On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. “Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played? “I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.” The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits.

The super PAC, Democratic Coalition, has been previously accused of self dealing. The PAC says it takes certain investments to create viral content.

One expert said the goose, a greater white fronted goose, may have been migrating from Alaska to Mexico and was caught in the bright lights at Dodger Stadium.

‘Terror granny’ accused of ‘plotting German civil war to bring back the Kaiser’

Channel 4 has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should destroy it. As part of its latest season of programmes, the TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists, including Pablo Picasso, as well as convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill. A forthcoming televised debate called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, airing later this month, will then question whether you can truly separate a work of art from its creator – before deciding which pieces to destroy. Ian Katz, Channel 4’s director of programming, confirmed that if the studio audience chose to save the painting by Hitler it would not hang in the Channel 4 boardroom but would be “appropriately” disposed of.

One of my former colleagues at the Wire — having departed that institution themselves a bit under a decade ago — suddenly appeared as the author on a screenshot of a fake Atlantic article that made the rounds in the conservative social media universe this week. A weird series of job changes and branding shuffles resulted in someone who was looking to cast the media as a bunch of woke liberal losers seizing upon that name and the Atlantic’s logo as the conduit for their misinformation. They probably didn’t care who the author actually was; they probably cared only slightly more about using the Atlantic as their foil. All they really cared about was ginning up outrage at one of the right’s myriad enemies — the media — and if my colleague, my friend, took some heat, so be it. After all, it worked. The screenshot got broad pickup — including by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Despite being entirely and quickly provably fake. I reached out to my friend after seeing Cruz tweet out the fake story — which he did with an ironic declaration that “the Left is beyond parody.” I’m not naming my friend here because, first, you can easily find the fake news article for yourself with a quick search and because, second, they’ve been the focus of enough negative attention in the past 30 hours or so.

In September 1995, Pat Buchanan adviser and columnist Sam Francis was ousted from The Washington Times for virulent racism. It was, according to the Washington City Paper, the culmination of monthslong campaign carried out by young conservatives in Washington, DC, who wanted Francis to be removed not just from the Times but from the conservative movement as a whole. Francis had kept his white nationalism semiprivate—a feat easier accomplished in the pre-internet era, when his most extreme views, like calling for a “white reconquest of the United States,” could be circulated in more obscure publications without wide distribution. But in May 1994, in the course of researching his book The End of Racism, Dinesh D’Souza, then a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, caught Francis saying (at a conference put on by white nationalist Jared Taylor, no less), among other things: “What we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” When the galley for D’Souza’s book circulated the next summer, and some of the quotes D’Souza captured were featured in The Washington Post, what Francis had said and written were deemed beyond the pale and incompatible with conservatism. It didn’t help that earlier that summer Francis had written a column for the Times criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. Sample line: “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.” (D’Souza’s book was no anti-racist tract itself; highly controversial and panned by historians and critics, The End of Racism was considered so problematic by Black conservative intellectuals Glenn Loury and Robert L. Woodson that they announced they would no longer associate with AEI after its publication.) In today’s parlance, Francis was canceled; his career at the Times was over and he spent his final years largely confined to the fever swamps of explicitly white supremacist organizations before he died in 2005. Now—nearly 30 years later—rising names in the Republican Party are trying to bring Francis back into the fold.

In a major blow to America's seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge means for the health of the Arctic ecosystem. An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population.

An Oklahoma couple is claiming their son's teacher bullied him and encouraged other students to call their son a derogatory, anti-gay slur. 5NEWS confirmed with the Talihina Public School District that it did launch an investigation. The Stepps say their son was sent home from school during the investigation. Talihina schools released a statement to 5NEWS that reads: “Talihina Public Schools values and takes student and employee safety very seriously. We have received this complaint and, in response, have completed an investigation and taken appropriate action. This teacher does remain employed in our school district. We cannot comment further as this involves confidential personnel and confidential student information. “ "Our son was to return to the classroom," Amber said. "His classroom or an all-girl classroom." The parents say 5th grade is the only grade to separate students by gender. "It's completely inappropriate to expect a child that's been bullied by the teacher to return to that classroom and completely inappropriate to put him in the middle of an all-girl classroom," Amber said.

Governor Ron DeSantis has made voting easier in certain Florida counties battered by Hurricane Ian – but only Republican-leaning ones. DeSantis signed an executive order on Thursday that eases voting rules for about 1 million voters in Lee, Charlotte and Sarasota counties, all areas that Hurricane Ian hit hard and that all reliably vote Republican. Meanwhile, Orange county, a Democratic-leaning area which experienced historic flooding from the storm, received no voting exceptions, reported the Washington Post.

Donald Trump pardoned campaign operative Roger Stone in December 2020, after Stone lied to Congress about what he and Trump knew of Russian efforts to discredit Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, as well as for witness tampering and obstruction. But Stone was expecting a second, eleventh-hour pardon from Trump to shield him from criminal charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection—and Trump didn’t deliver. So, naturally Stone threatened to fight the outgoing president’s son-in-law, Jared Kusher, and called his daughter, Ivanka, an “abortionist bitch” in an unhinged rant caught on camera. “Jared Kushner has an IQ of 70. He’s coming to Miami. We will eject him from Miami very quickly; he will be leaving very quickly,” Stone says in video footage published by the Daily Beast. “Very quickly.” “He has 100 security guards,” Stone yells in the clip. “I will have 5,000 security guards. You want to fight. Let’s fight. Fuck you.”

Starring Cate Blanchett as a conductor accused of misconduct, the film takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture.

A subsequent statement from Meta says 'the segment featured animations created from motion capture'

In a rare archaeological coup for the war-torn country, a spectacular Roman-era mosaic floor – well preserved and highly detailed – thought to date back over 1600 years was unearthed near an old building in Rastan, a former rebel stronghold in Homs province. The Mosaic design presents a stunning visual depiction of an enormous 120 square metres which was slowly revealed after excavation efforts by Syria's General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums and shows fierce soldiers carrying swords and shields, seemingly from the Trojan War between Troy and Greece in the 12/13th century. So far, 65 feet have been uncovered of the meticulous mosaic, which potentially served as a floor for an ancient bathhouse. Archaeological water channels were found nearby, reiterating the potentiality that it could have been a hammam or a communal bath as work continues on the surrounding areas to obtain a clearer picture of what else could be there in the vicinity of the excavation. The Director of the Mission to excavate the mosaic Dr Hummam Saad told The New Arab that this find is huge for the country. “We are facing a rare and very important discovery, not at the level of the region but the global level.” He adds: “This is a mosaic that is unparalleled in the world, dating back to the fourth century AD, it is truly distinguished by its size and in good condition despite the succession of ages.”

The court filing said the billionaire was under investigation but it did not explain why.

NBC News found one example of a school district keeping cat litter on campuses for students to use — but it had nothing to do with accommodating children who identify as animals. In Colorado, GOP gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl insisted in several recent interviews that students were dressing and identifying as cats, disrupting class, and the state’s schools were tolerating it. Some children, she alleged, would only communicate in barks and hisses. Her campaign declined to answer questions about Ganahl’s claims, but in one interview with a local Fox affiliate, she suggested “there’s a lot of this going on” in Jefferson County. The Jefferson County school district disputed Ganahl’s claims and said its dress code prohibits costumes at school. The district — where Columbine High School is located — has been stocking classrooms with small amounts of cat litter since 2017, but as part of “go buckets” that contain emergency supplies in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting. The buckets also contain candy for diabetic students, a map of the school, flashlights, wet wipes and first aid items.

The family says the QAnon “queen” has voided the rental contract and is not answering their requests to return it.

A Texas sheriff says the 49 migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard were crime victims, opening the door for them to apply for special visas to remain in the country legally.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina mayor announced that five people, including a police officer, were killed in a shooting in a residential area. Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin told reporters that multiple people were shot on the Neuse River Greenway around 5 p.m., and that the police department told her around 8 p.m.

Elizabeth Huffner thinks it is obvious: A full-term, healthy pregnancy results in a birth. “When your due date has come and gone, you’re expecting a baby any minute,” Huffner said. So she was surprised to discover she was an “unknown accident”—at least from a billing standpoint—when she went to the hospital during labor. Her bill included a charge for something she said she didn’t know she’d ever entered: an obstetrics emergency department. That’s where a doctor briefly checked her cervix, timed her contractions, and monitored the fetal heartbeat before telling her to go home and come back later. The area is separated from the rest of the labor-and-delivery department by a curtain. The hospital got about $1,300 for that visit—$530 of it from Huffner’s pocket. In recent years, hospitals of every stripe have opened obstetrics emergency departments, or OBEDs. They come with a requirement that patients with pregnancy or postpartum medical concerns be seen quickly by a qualified provider, which can be important in a real emergency. But it also means healthy patients like Huffner get bills for emergency care they didn’t know they got. “It should be a cautionary tale to every woman,” said Huffner, of Rockford, Illinois. Three of the four major companies that set up and staff OBEDs are affiliated with private equity firms, which are known for making a profit on quick-turnaround investments. Private equity has been around for a long time in other medical specialties, and researchers are now tracking its move into women’s health care, including obstetrics. These private equity-associated practices come with a promise of increased patient satisfaction and better care, which can help the hospital avoid malpractice costs from bad outcomes.