By Thursday afternoon, Musk went onstage at a conference — honestly itself a weird thing to do in the middle of a hostile takeover or whatever? — and said words that I think a connoisseur of mergers and acquisitions, or of Elon Musk, will interpret to mean “okay sure I was kidding a little”: “I am not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” the billionaire entrepreneur said Thursday at a TED event in Vancouver. Musk said he has a Plan B if Twitter rejects his offer, without offering more details. … Musk said his intent “is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company.” When Musk was pretending to take Tesla private, he pretended that he was going to let all of Tesla's existing shareholders remain shareholders of the new “private” Tesla. This is not a thing, and it was never going to work, but it was a nice friendly promise for Musk to make given that he was never going to take Tesla private. And now he’s doing it again, saying that he will take Twitter private while also keeping as many existing shareholders as he can. Sure buddy!

In a video seen more 700,000 times on TikTok, gay Missouri lawmaker Ian Mackey called out Basye. He compared the anti-trans bill to his own experience as a queer student growing up and even brought up Basye’s own gay brother. “Your brother wanted to tell you he was gay, didn’t he?” Mackey asked him. Basye said he did and his brother thought their family would hold it against him. “Why would he think that?” Mackey asked. “I don’t know,” replied Basye. The GOP representative said, “that was never going to happen.” Mackey said, “I would have been afraid to tell you too. I would have been afraid to tell you to because of stuff like this because this is what you're focused on. This is the legislation you want to put forward. This is what consumes your time ... I was afraid of people like you growing up.” He continued that he grew up with people like Basye, “nice people” who voted against Mackey’s rights and against the rights of LGBTQ+ people. “Thank God I made it out … I think every day about the kids who are still there who haven't made out, who haven't escaped from this kind of bigotry. Gentlemen, I'm not afraid of you anymore,” Mackey said. “Because you're gonna lose. You may win this today, but you're going to lose.”

Shortly after Catalina Ortiz-Sierra lost her job and failed to make payments on what she thought was a loan, a collections agent in 2019 threatened to take away her dog, Milo, a Shih Tzu-poodle mix. “I was like, ‘What do you mean you can take my dog away?’” Ms. Ortiz-Sierra, 22, said in an interview on Thursday. “I was so confused.” The Boston resident was shocked to learn that she didn’t own her dog, but rather was leasing Milo, as if he were a car or an apartment. It’s a practice that some states, including Massachusetts and others, have made illegal, officials said. On Wednesday, the Massachusetts attorney general announced that a California-based financial services company had agreed to $930,000 in debt relief and restitution to settle allegations that it was illegally leasing dogs in the Bay State, including to Ms. Ortiz-Sierra.

The woman who claims a Hamilton County Deputy baptized her in Soddy Lake in 2019 as a way to get out of an arrest was found dead in a residence in Soddy-Daisy Wednesday night, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI). A TBI spokesman says Hamilton County deputies found the body of 42-year-old Shandle Marie Riley at a home on Log Cabin Lane. The Hamilton County Medical Examiner will conduct an autopsy.

Democratic donor Ed Buck, who in 2021 was convicted by a federal jury of nine felonies, including giving methamphetamine to two men who died at his West Hollywood apartment after being injected with the drug, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, a spokesperson for the United States Attorney's Office Central District of California said Thursday. Buck, 67, was sentenced to 360 months, said spokesperson Ciaran McEvoy. Buck was found guilty in 2021 of two counts of distribution of methamphetamine resulting in death, four counts of distribution of methamphetamine, one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises and two counts of enticement to travel in interstate commerce for prostitution. Gemmel Moore, 26, died of an overdose in July 2017 and Timothy Dean, 55, died in January 2019.

Thieves have long found cheese as lucrative as many people find it delicious, and a sophisticated heist in the Netherlands has dairy farmers there on high alert. Gerda van Dorp, a Dutch cheese farmer in the town of Fijnaart, in the south of the country, woke up on March 29 to a mostly empty cheese storage room. Overnight, unknown thieves had taken from her shelves 161 wheels of cheese, weighing 3,500 pounds, that had taken months to make and mature. The value: about $23,000. “It was like waking up in a movie,” said Ms. van Dorp, who runs her business and farm together with her husband, Joost. Cheese from similar robberies in 2016 was later located in Eastern Europe, said Theo Dekker, the chairman of an interest group for Dutch dairy farmers. The incident has left some farmers on edge, and Ms. van Dorp said that several other farmers had reached out to her for support. The thieves also stole her trailer and two wheelbarrows from the farm, the police said, presumably to transport the cheese to a bus or a truck. (A wheel of cheese is roughly 10 kilos, or 22 pounds.) The police said they recovered the trailer and the wheelbarrows nearby. Ms. van Dorp guessed that whoever stole the cheese must have been watching her farm, where she lives with her husband and two children, for a while. The incident happened while the gate to the property was left open for an overnight milk delivery.

The USS The Sullivans was seen listing heavily to its starboard side, and sitting lower in the water than usual. (The mainstream media won’t discuss this, but we can’t rule out Russian saboteurs taking revenge for the loss of the Moskva.)

Ukrainian forces attacked the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva, causing significant damage aboard the vessel.

“She was an intellectual and political force not that long ago, and that’s why my encounter with her was so jarring. Because there was just no trace of that.”

The global elite’s obsession with climate change takes away from many other major problems facing the planet

As the Bank of Canada hikes interest rates again, this time by half a percentage point, Canadians are "climbing a wall of worry," and can't seem to let go and enjoy the fact that the economy is very strong and likely growing stronger.

Five of Alabama's seven U.S. congressional districts are among the bottom 35 districts in the nation for average life expectancy.

He's our subway hero

"While there have been factual inaccuracies in recent reports about our work for Amazon, being involved in any way was a mistake."

Viral TikTok claims Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is blocking border trade to drive inflation and hurt Democrats in the midterms.

The actor/author was disappointed by the sexism and insensitivity of his 2004 memoir ‘Just a Geek,’ so he decided to revise it. He talks to MEL about getting a do-over, living with the anger of how his parents mistreated him and why he still stands with Chris Hardwick

Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. entered a plea of guilty on Wednesday to a misdemeanor charge of forcibly touching a woman at a New York City nightclub in 2018.

Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet as an NFT for $2.9 million last year. He listed the NFT for sale again at $48 million last week.

America conceives of itself as an “ownership society.” Nearly two-thirds of U.S. households own their home, and the idea of renting is inseparable from ownership in the U.S. context. Renting is given meaning by its relationship to ownership—it’s how you live if you can’t afford, or aren’t yet ready, to own. America treats renting as it has treated the minimum wage for the past several decades: unworthy of serious concern, just a phase in young people’s lives, and a long-term outcome only for those unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This perspective is a big part of why renters enjoy so few protections, and why the U.S. showers roughly $150 billion on homeowners each year but only a fraction of that on renters, despite renters having about half the median household income of owners. Yet look no further than the Great Recession—or the declining home values in much of the Rust Belt over the past half century—to see the tremendous drawbacks of homeownership. Those losses aren’t equitably distributed, either: Nearly 2 million mortgages are underwater in the U.S., and they’re disproportionately concentrated in Black and Latino communities. Tenants in coastal cities, meanwhile, know the pain of forking over more and more rent every year, unable to save for a down payment and living at the mercy of sometimes unscrupulous landlords.

NASA is planning to test an unconventional system for launching small objects to low Earth orbit. The system, which uses intense centrifugal force and a final propulsion stage, aims to make launches more affordable and environmentally friendly, but the concept remains unproven. SpinLaunch has been running tests of its system in the New Mexico desert for the past several months, and we certainly took notice of the California startup when it performed a successful first test on October 22, 2021, when the A-33 Suborbital Mass Accelerator—working at just 20% capacity—flung a 10-foot-long projectile to an altitude of tens of thousands of feet, according to the company. The current suborbital accelerator is a one-third scale version of the machine SpinLaunch would like to build—a gigantic kinetic launch system capable of hurling objects to the edge of space. Flung to an extreme altitude, the projectile’s propulsion stage would kick in, providing the final boost to low Earth orbit (LEO). The system, should it work, would introduce an entirely new means of delivering objects to space, as potential payloads could include small satellites, on-orbit scientific experiments, building materials, or even the ashes of loved ones.