“You’re a bad mofo, you get out of the Cadillac and you pimp-slap her.”

If signed into law, it would mean by 2073 people wanting to buy cigarettes would have to show ID to prove they are at least 67 years old.

Kayfabe — the knowledge that pro wrestling is fake — has a long and rich history in American entertainment. It also explains something deep about G.O.P. politics now.

With the release of director Alex Proyas's preferred cut of the sci-fi noir Dark City, we look at which cut you should watch.

The United States is set to deploy facial recognition technology on drones. The tech, called SAFR, is owned by the company RealNetworks. According to a contract between RealNetworks and the U.S. Air Force, the facial recognition software will be used on small drones as part of special operations missions. The Air Force paid RealNetworks $729,056 for SAFR. “Through this effort, we will adapt the SAFR facial recognition platform for deployment on an autonomous [small unmanned aircraft system] for special ops, [intelligence, surveillance, and target acquisition] , and other expeditionary use-cases,” the contract said. “This will require integrating the SAFR software with the hardware and software stack of the [small drones], including its onboard compute, communications systems, and remote controller software to enable operation in [disconnected, intermittent, and limited] communications settings, support actionable insight for remote human operators, and open the opportunity for real-time autonomous response by the robot.” The small drones of the U.S. military are typically not armed. Small UAVs like the RQ-11B Raven are often hand launched by soldiers in the field and used for reconnaissance. This contract does not describe putting facial recognition software on large Predator and Reaper drones that will make decisions about who to assassinate in a war zone. The contract describes a use-case where teams of special operations soldiers use the facial recognition technology on smaller reconnaissance drones during operations in foreign countries.

dis gon be gud

Glenn W. Turner is now all but forgotten. But this salesman extraordinaire in flashy suits was once all but omnipresent in American life. Turner, the son of a sharecropper, told people they could all be rich and successful like him — if, that is, they made an investment in his multi-level marketing company. They would peddle “mink oil” makeup and his “Dare to Be Great” motivational tapes, and collect more money by recruiting others and taking a percentage on their sales. When newly minted salespeople found it impossible to make a go of it, they were told to “fake it until you make it,” by wearing expensive clothes and waving around $100 bills to lure in others, a disillusioned Oregon recruit testified in court in 1972. A few months later, another seller would tell a Florida courtroom that he, too, had been instructed to “fake it till you make it.” When the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Turner’s company, a judge cited the phrase as evidence of malfeasance.

Wait times at Philadelphia Zoning Board of Adjustment have doubled since the pandemic, frustrating business owners and making it harder to open small commercial enterprises.

Tennessee residents say the black fungus fueled by the Jack Daniel's facilities coats their homes, cars, and trees and is nearly impossible to remove.

How one of the hottest rap stars became the face of urban crime.

Pokémon Sleep is a mobile game from Pokémon: Magikarp Jump developer Select Button that can track your sleep. It features Snorlax (of course) and Professor Neroli, a Pokémon sleep researcher. The idea is that you leave your phone next to you when you go to bed. The app will analyze your sleep and categorize it into one of three types: dozing, snoozing and slumbering. Pokémon that tend to sleep in a similar fashion will gather around Snorlax. The more you play, the more likely you are to unlock rare sleep styles for various Pokémon. Droopy-eared Pikachu in particular looks extremely cute.

A new report from Wendell Potter at the Center for Health and Democracy examines just how the private insurance market makes its money—and how American health care is worse off for it. Health care reform has always been one of the least attainable objectives for American progressives. Reverence for private industry has allowed the health care industry to remain at the center of the medical system, and reforms have made modest gains at best. Today, the private health care industry is enormous, notoriously difficult to navigate, and shrouded in secrecy. A new analysis from Wendell Potter, executive director of the Center for Health and Democracy, published on his Health Care un-covered Substack, sheds light on how the industry has grown to such a state, and what can be done to rein in an industry that costs the American people trillions and still leaves millions under- and uninsured. The report analyzes the health insurance market by looking at the financial statements of the top seven insurance providers in the country, information that is typically aimed at financial investors and market analysts. The companies are Centene, Cigna, CVS/Aetna, Elevance, Humana, Molina, and UnitedHealth Group, also referred to as the Big Seven. The report compares growth from 2012 and 2022. It found an industry enjoying massive profits, often by undermining public programs, and whose ruthless pursuit of money has often life-threatening consequences. The numbers are astounding. Big Seven revenue increased 300 percent in the ten-year period studied, while profit increased 287 percent. Potter notes that, at three of these companies, over 90 percent of health plan revenues come from government programs.

The attempt to make the CFPB unconstitutional has grave consequences. The conservative legal movement’s strategy to kneecap the administrative state continued its march yesterday, with a ruling that calls into question the operation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). While bad enough on its own terms, if ultimately successful, this ruling would lead to significant collateral damage that the gleeful destroyers of consumer protection haven’t thought through. The case, where the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found the funding mechanism for the CFPB unconstitutional, could throw nearly all consumer financial markets into upheaval. Separately, it could potentially toss aside every agency and federal program that is not funded through discretionary congressional appropriations—threatening senior health care, retirement security, food and drug safety, and all kinds of other actions. The unintended consequences of the ruling would drive the U.S. government into near-total paralysis.

There's a reason so many restaurants have almost the same name.

A helicopter with a shooter will fly over a portion of the vast Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico next week, searching for feral cows to kill.

The layoffs also included “hardcore Musk loyalists,” tweeted Zoë Schiffer, who covers the company closely for Platformer. She added that the layoffs included “a ton of surprises.” For instance, she tweeted, among the laid off was Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments. In early November, Crawford tweeted, “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.” One senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that he’d been locked out of his email account. De Kuijper, who founded Revue, an editorial newsletter tool Twitter acquired in 2021, tweeted: “Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email. Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over.”

In The Third Reconstruction, historian Peniel Joseph examines how how the broken promises of racial equality in the past might be fulfilled in the future.

Rene Gonzales talks about why he’s sticking to his decision, made to help curb tent fires among homeless Portlanders, just before temperatures plummeted.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president posted a photo on his social media accounts Saturday showing what he said appeared to be a mythological woodland spirit similar to an elf. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not seem to be joking when he posted the photo of an “Aluxe,” a mischievous woodland spirit in Mayan folklore.

Supermarkets in the UK have run out of turnips after a Tory minister told Brits to eat them to avoid food shortages. Turnips are out of stock in Waitrose and Tesco, with the latter pointing customers in the direction of swede instead. It comes after Environment Secretary Therese Coffey said turnips would be a suitable alternative to other vegetables that are currently out of stock. She said: “A lot of people would be eating turnips right now, rather than thinking necessarily about aspects of lettuce and tomatoes and similar. “But I’m conscious that consumers want a year-round choice, and that’s what our supermarkets, growers and food producers around the world try to satisfy.” Her remarks came after Tory colleague Selaine Saxby said supermarkets are importing “far too many products” and suggested seasonal eating would solve the issue. Growers have also warned of a leek shortage that will see British-grown supplies exhausted by April. High temperatures and a lack of rain, followed by a period of cold weather, are being blamed for creating the “most difficult season ever,” Tim Casey, chairman of the Leek Growers Association, said. Suppliers have warned that shortages could last weeks as a combination of bad weather and transport problems in Africa and Europe has left some fruit and vegetables out of stock. Four supermarkets have introduced customer limits on certain fresh produce, with photographs emerging of empty shelves.