A new Senate report calls out the FBI for lying to Congress about its social media monitoring, pointing out the FBI’s hiring of ZeroFox.

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination. Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year. Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

The list of shortcomings and failures associated with North Carolina’s decade-long experiment with private school vouchers (aka “Opportunity Scholarships”) is a long and sobering one. Though originally pitched and sold as a tool that would lift student performance and achievement by providing low-income families with a greater degree of “school choice,” there’s no evidence that kids attending voucher schools have experienced any such renaissance. The North Carolina schools that receive the funds are almost completely unaccountable and under no obligation to meet meaningful standards, so collecting and dissecting hard data is extremely difficult. A 2020 Duke University report, however, cast significant doubt on the program’s performance. Meanwhile, in states where thorough study has been possible — Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, the District of Columbia – voucher student performance and achievement have both lagged. There are other significant red flags associated with the program: Voucher schools frequently discriminate against children and families on the basis of their religious beliefs and sexual orientation. Many employ curricula grounded in religious fundamentalism and white supremacy that teach factually inaccurate lessons in science (denying the reality of evolution) and history (presenting a sanitized version of the enslavement of African Americans). Despite these problems and having already spent millions of dollars to no evident and measurable positive effect, state lawmakers are preparing to dramatically expand the program.

In Mayor Eric Adams’s first month in office, he was confronted with a tragic crisis: the deaths of two New York City police officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance in Harlem. Mr. Adams, a former police captain who campaigned as a Democratic crime fighter, quickly sought to humanize the killings. The loss of the officers, he said, reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable. “I still think about Robert,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference at City Hall. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet.” A week later, Mr. Adams posed for a portrait in his office, holding a wallet-size photo of Officer Venable after The New York Times had requested to see it. Mr. Adams has since repeated the moving anecdote in media interviews and at a Police Academy ceremony last June, where he again displayed Officer Venable’s picture. But the weathered photo of Officer Venable had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet. It had been created by employees in the mayor’s office in the days after Mr. Adams claimed to have been carrying it in his wallet. The employees were instructed to create a photo of Officer Venable, according to a person familiar with the request. A picture of the officer was found on Google; it was printed in black-and-white and made to look worn as if the mayor had been carrying it for some time, including by splashing some coffee on it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Members of Michael Protzman’s conspiracy cult abandoned their families and spent their life savings to follow him to Trump rallies around the country.

Labour leader says he feels ‘very uncomfortable’ about industrial action leaving students unable to graduate. The University and College Union said that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer should be “backing staff, not bosses”, after he urged academics taking part in the UK’s assessment boycott to mark students’ work. Thousands of students who are due to graduate this summer are expected to not get their final degree classifications due to industrial action tied to UCU’s long-running pay dispute with the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (Ucea).

The large mammal likely contracted the virus from a fox, say wildlife officials

Federal prosecutors say former President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform what he claimed was the home address of former President Barack Obama the same day a man with guns in his van was arrested near the property.

Yashar Ali, who has more than 700,000 Twitter followers, owes Ariadne Getty nearly $250,000. Now anything he makes will go to her.

The shootings involved a Fort Worth police officer and a Fort Worth arson investigator

Gov. Tony Evers, a former public school educator, used his broad partial veto authority this week to sign into law a new state budget that increases funding for public schools for the next four centuries. The surprise move will ensure districts' state-imposed limits on how much revenue they are allowed to raise will be increased by $325 per student each year until 2425, creating a permanent annual stream of new revenue for public schools and potentially curbing a key debate between Democrats and Republicans during each state budget-writing cycle. Evers told reporters at a press conference in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Wednesday his action would "provide school districts with predictable long-term increases for the foreseeable future." Evers crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a "20" from a reference to the 2024-25 school year. The increase of $325 per student is the highest single-year increase in revenue limits in state history.

There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit. Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all. The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars. You’re not reading those numbers wrong. To say that the Metaverse is dead is an understatement. It was never alive.

Democrats who control the PA House said they would leave Harrisburg for the weekend, indicating no budget will reach the governor by the deadline. Pennsylvania lawmakers are at an impasse just hours before the state’s midnight deadline to pass a new budget, with a $100 million private school voucher program at the heart of the fierce disagreement. The GOP-controlled state Senate voted 29-21 late Friday to advance a roughly $45 billion budget that uses state money to fund scholarships so K-12 public school students can attend private institutions — a poison pill for Democrats who control the state House. “I would say the voucher issue is over,” state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said Friday afternoon, before the upper chamber voted. “This obviously needs some time.”

The article on the GQ website was a fierce critique of David Zaslav, comparing the Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive to the ruthless business tycoon played by Richard Gere in “Pretty Woman.” Then, hours after the article went online on Monday, it disappeared with no explanation. The article had been altered, and then deleted, after Warner Bros. Discovery raised an objection with the magazine. Publications often amend or correct articles after they’re published. But it is unusual for mainstream news organizations like GQ to remove an article entirely. And some GQ readers noticed and voiced their concerns on social media. A spokesman for Warner Bros. Discovery soon reached out to the magazine to complain, pointing out that the company wasn’t contacted for comment on the article, according to the two people with knowledge of the interactions. Soon after, Mr. Bailey heard from a senior editor at GQ, who asked him to revise the story. Mr. Bailey declined to participate but gave the editor permission to make changes, according to the two people with knowledge of the interactions. When the revisions came back, Mr. Bailey objected to the new version and said that he wasn’t comfortable with his byline appearing on the article. The revised version did not include the reference to “Pretty Woman,” among other changes.

Three academic workers at the University of California, San Diego, were arrested on felony charges of vandalism and conspiracy to commit a crime. They were using washable markers and chalk.

Wrought iron process that drove UK success was appropriated from black metallurgists, records suggest

President Joe Biden announced Monday his intention to nominate a former appointee under former President Donald Trump with a controversial past in Latin America to the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

For many working-class Americans, cars are a burden and a necessity.

A man has been arrested and charged in connection with an incident in which a woman was killed after being hit and run over by a stolen forklift in a Waldorf, Maryland, Home Depot parking lot on Sunday, according to a release from the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.

In eight months, Erica Marsh has become one of the most consistently viral left-wing voices on Twitter, gaining more than 130,000 followers for her hyper-liberal, often melodramatic opinions on the biggest flash points in American news. She’s been especially popular with conservatives, who promoted her as a perfect symbol of how overly theatrical and inane progressives can be — like when she attacked the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision last week by saying “no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system.” The tweet was viewed more than 27 million times. There’s just one problem: She’s probably a fake. The “proud Democrat” in Washington, as she described herself on Twitter, doesn’t show up in any local phone or voting records. The Biden presidential campaign, where she said she worked as a field organizer, has no record of her; neither does the Obama Foundation, where she claimed to have volunteered. Her only other known social media profile, on TikTok, posts copies of her tweets but has never included her speaking or showing her face. And a digital-imaging expert said that the three purported selfies she’s posted on Twitter — showing a young, smiling blond woman — bear the hallmarks of digital manipulation.