Judges ordered Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Green, 43, to be involuntarily committed the day they died in September 2018, but their families said they were not violent. Newton was only seeking medicine for her fear and anxiety and Green’s family said she was committed to a mental facility at a regular mental health appointment by a counselor she had never seen before. Flood, 69, was sentenced about 30 minutes after the verdict and after several relatives of the women said his decision to press forward with the shortest route left an impossible-to-fix hole in their lives. “This was a deliberate act set in motion by a pompous, stubborn man,” Green's sister Donnela Green-Johnson told the judge. “He abused the trust my sister, Nikki, Wendy and the state of South Carolina entrusted him with. And for what? To save time.”

Mike Bivins had supposedly left the scene of political extremism. As of October, Bivins had an administrative job at Oregon Health & Science University, where he had worked since 2006. He and his wife of nine years lived in a high-end apartment building in the Lloyd District. He had ceased the work two years earlier that had brought him some regional notice and bylines in Willamette Week: filming clashes between dueling protesters in the streets of Portland. In November 2021, he got divorced, quit his OHSU job, cashed out his retirement account, and started living on the streets. This month, he allegedly went on a weeklong, citywide hate-crime spree. Bivins, 34, is charged with breaking windows and spray-painting a Nazi-referencing death threat at Congregation Beth Israel in Northwest Portland; attempting to set fire to the Muslim Community Center in North Portland while people were inside the building; and breaking windows at another synagogue and a Black-owned restaurant. He is currently being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center on 11 counts: five charges of second-degree bias crimes, five charges of criminal mischief and one felony charge of first-degree arson. Friends and former colleagues are left with the same question as his alleged victims: How did he get from point A to point B?

The asset restrictions for SSI are so onerous that they are almost literally unbelievable.

When Instagram repeatedly shut down OnlyFans model Kitty Lixo’s account for ‘suspicious activity,’ she devised an unorthodox solution for getting it back: having sex with Instagram staffers who could pull some strings

Philosopher Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s new book reclaims the concept from elite power brokers.

Its embattled leader, Nina Jankowicz, announced her resignation on Wednesday.

Biden’s administration has followed through on several of his promises to recommit the federal government to pursuing racist extremism, but other important initiatives are stalled.

JK it’s just transphobia again.

Why do tenants have to bring their own refrigerators to rent apartments in Los Angeles?

New Millennium Park restrictions for minors went into effect Thursday. As of 6 p.m. minors must be accompanied by an adult Thursday – Sunday or they are prohibited form the park.

“The time for gentile politics as usual has come to an end,” the defeated Republican wrote, presumably not in reference to the politics of non-Jews.

During a House hearing, the GOP demonized patients and doctors with QAnon-style conspiracy theories

Tesla CEO and “guy who won’t shut up” Elon Musk has said that he won’t proceed with his $44 billion takeover of Twitter unless they can prove that bots make up less than 5% of the userbase. It’s the latest in what can be described as something between a tantrum and nervous breakdown from one of the world's richest people, a man who, despite having no PR or marketing department, desperately craves to be in the news cycle at all times. [published yesterday before we found out Elon is a sex pest]

SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 in severance after she accused Elon Musk of exposing himself and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for a sexual massage.

How American life was changed by a subsidy that ride-hail companies can no longer afford.

Matt Pike overcame long odds to find success in metal bands Sleep and High on Fire. But his deepening obsession with conspiracy theories has created a dissonant riff.

In his new book Nazi Billionaires, David de Jong explores the damning history of companies who have refused to examine their murky history with Hitler. The former reporter for Bloomberg News examines German companies that own beer brewers and wine producers as well as famous US brands such as Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. But he casts an especially harsh light on car makers led by household names such as BMW and Porsche, which powered the postwar economic miracle and contribute about a 10th of the nation’s gross domestic product.

George Miller is distracted. Five minutes into our meeting, he begs forgiveness to take a quick call. And then, on an iPad tilted in his direction, the filmmaker watches as a camera feed from the Australian outback offers him a live view of a pre-shoot for his next feature, Furiosa. His supervising stunt coordinator and second unit director, Guy Norris, whose work with Miller stretches back to 1981’s Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior, is already shooting sequences for the new film. Set 15 years before the events of Mad Max: Fury Road, the film will tell the backstory of Charlize Theron’s enigmatic Furiosa, this time played by Anya Taylor-Joy. “Here I am doing an interview with you halfway across the world, and I’m able to look at this footage being shot far west from where I am and we’re discussing it as we go through the process,” says Miller, marveling at the technology. “It’s amazing, really.” It has been seven years since Fury Road established itself as the most innovative and exciting blockbuster in decades, earning six Oscars from 10 nominations. Miller was nominated for Best Director and the film for Best Picture. And now here he is, on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, where he will premiere his next feature — the film he shot in-between — Three Thousand Years of Longing, perhaps suggesting that Miller’s movies can be likened to that old adage about buses: you wait forever for one to come along only for two to stack up in quick succession. Miller has described Three Thousand Years of Longing as the “opposite” of Fury Road — an “anti-Mad Max” — and in many ways, he’s correct. It is dialogue-driven; a lingering two-hander in which a scholar on a trip to a speaking engagement in Istanbul inadvertently summons a Djinn who details his long journey through fantasy and history as he endeavors to tempt this scholar — who claims she wants for nothing — to make her three wishes. Tilda Swinton plays Alithea, the scholar, and Idris Elba the Djinn. But the director of Mad Max: Fury Road does scale in his sleep, and Three Thousand Years of Longing doesn’t just tell us about the Djinn’s complex journey to a modern-day hotel room in Istanbul. It shows us, too, bringing us into the courts of the Queen of Sheba and the Ottoman rulers, the bedroom of a 19th Century Turkish slave courtesan, and all the way to present-day London; despite the film having been entirely shot in Australia during the pandemic. There is magic, and there is war. Mythical creatures and conquering armies all conjured in exquisite detail. It is a chamber piece in the George Miller mold, which is to say that it flatly refuses to be confined to a single chamber. It is also a project that has burned brightly for Miller for more than 20 years. The filmmaker optioned A.S. Byatt’s short story, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, a little while after it was published in 1994. He has tinkered away at it, in between other projects ever since, collaborating with his daughter, Augusta Gore, on a screenplay that took on added dimension as time and technology developed. It is a film about love and human connection — even if one of the parties may not strictly be human — but it is also a story about a world that is becoming increasingly distracted by other, less essential, priorities.

Greek composer topped US charts with Chariots of Fire’s uplifting piano-led theme

Under Greg Lopez’s proposal, the 2018 gubernatorial race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits. Coloradans have elected just one Republican governor in the last 50 years. A current GOP candidate for governor has an idea that could change that: stop counting each vote equally. Former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez, who holds the top line on the 2022 Republican primary ballot, says Colorado should create an electoral college system for electing candidates to statewide office. The plan, which would be the first of its kind on the state level, would give far more voting power to Coloradans in rural, conservative counties and dilute the voting power of Coloradans in more populous urban and suburban areas. Even as turnout numbers vary over time, the sheer number of rural conservative counties would create a built-in advantage for Republicans. Lopez outlined his proposal at a May 15 campaign stop in Silverton. An audio recording of the event made by a political tracker was provided to 9NEWS. “One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, is, as governor, I’m going to introduce a conversation about doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials and doing an electoral college vote for statewide elected officials,” Lopez said. Lopez said his electoral college plan would weight counties’ votes based on their voter turnout percentage to encourage turnout.