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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Most of the newly ordered maps redrawing Wisconsin’s political boundaries for the state Legislature would keep Republicans in majority control, but their dominance would be reduced, according to an independent analysis of the plans. Seven sets of new state Senate and Assembly maps were submitted on Friday, the deadline given by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to propose new maps after it ruled three weeks ago that the current ones drawn by Republicans were unconstitutional. The ruling stands to shake up battleground Wisconsin’s political landscape in a presidential election year.

Walmart is closing its stores in North and Southeast Portland, saying the two locations have not met financial expectations. The retail giant said it plans to shutter the stores at the Delta Park and Eastport Plaza shopping centers, including their pharmacies, on March 24. The company said it would work with its staff to instruct customers on how to transfer prescriptions to pharmacies of their choice. “There is no single cause for why a store closes – we do a thorough review of how a store performs and weigh many factors before making the difficult decision to close a facility,”...

Share the things you do to combat food inflation.

The number of workers in the U.S. has continued to shrink as businesses struggle to find employees for their openings. "The hope for many to achieve a soft landing is that you meet in the middle, with demand cooling off and labor supply picking up, and we reach a much healthier equilibrium between the two," Michael Pugliese, an economist at Wells Fargo, told the Wall Street Journal Sunday. "But if labor supply flatlines or keeps falling, you need to bring demand down even more in order to cool off wage growth." According to Labor Department data, the number of workers...

Federal Reserve officials agreed to shrink the central bank’s balance sheet by a maximum of $95 billion each month, minutes from the March meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee revealed on Wednesday. Fed officials in March hiked the target for overnight lending and the interest paid on reserves by a quarter of a percentage point, to a range of 0.25 to 0.5 percent. The minutes released Wednesday revealed previously undisclosed details about the Fed’s plans to shrink its enormous stockpile of bond holdings.

An anonymous man in his 30s who had to be hospitalized after contracting COVID-19 last July now claims that the disease left him with a shrunken penis and erectile dysfunction. "When I got out of the hospital, I had some erectile dysfunction issues. Those gradually got better with some medical attention, but I seem to be left with a lasting problem. My penis has shrunk," the man wrote in a letter to Slate's "How To Do It" podcast. "Before I got sick, I was above average, not huge, but definitely bigger than normal. Now I've lost about an inch and...

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications.Enabled by a joint design of the camera’s hardware and computational processing, the...

VIDEOAfter years of psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee diagnosing from afar that President Donald Trump is mentally ill, Yale University finally got around to firing here four years too late for her more than obvious violation of the "Goldwater Rule" which prohibits shrinks from diagnosing public figures without a personal diagnosis. Lee has become quite the camera hog over the past few years and has been interviewed many times. Here are just a few of her career lowlights from those self-promoting interviews. I'm not a professional shrink so I won't be violating the Goldwater Rule by suggesting that there is something...

President-elect Donald Trump is driving New Yorkers crazy. Anxiety is so high in the Big Apple following Trump’s astonishing presidential win, that patients are rushing to their therapists to book emergency therapy sessions. Dr. Chloe Carmichael, a clinical psychologist and stress management expert based in Manhattan, said she was already swamped at 7 a.m. Wednesday helping her clients navigate their emotions surrounding the election’s results. “It was something that came up immediately,” she told The Post. And it wasn’t just Carmichael’s existing patients who needed someone to talk to about the 2016 race. “We did get a couple of calls...

President Barack Obama’s plan targeting coal-burning power plants will cost a quarter of a million jobs and shrink the coal industry by nearly half, according to a new report by the American Action Forum (AAF). The president released final regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday, which require every state to meet strict emission standards for coal-burning power plants in the next 15 years. The so-called “Clean Power Plan” will cost the industry $8.4 billion, nearly 10 times more expensive than the most burdensome regulation released this year, according to AAF, a center-right think tank led by Douglas...

Breathing polluted air every day may change a person's brain in ways that end up leading to cognitive impairment, according to a new study. In the study, researchers examined 943 healthy adults who were at least 60 years old and lived the New England region. The investigators used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look at the participants' brain structures, and compared the images with the air pollution levels in the places where the participants lived. The researchers found that an increase of 2 micrograms per cubic meter in fine-particle pollution — a range that can be observed across an average...

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup and eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets in a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror attacks of 2001. The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its release on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged...

Patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and other premier military hospitals are being sent to private doctors and having surgery and other treatment delayed because of furloughs to medical personnel, according to interviews and internal documents. "Please show (patients) the utmost understanding and care while we are asking them to accept longer wait times and in some cases, curtailed or limited services," Rear Adm. Alton Stocks, hospital commander, told staff in a July 12 message. A "colleagues" memo issued in recent days says inpatient beds are in "critically short supply" because of furloughs of civilian staff triggered by...

Scientists say climate change will eventually claim many victims -– including, according to a new report, chocolate. As temperatures increase and weather trends change, the main growing regions for cocoa could shrink drastically, according to new research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Ghana and the Ivory Coast –- which produce more than half of the global cocoa supply –- could take a major hit by 2050. Currently, the optimal locations to grow the crop are about 330 feet to 820 feet above sea level, with temperatures of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit to 77 degrees. That range will soar...

Earlier this year, a four-page document with a bland title, "Stipulation for Dismissal with Prejudice," was filed in a civil matter percolating on the King County Courthouse's ninth floor. Hardly anyone took notice. Most everyone had moved on. But that document — filed by lawyers tangled up in the estate of Stuart Greenberg, a nationally renowned psychologist whose life ended in scandal — signaled the end of a tortuous undertaking. Greenberg had proved such a toxic force — a poison coursing through the state's court system — that it took more than three years for lawyers and judges to sift...

Geithner’s explanation of the administration's small-business tax plan came in an exchange with first-term Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). Ellmers, a nurse, decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 after she became active in the grass-roots opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reform plan in 2009. “Overwhelmingly, the businesses back home and across the country continue to tell us that regulation, lack of access to capital, taxation, fear of taxation, and just the overwhelming uncertainties that our businesses face is keeping them from hiring,” Ellmers told Geithner. “They just simply cannot.” She then challenged Geithner on...

<p>When seeking mental health care, it’s important to check the background of any one-on-one counselor you are considering. It's not enough to simply eyeball training and degrees, one must always take steps to ensure that the counselor or doctor is, in fact, human.</p>

Songbirds in the US are getting smaller, and climate change is suspected as the cause. A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are gradually becoming lighter and growing shorter wings. This shrinkage has occurred within just half a century, with the birds thought to be evolving into a smaller size in response to warmer temperatures. However, there is little evidence that the change is harmful to the birds. Details of the discovery are published in the journal Oikos. In biology, there is a general rule of thumb that animals tend to...

The cluster of special federal tax benefits and subsidies for homeowners has long seemed politically untouchable. Those include deductions for mortgage interest, local property taxes and capital gains exclusions on up to $500,000 in sale profits. Is the Obama administration serious about beginning to limit at least some of these subsidies?

MELBOURNE: Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage. Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin. The link was discovered by Oxford University scientists who used memory tests, physical checks and brain scans to examine 107 people...