According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, a third of unvaccinated Hispanic adults want a vaccine as soon as possible—twice the proportion of unvaccinated whites. But 52 percent of this eager group were worried that they might need to miss work because of the reputed side effects, and 43 percent feared that getting vaccinated could jeopardize their immigration status or their families’. Unsurprisingly then, among the states that track racial data for vaccinations, just 32 percent of Hispanic Americans had received at least one dose by May 24, compared with 43 percent of white people. The proportion of at least partly vaccinated Black people was lower still, at 29 percent. And as Lola Fadulu and Dan Keating reported in The Washington Post, Black people now account for 82 percent of COVID-19 cases in Washington, D.C., up from 46 percent at the end of last year. The vaccines have begun to quench the pandemic inferno, but the remaining flames are still burning through the same communities that have already been disproportionately scorched by COVID-19—and by a much older legacy of poor health care.

Thirty years ago, the biggest celebrities on earth opened a chain restaurant. For a few years, it was the hottest ticket in town. Then it went bankrupt. Twice. The brains behind this pop-culture phenomenon explain how it happened.

Liberals hate leftists more than they hate fascists.

The state of Florida reversed itself Wednesday and said it would allow a downtown Jacksonville bridge to be decorated in rainbow-colored lights to mark Pride Month — just a day after it hit the dimmer switch on that celebration. A spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis confirmed that the rainbow lights will be back on the Acosta Bridge in Jacksonville on Wednesday night, but insisted the governor played no role in the Florida Department of Transportation’s decision to turn them off.

The barrister acting for media companies being sued for defamation by Ben Roberts-Smith has described as “inherently implausible” the former soldier’s claim that 21 current or former comrades who will give evidence against him are motivated by jealousy or have memories tainted by trauma. Barrister Nicholas Owens, SC, who is representing The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in the landmark case, alleged Mr Roberts-Smith had committed or been involved in six murders as a Special Air Service soldier in Afghanistan. The killings were unlawful under the Geneva Conventions, Mr Owens told the Federal Court in Sydney, and could not be explained as being in the “heat of battle” or “fog of war”. But Mr Roberts-Smith, who began what is expected to be several days of evidence on Thursday, said the allegations were “devastating” and based on “rumour and innuendo”. One made him “really angry”. At the end of the day’s proceedings, the two-metre-tall former soldier appeared to wipe tears from his eyes as he spoke about the events for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. The defamation trial, which started on Monday and is expected to run for up to 10 weeks, centres on articles published in 2018 that Mr Roberts-Smith alleges portrayed him as a war criminal and a perpetrator of domestic violence. The media outlets outlined their truth defence on Thursday, before Mr Roberts-Smith entered the witness box. Mr Owens said none of the six alleged murders involved “the difficulty of distinguishing between a civilian and a non-uniformed insurgent, or making a split-second assessment of whether the way that a person was moving indicated hostile intent”. Instead, all of the alleged victims were so-called PUCs – persons safely and securely under the control of Australian forces, he said. Mr Owens said the rules of engagement under which Australian troops operated in Afghanistan were consistent with the Geneva Conventions. Once a person had been brought under the control of Australian troops, no matter whether they were “the most brutal, vile member of the Taliban imaginable”, they could not be killed. To kill in these circumstances “is murder”. The media outlets’ case did not “shy away” from the fact that most, but not all, of the six people killed were almost certainly insurgents, Mr Owens said. He alleged Mr Roberts-Smith had constructed a “false narrative” that five of the six killings occurred during combat. Mr Roberts-Smith said the sixth killing did not occur and the person, an Afghan teenager, was released. Justice Anthony Besanko was “presented with a stark choice”, Mr Owens said, and ultimately must decide “who is lying”. Mr Owens said the suggestion by Mr Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Bruce McClintock, SC, that 21 current and former SAS soldiers giving evidence for the media outlets were motivated by jealousy or were misremembering incidents owing to trauma was “inherently implausible”. He alleged Mr Roberts-Smith had “engaged in a pattern of behaviour over many years calculated to undermine the integrity of the evidence relevant to allegations made against him”, including by arranging for threatening letters to be sent to one person. Mr Owens said four Afghan villagers would also give evidence for the media outlets, and there could be no explanation for their recollections aligning with the soldiers’ accounts “other than that they are all telling the truth”. Mr Roberts-Smith launched defamation proceedings in 2018 over reports in The Age and the Herald, now owned by Nine. He says the articles accused him of murder during his 2009 to 2012 tours of Afghanistan and committing an act of domestic violence against a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. He is also suing three journalists and The Canberra Times, now under separate ownership. Mr Owens said the domestic violence allegation was “powerfully supported by significant documentary evidence”, including text messages the day after he allegedly punched the woman in the face in Canberra in 2018. After speaking to her husband, the woman texted to Mr Roberts-Smith: “He didn’t believe that I had fallen down stairs”. She said other bruises would “hopefully make the falling story more believable”. “Well, hopefully, he believes you,” Mr Roberts-Smith replied. Mr Roberts-Smith rejected Mr Owens’ opening address emphatically and described domestic violence as “deplorable”. “I spent my life fighting for my country and I did everything I possibly could to ensure I did it with honour,” he said. “I really cannot comprehend how people, on the basis of rumour and innuendo, can maintain that in a public forum. It breaks my heart, actually.” He dismissed as “ridiculous” an allegation that he carried an Afghan man with a prosthetic leg outside a compound in 2009, threw him to the ground and shot him 10 to 15 times. It would not be possible to carry his gun and a person who was resisting, he said. “It makes me really angry,” Mr Roberts-Smith said. He said he fired two rounds as an insurgent moved towards him. The allegation the man was under his control and posed no imminent threat was “so far from the truth it’s not funny”. He said another soldier took the man’s prosthetic leg and he had seen it used as a drinking vessel by other soldiers. He did not drink from it himself, he said, but he didn’t object to the “gallows humour” of others doing so. “We were out there doing a job you cannot explain to people,” Mr Roberts-Smith said. The hearing continues.

Police say he confessed to stabbing the victim, stating that if he had better aim, he would have 'gut him.’

She was a star engineer who warned that messy AI can spread racism. Google brought her in. Then it forced her out. Can Big Tech take criticism from within?

In the late 1980s, a Dallas-based skinhead group known as the Confederate Hammerskins attacked people of color, rival skinheads and places of worship around town. In the late 1980s, skinhead gangs fanned out around the country. Inspired by the legions of white nationalists who came before them, the neo-Nazi groups beefed up their ranks by recruiting the young and the angry. They plucked teens from the punk scene and turned them into street soldiers. The skinheads handed out pamphlets warning of supposedly powerful Jewish cabals and nefarious racial minorities. They vandalized synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. Many groups rented post office boxes and mailed each other propaganda and letters across the nation, not unlike the way neo-Nazis and white nationalists communicate online or in messaging apps today. That night in Dallas, the skinheads tailed Newton to Cedar Springs Road. He kept running even when they stopped. He sprinted down McKinney Avenue and ducked into Joe Miller’s, a popular local bar. He phoned the police. An officer took his report over the phone, but no one was dispatched to take an in-person statement.

Dallas Goldtooth wrote on Twitter: “We took on a multi-billion dollar corporation and we won!!”

A recent WSJ piece entitled, If You Sell Your House, The Buyer Might Be A Pension Fund, caused some commotion. The article highlighted how competition is heating up for single family homes due to demand from institutional real estate investors. When I read the article, I was surprised to see Fundrise, my favorite real estate investing platform, mentioned in the second paragraph. Usually, you hear institutional real estate investors like BlackRock in the news. The article is behind a paywall, but here's the snippet the WSJ allows non-subscribers to read. A bidding war broke out this winter at a new

Conservative states are reducing enhanced weekly payments and increased eligibility, while other federal fiscal supports expire. It could stunt the economic recovery.

Yesterday, Silicon Valley Analyst Jeremiah Owyang vaguely reported that executives are scared of their employees “working part-time (but paid full salary)” and “even working on side hustle startups, while on a full-time salary,” a truly terrifying prospect that has chilled me to the bone.

A woman has been sentenced to three years and four months in federal prison for making false 911 calls that ultimately resulted in a 2019 drug raid by Houston police that killed both homeowners.

Also a few days after he returned the Cruelty Squad guy announced a partnership with the Brigador guys so maybe don't throw money at that game either.

“The Bomber Mafia” enthuses about precision tactics said to spare civilian lives. Except they didn’t. There’s a scene in the 2011 film Moneyball where Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is mentoring young Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) on how to cut a professional baseball player from the roster: bluntly, without euphemism. “Would you rather,” he asks, “get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?” Imagine, if you will, that this was not a rhetorical question or an analogy about firing someone but rather a serious, literal question. Now imagine 206 pages of this, and you have a sense of what it’s like to read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book.

Most people on death row are guilty. That doesn’t mean they deserve their fate.

A profile of the popular digital journalist reveals what LA magazine describes as his “rather checkered history,” including messy relationships with high-power California figures.

Dublin is sold as a modern city that is home to the world's most dynamic industries – but for its residents, daily life is scarred by one of Europe's worst housing crises and rampant workplace precarity. Measures that were sold as necessary to get the country back on its feet have had the effect of funnelling billions in rent money out of the country into the pockets of anonymous shareholders. We are crushed between these two stone walls of capital, one petty and domestic, the other enormous, cold, and remote. Our very lives are contingent on the good will of the wealthy. Public space is becoming history. Now there is only the privatised and the semi-privatised. No more public housing, but only the neoliberal version of the Khrushchyovka, the co-living complex. The bench you pay to sit on and the toilet you pay to use. The park with a fee for entry and the community space replaced by a co-working office. If you want a model for your future life, look at how the homeless, the stateless and the nomadic are treated now. Your whole existence is made illegal. To be homeless is to have your life become a misdemeanour. Everything you are required to do to survive is against regulations. The very universal things of humanity, eating, sleeping, waiting, excreting, are made shameful, punishable by the fact of your poverty. Any safety is temporary, any help is an indulgence from the sentimental section of the ruling class that still imagines itself to have a soul.

One person has been fined $600 after a gender reveal party involving explosives sparked a wildfire last week near Fort McMurray.

The far-right militia group connected to the killing two law enforcement officers last year had far more elaborate plans to kill many more officers. And, unsurprisingly, we learn of child enticement charges against the very people who claim a cabal of pedophiles is running the government.