James' World 2

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Actor-turned-director and activist Robert Redford, one of Hollywood’s most well-known leading men and an influential supporter of independent film, has died at the age of 89.

His publicist Cindi Berger confirmed the death to CBC News on Tuesday, saying he passed away in his home in Sundance in the mountains of Utah, “the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved.”

Redford used the millions he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable.

“Robert Redford was the golden boy,” said Sean P. Means, deputy editor at the Salt Lake Tribune, who formerly served as the paper’s film critic for 25 years.

Whether Redford was portraying the wealthiest among us in The Great Gatsby, making hearts race in romantic roles like Out Of Africa, or playing an outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Means says he had the “stunning good looks that [let him] fit in to society’s spaces equally well.”

Baseball player, then painter, then actor

Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on Aug. 18, 1936, to what he described as a “lower working class family,” Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.

Deciding he wanted to be an artist, Redford moved to Europe, spending time in France and Italy trying to sell his paintings on the street. Moving back to the U.S., he enrolled in drama school to try his hand at theatrical set design. Michael Feeney Callan, Redford’s biographer and friend, told CBC News Network that Redford was initially skeptical of a career in front of the camera.

“The idea of being an actor had never been in his game plan,” Callan said. “By osmosis, celebrity happened to him.”

But he was persuaded to take to the stage, and by 1959, he was a full-time performer on Broadway and later found work on television.

Redford made his movie debut in 1962 in a low-budget film called Warhunt, but first won attention in Barefoot in the Park, opposite Jane Fonda.

Redford remained best known for the two early movies he made with Paul Newman: the 1969 western caper Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, both of which became classics.

He never won the best actor Oscar, but Redford’s first outing as a director — the 1980 family drama Ordinary People — won for best picture and best director.

From the 1980s, he devoted more time to producing films and to the establishment of the Sundance Institute — a year-round workshop for aspiring filmmakers — and the Sundance Festival, which has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.

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Actor, director, and activist Robert Redford, known for roles in movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, has died at the age of 89. His publicist, Cindi Berger, confirmed the death to CBC News on Tuesday, saying he passed away at his home in Sundance in the mountains of Utah, ‘the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved.’ (Adam Rountree/The Associated Press)

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A school-aged child in Los Angeles County has died from a rare but always fatal complication from a measles infection they acquired when they were an infant who was too young to be vaccinated. The first dose of the vaccine is typically not administered until one year of age. Experts say the death underscores the need for high levels of vaccination in a population to protect the most vulnerable against the disease, as well as from side effects that can occur long after the initial illness has passed.

“This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members,” said Los Angeles County Health Officer Muntu Davis in a recent statement.

The child who died suffered from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a progressive brain disorder that usually develops two to 10 years after a measles infection. The measles virus appears to mutate into a form that avoids detection by the immune system, allowing it to hide in the brain and eventually destroy neurons.

“It’s just a virus that goes unchecked and destroys brain tissue, and we have no therapy for it,” said Walter Orenstein, an epidemiologist and professor emeritus at Emory University, to Scientific American earlier this year.

People with SSPE experience a gradual, worsening loss of neurological function and usually die within one to three years after diagnosis, according to the Los Angeles County Health Department. The disorder affects only about one in every 10,000 people who contract measles. But the risk may be as high as about one in 600 for those who are infected as infants.

“There is no treatment for this. Children who suffer from this will always die,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a previous interview with Scientific American. Offit, who had measles himself in the 1950s, has seen five or 10 cases of SSPE in his career.

SSPE is one of several side effects of measles that go beyond the coughing, runny nose, and characteristic rash of the original infection. Measles can also cause encephalitis, a faster-occurring brain inflammation, in one in every 1,000 people who are infected because the virus causes the immune system to attack a protein produced by certain brain cells. This inflammation kills about one in five people who develop it.

Measles also causes “immune amnesia”: the virus seems to attack the immune system’s B cells, which remember previous pathogens the body has been exposed to, resulting in reduced immunity. There is some evidence this effect can last for a couple of years, making those who get measles more susceptible to other infectious diseases.

These side effects are of particular concern because the measles virus is highly contagious, an order of magnitude more than seasonal influenza. With measles, viral particles emitted by coughing or sneezing can linger in a room for hours after the infected person has left. One infected person infects 15 more people on average.

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BJ MILLER: Dying is not just a medical event. It’s way bigger than that. It’s where everything comes to account. Our psychology, our philosophy, our spirituality, our social world, our intrapersonal lives. It is all-encompassing.

TYLER VOLK: Without death, there’s no evolution. Evolution, as it works now, operates by dying, and the next generations carry on. The body, through the evolutionary process, has tuned interconnectivity of the cells and the brain. You can get a design happening out of evolution over time. Or you can get adaptations occurring that did not exist. At one point, there were no large creatures such as us walking around on land. The only way that could happen would be many generations dying. So death has really been an essential ingredient to the evolutionary process.

BRUCE GREYSON: I started being confronted by patients’ reports of things that I couldn’t explain. Near-death experiences are profound, subjective experiences that many people have when they come close to death, or sometimes when they are in fact pronounced dead.

And they include such difficult to explain phenomena as a sense of leaving the physical body. And we have hundreds and hundreds of experiences that occur during a cardiac arrest or deep anesthesia, when we know the brain is not capable of functioning well enough to create complex thoughts and feelings and memories. And they often report hearing sounds they’ve never heard on Earth, and seeing colors they’d never seen before.

Some of the lessons that near-death experiences bring back from this event is the sense of being interconnected with other people, about how to make this life more meaningful, more purposeful, more fulfilling. But I think the important part of near-death experiences is what they tell us about this life we’re in now.

BJ MILLER: The domain of death is more or less ruled these days by health care. In times past, it’s been the church or the family was the center of all this. The medical piece is a little itty bitty piece, it just gets too much attention. We people, we humans, we patients, loved ones, we need to take back the subject on some level.

One of the things I see, that happens a lot around this subject, one can be made to feel ashamed, to be sick, ashamed to be dying like we’re failing somehow. We end up accidentally making life even harder for each other by keeping the truth of the situation at bay. We die before we have to die.

Ideally, we come to our death without piles and piles of regret. When I’m working with patients, especially upstream of their death, I’m always encouraging them to feel things, enjoy the body they have while they have it, because it’s someday going to go and you’re going to miss it. As long as I can feel something, I’m interested in being alive.

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Researchers from the Noah’s Ark Scans project claim they’ve uncovered “compelling evidence” of a potentially man-made structure beneath the Durupinar formation in Turkey — a site long speculated to be Noah’s Ark. New soil samples show unusual levels of organic material, possibly from decayed wood. Reanalysed 2019 ground-penetrating radar scans reveal a 234-foot corridor and room-like formations 20 feet underground. The angular shapes and distinct soil composition, researchers say, point toward intentional design rather than natural formation — reigniting debate over the biblical Ark’s possible location near Mount Ararat.

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Noah’s ark?

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Here in New York City, we humans crown ourselves rulers of the five boroughs—but the kingdom is split. We cohabit with a parallel society that commutes along subway rails, picnics in parks, and patronizes trash cans like they’re Restaurant Row. A new field study watched them the way New Yorkers often watch each other: from a respectful distance and with digital tech. The findings shed light on how rats have adapted to city life—and how chatty they are. “There’s this kind of secret language that rats are communicating in with each other that we don’t hear,” says Emily Mackevicius, a neuroscientist and a co-author of the study. “They’re very social,” adds Ralph Peterson, another study co-author. “They’re rugged, and they’re New Yorkers themselves: persistent and resilient and able to thrive in a very extreme environment.”

At three Manhattan locations—a park, a subway platform, and a sidewalk—the team used a specialized wireless recorder to eavesdrop on the rats’ ultrasonic conversations, which humans can’t hear. They placed thermal cameras on tripods or held them by hand to record the warm bodies moving like glowing, otherworldly specters along the cooler ground. Dmitry Batenkov, a team member who works with machine learning and computational modeling, then converted the two-dimensional videos into three dimensions because 2D recordings distort the size and movement of animals, making rats closer to the camera appear larger.

New York City is home to an estimated three million rats—approximately one for every three humans. Virtually all of these are Rattus norvegicus—the brown rat, aka the Norway rat—a larger and more robust species than the black rat (Rattus rattus), which arrived first on ships in the 1600s but was displaced by the brown rat in the 1700s. Since then, about 500 generations of brown rats have lived here and have developed unique genetic adaptations related to metabolism, diet, nervous system, and locomotion. Even the shape of their heads has changed. And to survive, they need a single daily ounce of water and food, the latter of which we provide in abundance, often processed.

Over this past summer in New York City, the research team—Mackevicius, Peterson, Batenkov, and Ahmed El Hady, a neuroscientist who has studied rats and collective behavior—came together with a simple yet powerful idea: take what is known about rats from lab research and see how it holds up in the places we share with them. They wanted to do so not just to understand the animals’ behavior and cognition in the urban wild but also so that city planners, building managers, and public‑health teams could craft decisions with real data to make city life a little less—squeaky. If scientists can more precisely measure rats’ complex habits and predilections, they can apply those data to trash pickup timing, building design, disease risk near burrows, and even the question of which blocks attract big, bold rats versus skittish juveniles. Peterson, a computational neuroscientist, sums the concept up succinctly. “It’s like Sun Tzu says in The Art of War: to defeat your enemy, you have to understand your enemy.”

“To defeat your enemy, you have to understand your enemy.”In 1944 Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker writer who chronicled the city’s overlooked characters, wrote about the metropolis’s shadow mascot: “Anyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away, its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands fully why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of the Judas and the stool pigeon, of soullessness in general.”

But maybe Mitchell was wrong about the soulless part. Rats are the dolphins of the sewage system; they chatter constantly as they run along the sidewalk in packs, peeking from holes, scavenging beneath grates, or slipping into human-audible squeaks during scuffles by the dumpsters. One of the rats that the team recorded even soliloquized alone inside a garbage bag—perhaps offering a Yelp review for passing comrades.

Rats are the dolphins of the sewage system.

The study, which was released as a preprint paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, also revealed that the rats modulated their ultrasonic squeaking based on ambient sound. In the subway system, which was louder than parks and sidewalks, rats communicated more loudly. But the moment that truly surprised Mackevicius was in the street. “There was an ambulance going by, and you could look at that in the spectrogram, and the rat vocalizations were louder than the ambulance,” she says. “They’re just kind of screaming to each other, but we just don’t hear it.” Peterson, who has studied rodent vocalizations in the lab, was struck by how talkative the vermin were. “Why would you vocalize if not to some end?” he asks. “The fact that we don’t understand that yet—this is one of the questions that really keeps me up.”

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People across the U.S. are facing disciplinary consequences for expressing views deemed offensive after the killing of conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk, who has been described by supporters as a model proponent of free speech.

Several people have been fired, including MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd, and others suspended from their work over comments or social media posts relating to Kirk, who was fatally shot on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s State Department warned that it will vet visa-seekers’ and visa-holders’ social media for posts “praising, rationalizing, or making light” of Kirk’s death.

Democratic and Republican officials have condemned the shooting as the latest episode of a troubling rise in political violence in the U.S. But Kirk’s assassination has also appeared to exacerbate divisions across America. Some fear that the fraught tensions could quickly spiral into more unrest and violence. Several historically Black colleges and universities suspended classes and placed their campuses under lockdown on Thursday, citing potential threats, while lawmakers have called for increased security.

A number of far-right influencers and politicians, including President Donald Trump, have blamed the shooting on leftists’ criticisms of Kirk and of the conservative movement more broadly and have called for a crackdown on the left. A particular point of concern many have highlighted is the apparent celebration of Kirk’s death by political opponents.

Workplace sanctions

MSNBC issued an apology after Dowd, a political analyst and media pundit, “made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable,” the company’s president, Rebecca Kutler, said in a statement. Dowd also issued his own apology prior to the company statement. A source at the network told TIME that Dowd is no longer with MSNBC.

Dowd had appeared to blame Kirk for creating the conditions of his own killing, saying in response to a question about the political environment in which the shooting took place that Kirk has “been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in.”

Dowd’s not the only one to face consequences for his speech. 

An anonymously registered website aiming to “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” asked for tips on people who were “supporting political violence online,” the Associated Press reported. The site had published a list on Thursday of social media posts with the names, locations, and employers of the posters. Some posts included inflammatory language, but others did not seem to be celebrating the shooting or glorifying violence, according to the AP.

Several right-wing activists have also begun compiling their own lists.

“I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X.

Scott Presler, a conservative activist and former organizer for the Republican Party of Virginia before the 2016 elections, asked his over two million followers to provide tips on teachers celebrating Kirk’s death, and he shared posts and social media profiles of alleged wrongdoers and, for some, their workplaces.

Florida’s education commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas also warned teachers about making “despicable” comments related to Kirk’s death in a memo to school district superintendents that he posted on X on Thursday. “I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior,” he said in the memo. “Govern yourselves accordingly.”

Some across the country have already faced sanctions. The University of Mississippi said it fired a staff member who had shared “insensitive comments” about Kirk’s death, while the Middle Tennessee State University said it fired a staff member who made “inappropriate and callous comments on social media.”

Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn had called for the removal of MTSU’s assistant dean of students, who had posted that they had “ZERO sympathy” after the shooting, although it is not clear if the assistant dean was the person who was fired. Blackburn also penned a letter calling for the termination of a Secret Service agent who posted, “If you are Mourning this guy, delete me. He spewed hate and racism on his show.”

In Florida, a reporter for Floridapolitics.com was suspended after asking Republican Rep. Randy Fine a question about gun control immediately after the shooting, according to the AP. Fine had posted a screenshot of the text exchange on X with the caption, “You don’t hate the media enough.” A sports journalist for Arizona media company PHNX Sports was also fired after conservative activists denounced posts he had made criticizing Kirk’s positions on gun violence and “hateful rhetoric.”

And DC Comics fired one of its comic writers and cancelled their series after the writer had posted comments about the shooting. “Posts or public comments that can be viewed as promoting hostility or violence are inconsistent with DC’s standards of conduct,” DC Comics said in a statement to CNN.

Immigration crackdown

The State Department also said it would crack down on non-citizens who have made posts making light of the shooting.

“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country. I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on Thursday. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.”

Landau said he “will direct consular officials to monitor the comments to this post” for people denouncing examples they have seen.

A State Department spokesperson told ABC News that the Administration “does not believe that the United States should grant visas to persons whose presence in our country does not align with U.S. national security interests.”

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Charlie Kirk

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Archaeologists have discovered a massive 5,000-year-old fortress hidden beneath thick forest in Neamț County, Romania. The site dates back to the transition period between the Neolithic and Bronze Age, revealing a complex settlement that challenges previous ideas about early societies in the region. This discovery sheds new light on the sophistication of ancient civilizations long forgotten beneath centuries of vegetation.

LiDAR Technology Reveals Hidden Fortress in Detail

The breakthrough came from the use ofLiDAR (light detection and ranging) drones, a technology that emits rapid laser pulses to map landscapes covered by dense vegetation. “Thanks to current technology and using LiDAR scans, I was able to obtain a faithful image of an almost 5000-year-old fortification,” said Vasile Diaconu, the lead archaeologist from the Neamț County Museum Complex. LiDAR’s ability to detect subtle human-made structures beneath forest canopies allowed researchers to visualize details impossible to see during traditional fieldwork.

The fortification is built on elevated terrain, with large defensive ditches and earthen mounds designed to enhance protection. According to Diaconu, the ditches “had impressive dimensions with lengths of several hundred meters, which required considerable human effort in the construction.” The placement of the fortress provided excellent visibility over the surrounding landscape, highlighting its strategic importance. The scale and complexity of the site indicate a highly organized society capable of coordinated large-scale construction projects.

Collaboration Between Archaeologist and Technology Expert

This discovery was made possible through a partnership between multiple organizations, including Geocad Services, Geo Edu Lab, and the National Institute for Research and Development for Earth Physics. The project was led by Vasile Diaconu, with key technical support from Vlad Dulgheriu, owner of Geocad Services and former student of Diaconu. The collaboration between teacher and student enabled the deployment of advanced LiDAR technology, marking a milestone in archaeological research methods.

Diaconu emphasized the importance of integrating modern technologies into archaeological investigations. “Only by using modern technologies will we be able to better understand the complexities of archaeological sites,” he said. The discovery of this well-planned fortress illustrates how sophisticated ancient communities were, beyond what traditional excavation alone could reveal. As LiDAR and similar techniques become more common, the archaeological record will continue to expand with new findings hidden beneath earth and foliage.

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Recent headlines warning of concerns such as heart risks or danger to teenagers have put a new spotlight on a diet trend that has long been the popular epitome of a healthy lifestyle: intermittent fasting. “Intermittent fasting’s image has been deeply tarnished—and quite rightly so,” says Stefan Kabisch, a physician at the endocrinology and metabolic medicine department at Charité–University Medicine Berlin. “The hype was never really backed up by good data in humans.”

Advocates have claimed that temporarily abstaining from food for long stretches of the day can improve health and longevity. In the most common fasting schedule, people don’t eat for 16 hours—often skipping breakfast or dinner—and make up for it in the remaining eight hours (the so-called 16:8 method). Some people may severely limit food intake every other day (alternate-day fasting) or take a fasting day twice a week (the 5:2 method).

The effects of such practices can be difficult to study. “The main problem with randomized controlled trials on intermittent fasting is that there are so many variations,” Kabisch explains. “The data is therefore very heterogeneous, which makes it difficult to assess effects.”

Why Take Long Breaks from Eating?

Modern society has given way to lifestyles that encourage overeating, says Tinh-Hai Collet, a diabetologist and a professor at the Geneva University Hospitals. “This promotes obesity and diabetes.” Experts have called diabetes a global epidemic. Approximately 590 million people worldwide have diabetes, according to the latest 2025 reports from the International Diabetes Federation, and more than 90 percent of them have type 2, often called adult-onset diabetes.

One of the main issues in type 2 diabetes is that those who are affected absorb more energy than they use. A hallmark of the disease is insulin resistance, in which cells no longer effectively respond to the hormone insulin. This means cells take in less sugar from the blood, and blood sugar levels rise. “Intermittent fasting almost always improves the cells’ response to insulin,” says Stephan Herzig, a professor at the Technical University of Munich and head of the Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz Munich. “As a result, the concentrations of sugar, fats, and cholesterol in the blood also fall.” A 2023 study, led by Mark Ezpeleta of the University of Illinois Chicago, suggests that alternate-day fasting—especially when combined with exercise—also mitigates fatty liver disease, in which fat builds up on in the liver, unrelated to alcohol consumption.

A closer look at the research, however, shows such statements may not be as clear-cut as they are often presented to be. For example, the researchers on the 2023 liver fat study compared volunteer groups that underwent different eating and exercise schedules: alternating days between a reduced calorie intake and an unrestricted diet; only completing an exercise program; combining the fasting schedule with exercising; or not undergoing any intervention. The group that fasted and exercised at the same time saw the best results. Yet there was no comparison group in which people didn’t alternate days but still had the same calorie intake as the fasting participants. “This is an unfair comparison,” Kabisch says. And similar gaps in study design “run through the entire literature on the subject.”

Two meta-analyses of people with diabetes or obesity concluded that intermittent fasting had a positive effect on weight, blood sugar, blood pressure, and blood lipids (triglycerides). “In most of the underlying primary studies, however, the fasting subjects were compared with people who did not change their diet,” Kabisch says. As a result, the subjects in the intervention groups lost weight—but, logically, the control groups did not, because the researchers didn’t apply any calorie restrictions. “You only see strong effects of intermittent fasting compared to people who were not given any diet or exercise guidelines,” Kabisch explains. “But as soon as you compare it with equivalent calorie reduction, the benefits of intermittent fasting disappear.”

And the supposed improvement in insulin resistance is also not always demonstrable. In another meta-analysis, no effects were found in this regard. In other studies, the improvements were small.

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“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry,” said Erika Kirk, the wife of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, in her first public message since his killing.

Just days after a gunman shot and killed Kirk at a Utah university, Erika Kirk addressed her husband’s supporters and the nation as a whole, saying she would continue Charlie Kirk’s political activism through his Turning Point USA organization.

“To everyone listening tonight across America, the movement my husband built will not die. It won’t, I refuse to let that happen … All of us will refuse to let that happen,” Erika Kirk said. “No one will ever forget my husband’s name, and I will make sure of it.”

She thanked first responders and investigators, as well as President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, for their support in the wake of the fatal shooting on Wednesday.

“Mr. President, my husband loved you, and he knew that you loved him, too,” Erika Kirk said, fighting back tears. “He did. Your friendship was amazing. You supported him so well, as did he for you.”

Charlie Kirk was husband to Erika and the father of two young kids at the time of his death on Wednesday, a 1-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter.
“When I got home last night, our daughter just ran into my arms … and she said, ‘Mommy, I missed you.’ I said, ‘I missed you too, baby.’ She goes, ‘Where’s daddy?’ What do you tell a 3-year-old? She’s three. I said, ‘Baby, daddy loves you so much. Don’t you worry. He’s on a work trip with Jesus so he can afford your blueberry budget,” Erika said.

The founder of the conservative youth activist organization was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University, the first stop this fall for Turning Point USA’s “The American Comeback Tour,” which was traveling to multiple college campuses across the country.

In what has been described as a “political assassination,” Kirk was struck by a single shot while he was speaking at the event on Wednesday. He was rushed to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on social media, writing, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead.”

“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us,” the president wrote. “Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”

When Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced at a Friday press conference the arrest of a suspect in the shooting, he spoke of Charlie Kirk’s family.

“I especially want to thank the family of Charlie Kirk — Erika, Charlie’s parents, his children,” Cox said. “I want us to be thinking of them as we bring justice in this case. They will be involved in that justice. We will be working very closely with them as we move through this process as well.”

Erika Kirk is a former Miss Arizona USA and collegiate basketball player who is currently studying for a doctorate in Biblical studies at Liberty University, according to a biography on her website.

She is the founder of Proclaim, a faith-based clothing line, the host of the “Midweek Rise Up” podcast, and the founder of two nonprofit organizations, according to her website.

Erika Kirk has also been a frequent presence by her husband’s side at speaking engagements and public appearances.

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