One of the features being worked on for a while with the read-only EROFS file-system is page cache sharing. Besides EROFS being popular on some mobile/embedded devices, this open-source read-only file-system has been quite popular for container usage and there this page cache sharing functionality can provide some significant reductions in RAM usage...
Marcy McDannel slid a photograph across the steel jailhouse table to the convicted killer and watched his face for a reaction.
Samuel Atchak, 27 at the time, was serving 115 years for an unusual killing. One August morning in 2014, a young woman was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her body displayed nude on the tundra at the center of the coastal Alaska village of Chevak and her clothes placed nearby. Atchak pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted sexual assault in Roxanne Smart’s death.
McDannel was interested in the death of a second young woman, less than nine months later, in another Alaska coastal community that neighbors Chevak. Eunice Whitman too was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her clothes placed nearby and her body displayed nude on the tundra in a well-trafficked area of Bethel. No one had been convicted in her death.
“If you don’t want to see it,” McDannel said gently, “I won’t show it to you,” according to a recording she made.
Atchak didn’t mind looking at the pictures, he assured her. “I’m all right.”
McDannel recalls he did not flinch as he stared at a redacted printout of the crime scene photo.
Over the course of two hours, McDannel coaxed responses from him bit by bit. He speculated that based on the position of the body, the killer likely caught the woman off guard. Maybe surprised her from behind and strangled her, he said, with a “rear naked chokehold,” using a martial arts term. He offered thoughts about why Whitman’s body was arranged just so, what the killer’s motive might have been, even the height of the murderer. Could be someone around 5’8” judging from how the attack seemed to go down, suggested Atchak, 5’6”.
A former state prosecutor turned defense attorney, McDannel thanked him for the insight and headed home.
Although she didn’t ask directly, what she really wanted to know, of course, was if the man across the table had committed both killings. Atchak, one of more than a dozen people McDannel portrayed as viable suspects in court filings or in communications with state police, said in their interview that he thought he remembered passing through Bethel around the date Whitman’s body was found. State troopers later told McDannel that records placed him elsewhere.
Two months before the October 2022 prison visit, McDannel had helped win freedom for her former client, Justine Paul, whom police arrested in Whitman’s murder. Like so much in Alaska’s justice system, the victory came at a glacial pace, even after physical evidence used to link Paul to the crime fell apart. He spent seven years in jail.
Though McDannel’s work as Paul’s attorney was done, she found she couldn’t let the case go.
Someone had killed Whitman. If not Paul, she wondered, who?
Heather Whitman shows a social media post memorializing her sister, Eunice.Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News
Police questioned many people after Paul’s arrest, asking about their whereabouts, sometimes requesting DNA samples, but also seeking in most cases to learn about Paul’s relationship with Whitman and his movements the night she was killed.
The investigation left unresolved clues, such as male DNA on Whitman’s body that came from someone other than Paul. The lab found no match for him, the four men who reported finding the body or a registered sex offender captured on security video nearby.
As for Atchak, records from state troopers and Bethel police do not show anyone asked him about the case during the investigation, despite striking similarities between the Smart and Whitman murders and despite media attention they each received locally.
Atchak declined two requests for an interview sent through prison officials and did not respond to written questions delivered to him this month. His last known attorney also did not respond.
Bethel police announced Paul’s arrest to the news media the day after the body was found. The state went to the grand jury 11 days after the investigation began.
McDannel said police and prosecutors could have waited until testing was done on the key physical evidence. Other attorneys said Alaska’s legal system could move cases like Paul’s far more swiftly to trial, where the validity of evidence can be judged.
Either of these possibilities might have kept Paul from spending years in jail on an indictment that prosecutors ultimately admitted they could no longer support. It could have saved the victim’s family from going years without anyone being tried for her murder. It could have led investigators to pursue more leads while the case was relatively fresh.
The former lead Bethel police investigator said she continues to believe Paul is guilty and defended the efforts of law enforcement. Prosecutors have said that they and the police acted properly during the investigation. The Alaska Department of Law, which oversees prosecutors, said the state changed course after new information came to light. But the department also acknowledged that the time the case took was “unacceptable” and said multiple factors contributed to delays, including prosecutor turnover.
Today, Alaska state police are back at square one. They reopened the investigation of Whitman’s death this year, three years after Paul’s charges were dismissed. They said they couldn’t discuss whether they have ruled out anyone as a suspect.
Whitman’s sister Heather said she remains firmly convinced that Paul is responsible, possibly with an accomplice.
Paul could come under renewed scrutiny if police were to find new evidence that’s stronger than what prosecutors showed grand jurors. In response to questions, the Law Department left open the possibility a court might allow him to be charged again. The department has noted that the dismissal of charges is not the same as a declaration of a defendant’s innocence.
But as with any potential suspect, in any cold case, the passage of time has made the task more challenging.
This is a story of a state legal system that failed every person it touched — especially Eunice Whitman.
Eunice Whitman
Eunice Whitman was the youngest of six siblings. Her sister Heather called her “the light to everyone’s life.”
She was happy, a lover of heavy metal and house parties. She grew up in Bethel, attending a local school where the Indigenous Yup’ik language was taught. Heather named her daughter after Eunice. Now 8, the girl reminds everyone of her namesake for her silliness.
Heather Whitman and her 8-year-old daughter, Eunice. Heather’s daughter never got to meet her namesake.Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News
“Oooh la la,” said little Eunice, as a server placed a glass of Dr Pepper on the table of a Bethel pizza parlor one recent afternoon. She sat attentively as her mother recounted the family’s history for a reporter. Eunice ordered a burger, heavy on the ketchup.
Heather Whitman sat beside her, her long hair recently cut. So many split ends, she said. No one has been able to braid it as tightly as she likes since her sister died.
Heather and Eunice’s other surviving sister, Sarah, work at a convenience store at the end of the boardwalk where Eunice’s body was found, a busy footpath crisscrossing a wetland at the center of town. Heather said her bedroom faces that same marshy tundra. She said she keeps the window closed and avoids the boardwalk. When the city finally placed streetlights along its wooden planks last year, she said, she hugged one of the construction workers.
Eunice’s father declined an interview request. Sarah Whitman said she wasn’t ready to talk about her sister’s murder.
Details of how Eunice met Justine Paul, her boyfriend of five months when she died, come from Paul’s mother.
Joann Paul Carl said her son had known Whitman since they were kids. The two met when Whitman visited Kipnuk, a neighboring village where Carl and Paul lived, for the Native Youth Olympics. They started dating in January 2015. Carl said her son was soon talking about proposing.
The Alaska Native villages of Kipnuk and Chevak are both a short plane ride from Bethel, a regional hub of 6,000 people in southwest Alaska.Lucas Waldron/ProPublica
The day before the murder in May 2015, Paul was visiting Bethel. A video recovered from Paul’s phone would show her on the boardwalk arguing with the person behind the camera at 12:11 a.m., according to state troopers. Paul told police the couple went separate directions at 1 a.m. About three hours after that, a group of young men reported finding her body as they looked for a place to get high.
The case quickly made headlines. Radio stations and newspapers ran stories quoting police saying they found Whitman’s blood on Paul’s clothes.
As the years wore on, police and prosecutors released no updates to the public on why a case presented as open-and-shut was taking so long to reach a jury. Nothing about how the state crime lab found that the blood was consistent with DNA from Paul, not Whitman. No word on the state dropping the charges.
Heather Whitman said she didn’t know the reason for the dismissal until told recently by a reporter. She said she and her family feel he has gotten away with murder.
The void of coverage in the local news media left an aspect of the case unknown to the general public, at least to anyone who wasn’t scouring the red case folder at the Bethel courthouse. Paul’s attorneys submitted court filings that listed others they said could have killed Whitman.
McDannel, who took over the case in 2018, said she came to believe the police had gone after the wrong man.
An Alleged Confession
Kyle Jones says he never killed anyone, including Eunice Whitman.Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News
In the days after Whitman’s killing in 2015, the chief investigator in the case spoke with a man named Kyle Jones, who’d known the victim since childhood.
Paul had told police he ran into Jones the night of the killing — on the boardwalk, around 3 or 4 a.m. It was after Paul last saw Whitman, based on what Paul told police, but before dispatchers took the call reporting the body.
Speaking to the lead detective, Bethel Sgt. Amy Davis, Jones confirmed Paul’s account of what happened when they crossed paths. Jones said Paul told him he was out looking for his girlfriend, the investigator’s write-up shows.
Both men were in the vicinity of the crime scene around the presumed time of Whitman’s death.
Davis said she treated only one, Paul, as a suspect because she saw nothing further to indicate Jones did something wrong. Paul had blood on his clothing and shoes with a tread that Davis thought resembled prints at the crime scene.
In 2019, McDannel filed a court motion saying Jones had “admitted to killing Eunice Whitman to another individual while crying and intoxicated.” McDannel told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica that the person was Jones’ aunt, who’d approached her with the information. The newsrooms’ attempts to contact the aunt by phone and email were unsuccessful.
Jones had a documented history of violence on the boardwalk by the time of the filing.
In 2011, Jones was charged with felony assault in the beating of a woman he encountered on the walkway. He eventually pleaded guilty. Five years later, almost exactly a year after Whitman’s death and in nearly the same spot, he was accused of stabbing a man twice in the side. Jones pleaded guilty to felony assault in that case too.
In two recent interviews at an Anchorage jail, Jones admitted to prior violence like the attacks in 2011 and 2016 on the boardwalk. But he never killed anyone, including Whitman, he said.
“If I have a body, I will claim it,” Jones said from behind thick glass.
During the first interview, he was awaiting trial on charges of violating a protective order filed by his ex-wife and of illegal contact with a victim. He had pleaded not guilty. By the time of the second interview, two weeks later, he’d been charged with an additional 20 counts of illegally contacting a victim. He pleaded not guilty to those charges as well.
Jones said the drunken “confession” that Paul’s attorney wrote about in court wasn’t about murder at all. Jones said he told his aunt during a car ride that he felt responsible for Whitman’s death. He told a reporter he believed at the time that Paul killed Whitman out of jealousy of her longtime friendship with Jones.
By coincidence, Jones and Paul shared a cell in Bethel’s small-town jail for a few weeks in 2016. Paul was awaiting trial for Whitman’s murder, Jones for the recent stabbing in the same location.
Jones noticed that Paul had drawn a picture of his girlfriend and written “R.I.P.,” which he hung in the cell. One day, as the men played cards, Paul stood up and quietly set about making coffee. There was something about the way Paul moved. The way he didn’t want to fight.
Jones said a realization struck him: “This guy, I don’t think he did it.”
Alaska locked up Justine Paul, Whitman’s boyfriend, for seven years without trial.Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News
After McDannel filed her court motion saying Jones confessed, Bethel police reexamined the old evidence that had never been explained: the unidentified male DNA recovered from Whitman’s body. The state crime lab compared it with Jones’ DNA. Like other samples before, it was not a match.
But Jones wasn’t the only person McDannel had listed as a potential suspect in court filings. (The court did not rule on the validity of the filings because the case didn’t go to trial.)
Police should have treated no fewer than 12 people as suspects of “higher interest” than Paul, according to a report written by defense witness Gregory Cooper. The founder of the Cold Case Foundation, Cooper is listed on the nonprofit’s website as a former acting unit chief for the FBI’s behavioral science unit. All the people described in the report were seen in the vicinity or had encountered the victim earlier, he wrote.
These included an ex-boyfriend Whitman had named in a restraining order the year before. He told police he had an alibi. He has since died. Another man managed the nearby convenience store and told police Whitman texted him around 2:30 a.m., which was 90 minutes before her body was reported found. He told police he overheard the couple arguing, a statement he repeated to the grand jury. He too is now dead.
The defense later added one more name to the persons-of-interest list: a man who fought with Paul days before Whitman’s murder. A week after she died, he had her phone in his possession and a bandage on his hand, according to police reports.
The man told police his girlfriend, who was friends with Whitman, found the phone at the couple’s home “the other day.” His girlfriend corroborated finding it to the police. The man handed it over to Davis. He told her the bandage was because a dog bit him.
The man did not respond to texts and phone calls from the newsrooms or to an email asking to discuss the homicide case and his interactions with police.
Davis, in discussions with the Daily News and ProPublica this year, rejected the possibility that anyone other than Paul could have killed Whitman. “We had the right person in jail,” she said.
It’s the defense’s job, she added later by email, to “present alternative theories no matter how ridiculous they are. They want to present doubt.”
The Earlier Killing
In the end, Paul’s defense attorneys didn’t need to show a jury alternative suspects. Prosecutors allowed the charges to be dropped in 2022 after the defense noted in court that the key physical evidence had not delivered on what prosecutors promised.
Yet McDannel, who said she believed in his innocence, wasn’t finished. She said she wanted to clear her former client’s name.
Marcy McDannel, a former state prosecutor turned defense attorney, helped win freedom for her former client, Paul.Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News
Just two weeks after his release, an investigator working for McDannel ran across a newspaper story that stopped her cold. It described a stabbing case that involved a young woman in the village of Chevak nine months before Whitman died.
The body of 19-year-old Roxanne Smart was found by a passerby the morning of Aug. 27, 2014, according to Alaska State Troopers. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed in the groin, abdomen and throat. In addition to having her bloody clothes removed and set nearby like Whitman’s, her body was also found with legs outstretched.
People had seen a young man named Samuel Atchak behaving strangely near the murder scene. Troopers obtained a DNA sample from him a month later after he tried overdosing on pain pills and was placed in a jail cell for his own protection. Six months after that, on March 31, 2015, the state crime lab linked Atchak’s DNA to evidence at the scene.
Atchak confessed when troopers confronted him on July 24, 2015, according to their report. “I surprised her from behind,” he explained to the troopers. “Her last words were, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and then she blacked out.”
McDannel’s investigator placed Atchak’s movements on her timeline: The date of Whitman’s killing in nearby Bethel came while Atchak was under investigation but still walking free. What’s more, the investigator was able to trace Atchak’s whereabouts to Anchorage just five days after Whitman died, and she knew the only flight from Chevak to Anchorage stops in Bethel.
The similarities seemed to have eluded police. Davis, the Bethel sergeant who led the Whitman murder investigation, told ProPublica and the Daily News she was unfamiliar with Smart’s murder. State troopers declined to say whether they considered the two murders possibly connected back then.
McDannel’s investigator told her boss about Atchak. They agreed they needed to hear from the man.
The pair drove two hours to the state prison in Seward, beating the first snowstorm of 2022.
McDannel took her time after Atchak walked into the room. She began by telling him about Paul and the killing he was accused of committing in Bethel. She made small talk about people Atchak knew in Bethel, how often he traveled there.
The young man described his life before Smart’s murder. A difficult childhood with a skin condition that made him a target for teasing. Anger at his parents.
McDannel slowly steered the discussion to Whitman’s murder, exploring what sounded to the attorney like echoes of Smart’s killing. She asked Atchak what happened with Smart. Atchak said he thought they were going to have sex, and then she turned him down.
Based on his own experience, did Atchak think Whitman’s killer might have had the same motive? Was the man angry? There were so many stab wounds, including to the neck.
“It’s the best, like quickest way to let someone die,” Atchak responded. “That’s what I think. Like a slit throat. That’s what I’m thinking. The other stabs to the body, probably the anger that was probably in their mind.”
Brush moves in the wind near the place where Eunice Whitman was stabbed to death.Katie Baldwin Basile for ProPublica
Although McDannel never asked Atchak during the interview whether he killed Whitman, the attorney hinted at it. Atchak said he thought he remembered stopping in Bethel on May 23 or 24, which was the weekend of Whitman’s death, but said he never left the airport.
McDannel said she and her investigator had their doubts.
They came away with an odd decision for a defense team. They approached law enforcement with the information they had obtained. They hoped it might prompt the state crime lab to check the unidentified male DNA on Whitman’s body against Atchak’s. Troopers thanked them for the tip.
But on Dec. 11, 2023, Trooper Investigator Dugger Cook wrote McDannel to say the state had taken a look and ruled out Atchak based on “search warrants for travel and medical records.” Troopers didn’t provide her with the documents they said supported their conclusion. The agency told the Daily News and ProPublica it can’t talk about potential suspects or evidence that might exist in the case.
Without seeing the records, McDannel said, she didn’t believe the alibi. Atchak’s own description of his travels during his interview with her put him potentially in town, at least briefly, near when Whitman was killed. But she was out of options. She was officially off the case.
New Eyes on the Investigation
Another year passed.
Then, this past January, something changed.
Antonia Commack, an advocate for murdered and missing Indigenous people, posted a video to TikTok and Facebook reviving questions about Whitman’s unsolved murder. Viewers flooded the Bethel Police Department afterward with phone calls urging action.
Sarah Whitman and her 5-year-old child, Harvie Mattie Whitman-Aliralria, stand near the place where Sarah’s sister, Eunice, was found dead in 2015.Katie Baldwin Basile for ProPublica
For many people, it wasn’t about finding a new suspect. In the absence of media coverage about the reasons prosecutors dropped charges against Paul, the public wanted to know why he was walking free.
In March, Bethel police asked the state troopers’ Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit to take over the investigation.
The head of the unit, Lawrence Piscoya, said in a May interview that detectives had begun their work fresh. Whitman’s murder was one of six cold cases the unit was working on at the time.
“We have to start on Page 1 and go to the end, and there’s quite a bit in this case,” Piscoya said. “There’s a lot to understand and a lot to analyze before we begin getting boots on the ground.”
The Department of Public Safety wouldn’t comment on past email exchanges in which McDannel urged further investigation of Atchak. The missing and murdered persons unit has not solved a cold case homicide since its creation in 2022.
Davis, the former Bethel detective who investigated Whitman’s homicide, now works in Fairbanks. She called it “one of those cases where I will forever lose sleep about.”
Davis remains convinced that tests beyond those done on Paul’s bloody jeans and shirt would have connected him to the victim. But there is one thing that she and Paul’s defense team would agree about.
It took far too long.
“Maybe it’s like no single person’s fault that this happened,” Davis said. “But this case just sat on so many people’s desks and nobody really looked at it. The DA’s office there gets so much turnover. Every time I turned around it was going to a different attorney.”
The state Law Department conceded in a statement that “retaining experienced prosecutors, particularly in rural Alaska, has long been a significant and ongoing challenge.” The agency said it is taking steps to stabilize staffing.
Lawrence Piscoya, head of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit, which has taken over the investigation of Whitman’s murder. “We have to start on Page 1 and go to the end, and there’s quite a bit in this case,” he said in May. “There’s a lot to understand and a lot to analyze before we begin getting boots on the ground.”Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News
Asked whether officials have a system to ensure defendants don’t wait years for resolution when big holes appear in the evidence, the Law Department said it continuously reevaluates every case for proof beyond reasonable doubt.
It cited as an example the eventual decision to let Paul’s prosecution come to an end.
Heather Whitman said if troopers are actively investigating the murder again, that is news to the family. She said no one has interviewed her, Sarah or their father, George Whitman Jr., about their last conversations with Eunice.
In response, the agency said in a statement: “We recognize the profound loss experienced by Eunice Whitman’s family and understand their desire for answers. Out of respect for the family and the integrity of the investigation, we will not publicly discuss the timing or substance of communications with family members while this investigation remains active.”
After Whitman died, the family left her bite-sized cupcakes at the former crime scene, Heather Whitman said. Vanilla and chocolate.
“Really don’t want to forget you,” her father wrote on her Facebook page, a day after the seventh anniversary of her death.
Her birthday was Dec. 14. This year, she would have turned 34. Her daughters baked an extra chocolatey cake in her memory. Half they ate that afternoon, her sister said, and half they saved for later.
Whitman’s grave. Her family is still waiting for justice for her murder.Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News
WFXT reports Anastacia Morales collapsed at Icon on Warrenton Street Sunday night, EMTs had trouble getting the crowd to let them through and she was rushed, unconscious, to nearby Tufts Medical Center. The Globe reports she died.
An unfortunate Linux kernel bug coming to light just ahead of Christmas may cause frustration for some server administrators, particularly public cloud providers... It turns out with the Linux kernel releases since 2022, KVM guest virtual machines making use of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is possible to cause the host to experience a kernel panic...
Sched_ext as the extensible scheduler code for the Linux kernel that allows loading schedulers from user-space via eBPF code has shown a lot of interesting possibilities. Andrea Righi of NVIDIA who has been heavily involved in sched_ext development shared some of the future plans being looked at as we move into 2026...
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is touting her department’s plan to triple the so-called “bonus” for immigrants who choose to self-deport, goosing it from $1,000 to $3,000 for anyone who signs up by the end of the year.
Gosh, a whole eight days.
Actually, DHS officials are calling it a “holiday stipend,” which is even more gross than calling it a bonus.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem
Immigrants are right to be wary of this offer, because the government’s execution so far has been patchy at best. Some immigrants who signed up for the offer just never received the promised money or the accompanying plane tickets back to their country of origin. This leaves people in a Kafka-esque limbo where they have already alerted the government to their status as undocumented and where they live, putting a target on their back when they are just trying to get home.
Some people who have agreed to self-deport end up sitting in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for months anyway, with their money arriving and departing while they are locked up. Sometimes the payment information went to the wrong people. Sometimes people were told the money would be waiting for them when they returned to their country of origin. Narrator’s voice: The money was not waiting there.
But surely all of this will get fixed right quick with the nearly $1 billion sweetheart deal for one of Donald Trump’s donors to run what the administration is also calling “Project Homecoming,” explaining it will offer a “concierge service” at airports for immigrants who self-deport.
This might be more welcome news if that donor, William Walters, had ever handled work like this before, but nope. Instead, it looks much more like the Trump administration just has a lot of cash to throw around.
If the administration was genuinely interested in assisting people with leaving the country, the sum wouldn’t be a paltry $3,000, nor would the program be only intermittently functional.
Contrast this with last week’s news that the bonus to join U.S. Customs and Border Protection is jumping to $60,000. Yes, the people who look at what is happening to immigrants right now in this country and think “Yeah, I could get with that,” would get that $60,000 upon completion of training and moving to a “remote location.”
So, one CBP agent gets a bonus that is 20 times what an immigrant would be given to leave. Also announced last week: People who CBP already employs are now also eligible for bonuses of $50,000 and $60,000, so it’s not really a hiring bonus as much as a “shower cash on everyone who will stay at CBP” bonus.
And CBP can afford it, as they have $285 million set aside just for bonuses.
Just. For. Bonuses.
They have to keep sweetening the pot because, although people seem to be applying to CBP in droves, they are not actually getting hired. Between May and June, CBP got roughly 50,000 applications and hired around 1,200 agents, which is a pretty bleakly small number.
If Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s corresponding hiring spree is any guide, the white supremacists who are applying for these jobs are not exactly top-quality candidates. ICE has been offering $50,000 bonuses and begging retirees who agree to come back and kidnap immigrants. Those who do get to keep receiving their federal retirement annuity along with a salary ranging from $89,000 to $105,00 and, of course, that bonus.
ICE also got rid of age limits and slashed training requirements. Anything to get violent, morally flexible xenophobes in the door, right?
The government is constructing a very well-funded, very lawless, very secret police, with a goal of 8,500 new CBP employees and 10,000 new ICE agents. But what we’re seeing is that even with all that money, it still doesn't seem to produce quality applicants, because normal people generally don't want to be monsters like ICE and CBP agents are.
Meanwhile, the thing that might actually make it palatable and possible for immigrants to leave rather than be thrown into the brutal maw of ICE detention is a pittance, and there’s no guarantee they will ever see the money.
What DHS really wants is to keep brutalizing immigrants with maximum force, while lining some donor pockets along the way.
Firefighters were able to get a man in his 30s who somehow wound up on Track 1 at Back Bay station shortly before 4:20 p.m. up to the platform.
Boston EMS transported the man, who was alert and conscious, with what appeared to be just a leg wound, to a local hospital.
An Amtrak train was stopped on the track at the time.
The response caused what the MBTA said were "significant delays" on the Needham, Franklin/Foxboro, Providence/Stoughton and Worcester lines, which at first stopped, then bypassed Back Bay. Amtrak also reported delays - in some cases of up to two hours.
For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles.
The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 9:00 pm EST Monday (02:00 UTC Tuesday).
Less than 10 minutes later, rocket's methane-fueled first stage booster hurtled through the atmosphere at supersonic speed, impacting in a remote region about 200 miles downrange from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The booster failed to complete a braking burn to slow down for landing at a prepared location near the edge of the Gobi Desert.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to allow the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area to support its immigration crackdown, a significant defeat for the president's efforts to send troops to U.S. cities.
The justices declined the Republican administration’s emergency request to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge April Perry that had blocked the deployment of troops. An appeals court also had refused to step in. The Supreme Court took more than two months to act.
Three justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, publicly dissented.
The high court order is not a final ruling but it could affect other lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s attempts to deploy the military in other Democratic-led cities.
“At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois,” the high court majority wrote.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with the decision to block the Chicago deployment, but would have left the president more latitude to deploy troops in possible future scenarios.
The outcome is a rare Supreme Court setback for Trump, who had won repeated victories in emergency appeals since he took office again in January. The conservative-dominated court has allowed Trump to ban transgender people from the military, claw back billions of dollars of congressionally approved federal spending, move aggressively against immigrants and fire the Senate-confirmed leaders of independent federal agencies.
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker applauded Tuesday's decision as a win for the state and country.
“American cities, suburbs, and communities should not have to faced masked federal agents asking for their papers, judging them for how they look or sound, and living in fear that President can deploy the military to their streets,” he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to an email message seeking comment.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker arrives during a "No Kings" protest on Oct. 18 in Chicago.
In a dissent, Alito and Thomas said the court had no basis to reject Trump's contention that the administration was unable to enforce immigration laws without troops. Gorsuch said he would have narrowly sided with the government based on the declarations of federal law enforcement officials.
The administration had initially sought the order to allow the deployment of troops from Illinois and Texas, but the Texas contingent of about 200 National Guard troops was later sent home from Chicago.
The Trump administration has argued that the troops are needed “to protect federal personnel and property from violent resistance against the enforcement of federal immigration laws.”
But Perry wrote that she found no substantial evidence that a “danger of rebellion” is brewing in Illinois and no reason to believe the protests there had gotten in the way of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Perry had initially blocked the deployment for two weeks. But in October, she extended the order indefinitely while the Supreme Court reviewed the case.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the west Chicago suburb of Broadview has been the site of tense protests, where federal agents have previously used tear gas and other chemical agents on protesters and journalists.
Last month, authorities arrested 21 protesters and said four officers were injured outside the Broadview facility. Local authorities made the arrests.
The Illinois case is just one of several legal battles over National Guard deployments.
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb is suing to halt the deployments of more than 2,000 guardsmen in the nation’s capital. Forty-five states have entered filings in federal court in that case, with 23 supporting the administration’s actions and 22 supporting the attorney general’s lawsuit.
More than 2,200 troops from several Republican-led states remain in Washington, although the crime emergency Trump declared in August ended a month later.
A federal judge in Oregon has permanently blocked the deployment of National Guard troops there, and all 200 troops from California were being sent home from Oregon, an official said.
I got a lotta problems with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and now you're going to hear about it!
It's Festivus, the semi-fictional holiday from "Seinfeld" in which, among other things, revelers enjoy a holiday meal before airing their grievances from the previous year. And boy, do I have grievances.
To Republican lawmakers: What is the point of being an elected official if you willingly neuter your own power and do nothing but stand by as Trump does what he wants, even when it hurts the people who voted for you? You're all cowards who deserve to lose next year's midterm elections, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that happens.
Elon Musk and the jump mocked ‘round the internet.
To Secretary of State Marco Rubio: No amount of debasing yourself at Trump’s feet will make you president in 2028. I hope throwing away your values was worth it!
To Attorney General Pam Bondi: Fuck you for making me have to defend former FBI Director James Comey. You are the worst attorney general in American history, among a list that includes Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and warrantless surveillant Alberto Gonzales. You should be disbarred.
To Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel: Fuck you for using my hard-earned tax dollars to fly around on private jets trying to boost your own images so you can cash in again on your right-wing grift once you are inevitably fired for being awful at your jobs.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, just havin’ fun being power-mad.
To border czar Tom Homan: You should be in jail right now for (allegedly) taking a bag full of $50,000 from undercover FBI agents in exchange for (allegedly) promising to facilitate lucrative government contracts. Justice is hopefully coming for you in the next Democratic administration.
To Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents: You are sick people. Wearing masks to hide your identities as you racially profile passersby, violentlyarresting them without warrants, and sending them into squalid conditions where they have to fight for their release—all to hit an arbitrary quota set out by Trump and his racist aide Stephen Miller. You have to be a true sociopath to carry out this deportation agenda—targeting millions of people who just want to provide better lives for their families—and then go home to your families and say you are proud of your work.
To major corporations, law firms, universities, and world leaders: You are cowards. Rather than band together to stand up to the shakedowns from Trump and his goons, you folded like wet noodles, throwing money at Dear Leader in the hopes that you would be spared the worst of his wrath. In the process, you've helped fund a corrupt presidency, weakened your institutions, and will go down in the history books as losers who did the wrong thing at a pivotal moment. You all deserve every ounce of scorn that's hurled your way.
If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn't nostalgic enough for you, here's something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors...
With the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite release, they are getting rid of the "Community Edition" branding for the standard version of this widely-used cross-platform office suite...
Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, the oncologist who was the subject of a 2024 ProPublica investigation, will never again practice medicine in the state of Montana.
Last week, medical board members revoked Weiner’s license, citing seven cases of malpractice. The board concluded that he had violated rules of professional conduct and provided substandard care. By law, it must report Weiner to a federal database that tracks doctors who’ve been disciplined — which will make it extremely difficult for him to practice medicine.
That decision comes more than a year after ProPublica exposed how, for years, Weiner had been suspected of hurting patients, including some who died, at St. Peter’s Health, the only major hospital serving the state capital of Helena. The story, built on court and medical records, showed Weiner subjected patients who didn’t have cancer to chemotherapy and other dangerous treatments, neglected to properly treat patients who were seriously ill, overprescribed addictive narcotics and was suspected by colleagues to have hastened the deaths of more than a half dozen people.
Weiner, 62, has denied mistreating patients. He did not respond to a request for comment about the board’s decision to revoke his license. St. Peter’s Health, which fired him in 2020, accusing him of malpractice, did not provide comment. The hospital has previously attributed the mistreatment of patients to a rogue doctor and says it provides high-quality care.
Weiner sued St. Peter’s for wrongful termination, a case the hospital ultimately won. Weiner also filed a defamation claim against Dr. Randy Sasich, a former St. Peter’s colleague who lodged complaints about his care. Sasich remains a defendant in that lawsuit.
Before his termination, Weiner was the highest paid doctor at St. Peter’s. Over the years, he made tens of millions of dollars and wielded his influence in the community to drive out hospital leaders who questioned his judgment. Colleagues feared him, and few challenged him. His firing prompted a public outcry, led by his nursing staff and former patients, many of whom continue to support him in a “We stand with Dr. Tom Weiner” Facebook group and on billboards expressing their support.
The ProPublica investigation identified scores of problematic cases. The medical board, though, focused on just seven. Among them was the case of Scot Warwick, whose death and subsequent autopsy was the catalyst for Weiner’s downfall.
As ProPublica reported, Weiner diagnosed Warwick in 2009 with Stage 4 lung cancer, a disease that kills most people in months. For the next 11 years, Weiner subjected his patient to round after round of debilitating therapies including chemo. In 2020, he started to decline rapidly, gaining the notice of Sasich, who couldn’t make sense of his original diagnosis and improbable survival span. But before Sasich could find answers, Warwick died an agonizing death. His widow, Lisa Warwick, ordered an autopsy. It came back negative for cancer — a finding Weiner has repeatedly dismissed — and concluded he likely died from the chemotherapy that Weiner had ordered.
Medical board members confirmed the autopsy’s findings. In its written order, the board concluded that Warwick died “due to gemcitabine-associated pulmonary toxicity.” In other words, the chemotherapy killed him.
The board noted that “Weiner disagrees with this finding and does not admit to it.”
In response to the board’s decision, Lisa Warwick said, “It’s definitely welcomed news — very happy to hear it — but with the caveat that this whole thing took way too long.” For five years, a board that’s supposed to protect patients, she added, “blatantly turned a blind eye.”
Lisa Warwick and her children, Peyton, left, and Brady, stand next to a collage of photographs of their late father, Scot.Louise Johns, special to ProPublica
According to a hospital spokesperson, after St. Peter’s fired Weiner in 2020, it provided the medical board with thousands of pages of documents detailing its allegations, including that Weiner took over complete control of his patients’ care, which made it difficult for other doctors to see or question his treatment. Those documents, many later obtained by ProPublica, languished for years without review by the board, a mystery its spokespeople have declined to explain.
The board renewed Weiner’s license in 2021 and 2023. After ProPublica’s investigation publicly revealed the hospital’s allegations against Weiner, the board renewed his license for a third time this year.
Weiner’s troubles extend beyond losing his license. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued him, accusing him of prescribing needless treatments, double billing, seeing patients more frequently than necessary and “upcoding” — billing for more expensive treatments than he delivered. Weiner has denied the charges. For its part, St. Peter’s already agreed to a $10.8 million settlement for numerous violations of the False Claims Act related to Weiner’s billing of federal insurance programs.
Separately, the parents of a deceased 16-year-old girl whose case was prominently featured in the ProPublica investigation have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Weiner, the hospital and other staff, accusing them of substandard care and fraud, which is ongoing. In a lengthy interview with ProPublica, Weiner denied that his treatment led to her death.
A criminal investigation is also underway, led by the Montana Department of Justice with help from federal investigators, according to several people who’ve been interviewed by law enforcement. That office did not respond to a request for comment. Weiner has not provided comment on the ongoing criminal investigation.
Weiner sold his home in Helena this year, leaving behind a city deeply divided over his legacy and many people who still believe he was a world-class doctor who has been unfairly targeted by the hospital and the media.
Anthony Olson, a former patient whom Weiner prescribed nine years of chemotherapy for a cancer that never existed, was among that group of supporters until doctors at St. Peter’s helped him accept what had happened to him. His body is still recovering from being poisoned for so long. He has thought about joining the Weiner Facebook group to share his story. But, he said: “I assume there is nothing I can say to them that will bring them around to reason. I’m just glad that no one else is going to be injured.”
You've no doubt heard some version of the Robert Burns adage about the best-laid plans. Marvel Studios had an elaborate marketing plan in place to introduce four teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday as previews prior to screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash, with one teaser rolling out each successive week. But the first one leaked online a few days early, revealing that (as rumored) Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) will appear and will have a newborn baby, presumably with Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter.
So maybe you've seen a bootleg version floating around the Internet, but Marvel has now released the HD version to the public. Merry Christmas! And we can look forward to three more: one focused on Thor, one on Doctor Doom, and the final one is purportedly a more traditional teaser trailer.
As previously reported, Marvel Studios originally planned to build its Phase Six Avengers arc (The Kang Dynasty) around Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror (and associated variants), introduced in Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But then Majors was convicted of domestic violence, and Marvel fired the actor soon after. That meant the studio needed to retool its Phase Six plans, culminating in the announced return of the Russo brothers, who directed four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most successful films, which brought in more than $6 billion at the global box office.
Just daysafter forcing his name on the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump has found another institution worthy of the Trump brand: the U.S. Navy.
On Monday, the presidentannounced plans for a new class of military vessels bearing his name, unveiling what he called “Trump Class” battleships as part of a broader vision for a revamped American fleet. The first ship, according to the White House, would be named the USS Defiant.
President Donald Trump stands next to a rendering of the proposed $5 billion USS Defiant battleship.
“These are the best in the world,” Trumpsaid, standing before glossy renderings of the proposed ships. “They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
The plan would inch the country toward whatthe administration is advertising as a modern “Golden Fleet,” a term Trump has increasingly embraced as shorthand for national strength and renewal.
Each ship is expected to cost at least $5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, whichfirst reported the details. Mark Montgomery, a former rear admiral now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Journal the proposal is “exactly what we don’t need.”
Administration officials framed the move as an attempt to jump-start the nation’s sluggish shipbuilding industry. But it would also upend long-standing Navy naming conventions and inject presidential politics directly into a military program from its inception.
According to Axios, Trumphas grown fixated on seapower in his second term, viewing naval dominance as a visible marker of American might. Hehas complained that existing warships are rusted and outdated, calling the current fleet “terrible-looking.” And he has launched a new shipbuilding office, promising vessels “very fast, very soon.”
Trump unveiled the battleship plan at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Navy Secretary John Phelan.
Trump claimed the ships would feature hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns, lasers, and top-tier missile systems.
“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” he said.
The Journal reports construction on the USS Defiant would begin “almost immediately” and take roughly two and a half years.
In its follow-up statement, the Navy leaned hard on superlatives,calling the ship “the most lethal surface combatant ever constructed.” The vessel would be roughly three times the size of a standard destroyer, according to the service, though it would still fall short of the Navy’s largest aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.
A logo unveiled for the so-called Trump Class battleships depicts the president with his fist raised in the moments after the July 2024assassination attempt, underscoring how closely the program is being tied to Trump himself.
The naming convention would break sharply with tradition. Battleships have historically been named after states, while aircraft carriers have been named after presidents and other national figures.
As The Washington Post notes, battleships themselves fell out of favor after World War II and were eventually deemed obsolete. The last to see active service, the USS Missouri, was decommissioned in 1992 and later turned into a museum at Pearl Harbor.
Phelan said the new battleship would carry nuclear cruise missiles, a weapons system Trump approved during his first term, canceled by the Biden administration, and revived by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2024.
Whether such a vessel is ever actually builtremains an open question. Its sheer size would saddle it with many of the same vulnerabilities that plague the Navy’s largest ships today.
But the practicalities appear secondary. For Trump, the announcementfits neatly into a familiar pattern. Since returning to the White House, he has made a point of leaving his mark everywhere he can.
The Oval Office has been remade into a gold-tinged reflection of his gaudy taste. A$400 million ballroom is under construction following a complete teardown of the East Wing. Atriumphal arch in Washington has been floated. Now, even the country’s institutions and military hardware are being refashioned to carry his imprint.
Americans will be unable to buy the latest and greatest drones because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has banned foreign-made drones as of today.
On Monday, the FCC added drones to its Covered List, which it says are communications equipment and services “that are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” The list was already populated by Kaspersky, ZTE, Huawei, and others.
An FCC fact sheet [PDF] about the ban released on Monday says:
CBS News’decision to pull a ’60 Minutes’ report detailing torture and other offenses at the Trump-approved CECOT prison in El Salvador is continuing to cause major headaches for the network.
On Monday, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren questioned the decision, noting that CBS’ parent company Paramount “needs Trump’s backing to buy Warner Bros.—including CNN,” and that the editorial move happened as these negotiations are underway. “Is that just a coincidence? This looks like corruption,” she added.
TheNew York Times reported from internal sources within CBS that the network’s conservative editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who made the decision to spike the story, failed to attend five internal screenings of the report as it made its way through the editorial process. Weiss did not voice her purported concerns about the report as it developed, instead making the decision to kill the story hours before it was to be broadcast.
According to multiple sources within the network, correspondent Scott Pelley criticized Weiss’ actions at an internal meeting. “It’s not a part-time job,” the veteran journalist reportedly said.
Despite Weiss and CBS’ efforts to squelch the story, itleaked online Monday evening and may end up being watched by far more people than would have seen the network broadcast. In the piece, people sent to CECOT by the Trump administration describe conditions at the facility as torture.
Bari Weiss at Miami Dade College in Nov. 2019.
“It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour, and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there,” one man told reporter Sharyn Alfonsi.
Weiss, who founded the right-wing outlet Free Press before being installed at CBS, is the central figure in the scandal. Over the years, shehas supported the suppression of speech she disagrees with, including a call to silence Arab professors at Columbia University. Zeteoreported that Weiss in April called the CECOT prison the “hottest campaign stop” for the year in a piece for Free Press.
At CBS,Weiss began dismantling the network’s existing standards department in November, with the complaint that it had “too much power.” But those departments exist to avoid scandals like the one she has now created.
In Weiss’ leakedinternal memo to CBS employees, she pushes for the network—at nearly the last minute—to do interviews with anti-immigration administration officials and include them in the CECOT report. Most notably, she references immigration czarTom Homan and White House deputy chief of staffStephen Miller.
“Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don't tend to be shy. I realize we've emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record,” she wrote.
Refusing to go ahead with the story unless figures like this are interviewed acted as a “kill switch” on her reporting, Alfonsi later alleged in an email to colleagues.
During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump and the QAnon acolytes that surround him could not stop talking about how the Democrats and former President Joe Biden were hiding investigatory materials related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his network of high-powered human-trafficking perverts. Yet once Trump returned to office, lo and behold, it was his own administration—and the Republican Party—that spent the better part of a year doing everything in its power to avoid releasing the long-promised files to the public.
Here are 27 times Trump and his yes-men have covered up the Epstein files.
Three days into his second term, Trump ordered the declassification of files pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy… but forgot to sign one important set of orders.
Trump refused to rule out the possibility that he could grant clemency to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence forhelping her ex-boyfriend Epstein sexually exploit and traffic underage girls.
The country, and that includes some MAGA faithfuls, aren’t letting go of the White House’s attempt to brush off the unreleased Epstein files and Trump is seemingly starting to squirm under the spotlight.
House Speaker Mike Johnson seemed rather anxious in defending his decision toblock any votes related to the Epstein files scandal before the chamber departed for its summer break.
Trump was reportedly told in May that his name appears multiple times in the trove of documents the Department of Justice possesses about convicted sex offender Epstein—a bombshell revelation that sheds light into why Trump is so desperate to keep the files under wraps.
There is no doubt that the American public is pissed off about Trump’s cover-up around the Epstein files—and his most loyal Republican minions are feeling the wrath.
During a press conference, Trump whiffed a softball question about a Fox Newsreport that FBI Director Kash Patel recovered secret documents related to the probe of Trump’s connections to Russia during the 2016 election. Instead of addressing the question directly, Trump ranted vaguely about his own administration’s inability to release its files on Epstein.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about a federal judgeblocking the release of grand jury documents related to Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett, America’smost frightened congressman, found himself in a pickle when CNN host Dana Bash asked him about the Justice Department’s delay in releasing its long-promised files.
Trump responded to the mounting pressure from accusers and members of his own party to release the Epstein files by insisting, once again, that not only was he releasing the files, but that they were a “hoax” concocted by Democratic operatives to tarnish his accomplishments.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky revealed that a billionaire “on Epstein’s black book” is bankrolling ads against him, joining in Trump’s pressure campaign against Republicans pushing for the release of government data on Epstein.
Johnson appeared on CNN, and things gotpredictably uncomfortable when he was asked whether he’d allow a vote on abipartisan bill from Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California that would compel the full release of the Epstein files.
Trump's defenders came up with an embarrassing and implausible lie to distance their Dear Leader from thevile birthday note he wrote to convicted sex offender Epstein, ridiculously claiming the signature on the document is not Trump's—when it very obviously is.
DemocraticRep. Dave Min of California appeared on CNN to discuss the ongoing investigation into the federal government’s documents related to Epstein's crimes. Min, a member of the House Oversight Committee, had justseen Trump’s perverse birthday card to the convicted sex offender—the one Trump denied existed.
Johnson did an about-face, expressing his uncertainty about the “terminology” he used in Septemberwhen he claimed thatsex scandal-plagued Trump was "an FBI informant” working to take down Epstein.
Johnsonwas asked on Oct. 7 whether his delay in swearing in Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election for Arizona's 7th District two weeks before, was related to fears over a forced vote on releasing thegovernment’s files on Epstein.
Johnson wasconfronted in the halls of the Capitol by Arizona Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly over his flimsy excuse for refusing to swear in Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won her special election in September.
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is no longerfacing reelection, is standing strong in his conviction that the Trump administration should release the long-promised Epstein files.
House Republican leaders insisted there is nothing at all damning about Trump in the government’s Epstein files—but they still won't release the files.
During a White House briefing, Leavitt struggled to explain what exactly is the Democratic "hoax" surrounding the Epstein files—aclaim that she and Trump have both made.
Trump's Make America Great Again movement is looking for a scapegoat as its members rage about the Trump administration's announcement that there are no bombshell files about convicted sex offender Epstein.
Bondistonewalled and deflected straightforward questions from Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island during a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing, leaving the impression ofsomeone with a lot to hide.
Things got weird during apress conference, when Trump was asked whether he would consider pardoning convicted sex traffickerMaxwell—whose appeal to overturn her conviction wasrejected by the Supreme Court.
Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM...
Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen "50xx" NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository...
OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are required by law to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced. Increased reports can sometimes indicate changes in a platform’s automated moderation, or the criteria it uses to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in nefarious activity.
Charts showing hockey-stick growth in both diagnosed cases and ER visits, from BPHC. ILI="Influenza-like illnesses."
The Boston Public Health Commission reports that flu and flu-like infections are surging a month earlier than last winter - especially in children and teens.
This uptick in flu cases is occurring a month earlier than last season, when Boston did not hit these numbers until January.
Based on numbers reported through testing of wastewater in sewers across Boston, most of the city is now rated as having "moderate" flu levels, with Allston/Brighton rated "high" and Hyde Park "low."
BPHC says only 30% of Bostonians have gotten a flu shot this season. VaccineFinder lets you find pharmacies and other providers in or near your Zip code that offer flu shots. The city is also planning a series of flu clinics for 2026.
Individuals at high risk of complications from respiratory infections, including people under two or over 65 years of age, pregnant people, immunocompromised individuals and people with chronic illnesses, should seek medical care if they develop flu-like symptoms or are exposed to flu; early testing and antiviral treatment of flu and COVID can prevent severe illness and hospitalization.
Weiss's skill was charming old white guys, who would then defend her to the death. Old NYT reporters would assemble like Voltron whenever she was criticized.
Meanwhile, she used her job at the NYT essentially to establish her social networks - get on Bari's good side and she would publish you in the Opinion section. Always "contrarian" stuff. 3 categories on the opinion page: conservative, liberal, and contrarian (also conservative).
CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing.
The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games."
Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment "did not advance the ball" and merely echoed others' reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was "ready," insisting that holding stories "for whatever reason" happens "every day in every newsroom."
There's still another couple of months before the 2026 crop of F1 cars takes to the track for the first preseason test. It's a year of big change for the sport, which is adopting new power unit rules that place much more emphasis on the electric motor's contribution. The switch to the new power units was meant to attract new manufacturers to the sport, and in that regard, it has succeeded. But controversy has erupted already as loopholes appear and teams exploit them.
Since 2014, F1 cars have used 1,000 hp (745 kW) power units that combine a turbocharged 1.6 L V6 gasoline engine with a pair of hybrid systems. One is the MGU-H, which recovers energy from (or deploys it to) the turbocharger's turbine; the other is a 160 hp (120 kW) MGU-K that harvests and deploys energy at the rear wheels. Starting next year, the MGU-H is gone, and the less-powerful 1.6 L V6 should generate about 536 hp (400 kW). That will be complemented by a 483 hp (350 kW) MGU-K, plus a much larger battery to supply it.
And the new rules have already attracted new OEMs to the sport. After announcing its departure at the end of 2021—sort of— Honda changed its mind and signed on to the 2026 regs, supplying Aston Martin. Audi signed up and bought the Sauber team. Red Bull decided to build its own internal combustion engines, hiring heavily from the Mercedes program, but Ford is providing Red Bull with the MGU-K and the rest of the hybrid system. And Cadillac has started an engine program, albeit one that won't take the grid until 2029.
The Department of Justice on Monday released another tranche of files, as required by law, which included numerous mentions of Trump himself.
The document drop included a jaw-dropping email from 2020 in which a federal prosecutor said that Trump flew multiple times on accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's private jet—nicknamed the Lolita Express because Epstein used it to traffick underage girls—including one flight that included just Trump, Epstein, and a 20-year-old female.
"I wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware)," the prosecutor, whose name was redacted, wrote in the email.
The email went on to say that Trump took at least eight flights on the plane between 1993 and 1996, with the prosecutor saying, "On two other flights, two of the passengers, respectively, were women who would be possible witnesses" in the case against now-convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
This redacted photo released by the DOJ shows files documented on Aug. 12, 2019, during a search of Jeffrey Epstein's home on Little St. James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
It’s no wonder Trump has acted suspicious as hell when asked about his relationship to Epstein and Maxwell.
In another disturbing document, Epstein allegedly sent convicted pedophile Larry Nassar a handwritten note in which he referenced Trump’s taste for underage girls.
"Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to 'grab snatch,' whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system,” Epstein allegedly wrote to Nassar.
Because of how damning some of the documents are, the Department of Justice—which Trump has weaponized to become his personal legal team and revenge squad—released a statement defending Trump.
"Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already," the DOJ wrote in a post on X. "Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims."
The statement is a terrible look for the DOJ, which is supposed to be an independent law enforcement agency and not the president's personal defense team.
What’s more, Trump was the only person who appears in the files whom the DOJ defended.
Not only that, but the DOJ actually weaponized the document drops against former President Bill Clinton, including their dubious decision to redact an image of Clinton that makes him look like he is with Epstein victims. In fact, the photo has been in the public record for decades and the people whose images were blacked out are just the children of pop icons Diana Ross and Michael Jackson—not Epstein victims.
As Daily Kos reported yesterday, Trump has given a masterclass in how to appear guilty amid this entire Epstein files document saga. And as the documents now become public, Trump will have a lot of explaining to do.
As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.
In the cheerful holiday message, the performer, whose real name is Paul Michael Levesque, recommended that people just starting on their health journey focus on enjoying the holidays over trying to make major changes now.
However, he does helpfully advise that people focus on adding any kind of exercise to their lives.
On one hand, the well-intentioned video sends an encouraging message of health and wellness. But can we all take a moment to collectively ask: What the hell is up with all of the WWE personalities floating around the Trump administration?
Triple H has consistently hovered around Trump since the start of his second term in the White House. The wrestler appeared alongside the president and registered sex offender Lawrence Taylor in July to announce the return of the much-reviled presidential fitness test.
And their friendship clearly stayed strong, given that Vince and his estranged wife Linda dumped millions into super PACs to fund Trump’s election campaign.
But it’s not just the McMahons and their relatives getting comfy in the White House. The CEO of WWE parent company TKO, Ari Emanuel, also goes way back with the president to his days on “The Apprentice.”
The Bari'd 60 Minutes clip was sent to Canada and broadcast, so it is all over the internet now. If she does ever broadcast a revised version we will know what she changed, and I am sure people have checked out how her excuses for Bari-ing it match the broadcast (will link to comparisons when I find - I am a bit in holiday mode at the moment).
International broadcast rights, how the fuck do they work?
It's been called an “epidemic” of loneliness and isolation. The “bowling alone” phenomenon.
By any name, it refers to Americans' growing social disconnection by many measures.
Americans are less likely to join civic groups, unions and churches than in recent generations. They have fewer friends, are less trusting of each other and less likely to hang out in a local bar or coffee shop, recent polling indicates. Given all that, it's not surprising that many feel lonely or isolated much of the time.
Such trends form the backdrop to this Associated Press report on small groups working to restore community connections.
They include a ministry pursuing “trauma-informed community development” in Pittsburgh; a cooperative helping small farmers and their communities in Kentucky; an “intentional” community of Baltimore neighbors; and organizations seeking to restore neighborhoods and neighborliness in Akron, Ohio.
Loneliness and its health risks
In 2023, then Surgeon General Vivek Murthy reported on an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” similar to his predecessors’ advisories on smoking and obesity.
Isolation and loneliness aren’t identical — isolation is being socially disconnected, loneliness the distress of lacking human connection. One can be alone but not lonely, or lonely in a crowd.
But overall, isolation and loneliness are “risk factors for several major health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and premature mortality,” the report said.
Murthy says he’s encouraged by groups working toward social connection through local initiatives ranging from potluck dinners to service projects. His newTogether Project, supported by the Knight Foundation, aims to support such efforts.
“What we have to do now is accelerate that movement,” he said.
The pandemic temporarily exacerbated social isolation. There’s been some rebound, but often not back to where it was before.
Scholars and activists have cited various potential causes — and effects — of disconnection. They range from worsening political polarization to destructive economic forces to rat-race schedules to pervasive social media.
Murthy said for many users, social media has become an endless scroll of performance, provocation and unattainably perfect body types.
“What began perhaps as an effort to build community has rapidly transformed into something that I worry is actually now actively contributing to loneliness,” he said.
Bowling alone, more than ever
Harvard’s Robert Putnam, 25 years ago, described the decline in civic engagement in a widely cited 2000 book “Bowling Alone.” It was so named because the decline even affected bowling leagues. The bowling wasn’t the point. It was people spending time together regularly, making friends, finding romantic partners, helping each other in times of need.
Memberships in many organizations — including service, veterans, scouting, fraternal, religious, parental and civic — have continued their long decline into the 21st century, according to a follow-up analysis in“The Upswing,”a 2020 book by Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.
While some organizations have grown in recent years, the authors argue that member participation often tend to be looser — making a contribution, getting a newsletter — than the more intensive groups of the past, with their regular meetings and activities.
A reaction against institutions
Certainly, some forms of social bonds have earned their mistrust. People have been betrayed by organizations, families and religious groups, which can be harshest on their dissenters.
But disconnection has its own costs.
“There’s been such a drive for personal autonomy, but I think we’ve moved so far past wanting not to have any limits on what we can do, what we can believe, that we’ve become allergic to institutions,” said Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute.
“I’m hoping we’re beginning to recognize that unbounded personal autonomy does not make us happier and creates a wealth of social problems,” said Cox, co-author of the 2024 report, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life.”
By the numbers
About 16% of adults, including around one-quarter of adults under 30, report feeling lonely or isolated all or most of the time, according to a2024 surveyby the Pew Research Center.
Just under half of Americans belonged to a religious congregation in 2023, a low point forGallup, which has tracking this trend since 1937.
About 10% of workers are in a union, down from 20% four decades ago, theBureau of Labor Statisticsreports.
Around half of Americans regularly spent time in a public space in their community in 2025, such as a coffee shop, bar, restaurant or park. That’s down from around two-thirds in 2019, according to “America’s Cultural Crossroads,” another study by the Survey Center on American Life.
About two in 10 U.S. adults have no close friends outside of family, according to the “Disconnected” report. In 1990, only 3% said that, according to Gallup. About one-quarter of adults have at least six close friends, down from nearly half in 1990.
About 4 in 10 Americans have at most one person they could depend on to lend them $200, offer a place to stay or help find a job, according to “Disconnected.”
About one-quarter of Americans say most people can be trusted — down from about half in 1972, according to the General Social Survey.
Exceptions and a stark class divide
Some argue that Putnam and others are using too limited a measurement — that people are finding new ways of connecting to replace the old ones, whether online or other newer forms of networking.
Still, many numbers depict an overall decline in connection.
This hits hardest on those who are already struggling — who could most use a friend, a job referral or a casserole at the door in hard times.
Those with lower educations, which generally translates to lower incomes, tend to report having fewer close friends, fewer civic gathering places in their communities and fewer people who could help out in a pinch, according to “Disconnected.”
Responses to the crisis
Across the country, small organizations and informal groups of people have worked to build community, whether through formal programs or less structured events like potluck dinners.
Murthy will continue to be visiting such local groups in his “Together Project,” supporting such efforts.
Another group,Weave: The Social Fabric Projectat the Aspen Institute, has asearchable databaseof volunteer opportunities and an online forum for connecting community builders, which it calls “weavers.” It aims to support and train them in community-building skills.
“Where people are trusting less, where people are getting to know each other less, where people are joining groups less, there are people still in every community who have decided that it’s up to them to bring people together,” said its executive director, Frederick J. Riley.
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Since I’m fascinated by new display technologies and by improving image quality, I’ve never been a fan of home projectors. Projectors lack the image quality compared to good TVs and monitors, and they’re pretty needy. Without getting into the specific requirements of different models, you generally want a darker room with a large, blank wall for a projector to look its best. That can be a lot to ask for, especially in small, densely decorated homes like mine.
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The Splay was crowdfunded in 2021, and its maker, Arovia, describes it as the “first fully collapsible monitor and projector.” In short, it’s a portable projector with an integrated fabric shroud that can serve as a big-screen (24.5 or 34.5 inches diagonally, depending on the model) portable monitor. Or, you can take off the fabric shroud and use the Splay as an ultra-short-throw projector and cast a display that measures up to 80 inches diagonally onto a wall.
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