The IRS has opened an investigation into apparently leaked tax documents showing that ultra-rich Americans like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and business tycoon Warren Buffett paid very little or no taxes, while Democrats seized on the report to further their call for higher taxes on the wealthy.

The mayoral hopeful has been staying overnight and keeping late-night and early-morning hours in the government building where he and his staff work, according to POLITICO’s recent observations.

The driver ran over a family of five, killing four of them and seriously injuring the other in a deliberate attack, Canadian police say.

President Biden on Monday announced that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will continue to defend a law that excludes Puerto Ricans from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, while calling on Congress to extend eligibility to the U.S. territory's residents. Biden said the Justice Department will be adhering to its practice of defending the constitutionality of federal law in the legal challenge against a provision in the Social Security Act that excludes Puerto Rico residents from the program, which provides income for low-income citizens with disabilities.

This afternoon, the New York Times published an article making a surprising claim about exobiology: that watermelons had been discovered on Mars.

As the world knows, the FDA approved Biogen’s anti-amyloid antibody today, surely the first marketed drug whose Phase III trial was stopped for futility. I think this is one of the worst FDA decisions I have ever seen, because – like the advisory committee that reviewed the application, and like the FDA’s own statisticians – I don’t believe that Biogen really demonstrated efficacy. No problem apparently. The agency seems to have approved it based on its demonstrated ability to clear beta-amyloid, and is asking Biogen to run a confirmatory trial to show efficacy. They will be absolutely overjoyed to do that, of course, because the whole time that’s going, they will be selling the first drug that (in theory) targets the etiology of Alzheimer’s. The backed-up demand is going to be gigantic, and Biogen is going to make enormous amounts of money. They have nine years, as it turns out, to get this trial done, and I feel safe in predicting that it’s going to take alllll niiiiine loooong sloooow years to get this done. Why shouldn’t it? The company certainly showed no interest whatsoever, not even a twitch, in running a confirmatory trial before this, so why should they hop to running one while the drug is selling? I continue to think that odds are quite good, and certainly unacceptably so for Biogen, that the drug will turn out in the end to have no real effect on Alzheimer’s patients at all. I’ve been dreading a decision like this for a long time.

In response to calls for a boycott of Israel from the Palestinian labor movement, longshore workers in Oakland, California, last week refused to unload cargo from an Israeli shipping operator.

“Typical birthday party attendees do not expect the hired clown or magician to start electrocuting and incapacitating people,” she wrote.

The bill, known as HR1, is a top priority for Democrats and is viewed by many in the party as the antidote to a wave of Republican-backed laws being passed on the state level that restrict people's ability to vote. It touches on almost every aspect of voting and was already passed by the House. But Manchin threw a wrench into the works Sunday when he said he would oppose the bill. That effectively dooms the measure in a narrowly divided Senate where it is universally opposed by Republicans. His decision sent voting rights groups and members of his own party scrambling for options, raising the prospect that no voting legislation would pass Congress to address what experts say is the greatest attack on voting rights in generation. Manchin has said “inaction is not an option” when it comes to voting rights. But he has exasperated fellow Democrats and voting rights groups by insisting his support for any legislation would be contingent on some Republicans voting for it as well. He also opposes eliminating the 60-vote requirement to break a filibuster, a step that would allow Democrats to pass the legislation without Republican votes.

This is all to say, "Indiana Jones Doesn't Matter" isn't annoying because it's "wrong"—Indiana Jones is not directly responsible for a Nazi regiment being struck down by the wrath of God, this is true—but because it's emblematic of the type of I-must-be-smarter-than-the-movie criticism that's ruining the way we talk about movies. It's almost designed to miss the point. It's the film-as-riddle mindset that first formed alongside the birth of the internet, but really crystalized into something insidious somewhere between the mid-point of Lost and the exact moment Inception cut to black. "Indiana Jones Doesn't Matter" is the personification of the idea films and television shows are something to be solved instead of felt; that stories are static objects made of ones-and-zeroes and to remove the flawed piece of data sends the whole thing crumbling. (Thus making you The Internet's Smartest Boi that day.) But movies are, in Roger Ebert's words, "machines that generate empathy"; whether it's a quiet character study or a globe-trotting adventure, the joy comes from living another life for a few hours. That is the result of character, not plot, and Indiana Jones is the type of character whose arc is supposed to have holes.

In this special report on the hidden danger of big pickup trucks, Consumer Reports notes that the trucks are getting larger and that many also lack advanced safety systems. Here’s why that makes them a hazard to pedestrians and drivers of smaller vehicles.

July 10, 1968 Dear Mr. Schulz, Do you know what it’s like to wander through life, having no significant conversations and participating in no significant events? Existing while not truly living? I’ve been doing it for years, breathing and walking around aimlessly while my peers engage in witty three-panel exchanges that reveal a depth of humanity and character. I wish it could be me. I wish I could be there, having relationships, demonstrating nuance, or ideally punching everyone in the face. You’ll recall that I was there at the beginning. Strip number one. October 2, 1950. I sat next to Shermy (who says hello, by the way) (actually he doesn’t, he doesn’t think you know who he is) as good ol’ Charlie Brown came walking by. “Oh, how I hate him,” said Shermy. I had no lines that day, but any reader knew that I was listening. I was learning. In the very next day’s strip, I walked down the road, saying, “Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.” Then I see Charlie Brown, and I punch him in the fucking eye. “That’s what little girls are made of,” I conclude.

His Nike commercials had fun with his multi-sport talents, showing him ready to play polo, golf, basketball and any number of sports that he came into contact with. But could he really excel at any of those other pursuits without much experience? Sports you wouldn't expect a 6-foot-1, 220-pound muscle-bound athlete to be able to pull off? Sports like, say, diving? "Oh yeah, the story that you're talking about is essentially true," former Auburn dive coach Rick Theobald told me over the phone. "All the divers who were there at the time, they still talk about it whenever we have a reunion."

Criminal organizations around the world thought they were using the latest, most exclusive encrypted cellphone technology available to conduct business away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. Instead, they were unwitting customers of a communications service that was secretly created by FBI agents and federal prosecutors in San Diego. Whether it was coordinating drug trafficking, money laundering or murders, every message tapped out on the phones was sent not only to the intended criminal underworld recipients, but delivered right into the hands of investigators. As Tuesday began on the other side of the world, first in New Zealand, Australia and later in Europe, hundreds of people were arrested as a result. Raids were ongoing into the night, and it was unclear if there were any arrests or charges in the United States.

Most magic tricks require a fairly sophisticated understanding of how humans perceive the world. To fall for a trick, people have to see things they perceive as important and ignore things that are actually important. Understanding why magic works can tell us important things about how humans direct their attention and form expectations. At some point, behavioral scientists realized they could take this idea and apply it to animals. If animals are also fooled by magic tricks, we can identify where our cognitive skills overlap. If the trick fails, we can identify points where our understandings of the world diverge. Unsurprisingly, most early experiments were done with other primates, as they would likely have a lot of overlap with us. But a new study attempts magic with birds and finds that many tricks just don't work with them.

Organizers told me they found that date appropriate because the ending of slavery and resistance to vaccines are both about "liberation"

Here are a just few groundbreaking pieces of queer cinema from early European, pre-code American, and the silent era of film.

Party leaders should act like they believe their own rhetoric on Republican extremism. The average consumer of political news can be forgiven for not being entirely sure how much to panic about the state of our democracy. On the one hand, one can read, in the mainstream press, that “more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement” warning that “the future of our democracy itself” is in jeopardy. The president, a kindly old moderate who touted his ability to work across the aisle, even echoed this line, calling on Congress to fight back against the Republican “assault on democracy.” One can then read, from the same outlets, a White House statement saying “the President hosted Senator Capito for a constructive and frank conversation in the Oval Office about how we can drive economic growth and benefit America’s middle class through investing in our infrastructure.” Senator Shelley Moore Capito is a Republican from West Virginia. The subject of her conversation with the president was the White House’s current legislative priority, an infrastructure bill, the size and contours of which the administration is currently negotiating with the Republican minority that it also casts as an existential threat to representative democracy. Capito and Biden had another call on Friday and agreed to “connect again” on Monday. These negotiations have not only delayed action on an infrastructure package, they have sidelined every other piece of the ambitious agenda Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats ran on last year. But, even if the negotiations are doomed, they serve an important political function, according to insiders: “White House advisers like Steve Ricchetti have told Democrats that a concerted bipartisan attempt would benefit Democrats politically.”

The Senate on Monday unanimously passed a bill that would boost medical care for American diplomats and spies who develop mysterious brain injuries amid an uptick in suspected directed-energy attacks on U.S. personnel at home and abroad. The bill authorizes funding for treatment of illness linked to the attacks and gives the CIA director and the secretary of state expanded discretion on how the money is spent. The legislation also requires both the CIA and the State Department to keep Congress apprised of how the funds are being used — a nod to lawmakers’ long-standing frustrations with intelligence officials over what they see as a years-long failure to properly address the matter.

ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.