Well, this is a bit of a roller coaster tale that I’ve been meaning to share for a while. Before we start, let’s take a trip into the history books to set the scene. In October 1993, Namco released its seminal arcade racer, Ridge Racer to wide acclaim. The graphics, gameplay and sound score, delivered an arcade racing gameplay experience never previously seen.

So much cocaine is being seized by Belgian customs at the port of Antwerp that incinerators cannot keep up with the backlog of destroying it all. Dubbed Antwerp’s “cocaine-berg” or “cocaine mountain”, the huge stash of seized drugs is regarded as a major security threat. Police and justice authorities fear that heavily drug gangs will use force to retrieve their seized cocaine which is worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Children and their guardians are still being cleaved apart in Texas—and elsewhere—under the new administration.

SAN FRANCISCO — Before Elon Musk bought Twitter last month, the company’s executives had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel invoices that the social media service planned to pay. But once Mr. Musk took over the company, he refused to reimburse travel vendors for those bills, current and former Twitter employees said. Mr. Musk’s staff said the services were authorized by the company’s former management and not by him. His staff have since avoided the calls of the travel vendors, the people said.

A story that theoretically could’ve triggered armed conflict between NATO and Russia required less than ten minutes, one anonymous source, and just over a dozen Slack messages for the wire service to publish.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.  The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner Meta. 

Sayuri Ogawa spent 20 years living in accordance with Unification Church doctrine. Her family forced her to attend services and read the church's literature, and she was forbidden to have romantic relationships. Ogawa was told that she would go to hell if she violated the rules. Her parents impoverished her family through prodigious donations to the church, also known as the Moonies after founder Sun Myung Moon. She was bullied at school for appearing poor, and her parents confiscated her savings of around 2 million yen ($14,300), claiming they would use it for living expenses. Ogawa never saw that money again, but her parents kept donating to the religious group. Years of mental health struggles led Ogawa to leave the church six years ago. "I want the church to be dissolved," Ogawa told Nikkei Asia. "Society must not allow the wrongdoings of this group."

After 18 deaths so far this year, the prospect of a federal takeover of Rikers Island jail complex is back on the table. A judge gave the city a temporary reprieve earlier this year, after officials swore up and down to clean up their act at Rikers, not for the first time. Now plaintiffs in a longstanding federal lawsuit say the city has failed again, and they’ll be formally asking the judge to remove Rikers from New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ control and hand it over to a federal receiver.

What happened when I wore a rainbow t-shirt to the Qatar World Cup in support of LGBTQ rights in a country where same-sex relationships are illegal.

Statewide prosecutors have dropped charges against one of the 20 people accused by Gov. Ron DeSantis of voting illegally in 2020. In a court filing Monday, prosecutors wrote that they were dropping charges against Tampa resident Tony Patterson, 44, because of “information received” from the Hillsborough County elections supervisor and because he was already being sentenced to prison in a separate case. The decision means state officials avoid potentially having a second voter fraud case thrown out by a judge in as many months. Patterson was one of 20 people accused by DeSantis in a high-profile news conference in August of voting illegally. As someone convicted of a felony sexual offense, Patterson was not allowed to vote under state law, but state elections officials — who report to DeSantis — cleared him to receive a voter ID card and didn’t stop him from voting in the 2020 election.

For decades, the U.S. government has failed to test for chemicals and metals in fish. So, we did. What we found was alarming for tribes.

I’m sure you remember how a bit over a week ago the man who is possibly the world’s most famous gearhead, Jay Leno, was severely burned in a gasoline fire while working on one of his cars. I’m happy to inform you now that Jay seems to be on the mend, and has been released from the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles. As you can see in the pic released by the burn center, Jay’s trademark lower jaw seems to have taken the brunt of the burns, but he’s healing up and back in his expected all-denim getup, which I take as a good sign.

A food fight started on Twitter after one woman said she wanted to gift her new neighbors with a batch of homemade chili.

A conspiracy theory, fueled by a recent article, is alarmingly wrong.

The report says that while Alexa's Echo line is among the "best-selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost." One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

Two men arrested just before midnight on Friday at New York’s Penn Station, in what authorities said was a “developing threat to the Jewish community,” have been charged with multiple felony counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and making a terroristic threat. Authorities seized an 8-inch military style knife and an illegally held gun with a 30-round magazine from Christopher Brown, 21, and Matthew Mahrer, 22. They also found Mr. Brown in possession of a Swastika arm patch and ski mask. Law enforcement officials with knowledge of the situation said that threats of violence to Jewish sites, including “shooting up a synagogue,” were recently made in social media posts and that there was a reference to a violent act occurring on Friday. “A potential tragedy was averted when they were intercepted by police officers at Penn Station,” said Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, “given that online postings indicated an intent to use these weapons at a Manhattan synagogue.”

The law enforcement lobby showed up Tuesday to oppose new rules proposed by the state’s police licensing board‚ including banning law enforcement officers from being involved in hate, extremist or white supremacist groups — because they said the wording is too vague.

“They should've been connected to the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force after the first brick."

Thanks to reporting from Colorado Springs Independent, it is now public knowledge that Colorado Springs Police infiltrated the Chinook Center and a number of orgs that organize there such as Colorado Springs DSA and Colorado Springs Tenant Union, using a pink haired cop named April Rogers who went by Chelsie Kurti and pretended to be a sex worker.

Lots of current vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them specifically target the spine helix. And yet, there are good reasons to focus on that part of the pathogen. Whereas many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, the spine helix doesn’t.