When asked how Bronco Wine Company can sell wine cheaper than a bottle of water, Fred Franzia famously retorted, 'They're overcharging for the water. Don't you get it?'

After getting stuck on a dirt road in Clear Creek County in June, Christian Glass called 911 for help. Instead, the 22-year-old was killed while locked inside his own car after a long, tense, confusing and chaotic confrontation played out between him and Clear Creek deputies and a handful of other agencies. Video footage was released by his family’s lawyers. Glass’s parents, Sally and Simon Glass, spoke to reporters Tuesday to try and clear their son’s name and announce their intention to eventually sue the responding agencies responsible for their son’s death. “From beginning to end, the officers escalated and proactively initiated force,” Glass’ family lawyers, Siddhartha Rathod and Qusair Mohamedbhai, said, in a release. “And yet, these officers, including the one who killed Christian, are still in uniform and have paid no price for their conduct. Our country cannot continue to tolerate this level of extreme violence by law enforcement. The act of simply calling 911 for help cannot be a death sentence.”

Unless it was a new way of teaching human anatomy, someone got a little naughty at the University of Utah by displaying porn on an electronic billboard.

While vacationers might enjoy the Mediterranean Sea's summer warmth, climate scientists are warning of dire consequences for its marine life as it burns up in a series of severe heat waves. From Barcelona to Tel Aviv, scientists say they are witnessing exceptional temperature hikes ranging from 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) to 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) above the norm for this time of year. Water temperatures have regularly exceeded 30 C (86 F) on some days. Extreme heat in Europe and other countries around the Mediterranean has grabbed headlines this summer, but the rising sea temperature is largely out of sight and out of mind. Marine heat waves are caused by ocean currents building up areas of warm water. Weather systems and heat in the atmosphere can also pile on degrees to the water's temperature. And just like their on-land counterparts, marine heat waves are longer, more frequent and more intense because of human-induced climate change. The situation is "very worrying," says Joaquim Garrabou, a researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona. "We are pushing the system too far. We have to take action on the climate issues as soon as possible."

The biggest election disinformation event of the 2022 midterm primaries was not an elaborate Russian troll scheme that played out on Twitter or Facebook. It was some text messages. The night before Kansans were set to vote on a historic statewide referendum last month, voters saw a lie about how to vote pop up on their phone. A blast of old-fashioned text messages falsely told them that a “yes” vote protected abortion access in their state, when the opposite was true — a yes vote would cut abortion protections from the state’s constitution. The messaging effort and referendum both failed. But the campaign shows how easily a bad actor can leverage text messages — which still rely on the same basic technology from when they were developed in the 1990s — to spread disinformation with few consequences. And while there’s now a cottage industry and federal agencies that target election disinformation when it’s on social media, there’s no comparable effort for texts. Scott Goodstein, who built the bulk text messaging apparatus for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and has since advocated for stronger reforms to rein in potential abuse of political text spam, said there’s little stopping other political groups from spamming voters with disinformation. “This is very easy, and there’s no real cost or consequences for a bad actor to upload very, very targeted voter-file-based groups and spread misinformation, disinformation, horrible rumors,” Goodstein said.

Federal laws require police to assist those who don't speak English. Volunteer testers who call Nassau County police precincts and headquarters and speak only Spanish only got help about half the time, according to a new report by advocacy groups the Long Island Language Advocates Coalition and the New York Immigration Coalition. A team of seven volunteers made 94 phone calls in Spanish to all of Nassau’s precincts and headquarters for the study. More than a third of the callers were disconnected and another 16% were intentionally hung up on, according to the report.

After a private equity firm purchased an upstate power plant, thousands of gallons of oil spilled into Lake Ontario. It’s part of a troubling pattern. IN NOVEMBER 2021, without fanfare, and having received no public comments, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) issued a succinct declaratory ruling enabling a new company called Generation Bridge LLC to absorb a massive fossil fuel-burning power plant in Staten Island and another one upstate, in Oswego. The PSC’s language made it seem benign. “No further review will be conducted of the proposed transfer of ownership interests,” the order stated, noting that the direct owners of the Arthur Kill and Oswego Harbor plants were authorized to go into debt up to $700 million to fund their acquisitions and would continue to be subject to lightened regulation. Four months later, the phone rang at the National Response Center (NRC), the 24-hour federal hotline for reporting hazardous discharges. It was someone near the Oswego plant, a whopping 1,800 MW, residual fuel oil-burning facility perched on the southern edge of Lake Ontario. “Caller is reporting there is a large black container that is floating in the water and the container is discharging an unknown oil into the water,” an NRC staff member entered into a call log on March 8. A similar report came two days later. “Caller is reporting that there is an unknown heavy oil product leaking into the Oswego Harbor from the site of a power plant. The oil is creating a large sheen on the water. The cause of the oil sheen is unknown due to limited access to the site,” the NRC recorded. Upon notification by the NRC, officials from seven local, state, and federal agencies quickly launched an investigation. It turned out an underground fuel transfer line had corroded, and there was a hole in an oil pipe. No. 6 fuel oil was gushing into Lake Ontario and onto its shore. Oswego Harbor Power, which stores 68 million gallons of oil on site, was confirmed as the source. But conspicuously unnamed as a responsible party was the new owner: Generation Bridge, a subsidiary of a fund managed by ArcLight Capital Partners—a private equity firm that has quietly scooped up and cut costs on some of the dirtiest fossil fuel-burning infrastructure in the United States, which experts say might otherwise be destined for retirement.

Sorry about closing that door says God, here I'll open this window.

Favre has pleaded innocence or, at worst, ignorance in a Mississippi welfare scandal that will not go away.

The New Wave director rewrote cinema's rules and influenced film-makers from Scorsese to Tarantino.

Police were able to use the intel gathered by the woman to arrest the drug dealer on charges of second-degree rape, false imprisonment, and distribution of meth, the AP reports. But weeks after the sting, they arrested the woman who had been their informant and charged her with possession of drug paraphernalia—despite the fact that she was violently raped while successfully helping them nab a drug dealer. “It’s absolutely horrible,” the woman’s attorney, Harold Murry, told the outlet. “She has a drug problem, and I don’t know if she’s going to be able to beat it or not. But when you become a snitch, they keep your drug problem going, and then they arrest you for it.” Local police said this kind of thing is pretty par for the course.

A Starbucks collectible NFT project has been announced on the same day it released two new staff benefits that excluded unionized branches.

Emma Straub remembers her father, horror icon Peter Straub.

Stockholders approved the Musk Merger in preliminary tallies, and the company announced the vote result in a brief meeting.

Emails from the servicing company entice borrowers to refinance into private loans that wouldn’t be eligible for the announced debt forgiveness.

Armenia has said nearly 50 of its soldiers have been killed in clashes along the border with Azerbaijan, in the worst escalation of hostilities since a 2020 war. The stepping up of decades-old bloodshed between the south Caucasus countries has fuelled fears that a second fully-fledged war could break out in the post-Soviet world in addition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Armenia said several towns near the border with Azerbaijan, including Jermuk, Goris and Kapan, were shelled in the early hours of Tuesday, and that it had responded to what it called a “large-scale provocation” by Azerbaijan. Baku responded that it was attacked by Armenia. Russia, which has mediated between the ex-Soviet republics in the past, said it had succeeded in bringing the fighting to a halt later on Tuesday, although there were reports of ongoing clashes.

Trying to understand the people who feel “trapped on Earth” and would like to live on Mars

A new riddle in our everything-is-weird economy: Homebuilders say that the U.S. is in a “housing recession.” But rents are at an all-time high—and official rent inflation is still surging. If you’re a new renter thinking you’ve never seen anything like 2022 in your lifetime, you’re not alone. In Manhattan, the average monthly rent jumped to a record $5,000. In Miami and Tampa, the typical rent is up nearly 50 percent since before the pandemic, and nationwide, the median monthly rent just topped $2,000 for the first time ever. “Our annual index of rent growth was pretty stable in the last few years, from about 3 percent to 4 percent,” Jeff Tucker, a senior economist at the online real-estate marketplace Zillow, told me. “This year, it hit a record-high 17 percent. So the time series of rent growth looks like a flat line followed by the beginning of a huge roller coaster.” The rental market is just one roller coaster inside the unamusement park that is the U.S. real-estate landscape. Since the pandemic began, housing prices nationwide have lurched to all-time highs, as Americans fanned out in search of more space. In the so-called Smile States—the sunny crescent swinging down from the Carolinas, into Texas, and up through the Mountain West—no one is smiling: Rents have blown up in many of the same metropolitan areas where housing costs have risen, such as Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; and Salt Lake City.

Black babies in NC are more than twice as likely to die as white infants before their first birthdays, a problem that's gotten worse.

Former President Donald Trump has now shared his most explicit endorsement of the QAnon conspiracy movement to date. Trump shared a picture of himself wearing a Q lapel pin, overlaid with the QAnon phrases “The Storm is Coming” and “WWG1WGA,” on his Truth Social account on Monday evening. The post was originally shared on Truth Social by an account called “Patriots in Control,” before Trump re-shared it. “How much more obvious can it get?” one QAnon follower asked in the QAnon-focused Great Awakening forum.