Labourers at the one of the world’s largest egg factories arrived at the plant in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to discover they were about to work themselves out of a job. As they gathered at the huge barns housing stacks of caged hens, the workers were told to forget about their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of avian influenza. Even supervisors were assigned to the arduous task of dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises raced to contain the spread of the virus, amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the US in seven years. The culling has been repeated at chicken and turkey farms across Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah. More than 22m birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the US’s biggest producer of eggs. The slaughter of 5.3m hens at Rembrandt is the largest culling at any factory farm in the country. Workers spent nearly a month pulling the dead poultry from the cages and dumping them in carts before they were piled high in nearby fields and buried in huge pits. The killing over, about 250 people were summarily thrown out of work with just a few dozen skeleton staff remaining.

A state audit of five law enforcement agencies in California found bias among officers toward people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ people, as well as a smattering of support for far-right extremist organizations such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters. The audit also found the agencies had insufficient policies in place to safeguard against such attitudes within their ranks, to investigate them when they are alleged or to address them once identified, according to a report issued by the state auditor’s office this week. “As a result, these departments are at a higher risk of being unaware of and unable to effectively address the ways in which their officers exhibit bias,” the audit found. The audit was conducted at the request of state lawmakers. It comes amid rising concerns nationally about far-right extremism among police and other law enforcement officers, as well as evidence that bias complaints against California officers are overwhelmingly dismissed after internal investigations. On the national level, attention to the problem increased after it was revealed that police officers were among those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In California, a recent Times investigation found that police agencies across the state upheld just 49 racial profiling complaints from 2016 to 2019, or less than 2% of the roughly 3,500 allegations filed. The Los Angeles Police Department has been accused of showing sympathy to far-right protesters at demonstrations in L.A., and L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva recently said 80% of his workforce was “conservative and far right.”

A British cryptocurrency expert accused of breaching North Korea sanctions by speaking at a conference in Pyongyang is facing a £1 million fine and 20 years in jail in the United States. Christopher Emms, 30, from Reigate, Surrey, allegedly “advised members of the North Korean government on cutting-edge cryptocurrency”.

Two South Koreans have been arrested on charges of stealing military secrets on behalf of a suspected North Korean spy agent who paid them in cryptocurrency, the police said on Thursday. A 38-year-old executive at a cyber-currency company met the agent through an online cryptocurrency community six years ago and has been paid $600,000 in cryptocurrency since February last year to work for him, the South Korean national police said. Together, the executive and the agent tried to hack into the South Korean military’s command communication system, but failed. They succeeded, however, in recruiting a 29-year-old South Korean military officer, who helped steal classified military data by taking pictures with a smartphone, the police said. The police did not provide details about the stolen data, but said that the officer was paid about $38,000 in cryptocurrency by the agent. The two South Koreans were arrested earlier this month and now face criminal charges of breaking the country’s National Security Act. The South Korean police said they could not arrest the agent, who was operating from abroad, but said that they believed he was a hacker working for the North Korean government. South and North Korea have remained technically at war since 1950. For decades, the two Koreas have waged intelligence and counterespionage campaigns. In recent years, the war has increasingly shifted into cyberspace.

Some insurers pocketed ‘eye-popping’ overpayments, billing records show.

Illinois law bans schools from fining students. So local police are doing it for them, issuing thousands of tickets a year for truancy, vaping, fights and other misconduct. Children are then thrown into a legal system designed for adults.

The U.S. military is actively discussing an initiative, proposed by a defense contractor, to fund athletic scholarships for tens of thousands of college athletes each year in exchange for their mandatory service. Over the last seven months, the proposal, which would not include football and basketball players, has reached military and civilian leaders throughout the Department of Defense and key members of Congress. It has been pitched as a solution to inefficient recruiting within the armed forces—which spend billions on recruits who fail basic training—and financial unease in college sports, where athletic departments face increasing cuts to non-revenue teams like tennis and wrestling. Needless to say, the proposal would require a massive rethink for both intercollegiate athletics and the Department of Defense, two American institutions often criticized for their lack of innovation. It would almost assuredly draw pushback from some key stakeholders, such as the NCAA and its members. That’s before the task of convincing high school athletes, an attractive demographic to military recruiters, that a college athletic scholarship is worth a commitment to years of military or alternative civilian service once they have completed their schooling.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights found there is probable cause that the city of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Police Department “engage in a pattern or practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act,” according to a report released Wednesday.The Department of Human Rights relied on hundreds of interviews, a review of 700 hours of body worn camera footage and nearly 480,000 pages of city and MPD documents to come to that conclusion.Tucked inside the 72-page report are some astonishing findings, statements and anecdotes.

A new generation of fitness instructors teaches simple skills that make a difference, writes @amandamull. Why is beginner-level exercise treated like a niche?

They’re toasted.

The world wonders.

After significant cutbacks and tragedies at their private equity–owned hospital, the community of Riverton, Wyoming, tried something different.

The US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine, sources tell CNN, a blind spot that's due in large part to the lack of US boots on the ground in the country -- and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems now pouring across the border. It's a conscious risk the Biden administration is willing to take. In the short term, the US sees the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of equipment to be vital to the Ukrainians' ability to hold off Moscow's invasion. A senior defense official said Tuesday that it is "certainly the largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict." But the risk, both current US officials and defense analysts say, is that in the long term, some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm. "We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero," said one source briefed on US intelligence. "It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time." In making the decision to send billions of dollars of weapons and equipment into Ukraine, the Biden administration factored in the risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places, a defense official said. But right now, the official said, the administration views a failure to adequately arm Ukraine as a greater risk.

Electronic music composer Klaus Schulze has died at the age of 74. According to a statement, Schulze passed away on Tuesday, April 26th. He had been suffering from an undisclosed illness, but his death was described as “sudden” by Frank Uhle, the managing director of his record label, SPV. “We were shocked and saddened to hear the news of Klaus Schulze’s sudden death,” Uhle said in a statement. “We lose and will miss a good personal friend – one of the most influential and important composers of electronic music – a man of conviction and an exceptional artist. Our thoughts in this hour are with his wife, sons and family. His always cheerful nature, his innovative spirit and his impressive body of work remain indelibly rooted in our memories.” A pioneer of the krautrock and techno genres, the German-born musician released more than 60 albums over his five decade career. He was also an early member of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, and collaborated with the likes of Steve Winwood, Michael Shrieve, Ernst Fuchs, Rainer Bloss, and Lisa Gerrard. Most recently, he worked with Hans Zimmer on the soundtrack to Dune.

The Minneapolis Police Department has engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination in violation of the state's civil rights law over the past decade, enabled by a culture of leadership that doesn't hold problem officers accountable, according to a scathing report published Wednesday morning by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. In a two-year investigation, the state human rights department found Minnesota's largest municipal police agency uses force, stops, searches, arrests and cites people of color — particularly Black people — in starkly higher rates than white people, according to the 72-page report. Minneapolis police also conduct "covert social media" surveillance on Black individuals and organizations that are unrelated to criminal activity, and used phony accounts to criticize a City Council member and state official online. Officers also regularly use "racist, misogynistic, and disrespectful language," the report found. City and police department leaders have been aware of these practices, which undermine Minneapolis' public system, the report found. "Yet, these leaders have not collectively acted with the urgency, coordination, and intentionality necessary to address racial disparities to improve public safety," according to the report. Instead, the department has continued to emphasize paramilitary training that results in officers "unnecessarily escalating encounters or using inappropriate levels of force." And the system of holding officers accountable for misconduct is "insufficient and ineffective," according to the report.

The South Philadelphia police task force that fatally shot TJ Siderio were known as "cowboys." Some they arrested thought they were being carjacked, robbed or stalked — with dangerous consequences. As for the plainclothes cops who tailed Waters — seemingly in violation of a departmental directive to avoid most car chases — they continued as officers assigned to the South Task Force, a roving tactical unit that uses social media and on-the-ground surveillance to seize illegal guns and arrest suspected felons across South Philadelphia. Its mission is central to a prime goal of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw: getting illegal guns off the street to combat an unprecedented surge in shootings and homicides. But it began to attract scrutiny in March, when a task force officer, Edsaul Mendoza, fatally shot a 12-year-old boy, Thomas “TJ” Siderio, in the back. Some in the community, and even within law enforcement, now say there were warning signs long before that. Task force members, they say — wearing jeans and hoodies and driving unmarked cars — had gained a reputation as “cowboys” or “jump-out boys,” creating unsafe or chaotic situations in pursuit of arrests.

Pinellas County commissioners voted Tuesday to sue the state over its new elections reform law, which includes a provision they say illegally targets Pinellas to accommodate the political ambitions of one state legislator. On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that created an office within the executive branch to investigate election crime. The law includes a provision that requires county commissioners in single-member districts to run again for their seats following a redistricting process, which Pinellas finalized in December. But the language included multiple exceptions so that Pinellas County is the only government affected in the state. Due to the provision, District 5 Commissioner Karen Seel and District 7 Commissioner Rene Flowers must run again for their seats in November even though they have two years left in their four-year terms.

For the past year, Twitter has censored tweets about a documentary exploring the origins of the QAnon movement. The documentary, Q: Into the Storm, debuted as a six-part series on HBO Max in March 2021. Twitter decided to “limit the visibility” of the series on its social network shortly after the release, a Twitter spokesperson said. Twitter admitted that it was restricting the reach of tweets about the series after the director, Cullen Hoback, tried paying to boost his own tweet publicizing the film’s iTunes debut on March 21. He was barred from buying promotion for his tweet. An email from Twitter’s ad department stated the film had been “manually reviewed” and deemed to be in violation of the social network’s “inappropriate content” policy. The documentary criticizes Twitter for the role it has played in the spread of QAnon. Believing the response in error, Hoback’s production house, Hyrax Films, reached out to members of the Twitter communications team to request help. A response came three days later. To Hoback’s surprise, Twitter informed the suppression was intentional. “In 2021, Twitter made the decision not to allow promotion of this documentary via advertising on the platform,” the company said. “This decision was aligned with the actions we took to suspend accounts dedicated to QAnon and to limit the visibility of QAnon-related content on the platform generally. As a result, the client will not be able to promote this content.”

A self-described “comically terrible spy” who is believed to have worked with federal authorities investigating the activities of Deutsche Bank and its ties with former President Donald Trump was found dead east of Lincoln Park, police said Tuesday. Valentin Broeksmit, 45, was found about 7 a.m. Monday in the 4500 block of Multnomah Street, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. An autopsy was pending to determine his cause of death. Broeksmit was reported missing last year, with police saying he was last seen around 4 p.m. April 6, 2021, driving a red Mini Cooper on Riverside Drive in Griffith Park. The Los Angeles Police Department reached out at the time for help from the public finding him.

Social media is awash in videos and memes that imagine an alternate reality for the beleaguered actor