Choosing a bottle of wine can be a stressful task. Especially when that wine is meant for someone else. If you’re daunted by trying to decide what wine to bring to a party, the perfect bottle for a hard-to-please mother-in-law or something to entice a prospective paramour, consider some tried-and-tested tips from Chicago wine experts. Surefire party hits When selecting a wine to bring to a party, Chasity Cooper, a communications strategist and wine and culture writer, turns to trusted favorites. “Pinot noir from Oregon always delivers,” says Cooper, who recently published the “Wine Convo Gener ..read more

John T. Bennett | (TNS) CQ-Roll Call WASHINGTON — Joe Biden’s aviator sunglasses likely won’t be far away Saturday night when the president cracks some jokes at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But not everyone will be laughing during Washington’s yearly spectacle — even if “Dark Brandon” makes another appearance. That’s Biden’s political alter ego, his team’s attempt to flip the conservative slogan “Let’s Go Brandon” on his foes. Biden ended his comedy set last year by slipping on his signature shades and pretending to morph into his edgier persona. Official Washingt ..read more

By Noah Bierman, Los Angeles Times WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s tough week showed as well as any to date why he is facing a new and unprecedented reality as a presidential candidate — as he ping-ponged among a dizzying array of court appearances, judicial rulings, competing allegations and subsequent grievances. By Thursday, he was complaining about the overlap in his busy legal schedule, railing that Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is presiding over his hush-money case in New York, wouldn’t let him leave that trial to attend a Supreme Court hearing in Washington, D.C ..read more

By Shalina Chatlani, Stateline.org In Humphreys County, Mississippi — about 70 miles north of the state capital, in the heart of the fertile Delta region — a third of the residents live in poverty. In Belzoni, the county seat, there are just a handful of health care clinics. The town’s only major hospital closed more than a decade ago, around the same time its catfish industry collapsed. Jobs in the area are scarce, said Wardell Walton, who was mayor of Belzoni from 2005 to 2013. But even if there were jobs, he said, a lot of Belzoni residents wouldn’t be able to get to them — they don’t own c ..read more

Kate Wells, Michigan Public | (TNS) KFF Health News For the past year, police Detective Tim Lillard has spent most of his waking hours unofficially investigating his wife’s death. The question has never been exactly how Ann Picha-Lillard died on Nov. 19, 2022: She succumbed to respiratory failure after an infection put too much strain on her weakened lungs. She was 65. For Tim Lillard, the question has been why. Lillard had been in the hospital with his wife every day for a month. Nurses in the intensive care unit had told him they were short-staffed, and were constantly rushing from one patie ..read more

By Lillian Mongeau Hughes, KFF Health News MANTI, Utah — Garrett Clark estimates he has spent about six years in the Sanpete County Jail, a plain concrete building perched on a dusty hill just outside this small, rural town where he grew up. He blames his addiction. He started using in middle school, and by the time he was an adult he was addicted to meth and heroin. At various points, he’s done time alongside his mom, his dad, his sister, and his younger brother. “That’s all I’ve known my whole life,” said Clark, 31, in December. On the day of her release from Sanpete County Jail in rural Uta ..read more

Andrea Chang | (TNS) Los Angeles Times Saying it does not want to promote negative body comparisons, TikTok is cracking down on posts about disordered eating, dangerous weight-loss habits and potentially harmful weight-management products. The wildly popular social media app updated its community guidelines last week, introducing a slate of new rules that it hopes will make the platform a safer place for its roughly 1 billion users worldwide. The initiative comes at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Beijing technology firm ByteDance, is facing increased scrutiny over its operations and con ..read more

Nada Hassanein | (TNS) Stateline.org Before the successful, healthy birth of her son, recalls Germine Awad — an Egyptian American who is a psychologist at the University of Michigan — clinicians told her that her hormone levels were too high and that her pregnancy was in danger. “They don’t know us,” her mother reassured her. Iyman Hamad, a Palestinian American public health graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit, had to search online to figure out which race or ethnicity box she should check at the doctor’s office and on school forms. And Itedal Shalabi, who runs an Arab Americ ..read more

By Cindy Carcamo, Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES — Food never happened in a vacuum for Karla Tatiana Vasquez. Stories always followed. Whenever her grandmother or mother cooked, Vasquez knew something special was coming. Their food unlocked memories, especially about El Salvador — the homeland they’d fled in the late 1980s during the country’s civil war. Vasquez was born in the Central American nation but had no memory of it. She was an infant when her family spirited her away to Los Angeles, where many family members ended up settling. As a child, Vasquez had a difficult time saying “Salvadore ..read more

A pair of teenage ghosts solve mysteries for their supernatural clientele in “Dead Boy Detectives” on Netflix, an eight-episode season that sits squarely in the YA genre. Picture something like “The Hardy Boys,” but British. And dead.  Edwin (George Rexstrew) died at his boarding school in 1916 and he is bookish and sensitive. Charles (Jayden Revri) died at the same boarding school in 1987 and he has a bolder streak and a dangly cross for an earring. The actors bear a physical resemblance that goes unremarked upon — thin and lanky, with dark hair and pointy features — but the characters a ..read more