The Conjuring conjurer adds some giallo lunacy (and gore!) to his winning fright formula

It’s time to reconsider one of the most ridiculed women in American history.

Most don’t have bank passwords. Few have credit scores yet. And still, parts of the internet are awash in the personal information of millions of schoolchildren. The ongoing wave of ransomware attacks has cost companies and institutions billions of dollars and exposed personal information about everyone from hospital patients to police officers. It’s also swept up school districts, meaning files from thousands of schools are currently visible on those hackers’ sites.

Stating the obvious

Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land. Here's a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.

State Sen. Lora Reinbold was banned by Alaska Airlines for refusing to wear a mask.

Dinuba, a California town with more than one-fourth of its residents living in poverty, could easily have been a casualty of the pandemic economy. But it had an ace in the hole: an agreement with Best Buy Inc. to share tax revenue on sales from its local warehouse. Instead of cutting basic services, the city took in enough money from the pandemic’s e-commerce boom to provide computer tablets and microphones to students learning from home. It’s giving aid to businesses on its own while it waits for federal funding from the CARES Act, and offered a three-day Covid-19 vaccination event. “We were planning for the worst,” Dinuba Assistant City Manager Daniel James told Bloomberg Tax. “But we were able to exhale. These sorts of agreements are just lifesavers.” Agreements like Dinuba’s are a source of tension because they make one city’s gain a loss to municipalities across the rest of California. In Dinuba’s case, cash is flowing because when customers anywhere in California go online and use BestBuy.com to outfit new home offices, classrooms, or home theaters, Dinuba gets the 1% local share out of the 7.25% state sales tax all customers pay.

Apple Inc.‘s share of local taxes collected by its hometown from e-commerce sales reached new records last year in the midst of a recession, thanks to the boom in pandemic-induced online shopping. Cupertino’s most recent payments to Apple—totaling $5.7 million for the second and third quarters of 2020—increase the total amount paid to the company to $80 million since the original deal was negotiated in 1997, when Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. The record haul shows how the sales-tax sharing agreements that Cupertino and a handful of other California cities struck with e-commerce giants before the pandemic are saving their finances while dozens of other cities are facing drops in tax revenue. Best Buy Co. Inc., Home Depot Inc., and eBay Inc. benefit from similar agreements with other cities, though all those pacts were struck much more recently than Apple’s with Cupertino. For Cupertino, the online spree drove sales tax revenue up by more than one third from April through September, reversing predictions in the spring that city revenue could drop by 18%. But the surge has renewed criticism that the deals benefit some cities to the detriment of others by siphoning away tax revenue that otherwise would be collected where the sale was generated. Although some cities require companies to add jobs and facilities as a condition of getting the payments, Apple’s doesn’t. “This is a bookkeeping trick that is costing California taxpayers millions of dollars for literally no new jobs,” said Nathan Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who focuses on economic development and subsidies. “Apple gets the majority of the benefits and a few locations come out ahead. A large number of communities will see sales tax declines.”

Highlights include the many false reports of other bombings and plane crashes throughout the day, lots of lusting for Palestinian blood, and a few genuinely heartfelt and level-headed calls for peace and love amid the internet tough guys dusting off their middle-eastern slurs and calling for nukes.

Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness, the Peruvian government said.

Most recently was WNDB’s Marc Bernier, a late Daytona, Florida, talk radio host who dubbed himself “Mr. Anti-Vax” in December while assuring his listeners “I’m not taking it.” True to his word, Bernier contracted COVID-19 roughly three weeks ago and his death was announced over the weekend by his radio station––which had awkwardly acknowledged his on-air “anti-vaccine” commentary just before his passing.

"I ain't taking that sh*t. I ain't taking it!" Bland said. He didn't want to detail why until he was pushed to explain why he'd trust drugs like Regeneron's antibody cocktail but not the vaccine. He turned to Rodebush and asked, "Am I going to have to tell her?" Rodebush laughed and shrugged. "They shafted my President," Bland said. He thought the vaccine was delayed intentionally to hurt Trump, a baseless claim. "They wouldn't give it to him because they know damn good and well he'd be reelected, and there'd be nothing nobody could do. So, they had to swindle around and scheme around and keep it from him, and just as soon as the election was over, Bam! There we got it."

The benefits of ventilation reach far beyond the coronavirus. What if we stop taking colds and flus for granted, too?

Signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April, the law criminalizes protests that turn violent and can end in severe prison sentences.

Kabul, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's Taliban authorities have allowed a flight carrying Americans and other foreign nationals to fly out of Kabul, U.S. and Qatari officials said on Thursday. The departure of the plane, which landed safely in Doha, Qatar, marked the airport's first such flight since U.S. forces withdrew from the country.  The group of about 115 passengers, including about 20 Americans and their families as well as other Westerners, departed on a Qatar Airways flight that had earlier ferried humanitarian aid to the country, officials said. From the tarmac at Kabul international airport, Mutlaq bin Majed al-Qahtani, a Qatari special envoy, said the flight would leave with Americans and Westerners.   "Call it what you want, a charter or a commercial flight, everyone has tickets and boarding passes," he said, adding that another commercial flight would take off on Friday. "Hopefully, life is becoming normal in Afghanistan."

Five animals roam neighbourhoods after fleeing private farm as officials struggle to catch them

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and a group of his allies met with Donald Trump over dinner on Aug. 13 — the date Lindell had previously promised would bring Trump's "reinstatement" as president — sources have told Salon. The previously-unreported meeting occurred shortly after the bedding tycoon's "cyber symposium" in South Dakota, which failed to produce anything close to proof of election fraud. Josh Merritt, a former member of Lindell's "red team" at the South Dakota gathering, told Salon that the meeting occurred at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach on the evening of Aug. 13. According to Merritt, New Mexico State University law professor David K. Clements, a Lindell associate and "election truther," talked about the potential Trump meeting ahead of time, during the cyber symposium. "David said he was trying to get on as a lawyer for 45," Merritt said adding that Clements saw Lindell's relationship with Trump as a way to gain access to the inner circles of TrumpWorld. 

In the early morning of June 27, Saint Gaines, a 46-year-old lifelong West Oakland resident who lives in his RV under the I-880 near Wood Street, was still putting out fires from the night before. He and another unhoused resident who lives nearby had to tap a city water main and connect several hoses to be able to reach all the flames.  The night before, a massive crowd of concertgoers, which Gaines estimated at well over 1,000 people, converged on an area between West Grand Avenue and 20th Street under the freeway bridges. Homeless residents who live around there said they saw many concertgoers lighting fires and setting off fireworks, smashing car windows, kicking over tables, spray painting resident’s property, and causing other destruction. “It was utter chaos,” said Lydia, who lives in an RV nearby. In the days and weeks after, several bands that played for the raucous audience posted photos and videos to social media, displaying some of the damage done to the West Oakland homeless community. The band SECTION H8 posted a video of two inflamed vehicles, while Dead City Punx posted a video showing a firework exploding inside a large fire, shooting out in all directions and into the surrounding crowd.

That Newsom is hated by a certain subset of the California population should be taken as a given. The state may be as reliably blue as any in the union, but its nearly 40 million people are far from a monolith, and California, after all, inflicted both Nixon and Reagan on the rest of the country. Still, seeing Newsom this close to a humiliating defenestration is a real shock. Even if the effort to oust him is being led by far-right paranoiacs, his brush with political death suggests there’s something more to it than the ever-present reactionary forces using the pandemic to take their shot, particularly when you consider that voters under 30 are one of the most reliable pro-recall blocs. For almost two centuries, California has been built on extractive industry, industrialized agriculture, and, most importantly these days, real estate. But the gold’s all gone now, the money from the tech boom has been mostly hoarded, and the Central Valley heartland is becoming increasingly dystopian, thanks to the megadrought and global-warming–amplified wildfires. Meanwhile, California’s infamous housing crisis is, if you ask experts, really more like three nesting crises: an outrageous 160,000 Californians are unhoused, low-income renters are rapidly being pushed out of cities to the exurbs, and soaring prices limit new ownership to the wealthy. These issues are not directly Newsom’s fault, even if he comes from California political royalty. He’s just the guy in charge as the slow contraction of what he himself termed the “California Dream” makes itself unavoidably apparent. California is now and always has been the frontier of the American continent, its booming industries built on forever expansion. What happens when the frontier comes to an end?

People who were not fully vaccinated this spring and summer were more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 11 times more likely to die of covid-19, than those who were fully vaccinated, according to one of three major studies published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that highlight the continued efficacy of all three vaccines amid the spread of the highly contagious delta variant. A second study showed that the Moderna coronavirus vaccine was more effective in preventing hospitalizations than its counterparts from Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson. That assessment was based on the largest U.S. study to date of the real-world effectiveness of all three vaccines, involving about 32,000 patients seen in hospitals, emergency departments and urgent-care clinics across nine states from June through early August. While the three vaccines were collectively 86 percent effective in preventing hospitalization, protection was significantly higher among Moderna vaccine recipients (95 percent) than among those who got Pfizer-BioNTech (80 percent) or Johnson & Johnson (60 percent). That finding echoes a smaller study by the Mayo Clinic Health System in August, not yet peer-reviewed, which showed the Moderna vaccine to be more effective than Pfizer-BioNTech at preventing infections during the delta wave.