The Senate voted 72 to 18 to confirm Dr. Stephen Hahn as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, as the agency faces pressure to reduce teenage vaping and weighs competing interests on a long-delayed proposal to ban flavored e-cigarettes. Dr. Hahn, chief medical executive at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, was…
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It was chest pain that brought the 34-year-old woman to the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She’d been coughing for days, but that morning the pain was so bad she was worried that it had turned into pneumonia. She tried to tough it out, but when it was no better by…
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“Is this the greatest concert any of us have ever heard?” Robert Downey Jr. asked from the stage of the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Monday night. The crowd roared in agreement. The lineup already featured Deborah Harry, Darryl McDaniels (of Run D.M.C.), James Taylor, Shaggy and Ricky Martin. Yet to come were Bruce Springsteen…
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As co-owner of Billykirk, a leather goods brand based in Jersey City, N.J., Chris Bray has devoted the past 20 years to hand-crafting wallets, among other accessories. He can wax philosophical about how “your oils, your skin, your travels” affect the wallet that you carry around. But when Mr. Bray goes out at night, he…
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Edna Smith Primus had graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law — the first black woman to do so, in 1972 — when barely one year later she was assigned a case that could have jeopardized her career. She had been working at the time for the South Carolina Council on Human Rights…
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PITTSBURGH — Our planet is a perilous place filled with terrifying ways to die. They need not be enumerated here; there is no practical benefit to extending your personal list of dreads. In the event you are knocked unconscious in a freak midair collision with another sky diver, for instance, you — hurtling insensate toward…
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One morning in the small Transylvanian mountain resort of Baile Homorod, in Romania, travelers and residents gathered under the shade of a wooden canopy near three streams of sparkling spring water to fill up a row of empty bottles. This is no ordinary water. It flows from volcanic mountains nearby and pours into the springs…
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California syrah has been much maligned, often justifiably. The grape arrived in a big way beginning in the 1990s. It was intended to be the next merlot, a wine with an easy, wide appeal. Yet as the popularity of merlot nose-dived, syrah never could replace it. Partly, it was because much California syrah was planted…
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Almost every region in the world that produces still wine makes some form of sparkling wine as well. Given this bounty, why would consumers choose American sparkling wines? One reader raised a similar point, wondering why, if sparkling wines from Europe are exempt from a recent 25 percent tariff, I had offered a lineup of…
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When my wife passed away a few years ago, I went into a deep funk and isolated myself from people. I don’t have family or close friends nearby, so I reached out to a woman I worked with for many years. There was a definite attraction when we worked together, but we never acted on…
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