WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) - Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation.
The remark was made during a briefing by David Richardson, who has led FEMA since early May. It was not clear to staff whether he meant it literally, as a joke, or in some other context.

The U.S. hurricane season officially began on Sunday and lasts through November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast last week that this year's season is expected to bring as many as 10 hurricanes.

A Texas health authority is warning against "measles parties" as the outbreak in West Texas grew to at least 146 cases, with 20 hospitalized and one unvaccinated school-age child dead. The outbreak continues to mainly be in unvaccinated children.

In a press briefing hosted by the city of Lubbock, Texas, on Friday, Ron Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, offered the stark warning for Texans in his opening statements.

"What I want you to hear is: It's not good to go have measles parties because what may happen is—we can't predict who's going to do poorly with measles, be hospitalized, potentially get pneumonia or encephalitis and or pass away from this," Cook said. "So that's a foolish idea to go have a measles party. The best thing to do is make sure that you're well-vaccinated."

Lubbock sits about 90 miles northwest of the outbreak's epicenter in Gaines County, which is one of the state's least vaccinated counties. It has recorded 98 of the outbreak's 146 cases. While Lubbock has only reported two of the 146 cases, patients from elsewhere have been treated in Lubbock. That includes the first two cases in the outbreak as well as the child who died of the infection earlier this week, who was not a resident of Lubbock.

Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.

Trump’s second presidential term has arrived amidst a new golden age for internet grifters, propagandists, and bad-faith hucksters of all stripes. The contours of this era of untruth have been flashing like neon signs for the past decade, constantly enticing us to engage with its impenetrable nonsense. Whether it’s gaslighting everyone who saw Elon Musk give two Nazi salutes during the inauguration or blaming the Los Angeles wildfires on the racist dog whistle of “DEI,” lies and absurdities now regularly flood our senses, having long outpaced the media’s capacity to filter them.

Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.

Major anti-corruption protests in Serbia add to pressure on President Vučić - Tens of thousands rally against government and in memory of railway station roof collapse that killed 15

Serbia’s powerful populist leader Aleksandar Vučić was facing his biggest challenge yet as student-led demonstrations intensified at the weekend in what was being called the Balkan country’s greatest ever protest movement.

Three months to the day after a concrete canopy collapsed at the entrance of Novi Sad’s railway station, tens of thousands of protesters converged on the northern city, blockading its three bridges in commemoration of the 15 people killed in the accident. The tragedy has been blamed squarely on government ineptitude and graft.

“What we are seeing are the greatest street protests in the history of Serbia,” said Dejan Bagarić, a master’s student speaking from the city. “There’s never been anything like it, people are really animated because everybody has had enough of corruption and this government is very corrupt.”

Saturday’s outpouring of dissent – the culmination of sit-ins and protests that began in November – have focused on what demonstrators have described as the government’s striking unwillingness to accept any accountability for the tragedy. Reconstruction of the station was carried out in collaboration with a Chinese state consortium, as part of a large infrastructure project that critics contend paid little, if any, attention to safety regulations.