In late July, a wild chain of events occurred when the Trump administration decided to give Eastman Kodak, the film giant that went bankrupt in 2012, an unprecedented $765 million government loan through the Defense Production Act. Under this deal, which President Trump touted, the company would manufacture ingredients for an assortment of drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug Trump has repeatedly promoted—without scientific support—as a treatment for COVID-19. The agreement was officially announced on July 28, but the previous day, the price of Kodak’s stock began to surge, following local media leaks about the loan in Rochester, New York (the home of Kodak). This buying frenzy continued for a couple of days. During that time, billionaire investor George Karfunkel, a member of Kodak’s board of directors, made an unusual transaction: He donated 3 million Kodak shares—worth up to $180 million at the time—to a relatively new Jewish congregation that has almost no public profile.  The out-of-the-ordinary loan for Kodak came from a new and little-known government agency: the US International Development Finance Corporation. This outfit was created to provide foreign aid—not domestic assistance—and it is headed by Adam Boehler, a former roommate of Jared Kushner. In March, Kushner tapped Boehler to be part of his shadow coronavirus task force.

About three-quarters of all American voters will be eligible to receive a ballot in the mail for the 2020 election — the most in U.S. history, according to a New York Times analysis. If recent election trends hold and turnout increases, as experts predict, roughly 80 million mail ballots will flood election offices this fall, more than double the number that were returned in 2016. The rapid and seismic shift in how Americans will vote can be traced to the coronavirus pandemic. Concerns about the potential for virus transmission at polling places have forced many states to make adjustments on the fly that — despite President Trump’s protests — will make mail voting in America more accessible this fall than ever before. “I have a hard time looking back at history and finding an election where there was this significant of a change to how elections are administered in this short a time period,” said Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. Most of the changes are temporary and have been made administratively by state and local officials who have the power to make adjustments during emergencies like the pandemic.

A man punched a 17-year-old Sesame Place employee in the face after the teen reminded him to wear a mask, police said.  The incident occurred Sunday at the Sesame Place theme park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A teen employee told an unidentified man and woman that they were required to wear masks while in the park due to COVID-19.  Later that day, around 5 p.m., the same man confronted the teen worker at the Captain Cookie’s High C’s Adventure ride and punched him in the face, police said. The man and woman then fled from the scene as park security chased after them. Investigators said they were last seen driving away in a vehicle registered in New York. 

iOS 14, Apple’s upcoming major update to the iPhone operating system, has a security feature that tells users if an app is copying the clipboard in the background without permission from the user. This may not sound like a big deal, but think about the times you have, say, copied a password from a password manager and pasted it into an app to access an account, or copied a credit card number and pasted it into a website to buy something. When you copy the info, it goes to the clipboard. Since the developer beta release of iOS 14, it has been revealed that several apps have been copying data from the clipboard. Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, and many other apps are just a few that triggered the iOS 14 alert. LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok announced that they will be updating their apps so that they will stop accessing the clipboard. LinkedIn and Reddit say it’s a bug, while TikTok says it was to monitor “spammy behavior.”

And those were just the factual errors. This is to say nothing of the efforts by the New York Times and the Washington Post to gaslight readers into thinking that major news developments are not as serious or violent as they really are.

High winds and rain tore through the Chicago area Monday afternoon, with gusts reaching close to 100 mph in some parts of northern Illinois.

Jenna Ellis, a Trump adviser, is the latest transphobe to misgender and harass Pennsylvania’s trans health director, Dr. Rachel Levine. Levine is just getting on with her job. Ellis is hardly the only offender. A state lawmaker, a local official and countless other Pennsylvanians tweeting in their pajamas have painted Levine as a freak and a man in a dress and mocked her advice that wearing masks will flatten the curve of the ongoing and very deadly pandemic.

The US president returned minutes later, saying that the US Secret Service shot an armed suspect.

Indonesia's Mount Sinabung has erupted in a dramatic plume of ash rising several miles into the sky and posing health risks to nearby residents, according to Indonesian authorities. The volcano, located on Sumatra Island, erupted on Saturday and again on Monday, "emitting a thunderous noise and turning the sky dark," Reuters reports. An official on the island told The Associated Press that ash and grit had piled up 2 inches thick in some abandoned villages close to the volcano.

The dwarf planet Ceres -- long believed to be a barren space rock -- is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed Monday. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the NASA Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.  Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analysed images relayed from the orbiter, captured around 35 kilometres (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and determined that there is an "extensive reservoir" of brine beneath its surface. 

this fucking resume: Fleetwood Mac 1969 - Then Play On (engineer) 1970 - Kiln House (engineer) 1972 - Bare Trees (engineer) 1973 - Penguin (producer, engineer, mixing) 1973 - Mystery to Me (producer, engineer, guitar) Deep Purple 1969 - Concerto for Group and Orchestra (engineer) 1970 - Deep Purple in Rock (engineer) 1971 - Fireball (engineer) 1972 - Machine Head (engineer)[4] 1972 - Made in Japan (engineer)[5] 1973 - Who Do We Think We Are (engineer) 1974 - Burn (engineer, mixing) 1974 - Stormbringer (co-producer, engineer, mixing) 1975 - Come Taste the Band (co-producer, engineer, mixing) 1976 - Made in Europe (co-producer, engineer, mixing)- recorded live in April 1975 1977 - Last Concert in Japan (co-producer, engineer) - recorded live in December 1975 Jon Lord 1971 Jon Lord - Gemini Suite (engineer) 1976 Jon Lord - Sarabande (producer, engineer, remixing) 1974 Tony Ashton & Jon Lord - First of the Big Bands (engineer) 1977 Paice Ashton Lord - Malice in Wonderland (engineer) Wishbone Ash 1970 - Wishbone Ash (engineer) 1971 - Pilgrimage (engineer) 1972 - Argus (engineer) Rainbow 1975 - Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow (co-producer, engineer, mixing) 1976 - Rising (producer, engineer, mixing) 1977 - On Stage (producer, engineer, mixing) - recorded live in 1976 1978 - Long Live Rock 'n' Roll (producer, engineer, mixing) 1986 - Finyl Vinyl (producer) - collection Whitesnake 1978 - Snakebite (producer) 1978 - Trouble (producer) 1978 - Live at Hammersmith (producer) 1979 - Lovehunter (producer, engineer) 1980 - Ready an' Willing (producer, engineer, mixing) 1980 - Live... in the Heart of the City (producer, engineer) - recorded live in 1978 and 1980 1981 - Come an' Get It (producer, engineer, mixing) 1982 - Saints & Sinners (producer, engineer, mixing) 1984 - Slide It In (producer) Black Sabbath 1980 - Heaven and Hell (producer, engineer) 1981 - Mob Rules (producer, engineer) Blue Öyster Cult 1980 - Cultösaurus Erectus (producer, engineer) 1981 - Fire of Unknown Origin (producer, engineer) Iron Maiden 1981 - Killers (producer, engineer) 1982 - The Number of the Beast (producer, engineer) 1983 - Piece of Mind (producer, engineer, mixing) 1984 - Powerslave (producer, engineer, mixing) 1985 - Live After Death (producer, engineer, mixing)[5] 1986 - Somewhere in Time (producer, engineer, mixing) 1988 - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (producer, engineer, mixing) 1990 - No Prayer for the Dying (producer, engineer, mixing) 1992 - Fear of the Dark (producer, engineer, mixing) Other artists 1969 Jeff Beck - Beck-Ola (engineer) 1970 Peter Green - The End of the Game (engineer) 1970 The Groundhogs - Thank Christ for the Bomb (engineer) 1971 Stackridge - Stackridge (engineer) 1971 Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker - Hooker 'N' Heat (Mixdown Engineer) - recorded in 1970 1971 Skid Row - 34 Hours (engineer) 1971 Toad - Toad (engineer) 1971 Faces - Long Player (engineer) 1971 Rock Workshop - The Very Last Time (engineer) 1971 Jodo "Guts" LP (engineer) 1972 Silverhead - Silverhead (producer) 1972 Toad - Tomorrow Blue (engineer) 1972 Flash - Flash (engineer) 1972 Flash - In the Can (engineer) 1973 Gary Moore - Grinding Stone (producer, engineer) 1978 The Electric Chairs-"The Electric Chairs"(producer) 1978 Wayne County & the Electric Chairs - Storm The Gates Of Heaven (producer) 1978 Wayne County & the Electric Chairs - Blatantly Offensive E.P. (producer) 1978 Roger Glover - Elements (producer) 1979 Cozy Powell - Over the Top (producer) 1982 Michael Schenker Group - Assault Attack (producer, engineer)

Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. were ordered to convert their California drivers from independent contractors to employees with benefits, an early loss in a court battle the gig economy can’t afford to lose. The judge’s ruling Monday won’t be the last word, as the ride-hailing companies are expected to appeal the far-reaching preliminary injunction that could make them halt their services as they figure out how to adjust their business model to comply with it. The case brought by California officials to enforce a state labor law that took effect this year is the most serious legal threat yet to the gig economy -- and comes at a particularly difficult time for the ridesharing industry. Decimated by travel restrictions related to the coronavirus, Uber widened its losses and reported a 67% decline in ride revenue during the June quarter.

The story of a guy who wouldn't let a few quintillion possible decryption keys stand between him and his cryptocurrency.

An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to internal company documents reviewed by NBC News. The investigation’s preliminary results, which were provided to NBC News by a Facebook employee, shed new light on the scope of activity and content from the QAnon community on Facebook, a scale previously undisclosed by Facebook and unreported by the news media, because most of the groups are private. The top 10 groups identified in the investigation collectively contain more than 1 million members, with totals from more top groups and pages pushing the number of members and followers past 3 million. It is not clear how much overlap there is among the groups.

For many people in the past, the most awe-inspiring and impressive events in their lives were thunderstorms. Even today, lightning strikes make hot favourite movies and still images in social media. Although paintings of thunderstorms and lightning strikes may be pale imitations of their vivid and earth-shaking reality, they have enjoyed sustained popularity. In this first of two articles, I look at mainly landscapes in which there’s a thunderstorm; in tomorrow’s second and concluding article I’ll look at narrative works in which the thunderstorm plays a part in their story.

Owing to the fact [Roy Orbison had] been dead for four years at the time of production, a spectral Orbison appears in the 'I Drove All Night' video via snippets of distorted archival footage while Jason Priestley and Jennifer Connelly cavort in moody monochrome. An impossibly attractive couple – the objects of approximately 98% of teenage crushes of the era – Priestley does his best James Dean impression behind the wheel as he drives to meet Connelly in the middle of the desert. On arrival, the two young stars then frolic on the car bonnet and other locations, generally enjoying each other’s company for the rest of the song. As we took this nostalgia trip and cursed the ravages of Mother Time, we suddenly bolted upright at a brief shot of a van the two lovers ride past, spilling our coffee as we did a cartoon-style double-take. No, it couldn’t be. Grabbing the remote we hit rewind just to make sure and there it was, plain as day:

There is outrage down in... down in Mexico after a bear in a video. There was this black bear on video and this lady visiting in a nature park and the wild bear came right up and was sniffing her hair. So they caught the bear and caught it and castrated it because that’s not the way to do things, you can’t do that, Mack.

Thirty minutes of TikTok left me with just one burning question: How can this thing be a threat to U.S. national security? And then I had the epiphany. TikTok is not just China’s revenge for the century of humiliation between the Opium Wars and Mao’s revolution. It is the opium — a digital fentanyl, to get our kids stoked for the coming Chinese imperium.

A man was shot during an exchange of gunfire with Chicago police Sunday in Englewood on the South Side, authorities said. About 2:30 p.m., officers responded to a call of a person with a gun in an alley near the 5700 block of South Racine and saw a man matching the description take off on foot, Deputy Chief Yolanda Talley told reporters. During an ensuing chase, the man, thought to be in his late teens or early 20s, allegedly turned to the officers and fired shots. Two officers then returned fire and struck the suspect, who was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where his condition was stabilized, authorities said. He remains in police custody.

One of the Milky Way’s neighbour galaxies has been disrupting our galaxy’s disc for billions of years, but now it is on the brink of being shredded into pieces