An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.

Nurses, doctors, and other employees have been instructed not to enter or exit the building, and not open the doors to anyone. Incoming ambulances are being diverted away from St. Luke's to other area hospitals. Those who need medical attention are asked to go to other facilities, while the general public is urged to avoid the area entirely. Boise Police officers stood outside the hospital doors as several dozen protestors gathered, holding umbrellas and signs decrying the "medical kidnapping" of a 10-month-old baby who was taken from his parents and brought to St. Luke's after investigators determined this weekend that he was in "imminent danger." Tuesday marked the fourth straight day that demonstrators have protested outside of St. Luke's. (Ladies and gentlemen, Ammon Bundy is up to his bullshit again)

The test ads weren’t supposed to be live, but could appear in the future.

Compute North, which plans to host a controversial cryptomining center in Greenville, allegedly withdrew its application for a different site in Pitt County because of the area’s racial demographics, according to a lawsuit filed last month in Minnesota state court. Compute North is headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. It has since selected a site within the Greenville city limits for its cryptocurrency operations, Policy Watch reported in January. The lawsuit, filed by Rohit Shirole, is an employment dispute that details allegations of racial discrimination, but also includes information about Compute North’s siting decisions . Shirole, whose title was vice president and business development, is of South Asian descent. He alleges he was treated differently from white employees because of his race. He also alleges that the company asked him to sign an “overly broad” non-compete agreement, then fired him after he refused to do so. The company allegedly owes him back pay, based on sales commissions. The company denies all allegations of racial discrimination, retaliation and non-payment, according to court records. On Nov. 3, 2021, Shirole attended a conference call with top Compute North officials and a customer, Marathon Digital Holdings. Marathon Digital Holdings is building one of the largest Bitcoin mining operations in North America. On that call, Compute North Chief Operating Officer Drake Harvey allegedly stated that the original site in Pitt County was in “‘an economically downtrodden area’” and the residents were “‘non-white’,” court documents read. Harvey allegedly stated that these factors combined with an “‘activist individual’ made the site less desirable.”

A new United Nations report has projected that the death toll from Yemen’s war will reach 377,000 by the end of 2021, including those killed as a result of indirect and direct causes. In a report published on Tuesday, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that 70 percent of those killed would be children under the age of five. It found that 60 percent of deaths would have been the result of indirect causes, such as hunger and preventable diseases, with the remainder a result of direct causes like front-line combat and air raids. “In the case of Yemen, we believe that the number of people who have actually died as a consequence on conflict exceeds the numbers who died in battlefield,” UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said.

The plan charts a future largely absent the input of Puerto Ricans who will be most impacted by its devastating effects.

A would-be Russian marijuana tycoon who allegedly bankrolled a scheme by Rudy Giuliani associates to distribute illegal campaign contributions has been charged with campaign finance crimes. The charges against Andrey Muraviev are the latest shoe to drop in a plot that includes South Florida-based Soviet émigrés Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — two of the odder characters in the orbit of the last administration — President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, a $1 million political fund and the peculiarly named company Fraud Guarantee. The South Floridians, whose donations included $50,000 to the successful campaign of Ron DeSantis, separately got tangled up in a Giuliani-engineered plot to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine, the effort that led to the first impeachment of then-President Trump. Neither DeSantis nor his campaign are charged with any impropriety.

Newly declassified documents reveal Ammar al-Baluchi was repeatedly slammed against a wall while naked until all trainees received ‘certification’

Ohio will become the 23rd state to allow conceal-carry in public without needing a license.

Growing up, I never kept a diary. There were no journals hidden beneath my twin mattress, no spiral-bound collection of ruffled notebooks stuffed with private confidences. I was a voracious reader who devoured books in secret, in defiance of my strict evangelical parents, but when it came to my personal feelings, I allowed nothing of myself to migrate onto the page. Writing felt treacherous; a way to accidentally reveal too much. The few times that I did manage to pen any of my feelings, I immediately shredded everything, crumpled papers stuffed at the bottom of the garbage can, hidden beneath scraps of the previous night’s dinner. Those scribblings were too unruly, I thought at the time, unwilling to let any of it live outside the privacy of my head. Regardless, my hopes and fears sometimes erupted from the watched pot of my brain, boiling over to reveal truths I was desperate to hide. A swirl of images spit and hissed steam beneath the lid: friends changing out of wet bathing suits after a pool party, the heart-shaped sweat mark on a girl’s back during gym class on an especially sweltering Central Florida afternoon, the sun tracing shiny golden tinsel into a woman’s plaited hair. The memories flickered neon red at the edges, warning of danger. There was something unacceptable about them. Something scary. I know now why I couldn’t write them down. My words were too gay. As an adult, I can see that the smothering of the queerness that lived inside me led to long, tumultuous years of depression and misery. So much of that overwhelming despair could have been abated by the simple act of voicing the unsaid thing. All those times I cried myself sick and prayed for death, I needed the words. Whenever I sliced at my skin, or when I pulled the hair from my head in order to feel something other than the self-loathing of my secret burden, I needed that frustratingly inaccessible language. If only I were allowed a sentence. Even a word. If I could tell someone, anyone, without fear of repercussion, then I’d have found relief. I’m gay, I would have said. And the immediate follow-up: I’m gay and I’m scared.

A container ship is reported to be stranded off the coast of Gibson Island in the Chesapeake Bay.

Right now in California, a gallon of gas costs $5.74, which makes Nebraska’s $3.89 feel downright cheap. The national average is $4.32. The oil industry is calling for an increase in domestic drilling, while Democrats and Republicans alike have proposed gas-tax holidays and driver subsidies. None of this is exactly new: Oil shocks are recurring (and largely embedded into society at this point), and so are the myopic and self-serving responses of politicians. When asked about high gas prices last week, Joe Biden responded that “defending freedom is going to cost” because he “can’t do much” about them. Here’s something he could do: Pay people to get rid of their cars. Statistically, most Americans already live in a densely populated city, where the main barrier to a relatively car-free existence is the absence of safer and more reliable alternatives. And the distances Americans move every day aren’t actually all that long: About 60 percent of all vehicle trips in the U.S. are six miles or less, and in cities, about half of all vehicle trips are three miles or less. A federal buyback program for gas-guzzlers would be just one piece of the urgent, necessary work of decentering automobiles from American life — a just transition away from our cars — but it’s a surprisingly achievable one. A timely new report out Monday from the Green New Deal’s policy arm, the Climate + Community Project and the McHarg Center, lays out a framework for dramatically decarbonizing a typical American’s daily coming and going by 2030. It goes like this: Give people attractive alternatives to their solo commutes — people in the U.S. mostly drive alone in vehicles that emit 29 percent of U.S. carbon pollution with the highest per capita transportation emissions in the world — and help them dump their cars. More specifically, the report proposes we increase transit ridership fivefold by boosting service, prioritizing buses, and investing in good-paying transportation jobs; set up 10,000 miles of protected bike paths with bike-storage facilities designed for workers; and build out a nationwide network of accessible sidewalks and walking trails with a focus on universal ADA-compliant infrastructure. (Here’s how the math pencils out.)

S&P Global’s CERAWeek was an event seemingly designed for a different point in history. History, of course, has moved fast in recent weeks. The green color scheme and sea-foam carpet welcoming attendees to registration reflected an industry eager to show a climate-friendly face to a world that, until a few weeks back, seemed preoccupied with rising temperatures. But by the conference’s opening on March 7, both politicians and fossil fuel executives were fully focused on sticking it to Russia. A more apt design decision might have been red, white, and blue. “The conference was designed to have a heavy emphasis on climate,” says George David Banks, a member of the State Department’s negotiating team at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change under Trump and now an affiliate fellow at the Atlantic Council. “With the events around Ukraine, that’s shifted back to kind of a traditional geopolitical energy security conversation.” An industry that’s spent the last two years and billions of dollars trying to convince the world that it can “decarbonize hydrocarbons” is much too savvy to brag about all the money to be made off a humanitarian catastrophe. Accordingly, the message fossil fuel execs pivoted to, as Russian troops crept further into Ukraine, is that they’re patriots, standing ready to meet the world’s energy needs and build American “energy independence.” Even the brief planned programming of happy hours dotting the bars around downtown Houston—like a well-stocked “Women in Energy” confab convened by the American Petroleum Institute—kicked off with paeans to the bravery of the Ukrainian people. That’s not entirely disingenuous, of course, but fits neatly into a narrative that could spell big business for U.S. drillers: If you stand with the people of Ukraine—and of Europe, where an energy crisis looms—then it’s time to stand with American fossil fuel producers, who are ready to unleash the freedom molecules that’ll help kick Russian oil and gas to the curb and defund Putin’s war machine. If only they’ll let us. They, in this narrative, includes two groups. Wall Street investors won’t finance expanded production. And the Biden administration—in its alleged hostility to the industry and acquiescence to misguided climate activists—is sending those investors all the wrong signals, preventing them from changing their minds.

Police in New York and Washington, D.C., on Monday were searching for a suspect they believe had shot five homeless men in the two cities, saying forensic evidence had linked a lone gunman to all of the shootings.

A new Chinatown business group, formed in the wake of #StopAAPIHate, donated the unmanned aerial vehicles since OPD can’t buy its own.

Former President Barack Obama said on Sunday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus , though he's feeling relatively healthy and his wife, Michelle, tested negative.

How so-called scalpers use online bots to snap up consoles and resell them for profit.

Shah died in hospital after being shot outside his southwest Edmonton home Sunday night, police said in a news release.

Workers are under intense strain amid grueling schedules, union contract negotiations and an arcane attendance policy system. Drastic labor cuts have been implemented in recent years, reducing the workforce and lowering overall costs, while rail transportation companies have used the supply chain crisis to increase fees and make record profits.

Lanisha Bratcher Jones didn’t mean to do something wrong. She just didn’t know. In 2019, Jones was one of four Hoke County residents charged with felony voter fraud from the 2016 election after ballots were cross-referenced with criminal records. Jones had served time in prison for a felony and was out on probation. Under North Carolina law, she wasn’t allowed to vote. No one told her that when she registered. “I know what I did was for a good cause,” Jones told me over the phone this week, getting choked up explaining why she wanted to vote. “You want to see that change, especially in your neighborhood.” Jones’s story resurfaced this week after The New Yorker reported that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows voted with the address of a mobile home in Macon County that he had never set foot in, let alone lived in long-term or owned. He also registered to vote in Virginia right before the state’s high profile gubernatorial race, resulting in him being registered in two states. Although the story was published Sunday, the N.C. Board of Elections officials have not said whether they’d be handing the case over to prosecutors, who could charge Meadows with voter fraud. Meadows hasn’t spoken publicly about the story and allegations, but he has consistently pushed “the Big Lie” that there was mass voter fraud against the former president in the 2020 election Jones made a mistake. Meadows, it appears, did not. And Jones, for her part, wants to see Meadows go through the same legal process she dealt with for two years, the same legal process that has continuously prosecuted Black North Carolinians. “He should not be above the law,” she says, “because I was not.”