Ron and Florence Schaffhauser stood in matching orange “I SURVIVED HURRICANE MICHAEL” T-shirts, waiting for the MAGA rally to begin, a Doppler radar image of the deadly storm emblazoned on their chests.
Last October, the behemoth Category 5 hurricane had churned towards this beautiful stretch of white-sand beaches on the Florida panhandle, eventually killing 59 Americans and causing $25 billion in damage.
“We lost the roof … the living room, dining room, kitchen,” said Ron Schaffhauser, a retired Marine, holding Florence’s hand as the couple recounted their ordeal to HuffPost.
“Our daughter’s house got totally destroyed,” said Florence Schaffhauser, who recently retired from a job at a local Winn-Dixie grocery store.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Supporters of President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, on May 8, 2019.
Choosing a safe but effective sunscreen is becoming a pain in the brain.
While we spent decades happily applying the sunscreen of our choice, the chemical ingredients that manufacturers used to fight the sun have been under attack. The latest salvo: a study by the US Food and Drug Administration showing that we can absorb high levels of four of those chemicals into our bloodstream after just one day of sunblock use.
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Is that a problem for our health? No one knows. In February, the FDA reiterated its call for manufacturers to do safety investigations of 12 of the sunscreen chemicals most commonly used in the United States. Those tests could take months or even years.
By now, you’ve probably been taught to gird your sun-starved skin for battle with cancer-causing cosmic rays every time you go outside. Choose a spray, choose a lotion, but by heavens, choose something! Legions of doctors, parents, and YouTube beauty influencers are unanimous on this point. But with sunscreen application evolving from a week or two at the beach every year to a constant daily slather, US health regulators want to know more about how all those photoprotective chemicals interact with people’s skin.
If they sink into tissues and get absorbed into the bloodstream, that could be a problem. Then, like other over-the-counter drugs the Food and Drug Administration oversees, sunscreens should be studied to make sure they don’t mess up people’s hormones, affect their reproductive systems, or cause cancer. Such safety testing has never been done on the active ingredients in sunscreen, because those chemicals were approved decades ago, before anyone suspected they could be absorbed into the body. Now we know it’s more than just a suspicion.
Around two or three times a week, in a small open-plan office in London, Lilith* worked with a computer in her lap, crouching underneath her desk—a rectangular table that six people shared, with short dividers between each station.
“I get easily overwhelmed with noise or an excessive amount of people around,” she said. “People working with me mostly found it funny, if not a little odd, but they were polite about it.”
In a long alleyway in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not far from the East River, Tracy Morgan sat on a director’s chair, his feet dangling high off the ground. He was surrounded by a languid swarm of crew members, who brought him water, fussed over the orange jumpsuit that was his costume for the day, and kept him shaded from the sun. Morgan has a plush love seat for a nose and a protrusive mouth that tugs the rest of his face forward, but his eyes are the key to his knack for physical comedy—he controls their focus with gonzo precision. Sometimes he looks upward and grins, mimicking the innocent gaze of a child; at other times, he tucks in his chin and offers a stare that lands about a yard beyond the ostensible object of his attention. Now he looked restless.
It was a September scorcher, cloudless at noon, and Morgan was working himself into a muddled but intense emotional state—jokey, sentimental, triumphant, pissed—in order to film a climactic scene from the second-season finale of his TBS sitcom, “The Last O.G.” (Season 2 premièred in April.) Morgan plays Tray Barker, a man who has returned to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn after fifteen years in prison on a drug charge. Just before his arrest, Tray unknowingly impregnated his girlfriend, Shay, played by Tiffany Haddish, best known for the torrent of ribaldry that she brought to the movie “Girls Trip.” With Tray out of her life, Shay became a successful designer and married a white man, with whom she is raising Tray’s twins. In the first season, Tray, desperate to earn a place in his children’s lives, takes a job at a Starbucks-like coffee shop, one of many signs of local gentrification. In the second season, he tries to launch a business venture that draws on his experience and also suits the neighborhood’s changing demographics: a prison-themed food truck.
One 18-year-old student was killed and eight others were injured after two shooters opened fire on a science and technology school in the Denver area on Tuesday.
The gunmen entered two classrooms in different locations “deep” inside STEM School Highlands Ranch and began shooting at students, Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said at a press conference.
Deputies responded to the scene two minutes after receiving reports of shots fired within the school shortly before 2 p.m.
Up to 1 million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction, with alarming implications for human survival, according to a United Nations report released Monday.
The report’s findings underscore the conclusions of previous scientific studies that say human activity is wreaking havoc on the wild kingdom, threatening the existence of living things ranging from giant whales to small flowers and insects that are almost impossible to see with the naked eye.
But the global report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services goes a step further than previous studies by linking the loss of species to humans and analyzing its effect on food and water security, farming and economies.
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Moe Flannery of the California Academy of Sciences inspected a dead gray whale in Tiburon, Calif., last month, one of seven whales that have washed up on the shores of the San Francisco Bay and along the coast in recent weeks. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, welcomed a baby boy on Monday. Prince Harry said, “I’m just over the moon!” The global media said, “Show us the baby!”
Some of the details — especially where the birth took place — are yet to be revealed by the palace or the couple, who sought to keep the delivery more private than the past public issues of Harry’s brother, Prince William, likely a future king.
Baby Sussex is seventh in line to the British throne and Queen Elizabeth II’s eighth great-grandchild.
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Prince Harry and Meghan, duke and duchess of Sussex, are doing things a bit differently than Prince William and Catherine, duke and duchess of Cambridge.(Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
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.
Choosing a sunscreen
Illustration: Hunter French
Tracy Morgan
Shooting At Denver-Area School
James' World 2 