DEAD AT LAST

They wield the important power of determining a victim’s manner of death—but they’re susceptible to both political pressure and racial bias.

The indictment for the brazen murder-for-hire plot brings more heat onto India for its alleged transnational assassination program.

Pope Francis is evicting US Cardinal Raymond Burke, an outspoken critic, from his Vatican apartment and revoking his salary. Cardinal Burke is part of a group of American conservatives who have long opposed the Pope's plans for reforming the Catholic Church. A Vatican source told the BBC that Pope Francis has not yet carried out his intention to evict the 75-year-old. And the decision is not meant as a personal punishment, the source added. Instead, it comes from the belief that a person should not enjoy cardinal privileges while criticising the head of the church.

An uncharacteristic level of honesty from Politico.

The Ohio Supreme Court suspended an attorney who defecated into a Pringles potato chip can and then tossed it into a parking lot of a crime-victim advocacy center. Criminal defense attorney Jack A. Blakeslee's conduct called into question his fitness to practice law, the court decided. Blakeslee's defense? He said he didn't target anyone but had a habit of putting his feces in Pringles cans and randomly throwing them from his car. He claimed he pulled the Pringles prank at least 10 times that year. But the court didn't buy it and said Blakeslee purposely chose the Haven of Hope in Cambridge as his "drop zone." Surveillance video captured the incident in November 2021. Blakeslee had known the victim advocates at the center for years and was scheduled to see them in court 15 minutes after the Pringles deposit. At the time, Blakeslee was representing someone accused in a capital murder case.

The 12-year-old boy stole the construction vehicle from outside a middle school, leading police in an hourlong pursuit without headlights on, police said.

With criticisms of Israel's conduct in Gaza mounting, the IDF is hastily organizing briefings for members of Congress.

In a shocking, horrifying incident at Shawnee Mission East High School, a Black student was hospitalized after being attacked by a white male student. Despite being the victim, she faces suspension in a case highlighting systemic racism and administrative negligence.

Netanyahu "boasted about having gone against" U.S. wishes by launching a ground invasion of Gaza and raiding the Palestinian territory's largest hospital on the pretense that Hamas was hiding a command center on the facility's grounds—a claim that has not been substantiated.

According to various reports throughout 2023, the Pentagon is working on directed-energy weapons as one of its top priorities. While reports indicate that the military is facing hitches in development, billions of dollars are still being poured into directed-energy technology.

French authorities have arrested the leader of a multinational tantric yoga organization on suspicion of indoctrinating female followers for sexual exploitation

"I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff," a user said of Plex's Week in Review email and Discover Together feature.

After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine. In a statement to The Verge, Cathy Hebert, the communications director for PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures, says the outlet needs to “evolve” beyond its magazine product, which published its first all-digital issue in 2021. PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020. In a post on LinkedIn, former PopSci editor Purbita Saha commented on the magazine’s discontinuation, stating she’s “frustrated, incensed, and appalled that the owners shut down a pioneering publication that’s adapted to 151 years worth of changes in the space of a five-minute Zoom call.” Layoffs have impacted journalists on the science beat particularly hard in recent weeks. National Geographic cut the remainder of the magazine’s editorial staff in June, followed by Gizmodo laying off its last climate reporter, and CNBC shuttering its climate desk last week. “PopSci is a phenomenal brand, and as consumer trends shift it’s important we prioritize investment in new formats,” Herbert tells The Verge. “We believe that the content strategy has to evolve beyond the digital magazine product. A combination of its news team, along with commerce, video, and other initiatives, will produce content that naturally aligns with PopSci’s mission.”

Despite long advocating small government and local control, Republican governors and legislators across a significant swath of the country are increasingly overriding the actions of Democratic cities — removing elected district attorneys or threatening to strip them of power, taking over election offices and otherwise limiting local independence. State lawmakers proposed nearly 700 bills this year to circumscribe what cities and counties can do, according to Katie Belanger, lead consultant for the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization focused in part on ending the overreach it calls “abusive state preemption.” The group’s tracking mostly found “conservative state legislatures responding to or anticipating actions of progressive cities,” she said, with many bills designed to bolster state restrictions on police defunding, abortion, and LGBTQ and voting rights. As of mid-October, at least 92 had passed.

The United Nations migration agency says a record 6.9 million people have been displaced by conflict across Congo, making it one of the world’s largest displacement and humanitarian crises.

Despite police incompetence, a stunning lack of evidence, and a trial this summer that resulted in a hung jury, Henderson Atwater remains in jail after nearly three years.

lon Musk received a hero’s welcome from Israel’s leaders on Monday. The same Elon Musk who recently told a far-right user on his X social media platform that he spoke “the actual truth” when the poster explained why he was “deeply disinterested” in Jewish concerns over spiking antisemitism. Both Musk’s visit and the proverbial red carpet being laid out for the man who has overseen the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation regarding the October 7 attack – and actually at the site of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust – come at a time where many are finding it hard to check their cynicism. The Israel visit comes just weeks after Musk, adopting rhetoric used by the far right’s most prominent figureheads, directly engaged and platformed the antisemitic conspiracy theory cited by Robert Bowers, the assailant behind the deadliest massacre of American Jews in U.S. history. This is not the first time Benjamin Netanyahu has, for the sake of political expediency, plummeted to the depths of sycophancy regarding Musk. Visiting the United States in mid-September, at the height of the controversy surrounding his government’s plans to gut Israel’s judiciary, the prime minister visited Tesla HQ after failing to score a White House invitation. At the time, he defended Musk against allegations of antisemitism while implying that the entrepreneur was more powerful than the U.S. president. Those comments came during Musk’s then-nadir on trafficking in antisemitic tropes, after he participated in and amplified an antisemitic social media campaign targeting the Anti-Defamation League. Hamas infiltrated Israel’s borders under Netanyahu’s watch some three weeks after that fawning performance, massacring 1,200 men, women and children. Musk’s public rhetoric around the attack has hopscotched from urging Israel to commit performative kindness to granting Hamas a moral victory after saying he would install Starlink satellites in Gaza, leading the charge on some of the most bilious conspiracy theories – all while profiting from his failure to combat wildly false accounts of the Israel-Hamas war. He has also attempted to beat back criticism of antisemitism by vowing to combat pro-Palestinian advocacy on his platform, threatening to suspend users posting phrases like “From the river to the sea…” and “decolonization” – as if banning certain expressions and combating only one side of the free speech debate nullifies his own culpability in antisemitism’s proliferation. This backdrop makes his visit to October 7 massacre sites all the more repulsive. Israel’s leaders, yet again, have fashioned themselves as judge and jury on global antisemitism, at a time when Jews worldwide are being targeted at previously unimaginable rates. Welcoming such a toxic mogul with open arms and taking him around sites of a massacre that has been belittled, demeaned and denied on his watch should be a stain on Netanyahu’s legacy – alongside the growing list of failures associated with the tragedies of the past eight weeks.

Trump recently got a surprise endorsement from Bernie Marcus and is gradually getting more support from other former donors

For millennia, Tyrian purple was the most valuable colour on the planet. Then the recipe to make it was lost. By piecing together ancient clues, could one man bring it back?