The year 2015 was the beginning of a boom time for conmen in America. The next seven would see the rise of the MAGA movement, Fyre Festival, NFTs, QAnon, and a grifter-led insurrection. Conmen and scammers are not a new American phenomenon. But Better Call Saul, a show about a gifted grifter, countered their mainstream success and prevalence with a question: How can these people live with themselves?

At face value, this trend might look like the latest version of side hustles, which have been a thing forever. People have been picking up freelance projects, driving Ubers, or selling crafts on Etsy as a way to make extra cash and nurse their creativity for years. But having a side startup is different because people are creating full-fledged businesses that are meant to supplant their main job. The current trend is also distinct from being over-employed, a situation in which remote workers secretly take on two full-time jobs for someone else. Their goal is two paychecks for one 40-hour work week and to get back at what they think is an unfair system.

A new study says that as the Earth warms, a massive California flood gets more likely — one that would swamp Los Angeles, displace millions and cause historic damage. Climate change is increasing the risk of floods that could submerge cities and displace millions of people across the state, according to a study released Friday. It says that an extreme monthlong storm could bring feet of rain – in some places, more than 100 inches – to hundreds of miles of California. Similarly unrelenting storms have happened in the past, before the region became home to tens of millions of people. Now, each degree of global warming is dramatically increasing the odds and size of the next megaflood, the study says.

Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth by US contamination guidelines, according to a team of environmental scientists. That's because rainwater across the planet now contains hazardous chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). In a paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology on August 2, researchers at University of Stockholm, which has been studying PFAS for a decade, found evidence that these substances have spread throughout the entire atmosphere, leaving no place untouched.

This holy beast will purify the world.

French environmentalists sabotage golf greens to protest against their exemption from water bans.

The captain with top secret clearance vanished into thin air. It’s not clear exactly how long a man who called himself Barry O’Beirne lived a quiet life in Daly City, the sleepy suburb a few miles south of San Francisco. It’s also not clear what he was doing on the morning of Wednesday, June 6, 2018, when, after 35 years, Air Force special agents knocked on his door and arrested him for desertion. The jigsaw puzzle of William Howard Hughes Jr.'s life has many missing pieces. After disappearing into thin air in 1983 he was wanted across the globe by numerous agencies, from the Air Force to the FBI to Interpol. At one point it was thought that he defected to the Russians. Some suggested he sabotaged the disastrous Challenger space shuttle launch. Even after his recent capture, much of this unlikely story remains a mystery for the ages. Here’s what we found out.

Andres Velasquez was swimming at Rockaway Beach on Friday evening, cooling off after a hot day at his dog-walking job, when he heard someone blowing a whistle. Mr. Velasquez, 33, said he thought it was merely a signal that swimmers could remain in the water at their own risk. But a few minutes later, he heard someone yelling at him through a bullhorn to leave, and on the shore he saw a line of New York City Parks Department patrol officers waiting for him. What followed was deeply unusual at the Rockaways, where New Yorkers come every summer to relax: Mr. Velasquez was arrested and walked off the beach in handcuffs wearing his still-wet swim trunks, as officers explained to him that swimming was not allowed after 6 p.m. The tense encounter at Rockaway Beach came amid a persistent heat wave that has sent New Yorkers scrambling to find ways to cool down. Yet, lifeguard shortages at city pools and occasional beach closures — because of shark sightings, and in one case because of bacteria in the water — have sometimes made it harder this summer to find safe spots to go swimming. And at a time when several young people have recently drowned along the city’s coastline, the arrest has highlighted confusion over what’s ill-advised, and what’s illegal, at New York’s beaches.

Far too often, students at California’s public colleges and universities have had to sleep in their cars or couch surf in their friends’ apartments because they couldn’t afford permanent housing. It’s time to increase funding and remove obstacles so that the state public higher education system can create the housing students need. One in 20 University of California students, one in 10 California State University students and one in five California Community Colleges students have reported they were homeless at some point during the academic year. Even more students reported sleeping on a sofa, in a hotel or outdoors because they lacked permanent housing. Most CSU and CCC students now pay more for housing than tuition, and COVID-19 has driven up those costs, according to one recent survey. The lack of affordable campus housing can harm our young people’s educational opportunities and, ultimately, the state’s economic future.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who single-handedly thwarted her party’s longtime goal of raising taxes on wealthy investors, received nearly $1 million over the past year from private equity professionals, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists whose taxes would have increased under the plan.

The federal probe follows years of reporting from the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio...

“Anytime she poured Drano into a cup it was completely empty,” the lawyer said. “It was for facilitating use in the sink or any other part of the house that was clogged as far as the drainage goes.”

So that’s why he’s been too busy to post here…

Doug Ford's live news conference on Friday was unexpectedly interrupted after the premier swallowed and choked on a bee.

Investigators pulled 11 boxes of sensitive and top secret information from Mar-a-Lago.

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong — known in the West as Jay Y. Lee — has won a presidential pardon by South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, allowing the grandson of Samsung’s founder to resume leadership of the powerful conglomerate, Bloomberg reports. The pardon will be formalized on August 15th. The presidential pardon is reminiscent of the two given to Lee’s father, Lee Kun-hee, who was convicted of corruption and tax evasion in 1996 and 2008. “In a bid to overcome the economic crisis by revitalizing the economy, Samsung Electronics vice chairman Lee Jae-yong, whose suspended prison term ended recently, will be reinstated,” the South Korean government said in a statement reported by the Financial Times. The pardon is the latest turn in a bribery scandal that dates back to 2017, when Lee was accused of bribing then-President Park Geun-hye. The Samsung heir was initially sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of corruption but served less than one year of his sentence before being released on appeal. He was subsequently reimprisoned in January 2021 before being released again in August that year on parole. In total, he served a year and a half of his 30-month sentence.

Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who spent years in hiding after he was ordered killed by Iran in 1989 because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck as he was about to give a lecture in New York state on Friday, according to police and an eyewitness. A man rushed to the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and attacked Rushdie as he was being introduced to give a talk on artistic freedom to an audience of hundreds, an eyewitness said. A State Trooper present at the event took the attacker into custody, police said. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Rushdie was alive and "getting the care he needs." Rushdie, 75, was taken by helicopter to a hospital but police said his condition was not yet known.

Roh said in the report that Samsung’s foldable phones are attracting three times more brand switchers than Samsung’s regular Galaxy S phones. That means people are moving away from other phone makers, whether it’s Apple, Xiaomi or Oppo, and instead buying Samsung phones.

"I'm a capitalist at heart, and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values"

Should a military veteran who has been reliably accused of war crimes, and who admitted that he killed a prisoner, be invited to train police officers on how to do their job? The police department in Tallahassee, Florida, found a surprising answer to that question. Retired Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, accused by his fellow operators of intentionally shooting civilians and murdering a prisoner in Iraq, shared a photo and video on Instagram last week in which he described working with Tallahassee police officers in close-quarters combat and other lethal skills. He posted a picture of himself flanked by the rifle-bearing officers in Florida, with his caption describing an “awesome day of training” with “an extraordinary group of men who were ready to train and take on new concepts of shooting and CQB to add to their tool box. It was truly an honor!” After Gallagher’s picture was spotted and shared by journalist Wesley Morgan, the Tallahassee Police Department stumbled forward with a believe-it-or-not statement that its officers were merely practicing at a private facility operated by a company called Stronghold SOF Solutions, which Gallagher is affiliated with. Gallagher happened to be at the facility and offered his “input” to the officers, according to the TPD. The department did not provide an explanation of how or why its officers assembled for a group photo with Gallagher, whose current business endeavors include private instruction on weapons and tactics. Gallagher, imprisoned before his court-martial in 2019, is a free man because a military jury controversially declared him not guilty of premeditated murder, and his conviction on just one minor count — of posing in a picture with a dead prisoner — was essentially overturned when former President Donald Trump granted him clemency. Not long after the trial and grant of clemency, the New York Times released a trove of evidence from Gallagher’s fellow operators that laid out their damning case against him.