Vishnu Dabad attributes his rise from poverty to powerful local politician to an animal: the cow. The 30-year-old is one of many Gau Rakshaks, or cow protectors: activists who have taken Indian laws banning cattle slaughter and beef consumption into their own hands since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 at the head of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Scores of cow protectors in recent years have been accused of using violence to carry out extra-judicial activities, often finding themselves at odds with law enforcement, even as many won acclaim for defending the Hindu faith. Now some of these operatives are transferring their clout into grassroots political power, where they are pursuing a hardline majoritarian agenda, according to interviews with more than 90 activist-vigilantes, as well as senior leaders of the BJP and other parties, government officials and political analysts. They described how cow vigilantism has become a finishing school for the young men who mobilise large groups against alleged cattle smugglers and used the resulting popularity to catapult into politics. Many are now campaigning and preparing for elections in 2024 that the BJP and allied right-wing parties are favoured to do well in.

Clarice Schillinger made an unsuccessful bid for Pa. lieutenant governor and has worked with a PAC boosting conservative school board candidates.

Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow said he was fired for producing and appearing in pornographic videos with his wife.

The 21-year-old woman who became the face of Israel's hostage crisis says she 'went through a holocaust' in captivity

A Guatemalan teen is charged in the death of a Florida sheriff’s sergeant after the fat asshole died of a heart attack from beating the 18 year old who spoke no english during a racist and pointless stop and frisk

Ricky Gervais' latest Netflix special, 'Armageddon,' isn't as controversial as the comedian wants it to be — it's just awfully boring and hacky.

Deep learning has a terrible carbon footprint.

Anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience emerged from a movement to provide scientific justification for the political priorities of conservative Christians.

The cell of a flow battery uses two chemical solutions containing ions, one acting as the anolyte (adjacent to the anode), the other as the catholyte (near the cathode). An electrochemical reaction between the two solutions pushes electrons through a circuit. Typical redox flow batteries use ions based on iron chromium or vanadium chemistries; the latter takes advantage of vanadium’s four distinct ionic states.

And while US society specialises in oppressing a wide range of demographics – minus, of course, the elite minority that thrives on acute inequality – the treatment of the elderly is particularly cynical. Having outlived their labour-based exploitability as cogs in the capitalist machine, older people become decaying objects from which profit must continue to be extracted until the very last minute.

The Ninth Circuit ruled Tuesday that prosecutors should not have tried the former Nebraska congressman in Los Angeles.

The Lincoln Project dropped a new ad mocking the former president after claims about his bad odor gained traction on social media.

Nor was the habit unique to one time or place, he added. “Quite a few societies encourage fingers to be cut off today and have done so throughout history.”

But one day, on a whim, Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel. "She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that's when we got the surprise," said Reginald Penner, chair of the university's chemistry department. "She said, 'this thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it's still going.' She came back a few days later and said 'it's been cycling for 30,000 cycles.' That kept going on for a month."

A homeless man who argued that he beat a former San Francisco official with a metal pipe in self-defense was found not guilty of all charges Friday in a rebuke of the case filed by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. Garret Doty, 25, stood trial at the Hall of Justice on three counts of assault and battery for repeatedly striking Don Carmignani, 54, with the metal pipe April 5. The attack happened after Carmignani confronted Doty for camping outside his home in the Marina District, demanding he leave the area. After deliberating for three days, jurors acquitted Doty of all three counts, as well as lesser assault and battery charges that he could have been convicted of.

Two Denver-area paramedics have been convicted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a Black man they injected with lethal dose of ketamine.

Last week, I was meant to deliver a talk at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. That talk, along with the entire speaking series to which it belonged, was canceled back in October after the Y abruptly scrapped an event with the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed an open letter condemning Israel’s war on Gaza. (I signed the same letter.) The 92NY debacle, which resulted in the resignation of the Poetry Center’s entire staff, was part of a much broader stifling of dissent within our liberal cultural institutions, where a decidedly pro-Israel consensus holds strong among donors and executives. Since Israel began its brutal bombing campaign in Gaza, where the death toll has reached 20,000, we have seen waves of suppression roll across the culture: the editor-in-chief of Artforum has been fired; an award-winning writer has been pushed out of The New York Times Magazine; an actress was dropped from the upcoming horror movie Scream 7. The situation has become especially dire on college campuses, where pro-Palestine students groups are facing doxing and disbandment — even as Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, in a contentious House committee hearing, rebuked several university presidents for failing to discipline students for chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea.” (Penn president Liz Magill has since resigned over this supposed failure.) We should call this what it is: a one-sided, McCarthyist crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. But it is not an ironic new phase of cancel culture, as a score of commentators have already claimed. “Far from being a culture-war canard, cancellation turns out to be a weapon that many people on both the left and the right are willing to wield to silence anyone who violates their orthodoxies,” wrote the pundit Yascha Mounk for the Atlantic last month. In this view, it is the left which has created a climate of censoriousness by recklessly pursuing the firing and deplatforming of those whose views it deems ideologically unacceptable; now those same tactics are being employed against the pro-Palestine left, which yearns too late for the guard rails it helped remove. It is as if the worst fears of the infamous Harper’s letter from a few years ago, in which a number of very serious people admonished the left for abandoning liberal norms of open debate and good-faith disagreement, have come true. To the liberal mind, the only solution to this crisis is for both sides of the aisle to recommit to, as Mounk put it, a “principled defense of free speech” regardless of political content. Now it’s true: A left that supports the deplatforming of transphobes but opposes the deplatforming of anti-Zionists cannot justify itself by appealing to free speech — nor should it. For the liberal, freedom of speech is a deliberately empty principle. It allows a liberal institution to mediate peacefully between differing political views without any (apparent) reference to the content of those views — all while quietly promoting its own views under the banner of neutrality. The left can do better. In fact, the current political moment provides the left with an opportunity to clarify its often poorly articulated position in the so-called culture wars: namely, that the freedom of speech is a crucial public utility in a democratic society but it is not the soul of justice; and that to install it as such eclipses and ultimately degrades the left’s substantive values.

Bargaining-table negotiations over a first contract are never easy, but now they’re becoming excruciatingly slow and difficult. For companies like Trader Joe’s, that’s the goal.

President Joe Biden announced he's pardoning every American who has used marijuana in the past, including those who were never arrested or prosecuted.

A Florida woman who crashed into another car decides to dance an Irish jig in addition to doing field sobriety tests.