Old cigarette ads often made outrageous claims about cigarettes, including, infamously, that they could cure asthma. (They can't.) So the rumors that smokers might be at lower risk for contracting COVID-19 seem similarly specious. Oddly, such rumors seemed to be rooted in a grain of truth. (We'll get to that later.) Still, Salon spoke with three…
TOPLINE The assertion that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, is gaining traction among prominent Republicans—and, reportedly, with officials inside the federal government—even as scientists remain skeptical of the claim and no hard evidence exists to support it. An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan…
U.S.|Grand Juror in Breonna Taylor Case Says Deliberations Were MisrepresentedThe Kentucky attorney general’s office said it would release the panel’s recordings after a grand juror contended in a court filing that its discussions were inaccurately characterized.Breonna Taylor's family and the lawyer Ben Crump, right, said the charges a Kentucky grand jury agreed upon in the…
(John Finney Photography/Moment/Getty Images) An abnormally bad season of weather may have had a significant impact on the death toll from both World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to new research, with many more lives being lost due to torrential rain and plummeting temperatures. Through a detailed analysis of an ice…