A property owner who illegally demolished a 1936 Twin Peaks house designed by a renowned modernist must rebuild an exact replica of the home rather than the much larger structure the property owner had proposed replacing it with, the City Planning Commission ruled this week.

In a unanimous 5-0 vote late Thursday night, the commission also ordered that the property owner — Ross Johnston, through his 49 Hopkins LLC — include a sidewalk plaque telling the story of the original house designed ...

Darlene Coker knew she was dying. She just wanted to know why.

She knew that her cancer, mesothelioma, arose in the delicate membrane surrounding her lungs and other organs. She knew it was as rare as it was deadly, a signature of exposure to asbestos. And she knew it afflicted mostly men who inhaled asbestos dust in mines and industries such as shipbuilding that used the carcinogen before its risks were understood.

Coker, 52 years old, had raised two daughters and was running a massage ...

When Charles Barkley's mother, Charcey Glenn, passed away in June 2015, Barkley's hometown of Leeds, Alabama, came to the funeral to pay respects. But there was also an unexpected guest.

Barkley’s friends couldn’t quite place him. He wasn’t a basketball player, he wasn’t a sports figure and he wasn’t from Barkley’s hometown. Here’s what I can tell you about him: he wore striped, red polo shirts tucked into khaki shorts and got really excited about two-for-one deals. He was a ...

Vox has an explainer today about how YouTube automatically steers users toward deranged and conspiratorial videos, even if the users have started out with perfectly ordinary interests. This has been explained before, but it keeps needing to be explained because it’s so incomprehensible in normal human terms: YouTube’s algorithms, which are built to keep people watching as many videos and video ads as possible, have apparently followed that instruction to the conclusion, as Zeynep Tufekci ...

THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT AN EXCUSE TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE

A New York judge has resigned after making homophobic remarks involving Hollywood actor Viggo Mortensen.

Balls in your court, Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

On the day before Halloween, nearly six months after we were first puzzled by the slo-mo Mister Softee jingle invading the sidewalk Wi-Fi tablets of New York City, I received a cryptic email that began as follows: "I'm the one who's been making the LinkNYC kiosks blast Mister Softee, and other noises and sounds. I'm contacting you through a burner email address, because I don't think I want to identify myself as the culprit. You might understand my indecision better if you knew who I am. Or ...

When I ask Eames, who’s meeting with me to break his silence for the first time, he cops to it all: an audacious Hail Mary from a down-on-his-luck Midwestern death-metal artist who had tried and failed to make it the usual way. So he decided to fake it instead. “It’s a publicity stunt,” he says, “but the music is very real.”

Neilsen was staring at a ghost, a bird that the world had written off as extinct. The fact that it was less than a year old meant that there were more out there and they were breeding. The last time anyone collected a living Night Parrot, Australia was still a British dominion and the primary mode of transportation in the Outback was the one-humped camel. That was in 1912.

Ever since the midterm election, conservative media in the United States have targeted with special zeal Ilhan Omar, an incoming Somali-American Democratic congresswoman and a devout Muslim who wears hijab. In response to Democrats’ push to remove a headwear ban on the House floor to accommodate Omar, conservative commentator and pastor E.W. Jackson complained on a radio show that Muslims were transforming Congress into an “Islamic republic.”

The Democratic Party has several rising ...

UPDATE, Dec. 12, 5:20 p.m.: I have confirmed that according to the latest campaign finance report, which covers the period from Oct. 17 through Nov. 26, the O’Rourke campaign had not returned 29 “large donations” of over $200 from oil and gas executives, violating the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge O’Rourke signed.
...
Out of all federal candidates in the 2018 election cycle, Democratic Texas representative and 2018 Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke had the second-highest total of donations ...

Federal authorities have arrested 170 immigrants who came forward seeking to sponsor migrant children in government custody, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

ICE said Tuesday that the arrests were of immigrants suspected of being in the United States illegally and took place from early July to November. They were the result of background checks conducted on potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children placed under the care of the Department of Health and Human ...

Britain's embattled Prime Minister Theresa May will go back to London empty-handed on Friday, after racing to Brussels to try to get a few more concessions from the European Union.

The prime minister was hoping to get "legal and political" reassurances from the other 27 member countries regarding the Irish backstop — the biggest stumbling block preventing progress in the Brexit process...Sterling was down 0.6 percent against the dollar at $1.2591, with Reuters citing May's unsuccessful ...

The Center for American Progress does not just accept shady donations. It also gives them. Journalist Andrew Perez reported that according to financial disclosure forms, CAP donated $200,000 last year to the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is a right-wing free-market think tank perhaps best known as the longtime home of racist social scientist Charles Murray.

Now someone is taking advantage of that ludicrous belief. For months, a Twitter account called “TheRealRAnon” has been posing as a man some QAnon believers think is actually Kennedy.

In fact, the Twitter account appears to be run by a former Green Party congressional candidate in Arizona who makes money off QAnon supporters through Amazon affiliate links.

Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, is under consideration to become the next White House chief of staff, CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett has confirmed, citing a source familiar with the process.

Kushner met with Mr. Trump on Wednesday to discuss the job. Kushner's candidacy for chief of staff was first reported by HuffPost.

Many colleges and universities were caught by surprise when frustration among rural Americans spilled over into national politics during the 2016 election. That, in addition to steady declines in enrollment, has pushed some schools to pay more attention to rural students — and to recognize that these students need at least as much help navigating the college experience as low-income, first-generation racial and ethnic minorities from inner cities.

Rural students graduate from high school at ...

Today we are going to create an interactive ornament with Micro:Bits and MakeCode! These plans are just one way to use these multi-functional micro-boards to create seasonal decorations that blink, scroll words, and play sounds. Have fun, get creative, and think outside the literal box!

On any given day at the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, visitors can to see more than 60 varieties of butterflies. In the spring and fall, monarchs and other species can blanket the center’s 100 acres of subtropical bushlands that extend from the visitor center to to the banks of the Rio Grande river, where their property, and US sovereignty, ends.

Today the most diverse butterfly sanctuary in the country, and other protected areas in the lower Rio Grande Valley along the ...