The 20-year-old University of Central Florida student had set up @ElonJet as one of of a slew of flight-tracking bots, which use the ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) system to monitor flight paths. But as of this morning, only @ElonJet had been banned. (That changed shortly after publication of this story, when Twitter suspended Sweeney's personal account — for violating rules "against platform manipulation and spam" — and some two dozen others he ran. By early evening, @ElonJet was back for a brief period, only to be suspended again.) “I'm pretty surprised, especially after he put out a tweet saying he wouldn't do it,” Sweeney told BuzzFeed News, referring to the @ElonJet suspension. “But I guess after the last commotion over the weekend, he's probably not too happy about all that.”

“Boo me will you?”

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality. A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.” So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion. Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

A day after a task force recommended a plan with a 3 percent cap on yearly residential rent hikes, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he'd veto that idea if it advances to him. "It's not happening," Frey said Wednesday. "If it moves forward to my desk, I will veto it." Frey's clear opposition, given in response to reporters' questions, underscores the uncertainty facing the prospect of rent control in Minneapolis as the idea enters its next phase on a potential path to the voters.

Here’s what happens when a school rethinks punishment.

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