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Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said.

The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene’s growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.

“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.

“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Monday said more than 40 foreign operators of Boeing 737 airplanes could be using aircraft with rudder components that may pose safety risks.

The NTSB last week issued urgent safety recommendations about the potential for a jammed rudder control system on some Boeing 737 airplanes after a February incident involving a United Airlines flight.

The NTSB also disclosed on Monday that it has learned two foreign operators suffered similar incidents in 2019 involving rollout guidance actuators.

Alberta's orphan well woes are about to swell following the end of a controversial court case involving some of the biggest names in the Canadian oilpatch.

The province's Orphan Well Association (OWA) is tasked with cleaning up oil and natural gas wells that no longer have an owner, something that is often caused by a company going bankrupt.

The OWA already has an inventory of about 1,600 wells in need of closure and reclamation. That workload is expected to more than double as the bankruptcy of Sequoia Resources is finally settled — a court case that has been followed closely by many because of its broad implications for landowners, industry and taxpayers.

With Sequoia, the OWA is expecting to inherit 1,800 to 2,000 more wells, in addition to the company's other infrastructure, such as pipelines. The estimated clean-up cost of the Sequoia properties is about $200 million.

One in every ten pregnancies in the US ends in a miscarriage, a common medical event for which there are safe and effective treatments should there be complications. But over the past two years, having a miscarriage in many states has become far more dangerous, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.

Thirteen states have passed total abortion bans. Four others ban abortion after six weeks—a de facto ban. These laws have resulted in a rash of horror stories—not about the anticipated illegal backroom abortion deaths, but about ordinary women having ordinary but occasionally life-threatening pregnancy complications, while hospitals and doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted.

Among the legion of GOP anti-abortion politicians in the US who’ve helped create this carnage, there is one you might expect to have some sympathy for the suffering of these women: Vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator JD Vance. On the surface, the politician who denigrated Democrats as the party of “childless cat ladies” and suggested that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,” was to take care of children, would not be an obvious softie for the victims of policies that have left women bleeding out in hospital restrooms. And yet, he might understand the situation better than many of his Republican colleagues.

IN JANUARY 2023, U.S. federal agents raided the home of a Tucson maintenance worker who had a side hustle hauling packages across the border to Mexico.

They estimate that over the previous two years, the gray-bearded courier had ferried about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel. That’s 15,432 pounds, sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills – enough to kill every living soul in the United States several times over. The chemicals had traveled by air from China to Los Angeles, were flown or ground-shipped to Tucson, then driven the last miles to Mexico by the freelance delivery driver.

Even more astonishing is what fed this circuitous route: a few paragraphs buried in a 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms that made it easier for imported goods, including those fentanyl ingredients, to enter the United States.

On Tuesday, Louisiana will become the first state in the U.S. to categorize two widely used abortion pills as “controlled dangerous substances.”

Opponents argue the classification could have catastrophic impacts in a state that already has a near-total abortion ban and one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation. Doctors fear the reclassification will cause delays in accessing the drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — which together can be used to manage miscarriages, while misoprostol induces labor and treats severe bleeding after delivery. They also worry the practice of reclassifying the drugs might spread beyond Louisiana.

Proponents say the new law should help prevent coerced abortion, pointing to a Texas case in which a pregnant woman was given seven misoprostol pills by her husband without her knowledge; the baby survived. Over the past 15 years, news outlets have reported on similar cases — none in Louisiana — but the issue does not appear widespread.

Another top adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams resigned Monday, even as the Democrat’s lawyer criticized the federal corruption case against him and asked a judge to toss out bribery charges.

Timothy Pearson, one of the mayor’s closest confidants, submitted his resignation Monday evening, weeks after federal agents seized cellphones, documents and cash from his Long Island home, said his attorney, Hugh H. Mo.

Pearson, a retired police inspector who served in the department alongside Adams, had a broad role that included overseeing contracts and security at migrant shelters while also maintaining significant influence over the police department.

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A failure to document the citizenship status of Arizona voters is now estimated to affect as many as 218,000 people — more than double what state election officials initially said after discovering the mistake this month.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) announced the new number Monday and said the problem affects more Republicans than Democrats or independents. State election officials have previously said that the number of affected voters could change as they investigate the scope of the 20-year-old problem, which began as part of an effort to implement a Republican-led state law intended to prevent rare instances of voting by noncitizens.

Arizona voters who do not provide proof of citizenship, such as a U.S. birth certificate, are not allowed to vote in state or local elections. But the state Supreme Court this month ruled those whose voting status has recently been drawn into question can vote in all races this fall.

The US is known as one of the most litigious countries in the world, and in recent years there’s been a new effort to apply that reputation to one of the nation’s most vexing problems: gun violence.

In the absence of political change to tackle the US’s epidemic of gun violence, survivors of mass shootings have been launching multimillion-dollar lawsuits against gunmakers, gun dealers, tech companies and the federal government for their failure to protect them.

While suits against the gun industry have happened before, their increased use now is, in part, due to the rise of large, well-resourced violence-prevention groups backing them as a tool for change – to shift the narrative about who bears responsibility for mass shootings, and to force the gun industry, social media companies and the federal government to shift their practices.

“The lawsuits are created because we can’t get anything done at the state, local or federal levels, so we go for the manufacturers,” said Dion Green, who survived a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in 2019. “No one likes when their money gets attacked.”

Llusco, 39, is one of about 10 Indigenous female mountain guides in Bolivia. Her long black hair is tied in two plaits, linked with a large safety pin and wool decorations in red, yellow and green, the colours of the Bolivian flag. She is wearing a pollera, a voluminous floral skirt over layers of pink petticoats. She has paired it with a pink diamanté top, beneath a pink cardigan and a red fleece gilet. “I have never worn trousers to go up a mountain and I never will. Our polleras don’t impede us,” she says of the traditional Aymara garment.

She has been climbing Huayna Potosí for most of her life, but on 17 December 2015 she was part of a group of 11 women who made it to the summit. They called themselves the cholitas escaladoras (the climbing cholitas) and they made headlines when they scaled more peaks in the Cordillera Real. The word cholita comes from chola which was previously used as a pejorative term for indigenous Aymara women.

Huayna Potosí is one place she keeps returning to that fills her with joy. “I feel free, so happy, as if I’m escaping and the mountain is calling me. I’m also in love with nature,” she says. Minutes later, a condor, a national symbol of Bolivia and the largest bird of prey in the world, cruises overhead.

The town of Hilario Ascasubi near Argentina's eastern Atlantic coast has a parrot problem.

Thousands of the green-yellow-red birds have invaded, driven by deforestation in the surrounding hills, according to biologists. They bite on the town's electric cables, causing outages, and are driving residents around the bend with their incessant screeching and deposits everywhere of parrot poo.

"The hillsides are disappearing, and this is causing them to come closer to the cities to find food, shelter and water," biologist Daiana Lera said, explaining that much of Argentina's forest land has been gradually lost over the years.

In the past few years, the parrots have started to arrive, seeking refuge in the town through autumn and winter. At times, according to locals, there are up to 10 parrots for each of the town's 5,000 human inhabitants. During the summer, the birds migrate south to the cliffs of Patagonia for the breeding season.

Buying a house may remain out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future, with mortgage costs unlikely to fall enough to offset lofty home prices and weak spending power, economists and real estate agents say. 0 Even with expectations that Bank of Canada will keep cutting rates in the coming months, the issue of home affordability - which has strangled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's poll numbers - is unlikely to fade before the next election.

The mandate for the Liberal minority government ends at the end of October 2025, but an election could come well before then, with the Conservative opposition spoiling to end Trudeau's nine-year run at the top.

"You won't get back to an affordable range for housing on a sustained basis for a decade," Tony Stillo, director at forecasting and analysis group Oxford Economics, said last week at a conference.