The Securities and Exchange Commission intends to seek sanctions against Elon Musk over his failure to appear for testimony in an investigation related to his takeover of Twitter, now called X, the regulator said in a court filing Friday.

Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered Musk to testify as part of the SEC’s probe of the billionaire’s $44 billion acquisition. The agency is examining whether Musk followed the law when disclosing his purchases of Twitter stock and whether his statements in relation to the deal were misleading.

Footage of two New York City police officers opening fire at a subway station as they confronted a man holding a knife shows they shot at him as he was standing still, his arms by his side and his back to a train.

In the days since Sunday’s shooting, police officials have repeatedly emphasized that the officers fired after Derell Mickles “charged” at one of them, and when their attempts to deescalate the situation and use Tasers had failed — leaving them with little choice but to resort to deadly force to protect themselves and passengers. 

The footage, uploaded to the NYPD’s YouTube page Friday, offers a different view of the shooting that not only wounded Mickles but also a bystander, who was hit in the head with a stray bullet. Gregory Delpeche, 49, was sent to the hospital in critical condition, where doctors had to open up his skull to reduce brain swelling, according to his family.

One of 50 men accused of raping the French woman Gisèle Pelicot after she was drugged by her husband accepted the charges on Thursday, saying he was sorry for what he did.

Lionel R, a 44-year-old supermarket worker and father of three, was among dozens of men accused of participating in the mass rape of Pelicot over a decade in a trial that has shocked France.

Gisèle Pelicot’s then husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to drugging her into the state of a “deep coma” and inviting strangers he met in online chatrooms to rape her.

Gisèle Pelicot, who said she had not consented, requested that the trial be open to the public to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit rape and sexual abuse.

Lionel R admitted in court that he had indeed raped Gisèle Pelicot on 2 December 2018, though he said he had not intended to. “Since I never obtained Mrs Pelicot’s consent, I have no choice but to accept the facts,” he told the court.

FDA Approves Nasal Spray Influenza Vaccine for Self- or Caregiver-Administration

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-nasal-spray-influenza-vaccine-self-or-caregiver-administration

@news

The maker of the party game Cards Against Humanity has sued Elon Musk’s SpaceX accusing it of trespassing on and damaging company-owned property in Texas.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Texas court, asks for $15 million to cover damages including what the company calls the destruction of natural vegetation.

Salacious posts that North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson purportedly made on a pornography website have been deleted in the 24 hours since CNN first drew attention to them.

The posts in question, which Robinson denied were his and had previously appeared on on the “Nude Africa” pornographic website, have been removed. POLITICO confirmed the posts’ removal after reviewing message board threads on the website that previously featured comments from a username Robinson has used on other platforms.

A profile page for the account in question remains on the website, and “mark robinson” is listed as the account holder’s name.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20523443

Agence France-Presse in Jerusalem
Fri 20 Sep 2024 17.28 EDT

Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX yesterday, alleging that Elon Musk's firm illegally took over a plot of land on the US/Mexico border that the party-game company bought in 2017 in an attempt to stymie then-President Trump's attempt to build a wall.

"As part of CAH's 2017 holiday campaign, while Donald Trump was President, CAH created a supporter-funded campaign to take a stand against the building of a Border Wall," said the lawsuit filed in Cameron County District Court in Texas. Cards Against Humanity says it received $15 donations from 150,000 people and used part of that money to buy "a plot of vacant land in Cameron County based upon CAH's promise to 'make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall.'"

Cards Against Humanity says it mowed the land "and maintained it in its natural state, marking the edge of the lot with a fence and a 'No Trespassing' sign." But instead of Trump taking over the land, Cards Against Humanity says the parcel was "interfered with and invaded" by Musk's space company. The lawsuit includes pictures that, according to Cards Against Humanity, show the land when it was first purchased and after SpaceX construction equipment and materials were placed on the land.

The key battleground state of Georgia's election board voted Friday to force ballots to be hand-counted three times before a result is declared.

As one of multiple motions on changing how elections are run, less than 50 days out from the November 5 election, the new rule was passed 3-2 by the conservative-leaning panel.

The changes come after Donald Trump heavily criticized the way the state handled the 2020 election results, repeatedly and falsely claiming he won the state.

President Joe Biden narrowly won in Georgia, with 49.5 percent of the vote against Trump's 49.2 percent.

…

Critics have claimed the board, which has swung more to the right, is trying to rewrite the rules to favor former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

In a letter Thursday, the office of Georgia's Attorney General issued a warning that the board was pushing rules that "very likely exceed the board's statutory authority", while voting rights groups had also raised concerns.

🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/

The actor Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, who received a barrage of online racial abuse after being cast in a production of Romeo & Juliet this year, has called for industry-wide action to protect black and brown actors.

The abuse aimed at Amewudah-Rivers beganafter the Jamie Lloyd Company theatre group announced the cast of its production in April, with Amewudah-Rivers to play Juliet and the Spider-Man star Tom Holland playing Romeo.

Amewudah-Rivers has revealed she also received hate mail, and that she did not feel safe while working on the play, her West End stage debut, at the Duke of York’s theatre.

“There were many days where I didn’t know how I was going to get through it,” she told the Stage. “The flurry of abuse was sustained throughout the whole job. I received death threats, hate mail sent to the theatre. I didn’t feel safe at work.”

The Food and Drug Administration announced Friday it had broadened the approval of the FluMist nasal spray to become the first "self-administered" influenza vaccine — though a delay in the change means the vaccine will not be available to ship to homes until next year's flu season at the earliest.

"Today's approval of the first influenza vaccine for self- or caregiver-administration provides a new option for receiving a safe and effective seasonal influenza vaccine potentially with greater convenience, flexibility and accessibility," Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

The FluMist vaccine, manufactured by AstraZeneca, had previously been approved back in 2003 to be given by health care providers similar to other flu shots. Now the vaccinemaker has approval to sell FluMist to adults for use at home on themselves or to administer to their children.

The preliminary investigation by Russia’s Investigative Committee accused four Russian servicemen of the kidnap and murder of the American Russell Bentley, a Russian “war correspondent.”

The Russian state news agency TASS reported on Friday that the Main Military Investigative Department of Moscow’s Investigative Committee confirmed that four Russian servicemen have been charged in connection with the kidnap, torture and murder of the American Russell Bentley in April, while he worked for the Spunik propaganda outlet in the Donbas region.

The investigation found that on April 8, Bentley, who was known as the “Donbas Cowboy,” was abducted while filming the aftermath of a Ukrainian artillery strike in Donetsk's Petrovsky District.

It is alleged that three Russian servicemen Vitaly Vansyatsky, Vladislav Agaltsov and Andrey Iordanov, a tank crew from Moscow’s 5th Zakharchenko Brigade violently kidnapped Bentley, took him to an unidentified location where they interrogated and tortured him which, in the words of the committees indictment involved “actions that clearly went beyond their authority and which through negligence resulted in the death of the victim.”

The charges also say that, in trying to cover up the incident they put the American’s body into a VAZ-2115 / Lada Samara car which they then blew up using TNT blocks. The next day Vansyatsky ordered another serviceman in his unit, Vladimir Bazhin, to remove and hide Bentley’s remains, which have not been recovered but his car was later found, inside which was a baseball cap, glasses and a broken phone.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20522147

Jonah Valdez
September 20 2024, 12:51 p.m.

Don’t worry, everybody. It was just AI. What a relief! I almost thought this guy was a terrible person.

This week, ProPublica released two studies tracing the deaths of two women to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban—the first to be reported since the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman took abortion pills but did not completely expel the fetal tissue from her body. She developed a serious infection and went to the hospital, where physicians would ordinarily have performed a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining tissue. In Thurman’s case, however, physicians failed to act for roughly 20 hours. They waited to operate until the situation was dire, and Thurman died.

Candi Miller, a mother of three, suffered from lupus, diabetes, and hypertension, and she was warned that her health was so fragile that she might not survive another pregnancy. When she accidentally became pregnant again, she ordered abortion pills online. Like Thurman, Miller didn’t entirely expel the fetal tissue and developed a serious infection. But Miller did not seek out care. Her family reported that she was aware of Georgia’s criminal abortion law and afraid of what would happen if she sought emergency care. Her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

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