Volunteers giving out free meals with the organization Food Not Bombs have wracked up 40 tickets seeking more than $10,000 in fines since March 1, four weeks before visitors began pouring into downtown for the Final Four. The Houston law they were charged with violating — an ordinance against giving away meals unless you have permission from the property where you’re doing it, even if the property is public — was put in place by City Council in 2012 but largely had gone unenforced for over a decade, municipal records show. The current administration’s decision to crack down on the ordinance sent ripples through Houston’s extensive network of Good Samaritans. Some have quietly pulled back from their work. Other groups have relocated to a Houston Police Department parking lot just outside of downtown, which was recently designated an acceptable public location for charitable meals. (Houston is paying a nonprofit to provide meals at that location for at least a year.)

When Texas A&M University announced last month that it had hired a director to revive its journalism school, it included the kind of fanfare usually reserved for college coaches and athletes. The university set up maroon, silver and white balloons around a table outside its Academic Building for an official signing ceremony. It was there that Kathleen O. McElroy, a respected journalist with a long career, officially accepted the position to run the new program and teach as a tenured professor, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. McElroy, a 1981 Texas A&M graduate, was the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism between 2016 and 2022, where she is a tenured professor. Earlier, she spent 20 years in various editing roles at The New York Times until heading to UT-Austin to pursue her doctorate. She has studied news media and race, with a focus on how to improve diversity and inclusion within newsrooms, and spent her career covering other areas like sports and obituaries. Her master's thesis focused on the obituaries of civil rights leaders. Now, she was excited to head back to her alma mater to build a brand new program there. But in the last several weeks, McElroy told The Texas Tribune, the deal with Texas A&M fell apart. In the days after the signing ceremony, she said, A&M employees told her an increasingly vocal network of constituents within the system were expressing issues with her experience at the Times and with her work on race and diversity in newsrooms, McElroy said.

Love was around well before we arrived and it will remain long after we’re gone, because the very existence of something in a sea of nothing is an act of love. Reality is the biggest piece of performance art there is.

Washington retakes membership of body amid concerns China is filling the vacuum it left behind when it quit over alleged anti-Israel bias

MyPillow Auction: Equipment from Mike Lindell's MyPillow is on the auction block after stores dropped his product.

A personal perspective on the YouTube star's controversial behaviors with fans, and the dynamic rooted in stan culture.

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The lack of a comprehensive national rainfall database and current flood maps hampers the ability to prepare for storms intensified by climate change.

About two dozen classic carriages around the country offer time travel by train.

The comedian is part of a class action lawsuit accusing the tech companies of copyright infringement. To Silverman and her co-plaintiffs, I bid godspeed.

The annual celebration has been going on for nine years according to those who live there and attended the event. The homeowner said they get a permit from the city in order to pop fireworks and that earlier in the night different officers came through to make sure they were operating correctly. Nicole Johnson, who is Cynthia's God daughter and called Smith her brother, said she was inside the house with her daughter and grandmother when bullets came flying through their house. "That was our grandmother’s house, the police crept up in our yard as we were getting things together to get people out of the way to get people home safely. They came in our yard and started blatantly shooting and every bullet that they shot out, they hit somebody. They hit my brother first, they killed my brother first," expressed Johnson who was visibly emotional.

New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable

For their study, Lennon’s team used the synthetic organism, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn3B—a minimized version of the bacterium M. mycoides commonly found in the guts of goats and similar animals. Over millennia, the parasitic bacterium has naturally lost many of its genes as it evolved to depend on its host for nutrition. Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in California took this one step further. In 2016, they eliminated 45 percent of the 901 genes from the natural M. mycoides genome—reducing it to the smallest set of genes required for autonomous cellular life. At 493 genes, the minimal genome of M. mycoides JCVI-syn3B is the smallest of any known free-living organism. In comparison, many animal and plant genomes contain more than 20,000 genes.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden sentenced Tyler Bensch, who pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts in connection with the riot, to two years of probation and 60 days home incarceration. Prosecutors had requested nine months in federal prison. A tearful Bensch did not speak during Friday's sentencing hearing, but his court-appointed attorney Peter Cooper said the Florida man deeply regretted his actions. Bensch, Cooper said, "didn't have the maturity to understand what he was getting into" and "carries great remorse for what he did that day." Cooper went on to say that Bensch hopes to start a career in law enforcement, adding that it's "not beyond the realm of possibility" that he could do so even with his misdemeanors. Bensch is currently working for a pool cleaning company, and the conditions of his sentence will allow him to leave his home for employment during his 60 days of home detention.

IN LATE MAY, an alliance of anti-Putin partisans used Ukrainian territory to launch a stunning incursion into western Russia. Spearheaded by the Russian Volunteer Corps, or RVC, and its leader Denis Kapustin, a wanted neo-Nazi and ex-soccer hooligan, the assault exposed just how vulnerable Russia had become to attacks since its invasion of Ukraine. For years, Kapustin has maintained public links with two notorious American neo-Nazis: Robert Rundo, the founder of the street fighting gang Rise Above Movement, and Christopher Pohlhaus, an ex-Marine and leader of a group that terrorizes drag events in the U.S. While Kapustin has been a regular fixture for years among European extremists, he gained minor popularity among American neo-Nazis when he started co-hosting a podcast in January 2021 with Rundo, a Charlottesville riot defendant now facing extradition to the U.S. from Romania. On the multiepisode show, the two men — avid mixed martial artists — discussed the benefits of “active clubs,” which are essentially fascist fight clubs that have sprouted up all over the U.S. But Kapustin, who also goes by his call sign “White Rex” (his personal MMA brand) or uses the last name “Nikitin,” has contacts that go further into stateside neo-Nazism. In July 2021, he also appeared in another two-and-a-half hour podcast with Pohlhaus, a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps who only months ago, with a revolver strapped to his hip, led his so-called Blood Tribe in a protest of a drag event outside Akron, Ohio. The relationship appears ongoing: Pohlhaus has told his followers on the Telegram app in recent weeks that he wants to help his friend “Denis” in Ukraine and plans to travel there to establish a neo-Nazi pipeline of volunteer soldiers to the cause.

The court once held that the Civil Rights Act trumped religious freedom. After these recent decisions, that’s over. The consequences could be enormous.

A sea otter accompanied the paddle-out, mingling with the humans in the water, and going from surfboard to surfboard before deciding which one they wanted to perch upon. Ultimately, they picked a blue soft-top adorned with a phallus drawn in wax. Photos and videos of the incident were captured by Native Santa Cruz, a local photo account highlighting the central coast town’s natural beauty. “A surfing sea otter at Cowells,” the account operator wrote. “This sea otter was putting on quite a show checking out and climbing on multiple boards, but it chose the blue one as its preferred ride. At one point, it was swimming after the board as the surfer was heading in.”

Electric green algal blooms are spreading, threatening wildlife, pets, people and cities. And algae season is only getting started.

The girl was found June 28 at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, weeks after her grandmother reported her missing.

Pathetic.