The myth of the Mafia, immortalized in countless gangster movies, is that they protect their own. As the legend goes, once you’re a fully pledged member of La Cosa Nostra—a “made man,” in common parlance—you enjoy the special impunity of a club that values loyalty above all. This rosy view of organized crime is of course pure fantasy: From actual court cases involving gangsters, it seems they are exceptionally quick to rat each other out to avoid jail time. But there is one group of shadowy miscreants that do operate under a code of omertà designed to ensure that almost all misdeeds will be forgiven, forgotten, and shielded from punishment: the American foreign policy establishment. Once you’re an accredited member of the cozy club of Washington policy warlords, you need never worry about having to face the consequences of your actions. Perhaps the only major exceptions to this rule are those who break the code of silence and let the public in on the dirty deeds of the ruling class—as the late Daniel Ellsberg did with the release of the Pentagon Papers. For that unpardonable crime, the price is ostracism and threats of jail. Ellsberg’s great foe Henry Kissinger offers the more typical pattern. Kissinger was recently feted at New York’s Public Library, in an event so private that no guest list was posted. But standing outside the library, reporter Jonathan Guyer got a glimpse of a stellar constellation of the political and economic upper crust, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, former representative Jane Harman, tech billionaire Eric Schmidt. USAID administrator Samantha Powers was also there to raise a toast to Kissinger. This is perhaps the best example of elite coziness since, as Guyer notes, in her 2002 book “A Problem From Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide, Powers detailed both Kissinger’s sins of commission (the carpet bombing of Cambodia) and omission (turning a blind eye to the murder of a million Bengalis killed by America’s allies in the Pakistani military).

“Based on a true story,” I heard from somewhere across the theater. The familiar words had appeared on screen, and an elderly man had taken it upon himself to read them aloud, to the rest of a sizable audience seated for a matinee showing of the anti-child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel. For the seasoned moviegoer, this phrase is a joke — we know that cinema will stretch almost any “truth” to the breaking point — and the rank insincerity of such a pronouncement is the foundation of the prankish opening titles of Fargo. But this crowd, I could tell, would view the events depicted over the next two-plus hours as entirely literal. Caviezel, best known for being tortured to death in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, has become a prominent figure on the conspiracist right, giving speeches and interviews in which he hints at an underground holy war between patriots and a sinister legion of evildoers who are harvesting the blood of children. It’s straight-up QAnon stuff, right down to his use of catchphrases like “The storm is upon us.” Here, he gets to act out some of that drama by playing a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, head of the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), in a feature film that casts the operator as a Batman-style savior for kids sold into the sex trade. Ballard himself has dabbled in Q-adjacent conspiracy theories, such as the Wayfair trafficking hoax, while his organization has far-right affinities and a long record of distorting its botched “raids,” which rely on bizarre tactics like asking psychics where to find victims for rescue. Ballard, Caviezel, and others of their ilk had primed the public to accept Sound of Freedom as a documentary rather than delusion by fomenting moral panic for years over this grossly exaggerated “epidemic” of child sex-trafficking, much of it funneling people into conspiracist rabbit holes and QAnon communities. In short, I was at the movies with people who were there to see their worst fears confirmed.

One of the darkest moments of France’s colonial history has never been properly acknowledged. That could be about to change. Since 2013, March 19 has marked France’s annual day of commemoration for those killed in the Algerian war of independence as well as the more minor conflicts in Morocco and Tunisia. But on the day that France commemorates those who died in its wars of decolonisation in North Africa, the truth about a massacre of sub-Saharans who fought on its side in World War II must also be acknowledged. In December 1944, between 35 and 70 tirailleurs sénégalais – colonial troops from French West Africa – were killed at a demobilisation camp in Thiaroye, just outside Dakar in Senegal. These were soldiers who fought for France who were then gunned down in cold blood by the French army. Then followed decades of silence on the matter. Successive governments said nothing, and when they did, as in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, they took a “Je ne regrette rien” stance. Then, François Hollande appeared to begin to break rank. On a trip to Dakar in October 2012, he called the events of December 1 1944 “an act of bloody repression”. He solemnly declared that France would hand over archives relating to the massacre on its 70th anniversary. He reiterated these sentiments at a speech at the military cemetery in Thiaroye in November 2014 – on the eve of that anniversary. However, the impression given was that the announcement of the creation of a museum on the site and the formal handing over of several boxes’ worth of archives to Senegal was designed to draw a line under Thiaroye, not open it up to more scrutiny.

An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation called automated license plate readers ‘a growing threat to everyone’s privacy.’

An Oregon field research team has uncovered evidence that indicates humans roamed the state at least 18,000 years ago. This could be proof of North America’s oldest human-occupied site yet. Since 2011, the Bureau of Land Management and the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History Archaeological Field School have partnered to excavate the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter near Riley, Ore. According to the BLM, archaeologist Patrick O’Grady led the team that had a major discovery back in 2012. The archaeologists unearthed camel teeth fragments that were initially hidden by volcanic ash from a Mount St. Helens eruption roughly 15,000 years ago.

A farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada was fined a hefty sum for using the emoji after he was sent a contract by text message. Chris Achter argued it was to acknowledge receipt, but a judge ruled it amounted to a contractual agreement. He must now pay C$82,000 ($61,610; £48,310) for failing to fulfil the contract.

The Chicago Police Department acknowledged an internal investigation Thursday into allegations that an officer or officers assigned to a West Side patrol district engaged in sexual relations with migrants who were living in a police station. The department said in an email late Thursday that the bureau of internal affairs, as well as the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, had opened an investigation, but a department spokesperson did not address questions about when the investigation began or if any officers were stripped of their police powers. A representative for COPA did not respond to an inquiry Thursday night. The Police Department said the allegations concern an officer or officers assigned to the Ogden District, which covers the Little Village and Lawndale neighborhoods on the West Side. Few details were available late Thursday about the scope of the investigation. Also a focus was whether some of the migrants allegedly involved in the matter were minors, sources with knowledge of the internal review said.

The indictments from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg did not implicate the mayor.

Wildlife in one of the country’s best-known rivers is under threat from a plague of fungus that attacks a precious water creature.

Biden must act now to make student debt relief a reality—no matter what the Supreme Court says.

Twitter sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter over the newly launched Threads app, sources familiar with the letter's existence told ABC News. The letter was sent by Twitter's legal team Wednesday, the sources said. The letter accused Meta of misappropriating Twitter's trade secrets and said Meta hired former Twitter employees who retained proprietary information, the sources said.

The measure (SB 1416) includes doing away with what is known as permanent alimony. DeSantis’ approval came a year after he nixed a similar bill that sought to eliminate permanent alimony and set up a formula for alimony amounts based on the length of marriage. The approval drew an outcry from members of the “First Wives Advocacy Group,” a coalition of mostly older women who receive permanent alimony and who assert that their lives will be upended without the payments. “On behalf of the thousands of women who our group represents, we are very disappointed in the governor’s decision to sign the alimony-reform bill. We believe by signing it, he has put older women in a situation which will cause financial devastation. The so-called party of ‘family values’ has just contributed to erosion of the institution of marriage in Florida,” Jan Killilea, a 63-year-old Boca Raton woman who founded the group a decade ago, told The News Service of Florida in a text message Friday.

Today Teamsters are erecting practice picket lines as the July 31 expiration of their contract with UPS rapidly approaches. After negotiations broke down yesterday, the largest strike at a single employer in US history is a real possibility.

REI did not voluntarily recognize the union. Since the SoHo store's vote, seven more stores across the U.S. have unionized; a ninth vote remains too close to call. Pro-union workers have formally accused the company of breaking labor laws — threatening and intimidating workers, disciplining and firing organizers — which REI denies. More than a year into it, workers and the company are nowhere close to a collective bargaining contract.

Arizona's unique method for awarding water to tribes was supposed to open up economic possibilities beyond farming for the Hopi Tribe. Instead, the tribe says it has dashed their dreams of building a thriving homeland. In September 2020, the Hopi Tribe’s four-decade effort to secure its right to water culminated in a court proceeding. The outcome would determine how much water the arid reservation would receive over the next century and whether that amount would be enough for the tribe to pursue its economic ambitions. Under rules unique to Arizona, the tribe would have to justify how it would use every drop it wanted. Court records show that at the trial, experts brought in by the tribe, state and corporate water users argued over how many Hopi had lived in the area going back centuries and how much water they had used for crops and livestock. They debated the correct fertility rate of Hopi women and the viability of the tribe’s economic projects. And the court examined lists of sacred springs — sites the Hopi traditionally kept secret to preserve them — to decide how much water could be drawn from them for future religious ceremonies. The legal battle, one of the tribe’s largest expenses in recent years, resulted in May 2022 with the court awarding less than a third of the water sought by the Hopi Tribe. That was the amount needed, the court said, “to provide a permanent homeland.” “I would define it as modern-day genocide,” Nuvangyaoma said. “Withholding water, which is life for the Hopis, until an undetermined time is really a position to kill off a tribe that’s been here since time immemorial.”

Tad DeLay writes on the futility of carbon offset programs. The exaggerated promises of carbon sequestration allow corporations like Delta Airlines, BP, and Tesla to make absurd claims of neutrality and launder ever-worsening emissions.

Domenic Broccoli, the IHOP kingpin of the Bronx, lives a good life. He drives a nice car, spends time with his six grandkids, and golfs often enough to have a tan for most of the year. He owns a four-bedroom home in Pelham Manor, a house upstate, and IHOPs throughout the borough where he grew up, each of which runs smoothly enough to give Broccoli the time and resources to devote himself, at the age of 66, to the animating force in his life: destroying his enemies. This mission came as a surprise to Broccoli, who had little reason to expect that trying to expand his pancake empire into upstate New York — and to build his grandest IHOP yet — would lead to such conflict. But sometimes that’s what happens when you find a dead body. On Memorial Day, Broccoli drove to his property in Fishkill, where a crowd was gathering to protest his planned development. These were the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the town’s Revolutionary War history and, in Broccoli’s view, to making his life hell. For more than a decade, the Friends have argued — based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like — that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States. Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes — with some evidence, but not as much as he would like — of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is.

SubCom is laying deepwater internet cables to boost U.S. economic and military might, including a secret mission to a remote island naval base, Reuters found. SubCom, a company born out of a U.S. Cold War project to spy on Soviet submarines, is living a double life. Publicly, it is one of the world’s biggest developers of undersea fiber-optic cables for telecom firms and tech giants like Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta Platforms. Behind the scenes, SubCom is the exclusive undersea cable contractor to the U.S. military, laying a web of internet and surveillance cables across the ocean floor, according to the four people with knowledge of the matter: two SubCom employees and two U.S. Navy staffers. The individuals asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the operations.

Two Newark firefighters died and five were injured late Wednesday as they battled a blaze on a massive cargo ship carrying vehicles in the port of Newark, New Jersey, officials said.

Yet from a scientific perspective, there’s nothing surprising about record-breaking heat, dangerous as it may be. It’s actually exactly in line with what scientists have long predicted in a world warmed by climate change. Fossil fuel emissions heat up the planet, and hotter weather makes heat waves more extreme.