And other fake news from the Supreme Court’s Purdue Pharma hearing The first hour and a half or so of Monday morning’s Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement, which shields from liability every member of Purdue’s OxyContin-peddling Sackler family, and a 24-page list of related parties, in exchange for their contribution of some $6 billion to the estate of the opioid empire, went about as you’d expect. Attorneys for both sides went back and forth variously over whether the settlement was “appropriate” under, and/or “not inconsistent” with, the bankruptcy code. The judges poked and prodded and showed off their intelligence. It was another day at the office. And then came Pratik Shah, an Akin Gump attorney who purported to represent the real “victims” of Purdue’s malfeasance, retained to offer a final ten minutes of discussion by the official Committee of Unsecured Creditors of Purdue, which includes some 130,000 people who either personally experienced, or lost an immediate family member to, the OxyContin scourge. “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, the U.S. Trustee does not speak for the victims of the opioid crisis,” Shah began his melodramatic oratory. “Quite the opposite. The Trustee appointed the official committee, my client, as the fiduciary representing their interests. Every one of the creditor constituencies in this case comprising individual victims and public entities harmed by Purdue overwhelmingly supports the plan. Indeed, it was the creditors that insisted on the release of the creditor claims against the Sacklers for the same injuries.”

The group had cited an estimate of the financial impact of organized retail crime that turned out to be a six-year-old survey of aggregate inventory losses for all reasons, including those unrelated to theft. On Friday, after the publication of Retail Dive’s story, the group said it had updated its report. It no longer includes any estimate of organized retail crime’s overall impact in dollar terms, the assertion that nearly half of shrink is attributable to ORC, or any mention of the National Coalition of Law Enforcement. In the original report, dedicated to organized retail crime and conducted with risk, compliance, investigations and monitoring firm K2 Integrity, the group had said that shrink was $94.5 billion in 2021, “nearly half of which was attributable to ORC, according to NRF survey data and research by the National Coalition of Law Enforcement.” ... Trevor Wagener, the chief economist at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, who has conducted research on these issues, found that using the NRF’s methodology ORC’s contribution to retail shrink is probably closer to 5%, in contrast to the 50% that results from using Dugan’s number. However, calculating the scope of ORC is an onerous task, he told Retail Dive.

A significant portion of demand for George Santos' Cameo videos appears to have come from Democrats, including John Fetterman.

A disinformation scholar who left Harvard University in August has accused the school of muzzling her speech and dismantling her research team.

The Boy and the Heron is as peculiar as life itself.

When Feeld shut down for updates last week, users lost their matches, missed out on dates, and generally descended into turgid madness.

From launching a historic strike at the Big Three automakers to calling for a cease-fire in the war on Gaza, the UAW has had a big year. And 2024 might be even bigger: the union is pushing to organize 150,000 workers at nonunion automakers across the US.

An attempted search warrant turned into a house explosion in Arlington County Monday night, police claim.

Some hallucinations could ‘potentially induce cardiac incidents in Legal,’ according to internal documents

A quest to uncover the truth about Bobi, named the “oldest dog ever” by Guinness World Records, led to dog fur experts and conspiracy theories, and left me with serious questions about how world records are verified.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed one of his closest aides to explore ways to "thin out" Gaza's population, the Israel Hayom newspaper reported on Friday.

The Pogues frontman, punk trickster-god, and poet of the gutter died Thursday in Dublin, but the songs he wrote and sang have always transcended time.

But even the honored dead are still dead, only dead, and the dead forget everything.

The bubbling anger among Arab and Muslim Americans over the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict could threaten his chances of reelection.

The soldier of the future will be "flooded with pain-numbing stimulants," cybernetically enhanced, and, one official sort-of joked, must be eventually "terminated."

The president of Colombia has compared the “genocide of the Palestinian people” to climate change. Speaking at COP28 on Friday, Gustavo Petro linked the Israel-Gaza conflict to the climate emergency. "The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis.” He went on: “Most victims of climate change, which will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO2 or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north, where the melting glaciers will make it possible for people to have drinking water. The exodus will be of billions. “There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future. Why have the major carbon-consuming nations made it possible for the systematic killing of thousands of children in Gaza, is my question? “Because if they do not kill them, they will invade their country to prevent them from consuming their carbon. We can therefore see what the future will look like. There will be a shrinking of democracy and unleashed barbaric acts against our peoples. Those of us who do not emit CO2. Those of us who are poor."

Rodolfo Barra resigned as Justice Minister almost 30 years ago amid an outcry over revelations about his past Argentina's public conversation is abuzz on Friday after the incoming Javier Milei administration announced the next Solicitor General will be Rodolfo Barra, who almost 39 years ago resigned to another top government position amid outcry over his neo-Nazi past.

VICE News can reveal the identity of the man who is behind the spread of neo-Nazi groups across Canada, as well as his ties to a terrorist group.

Every so often, the spiritual center of the internet shifts, as the locus where online culture is shaped and incubated before rippling out into the wider world cycles to a new home. Today, that shift is happening again, with Telegram taking the main stage. In recent years, the messaging app and digital platform has recurringly become the place for the rawest, most direct coverage of massive international crises, first with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now with Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent month-long massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. The app lets users opt-in to encrypted messaging, which helps explain why high-profile and dangerous movements and events have been organized there, including the January 6th storming of the US Capitol. The far-right and neo-Nazis have used Telegram to plan and recruit both in the US and abroad; this fall, organizing and communication on the platform reportedly sparked antisemitic violence against Jewish people in Dagestan, Russia, and may have played a part in exacerbating Azerbaijani violence against Armenians. With 800 million accounts, Telegram ranks towards the bottom of the top ten social media platforms in users. But its influence exceeds this position. “Nearly all conflict visuals are now just downstream from Telegram, the same way news on Facebook/Instagram used to be collected from Twitter,” tweeted New York Times visual investigations journalist Aric Toler on October 11, as new images from the October 7 attack and Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza poured on to the broader internet after first appearing on the platform. (Toler, in his prior job at Bellingcat, helped pioneer open source intelligence reporting.)

Tacky left-centrist garbage isn’t moving the way it used to.