Lacking ink, the label-printing market has been spared the kinds of shenanigans that plague the world of inkjets…until now.

One year after historic storm Uri, a small yet remarkable group of people on the Austin food scene reflect on how they banded together to feed the city

Dr. Gina Sequeira first saw the protesters on a bright clear morning last September. A co-director of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic who provides gender-affirming care to young people, Sequeira had confronted ignorance about her medical specialty in the past. But nothing had prepared her to see people outside her office, waving signs and handing out flyers warning of the “dangers” of the work she does. “That was really, really hard for us as a clinic,” she says. “And I think it was really hard for the hospital’s patients and families who witnessed it.” Just a month later, protesters showed up again. Hers wasn’t the only clinic having a hard time in 2021. The LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has calculated that, last year, conservative lawmakers introduced over 130 anti-trans bills into state legislatures—including 35 that explicitly limited the ability of trans and gender-expansive youth to access gender-affirming care, a term that refers to holistic psychological and medical care that affirms a person’s gender identity. As of Feb. 11, the ACLU has tracked similar bills in at least 17 state legislatures this year. Only a small group of pediatricians provide such care in the U.S., and, in this political context, those who do are often finding themselves at the receiving end of growing harassment—even as research confirms the potentially life-saving nature of the work they do. Demonstrators have organized protests like the ones at Sequeira’s clinic at other sites across the country; in Ohio, billboards have been rented spreading disinformation about affirming care—including one near a children’s hospital. Pediatricians tell TIME they have received threatening mail, have been impersonated online and have feared for their safety. And they worry such harassment campaigns could have a devastating impact on the ability of young people to access crucial medical care. Roughly a month before the September protest, Sequeira had received an unmarked letter in the mail that gave her pause. She’d worried about the risk of anthrax, she tells TIME; of someone trying to hurt her. Eventually she gingerly opened the envelope. Inside, she found printed posters decrying gender-affirming care for children. “No child is born in the wrong body!” one read. “Who profits from this crime?” “I was taken aback, and really kind of fearful,” Sequeira recalls. She’d seen colleagues who provided abortion receive similar abuse. But she never thought her work could become nearly as controversial. “It really made me wonder what the future of our work looks like,” she says. “Is that the path we’re going down?”

Parents say their children’s education suffers when career and technical education programs are tailored to the needs of corporations. “It’s going to be great,” Houston entrepreneur Jim McIngvale told a reporter about the charter school he was planning to open in August 2020. According to McIngvale, known locally as “Mattress Mack,” the new school—named Premier High School—would be located inside one of his businesses, Gallery Furniture, and offer Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses in automotive, electrical, welding, and carpentry. While having part of a high school’s curriculum devoted to “valuable job training”—as McIngvale put it—might sound beneficial to students, some of that training is on-the-job at Gallery Furniture. McIngvale, in a pitch to prospective students, sketched out what this looks like in practice. His school is “going to train you for four days a week . . . . That’s going to be free. You work for Gallery Furniture one day a week to pay off the, ah, equipment that you might need, tuition, whatever,” he said in a program broadcast on a local morning radio show. So when McIngvale exclaims his school is “absolutely free,” what he really means is that he’s getting one day per week of free labor in addition to free workforce training, at taxpayers’ expense, for the students who graduate and decide to stay on as Gallery Furniture employees. It’s easy to see this setup as a racket; what’s less obvious is how Premier High School challenges the idea of a liberal arts education model, which consists of a holistic learning experience where students develop their creativity and critical thinking along with technical career knowledge and skills. Instead, the sole purpose of Premier, according to a local reporter, is to “get a job, keep a job, [and] help career advancement.” But it’s not just small entrepreneurs like McIngvale who see public schools as a potential source of cheap employee training. A 2021 New York Times Magazine article about Amazon’s influence in California included a section on career and technical education courses taught at a high school in San Bernardino. Here, students wear shirts “emblazoned with the Amazon logo” and learn in a classroom “designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility.” According to the article, “The lesson of the day was on Amazon’s ‘14 Leadership Principles.’ ”

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Former U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke misused his position to advance a commercial development project that included a microbrewery in his Montana hometown and lied to an agency ethics official about his involvement, according to a report by federal investigators released Wednesday.

Two decades ago, the destruction of the World Trade Center plunged many novelists in the West into feelings of powerlessness and marginality. Fanatics of seemingly obscure background and motivation had set off colossal explosions in what Don DeLillo in Falling Man called the ‘narcissistic heart of the West’. Martin Amis was not alone in ‘considering a change of occupation’. Ian McEwan claimed to have found it ‘wearisome to confront invented characters’. ‘I wanted to be told,’ he said, ‘about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.’ This learning process could have begun with fiction from outside the West. Unlike the novelists blindsided on 9/11, and since, by the ferocity of political antagonism, writers from Asia, Africa and Latin America had always written from within, and often about, the experience of violence and disorder; they couldn’t remain oblivious to conflicts over food, water, land and identity. After 9/11, however, amid Western preparations for retribution in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, facts rather than fiction – the facts of history, politics, sociology and, especially, religion – suddenly seemed crucial to re-education in the self-involved West. In the abrupt efflorescence of Western curiosity about far-off lands and peoples, I was one of those tasked with answering the puerile question ‘why do they hate us?’ Early in 2001, a few months after publishing my first novel, The Romantics, I had travelled to Afghanistan. I wrote at length, in Granta and the New York Review of Books, about the way the country had been ravaged by the Soviet Union, the ‘free world’ and Saudi-sponsored Islamic fundamentalists. I tried to describe this recent history from the point of view of the Afghans. Soon after 9/11, however, I found myself routinely invited by the American and European media to share my expertise on ‘terrorism’.

Let me take you back to our favourite table at the West Hollywood Sunset Marquis where DC publisher Dan Didio knew how to hook me like a prize trout – he and his writers had ‘come up with’ plans he told me, to shake up the Superman books; plans that included Superman’s son graduating to the primary role as Earth’s heroic protector while a disillusioned older Superman became ever more right wing and authoritarian… eventually assembling a new version of the Authority team to enact his patrician will. Concurrent plans existed to push Supergirl in an increasingly fascistic direction for reasons that made scant sense to me. Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant? The notion behind the Superman and the Authority series as it was proposed to me was that Superman – who had aged in real time since his 1938 arrival on Earth and was now 82 going on 55 and with diminishing powers - would inevitably grow more and more autocratic as he got older and his son took his place as a new and more popular switched-on Superman. Dan knew exactly how I’d feel about this. He waited for me to take a breath while he ordered another bottle of our favourite ZD. Then, waving a fork in an unnecessarily aggressive manner, I got going… I liked the idea of an older Superman rethinking his mission and turning into what I saw as a Doc Savage pulp hero figure with his own team of expert operatives… but as for the rest of it… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us? To undermine the fundamental appeal of superheroes like Superman and Supergirl by re-casting them as anti-heroes at best or outright monsters - dragging imaginary childhood paragons off their pedestals to reinforce a fairly facile point about the tendency of real world heroes to exhibit feet of clay, struck me and strikes me still as imaginatively lazy. Using kids’ adventure heroes to make hackneyed observations about typical human behaviour that does not in fact apply to made up comic book characters strikes me as – I don’t know - whimsical? Dilettantish? A squandering of energy and creativity?

The U.S. seizure of Afghan government funds after the Taliban took power has put millions at risk of starvation. A lead attorney for some families of 9/11 victims who sued the Taliban — plaintiffs who could receive billions of dollars as a result of the Biden administration’s decision to seize the reserves of the Afghanistan central bank — also worked until January at the Biden White House on Afghanistan issues. Lee Wolosky, co-chair of the litigation department at the law firm Jenner & Block LLP, was appointed to aid with Afghan evacuees in September 2021 and returned to his firm last month. After the fall of Kabul, the U.S. government seized the assets of the country’s central bank, and last week the administration announced it would hold half of the roughly $7 billion for families who had brought suit against the Taliban, and deploy the other half at some undetermined point in time “for the benefit of the Afghan people.” On Monday, Wolosky himself signed a brief asking the judges in the families’ case against the Taliban to move forward with enforcing the settlement. The long-running lawsuit stands to be a lucrative payday for the high-powered attorneys working on the once long-shot case. Lawyers often take a percentage of damages awarded, which in this case easily puts the payout into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Families with school-age kids have borne the brunt of the pandemic. Will they make themselves heard at the ballot box? Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, everyone can agree that parents have had a particularly difficult few years. Many parents of school-age children, and particularly mothers, had to leave their jobs to take care of children unable to attend school. Children have struggled with virtual learning, as well as the mental health and educational effects of not being able to sit in a classroom. Families have had to sort through an ever-shifting welter of pandemic guidance, adjusting on the fly to changing circumstances, as well as a lack of consistency: Masking requirements differ from district to district, community to community, and state to state. The chaos and inconsistency has naturally manifested itself in our politics, as well. Children and schools have increasingly become the focal point of several political maelstroms, from school system coronavirus policies to the information being taught in the classroom, virtual or not. As these debates have raged, many parents have lost the cushion provided by an expanded child tax credit that expired at the end of last year, while inflation has reached its highest point in decades. The party in power typically suffers significant losses in midterm elections, and Democrats are in danger of losing one or both chambers of Congress. Already facing a hostile environment and a myriad of messaging challenges, Democrats may also need to convince the parents of young children that they are the party best equipped to address these overwhelming concerns.

On Jan. 21, FBI agents raided the home and campaign office of Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX). And it wasn’t long before the love came pouring in on Twitter, with Cuellar die-hards stuffing his replies with encouragement a few days later. “Here we will be supporting until the end.” “Bravo many more achievements.” “We are getting better and better.” “For better things for the country!!” “Hopefully Henry can stay in congress.” But these well-wishers aren’t constituents, supporters, or adoring fans. They’re a coordinated network of fake troll accounts, and they’re on a mission. Cuellar, one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, had never seen much engagement before the raids, with his tweets normally only drawing a half dozen or so replies. But after the FBI came knocking, Cuellar’s replies teemed with critics calling on him to resign, reminding him of the investigation, and taunting the nine-term congressman with the thought of prison. Within a week, those replies were matched with missives from ostensible supporters swooping in to battle the haters.

The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it’s on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable,” according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.

An analysis of 40 major metro areas revealed unequal levels of investor activity, with southern cities and Black neighborhoods disproportionately affected

Disney's first Storyliving community will open in California's Coachella Valley. Other locations around the U.S. are under exploration.

Jon Christiansen says he has reason to feel paranoid. In 2020 and 2021, while law enforcement and other officials painted a picture of rising crime rates and an ongoing struggle to recruit enough police officers, Christiansen and other activists in left-leaning organizations were the subject of what they say was a politically motivated and wasteful undercover investigation. “I’m blown away by the amount of resources the city had to have spent to spy on peaceful political groups,” says Jon, who co-founded the Chinook Center with wife Sam Christiansen and Shaun Walls. “This certainly doesn’t seem like a wise use of taxpayer money — to have an undercover cop spending hours to discover that the Tenant Union helps tenants, that the [Democratic Socialists of America] and Our Revolution try to pass laws and elect candidates that reflect their values, or that the Chinook Center is a space for groups to organize. All of those groups are completely above ground and explicit about their goals.” The investigation started after the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, when a CSPD undercover officer spent a year posing as a political activist to infiltrate a variety of progressive organizations including the Chinook Center, the Colorado Springs chapter of the DSA, the Colorado Springs Tenants Union, and the Colorado Springs Mutual Aid and Solidarity Union. Officer April Rogers, using the alias “Chelsie Kurti,” gained access to internal chat groups, membership rosters and email accounts associated with the groups.

President tells story of woman who called county government to have dog removed from lawn – so Biden put it on her front step

What does society owe immunocompromised people?

Synthetic human faces are so convincing they can fool even trained observers, and they may be highly effective for use in scams

A private prison company will run a new U.S. pilot program that would place hundreds of migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under house arrest, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told Reuters, an approach that critics say is an extension of for-profit detention.

The unnamed flier reportedly attempted to breach the cockpit before turning to the aircraft’s door.

The furniture giant is hungry for Romania’s famed trees. Little stands in its way.