Biden pledges mpox aid to Africa in his valedictory speech to the United Nations

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Several Gold Star family members whose loved ones were killed in the 2021 airport Kabul Airport suicide bombing during the withdrawal from Afghanistan were underwhelmed by President Biden's Tuesday remarks about the 13 service members killed in that attack.

"Why don't you come hang out with me?" Combs recalled asking the royal brothers when they were in their young party phase.

Shirley Curry, known online as the video game streamer "Skryim Grandma," announced she is calling it quits from publically playing the mythical game after over a decade.

An emergency-ready Hudson Valley sanctuary designed to be the ultimate “safe house” has hit the market.

A knife-wielding lunatic allegedly stabbed a man in the back at a Manhattan subway station for accidentally bumping into him on the staircase – only to be freed without bail Tuesday.

A coronal mass ejection could strike the Earth's magnetosphere this week and cause a geomagnetic storm due to conditions caused by the autumnal equinox.

Is this the world's best vibrator?

Aaron Rodgers took a not-so-subtle dig at Haason Reddick, who is supposed to be his Jets teammate.  

Consider these long shots in your college football futures portfolio.

An 0-3 start has the Bengals taking drastic measures.

Mike Segar/ReutersOhio’s Republican Senate nominee thinks it’s “a little crazy” how much women care about abortion rights.“You know, the left has a lot of single-issue voters,” Bernie Moreno said at a town hall on Friday, according to a video obtained by Columbus TV station WCMH. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’”“It’s a little crazy, by the way,” he continued. “But—especially for women that are like past 50—I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”Read more at The Daily Beast.

"I’ve always been open to what I started," teased Kevin Costner.

Earlier this month, the self-identified “white nationalist” Donald Trump adviser Laura Loomer said that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”Asked what he thought of Loomer’s remarks, the GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, said he didn’t “like” them, but then continued, “Whether you’re eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken, things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’s] policies.” The line about inflation would have worked without the mention of fried chicken and curry, but then it would not have included a belittling reminder that Harris is of Black and Indian descent.Now, the notable thing is not the void where Vance’s sense of humor should be—that’s an old story. What’s going on here is emblematic of the Trump campaign’s strategy, which is to try to make race the big issue of the campaign, via incessant trolling, lying, and baiting of both the press and the Harris camp. The racism rope-a-dope is one of Trump advisers’ favorite moves—say something to provoke accusations of racism, then ride the wave of outrage over your critics’ perceived oversensitivity.The theory is that by supercharging the salience of race—a reliable winner with huge swaths of the electorate—they can compensate for the unpopularity of the Trump campaign’s actual policy agenda: its plans to ban abortion, repeal protections for preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act, deregulate Big Business, and cut taxes on the wealthy while raising them on everyone else. The campaign wants people—white people in particular—thinking about race, and hopes that these kinds of appeals will activate the necessary number of voters in the key swing states where the electorate is more conservative than the country as a whole. As Molly Ball reported in 2017, based on polling from the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, another former Trump stalwart, Steve Bannon, developed a plan to galvanize white voters with race-baiting on immigration.[From the January/February 2024 issue: A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere]The belief that demagoguery on immigration is politically potent is why conservative media erupt with saturation coverage of the perennial migrant caravans every election season. The right sees as its most effective message the argument that immigrants, particularly nonwhite immigrants, are going to come to America and take or be given that which belongs to you. Encounters at the southern border have dropped precipitously in recent months, however, owing to a crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in the absence of that reliable scapegoat, the Trump campaign found a new one, spreading lies about hardworking Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.“What it is is: Imagine if this explosion of migrants or illegals happened on your block, in your neighborhood? You don’t have a clearer real-world example of the consequences of these Biden-Harris immigration policies, and most voters do not want that to happen where they live and send their kids to school,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng. He added that the Trump campaign believes “this is a surefire political winner for them.”As soon as Harris became the nominee, Republicans began goading her. Republican elected officials immediately attacked Harris as a “DEI hire,” accusing the former district attorney, attorney general, and senator, who has spent more time in elected office than either member of the GOP ticket, as unqualified. Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalists convention and falsely accused Harris of recently “becoming” Black. The Trump campaign has charged Harris with wanting to “import the third world,” a framing that implicitly suggests that Americans of non-European descent don’t belong here. In August, Trump shared an image of dark-skinned people with the caption, “If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.” Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” predates Harris’s entrance into the contest, but the Trump campaign’s focus shifted once the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants took center stage.“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world—Asia,” Trump told supporters last week. “What’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country … We’re not going to take it any longer. You got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.” Trump makes no distinction between illegal and legal immigration here, and Vance has already announced that the distinction doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that people who are not white do not belong here, unless they happen to be married or related to Vance; then he’s willing to make an exception.This is a racist politics straight out of the 19th century. Even as it foments racist fears about nonwhite people, the Trump campaign draws accusations of racism—which makes race more salient to white people who will feel defensive and rally around the campaign.In her book, White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina distinguishes between a politics of racism and white identity—one that is useful for understanding what the Trump campaign is doing. Some white voters who are not ideologically opposed to stronger social-welfare policies in general can be manipulated by appeals to the sense that white people as a group are threatened.“White identity is sometimes latent, but it is also reactive—made salient by threats to the dominance of whites as a group,” Jardina writes. Politicians seeking to activate that sentiment “can make racial appeals that not only take advantage of the hostilities whites feel toward racial and ethnic minorities, but also ones that appeal to whites’ desire to protect and preserve their group’s power.”The Trump campaign’s more overtly racist rhetoric is meant to capture the support of the former group, while its race-baiting is intended to provoke attacks that will activate a sense of white solidarity. “I want them to talk about racism every day,” Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. Vance was so desperate to bait Democrats into such accusations that, in July, he awkwardly suggested to a confused audience of supporters that liberals would accuse him of racism for drinking Diet Mountain Dew. Sadly for him, they waited until Vance went all in on repeating baseless lies about Black immigrants.“For Trump, this kind of explicit race baiting has been effective,” Jardina, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, told me. But, she added, “I think that it’s still somewhat of a risky strategy for Trump. It activates his core group of real MAGA conservatives, who have rallied around white identity. But I think there’s a segment of the white population who finds this at least distasteful, if not appalling.”Harris’s campaign, by contrast, is avoiding talk of race, especially when it comes to the candidate herself. To look at the Harris campaign is to observe a Democratic Party chastened by backlash. Barack Obama warned Americans not to support his candidacy as a means of “racial reconciliation on the cheap,” but his candidacy was nonetheless seen as a fulfillment of the civil-rights movement’s aspirations. His success led to the rise of Trump, who defeated Hillary Clinton, whose campaign aspired to break “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”It also has none of the soaring rhetoric of the Obama campaign or the overt feminist appeals of the Clinton campaign. The Harris camp's stated policy goals are relatively modest, with none of the revolutionary tone of the Bernie Sanders campaign or the wonky radicalism of Elizabeth Warren. It is a campaign for an era of backlash.Harris is running, as best she can, as a generic Democrat—the kind who polled so well against Trump in the past. There is scant use of the more radical language used to discuss systemic racial or gender inequalities, and relatively little about the ongoing scourge of discrimination. Her campaign’s Issues page does not mention racial inequality directly. Harris has moved to the right on crime and immigration, matching a public that has also shifted in Trump’s direction. The Harris campaign is behaving as though it understands exactly what Trump is trying to do, and is attempting to neutralize that despite having a Black woman at the top of the ticket.[Read: What Trump’s Kamala Harris smear reveals]You can see the campaign’s approach in how Harris responds to the Trump campaign’s overt, incessant, and often personal race-baiting. After Trump’s remarks about her at the NABJ convention, Harris merely dismissed the comments as “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.” At the debate, Harris responded with similar framing—as though Americans were the target of Trump’s racist remarks, and not her. “Honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said. In this way, she can condemn Trump’s remarks without making it seem like she is, in right-wing parlance, “playing the race card.” Whether consciously or not, Harris’s recent remarks about gun ownership—she told Oprah that anyone breaking into her home is “getting shot”—tell conservative-leaning white people that she shares their fears about crime, another point of emphasis for Trump that involves lurid descriptions and exaggerations.It is not a coincidence that Harris’s harshest condemnations of Trump have come in response to remarks he’s made about other people—namely the falsehoods he has spread about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. But even then, although Harris criticized Trump for “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old,” her focus was on Trump’s dishonesty, not his racism, insisting that Trump “cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America.”Harris’s delicate responses to Trump’s overtly racist remarks and race-baiting are indicative of the tightrope the Harris campaign has to walk, and explain the unrelenting racist bombast of the Trump campaign. Trump needs to turn Harris into a threatening figure, and Harris has to defuse those appeals with all the caution of a bomb squad trying to disarm an explosive.

The student was arrested after what police described as a 'unprovoked attack' on a professor in a classroom. It wasn't immediately clear the professor's condition.

In the United States, home heat pumps have been gaining traction (and government subsidies) as highly energy-efficient replacements for gas-fired boilers and furnaces. They vary in size, but most of the units being hyped by environmentalists and installed nationwide measure just a few square feet. In Stockholm’s Hammarbyverket plant, which is by some measures the world’s largest heat-pump plant, each of the seven electric-powered heat pumps is the size of a two-story house.On the day I visited last fall, the motors and massive compressors hissed at a nearly deafening pitch. Pumps drew treated wastewater from an underground tunnel. As the water rushed through the pipes and cascaded down exposed panels, coolants in the machines sucked away degrees of warmth, until the water was so cold that it left small ice crystals behind as it poured into the Baltic Sea. Industrial-sized compressors, meanwhile, used that extracted heat to create a separate flow of 195-degree water that runs into a network of insulated pipes, supplying heat across the city.The argument for heat pumps centers on their efficiency: Because they move warmth around, instead of generating heat directly, heat pumps can be many times more energy efficient than other heaters. In the U.S., heating alone accounts for more than half of the energy used in homes. Heat pumps sized for individual households can slash those emissions dramatically, and since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, more than 250,000 families have used one of the bill’s tax credits to invest in heat pumps, according to the Treasury Department. The larger heat pumps I saw at the Hammarbyverket plant are similar to the popular air-source household units, but a single heat pump there pushes out enough heat to warm thousands of apartments. And in recent years other European cities, too, have started switching large heating systems, that serve tens of thousands, over to heat pumps.The efficiency advantage of small heat pumps holds for giant heat pumps. And giant heat pumps can also tap into heat sources—freshwater lakes, treated wastewater, heat exhaust from industrial plants—that wouldn’t be practical for smaller home units.The first heat pumps in Stockholm’s system pulled waste heat from IBM mainframe computers, says Fabian Levihn, who heads research and development for Stockholm Exergi, the local utility that runs the citywide, interconnected heating system, a setup typically referred to as district heating. Modern data centers, which use huge amounts of energy to run and cool their servers, remain a major source of otherwise wasted heat. So are factories that produce excess heat in energy-intensive industrial processes.My guide at Hammarbyverket was Bo Berndtsson, who oversees operations there. He began working in the control room just months after the giant heat pumps were installed in 1986. At the time, Sweden was more focused on weaning itself off volatile supplies of imported fossil fuels than reducing the carbon footprint of home heating. Similar district-heating systems elsewhere in Europe long relied on siphoning the extra heat from power plants that run on fossil fuels.Stockholm decommissioned its last coal-fired plant in 2020, and its giant heat pumps are a major supplier of heat to the city, along with power plants that burn waste and scrap wood from Sweden’s forestry industry that would otherwise be left to rot. Levihn contends that generating heat and electricity from incinerated waste is more efficient than dumping it in a landfill, although these plants still emit carbon dioxide. Stockholm Exergi is working to install carbon-capture technology in the plants in hopes of making the system net carbon negative, he told me.In Europe, interest in giant heat pumps like those at Hammarbyverket has been growing. The technology “has never really gotten traction because gas prices were always too cheap,” Thomas Nowak, a former secretary general of the European Heat Pump Association, told me last fall. In Europe, only a handful of massive heat pumps, such as those in Stockholm, are in operation, but more have been coming online as district-heating systems move to shut down coal-fired power plants and hit climate targets.When we met, Berndtsson had been occasionally checking in on the progress of workers in Mannheim, Germany, who were building a massive new heat pump; it started heating thousands of homes right around the time we met. The Danish port city of Esbjerg is in the final stages of installing two giant heat pumps to use water from the North Sea to provide heat for about 25,000 households. Helsinki, meanwhile, is building a new plant that uses heat pulled from the Baltic Sea to cover the needs of as much as 40 percent of the Finnish capital (whose population exceeds 600,000).And in Vienna, a series of heat pumps that can warm about 56,000 households opened in December. The city plans to double the capacity of the plant in the coming years. The Austrian capital’s district-heating system also uses heat pumps to recycle waste heat on a smaller scale from, for example, a local spa and a commercial bakery producing Manner wafer cookies, an beloved Viennese treat, Linda Kirchberger, the head of decarbonization and new technologies at the local utility Wien Energie, told me.What Stockholm, Vienna, Helsinki, and other European cities installing giant heat pumps have in common is that they already have sizable district-heating systems. Many of those systems use hot water running in special insulated pipes to move heat from generation plants to buildings across the city. Shutting down the coal-fired plants that powered those systems, and instead installing giant heat pumps running on renewable electricity, can decarbonize tens of thousands of households with a single (albeit expensive) project.In the United States, district-heating infrastructure is much less common and, where it does exist, is often far harder to convert to electric-powered heat pumps. Many of the systems in the U.S.—including Con Edison’s massive Manhattan system, among the largest in the world—run on high-pressure steam instead of hot water. For technical reasons, heat pumps are not designed to make steam. Switching over steam-based systems to water would be expensive and complicated, as would installing the network of pipes for a brand-new district-heating system. Density is a key factor in whether a district-heating system can be efficient and cost-competitive, so sprawl—or decisions by building owners to opt out of a newly launched system—poses major challenges to making one feasible.Plus, the economic case for replacing furnaces and boilers with massive heat pumps is harder to make when natural gas remains relatively cheap and abundant in the United States. Higher gas prices in Europe, combined with carbon taxes, means the efficiency savings of large heat pumps will pay off far sooner.Few places in the U.S. have tackled such projects, but several universities with campus-wide steam-heating systems have converted to hot water and installed giant heat pumps, in some cases to replace aging boilers. And for places with the right infrastructure—or for new campuses or other developments that provide their own heat—heat pumps can work.And they have the bonus of solving two problems at once. Heat pumps can also work as cooling systems, an advantage in places that might not previously have needed air-conditioning. In Stockholm, only a few days before I visited the Hammarbyverket plant, workers were swapping out compressors and other parts from pumps that had been cooling buildings in the city center. The Swedish summer is still relatively mild compared with the rest of the world’s, but average temperatures have been slowly, steadily rising for decades.

"I might expect this from Smiths or Lay’s, but not the God-tier Pringles."

Biden succinctly summarized his broad view of world politics and made it personal.

Here’s how you can achieve tender, juicy brisket every time you make one for the Jewish High Holidays or any other occasion.

A New Jersey doofus who busted into Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6 riots -- and posted video of his antics to Instagram, handing prosecutors proof of his crime — has pleaded guilty.

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds hold hands on a walk in NYC and more.

Consider your next movie night planned.

The play “Cracking Zeus” brings a mythical take on a drug-ravaged neighborhood.

Thanks to It-girls like Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Julia Fox who’ve all adopted the jersey trend, bloke-core aesthetic has jumped off TikTok feeds and onto the streets.

The former WWE head claimed "a lot has been misrepresented or left out entirely in an effort to leave viewers intentionally confused."

Doug Pederson's desperate search for answers after the Jaguars' pitiful 0-3 start could include what would be a jaw-dropping quarterback change.

"We were honored to be included in this opening night!" Amurri captioned Instagram photos of herself in the black Donna Karan gown.

Weight-loss drugs sell in Europe for a fraction of what they cost in the United States, a pattern that is typical for brand-name prescriptions.

Don't take any comfort in what happened last time around.

Meet Pesto, the massive king penguin chick that has won over the internet. Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium in Australia recently hosted a gender reveal party to break the news that the large, brown fluffball is a male. Zookeepers explained that a blood test is needed to determine the sex of king penguins.

It's location, location, location for this prime Little Silver property, which was ravaged during Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and left to rot for years.

Jayden Daniels and Malik Nabers were stylin' and profilin' in Week 3 and have firmly set themselves apart as Offensive Rookie of the Year favorites.

LAS VEGAS — Vice President Kamala Harris’ repeat gambit of spouting scripted answers demonstrates her contempt for voters, charges former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard — who famously shish-kebabbed the veep in a 2019 debate. “Kamala Harris today is the same person who ran for president in 2020 in the sense that she is great at delivering...

Republicans did not have enough support to change how the state allocates Electoral College votes, a move that would have benefitted former President Donald Trump.

"[George RR Martin] made the very funny quip where I was talking about deadlines being stressful. He said, ‘I’m 12 years late, Kristian. I understand about deadlines.’” 

Oran Alexander Routh was arrested after authorities searched his Greensboro, N.C., home 'in connection with an investigation unrelated to child exploitation.'

CNBC's Joe Kernen pressed Harris campaign surrogate Sen. Chris Coons on Tuesday about what the host described as a "deliberate effort" by VP Harris to avoid questions.

Brett Favre says he has Parkinson's disease while testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee about welfare fraud he was allegedly involved in Mississippi.

A Texas county that wants to keep 17 books off library shelves has been sued.

The Duke of Sussex spoke at the Clinton Foundation in New York City Tuesday.

A 62-year-old vintage airplane precision flying pilot was killed Sunday when his plane crashed into another in midair and sent both aircraft plummeting to the ground near Los Angeles.

Attorney Gloria Allred is holding a press conference with an alleged victim of Sean “Diddy” Combs today at 2:30pm ET. Allred’s client has filed a lawsuit against Combs. The hip-hop magnate, who was charged with federal counts of racketeering and sex trafficking in separate charges, has pleaded not guilty.

Regulators have largely taken a hands-off approach to AI during campaign season—and the consequences may be severe.

Hannah Foslien/GettyNFL star Brett Favre announced he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a nervous system disorder.The Super Bowl champion made the revelation during a congressional hearing Tuesday about welfare reform.“Sadly, I also lost an investment in a company that I believed was developing a breakthrough concussion drug I thought would help others,” the Hall of Fame quarterback said. “And I’m sure you’ll understand why it’s too late for me, because I’ve recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. This is also a cause dear to my heart.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Six in 10 employers said they have already let go of recent college graduates this year, according to a survey by Intelligent.com.

Vice President Kamala Harris said in a public radio intereview she supports eliminating the Senate filibuster to federalize abortion access by reinstating the Roe v. Wade ruling.

A classmate of Detroit Lions Head Coach Dan Campbell's daughter reposted the family’s home address on social media following the team’s January playoff loss

Scammers revel in cash as billions slip past U.S. banking safeguards.