On the night of June 24, 1973 smoke rose and sirens sounded in the upper French Quarter as fire trucks clustered at the corner of Iberville and Chartres Streets to fight a fast-moving blaze in an second-story barroom called the UpStairs Lounge.

Unable to escape, 32 patrons died from the fire, which remains the most notorious mass murder in modern New Orleans history. As NOLA.com contributor John Pope wrote in a 2017 story, until 49 people perished during a shooting rampage at the Pulse ...

Anyway, here's the thing. The purpose of bigotry is to exalt the mediocre.

Pabst Blue Ribbon: It’s more than just an iconic American beer; it’s also the poster child for a brand brought back from the brink by sheer consumer willpower – bottoming out with production under a million barrels in 2001, but shipping about 2.5 million barrels last year. And yet, now, Pabst may be facing another battle for survival – this time a legal one – against another beer giant: MillerCoors.

MillerCoors and Pabst Brewing are reportedly set to go to trial this November as part ...

In a detention center near Houston, an asylum seeker from Honduras said he agreed to sign a voluntary removal order from the U.S. after federal officials promised to reunite him with his 6-year-old daughter.

The people who called into the help hotlines and domestic violence shelters said they felt as if they were going crazy.

One woman had turned on her air-conditioner, but said it then switched off without her touching it. Another said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another told an abuse help line that she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there.

Their stories are part of a new pattern of behavior in ...

Early on in the study of quantum computers, computer scientists posed a question whose answer, they knew, would reveal something deep about the power of these futuristic machines. Twenty-five years later, it’s been all but solved. In a paper posted online at the end of May, computer scientists Ran Raz and Avishay Tal provide strong evidence that quantum computers possess a computing capacity beyond anything classical computers could ever achieve.

Raz, a professor at Princeton University and ...

Facebook has filed thousands of patent applications since it went public in 2012. One of them describes using forward-facing cameras to analyze your expressions and detect whether you’re bored or surprised by what you see on your feed. Another contemplates using your phone’s microphone to determine which TV show you’re watching. Others imagine systems to guess whether you’re getting married soon, predict your socioeconomic status and track how much you’re sleeping.

A review of ...

Every once in a great while, American readers experience a rare moment of collective awareness about editorial cartooning...As with so many other outrages, America then usually goes back to sleep and pays little attention to the existential threat to editorial cartooning unfolding under their noses...The generally accepted number by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists is that there were about 180 staff cartoonists three decades ago. Now there are fewer than a couple dozen.

The Clark County School District has completed reductions of approximately $68 million from its 2018-19 general operating fund in order to present a balanced budget in accordance with state law.

A railroad official says 14 of 32 derailed oil tanker cars in the northwest corner of Iowa dumped an estimated 230,000 gallons of crude oil into floodwaters, with some making its way to nearby rivers.

BNSF spokesman Andy Williams confirmed the details Saturday. He said nearly half the spill had been contained with booms near the derailment site and an additional boom placed about 5 miles downstream. Williams had earlier said that 33 oil cars derailed.

Williams said oil will be removed from ...

[...]Tesla’s accelerated rate of cashing in the credits could have consequences for the state of Nevada’s bottom line too. It has blown a big hole in the state budget surplus that Nevada officials expected for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

The state lured Tesla’s giant lithium-ion battery plant to a site outside Reno by promising $1.3 billion in incentives. Most of that is in the form of tax exemptions — Tesla doesn’t have to pay sales-and-use, property and general business taxes ...

Alison Ettel told HuffPost she was only "pretending" to call the police.

“Please don’t make me sound horrible.”

On Global Big Day last month, birders around the world counted all the species they could spot in 24 hours. It was a super-birding event in the bonanza that is spring migration — which runs from late April to early June, but peaks for songbirds in May — when millions of birds make their way from parts south to breed in the Northern latitudes.

In Prospect Park, members of the Feminist Bird Club did their bit for this enormous citizen-scientist data collection effort. Led by Molly Adams, its ...

We know empirically from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.

The Gates Foundation came out with a report this morning admitting that their heavy-handed, and expensive, focus on teacher evaluation was a failure.

We have full employment in the US and the UK but extremely low wage growth.
The "gig economy" is structured to keep wage levels down even when there are shortages of workers.
Underemployment — part-time work — has replaced the role that mass unemployment used to play in the US and the UK.
Work now creates inequality, and workers know they cannot get ahead merely by working.
That has political consequences: It makes the minimum-wage level one of the most important political issues.

The chances of success, according to Heritage, do not reach 100 percent until the initial crew has 98 settlers, or 49 breeding pairs. “We can then conclude that, under the parameters used for those simulations, a minimum crew of 98 settlers is needed for a 6,300-year multi-generational space journey towards Proxima Centauri b,” say Marin and Beluffi.

That’s interesting work that sets the stage for more detailed simulations. For example, fertility rates in deep space may turn out to be ...

The lawsuit stems from the deportation of a student from East Boston High School. Evidence used by federal officials in his deportation proceedings included information from a school incident report generated prior to his arrest.

The student, while at East Boston High School, had been involved in a confrontation with another student, but it never became physical because school employees stepped in.

School police, however, wrote up an incident report, which the groups say included ...

It’s becoming increasingly hard to dine in public if you’re a member of the Trump administration complicit in carrying out the president’s agenda.

On Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant because of her role in the administration.

The real story is that they made a casual mobile game based on Westworld.