Category: Breaking News

The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here.

Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for its resources. They are tiny cogs in a global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest — an area about the size of California — over the last 35 years, driving more than 10,000 plant and animal species toward extinction. 

During an extensive reporting trip through three of the Amazon’s

A search warrant was issued for actor Alec Baldwin’s cellphone Thursday, nearly two months after a shooting on the New Mexico set of “Rust” killed the film’s cinematographer and injured its director, court documents show.

In an affidavit filed in Santa Fe Magistrate Court, authorities asked for the iPhone “due to conversations between affiant and Alec Baldwin being conducted through ‘iMessages.'”

The affiant is identified as a violent crimes detective with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. The documents give no further details about the conversations.

Baldwin was holding a Colt .45 on Oct. 21 when it fired, killing Halyna

President Joe Biden, in his first address to Congress, pressed lawmakers to send him a massive police reform bill in the name of George Floyd by May 25 — the one-year anniversary of his murder.

It never happened. After missing that deadline, bipartisan talks sputtered over the summer before eventually collapsing.

While Washington has little to show for its efforts, state and local governments spent 2021 charging ahead with changes of their own, from overhauling police training to restoring the right to vote for formerly incarcerated people.

Indiana, Nevada, Texas and Virginia all enacted laws this year aimed at beefing

LONDON — London Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a “major incident” Saturday as the omicron variant of the coronavirus surged through the United Kingdom’s capital.

The impact of the rapid spread of the variant was already felt across the city with staff absences in front-line services, a statement from the mayor’s office said.

Khan said the surge was “hugely concerning.” Urging citizens to get vaccinated, he added that the omicron “variant has quickly become dominant with cases increasing rapidly and the number of patients in our hospitals with Covid-19 on the rise again.” 

The declaration was made after 65,525 new Covid-19

KARACHI, Pakistan — A powerful gas explosion in a sewage system in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, killed at least 12 people and injured 11 others Saturday, police and a health official said.

Police spokesman Sohail Jokhio said the blast was apparently caused when something ignited gas that had accumulated in the sewer beneath a local bank building in the Shershah neighborhood of the port city.

The powerful blast destroyed the HBL bank building. Video footage aired by local television stations showed the entire structure of the Shershah branch was damaged. The floor was blown out and furniture was mired in

In 1999, “The Matrix” was released and with it, the phrases “red pill,” “bullet time,” and “free your mind” entered the cultural lexicon. That was a different world then, when technology taking over our brains was the stuff of science fiction. To Keanu Reeves, our current overreliance on technology is what makes “The Matrix: Resurrections,” the newest installment in the franchise, all the more relevant. 

“​I think it folds technology, or how we’re interacting, and also has a futuristic aspect to it — in terms of programs, artificial intelligence, machines, all kinds of sentients, and the interactions of such. And

Indonesia’s Semeru volcano on Java island erupted early on Sunday spewing a high ash column over a mile into the sky and prompting authorities to warn people to stay away from the eruption range.

Earlier this month, the eruption of Semeru, Java’s tallest mountain, ejected ash clouds and pyroclastic flows that killed at least 46 people and left several missing, while thousands were displaced.

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On Sunday, the early morning eruption resulted in dense white and grey ash clouds, according to Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (PVMBG).

The

Everywhere I look, I see parents immersing their young children in Santa mythology. They play elaborate games with elves on shelves, tell convoluted stories about “real” Santas versus mall Santas and follow a script containing the sometimes-desperate admonition to their children to just believe.

It feels more over the top these days than ever, but maybe that’s because I’m past it as a parent (my kids are

BURLINGTON, VT — One evening in June 2020, a City Council budget meeting in this college town near the Canadian border stretched past midnight after hundreds of locals had logged on to Zoom to speak. Over nine hours, bleary-eyed councilors heard a message that had rippled across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

“Enough performing,” said one citizen. “Defund the Burlington police department.”

The council would ultimately pass a resolution that upended the way policing was done in the city.

Other cities with similar profiles — majority white college towns — “defunded” their police. Norman, Oklahoma, diverted

A huge wildfire that burned among California’s sequoias, prompting the base of the famous General Sherman Tree to be wrapped in a protective blanket, has been declared fully contained, officials said Friday.

The full containment of the KNP Complex comes more than three months after the two fires that comprised it were sparked by lightning in early September. The fires, which merged into one, burned 88,307 acres.

“We hope that total containment on the KNP Complex is a comfort not only to local communities, but to people everywhere who care about the parks,” Leif Mathiesen, assistant fire management officer for