Detroit City Council voted 6-3 on Tuesday to extend the city's police department facial recognition contract, despite its near 100 percent misidentification rate and almost exclusive use on Black citizens. The measure approves a two-year contract worth nearly $200,000 with DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina-based company, that will maintain, support, and upgrade the city's facial recognition technology. According to Detroit Police Captain Aric Tosqui, the technology has been used 106 times, made 64 matches, and was used in 12 arrests. As Motherboard has previously reported, it has been used almost exclusively on Black people.

By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or, our preventive practices.

The publisher and developer of Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 have fired the game’s creative director and lead writer, and it doesn’t sound like it was an amicable departure. Paradox Interactive and Hardsuit Labs announced the dismissals in a blog post on Wednesday, saying that Brian Mitsoda, who was also lead writer of the original 2004 game, and director Ka’ai Cluney “are no longer part of the team at Hardsuit Labs.” “This was a joint decision made by the leadership of Hardsuit Labs and Paradox Interactive,” the statement said. Mitsoda, in a statement to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, called the changes an unpleasant surprise. “That this came as a shock to me is underselling it,” Mitsoda said, noting his five years of work on the game. “I’m incredibly disappointed and frustrated to say that this is where it ends for me on the project.”

During an episode all about why his viewers should support Donald Trump, his entire panel decided to speak in tongues and say… I don’t know. Something, I guess. Who knows.

U.S. security officials are warning that violent domestic extremists pose a threat to the presidential election next month, amid what one official called a “witch’s brew” of rising political tensions, civil unrest and foreign disinformation campaigns. FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos say threats by domestic extremists to election-related targets will likely increase in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. Those warnings so far have largely remained internal. But New Jersey’s homeland security office took the unusual step of publicly highlighting the threat in a little-noticed report on its website last week.

Lawmakers adopted the measure in a bipartisan 397-5 vote, with all of the votes in opposition coming from Republicans. The five Republicans who voted against the resolution were Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Clay Higgins (La.), Steve King (Iowa) and Thomas Massie (Ky.). 

The far-right group the Proud Boys celebrated Tuesday night after President Trump refused to denounce white supremacy and mentioned them during the first presidential debate. When asked by debate moderator Chris Wallace if he'd denounce the violence from white supremacist groups, Trump replied: "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left." The Proud Boys immediately shared a new logo online that included the phrase "stand back and stand by."

President Donald Trump could barely bring himself to condemn white supremacists during Tuesday evening's presidential debate.

An attorney for the juror told The New York Times that Cameron "misrepresented" the deliberations and "failed to offer the panel the option of indicting the two officers who fatally shot the young woman." The attorney general's office said it is "confident" in the case they presented but acknowledged that jurors were not given the option of indicting Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Det. Myles Cosgrove in Taylor's shooting.

An international team led by Chinese researchers has used gene-editing technology to produce "Pig 3.0" prototypes, a leap forward for life-saving organ transplants from animals to humans.

World Wrestling Entertainment referee/talent liaison Drake Wuertz and Matt Morgan, WWE wrestler-turned-mayor of Longwood, Florida, have been coordinating to raise money for a QAnon-adjacent anti-child trafficking charity on company and city time, emails obtained by Motherboard show. While Operation Underground Railroad says it has no connection to QAnon and vaguely disavows conspiracy theories on its website, the organization has embraced followers of that particular baseless conspiracy theory, rather than condemning it the way that other anti-trafficking charities have. “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes,” OUR founder/CEO Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent, told the New York Times in August. “So now it’s our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.” A few weeks earlier, Ballard treated the false and QAnon-supported conspiracy theory that furniture retailer/marketplace Wayfair was a child trafficking hub as a legitimate concern in posts on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. “With or without Wayfair, child trafficking is real and happening!!!” he wrote, adding in the attached video that “law enforcement’s gonna flush that out and we’ll get our answers sooner than later, but I want to tell you this: Children ARE sold that way!” (The organization also makes a habit of posting videos of the “operations” it claims to help smaller law enforcement agencies with. One recent video profiled the vaguely defined “ops training” that OUR agents must undergo to participate in such “operations.”) Emails released via public records requests under Florida’s Sunshine Act show Wuertz, the WWE referee, coordinating his activities as a volunteer for Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) via his WWE corporate email, even pledging to solicit WWE performers to appear at an OUR fundraiser. The same emails also appear to show Morgan making an effort to keep his behind-the-scenes discussions of OUR out of the public record, limiting his conversations to non-recorded phone calls and email threads using his personal Gmail account, which isn’t subject to Sunshine Act requests. The emails were released to Motherboard as part of a cache of 40 pages from the Longwood city government that were responsive to requests about QAnon, Operation Underground Railroad and an August 24 meeting that both Wuertz and Morgan posted about on social media.

Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with current and former government officials. As part of their behind-the-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent the C.D.C. in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little danger to children. The documents and interviews show how the White House spent weeks trying to press public health professionals to fall in line with President Trump’s election-year agenda of pushing to reopen schools and the economy as quickly as possible. The president and his team have remained defiant in their demand for schools to get back to normal, even as coronavirus cases have once again ticked up, in some cases linked to school and college reopenings.

France's environment minister has announced a gradual ban on using wild animals in traveling circuses, on keeping dolphins and killer whales in captivity in marine parks and on raising mink on fur farms. Barbara Pompili, France's minister of ecological transition, said in a news conference Tuesday that bears, tigers, lions, elephants and other wild animals won't be allowed any more in traveling circuses “in the coming years.” In addition, starting immediately, France’s three marine parks won’t be able to bring in nor breed dolphins and killer whales any more, she said. “It is time to open a new era in our relationship with these (wild) animals,” she said, arguing that animal welfare is a priority.

Donald Trump's demoted campaign boss Brad Parscale is under investigation for 'stealing' between $25-$40 million from Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, well-placed sources exclusively told DailyMail.com. The 44-year-old is also being investigated for 'pocketing' nearly another $10 million from the Republican National Committee, the insiders added.    The revelation comes as Parscale was involuntarily committed to a hospital by Fort Lauderdale police on Sunday following a concerning episode at his $2.4 million Florida home. 

Ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate, rumors began spreading among right-wing influencers and Trump campaign surrogates that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, was being outfitted with a hidden earpiece in order to receive surreptitious help during the debate, and that Mr. Biden’s campaign had refused a request from the Trump campaign to allow a third party to inspect both candidates’ ears for hidden earpiece receivers before the debate. “If Joe Biden isn’t hiding anything,” wrote the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Twitter, “why won’t he consent to a third party checking for an earpiece before tonight’s debate?” The debate, of course, has not yet begun, and there is no evidence that Mr. Biden will be assisted by an earpiece once it does. (A member of Mr. Biden’s campaign staff called the rumor “completely absurd” during a call with reporters on Tuesday.) But the theory is being speculated about in right-wing media, including on Fox News, and it has been shared thousands of times on Facebook. It was also advanced by “Q,” the pseudonymous poster behind the QAnon conspiracy theory.

President Trump’s son Eric affirmed he is not “part of” the LGBT community after appearing to come out in a televised interview Tuesday. A friend of the Trump family told The Post that “he misspoke” when appearing to say he was “part of that community” hours before his father’s first debate with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. It all started when Eric Trump was asked on “Fox & Friends” about a lesbian New Yorker who supports the president.

‘Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.’ (III Avengers 43:47) Fans really love the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Arguably, the movies are almost a religion to some dedicated adherents, who worship their idols through intensive movie marathons and arguing about the films online. But what if they actually were a religion, with the text of the movies turned into a form of scripture? Well, then you’d get the MCU Bible, a project created by developer Sean Lennaerts that turns every single line of dialogue from the 22 films in the MCU into a literal bible.

Inside the Villages in Florida, where election tensions are at an all-time high.

Building on recent advances in social cognition, we design an algorithm to automatically generate trustworthiness evaluations for the facial action units (smile, eye brows, etc.) of European portraits in large historical databases. Our results show that trustworthiness in portraits increased over the period 1500–2000 paralleling the decline of interpersonal violence and the rise of democratic values observed in Western Europe. Further analyses suggest that this rise of trustworthiness displays is associated with increased living standards.

A Christian crowdfunding site has raised more than $520,000 to help cover legal fees for Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. The GiveSendGo site, created shortly after Rittenhouse shot three Black Lives Matter protesters in the Wisconsin city on Aug. 25, killing two, is sponsored by a group called “Friends of the Rittenhouse family,” which is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The group set an initial goal of $500,00 but had surpassed that by Monday, with nearly $523,000 in contributions.