The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to phase out all oil drilling in L.A. and ban new wells, a historic move in a city that was built by a once-booming petroleum industry and whose residents have suffered with decades of environmental consequences as a result. In a 12-0 vote, the council approved a new ordinance that immediately bans new oil and gas extraction and requires that all existing oil and gas extractions stop production within 20 years.

In 2022, the American right has sharply escalated its attacks on gay and transgender people and the broader queer community. This escalation shows up in the Crowd Counting Consortium’s data a…

California Highway Patrol officers stationed in East Los Angeles grew so accustomed to uneventful overtime shifts that they set up a room with six beds where they could sleep while on duty, according to investigative reports prepared by the department. Photos of the beds, set up in a room nicknamed “535 Inn” after the station’s identification number, appear in reports that formed the basis for the CHP to fire many of the officers and, early this year, for Attorney General Rob Bonta to charge 54 of them with fraud and felony wage theft of about $267,000. The criminal charges followed a CHP audit and investigation that found officers exaggerated the overtime hours they had worked on late-night Caltrans details, reporting full shifts when in fact they spent only a few hours, or none, at work sites. The East L.A. office was the smallest in CHP’s Southern Division but accounted for nearly three times as much reimbursable overtime as the largest office in the division, according to a summary of CHP’s initial audit. By Thursday, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge had dismissed charges against nearly all of the officers — over objections from Bonta’s office — in a deal that allowed them to repay Caltrans for the unworked hours without admitting guilt. Fifty-two of the 54 officers agreed to the deal, while two planned to proceed to trial.

Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any other ways of playing that are better than Marxism.

I promise you are not ready for how stupid this gets. The way the tech press fell for this is fascinating, but today we’re going to look at some of the ideology that helped inspire the greatest disaster in crypto history. And to tell that story, we need to look back at Caroline Ellison, and her obsession with Harry Potter.

railgun editorializing - there was a drag show planned today in the area and Proud Boys/etc were rolling in to protest it; it's sounding like people shot up transformers at multiple substations which caused explosions/outages.

The sky over the city of Vancouver was the color of a television tuned to a Prince concert.   OK, maybe not the whole sky. But enough of it that people noticed. A bunch of streetlights — a few hundred out of thousands — had suddenly changed. What had been moonshine white was now blue, or purple, or even violet. They weren't any less bright, objectively speaking. But purple doesn't exactly illuminate a sidewalk the way white does. The spectrum of Vancouver had taken a hard left turn. It didn't look bad. It wasn't unsafe, particularly. It was just weird. So people placed worried calls to the city. And after all the hue and cry, Vancouver rolled out the utility trucks and set out to replace the chromatic aberrations — even though the lights were still pretty new. Like most other cities, Vancouver has spent the past few years switching from old sodium-vapor streetlights to LEDs. The new bulbs, basically arrays of computer chips that convert electricity to light, are cheaper, less power-hungry, and longer-lasting. LED streetlights are supposed to shine for the better part of a decade. Unless they don't. Because the Great Purpling didn't start — or end — in Vancouver. Reports stretch back to 2020 and across the hemisphere — Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, New Mexico, California, even Ireland. "It's something we began seeing about two years ago," says Jeff Brooks, a representative for Duke Power, which is responsible for streetlights across the Carolinas and parts of Florida and the Midwest. "I've had people call and ask if this was because it's Halloween, or because their football team in that area wears purple."  It isn't ghost- or football-related. And it isn't some grand conspiracy, though lots of people saw in the synthetic twilight the effects of 5G radiation or government surveillance, a sign of the times. There's nothing shady going on here. But still: Streetlights aren't supposed to spontaneously change color. So I did a little digging. The mystery of the purple lights appears to be both more mundane and more worrisome than anyone has realized — a mood-indigo check-engine light on the entire infrastructure of modernity. When LED streetlights start changing color for no apparent reason, it's a visual cue that we might need to rethink, just a bit, how we build the future.

Former San Francisco employees, including a director who worked with the homeless, allege that the city routinely cleared encampments while knowing there were not enough shelter beds available, according to new testimony filed in court Friday. Encampments were often cleared at the behest of the mayor and city officials, according to the testimony of Kaki Marshall, who was the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s former Director of Outreach and Temporary Shelter from October 2018 to August 2019. Marshall believed the policies “fundamentally harmed people and actually exacerbated San Francisco’s homelessness crisis.” “There were many times when I was working for San Francisco that I believed I was being asked to break the law,” wrote Marshall, who is formerly homeless and was a homeless activist. These new testimonies were filed as a part of a lawsuit brought in September against the City and County of San Francisco over the treatment of unhoused individuals. The Coalition on Homelessness, which filed the lawsuit alongside seven homeless people, alleges that the city broke several of its own policies and violated the Boise Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that prohibits cities from relocating homeless people if there isn’t sufficient shelter to offer them.  The testimonies are intended to support an injunction that would prevent all homeless encampment sweeps until the lawsuit is resolved. A hearing regarding that injunction is scheduled for Dec. 22. In Friday’s filings, Marshall said they were explicitly directed by the former head of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Jeff Kositsky, to forcibly move unhoused people and destroy their property without taking the time to inquire about their needs. 

Julio Ramirez died in the back seat of a taxi in April after he left a popular gay bar in Manhattan with a group of men. They stole his wallet, phone and ID before they abandoned his body in the car with a distressed cabdriver. One month later, John Umberger was found dead in an Upper East Side townhouse after he and a group of men left another popular gay bar just three blocks from the last place Mr. Ramirez was seen alive. Surveillance footage showed Mr. Umberger sandwiched between the men as they guided him into a car. The Police Department and many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community at first regarded the deaths as isolated drug overdoses: men who partied too hard, quotidian tragedies in a gay nightlife scene that has roared back to life as the coronavirus pandemic has waned. But the men’s families soon discovered something more sinister: Credit cards in the men’s names were maxed out and their bank accounts drained of tens of thousands of dollars. Now, their deaths are being investigated by the Police Department’s homicide unit. The deaths of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Umberger came at a fraught time for the city’s L.G.B.T.Q. community, which emerged from the pandemic into the jaws of a monkeypox outbreak, a landscape of struggling and sometimes shuttered bars and an increasingly hostile national political climate. Some men who said they were drugged have struggled to convince the police they were the victims of a crime and not just irresponsible partygoers who took someone home and blacked out.

The G7 price cap will allow non-EU countries to continue importing seaborne Russian crude, but it will prohibit shipping, insurance and re-insurance companies from handling cargo unless the oil is sold for less than $60 a barrel. Russia "will not accept" a price cap on its oil and is analysing how to respond, the Kremlin said in comments reported on Saturday, in response to a deal by Western powers aimed at limiting a key source of funding for its war in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow had made preparations for Friday's price cap announcement by the Group of Seven nations, the European Union and Australia, the Russian state news agency TASS reported. "We will not accept this cap," RIA news agency quoted him as saying. He added that Russia would conduct a rapid analysis of the agreement and respond after that, RIA reported. Russia has repeatedly said it will not supply oil to countries that implement the cap - a stance reaffirmed by Mikhail Ulyanov, Moscow's ambassador to international organisations in Vienna, in posts on social media on Saturday.

"They sound like the guy playing the violin on the Titanic," says a senior media buyer.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in late February, speculation about Russian President Vladimir Putin's health has implied that he is battling an array of illnesses, including cancer and Parkinson's disease. The most recent rumor, posted by the General SVR's Telegram channel, alleges after a difficult day of leadership earlier this week, Putin fell down five steps on a staircase and landed on his coccyx, or tailbone. The jarring fall caused the Russian leader to then "defecate involuntarily," according to the Telegram channel.

In October, the university quietly introduced heat sensors under desk without notifying students or seeking their consent. Students removed the devices, hacked them, and were able to force the university to stop its surveillance.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made national headlines in April when he signed a bill repealing the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID), the special taxing district on the Walt Disney Company’s Central Florida property. But now that the governor has won re-election, Disney has brought back a former CEO — and the legal reality loomed ready to inflict some staggeringly bad consequences — DeSantis is reportedly backing down. The bill repealing RCID effective June 1, 2023 was sponsored by State Rep. Randy Fine (R) and State Sen. Jennifer Bradley (R), who did not communicate with anyone at Disney, RCID, or any of the county governments that would be affected before passing this ill-conceived law. The Republicans backing the move openly admitted they were doing so in retaliation for former Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s criticism of the Parental Rights in Education bill (deemed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics), specifically regarding a memo Chapek sent to Disney employees vocally objecting to the bill after its passage. Chapek also hit the pause button on the Mouse making any political contributions and a plan to move thousands of employees from Palo Alto, California to a new facility being built in Lake Nona (a region in the southeast area of Orlando).

An ongoing lawsuit in Alabama typifies the far-reaching criminalization of women enabled by some anti-abortion ideology and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. A ruling in the matter, which involves a woman merely suspected of being pregnant, could be a bellwether for various cases relitigating women’s rights in the wake of the high court’s decision. Etowah County officials are facing what appears to be the first lawsuit in the state alleging false imprisonment because a woman who was jailed for exposing her unborn child to drugs wasn’t pregnant – although it isn’t the first time such dystopian injustice has played out in Alabama. Stacey Freeman, who is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, was under investigation by a family services agency for substance abuse when her daughter incorrectly told social workers that Freeman was pregnant, according to her Nov. 7 complaint. Freeman said she offered to take a pregnancy test, but it wasn’t administered. Sheriff’s investigator Brandi Fuller later issued a “patently false” warrant saying Freeman tested positive for amphetamines, according to the complaint. She was arrested for “chemical endangerment” days later, the complaint said, by sheriff’s deputies who stopped to assist her with a flat tire.

Denver police officers dressed in military-style SWAT gear on Jan. 4 descended on Johnson’s Montbello home to serve a search warrant. Johnson, in her bathrobe, opened her door when an officer on a bullhorn told anyone inside to come out. Officers carrying rifles stood on her lawn next to an armored tactical vehicle. One officer held the leash of a German shepherd K9. Once inside her home, Johnson said, they smashed a door to her garage with a battering ram, broke apart a ceiling panel, broke the head off of a beloved collectible doll and left the house in disarray. They were looking for a stolen iPhone that had pinged near her home. The iPhone was believed to be inside a stolen truck along with several guns. But police found nothing inside Johnson’s home. Now Johnson keeps all her windows and doors locked when she’s home. She’s afraid to answer the door. She’s thinking about moving and leaving behind the neighborhood where she’s lived for decades, where she raised her children, where her church is. “I still feel the same as when they did this,” she said. “It’s just frightening.” Johnson on Wednesday sued the Denver police detective who led the case, Gary Staab, alleging the search violated her civil rights because police failed to conduct a proper investigation before requesting the search warrant, which she said was executed with unreasonable force.

Since January 2016, at least 30 artificial-stone fabricators in the Los Angeles area have been diagnosed with an accelerated form of silicosis, a deadly, dust-related illness.

The report confirms a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation that found the privately built fencing could collapse during major flooding. The federal government resisted making the findings public for more than a year.

ChatGPT is a lot of things. It is by all accounts quite powerful, especially with engineering questions. It does many things well, such as engineering prompts or stylistic requests. Some other things, not so much. Twitter is of course full of examples. (These are all rationalist dorks but they're not wrong about this.)

BOSTON—His woolen mittens dangling from the ends of his sleeves and his mouth partially agape in breathless wonder, a pudgy doughboy with rosy red cheeks is currently pressing his round button nose up against the display window of a local chocolate shop, sources confirmed. The astonished butterball, his cheeks aglow…