Rahm Emanuel has mocked Chinese President Xi Jinping, speculating about the recent disappearance of a top official.

The oil only started flowing in 2019, but per capita GDP has already tripled since then and is likely to triple again in the next ten years. That should be making people like President Irfaan Ali very happy, and yet….

Las Vegas’s hottest new attraction is an interactive ransomware exhibit, currently playing out across every MGM property in the city. To experience what it’s like to gamble in a series of hacked casinos, I got on one of the first flights out of Los Angeles Saturday morning with the goal of figuring out not just how screwed up the casinos were, but also to witness the marvelous ability of the human species to adapt and cope with bizarre circumstances. Last week, the ransomware gang ALPHV hacked Caesars and MGM, taking down multiple systems across the casino giants’ networks. Caesars folded quickly, and paid a $15 million ransom, helping return everything to normal for their customers. MGM, meanwhile, is refusing to pay, meaning that all sorts of things are broken at its 14 hotels and casinos in Vegas, including the Bellagio, Aria, MGM Grand, NoMad, and Mandalay Bay.

"Tank man" has become something of a litmus test for shitty technology.

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.

Voting rights groups are urging election officials to reject a new tool championed by some conservatives as a way to root out fraudulent voter registrations – arguing that the private software depends on unreliable information and could be used to improperly disenfranchise legitimate voters.

Israel has “made the desert bloom” by planting water-intensive monocrops over the site of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages.

A Texas middle school teacher has been fired after assigning an unapproved illustrated version of Anne Frank's Diary to her eighth grade reading class. Per a report from KFDM, a spokesperson for Hamshire-Fannett ISD, located south of Beaumont, released a statement confirming the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia. An investigation into the incident has since ensued. "As you may be aware, following concerns regarding curricular selections in your student's reading class, a substitute teacher has been facilitating the class since Wednesday, September 13, 2023," read a district statement sent to parents obtained by KFDM. "The district is currently in the process of posting to secure a high-quality, full-time teacher as quickly as possible."

There are many ways for a small North Texas town to tell married gay dads who adopted a young boy and who live and work in their midst that they are unwanted. But there’s a downside for any bigots who try this. They may feel the wrath of the fathers in ways unexpected. The alleged mastermind of this poisonous attempt to ruin one family is Toni Lynn Wheeler, the former town administrator for Aurora. She apparently called the shots to drive the family out of town. But Karma hit her hard. Earlier this year, Wheeler, 50, testified under oath that she’s now homeless, living in a city park in Colorado and hitchhiking because she has no car. She was charged in Texas for filing false child abuse reports, money laundering and the theft of at least $767,000 from the town’s financial accounts. Where’s the evidence? Much of it burned in a suspicious 2021 fire that destroyed Aurora City Hall. An arson investigation continues.

A group of 18 state attorneys general said on Monday they backed Montana's effort to ban Chinese-owned short video app TikTok, urging a U.S. judge to reject legal challenges ahead of the Jan. 1 effective date.

The league’s grievance accuses the union of improperly advising running backs to fake or embellish injuries as a contract-negotiating tactic. The NFLPA called the grievance “ridiculous.”

The escalation follows weeks of bloody clashes and comes three years after a full-scale war with Armenia over the Caucasus region.

The first public inquiry into abuses at a UK immigration detention centre has identified a “toxic culture” and numerous breaches of human rights laws relating to torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as racist, derogatory language used by some staff towards detainees. The inquiry calls for sweeping changes to immigration detention including the introduction of a 28-day time limit. The 711-page Brook House inquiry report, published on Tuesday after more than three years of investigation, was ordered by the former home secretary Priti Patel, after BBC’s Panorama broadcast undercover footage of violence against and abuse of vulnerable detainees at Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick airport during a five-month period between April and August 2017. The report has identified 19 instances where the inquiry chair, Kate Eves, found “credible evidence” of acts or omissions, which were capable of amounting to mistreatment under article 3 of the European convention on human rights that says no one shall be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Canada said on Monday that it was "actively pursuing credible allegations" linking Indian government agents to the murder of a Sikh separatist leader in British Columbia in June, dealing a further blow to diplomatic ties between the countries. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an emergency statement to the House of Commons that any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen was "an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty". Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, was shot dead outside a Sikh temple on June 18 in Surrey, a Vancouver suburb with a large Sikh population. Nijjar supported a Sikh homeland in the form of an independent Khalistani state and was designated by India as a "terrorist" in July 2020. "Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India" and Nijjar's death, Trudeau said. He said he had raised the murder directly with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi last week, and urged the government of India to "cooperate with Canada to get to the bottom of this matter".

Sources familiar with the situation said that the self-styled anti-slavery activist, who appears to be preparing for a Senate run, invited women to act as his “wife” on undercover overseas missions ostensibly aimed at rescuing victims of sex trafficking. He would then allegedly coerce those women into sharing a bed or showering together, claiming that it was necessary to fool traffickers. Ballard, who was played by Jim Caviezel in the hit film Sound of Freedom, is said to have sent at least one woman a photo of himself in his underwear, festooned with fake tattoos, and to have asked another “how far she was willing to go,” in the words of a source, to save children. These sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation.

How does this keep getting trashier?

The clothworkers of the 1800s had the right idea about how the benefits of innovation should be shared. I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone. Also, I’m a Luddite. That’s not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them. It is that spirit that I’ve come to appreciate in the age of tech monopolies and generative artificial intelligence. The kind of visionaries we need now are those who see precisely how certain technologies are causing harm and who resist them when necessary.

The Florida congressman, however, told NBC News that his only political goal at the moment is getting Donald Trump elected president in 2024.

Five prisoners sought by the U.S. in a swap with Iran were freed and left Tehran on Monday as part of a deal that saw nearly $6 billion in Iranian assets unfrozen.

The U.S.-brokered IMF loan let Pakistan’s military postpone elections, deepen a brutal crackdown, and jail former Prime Minister Imran Khan.