The top 3 factors heightening the risk of terror attacks on the homeland

Firefighters have taken the rare but not unusual move of scooping up ocean water to help battle the flames as wildfires rage across Southern California.

Gothamites weren't buying it.

Concern rises after positive cases found in wild birds and poultry in Delaware’s Kent County and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez may be tying the knot in Italy.

As commuters opt for public transit to avoid paying the $9 congestion zone toll, straphangers griped their trains were packed beyond compare last week.

There has been a reprieve from the strongest winds in southern California, but winds are expected to pick up later into tonight, raising the fire danger.

Matthew Livelsberger’s dramatic death at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas has spotlighted the Pentagon’s efforts to screen for and treat invisible injuries.

In 1967, Robby Krieger, the guitarist for legendary L.A. band The Doors, wrote the hit single "Light My Fire" in the living room of his parents' Pacific Palisades home.

The psycho who allegedly knifed a USPS worker to death over a line dispute at a Harlem deli earlier this month was caught on video brawling with a pair of men this summer.

Sam Moore, who was one half of the 1960s duo Sam & Dave and best known for his hit "Soul Man," has died. He was 89.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Some of Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks will appear before the Senate next week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the tough questions that Democrats are promising.Meanwhile, as Senate confirmations loom, Trump has taken to criticizing U.S. allies including Canada, Panama, and Greenland. These comments may, in part, be an element of the president-elect’s strategy, Tom Nichols explained last night. “We’re talking about things that are never going to happen: We’re not going to war with Denmark over Greenland; we’re not going to seize the Panama Canal,” he said. “This whole strange foreign-policy fandango has kind of obliterated a lot of other discussions.”Ahead of his inauguration, Trump has also made many promises about how the government will work once he takes office for his second term. But, as panelists discussed, whether he will be able to deliver, and how his supporters and political opponents could react if he can’t produce his pledged results, remains to be seen.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS News Hour; Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Vivian Salama, a national-politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.Watch the full episode here.

Police believe the maniac who fatally stabbed a 14-year-old boy is the same man who randomly slashed an innocent bystander in a Bronx subway station last weekend.

Altadena and north Pasadena has seen a new generation start new businesses and revive old ones.

Surgeon general's new warning about the connection between alcohol and cancer is time for us to better understand the threat. Sixty percent of Americans knew nothing about the danger.

Longtime journalist Fuzz Hogan was the first CNN staffer to take the stand in the high-stakes defamation case against the network brought by Zachary Young.

Prosecutors are seeking at 15-year sentence for disgraced former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who was convicted in a bribery case after a nine-week-long trial.

The nation’s universities, particularly so-called elite ones, are in crisis. Speakers are shouted down, professors are afraid of students, students can’t discuss certain topics, and nobody trusts the gowned “experts.” And that’s before Hamas’ attack on Israel revealed these bastions of progressive enlightenment to be the heart of antisemitism in America. Why is this happening?...

Neglect and mismanagement are at the roots of this disaster.

The debate over immigration in America has taken a strange turn recently. Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer and a prolific spreader of dehumanizing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, finds himself defending an immigrant-visa program against his fellow right-wingers. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most prominent leftist in the country, has taken to harshly criticizing the same program for undermining American workers. Odder still, the richest man on the planet and the senator who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist actually agree on what should be done to reform the program.The policy in question is the H-1B program, which allocates about 85,000 temporary visas every year to foreign workers who hold at least a bachelor’s degree and have expertise in a “specialty occupation,” such as engineering or information technology. The program is relatively small, but the debate around it could have deep implications for both major political parties. For Republicans, it is a harbinger of a looming intra-MAGA war over skilled immigration that might intensify when Trump enters office. For Democrats, it represents a key front in the fight over whether the party should turn in a nativist direction to repair its toxic brand on immigration. In both cases, the struggle is a preview of just how unpredictable the country’s immigration politics could be over the next four years.The debate began just before Christmas, when Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born former Twitter executive and a vocal supporter of skilled immigration, to be a senior AI-policy adviser in his incoming administration. Laura Loomer, the openly xenophobic MAGA influencer, criticized the decision on X and attacked Krishnan for his views on immigration. Other right-wing figures piled on. This prompted members of the tech right wing, most notably Musk, to defend both Krishnan and high-skilled immigration more broadly. The dispute quickly turned to the merits of the H-1B visa program, as the nativist right argued that the program was designed to replace American workers with foreign labor and the tech right countered that it is necessary to fill a shortage of highly skilled workers and help the U.S. compete with its rivals. “The ‘fixed pie’ fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking,” Musk posted on X. “There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation.” (The back-and-forth also featured less high-minded arguments. “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India,” Loomer posted on X. Indians make up more than 70 percent of H-1B holders.)[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]Eventually, Donald Trump weighed in on the side of Musk, claiming he’d always been supportive of the H-1B program. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told the New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” (In fact, Trump campaigned against H-1B at points in 2016, and he might have been mistakenly referring to his use of the H-2B visa program for lower-skilled immigrants who work on his properties.) Trump’s intervention caused the controversy to quiet down temporarily. Then an unexpected interlocutor entered the fray.“Billionaires like Elon Musk claim it is crucial to our economy,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for Fox News on Wednesday, referring to the H-1B program. “They are dead wrong.” The Vermont senator went on to accuse H-1Bs of allowing wealthy corporations to enrich themselves by importing cheap labor (or, in Sanders’s phrasing, “indentured servants”) at the expense of native-born workers.Both Sanders and Musk turn out to have a point. Sanders is correct that the H-1B program has major flaws that are often exploited by corporations at the expense of workers. A 2021 analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, for instance, found that at least a quarter of H-1B visas are allocated to outsourcing firms, which use the program to import foreign workers, train them up while paying below-market wages, and ultimately return them to their home countries, where they can do the same work at a fraction of the cost. In one infamous case, tech workers at Disney were forced to train their replacements, H-1B visa holders who were subcontracted by an Indian firm, before being laid off.However, Musk is correct in the sense that most careful experimental studies on the program find that, overall, it has neutral or positive effects on the employment prospects and wages of native-born workers. Companies that receive H-1B visas tend to grow faster than companies that don’t—likely because many of them really are hiring foreign workers whose skills they need—and thus often end up employing more native workers overall. Employers receiving H-1B visas also tend to develop new products and technologies at higher rates, which helps create new jobs.Despite their sharply different takes on the merits of the H-1B program, Musk and Sanders endorse the same set of reforms to it: a combination of raising the salary floor for H-1B visa holders and raising the cost to companies for maintaining an H-1B visa, which together would make it more expensive for a company to hire foreign workers over domestic ones.But the fact that Musk and Sanders agree on solutions means very little about the prospects for reform, because the real conflict here is within the parties, not between them. This is especially true on the right, where the fight is over how the second Trump administration should approach skilled immigration. Trump was elected by a coalition that included Silicon Valley technologists, who tend to believe in immigration for skilled workers, and hard-core nativists, who believe that all immigration, at least from most non-European countries, is bad. Both sides will hold considerable power in the incoming administration; the tech right is represented most prominently by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy while the nativist right is represented by Stephen Miller, a longtime opponent of even skilled immigration. Miller shaped much of immigration policy during Trump’s first term, including multiple efforts to limit the H-1B program, and has been tapped for an even larger role in his second.[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]It’s impossible to know which faction will ultimately triumph in the second Trump administration. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has pointed out, although Trump has rhetorically endorsed Musk’s position on H-1Bs, he tends to defer to Miller on the substance of immigration policy. The current, mostly online spat over H-1B visas is likely a preview of a larger coming showdown between Miller and Musk. (Complicating matters further, Trump recently appointed Miller’s wife to staff the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Musk and Ramaswamy.)The left is engaged in a factional fight of its own. The Democratic Party’s approach to immigration is widely understood to have hurt its standing with working-class voters, including many Latinos. But a new politics of immigration has yet to emerge to take its place. Sanders’s criticism of the H-1B program suggests one direction the party could take: a return to old-school economic populism that portrays certain forms of immigration as a scheme perpetuated by corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of the American worker. Sanders embraced this position during his 2016 presidential campaign, at one point calling open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal” that would “make everybody in America poorer.”Back then, Sanders’s immigration skepticism was met by widespread criticism from the left. Not this time. In fact, some of Sanders’s fellow Democrats have levied their own criticisms of the H-1B program. But the Sanders approach suffers from a glaring flaw: A large body of research shows that even low-skill immigration does not make native-born American workers worse off; high-skilled immigration almost certainly makes them better off. Claiming otherwise might be an effective way for Democratic politicians to win over immigration-skeptical voters. But in the long run, they might find out that false narratives about immigrants, once unleashed, are hard to control.

Two new studies suggest once again the importance of getting a good night's sleep for good health over a lifetime, as scientists pursue new understandings of restorative deep sleep.

ESPN's coverage of the Cotton Bowl included the airing of a prayer on the field before the game after a week of controversy for not airing the national anthem.

Anthony Liguori Jr. is known to the faithful as "Deacon Elvis" at Corpus Christi Church in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ.

The devastating California wildfires moved into a fifth consecutive day on Saturday, with the number of people officially confirmed dead climbing to 11, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner said Friday.

A new book details comedian Josh Gad's rise to stardom.

Problems with fire hydrants raise questions about how prepared L.A. was for this week's wildfires.

When President-elect Donald Trump takes office in nine days, it will be as the first president with a felony conviction on his record. A Manhattan judge formally sentenced him on Friday for falsifying business records. He could have received up to four years in prison, but the judge imposed an unconditional discharge, without jail time, fines or other penalties.

Greenland's leader Múte Egede said he was prepared to enter into negotiations with President-elect Trump on Friday about the future of the mineral-rich arctic territory

The charismatic figure known as Coach Mac died Friday night “after a courageous journey with dementia,” according to a family statement. His family announced in 2016 that he had been diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer's.

He successfully appealed the sandwich firing in 2019, and briefly returned to the force before being fired again.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are being called by host of the podcast "Barely Filtered," Aurora Culpo, to resign amid raging California wildfires.

As New Orleans seeks to recover from the deadly, Islamic State-inspired truck attack, law enforcement and community leaders are confronting an existential question as old as the city's famed entertainment district: Can Bourbon Street be protected in a ...

It's an uncertain time in the electric vehicle market, but Hyundai Motors is preparing to release a highly anticipated new electric SUV. The company's global CEO opened up about the new vehicle and what 2025 might mean for the EV market.

Moscow's counterattack has left Ukrainian forces outstretched and demoralized, killing and wounding thousands and retaking more than 40% of the 380 square miles of Kursk Ukraine had seized.

Knicks fan Joseph DeSimone popped the question to his girlfriend Erica Vann on the Kiss Cam as the team took on the Oklahoma City Thunder on Jan. 3.

Sitting at a desk all day takes a toll on your body, so get in your exercise with the right equipment.

The "Friends" star appeared on a 2023 celebrity version of the show, where he even received a coveted Paul Hollywood handshake.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In The Atlantic’s latest cover story, my colleague Derek Thompson explores how Americans turned anti-social. Many young people are actively choosing the solitary life, spending time at home in front of screens instead of out with other people, he explains. In a conversation with my colleague Lora Kelley, he noted that this sort of isolation is the result of choices that add up: “The anti-social century is about accretion,” he said. “It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.”Those choices might seem minor, but they matter: To call a friend, or scroll on Instagram? To go to church, the weekly soccer game, or book club—or sleep in and scroll again? Today’s newsletter rounds up stories on the activities that bring us together, and the ones that keep us apart.On Hanging OutThe Anti-Social CenturyBy Derek ThompsonAmericans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.Read the article.Americans Need to Party MoreBy Ellen CushingWe’re not doing it as much as we used to. You can be the change we need.Read the article.The Friendship ParadoxBy Olga KhazanWe all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone.Read the article.Still Curious? The death of the dining room: “The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans,” M. Nolan Gray wrote last year. How America got mean: People no longer grow up learning how to be decent to one another, David Brooks argued in 2023. Other Diversions Watch—and rewatch—this 215-minute film. The agony of texting with men What to read when the odds are against you P.S. Courtesy of Mark Bernstein I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Mark Bernstein, 75, from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, sent this photo of “a storm over Blackfish Creek, Cape Cod.”I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.— Isabel

The Supreme Court decided, by a scant 5–4 margin, that President Donald Trump would have to (virtually) sit through a sentencing hearing.

Columnist David Marcus says Californnia's leaders are using the Biden-Harris playbook of simply refusing to answer questions amid the wildfires. But not being accountable comes with a price, he says.

The late actor appeared in a Season 8 episode of the ABC sitcom.

“The flames of Gaza will not stop there, they will find us all if we don’t stop them…None of us are spared in the eye of the empire,” Fatima Mousa Mohammed eerily wrote on X this week.

Los Angeles officials launched an investigation after evacuation alerts were sent to the wrong people as wildfires ravage the region. The company that provides the technology says it's added safeguards to prevent it from happening again.

After fighting to save his family home, 30-year-old Orly Israel had to flee the advancing Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. He shared his harrowing escape online, and the video has garnered more than 8 million views. His home burned, but he was recently able to find hope amid the ashes.

TikTok may go dark in days with the U.S. ban on the popular video-based social media platform looming. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared likely to uphold a federal law to shut down the platform unless its Chinse parent company agrees to sell the app.

Genasys, the company behind Los Angeles' emergency alert technology, said it has "not been able to replicate" an error that sent inaccurate information to millions.

Bass slashed $17.6 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year -- which critics blasted as "a bad call."

Clergy and congregants vow to persevere in the face of the loss.

What it means to go from smog to smoke