It’s over: According to The Wall Street Journal, Quibi Holdings LLC is finally shuttering after only six months, making it the shortest living streaming service to date. This comes after a weeks-long, last ditch effort to garner additional backers, lure new meme enthusiasts with new features, and outright sell the company to the highest bidder. We’d say we’re shocked, but we—like everyone else—have been paying attention.

We all could have ignored the Westboro Baptist Church, theoretically, but the opportunity to be party to a morality play seemed unusual and interesting, back then. It was a sunny day in 2014, just before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and protesters from the church had come all the way from Topeka, Kansas, […]

The privately-run psychotherapy centre Vastamo announced that sensitive information about its clients was leaked after its database was recently hacked, according to a company release issued on Wednesday. The Helsinki-based company said that the hackers who stole the data made attempts to extort money in exchange for its return. (both the username and the password for the root account were "root", full psychotherapy notes for tens of thousands patients up until late 2018 compromised, hacker now leaking 100 per day into the dark web until demands are met, i personally was not affected by this but motherfuck do i love adding this to my list of existing anxieties)

Data for Progress polling shows that support for a fracking ban fell 16 points among Democrats after Biden and Harris opposed it in the debates.

A rare, hopeful image of a Siberian tiger in Russia's Far East won Russian photographer Sergey Gorshkov the honor of Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

Trump’s personal attorney has indiscreet encounter with actor playing Borat’s daughter in hotel room during pandemic.

Efrén Pare­des Jr.’s life out­side prison was over before he was old enough for a driver’s license. With no crim­i­nal record, 15-year-old Pare­des worked part-time as a bag­ger at a Michi­gan gro­cery store. One night, after hours, his co-work­er was shot and killed dur­ing a rob­bery. Pare­des, who main­tains his inno­cence, was charged as an adult and con­vict­ed in a wide­ly pub­li­cized 1989 tri­al, in which the rap lyrics he copied into a high school note­book were used against him as evi­dence of pre­med­i­ta­tion. The judge gave Pare­des the manda­to­ry sen­tence for first-degree mur­der in Michi­gan: life with­out parole. More than two decades lat­er, the U.S. Supreme Court began a series of deci­sions that would all but deem that sen­tence uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for minors. But of the more than 2,800 peo­ple sen­tenced to life with­out parole as juve­niles in the Unit­ed States, approx­i­mate­ly 2,150 remain in prison, includ­ing Paredes.

In a year when Tesla might have been forgiven for extending its timeline on a key initiative, Elon Musk is forging ahead with a vision for what he calls “Full Self-Driving.” This week, a group of drivers was selected to receive a software update that downloaded automatically into their cars, enabling the vehicles to better steer and accelerate without human hands and feet. According to Tesla, hundreds of thousands of its cars will be able to drive themselves as soon as this year, probably making them the first large fleet of vehicles billed as autonomous owned by ordinary consumers.

Thirteen-year-old Seira Watanabe is a huge Godzilla fan. She has an impressive collection of figures and does an excellent impression of the kaiju’s roar. Recently, she wrote to Osaka television show Tantei! Knight Scoop, asking to go on a date with Godzilla.

It's hard to imagine there is a part of the human body that's gone unnoticed by doctors after centuries of medical research. But that's exactly what a group of scientists from the Netherlands believe. They said they have discovered a pair of previously overlooked glands that are hidden away in our skulls where the nasal cavity and the throat meet.

President Trump and his advisers have repeatedly discussed whether to fire FBI Director Christopher A. Wray after Election Day — a scenario that also could imperil the tenure of Attorney General William P. Barr as the president grows increasingly frustrated that federal law enforcement has not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter. The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but Barr as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or other Biden associates are under investigation, these people say. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions. In the campaign’s closing weeks, the president has intensified public calls for jailing his challenger, much as he did for Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016. Trump has called Biden a “criminal” without articulating what laws he believes the former vice president has broken.

James Randi, the magician who escaped from jail cells, coffins and straitjackets before becoming a scientific skeptic bent on debunking those who peddle in the paranormal and supernatural, has died. He was 92.

Several years ago, I found myself sitting at a desk in the main reading room of Stanford University’s Hoover Library. The box in front of me contained thousands of unopened letters, their thin red, white, and blue envelopes stacked indiscriminately. All were postmarked in the winter of 1972, and written in languages of the former Soviet Union: Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Kazakh. Most notably, all were addressed to Angela Davis.

How a racial awakening unfolded in a white-dominated brotherhood known for its veneration of the Confederate general.

At least 70 artworks and ancient artefacts across three galleries on Berlin’s museum island were vandalised with an oily substance earlier this month, German media has reported. ... ... German media have linked the museum island attack to conspiracy theories pushed through social media channels by prominent coronavirus deniers in recent months. One such theory claims that the Pergamon Museum is the centre of the “global satanism scene” because it holds a reconstruction of the ancient Greek Pergamon Altar. Attila Hildmann, a former vegan celebrity chef who has become one of Germany’s best-known proponents of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, posted messages on Telegram in August and September in which he suggested that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was using the altar for “human sacrifices”.

A man in Frederick, Md., northwest of Washington, is accused of threatening to kidnap and kill Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Insiders say Dataminr’s “algorithmic” Twitter search involves human staffers perpetuating confirmation biases. New York startup Dataminr aggressively markets itself as a tool for public safety, giving institutions from local police to the Pentagon the ability to scan the entirety of Twitter using sophisticated machine-learning algorithms. But company insiders say their surveillance efforts were often nothing more than garden-variety racial profiling, powered not primarily by artificial intelligence but by a small army of human analysts conducting endless keyword searches. In July, The Intercept reported that Dataminr, leveraging its status as an official “Twitter Partner,” surveilled the Black Lives Matter protests that surged across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. Dataminr’s services were initially designed to help hedge funds turn the first glimmers of breaking news on social media into market-beating trades, enabling something like a supercharged version of professional Twitter dashboard TweetDeck. They have since been adopted by media outlets, the military, police departments, and various other organizations seeking real-time alerts on chaos and strife... In practice, Dataminr’s anti-gang activity amounted to “white people, tasked with interpreting language from communities that we were not familiar with” coached by predominantly white former law enforcement officials who themselves “had no experience from these communities where gangs might be prevalent,” per a second source. “The only thing we were using to identify them was hashtags, possibly showing gang signs, and if there was any kind of weapon in the photo,” according to the first source. There was “no institutional definition of ‘potential gang member,’ it was open to interpretation.” All that really mattered, these sources say, was finding as much danger as possible, real or perceived, and transmitting it to the police.

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has agreed to plead guilty to three federal criminal charges for its role in creating the nation's opioid crisis and will pay more than $8 billion and close down the company. The money will go to opioid treatment and abatement programs. The privately held company has agreed to pay a $3.5 billion fine as well as forfeit an additional $2 billion in past profits, in addition to the $2.8 billion it agreed to pay in civil liability. "Purdue Pharma actively thwarted the United States' efforts to ensure compliance and prevent diversion," said Drug Enforcement Administration Assistant Administrator Tim McDermott. "The devastating ripple effect of Purdue's actions left lives lost and others addicted." The company doesn't have $8 billion in cash available to pay the fines. So Purdue will be dissolved as part of the settlement, and its assets will be used to create a new "public benefit company" controlled by a trust or similar entity designed for the benefit of the American public. The Justice Department said it will function entirely in the public interest rather than to maximize profits. Its future earnings will go to paying the fines and penalties, which in turn will be used to combat the opioid crisis.

Today, the embargo on 'Borat 2' dropped. And Rudy Giuliani has a very comprising scene with a young woman.

The comments, made in a new documentary, are the strongest yet from a pontificate that has taken a more tolerant and inclusive tone.