Even Small Amounts of Alcohol Can Cause Cancer, Surgeon General Says

A slab of uplifted rock larger than Italy sits in the center of the American Southwest. It is called the Colorado Plateau, and it is a beautiful place, higher ground in every sense. What little rain falls onto the plateau has helped to inscribe spectacular canyons into its surface. Ice Age mammoth hunters were likely the first human beings to wander among its layered cliff faces and mesas, where the exposed sedimentary rock comes in every color between peach and vermillion. Native Americans liked what they saw, or so it seems: The plateau has been inhabited ever since, usually by many tribes. They buried their dead in its soil and built homes that blend in with the landscape. In the very heart of the plateau, the Ancestral Pueblo people wedged brick dwellings directly into the banded cliffs.Some of the best-preserved Ancestral Pueblo ruins are located near two 9,000-foot buttes in southeastern Utah, 75 miles from where its borders form a pair of crosshairs with those of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Ancestral Pueblo were not the only Native Americans in the area. Other tribes lived nearby, or often passed through, and many of them describe the buttes as “Bears Ears” in their own languages. Thousands of archaeological sites are scattered across the area, but they have not always been properly cared for. Uranium miners laid siege to the landscape during the early atomic age, and in the decades since, many dwellings and graves have been looted.In 2015, five federally recognized tribes—the Navajo Nation, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Mountain Ute, and the Ute—joined together to request that President Barack Obama make Bears Ears a national monument. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, as they called themselves, wanted to protect as many cultural sites as possible from further desecration. They asked for nearly 2 million acres centered on the buttes. In 2016, Obama created a monument of roughly two-thirds that size.The borders of that monument have been shifting ever since. In late 2017, President Donald Trump erased all but roughly 15 percent of the protected land, in the name of reversing federal overreach and restoring local control; and in the years that followed, mining companies staked more than 80 new hard-rock claims within its former borders. The majority were for uranium and vanadium, minerals that are in demand again, now that a new nuclear arms race is on, and tech companies are looking for fresh ways to power the AI revolution.In 2021, President Joe Biden put the monument’s borders back to where they’d started—and the miners’ claims were put on hold. Now Trump is reportedly planning to shrink Bears Ears once again, possibly during his first week in office.With every new election, more than 1 million acres have flickered in and out of federal protection. People on both sides of the fight over Bears Ears feel jerked around. In southeastern Utah, the whipsaw of American politics is playing out on the ground, frustrating everyone, and with no end in sight.Vaughn Hadenfeldt has worked as a backcountry guide in Bears Ears since the 1970s. He specializes in archaeological expeditions. Back when he started, the area was besieged by smash-and-grab looters. They used backhoes to dig up thousand-year-old graves in broad daylight, he told me. Some of these graves are known to contain ceramics covered in geometrical patterns, turquoise jewelry, and macaw-feather sashes sourced from the tropics. Thieves made off with goods like these without even bothering to refill the holes. Later on, after Bears Ears had become a popular Utah stopover for tourists passing through to Monument Valley, the looters had to be more discreet. They started coming in the winter months, Hadenfeldt told me, and refilling the ancient graves that they pillaged. “The majority of the people follow the rules, but it takes so few people who don’t to create lifelong impacts on this type of landscape,” he said.Hadenfeldt lives in Bluff, Utah, a small town to the southeast of Bears Ears. Its population of 260 includes members of the Navajo Nation, artists, writers, archaeologists, and people who make their living in the gentler outdoor recreation activities. (Think backpacking and rock climbing, not ATVs.) The town’s mayor, Ann Leppanen, told me that, on the whole, her constituents strongly oppose any attempt to shrink the monument. More tourists are coming, and now they aren’t just passing through on the way to Monument Valley. They’re spending a night or two, enjoying oat-milk lattes and the like before heading off to Bears Ears.[Read: What kinds of monuments does Trump value?]But Bluff is a blue pinprick in bright-red southern Utah, where this one town’s affection for the monument is not so widely shared. Bayley Hedglin, the mayor of Monticello, a larger town some 50 miles north, described Bluff to me as a second-home community, a place for “people from outside the area”—code for Californians—or retirees. For her and her constituents, the monument and other public lands that surround Monticello are like a boa constrictor, suffocating their town by forcing it into a tourism economy of low-paying, seasonal jobs. The extra hikers who have descended on the area often need rescuing. She said they strain local emergency-services budgets.I asked Hedglin which industries she would prefer. “Extraction,” she said. Her father and grandfather were both uranium miners. “San Juan County was built on mining, and at one time, we were very wealthy,” she said. She understood that the monument was created at the behest of a marginalized community, but pointed out that the residents of Monticello, where the median household income is less than $64,000, are marginalized in their own right. I asked what percentage of them support the national monument. “You could probably find 10,” she said. “10 percent?” I asked. “No, 10 people,” she replied. The two bluffs known as the "Bears Ears" stand off in the distance at sunset in the Bears Ears National Monument on May 11, 2017 outside Blanding, Utah. George Frey / Getty The election-to-election uncertainty is itself a burden, Hedglin said. “It makes it hard to plan for the future. Even if Trump shrinks the monument again, we can’t make the development plans that we need in Monticello, because we know that there will be another election coming.” Britt Hornsby, a staunchly pro-monument city-council member in Bluff, seemed just as disheartened by what he called the federal government’s “ping-pong approach” to Bears Ears. “We’ve had some folks in town looking to start a guiding business,” he said, “but they have been unable to get special recreation permits with all the back-and-forth.”[Read: Return the national parks to the tribes]The only conventional uranium-processing mill still active in the United States sits just outside the borders of another nearby town, Blanding. Phil Lyman, who, until recently, represented Blanding and much of the surrounding area in Utah’s House of Representatives, has lived there all of his life. Lyman personifies resistance to the monument. He told me that archaeological sites were never looted en masse, as Hadenfeldt had said. This account of the landscape was simply “a lie.” (In 2009, federal agents raided homes in Blanding and elsewhere, recovering some 40,000 potentially stolen artifacts.) While Lyman was serving as the local county commissioner in 2014, two years before Bears Ears was created, he led an illegal ATV ride into a canyon that the Bureau of Land Management had closed in order to protect Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. Some associates of the anti-government militant Ammon Bundy rode along with him. A few were armed.To avoid violence, assembled federal agents did not make immediate arrests, but Lyman was later convicted, and served 10 days in jail. The stunt earned him a pardon from Trump and a more prominent political profile in Utah.When Biden re-expanded the monument in 2021, Lyman was furious. While he offered general support for the state of Utah’s legal efforts to reverse Biden’s order, he also said that his paramount concern was not these “lesser legal arguments” but “the federal occupation of Utah” itself. Like many people in rural Utah, Lyman sees the monument as yet another government land grab, in a state where more than 60 percent of the land is public. The feds had colluded with environmentalists to designate the monument to shut down industries, in a manner befitting of Communists, he told me.Davina Smith, who sits on the board of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition as representative for the Navajo Nation, grew up just a mile outside of Bears Ears. She now lives in Blanding, not far from Lyman. Her father, like Mayor Hedglin’s, was a uranium miner. But Native Americans haven’t always been treated like they belong here, she told me. “People in Utah say that they want local control, but when we tried to deal with the state, we were not viewed as locals.” Indeed, for more than 30 years, San Juan County’s government was specifically designed to keep input from the Navajo to a minimum. Only in 2017 did a federal court strike down a racial-gerrymandering scheme that had kept Navajo voting power confined to one district.Smith, too, has been tormented by what she called the “never-ending cycle of uncertainty” over the monument. The tribes have just spent three years negotiating a new land-management plan with the Biden administration, and it may be all for naught. “Each new administration comes in with different plans and shifting priorities, and nothing ever feels like it’s moving toward a permanent solution,” Smith said.The judicial branch of the federal government will have some decisions of its own to make about the monument, and may inject still more reversals. In 2017, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and other groups sued the government over Trump’s original downsizing order, arguing that the president’s power to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act is a ratchet—a power to create, not shrink or destroy. No federal judge had ruled on that legal question by the time of Biden’s re-expansion, and the lawsuit was stayed. If Trump now shrinks the monument again, the lawsuit will likely be reactivated, and new ones likely filed. A subsequent ruling in Trump’s favor would have far-reaching implications if it were upheld by the Supreme Court. It would defang the Antiquities Act, a statute that was written to protect Native American heritage, empowering any president to shrink any of America’s national monuments on a whim. (The Biden administration launched an historic run of monument creation. Project 2025, a policy blueprint co-written by Trump’s former head of BLM, calls for a shrinking spree.) The borders of each one could begin to pulsate with every subsequent presidential handover.An act of Congress might be the only way to permanently resolve the Bears Ears issue. Even with Republican lawmakers in control, such an outcome may be preferable to the endless flip-flops of executive power, Hillary Hoffmann, a co-director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, told me. “The tribes have built bipartisan relationships with members of Congress.” They might not get as much land for the monument as they did under Obama or Biden, she said, but perhaps a grand bargain could be struck. A smaller allotment of protected land could be exchanged for the stability that would allow local communities—including monument supporters and opponents alike—to plan for their future.In the meantime, people in southeastern Utah are waiting to see what Trump actually does. When I asked Smith how the tribes are preparing for the new administration, she was coy. She didn’t want to telegraph the coalition’s next moves. “We are definitely planning,” she told me. “This isn’t our first time.” Everyone in the fight over Bears Ears has to find some way to cope with the uncertainty; for Smith, it’s taking the long view. She invoked the deeper history of the Colorado Plateau. She called back to the Long Walk of the Navajo, a series of 53 forced marches that the U.S. Army used to remove thousands of tribe members from their land in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1860s. “When the cavalry came to round up my people, some of them sought refuge in Bears Ears,” she said. “To this day, I can go there and remember what my ancestors did. I can remember that we come from a great line of resilience.”

Rex Ryan is confident he'll land his old job as the New York Jets head coach and he's already revealing what that might look like for certain players.

It took my father nearly 70 years to become a social butterfly. After decades of tinkering with Photoshop on a decrepit Macintosh, he upgraded to an iPad and began uploading collages of photos he took on nighttime walks around London to Flickr and then to Instagram. The likes came rolling in. A photographer from Venezuela applauded his composition. A violinist in Italy struck up a conversation about creativity. And then, as quickly as he had made his new friends, he lost them. One night in 2020, he had a seizure. Then he began forgetting things that he’d just been told and sleeping most of the day. When he picked up his iPad again, it was incomprehensible to him. A year or so later, he put an electric kettle on the gas stove. Not long after, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.An estimated 7 million Americans age 65 and older are currently living with Alzheimer’s; by 2050, that number is expected to rise to nearly 13 million. Millions more have another form of dementia or cognitive decline. These diseases can make simple tasks confusing, language hard to understand, and memory fleeting, none of which is conducive to social connection. And because apps and websites constantly update, they pose a particular challenge for patients who cannot learn or remember, which means that people like my father, who rely heavily on social media to stay in touch, may face an even higher barrier to communication. When my father turned on his iPad again about a year after his seizure, he couldn’t find the Photoshop app because the logo had changed. Instagram, which now had Reels and a shopping tab, was unnavigable. Some of his followers from Instagram and Flickr had moved on to a new app—TikTok—that he had no hope of operating. Whenever we speak, he asks me where his former life has disappeared to: “Where are all my photos?” “Why did you delete your profile?” “I wrote a reply to a message; where has it gone?” Of all the losses caused by Alzheimer’s, the one that seems to have brought him the most angst is that of the digital world he had once mastered, and the abilities to create and connect that it had afforded him.[Read: My dad had dementia. He also had Facebook.]In online support forums, caretakers of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients describe how their loved ones struggle to navigate the platforms they were once familiar with. One member of the r/dementia Subreddit, who requested not to be identified out of respect for her father’s privacy, told me that, about a decade ago, her father had been an avid emailer and used a site called Friends Reunited to recall the past and reconnect with old acquaintances. Then he received his dementia diagnosis after back-to-back strokes; his PC now sits unused. Amy Evans, a 62-year-old in Sacramento, told me that her father, who passed away in May at the age of 92, started behaving erratically online at the onset of Alzheimer’s. He posted on Facebook that he was looking for a sex partner. Then he began responding to scam emails and ordering, among other things, Xanax from India. Evans eventually installed child-protection software on his computer and gave him a GrandPad to connect with family and friends. But he kept forgetting how to use it. Nasrin Chowdhury, a former public-school teacher’s aide who lives in New York City, once used Facebook to communicate daily with family and friends, but now, after a stroke and subsequent Alzheimer’s diagnosis at 55, she will sit for hours tapping the screen with her finger—even if nothing is there, her daughter Eshita Nusrat told me. “I’ll come home from work, and she’ll say she texted me and I never replied, but then I’ll look at her phone and she tried to type it out in YouTube and post it as a video,” Chowdhury’s other daughter, Salowa Jessica, said. Now Chowdhury takes calls with the aid of her family, but she told me that, because she can’t use social media, she feels she has no control of her own life.Many patients with dementia and related cognitive disorders lose the ability to communicate, regardless of whether they use technology to do it. It’s a vicious cycle, Joel Salinas, a clinical assistant professor of neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told me, because social disconnect can, in turn, hasten the cognitive degeneration caused by Alzheimer’s and dementia. Social media, by its very nature, is an especially acute challenge for people with dementia. The online world is a largely visual medium with a complex array of workflows, and dementia commonly causes visual processing to be interrupted or delayed. And unlike face-to-face conversation, landlines, or even flip phones, social media is always evolving. Every few months on a given platform, buttons might be changed, icons reconfigured, or new features released. Tech companies say that such changes make the user experience more seamless, but those with short-term memory loss can find the user experience downright impossible.On the whole, social-media companies have not yet found good solutions for users with dementia, JoAnne Juett, Meta’s enterprise product manager for accessibility, told me. “I would say that we’re tackling more the loss of vision, the loss of hearing, mobility issues,” she said. Design changes that address such disabilities might help many dementia patients who, thanks to their advanced age, have limited mobility. But to accommodate the unique needs of an aging or cognitively disabled user, Juett believes that AI might be crucial. “If, let’s say, Windows 7 is gone, AI could identify my patterns of use, and adapt Windows 11 for me,” she said. Juett also told me her 97-year-old mother now uses Siri to make calls. It allows her to maintain social ties even when she can’t keep track of where the Phone app lives on her iPhone’s screen.[Read: How people with dementia make sense of the world]The idea of a voice assistant that could reconnect my father to his online world is enticing. I wish he had a tool that would allow him to connect in the ways that once gave him joy. Such solutions will become only more necessary: Americans are, on average, getting both older and more reliant on technology to communicate. The oldest Americans, who are most likely to experience cognitive decline, came to social media later in life—and still, nearly half of the population over 65 uses it. Social media is inextricable part of how younger generations connect. If the particular loneliness of forgetting how to use social media is already becoming apparent, what will happen when an entire generation of power users comes of age?

The consent decree agreement Monday with the Minneapolis Police Department follows a similar decree that the department agreed upon with Louisville, Kentucky, police last month.

The aircraft had arrived in Fort Lauderdale shortly after 11 p.m. from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

Dallas Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones insisted he had no plans to give up the general manager role after a down year in 2024 and disappointment in the playoffs.

Ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, Mexico is dissolving attention-grabbing migrant caravans and keeping them far from the U.S. border.

The Golden Globes producers weren't expecting that Vin Diesel-Dwayne Johnson viral moment.

The illegal immigrant charged with the horrific torching death of a New Jersey woman on a Brooklyn subway train told cops he was so inebriated after a night of drinking that he blacked out before the sick attack, newly released court records reveal. Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, wore an orange jumpsuit and orange jacket as he was arraigned...

Asif Merchant, 46, has been holed up in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park ever since he was nabbed last July over the alleged murder-for-hire plot to take out current and former government officials.

The layoffs will impact the newspaper's business division, including its sales and marketing teams.

There are several contenders to be the next Labor Party leader after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his upcoming resignation.

On Monday during CES 2025, the major tech trade show in Las Vegas with all the latest gadgets, Chairman Akio Toyoda revealed the carmaker is investing $44.4 million, or 7 billion yen, into Interstellar Technologies, a private Japanese spaceflight company.

Un promedio de 10,1 millones de espectadores sintonizaron la 82ª edición de los Globos de Oro a través de CBS y Paramount+, informó Dick Clark Productions, cifra que coincide aproximadamente con la audiencia del año pasado.

FDNY unions are sounding the alarm on the city's new congestion pricing, warning it could delay response times and have deadly side effects as a result.

President-elect Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, one day after Vice President Kamala Harris certified his election victory.

Officials say more than 5,600 people were reported killed in Haiti last year as a U.N.-backed mission led by Kenya struggles to contain rampant gang violence.

Un centenar de migrantes deambulaban el lunes sin saber muy bien qué hacer por distintos lugares de Acapulco, el puerto del Pacífico mexicano que intenta recuperarse de dos huracanes devastadores y donde la violencia se multiplica.

EXCLUSIVE: President-elect Trump reacted to Meta's move to end its fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram and its other platforms, telling Fox News Digital that the company has “come a long way."

A total of 29,417 felony assaults were reported within the five boroughs between January and December of 2024 – up 5 percent from the 28,003 tallied by the department in 2023.

Ariana Grande fans know all about her close bond with her 99-year-old "Nonna."

Country singer Riley Green ended up in the emergency room after he "impaled" his foot. Green explained he "stepped on a nail" during his hunting trip.

De acuerdo a una encuesta AP-NORC más estadounidenses opinan que la inmigración debería ser un enfoque principal para el gobierno

Sebastian Zapeta, the Guatemalan man accused of lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire and watching her burn to death on a Brooklyn subway car, was arraigned Tuesday.

Daniel Penny says a lawsuit filed by Jordan Neely’s father should be dismissed outright, according to a new filing by his attorneys.

Pamela Anderson is recounting a time on an airplane when she was mistaken for a member of the country music group formally known as the Dixie Chicks.

The next presidential term in Venezuela is set to begin Friday, as the opposition leader is trying to garner international support following meetings with President Biden, and other world leaders.

“It’s like Cinderella, you wear it to the ball, and at midnight it has to go back.”

Four suspects linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were caught trying to sneak across the southern U.S. border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced.

WWE legend Hulk Hogan came out to the Los Angeles crowd on "Monday Night Raw" to boos but found some defenders on social media during the show.

Ruby Franke's daughter, Shari Franke, remembers her last conversation with her mother before she was charged with child abuse her new memoir, "The House of My Mother."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla’s automated summoning feature has been linked to at least four crashes.

Consuelos played a cop in his brief Season 7 cameo.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded France's far-right National Front party, died at 96 years old. Le Pen was a controversial and confrontational figure.

Donald Trump will deliver remarks on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago in what will be his second news conference since becoming president-elect.

The Titans didn't trust their current regime to handle the No. 1 pick.

Donald Trump's bid to halt his sentencing in his hush money case continued Tuesday with a 502-page lawsuit against Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.

Jason Kelce did not take late night to new heights for ESPN.

A polarizing figure in French politics, Le Pen was convicted numerous times of antisemitism, discrimination and inciting racial violence.

Michigan dad Robert Loren Bacon apparently drowned in the Cass River in Frankenmuth after he was last seen with family at the Bavarian Inn Lodge on Dec. 27.

Oddsmakers have five teams with odds of +650 or better, while the AFC South champions and fourth-seeded Texans bring up the rear with their 100/1 odds.

The FOX Forecast Center said the incoming storm will likely impact cities farther south than the most recent storm, putting millions of people in cities such as Dallas, in Texas, Little Rock in Arkansas, Memphis and Nashville in Tennessee and Atlanta in Georgia on alert for winter weather.

Richmond Mayor Danny Avula said water pressure might return to city taps by midday or early afternoon Tuesday, but a boil-water advisory would remain in effect.

The body of former President Jimmy Carter will make its final trip to Washington D.C. Tuesday before lying in state at the U.S. Capitol. CBS News correspondent Skyler Henry has more.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos "took a personal interest in the doc," a source tells Page Six.

Democratic strategist David Axelrod indicated to CNN this week that he's open to President-elect Trump succeeding with his second-term agenda, saying it'd be "good for the country."

Airplane food often gets a bad rap. 

Many conservatives on social media acted reacted positively on Tuesday in response to news that Meta is pledging to shift its content moderation more toward free speech.