About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good. That’s why the fear of becoming fat, or staying that way, drives Americans to spend more on dieting every year than we spend on video games or movies. Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat.

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The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we'll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.

St. Louis County Commissioner Pete Stauber, the Republican candidate for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District, communicated with a key GOP group in Washington using his government e-mail address, according to a review of county records.

The e-mail traffic would appear to be in violation of a St. Louis County policy, which states “elected officials will not use St. Louis County equipment in support of their own campaigns for re-election, other candidates for public office, or political organizations.”

Stauber, a retired Duluth police officer, is locked in a tight race with Joe Radinovich, a former DFL state lawmaker, to fill an open seat being vacated by Democratic U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan, who is retiring.

The Eighth District, which President Donald Trump won by more than 15 percentage points, is considered one of Republicans’ best shots at flipping a Democratic seat in the entire country, and control of the United States House of Representatives could turn on the race.

John McCain was a white American man, whose whiteness and Americanness and maleness were his most prominent and predictable characteristics. He was also considered to be a hero. Barack Obama spoke on McCain’s “courage to put the greater good above our own.” Joe Biden remarked that McCain’s life was “proof that some truths are timeless.” There are many other tributes like this from many other prominent American and international figures, each extolment more gracious and fawning than the last, fitting for a man who put his life on the line for his country as a young man and then, for his remaining years on Earth, continued to serve it.

This sort of veneration will likely be the legacy that prevails when he’s regarded by history. I do not disagree with it. He was, in the context of whiteness, in the context of Americaness, in the context of maleness, and in the context of what those things fused together are intended to mean, a hero.

That McCain is considered and will continue to be considered heroic is less a way of synopsizing his life and more a testimony on whiteness and Americanness and maleness. Or, more accurately, an indictment. And we do not have to look further than the very recent past for proof. We know, for instance, that despite his conspicuous animus for President Trump and the type of nasty, dishonorable, and cowardly Americanness Trump represents—an Americanness that John McCain considered himself above—he was so aligned politically with this man he detested that he voted with him 83 percent of the time. And we know that his choice to select the squirrelly and thick-witted Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 paved the way for Trump’s ascension, the way a fart leads way to a shit.

There were many other decisions like this; careful and measured political choices that aligned McCain with what was (and is) the status quo for white American men. There was his dogmatic support of the Iraq War. Which, to be fair, he later admitted was a mistake. But, as Splinter’s Paul Blest articulated, he didn’t seem to learn many lessons from it.

It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

“He kind of hit, and— ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.

For just a moment, the room was still. “Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. “Well, I guess you’d call it — it was a bounce,” she replied. “And then he laid still.”

Sally, who was speaking under oath, tried to explain it. She started again. “The first thing I saw was looking up, hearing the crash of the window, and then him going down, but my eyes were still glued—.” She pointed up at where the broken window would have been and then she pointed at her own face and drew circles around it. “That habit thing, whatever it is, that they wear, stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Authorities in Florida say they are responding to a mass shooting at an outdoor entertainment complex in Jacksonville.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office warned residents to stay "many blocks away" from Jacksonville Landing, an outdoor shopping mall along the St. Johns River.

Unconfirmed reports on social media indicate that the shooting happened at a video game tournament.

No other details have been released.

The NYPD paid Spike Lee — one of its fiercest critics — more than $200,000 to help launch a new policing program aimed at improving relations with minority communities.

The department tapped the “Do the Right Thing” director in 2016 as a consultant for the campaign, a spokesman for the department’s nonprofit New York City Police Foundation confirmed Thursday.

The contract with Lee’s advertising firm, Spike DDB, was for $219,113 — which was paid for by the Police Foundation.

“The Foundation approached and consulted several creative teams including the Spike DDB agency to help develop a public awareness campaign that would aim to strengthen the partnership between the NYPD and the communities it serves,” said spokesman Brady Littlefield. “We received tremendous input and ideas, and that process ultimately resulted in last spring’s neighborhood policing ad campaign.”

No charges will be filed against two Minneapolis police officers who fatally shot an armed Thurman Blevins during a foot chase last month in a residential neighborhood, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced Monday.

Witness testimony, body camera video and forensic testing all proved that Blevins had a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun in his hand and refused multiple commands to drop the gun during the foot chase that ended in his death on June 23, Freeman said in a statement.

"When Mr. Blevins fled from the officers with a loaded handgun, refused to follow their commands for him to stop and show his hands and then took the gun out of his pocket and turned toward the officers, Mr. Blevins represented a danger to the lives of Officer Schmidt and Officer Kelly," the statement quoted Freeman as saying. "Their decision to use deadly force against Mr. Blevins under those circumstances was authorized [under the law]."

The officers fired 14 shots from their weapons, four of which struck Blevins, Freeman said.

Congressman Rick Nolan’s former legislative director has been accused of sexual harassment — and in one case, repeated groping — by several women who used to work for the Democratic representative of Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District.

Former staffers say that in the summer of 2015, Nolan and his two most senior aides allowed Jim Swiderski to resign his post and tell colleagues he was looking for new opportunities rather than make him face formal disciplinary consequences after several female staffers raised harassment allegations. Months later, Swiderski was hired to do work for Nolan’s 2016 re-election campaign. He was only let go after a group of Nolan aides put pressure on the congressman to remove him.

MinnPost spoke to eight former employees of Nolan’s congressional office and of his campaigns, a group that included three women with specific harassment allegations, and five other staffers who corroborated details about Swiderski and provided information about the work environments in the congressman’s office and campaign. Most of these former Nolan employees remain active in Minnesota Democratic politics and requested anonymity to speak candidly without fear of retribution.

These staffers remain disturbed over the way Swiderski’s behavior was handled by Nolan and his most trusted lieutenants, particularly chief of staff Jodie Torkelson and district director Jeff Anderson.