The UK’s new socially distanced music venue has been shut down amidst a spike in coronavirus cases within the country. The Virgin Money Unity Arena opened in Newcastle earlier this summer, offering live music junkies the chance to see a concert live and in person in a safe setting. Specifically, the venue’s viewing area consisted of a series of enclosed platforms — each spaced six feet apart. Individuals or small groups could watch the concert standing or seated on these platforms, while concessions and bathrooms could be accessed through a one-way system. All told, it was a pretty creative setup that safety accommodated up to 2,500 music fans who turned out to watch concerts put on by Two Door Cinema Club, Sam Fender, The Libertines, Maximo Park, and more. Unfortunately, as the UK faces a new wave of COVID-19 cases, the Virgin Money Unity Arena has been forced to cancel its remaining shows. “We’re honoured to have been able to provide a little happiness and joy to thousands of music and comedy fans throughout the region and the UK in what has been such a tough 2020 for everyone,” event organizer Steve Davis said in a statement.

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a statement.

If you are a liberal who cares about the Supreme Court, you may be feeling that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just slipped coal into your Christmas stocking. (If you don’t have a stocking, me neither, but ’tis the season.) At an event in Virginia on Tuesday, answering a question from former Solicitor General Ted Olson about whether Supreme Court justices should retire when the party that appointed them controls the presidency and will get to replace them, Ginsburg said, “I think one should stay as long as she can do the job.” This builds on her remark to Adam Liptak of the New York Times in August, when she made it clear that she was not timing her departure based on Barack Obama’s remaining years in office. She said then, “There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president.”

“We literally watched as she became radicalized.” “The level of heartbreak I felt was unfathomable.” “It feels like we are losing her to an addiction.” This is how friends and family of QAnon supporters describe what they’re going through. Most don’t understand how their loved ones could fall for something so unbelievable.

Cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates said Friday that TikTok and WeChat users should probably stop using the applications in the coming days, given that the Trump administration’s new ban on them will effectively block users from downloading updates. Updates, of course, provide security fixes and not just new features. In just the last year, TikTok has had to issue multiple patches for vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to capture users’ data without their permission or send them malicious links, for instance. WeChat has also had to address several flaws in the last year. “The order … harms the privacy and security of millions of existing TikTok and WeChat users in the United States by blocking software updates, which can fix vulnerabilities and make the apps more secure,” the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, Hina Shamsi, said in a statement. After Sunday, when some of the restrictions are slated to take effect, TikTok and WeChat will progressively become riskier and riskier, said Dave Kennedy, the chief technology officer and co-founder of Ohio-based Binary Defense.

But the Nikola truck is more than just a fuel cell vehicle; it’s a rolling super computer. One of the key elements of Nikola’s advanced system is the Bosch Vehicle Control Unit, which provides higher computing power for advanced functions while reducing the number of standalone units. "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."  

His request was a little ... odd, but you know.

One of the militia members who joined Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, told Hatewatch that far-right propaganda praising the 17-year-old accused murderer is harmful and said that he was not part of a “well-regulated militia.” Ryan Balch, the Wisconsin man who Hatewatch reported was immersed in white supremacist propaganda before joining Rittenhouse in Kenosha on Aug. 25, reached out to Hatewatch by phone. He offered additional context about what happened that night, when Rittenhouse allegedly killed two people and injured another. Balch, 31, described the militia contingent that descended on the city in the midst of civil unrest there as being “small groups of friends who went together” in separate groups. He called the groups “ad hoc.” Balch also told Hatewatch that Rittenhouse lied to him that night, claiming that he was 18 years old and an EMT, both of which were untrue. Referring to the culture war surrounding the violence that gripped Kenosha in August, Balch told Hatewatch in a phone call: I think that the propaganda around Rittenhouse is not factually based, which I mean, it’s propaganda, so of course. But … it’s really damning [when looking at] the facts of what happened. And, I think them lionizing him is only going to hurt him down the road. It’s only going to [make] the divide bigger. Myself personally, I don’t lionize him. Rittenhouse was a kid who lied to the people he was with. Anybody who was in proximity to him, he lied to us.

In Finland, where Burger King is running an ad campaign featuring its mascot kissing Ronald McDonald, one conservative activist says the restaurant chain has made another assault on youth and the culture.

ne-time QAnon supporter Lauren Witzke won the Republican Senate primary in Delaware on Tuesday, campaigning on a pledge to institute a decade-long moratorium on all immigration and beating a rival candidate endorsed by the state GOP by nearly 14 percentage points.  Witzke’s win marks the second time a fan of the dangerous pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory has won a GOP Senate nomination this cycle, although Witzke said in January that she no longer promotes QAnon. But while Witzke has been photographed wearing a QAnon T-shirt and has repeatedly posted QAnon hashtags on social media, even as she now claims not to believe in the theory, her connections to the right’s darkest internet fringes go far beyond QAnon. And she’s not particularly inclined to hide them either.  With her victory still just hours old, the newest Republican Senate nominee publicly thanked a white nationalist leader who marched in the “Unite the Right” rally and has questioned the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.   “Thank you, Nick!” Witzke tweeted in response to a tweet from Nick Fuentes, a Charlottesville participant who has become the face of the far-right angry, young white nationalist fringe.

The attorney general said in a statement Monday night that he and the local sheriff searched a crash scene after he thought he hit a deer Saturday night but they both missed spotting the pedestrian he had hit and killed. Jason Ravnsborg said he used Hyde County Sheriff Mike Volek’s personal vehicle to drive home to Pierre and then returned it to Highmore the next day.  As he passed by the crash scene Sunday morning, Ravnsborg said he stopped to look for the deer but instead found the body of Joe Boever, a 55-year-old man from Highmore. Instead of calling 911 Ravnsborg drove to Volek’s house “to report the discovery,” leaving Boever on the side of the highway where he had been since 10:30 p.m. the night before. Ravnsborg shared this information and other details in a statement written on the letterhead of the Office of Attorney General and sent from his campaign email address.

I'm a mortality modeler. It's clear what's killing Black people.

A convicted Russian neo-Nazi has been found dead in what appears to be a suicide inside his jail cell in the Urals region of western Siberia, prison authorities confirmed Wednesday. Maxim Martsinkevich, who went by the nickname Tesak (Russian for machete), was serving a 10-year sentence for a violent attack on synthetic cannabinoids dealers. Martsinkevich, 36, had three prior convictions relating to extremism and inciting hatred. During his lifetime, Martsinkevich had gained notoriety for founding a group that organized vigilante attacks on gay men and alleged pedophiles.

The nerve agent used to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detected on an empty water bottle from his hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk, suggesting he was poisoned there and not at the airport as first thought, his team said on Thursday.

Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages around the U.S., more than a half million households are made up of married same-sex couples, according to figures the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday. Since 2014, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same sex marriages, the number of married same-sex households has increased by almost 70%, rising to 568,110 couples in 2019, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Of the 980,000 same-sex couple households reported in 2019, 58% were married couples and 42% were unmarried partners, the survey showed.

Thursday’s legislative session in both chambers was canceled, sparking criticism from some Democrats that it was a precautionary move by GOP leadership to avoid armed visitors entering the state Capitol. Session on Thursday would have coincided with the annual “Second Amendment March” event on the Capitol lawn, hosted by a slew of pro-gun groups. Open carry was encouraged and speakers touted attendees’ rights to bear arms under the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment March was hosted by the “Second Amendment March” Facebook page, Michigan Gun Owners and Michigan Open Carry Inc. More than 1,100 people attended, according to the Facebook event, although more than 4,700 more people were marked as “interested.”  Many attendees sported pro-President Donald Trump signs and flags, “Don’t tread on me” flags and anti-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs like, “My Governor Is An Idiot.” Members of the Michigan Militia were present, along with members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Proud Boys, a self-described western chauvinist group.

One week after Reuters published an explosive report on an alleged sexual and financial relationship between Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife and a Miami man named Giancarlo Granda, responders were called to the Falwells’ house in Bedford County, Virginia. According to records and 911 audio obtained by HuffPost, on the night of Aug. 30, Jerry Falwell Jr. was intoxicated and apparently injured; his wife, Becki Falwell, described “a lot of blood right now.” Alcohol use lurked behind the series of scandals that led Jerry Falwell Jr. to resign as president of Liberty University last month. He initially announced a leave of absence from Liberty, a private evangelical university founded by his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., on Aug. 7 after he posted a racy photo on Instagram with his pants unzipped, and his arm around a woman with her midriff exposed. A dark drink was in his hand, which he later claimed was “black water” that was “a prop only.” Liberty University stringently forbids alcohol use by students.

What actually transpired in the room stunned a number of those in attendance. Vanity Fair has reconstructed the details of the meeting for the first time, based on recollections, notes, and calendar entries from three people who attended the meeting. All quotations are based on the recollections of one or more individual attendees. Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.” One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction. “Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.” The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies. “That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

President Donald Trump has spent $20 million of his political war chest to stop it. He riffs about it at rallies. He tweets relentlessly about it. Yet six months into a crusade to stop universal mail-in voting, Trump hasn’t yet prevented a single state from sending voters the unsolicited ballots he claims, with minimal evidence, are ripe for fraud.

The head of the Federal Election Commission chastised Catholic bishops during a pair of interviews this week, accusing church hierarchy of “hiding behind” their nonprofit status and declaring that this year’s U.S. election amounts to a “spiritual war” that threatens the country’s “Christian moral principles.” FEC Chairman James E. “Trey” Trainor III made the remarks during an interview released on Wednesday (Sept. 16) by Church Militant, a controversial conservative Catholic media outlet, and in a separate phone interview with Religion News Service. Trainor, who is Catholic and attends Mass weekly, was asked by Church Militant founder Michael Voris about a priest who recently published a viral video in which the cleric declares that no Catholic can be a Democrat. Voris pressed Trainor about news that, in response to the video, a bishop plans to attempt “fraternal correction” of the priest, with the hierarch arguing the priest has inflicted a “wound” upon the church. “I don’t think a bishop has the right to tell a priest that they can’t come out and speak,” the FEC chairman said.