On Thursday, MSNBC executives held one of their regular quarterly virtual town hall meetings with their employees. A big part of the meeting focused on the cable news channel’s 25th anniversary, but during the town hall, the executives, including MSNBC president Rashida Jones, were asked about something much more current: the effort by hundreds of MSNBC staffers to form a union. Audio of the meeting, which was obtained by Discourse Blog, shows the subtle, skillful, but nevertheless unmistakable ways that MSNBC’s corporate bosses appear to be trying to stop the union drive in its tracks. Recommended The MSNBC staffers announced in June that they had formed a union with the Writers Guild of America East. (Disclosure: seven Discourse Blog staffers are members of the WGAE.) According to the WGAE, the bargaining unit contains 315 editorial staffers who work both on MSNBC’s television shows and on some of the news shows that air on NBC’s Peacock streaming service. (NBC News’ digital-side employees are already unionized.) In their letter announcing the drive, staffers said they were organizing for things like higher pay, pay equity, improved benefits, and diversity.

Federal prosecutors in the District filed a motion to dismiss charges against a protester who was identified using facial recognition technology and was accused of assaulting police officers as they swept demonstrators from Lafayette Square last summer. The case against Michael Peterson Jr. was one of a number in which authorities have used the controversial technology to identify protesters accused of violence during demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd. It was also the first known instance in which authorities disclosed the existence of a powerful facial recognition system that had been used in thousands of cases across Virginia, Maryland and the District. It was discontinued earlier this month. The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington did not give a reason for filing the motion to dismiss, and the office declined to comment. It came days after Peterson’s attorney filed a motion to suppress his client’s identification by the system known as the National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System ­(NCRFRILS). Glenn F. Ivey argued in his motion that facial recognition software has not been shown to be scientifically reliable, that it has a higher error rate when identifying Black people, like his client, and that the procedure followed to identify Peterson was flawed.

A gamer identifying as Challenger 2 commander has posted a classified document online in order to improve the accuracy of the design of the tank in the game 'War Thunder'.

As we outlined yesterday, there is over 17 million square feet of vacant office space now spread across San Francisco, which is up from around 16 million square feet of vacant space three months ago and as compared to under 5 million square feet of vacant space at the start of last year.

Fight Club has a tortured legacy, managing to be at once a prime example of David Fincher’s meticulous craftsmanship, a subversive commentary on late-capitalist machismo, a totem embraced by the very knuckleheads it ostensibly criticizes, and an over-exposed subject of “my first thinkpiece”-style pop-culture takes.…

A Florida man told police officers he was “teaching it a lesson” when he tried to throw a live alligator he had stolen from a miniature golf course onto the roof of a beachside cocktail lounge, authorities said.

Coastal cities under threat from ‘rapidly increasing high tide floods’ which could occur in clusters lasting a month or more, say scientists

Hundreds of workers at the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas are striking for the first time.

The Vermont ice cream company’s silence on social media has followed blowback in May over its longstanding license of a factory in Israel that produces and distributes ice cream in the country, and also sells in and caters to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

The classical CEO of any company is, by definition, removed from the process that enriches them. As a result, they are a poor definer of what actually makes their company work on a micro level, which is where remote work sits. Reed Hastings claims that he models his company on professional sports teams, and also that Netflix is “fundamentally dedicated to employee freedom because that makes us more flexible,” several months before saying that employees must return to the office. This is the problem - these CEOs, these managers, these people that do not actually do the work or see the work or really interact with the work, they are the ones that are making this big argument about how bad remote work will be for their office culture, the office culture in which they do not participate in any meaningful way.

As art lovers return to Italian galleries and exhibitions, newly installed technology at one Bologna museum is keeping track of how people look at paintings.

Rich nations have bought up most doses long into the future, and there is little hope of a rescue in sight.

Strong rains caused rivers to burst their banks and wash away buildings in Belgium and Germany, where at least 1,300 remained missing. Homes and streets in the Netherlands and Switzerland also flooded.

Tyrone Allen got time-served in an extraordinary outcome for someone convicted of a series of bank robberies.

Novelist Brad Thor thought he had found his doomsday-prepping soulmate, but then the End Times went bad.

That section of the garden had been left unattended since he moved in over two decades ago.

An upcoming book reveals that Milley, the US's top general, was seriously afraid that Trump would lead a coup after losing the 2020 election.

Housing has become so expensive in the United States that the typical minimum wage worker cannot afford rent, according to a new report.

KETCHUM, Idaho—Ethan McKee-Bakos has had no trouble finding work since he moved to this upscale mountain town last February, earning $60,000 a year from two jobs. But Mr. McKee-Bakos spent nearly six weeks living out of his SUV in the nearby Sawtooth National Forest, unable to afford rent for a condo. “If you live in Ketchum, there’s no shortage of work. There’s just a shortage of where you can live,” said Mr. McKee-Bakos, who works as a supply manager at a local hospital and a bouncer at a bar. “This is the first time I’ve experienced any type of homelessness.” Like many towns in the West with economies built around tourism, Ketchum is facing a cascading housing crisis caused by a rush of new residents during the Covid-19 pandemic, growing demand for workers during the economic boom that has followed, and a shortage of affordable homes that was years in the making. Businesses in this community of 2,700, located in central Idaho near the Sun Valley ski resort, are struggling to fill open positions, forcing some to cut hours. Some workers live in trailers or tents in the Sawtooth National Forest. And the waiting list for the 113 affordable-housing units for sale or rent in surrounding Blaine County is yearslong. The situation has gotten so extreme that Ketchum’s mayor recently raised the idea of allowing local workers to temporarily erect tents in a park so they could have a place to live while searching for something permanent.

FBI agents disregarded allegations by Olympic gymnasts that they were sexually assaulted by former national team doctor Larry Nassar and later made false statements to cover their mistakes, Justice Department investigators said Wednesday in a long-awaited report on the bureau’s handling of one of the biggest abuse cases in U.S. sports history. The Justice Department’s inspector general detailed multiple failings in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s response to the gymnasts’ complaints, which were first brought into the Indianapolis field office on July 28, 2015, by USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body. For more than a year after that, the bureau did almost nothing in response. The Indianapolis agents receive the brunt of the blame: according to the report, agents there were unsure if the allegations against Nassar represented a possible federal crime. They were also unsure how to handle concerns that had been brought to them in Indianapolis—the city where USA Gymnastics is headquartered—when there were no allegations of Nassar treating gymnasts there. Nassar, now serving an effective life term in prison, was later established to have sexually abused hundreds of women and girls—including members of the U.S. national gymnastics team—under the guise of medical treatment. The abuse occurred in training and competitions around the country and overseas, and through his employment at Michigan State University. According to the report, the Indianapolis agents did not formally document their July 2015 meeting with the USA Gymnastics officials, which came after the gymnastics body had conducted its own five-week internal inquiry into concerns about Nassar. After the meeting, Indianapolis agents spoke with only one gymnast: McKayla Maroney, who had described her abuse to a private investigator retained by USA Gymnastics. An agent conducted that interview over the telephone. The report says that the interview was not properly documented until February 2017, which is around the time The Wall Street Journal first documented the delays in the investigation. Agents did not follow up with other gymnasts. And, the report says, the Indianapolis agents failed to transfer the Nassar allegations to the FBI’s resident agency in Lansing, Mich.—under the Detroit field office—the most likely place to investigate potential federal crimes that had been committed in the area, even after they had been advised by an Assistant U.S. Attorney to do so and they told USA Gymnastics that they had. Nor did the FBI contact state or local enforcement or take any other action to mitigate the risk to gymnasts that Nassar continued to treat. The report also details multiple false statements to internal FBI investigators by Indianapolis agents, including the special agent in charge of the office, Jay Abbott, and a supervisory special agent who is not named, dating to the earliest days of the gymnasts’ complaints. The supervisory special agent’s February 2017 write-up of his telephone interview with Maroney contained materially false statements and omissions, and the agent also made materially false statements when questioned later about the interview. Abbott, too, “made materially false statements during his OIG interviews to minimize errors made by the Indianapolis Field Office in connection with the handling of the Nassar allegations,” according to the inspector general’s report. He also showed “extremely poor judgment and violated FBI policy” by communicating with Steve Penny, the then-head of USA Gymnastics, about a potential vacancy at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee while the two continued to discuss the Nassar allegations. Abbott then applied for the job, and later twice told internal investigators he had not.