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Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point. But this is more than bargain-basement motoring. Slate is...

“We built it, you make it.”That’s the motto for Slate, a new American electric vehicle company, which just revealed its launch model and is backed by ex-Amazon (AMZN) executives, including, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’s family officeSlate said its EV pickup, a bare-bones truck with a footprint smaller than a Ford (F) Maverick, will cost somewhere in the mid-$20K range, and it will come in any color you want — as long as it’s slate gray, that is. The option-challenged vehicle offers a choice of two battery sizes for the rear-wheel-drive truck: a 52.7-kWh battery pack targeting 150 miles of range and...

Slate Auto’s new vehicle is designed to make EVs more accessible by making most features optional add-ons. The company says it will start delivering vehicles in 2026. *************************************************************** A new auto startup is launching with a made-in-America EV that with federal tax credits will cost just $20,000. Backed by Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, Slate Auto says that affordable price is possible because of its pared-down, basic model that can then be customized—and even transformed from a truck into an SUV. Slate Auto has been in stealth for almost three years, says CEO Chris Barman, who worked as a Chrysler...

It wasn’t long ago when most comedians shared the same game plan as Nate Bargatze. The 45-year-old stand-up veteran—whose latest Netflix special arrives on Christmas Eve, and has a holiday variety show airing tonight on CBS—has dutifully steered clear of every pressure point currently mangling American society. Unlike so many other comedians his age, Bargatze is fundamentally disengaged with the curdled rage over the trans debate, racial justice, or “wokeness” writ large. Nor has he adopted the surly demeanor of the lefties who dominated the scene in the 2000s—guys like Patton Oswalt and David Cross, who managed to shape every...

Armed Services panel secretly fought court battle this summer to quash subpoena seeking records of contacts with ex-FBI official Daniel Jones and liberal-funded The Democracy Integrity Project nonprofit. ================================================================================= The efforts to disseminate a now-discredited theory that the Trump campaign had secret computer communications with the Kremlin extended beyond the FBI, CIA, and State Department to the U.S. Senate. Under the late Sen. John McCain, the Armed Services Committee engaged a former FBI official and his progressive-funded nonprofit to produce a report on the matter, according to court records obtained by Just the News. The Senate committee, now under Democrats'...

Earlier this month, Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, was sentenced to nine years’ incarceration for her role in allowing Trump allies access to Mesa County’s voting system. . It doesn’t matter that these voting-machine “analyses” have never proved election fraud: They could still be weaponized for postelection litigation. Taking the proprietary software that records and counts votes is no small thing. In the wrong hands, it presents real and serious risks to the security of our election systems. In early 2021, before any of these breaches were known, Cyber Ninjas sought to obtain copies of Arizona’s voting system...

Why is Kamala Harris doing worse with Black and Latino voters than previous Democratic presidential candidates? That’s the campaign topic of the week after a New York Times/Siena poll found Harris winning only 57 percent of Hispanic voters—a step down from the estimated 63 percent that Joe Biden won in 2020—and 78 percent of Black voters, 15 points less than Biden’s estimated 2020 share. In the New York Times, David Leonhardt suggested an explanation for the disparity that echoes a centrist critique we’ve heard a lot over the past few years: The problem is identity politics, particularly on the...

The federal government’s classified documents indictment was once considered a “slam dunk.” But this month, Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida dismissed the case, ruling that the attorney general improperly appointed Jack Smith, and therefore Smith could not legally prosecute Trump. Smith promptly notified Cannon that he intends to appeal her decision, but it’s not clear what his strategy will be. There is now a near-zero chance that Donald Trump will be tried over this case in front of a jury before November—but special counsel Jack Smith is forging ahead with an appeal that could go...

On a hot August afternoon, I finished a call with a client as I opened the door to the room of my 2-year-old daughter, Alice. She’d slept a little longer than usual, and I needed to wake her so we could retrieve my 4-year-old daughter, Grace, from school. I leaned over Alice in her crib, and she was stiff and blue. Bad, bad, very bad ran through my brain. I started CPR, counting two breaths per 30 chest thrusts, and somehow managed to call 911. Eventually, the paramedics arrived. They told me to stand back. I did. Shortly after, I...

On Friday, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a new order in the Donald Trump classified documents case adding to the mountain of evidence that she is firmly in the former president’s pocket. Trump appointed Cannon in 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment in the days after he lost the 2020 election. It’s deeply offensive to the rule of law for judges to bend the law to benefit those who put them on the bench. Sadly, Cannon does just that.

In a video taken from the passenger seat of a car after Narendra Modi’s address to the joint session of Congress in June, Vivek Ramaswamy was full of praise for the Indian prime minister. “Modi talked unapologetically about Indian national identity,” he said in the video, which was posted on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. “He quoted the Vedas, ancient Indian scriptures. Yet here in the United States we have now gotten in the habit of apologizing for our own national history. … That’s what I think we need to learn here from Modi’s visit, is that we...

Falsifying business records “with intent to defraud,” by itself, is a mere misdemeanor under New York law. It is only elevated to a Class E felony, punishable by 1–5 years in prison, when committed with “intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” So Bragg’s challenge is to prove not only that Trump illegally concealed his hush money payments, but also that he did so in furtherance of another crime. That crime, Bragg’s announcement of the indictment confirms, is a violation of election law: Bragg argues that Trump devised this scheme with the intent to influence...

The final count is in: Republicans will hold a slim 222–213 majority in the House of Representatives, giving whoever lands the terrible job of speaker a four-seat cushion on any floor vote. That’s the exact margin that outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi has worked her formidable magic with for two years. Pelosi, however, had two things that her Republican counterpart will not: a caucus full of mostly sane team players, and a policy agenda less radioactive than graphite from an exploded nuclear reactor. It’s not like this is a new problem for the GOP. But previously, when House Republicans held majorities...

It’s been a real “well, shit” few days for Democrats, for which one could either blame the New York Times or the underlying reality on which the New York Times reports. On Monday, the Times’ Upshot section released a new poll in which Republicans led Democrats by just over three points when respondents were asked which party’s candidate they supported in their district—a gain of about four points for the GOP in the last month on the measure. It was the latest such “generic ballot” question on which Republicans have made gains over that time, and the party has closed...

Why Shia LaBeouf’s Conversion to Catholicism Is So ScandalousBut the traditionalists who love the TLM can be deeply toxic. “Trads” embrace traditionalism that goes beyond the language spoken in services. Many of them reject the reforms of Vatican II altogether, and stick to uncompromising positions on gay marriage, divorce, and the dress of women and their role in society.

e year was 1748, the place was Philadelphia, and the book was The Instructor, a popular British manual for everything from arithmetic to letter-writing to caring for horses’ hooves. Benjamin Franklin had set himself to adapting it for the American colonies. Though Franklin already had a long and successful career by this point, he needed to find a way to convince colonial book-buyers—who for the most part didn’t even formally study arithmetic—that his version of George Fisher’s textbook was worth the investment. Franklin made all sorts of changes throughout the book, from place names to inserting colonial histories, but he...

Last month, in response to the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinon ending Roe v. Wade, the Louisiana legislature briefly considered a bill that would define a fetus as a person for the purpose of the state’s homicide law...... on page 16 of the draft opinion, Alito cites a brief by John M. Finnis and Robert P. George that argues that fetuses are legal people. Finnis and George are clearly wrong, though. This issue has already been considered and decided by the Reconstruction-era Congress. They definitively determined that fetuses do not count as “persons” for purposes of the 14th...

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting. ...snip In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups...

President Barack Obama reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in October that directly interfering with the U.S. election could result in an "armed conflict." According to NBC News, Obama opted to use the red phone to contact Moscow directly, a communication system that dates back to the Cold War. It's not an actual telephone, but instead sends a secure email message between the two countries. "International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace," part of the Oct. 31 message read, according to NBC. "We will hold Russia to those standards."

Elon Musk called out an old Hillary Clinton tweet as a “hoax” Friday after a Twitter user flagged it for misleading disinformation and was ignored. The tweet, written Oct. 31, 2016 during Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, is a statement issued in response to a news report about an alleged secret server at Trump Tower that was being used to covertly communicate with Russia. “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” Clinton wrote in the tweet alongside the statement issued by one of her then-top aides, Jake Sullivan. A Twitter user tagged...