Storm preparations ramped up across the New Orleans metro area Monday, and though the worst fears about Hurricane Sally's high winds and heavy flooding had shifted to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, southeast Louisiana residents in vulnerable areas were still bracing for an onslaught of wind and water. A move east in Sally's forecast track overnight on Sunday put the storm on a path to buffet the Louisiana coast before making landfall in Mississippi on Tuesday. The exact trajectory of the slow-moving storm remained uncertain, however, and officials still expect area parishes to suffer a blow even if they avoid a direct hit.

It's peak hurricane season, and that's clear when you look at the Atlantic Ocean, which has five active tropical cyclones at the same time for only the second time in history. The only other time there were five active tropical cyclones -- hurricane, tropical storm and/or tropical depression -- in the Atlantic was in 1971. The five systems are Hurricane Paulette, Hurricane Sally, Tropical Storm Teddy, Tropical Storm Vicky, and Tropical Depression Rene.

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News. The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Bolivia, and Ecuador she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them. “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her Linkedin profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”

he South Dakota Attorney General reported hitting a deer Saturday night but had actually hit and killed a pedestrian whose body wasn’t discovered until the next morning, according to the Department of Public Safety. “My cousin got run over by the attorney general,” Nick Nemec said Monday about his relative Joe Boever. “A deer doesn’t look like a human,” Nick’s brother, Victor, added.

Eight people in Gresik regency, East Java, were ordered by local authorities to dig graves for those who have died of COVID-19 as punishment for not wearing face masks in public. 

"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank McKenzie told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

As the saying goes, the operation was a success but the patient is dying. Theaters are open, and operations have been smooth; it’s possible that more, and more significant, cities will reopen in the coming weeks. However, upcoming weeks will see no new major releases. With “Wonder Woman 1984” delayed until December — the sole potential blockbuster for next month — and Universal taking “Candyman” out of October 16 until next year, studios are saying it’s not worth it. This leaves theaters in dire straits. This weekend, the average complex grossed under $5,000 (before concessions). More than half of that goes to film rentals. They have staff and other operational costs to pay, as well as rent to landlords. Theaters have a stronger hand in negotiating rent if they’re closed. Once open, they owe, and now they face weeks of operation at a significant loss. Theaters weren’t fools in trying to reboot. They were operating from a weak position where opening gave a hope that audiences might flock to “Tenet,” and if so other top films would follow. They also feared not opening would encourage more VOD plays, which would lead to greater problems. Now, they face further financial stress.

That data centre has now been retrieved from the ocean floor, and Microsoft researchers are assessing how it has performed, and what they can learn from it about energy efficiency. Their first conclusion is that the cylinder packed with servers had a lower failure rate than a conventional data centre. When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018, just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed. That compares very well with a conventional data centre.

A supposed FBI raid of a home of an infamous Republican dirty trickster appears to have been a ruse—one that began falling apart even as its perpetrators managed to dupe a major national newspaper. On Monday, a Virginia man who responded to a Craigslist ad seeking actors to play FBI agents for a television pilot came forward to say that he’d been roped into the latest hoax orchestrated by bumbling right-wing smear merchants Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl.

The recent mass gathering in South Dakota for the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally seemed like the perfect recipe for what epidemiologists call a “superspreading” event. Beginning Aug. 7, an estimated 460,000 attendees from all over country descended on the small town of Sturgis for a 10-day event filled with indoor and outdoor events such as concerts and drag racing. Now a new working paper by economist Dhaval Dave and colleagues is making headlines with their estimate that the Sturgis rally led to a shocking 266,796 new cases in the U.S. over a four-week period, which would account for a staggering 19 percent of newly confirmed cases in the U.S. in that time. They estimate the economic cost of these cases at $12.2 billion, based on previous estimates of the statistical cost of treating a COVID-19 patient.

The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus accused career government scientists on Sunday of “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and warned that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election. Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump. Mr. Caputo, who has faced criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger. “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo, a Trump loyalist installed by the White House in April, told followers in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page. Mr. Caputo has 5,000 Facebook friends, and the video has been viewed more than 850 times. It has been shared by 44 followers.

Deep within the acidic clouds of Venus, astronomers have detected a tantalizing gas never found on the planet before — a gas that, remarkably, could be a sign of life on the hellish world. The gas’s presence isn’t enough to say for sure that Venus hosts life forms, but the fact that it exists in the planet’s clouds indicates that something is going on there that we don’t fully understand. The gas in question is a nasty one called phosphine, a toxic and explosive molecule with a lingering odor of garlic and dead fish. Astronomers discovered the putrid gas lurking within a layer of clouds on Venus, where temperatures are pretty close to those on our planet. They didn’t find much — just small traces in the swirling mix of sulfuric acid clouds that surround the planet. “It’s equivalent to a few tablespoons in an Olympic sized swimming pool,” David Clements, an astrophysicist at the Imperial College of London and part of the team that made the discovery, tells The Verge. But finding even a small amount of phosphine on Venus is enticing because of how the gas is made here on Earth. Either it is manufactured artificially by humans — into products like fumigants or biological weapons — or it is a natural byproduct of life. Phosphine can be found in swamps and marshlands, where it’s thought to be produced by microbes. It can also be found in the guts of animals or in the poop they leave behind. Above all, it’s a gas that is almost exclusively associated with life on Earth, raising the possibility that it could be a sign of microbes floating in the Venusian clouds.

The Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa, U.S. intelligence reports say, according to a U.S. government official familiar with the issue and another official who has seen the intelligence. News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald Trump’s decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back — possibly in the middle of a tense election season.

PepsiCo is launching a new enhanced water drink called Driftwell.

“It’s not right-wing. I don’t have a problem with right-wing stuff. It’s QAnon stuff. This is conspiracy theory. This goes beyond. This is new. This is a new phenomenon in Spanish speaking radio. We Cubans are not normal,” Tejera laughed, “but this is new. This is crazy. This is f---ing crazy.”

The Los Angeles Police Department has been caught in a series of lies about their arrest of KPCC Josie Huang, who was reporting outside of St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood where the two police officers shot in an ambush were taken. Two LA County deputies were shot and are in critical condition after their patrol car was fired on by an individual captured on video. While sitting outside of a metro station in Compton, an individual can be seen in the video approaching the car and firing shots. One deputy got out of the vehicle to pursue the suspect, then the video ends.

Internal documents show how a source ended up in jail — and the fallout in the newsroom. ... Failing to protect an anonymous leaker is a cardinal sin in journalism, though the remarkable thing in this instance is that The Intercept didn’t seem to try to protect its source. The outlet immediately opened an investigation into its blunder, which confirmed the details that the Justice Department had gleefully announced after it arrested Ms. Winner. They included the fact that The Intercept led the authorities to Ms. Winner when it circulated the document in an effort to verify it, and then published the document, complete with the identifying markings, on the internet. ... The documents fall short of revealing a conspiratorial cover-up. Instead they show an extreme version of the human errors, hubris and mismanagement familiar to anyone who has worked in a newsroom — and the struggle of The Intercept to live up to its lofty founding ideals in dealing with its own errors. Ms. Winner may have thought she was mailing the documents to Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras, who went to great lengths to protect Mr. Snowden. But Mr. Greenwald was in Brazil and when he heard about the document, he was not interested. He told me that he considered its claims about Russian hacking during the 2016 race “wildly overblown” and that it didn’t include direct evidence to persuade him otherwise.

I was told this video is "old news" but it was news to me lord thundering jesus

President Trump's campaign says it knocks on a million doors a week. Joe Biden's campaign hasn't knocked on any doors to talk to voters for months. In lieu of in-person meetings, Democrats are focused on conversations they can have virtually. "While you might hear our opponent spend a lot of time talking about the millions of door knocks or attempts that they're making week to week, those metrics actually don't have any impact on reaching voters," Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, told reporters in a call last week, downplay the clear door-knocking disparity. "Our metric of success, the numbers we look at and use, are conversations."

Bannon has emerged as one of the biggest champions of businessman Guo Wengui, who casts himself as an anti-communist dissident, even as other critics of the Chinese government have grown skeptical of his claims.