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.

The population increase from one to eight billion, and >100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.

US military officials appealed to the public for help finding a fighter jet after losing track of it over South Carolina when the pilot ejected. A Marine Corps pilot safely escaped the F-35B Lightning II jet over North Charleston on Sunday afternoon after a “mishap”, military officials said, adding that the search for his missing aircraft was focused on two lakes north of North Charleston. The pilot parachuted safely into North Charleston at about 2pm and was taken to a local hospital, where he was in stable condition, said Maj Melanie Salinas. The pilot’s name was not immediately released. Based on the plane’s location and trajectory, the search for the F-35 Lightning II jet was focused on Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, said Senior Master Sergeant Heather Stanton at Joint Base Charleston. Both lakes are north of North Charleston.

I was working the day that it happened, preparing meals. Jason should’ve been watched every minute! He was … he wasn’t a very good swimmer. —Pamela Voorhees, Friday the 13th What would he be like t…

Walter Isaacson's new biography on Elon Musk also reveals that the CEO left his engineers who wanted to use LiDAR exasperated.

The first ever dog-fox hybrid was discovered after a hit-and-run incident in Brazil.

He said seeing his wife's blood and organs led to him developing a "psychotic illness."

The jury of 30 senators spent about eight hours deliberating behind closed doors before emerging for the historic vote. The Senate is led by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who served as Texas chairman of Trump’s previous presidential campaigns, and who served as the presiding judge for the trial. --- System working exactly as it was built to

The word “vigilante” has a negative connotation. However, Merriam-Webster says the word is of Spanish origin and means watchman or guard. Call the “Boot Girls” in Atlanta vigilantes if you want, because it seems apt: these two women are on a mission to remove boots from cars in their city. Boots, those annoying, clunky metal devices that clamp onto one of your wheels and prevent the car from moving, are becoming a point of contention in Georgia’s capital city. Some residents are frustrated with what they say is excessive booting, and they’re finding ways around it. After experiencing the placement of a land anchor themselves, the balaclava-wearing Boot Girls (Boot Baby and Boot Sheisty) obtained a boot key from someone who manufactured the tool, NPR reports. Then they started offering their boot removal services for $50 each, and they (and others using the “boot girls” theme) seem to take orders via text and Instagram through referrals as word spreads.

The U.S. government has warned a Virginia judge that allowing an American Marine to keep an Afghan war orphan risks violating international law and could be viewed around the world as “endorsing an act of international child abduction,” according to secret court records reviewed by The Associated Press. It is rare for the federal government to step into a local custody case, but concern about the child’s fate has stretched across the Trump and Biden administrations. The Justice Department argued in the court documents that the dispute has ramifications that extend far beyond the rural courthouse where the girl’s future is being decided. Failing to return the child, now 4, to Afghan relatives in the U.S. could jeopardize American efforts to resettle Afghan refugees, threaten international security pacts and might be used as propaganda by Islamic extremists — potentially endangering U.S soldiers overseas, Justice Department attorneys and other U.S. officials warned in court filings seeking to intervene in the case. The Justice Department was particularly scathing in its assessment of how Marine Maj. Joshua Mast and his wife convinced a Virginia judge to sign off on the adoption of the girl, who has been in their custody since 2021.

Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous pictures and sculptures of overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other products of his whimsical imagination made him one of the world’s best-known artists, died on Friday in Monaco. He was 91. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of an art gallery in Houston, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia earlier announced the death on social media. As a young artist, Mr. Botero developed an instantly recognizable style and enjoyed great and immediate commercial success. Fans sought his autograph and were known to wait for him at airports. “‘It’s the profession you do if you wish to die of hunger,’ people used to tell me,” he once recalled. “Yet I was so strongly impelled to take it up that I never thought about the consequences.” Mr. Botero was permanently associated with the florid, rounded figures that filled his pictures. He portrayed middle-class life and bordellos, clerics and peasants, bulging baskets of fruit and the grim effects of violence.

The football teams weren’t the only ones making major plays that drizzly day in downtown Cleveland. Dudes rock.

On January 18, the Atlanta police, DeKalb County police, Georgia state troopers, and a SWAT team descended on a protest encampment in the Weelaunee Forest, armed with dogs, pepper bullets, and live ammunition. They shot and killed twenty-six-year-old Manuel Paez Terán (also known as Tortuguita), a young Indigenous Venezuelan who had been protesting the clearing of the forest to build the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known to those who have spent the past two years opposing it as Cop City. Even after their death, which Kamau Franklin of the group Community Movement Builders, a Black, member-based collective of community residents and organizers, rightly called a “political assassination,” the officers continued with the violent clearing operation, cutting tree limbs and ropes from under tree sitters and attacking protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. The official autopsy, finally released in April, reveals that Tortuguita was shot over fifty times. Researchers and journalists have called the shooting “unprecedented”; according to The Guardian, it is the first known instance of state forces in the United States killing an environmental protester. Just eleven days after Tortuguita’s murder, two water defenders from Guapinol, Honduras, Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla, were assassinated by unidentified gunmen. The two were cofounders of a group responsible for leading an occupation of the Los Pinares mine to protest against exploitative mining operations which would pollute their water source, the Guapinol River. The Honduran government has refused to investigate the matter further, instead blaming the murders on a robbery attempt. Between December 2022 and February 2023, at least seven land defenders and community members across the Bajo Aguán region—a fertile and heavily militarized region in Northern Honduras—were killed, including campesino leader Hipolito Rivas of the Gregorio Chavez Cooperative, his son Jose Omar Cruz Tome, president of the Los Laureles cooperative, and his father-in-law, Andy Martinez Murrillo. For decades, communities in the Bajo Aguán and international solidarity organizations have denounced the collaboration between private security firms working for palm oil and mining corporations and military and police-backed paramilitary forces heavily supported by the United States to violently repress organized opposition to the land theft and environmental destruction upon which the industries depend.

Documents obtained by VICE News show anti-trafficking activist Tim Ballard claimed that a revered and powerful figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints played a secret, central role in Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR, the organization Ballard founded. Insiders who spoke to federal and local investigators as part of a since-closed criminal inquiry described Ballard claiming that OUR and his personal business ventures were backed by the senior member of the church’s second-highest leadership body, and part of a larger mission to use the anti-trafficking cause to bring Americans to the Mormon faith—or, in his words, “lead them to the covenant.” “Tim is fully convinced that he is supposed to be the 'Mormon Messiah and lead people back to the church,’” read notes from an interview between criminal investigators and a former OUR higher-up. But now a spokesperson for the church tells VICE News that while the apostle in question, President M. Russell Ballard, was once close to Tim Ballard—to whom he is not related, despite their sharing a last name—the OUR founder “betrayed their friendship, through the unauthorized use of President Ballard’s name for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable.” The unusually public denunciation of Tim Ballard is particularly newsworthy at this moment. He left OUR earlier this year following an internal investigation into employee complaints about his conduct at virtually the same moment that Sound of Freedom, a fictionalized version of his purported child-rescuing exploits, became a surprise box office hit. He has since begun promoting a new anti-trafficking organization, the SPEAR Fund. But he is also said by many Utah insiders to be weighing a run for Senate—speculation that was given more weight by a recent statement from Sean Reyes, the Utah attorney general, who’s also a longtime friend and supporter. (Reyes wrote that he would not be running for Senate, allowing “an opportunity for a dear friend of mine who is a great conservative, patriot, and warrior to run and serve as the next Senator from Utah.” Reyes said that person would announce their run in the coming days.)

Anti-LGBTQ activists are increasingly targeting public reading spaces—and librarians are our best defenders. Maybe it was inevitable that anti-LGBTQ groups would target the public library in Ferndale—nestled between the police station and a few blocks from the cute cafés peppered around this Detroit suburb. But “Hide the Pride,” a national campaign coordinated by the group CatholicVote, hit Ferndale one day back in early June. The campaign’s mission is to eliminate books by and for queer and trans people from public libraries. They are not secretive about this. The Hide the Pride activists claimed credit soon after their action in Ferndale, posting before-and-after photos showing off how they had removed A Queer History of the United States from the library’s Pride display and replaced it with the Bible; how they took out The Book of Pride and shelved in its place Catholicism for Dummies. Ferndale youth librarian Mary Grahame Hunter had anticipated something like this, she told me back in January, when we met in the children’s section—where one of the displays would be put up for the Pride celebration six months later. But did Hide the Pride care to know, as she put it to me after, that the reason some of those titles were there is because “a queer Christian woman bought those books” ­for the library, because selecting books for the children’s section is her job? It’s a critical matter that keeps getting lost in the wake of such acts of harassment: The library is a public good made possible by the people who work there, the people whose jobs now involve dealing with the aftermath of anti-LGBTQ groups’ constant attempts to prevent them from doing their jobs. The stakes of this kind of harassment may be easier to recognize when it’s taking place on a sidewalk outside a clinic providing abortion—perhaps less so in the children’s section of a library. The targeted books, which the activists did check out, were quickly replaced, but the threat to the library’s patrons and workers lingered. As much as fighting book bans is about fighting censorship, it’s also about confronting and demobilizing those who are driving that censorship and the attendant instability left in their wake. Because they are not just coming for the books; they are coming for the library and the people and ideas that make libraries possible. The work of library defense right now is unapologetically queer.

The bill now heads to the desk of Mayor Jim Kenney, who has for years endorsed supervised drug consumption sites as a strategy to prevent overdose deaths.

Microsoft's MSN news portal publisheda garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as "useless" in its headline.

Registered dietitians are being paid by to post videos that promote diet soda, sugar and supplements on Instagram and TikTok As the World Health Organization raised questions this summer about the risks of a popular artificial sweetener, a new hashtag began spreading on the social media accounts of health professionals: #safetyofaspartame. What these dietitians didn’t make clear was that they were paid to post the videos by American Beverage, a trade and lobbying group representing Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and other companies. In all, at least 35 posts from a dozen health professionals were part of the coordinated campaign by American Beverage. The trade group paid an undisclosed amount to 10 registered dietitians, as well as a physician and a fitness influencer, to use their social media accounts to help blunt the WHO’s claims that aspartame, a mainstay of Diet Coke and other sodas, is ineffective for weight loss and “possibly carcinogenic.” The campaign, which the beverage group acknowledged organizing, highlighted a little-known tactic the multibillion-dollar food and beverage industry is using to sway consumers faced with often-contradictory health messages about popular products. The food, beverage and dietary supplement industries are paying dozens of registered dietitians that collectively have millions of social media followers to help sell products and deliver industry-friendly messages on Instagram and TikTok, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and The Examination, a new nonprofit newsroom specializing in global public health reporting.

Lawyers for several families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting are criticizing Alex Jones' personal spending as they seek nearly $1.5 billion they won in lawsuits against the Infowars host.