Phoenix officers created a trophy in the form of a coin emblazoned with a protester being shot with a pepper ball in the testicles.

Jungle Cruise stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are reteaming for a new Amazon film, chronicling the life of the world's first female Pinkerton.

WASHINGTON — American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group takes over the country’s government and ever wants to receive foreign aid, three American officials said. The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off a full evacuation of the embassy as they rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. On Thursday, the State Department announced it was sending home an unspecified number of the 1,400 Americans stationed at the embassy and drawing down to what the agency’s spokesman, Ned Price, described as a “core diplomatic presence” in Kabul. The embassy also urged Americans who were not working for the U.S. government to immediately leave Afghanistan on commercial flights. The Taliban’s march has put embassies in Kabul on high alert for a surge of violence in coming months, or even weeks, and forced consulates and other diplomatic missions in the country to shut down. American diplomats are now trying to determine how soon they may need to fully evacuate the embassy should the Taliban prove to be more bent on destruction than a détente. “Let me be very clear about this: The embassy remains open,” Mr. Price said on Thursday. “And we plan to continue our diplomatic work in Afghanistan.” Mr. Price said the heightened pace of the Taliban’s rout, leading to increased violence and instability across Afghanistan, was of “grave concern.” “So given the situation on the ground, this is a prudent step,” he said. Five current and former officials described the mood inside the embassy as increasingly tense and worried, and diplomats at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington noted a sense of depression at the specter of closing it, nearly 20 years after U.S. Marines reclaimed the burned-out building in December 2001. Several people gloomily revived a comparison that all wanted to avoid: the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans stationed at the U.S. Embassy were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter. The fears underscore what was unfathomable just a few years ago, when thousands of American forces were in Afghanistan and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul hosted one of the largest diplomatic staffs in the world. Editors’ Picks The March of the Karens Eye Drops Were Supposed to Help Her Vision. Why Did It Feel Worse? Can We Ever Look at Titian’s Paintings the Same Way Again? Continue reading the main story Mr. Khalilzad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government. The Taliban leadership has said it wants to be seen as a legitimate steward of the country, and is seeking relations with other global powers, including Russia and China, in part to receive economic support. Two officials confirmed Mr. Khalilzad’s efforts, which have not been previously reported, on the condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations. A third official said on Thursday that the Taliban would forfeit any legitimacy — and, in turn, foreign aid — if it attacked Kabul or took over Afghanistan’s government by force. Other governments are also warning the Taliban that they will not receive aid if they overrun the Afghan government, given the rampage its fighters have waged across the country in recent days. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of Germany said Berlin would not give the Taliban any financial support if they ultimately rule Afghanistan with a hard-line Islamic law. In other posts around the world, U.S. diplomats said they were closely watching the perilous situation in Kabul to see how the State Department would balance its longstanding commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan against protecting the Americans who remain there as military forces withdraw. Ronald E. Neumann, who was the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, described a push and pull between the Pentagon and the State Department in similar situations, given the military’s responsibility for carrying out evacuations and diplomats’ duty to maintain American assistance and influence even in danger zones. Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know. Get it sent to your inbox. “If the military goes too early, it may be unnecessary, and it may cost you a lot politically,” said Mr. Neumann, who is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington. “If the diplomats wait too late, it looks like Saigon off the roof or the departure from Mogadishu after everything was already lost, and it puts the military people at risk. So there’s no guaranteed right side.” Another senior U.S. official expressed alarm this week at the fall of the provincial capitals across Afghanistan, and said that if other cities follow, particularly Mazar-i-Sharif, the only major northern city still under government control, the situation could disintegrate quickly. Officials in Washington and Kabul said the embassy was holding regular meetings of an emergency action committee, which is set up in every American diplomatic post to assess whether or how soon an evacuation may be necessary. The content of the meetings is classified because, in part, they review intelligence about specific attack scenarios.

According to the school district’s dashboard, 113 students have tested positive and 19 staff members have tested positive.

Officials confirm Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams has been suspended for a day and others in her executive staff have been demoted after outside investigations into bogus gang charges for protesters, and a department "challenge coin." The decision to falsely charge a group of protesters as a criminal street gang was approved and known at the highest levels of the Phoenix Police Department, according to the investigation conducted by an outside law firm.

Late one October night in 2019, Joseph Andrews and three other Henderson State University students were studying in the chemistry department of the Arkadelphia campus when Andrews became sick.

Mobile homes account for a lot of affordable housing. They can cost less than half of what other homes go for, and there are nearly 3 million households living in mobile home parks across the country. But even if you own your mobile home outright, you still have to pay rent on the plot of land that your house sits on. And ownership of those plots has been changing. A lot of the mom and pops who have been running mobile home parks for decades... they're retiring. Looking to sell. Big investors are swooping in with billions of dollars to buy them up, because they think the parks could be more profitable. Today on the show, what happens when big investors like private equity firms spend billions of dollars buying mobile home parks, and make them less affordable for the people who live there — and how the government's helping them do it, with super low-cost loans that were meant to support affordable housing.

For many of us, reading the A.G.’s report, and listening to the Governor’s cynical denials, spurs a kind of embarrassed clarity, similar to the feeling one experiences after running into an old ex. How could we have witnessed these same qualities—in Cuomo’s case, the narcissism, the bullying, the hackneyed paternalism—and found them attractive? In search of an answer, I contacted Virginia Goldner, a psychoanalyst who has written about sexual harassment (see: “Pleasure Can Hurt: The Erotic Politics of Sexual Coercion,” published last year, in an issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues). Goldner, a clinical professor at N.Y.U., co-founded an academic journal called Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and appears on the Showtime series “Couples Therapy.” She had some reassuring words for any Cuomosexuals who are in a shame spiral right now. The Governor was up to something in those press conferences. “He was radiating an erotized masculinity that has within it hostility and a little tenderness,” she said. “That combination of soft and hard—mostly hard, but also soft—is what so many women crave in some way,” she said. She called it the “retrosexual part of us”—the part that was raised with the image of a “big, square” daddy/lover figure, even if we’ve never actually had one. She noted that a lot of gay men respond to the fantasy, too: “That’s a figure that could easily be hot to a man.”

Peter Ben Embarek said that one scenario, in which a researcher inadvertently could have brought the virus from a bat cave to Wuhan, is viewed as “likely.”

A community formed in Central Park around a barred owl with a charming, people-friendly personality. Saying goodbye isn’t easy.

Mississippi allows landlords to seize tenant property upon eviction. Advocates say these are the harshest laws of any state in the nation.

McKinley Phipps is sitting on the couch in the living room of his Uptown New Orleans house. The skinny 44-year-old with a salt-and-pepper goatee, gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt is listening to “I Get Physical” from Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth’s 1994 album The Main Ingredient on his smart TV. In an hour, his manager is coming over to help fix a toilet and take him to his weekly meeting with his parole officer. Afterward, Phipps will fiddle with the first iPhone he’s ever owned and try to coordinate picking up his teenage stepdaughters from summer school. Then he’ll go to the studio to work on the music that will reintroduce him to the world. That session will get cut short to make sure he’s home for his mandatory 9 o’clock curfew. This is the new normal for McKinley “Mac” Phipps, the gold-selling former No Limit Records artist. The Camouflage Assassin. The “down south Nas.” And the man who just got home after spending 21 years in prison for a murder Mac says he didn’t commit.

This charade doesn’t leave anyone safer. It’s gone on long enough. American politicians often warn that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will spark a nuclear stampede across the Middle East. Allowing Tehran to get the bomb, Senator Robert Menendez, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, predicted in March 2020, could “set off a dangerous arms race in the region.” In an interview in December, President-elect Joe Biden cautioned that if Iran went nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt might too, “and the last goddamn thing we need in that part of the world is a buildup of nuclear capability.” Such statements are so familiar that it’s easy to overlook their artifice. In warning that Iran could turn the Middle East nuclear, American politicians imply that the region is nuclear-free now. But it’s not. Israel already has nuclear weapons. You’d just never know it from America’s leaders, who have spent the last half-century feigning ignorance. This deceit undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell the truth. American officials began hiding the truth about Israeli nuclear weapons after Israeli leaders hid the truth from them. In the early 1960s, writes Avner Cohen in his book “The Worst Kept Secret,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion repeatedly told President John F. Kennedy that the reactor Israel was building in the desert town of Dimona “was for peaceful purposes only.” When the United States sent inspectors to the site, the Israelis concocted an elaborate ruse, which included building fake walls to conceal the elevators that led to an underground reprocessing plant. By decade’s end, the die was cast. The C.I.A. concluded that Israel already possessed nuclear warheads. So Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir hatched a deal. Neither Israel nor the United States would acknowledge that Israel had nuclear weapons, and Washington would not pressure Israel to submit them to international oversight. For 50 years now, American presidents have abided by the bargain. Scholars believe that when Israel tested a nuclear weapon in the Indian Ocean in 1979, the Carter administration covered it up. In 2009, when a journalist asked Barack Obama if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama responded, “I don’t want to speculate.”

The "two-finger" virginity tests on female recruits in the Indonesian army have been branded "degrading, discriminatory, and traumatic."

In collaboration with VICE, Logically investigators reveal the California woman operating OpenVAERS, a website that misrepresents federal data to promote an anti-vax agenda.

Coleman loaded his two children — a 2-year-old son and a 10-month-old daughter — into a Mercedes Sprinter Camper Van, an FBI agent said in court documents filed Wednesday. Coleman didn’t have a car seat for his daughter, so he put her in a box. From his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., Coleman drove south, investigators say. Instead of the family camping trip he had planned, Coleman took his children some 250 miles to Rosarito, a resort city on the Pacific coast in Mexico, just south of the U.S. border, FBI agent Jennifer Bannon said in a nine-page sworn affidavit. Then, he shot each of them in the chest with a spearfishing gun, the agent said.

Leading up to the seminar, Mr. Lindell had displayed a video of scrolling, incomprehensible text, which he claimed were the packet captures he had received — proof, he claimed, of his China hacking theory. The video was featured in his documentary “Absolute 9-0” and was played on loop on screens throughout the convention center during the symposium. Cybersecurity expert J. Kirk Wiebe, a former senior National Security Agency analyst and whistleblower, also said Mr. Lindell did not have the actual data sets. He said the scrolling text was likely meant to resemble what the packet captures would look like in the data set but were not actual packet captures, which are vital to prove the claims. Several cyber experts at the symposium became frustrated late into the first day with not being provided with packet captures.

The comedy survived cancellation. Can it survive changing feelings about the police?

There could be a slippery slope here.

It tastes weirdly similar to corn on the cob!