To commemorate the multicultural harvest feast of 1621 at Plymouth Rock, about three million New Yorkers and visitors annually station themselves on freezing late-November streets to watch giant inflatable branded cartoon characters, all promoting a department store that filed for bankruptcy protection more than 25 years ago. Something like that. More than 40 million people watch it on television. Even compared to eating turkey, a dish that few people truly make well, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, now in its 92nd year, is a bit of a head-scratcher. See historic photographies from the New York Times coverage.
The few residents of the burned-out Northern California city of Paradise who were able to inspect their property on Saturday saw nothing but disappointment. Nearly the entire city of 27,000 residents lay in ruins and most were still barred from returning to the still hazardous town where small fires continued to flare. Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said Saturday 14 additional bodies were found, bringing the death toll to 23. The victims have not been identified. Two people were found dead in a wildfire in Southern California, bringing the total number of fatalities for the state to 25.
Thousands of people gathered in front of the Pittsburgh synagogue in Squirrel Hill where 11 people were killed and others injured after a man allegedly opened fire during services Saturday morning. To pay tribute to the lives that were lost, the mourners crowded the street fronting the Tree of Life synagogue, holding candles, singing songs and pleading silently with signs to end the hate and violence. While the Squirrel Hill neighborhood has attracted a diverse range of residents in recent years, it remains a historic hub for Pittsburgh’s Jewish population. Drew Barkley, the executive director of the nearby synagogue Temple Sinai, told Time magazine on Saturday that the community is tight-knit. “The sad part is that people are waiting to find out who the dead are because it’s such a close-knit community there’s like one degree of separation and chances are everyone will know at least one person who died,” Barkley said.
Launched nearly 28 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our understanding of the cosmos, allowing us to calculate the age of the universe and the rate at which it is expanding. Hubble has allow us to peer back to almost the origins of the universe, to locations more than 13.4 billion light-years from Earth.This photo essay presents some of the Hubble's most spectacular images.