An unapologetic defense.

Late last spring, a strange, beguiling novel began arriving, in installments, in the mail. Who had written it?

We spoke to the artist behind Australia's Olympic fursonas

Delaware State Police are facing a lawsuit after four plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles blockaded a woman in her car and held her at gunpoint, before realizing she was not the suspect they were searching for. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday night in U.S. District Court, seeks damages for “extreme emotional pain and suffering,” citing claims of excessive force, false arrest, assault and battery, and negligence. Martiayna Watson, 20, was leaving the BP Gas station at 201 S. Heald St. in Wilmington’s Southbridge neighborhood at 5:25 p.m. on June 24 when, according to the suit, she noticed a car driving slowly behind her. The car followed her to the 1000 block of Church St. when the car suddenly swerved in front of Watson to cut her off, stopped and reversed into her car. At the same time, a second car hit Watson from behind. A third and fourth car then pulled up on either side of her car, blocking her in. All four cars were unmarked Delaware State Police vehicles driven by plainclothes officers. “I thought I was about to be kidnapped,” Watson said Thursday during a press conference outside the gas station. The four plainclothes officers got out of their cars with guns drawn and pointed at Watson through her rolled-down windows, according to the suit. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Stop talking and shut the ---- up,” an officer said, the suit says. One of the officers broke the driver’s side rear window of Watson’s car, according to the suit, and another officer opened the door of her car and forcefully pulled out Watson.

QAnon isn't just targeting liberal celebrities and politicians any longer. Now they're coming for the evangelical leaders who supported them.

Sybil Elijah believes she contracted the coronavirus while working at a Texas chicken production plant and passed the virus to her husband, who later died. Elnora Brown also worked at the plant, and she died nearly a month later at age 60. Her husband is convinced she got covid-19 on the job. Those are among the claims in a lawsuit filed against Pilgrim’s Pride, a multinational food corporation with operations in several states, alleging the company wantonly disregarded worker safety and was grossly negligent. But the meatpacker is utilizing a new Texas law to argue the lawsuit should be thrown out. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a bill last month raising the bar for what employees will have to prove to sue their employers for being exposed to the coronavirus at work. Consumer advocates and labor rights groups say the law effectively makes it nearly impossible for workers to win in court. “You cannot prevail,” said Remington Gregg, an attorney with the nonprofit group Public Citizen. “A worker cannot prevail under Texas law.” Although the lawsuit was filed in April, the new statute can be retroactively applied to cases stretching back to March 2020.

Without more sand, Louisiana’s barrier islands are shrinking at a rapid rate as sea levels rise, and becoming more costly to maintain. Jean Landry sits on her covered porch, 16 feet above ground. Hummingbirds hover just below her face as she sips her morning coffee. Half a mile away, the Gulf of Mexico laps against Grand Isle’s shores.On most days, the slow pace of life on Louisiana’s last inhabited barrier island fills Landry, 74, with peace. There’s only one road in and one road out, a remote paradise to the community of fewer than 1,500. Like the rest of Grand Isle’s full-time residents, Landry lives on “island time.” But that carefree phrase has taken on a grimmer cast as hurricanes and rain storms have intensified and the land sinks into the rising sea. Landry and some of her neighbors consider: How much time do Grand Isle and Louisiana’s 20 other disappearing barrier islands have? “What used to be 100-year storms became 50-year storms. Now, they’re 10-year storms, and sometimes, they don’t even give us 10 years in between,” said Landry, a conservationist. After Louisiana faced six tropical storms and hurricanes in 2020, she knows it’s related to climate change. “It’s here, and it’s a real thing. We’re seeing it; we’re living it.” Across the Gulf Coast, humans live and recreate on dozens of barrier islands, from Mississippi’s Ship Island to Florida’s Santa Rosa Island, home to Pensacola Beach. These narrow, sandy spits are the first line of defense against storm surge for ecosystems and inland coastal communities such as New Orleans. But compared to those protecting Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the barrier islands of Louisiana are unstable, disappearing at a faster rate and becoming more costly to maintain.

The limited response to postal workers’ repeated appeals for help provides a window into the failures of two federal agencies: the Postal Service, which is one of the country’s largest employers, and OSHA, which is supposed to protect workers.

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.