Joan Didion made sense of the world through words. She was known for them: her cool, exacting prose; her sentences, smooth and spare. But in the aftermath of her husband’s fatal heart attack in 2003, her relationship with words changed. "This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning,” she wrote in her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. “This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Kim Potter, the former Minnesota police officer who shot and killed an unarmed Black motorist after saying she mistook her gun for her Taser, was found guilty of manslaughter Thursday by a jury that deliberated for more than 26 hours over four days.

Hennepin County Judge Regina Chu announced the verdict as Potter stood silently between her lawyers. She showed no emotion as Chu polled the jurors, who were sequestered throughout their deliberations.

The manger scenes that decorate homes and church yards this time of year remind us that first-century shepherds were the original witnesses to the good news of Jesus. The low-wage workers of their day, shepherds in first-century Palestine were either young boys from poor families or migrant workers—the same class of people who work for less than a living wage today in the food service and hospitality industries.

Amid contentious national pushback over how much of the full history of slavery in the United States should be taught in schools, the holiday season represents a particularly overlooked period. Around the time Christmas was starting to become a national holiday in the late-19th century, propagandists of the Lost Cause—the myth that the Civil War was fought for states rights and not for slavery—were trying to reframe what happened in the South during the antebellum era.

(LOS ANGELES) — Los Angeles police fatally shot a 14-year-old girl who was inside a clothing store dressing room Thursday as they fired at a suspect who had assaulted a woman earlier, authorities said.

Police also killed the male suspect, authorities said. He and the girl have not been named. The woman who had been assaulted was taken to the hospital with moderate to serious injuries.

The shots were fired around 11:45 a.m.

Want a quick summary of the daily news? Inflation. Labor shortages. Supply-chain issues. Omicron. Partisanship. Gridlock. Biden stalled. Trump ranting.

Given that, it’s hardly surprising that many Americans are feeling not so good about the country in general and, more specifically, about this thing we call the economy. Yet, the actual data about our economy point in a radically different direction: up.

After months of debate over what to do with the Pillar of Shame, a statue commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre on the campus of the University of Hong Kong, workers arrived in the middle of the night—dismantling and removing it.

Reports started circulating on social media late Wednesday that security guards had erected plastic sheets and barricades around the statue and that construction work could be heard going on.

It’s clear that 2020 was a terrible year for health in the U.S., but just how terrible is now coming into focus. New mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics finds that life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years in 2020 compared to 2019, and more than 528,800 more U.S. residents died in 2020 than in 2019. It is the largest single-year increase in annual mortality since 1933, when data for the entire country first became available.

COVID-19 is the primary reason for this shift.

After nearly 2 years of calling for rapid tests, the U.S. is finally catching up to the rest of the world with these crucial public health tools. There is no time better than now, as the Omicron quickly spreads in the U.S., and is more infectious and better able to break through the immune protection we’ve built up through vaccines and previous waves of the virus.

Almost as soon as Omicron was announced, some countries started to enact travel bans to stop the spread, but it was too late.

(BEIJING) — China ordered the lockdown of as many as 13 million people in neighborhoods and workplaces in the northern city of Xi'an following a spike in coronavirus cases, setting off panic buying just weeks before the country hosts the Winter Olympic Games.

State media reported that city officials ordered all residents to stay home unless they had a pressing reason to go out and suspended all transport to and from the city apart from special cases.