Health

Most newly enrolled CA hospice agencies flagged for fraud: CMS

A top official at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services informed Congress on Tuesday that federal investigators have stripped billing privileges from three-fifths of newly enrolled hospice agencies that have continued to pop up in California, a state long riddled with healthcare fraud.

The BTS comeback album is almost here – and you best believe I’m slipping back into my K-pop obsessive era

I used to be embarrassed by my teenage fandom of the Korean boyband. Now I look back at that version of myself with so much softness

Opioid addiction almost destroyed me

After years of hiding his substance abuse, Ken Rideout finally confessed to his wife. It was the start of a difficult and rewarding journey, which led to athletic success in his 50s

Oz eyes Florida as first GOP target in Medicaid and Medicare fraud

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced Tuesday that Florida is under investigation for sweeping suspected abuse of Medicaid and Medicare.

How to turn puff pastry offcuts into a brilliant cheesy snack – recipe

Surely the zero-waste treat par excellence – even one trimming, with your choice of filling, can cook alongside your main bake for a moreish treat

Tell us: what has someone done that made you feel less lonely?

We would like to hear about the ways people have helped each other feel less isolated

Love & Fury: How Poster Artists Responded to the Aids Crisis

A new exhibition at New York’s Poster House explores how graphic design helped to define the city’s response to Aids from the late 1970s to the 2000s.

This Month’s Best Paperbacks: David Szalay, Han Kang and More

Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards?” He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”. Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, “a gradual, desperate calamity” has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps at despicable levels. “Generational amnesia” means that young people don’t know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: “I am the river; the river is me.” Macfarlane is less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer, the author of memorable books about mountains, landscape and underworlds, as well as a celebrant of words (acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, etc) he fears children no longer know. He’s also a dauntless traveller and in his new book records trips to India and Canada as well as Ecuador. The battle is to save rivers as living beings. Macfarlane’s impassioned book shows the way.

When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologists

A moment that changed me: I applied mucous-tinted mascara

I was 12 and it was the first makeup I had ever worn. While people’s responses ranged right up to genuine repulsion, they couldn’t quell my happiness

Plantwatch: the Natal crocus co-opts fire, bees and ants to reproduce

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it tricks ants into moving its seeds with a scent that mimics their larvae

Stuart Gillies' lentil recipes: braised with pasta and spiced with cod

A spicy, aromatic way with lentils that’s redolent of north African cuisine and that pairs wonderfully with white fish, and a rustic Italian pasta