This time last year, during the final presidential debate, Joe Biden promised to “fundamentally change” the administration of criminal justice if elected. That change is much needed — on issues ranging from police misconduct to excessive sentences to racial disparities in arrests, charges and punishment.

On a chilly October night, a dozen immigrant yellow cab taxi drivers and allies sat around a foldable table in protest outside Manhattan’s City Hall, their bodies awash in the unblinking glare of traffic and neon lights. Signs for Chase, Citi Bank, and Bank of America clashed with the high beams of cars speeding by. If you took out the idle yellow cabs, their illuminated roof lights spelling out medallion numbers and letters, the scene could be in any major city worldwide. But no, this was New York City, known for its enduring hustle, for the possibility of deliverance. Any roving yellow taxi driven by an immigrant isn’t only transporting city residents to work, carrying businesspeople to airports, or screeching to a halt at the sight of would-be Carrie Bradshaws waiting at the curb to be ferried to the club. It’s also freighted with its driver’s hopes for new beginnings and economic stability. Today, these modern-day Charons, numbering nearly fourteen thousand and hailing from the sunbaked lands of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Haiti, ushering poor and rich alike through the recurring rites of city travel, are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And the person who should be their likeliest ally is their staunchest opponent, standing in the way of true debt relief. In 2013, Mayor Bill de Blasio ran on a promise to close the economic chasm bifurcating New York into a Tale of Two Cities, a campaign slogan about runaway inequality turbocharged when billionaire Michael Bloomberg was at the helm of city governance. (Disclosure: I worked for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Democracy NYC Initiative as a communications director from December 2020 to January 2021.) Eight years later, de Blasio is facing a 24/7 protest encampment outside City Hall, where drivers and allies distribute leaflets with the headline: “TELL MAYOR DEBLASIO: Help the Cabbies, Not the Banks!”

federalized undercover officers working on the task force that killed Winston Boogie Smith Jr., were exercising “lawful authority,” and will not face charges said Crow Wing prosecutor Donald Ryan in a letter made public on October 11, 2021. A press conference was held four days later in which attorneys for Smith’s family revealed that all officers involved in the task force refused to speak with investigators after killing Smith.

A no-holds-barred talk with the megastar and entrepreneur about his volatile childhood, his heartbreaking relationship with his dad, and Vin Diesel’s “bullshit.”

Community advocates and environmental groups pointed out that the EPA has promised action on toxic PFAS pollution for many years.

Delphi is a computational model for descriptive ethics, i.e., people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations. To learn more about the model and the dataset, please read our paper. Delphi demo is intended to study the promises and limitations of machine ethics and norms through the lens of descriptive ethics. Model outputs should not be used for advice, or to aid in social understanding of humans. The model’s output does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the authors and their associated affiliations.

In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies. Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a “mitochondrial Eve”, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor, but DNA sequencing demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the Great Rift Valley in east Africa seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savanna-womb that gave life to us all. Many of us probably still have something resembling this picture of human origins in our mind. More recent research, though, has shown it couldn’t possibly be accurate. In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannas, as previously thought. Instead, our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope. Some of those populations remained isolated from one another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed, so that early human populations appear to have been far more physically diverse than modern humans. If we could travel back in time, this remote past would probably strike us as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.

Industry has long profited by casting doubt on science. But how did conspiracy theories and lies come to supplant America's faith in reason and truth?

Counterterrorism officers are questioning 25-year-old suspect Ali Harbi Ali in connection with the death of Sir David Amess, a fact that’s been seized upon with glee by neo-Nazis and far-right commentators online.

Kanye West is no more. After filing paperwork to change his name, the rapper, born Kanye Omari West, finally got what he asked for, and will be legally known as "Ye."

Declaring an impasse in contract talks with striking union workers, global spirits producer Heaven Hill said Monday it will start hiring permanent replacement workers for bottling and warehouse operations in Kentucky. Union leaders responded that they're willing to continue negotiations and accused the company of wanting to replace longtime employees with non-union workers. About 420 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23D have been on strike for more than five weeks They voted overwhelmingly last month to reject a new five-year contract offer and formed picket lines at Heaven Hill’s operations in Bardstown.

Illusionists, cardsharps, charlatans and human cannonballs enliven a trove of rare books, posters and ephemera now going to auction at Sotheby’s.

The K-drama is the hottest show in the world – so why do its English speakers sound like they’re reading off Google Translate? We meet the men accused of dire, stilted acting to see how they’ve found being catapulted to fame.

Joe Manchin’s prescriptions for the Biden bill in some cases even fall short of the status quo.

Daniel Baker’s calls for armed defense against possible far-right attacks led to a much harsher sentence than that facing most insurrectionists.

Pittsburgh's mayor procured a social media monitoring tool, Zencity, for helping understand COVID. His use of it has been entirely different.

This is the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest "fake news" operations in the US. For two years, he ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Under him was a dedicated team of writers and editors paid to produce deceptive content—from outright hoaxes to political propaganda—with the supreme goal of tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Through extensive efforts, he built a secret network of self-reinforcing sites from the ground up. He devised a strategy that got prominent personalities—including Trump—to retweet misleading claims to their followers. And he fooled unwary American citizens, including the hacker's own father, into regarding fake news sources more highly than the mainstream media. Pundits and governments just might have given Russia too much credit, he says, when a whole system of manipulating people's perception and psychology was engineered and operated from within the US. "Russia played such a minor role that they weren't even a blip on the radar," the hacker told me recently. "This was normal for politicians, though… if you say a lie enough times, everyone will believe it." Previously dubbed "Hacker X," he's now ready to reveal who he is—and how he did it.

One of Haiti's most powerful gangs -- the 400 Mawozo -- is believed to be behind the kidnapping of 17 American and Canadian missionaries, a source in the Caribbean country's security forces told CNN Sunday.

The software has outed one student and also incorrectly notified a transgender teen's parents after they wrote about their past suicidal thoughts.

More than a month later, loved ones are still reeling from the loss, which experts say was the result of housing issues, climate change's hidden toll on low-income immigrants and more.