In 2003, when the Supreme Court held, in Lawrence v. Texas, that criminalizing gay sex was unconstitutional, it insisted that the decision had nothing to do with marriage equality. In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “Do not believe it.” Then, in 2013, when the Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, emphasizing the tradition of letting the states define marriage, Scalia issued another warning, saying that “no one should be fooled” into thinking that the Court would leave states free to exclude gay couples from that definition. He was finally proved right two years later, when the reasoning on dignity and equality developed in those earlier rulings led to the Court’s holding that the Constitution requires all states to recognize same-sex marriage. Just as rights can unfold and expand, however, they can also retract and constrict in breathtaking ways, pursuing a particular strain of logic one case at a time. In the forthcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court is widely expected to overturn or severely undermine its abortion-rights cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In fact, following the comments of the six conservative Justices at the oral arguments in December, the strength of this expectation has spurred state legislative efforts to proceed as if Roe were already gone. A handful of states have passed laws, like the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs, that ban abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, in violation of precedents establishing that abortion cannot be banned before “viability,” at around twenty-four weeks. (On Thursday, Florida became the most recent.) Some of the laws have been blocked by the courts, but, if Mississippi prevails, the states expect to be free to enforce these bans.

The good news? Rats are down. The bad news? Cats are multiplying, they’re in the arena and baseball field, and rehoming them isn’t easy.

Eight women, including a state lawmaker, have accused the Nebraska businessman and GOP gubernatorial candidate of sexual misconduct.

Wind power was the No. 2 source for power generation in the U.S. for the first time ever on March 29, surpassing coal and nuclear power, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Thursday. Wind turbines in the continental U.S. produced 2,017 gigawatthours of electricity on the 29th, according to data from the EIA. While there have been days in the past when wind generation separately outpaced coal and nuclear generation, the 29th marked the first day that it surpassed both power sources.

A man charged with making pipe bombs in his mother's house in Wilder owned Nazi paraphernalia and spoke about killing Black people and Democrats, federal prosecutors allege. The U.S. Attorney's Office charged William Hillard, 51, on Thursday with illegally possessing an explosive device and a firearm. The federal complaint followed a raid of the house on Wednesday by local, state and federal authorities, during which they found a semiautomatic rifle adorned with "WHITE POWER" and skull stickers. Hillard cannot legally possess firearms due to a 1997 felony conviction in New Hampshire for possessing an explosive device. Hillard told police that he amassed the weaponry to protect himself from "Antifa" or "other Democrat-affiliated extremist groups," in anticipation of "societal unrest," court papers state.

The female dolphin washed up on Quintana Beach Sunday and was reportedly pushed back to sea while beachgoers tried to “swim with and ride the sick animal."

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, the FBI told Congress and the American people that the agency had failed to prevent or fully prepare for the worst attack on the U.S. Capitol in more than 200 years in part because it lacked the authority and capabilities to more aggressively monitor social media, where much of the planning for the insurrection took place. As FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last summer, the FBI had circulated intelligence materials and other resources before Jan. 6, but the agency had limits in what it could and couldn’t gather from social media. “When we have an authorized purpose and proper predication, there are a lot of things that we do at social media and we do do,” Wray said, “but [what] we cannot do on social media is, without proper predication and authorized purpose, just monitor just in case on social media.” Wray added, “Now, if the policies should be changed to reflect that, that might be one of the important lessons learned coming out of this whole experience. But that’s not something that currently the FBI has either the authority or certainly the resources, frankly, to do.” Since Wray’s testimony, the bureau has sought to ramp up its online surveillance capabilities, including by entering into one of the largest social-media monitoring contracts of any federal agency. Yet internal FBI records obtained by Rolling Stone show that, well before Jan. 6, the bureau already engaged in ongoing and widespread tracking of Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and other social-media platforms. The new documents suggest the agency has all the authority it needs to monitor the social-media platforms in the name of public safety — and, in fact, the bureau had done just that during the nationwide wave of racial justice protests in 2020. Critics of the FBI say that the bureau’s desire for more authority and surveillance tools is part of a decades-long expansion of the vast security apparatus inside the federal government.

A mysterious leaden sarcophagus discovered in the bowels of Paris' Notre-Dame cathedral after it was devastated by a fire will soon be opened and its secrets revealed, French archaeologists said Thursday.

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow’s invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date. The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses. The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war. But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin’s war machine.

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.