In her statement, Simon wrote that she moved “because I feared for my and my daughter’s safety after receiving multiple threats due to my work on police reform.” Reached by text message Thursday, Simon said she was not available for an interview. She told the San Francisco Chronicle that she moved last year from a home in Richmond to an apartment in the new housing complex next to the MacArthur BART station. “Before moving, I informed top BART officials and sought their input, and was assured that the building is within District 7,” Simon wrote in her statement. “I would not have moved my family to this residence otherwise.”

Quentin Sommerville and cameraman Darren Conway are with Ukrainian forces fighting to stop the Russian advance on the country's second city.

A Michigan dog on the loose for nearly a week was reunited with her owner after the canine was found to have traveled 7 miles on the ice of a frozen bay.

Over the past year, thousands of TikTok employees have scrambled to move the company’s stores of information about its US users to data centers inside the US, and to restrict access to that data abroad. The effort, which is ongoing, is known internally as “Project Texas.” According to seven current and former TikTok employees, it represents the company’s response to concerns from regulators that the Chinese government could use the app, owned by the Chinese corporation ByteDance, to access sensitive information about US citizens. The heart of Project Texas has been the creation of US-specific clones of TikTok’s internal systems. Some of these systems are tracking and analytics tools, like the ones that employees use to monitor content virality, while others affect what users see, like the recommendation algorithm that powers TikTok’s popular “For You” page. The new US-specific systems, including all US user data, will be hosted in data centers owned by Oracle, TikTok’s “trusted technology partner.” (The project name is a nod to Oracle’s headquarters in Austin.) New controls will restrict access to the systems to a new US-based team, called US Tech Services (USTS). Once Project Texas is complete, TikTok plans to replicate it in Europe.

Exhausted and choked with emotion, a group of captured Russian soldiers told journalists in Kyiv on Monday that their government had betrayed them by sending them to fight a war under false pretenses. “I feel shame that we came to this country,” Lieutenant Colonel Astakhov Dmitry Mikhailovich said on camera. “We will go to jail or whatever we deserve.” Hours later, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky bluntly stated what he thought they deserved. “All people who came to our land, all people who gave those orders, all soldiers who were shooting—they are all war criminals,” he told ABC News. But experts say that proving Zelensky’s claim, and convicting people of war crimes—from frontline soldiers to President Vladimir Putin—will likely take years, with an uncertain outcome, despite the horrific violence. For indictments to stick in court, hard evidence will be needed— and not the kind of photo and video evidence that you might expect. The most important place to look is actually in soldiers’ pockets, says Bill Wiley, founder and executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, who has investigated conflicts for 25 years, in the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. The “pocket debris,” as he calls it, includes cellphones and computers, written instructions from commanders, and battlefield maps. These are all crucial in proving the pivotal issue in any war-crimes indictment: intent. While international laws of war forbid targeting civilians or civilian property, it also allows for innocent people being killed by accident in the crossfire, which would indemnify Russian soldiers and their commanders.

Israel’s parliament on Thursday passed a law denying naturalization to Palestinians from the occupied West Bank or Gaza married to Israeli citizens, forcing thousands of Palestinian families to either emigrate or live apart.

Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.

This is no longer a matter of creepy ads following you around the internet.

Dallas Heard, chair of the Oregon Republican Party, has resigned, citing “evil” inside the party he leads. Heard, who is also a state senator from Myrtle Creek, wrote a blistering letter to inform the party of his decision. “My physical and spiritual health can no longer survive exposure to the toxicity that can be found in this community,” wrote Heard. “We truly have an equal if not greater evil than the Democrats walking among us.”

If Google is any indicator, public interest appears to be falling fast in the concepts of NFTs and the metaverse.

The 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, while overcounting people who identified as white and not Latino, according to estimates from a report the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday. Latinos were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier. Among Native Americans living on reservations and Black people, the net undercount rates were numerically higher but not statistically different from the 2010 rates. People who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at almost double the rate in 2010. Asian Americans were also overcounted. The bureau said based on its estimates, it's unclear how well the 2020 tally counted Pacific Islanders.

Scientists are finally starting to understand the centuries-old mystery of “ballooning.”

The second-best player in every sport is a superstar at a level that 99.999 percent of professional athletes — who are already the elite of the elite of the elite — will never come close to achieving. Joel Embiid finished second in NBA MVP voting last year; in baseball (a sport once actively played in this country), it was Vladimir Guerrero Jr.; and in football, it was Tom Brady. In the WNBA, the Phoenix Mercury’s Brittney Griner earned this distinction last year. She was second in scoring, sixth in rebounds, first in blocks (she’s on track to become the WNBA’s all-time leader in that category), and, according to most advanced metrics, the best offensive player in the league. Her résumé is glittering: She won an NCAA national championship for Baylor in 2012, the same year she captured college basketball’s Player of the Year Award. She then won a WNBA championship in 2014 and was selected as one of the best 25 players in league history in 2021. She has two Olympic gold medals to her name. In the gold-medal game against Japan in Tokyo last summer, she dominated, scoring 30 points to clinch an easy victory. She is the apex of her sport. She is the best of the best. She is a legend. And for more than a month now, she has been in the custody of the Russian government. Yet until Russian officials released a statement over the weekend saying they had detained Griner after finding hashish oil in her airport bag, it seemed that nobody had noticed. And the reaction since the arrest has been stunningly quiet. One of the greatest athletes in American sports — a gold-medal winner, a superstar, a champion — was arrested in a dangerous and volatile country that has suddenly become a pariah on the world stage. Making equivalences between sports only takes you so far here, but seriously: Imagine if Tom Brady were being held by Russian officials right now.

An exclusive document sheds light on a classified Special Operations partnership with a Cameroonian unit implicated in atrocities. Months after the head of U.S. Africa Command announced that funding for Cameroon’s armed forces would be slashed due to human rights concerns, the Pentagon continued employing members of an elite Cameroonian military unit long known for committing atrocities — including extrajudicial killings — as proxies through a classified Special Operations counterterrorism program, The Intercept has learned. Until late 2019, members of the unit — known as the Rapid Intervention Battalion or by its French acronym BIR — conducted the missions against groups U.S. officials designated as VEOs, or violent extremist organizations, to “degrade” their ability to “conduct terrorist acts against U.S. interests,” according to a formerly secret Pentagon document obtained through a public records request. At least some of the operations were “planned and coordinated … with input from U.S. counterparts,” the memorandum notes. Those operations occurred under a program intended to carry out counterterrorism missions with minimum deployment of U.S. personnel. 127e programs are named after the budgetary authority that allows U.S. Special Operations forces including Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marine Raiders to use foreign military units as proxies. They differ from other forms of assistance, training, or equipping of foreign forces because they allow the U.S. to employ foreign troops to do its own bidding — often in countries where the U.S. is not officially at war and the American public does not know the military is operating. In some cases, U.S. troops even engage in combat.

the world is on fire, let's make it worse

In a historic moment, the Senate passed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 on March X with a vote of X. The House passed the bill last month with a vote of 342-92. The legislation will now go to President Biden’s desk, where he will sign it into law. The enactment of Postal Reform marks a turning point in the fight to protect and strengthen the people’s public Postal Service.

A Bronx judge slammed cops as she moved the case of a teen rapper accused of shooting a police officer during a Bronx kerfuffle to family court Tuesday, calling one arresting officer’s testimony “incredible and unreliable.” Bronx Judge Naita Semaj said that while Camrin “C Blu” Williams, 16, possessed a gun on Jan. 18 in Belmont, there was “no apparent reason” for Bronx Officer Taulant Gjonbalaj and other cops to have initiated the confrontation. “There was absolutely zero reason for any of those officers to approach this individual. They approached him, they detained him, they searched him, and no officer even bothered to come up with a halfway legitimate reason for any of that,” Semaj said, making an emotional ruling in Bronx Supreme Court Tuesday. “While there is no disputing the fact that Mr. Williams had a gun on him that night... He literally does everything you tell your child to do when they’re approached by cops. He literally kept his hands up. He literally tried to record to make sure there was proof. He answered questions he had no obligation to answer,” Semaj said. Semaj added that Gjonbalaj’s testimony during the hearing did not match up with video evidence. “I cannot state how absolutely incredible his testimony was. It was inconsistent with the video, it was inconsistent with his fellow officer’s testimony, it was self-serving, it had no value,” she said.

When a pet guinea pig or snake or hamster dies in the hands of America’s largest pet store, PetSmart, the retailer has strict protocols for disposing of its remains, at least on paper. Wrap the deceased pet in a paper towel, place it in a plastic fish bag, seal the bag with rubber bands, and store it in a refrigerator or a freezer, according to the company’s “deceased store-owned pet policy” which was obtained by Motherboard. (PetSmart enacted this policy in July 2020 and it was active as of January 2022, but the company did not respond to a question about whether the policy remains active.) Since the private equity firm BC Partners acquired PetSmart in a $8.7 billion leveraged buyout in 2014, four PetSmart employees say that cost-cutting in the form of severe understaffing, the consolidation of jobs, a lack of sufficient job training, and denial of veterinary care and proper habitats for animals has meant that pets are falling sick, forgoing treatment, and dying at alarming rates in their stores, where freezers and coolers, in some cases, are literally “overflowing” with dead pets. Motherboard obtained photos of freezers stuffed to capacity with dead hamsters, lizards, and other animals. In one case, an employee said dead animals had been in the freezer for 10 months. Abegale Fernandes, a 34-year-old former PetSmart manager in Barnstable, Massachusetts who quit in December, said this happened because stores were so understaffed that no one qualified to do so could take the deceased animals to the vet for cremation.

Over the past few years, car accident deaths in the United States have spiked dramatically. Journalists and commentators have been quick to point to pandemic-induced stress and anxiety to explain the increase. But is that account too pat? On episode 44 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk with three guests about road design, automobile regulation, and what’s wrong with blaming crashes on reckless drivers. Guests include Charles Marohn, the author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer; Jessie Singer, the author of There Are No Accidents; and Jason Slaughter, the creator of the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes.

By Franklin Simpin Foer Biden