Google’s water use in The Dalles has nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city. That’s according to records released this week after the city settled a lawsuit against The Oregonian/OregonLive and agreed to hand over data on Google’s water consumption. The company’s water use is poised to continue soaring in the years ahead, as Google has plans for two more data centers along the Columbia River. The numbers illuminate a long-running debate over the future of The Dalles’ water supply, and the potential consequences of Google’s continued growth. “If the data center water use doubles or triples over the next decade, it’s going to have serious effects on fish and wildlife on source water streams, and it’s potentially going to have serious effects for other water users in the area of The Dalles,” said John DeVoe, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group WaterWatch. “If the river is going to be de-watered eight or nine months a year, those fish are just out of luck,” he said. “Google is in part cooling its servers with salmon and steelhead.”

We ranked every movie version of A Christmas Carol, from Smurfs to Mickey Mouse to Scrooged to the great classics

Censorship kept me from finishing a college essay behind bars. Now, prisons might keep readers from my memoir. While Florida bans more than 20,000 titles and Texas bans nearly 10,000, Rhode Island prohibits just 68. Nebraska maintains a list for only one of its nine prisons, while Wyoming has a different list for each facility. In total, more than 54,000 books are banned behind bars.When I started looking through all the prohibited titles, the first thing I noticed was that prison systems where lots of books are banned are not generally safer or less chaotic than those that don’t ban many titles. Maybe that’s in part because of the second thing I noticed: Many of the justifications for the bans were absurd. Some states deemed Dungeons & Dragons books a security “threat,” while others banned many yoga books and anatomy texts over “explicit” illustrations. Perhaps more troubling than the books that are banned are those that are not. Of the states that sent lists, only seven explicitly banned “Mein Kampf,” and only four banned “The Turner Diaries,” a 1976 extremist text about exterminating people who aren’t White. While Texas prisoners can read Hitler’s manifesto, the state banned pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells’ book “On Lynchings” because its examination of racist vigilante mobs used “racial slurs.” Similarly, Louisiana bans texts by Black prison abolitionists, including George Jackson’s “Blood in My Eye” and Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us,” for being “racially inflammatory.” But it allows “Mein Kampf,” as well as every single book mentioned in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s round-up of racist literature.

A lackadaisical approach led to failure for numerous bipartisan bills, and kept alive Republican goals to take the debt limit hostage in 2023. The 117th Congress came down to one final legislative package, and because it was the last train leaving the station in Washington, every significant unfinished activity of the two-year Democratic majority was trying to book passage. The omnibus spending bill released Tuesday, which funds the government through to next September, includes a handful of items that lawmakers had hoped could be forced into the bill, though not everything lawmakers wanted. As a last grab for policy under a Democratic congressional majority in President Biden’s first term, this is frankly a very modest haul. While some last-second proposed deals for the omnibus were far-fetched, others were bipartisan enough that they could have found their way to the president’s desk months ago. That all of them had to jockey for space in must-pass bills was symptomatic of the lackadaisical approach to the lame duck, a stark contrast to the last time Democrats had a lame-duck session before losing their congressional majority. And the real culprit in that is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who appears to have thought that the successes of August, when Congress advanced the Inflation Reduction Act, medical care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits (the PACT Act), and semiconductor manufacturing subsidies (the CHIPS and Science Act), were enough to secure the Democratic majority’s legacy. Though much more was available—like measures on press freedom, tech antitrust, criminal justice, Afghan refugees, and workplace fairness—there just wasn’t much interest from Schumer.

The reasons, however, are more intriguing. Amazingly, 42% of exchanges which failed simply disappeared without a trace. That amounts to 134 exchanges, highlighting quite how opaque the cryptocurrency industry can be.

Donald Trump has guarded his income tax returns from public disclosure. A House committee has voted to release them in redacted form. The amount of income, deductions and taxes paid by or refunded to former President Donald Trump while serving in the White House was detailed in a new report released Tuesday night. The report reveals that Trump on his federal tax returns declared negative income in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020, and that he paid a total of $1,500 in income taxes for the years 2016 and 2017. On their 2020 income tax returns, Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income taxes and claimed a refund of $5.47 million, according to the report by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.

The teachers at St Anthony’s Catholic College in Urmston may come to regret confiscating 12-year-old Cael Bell’s disco equipment. All Cael wanted to do was cheer the mood and offer a service, in his case with a little party for his fellow Year 8 pupils during troubled times. But his teachers took a dim view of the affair after they discovered the event he was hosting involved music decks, speakers and disco lights being crammed into the boys’ toilets.

By the time Karl Ashanti neared his office in the New York City Law Department’s headquarters in March 2018, the police were shutting down Park Place. Ice had fallen from the buildings above, so an officer had cordoned off the area. Ashanti flashed his work ID and the cop let him through. Then, about two-thirds of the way down the block, he ran into a second officer. “Turn around now,” John Shapiro barked. “I said now.” Ashanti stiffened. The two men were about the same size, each around 6 feet tall and 240 pounds. Shapiro was in his blue New York Police Department uniform. Ashanti, a city lawyer, wasn’t due in court that day and had dressed casually in dark slacks, a button-down, an overcoat and a winter hat. The two had never met before, but there was something about Shapiro’s brusque demeanor that Ashanti recognized.

An incident near a Los Angeles-area highway last week became a flashpoint for a debate about the sharing of personal information on the Musk-owned Twitter.

By deftly navigating crypto’s frontier markets and winning big on the collapse of Terra’s stable coin, Wintermute has grown into one of the world’s leading crypto trading firms. Now it must navigate a market littered with carcasses and landmines.

RIO DELL, Calif., Dec 20 (Reuters) - A powerful magnitude 6.4 earthquake jolted the extreme northern coast of California before dawn on Tuesday, damaging homes, roads and water systems and leaving tens of thousands of people without electricity. At least 11 people were reported injured, and two others died from "medical emergencies" that occurred during or just after the quake, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office. The tremor, which struck at 2:30 a.m. PST and was followed by about 80 aftershocks, was centered 215 miles (350 km) north of San Francisco offshore of Humboldt County, a largely rural area known for its redwood forests, local seafood, lumber industry and dairy farms.

A train derailed in Collegedale early Tuesday afternoon, according to Collegedale Police.We have a crew on the scene working to learn more information.Facebook

Fuck, this cyclone rules!

A recent incident at Radio City Music Hall involving the mother of a Girl Scout is shedding light on the growing controversy of facial recognition, as critics claim it is being used to target perceived enemies — in this case, by one of the most famous companies in the country. Kelly Conlon and her daughter came to New York City the weekend after Thanksgiving as part of a Girl Scout field trip to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas Spectacular show. But while her daughter, other members of the Girl Scout troop and their mothers got to go enjoy the show, Conlon wasn't allowed to do so. That's because to Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Conlon isn't just any mom. They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby. Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment. "I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," said Conlon. But MSG said she was banned nonetheless — along with fellow attorneys in that firm and others.

When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball is one of nearly 150 books that Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher, is seeking to ban from school libraries in Escambia County, Florida. According to a challenge form submitted by Baggett on August 24, the purpose of When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball is "race-baiting," and the book is not appropriate for any student... Baggett's social media accounts raise more questions about her approach to racial issues. In 2015, Baggett posted a picture of the Confederate Flag on her Facebook page.  Baggett said she posted the flag because "everyone in my clan fought in the Civil War" and she was not "ashamed of that." Baggett added that she was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, which has been designated as part of the Neo-Confederate movement. As recently as 2018, the group's website stated: "Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters."  

An offshoot of the now-defunct neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division is undertaking a propaganda push related to the attack on the power grid earlier this month in Moore County that resulted in widespread power outages affecting about 40,000 customers. The morning after the power grid attack, which coincided with a protest against a drag show in Southern Pines, neo-Nazi accelerationists on a private Telegram channel began to speculate about the involvement of the National Socialist Resistance movement, or NSRF. The contents of the chats in the “Uncle Ted’s Cabin” channel — named in honor of the anarcho-primitivist terrorist Ted Kaczynski — were obtained by an infiltrator, who leaked them to the White Rose Society, a volunteer research collective in Australia. The chats, which cover a period from early November through Dec. 9, were provided exclusively to Raw Story. Antifascist researchers in North Carolina who tweet under the @arelephanteau and @M1523751 accounts also helped corroborate information and develop reporting for this story.

Instructors in military-sponsored J.R.O.T.C. classes have offered to promote the N.R.A. in high schools in exchange for money for their marksmanship programs. Beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school gym, dozens of teenagers took turns firing air rifles at a series of bull's-eye targets, part of a marksmanship competition that drew students from schools all along the Florida Gulf Coast. The event was better outfitted than many high school competitions, with lights that illuminated the targets, scopes for spotting downrange and a heavy curtain to keep pellets from going astray, thanks to the help of a key sponsor: the charitable arm of the National Rifle Association. “A lot of the equipment that you see behind me comes from N.R.A. grants,” Bryan Williams, a retired Army major who teaches in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program at Mariner High School in Cape Coral, told the contestants. That tip of the hat was no casual remark. In order to win N.R.A. sponsorships, records show, military instructors who lead J.R.O.T.C. marksmanship teams at public high schools have repeatedly promised to promote the organization at competitions and in newsletters, post N.R.A. banners at their schools or add the N.R.A. logo to apparel worn by students. In his pitch, Mr. Williams also offered to provide student testimonials to the organization “to include supporting photographs and storyboards showcasing the equipment and the happy cadets.”

One of my favorite Twitter accounts is @baberuth. The account joined in 2007, just a few weeks after I did. I’m not sure when it entered into the sports Twitter ether, but I’ve known about it for at least a decade... The email Taibbi posted shows the FBI San Francisco office emailing its Twitter contacts—who they obviously knew well, as we can decipher from the salutation “Hello Twitter contacts”—about four accounts that the FBI flagged as possibly having violated the site’s terms of service. Only one of those accounts, @fromMA, is still active; the others were suspended by Twitter. But there’s one account on there that deserves a deeper look: @madandpissedoff, which was not any sort of state actor or terrorist as far as I can tell. It was, instead, a parody account of professional wrestler The Undertaker that role-played as “PISSED OFF TAKER.” Originally, the account was just @pissedofftaker, but that was banned at some point. Here was the conceit of the account: The Undertaker was constantly shitting his pants. That’s simplifying it a little. PISSED OFF TAKER would post giant, disgusting meals, then tweet that he went into a “fugue state,” had his pants removed by a mysterious Mr. Brown, and then had his pants put back on him filled with human shit. PISSED OFF TAKER would then explain that he did not shit his pants; it was Mr. Brown.

The final votes are in, and I work at Twitter -- or rather, that person's boss, Elon Musk -- won the Worst Boss of 2022 Award, with 53% of the vote in the

Initial reports indicated the heart might belong to an adult male, but state investigators are asking the public for more information