A stifling heatwave has begun to take shape across large portions of the United States, with millions likely to see temperatures creep toward the century mark, along with even higher heat indexes by this weekend.
The heatwave is already generating excessive heat watches in the central United States, and by Wednesday the national weather map is likely to feature a blanket of heat advisories from the National Weather Service. The combination of sultry dew points and scorching air temperatures approaching will help make this event a dangerous one from a public health perspective.
Cities including Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Nashville and Kansas City, Mo., are likely to see at least three days with temperatures between 95 degrees and 100 degrees, along with dew points — a measure of the amount of moisture in the air — above 70 degrees.
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Visualization of heat and humidity Friday. (Earth.nullschool.net)
Disneyland calls itself “The Happiest Place on Earth,” but family heiress Abigail Disney said she found workers struggling when she recently visited the park undercover.
In an interview with Yahoo this week, Abigail Disney said she decided to check out Disneyland’s worker conditions after a worker sent her a Facebook message. She said every employee delivered a similar message to her: “I don’t know how I can maintain this face of joy and warmth when I have to go home and forage for food in other people’s garbage.”
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After the visit, she said she was “so livid” that the company didn’t respect its workers enough.
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The Disney heiress, who is also a filmmaker and activist, said Disney CEO Bob Iger needs to fix the huge wage gap between his pay and that of an average worker at the company.
It began, as it so often does, with a glimpse. Something tall. Something hairy. Something that left footprints too big to be human.
Whatever it was, the spotting was more than enough to get Peter Byrne on the scene. It was the mid-1970s and Byrne had already made a name for himself as one of the world’s most prominent researchers of Bigfoot. His passion exposed him to a few kooks and a lot of fakery, he said in an interview with The Washington Post. But on that day, he found neither.
This was what he called “a credible sighting.”
Two men, both biologists and both employees of the U.S. Forest Service, spotted an unidentified walking creature in a forest somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Last seen: lumbering between a pair of trees. Cue Byrne, who at the time was director of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The Dalles, Ore.
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The first page in a batch of documents released by the FBI on Wednesday concerning its 1970s testing of “Bigfoot” hair. (FBI)
A former tenant of the founder of an African American history museum in Louisiana was charged Tuesday with her murder, authorities said.
Ronn Jermaine Bell, 38, was arrested for allegedly killing Sadie Roberts-Joseph, who was found dead in the trunk of her car on Friday, Baton Rouge police announced. He was charged with firstdegree murder.
A preliminary autopsy conducted by the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner’s Office showed Roberts-Joseph, 75, died of traumatic asphyxia.
An avowed white supremacist was sentenced to life plus 419 years on federal hate crime charges Monday for deliberately driving his car into anti-racism protesters during a white nationalist rally in Virginia.
James Alex Fields Jr., 22, received the sentence for killing one person and injuring dozens during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017.
Last month, Fields received a life sentence on 29 federal hate crime charges.
Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore followed a state jury’s recommendation in handing down the sentence. Under state law, he was allowed to go lower than the recommendation, but not higher.
“Mr. Fields, you had choices. We all have choices,” Moore said. “You made the wrong ones and you caused great harm. … You caused harm around the globe when people saw what you did.”
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James Alex Fields Jr., is led out of General District Court courthouse after his sentencing on state charges in Charlottesville, Va., . Fields was sentenced to life plus 419 years on federal hate crime charges Monday for deliberately driving his car into anti-racism protesters during a white nationalist rally in Virginia.
Devins’ family described her as a “talented artist, loving sister, daughter, and cousin” in a statement issued Monday evening. She graduated from T.R. Proctor High School in Utica last month and was planning to attend Mohawk Valley Community College in the fall, according to the statement.
“We are very grateful for the outpouring of love and sympathy we have received from our Friends, Family, Bianca’s Friends and the whole community,” Devins’ family said. “Your prayers help to strengthen us through this difficult time.”
“[She was] a wonderful young girl, taken from us all too soon,” the family’s statement continued. “She is now looking down on us, as she joins her cat, Belle, in heaven. Bianca’s smile brightened our lives. She will always be remembered as our Princess.”
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Twitter
Police say 17-year-old Bianca Devins was found dead outside a vehicle in Utica, New York, on Sunday morning.
Tropical Depression Barry soaked the Gulf Coast and slowly inched northward Sunday, sparing New Orleans but still packing enough force to swamp the region with potentially life-threatening flash floods and possible tornadoes.
As Barry crawls north at a painstaking 9 mph, it will continue to dump rain on the waterlogged central United States. The National Hurricane Center predicted life-threatening flash and river flooding in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, southeast Missouri and western Tennessee.
Barry’s overall path reflects a boomerang, having begun as a disturbance in the Midwest in early July before creeping southeast, entering the Gulf of Mexico over the Florida Panhandle and moving west to the shores of Louisiana, where it returned to land as a Category 1 hurricane.
A wealthy Manhattan couple has emerged as significant financiers of the anti-vaccine movement, contributing more than $3 million in recent years to groups that stoke fears about immunizations online and at live events — including two forums this year at the epicenter of measles outbreaks in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Hedge fund manager and philanthropist Bernard Selz and his wife, Lisa, have long donated to organizations focused on the arts, culture, education and the environment. But seven years ago, their private foundation embraced a very different cause: groups that question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
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“They should be allowed to have the measles if they want the measles,” Del Bigtree told reporters outside an anti-vaccine forum in Brooklyn earlier this month geared to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
If cells were personified, each fat cell would be an overbearing grandparent who hoards. They’re constantly trying to make you eat another serving of potatoes, and have cabinets stacked with vitamins they never take.
Like that grandparent, your fat cells are always trying to store stuff. Fats? Of course. Vitamins? Heck yeah. Hormones? You bet. Random pollutants and toxins? Sure. Adipose tissue will soak all that up like an oily little sponge and keep it safe until you need it again. That’s the whole point of body fat—to store energy for you. When you lose weight, your fat cells start shrinking, releasing lipids and other fats into your bloodstream. These get broken down, and eventually the smaller molecules exit via your urine or breath.
But adipose cells release all the other molecules they’ve hoarded, too. That includes key hormones like estrogen, along with fat-soluble vitamins and any organic pollutants that found their way into your bloodstream as you gained weight.
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.
Visualization of heat and humidity Friday. (Earth.nullschool.net)
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Flood Tips
James' World 2 