The city’s police union sued AK-47 in 1981 for naming victims of brutality in the song ‘The Badge Means You Suck.’ The reporters gathered in Houston police chief B.K. Johnson’s office were ready for a routine press availability on a Friday in 1981. But that day, instead of just taking questions, the chief had something he wanted to talk about: “The Badge Means You Suck,” a single by a Houston punk band called AK-47. Its title was a jab at the department’s “The Badge Means You Care” slogan, and its subject was a series of controversial killings of Houstonians at the hands of police officers. The song had been out for months, but Johnson had only just heard about it. Which was odd, because the lyricist and singer, known pseudonymously as Tim Phlegm, was local radio journalist Tim Fleck, who was present among the reporters as Johnson held forth in his office. Fleck’s friend and former journalist Burke Watson remembers the moment well. The chief was livid, he recalls. “Just out of the blue, Johnson brought up this song, and obviously he was just, really, in high dudgeon about it,” Watson says. As he remembers it, the chief complained at length about how disrespectful the lyrics were. “He didn’t realize the lead singer was sitting right there in the office, a few feet from him.”

Only one other case of a long-lasting, coronavirus-linked erection has been recorded to date.

Three years ago, the company began building "responsible AI." This is the story of how it failed.

Massachusetts crossed a grim new threshold in the fight against COVID-19, as the state’s death toll passed 16,000 Saturday, even as numbers of new cases and hospitalizations continued to decline in the state. The Department of Public Health reported 52 new deaths, which brought the total number of deaths to 16,044. But despite recent overall declines in numbers of new cases and deaths, Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University, criticized the state’s handling of the pandemic Saturday, pointing to US Centers for Disease Control data that reported Massachusetts had the fourth-highest death rate in the country. The state, with a death rate due to the coronavirus of 235 per 100,000 people, was behind New York City, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, according to CDC data. “To put this in perspective, if our state had managed this pandemic more effectively and the result was a mortality rate at the national average, there might be 6,000 more people alive today in the state,” Scarpino said in an e-mail. “This is truly horrific.”

So much worse, so fast

Sterling Higgins died in a Tennessee jail in 2019 after officers pinned him to the floor. Two new medical experts’ reports describe the incident as homicide.

With fate of Biden infrastructure package unclear, Sen. Charles E Schumer pushes bill to curb China’s influence.

For bird-watching enthusiasts and amateur naturalists across the Bay Area, backyard feeders have provided a sense of solace and a much-needed connection with the outdoors, especially amid the isolation of the pandemic. But the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is urging residents to take them down as soon as possible – the lives of finches and other avian species depend on it. Since mid-November, scores of songbirds have died as a result of salmonellosis, a gut disease that is quickly transmitted when they gather at bird feeders or birdbaths. The CDFW said bird rescue centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Central Coast and Sierra Nevada have been “inundated with calls” from residents who have discovered increasing numbers of sick or dead birds at their feeders; in particular, the pine siskin, a migratory finch with a frantic, chattering call and mottled brown and yellow plumage.

The remarkable bird has outlived mating partners, and even the biologist who first placed a band on her in 1956

A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies' portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.

The financial industry’s pursuit of profits from mobile-home communities is undermining one of the country’s largest sources of affordable housing.

A couple accused of abusing girls at Circle of Hope Girls Ranch has been charged with more than 100 felonies, Missouri's attorney general announced Wednesday. Boyd and Stephanie Householder, who ran the religious boarding school for troubled girls in southwest Missouri, were scheduled to be arraigned later in the day in Cedar County Circuit Court, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said. The details of the charges are “not are for the faint of heart,” Schmitt said. “As the father of two young girls, it is simply unthinkable that this type of abuse could be perpetrated against those who are so vulnerable, as well as on families of the victims” who trusted Circle of Hope.

Twice before, humanity has mitigated severe global environmental threats. In both cases we did this not with ‘cap and trade’ systems, taxes, or offsets, but with bans Time is running out to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change. The 2018 special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “suggests a remaining budget of about 420 Gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 for a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C.” The clock on this so-called remaining carbon budget started ticking at the beginning of 2018. Despite this stark warning, the world keeps emitting over 40 Gt of CO2 per year. In other words, the policy instruments that are currently being used across the globe to reduce CO2 emissions aren’t working. It is therefore time to ban fossil fuels.

Any nation that still has a monarchy in 2021 is proving itself to have a mortifying lack of revolutionary gumption.

The martial arts films made in Hong Kong would never have been worldwide hits if it had not been for a select group of choreographers whorevolutionised their fight scenes. Yet for years their names were absent from film credits.

RICHARD KAY: So while therewill be anxieties about the Prince of Wales as he fights Covid-19, the question for millions will be: what about the Queen?

Scientists say Florida’s most enamored marine mammal is starving to death, News 6 partner Florida Today reports.

Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape and a CD pioneer died aged 94 at his home in Duizel in Brabant on Saturday, Dutch media report. Ottens, who studied to be an engineer, started working for Philips in 1952. Eight years later he became head of the firm’s recently introduced product development department. Within a year he and his team had developed the first portable tape recorder of which over a million were sold. Two years later he revolutionised the...

Congress is set to give the final green light to the $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, setting in motion a Washington-wide effort to administer one of the largest economic relief packages in U.S. history. The sheer volume of new programs threatens to swamp federal agencies.

What appeared to be racial progress in rural Virginia turned into bitter conflict over a Confederate statue, the election and the Capitol riot. Now, people there foresee “a very dangerous time.”