California lawmakers shelved a bill Thursday that was directly inspired by the killing of George Floyd, which would have required police officers to physically intervene when their colleagues use excessive force. The bill, AB1022 by Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, would have disqualified officers who failed to intervene in such situations from serving in law enforcement and made them an accessory to any crime their colleague committed through the use of excessive force.

Air quality in the Bay Area, particularly along the Peninsula, was the worst in the world Wednesday, as smoke from wildfires blows over the region. The PurpleAir map below shows real-time air quality readings around the Bay Area. On Wednesday, a thick band of purple AQI readings along San Mateo County, from Millbrae and San Mateo, down into western Santa Clara County. On Thursday morning, things were looking a bit better on the Peninsula, but far worse in the East Bay.

A viral tweet claiming the film sexualizes a young Black girl has led to thousands of people calling for Netflix to dump the film.

Democrats say climate change is a priority. The DNC platform dropped its demand to end subsidies to dirty energy.

All your ninjutsu scrolls is mine

[$53,000/year tuition] Students at New York University are exposing the nightmarish quarantine meals on TikTok, and now the school is going viral for serving food reminiscent of Fyre Festival's infamous "gourmet" lunches. Amid the ongoing debate over the safety of in-person classes, the school announced its return to campus on July 30, leaving thousands of students scrambling to get to New York City in time to move into their dorms. To limit the spread of COVID-19, the school is facilitating an unconventional move-in process to comply with the city's mandatory quarantine order. Anyone traveling from outside New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut is required to quarantine for 14 days, so NYU is splitting move-in into two shifts. About 2,600 students from outside the tri-state area have begun quarantining in the school's dorms this week, and 3,700 will arrive in another two weeks. Students living on-campus will be tested for COVID-19 within 24 hours of arrival, and then again in seven to ten days, per the school's return plans. NYU promised to deliver three free meals and one "snack" per day for students quarantining in the dorms, as travel outside their rooms is extremely limited. According to information the school posted online, the meals will be delivered "at the same time" between 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. for students in residences with a kitchen and fridge, and three times a day for those without. The plan supposedly includes options for students with dietary restrictions, including vegetarian, vegan, gluten and dairy free, Halal or Kosher, and allergen free. The school also said that students will be allowed to order meals and groceries for delivery, but only between 2:00 and 8:30 p.m.

Former Trump campaign CEO and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was indicted in New York on fraud charges related to a fundraising campaign to build a border wall, federal prosecutors said. Bannon is among four people indicted for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to the online "We Build the Wall" campaign.

A Waco, Texas, woman arrested last week and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and driving while intoxicated​ appears to have been motivated by the QAnon conspiracy theory President Donald Trump spoke positively of during a White House press conference Wednesday. According to arrest affidavits first reported by the Waco Herald-Tribune, 30-year-old Cecilia Fulbright got behind the wheel of her car just after 9 a.m.​ Wednesday with the intent to “[save] a child” from “pedophiles.” Fulbright reportedly chased two strangers’ vehicles in an apparent attempt to ​hit them. According to a Waco police report, the first vehicle was a catering truck driven by a woman with her ​minor daughter in the passenger’s seat. They successfully evaded Fulbright before calling the police who, according to an incident report, were unable to locate Fulbright or her vehicle. Fulbright then ​targeted a second unrelated ​vehicle, a Dodge Caravan ​driven by a 19-year-old college student​. Fulbright chased ​the student into a parking lot​ where she cornered​ and repeatedly rammed ​the Dodge Caravan​.

Asingle mother of three children, Sandra Bivin of Denver, Colorado, is now being forced to try to survive on $58 per week on unemployment since the $600 per week expanded unemployment benefits expired on 26 July. It is not easy. Before the pandemic hit, Bivin worked as a driver for Uber and Lyft, and had a part-time job in accounting. Because of her part-time position, she doesn’t qualify for pandemic unemployment assistance offered to independent contractors until her regular employment runs out in another seven weeks. In the meantime, Bivin has struggled to make ends meet and will be ineligible for the $400 per week unemployment benefits from Donald Trump’s executive order when it goes into effect.

Swisher proposed adding a driver representative to Uber’s board to help driver better hold the company accountable. Khosrowshahi seemed to suggest it was possible, citing German companies that have an employee representative on their boards, which he called “cool.” But such a thing would only be possible “in a different world,” he said. “I do think we have the system that’s optimized... it’s called capitalism,” Khosrowshahi said. “It’s not called labor-ism. It’s not called socialism. It’s capitalism and it’s a system that’s built to maximize shareholder value and capital. And if that’s the only input, then you’re going to keep getting the same results going forward that you got going backward. So these kinds of systemic changes, you know, I’m game for it. I don’t want yesterday’s capitalism 20 years ago to be the same 20 years from now.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed Rep. Joe Kennedy in his effort to unseat Sen. Ed Markey in an upcoming Massachusetts Senate Democratic primary. The move puts the California Democrat squarely in the middle of a closely-watched fight and could deliver a boost to Kennedy ahead of the September 1 primary election where he is challenging Markey, who served alongside Pelosi for decades as a member of the House of Representatives. "Never before have the times demanded we elect courageous leaders as today. That is why I'm proud to endorse Joe Kennedy for Senate," Pelosi said in an endorsement video released by the Kennedy campaign on Thursday. "Massachusetts and America need Joe Kennedy's courage and leadership in the Senate to fight for the change we need," Pelosi said.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has united disparate factions of the Democratic Party behind a message of defeating President Trump and rebuilding from the coronavirus pandemic. The detente might not last past the Nov. 3 election, no matter who wins. Mr. Biden won the nomination after resisting calls from more liberal candidates to create a Medicare-for-all health-care system, extend free public university tuition to everyone and overhaul the economy to eventually eliminate fossil fuels. Polls showed Mr. Biden benefiting from a primary electorate that cared most about defeating the president. But progressives have seen a resurgence since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March, ousting establishment Democrats in congressional primaries in Illinois, New York and Missouri. And they plan to heap pressure on Mr. Biden to implement liberal policies if he wins the presidency. Interviews with Democratic lawmakers and strategists show that the internal battle over what the party stands for wasn’t resolved by Mr. Biden’s primary win—but merely postponed. If the former vice president wins the White House, he will preside over the fight on how the party governs. If he loses, the party is likely to go through an extensive soul-searching process that will test the liberal-moderate divide.

Early on in the Trump age, Hannity gained weight and vaped incessantly, which some members of his inner circle blamed on Trump-related stress. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Hannity told a colleague. He was sensitive to trolls’ comments about the extra weight, especially from his chest up; that’s all viewers saw of him most nights, when he was live from his palace. He doubled up on his workouts and slimmed back down.

We love Randy Rainbow. [We absolutely do not love Randy Rainbow. -ed.] Which is why it was so disappointing when we learned old racist, sexist, transphobic, and anti-Semitic tweets he wrote years ago had resurfaced. And, folks, it’s not, like, one or two tweets. It’s dozens.

When InfoWars correspondent Millie Weaver was arrested last week, her supporters claimed she was the victim of a “deep state” prosecution of a truth-telling journalist. By Tuesday afternoon, they had raised more than $170,000 to help her fight the charges. In reality, Weaver wasn’t some heroine at the vanguard of a fight against nefarious government agents. Instead, she was arrested on charges of robbing her own mother, according to newly released court documents from police and prosecutors.

As Lyft and Uber face a looming deadline to classify drivers as employees in California, Lyft has made good on its threat to suspend service in the state.

James Blunt, a man best known for his 2005 hit song “Beautiful” and being used as an insult on Skins (“You take me for a complete James Blunt, don’t you?”), reportedly once developed scurvy after adopting a meat-only diet to piss off the women in his university classes and assert his masculinity Naturally, his journey into this proto-manosphere bullshit fucked up his health, as James revealed on singer Jessie Ware’s podcast, Table Manners.

Shortly after USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy issued a public statement saying he wanted to "avoid even the appearance" that any of his policies would slow down election mail, USPS instructed all maintenance managers around the country not to reconnect or reinstall any mail sorting machines they had already disconnected, according to emails obtained by Motherboard. "Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight. They are not to reconnect / reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager," wrote Kevin Couch, Director of Maintenance Operations. "Please have them flow that request through you then on to me for a direction." A subsequent email sent to individual maintenance managers across various regions forwarded that request along with a single sentence: "We are not to reconnect any machines that have previously been disconnected."

When a 17-year-old employee at Sesame Place, a Sesame Street theme park near Philadelphia, spotted two guests without masks last week, the teen asked the man and woman to cover their faces. Instead, the man punched the teen in the face, sending him crashing to the ground and then to the hospital, police said. On Wednesday, the U.S. Marshals Service and New York Police Department arrested the man suspected in the Aug. 9 assault at his home in the Bronx, Middletown Township police said. Troy McCoy, 39, faces aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and other charges in the attack. His roommate, Shakerra Bonds, 31, has also been charged with simple assault and criminal conspiracy and has arranged to turn herself in, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

If you have a spare fifteen whole minutes, you could do worse than check out the new short film John was trying to contact aliens on Netflix about John Shepherd, a guy who has spent 30 years beaming out obscure music to aliens, constructing a homemade SETI project based at—and taking over—his grandparents home in rural Michigan. We shot the breeze with director Matt Killip.