WHEN JOE BIDEN came into office, one of his first moves was to reject the Trump administration’s last-minute designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization, after warnings from the United Nations and aid groups that imposing sanctions would exacerbate the famine in war-torn Yemen. “The revocations are intended to ensure that relevant US policies do not impede assistance to those already suffering what has been called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a statement in February 2021. Now the Biden administration is considering reversing that reversal and redesignating the Houthis as a terrorist group at the request of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, despite what experts say would be disastrous consequences for Yemeni people. The Houthi rebels who have controlled Yemen’s capital since 2014 recently launched a rare attack on the UAE for its participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

The transphobic star of Ben Shapiro’s right-wing media empire tried to trick trans people, including a 14-year-old girl—until the deception was revealed this week.

Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion. Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.” In Austin, Texas, there are billboards with slogans like “Crypto Is Real” that weirdly mirror the ubiquitous billboards about Jesus found on Texas highways. Like many religions, Bitcoin even has dietary restrictions associated with it.

Can Oakland's 106-year-old produce market withstand Silicon Valley?

Manufacturer Oshkosh Defense is exploiting a long-standing loophole that incentivizes bigger, heavier vehicles that can pollute more.

Hundreds of millions of users. No algorithm. No ads. Courage in the face of autocracy. Sound like a dream? Careful what you wish for. On January 6, 2021, as a crowd of Donald Trump supporters began gathering for a rally near the foot of the Washington Monument, Elies Campo was spending a poignant afternoon at his family's home in Tortosa, Spain. January 6—the feast of the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day—is the high point of the holiday season there, when relatives visit and children open their presents. And Campo, a 38-year-old Spanish engineer who lives in Silicon Valley, had been largely stranded away from home since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As he moved through the house, Campo was surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins, and he got to hold a couple of their babies for the first time. His mind was about as far from the United States as it could possibly be. That changed around 8 pm, when a friend in the US pinged to ask if Campo had seen the news out of Washington, DC. Then came an avalanche of similar messages about the mob that had just stormed the Capitol building. As Campo watched the scenes of violence unfold on his phone, a question started to eat at him: How was this going to affect his company?

Across Taiwan, the classical melody “Für Elise” is a Pavlovian call to action: Bring down your garbage and catch up on neighborhood gossip.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday morning it seized more than $3.6 billion in allegedly stolen cryptocurrency linked to the 2016 hack of Bitfinex. As part of the operation, authorities detained a New York couple on allegations they planned to launder the digital goods. It marks the agency's largest financial seizure ever, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Officials said they arrested Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31. The couple is scheduled to make their initial appearances in federal court later in the day. Lichtenstein's and Morgan's legal representation wasn't immediately clear. Authorities accuse the pair of trying to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen from Bitfinex's platform after a hacker breached Bitfinex's systems and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. Prosecutors allege that the transactions sent the stolen bitcoin to Lichtenstein's digital wallet.

The number of new HIV diagnoses in heterosexual people are higher than those in gay and bisexual men for the first time in ten years, according to the UK Health Security Agency (HSA). In the year leading to December 2021, 45 per cent of all new diagnoses were in gay and bisexual men, while 50 per cent were in heterosexual men or women.

Visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, one of the masterminds behind the visual effects on some of the most visually audacious science fiction films of all time, including “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner,” died Monday. His daughter Amy wrote on Facebook. that he had cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke. He was 79. “My sister Andromed and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that he love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond,” she wrote. Trumbull also oversaw the visual effects on “Silent Running,” “The Andromeda Strain” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and he directed eco-sci-fi film “Silent Running” and Natalie Wood-starring “Brainstorm.” He shared Oscar nominations for best visual effects for “Close Encounters,” “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and “Blade Runner.” Trumbull also created Universal Studios’ “Back to the Future: The Ride” simulator and helped bring Imax into the entertainment marketplace.

The former editor Graydon Carter and a journalist, Vicky Ward, give conflicting accounts of why the magazine didn’t publish sexual-abuse allegations in 2003.

With Q silent, the community turned to Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Flynn, who has deep ties with the QAnon community and is highly regarded by many of its supporters, encouraged followers to “get involved,” “take responsibility for your school committees or boards,” and “run for local, state and/or federal office.” According to Flynn, “local action = national impact.” The QAnon community responded, with influencers echoing the call and telling followers to consider running for school boards, and multiple QAnon supporters running for and winning local offices. That included Tracy Diaz, one of the three main figures reportedly responsible for popularizing QAnon, who was elected to a position in a South Carolina county Republican Party chapter. Similarly, in September, a man named Derek Greco, who has expressed support for QAnon, and a group of protesters disrupted a school board meeting in California, causing the board to adjourn. The protesters decided this meant the board had vacated their seats and “elected” Greco as president. Greco directly credited QAnon show host Scott McKay for his tactics and McKay, in turn, claimed he had corresponded with Greco about it. This trend became so widespread that the National Education Association warned about it in June. The QAnon community has also embraced the so-called “precinct strategy,” a plan promoted by Arizona GOP committee member Dan Schultz encouraging followers to sign up as Republican precinct committee officers, who can elect people to higher positions in the party. Schultz appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic to promote the plan. He was also invited onto multiple QAnon shows, where he and the hosts urged the audience to become precinct committee members. Since then, there has been a notable increase in QAnon supporters enlisting as precinct committee officers.

On Monday, a judge ordered the US Air Force to pay more than $230 million to the survivors and families of the victims of a 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Last July, District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled the Air Force 60% responsible for the deaths and injuries sustained in the shooting after it failed to report gunman Devin Patrick Kelley's criminal history to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Doing so would have prevented him from purchasing the firearms used in the shooting. In a 185-page ruling released Monday, Rodriguez wrote that the survivors and relatives had sought compensation for the "pain and suffering, mental anguish, disfigurement, impairment, and loss of companionship" they endured due to the shooting, which left 26 people dead and another 22 wounded. The shooting took place on November 5, 2017, at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. Dressed in tactical gear and armed with a semiautomatic rifle, Kelley entered the church while a Sunday service was in session and began firing at the congregation.

Republican Missouri state Sen. Mike Moon believes that covid-19 vaccinations, especially among children, should cease until the long-term effects are known. He points to the research of sources of covid misinformation like America’s Frontline Doctors and Dr. Robert Malone, a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He himself is not vaccinated. So, on Feb. 1, he and other senators tanked the nomination of Donald Kauerauf to become the state’s next health director. Kauerauf had held the office in an interim capacity since September and professed on the record that he was anti-abortion and anti-mandate for masks and vaccinations, all while being nominated by a Republican governor who is also anti-mandate. But it wasn’t enough for Moon. “Missourians don’t want to be ruled with an iron fist,” Moon said. The heartland state’s kerfuffle is one more example of political pushback to public health leadership. A KHN and Associated Press investigation last year found that at least 1 in 5 Americans lived in places that had lost their top local public health official amid a wave of threats to the profession and chronic stress that led to firings, resignations, and retirements since the pandemic began. Such blows endanger the public health system’s ability to respond to other issues in the future, public health officials said.

On the afternoon of July 28, the Homeland Security Investigations tip line received a call about a sensitive matter on an island off the coast of Washington state: “the suspected female genital mutilation of an infant by her Turkish mother.” A babysitter on San Juan Island had seen what she considered an “abnormality” while changing the girl’s diaper, according to law enforcement reports. The sitter enlisted a friend to also inspect the child’s vagina, without the parents’ knowledge or consent. That friend then called the tip line, allegedly telling authorities she was acting on the sitter’s behalf. The women, according to reports from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office and U.S. Homeland Security, worried that the girl had undergone female genital mutilation, or FGM, an ancient ritual defined by the United Nations as the removal of external female genitalia for nonmedical reasons. FGM is a federal crime, and women’s advocates across the globe are campaigning to end the practice, which causes trauma and health complications. When a detective asked the women in separate interviews why they suspected FGM rather than a natural or medical condition for any perceived difference, they each invoked the mother’s background as a Turkish American Muslim, according to the sheriff’s report. That linking of Islam to FGM, a practice that spans faiths and continents, touched off an inquiry that made its way to the Homeland Security office for human rights violations and war crimes, home of an anti-FGM program called Operation Limelight USA. The call also upended the child’s family and is forcing a tough conversation on the island about the far-reaching harm of anti-Muslim stereotypes.

After years of controversy, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board assured the public in the fall that eating California crops grown with oil field wastewater “creates no identifiable increased health risks,” based on studies commissioned as part of an extensive Food Safety Project. Yet a review of the science and interviews with a public health scientist affiliated with the project and other experts show that there is scant evidence to support the board’s safety claims. The “neutral, third-party consultant” the board retained to conduct the studies, GSI Environmental, has regularly worked for the oil industry. That work includes marshaling evidence to help Chevron, Kern County’s biggest provider of produced water, and other oil giants defend their interests in high-stakes lawsuits around the country and globe. GSI did not tell water board officials about its ties to the oil industry, which shared the roughly $3.4 million in costs for the firm’s studies and related work with the water districts that benefit from the distribution of wastewater from oil extraction, known as “produced water.” One member of the board’s Food Safety Expert Panel that reviewed GSI’s studies was nominated by Chevron and initially paid by the oil industry, and a second panel member worked as a consultant for an oil company selling produced water. Still, the expert panel’s own review concluded that GSI’s studies could not answer fundamental safety questions about irrigating crops with produced water.

Simply shouting "this sucks" isn't criticism, it's just an opinion, and the Razzies are nothing but negative opinions. In order to vote for the Razzies, one simply must pay a $40 fee, so any person with a grudge can make their voice heard. It's not funny, it's just kind of sad.

Independent publisher and crowdfunding pioneer C. Spike Trotman has raised over $2.5 million for 30 successful projects on Kickstarter since 2009, but for her newest title, The Poorcraft Cookbook, she is leaving the platform and seeking to raise the $6000 to publish the book through her own website. At issue is Kickstarter’s announcement that it would be implementing blockchain technology as part of its growth strategy in the future. Her decision puts a spotlight on how toxic the entire concept of blockchain has become in certain corners of fandom.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s near-mythical first album All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling, which was reportedly released on cassette in December 1994 and limited to just 33 copies, may have just leaked online in full for the first time.

The tech billionaire, who has been on the board of the company formerly known as Facebook since 2005, is backing numerous politicians in the midterm elections.