On Nov. 18, the journalist Mike Pesca, who hosts the popular news podcast “The Gist,” posted a link to a Times story about health concerns associated with the puberty-blocking drugs sometimes prescribed to transgender youths, writing, “This seemed like careful, thorough reporting.”

In response, Parker Molloy, a journalist who writes the Substack newsletter “The Present Age,” accused Mr. Pesca of anti-trans bigotry, and then posted angrily at Mr. Davidson for not removing the post.

“@adamdavidson’s decision not to take action on anti-trans content isn’t inspiring confidence and I totally understand why other places are doing instance-level blocking,” she wrote on journa.host. (Instance-level blocking refers to the ability, on Mastodon, for one server to block content from another.)

Zach Everson, one of the journa.host administrators, responded that he agreed with Ms. Molloy, then added, “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”

On Saturday, journa.host suspended Mr. Pesca, who was informed via a text message from Mr. Davidson, a longtime friend.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released figures on Thursday indicating that nearly 107,000 Americans died of overdoses last year. This is an increase of almost 16 percent compared to 2020, reports The Associated Press.

Overdose deaths fall under the category of "accidental deaths" which are the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. Accidental deaths were responsible for 3.4 million deaths in 2021, which is 80,000 more than the previous year. The increase in overdose deaths is directly coupled with the opioid epidemic as it continued to be worsened by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.

Fentanyl was responsible for approximately two-thirds of overdose deaths, reports The Washington Post. Just this year, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than 379 million doses of fentanyl, enough to kill every person in America, the Post continues. Overdose deaths increased in every demographic over 25 years of age except for Asian men.

The CDC's figures also found that the U.S. life expectancy has once again dropped to 76 years and 5 months. This added to the pattern of decrease that the country has seen over the past two years.

U.S. life expectancy continued its steady, alarming decline in 2021, as covid-19 and illegal drugs took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, according to final government data released Thursday.

Even as some peer nations began to bounce back from the toll of the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped to 76.4 years at birth, down from 77 in 2020, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That means Americans can expect to live as long as they did in 1996 — a dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should rise steadily in an affluent, developed nation. (In August, using preliminary data, the agency had pegged life expectancy in 2021 at 76.1 years.)

Notably, every age group in the U.S. — from young children to seniors 85 and older — saw a rise in its death rate. Men, women and most racial groups lost ground. In some previous years, even when overall life expectancy declined, some groups advanced.

“This one, it’s sort of across-the-board bad news,” said Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California who studies life expectancy around the world. “We’ve gone since 1996 without improving. That’s incredible, given how much we’ve learned about medicine, how much we’ve spent.”

China has moved to a narrower definition of Covid deaths, which will drastically cut its death statistics as cases increase following the relaxation of zero-Covid rules.

Authorities reported no new fatalities in the latest Covid statistics update on Wednesday, despite widespread reports and images of overloaded hospitals and crematoriums and queues of hearses. The official number of deaths since the pandemic began in Wuhan three years ago even had one struck off on Wednesday and now stands at 5,241 – an extremely low number compared with many less populous countries.

The infectious disease expert Prof Wang Guiqiang told a State Council news conference on Tuesday that the National Health Commission had recently revised its guidelines to “scientifically and objectively reflect deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic”, classifying only fatalities caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure in patients who had the virus as Covid deaths.

“Deaths caused by other diseases such as cardiovascular or cerebrovascular diseases and heart attacks are not classified as deaths caused by coronavirus,” Wang said.

Britain’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic has been even weaker than originally believed and is the only member of the G7 group of leading industrial nations where output is still below its pre-crisis level.

The Office for National Statistics said the UK economy contracted by 0.3% in the three months ending in September – compared with an original estimate of a 0.2% decline – and also revised down growth in every quarter stretching back to the third quarter of 2021.

The Bank of England believes the contraction of the economy in the third quarter marks the start of a prolonged recession that will last for the whole of 2024. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is planning measures in his budget to boost growth but believes the looming recession will be less severe than those in the past.