The Flex Loan, a new type of payday loan pioneered by Advance Financial in Tennessee, allows residents to borrow up to $4,000 at a 279.5% interest rate.

The University of Houston's Special Collections Library is home to thousands upon thousands of priceless books and ancient manuscripts. But I was there to look at something most people threw away when they left college: blacklight posters from the 1960s and '70s printed and sold by a Houston company that no longer exists. My guide (or perhaps trip-sitter) for the day was Christian Kelleher, the Director of Exhibitions and External Relations at UH's libraries. Founded in 1969, Houston Blacklight & Poster Company was once one of the biggest distributors of the bright, colorful posters that adorned dorm rooms, basements and garage hangouts and became synonymous, along with lava lamps and bongs, with hippies and the counterculture movement.

Louisiana Republicans have eliminated an elected position days before an exoneree who overwhelmingly won the New Orleans-based clerk seat was set to take office. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry quietly signed legislation abolishing the longstanding Orleans Parish clerk of criminal court position into law Thursday, according to Louisiana Secretary of State spokesperson Trey Williams. Republicans say wiping away the office is a consolidation effort meant to make the local judicial system more efficient and cut costs. But Democrats describe the change as government overreach — arguing that it infringes on a predominately Black parish’s decision at the polls. Calvin Duncan, who spent nearly 30 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, easily won election to the criminal court clerk position in November, beating the incumbent and earning more than two-thirds of the vote. He had been set to take office next Monday and has asked a federal judge to allow him to take office as scheduled.

More than 60 units and 200 firefighters were called to the scene.

President Michael Kotlikoff backed his car into a student and drove over the foot of a recent graduate after what he called a "harassment and intimidation incident" in a Friday email blast to the Cornell community.

The arrest of a US military officer who participated in Maduro’s capture and the investigation in France into the tampering of thermometers at Charles de Gaulle Airport are the latest incidents of misconduct in the prediction market

Last week’s assassination attempt wasn’t a false flag. But the long-term internet brain rot producing the theories is real.

A Democrat running for Michigan’s 2nd House District in November has filed a campaign complaint against one of his primary opponents, a transgender woman, alleging that she violated state campaign law by not listing her deadname on her affidavit of identity submitted to run for office.

A China policy giving Africa’s biggest economies tariff-free access to its market for the next two years came into effect Friday while its economic rival the United States seeks to impose new import taxes under President Donald Trump’s push for protectionism. The China deal covers Africa’s 20 largest economies, including South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria and Kenya. China had already dropped tariffs on 33 poorer African countries, meaning 53 of the continent’s 54 nations are now eligible for “tariff-free treatment” for their goods, according to China. The country not eligible is the small nation of Eswatini because it is the only one in Africa that maintains formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

The four homicides recorded in April represent the fewest killings in a month in the city since 1970, when police began tracking monthly crime statistics.

A Baltimore County man who for years performed in blackface as the 1920s entertainer Al Jolson is running for the Maryland House of Delegates. He’s listed on the ballot as Bobby Al Jolson Berger. Berger said he stopped performing as Jolson in blackface in 2016. He said people got angry at him, but claimed they misunderstood that what he was doing wasn’t racist. According to the Baltimore Sun, a 2015 fundraiser planned for the six police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray was canceled because Berger was going to be the entertainment. It was called “racist and in poor taste.” In the 1980s Berger was fired as a city police officer because of his blackface performances. He sued and successfully got his job back.

Broadnax, who was convicted of killing two music producers in Garland in a 2008 robbery, is the third inmate executed by the state this year.

Uatsdin has spread amidst a growing interest in pre-Christian religious traditions as an important part of ethnic identity in the North Caucasus.

Isaiah Kirby, a 21-year-old Owings Mills native studying zoology at Michigan State University, was fatally shot by East Lansing Police Department officers.

By the time Maine Gov. Janet Mills launched her Senate campaign in October, Graham Platner was already drawing large crowds and raising impressive amounts of money. Mills supporters – including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – thought she could prevail with a pitch for electability based on her statewide name recognition, backing from Senate Democratic leadership and a tidal wave of opposition research on Platner. They were wrong, and on Thursday, Mills ended her campaign weeks before the June 9 primary.

Mexican president says she won't arrest officials indicted by the U.S. on drug charges without firm proof.

Scientists knew the stingers and pincers of these arachnids generally contained metals, but a new Smithsonian-led study maps out how these components are distributed

To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical. In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

The Pentagon has formally asked for congressional approval to codify its "Department of War" moniker, estimating it will cost taxpayers around $52 million. The estimate from the Pentagon is significantly lower than what the Congressional Budget Office projected in January, when it estimated the rebranding could cost as much as $125 million if it were adopted "broadly and rapidly" throughout the department.

Lynne Ramsay is not the kind of director to shill for a franchise and then watch the residuals roll in. Her intensely watchable studies of damaged people are big beasts revered by her peers and the actors she works with time and again. Jennifer Lawrence petitioned her to make Die My Love at Martin Scorsese’s suggestion, sowing the seed for a $24 million bidding war, a six-minute Cannes ovation and Lynne’s signing on with Hollywood’s biggest agency. Even with five starry projects in the works, the Glaswegian blue-collar intellectual, 56, swears she is still indie at heart.