From its name, to its hazy origins, to its drug interactions, there's a lot going on beneath that thick rind.

China's Yutu 2 rover spotted the mysterious object on its 36th lunar day on the moon, and it will now go investigate what it is.

“This morning at the ALEC Committee meetings,” Jason Isaac, director of the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote last Friday morning, “you’ll have the opportunity to push back against woke financial institutions that are colluding against American energy producers.” The email—obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, and first reported by CMD investigative journalist Alex Kotch—offers a window into a rapidly congealing strategy among Republican state-level officials: declaring war on “critical energy theory” within the financial sector. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, held its States and Nation Policy Summit in San Diego last week. The event—attended by a mix of state legislators and representatives from the private sector—featured spirited discussions about a potential Constitutional Convention, as well as lots of excitement about Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s attempt to galvanize voters around “critical race theory,” the once-obscure academic subfield that right-wingers now regularly rant about, claiming that CRT has infected the K-12 curriculum and that teaching students accurate facts about slavery and segregation is somehow unfair to white people. Now ALEC seems gearing up for a similar move on energy policy. The group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, which met on Friday, voted to back two pieces of model legislation that portray climate policy—even climate policy that doesn’t exist yet—as unfairly discriminating against fossil fuel companies. The ​“Resolution Opposing Securities and Exchange Commission and White House Mandates on Climate-Related Financial Matters” encourages states to take up legal challenges against forthcoming rules from federal financial regulators around climate risk and disclosures, potentially aiming to trigger a similar wave of lawsuits from states that followed the Clean Power Plan during the Obama administration. This follows a letter sent to the “U.S. Banking Industry” by state treasurers, plus a comptroller and auditor, from 16 extraction-heavy, Republican-controlled states just before Thanksgiving, pledging “collective action” against “reckless attacks on law-abiding energy companies.” The “Energy Discrimination Elimination Act,” voted through unanimously on Friday, directs states to compile a list of entities that are supposedly boycotting fossil fuel companies, explicitly citing banks that are “increasingly denying financing to creditworthy fossil energy companies solely for the purpose of decarbonizing their lending portfolios and marketing their environmental credentials”; institutional investors that are “divesting from fossil energy companies and pressuring corporations to commit to the goal of the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050”; and large investments that are “colluding to force energy companies to cannibalize their existing businesses.”

A man who left a bag of bombs Downtown during the 2020 George Floyd protests won't have to go to prison. U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose on Monday...

A widely mocked Nashville statue of the early KKK leader was removed Tuesday morning

The hedge fund pioneer is barred for life from buying more antiquities. He turned over 180 stolen objects that had decorated his homes and office.

This year alone, Chan has spent a total of 143 ETH (now worth more than $600,000) on four pixelated avatars from a collection known as CryptoPunks, among the most popular and prominent types of NFTs. To him, owning a CryptoPunk signals that you are an “OG” in the cryptocurrency space, or that you have the means to pay a steep price to join an increasingly exclusive club. In this digital world, the value of the social capital encoded in your pixels is a function of different kinds of attributes. In the most expensive tiers of NFT avatars, prices vary based on elements like accessories, hairstyles and clothing — and skin color. In other words, not all Punks are created equal. [...] “You’re allowed to buy anything you want provided that you have the budget to buy it,” Herrera said. “People of color are going to be limited.”

A Consumer Reports investigation into laws governing interest rates for auto loans found major gaps in protection for consumers. When Murino Frampton bought a used 2006 Jaguar S-Type sedan in the winter of 2019, he put $2,000 down and took out a $3,350 car loan from the Las Vegas dealer to finance the rest. The annual percentage rate (APR) on the loan was 75 percent. In many states, including Nevada, charging an APR that high for a car loan is technically illegal. And yet Frampton’s loan paperwork from the dealer, Auto Credit Center, plainly displays the 75 percent APR, according to a copy reviewed by Consumer Reports. Frampton, 55, says he needed a car to get to doctor’s appointments, having struggled for years using the Las Vegas limited bus system. He received about $1,000 per month from Social Security for disability payments, and thought he could make the $300 monthly payments work. The lender explained they needed to charge the sky-high APR because Frampton had a low credit score, he says.

Extreme gerrymandering in Texas shows the high price of congressional inaction. Ninety-five percent of the state’s population growth in the last decade came from communities of color, but, in an astonishingly brazen effort to forestall these demographic changes, the new redistricting maps for the state legislature and US House increase the number of districts with white majorities—overwhelmingly held by Republicans—and decrease the number of districts with Hispanic and Black majorities. Texas’ population is 39.8 percent white, 39.3 percent Hispanic, 11.8 percent Black, and 5.4 percent Asian American. But under the state legislative maps approved on October 15, white people comprise a majority of eligible voters in more than 60 percent of districts on average, while Hispanics are a majority in roughly 20 percent of districts, Black residents a majority in just 3 percent of districts, and Asian Americans a majority in zero districts—far below their overall numbers in the state. The congressional maps approved on October 18 have a similar skew in favor of white representation: white people comprise a majority of eligible voters in 60 percent of districts, while Hispanics are a majority in 18 percent of districts, and Black residents are a majority in zero districts—a stunning level of under-representation for voters of color given that Texas gained nearly two million new Latino residents and more than 550,000 Black residents compared to just 187,000 white residents over the past decade. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has already filed suit against the state, contending the maps violate the Voting Rights Act.

Three years ago, after the crash of two Boeing 737 Max jets in less than five months, an explanation emerged that was almost impossible for many civilian travelers to comprehend: The company had inadvertently outfitted the new planes with software that could cause them to dive into the ground. Wasn’t Boeing the undisputed master of its field? How could a treasure of American industry have committed such a deadly error? Peter Robison knew the answers. A Seattle-based investigative journalist for Bloomberg Businessweek, he has been watching the company’s behind-the-scenes decline for two decades. His new book, Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, traces the twin crashes directly to a 1997 merger that replaced the company’s engineering-focused culture with one obsessed with delivering “shareholder value” to investors. Rushed aircraft development, inadequate testing, and faulty code may have been the immediate causes of 347 deaths and the destruction of the reputation of America’s last great manufacturer. But before all that, it was a pathological form of capitalism that poisoned Boeing.

Talking to courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg about her 40-year-plus career and what it’s like when a defendant illustrates you.

Within days of the pandemic declaration in mid-March 2020, Plexiglas shielding was touted as a common-sense safety measure, installed sooner or later by retailers, restaurants, government buildings, schools and even the National Arts Centre Orchestra. But last month, a top adviser with the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table said such dividers may be ineffective, and even counterproductive, in some settings. Dr. Peter Juni, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Toronto and scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 advisory table, told reporters that “where you see (them) in schools or restaurants, the Plexiglas can impede ventilation and give people a wrong sense of security.”

The NFT shows a pixelated Ginsburg with a vagina for a head.

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and this new 3-D printed invention makes it even easier.

Quality assurance testers and other developers at Raven Software, the Activision studio in charge of the extremely lucrative free-to-play battle royale Call of Duty: Warzone, are walking out on the job today to protest surprise layoffs that were foisted on staff beginning last Friday. The group told Kotaku in a statement it has only one demand: give all QA testers, including those just laid off, full-time positions. “Those participating in this demonstration do so with the continued success of the studio at the forefront of their mind,” the group wrote. “The Raven QA department is essential to the day-to-day functioning of the studio as a whole. Terminating the contracts of high performing testers in a time of consistent work and profit puts the health of the studio at risk.” Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Management at the Wisconsin-based studio informed QA staff at the end of last week that they would have meetings starting over the next month to decide which employees would get converted to full-time with raises and which ones would be laid off. As part of the first wave of meetings, 30 percent of Raven’s QA team saw their contracts terminated (effective January 28), while others await news of their fate as they head into the holiday season.

The dramatic cryptocurrency crash was super-charged by liquidations in the crypto derivatives market, market players say.

About a week and a half ago, Dunkin’ announced the debut of its Sugarplum Macchiato. Normally I wouldn’t really think too deeply about something like that. Christmas is on the way, and you’ll hear wisps of tunes like Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker while you’re off baking cookies in the kitchen.

If he's such a good guy, why isn't it the Texas Chainsaw Picnic, instead?

(from 2020) Apple recalled the “one excruciating night” at Tarantino’s home that caused her to swear off cocaine forever, wherein she spent the night listening to Anderson and Tarantino brag. “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,”

Reno, Nevada, has one of the worst affordable housing shortages in the U.S. Yet city officials let an out-of-state casino owner displace hundreds of low-income residents so he could one day build an entertainment complex.