Not content with reactivating accounts that spewed anti-trans content, Musk’s Twitter has now banned a group that organizes to protect people at LGBTQ events from far-right violence. No surprises here: Elon Musk is now devoting the powers of his rapidly dwindling workforce to reactivating the Twitter accounts of violence-promoting reactionaries suspended before he took over. On Friday, for example, he proudly announced the restoration of two accounts suspended for posting anti-transgender content. But now it seems he’s not done. As an anti-trans moral panic pushed by Musk-favored Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok escalates, and in the wake of the massacre at Club Q, a queer club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Musk’s regime has also banned an account run by people mobilizing against anti-LGBTQ violence. On Tuesday, Twitter suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, or EFJBGC—as first reported by journalist Steven Monacelli. The John Brown Gun Club assists marginalized communities in defending themselves from white supremacist and fascist violence. “John Brown Gun Club isn’t so much an organization as it is a declaration of intent and commitment to abolitionist principles,” its website states. More concretely, as its Mastodon profile describes its mission, though its members may carry firearms, it is “not a militia.” The reason given for its account suspension, an Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club contributor told The New Republic, was that it had violated Twitter rules against “hateful conduct,” with two tweets cited: a reply to the official account of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“Mugging at gun point,” reads the reply to an unspecified CBP post) and another post with what seems like a retort to the perpetual conservative nonjoke about pronouns, “Every queer a riflethem.”

Elon Musk has his hands full these days, what with his chaotic takeover of Twitter, so I'm not sure how much involvement he will have had with Tesla's latest, and perhaps, weirdest product. No, it's not an unsteady robot or a dystopian off-road vehicle. We expect that from Tesla. It's a set of glassware. Alcohol might seem like a strange sideline for a car company, but Tesla surprised us earlier in the year by releasing its own limited-edition tequila. In a bottle shaped like a lightning bolt, obviously. Now it's released the perfect accessory for anyone who snapped up one of those $420 bottles – Tesla sipping glasses. And they're possibly the most impractical, worst designed glasses we've ever seen.

A policy proposal heading for Board of Supervisors approval next week would explicitly authorize San Francisco police to kill suspects using robots. The new policy, which defines how the SFPD is allowed to use its military-style weapons, was put together by the police department. Over the past several weeks, it has been scrutinized by supervisors Aaron Peskin, Rafael Mandelman and Connie Chan, who together comprise the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee. Peskin, chair of the committee, initially attempted to limit the SFPD’s authority over the department’s robots by inserting the sentence, “Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.” The following week, the police struck out his suggestion with a thick red line. Why is this happening now? Cities across California are currently drafting new policies on the use of military weapons by local police forces, thanks to a state law called AB 481, which passed last year. Figuring out the force options of robots is one small part of the law’s remit. The law mandates that every police force in California must annually report its stock of all military-style weapons, their cost, how they can be used, and how they were deployed in the prior year. The law gives local authorities — in San Francisco’s case, the Board of Supervisors — the ability to annually reject or accept the rules governing how the weapons are used. In its initial submission, the SFPD omitted all of its 608 semi-automatic assault rifles, 64 machine guns, and 15 submachine guns from the new use-of-force policy. According to Peskin, these were added in when he pushed back on their omission. But in the department’s latest version, which is set to come before the supervisors next week, 375 of the semi-automatic assault rifles are missing again. The rationale given for the removal of these assault rifles from the policy: The Chief of Police defines them as “standard-issue service weapons.” Others disagree with that assessment. “We don’t see regular officers walking around with assault rifles,” said Allyssa Victory, staff attorney with the criminal justice program at the ACLU of Northern California (and recent Oakland mayoral hopeful). “Just writing a policy doesn’t make it so.” “The law defines ‘military weapons,’ not the chief of police,” wrote civil rights lawyer Moyer over email. “San Francisco is not the only department to attempt to redefine ‘military weapons’ so as to justify hiding their use, costs, and upkeep from the public.”

BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. (AP) — Perched atop a fence at Badlands National Park, Troy Heinert peered from beneath his wide-brimmed hat into a corral where 100 wild bison awaited transfer to the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Descendants of bison that once roamed North America’s Great Plains by the tens of millions, the animals would soon thunder up a chute, take a truck ride across South Dakota and join one of many burgeoning herds Heinert has helped reestablish on Native American lands. Heinert nodded in satisfaction to a park service employee as the animals stomped their hooves and kicked up dust in the cold wind. He took a brief call from Iowa about another herd being transferred to tribes in Minnesota and Oklahoma, then spoke with a fellow trucker about yet more bison destined for Wisconsin. By nightfall, the last of the American buffalo shipped from Badlands were being unloaded at the Rosebud reservation, where Heinert lives. The next day, he was on the road back to Badlands to load 200 bison for another tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux.

Workers are accustomed to folks with more power than us telling us what to do and scolding us for not working hard enough. From Amazon’s minute by minute surveillance and punishments if you go to the restroom to lectures from politicians and fancy boys on the TV and everything in between. US Senator Tommy Tuberville added to the chorus of the latter last week in an op-ed where he bemoaned the plight of bosses and CEOs - “job creators,” as he called them - as they face a workforce that Tuberville claims has had their will to work “decimated” by “expanding government benefits.” The irony of Tuberville lecturing Alabamians about our “will to work” ought not be lost on us. We did not get millions of public dollars to quit our jobs. That was Tuberville. We do not have retirement payouts above the median income for having worked at a place for ten years. That is Tuberville. We do not say that a near $200,000 salary is so little as to “disincentivize” us from doing our jobs - that was Tuberville, when he shot down the idea of a stock trading ban for Congress.

Every resident of the Village Landais has dementia—and the autonomy to spend each day however they please.

Well, this is a bit of a roller coaster tale that I’ve been meaning to share for a while. Before we start, let’s take a trip into the history books to set the scene. In October 1993, Namco released its seminal arcade racer, Ridge Racer to wide acclaim. The graphics, gameplay and sound score, delivered an arcade racing gameplay experience never previously seen.

So much cocaine is being seized by Belgian customs at the port of Antwerp that incinerators cannot keep up with the backlog of destroying it all. Dubbed Antwerp’s “cocaine-berg” or “cocaine mountain”, the huge stash of seized drugs is regarded as a major security threat. Police and justice authorities fear that heavily drug gangs will use force to retrieve their seized cocaine which is worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Children and their guardians are still being cleaved apart in Texas—and elsewhere—under the new administration.

SAN FRANCISCO — Before Elon Musk bought Twitter last month, the company’s executives had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel invoices that the social media service planned to pay. But once Mr. Musk took over the company, he refused to reimburse travel vendors for those bills, current and former Twitter employees said. Mr. Musk’s staff said the services were authorized by the company’s former management and not by him. His staff have since avoided the calls of the travel vendors, the people said.

A story that theoretically could’ve triggered armed conflict between NATO and Russia required less than ten minutes, one anonymous source, and just over a dozen Slack messages for the wire service to publish.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.  The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner Meta. 

Sayuri Ogawa spent 20 years living in accordance with Unification Church doctrine. Her family forced her to attend services and read the church's literature, and she was forbidden to have romantic relationships. Ogawa was told that she would go to hell if she violated the rules. Her parents impoverished her family through prodigious donations to the church, also known as the Moonies after founder Sun Myung Moon. She was bullied at school for appearing poor, and her parents confiscated her savings of around 2 million yen ($14,300), claiming they would use it for living expenses. Ogawa never saw that money again, but her parents kept donating to the religious group. Years of mental health struggles led Ogawa to leave the church six years ago. "I want the church to be dissolved," Ogawa told Nikkei Asia. "Society must not allow the wrongdoings of this group."

After 18 deaths so far this year, the prospect of a federal takeover of Rikers Island jail complex is back on the table. A judge gave the city a temporary reprieve earlier this year, after officials swore up and down to clean up their act at Rikers, not for the first time. Now plaintiffs in a longstanding federal lawsuit say the city has failed again, and they’ll be formally asking the judge to remove Rikers from New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ control and hand it over to a federal receiver.

What happened when I wore a rainbow t-shirt to the Qatar World Cup in support of LGBTQ rights in a country where same-sex relationships are illegal.

Statewide prosecutors have dropped charges against one of the 20 people accused by Gov. Ron DeSantis of voting illegally in 2020. In a court filing Monday, prosecutors wrote that they were dropping charges against Tampa resident Tony Patterson, 44, because of “information received” from the Hillsborough County elections supervisor and because he was already being sentenced to prison in a separate case. The decision means state officials avoid potentially having a second voter fraud case thrown out by a judge in as many months. Patterson was one of 20 people accused by DeSantis in a high-profile news conference in August of voting illegally. As someone convicted of a felony sexual offense, Patterson was not allowed to vote under state law, but state elections officials — who report to DeSantis — cleared him to receive a voter ID card and didn’t stop him from voting in the 2020 election.

For decades, the U.S. government has failed to test for chemicals and metals in fish. So, we did. What we found was alarming for tribes.

I’m sure you remember how a bit over a week ago the man who is possibly the world’s most famous gearhead, Jay Leno, was severely burned in a gasoline fire while working on one of his cars. I’m happy to inform you now that Jay seems to be on the mend, and has been released from the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles. As you can see in the pic released by the burn center, Jay’s trademark lower jaw seems to have taken the brunt of the burns, but he’s healing up and back in his expected all-denim getup, which I take as a good sign.

A food fight started on Twitter after one woman said she wanted to gift her new neighbors with a batch of homemade chili.

A conspiracy theory, fueled by a recent article, is alarmingly wrong.