The Latest

At a retirement home in Ohio, Henry Heimlich, the 96-year-old inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, performed his procedure for the first time, dislodging a piece of hamburger from an 87-year-old woman’s airway. Merriam-Webster defined the hot dog as a sandwich. A judge in Italy dismissed a criminal complaint filed against a 50-year-old man who paid his child support in pizza and calzones, and a man in Texas paid a speeding ticket with 22,000 pennies. Read more...

Barack Obama visits Hiroshima; Tom Engelhardt searches for our atomic history

Navigating Colombia's class-based estrato system

Historian Gar Alperovitz on the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto proposed legalizing same-sex marriage, Canadian parliament members introduced legislation that would ban discrimination against transgender people, and teenagers in Chester, Vermont, wore “Straight Pride” T-shirts to protest a new policy at their high school that allows transgender students to use whatever bathroom accords with their gender identity. A Louisiana lawmaker proposed and then withdrew legislation that would have required dancers at strip clubs to weigh less than 161 pounds. “I can’t strip, either,” said the representative. “I’m a little overweight.” Read more...

Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, who called the pope a “son of a whore” and has been accused of running vigilante death squads that have killed 1,000 people, was elected president of the Philippines, promising to end crime in six months by “killing five criminals a week” and by restoring the “death penalty by hanging in public.” “If I fail,” he said during his campaign, “kill me.” Read more...

Helen Ouyang on the cost of crowd-sourcing drugs, Paul Wood on Trump's supporters, Walter Kirn on political predictions, Sonia Faleiro on a man's search for his kidnapped children, and Rivka Galchen on The People v. O. J. Simpson.

Indian scientists attempted to curb carbon emissions by making cows less flatulent, and the Tunisian champions of the cattle-herding mobile game Bagra were given an adult cow. A 10-year-old Finnish hacker was awarded $10,000 after discovering a bug in Instagram. “I could have deleted anyone’s comments,” he said. “Like Justin Bieber’s.” Justin Bieber was sued for destroying the iPhone of a man who took photos of him failing to complete a beer bong. Read more...

What does the war in Aleppo smell of? It smells of carbine, of wood smoke, of unwashed bodies, of rubbish rotting, of fear.

Journalists are doing the Clintons’ dirty work for them and their machine.

A New Jersey judge reduced to simple assault the charge of aggravated assault filed against a man who while dressed as the Easter Bunny dropped a 15-month-old girl during a photo shoot and then began to fight her mother. A daughter and mother in Georgia were charged with animal abuse for keeping 38 cats in their van, a man in Iowa was charged with animal neglect for keeping 62 ducks in a U-Haul, an elephant in Cambodia that was forced to carry tourists on a 104-degree day had a heart attack and died, a man in Hawaii was filmed punching a pregnant monk seal, and researchers found that dogs experience anxiety when hugged by humans. Read more...

Obama's legacy in the Middle East

Samuel James photographs the English Premier League season; Leicester City nears the title

Illustrations of theaters in the Bronx, as they appeared decades ago and today.

Trump wants to cut off Mexicans’ money? That’s what the Obama Administration already does to Somalis.

The United Kingdom issued an advisory against North Carolina in response to the state’s passing of a law in March that requires transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates. A 30-year-old man in Philadelphia accidentally killed his four-year-old daughter while waving a gun around a room full of children, then attempted to frame his nearby five-year-old daughter by wiping the blood from his hand onto her shirt. A man in India cut off the hands of a teenager accused of raping his then-seven-month-old daughter. Read more...

Visiting Nepal in the midst of its fuel crisis

Rebecca Solnit, Andrew J. Bacevich, Samuel James, Elisabeth Zerofsky, Paul Wachter, and more

A Washington State woman who had eaten Ruffles potato chips every day for 20 years discovered she had throat cancer after a chip injured her tonsil. It was reported that a seal in Ireland was scared away from a seafood restaurant by a photo of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a gorilla was filmed dancing at a British zoo, and employees of an aquarium in New Zealand revealed that an octopus named Inky escaped into a nearby bay, leaving behind his tank mate Blotchy. "He managed to make his way to one of the drain holes,” the aquarium’s manager, “and off he went.” Read more...

Searching for Rwanda's tortured icon.

The Tokyo Fire Department announced that 104 people had been hospitalized for acute alcohol intoxication during this season’s cherry-blossom viewing parties. Sweden’s tourism agency installed a phone line for anyone in the world to call “a random Swede,” and suggested discussing the northern lights, darkness, meatballs, and suicide rates. In California, two men began stabbing one another in the head and neck after one defecated on the other’s lawn. Read more...

"Both Sanders and Trump affirm their determination to rebuild an America weakened by unhealthy relationships with the outside world."

A visit to the American Museum of Natural History's frozen-specimen collection. 

Illustrations of cigar stores on Broadway in New York City, as they appeared between the early 1900s and today

Lawmakers in California and New York announced they would raise their states’ minimum wages to $15 per hour, and an assemblywoman in New Jersey proposed a law that would impose jail sentences of up to 15 days on pedestrians caught sending text messages while walking. A 72-year-old man was arrested on a plane in Hawaii for trying to bite and head-butt fellow passengers after being told he wasn't allowed to do yoga, and a 59-year-old man on an EgyptAir flight traveling from Alexandria to Cairo claimed to be wearing an explosive vest and forced the crew to redirect the plane to Cyprus, where his ex-wife lives. "Always there is," said the president of Cyprus, "a woman." Read more...

Five hundred family members of leprosy patients sue Japan; Rebecca Solnit explores how leprosy teaches empathy

Joseph Hickman discusses his new book, The Burn Pits, which tells the story of thousands of U.S. soldiers who, after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, have developed rare cancers and respiratory diseases.

In Sweden, postal workers discovered a package containing 300 live cockroaches; and in England, a cat was accidentally sealed into a box full of DVDs and mailed 250 miles, from Cornwall to West Sussex. In South Carolina, a woman was arrested on charges of buggery after she shared videos online of herself performing sexual acts with a dog; and in Florida, a woman was charged with three counts of engaging in sexual conduct with an animal after a man who was suspected of sexually battering her showed police officers videos she had sent him of her having oral sex with two dogs. Read more...

A man in Euclid, Ohio, was arrested for egging a neighbor’s house more than 100 times and pelting it with grapefruits and onions. Authorities in Florence, Italy, tried to discourage graffiti by allowing tourists to leave messages on digital tablets located at historical sites. A North Carolina man sentenced in 2006 to 30 years in prison for conspiracy and racketeering had his conviction overturned because his lawyer had slept during the trial “almost every day,” and a Michigan man who was convicted of unlawful imprisonment and carrying a concealed weapon sang Adele’s “Hello” at his sentencing hearing. “I love Adele’s music,” said the judge before sentencing the man to 17 years in prison.