Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has trolled ultra-rich New Yorkers freaking out over his possible election with a new ad featuring The Gilded Age star Morgan Spector.
The 44-year-old actor, dressed as industrialist George Russell from the HBO drama about the mega-rich in late 19th-century New York, gave a dramatic reading of a New York Times piece called “How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?”
The article detailed the reaction in the Hamptons, a popular summer getaway for well-heeled Gothamites, to the possible election of a self-described democratic socialist.
Spector has previously referred to Mamdani as a “fantastic candidate” before he clinched the Democratic nomination in July. He is now a favorite to become the Big Apple’s next mayor.
How are the very rich feeling about New York's next mayor?
"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"
A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.
Why this dangerous man is still allowed on the air is beyond me. Fox's Jesse Watters, a man who is a constant bomb thrower on his network, weighed in on the Charlie Kirk shooting on this Wednesday's The Five, and after pretending that Kirk wasn't in any way "controversial," or "polarizing," and going on about what a great person and family man he was, went on an angry tirade pretending it's the left that has a problem with political violence, before promising to avenge Kirk's death.
WATTERS: So when he goes out to these college campuses, he's not provoking anybody. He's like Socrates. He asks questions, and he does it with a smile.
And there's nothing controversial about saying socialism is worse than capitalism. Men and women are different. Let's put America first, because that's all he was about putting America first.
And as Greg said, this hits differently because Charlie was one of us.
And Trump gets hit in the ear. Charlie gets shot dead. They came after Kavanaugh with a rifle to his neighborhood. They went after Musk's cars. They just shot two Jews outside the embassy.
Think about it. Scalise got shot, barely survived. It's happening. We got trans shooters, we got riots in LA.
They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.
Fox News host Jesse Waters responded to Mika Brzezinski's good interview of Border Czar Tom Homan by declaring he's happy ICE is making people disappear - POOF!
In the MAGA cult, nothing is illegal, immoral, or insane if Trump orders it so.
US laws - POOF!
US Constitution - POOF!
WATTERS: So they destroyed the country with migrants.
And I have a problem with the way we're handling it.
You can sit this one out.
And I mean you, Jessica.
I don't care about disappearing.
I'm not even offended.
Tom Homan shouldn't have been offended.
So what?
Yeah, they're disappearing from the country.
Exactly.
That's what we were elected to do.
Make these people, poof, disappear.
MAGA cultists routinely speak in tongues or gibberish when it comes to reality.
Republicans in the media and in Congress do not have to make any sense at all anymore just as long as they defend Trump and his actions.
This is as heinous as it gets. We don't disappear people with no due process. Or at least, we didn't until this gang of crooks and liars took office.
A lady approaches, holding something I immediately wish I hadn’t seen.
Me: "Uh… ma’am, why are you holding a used plunger?"
Customer: "I need to return it."
Me: "That’s… used."
A group led by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther has launched a new protocol designed to standardize and scale licensing of online content for AI training. Backed by publishers like Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, and Medium, Real Simple Licensing (RSL) combines machine-readable terms in robots.txt with a collective rights organization, aiming to do for AI training data what ASCAP did for music royalties. However, it remains to be seen whether AI labs will agree to adopt it. TechCrunch reports: According to RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard, the goal was to create a training-data licensing system that could scale across the internet. "We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet," Walther told TechCrunch. "That's really what RSL solves."
For years, groups like the Dataset Providers Alliance have been pushing for clearer collection practices, but RSL is the first attempt at a technical and legal infrastructure that could make it work in practice. On the technical side, the RSL Protocol lays out specific licensing terms a publisher can set for their content, whether that means AI companies need a custom license or to adopt Creative Commons provisions. Participating websites will include the terms as part of their "robots.txt" file in a prearranged format, making it straightforward to identify which data falls under which terms.
On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once. A host of web publishers have already joined the collective, including Yahoo, Reddit, Medium, O'Reilly Media, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable and Cnet), Internet Brands (owner of WebMD), People Inc., and The Daily Beast. Others, like Fastly, Quora, and Adweek, are supporting the standard without joining the collective.
Notably, the RSL Collective includes some publishers that already have licensing deals -- most notably Reddit, which receives an estimated $60 million a year from Google for use of its training data. There's nothing stopping companies from cutting their own deals within the RSL system, just as Taylor Swift can set special terms for licensing while still collecting royalties through ASCAP. But for publishers too small to draw their own deals, RSL's collective terms are likely to be the only option.
The weapon wasn’t a handgun or hunting rifle. The single, long-distance shot appears to have come from a military-grade rifle. And that matters—because if it were up to liberals, weapons like that would be illegal to own.
But it’s not just the guns. It’s the climate that President Donald Trump and his allies have built. Scholars call it “eliminationist rhetoric”: the idea that political opponents aren’t simply wrong, but evil, dangerous, and must be eradicated. It’s language that leaves no room for disagreement or coexistence, only destruction.
GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna gave us a perfect example with her post on X. In her first breath, she claimed she was sick of the rhetoric. In the next, she insisted that liberals and the media were to blame for Kirk’s murder—that by calling Republicans fascists, we “caused this.” She piled on grotesque charges that liberals were “doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence,” and “protecting criminals.”
So much for lowering the temperature. Conservatives like to spout that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” But according to Luna, the shooter didn’t kill Kirk—liberals did. That’s not calming the fire. That’s pouring gasoline on it.
And this isn’t the first time she’s done it. When one Democratic Minnesota legislator and her husband were murdered and another legislator critically injured in June, Luna blamed Gov. Tim Walz for planning to speak at an anti-Trump “No Kings” rally, which was canceled in the wake of the shootings. In her world, “hate” means nothing more than daring to disagree with Trump.
But disagreement is as old as America itself. Our country’s founding was based on an argument: federalists vs. anti-federalists. We’ve fought bitterly over slavery, civil rights, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, marriage equality—the list is long. Democracy has always been messy and loud.
Most of the time, conflict is channeled into more speech, more organizing, more politics. But history also shows the danger when one side decides that disagreement is intolerable. Slavery didn’t just divide us—it tore the nation into civil war. The Vietnam War triggered deep domestic unrest and violence. The lesson should be crystal clear: Once politics give way to eliminationism, the result is bloodshed.
That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. We are going to disagree—fiercely—especially with a government that is actively dismantling itself, sending military forces to invade American cities, and shredding democratic foundations. But the answer cannot be to silence opposition with threats of more violence. That isn’t democracy. That’s literally fascism, plain and simple.
Luna is right about one thing: Kirk’s family and his children didn’t deserve this. No child who loses a parent to gun violence deserves it. No parent who loses a child to it deserves it. And that is why liberal policies—like universal background checks and bans on weapons of war—would save lives. Maybe they even would have saved Kirk’s.
But instead, the right is already escalating. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is demanding political opponents be jailed under the pretext of “chaos” that conservatives themselves are fomenting—criminalizing dissent until nothing is left but obedience.
This isn’t calming anything down—it’s intensifying. With Trump incapable of even a shred of moral leadership, the ugliest impulses in our society are rewarded, and the flames fanned hotter. And history tells us where this road leads: When violence replaces politics, the body count climbs.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with moderator Charlie Kirk during a Generation Next White House forum on March 22, 2018.
Now this is their world. They fought for it, built it, and defended it—even when the victims were children, and certainly when they were Democrats.
Kirk himself admitted as much in 2023.
“You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense,” he told a rapt crowd at a Turning Point USA event. “It’s drivel. But I … think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
For Kirk, gun deaths weren’t a tragedy to be prevented, but a cost to be accepted. He called it prudent. Rational. And now his own family is paying the price.
So stop blaming liberals. We hate this shooting as much as conservatives do. The difference is we hate all the other shootings, too.
Amazon's Zoox officially launched its driverless robotaxi service in Las Vegas with free rides from a few select locations. "Riders will eventually have to pay, but Zoox said it's waiting on regulatory approval to take that step," notes CNBC. A broader rollout is expected in the coming months. From the report: ... unlike Waymo and Tesla, Zoox's electric robotaxi doesn't resemble a car. There's no steering wheel or pedals, and the rectangular shape has led many in the industry to describe it as a toaster on wheels. Zoox co-founder and technology chief Jesse Levinson says, "We use robotaxi or vehicle or Zoox." "You can shoehorn a robotaxi into something that used to be a car. It's just not an ideal solution," Levinson told CNBC in an interview in Las Vegas. "We wanted to do that hard work and take the time and invest in that, and then bring something to market that's just much better than a car."
Zoox was founded in 2014, five years after Google formed the project that became Waymo. Following Las Vegas, the company said it plans to debut an early rider program in San Francisco before the end of the year. The company has been testing a fleet of 50 robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Austin and Miami will be Zoox's next locations, the company said. Zoox will soon begin testing robotaxis in those markets, and said it's already driving retrofitted test vehicles in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Seattle. "We think it's very, very early days, and the future is not written yet," said Levinson, during a demo ride with CNBC.
Zoox's Las Vegas depot spans 190,000 square feet, which is about the size of three football fields. At the facility, the company houses the dozens of vehicles set to start operating around the city. Smartphone users will be able to order them from Top Golf, Area15, Resorts World Las Vegas, New York-New York Hotel & Casino and Luxor Hotel & Casino. The robotaxi features two rows of seats that face each other and can transport up to four people at a time. The front and rear are identical, with bidirectional wheels that allow it to move forward or backward without turning around. The vehicle can run for 16 hours on a single charge. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a sightseeing experience for passengers who want a clear view of the endless rows of casinos. But the interior design is meant to enable easy conversation with fellow riders. "It's not a retrofitted car," said Zoox CEO Aicha Evans. "It's built from the ground up around the rider."
U.S. officials issued an advisory warning that foreign-made solar-powered highway infrastructure may contain hidden radios embedded in inverters and batteries. Reuters reports: The advisory, disseminated late last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, comes amid escalating government action over the presence of Chinese technology in America's transportation infrastructure. The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered "in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS," referring to battery management systems.
The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China. There is increasing concern from U.S. officials that the devices, along with the electronic systems that manage rechargeable batteries, could be seeded with rogue communications components that would allow them to be remotely tampered with on Beijing's orders. [...]
The August 20 advisory said the devices were used to power a range of U.S. highway infrastructure, including signs, traffic cameras, weather stations, solar-powered visitor areas and warehouses, and electric vehicle chargers. The risks it cited included simultaneous outages and surreptitious theft of data. The alert suggested that relevant authorities inventory inverters across the U.S. highway system, scan devices with spectrum analysis technology to detect any unexpected communications, disable or remove any undocumented radios, and make sure their networks were properly segmented.
I notice a man as I move through the aisle. I don’t think much of it. Customers often move in the same rhythm as me; I go aisle by aisle; they shop aisle by aisle.
By aisle three, though, something weird happens.
One night our night crew foreman tried to call in sick. His reason? He was drunk. Not sick. Just drunk. The store manager basically told him, "Get here or get a new job." So, he gets his girlfriend to drop him off. Before she leaves, she finds me and says:
Girlfriend: "Don’t leave him unsupervised too long."
A yelling match broke out in the House chamber Wednesday after Speaker Mike Johnson requested a prayer on behalf of Charlie Kirk.
The conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder was shot and killed during an event for his “America Comeback Tour” at Utah Valley University Wednesday.
After Johnson paused a vote to request a moment of silence for Kirk and his family, GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado similarly suggested that everyone participate in a prayer.
And while conservatives mourn Kirk’s death, Democrats have been quick to call out the discrepancy between Republicans’ reaction to last week’s school shooting in Minnesota and the shooting of Kirk.
GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida quickly jumped in when Democrats pointed out the change of heart, shouting expletives across the floor.
Charlie Kirk hands out hats before speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.
To Democrats, the right’s sympathetic response to Kirk’s murder seems to reek of irony after some of them used the Minnesota shooting to campaign against transgender people and to point fingers at the left.
"[Gov.] Tim Walz and the people around him, they're not trying to solve this,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told Fox News days after the shooting. “They're just exacerbating the problem, and they've been exacerbating it over the last several years.”
Emmer also attacked Walz for making Minnesota a trans refuge state.
And while prominent right-wing influencers—like Kirk—pushed the narrative that the Minnesota shooter’s gender identity drove them to violence, House Democrats are pointing out Republicans’ change in approach this time around.
As of Wednesday, it is not yet clear what the shooter’s motive was for killing Kirk. However, responses to Kirk’s death have invoked plenty of blame as Republicans quickly labelled—without evidence—the shooter as a violent Democrat. The suspect has not yet been identified.
Just before her shouting match on the House floor, Luna blamed the left for the shooting.
“I am done with the rhetoric this rotten House and corrupt media has caused. EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS,” she wrote on X. “You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting orgs that exploit minorities, protecting criminals, and stirring hate. Your words caused this. Your hate caused this.”
She later doubled down on her statement while speaking to reporters.
Former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was shot and killed along with her husband in June.
“Stop with the rhetoric. You’re getting people killed. You’re gonna get one of us killed, too, while you continue doing it,” she said.
In contrast, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a Marines Corps veteran, called for an end to political violence in his response to the shooting.
“Beyond politics Charlie Kirk was someone’s father, husband and son,” he wrote on X. “Remember that first, before engaging in whataboutism. His family will never be the same. Political violence has to stop by all sides.”
The last shooting of a prominent political figure was in June, when two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers—Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and state Sen. John Hoffman—and their spouses were shot in their homes. Hortman and her husband, Mark, were both killed.
What Walz called a “politically motivated assassination” at the time was similarly used as a vehicle for finger-pointing.
In a since-deleted tweet, GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah called the tragedy a “nightmare on Waltz street”—a misspelled reference to the Minnesota governor.
While the impacts of gun violence weigh heavily regardless of victims’ political affiliation, one message seems to be emerging through it all: A violent rhetoric is emanating across party lines, and something needs to be done about it.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motor1: BMW watched from the sidelines as Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, Volvo, and others announced lofty EV goals a few years ago, only to backtrack in recent months. Munich never vowed to go fully electric within a set timeframe, instead preferring to give customers the freedom of choice. It projects demand will be evenly split between gas and electric cars by 2030, but Bavaria hasn't committed to a combustion-free future. The company maintains its desire to give people what they want rather than artificially restricting powertrains to EVs, as the European Union plans for 2035. In an interview with Australian magazine CarExpert, Chief Technology Officer Joachim Post argued it should ultimately come down to buyers, not the EU: "Finally, the customer decides."
Provided the ban takes effect in a little over nine years, the board member fears it could have massive repercussions: "If the European Commission is going to say they have a plan to cut the combustion engine in 2035, they're not asking the customers and how [EV charging] infrastructure is coming up, how the energy prices are and all the things there. It's stupid to do that in that way. And you can kill an industry doing it that way."
His concerns are echoed by Mercedes CEO Ola Kallenius, who recently warned the European car industry is "heading at full speed against a wall" and could even "collapse" if the EU doesn't reconsider. The statement came shortly after Stuttgart's boss admitted the company had to make a "course correction" to keep combustion engines longer than initially planned. Mercedes continues to invest in conventional powertrains, and there's even a completely new V-8 from AMG on the way. The report notes that BMW continues to generate strong profits from its combustion engines, ranging from three-, four-, six-, and eight-cyclinder engines to a Rolls-Royce V-12 -- even supplying rivals like Toyota and possibly soon Mercedes.
In fact, the "M" in BMW stands for "Motoren" (German for "engine").
During a press conference held by House Republicans Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson refused to address questions about the long-promised release of the Epstein files. Instead, he urged Democratic leaders to roll out the red carpet for President Donald Trump's federal shock troops in their cities.
“This is common sense, and I cannot for the life of me understand how the Democrats think this is some sort of winning political message,” Johnson said. “Yield, man. Let the troops come into your city and show how crime can be reduced. It's a morale boost for the country, and it's safe and right for everybody involved.”
President Trump on Tuesday issued a memorandum directing the FDA and HHS to crack down on misleading direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads, requiring clearer disclosure of risks and ensuring that promotions don't overstate benefits or push costly drugs over generics. Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares an excerpt from the memorandum: The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall therefore take appropriate action to ensure transparency and accuracy in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising, including by increasing the amount of information regarding any risks associated with the use of any such prescription drug required to be provided in prescription drug advertisements, to the extent permitted by applicable law. The Commissioner of Food and Drugs shall take appropriate action to enforce the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act's prescription drug advertising provisions, and otherwise ensure truthful and non-misleading information in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements. "Advertising dollars is a major avenue for pharmaceutical companies to influence news and attempt to shape public opinion," comments sinij. "Advertising was a major contributor to painkiller addiction, where networks were hesitant to cover early reports of addictiveness. It is likely directly contributing today to lack of critical coverage of Ozempic. It is just too big of a conflict of interest to allow to stand."
Oracle shares had their best day since 1992, skyrocketing 36% and adding $244 billion in market value as surging AI-driven cloud demand pushed the company toward a $1 trillion valuation. The surge boosted founder Larry Ellison's fortune by $100 billion, making him the new world's wealthiest person. CNBC reports: The company said Tuesday after the bell that it has $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, up 359% from a year earlier. "This is a very historic kind of print right here from Oracle with this backlog," Ben Reitzes, technology research head at Melius Research, told CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" on Tuesday. "The Street was looking for about $180 billion in RPO and they're talking about a number that is a multiple of that. That is astounding."
Oracle now sees $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2026, with the company calling for the annual sum to reach $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Other analysts were left "blown away" and "in shock." D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria called it "absolutely staggering on CNBC's "Fast Money." Wells Fargo analysts said it was a "momentous confirmation" of the AI trade.
Oracle's cloud revenue projections overshadowed an otherwise lackluster fiscal first-quarter report in which the company missed expectations on the top and bottom lines. The company had earnings of an adjusted $1.47 per share for the quarter, just below the $1.48 per share expected by analysts polled by LSEG. Revenue for the first quarter came in at $14.93 billion, missing the $15.04 billion expected.
I imagine it would be disconcerting to visit the grave of your brother and find instead an entire cemetery gone, the gravestones gone, and the land bulldozed. Local officials denied that the cemetery was destroyed, however. They claim it had already fallen into disrepair and that a new beautification project was started to clean the area up and make it worthy of their sacrifice, or some such rationale for levelling the site.
Whatever the truth, the sister's video went viral on social media this week, forcing the Russians to address the situation.
Recently, a message appeared on social networks* that the graves of Yakuts killed in the North Military District were allegedly destroyed at the Magan Cemetery in Yakutsk. "We came to visit my brother's grave and did not find it, everything there was razed to the ground," said the message from a Yakut woman whose relative is buried there.
To confirm these words, the woman posted a video in which a grader was leveling the ground, according to her, at the burial site.
However, it turned out that this information is not true. This is reported by the relatives of the SVO participants buried in the cemetery:
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