Stephen Colbert is getting his audience back — a vaccinated crowd will return to their seats at a "Late Show" taping for the first time in more than a year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"After more than a year and 205 episodes produced without a live audience, 'The Late Show' is looking forward to safely welcoming fans back to The Ed Sullivan, which features the largest studio audience of any late night or sketch comedy series," CBS announced Monday.

A "full, vaccinated audience" will be back for Colbert's show beginning June 14, the network said.

The CBS funnyman's Broadway studio shuttered its doors in March of last year as COVID-19 forced closures in New York City and around the world. Colbert, 57, had filmed his show remotely, before returning to his studio and hosting to an audience filled with just a few members of his staff.

Faster than PCR and more accurate than lateral flow tests, the latest weapons against Covid-19 have four legs and a wet nose.

A study published on Monday found that people who are infected with coronavirus give off a distinct odour, which these highly trained dogs can detect with pinpoint precision.

Tala, a golden labrador in a red work jacket, greets me with a cursory sniff, before returning to his handler. I’m relieved to have passed the test, but feel a wet train of mucus on my hand where I petted him. This mucus fulfils an important purpose: dissolving odour molecules from the air and transporting them to olfactory receptors in the top of their nose, where the magic happens. Whereas humans have about 5m of these receptors, dogs have up to 300m.

Dr Claire Guest has always been fascinated by dogs, and humans’ relationship with them. After studying psychology, she worked for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, where she met a woman who said her pet dalmatian had diagnosed a malignant melanoma on her calf. “She kept saying, ‘The dog sniffed it,’” Guest recalled. In 2002, Guest joined forces with an orthopaedic surgeon, John Church, to test whether dogs could be trained to distinguish between urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer. The research, published in the BMJ, showed that they could.

New York City will no longer have a remote schooling option come fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during a television appearance on Monday, a major step toward fully reopening the nation’s largest school system.

This school year, most of the city’s roughly one million students — about 600,000 — stayed at home for classes. When the new school year starts on Sept. 13, all students and staff will be back in school buildings full-time, Mr. de Blasio said.

New York is one of the first big cities to remove the option of remote learning altogether for the coming school year. But widespread predictions that online classes would be a fixture for school districts may have been premature. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced last week that the state would no longer have remote classes come fall, after similar announcements by leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

New York City’s decision will make it much easier to restore the school system to a prepandemic state, since students and teachers will no longer be split between homes and school buildings.

You’ve been vaccinated. You’ve joyfully ripped off your mask when outdoors. Now it’s time to pop your quarantine bubble, right?

But finding a good moment to break up the pandemic pod can be tricky. Do you call a meeting? Send a group text to the “quaranteam”? Ceremoniously rip up a contract? Is it possible to ghost someone when they’re practically living in your house?

It may get intense. The quarantine, said Margaret Clark, a psychology professor and director of the Clark Relationship Science Laboratory at Yale University, seemed to have served as a relationship magnifier. “If your relationships were already fraught, the quarantine made them more fraught.”

That might be doubly true for one’s podmates, who have had to become surrogates for all other relationships. “We all have a variety of relationships that serve different purposes,” said Dr. Clark. “Without them, more responsibilities fell on those you were with.”

Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, “ends justify the means” candidates taking big roles in running the vote.

The candidates include Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the conspiracy-tinged vote audit in Arizona’s largest county; Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to have his 5-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election.


Now, they are running for secretary of state in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — and who wins the White House in 2024. Their candidacies come with former President Donald Trump still fixated on spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, insisting he won and lying about widespread and systemic fraud. Each of their states has swung between the two parties over the last decade, though it is too early to tell how competitive their elections will be.

The campaigns set up the possibility that politicians who have taken steps to undermine faith in the American democratic system could soon be the ones running it.

Eric Adams is expected to get the backing of Rep. Adriano Espaillat, according to three people familiar with the decision, which could be announced as early as Sunday.

The endorsement comes three weeks after Espaillat rescinded his support of Scott Stringer in the wake of a sexual assault allegation that he has denied. The Latino congressman could influence a bloc of voters in his district, which includes parts of Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood and the West Bronx. The sources requested anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the endorsement.

Espaillat was part of an exodus of support from the Stringer camp after lobbyist Jean Kim in April accused the city comptroller of sexually assaulting her 20 years ago when she volunteered on one of his campaigns. Stringer has vehemently denied the accusation and said the two were in a consensual relationship, but the allegation was enough to cost him key backers.

What does it mean to be Jewish in America? A new Pew Research Center survey finds that many Jewish Americans participate, at least occasionally, both in some traditional religious practices – like going to a synagogue or fasting on Yom Kippur – and in some Jewish cultural activities, like making potato latkes, watching Israeli movies or reading Jewish news online. Among young Jewish adults, however, two sharply divergent expressions of Jewishness appear to be gaining ground – one involving religion deeply enmeshed in every aspect of life, and the other involving little or no religion at all.

Overall, about a quarter of U.S. Jewish adults (27%) do not identify with the Jewish religion: They consider themselves to be Jewish ethnically, culturally or by family background and have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, but they answer a question about their current religion by describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” rather than as Jewish. Among Jewish adults under 30, four-in-ten describe themselves this way.

At the same time, younger Jewish adults are much more likely than older Jews to identify as Orthodox. Among Jews ages 18 to 29, 17% self-identify as Orthodox, compared with just 3% of Jews 65 and older. And fully one-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults under the age of 30 are Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox (11%), compared with 1% of Jews 65 and older.

Meanwhile, the two branches of Judaism that long predominated in the U.S. have less of a hold on young Jews than on their elders. Roughly four-in-ten Jewish adults under 30 identify with either Reform (29%) or Conservative Judaism (8%), compared with seven-in-ten Jews ages 65 and older.

Las Vegas (AP) -- Wearing a French maid-inspired lingerie costume and high heels, dancer JoJo Hamner waited patiently to get her COVID-19 vaccine in a line that snaked past a glittery hostess stand under a red-light chandelier.

When it was her turn, Hamner sat in a chair and held onto a small feather duster that completed her costume while a nurse administered the shot into her already-exposed arm.

Hamner then waited nearby for the required 15 minutes of observation, sitting with other vaccine recipients in leather chairs between plush purple booths, vacant stages and empty poles at this strip club in Las Vegas.

“This is just the most Vegas thing I’ve ever seen,” she said of the experience.

Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, with a spinning disco ball casting rainbow colors on the walls but more lights turned on than usual, was an unconventional site for a walk-in vaccination clinic. But as government officials and health workers try to address the slowing demand for COVID-19 vaccines, they’re increasingly turning to creative ways to incentivize people to show up and get a shot.

“This is just another way to access our population,” said JoAnn Rupiper, the chief nurse of the Southern Nevada Health District, who monitored the walk-in clinic. “It might attract some people who like the novelty of it, I suppose.”

Billions of dollars in Covid aid cushioned financial losses caused by the pandemic at some of the nation’s largest hospital chains. But those bailouts also helped sustain the big chains’ spending sprees as they expanded even more by scooping up weakened competitors and doctors’ practices.

More consolidation by several major hospital systems enhanced their market prowess in many regions of the United States, even as rural hospitals and underserved communities were overwhelmed with Covid patients and struggled to stay afloat.

The buying spree is likely to prompt further debate and scrutiny of the Provider Relief Fund, a package of $178 billion in congressional aid that drew sharp criticism early on for allocating so much to the wealthiest hospital systems, and that had no limits on mergers and acquisitions.

The Biden administration is now weighing which hospitals and health providers will get the remaining $25 billion.