The Biden administration is doing nothing to stop the environmental destruction wrought by Arizona’s construction of a shipping container wall.

Volodymyr Zelensky could become the country’s next real-life leader. If his show is any guide, Ukrainians should be worried.

A municipal judge in a small Alabama city found two women guilty Tuesday on all charges in a case that started when they were caught feeding and trapping cats on public property near the courthouse. Wetumpka Municipal Judge Jeff Courtney sentenced 61-year-old Mary Alston and 85-year-old Beverly Roberts to two years unsupervised probation and $50 fines plus court costs for each charge. He also added a suspended sentence of 10 days in jail for both women. The unusual hearing lasted all day and featured testimony by three Wetumpka police officers, a county official, the director of a national organization dedicated to the care of feral cats, the mayor and others. Alston and Roberts both faced charges of criminal trespassing. Roberts is also charged with disorderly conduct and Alston faced charges of interfering with government operations, all misdemeanors.

Video posted to social media showed surfers trying in vain to get the 30-foot whale back into the water on Tuesday.

Can tech bros save the Pentagon? The messy tale of Rebellion Defense. Rebellion Defense set out to disrupt the way the Pentagon handles new technologies. Silicon Valley’s elite and Washington’s national security leaders lined up behind the startup. Three and a half years later, Rebellion is falling short. Founded in 2019, Rebellion wants to create AI-powered software for the military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. The startup has claimed its tools could sort through heaps of sensitive data to help officials make decisions, and that it will ultimately build software capable of making battlefield decisions. Its backers are as big as they come, with high-profile investors like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Even Obama’s personal IT guy joined. Rebellion has also won several million dollars of military contracts from the Pentagon, the start of what some observers think will be a gusher of government dollars. In 2022, the company raised $150 million in funding and was valued at a staggering $1.15 billion. Now some industry experts say Rebellion has failed to meet its own mission, and some former employees allege the company has been stymied by problematic internal politics. Many startups face disarray, but the dangers are bigger here, far beyond the potential waste of taxpayer dollars on products that don’t actually exist. That’s because Rebellion is quickly developing military technologies, according to former staffers, without ethical guardrails on which governments products would be sold to or how they would be used. (Rebellion responded to this by sharing an “Ethical Principles” page from its website.) At worst, Rebellion’s ambition to automate decision-making could lead to algorithms with lethal power. Think Skynet in the Terminator films.

The allegations had previously been dismissed by the NYPD and the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office despite explosive video footage from two separate car stops in Staten Island in 2018.

There is a saying: “In the heart of every Haitian, there’s a sleeping president.” Haitian authorities say that was certainly true of Christian Emmanuel Sanon, the man some already called “President.” And he had devotees in South Florida — and Haiti — willing to help him achieve his vision. Sanon, a Haitian-American preacher and physician who split his time between Florida and his homeland, became the central character around whom coalesced a plan to topple Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and install him, Sanon, as leader. He held meetings in Port-au-Prince and at the Tower Club in downtown Fort Lauderdale in early May 2021 with associates to go over an ambitious redevelopment program to “save Haiti.” No hard evidence has been presented in support of the insistence by Haitian police that his plan, his goal, involved an assassination. But over several months, a sprawling array of characters became entangled in a complex plot to get rid of Moïse. Among them: an ambitious Haitian Supreme Court justice, a convicted drug trafficker, an ousted Haitian corruption fighter, a well-known politician, former and current cops, an ex-Drug Enforcement Administration informant and a current FBI informant, two Doral, Florida-based security firms, and former Colombian fighters turned soldiers of fortune.

NBC News spent a week in the seaside town of Morecambe, speaking with dozens of people about the real costs of this story of Western poverty. A dire and potentially deadly humanitarian emergency is endangering millions across Britain. It is playing out as the seats of politics and power are reeling from months of chaos, farce and opulent pageantry. The ruling Conservative Party has busied itself with internecine political warfare, cycling through the scandal-plagued Boris Johnson and the historically brief Liz Truss before settling on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker worth $800 million. Amidst it all was the gold-plated weeklong mourning period for the United Kingdom's longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. More than 200 miles north of London, in seaside Morecambe, Dusty Thomas says he spends many of his days quietly starving. He is 60, a veteran of the 1982 Falklands war and the sectarian “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. “Sometimes I’ve gone two or three days without food,” he said, huddled under a cartoon-themed blanket in his chilly first floor home just outside of town, where the heat hasn’t been switched on in three years. “A few times I’ve used tricks like drinking quite a lot of vinegar, which shrinks the sides of your stomach and takes your appetite away.”

It’s not just indifference. It’s an active, and deadly, cavalier attitude towards the lives of others: an example other nations follow

China’s government abruptly ended the long-running and strict zero-Covid policy last week, rolling back measures including travel restrictions and lockdowns. Health authorities also ended the mass testing drives and compulsory regular testing which were pillars of the policy. As a result, official daily reports have become an increasingly inaccurate measure of the outbreak.

An ex-boyfriend of one of the women who filed the lawsuit planted an AirTag in the wheel well of her car and was able to find out where she had moved to avoid his harassment.

i fucking called it looool

The case also seeks changes to Facebook’s algorithm, which it alleges fuels hate and violence

Three reporters from a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in West Virginia say they have been fired after publicly criticizing an interview conducted by their company president with a former coal executive who was convicted of a safety violation in connection with the worst U.S. mine disaster in decades. Charleston Gazette-Mail reporters Caity Coyne, Lacie Pierson and Ryan Quinn said Tuesday that they were fired due to their comments on Twitter about the video interview, now removed from the paper’s website, with former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. Quinn said no specific policy was cited. “The person who fired me said it was because I had publicly hurt the company on social media,” he said. Pierson said she was told “it was insubordination that we committed on social media” and “that was something they couldn’t accept.”

An investigation by The Markup and STAT found 49 out of 50 telehealth websites sharing health data via Big Tech’s tracking tools

Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced plans Tuesday to commute the sentences of the 17 people on Oregon’s death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, likely using her executive clemency powers for the last time as governor. In a statement, Brown criticized the practice of capital punishment, saying the death penalty “cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.” “I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people—even if a terrible crime placed them in prison," Brown said. “Unlike previous commutations I’ve granted to individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary growth and rehabilitation, this commutation is not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the individuals on death row. Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral."

As Elon Musk has decimated Twitter’s workforce and welcomed back some of the platform’s most polarizing figures, many Twitter users have decided they’ve had enough of his chaos and are migrating to smaller, niche platforms. This influx of users to platforms such as Mastodon, Hive, and Post, which have a fraction of Twitter’s resources, raises the question whether these social media upstarts can cope with the privacy and security concerns of a rapidly growing user base — ranging from how smaller platforms secure private messages to how they would respond to law enforcement requests for data. “For any company that is suddenly having this huge blow up in size as a communications outlet, I think it’s a very reasonable question and concern,” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project. “Odds are you’re going to start getting more if not a lot more law enforcement demands for private communications. And the question is: Do you have the resources to handle those?”

Mississippi State University Head Football Coach Michael Charles "Mike" Leach passed away last night (Monday, Dec. 12) at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi, following complications from a heart condition. He was 61.

On Sunday, Elon Musk tweeted a vague warning: “the bots are in for a surprise tomorrow.” He didn’t say what the surprise was. But in the hours that followed, Twitter blocked traffic from roughly 30 mobile carriers around the world, effectively cutting off access to hundreds of thousands of accounts, primarily in the Asia-Pacific region, including vast swaths of Russia, Indonesia, India, and Malaysia.  The project was part of Elon Musk’s attempt to rid Twitter of spam. But rather than work to remove individual offenders, the company identified mobile networks associated with large spam networks in specific countries, and blocked users who relied on those networks from receiving SMS messages from Twitter, impacting people with two-factor authentication. Then it blocked traffic from those carriers completely.  From 5:35 AM to 6:45 AM PT on Sunday, Twitter shut down access to the primary telecom providers in India and Russia, as well as the second biggest telecom company in Indonesia, Platformer has learned.

The dreamy picture-editing AI is a nightmare waiting to happen.