New York eliminated the religious exemption to vaccine requirements for schoolchildren Thursday, as the country’s worst measles outbreak in decades prompts states to reconsider giving parents ways to opt out of immunization rules. The Democratic-led state senate and assembly voted Thursday to repeal the exemption, which allows parents to cite religious beliefs to forego getting their child the vaccines required for school enrollment.

President Donald Trump likes to tout coal, calling it "indestructible" and proclaiming that "coal is back." Around the U.S., use of the fossil fuel shows a different trend: Coal consumption is at its lowest level in more than 40 years.

After more than a year ratcheting up its privacy protections, Firefox now blocks website cookies that can let advertisers and publishers track you on the web. Cookies are small text files that websites can store in your browser -- either first-party cookies from the operator of the website or third-party cookies that can come along for the ride from advertising and analytics firms.

China remains on schedule to ready its first independent mission to Mars in time for a short launch window in mid-2020, according to a leading space official. “Mars 2020 mission spacecraft is undergoing integration,” Wang Chi, director of the National Space Science Center (NSSC) in Beijing, told SpaceNews in a rare update on the mission.

Oh boy, the rumours are really starting to rack up now, aren't they? Spanish website Gamereactor.es say that The Last of Us: Part II is getting a trailer and a release date later this week, citing sources close to Sony. Adding a little more weight, fellow Spanish site Legion de Jugadores reports the same thing, also citing sources close to Sony.

Theresa May has said she will quit as Conservative leader on 7 June, paving the way for a contest to decide a new prime minister. In an emotional statement, she said she had done her best to deliver Brexit and it was a matter of "deep regret" that she had been unable to do so. Mrs May said she would continue to serve as PM while a Conservative leadership contest takes place.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it was revealed that Captain America's love, Peggy Carter, was married and had two kids. According to Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the man she married was the Captain America from the main MCU timeline who went back in time at the end of the film.

A victim of its own success, the most famous beach in Thailand is set to be tourist-free for at least another two years. Maya Bay, the stunning cove made famous by "The Beach," the 2000 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has already been shuttered for almost a year, and will likely remain closed for two more years to allow for its natural resources to regenerate, according to Songtam Suksawang, director of Thailand's National Parks Department (NPD).

Urban trees grow more quickly but die faster than rural trees, resulting in a net loss of street-tree carbon storage over time, according to a study published May 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ian Smith of Boston University, US and colleagues. The findings suggest that planting initiatives alone may not be sufficient to maintain or enhance canopy cover and biomass due to the unique demographics of urban ecosystems.

Android Q introduces a bunch of new features, while putting protections in place to provide even more transparency and control over your data.

The plagiarism lawsuit against the creators of “Stranger Things” is going to be dismissed, Deadline reports. Filmmaker Charlie Kessler had previously claimed in a lawsuit that series creators Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer took a central plot point for “Stranger Things” from his short film Montauk. Now, Kessler has said that he has filed a request for the suit’s dismissal. The case was scheduled to go to trial today (May 6).

Chuck Kinder, the novelist who became known for inspiring the central character in Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel “Wonder Boys,” has died. He was 76. Kinder, whose death was confirmed by friends and associates, died Friday of heart failure in Miami. A literary force with a larger-than-life personality, Kinder published his first novel, “Snakehunter,” in 1973, followed by 1979’s “The Silver Ghost,” 2001’s “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale” and 2004’s “Last Mountain Dancer: H...

Electric cars and solar panels are the most visible signs of California's ambitious climate change policies. But now the state is setting its sights on a lower-tech way to cut carbon emissions: soil. It's spending millions of dollars to help farmers grow plants, which absorb carbon and help move it into the soil where it can be stored long-term. This makes California home to some of the first official "carbon farmers" in the country.

Children under five must spend less time sitting watching screens, or restrained in prams and seats, get better quality sleep and have more time for active play if they are to grow up healthy, according to new guidelines issued by the World Health Organization (WHO). “Achieving health for all means doing what is best for health right from the beginning of people’s lives,” says WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Early childhood is a period of rapid development and a time...

Someone hacked my McDonald's mobile app and purchased roughly $2,000 worth of food at different locations across the country.

As reference books go, the thesaurus, these days, is one step up in respectability from the rhyming dictionary. To use one is to betray something embarrassing about yourself. To be accused of using one is to be accused both of pretentiousness and of using words whose meaning you don’t really know. (For instance: I originally wrote “accused of malapropism” in that previous sentence, but then checked the dictionary and discovered this refers to mistakes based on sound.) One goes to the thesa...