Running out of time and options to save water along the drying Colorado River, federal officials said they’re considering whether to release less water from the country’s two largest reservoirs downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada. Without enough snow this winter, the water level at Lake Powell — the country’s second-largest reservoir — will drop below a critical level by next November, according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Below that point, the Glen Canyon Dam will no longer be able to generate electricity and experts worry whether conditions will worsen to the point that the structure will no longer be able to send water downstream at all. Conditions on the Colorado River are worsening quicker than expected. The seven states in the river basin made little progress saving water over the summer and Colorado is heading into its third La Niña winter in a row, likely indicating below-average snowpack. A worst-case scenario, once considered only as a hypothetical, now presents a very real threat. “It’s going to be ugly,” Mark Squillace, a water law professor at the University of Colorado, said. “The bottom line is there just isn’t going to be enough water available.”

Like all hopelessly addicted Twitter users, I, of course, hate Twitter. It IS the social network for people who are both too mean and too unattractive to make it on TikTok or Instagram. But because I am a hopelessly addicted Twitter user, there are many things I like about Twitter. Things it has given me, over and over. Things that I will be sad to lose, as Elon Musk sets Turd Mountain aflame and claims to be surprised that people are running away.

SAN FRANCISCO — When the ax came down at Twitter on Friday, it did not fall smoothly. The first sign that some of the company’s 7,500 employees had been laid off came when their email accounts were shut off late Thursday. Yet they received no official word about termination and some of their Slack accounts still worked. In Twitter’s offices in Ireland and Britain, employees stayed up late waiting for the San Francisco headquarters to inform them of their job status. Some learned they were unemployed in the middle of their night. The cuts were so haphazard that at one late-night meeting about the Twitter Blue subscription product, at least one worker was locked out of the company’s systems during the call, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting and internal messages viewed by The New York Times.

They named their company Pegatron.........

France’s Assemblée Nationale is investigating a racist outburst after a far-right MP yelled “go back to Africa” as a black member of the lower house was speaking about migrants. Grégoire de Fournas, a member of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), or National Rally, is now threatened with temporary suspension from the house and a possible loss of pay. He said he was not referring to the MP but to migrants. The house erupted with outrage after his interjection on Thursday evening. The speaker, Yaël Braun-Pivet, immediately halted proceedings and demanded to know who had made the comment, which came as Carlos Martens Bilongo, of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), was questioning the government. Bilongo, a teacher, was addressing a request by the SOS Mediterranée, a humanitarian organisation, for help in finding a port willing to accept 234 migrants rescued at sea in recent days. The parliamentary speaker said the investigation would focus on whether De Fournas said “he” or “they”, to establish whether the comment was directed at Bilongo or the migrants, before deciding on what punishment was appropriate.

Rochester, N.Y. — Bright pink envelopes will soon be mailed to people spotted buying drugs on North Clinton Avenue. "This is not a criminal arrest, so we don’t have to witness an exchange of drugs and money," said Linda Kingsley, corporation counsel for the city. "We just need to see some interactions between a drug dealer and someone driving in the area." Inside the envelope is a letter with details of their encounter with the drug dealer, along with a list of criminal and safety risks.

The conspiracy theorist will be denied entry for two years, as officials say he could threaten public order.

The New York Times has revealed that Eryka Gemma was the individual responsible for giving the 1776 Returns document to Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys who has been indicted for seditious conspiracy. Gemma is a Miami cryptocurrency venture capitalist at Timelock Ventures, a smaller venture capital and advisory firm. The documents in question contained plans created by numerous persons to storm government buildings on January 6 in order to overturn the election. She also founded the Bitcoin Center in Miami and was a board member of the Florida Blockchain Business Association (FBBA) while advocating for cryptocurrency in the state. The FBBA helped promote the creation of the Florida Blockchain Task Force and, since 2012, Gemma has been involved with both cryptocurrency and republican politicians while campaigning for Ron Paul. Eryka supposedly told Tarrio that, “the revolution is more important than anything,” shortly after sending him the detailed plans for an insurrection.

An NYPD officer has been hit with departmental charges for violently kicking a woman in the head during a Bronx George Floyd protest, the Daily News has learned. Defending himself in his departmental trial at NYPD Headquarters Wednesday — the agency’s first Hasidic officer — Lt. Joel Witriol said there was so much chaos and fighting going at the June 14, 2020, protest at the corner of E. 136th St. and Brook Ave. in Mott Haven that anything could have happened. Body camera footage and medical reports all conclude Witriol kicked Huber while she was being subdued for not complying with former Mayor de Blasio’s 8 p.m. curfew order, CCRB officials said. The most damning piece of evidence was the body-worn camera footage from another officer which shows Witriol stomping on the ground followed by a woman’s scream, Nicole Jardim of the CCRB’s Administrative Prosecution Unit said. The footage doesn’t actually show Huber getting hit. “[Witriol’s] looking straight down at her. He lifts his leg up and he stomps,” Jardim said, describing the video during the one day departmental trial. Huber suffered a black eye and a cut on her nose and was too traumatized to testify in person Wednesday. If a department judge finds Witriol guilty of abuse of force, he could be fined 20 vacation days.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Republican officials around the country have been giving increasing attention and resources to investigating election crimes. Most have focused on the alleged wrongdoing of voters. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also working a different angle: His office has been criminally investigating the people who help run elections. Over the past two years, Paxton’s office opened at least 10 investigations into alleged crimes by election workers, a more extensive effort than previously known, according to records obtained by ProPublica. One of his probes was spurred by a complaint from a county GOP chair, who lost her reelection bid in a landslide. She then refused to certify the results, citing “an active investigation” by the attorney general. In at least two of the cases, Paxton’s office unsuccessfully tried to indict election workers, attempts that were first reported by the Austin American-Statesman. In the remaining eight investigations identified by ProPublica, it is unclear just how far the probes went. As of mid-October, none of the cases resulted in criminal charges. The attorney general’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Most of Paxton’s investigations of election workers center on allegations of obstructing a poll watcher, which is banned by a controversial and recently expanded law that experts fear could open the door for turmoil in the election process. Texas is one of the few states where blocking the view or limiting the movements of poll watchers — partisan volunteers who monitor election sites — can bring criminal penalties. Obstruction is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

The State Department is giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies unrestricted access to personal data from the passports of more than 145 million Americans without legal process or any apparent oversight, according to a letter sent from Sen. Ron Wyden to the State Department.

The Ohio Medical Board issued a citation to Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an anti-vaccination activist whose dubious claims to state lawmakers went viral in 2021.

A proposed new Berkeley ordinance is modeled on San Francisco's 2020 "CAREN Act," a play on the pejorative term for a racist white woman.

Scientists are working on fast-acting nasal sprays to block coronavirus infections — but formulating the sprays is a challenge. During the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Anne Moscona didn’t feel safe going to a restaurant or catching a flight. And she wished she could feel confident that she could see her immunocompromised relatives without inadvertently spreading the novel coronavirus to them. All this made her work personal: for the past decade, Moscona, a molecular virologist, had been hunting for compounds that could stop viruses in their tracks, before the pathogens infect even a single cell in a person’s body. Now Moscona, at Columbia University in New York City, and her colleagues have homed in on a compound that might foil SARS-CoV-2. Even better, it’s simply sprayed up the nose — no needle required. The spritz developed by Moscona’s team is one of a raft of proposed nasal sprays to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection. The sprays would be fast-acting and would be applied frequently, perhaps once or twice a day, to the site where the virus first takes hold — the nasal lining and throat. Unlike vaccines, which train the recipient’s immune system to build long-lasting protection, the sprays are short-lived compounds that would directly block the virus’s ability to enter cells. Multiple research teams have shown that such sprays are effective at warding off SARS-CoV-2 infection in animals.

A good lesson for all who are new to barbecue: “When pork is smoked, it turns pink.”

After four trips to the voting booth in less than four years, it should come as no surprise that, ahead of Israel’s Nov. 1 election, there has been little movement in voter sentiment. The lines are again drawn between those who favor former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power and those who are horrified by the prospect. Polls consistently show the voters delivering yet another deadlock. However, there is one exception to this reenactment of the last few elections, and that is the rise of the far right. The polls show that the alliance known as Religious Zionism—a grouping of the Religious Zionist, Otzma Yehudit, and Noam parties—is set to double the number of seats it controls in the 120-member Knesset to as many as 14 in this week’s election. That would make this alliance the third-largest bloc in the Knesset and ensure it gets a pick of plum cabinet portfolios in the event Netanyahu forms a religious-right government. The ideas and attitudes that comprise Religious Zionism’s platform have hovered on the margins of Israeli politics for a long time, but they had been rejected by the respectable right, represented by people like Netanyahu and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Its platform includes things like annexation of West Bank settlements, expulsion of asylum-seekers, and political control of the judicial system. Its leaders have spoken about deporting Arab (but not Jewish) Israelis who attack soldiers and politicians deemed disloyal to the state. Religious Zionism’s roots lie in even more extreme politics than it is peddling to voters today. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the alliance’s No. 1 vote-getter, began his career as a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, and for years adorned his living room with a picture of Baruch Goldstein, a Kahane follower who massacred 29 Palestinians in a 1994 shooting spree. The Noam party is openly homophobic. As the alliance has grown in strength, it has tried to smooth its roughest edges but has never quite disowned them.

At least 500 drones will depart the shores of New Jersey on Thursday evening, flickering over the horizon in a choreographed dance meant to evoke the experience of swiping colorful treats on a phone screen. Promising a “surreal takeover of New York City’s skyline,” the fleet will pulse with LED lights as it serves miles of Lower Manhattan with an aerial advertisement for the mobile video game, Candy Crush.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes wrote a message intended for former President Donald Trump in the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, calling upon Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to stay in power and arrest members of Congress. “If you don’t then Biden/Kamala will turn all that power on you, your family, and all of us. You and your family will be imprisoned and killed,” Rhodes wrote in a message presented in court Wednesday. “You and your children will die in prison.” The message, which also called for Trump to have members of Congress and state legislators arrested, was not delivered. Jason Alpers, a government witness in the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial, testified Wednesday that he had a recording device in his pocket that was disguised as a thumb drive when he met with Rhodes on Jan. 10, 2021, just a few days after the Jan. 6 attack. Alpers said he bought the recording device on his own and had previously used it. Alpers testified that he was not working on behalf of a federal law enforcement agency when he made the recording. The meeting took place in a parking lot of an electronics store in Texas. In the audio, Rhodes asks others at the meeting to "get rid of your phones," and Alpers testified that everyone put their phones in a car to make the meeting more secure.

Rust makes it impossible to introduce some of the most common security vulnerabilities. And its adoption can’t come soon enough.

Authoritarian societies depend on people ratting each other out for activities that were recently legal—and it's already happening in the US. In the United States, we appear to be creeping toward this culture of community surveillance. Texas’ SB 8 deputized everyday Americans to sue anyone who has had an abortion or assisted with one. Texans are reporting the parents of transgender children to authorities. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin set up a tip line and encouraged parents to report teachers who are teaching “divisive” subjects. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law encourages parents to monitor teachers. With the Republican Party increasingly embracing authoritarianism, this is likely just the start. Tom Ginsburg, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago, says these kinds of policies are an American version of what you might see in authoritarian states. “It incentivizes private enforcement of moral norms,” Ginsburg says. “That’s very corrosive. It’s a process that is undermining the ability of society to function in the traditional way that societies do.” Ginsburg says he worries that we’re losing democracy in states where Republican candidates for office appear willing to subvert future elections, which means citizens’ ability to reject authoritarian leaders may be slipping away. He says he doesn’t think our conservative Supreme Court has any interest in helping prevent democratic backsliding, either.