Though it's always good to see someone free themselves from the shackles of social media, today's notable escape attempt is bittersweet. After just recently establishing a Patreon, prolific videogame news hound Nibel(opens in new tab) has decided to pack it all in. A trip to Nibel's feed used to be part of my daily routine back when I was PC Gamer's news editor, and their constant stream of videogame titbits has been keeping Twitter users informed for years. Twitter is no place for original reporting, but Nibel's sharing of stories, accompanied by headlines and sometimes bullet points, proved to be just as valuable, turning their feed into a repository for the day's biggest stories.

Elon Musk (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened. That’s because as of this moment, it looks like Musk dug a big hole in the forest, carefully filled it with punji sticks and crocodiles, and then jumped in.

“This is just going to make future prosecutions easier for the state,” an attorney said. “I think it’s horrifying.” A week after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests of 20 people for alleged voter fraud, his administration quietly made a change that some say could help the state go after more people. Starting in August, Floridians on probation have been required to sign an updated form placing the burden on them to determine if they’re eligible to vote. Beneath warnings about remaining drug-free and reporting to their probation officer is the new message: “By signing this letter,” the updated form states, “you agree that you are solely responsible for determining if you are legally able to register to vote and that you must solely determine if you are lawfully qualified to vote.”

lol

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former leftist president, has reclaimed the leadership and vowed to reunify his country

FOR DECADES, A major piece of counter-culture history was wedged behind a bed in Merl Saunders’ San Francisco house. The crude pipe looks like something a teen may have cobbled together at summer camp, but according to art historian Steve Cabella, it’s basically a religious object. A so-called “spirit pipe,” this particular pot implement was made by LSD pioneer Augustus Owsley Stanley for Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and it’s been MIA for decades.

For Raines and the law’s other architects, this was the most alarming unintended consequence: their efforts to make New Yorkers virtuous had caused a spike in casual sex and prostitution.

Three days after completing a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Elon Musk on Sunday morning used his new platform to spread a bizarre, anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco that had been published by a fringe Southern California website. Musk responded Sunday at 5:15 a.m. Pacific time with a tweet that said, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” and posted a link to a baseless, anti-LGBTQ article in the Santa Monica Observer. By 10:30 a.m. Sunday, the message and link had been retweeted more than 30,000 times and liked more than 110,000 times, before being deleted less than an hour later. Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Monica Observer was “notorious for publishing false news,” and once claimed “that Hillary Clinton had died and that a body double had been sent to debate Donald Trump.”

A Bloomberg News/NPR investigation found that large U.S. coal companies used bankruptcy and asset transfers to move old mines to shaky new owners, putting at risk federally mandated land reclamation. Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor. Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago. Love Branch used to be owned by one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. Federal law requires companies to clean up the land when they finish mining — and Love Branch hasn't produced any coal in more than a decade. But the former owner, now named Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc., transferred the mine and its cleanup obligations to a smaller company in 2018, the year before Hatfield fell through his floor.

Pfizer’s range surprised Wells Fargo analyst Mohit Bansal, who expected a $50 price tag. But he told Reuters that it could add $2.5 billion to $3 billion in annual revenue for the company.

Because international relations were already tense, Pyke’s surveyors couldn’t be open about their mission. His solution? They would all pretend to be golfers. So, outfitted with clubs and caddies, nearly a dozen men traveled to Germany to hit the links and interrogate the populace. Pyke got the results he wanted — unsurprisingly, the average German wasn’t too excited about another World War — but they came too late. By August of 1939, Europe was on the brink of all-out conflict and he pulled his undercover golfers home.

At least 149 people were killed and 78 others were injured in a stampede during Halloween festivities in Seoul, officials said of one of the biggest disasters in South Korea that will likely raise serious questions about public safety standards. The massive death toll is being tallied after people were crushed by a large crowd pushing forward on a narrow alley in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhoods, a major leisure and nightlife district in the capital. Choi Seong-beom, chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department, said most of the victims in the stampede Saturday night were people in their late teens and 20s. “The figures include two dead foreigners and 15 injured foreigners,” he said. Earlier, Choi had said the death toll could rise and that an unspecified number among the injured were in critical condition. The number of injured had been as high as 150 earlier Saturday.

Russia linked its decision to pull out of the deal to an attack on Saturday on ships in the port of Sevastopol in the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

A revived lunch policy in Davidson County Schools has ignited controversy. DCS Director of School Nutrition S. Daved Roberts said in an email, obtained by FOX8, to cafeteria managers that “high schoolers will no longer be allowed to charge in the cafeteria.” The change goes into effect on Tuesday, Nov. 1. Davidson County woman aims to clear school fees for families in hardships What that means is that unless students have money in their account or money on hand to pay for the cost of their lunch, the cashier will take their plate away and the student will not be served a meal. If the student is unable to return to the cash register with money, their meal will be thrown away and wasted, according to the email.

On Friday, though, some engineers began to receive requests from Musk’s intermediaries. He would like to see the most recent software code that they had written, the engineers were told. And he would like them to print the code out and show it to him. According to four current employees, engineers spent Friday afternoon at Twitter dutifully printing out their code in anticipation of meetings with Musk and some of his senior engineers from Tesla. Other engineers were told to prepare for “code pairing” with Musk, in which they would sit with him and review code together. Just after noon, an executive assistant asked engineers to begin preparing code to show to Musk. “Please print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days (if you haven’t submitted code in the past 30 days, then you can go back up to 60 days),” the assistant wrote in a Slack message obtained by Platformer. “Please be ready to show on your computer as well.” “Recency of code is important but also use a code that shows complexity of our code,” she added. By mid-afternoon, printouts were seen everywhere at Twitter headquarters, I’m told. In mid-afternoon, the instruction changed again. A notice went out to employees ordering them to cease printing out their code, for reasons that were not immediately clear. “UPDATE: Stop printing,” read another bolded notice obtained by Platformer. “Please be ready to show your recent code (within last 30-60 preferably) on your computer. If you have already printed, please shred in the bins on SF-Tenth. Thank you!”

Saifullah Paracha, 75, was accused of being a Qaeda sympathizer and was held for two decades. But he was never charged with a crime.

“I know Joss Whedon said some bad things about me,” says Jeunet. “I don’t care. I know if Joss Whedon had made the film himself, it probably would have been a big success. He’s very good at making films for American geeks – something for morons. Because he’s very good at making Marvel films. I hate this kind of movie. It’s so silly, so stupid.” About the changes he made to Whedon’s script, Jeunet jokes: “Too bad, Joss Whedon!”

Family members of children killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary on Thursday called for the resignation of the state’s top law enforcement officer, telling him to his face that he needs to live up to his pledge to step down if his troopers had “any culpability” in the shooting. They were standing feet from Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw at a Public Safety Commission hearing as they confronted him. “You, sir, have told lies, you’re not in control of your officers, nor are you the leader this great state deserves at the helm of what was once known as one of the best law enforcement agencies,” said Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old nephew was killed in the shooting. “If you’re a man of your word, you’ll resign,” Cross said, looking directly at McCraw. “We’re not waiting any longer.” McCraw last month told CNN that “I’ll be the first to resign, I’ll gladly resign, I’ll tender my resignation to the governor if I think there is any culpability in the Department of Public Safety. Period.” But on Thursday, McCraw resisted calls to do so during the heated exchanges at the hearing, which offered the first public update on the shooting since the summer.

After decades of being shut out at the ballot box, the state’s tribal populations now wield significant influence as a voting bloc.

Canada’s civilian spy service assessed whether First Nations land rights activists who disrupt trains should be classed as a “terrorist threat” to national security.