Author: palmbeachocean.com

For two decades, Ilya Solkan served as the parish priest in a tiny Ukrainian village outside the capital, Kyiv. He baptized babies, blessed marriages and conducted funerals. The Orthodox church stood at the heart of the village and Mr. Solkan was central to its life.“Being a priest is my God-given calling,” he said in an interview at his house in the village of Blystavytsya, describing the church as his “second home.”Today, he is unemployed and has been ostracized from the village after parishioners booted him out last October for putting politics into his pastoral care.The removal of Mr. Solkan, a…

Birds get electrocuted on power lines. But people shooting at birds perched on power poles may be even more of a problem. In a survey of five sites in the western United States, two-thirds of birds found dead beneath power lines had been shot.Avians found dead along power lines are often assumed to have died from electrocution, especially if their bodies show burns or singeing, said Eve Thomason, a wildlife biologist at Boise State University in Idaho. But the animal may have been injured or killed before getting zapped.“We really need X-rays to understand fully what may have happened,” said…

Will Wade, the men’s college basketball coach recently hired by McNeese State, has been suspended for 10 games next season, bringing to a close a lengthy N.C.A.A. investigation into the football and basketball programs at Louisiana State, the Southeastern Conference powerhouse Wade formerly coached.A review panel on Thursday ruled that L.S.U. failed to monitor its marquee programs, which were found to have improperly funneled payments to a recruit, paid hush money to keep recruiting violations quiet and allowed the N.F.L. star Odell Beckham Jr., a former L.S.U. wide receiver, to hand out wads of cash to players after the national…

With the launch of the iPhone 15 lineup fast approaching, MacRumors video editor Dan Barbera thought he’d take a look back at his last year (almost) using the iPhone 14 Pro Max before it’s time to move on to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The ‌iPhone 14 Pro‌ Max introduced the Dynamic Island for the first time, and it’s been a feature that Apple doesn’t seem to have taken full advantage of yet. It also brought the higher-end 48-megapixel camera sensor and the Always-On display. Dan goes into depth on how the ‌iPhone 14 Pro‌ Max (used caseless!) has held…

Scorching temperatures blanketing much of the country make cool showers enticing. But beware the water bill.Average water and sewer bills — they are often combined — have increased about 50 percent over the last decade, according to Bluefield Research, an advisory firm, and are expected to continue to rise. Rates vary, but the average monthly bill for water nationally was about $49 last year, up from $32 in 2012. (The numbers are based on average monthly household water use in the 50 largest U.S. cities.)Inflation is one reason for the increase, along with supply chain disruptions and the cost of…

A Middle Eastern child interred in a stone-lined grave around 9,000 years ago wore an elaborate necklace that illustrates the complexity of social life in an early farming community, researchers say. More than 2,500 stone and shell beads strewn across the child’s upper body, along with a double-holed stone pendant positioned behind the neck and a mother-of-pearl ring laying on the chest, originally formed the impressive necklace, archaeologist Hala Alarashi and colleagues report August 2 in PLOS ONE. Perforations around the upper half of the mother-of-pearl ring held strings or cords for seven rows of beads that connected to the…

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — There are many ways in which the College Football Playoff national championship game is different from other postseason events in the sport.To start, the matchup scheduled Monday night between Georgia and Texas Christian has much less of the circus of activities and events for players and fans that generally surrounds bowl games.The game itself is more businesslike, too, with the national championship providing more clear incentive for players to take the field than for the lower-tier bowl games that some players skip from fear of being injured ahead of the N.F.L. draft or the next college season.And…

When you watch a video on Instagram, the app’s algorithms are also watching you. As you scroll, they are hoovering up information to figure out what makes you tick—not only to show you content that keeps you coming back, but also to show you ads that are more likely to make you buy something.Meta calls the information it compiles about how users behave across its apps “activity.” That activity might include what they say in social media posts or comments, the contents of the (unencrypted) messages they send or receive, the hashtags they use, and how long they spend watching…

Prolonged post-election uncertainty is raising questions over stability in Thailand, which has seen two coups over the past 20 years.Thailand’s parliament has postponed a vote for the next prime minister after the Constitutional Court began reviewing a case challenging the legislature’s refusal to allow the election-winning party a second shot at forming a government. The move on Thursday prolongs a political deadlock that has raised questions about stability in the Southeast Asian nation, which has seen two coups and waves of street protests over the past two decades. Speaker Wan Muhamad Noor Matha told reporters that a vote for a…

The margaritas you downed on Friday night leave you slumped in bed all Saturday. On Sunday, you wake up, and you’re still parched and jittery. Your head hasn’t stopped throbbing.Could you be in the throes of a two-day hangover?In order to metabolize alcohol, the body breaks it down into acetaldehyde, a chemical compound. A hangover — the whirring heart, the sour stomach — can be the byproduct of this process. For a vast majority of people in a vast majority of cases, hangovers follow a predictable pattern: They make you feel weak and weary for about 24 hours and then…