A massive, coordinated scheme to sell false and fraudulent nursing degree credentials has been brought down by a joint federal law enforcement operation, Justice Department officials said Wednesday. As first reported by ABC News, officials said the scheme involved peddling more than $100 million worth of bogus nursing diplomas and transcripts over the course of several years -- fake credentials that were sold to help "thousands of people" take "shortcuts" toward becoming licensed, practicing nurses. Officials said the forged diplomas and transcripts were sold from what had been accredited schools to aspiring nurses, in order to help candidates bypass the qualifying requirements necessary to sit for the national nursing board exam. Although they still had to take the exam, the bogus credentials allowed them to skip vital steps of the competency and licensure process, officials said -- and once licensed, those individuals were able to find a job in the health care field.

Turns out your office's graphics card isn't Call of Duty-compatible

In court documents, Yuga Labs, the parent company of the successful NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, has admitted that the 10,000 images that constitute the BAYC collection have no copyright. “Yuga Labs does not possess a copyright in the Bored Ape images,” a court document submitted by Yuga Labs’s lawyers reads. These court documents were submitted as part of the ongoing lawsuit that Yuga Labs has lobbed against artist Ryder Ripps, who appropriated images from the BAYC collection for his own NFT collection, titled RR/BAYC, that he made as a protest piece that hoped to both bring attention to his belief that the BAYC NFTs are threaded with alt-right, neo-Nazi symbolism, and challenge the belief that large PFP collections were protected by copyright.

A woman with a history of being rescued from storm drains was pulled from another one on Wednesday. It was Lyndsey Jane Kennedy's third storm drain.

The Moderate PAC, created to go after progressive primary challengers, received all its money from one source: Republican megadonor Jeffrey Yass.

The impossible task ahead for the newly flush Internal Revenue Service

A rapidly expanding cemetery in a southern Russian village offers insight into who is fighting - and dying - for the notoriously secretive mercenary army Wagner.

Exploring the well-documented history of a racist techno-utopian ideology rooted in eugenics.

There is also the mutual decay of both Trump and Facebook. Each thrives by hijacking attention and monetizing outrage, and they’ve benefited each other: The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on more than 289,000 Facebook ads over the span of just a few months in 2020, according to an analysis by The Markup. But lately, both appear to have lost the juice. Many people still support Trump, and many people still use Facebook products, but the shine is gone—and that matters. Facebook’s ad business was kneecapped last year by changes Apple made to limit tracking on its devices. It faces steep competition from insurgent apps such as TikTok. And there is a sense, looking at the company’s transparency reports, which detail the most popular content on its platform, that Facebook has become a vast wasteland of recycled memes and scammy, spammy clickbait. Meanwhile, Trump’s 2024 campaign has been, to date, almost nonexistent. His kickoff announcement was roundly mocked as “low energy,” and some cable news networks didn’t bother to air it in full. Trump and his team have been sloppy and clearly grasping for relevance. And although I wouldn’t downplay the former president’s chances in the 2024 contest, he certainly doesn’t appear as invincible in primary politics as he once did. In December, ​​Florida Governor Ron DeSantis beat Trump 52 to 38 percent in a hypothetical matchup among likely Republican voters. Electoral uncertainties aside, there’s the plain fact that some around Trump have suggested the man is diminished. “He has retreated to the golf course and to Mar-a-Lago … His world has gotten much smaller. His world is so, so small,” one Trump adviser told New York magazine in December.

A group of ill-advised businessmen and investors, including one of Mississippi’s own star athletes and former NFL player Jerrell Powe, were done being jerked around. Several of them hopped on a conference call the afternoon of Wednesday, Jan. 11. On the line was a guy they call the ultimate con artist, 28-year-old Bryce Mathis. Everyone on the phone agreed: Mathis owed them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nearly a year of lies had finally caught up to him. “We were all just like, ‘Look, we want our money back, Bryce. We want our money back,’” said Rob Howard, an investor in Mathis’ medical marijuana start-up and one of the individuals on the call. “And then he said, you know, ‘I just wanna make this right. I’m tired of doing all this stuff. I just wanna come clean and be done with this. It’s too stressful.’” During the call, Mathis, Powe and a marijuana grower from California were traveling in a rented Tesla from the southeast Mississippi town of Laurel to the Chase Bank in Ridgeland, the Jackson suburb 100 miles away, where they said Mathis told them he’d stashed their money. They arrived after the bank closed and decided to stay at a hotel in Pearl – near a Tesla charging station – so they could go first thing in the morning. The next day, Ridgeland police officers arrested Powe and the grower, Gavin Bates, for allegedly kidnapping Mathis and taking him to withdraw the money against his will. “If this case gets fully investigated, it’s going to turn out to be much different than what the police think it is,” said Powe’s attorney, Tom Fortner. The funds in the Chase account weren’t enough to cover the debts. Several of the creditors believe the kidnapping allegation is just another one of Mathis’ clever stunts.

In a hypothetical eight-way primary, 48 percent of Republican voters said they would back Trump for the nod, while 28 percent would support DeSantis.

The chief executive of DoNotPay, a chatbot that's been dubbed a "robot lawyer" by its creators, tweeted on Wednesday that the company has canceled its plans to use artificial intelligence in a physical courtroom, instead focusing on consumer rights.

Concerned staff warned administrators at a Virginia elementary school three times that a 6-year-old boy had a gun and was threatening other students in the hours before he shot and wounded a teacher, but the administration “was paralyzed by apathy” and didn’t call police, remove the boy from class or lock down the school, the wounded teacher’s lawyer said Wednesday. Diane Toscano, an attorney for Abigail Zwerner, said during a news conference that she has notified the school board in Newport News that the 25-year-old teacher at Richneck Elementary School plans to sue the school district over the Jan. 6 shooting, which left Zwerner with serious injuries. “On that day, over the course of a few hours, three different times — three times — school administration was warned by concerned teachers and employees that the boy had a gun on him at the school and was threatening people. But the administration could not be bothered,” Toscano said.

The lawsuit targets Google's advertising business and comes after reports that DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter had been cleared to work on Google.

Are you at risk of losing your Medicaid coverage? Almost a million Floridians are slated to lose their Medicaid coverage starting in April once the federal COVID-19 emergency comes to an end. Florida is one of 11 states that did not expand Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, which means tens of thousands of Florida families are expected to fall into the Medicaid access gap. This gap occurs when families have incomes that are above the state’s eligibility for Medicaid but are below the federal poverty line ($13,590 for an individual in 2022, $23,030 for a family of three, according to healthcare.gov). They won’t be eligible for Medicaid or for coverage within the Affordable Care Act marketplace. During the pandemic, to make sure there was continuous access of care, Medicaid participants were automatically re-enrolled, but now, their eligibility will be checked again. In Florida, more than 1.87 million people gained Medicaid coverage from March 2020, when the pandemic began, to December 2022, a 50 percent increase, according to state enrollment data. As of December, more than 5.6 million people in Florida were covered by Medicaid. “This is going to be a major, major wave of people losing coverage,” said Shirley Dominguez, program coordinator at Epilepsy Alliance Florida Navigation Program. The program offers free healthcare enrollment assistance and guidance across Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe, Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties.

"Each salami will have roughly 30% celebrity meat and 40% lab-grown animal meats," a representative of BiteLabs says.

Ellen Gilland and her terminally ill husband, Jerry, hatched the plan in which she would shoot him to death, then kill herself.

The U.S. Justice Department accused Alphabet Inc's Google on Tuesday of abusing its dominance in digital advertising, threatening to dismantle a key business at the heart of one of Silicon Valley's most successful internet companies.

Last Tuesday, the British Broadcasting Corporation released the first episode of “The Modi Question,” a two-part documentary series that tracks how the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi climbed the political ranks of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party during his time as the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. The documentary was originally broadcasted in the U.K., but it quickly generated hype in India after unauthorized video clips began circulating on social media platforms, reminding viewers of Modi’s controversial role in the 2002 Gujarat riots—and prompting the Indian government this week to block it from being aired on Indian platforms. What is the documentary about? The 59-minute documentary takes an in-depth look at the 2002 Gujarat riots—one of the worst outbreaks of religious violence in India since the country’s Independence in 1947. It traces how the riots erupted after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims in the northern state of Gujarat was set on fire and killed 59 people. The Muslim community was allegedly held responsible for the incident, leading to heightened retaliatory attacks and the further deaths of over 1,000 people, the majority of whom were Muslim. The riots took place under Modi’s watch, who at the time was Gujarat’s Chief Minister. Raw and chilling footage in the documentary reveals how the police stood by as Hindu mobs attacked Muslims and religious attacks took hold of the state.

A new bill would ban schools in the state from accommodating students who believe to be “any animal species other than human.”