Devin Nunes is such an idiot. Read the rest

On her official Twitter account, New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced that NY is suing Juul. Read the rest

Well this is awkward.

Donald Trump, a very normal and innocent President of the United States, just tweeted:

So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?....

LOL.

Lol you know everything you touch dies, right? https://t.co/PO2els1IWF

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 15, 2019

Who is next?

Roger Stone is the latest in a line of people around Trump who spent careers one step ahead of the law - until he became president, and now they're behind bars. Manafort, Cohen, Gates, now Stone. Who's next?

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) November 15, 2019

PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING:

• Roger Stone, you've been THUNDERSTRUCK Read the rest

Three Indiana judges got in a fight. Two were injured, all were suspended. NPR's Laurel Wamsley reports "an incident brimming with colorful details."

The altercation apparently started sometime after 3 a.m., when one of the judges, Sabrina Bell, raised a middle finger at two men yelling from a passing SUV, and ended after one of those men shot two of the judges.

In between, the three judges took a number of actions that "discredited the entire Indiana judiciary," according to an opinion posted by the Indiana Supreme Court this week, suspending the judges.

The court found that the three — Andrew Adams, Bradley Jacobs and Sabrina Bell — had "engaged in judicial misconduct by appearing in public in an intoxicated state and behaving in an injudicious manner and by becoming involved in a verbal altercation." Adams and Jacobs engaged in further judicial misconduct "by becoming involved in a physical altercation for which Judge Adams was criminally charged and convicted."

The judges will be in the sin bin for two months. The shooter's been charged with felony aggravated battery.

UPDATE: I read the ruling and it's fantastic, the reason we're here is because Judge Bell just stood there blabbing to the cops instead of shutting the fuck up.

Read the rest

A federal court ruled today that an atheist gentleman from Kentucky should be permitted to get a personalized license plate from the state with the phrase “IM GOD” on it. The man is committed to his cause -- this only took three years of legal fighting. Read the rest

Back in 2017, EFF, ACLU and ACLU of Massachusetts sued the US government on behalf of 11 travelers whose devices had been subjected to warrantless, suspicionless searches by Customs and Border Protection at the US border. Read the rest

In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission opened an antitrust investigation against Microsoft; in 2001, the company settled the claims, making a slate of pro-competitive promises that were widely derided as too little, too late. Read the rest

Grab your headphones. Read the rest

Gfycat is a site that people upload GIFs to so they can share them with other people reliably. Used most conspicuously to host memes, clips from other media, and animated porn, it announced Wednesday that it was planning to permanently delete old, anonymously-posted images within days. Archive Team, a web preservation initiative coordinated by Jason Scott, set about archiving the site's soon-to-vanish content. So Gfycat's CEO, Dan McEleney, threatened it with a lawsuit, describing archival of the memes it hosts as a "denial of service attack" and demanding compensation.

The fallout is ongoing on Twitter, with users of the site panicking about their old content and the company asking for (and being refused) private negotiations with Internet Archive, which Scott points out is not the same entity as the legally-threatened Archive Team. Read the rest

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Amazon Ring's surveillance doorbell partnerships with police are spreading like a virus. There are already more than 500 of them across the country. We can fight them at the local level, but at this scale we need Congress to intervene. Amazon is refusing to be transparent about its own policies and relationships with law enforcement. That's why more than 10,000 people have already called on Congress to investigate and demand answers about the impact these partnerships have on our privacy and civil liberties. If you're concerned, you can add your voice here." Read the rest

Foie Gras, a fatty dish created by force-feeding ducks and geese through tubes, will soon no longer be served in the thousand-or-so NYC restaurants that have it on their menus. Chefs are saying "what next, veal?" fearing other ostentatiously cruel delicacies (as opposed to the mundanely cruel ones) will be next.

CNN:

Foie gras has long been a point of debate. In 2012, California's foie gras ban went into effect, only to have the ban overturned in 2015. Then, in 2017, the ban was upheld by a circuit court judge -- a decision that was backed by the Supreme Court in January of 2019. Chicago's history with the ban is almost equally as tumultuous. The Chicago City Council passed the ban in 2006, only to lift it two years later. What makes foie gras so contentious is the method of preparation. Foie gras is made of fattened duck or goose liver, and it has long been considered a French delicacy -- so much that the country has protected it as part of France's cultural heritage. But the product is made by force-feeding ducks, an practice that many people, like councilwoman Rivera, have found troubling

The NSO Group is one of the world's most notorious cyber-arms dealers, selling hacking tools to some of the world's most oppressive regimes that are used to identify targets for arrest, torture and even murder. Read the rest

39 bodies found in a truck in Essex, England, were identified Thursday as Chinese nationals. Police have not confirmed whether they were victims of a human trafficking or human smuggling operation, but charged the driver, a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland, with murder.

The truck was found on a street at the heart of the usually busy industrial area. Police -- who were called to the scene at around 1:40 a.m. on Wednesday -- said the victims were found dead on the scene.

Road haulage experts said the truck appeared to be refrigerated. That could mean freezing temperatures of anywhere between -5 to -10 degrees Fahrenheit (-20C to -23C), Richard Burnett, chief executive of trade body the Road Haulage Association, told PA news agency, making conditions "absolutely horrendous" for anyone stuck inside.

"I can't overstate how big a tragedy it is that 39 people felt like they had no better option than to get in the back of this truck and obviously it's ended in an absolute tragedy," Matthew Carter, an emergency communications delegate for the British Red Cross, told CNN at the scene on Wednesday.

In this recording, embedded below, Trump lawyer William Consovoy tells Judge Denny Chin that if President Donald Trump were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he could not be investigated for the murder while in office. The context is oral arguments in Trump v. Vance, one of the legal efforts to get Trump, a famously unscrupulous and bankruptcy-prone businessman, to publicly disclose his tax returns.

Here is Trump's lawyer, William Consovoy, telling Judge Denny Chin that if Trump were to shoot someone on fifth avenue, he could not be criminally investigated while in office.

Very normal argument. pic.twitter.com/xlDBwmCUnR

— Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) October 23, 2019

To most Republicans, Trump is the country. The suggestion of him doing something "wrong" is already meaningless except as a threat to them. Working with him is possible, if you're not part of the in-group, but working with them is pointless. They're either in or they're out. Read the rest

Two Proud Boys, members of the violent far-right street gang founded by Gavin McInnes, were jailed for four years Tuesday. Maxwell Hare, 27, and John Kinsman, 32, were convicted of gang assault and rioting for attacking protestors outside a speech given by McInnes to New York City's Metropolitan Republican Club.

Judge Mark Dwyer called them McInnes' “soldiers” and compared them to Nazi Brownshirts: “I know enough about history to know what happened in Europe in the '30s when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system.”

The BBC:

The Proud Boys describe themselves as "proud Western chauvinists" and advocate political violence. The group has chapters across North America and beyond - including in the UK and Australia.

Hare and Kinsman were jailed in a case that centres of a fight that erupted after a speech by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes at Manhattan's Metropolitan Republican Club in October 2018.

CCTV footage showed the Proud Boys members beating up a group of four anti-fascist activists - known as "antifa" - who had come to protest against Mr McInnes' appearance.

This incident was obscured by serious failures of journalism. The NYPD initially implied that the Proud Boys were the victims and some media thumbed the scales for days afterward, casting the beatings as acts of self-defense against Antifa.

4/6 The brand new footage shows what followed: two Proud Boys went east on 82nd Street, approaching protesters who were perhaps 100 feet away from Park Avenue.

IVF had been available in Poland for years, but, as Anna Louie Sussman explains for The New Yorker, it became a wedge issue:

Anti-IVF rhetoric takes a number of forms. Polish politicians and religious leaders have sometimes described IVF using nationalistic overtones that scholars have connected to a resurgent anti-Semitism. Catholic media routinely depict children conceived through IVF as unnatural and genetically suspect; in a survey of Polish articles about IVF children, Radkowska-Walkowicz found that they were often characterized as suffering from physical deformities, such as a protruding forehead or dangling tongue, or from mental illnesses, including “survivor syndrome” in relation to unused embryos. (There is no evidence for these claims.) These purported defects are said to go undetected—and so, Radkowska-Walkowicz writes, IVF children are imagined to lurk among the general population, their “biological otherness” polluting the Polish body politic.

Other IVF opponents position themselves as protectors of frozen embryos. In Poland, the political scientist Janine P. Holc writes, the embryo is sometimes seen as “the purest citizen”—an unformed innocent in need of protection by the Polish constitution. Anna Krawczak, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw and the former chairperson of the patient-advocacy group Nasz Bocian (the name means “Our Stork”), which has fought for a more inclusive IVF law, told me that IVF opponents have found inventive ways of linking the procedure to abortion. Protesters gather in front of IVF clinics holding posters that show images of human fetuses, icy blue against a black background.

...

Some of the lawyers and doctors I spoke to believe that, although most media coverage of the IVF law focussed on how single women would be affected, its restrictions were actually designed with queer people in mind.