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Survey people about a range of issues, ask which issues are a "very big problem for the country," and more Americans will cite "made-up news" than terrorism, illegal immigration, racism or sexism.

Of course, some point the finger primarily at President Trump while others blame irresponsible news outlets. People are using different definitions of "made-up." But the study shows a widespread awareness of what's sometimes called the War on Truth.

1: Pew says "Americans blame political leaders and activists far more than journalists for the creation of made-up news but put the responsibility on the news media to fix it." Only 9% say the onus is mostly on the tech companies.2: When people bemoan made-up news, they're not just talking about politics: 61% of respondents said there's a lot of bogus content out there about entertainment and celebrities.3: "52% of Americans have shared made-up news knowingly and/or unknowingly." Almost everyone says they only found out the info was bogus after sharing.4: Here is a hopeful sign! 78% "say they have checked the facts in news stories themselves." More here...

Citigroup is making progress toward shrinking its gender pay gap. But it still has some work to do.

Globally, the bank's female employees earned 27% less than men did, according to a new report from the company. That's a slight improvement over the 29% gender pay gap Citigroup reported for 2018. This year's analysis also found that the median income for minority workers in the US was 6% less than the median income for non-minorities, down from 7% last year.

When adjusted to account for job titles, seniority and location, women at Citigroup (C) earned 1% less than their male counterparts, according to the report. Citigroup said that following a review of its global pay, it made pay adjustments as part of this year's compensation cycle according to the blog post.The company also said it has committed to increasing representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for black employees in the US by the end of 2021.

Brain surgeons are bringing artificial intelligence and new imaging techniques into the operating room, to diagnose tumors as accurately as pathologists, and much faster, according to a report in the journal Nature Medicine.

The traditional method, which requires sending the tissue to a lab, freezing and staining it, then peering at it through a microscope, takes 20 to 30 minutes or longer. The new technique takes two and a half minutes.

In addition to speeding up the process, the new technique can also detect some details that traditional methods may miss, like the spread of a tumor along nerve fibers

Washing your hands frequently, with plenty of water and soap, is one of the simplest and most effective measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Yet due to a lack of water supply and indoor plumbing, three-quarters of households in the developing world won't be able to follow this advice, Tim Wainwright of the nonprofit WaterAid told The Guardian, because they lack some place to wash with soap and water. How will they cope when the pandemic escalates and there is no clean water to help stop contagion?

The pandemic may be raging in Europe and the US, but it is spreading across Asia, Africa and Latin America, from where it may yet return to strike the Northern Hemisphere again. This pandemic is a global threat, and it will not be defeated until our most vulnerable communities are safe. One of the crucial ways of keeping them safe is to ensure they have access to safe water and sanitation; never has the sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal, which aims to ensure just this by 2030, been more vital for saving and protecting lives.

Two years ago, Cape Town in South Africa came perilously close to "Day Zero" -- the day its 3.7 million residents would run out of water. Strict water rationing has been the order of the day ever since. Water scarcity increases the burden on the poorest of the poor -- women who must walk for miles to find water and carry it back to their homes. And, of course, water scarcity makes the challenge of delivering clean water and sanitation much more complex.

When a Trump administration official said he doesn't think systemic racism exists in policing, many were stunned -- especially after studies have shown different races are often treated differently.

"There is no doubt that there are some racist police," O'Brien added. "I think they're the minority. I think they're the few bad apples, and we need to root them out."

"Of course there is" systemic racism, St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell said. "It's not just in police departments across this country. My goodness, there's systemic racism within pretty much everything in this country."

Seriously ill Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to a large observational study published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet.

Researchers looked at data from more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients from 671 hospitals. All were hospitalized from late December to mid-April and had died or been discharged by April 21. Just below 15,000 were treated with the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, or one of those drugs combined with an antibiotic.

Those treatments were linked with a higher risk of dying in the hospital, the study found.

Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.

In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.

And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.

“We are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.” Echoing poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” Dr. Batalha added: “It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to create the portal to the universe which is my physical self. So in that statement is this idea, or the fluidity of time and space. And I kind of see it all at once. And I don’t know what ‘me’ is. I just feel part of everything. And I feel such deep gratitude for being able to take this conscious look at the universe — at myself as being part of the universe.”

Millions of Americans are relying on unemployment benefits for their livelihoods after losing their jobs to the coronavirus crisis.

Another 3 million people filed initial unemployment claims last week on a seasonally adjusted basis,

It was the eighth week in a row that the number for initial claims decreased after peaking at 6.9 million in the final week of March

Dr. Tyson implied that President Bush was prejudiced against Islam in order to make a broader point about scientific awareness: Two-thirds of the named stars actually have Arabic names, given to them at a time when Muslims led the world in astronomy — and Mr. Bush might not have said what he did if he had known this fact.This is a powerful example of how our biases can blind us. But not in the way Dr. Tyson thought. Mr. Bush wasn’t blinded by religious bigotry. Instead, Dr. Tyson was fooled by his faith in the accuracy of his own memory.

When he was first asked for the source of Mr. Bush’s quotation, Dr. Tyson insisted, “I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the president. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere.” He then added, “One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”

We recall events easily and often, at least if they are important to us, but only rarely do we find our memories contradicted by evidence, much less take the initiative to check if they are right. We then rely on confidence as a signal of accuracy — in ourselves and in others.

That article, on the website of a conservative talk-radio host named Wayne Dupree, quoted a post from a Twitter account named “Betty Trump” that used a photo of Ms. Trump Grau as its profile picture.

“This election inspired me to break my silence and speak out on behalf of my family,” the account said in a post on Wednesday. “My brother Don won this election and will fight this to the very end. We’ve always been a family of fighters.”

Had the article’s author looked more closely, though, she would have noticed some suspicious details about the account. It was a day old. The photos it used of Ms. Trump Grau were taken from Getty Images and past news articles about her. And since that first post, the account had tweeted increasingly bizarre messages, sharply criticizing Democrats, journalists and Republicans who had questioned the false claim that Mr. Trump was re-elected.

Obama gives readers more than a mere recitation of events. He offers an insider’s peek into his thought process

Obama’s well-earned reputation as someone who could overthink almost anything is one reason fellow writers, especially in the media, found him so fascinating

Trump’s supporters found his “honesty” refreshing, by which they meant, he’s saying what I’m thinking, no matter how ignoble my thoughts.

If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.

Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.

First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to "strongly regulate" or even shut down social media platforms after Twitter applied a fact-check to two of his tweets this week.

"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen," Trump tweeted Wednesday

Trump's Twitter outburst followed an unprecedented decision by the platform on Tuesday evening to apply a fact-checking label to Trump's content for the first time.

Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.

But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex

Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.

With traditional campaigning abandoned and the Democrats' presidential front-runner hunkered down at home, deep-pocketed Democratic groups are racing to hit President Donald Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"This crisis could be the defining issue of this election," Kyle Tharp, of the nonprofit group Acronym, said Wednesday. "Now more than ever, voters need to be made aware of how Trump's handling of this threat and downplaying of its impact has made it worse and has made Americans less safe."

"Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it," the narrator says, before saying that Trump "let the virus spread unchecked across America."

For California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the call that triggered state's full crisis response came in the middle of the night on March 6, and he was waiting for it.

The state's lab had been working through the night, and one of his cabinet secretaries was on the line telling him 21 of the 42 crewmembers and passengers tested for coronavirus aboard the Grand Princess Cruise Ship, which was idling in international waters off California's coast, had tested positive.

Newsom hung up and immediately called Donald Trump, his frequent adversary, reaching the President around 4 a.m. PT to discuss the alarming results and their next steps, according to California aides involved in the response. By 6 a.m., Newsom had fully activated the Golden State's emergency operations center in the outskirts of Sacramento and begun orchestrating the unloading of more than 2,000 passengers -- diverting them to hospitals, into quarantine and back to their home countries.

Administration officials were still working Friday to finalize a list of options to present President Donald Trump concerning the next phase of national guidelines on coronavirus as he continues to push for reopening parts of the country.

Trump issued guidelines on social distancing meant to prevent the spread of novel coronavirus on March 16, but has said this week that he believes at least some Americans are ready to return to work amid a spike in jobless claims. The initial guidelines had a 15-day time frame, which will be reached early next week.

"We'll be sitting down on Monday or Tuesday, depending on which is best for everybody, and we'll be making that determination," Trump said, pointing to "brilliant" Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, and saying he'd hear out their options.

The ice cream maker has called on Americans to "dismantle white supremacy" and "grapple with the sins of our past" as nationwide protests against racial injustice stretch into their eighth day.

Ben & Jerry's describes the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer as the result of "inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy."

"What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning," said the brand, which is owned by Unilever (UL).