"A passenger was removed from a Breeze Airways flight that traveled from New York to Florida after allegedly taking snacks from the beverage cart without paying, airline officials said...
Breeze sells a variety of snacks on board, including $5 options such as gummies, potato chips and popcorn, as well as $10 premium items including ramen noodles and cheese trays.
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. . . All they do is show you’ve been to college. "(Kurt Vonnegut)"I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I’ll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript" (Edward Abbey) [In reference to The Monkey Wrench Gang and preserved in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast]"With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a useful little chap." (Abraham Lincoln)"I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”" (Ursula LeGuin) [from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination]
"Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the Department of Defense will offer testosterone deficiency screening for soldiers 30 and older.The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X...“Warfighters” aged 30 and above will undergo annual tests as part of their health assessments, while those under 30 can choose to opt in, Hegseth said. Treatment, including testosterone replacement therapy, is voluntary and aimed at “restoring and optimizing” natural capabilities...Hegseth is not the first member of the Trump administration to address the so-called “crisis” of low testosterone, or “low T”. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the 72-year-old health secretary, has spoken about injecting testosterone as part of his personal “anti-ageing regimen”. In October, he warned, without evidence, that today’s American teenagers have “50% of the testosterone of a 65-year-old man”.Testosterone, and concerns about a shortage thereof, has become a political fixation on the right. Alternative media commentators such as Tucker Carlson have decried a crisis of masculinity in films such as The End of Men, while influencers promote “T-maxxing” and direct-to-consumer testosterone injections...According to research published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, young men are being aggressively targeted online by influencers and wellness companies promoting hormone tests and treatments as essential to being a “real man”, despite screening for low testosterone being medically unwarranted in most people in this age group.
Sima* is 18, but has already given birth four times. Her youngest is a newborn, the eldest is four. Sitting with her children in their mud-brick room in Badghis province, Sima says: “After the Taliban entered the country, I had just finished the sixth grade and was supposed to start the seventh. But two months later, my father pressured me immensely to marry my cousin. After being beaten by my father several times, I was forced to accept.”...Interviews with workers at one public hospital in northern Afghanistan revealed that 42 underage girls gave birth in the first five months of this year. Six were in their second pregnancy. Five had ectopic pregnancies – a leading cause of maternal deaths – and 18 had caesarean sections. Two died, though their babies survived...They are victims of a growing trend toward child marriage, driven by Taliban policies legalising the practice and forcing girls out of school, combined with a deepening humanitarian crisis in which families are forced to sell their daughters to pay debts or buy food...Some families falsely believe the younger the mother, the healthier and smarter the child. Mothers who are still children themselves often haven’t completed their physical or psychological growth and face higher risk of severe bleeding, anaemia, miscarriage, obstructed labour and premature birth, along with a greater likelihood of a low-weight or unhealthy infant...Shabnam says families often resist caesarean section, believing they limit future pregnancies. Two young mothers in her care recently died in childbirth because their husbands refused to permit one...The other three families interviewed for this report, all in western Afghanistan, say their daughters had been used to settle debts – money paid in advance, the daughters to be handed over later. Three of the girls are still under 10, unaware of the future that has been planned for them...“When she turns eight, they will take her from us,” says Golnar. “They gave 100,000 afghani upfront, and they will give another 100,000 after they take the girl from me. We gave it directly to the creditors for the debts.” She worries about her granddaughter’s future, remembering girls sold years ago in her neighbourhood: “They have no future. Whether they leave us to burn in a fire or face anything else, we will not know.”
Until the 1960s, popular belief held that most mammals outside of primates were monochromats. In the last half-century, however, a focus on behavioral and genetic testing of mammals has accumulated extensive evidence of dichromatic color vision in a number of mammalian orders. Mammals are now usually assumed to be dichromats (possessing S- and L-cones), with monochromats viewed as the exceptions.The common vertebrate ancestor, extant during the Cambrian, was tetrachromatic, possessing 4 distinct opsins classes. Early mammalian evolution would see the loss of two of these four opsins, due to the nocturnal bottleneck, as dichromacy may improve an animal's ability to distinguish colors in dim light. Placental mammals are therefore – as a rule – dichromatic.The exceptions to this rule of dichromatic vision in placental mammals are old world monkeys and apes, which re-evolved trichromacy, and marine mammals (both pinnipeds and cetaceans) which are cone monochromats. New World Monkeys are a partial exception: in most species, males are dichromats, and about 60% of females are trichromats, but the owl monkeys are cone monochromats, and both sexes of howler monkeys are trichromats.Trichromacy has been retained or re-evolved in marsupials, where trichromatic vision is widespread. Recent genetic and behavioral evidence suggests the South American marsupial Didelphis albiventris is dichromatic, with only two classes of cone opsins having been found within the genus Didelphis.
