Donald Trump and his allies spent much of the 2020 campaign fomenting Republican fear of “cancel culture” to whip up votes against Joe Biden. He decried the alleged crisis in many speeches, accusing Democrats of wielding “cancel culture” as a “political weapon” against their enemies—a tactic he described as “the very definition of totalitarianism.” This gambit did not carry Trump to a second term, but his followers have carried on the crusade in the halls of Congress, on Fox News, and wherever else Trumpism remains alive and well. One bastion of Trumpism today, of course, is the federal judiciary, which is dominated by the 234 judges the former president installed on the bench (including one-third of the current Supreme Court). Some of these judges have taken up the mantle of Trump’s campaign against cancel culture, transforming judicial opinions into Tucker Carlson–style rants against political correctness. The nation’s federal courts are declaring war on wokeness.

A massive storm cloud formed Monday night above the Dixie fire, generating a spinning vortex of flames and ash that soared into the sky.

The city has given little room for public input ahead of a vote to approve the $90 million center that activists have dubbed “Cop City.” On a recent evening in Atlanta, a group of over 100 residents gathered in the sanctuary of a local church, spaced out and wearing masks to follow pandemic precautions. “We are dealing with a very important issue tonight that the city has not dealt with,” said Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders, a local Black-led collective that organizes against gentrification in the city, kicking off a town hall as the setting sun peered in through large pastel, stained-glass windows. “What we have here is a city dedicated to protecting the police while pushing out poor, working-class residents — particularly Black, poor, working-class residents — under the guise it’s helping to protect people.” For the next two hours, residents and activists took turns commenting on the city’s latest development plans that have caused a stir among locals: a $90 million police training facility in the city’s last large remaining green space known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. On June 7, City Council Member Joyce Sheperd introduced legislation that would authorize a ground lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation for the full 381 acres. That ordinance is moving through City Council committees this week and is expected to come up for a vote by the full council next Monday, August 16. So far, only two members of the 16-person council, Antonio Brown and Carla Smith, have publicly said they would vote against approving the project. In the lead-up to the vote, some Atlanta residents have raised concerns about the proposed training center, which activists have dubbed “Cop City” since APF plans to build a mock city for first responders to train in. Top of mind to the “Stop Cop City” coalition are the potential environmental and public health impacts of building the training center, along with investing so much money in police amid the city’s police brutality issues and housing crisis. Following last summer’s historic protests against police violence, the city responded by striking down any police reform measures and limiting opportunities for public comment while increasing the police budget and upping citizen surveillance. Atlanta Police have killed at least three people since the demonstrations, most recently in late July, while the long battle to close the city jail appears to have reached another stalemate. In total, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been called to investigate 59 officer-involved shootings throughout the state this year; they launched 96 investigations in 2020. The People’s Town Hall, which was organized by the Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America and was attended by two city council members, came after the city and APF hosted two virtual “public input sessions,” in which police representatives presented a slideshow and responded to questions that had been submitted ahead of time. Residents weren’t given any time to speak and the chat function was disabled, so some people held up written messages to their screens instead.

The February 2020 purchase's disclosure Wednesday was at odds with the 45-day deadline set forth by a federal law designed to combat insider trading.

And the author preserves the grammatical errors.

An unknown fraction of service members who were punished for refusing the anthrax vaccine in the late 1990s and early 2000s have sought to have their records corrected, but only a few have had success. Years ago, official Pentagon statements indicated that an estimated 350 servicemembers had refused the vaccine between 1998 to 2000. At least three dozen of them were court-martialed and hundreds left the service to avoid the vaccine, according to Pentagon statements in 2005. Also, at least another 149 troops were forced out of the service for vaccine refusal from 2000 to 2004. Those numbers did not include troops who refused but were allowed to leave the service without punishment or simply allowed to not receive the shot and suffered no repercussions.

Politician Igor Redkin says he wanted to scare away a bear when he opened fire in Russia's Far East.

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) yesterday announced five new board trustees, only one of whom will have a bathroom named after him at the institution.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, facing sharp criticism from health experts over a public service video that purports to show a deputy's near-death experience from fentanyl exposure, acknowledged that he, not a doctor, concluded the deputy overdosed.

First-year students discover that entrepreneurship isn’t just a way to make money — it’s also a set of tools that anyone can use to improve the world around them.

In essence, Kathryn found, nearly all Americans have the equivalent of a secret credit score that rates the risk of prescribing controlled substances to them. And doctors have authorities looking over their shoulders as they weigh their own responses to those scores.

Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering every aspect of a giant secret intelligence and secret operational organisation’. This, the CIA’s official history reports, was the genesis of ‘the nation’s first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.

Billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. Confidential IRS records show the windfall that followed.

Revolutions happen when a political system fails to address huge, obvious problems The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, probably the largest scientific collaboration in human history, has produced its Sixth Assessment Report on climate change. The science is complicated and the pile of evidence is immense, but the basic conclusion is fairly straightforward: Scientists are ever more certain that the global temperature is rising, that it is caused by humans, and that all manner of extreme weather events are connected to this warming. As a pseudonymous physicist summarized, "It's real, it's us, there's strong agreement amongst relevant experts, the impacts could be really severe, we can still do things to limit the impact." The threat is dire. Every part of the United States will be harmed by unchecked global warming — some are getting hit worse than others, but nowhere is immune — while poorer countries will have it worse still. With just one degree Celsius of warming, America has experienced a summer of rolling climate disasters. At 1.5 degrees and beyond, the damage will be much, much worse. And yet there is no sign that the American political system is taking this threat at all seriously. It raises the question of whether climate change will be the thing that finally topples the already creaking American constitutional system.

After being unceremoniously dumped from the show, Frank Fritz went on a social media tear insisting that he and Mike Wolfe were never friends...Fritz has acknowledged that he entered rehab for alcohol after his back surgery, saying the show’s producers were subsequently pretty vague about whether he’d be invited back on the show. Fritz told The Sun that he thinks Wolfe would like his brother Robbie to take Fritz’s role on Pickers, but so far that claim hasn’t been substantiated by Wolfe or History Channel. The official American Pickers site has removed all photos of Fritz, instead choosing to highlight only Wolfe and Colby.

The electric-yellow soda is going back to its rip roarin' rowdy roots

The episode instead set off the Streisand effect from a livid and amused public in YouTube comments and on Twitter. It turns out, his colleagues didn’t like the look, which they communicated in emails first obtained by Motherboard via FOIA request, and shared with Gizmodo. “WHYYYYYY?,” sergeant Miguel Campos wrote in an email to colleagues with a link to a news story and a quote from Shelby. “I am actually at a loss watching the video,” sheriff’s Deputy Phillip Corvello replied.

Gov. Gavin Newsom personally accompanied Caltrans officials to clear out a longstanding homeless encampment near the Berkeley Marina Monday morning. But while officials claim residents were offered alternate housing, several of them are in states of limbo as they search for another place to live. The camp, known as “downstairs” to the encampment on University Avenue at Frontage Road, is located underneath the Insterstate 80 underpass, accessed by stairs on the pedestrian bridge. Activists with “Where Do We Go Berkeley” have long maintained and fought for both camps, which have existed well over two years during a worsening, regional housing crisis in the Bay Area.

It is natural, on a day like this, to think about the deer. In the late autumn of 2016, a white-tailed buck took up residence at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem. Locals dubbed him J.R, after the park he was found in, or Lefty, because he was missing most of his antler on that side. It was Manhattan, where such megafauna are rare, so Lefty became a mini-celebrity. But also, it was Manhattan. Lefty, like Mucky the Gowanus Dolphin before him, was a long-term impossibility, a guest living beyond the practical means of his environment, and so several weeks later, when Lefty escaped from the park into the grounds of a nearby housing complex, the city announced that it would have to put the deer down. That’s when Andrew Cuomo stepped in. Although the city had acted on the recommendations of the state’s own conservation agency, which had a policy of discouraging deer relocation, the New York governor swooped in to offer sanctuary to the buck. “We want to do everything we can to save the Harlem deer,” he announced. “We have told the city that the feds or we can transport it upstate today.” The city and the state went back and forth on this for two days, until finally, Lefty died in custody—evidently from all the stress. It’s hard to conjure a political fight less consequential. Why was the governor of New York wading into this? Why was this even a Thing? What exactly were “the feds” supposed to do? There was no reason it ever had to happen at all, except that it offered Cuomo a chance to humiliate New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—which meant that there was no way in hell the governor was staying out of it. Brutish and unnecessary demonstrations of power, after all, are how Andrew Cuomo says hello.

A viral TikTok video of a woman taking umbrage with her neighbor's decorative Tigger flag tells us more than we want to know about ourselves.