"ICE put their MAGA hat on. They’re gonna try to take it off come January, but I don’t know how successful that will be."

In a complaint unsealed on Friday, whistle-blowers working on President Trump’s wall said that contractors were illegally bringing in Mexican guards to protect construction sites.

On Tuesday, Pornhub announced that it is banning downloads, restricting uploads, and expanding its content moderation efforts.

A broad bipartisan effort to pass legislation protecting patients from massive “surprise” medical bills is now on life support as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) digs in on a separate proposal. Democratic and Republican leaders of three committees in the House and Senate have been pushing for months to pass their measure, which would prevent Americans from unexpectedly getting hit with medical bills for thousands of dollars for common scenarios like treatment from a doctor outside their insurance network when they require emergency care. Neal has been holding out for his own rival proposal and has not shown any willingness to budge despite concessions offered by top lawmakers on the three committees. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) even stepped in over the weekend to speak to Neal in an effort to get him to compromise, sources said. Proponents are hoping to get their legislation attached to next week’s year-end government funding package that’s likely to include COVID-19 relief, leaving little time for action. Supporters say they are extremely frustrated with Neal, given that lawmakers have been working on a bipartisan basis for two years to solve an issue many view as an especially egregious practice that should be low-hanging fruit for Congress. Lawmakers tried to pass the measure last December, but disagreements with Neal derailed the measure.

The Biden administration plans to create a position to find common ground with conservatives, said Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement for the president-elect. “Right now I’m trying to set up the office and I’m actually looking at establishing a position that reaches out to conservatives -- because it’s about moving forward. We cannot stay where we are,” Richmond said during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Monday night. He said the office’s goal was to forge connections with all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation. “We’re not elected just to help Democrats or urban cities or minorities,” he said. “We were elected to help this entire country and that means reaching out to conservatives, that means reaching out to rural areas, reaching out to people who didn’t vote for us.” President-elect Joe Biden named Richmond, a campaign co-chair, to head the Office of Public Engagement last month. On Monday, Biden appointed him as one of five co-chairs of his inaugural committee. Part of Richmond’s mandate is to help the incoming Biden administration’s relations with Republicans in Congress. He said he would work to “create a demand in the country to make politicians work across the aisle and to work together.”

State police brandishing firearms Monday raided the Tallahassee home of Rebekah Jones, the former Department of Health employee who built the state's much-praised COVID-19 dashboard before being fired over what she said was refusing to "manipulate data." "They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids," Jones tweeted shortly before 5 p.m.  Jones — who launched her own COVID-19 dashboard after she was fired, and used crowdsourcing to raise money to support it — said the agents knocked on her door around 8:30 a.m. that morning, took all her "hardware and tech" after showing her a warrant based on a complaint filed by the Florida Department of Health.  A video accompanying the post shows Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents in vests at the front door with guns drawn, asking who else was in the house. She said her husband and two children were inside as they escorted her out of the house.

On Monday, the Trump administration finalized a sweeping new regulation that allows federal contractors to discriminate against racial and religious minorities, women, and especially LGBTQ people in the name of protecting “religious liberty.” It effectively abolishes critical workplace protections for these contractors that have been in place for decades, reframing religious freedom as a near-limitless license to discriminate. Monday’s move will force the Biden administration to waste countless hours and resources reversing this radical rewrite of federal law. The rules restricting discrimination by federal contractors springs from Executive Order 11246, which President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965. Johnson’s order barred discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Presidents later added sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity to the list of protected traits. Today, there are about 4 million employees of federal contractors who benefit from these protections. The Department of Labor enforces presidential prohibitions against discrimination in these workplaces. But the current Labor Secretary, Eugene Scalia, is no fan of these rules—or, it seems, of any workplace protections. Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, previously worked as a corporate attorney who specialized in crushing employees’ rights. He has spent his tenure at the Labor Department dismantling federal regulations that safeguard workers’ rights, health, and safety. Scalia’s deregulatory agenda has been especially catastrophic during the pandemic; under his guidance, the agency refused to protect workers from COVID-19, permitting fatal outbreaks through its own shocking negligence. In the long run, Scalia may be best remembered for abandoning his duty to shield vulnerable employees from infection and death—the many people who died of COVID-19 after he declined to enforce basic workplace safety rules in the midst of a pandemic are gone forever. Scalia’s new discrimination rule, by contrast, will have a short shelf life: There is no doubt that the Biden administration will repeal it, though the process may take months, even years. It is worth assessing Scalia’s rule, both because it will likely take effect for now and because it reflects a disturbing vision of “religious freedom” that is ascendant in the federal judiciary.

What did you do to celebrate Dragon Age day on Friday? I watched a voice actor get brutally shut down by Dragon Age fans, after he posted the cringiest video I have ever watched in my life. Greg Ellis, the voice of Cullen in Dragon Age: Inquisition, decided that it would be a good idea to post a 40 minute video, in-character as Cullen, complaining about him and his voice actor being victimised by cancel culture. It is awful. It is hilarious. It might well be the best thing to happen to Dragon Age since Dragon Age 2.

Already making excuses.

Trump recently told one adviser he was going to pardon "every person who ever talked to me."

But the Base, a terror group that has been the recent recipient of a lot of FBI attention, turned him down.

Five years of social reform driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have drastically loosened the conservative grip on Saudi society. CNN's Nic Robertson says it could yet prove to be a magnet for tourism.

AMES — When Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker heard the tall tales about the former owner of the house they were buying, they brushed it off as hearsay. They were in the process of purchasing a 1915 American Foursquare just on the edge of the village of Ames, Montgomery County, and a few people had mentioned the home was rumored to have once belonged to a bootlegger in the 1920s. "It was sort of the local urban legend that it was built by a bootlegger," Drummond said. "We went with it, but we also knew that this was totally made up." And the story still seemed fictional, at least until October when Drummond ripped off the rotting, wooden skirting on the home's mudroom and something tumbled out at his feet.

For those excited about Cyberpunk 2077 but are vulnerable to epileptic episodes, here are a few things you need to know.

US Air Force officer and test pilot Chuck Yeager, known as "the fastest man alive," has died at the age of 97.

New Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, seeking to revamp the nation’s largest prosecutor’s office with progressive policies, said Monday after taking office that cash bail will be ended for many offenses and sentences in thousands of cases will be reevaluated. Gascón, in remarks after taking his oath of office, took aim at his predecessors in recent decades — calling Los Angeles “a poster child for the failed tough-on-crime approach.” “The status quo hasn’t made us safer,” he said during a live-streamed ceremony.

Ivanov Sergey Nikolaevich, the scriptwriter for the survival-horror S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, has passed away. Born in Kiev in 1954, Ivanov was not drawn towards creative pursuits in his childhood or youth, surprisingly. He enjoyed science-fiction books and comics, and was a big fan of Boris Stern, a Soviet writer who penned a range of fairy tales, satire, social and realistic prose. "If they did not provoke a desire to take up the pen, then, at least, they made me look at writing from a slightly different angle," said Ivanov. "I don't consider myself, like many of those who write now, to be a writer (here, Stern was a real writer!)" At Donetsk National University, Ukraine, he trained and graduated in applied mathematics, and secured a role as a lecturer at the V. M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine from 1977 to 1992. At this point in time, video games were beginning to show promise and potential outside of simplistic yet entertaining puzzles. CD-ROMs were brand new inventions, and they revolutionised optical-based storage media, allowing for the arrival of three dimensional environments and characters in games.

This "Galactic Federation" has supposedly been in contact with Israel and the US for years, but are keeping themselves a secret to prevent hysteria until humanity is ready.

President Trump called the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives twice during the past week to make an extraordinary request for help reversing his loss in the state, reflecting a broadening pressure campaign by the president and his allies to try to subvert the 2020 election result. The calls, confirmed by House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s office, make Pennsylvania the third state where Trump has directly attempted to overturn a result since he lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. He previously reached out to Republicans in Michigan, and on Saturday he pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a call to try to replace that state’s electors.

On one local Facebook group, a man described the couple as “liberal socialist democratic homosexual transvestites from Chicago” who “hate this country.”