There was a pool of blood, a look of panic on her husband’s face — and then everything went black.
Alia McCants was back at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where nine days earlier, she had given birth to healthy twins. She and her husband had brought the babies home to their apartment in Harlem, and everything seemed all right — until complications from her cesarean section caused her to hemorrhage.
She rushed to the emergency room, where her vision went dim.
“My husband said, ‘You have to stay here, you have to stay here.’ And then I thought: I’m going to die,” she said.
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Alia McCants in her home in White Plains, New York. Nine days after giving birth to her twins, McCants nearly died from a hemorrhage that resulted from an unexpected complication following her cesarean section.Idris Talib Solomon / for NBC News
When Caleigh Haber was 22, she was told she was too sick for a lung transplant and would die. Her doctors recommended focusing on quality of life with her limited time remaining, and she was given do-not-resuscitate forms. She quit her job as a pastry chef and her mother and brother moved nearby to be with her.
“I felt completely hopeless,” she recalled. “To me, it wasn’t so much facing death as it was leaving my family.”
Pictures from the time show a petite young woman in an oxygen mask, under five feet tall and weighing as little as 66 pounds. She had a habit of showing off for pictures: one arm flexed, the other tethered to an IV pole.
To her doctors’ surprise, she grew stronger and was eventually listed for a transplant, adapting to the fraught routine of waiting for a lung to become available.
Three Americans held captive for more than a year in North Korea arrived at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington well before dawn Thursday to a hero’s welcome featuring President Trump, Vice President Pence and first lady Melania Trump.
Shortly before 3 a.m., in pitch black skies, a U.S. government plane made its approach to the runway with Kim Dong-chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song, having been preceded by a jet carrying Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. A large American flag suspended by two fire engine cranes was arranged on the tarmac, which was lit by banks of spotlights.
The plane carrying the three Americans pulled up in front of the giant flag. The president and first lady boarded the plane, while Pence, his wife, Karen, and Pompeo waited on the tarmac. Then Trump emerged followed by the three men, two of whom raised their arms in triumph and relief as they exited the plane.
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President Trump, Vice President Pence and first lady Melania Trump greet the three American prisoners who were freed from North Korea.(Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
Richard Cordray, the former head of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, won the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from former presidential candidate and House member Dennis Kucinich.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hand-picked Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, to run the CFPB and raised money for his campaign. Cordray will face Ohio’s current attorney general, Republican Mike DeWine, in the general election race for the governor’s job. Incumbent John Kasich (R) is term-limited.
Kucinich ran heavily on his support of Medicare-for-all and won the support of the progressive group Our Revolution, which grew out of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. (Sanders himself did not endorse Kucinich.)
On Wednesday, Gina Haspel, a veteran CIA officer who reportedly oversaw a secret prison in Thailand where an alleged terrorist was waterboarded and later helped destroy videotapes documenting interrogation sessions, will make the case to a Senate committee that she should be confirmed to be the director of the spy agency.
It will be the first time that Haspel, who has spent years undercover, will speak publicly about her career, and some lawmakers are urging the CIA to declassify documents that explain her role in the torture program. Haspel, the current acting director of the CIA, has never publicly atoned for her involvement in the now-defunct interrogation operation and the subsequent cover-up. If confirmed, she will serve under a president who campaigned on bringing back “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
When Haspel appears before the Senate committee for her confirmation hearing, lawmakers will not just be evaluating her record. They will be deciding whether overseeing torture is disqualifying. Because most of the people who were tortured by CIA officials, at times under Haspel’s watch, cannot tell their stories, HuffPost asked several people who have been waterboarded as part of mock interrogations or military training to describe the experience. (The military quietly banned the use of waterboarding in training in 2007 because it was too brutal, HuffPost reported in March.)
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Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Demonstrator Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is lowered onto the board during a simulation of waterboarding outside the Justice Departement in Washington November 5, 2007.
When Ali Wong’s debut special, “Baby Cobra,” had its premiere on Mother’s Day in 2016, very few people outside of the comedy world knew who Ms. Wong was and there was little reason to think this hour or so of jokes would change that. She had trouble selling out shows and no one submitted the special for Emmy consideration because what would be the point? And while Netflix had an impressive track record of showcasing stand-up stars, it had never made one — until Ali Wong.
“Baby Cobra” presented something new, a pregnant woman in her third trimester delivering a deliriously filthy and funny hour of comedy woven into a sneakily feminist assault on the double standards of parenting. Pioneers like Joan Rivers, who had also performed pregnant, and Roseanne Barr paved the way with biting jokes about motherhood and domesticity, but Ms. Wong made maternal comedy seem more glamorous, sexual and overtly political.
She alternated jokes about the injustice of how little is expected of fathers with lustful tributes to the sex appeal of Asian men. “They got no body hair from the neck down,” she says in the special. “It’s like making love to a dolphin.”
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When others ask how her husband feels about her success Ali Wong replies, “It’s not hard to feel good about your spouse making money.”CreditElizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times
Telephone pitchers, online scammers and even family members target the most vulnerable among us. And it’s about to get worse.
Marjorie Jones trusted the man who called to tell her she’d won a sweepstakes prize, saying she could collect the winnings once she paid the taxes and fees. After she wired the first payment, he and other callers kept adding conditions to convince her to send more money.
As the scheme progressed, Jones, who was legally blind and lived alone in a two-story house in Moss Bluff, Louisiana, depleted her savings, took out a reverse mortgage and cashed in a life insurance policy. She didn’t tell her family, not even the sister who lived next door. Scammers often push victims to keep promised winnings a secret, says an investigator who helped unravel this sinister effort to exploit an 82-year-old woman.
After surviving earthquakes and molten lava, residents of Hawaii’s Big Island now have new threats to worry about: steam-driven explosions, hazardous volcanic smog and acid rain.
The US Geological Survey and Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on Wednesday warned of possible explosive eruptions in the coming weeks. That could happen because as lava continues to sink into a lake inside a Kilauea crater, an influx of groundwater could interact with the lava to create steam explosions.
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Those forces would emit “ballistic projectiles” — as small as pebbles or weighing up to several tons. The agencies also said ash clouds would rise to greater elevations, dispensing ash over wider areas.
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“At this time, we cannot say with certainty that explosive activity will occur, how large the explosions could be, or how long such explosive activity could continue,” an advisory said.
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Residents of Hawaii’s Big Island now have new threats to worry about: steam-driven explosions, hazardous volcanic smog and acid rain.
A magnitude 4.5 earthquake shook a large portion of Southern California on Tuesday, and was felt from San Diego to Santa Clarita, authorities said.
Tuesday’s temblor struck at 4:49 a.m. about seven miles north of Cabazon and 85 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The epicenter was close to the San Gorgonio Pass, through which Interstate 10 connects Palm Springs with San Bernardino.
The strongest shaking — Intensity Level 6 — occurred in an uninhabited mountainous area in Riverside County. The cities of Riverside and San Bernardino felt only “light” shaking calculated as Intensity Level 4, while many areas in L.A. and Orange counties felt only “weak” Intensity Level 2 or 3 shaking.
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The temblor struck about seven miles north of Cabazon. (Los Angeles Times)
A video of lava deluging a car during Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano eruption and other staggering photos provide a grim look at how powerful the spewing molten rock is.
Shared late Sunday night by WeatherNation, the time-lapse clip shows the creeping lava engulfing a car parked on the side of the road in the Big Island’s Leilani Estates.
Since it first began spewing lava into residential areas on Thursday, the volcano has forced about 1,700 evacuations as it blanketed the island’s Puna district, destroyed at least 35 structures and forced roadway closures. Authorities have identified the emergence of 10 fissures, elongated fractures or cracks in the earth’s surface from which lava spews.
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Handout via Getty Images
A lava flow moves on Makamae Street on Sunday in Leilani Estates.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Alia McCants in her home in White Plains, New York. Nine days after giving birth to her twins, McCants nearly died from a hemorrhage that resulted from an unexpected complication following her cesarean section.Idris Talib Solomon / for NBC News
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Illustration: Rebekka Dunlap
Residents of Hawaii’s Big Island now have new threats to worry about: steam-driven explosions, hazardous volcanic smog and acid rain.
Handout via Getty Images
James' World 2 