The Damage from Hurricane Matthew. Hurricane Matthew swept through Haiti on Tuesday, bringing the death toll of the powerful storm to seven. The Category 4 hurricane made landfall in the early morning.

Hurricane Matthew made landfall southeast of McClellanville, South Carolina, as a Category 1 storm, the National Hurricane Center said. From: At 1100 AM EDT (1500 UTC), the center of Hurricane Matthew was located near latitude 33.0 North, longitude 79.4 West.

Matthew is moving toward the northeast near 12 mph (19 km/h), and this motion is expected to continue today. On the forecast track, the center of Matthew will continue to move near or over the coast of South Carolina today, and be near the coast of southern North Carolina by tonight. Maximum sustained winds are near 75 mph (120 km/h) with higher gusts. Although weakening is forecast during the next 48 hours, Matthew is expected to remain near hurricane strength while the center is near the coasts of South Carolina and North Carolina.

The center also warned of high storm surges, which are expected to reach 5 to 7 feet high between Charleston, South Carolina, and Cape Fear, North Carolina, as well as possible inland flooding. The president, in his emergency declaration, ordered federal aid to supplement state, tribal, and local efforts in the state. The warning coordination meteorologist, at the National Weather Service Office in Green Bay, Wisconsin, posted radar images of Matthew in which birds are seen inside the eye of the storm. Morning radar shows eye over water with biological returns, probably birds, inside. — Jeff Last (@JeffLast) This is fascinating because the birds—the red bits in the radar image—actually choose to go to the eye because it’s the calmest part of the storm. Here’s from Kenn Kaufman, Audubon’s field editor: The birds get into the end of the hurricane’s spiral and they move toward the eye of the hurricane. They may not necessarily do that in any organized way; more likely they’re out there in all this wild wind and when they chance into the calm of the eye they may make an effort to stay there and travel with it rather than fighting the winds again.

When the storm reaches land, some of them may start fighting the winds. Others may go with it and travel with the eye until the hurricane dissipates. The majority of seabirds, if they are not too weakened from having flown for so long without food, will probably find their way back to shore quickly. They have great powers of navigation. President Obama, in a statement after being briefed on the storm, said: “I just want to emphasize to everybody that this is still a really dangerous hurricane.” 'The big concern at this point is storm surge,' he said, adding: Many of you will remember Hurricane Sandy (in 2012), where initially people thought this doesn't look as bad as we thought, and then suddenly you get a massive storm surge and a lot of people are severely affected. We're still on the front end of this hurricane, we're not on the backend. So we don't know how bad the damage could end up, we don't know how severe the storm surge could end up being.

And we're not going to know for three, four, five days what the ultimate effects of this are.' Here’s the 11 a.m. ET from the National Weather Service: The Hurricane Warning has been extended northeastward to Surf City North Carolina.

The Hurricane Warning from Sebastian Inlet to Cocoa Beach Florida has been changed to a Tropical Storm Warning. The Tropical Storm Warning south of Sebastian Inlet has been discontinued. The Tropical Storm Warning and Tropical Storm Watch along the west coast of Florida has been discontinued. A Tropical Storm Warning has been issued from north of Surf City to Duck, North Carolina, including the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. A Hurricane Watch has been issued from Surf City to Cape Lookout North Carolina.

SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT: A Hurricane Warning is in effect for. * Cocoa Beach to Surf City A Hurricane Watch is in effect for.

* North of Surf City to Cape Lookout A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for. * Sebastian Inlet to Cocoa Beach * North of Surf City to Duck * Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. The folks at the Wall Street Journal have tabulated the 10 costliest hurricanes to have hit the U.S. Hurricane Matthew to test catastrophe-bond market — WSJ Graphics (@WSJGraphics) The paper, in an accompanying story, says pension plans and other bondholders could lose billions from the storm.

Here’s more: The costly combination from Matthew of hurricane-force winds, storm surges and heavy rainfall could result in big payout of bonds for hurricane damage. About $12 billion, or just over half the outstanding $22 billion in catastrophe bonds, have some exposure to Florida storms, according to insurance brokerage Aon Benfield.

Read the rest of the story (there’s a paywall). Here’s the 10 a.m. ET on the storm from the National Weather Service: During the past hour, a private weather station near New Smyrna Beach reported sustained winds of 63 mph (102 km/h) and a gust to 84 mph (135 km/h). A wind gust to 71 mph (115 km/h) has recently been reported in Daytona Beach. SUMMARY OF 1000 AM EDT.1400 UTC.INFORMATION ----------------------------------------------- LOCATION.29.1N 80.5W ABOUT 30 MI50 KM ESE OF DAYTONA BEACH FLORIDA ABOUT 50 MI.80 KM N OF CAPE CANAVERAL FLORIDA MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS.120 MPH195 KM/H PRESENT MOVEMENTNNW OR 330 DEGREES AT 14 MPH22 KM/H MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE945 MB.27.91 INCHES.

Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said “time has just about run out in Florida to evacuate. In fact, if you’re being told to hunker down and stay where you are, follow those instructions. However, there is still time left in places like Georgia and South Carolina where there have been evacuation orders in effect for sometime now, there is still time for you to get out.” “If I was where you are now right now, in a location that is under an evacuation instruction, I would leave right now,” he said. You can watch his remarks here: LIVE on: NHC Director Dr Rick Knabb — Natl Hurricane Ctr (@NWSNHC) The National Weather Service,, said Matthew would bring strong winds, storm surges, heavy rain, and isolated tornadoes along the coast from Florida to North Carolina. Matthew is a weakened (Category 3), but still powerful storm (sustained winds of 120 miles per hour) as it moves toward the coast of Florida on Friday, the National Weather Service at 5 a.m. “On the forecast track, the center of Matthew will be moving near or over the east coast of the Florida peninsula through tonight, and near or over the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina on Saturday,” the NWS said.

I have not yet found hurricane force winds on land. They appear to be contained in the eyewall, just offshore. — Greg Postel (@GregPostel). Hurricane Matthew in torpedoing the FARC peace deal by suppressing turnout in Colombia’s razor-thin referendum vote last week. Now it looks ready to disrupt with the U.S. General election. Florida’s voter-registration deadline ends next Tuesday, but Governor Rick Scott says he wouldn’t extend the deadline on account of the storm.

“Everybody has had a lot of time to register,” Scott. That could be a major blow to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which had requested the extension, as it seeks to capitalize on her momentum in recent state polls. Scott, a Republican, supports her opponent Donald Trump.

It’s a different story further north in South Carolina. The state’s Election Commission says prospective voters now have until midnight on Sunday to submit their registration applications online and can also submit applications by mail until Tuesday,. After hitting the Bahamas, Matthew is now en route to Florida’s eastern coast. But the latest projections suggest it could soon return.

The National Weather Service’s bureau in Charleston, South Carolina, just tweeted this forecast of Matthew’s path. It shows the storm curving further east into the Atlantic Ocean before veering back west towards where it already struck. The latest 5-day track forecast of is nearly a complete circle. — NWS Charleston, SC (@NWSCharlestonSC) This doesn’t guarantee the storm will actually come back.

Long-term forecasting for a hurricane’s path is an imprecise science at best, and even minor atmospheric fluctuations can alter its strength and course. But it’s a troubling image nonetheless. Matt Drudge, the publisher of the Drudge Report, is a highly influential media voice based in Florida.

That’s unfortunate, because he’s also at times a conspiracy nut. Take these tweets from Thursday afternoon: The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate — MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims.

Nassau ground observations DID NOT match statements! 165mph gusts? — MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) Drudge has half a point here: There aren’t ground observations that fast. A NOAA aircraft currently exploring the storm has registered surface-level winds as high as 107 knots, or 123 miles per hour; the most recent message it sent from the storm's center put the surface winds at 95 knots, or about 110 miles per hour. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that this is part of a climate-change hoax perpetrated by the government. Just ask Governor Rick Scott, a man that he banned state officials from referring to “climate change” and “global warming.” What is Scott saying about Matthew? 'You need to leave now.

Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,”, adding that 'no one should be taking a chance.” If Matt Drudge wants to take a potentially deadly chance, of course, that’s his prerogative. Everyone else, Trump supporting “deplorable” or not, should probably ignore his counsel, though. Hurricane Matthew is currently a Category 4 hurricane with sustained wind speeds of 140 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Weather Center said. According to the agency, the storm’s eye will hit Freeport in the northwestern Bahamas on Thursday evening before advancing towards Florida’s east coast throughout Thursday night and Friday.

In addition to hurricane-force winds and strong rains, one of Matthew’s most dangerous effects will be high levels of storm surge along the coasts of three states. The 5p prototype storm surge watch/warning area extends from Florida to North Carolina. — NHC Atlantic Ops (@NHC_Atlantic) Hurricane conditions will begin to affect Florida on Thursday evening, the agency warned. Florida hospitals are preparing for an influx of pregnant women during Hurricane Matthew—and cautioning expectant mothers that they need to register ahead of time if they believe they’re eligible to seek shelter at the hospital, A crowded labor and delivery department is a common sight during massive storms. That’s in part because women who are late in their pregnancies or face other complications are advised to get to the hospital while they still can, given the potential for road closures and dangerous weather, but it’s also because there’s evidence of a link between low-pressure systems and the onset of labor.

I took a look back through the medical literature to see. What can this seemingly innocuous, #brand-related tweet tell us about Hurricane Matthew? Quite a bit, as it happens: All Waffle House restaurants on 1-95 between Titusville, FL and Fort Pierce, FL are closed. Stay safe Waffle Nation! — Waffle House (@WaffleHouse) Craig Fugate, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, uses Waffle House as a key metric in disaster-response efforts. Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on.

Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions. 'If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?' FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. 'That's really bad.

That's where you go to work.' The scale has its limitations—Fugate was previously in charge of disaster response in Florida, but the chain is not ubiquitous throughout the United States. It is, however, common in hurricane-heavy regions., the point is not simply to know whether you can get an All-Star Breakfast. Instead, it’s a useful way to tell whether disaster managers are fixing the right problems: Oftentimes if you do government-centered planning you forget about the private sector unless you need them to do something for you. We’re asking a different question: “What can we do to get you open?” Each level of government, they do things that they think intuitively are helpful to recovery, but may be counterproductive, like curfews. When you talk to big-box retailers, they do almost all their resupply at night. Yet, your curfews are generally at night.

So you have this mismatch between law enforcement trying to keep an area secure at night and the private sector saying, “But that's when we try to do our resupply, when we try to do our repairs.” Stay safe, Waffle Nation. The National Weather Service’s bureau in Melbourne, Florida, has released on Matthew’s expected damage, describing it as “the strongest hurricane to affect this area in decades.” DANGEROUS HURRICANE MATTHEW MOVING NORTHWESTWARD NORTH OF ANDROS ISLAND, IS FORECAST TO MOVE VERY NEAR AND OVER THE EAST CENTRAL COAST OF FLORIDA TONIGHT AND INTO FRIDAY.

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, LIFE-THREATENING WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE FORECAST IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. THE CENTER OF HURRICANE MATTHEW CONTAINING THE STRONGEST WIND GUSTS, STORM SURGE AND HEAVY RAIN SQUALLS WILL MOVE ALONG OR OVER PORTIONS OF THE EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA COASTLINE LATE TONIGHT INTO THE AFTERNOON HOURS ON FRIDAY. WIDESPREAD EXTENSIVE TO DEVASTATING WIND IMPACTS WILL BE FELT. AIRBORNE DEBRIS LOFTED BY EXTREME WINDS WILL BE CAPABLE OF BREACHING STRUCTURES, UNPROTECTED WINDOWS AND VEHICLES. EFFECTS SUCH AS THESE RANGING FROM THE COAST TO WELL INLAND HAVE NOT BEEN EXPERIENCED IN CENTRAL FLORIDA IN DECADES.

LOCAL CONDITIONS WILL EXCEED WHAT OCCURRED DURING THE HURRICANES OF 2004. ANY EVACUATIONS AND STRUCTURE PREPARATION SHOULD BE COMPLETED THIS AFTERNOON. TRAVEL WILL BE STRONGLY DISCOURAGED BEGINNING AT DUSK. EXPECT WIDESPREAD POWER OUTAGES. The bulletin predicts devastation for eastern central Florida over the next 24 hours as Matthew strikes with hurricane-force winds, massive storm surges, and flooding rains. - STRUCTURAL DAMAGE TO STURDY BUILDINGS, SOME WITH COMPLETE ROOF AND WALL FAILURES.

COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF MOBILE HOMES. DAMAGE GREATLY ACCENTUATED BY LARGE AIRBORNE PROJECTILES. LOCATIONS MAY BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS OR MONTHS. - NUMEROUS LARGE TREES SNAPPED OR UPROOTED ALONG WITH FENCES AND ROADWAY SIGNS BLOWN OVER. - MANY ROADS IMPASSABLE FROM LARGE DEBRIS, AND MORE WITHIN URBAN OR HEAVILY WOODED PLACES. MANY BRIDGES, CAUSEWAYS, AND ACCESS ROUTES IMPASSABLE.

- WIDESPREAD POWER AND COMMUNICATIONS OUTAGES. Thursday’s bulletin strongly resembles the dire forecast given by the NWS’s New Orleans bureau ahead of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Its unusually stark descriptions, which warned that “most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks” and that water shortages would “make human suffering incredible by modern standards,” catalyzed a larger government response and how NWS officials warned the public about catastrophic storms. President Obama declared a state of emergency in Florida on Thursday afternoon, freeing up federal resources to assist local authorities as Matthew nears. About 1.5 million people are under evacuation orders in Florida, said Rick Scott, the state's governor, at a press conference Thursday morning.

Scott said Hurricane Matthew is expected to reach Palm Beach County Thursday night, bringing between four and eight inches of rain, and generating strong rip currents. 'Do not surf. Do not go on the beach,' Scott said.

'No one should be on the beach doing anything.' He added: 'No one should be taking any chances.'

Scott said 2,500 members of the National Guard have been called to duty to assist in hurricane preparedness. More than 80 shelters have been set up throughout the state. The Exorcist Tradition In Islam Pdf By Bilal Philips University. All tolls on roadways have been suspended, he said.

'There is no reason not to evacuate,' Scott said. A video posted by Jeanette Walker (@longislandgirlbahamas) on Oct 5, 2016 at 11:11am PDT In the U.S., the governors of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina have declared states of emergency. The National Hurricane Center the storm will “ move very close to the east coast of the Florida peninsula tonight through Friday night.” “I cannot emphasize enough that everyone in our state must prepare now for a direct hit,” Florida Governor Rick Scott said. “Having a plan in place could mean the difference between life and death.” But there are problems that may go beyond a direct hit. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance: “Hurricane Matthew could further complicate efforts to stop the spread of [Zika], which can cause grave outcomes—especially for developing fetuses whose mothers are infected.”. At least 11 deaths have been blamed on the hurricane, the AP Tuesday night.

Updated numbers are difficult to obtain, the AP said, because of downed phone communication in the hardest-hit areas of the Caribbean. Matthew made landfall in southwestern Haiti just after 7 a.m. Local time Tuesday, bringing sustained winds of 140 miles per hour and heavy rain. The hurricane reached Cuba’s eastern tip that night. Five deaths were reported in Haiti, according to the AP. Four people died in the Dominican Republic, and on each in Colombia and in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Matthew left a trail of destruction behind as it churned north toward the Bahamas Wednesday. Mike Theiss, a photographer for National Geographic, documented some of the damage in Cuba on Wednesday: Complete destruction in Baracoa, Cuba from a combination of extreme wind and storm surge.

Sad situation here. — Mike Theiss (@MikeTheiss) The storm flooded streets in Haiti, like this intersection in Les Cayes: Andres Martinez Casares / AP. President Barack Obama said he has sent Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers to states along the southeastern coast of the country to prepare for Hurricane Matthew.

FEMA workers will be in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Obama urged everyone in those states—and in the states surrounding the coast—to heed local law enforcement because of potential storm surge and high winds. Here’s an excerpt: I want to emphasize to the public: This is a serious storm. It has already hit Haiti with devastating effect. It is now in the process of moving through the Bahamas. Because it's not going to be hitting enough land, it is going to be building strength on its way to Florida.

We anticipate that by tomorrow morning it will already begin to have significant effect in Florida, and then has the potential to strengthen and move on up the coast during the course of the day. So I want to make sure that everybody is paying attention to your local officials. If there is an evacuation order in your community, you need to take it seriously. We anticipate that not only is there still a chance that the core of the storm strikes Florida and some of the states further north, but even if you don’t get the full force of the hurricane, we are still going to be seeing tropical force winds, the potential for a storm surge, and all of that could have a devastating effect. Haiti planned to hold presidential elections on Sunday but it now looks as if those will be postponed because of Hurricane Matthew.

Reports of just how bad the storm hit Haiti have been limited, because communication lines have been destroyed, and some communities were unreachable by aid workers. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at least 350,000 Haitians need immediate assistance. The Miami Herald Haiti’s current President, Leopold Berlanger, said: “The arrival of the hurricane has created delays. Like the deployment of materials by the Haitian National Police.” The opposition candidate, Jude Celestin, agreed voting should be delayed, saying that “getting assistance to the population is more important than elections right now. It’s difficult to go ask people to go vote, given what we’re dealing with right now.” This is the second time Haiti has delayed the presidential election. The first came in January, after protests of fraud in the first round of voting. Hurricane Matthew is expected to near Florida by Thursday afternoon.

From there it’s predicted path takes it north along the East Coast to South Carolina. Already both states are preparing for a major storm, and Florida’s governor has recommended residents near the coast leave, and South Carolina’s governor has ordered the evacuation of several counties. Florida’s Governor Rick Scott told residents along the coast who are able to leave Wednesday to go ahead and do so. Those who live near the barrier islands, or residents who live in mobile homes, were ordered to leave. People seemed to heed Scott’s warning, and The Miami Herald some gas stations had already run out of fuel, and some grocery stores out of water.

South Carolina’s Governor, Nikki Haley, said 315 buses would carry coastal residents of Charleston and Beaufort counties—about a quarter of a million people—100 miles inland on Wednesday. On Thursday morning, the evacuation of Georgetown and Horry counties would begin. The National Guard is helping. For more info please visit: — Nikki Haley (@nikkihaley). Matthew was called the fiercest Caribbean storm in nearly a decade, and the worst humanitarian crisis to hit Haiti since the devastation of the 2010 earthquake. Winds reached 140 miles per hour Tuesday as it whipped across Haiti, then struck Cuba. Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated.

At least seven people died, including two people in Haiti, four in the Dominican Republic, and many more are badly injured. It has been hard for emergency workers or aid groups to get a full count of the damage because the storm destroyed communication lines, and the extent of the wreckage is still settling. Particularly at risk are the people still living in shelters from the 2010 earthquake. Secretary-General's Deputy Special Representative for Haiti, Mourad Wahba, “much of the population” had been displaced, and already 10,000 were in shelters. Said it is sending 300 Marines to help.

Road clearing on route to — MINUSTAH (@MINUSTAH). Hurricane Matthew swept through Haiti on Tuesday, bringing the death toll of the powerful storm to seven. The Category 4 hurricane made landfall in the early morning. Citizens of the impoverished country soon faced flash floods and mudslides.

At least two people were killed in Haiti, while four have died in the Dominican Republic and one person died in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, CNN.

The storm has reached historic levels, according to one Colorado State University meteorologist: Hurricane has been a Cat. 4-5 in the Caribbean longer than all other Atlantic hurricanes from 2008-2016 combined. — Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach).

More than 1 million people are from South Carolina’s coastal areas on Wednesday as Matthew nears, state emergency officials said Tuesday. Governor Nikki Haley declared a state of emergency and urged residents to move at least 100 miles inland. Matthew is currently expected to hit hardest along the South Carolina coast on Friday night or Saturday morning. Florida Governor Rick Scott and Georgia Governor Nathan Deal already issued emergency orders on Monday in anticipation of the storm’s arrival on Thursday. Further north, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory also made similar declarations for 66 counties.

“With each subsequent forecast, the impacts to our state appear to be more substantial,” McCrory. Earlier this month, TIME published a of a young blond mother dressed in a tank top and skinny jeans, striking a defiant pose as her three-year-old son suckled at her breast. That photo is still being dissected in countless blog posts and coffee shop conversations. Some of the talk centers on the sheer strangeness of the image. (As Seth Meyers put it on, 'Did the kid from Modern Family sexually assault his yoga instructor?' ) But for mothers of young children, the photo itself may be less disturbing than the cover line, which demands: 'Are You Mom Enough?'

It's a stark, accusatory question, but it captures the debate that's been raging ever since 1993, when Dr. William Sears and his wife, Martha, published. The enormous tome gives useful tips on everything from diaper changing to cold medicines, but its main subject is 'attachment parenting,' a philosophy the Searses promote at every opportunity.

As the TIME article explains, the Searses offer three main pieces of advice: sleep with your child, wear him kangaroo-like in a baby carrier, and breastfeed him until he decides to stop. This year, podcasts got funnier, sharper, and even more niche. Our recommendations here pass a vigorous audio smell test. First, the arrival of a new podcast episode must send you into an ethical quandary: How do I get out of at least some of my obligations today to listen to this? Second, you must be able to recommend this to a colleague with the knowledge that your reputation is at stake. A podcast that teaches you how to prepare your taxes by hand might blow your hair back, but it’s doubtful you’ll recommend it to anyone aside from your accountant.

Third, we recused ourselves from ranking any podcasts produced by The Atlantic, including and. Finally, the podcast world, like any other sphere, is about what have you done for me lately. The best shows don’t paint themselves into a corner. They evolve and progress or risk their listeners hitting “unsubscribe.” Podcasts, like cowboys, shouldn’t get fenced in. These shows generated maximum buzz, kept us refreshing our apps, broke boundaries, and made our future selves romanticize the golden years of podcasting. Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young It’s too bad that Bunk, published just last month, had the misfortune to come out during a time that finds hoaxes and lies to be no longer releva—just kidding. Kevin Young’s rich history of fakery could not, in fact, be more urgent: This is a moment of deeply earned anxiety about the fate of truth itself, one in which science and fact and empiricism are threatened by the same choose-your-own-reality impulses that have been presaged by the forces Young outlines in his subtitle.

Young is a poet as well as a critic, author, and professor—he directs the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and recently became the poetry editor of The New Yorker—and Bunk is accordingly deep in its research, profound in its insights, and lyrical in its prose. It begins with the “winged men on the moon” stories published in the New York Sun, the 1835 version of fake-news-y clickbait, and from there offers a wide-ranging biography of B.S., from P.T. Barnum’s “humbugs” to the false fairies of Cottingley to the familiar fakers of the present day: James Frey, Jayson Blair, Lance Armstrong, Rachel Dolezal.

While the details of this chronicle are revelatory in themselves— Bunk offers nearly 500 pages’ worth of folly to explore—the book is even more compelling as an argument: that hoaxes, so tangled with stereotype and systemic lies, are inextricable from race, “a fake thing pretending to be real.” As Young puts its, in one of the many sentences I underlined and margin-starred and will keep thinking of for years to come: “The hoax reminds us, uncomfortably, that the stories we tell don’t just express the society of the self.” Instead, “they construct it.' It’s Christmastime for workers, and companies want everybody to know. After Congressional Republicans passed their $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts on Wednesday, a number of companies responded by announcing raises or bonuses for their workers. Comcast it would give $1,000 bonuses to more than 100,000 workers. Fifth Third Bancorp said it would give out bonuses and boost its minimum wage, with the cut, in its words, “the opportunity to reevaluate its compensation structure and share some of those benefits with its talented and dedicated workforce.” AT&T, Boeing, Washington Federal, and Wells Fargo the same. The announcements seemed the result of some basic financial logic: Lower corporate taxes— the Republicans’ bill cut the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent and included provisions to encourage businesses to bring cash back from overseas—would mean higher corporate profits and thus more money to pay workers with.

President Trump singled out two FBI officials by name Saturday afternoon, as Republicans have intensified their efforts to discredit the special counsel investigation into links between the Trump campaign and what intelligence agencies have said was a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election to Trump. “Wow, ‘FBI lawyer James Baker reassigned,’ according to @FoxNews.” Trump tweeted. “How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?” Trump added, “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”.

In late October of this year, the office-sharing start-up WeWork announced that it was buying Lord & Taylor’s flagship store in New York City. Coming as this did in the wake of the bankruptcies of such long-established retailers as The Limited and Toys “R” Us, it was widely viewed as the latest harbinger of the “retail apocalypse.” It isn’t just chain stores in economically distressed suburbs that are going belly up, but high-end luxury-goods purveyors along the retail corridors of America’s leading cities, such as New York’s Madison Avenue, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and Chicago’s Miracle Mile. All told, roughly were lost between October 2016 and April 2017. In the next five years, one out of every four malls is projected to close, according to. The square footage of America’s already dead malls covers more land than the city of Boston. When Donald Trump’s press secretary was to comment on a rogues’ gallery of foreign leaders embracing her boss’s catchphrase of “fake news,” she essentially made the Las Vegas argument: What happens in the United States stays in the United States. “I’m not going to speak to specifics of another country when I don’t know the details,” said Sarah Sanders.

“The White House is concerned about false and inaccurate information being pushed out. To mislead the American people.” One of the lessons of the past year, however, is that Vegas rules don’t apply to “fake news.” The phrase has escaped the confines of the American president’s Twitter feed. And other have trotted out the expression to reject evidence that the government summarily executed prisoners and massacred civilians with chemical weapons. The Chinese military a website for the public to report “fake news,” including “malicious posts,” about the People’s Liberation Army, while the Russian Foreign Ministry a webpage where international media reports that it considers problematic are slapped with a bright-red “FAKE” stamp. Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way?

What are the transformations that occur in the brain when we practice meditation? In a new book titled, two friends—Matthieu Ricard, who left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—engage in an unusually well-matched conversation about meditation and the brain. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt.

Matthieu Ricard: Although one finds in the Buddhist literature many treatises on “traditional sciences”—medicine, cosmology, botanic, logic, and so on—Tibetan Buddhism has not endeavored to the same extent as Western civilizations to expand its knowledge of the world through the natural sciences. Rather it has pursued an exhaustive investigation of the mind for 2,500 years and has accumulated, in an empirical way, a wealth of experiential findings over the centuries. A great number of people have dedicated their whole lives to this contemplative science.