Warner Bros. Discovery has different plans for the streaming era.

A sloth has become so besotted with one of his keepers that he now refuses to get out of bed until she cradles him like a baby.

Financial malfeasance has never been more rampant, or more under-punished. Everywhere you look in America, crime is out of control. Whether it’s Elon Musk—the world’s richest man—cutting regulatory corners in public, professional son-in-law Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion payoff from the Saudis, hackers draining hundreds of millions of dollars out of a crypto game, or the meatpacking industry boosting profits through price gouging, the economy’s winners color outside the lines with increasing chutzpah. There’s a lot of evidence that the country is in the middle of an alarming white-collar crime wave, but, unlike street crime, the phenomenon doesn’t show up much in our political discourse. It’s time to change that. Though most elected officials aren’t treating white-collar malfeasance as a matter of urgent public concern, the public seems to be experiencing it as one. Excitement around crypto currency has spurred the growth of a whole new fraud category, propelling investment scam losses to a record high, including over $50 million reported lost to crypto scams in Q1 of 2021. But you can’t blame tech: Phone scams took just under $30 billion off Americans in the pandemic’s first year, a 400 percent increase since 2015 and by far the highest ever estimated. (Though the voice on the phone is probably just some schmuck overseas, rogue Internet Service Providers and marketing database companies in the US are cashing in on their work.) People are getting taken at work, too: In a survey of service workers, 34 percent reported an increase in wage theft by their employers during the pandemic. A commentator could pull up these figures all day, and so could a prosecutor. Perhaps the thieves feel safe because the number of corporate and white-collar prosecutions has been on a declining trend for 10 or 20 years now, depending on how you measure. At the beginning of the pandemic, federal enforcers told reporters to expect a flood of cases at the end of 2020, but the year closed with cases at their lowest recorded levels. The Biden administration got to work and managed to make 2021’s numbers the second-lowest ever. That’s no surprise when you remember most of the enforcement drop happened under Biden’s boss Barack Obama, not Donald Trump or George W. Bush. Taking it easy on financial crime has bipartisan consensus, and a shocking number of people are paying the price. A Harris poll suggests almost 60 million Americans lost money to phone scams between March 2020 and 2021, making you roughly 1,786 times more likely to be robbed with a phone than with a gun.

Creators migrated to the streamer because of unprecedented creative freedom, now they’re facing a very different reality

Made from simple items, the Oreometer turns snacking into a science.

. . . This research has found most women who play sport are not concerned about the inclusion of transgender women and girls. Indeed, only a minority of women believed trans women have an “unfair advantage”. However, the views of most women who play sport stand in sharp contrast to the views of most men. Despite not being directly affected, men, such as the prime minister, seem to have strong opinions about the participation of trans athletes in women’s sport. The reason for this remains unclear, given men do not express strong opinions about other issues which impact women’s sport . . .

Adamatzky found that size of fungal lexicon can be up to 50 words; however, the core lexicon of most frequently used words does not exceed 15-20 words; Schizophyllum commune and Omphalotus nidiformis have largest lexicon while species Cordyceps militaris and Flammulina velutipes have less extensive one.

Housing advocates say legislation passed by the General Assembly on a bipartisan vote would have helped reign in the most negligent landlords.

An amazingly well-preserved fossil suggests the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs also had some type of feather or feather precursor

They want someone to knock on your door, too. Not to put you in the newspaper, though.

In Contra Chrome, Leah carefully charts this road and its terrain in a funny and easily accessible way. In webcomic form, she documents how over the last decade, Google’s browser has become a threat to user privacy and the democratic process itself. With her meticulous rearrangement of Scott McCloud‘s Google-commissioned Chrome comic from 2008, she delivers what she calls "a much-needed update". Laying bare the inner workings of the controversial browser, she creates the ultimate guide to one of the world‘s most widely used surveillance tools: Google Chrome, which – by design – is all about you.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-run municipal corporation has organised a two-day anti-encroachment drive in the area. Days after north Delhi’s Jahangirpuri was struck by communal violence, bulldozers arrived in the area at around 9 am on Wednesday (April 20) morning and began demolishing properties. The area saw heightened security, Indian Express reported, with 12 companies (around 1,250 jawans) of the CRPF deployed in and around the area. However, the Supreme Court later in the morning ordered status quo on the demolition drive. Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana said the matter should be listed for hearing tomorrow (Thursday), and until the court comes to a decision, status quo should be maintained. The court was hearing a plea filed by senior advocate Dushyant Dave. “Something serious requires your immediate intervention. This is about a completely unconstitutional and illegal demolition which has been ordered in Jahangirpuri area, where riots took place last week. No notice has been served. There is a provision for appeal under the Municipal Corporation Act. We have filed a provisional application(before SC). It was supposed to start at 2 PM but they started the demolition today morning at 9 AM knowing that we will mention,” Dave had said before the bench. However, the drive continued in Jahangirpuri despite the Supreme Court’s order.

Benny Johnson yelled at staff who say they weren’t paid on time

It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business of conference going seemed to be beside the point, a gesture at how we used to conduct politics back before life in America spun out of control. There were jokes, or maybe they were serious questions, about whether one of the guys tagging along with us was a fed. I surreptitiously made a few searches of the name he’d given me and was surprised when I couldn’t find a single plausible hit—though that could have been because he was a hyper-secret crypto type; there were some of those floating around. Not that anyone cared. These were people who were used to guarding their words. “Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired woman named Amanda Milius said to me—as she somewhat imperiously dealt with a guy at the door who was skeptical about letting a reporter into the party—“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids to Moloch. We’re just the last normal people, hanging out at the end of the world.” I had met Milius outside the Hilton when I asked for a cigarette, and she began to chaperone me around, telling people who eyed my press pass that I was there to profile her as an up-and-coming female director who, she said, had attracted more Amazon streams than any woman ever with her first documentary, a counternarrative about Russiagate. “Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the photo shoot,” she kept saying. In this world, almost every word is layered in so much irony that you can never be sure what to take seriously or not, perhaps a semiconscious defense mechanism for people convinced that almost everyone is out to get them. “Oh, fuck,” she said as we walked into a small ballroom where the party was already underway. The room was pitifully quiet, lit in strip-club red, and the sparse crowd was almost entirely male, with a cash bar off in the corner that seemed unable to produce drinks fast enough to buoy the mood. “We have a thing we say,” she said. “ ‘This is what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.’ Well, this is exactly what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.”

In the 2012 Hollywood hit “Zero Dark Thirty,” a red-haired Central Intelligence Agency analyst played by Jessica Chastain travels to a secret CIA prison and watches a colleague waterboard a screaming Al Qaeda suspect, then lock him in a box a little bigger than a mini-fridge, to make him talk. In 2002, red-haired CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer, then known by her maiden name Bikowsky, traveled to a secret CIA prison to watch the torture of Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded and locked in a “dog box,” Senate investigators reported. The Central Intelligence Agency had granted the filmmakers unprecedented access to agency officials, and outlets from NBC News to The New Yorker reported that Chastain’s character was patterned partially on Scheuer, citing her position but omitting her name because the agency said her work was classified. For two decades Scheuer was a central figure in some of the major controversies of America’s war on Islamist extremist groups, including secret detention centers and brutal interrogations. CIA operatives normally operate in a dark, shadowy world, but Scheuer’s experiences found the spotlight. Scheuer retired from her most recent role as deputy chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats late in 2021 and agreed to talk to Reuters this year. It’s the first interview she’s ever done, she said, and she decided to speak to make clear she was not forced out of the agency but left on her own terms. By policy, the CIA doesn’t discuss individual employees or confirm whether they worked at the agency. Over several calls that lasted two and half hours, Scheuer said she couldn’t discuss individual cases because they were classified. But in a broad sense, she said waterboarding cited in government reports was not torture, insisted such techniques can work and said any criticism of her was largely the result of her taking risks to combat terrorism. “I got bloodied,” she said, alluding to criticism of her agency in government and media reports, “and kept coming back to try again and again to do something. I'm proud that I wasn't on the sidelines. I didn't bury my head in the sand.” The New Yorker once dubbed Scheuer, again citing her position but omitting her name, as the “Queen of Torture,” writing that “she gleefully participated in torture sessions.” Now out of the CIA, Scheuer’s career has taken a turn: She is a “life coach,” running a business called YBeU Beauty, focusing on helping women “look good, feel good, and do good.” It is a world removed from her prior life, with the website featuring photos of her, thoughtful and confident.

Montpelier, the estate of James Madison, has gone from being the toast of the museum world to being, well, just plain toast. In March, the Montpelier Foundation board reneged on a June 2021 restructuring that gave descendants of the enslaved there “structural parity” on its board — a reversal criticized by Montpelier staff who had spent decades partnering with the descendant community in excavating the estate’s history of enslavement. A much-lauded promise to share power equally with the descendants of the enslaved has devolved into the erasure of key staff responsible for uncovering the history of enslavement at the estate of “The Father of the Constitution.” “They wanted to yank the narrative of Montpelier away from slavery, despite all of their protestations to the contrary,” said board member James French, chair of the Montpelier Descendants Committee . “And they wanted to create a false history that sees slavery and the constitution as unrelated opposites when in fact, freedom and slavery occupied the same place in Montpelier like no other place in the country.”

Democrats see Rep. Abigail Spanberger's district as competitive but winnable in a tough midterm fight. She thinks addressing GOP attacks on crime head on is key to keeping it. And Spanberger — who described the “defund” slogan as voters’ top issue in her own 2020 race — is one of many Democrats who worry those hits could prompt even more drastic political casualties than their unexpected losses two years ago. “I thought that was a terrible idea,” the Virginia Democrat said of the “defund” slogan, which she said obfuscated the meaning of police reform and confused voters. She and other Democrats are bracing for the GOP onslaught, unwilling to let Republican attacks go unanswered this year. Instead, they’re preemptively correcting the record. Spanberger, who spent years in law enforcement herself, offered a model on how to do that in a recent half-day tour that demonstrated her support for the Culpeper Police Department — speaking to over a dozen officers as they showed off drones and their K-9 unit, followed by a ride-along.

The Tennessee Republican Party voted Tuesday to remove former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus and two other people from the August primary ballot in the state's 5th Congressional District. The vote marked the culmination of months of effort by both GOP legislators and activists to boot Ortagus because she had only recently moved to the state. She was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. The state GOP’s executive committee has the authority to disqualify candidates from the primary ballot for failing to adhere to the party’s bylaws, which require a candidate to have voted in three of the last four GOP primaries, as well as to actively participate in the state or local Republican parties. The committee voted to remove Ortagus and fellow candidates Robby Starbuck and Baxter Lee, whose candidacies were also challenged, state GOP Chairman Scott Golden said. "I voted for Trump. I supported him," state Sen. Frank Niceley, the Republican who spearheaded the legislation, said in an interview last month. "I’ll vote for Trump as long as he lives. But I don’t want him coming out here to tell me who to vote for." In the earlier interview, Niceley, who is supporting former state House Speaker Beth Harwell in the primary and recently came under fire after he invoked Adolf Hitler in a state Senate floor speech about homelessness, suggested that only Jewish members of Trump’s family cared about Ortagus’ candidacy because of her Jewish faith. "I don’t think Trump cares one way or the other," he said. "I think Jared Kushner — he’s Jewish, she’s Jewish — I think Jared will be upset. Ivanka will be upset. I don’t think Trump cares."

In an extremely weird set of remarks, even for him, the Texas lawmaker opined at a live recording of his podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz: “I think there are people who are misguided, trying to drive, you know, Disney stepping in, saying, you know, in every episode now they’re gonna have, you know, Mickey and Pluto going at it. Like, really? It’s just like, come on guys, these are kids, and you know, you could always shift to Cinemax if you want that. Like, why do you have—it used to be, look, I’m a dad. You used to be able to put your kids on the Disney Channel and be like, alright, something innocuous will happen.”

Parents venting on social media is mostly harmless — but some reveal too much