IPS Mitropolit Andrei sfințește biserica ”Sf. Ilie” din Prundu Bârgăului în a treia zi de Paște

Yana Paskova/ReutersThe loud, combative, and boisterous Michael Cohen ditched his usual bravado and showed up to the witness stand on Monday as a somber man reflecting on the disaster that was his time working for Donald Trump.The disgraced lawyer who lost his professional license and spent months in a federal prison to protect his former boss came ready to turn on him in court, for the first time publicly answering questions from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.Wearing a dark gray suit over his white shirt and pastel pink tie, Cohen made his way into the courtroom at 9:40 a.m. with a startled look on his face, like a deer in headlights as the entire room turned its attention to the star witness at the first criminal trial against a former president in American history.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Wall Street titan Ken Griffin, who vowed last fall to never consider hiring students who voiced support for Hamas, slammed pro-Palestinian protests as “performative art” while urging his alma mater, Harvard University, to embrace “western values.”

Roaring Kitty, whose real name is Keith Gill, posted a popular meme that shows a man leaning forward in his chair while holding a video game controller.

The star prosecution witness in Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial, Michael Cohen, has taken the stand.

The 19-year-old received clearance from the NBA's Fitness to Play Panel following his cardiac arrest due to a congenital heart defect last year.

The protesting students were caught-on-camera storming across the platform on Friday to accept their degrees during significantly pared-back ceremonies after weeks of violent anti-Israel demonstrations that plagued the Ivy League school.

Steven Hirsch/GettySome notable MAGA lawmakers showed up at the courtroom where Donald Trump’s hush money trial will be hearing from the former president’s ex-ally-turned-foe Michael Cohen on Monday.While multiple members of Trump’s family—including his wife Melania—have been conspicuously absent from the trial, Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) appeared in the Manhattan courtroom. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) was also seen joining the pack.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Lexi Bogan lost her voice after doctors removed a tumor near her brain. In April, she regained her voice through an AI-generated clone trained on a snippet of her teenage voice.

Indonesia's Mount Ibu volcano erupted for five minutes. Authorities have prepared evacuation tents nearby but have not yet ordered an evacuation.

In September, this blue state reported gas prices will rise next year by about 50 cents a gallon and every year thereafter to aid in clean air efforts.

The Supreme Court refuses to shield California prison officials who transferred COVID-infected inmates to San Quentin, setting off a deadly outbreak.

Bronny James, who suffered sudden cardiac arrest prior to his freshman year at USC, has been medically cleared to participate in the NBA draft combine.

May has released her first drop with lab-grown diamond company GRWN, called Metamorphosis. She wanted the pieces to feel nostalgic and, essentially, for the girls.

It has been quite a ride and in 2024, the Giants commemorate a special anniversary. On Monday, they unveiled the plans for their 100th season celebration.

Jessica Seinfeld praised her husband's "amazing" Duke 2024 commencement speech on Instagram after a group of anti-Israel protesters tried to interrupt him.

Mike Segar/ReutersThe media and legal commentators seem to have developed a collective amnesia about Michael Cohen’s history. Observing the daily disparagements of Cohen as a “serial liar” and predictions of what a terrible witness he will be, an uninformed consumer of the news would likely believe that Cohen is a uniquely bad witness who carries enormously heavy baggage. In fact, his “baggage” is well within standard size and weight limits for a cooperating witness’ “carry-on” luggage.Media coverage has become so accustomed to casually disparaging Cohen as a “convicted liar” that most in the public could be forgiven for not even knowing what Cohen was convicted of lying about. Cohen, who was former President Donald Trump’s lawyer and “fixer,” was convicted for making false statements to a bank to get a home equity loan for $500,000, concealing $4 million from the IRS, lying to Congress by claiming a Russian business project had not been pursued after Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016, and violating campaign finance laws by arranging for the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to keep her silent in an effort to aid the Trump 2016 campaign.Consistently missing from the media coverage is the reminder to viewers that all but two of Cohen’s convictions came in service of Trump and allegedly at his direction.Read more at The Daily Beast.

The last time Ron Lance had visited Doggett Gap in western North Carolina, he photographed one of the premier sites for hawthorn trees in the American Southeast. Thousands of white blossoms speckled the hillside, with North Carolina’s Newfound Mountains stretching to the horizon. Last summer, he visited again for the first time in 25 years. All that was left was a field of fescue grass. Only a couple dozen hawthorns remained.Lance is a caretaker of a nature preserve in North Carolina and an expert on hawthorn trees. (The species Crataegus lancei is named after him.) And for years now, he’s been chronicling their mysterious decline in the eastern half of the United States. A century ago, the trees were all over the eastern landscape. Now finding one anywhere is hard. One Missouri botanist, Justin Thomas, told me they were functionally extinct in his region.“It’s gotten to the point where I don’t want to see these old places anymore that used to have a lot of hawthorns,” Lance told me. Much of his life’s work is disappearing before his eyes. At the same time, he has made a startling assessment of the former abundance and variation of hawthorns: “I think it might be considered unnatural to begin with,” he told me.Until the 1890s, hawthorn trees were believed to be a simple taxonomic group, known to science as Crataegus. North America had 10 recognized species. Suddenly, from 1895 to 1910, the number of species exploded, and finding new hawthorns became a competitive sport. In 15 years, a handful of competing “Crataegophiles” identified almost 1,000 new hawthorn species—a rate of species naming that is almost unmatched in biology.Out of those 1,000, many were the same species being named differently by botanists working independently. But the particular features of the trees themselves could mislead scientists, or at least those inclined to be misled. A 1955 history of hawthorns includes a blind item about a botanist known for his hawthorn obsession, who was once asked by a group of college women to identify three specimens. After he declared them three distinct species based on leaf shape, the women revealed that all three specimens came from the same tree. (The botanist—who was almost certainly Charles S. Sargent, the most prolific namer of hawthorns—reportedly called it a “damned dirty trick.”)This was what a 1932 article called the “Crataegus problem”—one of the biggest mysteries in American plant taxonomy.Today, most sources recognize anywhere from 22 to 200 hawthorn species in eastern North America. Whatever the true count, the trees take a vertiginous number of forms in nature. In many cases, one species isn’t intuitively different from another; often, two entities will be identical but for a slightly different leaf shape or a different size fruit. Leigh Van Valen, a prominent evolutionary biologist, wrote in 1976, that perhaps no true hawthorn species exist at all—that they make up a sort of genetic continuum that doesn’t allow for coherent species classification.Part of the difficulty in identifying hawthorn species is their bizarre reproductive habits. First of all, they hybridize; that is, two species interbreed (as when horses and donkeys beget mules). Second, they are prone to polyploidy, meaning that they may have multiple sets of the same genetic information in their cells. And third, they can clone themselves through seed. In short, hawthorn reproduction can go like this: Two species hybridize and create a polyploid daughter, basically a genetic accident, largely cut off from reproducing sexually with other hawthorns. It can clone itself over and over, until hundreds of trees have spread across a field. They might look and act like a species, but they don’t have the genetic diversity to persist over time. Botanists call these “microspecies.”This is rare in nature. With highly competitive organisms filling Earth’s habitats, the likelihood that a genetic accident will outcompete them is low. Unless, perhaps, those habitats get shaken up by, say, a couple hundred years of landscape-scale clear-cutting and pasturing by humans and cattle. In 2005, a mountain top at Doggett Gap, near Asheville, North Carolina, was full of flowering hawthorn trees. In 2023, when Ron Lance revisited the mountain, the hawthorns were all but gone. (Courtesy of Robert Langellier) This is what Lance means when he says hawthorns’ great diversification may have been unnatural. His hypothesis is this: European colonization remade the eastern North American landscape, converting forests into small cattle farms, logged lands, and fields bordered by sunny hedgerows—prime habitat for hawthorns, which thrive on a forest’s edge. So as settlers cleared land in the 1700s and 1800s, hawthorns proliferated and microspeciated like mad, reaching a critical mass at the end of the 1800s. “They were hybrid inventions of themselves,” Lance said.Then, those small cattle farms dissolved into massive commercial farms, devoid of hedgerows. Or they reverted to second-growth forests. Hawthorns have been contracting ever since. That, according to Lance, is why botanists can’t find them anymore. Sargent and the early Crataegophiles were seeing an aberration in geologic time.Not everyone agrees with Lance’s hypothesis. George Yatskievych, a botanist at the University of Texas at Austin, believes hawthorn mania was a reflection of botany itself, which had advanced enough by 1890 to take on complicated plant groups. Speciation doesn’t happen on a dime, he told me. ”You’re looking at hundreds of thousands of years” for speciation to occur in plants, not hundreds.Tim Dickinson, a hawthorn researcher and emeritus plant curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, thinks hawthorns have evolved in man-made habitats, but pointed out to me that in the past 2.6 million years, glacial advances and retreats would also have opened up habitat for hawthorns. Wesley Knapp, the chief botanist at NatureServe, an organization that assigns rarity scores to plants, agrees with Lance that human influence on the hawthorns’ habitat would have removed obstacles to their reproduction, but he thinks drawing hasty conclusions could lead to hasty extinctions. “If we just dismiss these things as doomed, then we’re probably not going to conserve them,” he told me.However hawthorns achieved such dizzying diversity, the fact that they’re now disappearing is inarguable. The reasons for that reversal are quite clear, too: Invasive species are choking out forest edges. Second-growth forests are shading hawthorns out. Commercial farms are bulldozing them. A fungal rust is killing them in the Midwest and the South.“A lot of the so-called species probably will disappear,” Lance told me. Then he added, to my surprise, “Who’s to say that’s a good or a bad thing? It’s just a natural cycle.” But conservationists tasked with trying to save biodiversity have to answer that question. If the present diversity of hawthorns is an artificial result of colonization, do we value the version of nature that preceded European influence, or do we value biodiversity for its own sake? In other words, how hard should we try to save the hawthorns? And which ones?The question of which hawthorn species are, in fact, species has a practical bearing on these decisions. Alongside North Carolina's Blue Ridge Parkway, for instance, you can find the balsam-mountain hawthorn—a rare species that grows in only one mountain range. A few years ago, conservation groups were gearing up to assign the tree the rarest rank a species can receive, which would imply an urgent necessity to conserve it. But Lance decided it was probably a hybrid of two other hawthorns. He still believed the tree should be protected, but instantly, the species went from critically rare to nonexistent, from a conservation point of view.With hawthorns suddenly scarce on the landscape, though, parsing out which species are real is next to impossible. “That’s the root of the problem,” Lance said. “They’re gone.”Arthur Haines, a New England botanist who has studied hawthorns for decades, told me the biggest threat to the trees is not land-use changes but botanists themselves, who are unwilling to meet the taxonomic challenge. If no one takes on the task of categorizing hawthorns, then no conservation group can take any measures to save them. Now that the trees are here, Haines said, “they’re part of our floristic diversity. They came about not because of an arbitrary breeding in greenhouses, but from wild species interacting with each other on the landscape.”To him, that means they’re worth saving. And every botanist I spoke with agreed with him. A small group of prominent southeastern botanists in North Carolina are now trying to set up an official hawthorn consortium to protect the genus, which would formalize and fund special research and conservation efforts for hawthorns. For most of the 20th century, botanists largely threw up their hands at solving the hawthorn puzzle. Now whatever solution they come to will determine what we try to save.

British climber Kenton Cool and Nepali guide Kami Rita Sherpa have both set new records for the most climbs of Mount Everest, officials said on Sunday.

Prince Harry "(reasonably) dislikes the trappings of monarchy" and it shows "through his clothing choices," a fashion expert says.

There's a whole new way to look at paint color charts.

Social media users couldn't get enough of the reactions, as one TikToker commented: "She screamed like she found out SHE was having twins!"

The fallout from peak TV's decline is being felt strongly by writers, who face fewer opportunities as entertainment companies merge and cut back offerings.

About 30 out of 7,000 graduating Duke University students walked out of the comedian's speech over his support of Israel.

Interest in raw milk is rising in the U.S., fueled by both "wellness" and conservative influencers on social media — even though it can make people very sick.

Kate Gosselin didn't mention her estranged kids Hannah and Collin in her post on their 20th birthdays.

Although not named in Swift's track "So High School," it's believed to be about Kelce, as is the song "The Alchemy," which contains football-themed references.

The perfect graduation gift for college graduates should be useful but fun, too – this list has ten selections that fit the bill.

Buscemi's publicist said the actor "is OK and appreciates everyone’s well wishes." 

The 3-year-old made her first public appearance in November 2023 as she attended the finale of Perry's Las Vegas residency, "Play," with Bloom.

Almost 50 employees of the Vatican Museums have filed a petition, alleging that staff are treated as "commodities."

"Dead butt syndrome" is a real and increasingly prevalent condition.

The insects cannot be seen in all the clips, but multiple people have filmed their "deafening" sound coming from nearby trees.

Trump told some of his supporters not to donate to his campaign if they cannot afford to do so.

Paige Spiranac, a golf influencer and "Maxim" cover star, shared that her mom takes her modeling photos in a sweet tribute to her mom on Mother's Day.

Michael Cohen, a key witness in Donald Trump’s trial on allegations of business fraud related to hush money payments, is expected to take the stand this week.

Two Red Bull skydivers wearing wingsuits dove through an opening just 115 feet in the air at over 150 miles per hour before pulling up and deploying their parachutes to land safely.

Sen. Lindsey Graham debated anchor Kristen Welker over President Biden's promise that he would restrict weapons to Israel as the country continues to fight Hamas.

It's time to advocate for the resources, school-based therapeutic supports, and understanding needed to facilitate healing in those who have suffered childhood trauma.

The forecasted conditions come after a weekend of jaw-dropping northern lights seen as far south as Florida and as "magnetically complex" sunspots bigger than Earth continue to emit solar flares.

Employees of the Vatican Museums have filed a class-action complaint demanding improved benefits and working conditions, challenging Pope Francis' administration.

The National Retail Federation estimates $743 billion worth of merchandise was returned last year. Buyers and sellers can't wait to get their hands on the products at bin stores, where the rejected items of others get a second lease on life, for a fraction of the price.

The Duchess of Sussex, 42, said that it's been "eye-opening" and "humbling" to learn more about her heritage.

Indonesia's Ibu volcano erupted on Monday morning, spewing thick columns of gray ash thousands of feet into the sky, the country's volcanology agency said.

The final whistle had sounded on Vancouver's 4-3 road win when things got quite chippy.

Lorenzo Prendini allegedly tried to take about 1,500 samples out of the country, news outlets reported.

Documents show a dental lab that made a device that was supposed to help patients with TMJ jaw disorder was never inspected by the FDA before a CBS News and KFF Health News investigation. Numerous patients have said the "anterior growth guidance appliance," or AGGA, damaged their mouths. The device's inventor, dentist Dr. Steve Galella, claimed it could cure TMJ jaw disorder and sleep apnea. The device and its inventor are under criminal investigation. They have denied wrongdoing. Anna Werner reports.

Prosecutors' star witness Michael Cohen is set to testify Monday in the criminal hush money trial against former President Donald Trump. Follow Newsweek's live blog for the latest.

There is no right or wrong way to crack an egg, only what works for you.