Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is putting the full weight of the Florida government behind an effort to defeat a ballot measure that would protect abortion access in the state — including by enlisting government lawyers in a campaign to silence a young mother with terminal brain cancer who is warning of the danger Florida’s strict ban poses to women like her.

This November, Florida residents will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 4; if passed, the measure will enshrine the right to abortion “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health” in Florida’s constitution. The pitch is broadly popular with Floridians: A September poll showed the measure attracting support from 76 percent of voters.

But DeSantis, who has signed two separate abortion bans into law — restricting the procedure first at 15 weeks, then 6 weeks gestation — is desperately trying to tank Amendment 4. First, he worked with the Heritage Foundation to add language to the ballot measure implying that relegalizing abortion would have a negative fiscal impact on the state.

Amid that baseless warning, state agencies began spending public money on TV and radio ads peddling misinformation about the measure, as well as a website that claims Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety.”

Now, DeSantis is trying to keep a cancer patient named Caroline from sharing the story of her abortion, by threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that carry the Amendment 4 ad featuring her story.

McDonald’s has some beef with today’s largest meat packers.

The fast food giant is suing the U.S. meat industry’s “Big Four” — Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef Packing Company — and their subsidiaries, alleging a price fixing scheme for beef specifically. In a federal complaint, filed Friday in New York, McDonald’s accused the companies of anticompetitive measures such as collectively limiting supply to boost prices and charge “illegally inflated” amounts.

This collusion caused the beef market to become “a monopoly in which direct purchasers were forced to buy at prices dictated by (the meat packers),” McDonald’s suit reads — later noting that the injury it has sustained as one of those buyers is what “antitrust laws were designed to prevent.”

McDonald’s alleges that the meat packers’ conspiracy dates back nearly a decade, at least as early as January 2015, and continues today. Its suit argues these companies’ actions violate the Sherman Act, a federal antitrust law.

TikTok users are asking Amazon’s Alexa unanswerable questions about the outcome of rapidly strengthening Hurricane Milton, which is forecast to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday. Unfortunately, Alexa is providing users with inaccurate answers, sparking panic and conspiracy theories that have already garnered over a million views on TikTok.

Users are asking variations of the same question: “Alexa, what kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?”

“From fandom.com: Hurricane Milton was an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane that caused widespread damage across its path in October 2024,” respondedAlexa in multiple videos. (Although Media Matters couldn’t replicate the response, Alexa did tell us the death toll and monetary damages of a hurricane that has not yet made landfall when we asked if there were any fatalities from Hurricane Milton).

Alexa’s response cites fandom.com, a fan-generatedentertainment and gaming platform. Within fandom is the Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki, a “wiki-based comprehensive database of hypothetical tropical cyclone articles that anyone can edit.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.

Without detailing their reasoning, the justices kept in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations that would violate Texas law.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court order, arguing that hospitals have to perform abortions in emergency situations under federal law. The administration pointed to the Supreme Court’s action in a similar case from Idaho earlier this year in which the justices narrowly allowed emergency abortions to resume while a lawsuit continues.

The administration also cited a Texas Supreme Court ruling that said doctors do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide an abortion legally. The administration said it brings Texas in line with federal law and means the lower court ruling is not necessary.

X owner Elon Musk has once again hijacked a rare coveted username from its original user.

This time, however, the takeover wasn’t for the good of X the company, it was so Musk could promote Donald Trump for president.

On Saturday, Musk appeared at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler Pennsylvania. However, earlier that day, Musk began promoting his pro-Trump Super PAC, called America PAC, using a brand new handle @America.

“Read @America to understand why I’m supporting Trump for President,” Musk’s new bio said as of approximately 1:30pm ET on Saturday, Oct. 5.

The @America handle appeared attached to a brand new account setup just this month, in October 2024. However, this rare, one-word geographic handle had already been long registered by another X user more than 14 years prior to Musk taking the handle from them, in September 2010.

According to a person familiar with the situation, X took the handle from the user much like how Musk’s social media company took the @X handle from its original registrant last year.

Wikipedia has had to lock down the Silent Hill 2 Remake page after repeated vandalism from editors who refuse to accept that the remake of Konami's seminal horror game released to critical acclaim earlier this week.

Outright lies around the games reception and metacritic score - including one edit that said the game had "received the worst reviews imaginable" - means the page has now been put into a semi-protected state to stop unregistered users from making wild, unsubstantiated claims, including one that said Eurogamer had awarded it 0/5 stars when, in fact, it got top marks.

It's unclear what's motivating the edits, although its presumed by some to have been fuelled by the nauseating discourse that the game is "woke" because of changes made to the characters facial features and clothing.

Alternatively, it may stem from some fans' dismayed that Silent Hill 2 has been remade by Bloober Teamor, indeed, at all.

As the control of the Senate hangs in the balance, GOP candidates across the country are facing a similar problem: Troubling and bizarre past statements, both in-person and on social media, are coming back to haunt them. But in Minnesota, Royce White is an even more extreme case.

In a tweet from 2022 that has since resurfaced, White claims that “‘bad guys” won the second world war, saying, “The bad guys won in WWII. There were no ‘good guys’ in that war. The controlling interests had a jump ball. If you look closely, you see the link between liberalism and communism in the Allied forces.”

A new survey has found that over half of gamers prefer to play single-player titles.

According to Midia Research, this game mode is most popular across all platforms – particularly on mobile, with 58% of respondents saying they preferred single-player games.

The data from the survey was collected from Midia Research's Q1 2024 and Q1 2023 consumer surveys across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Poland, Turkey, and South Africa.

Research found that older gamers were more drawn to single-player titles, with 74% of gamers aged over 55 choosing to play games solo.

The world's first ovarian cancer vaccine could wipe the disease out, researchers have said.

OvarianVax is a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognise and attack the earliest stages of ovarian cancer.

It's being developed by scientists at the University of Oxford.

The hope is that women could receive the jab preventatively on the NHS with the goal of eradicating the disease.

Experts have suggested it could work in a similar way to the human papillomavirus (HPV) jab, which is on track to stamp out cervical cancer.

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands.

This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsedDonald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.)

One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.”

A French judge has reversed a ruling in the trial of a man who is accused of drugging his wife to sleep and recruiting dozens of men to abuse her for over a decade.

Lawyers for Gisèle Pelicot, 72, had earlier appealed against the judge's initial decision to only show video of the crimes to lawyers and the jury.

She has waived her right to anonymity in the trial, enabling the shocking details of the case to be heard in public.

Her lawyers argued the video should be seen to draw attention to the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse. They hailed the latest ruling as a "victory"

Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in privacy and technology policy, said the patchwork of state laws governing DNA data makes the generic data of millions potentially vulnerable to being sold off, or even mined by law enforcement.

“Having to rely on a private company's terms of service or bottom line to protect that kind of information is troubling — particularly given the level of interest we've seen from government actors in accessing such information during criminal investigations,” Eidelman said.

She points to how investigators used a genealogy website to identify the man known as the Golden State Killer, and how police homed in on an Idaho murder suspect by turning to similar databases of genetic profiles.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has run a secretive program for years where ICE agents have trained hundreds of civilian volunteers on how to operate multiple types of firearms, conduct investigations and surveillance of immigrants, and use lethal force on human beings.

The program, known as Citizens Academies, includes role-play scenarios for civilians to conduct fictional raids on immigrants and is active in New York and in more than a dozen cities across the country. The program is run by Homeland Security Investigations, the branch of ICE in charge of intelligence, international affairs, and surveillance.

According to thousands of internal documents obtained from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request litigation, published on Oct. 1 by a group of civil rights organizations, the program was piloted first in Puerto Rico in 2014 and turned national in 2019.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the state's criminal investigation agency, said Wednesday it is looking into allegations against an Erwin plastics factory where several workers died and some went missing after they were swept away by floodwaters from Hurricane Helene.

"At the request of 1st Judicial District Attorney General Steve Finney, TBI agents are investigating allegations involving Impact Plastics," Leslie Earhart, the bureau's spokesperson, said in a statement to NBC News. The bureau deferred additional questions to the District Attorney General's Office.

Finney in a statement said that he specifically asked "that they review the occurrences of Friday, September 27, 2024, to identify any potential criminal violations."

A former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident was able to walk again thanks to a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton.

When one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working. Desperate to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs. But it turned him away, claiming his exoskeleton was too old, *404 media *reports.

"After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy," Michael Straight posted on Facebook earlier this month. "The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money."

While PS5 Pro 30th Anniversary Edition preorders sparked a flurry of eBay listings with huge mark-ups in the West, in Japan Sony has an actual plan to beat the scapers.

As spotted by Automaton, the Japanese PlayStation homepage confirms that anyone who wants to preorder the PS5 Pro 30th anniversary edition in Japan has to meet the following conditions: have a PSN account registered in Japan, and have at least 30 hours of PS4 or PS5 runtime on the account between February 2014 and September 19, 2024.

An apparent bug was causing game art backgrounds to be replaced by promotional messages and news posts on the PlayStation 5 dashboard for some people on Monday. The images they saw featured promotions for long-expired discounts and ads for new games.

People lamented the change in forums and on social media, saying the game art that previously showed up when they highlighted a game was gone. Instead, the image that would ordinarily show up as a news post in a separate section of the PS5 UI was splashed across the screen behind games like Miles Morales, Hi-Fi Rush, and Final Fantasy VII Remake.

In a since-deleted post, Daniel Hiatt, product lead for Game Hub and Activity Suggestions with PlayStation, wrote Monday afternoon that the change was a “(new) bug with an existing feature.” Then, by 6PM ET, those game pages are back to normal, as we confirmed on our own PS5s.

Zayna Iman's memory of her 40 hours in police custody comes back in flashes. What she does remember has haunted her for nearly three years.

The 39-year-old believes she was drugged and raped in her cell before being left naked and distressed on the floor, cowering under a blanket and so disorientated she urinated on herself.

Her quest for answers over what happened at Pendleton police station is subject of an IOPC investigation that has so far raised only more questions.

This is despite Zayna being handed dozens of pages of documents and police CCTV containing hour upon hour of distressing film - but, crucially, two are still missing.

Greater Manchester Police had initially told her that all cell footage had been reviewed, and there was no evidence to support her rape allegations.

Then the force told her several hours had been 'corrupted' and were not recoverable.

The IOPC began investigating and soon discovered the film 'was never downloaded', that GMP gave her false information and denied she had been strip-searched. It is now examining why.

It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

California’s law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation’s fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene called out Laura Loomer racist remarks about curry and call centers directed against Kamala Harris, Loomer accused Greene of saying the n-word. Former Black Voices for Trump director and Trump co-conspirator Harrison Floyd came to Loomer’s defense and said Greene’s n-word slur was directed at him after issuing a potential primary challenge.