Olympia Auset started SÜPRMARKT to provide her community easy access to food and healthy produce

The plate is her canvas.

Imani Cohen never wants her dish to look too brown nor too starchy. She gravitates toward foods bright with luminous colors such as greens, purples and orange, during her weekly Saturday visits to the farmer’s market – a ritual she’s kept for herself and family as a way to be intentional in the foods she purchases for quality health and manifesting energy.

Man crashes into mall after a police pursuit, striking four people before he was fatally shot by law enforcement

A fleeing motorist drove a pickup truck into a busy JCPenney store in Texas on Saturday, injuring five people before he was fatally shot by law enforcement, authorities said.

Four of the injured people were taken from the Killeen mall to hospitals and the fifth went on their own, Sgt Bryan Washko of the Texas department of public safety said in an evening media briefing. They ranged in age from six to 75 years old, and their conditions were not immediately known.

Sometimes the perfect present is a timely reminder that, even when it absolutely seems like it, all is not lost

I discovered the perfect Christmas present at work the other day after eating fish and chips too fast. I was wearing too many layers for the office, where heating is pumped from unusual angles bringing with it the smell of lasagne or sewer, and I was sweating. Partly, it was the layers, partly it was the meeting due in five minutes, which was about the future of our jobs, and I was in a rush to get a seat at our possible execution. By the sinks I removed a jumper and washed my hands, and joined my colleagues in a bright glass room. But, as the meeting began and my hands became fists, I realised something awful. I was missing a ring from my little finger. It was small and silver, in the shape of a tiny safety pin – I’d bought it 20 years ago on my first week at work and worn it every day since. Its loss struck me as ominous.

I am largely anti-Christmas present. I write this as a person who has helped compile numerous magazine gift guides, blithely sticking a cashmere sock beside, perhaps, organic sausages containing the Tibetan goat they were sheared from, beside a coffee table book about fonts, beside a hairclip in the shape of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, for the dads, a rake. The guides have come to open up for me a crack of dissatisfaction that creaks wider with every caviar cookbook, every feminist earmuff. I write this as a person, too, for whom shopping has come to feel like a treacherous bloodsport, a person who once took shelter in the Greggs concession upstairs at Primark and had to drop a pin so friends could organise a welfare check.

Gentrification and the cruelties of the rental market kept forcing me to move. This Christmas, I know I’ll find happiness wherever I am

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

After a while, you want to live alone. And then it happens and you discover everything that’s difficult about it. You realise that you didn’t really want to live alone, you were just sad and alienated in your old life.

The pandemic reshuffled society in a way that could not be anticipated. Sometimes it feels as though the life I now have has come about because I stepped through a portal to a parallel world. There is a disconcerting jump cut between life before Covid-19 and life now. In the history of unstable housing that characterised my 20s and early 30s, and about which I feel nothing but regret, there was a moment when it changed from an unquestioned, if depressing reality, to something emblematic.

Jay Bernard is a writer and artist

A growing trend of state laws permit the sale of cannabis drinks – and beverage companies are angling to make the next hit alcohol alternative

Laws around the US - most recently in Hawaii - are cropping up that allow THC in beverages, a move that some experts say will have mixed benefits for those seeking an alternative to alcohol.

It’s part of a growing trend of policies that make THC drinks available, often where alcohol is sold. About a year ago, Minnesota passed a law allowing THC drinks to be sold in liquor stores; ever since, these beverages have begun to appear on shelves around the country.

The Washington Post visits one of over 100 tide-tracking stations around the U.S. — Georgia's Fort Pulaski tide gauge: Since 2010, the sea level at the Fort Pulaski gauge has risen by more than 7 inches, one of the fastest rates in the country, according to a Washington Post analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data for 127 tide gauges. Similar spikes are affecting the entire U.S. Southeast — showing a glimpse of our climate future... [I]n the previous 30 years, the ocean rose about 3.7 inches. And the deluge stretches all across the South and the Gulf Coast; over the past 14 years, sea levels in the U.S. South have risen twice as fast as the global average... Scientists suspect part of that is because of the Gulf Stream — a long band of warm water that follows the coast up from the equator and then, near Cape Hatteras, turns out into the Atlantic Ocean. The waters of the Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico are warming faster than other parts of the Atlantic, boosting sea levels. "The Gulf of Mexico has warmed exceptionally fast over the past decade and a half," Piecuch said. "It's uncontroversial." But scientists have puzzled over where all that heat is coming from... [T]he current heat could be part of long-term variations in ocean currents, and not a clear signal of climate change. But the fact that the change is linked to heat — at the same time as the entire ocean is taking on excess heat from global warming — makes some experts suspicious. "This particular mechanism does not immediately suggest it's just natural variability," [said Ben Hamlington, a research scientist who leads NASAâ(TM)s sea level change team]. For now, sea levels in the Southeast are surging — and they provide an early picture of what most of the United States, and the rest of the world, will experience as oceans rise... On Tybee Island — whose population of 4,000 swells to over 100,000 during the summer months — leaders have gotten used to the constant fight against the waves. Five or six times a year, high tides sweep over the one road that connects the island to the mainland, cutting residents off from services. By 2050, scientists estimate, those high tides will happen 70 days a year. With the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the city has built dunes to protect vacation homes and local storefronts from the rising water; many homeowners have also raised their properties high up into the air. In Savannah, small businesses and city streets are washed in floods even on bright, sunny days — thanks to high tides that surge into the drainage system. The city estimates that it will cost $400 million to update the stormwater infrastructure over the next two decades. So far, it has raised $150 million... Other states and cities will soon see the same effects. NASA projections show that in the coming decades, many cities in the Northeast will experience up to 100 more days of high-tide flooding each year. "Some researchers think that the Southeast acceleration may be linked to long-term weather patterns in the Atlantic Ocean like the North Atlantic Oscillation. "If so, the trend could switch in the coming decades — with areas of the Northeast seeing rapid sea level rise while the trend in the Southeast slows down."

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