Sophomore Ceasar Reyes rushed for 179 yards in Garfield's 21-13 win over Bell

The decision to buy must factor in a range of personal and financial factors -- not just rates.

Shohei Ohtani went into a trance-like state while leading the Dodgers to a division title. His skills could carry them to a World Series victory.

Carter Shaw always wanted to play for his father, former Stanford coach David Shaw, but he's making the most of his college football experience at UCLA.

Common Sense Media also reviews “Penelope” and “Megalopolis.”

The Giants were victimized by two strange officiating decisions Thursday during the first half of a 20-15 loss to the Cowboys.

Stunning home camera video captured Matt Heller paddling around his flooded Tampa home in a kayak that he intended to use as an "escape plan" as Hurricane Helene's historic storm surge "came out of nowhere."

The United States Coast Guard has rescued a man and his dog as Hurricane Helene fast approached them when his boat became disabled and started taking on water 25 miles out to sea, officials said.

Prince Harry cursed up a storm and screamed in sheer fear as he ventured into Jimmy Fallon’s haunted maze in the Big Apple.

Former USC defensive coordinator Alex Grinch will make his return to the Coliseum as Wisconsin's safeties coach when the Badgers play USC on Saturday.

Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

Braden Fiske grew up about an hour drive from Soldier Field and his family is full of Chicago Bears fans, who will root for Fiske and Bears to win.

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida last night as a ferocious Category 4 storm after gaining strength as it barreled across the Gulf of Mexico. According to Vox’s Benji Jones, the storm and its expected surge have the potential to wreak havoc across the Southeast, but also dump heavy rains onto Appalachia and beyond.  Before summer had even begun, experts were predicting that this year’s hurricane season would be an unusually active one, with as many as 25 named storms churning across the Atlantic Ocean. The ingredients were all there: the uniquely warm ocean temperatures, lessened Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and the La Niña conditions cooling the waters of the Pacific.  But it’s impossible to look at hurricanes in 2024 without also considering the context of climate change, which has made everything from rains to drought to wildfires more extreme globally, and put more ecosystems and humans in danger in the process. The record-hot waters in the Gulf this summer, for example, have intensified storms like Helene and Beryl, a supercharged hurricane that broke the record for the earliest Category 5 in a season, making them that much more fearsome.  I recently spoke with Umair Irfan, a correspondent at Vox who’s been covering climate, the environment, and environmental policy for a decade, about this hurricane season, what has changed about these massive storms in recent years amid climate change — and what role humans are playing in compounding their impact. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. —Lavanya Ramanathan Tell us how we used to think about hurricanes, in terms of categories and in terms of strength. What’s complicating that thinking now?The main way we categorize hurricanes is by wind speed. Category 1, 2, 3 — those are thresholds defined by how fast the winds from the hurricane are moving. But what we’ve found in recent decades, and with lots of recent experience, is that wind is not the most destructive element of the hurricane. It’s the water.It’s the rainfall, it’s flooding, it’s storm surge. The water is what causes the most property damage, and what also causes the most casualties and the most extensive tolls on human life. Water makes it difficult to get repair crews in and to get ambulances in and to get people out. Flooding is what blocks the roads. It’s a challenge conveying to the public that when you think about water as the big threat rather than wind, you can take different precautions: storm-proofing your house, flood prevention and mitigation, but also taking evacuation orders more seriously.  What should we know about this hurricane season? You’ve written that it’s expected to be an unusually active season.  To form a hurricane, you need a few things to fall into place. You need warm water at the surface of the ocean, at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter, you need limited wind shear in the air above it, and then you need another thing called atmospheric instability, where the layers of the atmosphere start to blend and merge with one another. What that does is it creates an environment where you can have a lot of evaporation, where water can move upward to a very high altitude. That’s the main engine of a hurricane.Hurricanes are a relatively rare phenomenon; we only see a couple dozen every year, whereas we see rainfall just about every day. Major hurricanes — we see maybe three or four. It doesn’t happen very often that all these ingredients align in just the right way.But last year was the hottest year on record, and we had a major El Niño, which is a major pattern in the Pacific Ocean that tends to drive up global average temperatures. So air temperatures were very high, causing the oceans to heat up. The major ingredients were there.  I was in Houston after one of the big storms of this season, Hurricane Beryl, which struck in July. I saw the effects of the storm really taking their toll on the city for days afterward, in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. How is our understanding of the impact of hurricanes changing? Houston and Hurricane Beryl are good examples of how the ways we describe hurricanes don’t tend to reflect the risk that they can pose. It’s not simply the wind speed, or the strength, but how vulnerable the area is.  Houston was hit by Hurricane Harvey years ago, which caused immense amounts of record flooding because the storm parked over the city and dropped a lot of rain. But Houston also has very little in the way of zoning. It’s also very flat, and it’s right next to the Gulf Coast, so there was not a lot of infrastructure there to cope with an immense amount of water. The main natural features that would absorb water have been paved over to support development.  And so there are human-level decisions that ended up worsening the impact.  With Beryl, it was also a fast-moving storm, and the wind caused a lot of damage to power lines. One of the utility companies there, Centerpoint, has a backlog of maintenance and there were well-known vulnerabilities. So when you had a major storm, it knocked out a lot of power, but also took a long time to get it back. Meanwhile, Houston had a heat wave, so there was an intense energy demand. The high heat, the not having power, all converged to compound the effects of this disaster.If you look at Beryl as just a Category 1 storm, you might brush it off. But when you look at all these other things going on, you realize this is a much more severe disaster than the category would suggest.  And the impact was far broader, right? Right. Hurricanes tend to lose a lot of energy once they make landfall. But they can still be fairly devastating storms, especially if they move to an area that isn’t prepared for it, and isn’t used to getting a torrential downfall. The remnants of Tropical Storm Debby and Beryl both hit Vermont, and caused a lot of flooding and damage, and actually killed people. There was no place for that water to run off to, the people there are not necessarily well-versed in how to evacuate ahead of a storm, and the waterways, roads, and bridges are not designed to withstand sub-tropical storms.Is this something that we’re seeing more of, or are going to see more of? We see that in general with extreme weather. We had a major heat wave in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago; that was devastating because that’s the area with the least amount of air conditioning in the US. It was harmful for the people there because they’re not acclimated to the heat, and they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with it.We see the same thing with storms. A weaker storm can still be devastating in an area that does not have infrastructure that can withstand rains, or porous areas that can absorb the water. And when an event does occur, there’s more severe rainfall, because as air temperatures warm, the air can hold onto more moisture.  So, while we’re focusing on the extremes, we should look at what’s typical as well, and what’s typical is also changing.  Is there something people can do to protect themselves on an individual level that we’re not already doing?  First, you have to start to rethink your mentality. There’s a pervasive thinking that bad things won’t happen to you. If you go for years at a time without a hurricane or a storm, or your house got flooded, and now it’s been a decade, that memory fades very quickly. But one of the concerns with climate change is that it’s bringing extremes into areas where they haven’t experienced them before. So this is a new process for some. The first step is recognizing and appreciating that you are vulnerable, that bad things can happen but you can in fact prepare for them. The big thing is you want to also get your policymakers thinking about things that can mitigate disasters over time — things like building sea walls in coastal areas, but also thinking about big changes like rethinking where we are allowed to build at all. Are we going to retreat from certain areas? Are we just going to have to give up on oceanfront areas because the risk is too high? These are much more difficult policy questions, but we’re going to have to start grappling with them because now is the best opportunity — not after a disaster.

The U.S. official said it was "not surprising" that China's navy would conceal it. The submarine's current status is unknown.

"I don't think we know who's going to win Michigan yet," Rep. Debbie Dingell told chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett on "The Takeout" podcast.

Everything you need to know about the Rams taking on the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field, including start time, TV channel and betting odds.

Matthew Stafford sees the skills of No. 1 draft pick Caleb Williams of the Bears, the Rams' next opponent, but as a former top pick he also knows the pitfalls.

Everything you need to know about the Chargers playing host to the Kansas City Chiefs at SoFi Stadium on Sunday, including start time, TV channel and betting odds.

The Chargers hope Justin Herbert can play against the Chiefs, but feel lucky to have Taylor Heinicke and Easton Stick in the quarterback room ahead of Chiefs.

There are countless reasons dogs are abandoned. Shelters and rescues save them, but happy endings require more.

Who is Kathy Bates rebooting? What's Ohtani's latest milestone? Who are the curious creatures in Universal Studios' new monster maze? Take this week's News Quiz and find out.

Ronald Reagan governed in California much more pragmatically than he campaigned. If only today's Republicans would do the same.

'The Mighty Red' portrays heartbreak past and present for Native Americans and others in North Dakota's Red River Valley, but author Louise Erdrich finds hope in the landscape as well.

Controversial Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard once again sparred with locals and trustees during a heated Thornton Township meeting on the budget Tuesday night.

Real estate interests are leading the opposition to California's Proposition 33 which would allow cities and counties to dramatically expand rent control.

After four hours of deliberation, Justin Johnson was found guilty of first-degree murder and other crimes. A co-conspirator said they were hired for a hit.

Solar, wind, hydrogen and other renewable technologies are likely to become cheaper and available at a rapid clip, creating huge business and political opportunities.

A San Fernando Valley resident is the first person in L.A. County to die this year from West Nile virus, a mosquito-transmitted illness that can cause lethal inflammation in the brain.

The L.A.-based musician behind the viral hit 'Million Dollar Baby' on TikTok, new stardom and his debut album, 'Coyote.'

Fed and Treasury officials were ridiculed for predicting that the post-pandemic surge in inflation would be 'transitory.' But they were right all along.

Estate sales, cartoons and Frito pie from HomeState are on the agenda for the "Agatha All Along" actor.

For decades, Sean "Diddy" Combs promoted himself as one of the godfathers of hip-hop, a celebrity who transformed the genre and became a business estimated to top a billion dollars.

As Trump heads to Michigan to court autoworkers, the Ford Michigan Assembly plant remains divided politically, even as United Auto Workers supports Harris.

Vice President Harris to hold a campaign event in battleground Arizona along the U.S. southern border with Mexico as she pushes back against Trump's frequent attacks on immigration.

National security federal employees would be hit most by Trump’s plan to weaken job protections for civil servants. 

It's better to pay the cost of life imprisonment for all killers than to execute an innocent person, says a reader.

The Department of Data is still on assignment, but here’s another video — and some charts about hay — for your enjoyment!

A Colorado man faces felony charges of arson and trespassing after allegedly igniting a forest fire in August when he attempted to cremate his dog.

A 1970 graduate of UC Berkeley whose ceremony was canceled amid anti-Vietnam War protests expresses disgust over campus police stockpiling weapons.

Former first lady Melania Trump opens up to Fox News and a new train route called the Floridian is making waves for its rather impressive length. Can you guess the details of this week's trending stories?

As artificial intelligence and cloud storage hoover up more and more space on the nation's computer servers, real estate developers are racing to build new data centers or convert existing buildings to data uses.

Retail and law enforcement organizations are donating in support of California's Proposition 36, which would turn some misdemeanors into felonies.

After 16 seasons, Rogue Machine Theatre co-founding producing artistic director John Perrin Flynn has announced his retirement at the conclusion of current season.

Aaron Schimberg’s dark fable, co-starring Adam Pearson, looks at ugliness and transformation from the male perspective.

Real estate interests are leading the opposition to California's Prop 5 which would make it easier to raise money for affordable housing.

'One would be hard-pressed to find two more ungodly candidates than those at the top of the Republican ticket,' says a reader.

By the time Eric Adams addressed reporters under a rain-soaked canopy outside Gracie Mansion yesterday morning, the biggest question about his tenure as mayor of New York seemed to be how soon it would end. Fellow Democrats started calling on him to step down even before federal prosecutors formally accused Adams of defrauding the city and doing the bidding of the Turkish government. And in recent weeks, the leaders of the nation’s largest police department and public school system had resigned from his administration amid a series of investigations.Adams, who has denied the charges and vowed to stay on, already had at least four serious challengers to his reelection bid next year. Now a much larger number of Democrats—including former Governor Andrew Cuomo—are salivating at the prospect of a special election if Adams steps down.But don’t assume he’s going anywhere.“He is not going to resign,” predicted Mitchell L. Moss, a longtime observer of New York politics who has advised, formally and informally, some of its biggest stars over the past four decades. Moss, an NYU professor, has seen the scandals that have taken down governors such as Cuomo (sexual harassment, which he denied) and Eliot Spitzer (prostitution), members of Congress like Anthony Weiner (sending explicit photos to minors), and dozens of elected officials at lower levels of government. With few exceptions, New Yorkers accused of wrongdoing have left neither quickly nor quietly. Some have stayed in office quite a while. And that was true before a New Yorker convicted of 34 felonies won the Republican nomination for president. “We’re living in a different world from the one where you would be disqualified for a divorce,” Moss said. (In 2022, Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Moss to an economic-development committee, but he said he has no other ties to the mayor. “I met the guy once in a restaurant,” he told me. “That’s it.”)[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]The charges against Adams are significant, and more could be on the way; FBI agents searched his official residence yesterday morning, hours after news of the imminent indictment had come out. Prosecutors say that for the past decade, Adams has been soliciting illegal campaign donations and taking bribes from foreign businesspeople and at least one official of the Turkish government. Because he used the contributions to receive public matching funds through New York’s campaign-finance system, the government says he essentially stole $10 million from city taxpayers.New York has had more than its share of corruption and scandal, but Adams is the first sitting mayor to be indicted. (Coincidentally, one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred yesterday in Washington, D.C., for helping Donald Trump try to overturn his 2020 election defeat.) Yet the details of the 57-page indictment against Adams still pale in comparison to the government’s recent accusations against former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey; the FBI recovered gold bars and envelopes filled with cash in his home. Nor are the allegations as shocking as those leveled against expelled Representative George Santos of Long Island, who made up his résumé to win a seat in Congress. Moss contends that, as far as Adams’s constituents are concerned, the most damning allegation is that the mayor leaned on the fire department to approve the opening of a skyscraper housing a new Turkish consulate that had not passed a safety inspection. “That is serious,” Moss said.Democrats who have called for Adams to resign argue that the charges imperil his ability to govern the city. Moss doesn’t think so. “People care about the mayor, and they want the mayor to succeed, but the city functions no matter who the mayor is,” Moss told me. Emulating other scandal-tainted leaders, Adams will likely “double down on the job” to prove he can still lead, which could allow him to retain the support of his base of Black and Latino voters who helped him win a crowded Democratic primary, and then the mayoralty, in 2021. “They are not going to abandon him,” Moss said.Under New York City’s charter, Hochul could remove Adams as mayor, but Moss believes that possibility is inconceivable—not least because of the governor’s own deep unpopularity. “She’s not going to fire an African American mayor. No way,” he said. “She’d get defeated within an hour.”[Read: New York City’s chaos mayor]Moss predicted that Adams would even start as the favorite in next June’s primary in spite of his legal troubles. Cuomo, who is reportedly eying a run for mayor after resigning as governor in 2021, is “damaged goods,” Moss said, and the four candidates who have declared their interest—the current city comptroller, Brad Lander; the former comptroller Scott Stringer; state senators Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos—could struggle to unify progressive voters.Adams has said he wants a speedy trial, but the legal process could play out for months or longer. (He’s not even the highest-profile defendant that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Damian Williams, is currently prosecuting.) The next president will have the power to replace Williams if he or she chooses. When Trump took office in 2017, he moved quickly to oust the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara. That could happen again if Trump wins in November, Moss noted, with potential ramifications for Adams’s case. “There’s more uncertainty here than people realize.”

Around three in the morning on September 4, a Ukrainian doctor named Olesya Vynnyk was awakened by an explosion. She was staying with her parents several miles from the center of Lviv, where the blast occurred, but it was loud enough to drive her from bed. She raced to her car with a box of tourniquets and followed emergency vehicles toward the flames, until police roadblocks prevented her from reaching the site, which was close to her own downtown apartment.A Russian Kinzhal ballistic missile, fired from a MiG-31K aircraft about 200 miles from the border with Ukraine and 700 miles from Lviv, had hit an apartment in a civilian neighborhood. The apartment was the home of the Bazylevych family: Yaroslav Bazylevych; his wife, Evgeniya; and their three daughters, Yaryna, 21, Darya, 18, and Emilia, 7. Yaroslav staggered out of the damaged building, badly injured, but struggled to return inside while emergency personnel restrained him. He had lost his entire family.Vynnyk knew the Bazylevych family through their participation in a Ukrainian scouting organization. The girls reminded her of her nieces, and she thought about how easily the missile could have destroyed her own family. During the funeral, at the Garrison Church of Peter and Paul, which all of Lviv seemed to attend, Yaroslav moved between the four open coffins as if, Vynnyk told me, he couldn’t decide which one he should stay with to say goodbye. “There is a common thought in Lviv that he died together with them.”[Read: The timekeeper of Ukraine]At the many funerals she’s attended, Vynnyk has noticed that people avoid looking each other in the eye, out of some complicated mix of feelings—guilt, fear of breaking down. “You want to talk to God more than someone standing next to you,” she said. As a former member of a volunteer medical battalion, she’s lost numerous friends to the war, including a soldier who was killed the day before we sat down together this week in New York. But the erasure of a sleeping family shocked her more than anything Russia has done since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago. “I don’t think anyone can describe this tragedy of the Bazylevych family,” Vynnyk said. “It was beyond our understanding, beyond what we can allow ourselves to feel.”Vynnyk—whom I first met in Lviv shortly after the invasion and wrote about for this magazine—works for the Ukrainian World Congress, a nonprofit focused on diaspora Ukrainians. She was in the United States this month as part of her study for a doctorate in bioethics at Loyola University Chicago, and to speak with Americans about the war. She realized that our attention had moved away, and she wanted us to know that Ukrainians are still there, still fighting for values we’re supposed to share, still confident of ultimate victory. But beneath her cheerful resilience, she seemed tired beyond physical fatigue. The war had revealed to her the best and worst in human nature. At the start of the war, she told me, Ukrainians were standing in a circle, holding hands. “They are still holding the circle, they are doing it with all their strength, they will hold it until the last one of them is left standing, but that grip is not as strong as in the first days.”We were talking on a park bench in Lower Manhattan. A few miles north, the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly was in full swing. The world’s statesmen and diplomats were clogging Midtown with their convoys of SUVs, being chauffeured between meetings and luncheons and speeches. The UN has seemed unusually feckless recently, but never more so than while I sat with Vynnyk and she told me about the Bazylevych family.President Joe Biden was in town, and in his speech to the General Assembly he asked: “Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let aggression be renewed and a nation be destroyed? I know my answer. We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away. And we will not let up on our support for Ukraine, not until Ukraine wins a just and durable peace based on the UN charter.”It was a moving speech, given by a lifelong supporter of the world body on his last occasion to deliver such an address. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in Manhattan as well. He told the General Assembly that Ukraine would not accept a peace deal that surrendered pieces of his own country to Russian imperialism, and he urged Western allies to increase their support for Ukrainian resistance to aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin was not in town—he faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children—but in Moscow, he threatened the West with nuclear war if NATO-supplied weapons are used to strike Russian territory.But Biden’s vows and Zelensky’s pleas and Putin’s threats are just words. On the night of September 3–4, Russia fired 42 ground- and air-based missiles and drones from Russia and Russian-occupied territory at Ukraine. Ukrainian armed forces shot down most of them, but ballistic missiles travel so fast that many get through. To protect itself from those missiles, Ukraine would have to attack their points of origin, Russian bases and airfields, with long-range missiles provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries. NATO’s current policy forbids Ukraine from using its weapons to hit military targets deep inside Russia—and so the Bazylevych family no longer exists.[Read: No time for funeral rites]From New York, Zelensky went to Washington, D.C., to urge the Biden administration to lift those restrictions. The outgoing secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has indicated his support for Zelensky’s request; so has the government of Britain. But Biden has hesitated out of a fear of escalation into nuclear and world war. Putin has been blackmailing Biden and the West since the start of the invasion, first warning against the use of any NATO weapons inside Ukraine, then against certain tanks and long-range artillery, then against strikes on military positions just across the border from which Russia has been raining destruction on Kharkiv. All of those warnings turned out to be empty. This week Putin raised the stakes. Is he bluffing?That’s the question he hopes will paralyze the West. We can’t know his intent, and the consequences of guessing wrong could be catastrophic. But a lot of Russia experts think he is bluffing; after all, Putin cherishes his own survival above everything else, and he’s threatening suicide as well as mass murder. To give him the final say over every move his adversaries make is to surrender in advance. Perhaps we should ask a different question, one that Olesya Vynnyk asked me: If Ukraine is defending values we are supposed to hold dear, how can we not allow Ukraine to defend its people?

The effects of Hurricane Helene in Cuba, severe drought in Brazil and Ecuador, a simulated moon walk in Germany, Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, runway scenes from Paris Fashion Week, a comet viewed from Earth orbit, scenes from the opening weekend of Oktoberfest in Germany, and much moreTo receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.