Living in the nation’s largest cargo hub, thousands are exposed to high levels of diesel soot, which can contribute to heart disease, lung cancer and premature death. Signs everywhere in Braceville, Illinois, say trains could come barreling through at 80 mph. But workers at the Union Pacific intermodal terminal in Joliet can’t always unload freight that fast. So lately, said Braceville Mayor David Wright, trains have been screeching to a halt three or four days a week. They’re stacked 20 feet high with shipping containers from China. Some stretch 3 miles through Braceville and the next town. Most stay for a short time, but Wright remembers one train that Union Pacific didn’t touch for more than 24 hours. Another lingered so long schoolkids crawled underneath to get home. When asked about the yellow cranes Union Pacific just built to double unloading capacity at Joliet, Wright laughed. “The railroads can’t manage what they’ve got coming now,” he said. “If they double, they’ll have trains backed up all the way to St. Louis.” A town of 886 people, Braceville lies 60 miles southwest of Chicago where urban sprawl gives way to corn and soybeans. But stalled trains don’t just afflict Braceville farmers. They’ve been clogging up all 18 intermodal terminals that dot Chicago’s suburbs and its inner city.

The Virginia Board of Education agreed to license a controversial candidate for superintendent in Spotsylvania County with no experience in education and a history of incendiary social media posts,… (Combine this with the Youngkin assault on trans kids and we have ourselves a god damn coup of GQP scum within Virginia's educational system)

The revamped rules explicitly state that students must only use bathrooms and locker rooms associated with the sex assigned to them at birth. Similar restrictions apply to sports and other activities.

A woman in police custody in Weld County was seriously injured Friday night when the patrol vehicle she had been placed in — which was parked on railroad tracks — was struck by a train.

The 900 page, mostly redacted file says that police pulled Seals over at the request of FBI

Five Lebanese banks have been held up in one day by people demanding their own money. Seven banks have been held up since Wednesday in the country, where commercial banks have locked most customers out of their savings since an economic crisis took hold three years ago. On Friday morning, a man with a gun identified as Abed Soubra entered a BLOM Bank in Beirut demanding his money. He later handed his gun to security forces but remained locked in the bank past sunset, negotiating with bank officials to withdraw about $US300,000 ($455,000) of his savings in cash, he told Reuters. He eventually left the bank with no money as part of a settlement negotiated by an influential sheikh, local media reported. He was not taken into custody. While inside, he was cheered on by a large crowd, including Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, who held up his bank to get his savings in August. His bank dropped charges against him.

“The pandemic is over,” Biden said in a portion of the segment at the Detroit Auto Show last week. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it …but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”

Celtic supporters chanted: “If you hate the royal family clap your hands,” during a minute’s applause in memory of the Queen, before the Scottish Premiership defeat at St Mirren in Paisley. The hosts had confirmed the planned applause days after Celtic became the subject of Uefa disciplinary proceedings when supporters displayed an banner reading “Fuck the Crown” during Wednesday’s Champions League draw with Shakhtar Donetsk in Poland. Visiting fans housed in one stand behind the goals in Paisley chanted the anti-monarchy sentiment and there was banner held up which also read: “If you hate the Royal Family clap your hands.”

It's not that Nate revealed himself to be a climate change denier in his new book, The Signal and the Noise. But he falls victim to a fallacy that's all too common among those who view the issue through the prism of economics rather than science.

A powerful storm is slamming Western Alaska, with reports of major flooding in coastal communities including Golovin, Chevak and Hooper Bay. The storm is the remnants of what was Typhoon Merbok, and forecasters have predicted it could be one of the worst storms to hit Alaska’s western coast in recent history. Post on social media Friday night and Saturday morning documented high waters flooding communities and high winds.

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that Bremerton assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray on the field, it wasn’t widely understood then that the court had also ordered the school district to give him his job back. The day of the ruling, Fox News host Sean Hannity expressed doubts the district would follow through. But one of Kennedy’s lawyers clarified that they had no choice: “We’re ready to have that fight. If they want to defy the Supreme Court, I think they’re gonna realize they made a serious mistake.” Kennedy was sunnier about it all. “As soon as the school district says ‘Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight,” he said. So the school district has been flummoxed about what’s happened since. They complied by offering to reinstate him, they say, and now the football season is in full swing. But Kennedy is nowhere near the sidelines. “He’s had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8th, and we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call,” says Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools. Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention. The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute. Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas. “Place a PR/Publicity Request,” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe.

Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene. While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same?

Chinese hosting company .top has apparently also given Kiwi Farms the boot, as the site struggles to reboot.

This could hardly come at a worse time for the country.

Who is Elly Conway, and why can't the internet find anything about them?

Parkour classes, a cone of silence, and a principal with no apparent formal teaching experience. Inside the superstar’s new private school

Indianapolis garage rock thrashers Brother O Brother have announced that their new album Skin Walker will be released as a guitar pedal. And if that doesn't make any sense at all, it's exactly as it sounds: it's a vinyl record, and it's also a guitar pedal. This unholy innovation comes from pioneering vinyl experimentalists Romanus Records, who have something of track record when it comes to taking the humble long-player places it's never been before. Romanus filled one LP with razor blades and gunpowder, embedded LEDs in another, and even worked on a limited edition "liquid-filled snowglobe variant" vinyl edition of the soundtrack of the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged. Skin Walker will be released as a pair of vinyl LPs, each considerably thickened to house the pedal electronics, with the control knobs positioned on the centre labels. One pedal will offer overdrive/boost, and feature a toggle switch to control two different channels, while the other is a delay pedal, with four settings to create unique combinations of delay.

For almost a week straight, #MAGACommunism has been trending on Twitter. The rank and file British Empire Left has been … MAGA Communism is Based Read More »

Sheriff’s deputies raided the home of LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl on Wednesday morning. The department says the raid is tied to an investigation about county contracts awarded to Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit run by Patti Giggans, who is friends with Kuehl. Giggans is also a member of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, which oversees the department and has clashed repeatedly with Sheriff Alex Villanueva over his refusal to comply with subpoenas. Both Kuehl and Giggans have called for removing Villanueva, who’s up for reelection in November. The sheriff says he had no prior knowledge of the raid and recused himself from the investigation. Kuehl tells KCRW that she’s not connected with the no-bid contracts that LA Metro gave Peace Over Violence to run a sexual harassment hotline for people to report sexual violence on public transit. She adds that she happens to be friends with Giggans due to her decades-long work in domestic violence. “You can see everybody else has contracted with [Giggans] as well. I didn't have to do anything, and indeed never even knew about it. The administration at LA Metro looked at all the organizations, chose Peace Over Violence to do their sexual harassment work, and it never came to the …[supervisors] board. The sheriff seized their server yesterday. So now they're not even able to serve the women who are calling in for help.”

Right-wing pundits, landlords, and tech executives all believe they can prove we are amid a crime wave with just one more video.