Rattlesnakes are everywhere these days, he says – on front porches, in potted plants, and under children’s play equipment. “I am busier than I have ever been. Complaints are coming in from all over the state.”

A New Jersey school board has scrapped the names of all holidays from its calender to avoid 'hurt feelings' after backlash over renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Randolph Board of Education members unanimously voted to remove all holiday names off of the school calendar, including religious holidays such as Yom Kippur and Christmas, at a meeting that drew over 100 people on Thursday.

A movement in Buckhead, Atlanta, the city's wealthiest neighborhood comprised of predominately White residents, is working to secede in order to form its own city due to a rise in crime.

Although smoking has decreased in the United States since the 1990s, new research shows there was a global record high of 1.1 billion people who smoked in 2019.

The study estimated the prevalence of smoking in 204 countries, with 113 of them seeing an increase of smokers since 1990.

The study also said smoking was likely to increase over the next decades, and effective implementation and enforcement of tobacco control policies were needed to increase life expectancy and decrease health care costs.

New tobacco control policies have been introduced over the last few years, with the Biden administration announcing its plan to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars in April.

I met my husband 13 years ago, and we’ve been together ever since. We fell deeply, madly in love with each other and have been married for nine wonderful years now. He’s patient, kind, gentle-hearted. He’s also always been honest about being gay and has never hidden it from me. Only one of our mutual friends knows this about my husband. Our son also knows, since we thought it would be best to remain open with him about it, so he never “found out” by surprise or from our mutual friend. Our son took the news very well and doesn’t care that his father was gay.

I’ve never told my family, or really any of my friends, as I think they’d all be judgmental. My siblings don’t like my husband, but that’s a different letter in itself. So I’ve always kept it bottled up inside. He’s been married before, and divorced, to a straight woman, with whom he has a grown daughter. I’m a straight woman too. I’ve asked my husband about it, and he confirms that he’s gay, not bisexual. He left his first wife because of a lot of problems (and her infidelity), then he was in a few different relationships with other men, before he met his ex-boyfriend. They were still living together when we met. I’m confused by it all, and it has, at times, caused problems in our marriage, because of my lack of self-confidence. I have doubts that he might leave me someday for a gay relationship like he did his ex-wife. We’ve both been faithful to each other, and he loves me, and I love him. But is that good enough for him? Would you consider him bisexual or gay?

—Not-Quite-Lavender Marriage

By the time school administrators in Florida moved last year to fire Susan Oyer, the Boca Raton Middle School teacher had spent nearly a decade drawing harassment complaints from children and parents.

There were accusations she quarreled with students. That she mocked their grades and intelligence. That she used their race or nationality to demean them. That she threatened to sue them. That she revealed confidential information about them to their classmates.

Students reported she pushed a girl from behind. That she prohibited students from using the bathroom. That she belittled a girl for not being an American citizen and threatened to report her to immigration authorities.

The science is clear: without drastic action to limit temperature rise below 1.5C, the Earth, and all life on it, including all human beings, will suffer devastating consequences.

The parents of an 8-year-old student who killed himself after being persistently bullied can move forward with a lawsuit against the Cincinnati school district that alleges wrongful death and other charges, a federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday.

The lawsuit's allegations also charge school officials with intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress and failure to report child abuse. The lawsuit says Taye was bullied at his elementary school starting in first grade, with the bullying escalating in his third grade year.

Other students punched and kicked him in assaults and on Jan. 24, 2017, knocked him unconscious by throwing him against a bathroom wall, the parents say in the lawsuit.

He stayed home sick the next day, returned to school Jan. 26 and was bullied again in the bathroom by students who took his water bottle and tried to flush it down the toilet, his parents say. He killed himself that evening in his bedroom.

The support for nurses demonstrating outside South Coast Global Medical Center is clear. It was one of four protests at Orange County hospitals.
Nurses say that their safety and patient lives are at risk after the state allowed their hospital, part of KPC Health, to increase the patient to nurse ratio in the middle of a pandemic.

"So instead of giving us more nurses we got more work. Patients are going to die, nurses are gonna break, nurses are exhausted," says Karen Rodriguez, a registered nurse.

Nurses say that they are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, shifts go as long as 16 hours, four to five days a week, code after code, leaving them exhausted, waking up anxious in the middle of the night.

"It might be surge after surge and who knows, and they're not preparing for the worst," says Irene Brown, South Coast Global Medical Center ICU nurse

"I don't have any more to give when I get home, and that's really unfair to my family and myself because I just want to rest," says Vanessa Aguilar

She says it's also unfair to patients. Aguilar had this heartbreaking admission: Some may have made it if we had more resources.

New data suggests that a smaller percentage of patients with COVID-19 are being admitted to hospitals because the nation's healthcare systems are being overwhelmed by the staggering number of new infections.

Two sets of data show that the percentage of those who are admitted to the hospital once testing positive is decreasing.

Hospitals are being forced to tighten their restrictions on who is admitted, suggesting that some patients who may have been hospitalized for treatment during the spring and summer wave are now being turned away as deaths from the virus also increase.

The seven-day average for reported COVID-19 deaths rose to 2,123, the researchers found - surpassing the previous high of 2,116 recorded on April 21.

'Given data drops and spikes on and after Thanksgiving, the seven-day-average is an especially useful metric to watch right now,' their analysts warned.

An Oregon nurse is placed on administrative leave after she posted a TikTok video shunning basic COVID-19 measures.

The since-deleted post from user @Loveiskind05 showed the nurse wearing scrubs and a stethoscope, with the caption, “When my coworkers find out I still travel, don’t wear a mask when I’m out and let my kids have play dates.” A “duet” of the original TikTok remains online.

Users apparently identified the nurse and then alerted her employer, Salem Health.

Wearing a mask is important. For you and those around you. For elected officials? Not so much.

Actually, all the COVID rules are for us, not them. COVID-19, and the accompanying lockdowns, have made it painfully clear: We plebes have to follow the rules; the elites do not.

Start with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last week groveled for forgiveness after being caught attending a large birthday dinner at The French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley. When pictures from the event surfaced, the hypocrisy was glaring: The governor was seen with his wife at a large table full of maskless lobbyists, all sitting in close proximity.

But, hey: You’re not the governor — so if you want to celebrate Thanksgiving in his state, remember: “No more than three households, including your own,” at the gathering, and keep your distance.

Newsom isn’t the only one to live it up while everyone suffers. Gov. Cuomo, for example, is rarely seen in a mask, yet his Twitter feed never stops harassing you to “mask up.” (And, by the way, he’s just thrilled with himself over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis, even though it resulted in more deaths than any other state and, according to The New York Times, seeded the virus throughout the country.)

A few weeks ago, I was supposed to take my sons to an outdoor activity that ended up getting canceled due to weather. We found out about the cancellation when we were halfway there. Before I turned around, I texted my husband that we would be heading home and never got a text back. This wasn’t unusual, as he usually puts his phone on “do not disturb” while he’s working. When we got home, I opened the door to find my husband and his best friend, “Ryan,” completely naked, and having fairly rough sex on our dining room table. They had music blaring, so they didn’t hear us come in, and my sons and I were all in shock and just stood there for a good 30 to 60 seconds before I was able to shut the music off, and they realized what was going on and could cover up. Obviously, this is a bit of a chaotic situation.

Ryan is like an uncle to my kids, has dinner at our house several times a week, has occasionally lived with us, and he and my husband actually work together. My husband and I are planning on staying together and are still trying to figure a lot of things out. Here’s the problem: My younger son (6) is pretty oblivious and thought Uncle Ryan was wrestling with his dad. My middle son (9) is very confused about the mechanics of what we saw (we’ve had the sex talk with him, but in hindsight, we made the mistake of only talking about heterosexual sex). My older son (12) is having a very difficult time. My middle son has a lot of questions that I’m not really sure how to answer, and I’m not sure how much detail I should be going into, and who should be leading this conversation (me? my husband? a doctor?). I’ve been getting phone calls home from my older son’s school. Ever since the incident, he has apparently been making derogatory remarks about gay people, using slurs, and is also refusing to speak to his father (they were previously pretty close). The school is threatening to expel him. We’re on the waitlist for individual and family therapy, but I was wondering if you guys had any advice about what to do with my two older sons?

—What Now?

Even if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to zero, global temperatures may continue to rise for centuries afterward, according to a scientific study published Thursday.

"The world is already past a point of no return for global warming," the study authors report in the British journal Scientific Reports. The only way to stop the warming, they say, is that "enormous amounts of carbon dioxide have to be extracted from the atmosphere."

The burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to increase and sea levels to rise.

The scientists modeled the effect of greenhouse gas emission reductions on changes in the Earth's climate from 1850 to 2500 and created projections of global temperature and sea level rises.

A company that supplied a federal school lunch program sold juice with high levels of arsenic and used rotten fruit in their product, the FDA charged in a new lawsuit, according to a report.

In the suit, which was filed in federal court in Washington state against the company Valley Processing, food safety inspectors said they found high levels of arsenic in 17 batches of apple juice and two batches of pear juice during a 2019 inspection, The New York Times reported.

Investigators also found high levels of a toxin produced by rotting or moldy apples and pears in the company’s juice, according to the report.