Rand Paul: Thomas Massie 'Doing the Right Thing' to Oust Mike Johnson as Speaker

California lawmakers should support the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, a Superfund-style bill that would force big fossil fuel companies to pay for their damage to the climate. Otherwise, taxpayers will ultimately foot the entire bill.

"There can be no individuals up there with individual motives."

The Rangers aren’t just preparing to face a club that finished four points behind them in the NHL standings and is widely regarded as the team to beat in the East, but they’re about to have their hands full with an opponent that’s gotten closer to championship euphoria than most ever do.

GettyThe wiry-looking economist with no military experience who Vladimir Putin has chosen to serve as his new defense minister is apparently a lot closer to the murky underworld of Russian security services than was originally thought.Andrei Belousov was close to the late Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin—so close, according to a new report by opposition investigative reporting group Dossier Center, that the two were sometimes spotted “sitting with their arms around each other.”A source told the outlet Belousov, who served as first deputy prime minister prior to his rise to defense minister, oversaw Prigozhin’s activities. The two are said to have spoken to each other like friends and “their work meetings were reminiscent of family get-togethers with tea; they informally discussed all the issues, then nodded to the junior employees, who then compiled everything into a real report.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Investigators probing Matthew Perty’s death are reportedly still looking into how the “Friends” actor got a hold of the ketamine that was found in his system at the time of his death — and are trying to zero in on who is responsible for supplying him with the deadly drug. The 54-year-old actor, who long struggled...

It’s about providing good times and big moments — not necessarily delivering a championship.

Sean "Diddy" Combs' former head of security said he had witnessed the rapper being violent toward women, namely his exes Cassie Ventura and Kim Porter, "four or five times" — and that the shocking 2016 footage of him brutally beating Ventura did not surprise him.

Over 27 years, H5N1 flu has become less mysterious. But it still worries infectious disease specialists.

A Democratic agenda: Lose the filibuster, reform the court and revive Roe.

The names of witnesses will remain off limits to the public

In Georgia, incumbent Justice Andrew Pinson and Democratic former congressman John Barrow are running for the state Supreme Court in an unusually heated race.

French President Emmanuel Macron is making a surprise visit to New Caledonia to address ongoing unrest in the territory. The visit was announced by Prisca Thevenot.

Yesterday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) took an unprecedented, reckless, and morally skewed action.

Shane Nadeau told Newsweek he was "overcome with emotion" after coming across the early Father's Day present Isabella left.

The crash site — "waterlogged and filled with 80 years' worth of sediment" — is in eastern England, Cotswold Archaeology told CBS News.

The guide you need in your life.

Analysts who study the youth vote say that the president is in better shape with voters under 30 than many Democrats tend to think.

Women’s basketball has never seen anything like Caitlin Clark, the rookie guard for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever.

Cut five words out of the existing law — and don’t call them mobile homes.

As Red Lobster files for bankruptcy, other major U.S. restaurant chains are also facing trouble.

Billions of dollars sourced from Russian cash proceeds will be given to Ukraine's military after milestone EU ruling.

The National Rifle Association, whose image was sullied by former leader Wayne LaPierre's spending excesses, elected former GOP Rep. Bob Barr and Doug Hamlin to its top posts.

“The Hypocrisy of The Hague,” read the front page of one mainstream daily that has often been critical of Israel’s prime minister.

Robyn Novelle from the U.K. told Newsweek of her idea: "I do one for each year, so we can look back when we are older."

The Manhattan District Attorney was criticized for calling Donald Trump's former lawyer as a witness in his hush money case.

Nine Egyptian men have been acquitted by a Greek judge of charges related to a shipwreck that killed more than 500 migrants. The judge dismissed the case.

Betting on the United States has been a terrific strategy.

China claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, despite an international arbitral court's 2016 ruling to the contrary.

Gazprom has faced plummeting revenues due to sanctions imposed because of Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Sarasota County Sheriff's Office said the body of missing swimmer Jose Daniel Venta Ciro, 23, has been recovered on Siesta Key, Florida.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is not running for reelection, addressed rumors that he might run for governor in 2024 as an independent.

Fossil fuel companies enjoyed record profits under President Biden. But his decision to pause permits for gas export terminals has whipped up industry support for his challenger.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claim they have shot down an American drone over the impoverished Arab country. This would be the second MQ-9 Reaper drone downed by the Houthis.

Live updates from the 2024 campaign trail, with the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries and more.

The men were accused of causing a shipwreck that killed hundreds of migrants last year and sent shockwaves throughout the E.U.

A State Department spokesman confirmed the U.S. was "asked for assistance by the Iranian Government" after the helicopter crash, but did not comply.

A Boeing jet flying from London Heathrow to Singapore made an emergency landing in Bangkok. One passenger has died and several more have been injured.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Busy Philipps and more A-list moms shared their support for the tearful actress in the comments section.

Scientists believe that this could be down to melting permafrost, which releases metals into the water.

Think a second Trump term would be better for your finances? Think again.

CUP in Tampa provides workplace training and experience to people with intellectual disabilities, and it’s seen as a majory victory when one of them moves on.

If L.A. had hosted the 2024 Summer Olympics — which it almost did — the Olympic torch relay likely would have attracted pro-Palestinian protests.

We already have enough nepotism in our society.

Border technologies are not a deterrent for people who are migrating. It just makes the journey more deadly, writes Petra Molnar.

Changing someone’s beliefs is as sacred as changing their community. That's why it’s so rare and difficult, writes Derek Black.

I’ve spent more than five decades making difficult decisions in finance, government, business, and politics. Looking back, what most prepared me for the life I’ve led was the open exchange of ideas that I experienced in college and law school, supported by a society-wide understanding that universities and their faculty should be allowed to pursue areas of study as they see fit, without undue political or financial pressure. More broadly, throughout my career, I have seen firsthand the way America’s higher-education system strengthens our nation.I cannot recall a time when the country’s colleges and universities, and the wide range of benefits they bring, have faced such numerous or serious threats. Protests over Gaza, Israel, Hamas, and anti-Semitism—and the attempt by certain elected officials and donors to capitalize on these protests and push a broader anti-higher-education agenda—have been the stuff of daily headlines for months. But the challenges facing colleges and universities have been building for years, revealed in conflicts over everything from climate change and curriculum to ideological diversity and academic governance.But there is a threat that is being ignored, one that goes beyond any single issue or political controversy. Transfixed by images of colleges and universities in turmoil, we risk overlooking the foundational role that higher education plays in American life. With its underlying principles of free expression and academic freedom, the university system is one of the nation’s great strengths. It is not to be taken for granted. Undermining higher education would harm all Americans, weakening our country and making us less able to confront the many challenges we face.The most recent upheavals on American campuses—and the threat posed to the underlying principles of higher education—have been well documented.In some cases, individuals have been silenced or suppressed, not because they were threatening anyone’s physical safety or disrupting the functioning of the university environment, but rather, it seems, because of their opinions. The University of Southern California, for example, recently canceled its valedictorian’s speech at graduation. Although administrators cited safety concerns, many on campus, including the student herself, said they believe that the true cause lay in the speaker’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views. One does not have to agree with the sentiments being expressed by a speaker in order to be troubled by the idea that they would be suppressed because of their content.[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]In other cases, it is the demonstrators themselves who have sought to force their views on others—by breaking university policies regarding shared spaces, occupying buildings, and reportedly imposing ideological litmus tests on students seeking to enter public areas of campus. Some activists have advocated violence against those with whom they disagree. Even before the unrest of recent weeks, I had heard for many years from students and professors that they felt a chilling effect on campuses that rendered true discussion—including exchanges of ideas that might make others uncomfortable—very difficult.Even as free speech faces serious threats from inside the campus, academic freedom is under assault from outside. To an unprecedented degree, donors have involved themselves in pressure campaigns, explicitly linking financial support to views expressed on campus and the scholarship undertaken by students and faculty. At the University of Pennsylvania, one such effort pressed donors to reduce their annual contribution to $1 to protest the university’s decision to host a Palestinian literary conference. At Yale, Beverly Gage, the head of the prestigious Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, felt compelled to resign after the program came under increasing pressure from its donors. Among other things, the donors objected to an op-ed by an instructor in the program headlined “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump.”It’s not just donors. Elected officials and candidates for office are also attacking academic freedom. On a Zoom call whose content was subsequently leaked, a Republican member of Congress, Jim Banks of Indiana, characterized recent hearings with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Columbia—along with upcoming ones with the presidents of Rutgers, UCLA, and Northwestern—as part of a strategy to “defund these universities.” In a recent campaign video, former President Trump asserted that colleges are “turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers,” and promised to retaliate by taxing, fining, and suing private universities if he wins a second term. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, a close ally of Trump’s, has introduced a bill that would punish schools that don’t crack down on demonstrators. The bill would tax the endowment of such schools heavily and curb their access to federal funds.The methods of these donors and politicians—politically motivated subpoenas and hearings, social-media pressure campaigns, campaign-trail threats—may not violate the First Amendment. They do, however, seek to produce a chilling effect on free speech. The goal of these efforts is to force universities to bow to outside pressure and curtail the range of ideas they allow—not because scholars at universities believe those ideas lack merit, but because the ideas are at odds with the political views of those bringing the pressure. All of this needs to be seen against a foreboding backdrop. At a time when trust in many American institutions is at an all-time low, skepticism about higher education is on the rise. Earlier this year, a noteworthy essay by Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal explored “Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College.” The New York Times wondered last fall whether college might be a “risky bet.” According to Gallup, confidence in higher education has fallen dramatically—from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2023. The attacks on free expression and academic freedom on campus are both causes and symptoms of this declining confidence.It is ironic that, at a moment when higher education faces unprecedented assaults, more Americans than ever have a college diploma. When I graduated from college, in 1960, only 8 percent of Americans held a four-year degree. Today, that number has increased almost fivefold, to 38 percent. Even so, I suspect that many Americans don’t realize just how exceptional the country’s university system actually is. Although the United States can claim less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it is home to 65 percent of the world’s 20 highest-ranked universities (and 28 percent of the world’s top-200 universities). Americans can get a quality education at thousands of academic institutions throughout the country.Despite the skepticism in some quarters about whether a college degree is really worth it, the financial benefits of obtaining a degree remain clear. At 25, college graduates may earn only about 27 percent more than high-school-diploma holders. However, the college wage premium doubles over the course of their lifetime, jumping to 60 percent by the time they reach age 55. Looking solely at an individual’s financial prospects, the case for attending college remains strong.[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]But the societal benefits we gain from higher education are far greater—and that’s the larger point. Colleges and universities don’t receive tax exemptions and public funds because of the help they give to specific individuals. We invest in higher education because there’s a broad public purpose.Our colleges and universities are seen, rightly, as centers of learning, but they are also engines of economic growth. Higher graduation rates among our young people lead to a better-educated workforce for businesses and a larger tax base for the country as a whole. Institutions of higher education spur early-stage research of all kinds, create environments for commercializing that research, provide a base for start-up and technology hubs, and serve as a mentoring incubator for new generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders. In many communities, especially smaller towns and rural areas, campuses also create jobs that would be difficult to replace.The importance of colleges and universities to the American economy will grow in the coming decades. As the list of industries that can be automated with AI becomes longer, the liberal-arts values and critical-thinking skills taught by colleges and universities will become only more valuable. Machine learning can aid in decision making. It cannot fully replace thoughtfulness and judgment.Colleges and universities also help the United States maintain a geopolitical edge. We continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world to study here. Although many of these students stay and strengthen the country, many more return home, bringing with them a lifelong positive association with the United States. When I served as Treasury secretary, I found it extremely advantageous that so many of my foreign counterparts had spent their formative years in the U.S. That’s just as true today. In many instances, even the leadership class in unfriendly countries aspires to send its children to study here. In a multipolar world, this kind of soft-power advantage matters more than ever.At home, higher education helps create the kind of citizenry that is central to a democracy’s ability to function and perhaps even to survive. This impact may be hard to quantify, but that doesn’t make it any less real.It is not just lawmakers and executives who must make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. All of us—from those running civil-society groups that seek to influence policy to the voters who put elected leaders in office in the first place—are called upon to make hard choices as we live our civic lives. All of us are aware that the country is not in its best condition—this is hardly news. Imagine what that condition might be if we set out to undermine the very institutions that nurture rigorous and disciplined thinking and the free exchange of ideas.Of course, there is much about higher education that needs fixing. Precisely because colleges and universities are so valuable to society, they should do more to engage with it. Bringing down costs can help ensure that talented, qualified young people are not denied higher education for financial reasons. Being clear about the principles and policies regarding the open expression of views—even as we recognize that applying them may require judgment calls, and that it is crucial to protect student safety and maintain an environment where learning and research can be conducted—would help blunt the criticism, not always made in good faith, that universities have an ideological agenda. Communicating more effectively with the public would help more Americans understand what is truly at stake.But the fact that universities can do more does not change a basic fact: It is harmful to society to put constraints on open discussion or to attack universities for purposes of short-term political gain. Perhaps some of those trying to discourage the open exchange of ideas at universities believe that we can maintain their quality while attacking the culture of academic independence. I disagree. Unfettered discussion and freedom of thought and expression are the foundation upon which the greatness of our higher-education system is built. You cannot undermine the former without damaging the latter. To take one recent example: After Governor Ron DeSantis reshaped Florida’s New College along ideological lines, one-third of the faculty left within a year. This included scholars not only in fields such as gender studies, which many conservatives view with distaste, but in areas such as neuroscience as well.We can have the world’s greatest higher-education system, with all of the benefits it brings to our country, or we can have colleges and universities in which the open exchange of views is undermined by pressure campaigns from many directions. We can’t have both.

Smartphones and social media are melting our children’s brains and making them depressed, or so goes the story we are being told. The headlines are constant; it’s enough to make any parent want to shut off every smart device in their home. Fortunately for my kids, who enjoy a good “cat attacks dog” video on TikTok, I go to work each day and see what adolescents are really up to on their devices. And it turns out that the story behind teen social-media use is much different from what most adults think.I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]This is why other researchers and I are not buying the stories being told about adolescents and social media. The most recent wave of fear was unleashed by Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, an excerpt of which appeared in this magazine. Haidt claims that a “phone-based childhood” in the 2010s rewired our children’s brains and caused an epidemic of mental illness, especially among young girls; he’s written about this theme for years. Of course, Haidt is not alone in asserting that these apps cause such problems. Social media has been compared to heroin use in terms of its impact and has been blamed for things such as declining test scores and young people having less sex.These stories possess an intuitive appeal—social media is relatively new and makes for an easy scapegoat. But adolescence has always been a time of concern: It is the peak age for the onset of a number of serious mental disorders, and there are many alarming statistics about adolescents’ mental health right now. Caregivers are frightened, and people are just trying to do the right thing for young people. No one wants their children exploited online, or to be fed misinformation or sexually explicit and violent content. Pointing a finger squarely at smartphones and social media offers people common and unlikable enemies. But we simply do not know that these are the right targets. The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction from what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents—including among young-adolescent girls, along with a large review of 24 studies that followed people over time—suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around.Shockingly few experimental studies have specifically tried to test whether reducing social-media use improves mental health. In contrast with the correlational studies above, experimental studies randomize people’s social-media exposure. If done well, they can directly address cause-and-effect questions. I get excited every time one of these studies comes out, hoping I’ll learn something new about social media’s potential impact. But I have also learned to ask a few basic questions of this research before I start to draw conclusions. They’re worth keeping in mind whenever you see a story reporting on these findings: Does the study include young adolescents? Most of these studies do not. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University recently analyzed 27 experimental studies on the effects of social media on mental health conducted since 2013; surprisingly, this was all of the experimental work that could be identified to date. The majority were conducted with adults or college students; only two had participants with an average age of 18, and one small study included adolescents with an average age of 16. None included girls ages 10 to 14—a group that has been at the center of recent debates on this topic. If we are going to make causal claims about social media’s effect on adolescent girls’ mental health, then we need well-designed experimental studies that actually include them. Does the study focus on the social-media platforms that young people use today? If not, can we assume that the study’s findings are relevant to the spaces where adolescents spend their time? These studies have tended to observe college students or middle-aged volunteers, many of whom were asked to give up Facebook specifically, and then asked how they felt a few weeks later. (These days, teenagers tend to be on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.) What is the outcome that was measured? The conversation right now is about serious mental-health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, as well as suicide. Most studies do not come close to using clinically meaningful measures of these outcomes. A major problem is that participants are not blind to their condition, and are responding against a backdrop of messaging that social media is bad for them and that taking a break is good. Surprisingly, even given these issues, Ferguson reports that the evidence for causal effects across these experimental studies was statistically no different from zero. In other words, even this research, which was arguably primed to find a maximal link between social media and poor effects on mental health, does not reliably do so.[Listen: The problem with comparing social media to Big Tobacco]These results do not negate the very real fears that people—including the young people that we study—have about social media, nor do they negate the reality that many young people struggle with mental-health problems. Taking a safety-first approach to kids and social media is perfectly reasonable. I certainly believe that Big Tech companies can and should be doing a lot more to design platforms with the needs and best interests of adolescents in mind; I co-authored a report last year saying as much. The surgeon general’s office has also weighed in along these lines. Last May, it released an advisory, “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” acknowledging that more research is needed in this area, but because “we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” we should mitigate risks by requiring tech companies to emphasize health and safety, supporting digital literacy, developing Family Media Plans, and prioritizing research on social media’s potential impact. These are reasonable interventions designed to help people without causing undue alarm.But the problem with the extreme position presented in Haidt’s book and in recent headlines—that digital technology use is directly causing a large-scale mental-health crisis in teenagers—is that it can stoke panic and leave us without the tools we need to actually navigate these complex issues. Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.Offline risk—at the community, family, and child levels—continues to be the best predictor of whether children are exposed to negative content and experiences online. Children growing up in families with the fewest resources offline are also less likely to be actively supported by adults as they learn to navigate the online world. If we react to these problems based on fear alone, rather than considering what adolescents actually need, we may only widen this opportunity gap. We should not send the message to families—and to teens—that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.