Over 40 years after the legendary performance of The Cramps and The Mutants at a California mental institution, 'We Were There to Be There' captures punk rock history.

When things go horribly wrong during a stay, the company’s secretive safety team jumps in to soothe guests and hosts, help families—and prevent PR disasters.

At 15, he shot and killed his parents, two classmates at his school, and wounded 25 others. He’s been used as the reason to lock kids up for life ever...

Seven flight attendants told Insider they had experienced increased aggression from passengers as travel rebounds in the US.

Though it opened just this past weekend, people have been upset about new San Francisco nightclub YOLO for months now. (Broke Ass Stuart referred to the club as a "douchefest" all the way back in August 2020.) For live music fans, the fact of YOLO's opening was reason enough to be upset. Slim's, a live music institution in the city for over 30 years, was being replaced by a dance club featuring DJs only. Then, it was discovered that the new owners were Peter Lin and Michael Hu, who own Sunnyvale's Pure Nightclub. And Pure is the kind of place where "sports, recreation [and] athletic attire" are prohibited for club-goers, but female waitresses are required to wear lingerie.

Democrats have greater control of state legislatures than in the last round of redistricting but have turned over map-making powers in some states to independent commissions.

Four Saudis who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement. The instruction occurred as the secret unit responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an extensive campaign of kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, to crush dissent inside the kingdom. The training was provided by the Arkansas-based security company Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company says the training — including “safe marksmanship” and “countering an attack” — was defensive in nature and devised to better protect Saudi leaders. One person familiar with the training said it also included work in surveillance and close-quarters battle. There is no evidence that the American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 Group executives knew that the Saudis were involved in the crackdown inside Saudi Arabia. But the fact that the government approved high-level military training for operatives who went on to carry out the grisly killing of a journalist shows how intensely intertwined the United States has become with an autocratic nation even as its agents committed horrific human rights abuses. It also underscores the perils of military partnerships with repressive governments and demonstrates how little oversight exists for those forces after they return home. Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war. The State Department initially granted a license for the paramilitary training of the Saudi Royal Guard to Tier 1 Group starting in 2014, during the Obama administration. The training continued during at least the first year of former President Donald J. Trump’s term. Louis Bremer, a senior executive of Cerberus, Tier 1 Group’s parent company, confirmed his company’s role in the training last year in written answers to questions from lawmakers as part of his nomination for a top Pentagon job during the Trump administration. The administration does not appear to have sent the document to Congress before withdrawing Mr. Bremer’s nomination; lawmakers never received answers to their questions.

This is fine.

Former President Trump reportedly suggested sending Americans infected with COVID-19 to Guantanamo Bay in an effort to stem the rapidly growing number of cases on U.S. soil in the early days of the pandemic, according to a new book. Trump, during a February 2020 meeting in the Situation Room as administration officials were discussing whether to bring infected Americans home for care, reportedly asked the attendees “Don’t we have an island that we own?” and “What about Guantánamo?”

As Touchstone Pistachio Company ran through its routine audit earlier this month, something wasn’t adding up. More than 42,000 pounds of pistachios had vanished. The company soon enlisted the sheriff’s office in Tulare County, Calif., for help and on Saturday, law enforcement officials said they had found the missing nuts and arrested the thief. Police said Alberto Montemayor, 34, was hiding the pistachios in a tractor trailer parked in a nearby parking lot and then repackaging them to sell. The case is just the latest heist of pistachio nuts in Central California, where the nuts were a $5.2 billion economic engine tied to more than 47,000 jobs last year, according to studies commissioned by the industry. Last August, the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 23-year-old man and accused him of stealing two trucks full of pistachios valued at $294,000. Nuts are an ideal high-priced items to steal and resell because unlike electronic devices, pistachios don’t have serial numbers — making them virtually untraceable. Since Central California produces the vast majority of the country’s pistachio, walnut and almond supplies, it is fairly common to see large trucks hauling tens of thousands of pounds of nuts, Quartz reported. That makes it harder for law enforcement to identify which vehicles are carrying stolen product. Thieves have used forged documents, fake companies and computer hacking, BuzzFeed News reported in 2016, to pose as legitimate truckers. Similarly, the thieves are also able to sell off the product to retailers, who are none the wiser about who is actually receiving the money. Last July, the Kern County Sheriff’s Office arrested two men accused of going to an almond and pistachio distribution center and posing as drivers picking up a shipment. (They are due back in court later this month.)

More Black people died in traffic deaths in 2020 than any other racial group even though Americans drove less in the pandemic. Experts say this is not new.

In a film like 2001, a project that started with the explicit purpose of investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial life, it comes as no surprise that Kubrick decided very soon in the production to tackle the problem of how to actually depict the extraterrestrials themselves. Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke had met for the first time in April 1964: by the last months of that year the director had already set up a team working on hundreds of drawings about possible E.T. shapes - his wife Christiane was on board as well and worked on preparatory drawings - and in late 1965, the young and recently hired collaborator Anthony Frewin joined the team, researching on modern sculptures, paintings of German artist Max Ernst and modern art in general to try different ideas. (Here's an account by Frewin about his appointment to the movie and about Kubrick fondness for Ernst; thirty years later, Ernst was mentioned again in a Ian Watson interview about the making of the Kubrick project that turned into Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence).'p

On May 30, Texas Republicans came extremely close to passing a sweeping voter suppression bill. The bill, known as SB7, was approved by the Texas Senate. All that needed to happen was for the Texas House to approve the bill before midnight. Republicans control a majority of the Texas House and appeared to have the votes they needed. But shortly before midnight, Democrats left the chamber en mass, denying the legislature a quorum. Under the rules, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) was forced to adjourn. Since SB7 did not pass the Texas House by midnight, the bill failed.

A California man accused of stealing a rare lemur from the San Francisco Zoo could spend up to one year behind bars for violating the Endangered Species Act.

The conservative political commentator–who has refused to debate Seder in the past–was left panicking when Ethan Klein added a surprise guest to the H3 podcast. "Sam, I don't start debates with people based on lies!" Crowder protests before turning his camera off.

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past

EXCLUSIVE: Here’s a fun one uniting three screen greats. Oscar winner Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) and Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man) are set to star in Western thriller Dead For A Dollar

More retail workers are leaving their jobs than workers in any other industry

FLINT, Mich. (AP) — A 19-year-old Michigan woman died after exchanging gunfire with a police officer who was controlling traffic near a weekend Juneteenth parade, authorities said. The Flint officer was “fired upon by the lone occupant of a vehicle who drove up to him at the traffic point,” state police said on Twitter. “Upon taking fire, the officer returned fire, striking the suspect.” The woman was identified as Briana Sykes, 19, of Flint. No one else was injured Saturday.

European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong...Sometimes the violence is more symbolic, as was the case with Bourdieu. His extensive fieldwork among the Kabyle group of the Amazigh – an ethnically Berber people who live in Kabylia, in the Tell Atlas mountains – formed the basis for theories that would help shape contemporary thought: the habitus, the field of practice, symbolic capital, symbolic violence. Bourdieu was an ardent supporter of the Algerians in their war for independence, and he later assisted with the burgeoning movement of Amazigh identity and self-determination – which included the revival and widespread adoption of tifinagh.