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The Death toll from Maui's wildfires last week rose to 96 and is expected to grow higher while hotel rooms and home rentals are being made available to help house the roughly one-third of Lahaina's 13,000 residents who lost their homes. Readers are reminded that the grim numbers concern real people, like Faaso and Malui Fonua Tone, their daughter, Salote Takafua, and her son, Tony Takafua, who all were found dead inside a charred car.

Devastation in Lahaina.

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

David Weiss, appointed Friday as the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden, won't find anything new, one of Biden's attorneys told CBS' Face the Nation, because Weiss has already been investigating Biden for five years as the U.S. attorney for Delaware. Last month a judge refused a plea deal between prosecutors and Biden that would have given him probation and a deferred a gun charge in exchange for pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax evasion.

People taking new weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are at a higher risk of inhaling food or fluid into their lungs when under anesthesia, a surgical complication that can cause severe lung damage, infection or death. Many surgeries require only eight hours of fasting to empty the stomach, but people on the digestion-slowing drugs keep some of the food in their stomachs for weeks longer, so a new study recommends pausing the injections three weeks ahead of a procedure with anesthesia. 

We won't know for sure how many people died from the Extreme Heat last month, the hottest on record, because there is no standard way of determining or reporting excess heat deaths in the United States' more than 3,000 counties. As a result, deaths are almost certainly undercounted. A study last month found that Europe had 61,000 heat-related deaths last summer — more than 100 times the U.S. count despite having just twice the population.

Carla Gates believes her husband, Dallas mail carrier Eugene Gates Jr., died in June from extreme heat.

(Courtesy of Carla Gates via AP)

More than one in four students missed more than 10% of school days in the 2021-2022 academic year compared with just 15% before the pandemic, according to data from 40 states and Washington, D.C. The increase in absences isn't directly because of Covid-19 — rates of infection didn't strongly correlate with lower attendance — but the pandemic has been shown to exacerbate other factors, including unstable housing, school staffing shortages and mental illness.

One way to keep artificial intelligence from taking your job: Show employers that you and AI make for good coworkers, says Jordan Marlatt, lead tech industry analyst at Morning Consult. He predicts that as AI apps become more common in multiple industries, people will become increasingly valued for knowing how to prompt AI systems into generating the right information.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords colleagues.

Insurers in several states said they aren't covering Leqembi, the first drug shown to slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer's patients, even though Medicare began covering it last month following the IV drug's approval by the FDA. While most people with the disease are old enough to qualify for Medicare, those with early-onset Alzheimer's are more likely to have private insurance, and their insurer could deny them coverage.

California regulators voted last week to let two robotaxi services expand in San Francisco even though the driverless cars have blocked emergency vehicles dozens of times in the last year, including fire department calls and a response to a mass shooting. Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, also have autonomous ride-hailing, but San Francisco will be the first with two round-the-clock services: Cruise, owned by GM, and Waymo, a Google spinoff. 

Another one for the "What Could Go Wrong?" file.

A Waymo driverless taxi backs up San Francisco traffic for several minutes in February because the back door was not completely shut.

(AP Photo/Terry Chea, file)

Barbie earned nearly $34 million in its fourth weekend atop the domestic box office and is within $50 million of beating even The Super Mario Bros. Movie as the top-grossing film of 2023. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer returned to the second spot after Meg 2: The Trench pushed it to No. 3 the previous week.

Just days after falling nearly 100 feet off a cliff at the Grand Canyon, a 13-year-old boy was discharged from the hospital and joined his mom for the drive back to their home in North Dakota. Wyatt Kauffman broke nine vertebrae and suffered a ruptured spleen, a collapsed lung, a concussion and a broken hand and was airlifted to treatment on Tuesday after a two-hour rescue effort.

Zoo Knoxville (Tenn.) staff started refilling a freshly cleaned pool before realizing that some leftover soap was turning the whole thing into a massive bubble bath. So they decided to let Finn, the black bear whose pool it is, enjoy the suds.

Bare necessities

So fresh and so clean.

(Giphy)

I dance like people wish they weren't watching.
—@BobGolen

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