The certificates don't confer all the rights of marriage but represent a step forward, activists say.

Climate change, invasive species and military expansion have formed an unholy trinity that threatens our small but ancient civilization For about as long as I’ve been alive, there have been no sihek on the island of Guam. The sihek, or the Guam kingfisher, is a beautiful blue-gold songbird that’s been extirpated in the wild since the 1980s. Like most of Guam’s native birds – 10 out of 12 native species – the sihek rapidly declined after the introduction of the invasive brown tree snake brought to the island after the second world war as a stowaway on military ships. It is hard to articulate the trauma that is the absence of birdsong. It’s even harder to describe the feeling that accompanied the recent announcement by the US Fish and Wildlife Service of its proposal to release some of the roughly 140 sihek now being bred in captivity in zoos across the country, not on Guam, but on Palmyra Atoll instead. Palmyra Atoll is a set of remote islands roughly 1,000 miles (1.609km) south of Hawaii, and over 3,500 miles east of Guam. Palmyra has no permanent human population and is administered by the service alongside other third parties, including the Nature Conservancy. The theory is that because there are no brown tree snakes on Palmyra, the birds will have a fighting chance. On one hand, the people of Guam are elated that the sihek may soon fly free. On the other, we’re grief-stricken because Palmyra is not the bird’s home. Its home is Guam. Its home is here with us.

Surreal scenes as glittering orbs bigger than cars roll down the road after blowing down in strong winds

Kristina Karamo, the Trump-backed GOP candidate for Michigan secretary of state, once expressed support in 2020 for one of QAnon’s most outlandish conspiracies: that elites drink the blood of children and ‘sell baby body parts’ after abortions. VICE News obtained an audio recording of Karamo’s appearance on a QAnon podcast called Redpill News just weeks after the 2020 election, where she said that abortion is “child sacrifice” and boosted false claims that the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “Antifa posing as Trump supporters.” “If you go to the Satanic temple website, they have an entire five-minute video explaining why abortion is a religious ritual,” Karamo said in the interview, which also featured Rudy Giuliani associate Melissa Carone. “They literally say that it is a sacrifice, it is a religious ritual for them to have an abortion, it is sick. And as you mentioned, the baby body parts… they sell the organs. There’s a ton of money involved in freshly harvested organs. There’s so much evidence out there.”

Takeoff, a member of the rap group Migos, was fatally shot and killed at a party held at a Houston bowling alley early on Tuesday, his attorney said.

Conventional but masterfully designed, Cabinet of the Curiosities is a shining example of each director's craft.

Twitter has disrupted three China-based operations that were covertly trying to influence American politics in the months leading up the midterm elections by amplifying politically polarizing topics, according to a trove of data released by the social media giant to researchers and The Washington Post. The operations spanned nearly 2,000 user accounts, some of which purported to be located in the United States, and weighed in on a wide variety of hot-button issues, including election-rigging claims about the 2020 presidential election and criticism of members of the transgender community. Two of the three networks favored the U.S. right and one skewed left. At least some repeated pro-China narratives aimed at an American audience. Twitter also took down three networks that were based in Iran but often claimed to be based in the United States or Israel, the data shows. At least one of the accounts involved in the Iranian efforts, 10Votes81, endorsed candidates even in local races. An account named 10Votes and using the same logo as an avatar was also active on YouTube, TikTok and especially Reddit, said Renée DiResta of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, one of the data’s recipients.

A federal judge blocked Penguin Random House's proposed purchase of Simon & Schuster, saying that the joining of two of the world's biggest publishers could "lessen competition."

They were part of the ‘80s revolution with "The Dark Knight Returns," but without the big payday.

In Orange County, California, Republican Michelle Steel is painting her opponent as a tool of China with unhinged red-baiting attacks.

After failing to stop Democrat Summer Lee’s primary bid, the pro-Israel group is now helping Republicans put the seat into play. Within hours of each other on Sunday, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) jumped in to contest Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District. By Monday evening, AIPAC’s last-minute investment had swelled to over $700,000. It was at first glance an unusual choice. The election, in a Pittsburgh-based seat that is heavily Democratic, was thought to be over after the primary. There, AIPAC-affiliated PACs spent $3 million to help management-side labor attorney Steve Irwin in his race against progressive Summer Lee for the nomination. They failed, as Lee eked out victory by less than a point. But a quirk of fate has made the race competitive again, giving AIPAC a second chance to prevent Lee from making it to Washington and raising further suspicions about the organization’s vendetta against progressives. In recent weeks, local media has reported that the retirement of incumbent Democrat Mike Doyle has led to a closer-than-expected race between Lee and a Republican who also happens to be named Mike Doyle. (The retiring incumbent and Republican nominee share no relation.) Some voters have reported preferring Doyle, while assuming he was the same Doyle who has represented the district since 1995.

Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet — a schoolmate called him that after he tried to strangle a teacher. He once shot his bass player in the chest; just about all of his seven wives, including one who was a child, said he beat them; and there’s a lingering suspicion that he murdered wife No. 5. He was the very model of a high-functioning sociopath and somehow defied hard living, drug and alcohol abuse, and serious health problems to make it well into his ninth decade. The pianist, singer, and showman, who was one of the three or four people who decisively ushered in the rock-and-roll era — and utterly personified an unbridled and dangerous part of the music — died today, his family announced. He was 87 and, after the death of Little Richard in 2020, the last man standing from the dawn of rock and roll. Like most of his remarkable and rambunctious peers, Lewis got himself into trouble of his own making. He never backed down, and he viewed the world with a maniacal severity that hid a bleak sense of mischief that itself hid another layer of severity beneath it. He was a thief, a bigamist, an adulterer, a sexual predator, a family abandoner, and a liar, and felt — knew — society’s rules didn’t apply to him to such an extent that he acknowledged the fact flatly. There is one filmed interview with Jerry Lee Lewis that could be mistaken for an outtake from Mindhunter.

In the days after ProPublica published a searing expose based on a close reading of Communist Party memoranda in Mandarin, it called in at least two translators, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. That's right: In the days after. Friday, ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a joint investigation about an upcoming report by a research team commissioned by Senate Republicans which found that the Covid-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.” The allegations in the piece were explosive. The piece dubbed the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long been the subject of focus by lab leak theorists, a “laboratory institute in crisis” before the pandemic with a safety environment that was “far more troubled than previously known.” The Pro Publica/Vanity Fair article relied on Toy Reid, a State Department China analyst whose close readings of Chinese Communist Party documents apparently unveiled revelations that all other observers had missed. “Party speak is ‘its own lexicon, Reid explained in the piece, cautioning that even native Mandarin speakers might not understand it. “It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones.” But Reid’s “party speak” interpretations, quickly came under scrutiny from some journalists and experts on China, including many native Mandarin speakers, who said the story was based on a mistranslation. “You got the tense wrong,” Jane Qiu, a China-based writer, wrote in a tweet that was echoed by other Mandarin speakers. Now ProPublica seems to be having at least a few second thoughts, and is reviewing key details of the story. Three people with direct knowledge told Semafor that editors at the nonprofit news organization have been reaching out to Mandarin translators about whether the publication correctly quoted a communist party dispatch regarding safety in the Wuhan. One of the Mandarin speakers they contacted, the policy analyst and former translator Matt Schrader, had tweeted that Reid "screwed up." He declined to comment further, saying his conversations with ProPublica were "in confidence."

Chastain pinned his Chevrolet against the outside wall of the 846-metre Martinsville Speedway and was sailing at some 112kph faster than the rest of the field, careening from 10th place to fifth on the final lap to give Trackhouse Racing its first championship appearance.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold a Jim Crow law that Mississippi’s white-supremacist leaders adopted in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers designated certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as lifelong disenfranchising crimes. The court’s conservative majority admitted that the Jim Crow law was “steeped in racism,” but said the State had made enough changes in the 132 years since to override its white supremacist taint. A 2018 analysis found that the law still disproportionately disenfranchises Black Mississippians compared to white residents. In a statement on Wednesday, the Mississippi Center For Justice, which filed the lawsuit against the State of Mississippi in 2017, said it will appeal the ruling in Harness v. Watson to the U.S. Supreme Court. “This provision was part of the 1890 plan to take the vote away from Black people who had attained it in the wake of the Civil War,” said Rob McDuff, an attorney with MCJ who argued that the Jim Crow violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection under the law. “Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals is allowing it to remain in place despite its racist origins. Despite this setback, we will continue this battle and seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court.” The 5th Circuit Court is based in New Orleans and handles cases from Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. Republican presidents appointed most of its judges. The judges in Wednesday’s majority did not sign their names to the ruling on the voter disenfranchisement law.

Here is The Sacred Pools, an unreleased FMV game by Sega planned for release in 1997. The game was a new arrival to the FMV market that was pushed as an “erotic thriller” for older audiences. With a reported budget of 2-3 million dollars, Sega’s new division SegaSoft aimed to expand the experiences available on Saturn, PC, Macintosh, and PSX(!). Although Sacred Pools made a legendary debut at E3 1996, the press panned the game for its quality and it was quietly pushed aside to never be heard from again.

Indian police arrested nine people on Monday, including ticketing clerks and contractors, as they investigate the collapse of a foot bridge in which at least 134 people, including many children, were killed.

Ideally, when you look at a piece of art, you reason through what it is, taking account of your subjective experience, relating it to other people’s subjective experiences, and hypothesizing about the artist’s experience. But that is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process, which does not make it the most profitable form of aesthetic cognition. The forms of our aesthetic conversation inevitably bend to the material situation we’re in, and lyrical, reflective ideas of aesthetics inherit the ideals of a certain leisure class that is in decline. The dominant way people approach art today is through a hot-take framework: here’s a thing, here’s how it plugs into a contemporary event, and here’s why it’s “good” or “bad” based on that topical connection. When I started writing about art, the big bogeyman was theory criticism, where people would cite a passage of Foucault to explain why something was worth paying attention to. Both of these modes are ultimately responses to an existential insecurity about what the experience of art is. Before, art needed to call back to something you read in college for it to feel full of meaning. Now it needs to justify itself against the newsfeed.

Members of billionaire Elon Musk’s inner circle huddled with Twitter’s remaining senior executives throughout the weekend, conducting detailed discussions regarding the site’s approach to content moderation, as well as plans to lay off 25 percent of the workforce to start. Alex Spiro, a well-known celebrity lawyer who has represented Musk for several years, led those conversations. Spiro is taking an active role in managing several teams at Twitter, including legal, government relations, policy and marketing, according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved. Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were “staff software engineer.” Musk’s title in the directory was CEO, although that position has not been publicly announced. He refers to himself as “Chief Twit.”

I went to Ohio looking for super fans. Here’s what I discovered instead.