A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a historian’s memory. Mike Davis, author and activist, radical hero and family man, died October 25 after a long struggle with esophageal cancer; he was 76. He’s best known for his 1990 book about Los Angeles, City of Quartz. Marshall Berman, reviewing it for The Nation, said it combined “the radical citizen who wants to grasp the totality of his city’s life, and the urban guerrilla aching to see the whole damned thing blow.” And the whole thing did blow, two years after the book was published. When the Rodney King riots broke out in LA in 1992, frightened white people rushed home, locked the doors, and turned on the TV news. Mike, however, was driving in the opposite direction, with his old friend Ron Schneck at his side. They parked, got out, and started talking with the people in the streets about what was going on. Then he went home and wrote about it.

Jules Bass, the animator, producer, director and composer whose work included stop-motion holiday television specials like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman".. Oof, this one hurts.

Lawmakers in Pennsylvania seeking to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner released a new report Monday whose findings rely partially on a widely criticized study written by a former Republican district attorney. The interim report, which reads as a bill of particulars against Krasner, was handed down without a widely expected official recommendation to impeach the progressive district attorney. The study in question, which was peer-reviewed and published in August by the journal Criminology & Public Policy, claimed that Krasner’s policy of “de-prosecution” was associated with a statistically significant increase in murders in Philadelphia, compared to the rates recorded under his predecessors. The study, by Thomas Hogan, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute who served two terms as a tough-on-crime prosecutor in Chester County, Pennsylvania, engendered harsh criticisms among social scientists who said the quantitative methodology of the study was undermined by its flaws. “People who are serious about solving and preventing crime should look at serious and accurate research, not politically motivated documents like Hogan’s,” said Jessica Brand, a spokesperson for Krasner’s office who also leads the Wren Collective, a firm that advises reform-minded prosecutors. “People’s lives, after all, are at stake.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the letter was drafted several months ago but released by staff without vetting.

After spouting antisemitic conspiracies, Kanye West has lost a lucrative partnership with sportswear brand Adidas

Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions, hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid to discredit them. The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports. Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.

The recently suspended sheriff of Columbus County faces new allegations of corruption. Jody Greene “has demonstrated on numerous occasions that he is willing to misuse the power and authority inherent to the office of sheriff for improper personal and political gain,” Jon David, the district attorney for Bladen, Brunswick and Columbus counties, wrote in a new court filing Friday. Greene is scheduled to appear in court Monday for a hearing about whether he should be removed, not just suspended, from office. He was elected in 2018, becoming the county’s first Republican sheriff.

Romanian Defence Minister Vasile Dincu resigned on Monday, saying he could not collaborate with the country's president, amid pressure weeks after he said Ukraine's only chance to end the war was to negotiate with Russia.

ATLANTA (AP) — Herschel Walker campaigns for the U.S. Senate as a champion of free enterprise and advocate for the mentally ill, felons and others at the margins of society. And the Georgia Republican has called for policies that blend those priorities. “If someone comes out of prison, they should have incentives set up that the person has learned a trade, and you give an incentive for a company to hire him so he can make a living for himself,” Walker said Aug. 17 in Kennesaw, Georgia. Walker, who founded Renaissance Man Food Services in 1999 as part of America’s sprawling food processing industry, then nodded to his business experience. “It’s my responsibility now to help,” Walker declared. The argument blends several threads of Walker’s bid to unseat Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, in a marquee midterm election matchup that could determine control of the Senate. A former college and professional football star, Walker styles himself as a businessman, unapologetic Christian and someone who has overcome mental health challenges with others’ help. “We have to become a society that want to help, not hurt anyone,” he said in Kennesaw. Yet an Associated Press review of federal court cases, alongside other public records and statements, offers a more complicated reality. One instance at the heart of Walker’s business portfolio suggests he has benefited, through a firm he touts as a principal partner and supplier, from the unpaid labor of drug offenders routed from state courts to residential rehabilitation programs in lieu of prison.

This weekend, the New York Times published yet another article that models many of the dangerous media practices I’ve analyzed here. The stakes of this unethical reporting in this moment are enormous: not only is New York embarking on a project to dramatically militarize and surveil the subway and to expand the police bureaucracy, but the country as a whole is on the precipice of a far-right authoritarian takeover. It’s useful to discuss a few of the examples of exactly what the New York Times did because they are so prevalent and sometimes subtle. What is the article about? This weekend’s article is about a chilling plan by New York officials to dramatically militarize the subway, “flooding” it with armed government agents and surveillance cameras. Here are the Orwellian words of the New York City Mayor describing what they want to do: “omnipresence” of armed cops and a sort of cleansing of the subway system of human beings “dealing with mental health issues.”

What do you do when you're a perverted little boy, who also has access to a pit in the woods full of monsters? Throw people in, of course.

“You had no choice but to adore Leslie Jordan.”

A man has been throwing bags of human poop on the lawn of an elected official’s house, and Seattle police say the suspect is still at large. Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant said a man has thrown bags of poop on her lawn several times over the last month, according to the statement from the Seattle Police Department and media outlets. McClatchy News reached out to Sawant’s office and is waiting for a response. In a letter to Seattle police Sawant wrote that bags of “human feces” had been thrown on her lawn six times, according to Fox13. Following one incident, she received an email telling her that she could “sit on her throne of human excrement.”

Norm Eisen, who served as a White House ethics adviser under then President Barack Obama, who was asked by Fair Fight Action to contact POLITICO to comment on this story, said he did not see anything untoward about Abrams’ organization hiring her friend and campaign chair. “It happens all the time. It is the way our system is built, that the political leaders and the policy leaders are one in the same. So this is not unique to Allegra. You can say the same thing about Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or, or Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy,” Eisen said. “We not only countenance it, we embrace it; that is the American political, legal and ethical system.”

Four times in the past year, the parents, teachers, and police officers of the small, neighboring Minnesota cities of Cloquet and Esko briefly believed that their children were about to be murdered in their classrooms. The calls began in the spring with two bomb threats. In the first, a man claimed to have seen a suspicious backpack with wires coming out of it at Cloquet and Esko high school. In July, he called again, this time reporting a bomb in a red backpack at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, according to police records. Then, in September, the same man, described by the Midwestern dispatchers as having a thick Middle Eastern accent, reported that a pair of gunmen, armed with AK-47s, had killed 10 people at Cloquet High School. All of these calls turned out to be hoaxes. But according to Derrick Randall, Cloquet’s chief of police, each time they came in, it was “all hands on deck” for his department. Officers sprinted to their squad cars, threw on their extra body armor, and chambered rounds in the squad rifles. They may have blasted through stop signs and traffic signals while racing as fast as they could to face what might have been the worst thing they would ever see in their lives. “It’s dangerous, frustrating. It’s a waste, and we feel helpless,” says Randall. “Our job is to hold people accountable, and when there’s a person or group on the other side of the world able to take advantage of us and exploit our systems like this, they are taking away our power and control.”

Seeking to explore ways to improve diabetes care in resource-poor settings, a joint study by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and University of Geneva, published in the journal PLOS ONE, has demonstrated that a range of insulins can be stored at temperatures ranging between 25-37 degrees Celsius for a four-week period of use. This study confirms the possibility for people living with diabetes in similar temperature conditions to be able to use insulin, for a period of up to four weeks, even in the absence of access to refrigeration. Strict storage recommendations for insulin are difficult to follow in tropical regions and even more challenging in conflict and humanitarian emergency settings, adding an extra burden for people managing their diabetes. “For far too long, we were unable to send people with diabetes back to their homes with insulin due to its cold storage requirements,” says Dr Philippa Boulle, MSF non-communicable diseases adviser. “Some of these people were travelling long distances daily and some even relocated to get their insulin injections at the clinic.” “People with diabetes in resource-limited and humanitarian settings will now be able to inject themselves in their homes, greatly improving the significant disruption to their lives from having to attend hospital for twice-daily injections,” Dr Boulle adds.

On a recent episode of "WTF with Marc Maron," Quinones paints a lurid tale of addiction in America. His brash and hyperbolic writing style misleads his audience.

The speed record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip has been shattered once again. Engineers have transmitted data at a blistering rate of 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s), almost twice the global internet traffic per second.

Malawi's government has vowed to act after the discovery of a mass grave where the bodies of 25 immigrants thought to be Ethiopians were found. The bodies were exhumed in a Mzimba district forest after young boys reportedly detected a foul smell. The next day four more bodies were found 5 km (3 miles) from the grave. "It is a sorry state," Homeland Security Minister Jean Sendeza told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme."It is a pathetic situation," she said. "As a government we are really condemning this kind of activity. It's not right, it's not good". She stressed that the police was investigating and that those involved would be caught. A post-mortem will be undertaken to establish the causes of death. A group of 72 suspected migrants from Ethiopia were arrested after police were tipped off about their presence in another government forest reserve. Ten Malawians were also arrested on suspicion of being part of a syndicate involved in trafficking the Ethiopians. They have not yet appeared in court.

In early September, Donald Trump welcomed a handful of Republican allies to Manhattan’s Trump Tower with an urgent message: He saw a “scam” happening with midterm election voting in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, and he wanted conservatives to do something about it. “During our briefing, he was concerned that 2020 is going to happen again in 2022,” says former senior Trump administration official Michael Caputo, referencing Trump’s debunked assertion that voter fraud in Philadelphia helped win Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. Caputo — who attended the meeting alongside Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis — says they had a message back to the former president: “Our team encouraged him to be concerned … [Furthermore], I’m advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts.” But it’s not just one meeting, and it’s not just Philly. In recent months, Trump has convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls to discuss laying the groundwork to challenge the 2022 midterm election results, four people familiar with the conversations tell Rolling Stone. In these conversations, pro-Trump groups, attorneys, Republican Party activists, and MAGA diehards often discuss the type of scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy.