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Ask a travel nerd: 3 steps to booking holiday travel

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

By Sam Kemmis | NerdWalletWith holiday travel, I’ve always been a Grinch. Paying too much for airfare rubs every cell in my body the wrong way. Shelling out $1,000 for a domestic round-trip ticket for a route that usually costs half that just feels wrong, you know? So, while I’m happy to travel the world the other 49 weeks of the year, I typically try to stay home at the end of November and December.For years I’ve waged a campaign within my family to observe Thanksgiving a week or two early. Shifting our calendar slightly would mean we could all feast together without all the headaches of holiday travel. So far my campaign has, well, failed.I’m slowly coming around to the idea that holiday travel is important for a reason. Yes, it’s inconvenient. Yes, airports are clogged with screaming kids (including, now, mine). And yes, it’s just plain expensive. But it’s about something bigger than budgets — it’s about family.OK, my small Grinchy heart hasn’t grown big enough to ignore price ta...

Thousands got Exactech knee or hip replacements. Then, patients say, the parts began to fail

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

Fred Schulte, KFF Health News | KFF Health News (TNS)Ron Irby expected the artificial knee implanted in his right leg in September 2018 would last two decades — perhaps longer.Yet in just three years, the Optetrak implant manufactured by Exactech in Gainesville, Florida, had worn out and had to be replaced — a painful and debilitating operation.“The surgery was a huge debt of pain paid over months,” said Irby, 71, a Gainesville resident and retired medical technologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs.Irby is one of more than 1,100 patients suing Exactech after it began recalling artificial knees, hips, and ankles, starting in August 2021. A letter Exactech sent to surgeons blamed a packaging defect dating back as far as 2004 for possibly causing the plastic in a knee component to wear out prematurely in about 140,000 implants. Many patients argue in hundreds of lawsuits that they have suffered through, or could soon face, challenging and risky operations to replace defective...

What to watch: ‘House of Usher’ is a brilliant, unsettling take on Edgar Allan Poe

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

Two of the most anticipated streaming series of the season — Netflix’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Apple TV+’s “Lessons in Chemistry” — originated from the literary world. But does that transition from page to screen work?Oh, yeah.Here’s our roundup.“The Fall of the House of Usher”: It’s risky to modernize or repurpose classic literary works and try to create something unique and visionary in the process. Even Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón failed with a misguided “Great Expectations,” starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow.But upscale horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan could write a textbook on how to do it right with his eight-part ode to legendary horror writer Edgar Allan Poe. This inspired “Usher” infuses Poe’s tales of terror with contemporary relevance and respects the source material.Flanagan’s macabre update of Poe’s story of familial depravity and madness serves as a table setting for an “And Then There Were None” schematic in which the ones getting picked o...

Feds rein in use of predictive software that limits care for Medicare Advantage patients

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

Susan Jaffe | KFF Health News (TNS)Judith Sullivan was recovering from major surgery at a Connecticut nursing home in March when she got surprising news from her Medicare Advantage plan: It would no longer pay for her care because she was well enough to go home.At the time, she could not walk more than a few feet, even with assistance — let alone manage the stairs to her front door, she said. She still needed help using a colostomy bag following major surgery.“How could they make a decision like that without ever coming and seeing me?” said Sullivan, 76. “I still couldn’t walk without one physical therapist behind me and another next to me. Were they all coming home with me?”UnitedHealthcare — the nation’s largest health insurance company, which provides Sullivan’s Medicare Advantage plan — doesn’t have a crystal ball. It does have naviHealth, a care management company bought by UHC’s sister company, Optum, in 2020. Both are part of UnitedHealth Group. NaviHealth analyzes data to he...

Home Showcase: A distinctive, unique spot in Holliston

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

For a buyer who is willing to dust off their imagination and put in some time, 120 Goulding Street in Holliston is a real estate opportunity of a lifetime.The 1937 home has lived many lives, each as interesting as its modernist, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture. The main house — the property also boasts a pair of additional structures — wouldn’t look out of place in the Hollywood Hills, with a distinctive exterior facade and an interior that blends Colonial influences, modernist touches, and those quintessential 1930s built-ins we know and love in New England.In previous iterations, the main house and its sprawling, tree-filled 18 acres were part of a larger 500-acre property where Bernese Mountain Dogs were raised, housed a religious school, and became the home and working farm belonging to the founders of Sonesta hotels. It’s now ready for a new owner to whip it into shape and enjoy life by the serene adjoining pond, only an hour from Boston.There’s more than 6,000 squ...

Lucas: Where is Robert Gates when you need him?

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

Robert Gates, 80, is the distinguished former secretary of defense under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.Before that, he spent 26 years in the CIA, which he headed, and was a member of the National Security Council.Do not include him among the 51 disgraced intelligence officials who signed the deceitful letter calling the suppressed Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation during the 2020 election.Throughout Gates’ career, he got to know Joe Biden well, both when Biden was a U.S. Senator and chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and when he was Obama’s vice president.He summarized his opinion of Biden’s expertise on foreign policy in his book, “Duty, Memoirs of a Secretary of War,” published in 2014.He said he liked Joe Biden personally, but “I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”Asked if he still believed that on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, which Biden won, Gat...

Feds hope to cut sepsis deaths by hitching Medicare payments to treatment stats

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

Julie Appleby, KFF Health News | (TNS) KFF Health NewsDon Smith remembers the moment he awoke in an intensive care unit after 13 days in a medically induced coma. His wife and daughter were at his bedside, and he thought it had been only a day since he arrived at the emergency room with foot pain.Smith said his wife “slowly started filling me in” on the surgery, the coma, the ventilator. The throbbing in his foot had been a signal of a raging problem.“When you hear someone say a person died of infection, that’s sepsis,” said Smith, 66, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, who went to the ER shortly before Christmas 2017. Ultimately, he spent almost two months in the hospital and a rehab center following multiple surgeries to clear the infected tissue and, later, to remove seven toes.Sepsis, the body’s extreme response to an infection, affects 1.7 million adults in the United States annually. It stems from fungal, viral, or bacterial infections, similar to what struck Madonna this year, al...

911 calls from deadly Lahaina wildfire reveal terror and panic in the rush to escape

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

By CLAUDIA LAUER, REBECCA BOONE and AUDREY McAVOY (Associated Press)LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — Audio of 911 calls from a deadly August wildfire released late Thursday by Maui County authorities reveals a terrifying and chaotic scene as the inferno swept through the historic town of Lahaina and people desperately tried to escape burning homes and flames licking at cars in gridlocked traffic.The 911 calls were released to The Associated Press in response to a public record request. They cover a period from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 8 as the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, whipped by powerful winds from a passing hurricane, bore down on the town.At least 98 people were killed and more than 2,000 structures were destroyed, most of them homes, leveling a historic town that once served as the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom and a port for whaling ships.FILE1; A general view shows the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, Monday, Aug. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong,...

Yu Chang elects free agency, Kaleb Ort claimed off waivers by Seattle

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

Two members of this past season’s Red Sox are moving on.According to the league’s transaction wire, infielder Yu Chang has elected free agency after finishing this past season in Triple-A. In addition, right-handed pitcher Kaleb Ort has been claimed off waivers by the Seattle Mariners, the team announced Friday.The Ort move was first reported by MassLive’s Chris Cotillo.Chang played 39 games for the Red Sox this past season, batting .162 with six home runs and 18 RBI. He missed nearly two months between late April and early July due to a fractured hamate bone in his left hand, but before and after that injury he served as a valuable presence defensively while Trevor Story worked his way back from elbow surgery.Outside of some occasional flashes of power, Chang didn’t contribute much offensively and was ultimately designated for assignment once Story was ready to return. He finished the season with the WooSox, batting .313 over 12 games down the stretch.Ort ha...

A father worries for his missing child: ‘My daughter didn’t go to war. She just went to dance’

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:36:30 GMT

PARIS (AP) — Because of the fracture in her right leg, Karin Journo had talked herself out of going to the Tribe of Nova music festival and sold her ticket. But a week before Hamas militants turned the party into a killing ground, she bought another.The 24-year-old French-Israeli airport worker who loved to travel had learned that a bunch of her friends were going to celebrate the departure of one of them to the United States. She didn’t want to miss out.Before heading out to dance the night away, she snapped a photo of herself in her party gear — black shorts and black halter top for a joyous night of electronic music in a dusty field. She’d left her long dark hair untied and painted her nails bright red. She was clearly excited, giving a V-sign in her selfie. And dance she did: Video shot that night showed her waving her arms to the thumping beats, though she was rooted to the spot by the gray protective boot that encased her right foot and calf all the way up to her k...