ATLANTA (AP) — Comedians Eric André and Clayton English are challenging a police program at the Atlanta airport they say violates the constitutional rights of airline passengers, particularly Black passengers, through racial profiling and coercive searches just as they are about to board their flights. While the stated purpose of the program is to fight drug trafficking, the lawsuit says, drugs are rarely found, criminal charges seldom result, and seized cash provides a financial windfall for the police department.

The artist has begun burning artworks after giving buyers' the option to own the NFT instead.

Motherboard obtained footage of Ye making bigoted statements about Jewish people and bizarre claims about "fake children," as well as describing visions of "kinetic energy" cities sent to him by God.

The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.

Despite the Affordable Care Act’s promises, publicly subsidized insurers are jacking up prices while Americans lose coverage.

Or more likely, he lied to a reporter because he’s a dumbass.

A group of high-interest loan companies that target low- and middle-income consumers want to charge even higher interest rates. The companies, working through a front group called the Florida Financial Services Association, are planning to lobby the state Legislature after the elections to pass a bill that would nearly double the maximum interest rate they can charge their customers. They are already trying to curry favor with key people in Tallahassee. Records show a political committee controlled by the Florida Financial Services Association gave $100,000 last month to top Republican lawmakers — including $50,000 to a fund controlled by incoming House Speaker Paul Renner, a Republican from Jacksonville, and $50,000 to a fund controlled by incoming Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, a Republican from Naples. The companies are trying to ingratiate themselves with Democratic leaders, too. The association’s political committee also gave $25,000 last month to the Florida Democratic Party. The companies behind the Florida Financial Services Association — which include OneMain Holdings Inc., Oportun Financial Corp. and Mariner Finance LLC — want the Legislature to rewrite that law to let them charge 36 percent interest. And they want to charge that 36 percent on the entire amount of the loan.

Students at Pennsylvania State University are in an uproar after thousands of dollars in student fees were allocated for a campus event later this month featuring Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys street gang. The Oct. 24 event, titled “Stand Back & Stand By,” will feature McInnes and far-right media figure Alex Stein for a comedy hour in which the pair will riff on right-wing grievances such as “political correctness, gender roles, and immigration,” according to a pitch to sponsor the event from campus conservative organization Uncensored America. Students are protesting the plan over not just McInnes’s history of violent and bigoted rhetoric but also the potential physical threat posed by the Proud Boys. Not only does McInnes maintain a leadership role with the group — which includes members accused of leading the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, among many other violent crimes — but his previous appearances at college campuses and similar conservative events have descended into violence. “‘Free Speech’ does not mean ‘enabling Gavin McInnes to develop and reinforce right-wing extremist networks while padding his wallet and prestige,’” reads a public petition to university administrators penned by the Student Committee for Defense and Solidarity at Penn State. “We demand that the Penn State administration deny Uncensored America permission to sponsor and platform Gavin McInnes with a speaking engagement.” On Tuesday, the university decried McInnes’s “vitriolic and hateful language” in a statement. Still, it announced that the event would be allowed to continue “because Penn State fully supports the fundamental right of free speech.”

When the tobacco giant Reynolds American cut a cheque for Brent Jackson’s political campaign in November 2019, it was well aware of the accusations against the Republican North Carolina state senator. Jackson – dubbed “the only mega-farmer” in the North Carolina senate – had been accused by several migrant workers of either failing to pay their wages or blacklisting them for joining a union, according to court documents. In 2019, he was still in the midst of one of those court cases. But the cigarette maker’s relationship with Jackson goes beyond politics. They also do business together. At North Carolina’s capitol in Raleigh, Jackson has become a powerful force in the state’s corridors of power. Head south, though, to his home in Sampson County, and you’ll find his farm: thousands of acres of land where scores of seasonal migrant workers toil in the sun to pick watermelons, cantaloupes, sweet potatoes – and tobacco. An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Mother Jones and Enlace Latino NC can reveal how Reynolds American has pumped a significant amount of money into Jackson’s campaign. In fact, few lawmakers in the Tar Heel State have received more money from the company than Jackson, who has in turn used his platform to promote bills that prevent his workers speaking out against abuse.

The details of Israel's secret use of biological weapons and poison against Palestinians during the 1947/48 ethnic cleansing campaign has been revealed in a recent article by historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar. The 84-year-old Kedar is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the more well-known Morris is famed for his work as one of Israel's "New Historians". This group of Israeli scholars, including Professors Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, dismantled the occupation state's official narrative about its creation in 1948 and the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis. However, unlike his fellow historians, Morris went on to become a rather controversial figure for adopting morally questionable positions in defence of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine. "I find myself as convinced as ever that the Israelis played a major role in ridding the country of tens of thousands of Arabs during the 1948 war," said Morris in an article in the Los Angeles Times about the controversy surrounding his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. "For unearthing that dark side of 1948," Morris said that he was vilified by the "Zionist establishment." He was accused of shattering the founding myths of the Israeli state and lending moral weight to the Palestinian cause. Morris rejected the claim as "untrue" and explained that he "was simply a historian seeking to describe what happened."

DeSantis and his friends in conservative media claim the law, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, is a measure to protect kids from being groomed and prematurely introduced to sexual subject matter at school. It was passed in response to growing outrage, particularly online, a moral panic over teachers supposedly sexualizing their classrooms. Although educators, LGBTQ people, and their allies have fiercely resisted the law, it’s been widely touted in right-wing circles, part of an effective media campaign by the administration to shunt criticism and tout its importance. Emails obtained by the Daily Dot reveal the DeSantis administration’s talking points on the Don’t Say Gay bill, a blend of fact and fiction sent to a slew of reporters, producers, editors, and far-right influencers, who in turn covered it in lockstep with the governor’s views. This report is based on nearly 900 pages of documents received from a public records request and dozens of articles and tweets by the more than 50 members of the media who received the same email from DeSantis’ press secretary the day he signed the Don’t Say Gay bill. These documents, articles, and tweets further underscore how the prominent homophobic and transphobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok factored in as Florida proposed, then passed, the controversial Don’t Say Gay law.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage. DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through. DeSantis' office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map. A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state legislature and may also have violated Florida law.

On Monday afternoon, as pointed out by Parker Molloy, CNN ended its big Web3 project by announcing, “we have decided that it’s time to say goodbye to the Vault by CNN.”

Meta didn’t hold back with their announcements at Meta Connect this year. As Facebook has done every year or so, the company is shaking up their avatar products. This year as Meta focuses more heavily on the metaverse, the company made a big addition to their updated higher-detail avatars: legs. The announcement that the avatars, which were previously floating torsos with arms and heads, now have evolved to walk was something Zuckerberg was very excited about with his avatar jumping for joy during the keynote.

It’s known as the troubled teen industry. Spread across the country, this array of boot camps, wilderness therapy programs, therapeutic boarding schools and residential treatment centers is supposed to help children with mental health and behavioral issues, through a mix of therapy and tough love. In reality, it is harming many of the children it purports to be treating, because of a reliance on archaic tactics, a lack of oversight and regulation and a focus on maximizing profit. Desperate parents who don’t know what to do with their difficult kids turn to this industry for help. Many kids have already been through foster care, therapy, rehab, hospitalization or the criminal justice system. Lumped in with them are children who need long-term professional care for autism or complex problems, including severe depression, eating disorders, addiction and emotional trauma. Our society is failing some of our most vulnerable by warehousing them in an industry that is woefully equipped to deal with their mental health needs. Former patients have compared these centers with the insane asylums of centuries past. Future generations will look back on many of the tactics used in the troubled teen industry in the same way we look back on forced lobotomies and ask: How did we allow these practices to pass off as mental health treatment for so long?

Who’s going to see Louis C.K. in 2022? Not whom I expected.

A wealthy landowner is pressing ahead with legal moves that could threaten the right of backpackers and youth groups to wild camp on Dartmoor. A small group of right-to-roam activists built a protest camp over the weekend on the estate owned by Alexander Darwall and his wife, who are challenging the legal basis of bylaws that allow for wild camping on the moor, despite a growing outcry from local people, hikers and environmentalists. Dartmoor is the only place in England and Wales where it is legal to wild camp in designated areas, without a landowner’s permission. While all the land in the national park is in private hands, local farmers, known as commoners, have long had rights to graze their livestock on unenclosed parts of the moor. People have also camped in these areas for at least 100 years, with bylaws brought in under the Dartmoor Commons Act in the mid-1980s enshrining it as a right.

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party. It’s now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution,” Gabbard said in a video posted to social media.

When a highly contagious strain of avian influenza began racing across the United States this spring, the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, prepared for an influx of ailing birds. “But we never could have anticipated the flood of patients that arrived,” said Dr. Victoria Hall, executive director of the center, which provides medical care for birds of prey. From late March to early June of this year, Dr. Hall and her colleagues saw more than 180 flu-afflicted birds, including scores of great horned owls, red-tailed hawks and bald eagles. Many were severely ill, suffering from seizures or unable to see or stand. Caring for these animals — just one of which survived — was emotional, draining work that required long hours in personal protective equipment, including Tyvek suits and respirators. So it came as an immense relief when cases tailed off this summer, falling to just one in July and zero in August. But in September, the sick raptors returned. Last month, the center had 11 confirmed cases of the avian flu, Dr. Hall said: “It’s definitely coming back through.” This year’s avian influenza outbreak is the worst the United States has experienced since 2015, the last time the country was hit hard by bird flu. So far, the virus has affected 47 million farmed birds, nearly the same number as in the 2014-15 season. But by all other measures, this year’s outbreak is “radically different than what we’ve seen before,” said Bryan Richards, the emerging disease coordinator at the National Wildlife Health Center, which is part of the U.S. Geological Survey. This year’s is more wide-ranging, spreading to almost every state, and is having a much greater effect on wild birds, infecting more than 100 species in North America, according to Mr. Richards. (The virus currently poses little risk to humans, experts say.)

Over the weekend, TwitchCon attendees reported injuries—some very serious—after jumping into a foam “pit” that was just a layer of squishy blocks over a concrete floor. On Sunday, adult performer and Twitch streamer Adriana Chechik jumped from a pedestal designed for a foam-jousting game and broke her back in two places. The foam pit, which was sponsored by Lenovo and Intel, was live-streamed as part of TwitchCon, so the moment it happened was caught on video and went viral. Chechik leaps from the platform, does a split in the air, and lands on her backside before rolling over in pain: TwitchCon is an annual conference hosted by the live-streaming platform, where professional and amateur streamers and their fans gather to socialize, network, and participate in games like this one, where two people battled with foam rods to knock their opponent into the pit. Chechik tweeted that she was undergoing surgery to insert a metal rod into her back following the injury. “Send your support. When it rains it pours and I am definitely feeling the rain right now,” she wrote.