Mankind’s quest to really fuck up the Moon is taking another step. NASA has filed a “request for quotations” for any company willing to scrape the lunar surface for the first off-world sale of space resources, in a sort of baby step towards Moon Capitalism.

The largest declines are in tropical areas. The drop of 94% for Latin America and the Caribbean is the largest anywhere in the world, driven by a cocktail of threats to reptiles, amphibians and birds.

MEXICO CITY — Dressed in black hoods and armed with spray paint, the women stormed into Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission and seized control. They evicted government workers, ripped paintings of revolutionary heroes from the walls and declared that from now on, the federal building in downtown Mexico City would be a shelter for female victims of violence. The dramatic takeover last week was the latest in a series of bold actions by feminist collectives in Mexico that have grown increasingly confrontational over the last year. In a series of demonstrations beginning in August 2019, masked protesters have defaced national monuments, attacked the attorney general’s office and splashed blood-red paint on the doors of the National Palace. The activists say their tactics are justified in a country where an average of 11 women are slain daily and the perpetrators are rarely brought to justice, and where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and other officials frequently dismiss their demands for protection. “We’re here so that the whole world will know that in Mexico they kill women and nobody does anything about it,” said Yesenia Zamudio, who is still seeking justice for the slaying of her 19-year-old daughter four years ago.

The B.C. Supreme Court has dismissed a years-long court challenge of public health-care rules in B.C. that claimed the province's health-care system denies patients the right to timely care. The constitutional challenge launched by private health-care advocate Dr. Brian Day, the owner of the Cambie Surgery Centre in Vancouver, claimed that prolonged wait times for medical procedures violated two charter rights, including the right to life, liberty and security of the person. (TLDR: Canadian court says fuck off private health care it’s public or nothing)

Wading through waist-deep water, residents of the al-Shigla neighbourhood in Omdurman, twin city of Sudan's capital Khartoum, tried to rescue what was left of their possessions as they floated by. Others stood by in despair, observing the aftermath of days of torrential rains that brought record-breaking flash floods to the country where the Blue and White Niles join to become the Nile River. Pieces of furniture, broken tiles, damaged vehicles and more were washed away by this year's rain that fell profusely and continuously for nearly two weeks. The rain and flooding exceeded records set in 1946 and 1988, killing more than 100 people and forcing the government to declare a three-month state of emergency this week.

All of this got me thinking about the one of the most memorable parts of my coverage of Microsoft antitrust trial—the videotaped deposition of Bill Gates, the company’s cofounder and at the time its CEO and chairman. At its most basic level, the deposition underscored the utter contempt he had for an action he believed impinged the ability of his company—and others to follow, he warned—to design products and conduct business as they saw fit. The strategy during the three-day deposition was classic Microsoft. Obstruct. Paint the government as out-of-touch policy wonks who had no idea how tech and real markets worked. And above all, deny even the most basic of premises in the government’s case. The plan from Gates’ army of lawyers and PR handlers seemed to be to wield his image as a software wunderkind who dropped out of Harvard to bootstrap his company and went on to become the world’s richest man. Team Gates planned to use that same domineering force of will to beat back government lawyers. By day 2, it became clear that strategy was failing spectacularly.

The Avengers and Game of Thrones star is remembered as a "luminous" talent and a "wonderful actress".

The idea isn’t new. For countless generations, Indigenous people have worked with fire to maintain healthy landscapes that are less prone to massive wildfires. While allowing natural fires to burn, Native Americans in California and elsewhere started some intentionally to clear dry brush, maintain species balance, and create prairies and meadows where animals graze. In the early days of Western settlement, some ranchers also adopted this practice to maintain pastureland for cattle.  But in the 1880’s, the US Army began to administer Yellowstone, the first national park, and developed the idea of “fighting” fire. In 1910, wildfires in Idaho and Montana burned millions of acres, destroying communities and killing 86 people. The US Forest Service subsequently adopted a policy of putting out all blazes, which state and federal land management agencies mimicked in an effort to protect timber supplies and human lives. Under these policies, Indigenous people and ranchers alike could be fined for burning their own lands. In 1968, the National Park Service lifted its fire ban after noticing a decline in giant sequoia trees, which depend on fire to grow. Over the next fifteen years, the Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) gradually re-introduced fire to their landscapes. The Forest Service now admits that suppression backfired; excluding fire created an unnatural build-up of dry brush and overcrowding of trees that’s partly fueling today’s mega-fires. Scientists and policy makers increasingly agree that under the right conditions, intentionally burning away flammable vegetation is one of the most effective tools for reducing wildfire risk. And research shows that when wildfires do reach lands thinned by prescribed fire, far fewer trees die “even under extreme fire weather,” an effect that can last for up to 15-20 years.

More than 40% of all reported coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) deaths in the United States have occurred in nursing homes. As a result, health care worker access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and infection control policies in nursing homes have received increased attention. However, it is not known if the presence of health care worker unions in nursing homes is associated with COVID-19 mortality rates. Therefore, we used cross-sectional regression analysis to examine the association between the presence of health care worker unions and COVID-19 mortality rates in 355 nursing homes in New York State. Health care worker unions were associated with a 1.29 percentage point mortality reduction, which represents a 30% relative decrease in the COVID-19 mortality rate compared to facilities without health care worker unions. Unions were also associated with greater access to PPE, one mechanism that may link unions to lower COVID-19 mortality rates. [Editor’s Note: This Fast Track Ahead Of Print article is the accepted version of the peer-reviewed manuscript. The final edited version will appear in an upcoming issue of Health Affairs.]

In a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, the largest corporations in publishing want to change what it means to own a book.

With less than 48 hours' notice, the city began moving disabled people out of a Midtown shelter Thursday to make room for homeless people an Upper West Side community wanted out, the Daily News has learned. The city caved to complaints from residents who felt their quality of life was affected by homeless men staying at the Lucerne Hotel on W. 79th St.

The FBI’s sting against the so-called Boojahideen did something unusual by linking a foreign terrorist group to right-wing extremists.

Rose Jusino was waking up after working the graveyard shift at Taco Bell when a friend knocked on her door at the Star Motel. The electric company trucks were back. The workers were about to shut off the power again. The 17-year-old slammed her door and cranked the air conditioning as high as it would go, hoping that a final blast of cold air might make the 95-degree day more bearable. She then headed outside to the motel’s overgrown courtyard, a route that took her past piles of maggot-infested food that had been handed out by do-gooders and tossed aside by the motel’s residents. Several dozen of them were gathered by a swimming pool full of fetid brown water, trying to figure out their next move. The motel’s owner had abandoned the property to its residents back in December, and now the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic was turning an already desperate strip of America — just down the road from Disney World — into something ever more dystopian. The motel’s residents needed to pay the power company $1,500.

The University of South Carolina started with a tidy coronavirus tracking dashboard and a few manageable cases. Then things started to unravel.

As wildfires rage worse than ever across California, firefighters have pleaded with locals not to battle the blazes on their own. Now they might have a new worry during a year of violent unrest across America: unsanctioned fire rescue efforts organized by hyper-partisan Facebook groups comprised at least in part of Blue Lives Matter-style vigilantes. Defend East County, a 20,000-person Facebook group that organized in opposition to Black Lives Matter protests near San Diego, has begun fire rescue missions, especially for animals, according to recent posts by members in the group.  On their face, fire rescue campaigns may sound like an unambiguous good—the Valley Fire in the area had claimed some 17,000 acres and dozens of buildings by Tuesday afternoon. But state and local officials say amateur efforts can impede professional firefighters.  Add in a group involved in multiple recent violent confrontations, and the situation can turn potentially explosive.

Dinguss said he never saw Reinoehl pull out a gun. He said he watched as two unmarked police vehicles converged on Reinoehl as he walked to his car, holding his phone and chewing on a piece of candy. The officers never audibly identified themselves and didn’t try to arrest Reinoehl, Dinguss said. Instead, he said they immediately began firing. When Reinoehl heard the gunfire, he ducked behind his car, which was pinned in by the law enforcement vehicles; he never tried to get inside, Dinguss said, and he never saw him reaching for a weapon. Dinguss said he watched police unleash rapid-fire rounds at Reinoehl, once pausing to shout “Stop!” before resuming their fire. Dinguss added officers waited “multiple minutes” before rendering medical aid to Reinoehl, who died at the scene from several gunshot wounds.

The failed hacking attempt was caught by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects.

This week’s sex diary.

Trump bulldozed through them all, believing he could charm the man who helped take down a president and chronicled half a dozen administrations over the past half-century.

For ages, being sober meant getting stuck with a crappy O’Doul’s or some take on a Shirley Temple at the bar. But now that the...