The Milky Way Had A Big Sibling Long Ago - And Andromeda Ate It

There are many ways of framing the scale of the dislocation in Los Angeles this week. As the ferocious ring of five wildfires roared across the region in a multi-day blaze that began Jan. 7., some 180,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes—the equivalent of pitching the entire population of Little Rock, Ark., out into the streets or filling Los Angeles’s massive So-Fi stadium to more than double its capacity and not letting anyone go home again. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Southern California blaze was a special kind of hell.

The Republican-controlled House and Senate are pushing ahead with a law designed to cede some federal immigration enforcement power to the states and usher in a harsher new era of immigration detention. The Laken Riley Act passed the House on Tuesday with support from 216 Republicans and 48 Democrats. The Senate is considering the legislation, which has drawn an unusual amount of support from Democratic Senators.

NEW YORK — In a singular moment in U. S. history, President-elect Donald Trump faces sentencing Friday for his New York hush money conviction after the nation’s highest court refused to intervene. Like so much else in the criminal case and the current American political landscape, the scenario set to unfold in an austere Manhattan courtroom was unimaginable only a few years ago.

Dear Eric: My former best friend and longtime housemate is a serial monogamist and cannot go a couple weeks without being in a long-term relationship, usually having no more than two to three weeks in between very serious relationships. This friend disappears fully into relationships with people who aren’t good to him, and it’s impossible to get him to respond to invitations to hang out. After months of initiating plans, and rarely hearing back, I decided to take a step back from it due to incredible initiation fatigue. He will occasionally call me and say he misses me and wants to grab lunch.

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media behemoth will end its third party fact-checking program in the U. S. and instead adopt a crowd-sourced “community notes” program. The inspiration for such a decision? Elon Musk’s X. “We’ve seen this approach work on X,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer in a statement. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Thanks to the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg, social media is simply getting worse.

The scale of the infernos devastating Southern California is almost unimaginable. Since Tuesday, Jan. 7, nine fires in and around Los Angeles County—including five that remain uncontained—have so far burned approximately 29,000 acres, according to CAL FIRE, a web service by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That’s around twice the size of Manhattan—or the equivalent of about 22,000 football fields or nearly 200 golf courses. And, driven by a confluence of factors including fierce winds, the flames continue to expand.