Republican and jokingly wondered which war he could making reference to.

Yesterday, New York magazine published a story about the difficulties some New York City residents have had while trying to adopt a dog over the course of the last year. It’s a fun story, in the same way that most stories about intense subcultures and status-obsessed New Yorkers are fun. But it’s also kind of a bummer. [TL;DR: Adopt from city-run shelters!]

In a new political low in Texas, the Republican-dominated state Senate has passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klanand its white supremacist campaign of terror are “morally wrong.”

Show was second most in-demand cartoon in US households for 12-month run that ended in February, according to Parrot Analytics

A gold medalist in Rio, Becca Meyers didn't want to be left without her personal care assistant again.