Grammy-winning producer and drummer Sly Dunbar — one half of the Jamaican duo Sly and Robbie — has died aged 73, DancehallMag has confirmed. Alongside bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who died in 2021, Dunbar formed the most influential rhythm section in Jamaican music history, helping to define the sound of reggae, dub, and dancehall across five decades.

The power is out. TikTok has suffered from extensive problems on its first weekend after completing a transaction that changed the ownership of its US arm. According to Downdetector, the issues initially spiked in the early hours of Sunday morning, but many users, including editors here at The Verge, are still reporting errors. On Monday morning, TikTok USDS head of communications Jamie Favazza responded to our inquiries, pointing to a post on a newly-created X account for the US joint venture that said its current issues are the result of a data center power outage.

Eight men linked to a violent racist skinhead group are in jail in the U.S. South on felony conspiracy charges or awaiting extradition for hate crimes against Jewish and LGBTQ+ targets, Raw Story has learned. Five North Carolina men, ranging in age from 18 to 22 and described in court filings as “supporters of the Vinlanders Social Club/Firm 22 and members of the Southern Sons, all known white supremacist/nazi groups,” were arrested on Jan. 21 and booked into the Mecklenburg County Detention Center in Charlotte, N.C. Court documents suggest charges may follow for three others detained outside North Carolina.

The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations. “We don’t need the perfect rule,” said DOT’s top lawyer. “We want good enough.”

Workers can no longer count on the Department of Labor.

Senior White House aide Stephen Miller is claiming, without evidence, that the US citizen shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law endorsement.” Miller’s claim came just hours after the shooting of the 37-year-old man. An investigation has not played out, and the circumstances of the shooting are still unclear. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the suspect, who the agency said was armed, “violently resisted” attempts by federal law enforcement officers to disarm and “an agent fired defensive shots.”

Tommy Lee Walker was declared "innocent" by a Dallas court 70 years after he was executed for the rape and murder of Venice Parker.

It had been months since Wael Tarabishi seen his father. The family is calling on ICE to release Maher Tarabishi so he may attend his son's funeral. Less than a month after demanding the release of a North Texas father detained by ICE, the disabled son of that man has died, the family confirmed. According to a press release, Wael Tarabishi was pronounced dead at about 1:55 p.m. Friday in the ICU at Methodist Mansfield Medical Center. He was 30. "Today, he passed without his beloved father, primary caretaker and constant life companion, Maher, by his side," the Tarabishi family said in a press release. "Now, Wael’s family calls on ICE — and all other agencies and officials with applicable power — to release Maher Tarabishi so that he may attend his son’s funeral." Wael Tarabishi was a U.S. citizen living with Pompe disease, his family says. At the end of last year, after his father's arrest, his family said he had been rushed to the hospital twice.

The chair of a U.S. government vaccine advisory panel questioned broad vaccine recommendations for polio and other childhood diseases and said promoting individual choice, not public health, is the key aim of the panel, drawing a rebuke on Friday from the nation's top doctors group. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who was named chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's outside Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in December, made the comments in a Thursday interview on the podcast, "Why Should I Trust You?" Vaccination against some diseases, like polio, could be reconsidered given advances in medical care, said Milhoan, who joined the committee after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, fired all previous members in June.

[In short, fuck this guy. -- B.]

Trump’s goons thought they could push around a blue city. They came in for a nasty shock.

The Trump administration is dropping its appeal of a federal court ruling that blocked a campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion threatening federal funding to the nation’s schools and colleges.

Arnoldo Tiul Caal dropped his daughter off for school at Logan Elementary the morning of Jan. 9 with the unnerving sense that they were being followed.

Tony Dokoupil and Bari Weiss’s new broadcast has been one debacle after another. Let's try to make sense of it all, with or without whiskey.

Film writer Will Sloan argues that he'd take "the worst film by Ed Wood over every film by Ron Howard." He makes the case for an infamously "bad" director.

On the ground in Minneapolis, watching out for ICE at every corner, crosswalk, church, and school.

After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Perhaps it was for the best.

UNITE HERE Local 17 is one of many unions, community organizations and faith groups calling for a work stoppage tomorrow, showing a key way Minnesotans are organizing against ICE.  When Feben Ghilagaber delivers food to fellow union members hiding from the thousands of federal immigration agents swarming Minnesota, the lights to their homes are often off when she gets there. “People are scared for their lives,” she tells me as we drive to UNITE HERE Local 17 office in Minneapolis, a labor union representing more than 6,000 workers in hotels, stadiums and convention centers in the Twin Cities metro area. It also represents many of the workers at the Minneapolis – Saint Paul International Airport and Ghilagaber, an airport food service worker and steward for the union, says the people she delivers food to ​“are sitting in the dark.” “ICE,” she says, ​“is attacking everybody.”

“Exactly the right place at the right time” is an apt description for how Adams landed his syndication deal, as Dilbert checked all the boxes for United Feature Syndicate. In an eerily prescient interview with The Comics Journal in 1988, Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed predicted the next big trend in newspaper comics. “You know who the syndicates are looking for? They’re looking for the dissatisfied stockbroker, sitting in his office right now, he’s about 30 years old, thinking how funny it is, there’s all these office things going on around him, with computers and stuff. And he can draw a little bit. A little bit. He’s got the gags in his mind because he lived them. He’s going to start drawing comic strips, and he sends the stuff off to the syndicate. Even though they’re badly drawn, it doesn’t matter because they’re all reduced down to sub-microscopic size. And they start the comic strip. I have seen so many of these come across my desk in the past five years…they hit fast, they’ve got a good gimmick, and they’ve probably got a hook that sounds good to editors.” The following year, Dilbert, not yet an office strip, made its newspaper debut on April 16, 1989, less than six months before Berkeley Breathed retired the daily Bloom County strip to launch the Sundays-only strip Outland. Adams’s strip focusing on the title character, his canine companion Dogbert, and Dilbert’s bizarre science and engineering projects was not an overnight success, but when the strip shifted its focus to Dilbert’s office job and co-workers, Adams found his voice, and circulation of Dilbert grew exponentially, and, ironically enough, was the biggest beneficiary of Bloom County’s departure from daily newspapers. The strip’s office setting gave newspapers the option of running Dilbert in the business section, too, allowing features editors to add the popular new strip without displacing anyone’s favorite from the main comics page.

Prototaxites was the first giant organism to live on the terrestrial surface, represented by columnar fossils of up to eight meters from the Early Devonian. However, its systematic affinity has been debated for over 165 years. There are now two remaining viable hypotheses: Prototaxites was either a fungus, or a member of an entirely extinct lineage. Here, we investigate the affinity of Prototaxites by contrasting its organization and molecular composition with that of Fungi. We report that fossils of Prototaxites taiti from the 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert were chemically distinct from contemporaneous Fungi and structurally distinct from all known Fungi. This finding casts doubt upon the fungal affinity of Prototaxites, instead suggesting that this enigmatic organism is best assigned to an entirely extinct eukaryotic lineage.