Just what we all wanted, even more ads to deal with in our everyday life A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren’t doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver—which appears when your TV is idle—to companies like McDonald’s and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company’s screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

Billionaire Leon Black is speaking out about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein for the first time since resigning from his private equity firm, claiming the famous men in the sex-trafficker’s circle likely didn’t know “that Jeffrey was a pedophile.”The ex-Apollo CEO—whose relationship with Epstein tarnished his name and led to lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse—exclusively sat down with Puck’s William Cohan to defend his reputation amid continued scrutiny over his relations

*Sad trombone noise*

Michael Macartney, 50, confessed to the BBC his role in an extreme monkey torture network. (People are the worst.)

On the hook to repay $1.3 billion of debt this year, the nation's largest prison telecom company, Securus, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Its failure would represent a remarkable victory for advocates—and a potential beginning of the end for the industry as we know it.

Louisiana Library workers or libraries who seek membership in the largest professional organization would be criminalized for doing so.

Jane Willenbring was the first to blow the whistle on sexual harassment and assault in Antarctica. Years later, women are still coming forward with tales of horror as a government investigation unfolds.

Pascagoula Police Lt. Darren Versiga had been working in law enforcement for over a decade when the Sun Herald called his office in 2010, inquiring about how many cold cases the department had open. The lieutenant soon discovered that the department had 26 unsolved cases in Pascagoula at the time, which he found odd. The lieutenant told the Mississippi Free Press that he was shocked when someone at the Oklahoma crime lab told him they had the remains of several people that should have been sent back to Mississippi years ago. “I thought, why would they have them for all these years?” Versiga said. He said the 2012 discovery opened a “pandora’s box,” revealing a decades-old practice before the development of modern DNA testing where some county coroners, medical examiners and law-enforcement officials across the country would keep the human remains of people who could not be positively identified. Some would even use them for educational purposes or for “their own personal collections,” he said. Versiga did not name anyone specifically but said he found instances like that both in Mississippi and elsewhere in the country; not all of the incidents were intentional, he said.

Hours into a barefoot trek in the middle of the night along a highway in rural Nova Scotia, stranded without a phone, Mi'kmaq fisher Kevin Hartling says he and his friend felt that if they stopped walking they might die. Hartling, who is from Membertou First Nation, and Blaise Sylliboy, from Eskasoni First Nation, say that last week they were detained by federal fisheries officers for fishing near Shelburne, N.S. The two men from Cape Breton say that at around 1 a.m., they were left at a gas station far from home without footwear or cellphones and ended up walking for about six hours before they used a borrowed phone to get through to a friend, who picked them up. "It's basically a starlight tour, " Hartling said in an interview Wednesday, referring to a practice where police in Canada have taken vulnerable Indigenous people to a secluded location and left them to find their way home, sometimes in freezing conditions. "That's what was going through my mind the whole time .... If we stop moving, we're going to die. If we go and just sit somewhere to rest and fall asleep, we're dead."

A report claims that accounts associated with the suspect suggested that he was also ready to join a militia.

To tip or not to tip? It’s a simple question with a deeply complicated answer, at least in the U.S. Here, the practice of tossing a few bucks to a service worker when you pay your total bill is not only common, but expected in many industries, from grocery delivery to coffee shops. And while European tourists may famously struggle to decipher the rules, Americans are all too aware of how it works. And it’s more than likely they have a very strong—probably negative—opinion about it. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who likes the American tipping system, from the customers who resent paying more to the workers who are often paid too little in the first place. However, tipping culture and all of its attendant discourse is really just a means of obscuring the real issue: The continuing existence of the sub-minimum wage, and the ensuing expectation that consumers (and their tips) will make up the lost wages that employers avoid paying.

A former Tacoma officer acquitted in the Manny Ellis murder trial has been hired by the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. Christopher Burbank will serve as a Lateral Patrol Deputy, according to a Facebook post from the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office Monday. Burbank was one of three officers acquitted in December for the 2020 death of Ellis while he was in custody. The three Tacoma officers involved in the Ellis case — Burbank, Matthew Collins and Timothy Rankine — were collectively paid more than $1 million during the duration of the murder trial. The Attorney General’s Office charged Burbank and Collins with second-degree murder, and Rankine with first-degree manslaughter in 2021. According to reports, Ellis was beaten, tasered, hogtied and had a spit hood put over his head during the encounter with officers. He was restrained until medical personnel from the Tacoma Fire Department arrived at the scene. The former Pierce County medical examiner concluded that Ellis died from oxygen deprivation caused by physical restraint. During the trial, medical experts testified in agreement that Ellis died due to the way he was restrained by officers. A use-of-force expert also testified that the officers used excessive force.

Eclipses can affect animals, and biologists are preparing to see what happens during totality on April 8.

In Hualien near epicentre, three hikers and a truck driver were killed by falling rocks; tsunami warnings issued on the island and elsewhere in the region.

Opposition to identity politics isn’t confined to the cultural right.

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with. Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Mayor Eric Adams announced his intention to put weapons scanners on the subway system, but a 2022 pilot at a NYC hospital showed that the technology yields lots of false positives. Over the seven months that the Jacobi pilot was active, 194,000 people passed through Jacobi's scanners, and in just over 50,000 of those cases, the scanners threw up an alarm—an incidence rate of around 26 percent, or over one of every four times someone passed through the scanner. Of those 50,000 alarms, around 43,800, or a little more than 85 percent, were false positives; 7,027 of the alarms, or 14 percent, were law enforcement officers who were presumably carrying their service weapons; and just 295 alarms, or 0.57 percent, were determined to be a non-law enforcement person carrying either a knife, a gun, or a threat type labeled only "other," which likely entails other weapons like bats. Notably, Evolv's scanners did not get any more accurate as the pilot progressed—there was not a single month where the alarm to visitor ratio fell below 25 percent.

A former State Department official explains the Administration’s sharpening public critique of Israel’s war and simultaneous refusal to “impose a single cost or consequence.”

Sarah Joy gained half a million TikTok followers with videos about Amish and Mennonite life — but two friends claim she belongs to neither group.

He opened a medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay in 2006. The feds shut him down nearly a year later. In 2024, they were still after him.