President Joe Biden on Monday asked Congress to intervene and block a railroad strike before next month’s deadline in the stalled contract talks, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers would take up legislation this week to impose the deal that unions agreed to in September. The September agreement that Biden and Pelosi are calling for is a slight improvement over what the board of arbitrators recommended in the summer. The September agreement added three unpaid days off a year for engineers and conductors to tend to medical appointments as long as they scheduled them at least 30 days in advance.

The optimal splash-reducing angle for the average human is approximately 30 degrees.

In short, the web is not a free market of information as originally envisioned. It is a gamed system being rampantly abused.

Mauna Loa continues to erupt and lava has moved from the summit to the Northeast Rift Zone where, according to the USGS website, it is feeding several flows.

Musk seems to be picking a fight with Apple.

The Border Patrol needs reform. Too bad the man with the experience to do it got pushed out by the Biden administration.

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - The Pentagon is considering a Boeing proposal to supply Ukraine with cheap, small precision bombs fitted onto abundantly available rockets, allowing Kyiv to strike far behind Russian lines as the West struggles to meet demand for more arms. U.S. and allied military inventories are shrinking, and Ukraine faces an increasing need for more sophisticated weapons as the war drags on. Boeing's proposed system, dubbed Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), is one of about a half-dozen plans for getting new munitions into production for Ukraine and America's Eastern European allies, industry sources said.

Elon Musk’s tumultuous reign at Twitter has led to a damaging rift with top brands and marketers, with the social media company’s $5bn-a-year advertising business hit by tensions over content moderation and resources. Multiple top advertising agencies and media buyers told the Financial Times that nearly all of the big brands they represent have paused spending on the social media platform, citing alarm at Musk’s ad hoc approach to policing content and decision to axe many of its ad sales team. Musk, meanwhile, has sought to personally call chief executives of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them, according to one senior industry figure, leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation with the billionaire entrepreneur.

Employees hit with overdraft fees after paychecks fail to show up on schedule.

Australian software developer Jackson Palmer is a co-creator of Dogecoin. It’s a meme-inspired cryptocurrency that launched as a joke in 2013 but has become one of the world’s most valuable, after being promoted by the likes of Elon Musk and the traders at r/wallstreetbets. Palmer left the crypto community in 2015 and denounced the technology. Palmer gave a rare interview to coincide with the launch of his new podcast Griftonomics.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Monday in the latest in a series of cases involving the reach of federal public-corruption laws. The question before the justices in Percoco v. United States is whether an individual can be convicted of violating those laws even when he is not a government official or employee. The defendant in the case, Joseph Percoco, warns that allowing his conviction to stand would be a “startling expansion of federal bribery law” that could leave “lobbyists, donors, and virtually every other politically active individual at the mercy of headline-hungry prosecutors.”

Jayden Alexis Frisbee died last year at age 16. She had a passion for animals and music. She left behind grieving sisters, a baby brother, her mother, and a grandmother who still can’t forgive herself for ever letting the Florida Department of Children and Families into Jayden’s life. The state was in charge of Jayden through its privatized foster care system, and it made an inadequate, unstable parent. Jayden was shifted among 12 foster homes in a year and a half, and neighborhood sex traffickers caught up with her along the way. She died on Jan. 11, 2021, in the bathroom of a Jacksonville Studio 6 motel. A yearlong investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel exposed the complicity of Florida’s child welfare system in underage sex trafficking, through evidence found in government records, state and federal lawsuits, research studies, and interviews with victims and family members. The Sun Sentinel found: When Florida’s child welfare system takes in a girl, the odds she will be trafficked for sex increase. Florida exploited a loophole so it could keep sending vulnerable girls to group homes, despite a federal law that discourages their use. Teen girls at those homes have been preyed on by traffickers who sometimes “shark” the block, waiting for a girl to walk to the corner store. Young people with a history of commercial sexual exploitation run away from group homes at an alarming rate, and those runaways are even more susceptible to sex trafficking. Yet, once they’re gone, no one tries very hard to find them, and nothing in Florida law requires them to.

Born May 19, 1953, Pyun got his start in the industry by working in various production houses in Honolulu, Hawaii, and later as an intern in Japan for a TV series starring Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. After years as a commercial film editor in Hawaii, he moved to LA to become a full-time movie director. His debut feature, 1982's The Sword and the Sorcerer, gathered a strong cult following after its successful theatrical run and remains his highest-grossing film. Throughout his career, Pyun became best known for both collaborating with action movie stars of the 80s and 90s such as Jean-Claude Van Damme and Christopher Lambert, and his quick production turnarounds. During the 90s, he directed 22 films, including the second and fourth Kickboxer films, 1992's Nemesis and its three sequels, and the 1990 Captain America film. Much of his 90s films, such as Captain America, were produced by The Cannon Group. But from the 2000s and onwards, Pyun would go to self-finance his films. His output slowed down considerably during the last two decades, with only five films in the 2000s and four in the 2010s. It was during 2013 that he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but his condition had improved by 2014 to where he could direct The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper and 2017's Interstellar Civil War.

Links to adult content overwhelmed other posts from Chinese cities where rallies escalated.

At long last, we can report that Dredd 2 is moving forward with Karl Urban being brought back as Judge Dredd.

Former President Trump on Saturday said Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, is a “seriously troubled man” whom he was trying to help, but also blamed the controversial musician for a dinner in which Trump says Ye brought along a known white supremacist. Trump said on Truth Social that Ye brought far-right activist Nick Fuentes to the dinner on Tuesday night and that he did not know who Fuentes was. “So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else,” Trump wrote, “and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice.'” “He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years,” the former president added. “I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!”

Meena Kirupakaran didn’t think there was anything especially exciting about her job in publishing. She had an hourlong commute each way, including a 40-minute train ride. The HarperCollins Canada office in Toronto, where she worked as a marketing coordinator, didn’t have cold brew on tap or free lunches. But when she took some shots of the downtown area around her building, the views from her floor and the shelves of books decorating the space and edited them into a TikTok video — adding gentle music — she started to see her job, and office life in general, in a new way. So did her viewers. Overnight, the video, which she posted in August, was watched more than 100,000 times, Ms. Kirupakaran said, and it has since accumulated a couple of hundred thousand more views. “People in the comments were like, ‘Manifesting this,’” Ms. Kirupakaran, 23, said. “And I was like, this is literally me taking snapshots of what I do at work.”

This site contains ongoing research in the classification of occlupanids. Although occlupanids were known throughout civilized history as a common polymer parasite, the formal study of occlupanology is thought to have begun in Florence, Italy, in the late 1600s by the great polymath Altimizia Horgia, better known by his Latinized name Altimus Horg. As a young boy in Bassiano, Altimus collected with care the horn and tortise-shell occlupanids that would litter the cobble-stone streets. An accomplished merchant and tireless publisher of obscure journals of his own creation, Altimus is credited with the first description of occlupanids as a species, the first description of occlupanids in a text, in fact the first mention of occlupanids at all in western literature. He is also the first to devise a system of classification of the occlupanids he found.

Many former prisoners are broke until state settlements arrive. Tiding them over has become a niche market for finance firms. An investment can reap 33 percent interest. After serving nearly 20 years in a New York State prison for a 1989 murder he did not commit, Huwe Burton walked out like many inmates: with no money, no credit and no one to borrow from. Mr. Burton, who got by as an elevator repairman, could sue for millions in compensation, but payouts typically take years. So after being exonerated in 2019, Mr. Burton took an advance of $500,000 from a company that typically funds plaintiffs waiting to settle auto insurance claims, slip-and-fall judgments and medical malpractice cases. Mr. Burton’s advance, at 28 percent annual interest, came from USClaims, a company based in Florida whose investors include Further Global Capital Management and the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Across the nation, exonerations — and cash settlements — have risen steadily thanks to DNA-based reinvestigations, conviction-integrity units created by prosecutors and the vigor of innocence organizations. Now, the billions in payouts have attracted companies offering high interest cash advances while exonerated people await their claims. Many firms are backed by private equity investors eager to bet on nearly certain short-term profit. Many of the advances offer a tantalizing provision: If prisoners fail to collect a payout, the advance is essentially forgiven. But if the claims come through, which they usually do, the company makes a healthy profit when the exoneree pays in full, often from a settlement that far outstrips the size of the debt. Mr. Burton was a good investment. Wrongful conviction cases are exceptionally good bets because they have often gone through years of appellate court scrutiny and have been vetted by the lawyers handling the claims, said the president of USClaims, Donna Lee Jones. She said that in the eight years since the firm began taking such cases, she has seen a rise in demand. This year, a record 367 cases have been added to the National Registry of Exonerations, which usually records some 200 each year.

The crisis couldn't stop the city's queer scene from doing what it does best.