The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold a Jim Crow law that Mississippi’s white-supremacist leaders adopted in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers designated certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as lifelong disenfranchising crimes. The court’s conservative majority admitted that the Jim Crow law was “steeped in racism,” but said the State had made enough changes in the 132 years since to override its white supremacist taint. A 2018 analysis found that the law still disproportionately disenfranchises Black Mississippians compared to white residents. In a statement on Wednesday, the Mississippi Center For Justice, which filed the lawsuit against the State of Mississippi in 2017, said it will appeal the ruling in Harness v. Watson to the U.S. Supreme Court. “This provision was part of the 1890 plan to take the vote away from Black people who had attained it in the wake of the Civil War,” said Rob McDuff, an attorney with MCJ who argued that the Jim Crow violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection under the law. “Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals is allowing it to remain in place despite its racist origins. Despite this setback, we will continue this battle and seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court.” The 5th Circuit Court is based in New Orleans and handles cases from Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. Republican presidents appointed most of its judges. The judges in Wednesday’s majority did not sign their names to the ruling on the voter disenfranchisement law.

Here is The Sacred Pools, an unreleased FMV game by Sega planned for release in 1997. The game was a new arrival to the FMV market that was pushed as an “erotic thriller” for older audiences. With a reported budget of 2-3 million dollars, Sega’s new division SegaSoft aimed to expand the experiences available on Saturn, PC, Macintosh, and PSX(!). Although Sacred Pools made a legendary debut at E3 1996, the press panned the game for its quality and it was quietly pushed aside to never be heard from again.

Indian police arrested nine people on Monday, including ticketing clerks and contractors, as they investigate the collapse of a foot bridge in which at least 134 people, including many children, were killed.

Ideally, when you look at a piece of art, you reason through what it is, taking account of your subjective experience, relating it to other people’s subjective experiences, and hypothesizing about the artist’s experience. But that is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process, which does not make it the most profitable form of aesthetic cognition. The forms of our aesthetic conversation inevitably bend to the material situation we’re in, and lyrical, reflective ideas of aesthetics inherit the ideals of a certain leisure class that is in decline. The dominant way people approach art today is through a hot-take framework: here’s a thing, here’s how it plugs into a contemporary event, and here’s why it’s “good” or “bad” based on that topical connection. When I started writing about art, the big bogeyman was theory criticism, where people would cite a passage of Foucault to explain why something was worth paying attention to. Both of these modes are ultimately responses to an existential insecurity about what the experience of art is. Before, art needed to call back to something you read in college for it to feel full of meaning. Now it needs to justify itself against the newsfeed.

Members of billionaire Elon Musk’s inner circle huddled with Twitter’s remaining senior executives throughout the weekend, conducting detailed discussions regarding the site’s approach to content moderation, as well as plans to lay off 25 percent of the workforce to start. Alex Spiro, a well-known celebrity lawyer who has represented Musk for several years, led those conversations. Spiro is taking an active role in managing several teams at Twitter, including legal, government relations, policy and marketing, according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved. Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were “staff software engineer.” Musk’s title in the directory was CEO, although that position has not been publicly announced. He refers to himself as “Chief Twit.”

I went to Ohio looking for super fans. Here’s what I discovered instead.

Though it's always good to see someone free themselves from the shackles of social media, today's notable escape attempt is bittersweet. After just recently establishing a Patreon, prolific videogame news hound Nibel(opens in new tab) has decided to pack it all in. A trip to Nibel's feed used to be part of my daily routine back when I was PC Gamer's news editor, and their constant stream of videogame titbits has been keeping Twitter users informed for years. Twitter is no place for original reporting, but Nibel's sharing of stories, accompanied by headlines and sometimes bullet points, proved to be just as valuable, turning their feed into a repository for the day's biggest stories.

Elon Musk (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened. That’s because as of this moment, it looks like Musk dug a big hole in the forest, carefully filled it with punji sticks and crocodiles, and then jumped in.

“This is just going to make future prosecutions easier for the state,” an attorney said. “I think it’s horrifying.” A week after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests of 20 people for alleged voter fraud, his administration quietly made a change that some say could help the state go after more people. Starting in August, Floridians on probation have been required to sign an updated form placing the burden on them to determine if they’re eligible to vote. Beneath warnings about remaining drug-free and reporting to their probation officer is the new message: “By signing this letter,” the updated form states, “you agree that you are solely responsible for determining if you are legally able to register to vote and that you must solely determine if you are lawfully qualified to vote.”

lol

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former leftist president, has reclaimed the leadership and vowed to reunify his country

FOR DECADES, A major piece of counter-culture history was wedged behind a bed in Merl Saunders’ San Francisco house. The crude pipe looks like something a teen may have cobbled together at summer camp, but according to art historian Steve Cabella, it’s basically a religious object. A so-called “spirit pipe,” this particular pot implement was made by LSD pioneer Augustus Owsley Stanley for Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and it’s been MIA for decades.

For Raines and the law’s other architects, this was the most alarming unintended consequence: their efforts to make New Yorkers virtuous had caused a spike in casual sex and prostitution.

Three days after completing a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Elon Musk on Sunday morning used his new platform to spread a bizarre, anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco that had been published by a fringe Southern California website. Musk responded Sunday at 5:15 a.m. Pacific time with a tweet that said, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” and posted a link to a baseless, anti-LGBTQ article in the Santa Monica Observer. By 10:30 a.m. Sunday, the message and link had been retweeted more than 30,000 times and liked more than 110,000 times, before being deleted less than an hour later. Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Monica Observer was “notorious for publishing false news,” and once claimed “that Hillary Clinton had died and that a body double had been sent to debate Donald Trump.”

A Bloomberg News/NPR investigation found that large U.S. coal companies used bankruptcy and asset transfers to move old mines to shaky new owners, putting at risk federally mandated land reclamation. Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor. Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago. Love Branch used to be owned by one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. Federal law requires companies to clean up the land when they finish mining — and Love Branch hasn't produced any coal in more than a decade. But the former owner, now named Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc., transferred the mine and its cleanup obligations to a smaller company in 2018, the year before Hatfield fell through his floor.

Pfizer’s range surprised Wells Fargo analyst Mohit Bansal, who expected a $50 price tag. But he told Reuters that it could add $2.5 billion to $3 billion in annual revenue for the company.

Because international relations were already tense, Pyke’s surveyors couldn’t be open about their mission. His solution? They would all pretend to be golfers. So, outfitted with clubs and caddies, nearly a dozen men traveled to Germany to hit the links and interrogate the populace. Pyke got the results he wanted — unsurprisingly, the average German wasn’t too excited about another World War — but they came too late. By August of 1939, Europe was on the brink of all-out conflict and he pulled his undercover golfers home.

At least 149 people were killed and 78 others were injured in a stampede during Halloween festivities in Seoul, officials said of one of the biggest disasters in South Korea that will likely raise serious questions about public safety standards. The massive death toll is being tallied after people were crushed by a large crowd pushing forward on a narrow alley in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhoods, a major leisure and nightlife district in the capital. Choi Seong-beom, chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department, said most of the victims in the stampede Saturday night were people in their late teens and 20s. “The figures include two dead foreigners and 15 injured foreigners,” he said. Earlier, Choi had said the death toll could rise and that an unspecified number among the injured were in critical condition. The number of injured had been as high as 150 earlier Saturday.

Russia linked its decision to pull out of the deal to an attack on Saturday on ships in the port of Sevastopol in the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

A revived lunch policy in Davidson County Schools has ignited controversy. DCS Director of School Nutrition S. Daved Roberts said in an email, obtained by FOX8, to cafeteria managers that “high schoolers will no longer be allowed to charge in the cafeteria.” The change goes into effect on Tuesday, Nov. 1. Davidson County woman aims to clear school fees for families in hardships What that means is that unless students have money in their account or money on hand to pay for the cost of their lunch, the cashier will take their plate away and the student will not be served a meal. If the student is unable to return to the cash register with money, their meal will be thrown away and wasted, according to the email.