Don’t forget to vote blue in the midterms!

Well-funded Brinc positions its use of robots as nonviolent, but an early promo video undercuts this message.

utomakers keep trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet subscription income. Now, it’s Toyota’s turn. Nearly every car company offers some sort of subscription package, and Toyota has one called Remote Connect. The service offers the usual fare, letting owners use an app to remotely lock their doors, for example, or if they own a plug-in vehicle, to precondition the interior. But as some complimentary subscriptions for Remote Connect come to an end, Toyota owners are getting an unexpected surprise—they can no longer use their key fob to remote-start their vehicles.

The Biden administration admitted that a court decision did not compel it to lease vast tracts of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, shortly before claiming it was legally obliged to do so when announcing the sell-off, the Guardian can reveal. Last month, the US government held the largest-ever auction of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico’s history, offering up more than 80m acres of the gulf’s seabed for fossil fuel extraction. The enormous sale, which took place just four days after crucial UN climate talks in Scotland, represented a spectacular about-turn from Joe Biden’s previous promise to halt offshore drilling and was denounced by outraged environmental groups as a “huge carbon bomb”. The president’s administration insisted it was obliged to hold the lease sale due to a court ruling in favor of a dozen states that sued to lift a blanket pause placed on new drilling permits by Biden. But a memo filed by the US Department of Justice before the lease sale acknowledges that this judgement does not force the government to auction off drilling rights to the gulf.

Metadata in an editable copy of a PowerPoint presentation concerning the potential overthrow of the 2020 election sheds new light on Jan. 6.

Why did America fall in love with a family of extremists?

Twitter responded with a takedown of Nancy Reagan’s legacy and a field day with decades-long rumors about the former First Lady.

There's no evidence the tree-burning was politically motivated, but FOX anchors sure hated it, so therefore, it's a hate crime, or something.

It’s the least wonderful time of the year.

Lies, abuse, and mistreatment continue to be the markers of labor in the US

Officers say he murdered another man to try to fake his own death to avoid being returned to prison.

Late Queens DA Richard Brown seems to have been aware of his office’s alleged misconduct, which imprisoned people for years for crimes they were later found not to have committed. A lawyer who has pursued misconduct lawsuits reports that Brown once wrote to a top aide: “I think we’ve been getting away with this sort of thing for a long time.”

Teetering over an arid cliff face above the sprawling Chilean capital, Bernardo Segura reviews the footage from the camera trap and lets out a yell of excitement as the images reveal a flickering striped tail. On the screen displaying the conservationist’s latest video capture is an Andean cat – the most endangered feline in the Americas. Looking a little like a miniature snow leopard, the 4kg (9lb) male enters the frame and begins spray-marking the shrubs at the base of the cliff, before stealing away through sharp rocks with his banded brown and grey tail aloft. Segura is excited for many reasons. With a shrinking population of fewer than 1,400 mature Andean cats left, any sighting is good. But this one heralds a signal of hope in a different way for the species and the conservationists battling against the cats’ extinction because it confirms a new population living close to humans – on the very edge of Santiago, a city of eight million people.

A single top secret American strike cell launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria, but in the process of hammering a vicious enemy, the shadowy force sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians, according to multiple current and former military and intelligence officials. The unit was called Talon Anvil, and it worked in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019, pinpointing targets for the United States’ formidable air power to hit: convoys, car bombs, command centers and squads of enemy fighters. But people who worked with the strike cell say in the rush to destroy enemies, it circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and alarmed its partners in the military and the C.I.A. by killing people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings. Talon Anvil was small — at times fewer than 20 people operating from anonymous rooms cluttered with flat screens — but it played an outsize role in the 112,000 bombs and missiles launched against the Islamic State, in part because it embraced a loose interpretation of the military’s rules of engagement. “They were ruthlessly efficient and good at their jobs,” said one former Air Force intelligence officer who worked on hundreds of classified Talon Anvil missions from 2016 to 2018. “But they also made a lot of bad strikes.” The military billed the air war against the Islamic State as the most precise and humane in military history, and said strict rules and oversight by top leaders kept civilian deaths to a minimum despite a ferocious pace of bombing. In reality, four current and former military officials say, the majority of strikes were ordered not by top leaders but by relatively low-ranking U.S. Army Delta Force commandos in Talon Anvil.

Sounds about right

Leah didn’t expect her TikTok video about a work-from-home hack to go viral. She started using a mouse mover—a small device placed under her computer mouse, to keep the cursor active—after her job as a business lead in advertising transitioned to remote work at the start of the pandemic. Her company-issued computer set her status to “away” whenever she stopped moving her cursor or got up from her desk for more than a few seconds, and with three kids at home who needed help doing remote classes during school lockdowns, that little “away” signal was driving her nuts. “Working remotely, your colleagues can't physically ‘see’ when you get up to go to the bathroom or grab lunch. Or even take 30 minutes to reset on the couch,” Leah told me. “The last thing I wanted during those moments was to be paranoid that people thought I wasn't working—especially since I felt like I was working more than ever.”

"Florida just wasn't designed geologically to support 20 million people."

Documents obtained by Yahoo News show that the Counter Network Division, a secretive entity within U.S. Customs and Border Protection, routinely used sensitive databases to obtain financial and personal information of journalists, government officials, congressional members, NGO workers and others.

In October, former President Trump announced the creation of a new company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). Its signature product is a new social media site, Truth Social. According to an investor presentation, Truth Social and the larger company will "be a fountainhead of support for American freedoms as the first major rival to 'Big Tech.'" TMTG will "even the playing field" of a media landscape that "has swung dangerously far to the left." Initially, TMTG suggested that Truth Social was based on "proprietary" technology. It was later forced to admit that the code was taken from Mastodon, an open-sourced decentralized social network that anyone can use. Gab, an existing social media network geared toward the far right, already uses Mastodon. So neither the technology nor the concept is new. TMTG promised that "TRUTH Social plans to begin its Beta Launch for invited guests in November 2021." But November 2021 came and went without the Beta Launch or any update from the company. The Truth Social homepage is a single static page that collects email addresses.

Internal emails and their attachments show that a roving Metropolitan Police Department unit attempted to suppress robberies in 2012 and 2013 by stopping and frisking and surveilling residents of Black neighborhoods. Taken together, the RIP emails illustrate the extent to which the MPD officers aggressively surveilled, and often presumed the guilt of, members of the communities they policed. The documents reveal that RIP officers talked about and likely engaged in “jumpouts” — an intimidation tactic during which officers speed up in cars to people and jump out, often with guns drawn — as recently as late 2012, despite MPD assertions as early as 2014 that the tactic is a foregone practice of another era. They also shed light on the extent to which the MPD has focused on schools and youth in its efforts to crack down on poor and Black neighborhoods. And they show how the MPD championed stop-and-frisk, militarization, and tough-on-crime-style policing among its ranks. “Our neighbors are not community to D.C. police, they are enemies to be subdued,” said Valerie Wexler, an organizer with the Stop Police Terror Project DC, which advocates for alternatives to policing. “Whenever they don’t think their words will be heard or seen, they show what they really think of the people they are supposedly meant to protect.”