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Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Az.) on Friday called on the Biden administration to pause approvals for deepwater oil export terminals. In a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration (MARAD), Markey and Grijalva called for the approval criteria for deepwater terminals to be expanded to factor in criteria like public health, environmental justice and impact on climate change. The criteria currently requires MARAD to determine whether such ports “will be in the national interest and consistent with national security and other national policy goals and objectives, including energy sufficiency and environmental quality.” In its...

Female NYPD officer left bloodied after she’s punched in the face by repeat offender, leading to wild caught-on-camera arrestA repeat offender on probation allegedly punched an NYPD officer so hard that she fell to the ground before other cops pounced on the violent suspect on a Bronx sidewalk Thursday evening in a caught-on-camera arrest. Ernst Delma, 41, slugged the female officer in the face when she tried to break up an argument between him and a group of kids around 7:10 p.m. on the corner of Rosedale and Randall avenues, authorities and law enforcement sources said. Footage captured by a...

Breaking, a.k.a. break dancing, kicked off its inaugural appearance as an Olympic sport in style. Snoop Dogg opened the competition Friday at Place de la Concorde in Paris via the coup de baton, when a wooden baton is struck on the floor to signal an event’s commencement. Dressed in a red, white and blue tracksuit, the Grammy-nominated rapper — who has been making the most of his time in Paris and reportedly earning $500,000 per day as an Olympics correspondent for NBC and Peacock — accessorized with colorful kicks as the festivities got underway. Men and women will compete separately...

COSMIC! This name has become increasingly popular in the open-source community over the past year, raising high expectations. Now, more than two years after System76 unexpectedly announced its bold plan to create a new desktop environment written in Rust programming language from scratch, users can finally try it out. And let me tell you, the wait was worth it.We recently tested the alpha version of COSMIC, and our initial thoughts can be summed up most briefly with this: it’s a game-changer! Above all, it is incredibly fast. And when I say fast, I don’t just mean fast – it’s fast...

A former North Dakota State Senator pleaded guilty today to traveling to Prague, Czech Republic, to have commercial sex with minor boys. According to court documents and facts established in public proceedings, Ray Holmberg, 80, of Grand Forks, took approximately 14 trips to Prague between 2011 and 2021 to engage in commercial sex acts with minor boys. During some of these trips, Holmberg used the alias “Sean Evans” while staying at a brothel where young boys provided commercial sexual services. Holmberg also went to a public park in front of the main train station in Prague to procure sex from...

[Catholic Caucus] Vatican loosens stance on food, water for patients in vegetative stateROME – This week the Vatican’s Academy for Life issued a new text on a series of bioethical issues, including the provision of food and hydration for patients in a vegetative state, which marks a modest departure from the Vatican’s previously held position on the issue.Published Thursday by the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV), the volume is titled, “Small Lexicon on End of Life,” and covers a variety of bioethical issues.According to an introduction by Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the PAV, the volume has the aim...

Explanation: Denizens of planet Earth typically watch meteor showers by looking up. But this remarkable view, captured on August 13, 2011 by astronaut Ron Garan, caught a Perseid meteor by looking down. From Garan's perspective on board the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of about 380 kilometers, the Perseid meteors streak below, swept up dust from comet Swift-Tuttle. The vaporizing comet dust grains are traveling at about 60 kilometers per second through the denser atmosphere around 100 kilometers above Earth's surface. In this case, the foreshortened meteor flash is near frame center, below the curving limb of the...

As Vice President Kamala Harris fights for the votes of Americans threatening to abandon the Democratic Party, she faces challenges across the battleground states, from working-class Nevada communities to Arab American enclaves in Michigan.But perhaps no swing state has vexed Democrats as much this year as Arizona.A longtime Republican stronghold before President Biden’s victory in 2020, the state is tricky political territory for Democrats, who confront magnified concerns over the number of migrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. A handful of polls in recent weeks have shown former President Donald J. Trump leading Ms. Harris by the mid-single digits, even...

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is reportedly closing in on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip, as he runs out of places to hide and as other senior members of the terrorist organization are eliminated. The Jerusalem Post reported Friday: Sinwar is almost alone at the top of Hamas. His close friends in the senior military ranks of the organization, as well as the senior officials, have been eliminated or have disappeared: Mohammad Deif, Rafa’a Salama, Ahmed Ghandour, Raad Saad, and Ayman Nofal. … The fact that Sinwar’s entire operational hub has disappeared makes it difficult for him,...

Conscription — a practice most Americans believe should be relegated to the dustbin of history — has returned as an uncomfortable topic of conversation among U.S. allies and adversaries alike. This has generated concern and even conspiracy theories among American voters. But a candid discussion would be healthier. The fact is, if the United States hopes to deter or defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan, it should be prepared to effectively implement a draft. To be clear, this is a solution of last resort, but one that may be necessary. Right now, U.S. mobilization has not been tested in decades....

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VIDEOAgenda-Free TV becomes like "Seinfeld" a show about NOTHING when NOTHING happens as they spent eight and a half hours waiting for something, anything to happen as live cameras capture NOTHING happening in Israel as they anticipated an attack from Iran in retaliation for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran. Mercifully, the DUmmie FUnnies will show you only very brief clips of absolutely NOTHING happening on Agenda-Free TV as Steve Lookner and his audience waited for NOTHING to happen. Okay, something actually did happen. Steve took a meal break which was the highlight of his eight and a...

The violent unrest that has broken out in multiple towns across England and Northern Ireland this week feels simultaneously shocking and familiar. Rioters have rampaged across more than 15 towns and cities, looting businesses, injuring police officers, attacking mosques and targeting hotels that house asylum seekers. Britain has had sporadic outbreaks of semi-organized mob violence for decades, including brawls by infamous “firms” of soccer hooligans in the 1980s and ’90s, an outbreak of race rioting in northern England in 2001 and a spate of rioting and looting centered on London in 2011. But some circumstances are markedly different. While the...

Microsoft's Outlook email is changing in September. You can no longer set your email program's Authentication Method to Normal Password. You must set it to OAuth2. I'm having difficulty doing this. My Thunderbird, fully up to date, allows me to set the Server Settings to OAuth2, but my Outgoing Server (SMPT) setting has no OAuth2 option. Also, when I log into MS online, it wants to verify me. MS has my phone number, and my non-Outlook email (which forwards to my Outlook address). But though MS claims to have texted and emailed verification codes to me, I never receive them....

Disney’s Hocus Pocus star Bette Midler is enraged that the major news networks carried former President Donald Trump’s live press conference on Thursday, scolding the “corrupt” networks while also accusing them of surreptitiously trying to help Trump win the election in order to boost their own ratings. The major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — each aired at least part of Trump’s presser at Mar-a-Lago. The PBS Newshour provided a livestream while CNN also aired parts of it. They should all be ashamed of themselves, according to the Divine Miss M, who expressed her rage and paranoia in...

Throughout her political career, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken time during speeches and public events to define events or issues that most people are already familiar with...In November 2021, Harris was asked about what the Biden-Harris administration would do to fight inflation.'Let's start with this,' Harris replied. 'Prices have gone up, and families and individuals are dealing with the realities of — that bread costs more, that gas costs more.'She continued, 'and we have to understand what that means. That's about the cost of living going up. That's about having to stress and stretch limited resources.'Harris noted that she...

Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe we have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving us with an spooky sense of pastness.But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system.Our research found that the phenomenon arises when the part of the brain which detects familiarity de-synchronises with reality. Déjà vu is the signal which alerts you to this weirdness: it is a type of "fact checking" for the memory system.But repetition can do something even more uncanny...

We Windows users are sometimes the butt of the joke when it comes to cybersecurity issues. Or at least, we often used to be. Still, if I receive one more lecture on why Linux or Mac systems are more secure, I'll at least have this article to point to. Not always, I shall say. Not always.Oligo Security's research team has discovered a “0.0.0.0 Day” vulnerability that affects Google Chrome/Chromium, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari browsers, enabling websites to communicate with software running on MacOS and Linux systems (via The Hacker News).The vulnerability means public websites using .com domains are able...

LONDON — In response to desperate pleas from downtrodden citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Russia announced it was preparing to send troops to liberate oppressed British people from communist rule. British citizens who had been crushed under a communist reign of terror reportedly rejoiced when hearing the news that the brave, freedom-loving Russian military would soon arrive to set them free from the despotic British government. "We have heard the cries for help from the persecuted British people," Russian President Vladimir Putin said when announcing the operation. "Our forces are now on their way to the United Kingdom to liberate...

Joshua Young, a corrections officer in the Colorado prison system, was shocked by the lessons of the anti-bias training session he was required to attend in March 2021. With its references of “White supremacy,” “White exceptionalism” and “White fragility,” the training sent a clear and disturbing message to his mind: All White people are racist. “I thought the training was potentially harmful to our staff relationships, relationships between staff and offenders, and undermined us in so many ways,” Young, 47, said in an interview. “It told us basically that … we were unable to treat people fairly just because of...