Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's new Bluesky Social app is now accepting users for beta testing, and is set to launch "soon". The highly anticipated social media project has been described as a rival to Twitter (TWTR) and is set to challenge existing social media platforms like Facebook (META), Instagram and Snapchat (SNAP). On Tuesday, Bluesky announced the roadmap of its decentralised social network protocol, which will be the underlying code behind the app. Importantly, it says user data will be free from governmental influence and controlled by users rather than commercialised by a corporation, a move which could revolutionise the personal data economy. The app's code will allow user account data to be moved from platform to platform. Bluesky users will be able to use their account to log in to any social media account that adopts the new code. So a single account will give them access to all of their favourite social media.

The next few months are expected to be rough, with different viruses becoming dominant at different times. Hospitals may continue to be stretched thin. The severity of any winter Covid-19 surge and the possibility of a second wave of flu later in the season are two X-factors that will dictate how bad the situation ultimately becomes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi reportedly underwent skull surgery after he was allegedly violently attacked with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home early Friday–indicating his injuries are much more serious than previously described. The accused attacker, 42-year-old David Depape, broke into the couple’s home in search of the speaker, according to reports that said he yelled “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?” before attempting to tie Paul Pelosi up while he waited for the speaker to come home. When police arrived, Paul Pelosi and Depape were struggling over a hammer before Depape ripped the weapon from Pelosi’s hands and began to attack him, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said Friday. Depape was arrested and will be charged with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse and other felonies, Scott said. While Depape’s alleged motive remains unclear, he filled his Facebook page with conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from former President Trump, according to reports.

Collaging statistics, muzak, and Google Earth, Jon Bois's sports documentaries sketch alternative models of history—and moving-image art.

Owning Twitter means owning a host of impossible political problems. Is Elon ready?

On October 30, 2002, a cancer-stricken Warren Zevon returned to the ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ stage for one last performance. Twenty years later, Letterman and more remember the gravitas and emotion of that stunning night.

It’s very likely you don’t give a great deal of thought to where the digital colors you use originally came from. Nor, probably, have you wondered who might “own” a particular color, when you picked it when creating something in Photoshop. But a lot of people are about to give this a huge amount of their attention, as their collection of PSD files gets filled with unwanted black, due to a licensing change between Adobe and Pantone. As of now, widely used Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will no longer support Pantone-owned colors for free, and those wishing for those colors to appear in their saved files will need to pay for a separate license. And this is real life.

“During birth, I surrendered my mind to my body,” she said.

Journalists have been declaring Twitter dead for nearly a decade. Observers see flagging user numbers or feel an amorphous, grim vibe shift and pounce, often prematurely. But this week, everyone is fretting and monitoring. Tonight, Elon Musk reportedly took control of Twitter, firing CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives, including Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust. There is, both inside and outside the company, an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal. Earlier, Musk wandered around Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, carrying a porcelain sink (for content purposes) while simultaneously trying to convince employees that he will not, as previously reported, cut 75 percent of staff. One current Twitter staffer told me that “the bootlicking [was] next level” as anxious employees greeted Musk in the hallway, unsure of his plans for his new company and their place in it.

Volunteers in a rural Nevada county where voting machine conspiracy theories led to an unprecedented hand-count of mail-in ballots came face-to-face with one messy reality of their plan Wednesday: It’s more time-consuming than anticipated. After a full day in the Nye County office building in Pahrump, 60 miles (96 kilometers) west of Las Vegas, some 60 volunteers had counted about 900 of the 1,950 mail-in ballots that the county has received so far. It was the first day that counting could start under a state Supreme Court ruling that said officials must prevent the public release of early results. The court also blocked a plan to livestream the vote-counting, saying video could be released only after polls close on Nov. 8. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada unsuccessfully sought to block the counting on the grounds that it could allow election results to be made public before many voters had even weighed in.

After pressure from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, an internal Department of Homeland Security report released last year with significant redactions has been released again, almost in its entirety An internal Department of Homeland Security report assessing the agency’s intelligence collection on Portland racial justice protesters in 2020 has been released nearly in its entirety. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 2021. The newly public portions show in more granular detail how Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli led efforts to politicize intelligence operations in Portland, in many instances pushing constitutional boundaries. The now un-redacted portions of the report describe the two agency heads requesting so-called operational background reports, known as OBRs or “baseball cards,” on every person who attended protests, a request that would have entailed intelligence dossiers on potentially thousands of Portlanders. That was apparently motivated by a belief that a “U.S person” was funding the protests Since 2020, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and other members of Oregon’s congressional delegation have pressed the Justice Department and DHS for more details about the Trump administration’s response to the 2020 racial justice protests. In a statement Thursday, Wyden said Oregonians have a right to a full accounting of the Trump administration’s “twisted efforts to provoke violence in Portland for his political gain.” “Now the public knows much more about how political DHS officials spied on Oregonians for exercising their First Amendment right to protest and justified it with baseless conspiracy theories,” Wyden said.

The Biden administration is weighing a request by Somalia that the United States loosen restrictions on its military drone strikes targeting Shabab militants in the troubled Horn of Africa nation, according to several U.S. officials. The request comes as a new Somali administration has launched an offensive against Al Shabab, with several local clan militias joining the central government’s fight. President Biden also recently redeployed 450 U.S. troops to Somalia, reversing former President Donald J. Trump’s abrupt withdrawal in January 2021. But the Somali government wants U.S. military operators to be able to attack groups of Shabab militants who might pose a threat to Somali forces — even if they are not firing upon them at the moment, the officials said. Such a move would further escalate American involvement in the long-running counterterrorism war. In May, Somalia elected a new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who also held the role from 2012 to 2017. Since returning to office, he has made pushing back Al Shabab a top priority. He has ordered Somalia’s fledgling national army to go on the offensive in the countryside, is planning for the delivery of services to stabilize areas that have been newly liberated and is trying to forge stronger partnerships with both clan leaders and international allies. At the same time, local clan militias in the Hiran region of Hirshabelle State, in central Somalia, are fighting Al Shabab ferociously after turning against them over their heavy-handed rule and taxation. The Somali government has been resupplying the militias with ammunition and other aid. The Somali request, described by officials on the condition of anonymity, is said to ask the United States to more broadly define what can count as a collective self-defense strike. It could also be interpreted as asking to deem certain parts of Somalia as a war zone, where it is permissible to target members of an enemy force based only on their status, even if they pose no imminent threat.

Less than two months after California Governor Gavin Newsom approved a landmark law to increase the minimum wage at fast food restaurants and give workers a role in setting industry standards, labor union SEIU charged that canvassers collecting signatures for a ballot measure to overturn the pro-worker law have been deliberately lying to voters. AB 257 — also known as the Fast Food Accountability and Standards (FAST) Recovery Act — creates a state-wide council of workers, franchisees, officials, and corporate representatives to determine state-wide standards for fast food workers, including a minimum wage increase up to $22 an hour by 2023. Newsom signed the bill into law in early September, despite relentless opposition from fast food corporations. But the bill’s opponents quickly jumped to a new tactic to thwart the progressive policy: a ballot initiative that would leave the fate of the law to voters in 2024. The effort is backed by a corporate front group known as “Save Local Restaurants” – a coalition ​​that has received millions of dollars in donations from Starbucks, Chipotle, McDonald’s, and more. (The coalition is co-chaired by the National Restaurant Association, the International Franchise Association, and the nation’s largest corporate lobbying group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). If the ballot measure opposing AB 257 can gather enough signatures to qualify for the 2024 ballot, enactment of the law will be suspended until voters have a chance to weigh in. Lyft and Uber used a similar tactic in 2020, pouring millions of dollars into an effort to exempt gig drivers from a California law designating gig workers as employees.

Back in September we called your attention to a 1972 conversation between Billy Graham and Richard Nixon that was, according to researcher Mike Hertenstein, “quietly posted on the Nixon Library website.” The conversation reveals Graham talking about Jews as part of the “Synagogue of Satan.” Learn more about that conversation here. On October 5, 2022, the National Archives released another once-redacted phone conversation between President Nixon and Graham. Hertenstein is once again all over it. Check out his coverage here. Graham calls Nixon on June 9, 1971. The previous night, Graham’s service in Chicago got a bit out of hand. Here is the Chicago Tribune from June 9, 1971.

Elon Musk has completed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, a source familiar with the deal told CNN Thursday.

MOAB – As a Grand County sheriff's deputy searches for a shoplifting suspect in July, a rope repeatedly pops into view of her body camera, sometimes coiled in her hand and other times twirling in the air ahead of her. The unusual sight draws questions from observers in Moab, and deputy Amanda Edwards answers them in an upbeat tone, telling them she's looking for an African American man. "Are you going to lasso him?" one observer asks. "That was my plan, man," the deputy responds in the video. "I mean, it's better than running, right?"

On Christmas Eve 2016, Karlene Petitt, an international long-haul pilot for Delta Air Lines, received a devastating letter that threatened to end her career. She had been grounded since March pending an evaluation by a company-assigned doctor. The letter informed her of his diagnosis: She was mentally unfit for duty and would not be permitted to fly again. Petitt had then been flying commercial jets for 35 years. She’d raised three children, earned a doctorate and two master’s degrees and wrote a series of books, all while performing perfectly as a pilot. In early November of the previous year, she had sent emails to her superiors criticizing Delta’s safety culture, initiating a series of interactions with them about safety issues. Just six days later, captain Jim Graham, then Delta’s vice president of flight operations, in an email to a pilot manager under him, indicated clearly his intention to put a stop to Petitt’s critique and to do so using a Kafkaesque process called a “Section 15,” which would label her too mentally unstable to be a pilot. “We should consider whether a Section 15 is appropriate,” Graham wrote. “If she cannot embrace and understand the reasons behind our actions, it stands to reason she might not be able to make appropriate decisions for the safe operation of a flight.”

On Thursday's broadcast, he struck a very different tone and said he was wrong to trust the company's executives. "Let me say this: I made a mistake here. I was wrong. I trusted this management team. That was ill-advised. The hubris here is extraordinary, and I apologize," Cramer said. "OK," said Faber. "What did you get wrong?" Cramer explained that he did not expect Meta to spend as much as it had, calling it "almost a rogue situation." "What did I get wrong?" he said, visibly choking up. "I trusted them, not myself. For that I regret. I've been in this business for 40 years, and I did a bad job. I'm not proud."

"Just think if they didn't have the drill," parent Ebony King said. "I'm thinking that it could have went wild, like the Texas shooting, where so many kids were lost.

The operator of a progressive news outlet has been charged with mischief after a controversial statue outside an Edmonton Ukrainian centre was tagged with graffiti. Article content The Edmonton Police Service on Tuesday confirmed a charge of mischief under $5,000 was laid Oct. 14 against 39-year-old Duncan Kinney, related to an August 2021 incident of vandalism at the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in north Edmonton. That month, the words “Actual Nazi” were written in red paint on the base of a statue of Roman Shukhevych, while a memorial at nearby St. Michael’s cemetery to Ukrainian soldiers who fought in the Second World War was painted with the words “Nazi Monument 14th Waffen SS,” a largely volunteer unit that drew from the Galicia region. The presence of the Shukhevych statue has drawn the ire of Polish and Jewish groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, which called for the removal of the ’70s-era statue. “Over the years he was in charge of a number of different military units, some of which were collaborating with the Nazi regime,” Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, director of policy at FSWC, said in 2021. “They were engaging in the genocide of the Jewish population as part of the program of the Holocaust. They also were committing massacres on Polish civilians.”