SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The Medical Board of California said it would investigate a plastic surgeon who appeared in a videoconference for his traffic violation trial while operating. The Sacramento Bee reports Dr. Scott Green appeared Thursday for his Sacramento Superior Court trial, held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, from an operating room. He was dressed in surgical scrubs with a patient undergoing the procedure just out of view; the beeps of medical machinery can be heard in the background. “Hello, Mr. Green? Hi. Are you available for trial?” asked a courtroom clerk as an officer summoned to appear in trial raised her eyebrows. “It kind of looks like you’re in an operating room right now?” “I am, sir,” Green replied. “Yes, I’m in an operating room right now. Yes, I’m available for trial. Go right ahead.”

Love them or hate them, the Spongmonkeys were so annoying they changed advertising forever. Here’s how a viral video turned into a terrifying sandwich ad

We can learn from our failures.

Throughout history, men and women have had sex with supernatural beings—but when did summoning Satan to fuck become an evil act?

After its launch of Specialty Pizza Bowls in March 2020, Marco’s Pizza debuts all-new Build-Your-Own Pizza Bowls as a national menu item starting January 18. Pizza lovers now can enjoy a crustless pizza baked in a bowl with Marco’s original sauce recipe, three fresh signature cheeses, and their choice of up to four toppings for $7.99. Prices may vary depending on location with additional toppings costing extra.

Her response: “@collincollege president H. Neil Matkin has decided to not renew my contract for … mean tweets?”

Google’s streaming video game service Stadia had ambitious plans to disrupt the gaming industry, which is dominated by consoles. The tech giant had planned to pack Stadia with original content, announcing two years ago that it was hiring hundreds of game developers and starting studios in Los Angeles and Montreal. But those teams barely had time to get started before they were dismissed earlier this month as Google shut down in-house game development.

An avowed white supremacist was sentenced on Friday to 19-1/2 years in prison after pleading guilty months ago to a federal hate-crimes case stemming from a botched plot to bomb a historic Colorado synagogue in 2019.

if corruption, mismanagement, bullying, union busting and let-them-eat-cake-style austerity ideology are suddenly perceived negatively, then all the real-life Veep characters in Washington – the politicians, operatives and media elites who’ve spent their whole lives angling for fancy White House titles – could be out of luck

Consistently ranked as one of the leading causes of death around the world, malaria doesn’t have an effective vaccine yet. But researchers have invented a promising new blueprint for one — with properties akin to the novel RNA-based vaccine for COVID-19. Making a vaccine for malaria is challenging because its associated parasite, Plasmodium, contains a protein that inhibits production of memory T-cells, which protect against previously encountered pathogens. If the body can’t generate these cells, a vaccine is ineffective. But scientists recently tried a new approach using an RNA-based platform. 

The Fifth Circuit’s decision against James Garfield Broadnax, a Black man on death row in Texas, is the latest example of the deference judges grant prosecutors to craft white juries. In a ruling issued earlier this month, a federal court left a Black man on death row despite the emergence of new documents that suggest prosecutors sought to eliminate Black people from the jury pool. The decision reveals the length to which judges will go to permit prosecutors’ maneuvers, and underscores the urgency of political solutions that could create meaningful constraints on prosecutors. It’s well-established that the rule barring race discrimination in jury selection is inadequate, bordering on useless. The rule, established in the 1986 Supreme Court case Batson v. Kentucky, is so narrow and its burden of proof so high that prosecutors have had little trouble devising ways around it. Finding a Batson violation—that prosecutors struck a potential juror because of race—ultimately requires finding that prosecutors intentionally discriminated and that any acceptable reason they gave for removing a juror was a lie, knowingly offered to conceal the racism driving their conduct. Part of Batson’s deficiency is that it leaves judges, a great many of whom are former prosecutors themselves, wide leeway to defer to prosecutors. In most cases, a judge simply taking the prosecutor at their word is all it takes to kill a Batson claim. And prosecutors have developed training manuals on how to get all-white juries while going through the hollow motions of legal compliance.

A judge has held Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Ventura County in contempt of court for ignoring restrictions, but it still draws hundreds of maskless worshippers to its indoor services each week.

Time for ‘evidence-based national debate’ on use of stop and search for drug possession, watchdog says

A pregnant Afghan woman who was severely injured when she set herself on fire in a refugee camp on Lesbos has been formally charged with arson and destruction of public property after giving testimony to a prosecutor from her hospital bed. The 26-year-old, who has been granted refugee status and is due to give birth next week, was told she would face trial for her actions and be unable to leave Greece. She has not been publicly identified. “Although she was in a lot of pain because of her burns and found it difficult to speak, the testimony at the hospital in Mytilene lasted for around two and a half hours,” her lawyer, Teresa Volakaki, told the Guardian.

As funding runs out for JustCARE, a program that has moved more than 100 very high-needs people from tent encampments in Pioneer Square and the International District into hotels where they receive case management and services, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office has made it clear that it considers one source of funding off the table: Money from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which recently announced it would pay 100 percent of the cost for eligible hotel-based shelters. “While we appreciate the work of President Biden’s administration,” city budget director Ben Noble and Office of Emergency Management director Curry Mayer wrote in a letter to council members this week, “there continues to be no option to receive 100% reimbursement of the operation and services of non-congregate shelters for individuals experiencing homelessness in King County or Washington.” In other words: The city is grateful that the new administration is offering to pay for hotels; they just don’t consider it a viable option for Seattle. [They would prefer the homeless die instead]

He bought a summer home in Michigan with an unrecorded loan from Washington Federal Bank for Savings and now is under investigation for claiming deductions on his tax returns for interest authorities found he never paid, sources tell the Sun-Times.

Madison Cawthorn arrived at Patrick Henry College’s small Christian campus in northern Virginia in fall 2016 blazing with charm, bravado, and a flashing white smile. His former classmates said the future member of Congress would whip his white Dodge Challenger into the parking lot and regale his classmates with the story of how he survived a harrowing car crash as a teen, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair for life. After his intensive recovery, he was older than most students — 21 — and didn’t fit the mold of the Christian and largely sheltered first-year students who chose the conservative school in Purcellville because of its commitment to God and rigorous academics. And, former Patrick Henry students said, it didn’t take long for women on campus to start warning one another: You don’t want to be alone with him, especially in his car.

Yesterday, the Senate Parliamentarian, a baloney made-up advisory office with absolutely no real authority within or over the U.S. Senate, held by an unelected bureaucrat so anonymous and unimportant that her name—Elizabeth MacDonough—does not even appear until the eighth paragraph of the Washington Post‘s story from last night only and entirely about what she did yesterday, issued an opinion that a provision setting a new $15-per-hour federal minimum wage is written in such a way that it violates Senate parliamentary rules and therefore must not remain in the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill wending its way through Congress. Never mind that the Senate is not in any official way bound by anything the parliamentarian says. Never mind that, even to whatever (fictional) extent this powerless advisor’s proclamation even counts as any kind of “ruling,” it can be overruled or just flat-out ignored by basically anyone who wishes to do so. Never mind that, to the extent this ruling actually governs anything—it doesn’t—it’s only whether the bill as written can be passed through budget reconciliation and thus circumvent the threat of filibuster, and the Democrats could do away with the filibuster altogether and render the whole thing moot. Never mind that none of these things—the Senate parliamentarian, Senate parliamentary procedure, the filibuster, budget reconciliation—appear anywhere in the Constitution, and that to allow any of them to constrain the operations of the Congress is, in effect, to allow the nation to be governed by some older version of Congress instead of the one it just elected. Never mind that, back in 2001, the Republican majority leader, Trent Lott, just straight-up fired and replaced a parliamentarian who’d issued unfavorable decisions on a couple of bills favored by the George W. Bush administration, not incorrectly judging that the Congressional majority’s mandate to govern supersedes some unelected functionary’s opinions about the finer points of entirely made-up parliamentary procedure. Never mind that virtually no number of Americans give even the tiniest of shits about the dubious norm of deferring to the Senate parliamentarian, or about parliamentary procedure. Never mind that probably not even one out of 200 random Americans could have told you who the Senate parliamentarian was, or what the Senate parliamentarian does, or absolutely anything about Senate parliamentary procedure, prior to the Democrats agreeing, yesterday, to further the pretense that these things amount to legitimate constraints on their ability to govern. ... The $15 minimum wage may yet pass as part of the pandemic relief bill; who knows. The Democrats in the House, admirably, intend to go right ahead and pass the relief bill with the minimum-wage increase included in it, in effect daring anybody in the Senate to be the one who’ll sign their name to having stripped it out. But this, exactly this kind of dithering and capitulating, is why the Democratic party is always so much less popular than incredibly well-liked ideas—Medicare For All, gun control, COVID-19 relief checks, minimum-wage increase, a federal government that does more to help people directly, etc.—whose only support in government comes from its own members. Given the rare opportunity to flex some power, and a clear and obvious moral mandate to do so, they’re throwing their hands up at non-binding parliamentary procedures and well actually-ing their own supporters over what exactly the phrase “$2,000 checks” means. Bigots and billionaires and culture warriors can at least count on the Republican party to gleefully immiserate the classes of vulnerable people they despise, whenever it’s entrusted with the power to do so. The only thing you can count on the Democratic party to do is to develop a sudden paralyzing case of situational Budget Concern or Norms Respect, whenever it can cripple or stall or dilute the fulfillment of a pledge to make common people’s lives better, to materially address any of the myriad ways American society has been warped into incoherent brutality by capitalism and white supremacy.

A confidential U.S. government report found that people in Tigray are being driven from their homes in a war begun by Ethiopia, an American ally — posing President Biden’s first major test in Africa.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put the squeeze on more people's income and job prospects, a growing number of renters have formed grassroots tenant unions to collectively speak up against landlords and stave off the threat of possible evictions.