LinkedIn hacker indicted, hackers cause worldwide Internet outages, European experimental Mars lander may have exploded in crash landing, and more from across the United States and around the world.
—A federal grand jury indicted a Russian man for the 2012 hack of LinkedIn, where 117 million passwords were stolen. More here
—Domain name server company Dyn said hackers targeted them three times Friday with a distributed denial of service attack, causing internet outages across the globe. More here
—The European Space Agency (ESA) said Friday its experimental Mars lander, Schiaparelli, may have exploded in a crash landing on the planet’s surface. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Russian Man Indicted for Hacking 117 Million LinkedIn Passwords
Eric Risberg / AP
A federal grand jury indicted a Russian man this week in connection with hacking LinkedIn and stealing 117 million passwords.
Czech police arrested Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, 29, Wednesday in Prague. Nikulin allegedly hacked LinkedIn in March 2012. Prosecutors also alleged Nikulin hacked social media site Formspring and file sharing site Dropbox. He now faces nine criminal counts after his Thursday indictment.
In court papers, federal agents aren't clear about what exactly Nikulin stole -- or how he planned to profit from their sale online. But the government claims Nikulin worked with at least two others in the attempt to make the business deals.
His arrest is the latest chapter in growing cyber tensions between the U.S. and Russia. While there is no indication that these hacks were sanctioned by the Russian government, federal authorities have pinned other hacks on the Kremlin.
NFL Kicker Placed on Paid Leave After Abuse Revelation
(Matt Rourke / AP)
Josh Brown, the New York Giants kicker who admitted to domestic abuse against his then-wife, has been placed on paid leave by the NFL.
While the league investigates these recent revelations, the NFL put Brown on the commissioner’s exempt list, ESPN reports. Brown cannot play or attend games but, with the team’s permission, he is allowed to work out and receive treatment at the team’s facility. A player may be on the exempt list indefinitely.
In a letter sent Friday, Adolpho Birch, a senior vice president for the NFL, told Brown the league will investigate documents released earlier this week from the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington, which revealed a history of domestic violence and details surrounding a 2015 arrest.
In those documents, Brown referred to himself as a “physically, mentally, emotionally and verbally... repulsive man.” In one entry, he said that he viewed himself as “God” and his then-wife, Molly, as “my slave.”
Brown’s tenure with the Giants is likely over, and it’s unclear if any teams will sign him in the future. The Giants signed another kicker, Robbie Gould, to fill the current void left by Brown.
In the meantime, Giants head coach Ben McAdoo offered his support to Brown, saying Friday, “We’re not going to turn our back on Josh.”
Facebook says it’s relaxing its rules on explicit posts after feedback from our community and partners.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, and Justin Osofsky, the company’s vice president of global operations and media partnerships, wrote in a blog post that in “the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards.”
The move follows two recent controversies about posts that Facebook pulled because they apparently violated its Community Standards. One of those posts was Nick Ut’s iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning black-and-white photograph of a naked girl, wailing in pain in the aftermath of a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Then this week, a video posted by the Swedish Cancer Society to promote breast-cancer awareness didn’t make it past Facebook’s censors. The company apologized and reversed itself in both cases.
Canada’s Prospects of a Trade Deal With the EU Appear Dead
Canada's International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland (Chris Wattie / Reuters)
Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister, walked out of talks Friday in Belgium, declaring the European Union incapable of ratifying a long-discussed trans-Atlantic free-trade deal.
All 28 EU governments support the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), but the agreement was held up because one of Belgium’s five subdivisions has not signed off. Without French-speaking Wallonia’s affirmation, Belgium cannot give assent to CETA. Walloon lawmakers are concerned that CETA, and a stalled plan for a similar deal with the United States, risk degrading consumer, labor, and environmental protections, while granting excessive power to multinational corporations. But supporters say the agreement could increase trade by 20 percent.
“Canada has worked, and I personally have worked, very hard,” Freeland, who was a visibly distraught after the talks, said. “But it is now evident to me, evident to Canada, that the European Union is incapable of reaching an agreement.”
CETA was set to be signed at an EU-Canada summit next Thursday in the presence of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
This issue could serve as an ominous forecast for future EU economic deals, including with the UK, which voted over the summer to leave the bloc and is still unsure about the shape of trade relations with it.
Chemical Spill at Kansas Food Plant Sends 54 to Hospital
The fog in the air is believed to contain chemicals from the spill (Reuters)
Updated at 4:06 p.m. ET
A chemical spill Friday at an Atchison, Kansas, food-processing plant sent a thick fog into the air and a chlorine-like smell, spurring evacuations and warnings from emergency officials.
Fifty-four people have been admitted to Atchison Hospital for upper-respiratory discomfort, including one into the intensive-care unit, TC Roberts, the hospital’s marketing and public relations director, said in an interview. Two of the women were pregnant and being monitored, Roberts said. The hospital was following poison-control protocol.
The spill occurred at 8:02 a.m. at MGP Ingredients, a food-and-alcohol plant, Atchison City Manager Trey Cocking said. Citing city officials, the Kansas CIty Star reports the reaction was caused after two chemicals were inadvertently mixed together.
The Kansas Department of Transportation confirmed that the two chemicals were sodium hypochlorite—a salt-based chemical mainly used for bleaching—and sulphuric acid, according to public-affairs manager, Kimberly Qualls. Exposure to sodium hypochlorite can cause upper respiratory issues due to the corrosive effects of chlorine. The city would not confirm which chemicals were mixed.
Atchison city officials said shortly before 11 a.m. that the situation was under control and all-clear was being given.
Shortly after the spill, Atchison County emergency officials urged people to stay out of town.
Residents of Atchison who live north of the plant were being told to stay inside with their doors and windows shut.
Atchison is located in northeast Kansas, about 40 miles from Kansas City.
Images from social media showed a thick gray plume clouding the air.
Images of Schiaparelli’s expected landing site taken on October 20, 2016, by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (European Space Agency)
The European Space Agency (ESA) said Friday its experimental Mars lander, Schiaparelli, may have exploded in a crash landing on the planet’s surface.
“Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h,” the ESA said in a statement. “It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full. These preliminary interpretations will be refined following further analysis.”
As my colleague Marina Koren previously reported, Schiaparelli was scheduled to touch down on the red planet Wednesday after a seven-month journey. The mission, conducted jointly between the ESA and Russian space agency Roscosmos, lost contact with the lander shortly after it began its descent. Now, the ESA believes the lander suffered issues during the last 50 seconds of its descent through Mars’s atmosphere, prompting the possible crash.
The Wall Street Journal is offering buyouts to “a substantial number of employees,” Gerard Baker, its editor in chief, told the newspaper’s staff in a memo Friday.
As I told you earlier this week, we have begun an extensive review of operations as part of a broader transformation program. There will be, unfortunately, an impact on news department staff in this process. In order to limit the number of involuntary layoffs, we will be offering all news employees around the world - management and non-management - the option to elect to take an enhanced voluntary severance benefit. The terms are described in the attached FAQ.
We are seeking a substantial number of employees to elect this benefit, but we reserve the right to reject a volunteer based on business considerations. Employees will be required to sign a separation agreement and release of claims in a form provided by the Company in exchange for the accompanying severance benefits.
I regret of course the need for such a move and I appreciate deeply the dedication all of you continue to show through challenging times. Thanks to your hard work, the news department continues to produce world-class journalism every day and I'm confident this process is the right one to set us on the right footing for renewed growth in the years ahead.
Sydney Ember, The New York Times’s media reporter, pointed out on Twitter that the FAQ section of the memo says “there are no current plans for future buyouts.”
Earlier this week, the newspaper reported that Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s parent company, “launched a broader review of operations to cut costs in response to a significant decline in print advertising.” More:
The memo didn’t lay out specifics, but people familiar with the situation said one element of the plan involves combining the “Business & Tech” and “Money & Investing” sections. That would be aimed at reducing production costs, and wouldn’t signal a cutback in coverage in those core areas, one of the people said.
The newspaper’s report quoted unnamed sources as saying the revamp “could include a reduction of head count.”
Looks like whoever launched this morning’s attack on the internet is at it again, shutting down access to Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, and other sites. Around noon ET, domain name server company Dyn said hackers had once again targeted them with a distributed denial of service attack, flooding their servers with nonsense and hampering their ability to properly direct internet traffic.
This time, the U.S. reports of outages appear more closely centered on the northeast states, with sizable gridlock also seen in Japan, the U.K., and France, according to downdetector.com.
Police officers demonstrate on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, France (Michel Euler / AP)
Hundreds of police officers marched in Paris and other French cities Thursday for the fourth night of protests against their working conditions, Agence France-Presse reports.
The officers, who say they are ill-equipped to defend themselves on the job, protested against an increasing workload, bureaucracy, and outdated equipment. They also called on the government to implement fixed minimum sentences for attacks against officers. The demonstrations follow several attacks on police in recent months, including a Molotov cocktail thrown on a patrol car and the killing of a French officer and his partner in June by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS .
The demonstrations come amid a nationwide state of emergency—which has been in place since last November’s attacks—and will likely play a role in the country’s presidential election in six months. Many of the presidential candidates have used the opportunity to criticize President François Hollande, including Alain Juppé, the center-right candidate, and Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate.
In a statement to police Friday, Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said: “You are asking for respect, we owe you that. You are asking for resources, we’ll give you them. You are asking for support, you’ve earned it.”
AT&T Reportedly Is in Talks to Acquire Time Warner
(Brendan McDermid / Reuters)
AT&T is in advanced talks to buy Time Warner and a deal could be announced as early as this weekend, Bloombergand theWall Street Journal report.
The merger would unite AT&T’s portfolio of wireless, broadband, and satellite-TV services with Time Warner’s vast entertainment empire, which includes CNN, HBO, TNT, and TBS.
AT&T and Time Warner representatives declined to comment.
There Is Nothing Funny About Exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Sticky Bombs
Submitted to Reddit by Haku111
It seems Samsung has little sense of humor when it comes to its combustible Galaxy Note 7 cellphone. The company recalled the Note 7 last month because its lithium-ion batteries can burst into flames. It’s banned by some airlines, and become the butt of a presidential wisecrack. But the joke Samsung didn’t find funny was made this week by video-game enthusiasts.
A gamer who uses the screen name HitmanNiko wrote a code that players can download—called a “mod”—for Grand Theft Auto V that replaces sticky bombs with Samsung’s pyrotechnics-friendly cellphone. Gamers then posted videos to YouTube of their digital character using the phone to blow up people, cars, and helicopters.
Some owners of those YouTube accounts then received copyright-infringement notices, and their videos were removed. One U.S. gamer, who goes by the screen name DoctorGTA, said in a YouTube video his livestream account was suspended after he got an infringement notice from Samsung Electronics America Inc.
So far, Samsung has done a bad job of damage control. This latest move to silence jibes from gamers seems only to have raised more notice that Samsung produced millions of phones that can potentially catch fire.
Here's an example of the sticky-bomb Samsung videos (fast forward to 45 seconds):
America’s Latest Whiskey Rebellion May Be Coming to an End
(Bruce Schreiner / AP)
Jim Beam workers in Kentucky, on strike for the past six days to protest long work hours, were offered a new contract Thursday that includes a company pledge to hire more workers, according to the Associated Press.
About 250 union workers are scheduled to vote on the new contract Friday, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union said.
Workers walked out last Saturday from distilleries at Clermont and Boston, Kentucky, over working hours. Jim Beam workers said they were often forced to work 60-80 hours per week in order to meet the demands of the global bourbon boom.
Clarkson Hine, a company spokesman, said Thursday the company was encouraged by the tentative deal reached with union leaders.
Bourbon, Kentucky’s golden commodity, is a $3 billion a year industry. Ninety-five percent of the world’s bourbon is produced in the state.
Jim Beam is owned by Suntory Holdings Ltd., the Japanese beverage giant. Suntory bought the classic American whisky brand for $16 billion in 2014. In the first six months of 2016, Suntory’s alcohol profits rose 24 percent due to the popularity of its American spirit sales.
Smoke rises from a building in Kirkuk, Iraq, where two ISIS militants are believed to be holed up Friday. (Rudaw TV / AP)
ISIS fighters attacked the Iraqi city of Kirkuk Friday, killing at least 19 people, even as Iraqi forces were closing in on Mosul, the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq.
The battle in Kirkuk appears to be ongoing, and there are various versions of what’s exactly happening there. The BBC reported that ISIS fighters attacked government buildings, killing at least six police officers. They also targeted a power station that’s under construction and killed 13 workers. Twelve ISIS fighters were also reportedly killed. Images on social media posted by a Kurdish news site showed Kirkuk residents had hanged at least one suspected ISIS fighter.
The attack is a reminder that while ISIS is losing territory in Iraq and neighboring Syria, it still remains a force to be reckoned with in the region. The attack in Kirkuk comes as Iraqi forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, and their allies—backed by U.S. airstrikes—are trying to retake Mosul, which is about 100 miles northwest of Kirkuk.
About 5,000 ISIS fighters are reportedly still in Mosul, the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq, along with 1.5 million people.
Double-Oh No: Pierce Brosnan Wants Out of Indian Ad Campaign
John Salangsang / AP
Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond star, endorsed what he thought was breath-freshening, tooth-whitening mint. He appeared in Indian newspapers, with his lush beard and arched eyebrow, holding a tin of Pan Bahar. A minute-long TV commercial shows the former 007 cooly waltzing into a fancy hotel, disarming men, women, and a pack of ninjas with his good looks—and a can of Pan Bahar.
But Brosnan is upset now because Pan Bahar is associated in India with addictive forms of chewing tobacco. Those products, which are made from a mixture of nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, and tobacco, are used by millions of Indians and have been linked to cancer. Pan Bahar’s manufacturer, Ashok & Co., told the BBC the public has misconceived their product and there’s neither nicotine or tobacco in it.
In a statement to People magazine, Brosnan said: “As a man who has spent decades championing women’s healthcare and environmental protection, I was distressed to learn of Pan Bahar’s unauthorized and deceptive use of my image to endorse their range of pan masala products. I would never have entered into an agreement to promote a product in India that is dangerous to one’s health.”
Brosnan demanded the company remove his image from all of the company’s products. Here’s a video of the commercial:
Update 9:45 a.m. ET: Dyn, a large domain name service company, reports that it was attacked by a distributed denial-of-service attack around 7 a.m. ET, shutting down access to a number of popular internet sites. As of 9:20 a.m. ET, it had restored service to normal.
Dyn is one of several companies that essentially maintains a master list of websites, translating “CNN.com” into the string of numbers that actually directs readers to the news network’s servers. It appears they were flooded with targeted traffic by an unknown party with the intention of shutting down access to these sites.
Our original post below:
If your internet connection seems slow this morning—especially if you live in the U.S. Northeast—you’re not imagining it. Internet-monitoring service downrightnow.com says Twitter is experiencing a serious outage, and crowd-sourced downdetector.com reports trouble at a slew of popular sites, including CNN, Amazon, Netflix, and Reddit.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Donald Trump, her GOP rival, paused their contentious campaign for the presidency for an evening of what was supposed to be light-hearted ribbing and self-effacing humor.
But as my colleague Megan Garber noted, the evening at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner was going according to plan “until Trump decided it was time to tease his opponent a little more sharply.” Trump’s remarks, she said, “went full stream-of-consciousness [and] on the attack.” The crowd, at various points in the night, gasped, booed, booed some more, and then some.
South Africa Says It's Leaving the International Criminal Court
South Africa’s failure to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir prompted criticism. (Mike Hutchings / Reuters)
South Africa said Friday it notified the UN on October 19 that it is leaving The Hague-based International Criminal Court.
Michael Masutha, the justice minister, said at a news conference South Africa didn’t want to carry out the ICC’s arrest warrants, which would lead to “regime change.” Masutha said the government would introduce legislation in parliament to withdraw the country from the ICC.
Last year, the government didn’t arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who was in the country despite an ICC warrant against him for his alleged actions in the Darfur region. A South African court criticized the government for that failure.
Human-rights groups condemned Friday’s announcement, and experts predict it will trigger similar decisions by other African nations, many of which believe the ICC is biased against African leaders. The UN declined to comment.
Stores are stocked with copycat designs. It’s a nightmare.
As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hay’s eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery prints—bizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amish—had developed a cult following among weird New York fashion-and-art girls. Almost all of her early designs featured some kind of huge, puffy sleeve; according to a lengthy profile in TheNew Yorker published that September, the custom-made dress that inspired Hay’s line had enough space in the shoulders to store a few tennis balls.
Batsheva dresses aren’t for everyone. They can cost more than $400, first of all, and more important, they’re weird: When paired with Jordans and decontextualized on a 20-something Instagram babe, the clothes of religious fundamentalism become purposefully unsettling. But as described in that cerulean-sweater scene from The Devil Wears Prada, what happens at the tip-top of the fashion hierarchy rains down on the rest of us. So it went with the puff sleeve. Batsheva and a handful of other influential indie designers adopted the puff around the same time, and the J.Crews and ASOSes and Old Navys of the world took notice. Puff sleeves filtered down the price tiers, in one form or another, just like a zillion trends have before—streamlined for industrial-grade reproduction and attached to a litany of dresses and shirts that don’t require a model’s body or an heiress’s bank account. And then, unlike most trends, it stuck around.
The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
The past two and a half years have been a global crash course in infection prevention. They've also been a crash course in basic math: Since the arrival of this coronavirus, people have been asked to count the meters and feet that separate one nose from the next; they’ve tabulated the days that distance them from their most recent vaccine dose, calculated the minutes they can spend unmasked, and added up the hours that have passed since their last negative test.
What unites many of these numbers is the tendency, especially in the United States, to pick thresholds and view them as binaries: above this, mask; below this, don’t; after this, exposed, before this, safe. But some of the COVID numbers that have stuck most stubbornly in our brains these past 20-odd months are now disastrously out of date. The virus has changed; we, its hosts, have as well. So, too, then, must the playbook that governs our pandemic strategies. With black-and-white, yes-or-no thinking, “we do ourselves a disservice,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Binary communication “has been one of the biggest failures of how we’ve managed the pandemic,” Mónica Feliú-Mójer, of the nonprofit Ciencia Puerto Rico, told me.
I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.
In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.
In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.
Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, never had the abortion she was seeking. She gave her baby girl up for adoption, and now that baby is an adult. After decades of keeping her identity a secret, Jane Roe’s child has chosen to talk about her life.
Nearly half a century ago, Roe v. Wade secured a woman’s legal right to obtain an abortion. The ruling has been contested with ever-increasing intensity, dividing and reshaping American politics. And yet for all its prominence, the person most profoundly connected to it has remained unknown: the child whose conception occasioned the lawsuit.
Roe’s pseudonymous plaintiff, Jane Roe, was a Dallas waitress named Norma McCorvey. Wishing to terminate her pregnancy, she filed suit in March 1970 against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, challenging the Texas laws that prohibited abortion. Norma won her case. But she never had the abortion. On January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court finally handed down its decision, she had long since given birth—and relinquished her child for adoption.
Everything seems to be falling apart. The Russians are occupying a neighboring state. A foreign crisis is causing spikes in the price of oil. Inflation is the worst it’s been in some 40 years. A Democratic president is facing the lowest approval ratings of his term and has openly admitted that he knows the public is in a foul mood. A virus is on the loose and making a lot of people sick.
Even the music charts are a mess, a horrid stew of disco and wimp-rock hits.
Wait. Disco?
I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about 2022? I was actually reminiscing about 1979, the year I turned 19, when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution led to another round of oil shocks, inflation reached its worst levels since World War II, President Jimmy Carter was at 30 percent approval, and, yes, an influenza epidemic broke out.
For months and even years I have seen this coming, and yet the reality of the Supreme Court’s decision is still a shock. How can it be that people had a constitutional right for nearly half a century, and now no more? How can it not matter that Americans consistently signaled that they did not want this to happen, and even so this has happened?
The Court’s answer is that Roe is different. Roe, the Court suggests, was uniquely, egregiously wrong from the beginning—a badly reasoned decision criticized by even the most ardent supporters of abortion rights, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The majority suggests that the best comparison to Roe (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the decision that saved abortion rights in 1992) is Plessy v. Ferguson, the 19th-century decision that held racial segregation to be constitutional.
Getting vaccines to gay and bisexual men is an urgent matter.
Yesterday, a CDC panel discussed whether smallpox vaccines should be offered more widely as a preventive measure against monkeypox. The panel made no decision. But getting those shots into patients’ arms—and particularly gay and bisexual men’s arms—is an urgent matter. Since May 13, more than 3,300 cases of monkeypox have been reported in 58 countries where the disease was not previously thought to be endemic, including the United States. The CDC is reporting at least 172 cases. Before this outbreak, monkeypox had usually been reported from West and Central Africa, or in travelers from those regions. The new cases are occurring on all inhabited continents, mainly among men who have sex with men (MSM).
Now is the time for gratitude and profound humility about what comes after Roe.
The entire legal and cultural ethos of the pro-life movement can be summed up in two sentences: A just society protects all life. A moral society values all life.
Justice is thus necessary but not sufficient for a culture of life. The pro-life movement should greet the reversal of Roe v. Wade with a spirit of gratitude. The people of this country have, for the first time in almost 50 years, an opportunity to enact laws that truly protect the lives of unborn children. But the movement should also show a profound humility and absence of malice toward their political opponents.
After all, the simple truth is that if the pro-life movement wants to end abortion, it has to do much more work than merely banning abortion. Indeed, if it reacts with too heavy a hand in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the movement can ultimately defeat its very purpose.
One of the most-used tools on the internet is not what it used to be.
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A few weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be barely readable. Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland.