“I was grateful that when I came out as a lesbian, I didn’t have to step away from the sport I loved,” said U.S. Women’s National Soccer team member and amicus brief signer Lori Lindsey. “I gained the tremendous gift of being fully myself and showing other LGBTQ+ athletes that there’s a place for them in sports.” ... “There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind. I am proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love,” wrote Billie Jean King. “The global athletic community grows stronger when we welcome and champion all athletes – including LGBTQI+ athletes.”

Voat, an “anti-censorship” alternative social network that’s been described as the “alt-right Reddit,” is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure yesterday, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. “I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the US election of 2020. I’ve been paying the costs out of pocket but now I’m out of money,” Chastain wrote. Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. It grew rapidly after Reddit added an anti-harassment policy and banned five subreddits that it said violated the rules, including its infamous r/fatpeoplehate forum. The site set a model for other “censorship-free” alternatives to mainstream web platforms, a category that grew to include Gab, Parler, and the defunct crowdfunding site Hatreon.

Advisers persuaded the president on Thursday not to announce support for significantly bigger stimulus payments.

Trump described the groundbreaking legislation as “a disgrace” and suggesting he would not immediately sign off on aid for millions of Americans.

Powerful hospital and physician groups that tied up Congress for nearly two years on how to end “surprise” medical bills saw their efforts pay off with the compromise lawmakers inserted in the giant year-end spending package. The health care providers — including private-equity backed physician staffing groups — chipped away at leading legislative proposals through high-profile lobbying and tens of millions of dollars worth of attack ads while promoting a solution that would submit their payment feuds with insurers to independent mediators. The compromise in the year-end package settles what was supposed to be health care’s “easy fix” in the 116th Congress and ensures patients will no longer have to pay huge bills from out-of-network specialists, air ambulances and other clinicians. But it also underscores the clout of corporate medicine at a time when the health system and safety net programs are reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

Working in the belly of a beast.

Tucked away in the more than 5,000-page long Covid-19 stimulus bill is a new law that severely punishes streamers that pirate large amounts of copyrighted content.

The website asked authors including Rebecca Makkai and Courtney Maum to submit deliberately awful sex scenes, because 2020.

In a year this bruising, this unrelenting grim, do we really need a list of vicious pans? Doesn’t this exercise in festive schadenfreude, now in its forth year, demean us all? Can’t we …

President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday he will keep his pledge to roll back the Trump administration’s restrictive asylum policies, but at a slower pace than he initially promised to avoid winding up with “2 million people on our border.” Biden said immigration is one of the urgent matters he will tackle starting next month as the nation emerges from “one of the toughest years we’ve ever faced,” ticking off a list that includes the coronavirus, the economy, racial justice protests and “historic and punishing wildfires and storms.” Biden had promised to end on “day one” a program that requires tens of thousands of asylum seekers, mainly from Central America, to await their U.S. immigration hearings in Mexico. But the president-elect said that creating a system to process thousands of asylum seekers will take months because the government needs funding to put staffers such as “asylum judges” in place. “The timeline is to do it so that we, in fact, make it better not worse,” Biden said, speaking from his home state of Delaware to deliver remarks ahead of the holiday. “I will do what I said. It’s going to take, not day one, it’s going to take probably the next six months to put that in place.”

Ok, sounds cool?

This is a competition for the world’s best Christmas feast, and the prize is my gluttonous Jewish heart. Spoiler: Everyone wins

For most of America’s 10 million middle schoolers, English class means enjoying—or, perhaps, enduring—the timeless narratives of the Western canon: Fahrenheit 451, Black Boy, The Giver, Parable of the Sower, 1984. Teachers order these books every year, and school librarians stock up for fall classes. It’s a cash cow for book publishers and distributors—and they intend to keep it that way. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths have discreetly and methodically tightened their grip on American schools, and the pandemic has given them license to squeeze even tighter. By 2017, tens of millions of students were already using Google Chromebooks and apps for reading, writing, and turning in their work. Google Classroom now has more than 100 million users worldwide—nearly seven times the number reported in The New York Times three years ago. When we emerge from the pandemic, schools will be even more reliant on such systems. Industry is bolting an adamantine layer of technology onto the world’s classrooms, in what amounts to a stealth form of privatization. The benefits of e-books may seem obvious. They should provide a cheap, convenient way to supply millions of kids with classic novels: They don’t wear out, they can’t get lost or be defaced with underlining, doodles, or the name of your latest crush, and, with a pandemic still raging, they provide a safe, instantaneous way to distribute books to students who are stuck at home. But in practice, this convenience comes at a staggering cost. Billion-dollar companies like Follett and EBSCO are renting e-books to schools each year, rather than selling them permanent copies. By locking school districts into contracts that turn them into captive consumers, corporate tech providers are draining public education budgets that don’t have a penny to spare.

The eight-month impasse for additional COVID relief, unconscionable as it may have been, opportunistically gave time and space to those members of Congress most interested in policy. The 5,500-page, entire-session-of-Congress-in-a-bill that passed last night reflects some of their ready-made language. It’s going to take weeks to dig through this thing and fully decipher it, but I’ve already noticed several good measures. Still, Congress cannot help but throw up roadblocks for people who need help.

Deciphering the most beloved, most reviled children’s-book author in history.

A six-week, 37-source search for answers.

Congress has now passed the second stimulus bill, which includes $300 weekly unemployment benefits and $600 direct checks.

More than 20 women accused Harry Morel, a longtime district attorney in Louisiana, of sexual misconduct. But Morel pleaded guilty to just a single obstruction of justice count while Mike Zummer, the FBI agent who investigated him, was fired. Now, Zummer is speaking about what he says is a grave injustice—at the hands of the Justice Department.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all from McDonald's—cue the Flaming Hot Doritos Quarter Pounder and Hula Burger—the fast-food chain is raising eyebrows again with its latest menu creation. This time, the brand's bizarre burger concoction combines super-salty meat with a super-sweet cookie for a mashup that's equal parts intriguing and questionable.According to the Associated Press, McDonald's just released the "Lunchmeat Burger," aka a Spam burger topped with Oreo cookie crumbs. But you won't be able to get this burger by driving to your nearest Mickey D's… considering the item is only available in China. (Here are 8 other major changes McDonald's currently has in the works.)The burger consists of two thick slices of Spam, Oreo cookie crumbles, and mayonnaise—which, in fairness, provides all the elements for a really juicy flavor bomb (salty, sweet, and fatty).Some are calling this an attention-grabbing move, and they're absolutely on the money. McDonald's...

American conservative organization Turning Point USA was ridiculed on social media after videos from its most recent conference showed women shooting money out of a cannon into the audience. The clips from Turning Point USA’s Student Action Conference in Palm Beach, Florida this past weekend – which featured two women blasting cash into a scrambling crowd of young conservative activists – went viral on Twitter, with many on both the left and right deriding the organization’s attempt at youth outreach.