The Associated Press has obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia. The documents offer the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the so-called help line. Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show it’s part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harm’s way. The help line has been criticized by abuse victims and their attorneys for being inadequate to quickly stop abuse and protect victims. Yet the Utah-based faith has stuck by the system despite the criticism and increasing scrutiny from attorneys and prosecutors, including those in the Adams case.

Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola 3 whose incarceration and treatment at the Louisiana State Penitentiary became a rallying cry for prison reformers across the world, died Thursday at Ochsner Baptist Hospital in New Orleans of complications from COVID-19. He was 75. Woodfox was sentenced in 1971 to 50 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for armed robbery. Three years later, he was convicted of killing a prison guard, although no physical evidence linked him to the crime. He served 44 years in solitary confinement, perhaps the longest in U.S. prison history, before a federal court vacated his conviction, freeing him in 2016.

Claims came from Japan's Defence Ministry, and would mark the first time Beijing has sent missiles across the island

Erik Aadland recently announced endorsements from far-right thought leaders Paul Vallely and Tom Tancredo. Last month, The Colorado Times Recorder reported on Aadland’s connection to far-right and QAnon social media accounts, and his recent endorsements from Tancredo, a former congressman and contributor to white nationalist publication VDARE, and Vallely, who was described by Media Matters as an “unhinged right-wing conspiracy theorist,” are another sign of Aadland’s connection to fringe, extremist politics.

After an exhaustive historical investigation into the barrels of DDT waste reportedly dumped decades ago near Catalina Island, federal regulators concluded that the toxic pollution in the deep ocean could be far worse — and far more sweeping — than what scientists anticipated. In internal memos made public recently, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that acid waste from the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT — a pesticide so powerful it poisoned birds and fish — had not been contained in hundreds of thousands of sealed barrels. Most of the waste, according to newly unearthed information, had been poured directly into the ocean from massive tank barges. Although shipping records noted the number of discarded barrels, regulators say the word “barrel” appeared to refer to a unit of volume, rather than a physical barrel. Further review of old records revealed that other chemicals — as well as millions of tons of oil drilling waste — had also been dumped decades ago in more than a dozen areas off the Southern California coast. “That’s pretty jaw-dropping in terms of the volumes and quantities of various contaminants that were dispersed in the ocean,” said John Chesnutt, a Superfund section manager who has been leading the EPA’s technical team on the investigation. “This also begs the question: So what’s in the barrels? … There’s still so much we don’t know.” These revelations build on much-needed research into DDT’s toxic — and insidious — legacy in California. As many as half a million barrels of DDT waste have not been accounted for in the deep ocean, according to old reports and a UC Santa Barbara study that provided the first real glimpse into how the Los Angeles coast became a chemical dumping ground.

Losses are building up far faster than Kyiv can manage.

After Wednesday’s revelation that an attorney for Alex Jones accidentally turned over a copy of his entire cellphone to the lawyers suing him on behalf of Sandy Hook parents, a couple of things were obvious. The first was that Alex Jones must be turning redder than ever; the second was that the Congressional committee holding hearings on the January 6 insurrection would probably want those records, too. In an emergency hearing this morning, an attorney for the Sandy Hook parents, Mark Bankston, confirmed that he’d had requests from “several law enforcement agencies,” including the January 6 committee, to turn over the phone data, and that he intends to do so “immediately.”

More men in their twenties and thirties are taking little blue pills for a variety of sexual ills, from erectile dysfunction to anxiety about their performance in the bedroom. Ben Bryant speaks to users, doctors and relationship counsellors about a very curious phenomenon

BreAnn Scally quit her job at PetSmart in September of 2021. She had been bathing and grooming dogs at the retail chain’s Salinas, California, store for seven months, and she struggled to get by in such a pricey area on $15 per hour. She left in search of better pay and less stress. But PetSmart wasn’t done with Scally. The following January, she was doing one of her regular credit checks through Experian when she saw her new debt: She owed $5,000 for the cost of her training through PetSmart’s “grooming academy,” as well as another $500 for the tools she’d received for the job. PetSmart was apparently seeking to collect because Scally had left less than a year into a 24-month minimum tenure listed in the contract she’d signed. After years of working to clean up her credit, Scally says her score dropped from the high 600’s to the low 600’s, enough to complicate signing a new apartment lease. She didn’t know where she would find the money to pay the collection agency, IC System.

Damming the powerful waters of the Columbia River was a boon for cheap, clean electricity. But the fish that swam those waters are dying out. And the agency in charge isn’t stopping that. After nearly a century without salmon, Conant and other members of upper Columbia River tribes want to reintroduce the fish into waters long blocked by the dams. But there’s been something blocking those efforts, too: the Bonneville Power Administration. The U.S. government promised to preserve tribes’ access to salmon in a series of treaties signed in the 1850s. Upholding those treaties now rests in no small part with Bonneville, a federal agency little known outside the Northwest that takes hydropower generated at Grand Coulee and other dams and sells it wholesale to electric utilities, primarily in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Decades ago, Congress placed the agency at the center of salmon recovery, giving it conflicting mandates: protect fish and fund their recovery, all while running a business off the dams that have reduced fish populations by the millions.

JAMESTOWN TOWNSHIP—What started as a fight over an LGBTQ-themed graphic novel may end with the closure of a west Michigan public library. Voters in Jamestown Township, a politically conservative community in Ottawa County, rejected renewal Tuesday of a millage that would support the Patmos Library. That vote guts the library’s operating budget in 2023 — 84 percent of the library’s $245,000 budget comes from property taxes collected through a millage. Sponsor Without a millage, the library is likely to run out of money sometime late next year, said Larry Walton, library board president.

A BBC investigation links a little-known type of company to fraud, terrorism and money laundering. Sanctioned Russian oligarchs from Vladimir Putin's inner circle exploited a UK secrecy loophole left open by the government. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg - judo partners of the Russian president - used a type of company that was not required to identify its real owners. Ministers have acknowledged concerns that these companies, known as English Limited Partnerships (ELPs), have also been abused by criminals. A joint investigation by the BBC and Finance Uncovered has discovered evidence linking a number of ELPs to fraud, terrorism and money laundering. In 2016 and 2017, the government introduced measures that forced almost all UK companies to identify their real owners. ELPs were not covered by these new transparency laws. Since then, more than 4,500 of them have been set up.

A new Netflix docuseries evades a disturbing truth about why a mob of young white men felt entitled to engage in nihilistic behavior at the late '90s festival.

Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues. “The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of covid, has created this shortage,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “This shortage is contrived.”

I completed America's most disgusting treat

New CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav is already making some devastatingly evil creative decisions around the company's films, TV shows, and streaming service HBO Max.

An allegedly progressive Twitter personality is being dragged for their job at the Amazon of war.

He’s been explaining the Matrix while his attorneys accidentally gave the other side two whole years of his texts and emails.

How did extremists take over the GOP?

The announcement in mid-July that the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) would cease operations, no longer offering courses or degrees, is a significant and telling event. Whatever the concrete circumstances and whichever individuals or bodies may bear some degree of responsibility, the shuttering of the once renowned school is a further sign—in the broadest sense—that, in the eyes of the American ruling elite, as we noted in April 2021 in regard to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, “the artists can go hang themselves.” The situation is extraordinary. Not only was the SFAI one of the oldest art academies in the US, and the oldest in its Western half, it was located in one of the most dynamic cultural centers in the country historically, the Bay Area. In fact, the institute was a focal point of various artistic trends and movements in the 20th century. Now it has disappeared, without substantial outcry or protest, certainly not from the city’s affluent upper echelons.