USA Basketball announces its men's team for the Paris Olympics

The commotion broke out at UCLA in Westwood after several agitators attempted to break down a barricade set up on campus.

The Duke of Sussex, 39, is gearing up to return to London on May 8.

Judge Juan Merchan has already fined the former president and "incarceratory punishment" may be necessary for future violations.

Jose Siri and Abner Uribe threw punches against one another on Tuesday night in a benches-clearing melee on Tuesday night in Milwaukee.

Taylor Swift spent the weekend with partner Travis Kelce in Las Vegas, but some fans worried she got too much sun.

The country is seeing a surge in small business creation.

Home Depot has restocked its viral 12-foot tall skeleton and other Halloween decorations, but a limited amount are available and many items are already sold out.

WWE star A.J. Styles said he was blown away by praise from WWE legend The Undertaker in a recent interview with Fox News Digital.

Alicia Paans, a 31-year-old trans athlete, is expected to participate for the Michigan Wolverines' women's waterpolo club team in a national championship this weekend.

President Joe Biden has canceled $6.1 billion of student debt for 317,000 borrowers.

After beekeeper Matt Hilton removed the swarm, the Diamondbacks had him throw out the first pitch.

Ukraine has spent long months waiting for Lockheed Martin-made F-16 jets to take to the skies against Russian jets.

To be as tough as the guys, Republicans Kristi Noem shot her dog, Joni Ernst castrated hogs, Sarah Palin advocated shooting wolves from the air.

Benchmarked against her conservative colleagues, Justice Barrett has been a pleasant surprise.

Aldon Smith was a name believed to end up in Canton, Ohio, one day, but off-the-field issues stymied a once-promising career. Today, Smith is using his journey to mentor NFL rookies.

Plus, a possible shift on marijuana policy.

Violence broke out at UCLA overnight between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters, prompting police to arrive.

Restaurants still need humans to do much of the labor. Working people deserve to have their voices heard in determining how, when or whether AI and automation should be used.

A reader says she miscarried in Florida in 1989 and had to bleed for week to get needed care. She fears abortion bans will harm miscarriage patients.

Experts describe the plan as a legal long shot, but say it could sow doubts about the integrity of a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump.

ESPN analyst and former tennis pro Brad Gilbert consulted on the film ‘Challengers,’ starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.

Trump's politics and alleged criminal acts don't matter to many of his voters. They just admire his over-the-top tough-guy swagger.

Tensions have escalated and arrests have been made as protesters continue to stake out areas on the campuses of many California universities, including UCLA, USC and Cal Poly Humboldt.

Poker-playing artists have let the cigar smoke out and opened up the tables to a more diverse, inclusive and female-friendly pool of players.

The laundromat is your rare “third place” — a spot to go to that’s not your house, nor your office, but a secret third thing.

In a case that could shape the future of psychedelic medicine, a palliative care physician is challenging a DEA decision that bars him from prescribing psilocybin to late-stage cancer patients.

The Southern California Independent Bookstore Bestsellers list for Sunday, May 5, 2024, including hardcover and paperback fiction and nonfiction.

Artist Joel Coplin has a complicated relationship with homeless people. He sued Phoenix to clear an encampment. But he also befriended them and found inspiration for his art.

How will the DEA's decision to reclassify marijuana affect California's ailing pot industry?

Podcast hosts and comics Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer are rallying their fans and fellow comedians for a run at Rose Bowl.

For frequent fliers, Clear's line-skipping service is worth paying for. The state shouldn't limit its expansion to other airports.

From his rival’s hair to his maturity level, the president is no longer determined to stay above the fray

Their lobbying campaign targets a federal push to subject some tech companies to the same rigorous oversight as banks.

Chris Pratt demolishing a classic mid-century California home is part of a larger trend: buy a house, tear it down, build bigger.

In a new district, the fiery Colorado congresswoman enjoys a solid base among the GOP's MAGA wing. But some are put off by her indiscretions and messy personal life.

The automatic braking requirement for new cars is a milestone for U.S. road safety, on par with seat belts and airbags.

The Biden administration is arguing that Idaho’s near-total abortion ban violates a federal law on emergency treatment.

No singular cause was found for last year's high death toll before the Kentucky Derby, but the hope is that technology can mitigate future problems.

President Biden is putting his reelection at risk by not publicly calling on Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza.

Sarah McLachlan is touring this summer, 30 years after the release of 'Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,' the album that made her a star.

Borrowing costs for home loans have been elevated and discouraged activity in the housing market.

Campus protests across the country have renewed Americans' attention on the Israel-Gaza war and are scrambling U.S. politics, particularly on the left. Senior Opinions Editor Amanda Katz speaks with columnists Dana Milbank and Shadi Hamid about how their views have evolved since Oct. 7, whether there’s a double standard on free speech, and what the protests could foreshadow for the upcoming presidential election, particularly among young people.

There are no bad Pet Shop Boys albums, many great ones, and a few that will change your life.

Confronting the reality of China’s threat to the U.S.-led global order requires a deep, hard reassessment.

Heat waves have begun to take hold in Asia as El Nino begins to wane. | Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto via Getty Images Climate change and the outgoing El Niño will likely ignite more weather extremes. The Pacific Ocean — Earth’s largest body of water — is an engine for weather around the planet, and it’s about to shift gears this year. The warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as El Niño, is now winding down and is poised to move into its counterphase, La Niña. During an El Niño year, warm water starts to spread eastward across the surface of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water evaporates readily, adding moisture to the atmosphere and triggering a cascade that alters rainfall, heat waves, and drought patterns across the world. The current El Niño is among the strongest humans have ever experienced. It fueled wildfires, droughts, and floods in South America. It bent the jet stream, trapping heat over the southern United States last summer, and ended the year with the warmest winter on record for much of the country. It fueled both heavy rain and extreme dry conditions in southern Africa, killing crops and putting millions at risk of hunger. It heated the world’s oceans to the highest levels ever measured. It raised global temperatures to their tallest peaks scientists have ever recorded. “The last year has been an amazing year in terms of records set around the world for extreme heat,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The periodic swings between El Niño and La Niña, collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is a natural phenomenon cycling every three to seven years. Over the past year, the El Niño also synced with other natural patterns like the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean’s temperature cycle, driving thermometers up further. But humanity’s relentless injection of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere is pushing these changes to greater extremes. Forecasters now expect that warm water across the Pacific to begin retreating westward, heralding a shift to La Niña. McPhaden said one of the most common definitions of La Niña is when surface water temperatures over a large area of the Pacific drop by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius below the historical average for three months or more. El Niño is typically defined when the same region is a half-degree Celsius hotter. NOAA projects an 85 percent chance that the ENSO cycle will shift to its neutral phase between April and June 2024, and then a 60 percent chance a La Niña will develop between June and August 2024. Historically, strong El Niños are followed by short neutral phases, about three to five months, before switching to La Niña. “The handwriting is on the wall with regard to this La Niña,” McPhaden said. “The question is exactly when will it come and how strong will it be?” It also takes several months between when ENSO changes and when it starts to influence weather. So the warming impact of the outgoing El Niño is likely to persist and could raise global temperatures this year even higher than they were last year if the rising La Niña is weak or moderate. Heat waves are currently baking Southeast Asia, triggering school closures and health warnings. When La Niña does set in, it will slow and reverse some of the intense weather patterns the world experienced over the past year. But it will also set the stage for more hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. To make this all even more complicated, this is all occurring in a world that’s warmed to the highest levels humans have ever experienced, so it’s not clear yet how far some of these extremes will go. How La Niña will likely play out in different parts of the world Though they are on opposite sides of a cycle, the effects of El Niño and La Niña are not quite mirror images of each other. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” said Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia Extension. The specific types of weather impacts also vary by region, but looming shifts in the cycle can help forecasters calculate what kinds of heat, rain, and drought conditions are in store in the coming months. For instance, ENSO makes it easier to predict climate variability in the southeastern US, particularly in cooler months. “We have a pretty strong signal here compared to the central plains,” Knox said. During a La Niña, the cooler waters in the equatorial Pacific soak up heat energy from the atmosphere while air currents deflect the jet stream — a narrow, high-altitude band of fast-moving air — pushing it northward. NOAA La Niña tends to push the jet stream northward, leading to cooler weather to its north and drier conditions to the south. That air current then tends to box in cold weather to its north in places like Canada and Alaska while trapping moisture in regions like the Pacific Northwest. States like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina tend to be warmer and drier during La Niña winters, while the Midwest tends to be cloudier, cooler, and wetter. (NOAA has published maps of the globe showing how these patterns typically play out around the world). Mickey Glantz, director of the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the impacts of ENSO, noted that La Niña doesn’t just shift weather — it can also intensify existing rain and heat patterns in some regions. “La Niña, to me, is ‘extreme normal,’” Glantz said. “You have a wet season, it’s going to be really wet. If you have a dry season, the probability is it’s going to be really dry.” La Niña may bring about a more severe hurricane season One of the biggest consequences of a shift to La Niña is the higher likelihood of major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes are built from several ingredients, but two parameters are especially important when it comes to ENSO: water temperature and air stability. The ocean needs to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter to form a hurricane, and the air above it needs to hold steady. El Niño years tend to heat up the Atlantic Ocean, but they also induce wind shear, where air rapidly changes speed and direction in the atmosphere, disrupting tropical storms before they can form. Still, the Atlantic was so abnormally hot last year that it fueled an above-average hurricane season. The Atlantic Ocean is still startlingly hot, but now the looming La Niña is likely to stabilize the air above the sea — creating a foundation for more hurricanes. The Weather Company and Atmospheric G2 projected that the 2024 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, would see 24 named storms compared to an average of 14. They projected six hurricanes will reach above Category 3 strength, compared to just three in a typical year. Researchers at Colorado State University expect 23 named storms. University of Pennsylvania scientists anticipate 33 named storms in the Atlantic this year, the highest count ever projected. Why ENSO cycles are becoming harder to predict The added difficulty in predicting how La Niña will play out is that people have heated up the planet. A “cool” La Niña year is now hotter than an El Niño year from 20 years ago. “It’s not the same climate regime that we forecasted the earlier [ENSO cycles] so it’s getting a bit harder to forecast,” Glantz said. How will future climate change in turn affect ENSO? NOAA illustrated the answer with a helpful albeit highly technical schematic (bear with me): Anna Eshelman/NOAA Climate change is likely to amplify the swings in the ENSO cycle. The swings between the cool and warm phases of the ENSO are likely to get stronger if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current pace. So many of the most densely populated parts of the world, like the Andean region in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, are going to experience a more aggressive whiplash between wet and dry years, between calm and stormy summers, and between warmer and cooler winters. For scientists, the rest of 2024 is going to be an important case study in the impacts of climate change and natural variability, sorting out where they diverge, where they intersect, and where they lead to more disasters. The world will be a real-world laboratory, showcasing severe weather that could become more typical as average temperatures continue to rise. “It’s going to be a very interesting year,” McPhaden said. “We’ll have to wait and see and be ready for more extremes.”

Andrew Witty, chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, is set to appear before a congressional committee over the company’s handling of a hack that crippled much of the U.S. health-care system.

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him: “First there was Hassan,” he would say in his thick Arabic accent, “and then there was Simri.” Following fathers and sons down the line of paternity, in a rhythm much like that of a prayer, he told the story of 11 generations. Every generation until my father’s was born and raised in Ramallah, Palestine.After 1948, however, almost our entire family in Ramallah moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”His lectures were tedious, repetitive, and often fueled with so much passion that they overwhelmed me into silence. And yet they took up permanent residence in my brain, and I would reach for them when pressed to give political opinions after new acquaintances found out I was Palestinian. “So what do the Palestinians even want?” a co-worker’s husband once asked me as we waited in line for the bar at my company’s holiday party. I said what I imagined my father would have said in the face of such dismissiveness: “The right to live on their land in peace.”But sometime after the luster of young adulthood wore off, I found my piecemeal understanding of Palestinian history—what I’d gleaned from passively listening to my father—no longer sufficient when navigating these conversations. When a man I was on a date with learned where my olive skin and dark hair came from, he told me that Palestinians “were invented,” even though I was sitting right in front of him, sharing a bowl of guacamole. I left furious, mostly at myself. I had nothing thoughtful to say to prove otherwise.Like my father, I started collecting my own box of scraps about Palestine, although I couldn’t have said why. Perhaps I wanted to slice through a conversation just as others had sliced through my existence, but not even this was clear to me yet. Magazines, books, old posters, and stickers found a home in a corner of my bedroom. My collecting was an obsession. I’d buy books by Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, not necessarily because I knew who these men were at the time, but because the word Palestine was right there, embossed on the cover.At first I didn’t dare open these books. They became an homage to my identity that I both eagerly honored and wanted to ignore. My eventual engagement with the material was slow, deliberate. I wanted to preserve a semblance of ease that I feared I would lose once I learned more about my people’s history. I bookmarked articles on Palestine in my browser, creating a haphazard folder of links that included infographics on Palestine’s olive-oil industry, news clippings about the latest Israeli laws that discriminated against Palestinians, and articles on JSTOR with provocative titles like “Myths About Palestinians.” I was building an archive as if I were putting together an earthquake kit—like the ones my parents kept in our basement in San Francisco—even though I didn’t know when this particular survival kit would be useful or necessary. But my father knew. His father knew. Our liberation may eventually hang on these various archives.Even more true: These archives validate Palestinians’ existence. In the 19th century, before a wave of European Jews settled in Palestine following the Holocaust, early Zionists leaned on the mythology that the land was empty and barren. The movement advocated for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1901, the Zionist author Israel Zangwill wrote in the British monthly periodical The New Liberal Review that Palestine was “a country without people; the Jews are a people without a country.”In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: “[There is] no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israel’s Parliament, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”But this fiction of Palestinians’ nonexistence feels tired. It’s a distraction that not only invalidates us but also places Palestinians on the defensive while Israel’s government builds walls and expands illegal settlements that separate Israelis from their very real Palestinian neighbors.It feels especially absurd in the face of Israel’s latest military campaign in Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7. Since then, Israeli strikes have killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, although that number is incomplete. It does not include all of the civilians who have died from hunger, disease, or lack of medical treatment. If Palestinians don’t exist, then who is dying? I fear that Strock’s words may become true, that Palestinians soon will not exist, that slowly they will become extinct. It’s a cruel self-fulfilling prophecy—claim that Palestinians were never there, and do away with them when they continue to prove otherwise.While listening to my father’s monologues, I used to think about how exhausting it must be for him to keep reminding himself that the place where his father was born is real. At the time, I didn’t think about my place in this heartbreak. But I can’t ignore that heartbreak any longer.Since October, I’ve returned to my own little box on Palestine. I used to think that this haphazard archive lacked direction, but I see it differently now. This collection proves to me that the place where my great-grandfather owned orchards and grew oranges was real, that the land Siddi was forced to leave behind was a blooming desert before others claimed its harvest. It’s also a catalog of my own awakening, a coming to terms with a history that I didn’t want to know. My ignorance is shattered over and over again when I look through this box and think about all that we are losing today.Gaza is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world; some of its monuments date back to Byzantine, Greek, and Islamic times. Since the October 7 attacks, however, Israel’s air raids on Gaza have demolished or damaged roughly 200 historical sites, including libraries, hundreds of mosques, a harbor dating back to 800 B.C.E., and one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. In December, an Israeli strike destroyed the Omari Mosque, the oldest and largest mosque in Gaza City, which housed dozens of rare ancient manuscripts. Israeli strikes have endangered Gaza’s remaining Christian population, considered one of the oldest in the world, and have destroyed every university while killing more than 90 prominent academics.The destruction of cultural heritage is not new in the history of war. Perhaps that’s why when my father came across a tattered hardcover titled Village Life in Palestine, a detailed account of life in the Holy Land in the late 1800s, in a used-book store in Cork, Ireland, he immediately purchased it. He knew that books like these were sacred artifacts that hold a truth—a proof of existence outside political narratives. My father’s copy was printed by the London publishing company Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1905. The first few pages of the book contain a library record and a stamp that reads CANCELLED. Below is another stamp with the date: March 9, 1948. I’m not sure if that date—mere months before the creation of Israel—signifies when it was pulled out of circulation, or the last time it was checked out. But the word cancelled feels purposeful. It feels like another act of erasure, a link between my father’s collection and the growing list of historical sites in Gaza now destroyed. We are losing our history and, with that, the very record of those who came before us.After I started my own collection on Palestine, my father entrusted me with some of his scanned copies of Life that mention Palestine. He waited to show them to me, as if passing on an heirloom. Perhaps he wanted to be sure I was ready or that I could do something with them. One of the magazines dates back to May 10, 1948, four days before the creation of Israel. There’s a headline that reads, “The Captured Port of Haifa Is Key to the Jews’ Strategy.” The author goes on to write that the port “improved Jews’ strategic position in Palestine. It gave them complete control of a long coastal strip south to Tel Aviv … They could look forward to shipments of heavy military equipment from their busy supporters abroad.” Right next to this text is a picture of Palestinian refugees with the caption “Arab Refugees, crammed aboard a British lighter in the harbor at Haifa, wait to be ferried across the bay to the Arab-held city of Acre. They were permitted to take what possessions they could but were stripped of all weapons.”I can’t help but feel the echo of this history today. I think about President Joe Biden’s plans to build a temporary port in Gaza to allow humanitarian aid in, even though about 7,000 aid trucks stand ready in Egypt’s North Sinai province. Back in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to welcome the idea of letting help arrive by sea,which at first confused me because not only has he denied that Palestinians are starving, but his government has also been accused by the United Nations and other humanitarian groups of blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza (a claim that Israel denies). Nevertheless, the historical echo seems quite clear to me now as I look through my father’s magazine and see refugees leaving by port 75 years earlier.I believe my father didn’t want to be alone in his recordkeeping. Who would? It’s endlessly depressing to have to write yourself and your people into existence. But writing about Palestine no longer feels like a choice. It feels like a compulsion. It’s the same drive that I imagine led Siddi to recite his family tree over and over, a self-preservation method that reminded him, just as much as it reminded his young son, of where they came from. It’s the same compulsion that inspires my father to collect the rubble of history and build a library from it.This impulse is reactive, yes, a response to the repeated denial of Palestine’s existence, but it’s also an act of faith—faith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history. Sometimes I hear my father say that his magazines and books will one day be in a museum about Palestine.“Your brother will open one, and these will be there,” he muses to himself.Just as the compulsion to archive is contagious, so is hope. Since I’ve started publishing articles and essays about Palestine, I’ve had close and distant relatives reach out to me and offer to share pieces from their own collections.They ship me large boxes of books and newspapers, packed up from the recesses of their parents’ homes. “Can you do something with these?” they ask. My answer is always yes. I’m realizing that this archiving is not only work I have to do, but something I get to do.In the middle of the night, my father sends me subjectless emails with links to articles or scanned copies of magazines about Palestine that he’s been waiting to show to someone, anyone, who will care. I save each email in a folder in my Gmail account labeled “Palestine”—a digital version of the box in my bedroom, an archive that I return to whenever I feel despair.“It’s all here,” my father writes. “We existed. We were there.”

Parent coaching their son’s sports team is tired of him clowning around during practice.