Dustin P. Walsh

A U.S. cruise ship on an around-the-world voyage that touted its cabins as floating homes suspended its three-year voyage in Cambodia due to fuel costs, forcing hundreds of passengers to disembark. cbsn.ws/4e6v6BX

RFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Novel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."

A Florida man was found dead in his home during a welfare check in July 2022. Weeks later, one of the officers who discovered his body moved into the home and spent years impersonating him, according to investigators. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/off…

NEW: Last school year, a 7th grader viewed 4,700 YouTube videos during class. An 8th grader viewed 5,700 videos in class. A 2nd grader viewed ~500 in just 2 months. Less than 5% were educational. @nbcnews analyzed the YouTube watch histories of students from across the country. My new story shows how far some take it on their school laptops and iPads --> nbcnews.com/specials/hooked-…

Elon Musk said in a social media post Monday that he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to each child in the U.S., writing that the gift "will be the first of many." Musk didn't specify how the shares would be distributed or other details of how the pledge might be fulfilled. The SpaceX CEO is the company's largest shareholder with a 10.5% stake, according to financial data firm FactSet. His stake included 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX when the company went public earlier this year, an event that briefly made Musk the world's first trillionaire. cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-s…

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?” Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century. politico.com/news/magazine/2…

A striking contrast on the streets of Paris: A couple sits sipping drinks at an outdoor café as flames burn just steps away. The moment was captured Saturday near the Arc de Triomphe, on the outskirts of rioting that erupted during demonstrations over rising prices, inequality and public spending. Video shows the pair continuing their conversation as a burning trash bin lights up the background.

NEW: The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a statement firmly condemning plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan. Archbishop Paul Coakley calls the decision “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”

BREAKING: Tennessee governor puts a halt on executions after inmate Christa Gail Pike survives a lethal injection attempt. apnews.com/article/christa-p…

McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion dollars to find out why families stopped coming. I can save them the 8.5 billion. They took out the playground. The plan, announced Wednesday at investor day. Better food, faster service, new equipment, AI tools, hospitality training, and a bigger push into chicken and beverages. They call it Next. The goal, they say, is making customers feel more comfortable. Wall Street loved it so much the stock fell 5 percent to its lowest since 2022. Over five years McDonald's shares are down 3 percent. Burger King's parent is up 14. The owner of Taco Bell and KFC is up 13. This is not a hamburger problem. This is a McDonald's problem. So let us talk about who used to eat there. Parents. That was the whole business. Parents at 5:40 on a Tuesday with three kids in the back and nothing thawed at home. You did not go for the burger. You went because your kids could run screaming through a plastic tube for 40 minutes while you sat with a coffee and experienced silence. That was the product. The food was the cover charge. The first PlayPlace opened in 1971 in Birmingham, Alabama, and for fifty years it did one job. It made small children demand to go to McDonald's. Then 2020 arrived, every play area in the country closed, and a great many never came back. The equipment came out during a remodeling program named Experience of the Future. The Experience of the Future turned out to be a touchscreen. Their own chief executive said he did not know if ball pits were in their future. Sir, you were not selling ball pits. You were selling forty minutes. So now there is no counter, no playground, and no reason for a seven year old to want to go. A screen, a window, and a bag. And for that we pay prices that require a moment of reflection in the parking lot. For thin, overcooked, oddly uniform pucks that taste like a memory of beef. I did not love them because they were good. I loved them because I was eight and there was a slide. And have you seen the new buildings. The old ones were unmistakable. Red roof, yellow arches, legible from a highway at 70 to a child who could not yet read. The new ones are a flat gray box with a small logo and a drive through wrapped around it. A regional claims office with a fryer. They removed the color, the characters, the counter, and the playground, and then hired consultants to find out why it no longer feels like anywhere. Which is why, when I have to eat fast food, I go to Chick-fil-A. Not for the politics. For the competence. They have led the customer satisfaction index for fast food eleven years running, and average 8.5 million dollars per location against McDonald's 4 million. More than double, while closed on Sundays. Fifty two days a year with the lights off, and still double. A seventeen year old hands you a bag and says my pleasure and means it about 70 percent, which is 70 percent more than a touchscreen has managed. McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion on hospitality training. Chick-fil-A earns 8.5 million per restaurant by just having some. So here is my consulting proposal, free of charge, on behalf of mothers everywhere. Put the playgrounds back. Not a nostalgia campaign. Not a retro cup. The structure. Tubes, slides, a door the kids cannot open from the inside, and a bench where a tired woman can sit. And understand what you are buying, because it is not lunch. A six year old does not know your food is bad. He has no basis for comparison and no functioning palate. He thinks the burger is incredible because he is standing in a castle made of tubes. That is the window. That is the only window you get. You catch them before the taste buds arrive, and thirty years later they drive past your sign, feel something they cannot explain, and pull in anyway. That is not a menu strategy. That is imprinting, and you shut it down in 2020 to save on cleaning. Eight and a half billion dollars for AI tools and hospitality training. Or a slide. 🦋

America lost one in six of its neighborhood bars in a single decade, and the killer was real estate math. A bar like this can pour $3 beers because the building was paid off decades ago. The owner often lives upstairs. No rent, no investors, no debt service on a Pabst sign that's been hanging there for 40 years. The moment that building sells, the math dies with it. A new operator inherits a market-rate lease, which forces $9 drinks, which forces a renovation to justify $9 drinks, which produces another exposed-brick cocktail bar where the dive used to be. The Midwest kept its dive bars because of how they got built in the first place. Before Prohibition, Milwaukee's breweries put up corner taverns themselves. Pabst and Schlitz wanted guaranteed outlets for their beer, so they built bars directly into residential blocks. That's why these places sit on quiet snowy corners between houses instead of on commercial strips where rent explodes. Chicago had around 3,300 tavern licenses in 1990. It's down to about 1,200. At the worst of the decline, America was losing six neighborhood bars a day. And every single closure is permanent. You can't build a dive bar. You can only inherit one.

Trump admin preparing to ban diesel exports for 90 days, @bjlefebvre @meredithllee @scottpwaldman scoop politico.com/news/2026/09/23…

Trump: I could have banned fishing. I'll tell you what, the power of this office is crazy. I could have banned fishing. I think I'm gonna do that just for a day or two…