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This week, a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of engaging in a financial scheme to pay hush money to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels.

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In 2018, Deborah Copaken listed “30 simple shared truths” she learned at her 30th Harvard reunion. Among them:
“No one’s life turned out exactly as anticipated, not even for the most ardent planner.

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
When Mana Parast was a medical resident in 2003, she had an experience that would change the course of her entire career: her first fetal autopsy.
The autopsy, which pushed Parast to pursue perinatal and placental pathology, was on a third-trimester stillbirth. “There was nothing wrong with the baby; it was a beautiful baby,” she recalls. We’re not done, she remembers her teacher telling her. Go find the placenta.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty,” and since then, federal spending on anti-poverty initiatives has steadily ballooned. The federal government now devotes hundreds of billions of dollars a year to programs that exclusively or disproportionately benefit low-income Americans, including housing subsidies, food stamps, welfare, and tax credits for working poor families. (This is true even if you exclude Medicaid, the single-biggest such program.

According to forecasts from a range of sources, the hurricane season that begins today could be the direst in recorded history. Abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with the persistently strong winds formed by an emerging La Niña weather front, create dangerous conditions that could lead to as many as 25 named storms in the North Atlantic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

After a jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges yesterday, Bronze Age Pervert, the alter ego of the edgelord influencer Costin Alamariu, retweeted one of his own posts from March. It is a movie clip depicting a scene of armed men storming buildings and gunning people down. In the text accompanying the post, Bronze Age Pervert jokes that the clip is real footage of a “well-planned neutralization operation” that will take place after Trump wins his reelection campaign.

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Donald Trump is a felon. Yesterday, he was convicted on 34 counts in his New York criminal trial; today, he delivered an unrestrained and dangerous series of remarks about the verdict and his political opponents.

For weeks, American officials have referred to an “extraordinarily generous” offer made by Israel to secure a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas in Gaza. Today, President Joe Biden told the world what that offer actually is. Speaking from the White House, Biden laid out a multistage “Israeli proposal” for ending the current war and called on Hamas to accept its terms, and for the Israeli leadership to stand behind the deal despite internal right-wing pressure to fight on.

Republican leaders are adamant and practically unanimous on one thing: The case that got Donald Trump convicted on 34 felony counts was a political prosecution.
“This was a purely political exercise, not a legal one,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “This entire trial has been a sham, and it is nothing more than political persecution,” charged Senator Ted Cruz. “This is a politically motivated sham trial,” said Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Fast & Furious 6. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Top Gun: Maverick. For decades, Memorial Day weekend has been a reliable time for unveiling a new installment in a popular film franchise, sometimes to the tune of more than $100 million at the box office over the holiday break.
But this year’s Memorial Day weekend returns were meager, delivering a blow to Hollywood. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, earned just $32 million; the other new release, The Garfield Movie, cracked only $31 million.