"I don't want to sound cynical now, but there are those who don't want [Israel] to import ice cream or export technologies."

A U.S. delegation and other dignitaries were hurried to vehicles as reports emerged of shots fired and crowd control gas used on protesters outside the funeral of late Haitian president Jovenel Moise on Friday.

In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town. Forty-five years later, we revisit the story.

A quiet divide between President Biden and the leaders of the voting rights movement burst into the open on Thursday, as 150 organizations urged him to use his political mettle to push for two expansive federal voting rights bills that would combat a Republican wave of balloting restrictions. In the letter, signed by civil rights groups including the Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, activists argued that with the “ideal of bipartisan cooperation on voting rights” nowhere to be found in a sharply divided Senate, Mr. Biden must “support the passage of these bills by whatever means necessary.” The issue is of paramount importance to Democrats: Republicans have passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country this year that are likely to make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities, which lean Democratic. Several of the laws give state legislators more power over how elections are run and make it easier to challenge the results. In a fiery speech in Philadelphia last week, Mr. Biden warned that the G.O.P. effort was the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” But the president and voting rights advocates are increasingly in disagreement about how to pass that test. Mr. Biden, a veteran of the Senate who for decades has believed in negotiating on the particulars of voting rights legislation, has faced calls to push Democratic senators to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow the two major voting bills proposed by the party to pass with a simple majority. The president and his advisers have repeatedly pointed out that he does not have the votes within his own party to pass federal voting legislation, and does not have the power to unilaterally roll back the filibuster even if he supported doing so. But voting rights groups say that Mr. Biden is not expending sufficient political capital or using the full force of his bully pulpit to persuade Congress. They point to the contrast between his soaring language — “Jim Crow on steroids,” he has called the G.O.P. voting laws — and his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster.

Pandemic relief measures are hobbled by serious failures of program design and implementation.

Cornett, the lifelong restaurant worker from Kentucky, has watched the wage issue get tense on his local food service Facebook group. Any job posting below $15 an hour would get jeers and demands for higher pay. Then the employers would get defensive, saying they couldn't afford big raises. "The immediate response every time was: 'Then you can't afford to be in business, bro,' " Cornett said.

When Tommy Fisher heard the call for a big, beautiful wall, he erected a 3-mile fence along the Rio Grande. Now all he needs is someone to buy it back.

Officers were filmed shoving, pepper spraying, and hitting people as they dismantled a park encampment of fewer than 20 residents. Toronto police violently destroyed a homeless encampment in a city park, at times hitting and shoving protesters, pepper spraying them, and arresting 26 people. Dozens of officers and security guards showed up to Lamport Stadium park in the city’s west end Wednesday morning to take down a homeless encampment with an estimated 14 to 17 people. Activists showed up and created a makeshift barrier of wood, plastic, and other materials. Video footage shows police moving in on the demonstrators, ripping apart the barriers, and at times charging people, shoving them and dragging them on the ground. In one video, police shove a group of people who’d linked arms in front of a tent, destroying the tent. Officers could be seen ripping apart some of the tents on site. One photo shows an officer using the “knee-on-neck” hold to a person on the ground; last year, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, former Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said the force does not use that tactic. In a statement to VICE World News, Toronto police spokeswoman Connie Osborne said the photo was taken “during a dynamic response and captures one moment in time, but not any wider context.” She also said the officer’s knee was not on the person’s neck. In response to one video showing cops violently picking someone up and using batons on people, one person tweeted that police gave them a concussion. “The cops beat the shit out of me and threw my whole body on one final blow and knocked my head backwards onto a curb, giving me a concussion,” the person said.

Two white men in Kansas shot into a car of Latino teenagers and went home. Almost a year later, neither shooter is in custody.

Look at this fucking nonsense.

The lambda variant of the novel coronavirus has received a flurry of news coverage since it was added to the World Health Organization variant watch list in June. Lambda swept through several South American countries earlier this year and has been detected in some U.S. states, including this week at a major hospital in Houston. Infectious-disease experts in the United States aren’t sounding any alarms about lambda yet. Its progress here has been slow, with fewer than 700 cases identified since it emerged in the country months ago. Moreover, experts say the threat from lambda is insignificant next to the highly transmissible delta variant, which is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated people and causing hospitalizations to spike for the first time in months. “It is not anywhere near as concerning as the delta variant,” said S. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist Hospital, which on Monday reported its first case of the lambda variant. “That’s the engine that’s going to be driving the surge in the U.S.”

Stories on major news sites like ‘The Washington Post,’ and ‘New York Magazine’ currently have porn embedded in them.

The Texas comptroller’s office says it will investigate whether the state should blacklist ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s for announcing it will no...

In 2020, they set off a smoke bomb during the party that sparked the El Dorado Fire.

Cinema is no stranger to adapting the works of Shakespeare, but it's still exciting when a filmmaker like Joel Coen attempts to bring their own spin to the Bard's work. He – working without brother Ethan this time – has Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand starring in The Tragedy Of Macbeth, and the first image featuring the central pair is online. While we don't yet know exactly what tweaks the director has made to the text, the announcement about the film making its world premiere on the opening night of this year's New York Film Festival details that, "Coen's tale of sound and fury is entirely his own – and undoubtedly one for our moment, a frightening depiction of amoral political power-grabbing that, like its hero, ruthlessly barrels ahead into the inferno." And beyond any narrative shifts, it's all shot in a stark chiaroscuro, in a style that echoes "the forbidding visual designs – and aspect ratios – of Laurence Olivier’s classic 1940s Shakespeare adaptations, as well as the bloody medieval madness of Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood". So take that as you will (or as you like it).

Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have teamed up and formed a joint fundraising committee. Unfortunately for them, they’re losing money. At the height of the controversy surrounding Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and the revelations that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bet big on a nationwide joint fundraising tour with her embattled colleague. But new campaign filings show that not only did the gamble not pay off, but that the much-maligned Republicans actually spent four times as much as they raised.

Phones belonging to top state health department officials were found with no text messages from January 2014 to October 2015. In October 2015, then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder finally announced that Flint’s water was contaminated with dangerous lead levels. That public admission had come after more than a year of pleading from the city’s residents to examine the situation. The city, Snyder promised, would immediately stop using water from the Flint River, which residents had been drinking for 18 months. The public announcement raised as many questions as it answered and kick-started a yearslong investigation into how the decision that delivered the toxic water to Flint had been made in the first place, how many people were sickened and killed as a result, and when senior government officials first learned of the deadly consequences. Along the way, however, investigators who were part of a three-year Flint water investigation beginning in 2016 kept drilling dry holes. Dr. Eden Wells became Michigan’s chief medical executive in May 2015. By then, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services had been aware for at least seven months of a significant increase in the deadly waterborne Legionnaires’ disease throughout Flint. But when investigators obtained access to Wells’s phone, they discovered something unusual. “For Dr. Wells’ phone the earliest message is from November 12, 2015,” then-Flint special prosecutor Todd Flood wrote in a subpoena petition obtained by The Intercept. During the key period that investigators were probing, no messages were found. In 2018, a judge ruled that Wells would have to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, along with obstruction of justice, over her role in the water crisis. (Those charges were dropped by current Attorney General Dana Nessel in 2019; in January 2021, Nessel’s Flint water prosecutors recharged Wells with involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office, and neglect of duty.) Other searches turned up similar results. The phone of Tim Becker, MDHHS’s chief deputy director, had no messages on it prior to April 14, 2016, two months before he left his role with MDHHS. Becker testified to having first asked questions about Flint’s Legionella outbreak in January 2015. Patricia McKane, an epidemiologist with MDHHS who testified that she was pressured to lie by Wells about elevated blood-lead levels in Flint’s children, was found to have only had four text messages on her phone from 2015 and seven total messages. (Wells denied pressuring her to lie.) Fellow MDHHS epidemiologist Sarah Lyon-Callo, director of the state Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health, who Wells copied in an email responding to accusations by a Wayne State University professor that she was trying to conceal the link between the Flint River switch and the Legionella outbreak, had no messages prior to June 2016.

A New York City pilot program to respond to 911 calls for mental health crises with social workers instead of cops appears to be reducing unnecessary hospitalizations, while increasing the percentage of people who accept help when offered. The Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or “B-HEARD” program, which started in a portion of Harlem a month ago, has already…

“The inn was a boat. And then it became a life raft.”

It’s not shocking that someone who is young and thin is still young and thin when they’re no longer dressed as troll, a devil, or a lichen-covered rock.