Month: November 2019

South Korean K-pop star Goo Hara was found dead in her home in Seoul on Sunday, saddening fans of the 28-year-old musician and actress around the world.

Police say the cause of death is under investigation, and have not yet filed an official report about her passing.

Goo was hospitalized in May after what has been reported as an alleged suicide attempt. Last year, she was involved in a high-profile legal battle with an ex-boyfriend who she claimed had threatened her with revenge porn. The case was covered closely by the tabloid press and resulted in harsh public criticism directed …

As increasingly more shopping is done online, the solutions online retailers devise to meet delivery demands have become ever more patchworked.

One such workaround is something called a prepping center, where packages are delivered from third-party retailers — people who use platforms like Amazon to sell their own stuff. Once there, they’re unboxed, checked for damage, repackaged to Amazon’s standards, and sent on.

The Verge’s investigations editor Josh Dzieza discovered a cottage industry of these prepping centers that popped up in the small town of Roundup, Montana, an hour away from Billings. He wrote a story about how the …

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — A fight between President Donald Trump and the Navy has spilled out into the open over a controversial case involving the Navy SEALs — and it may lead to a top Pentagon official resigning in protest.

Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher was accused of murdering an ISIS captive, shooting civilians, and threatening those in his charge who gave their superiors information on him during his time in Iraq. He was acquitted by military jury of those charges in July, but the Navy still demoted him after he was found guilty of posing in a photo next …

More than 150 students and alumni protesting the two institutions’ financial ties to the fossil fuel industry halted the annual Harvard-Yale football game Saturday. The demonstrators took to the field during the game’s halftime, demanding the schools sell their stakes in fossil fuel companies.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan has reported, both Harvard and Yale rely on funds, bonds, and assorted financial instruments to keep their endowments strong. Increasingly, students and alumni have become concerned that the institutions are profiting from the climate crisis, and see a divestment pressure campaign as a way to encourage the schools to invest in more …

More than 200 climate activists brought the annual Yale-Harvard football game to a halt Saturday to protest both universities’ investment in fossil fuels.

Carrying a banner reading “Nobody wins: Yale & Harvard are complicit in climate injustice,” students rushed to the 50-yard line and stalled play until police arrived and began arresting them.

At $39.2 billion, Harvard’s endowment is the largest academic fund in the world. It grew 10 percent last year. In 2018, it paid out $1.8 billion in dividends, more than one-third of the university’s operating budget. Yale isn’t far behind, with an endowment of $29.4 billion. Right …

Ed MacMahon, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who faces charges of campaign finance violations, has told the Daily Beast that his client helped Republican Rep. Devin Nunes arrange meetings meant to advance the Ukrainian investigations into the Biden family that are at the center of the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Now, another lawyer for Parnas — Joseph A. Bondy — has told CNN that Parnas is willing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee about Nunes’s involvement in the Ukraine scandal. Nunes is the ranking member of that committee, and in that capacity has …

The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, is taking on the world’s most powerful.

Amazon on Friday filed a legal challenge to the Department of Defense’s surprise decision to award a hard-fought $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft last month, and notified the Court of Federal Claims that it plans to use two videos of President Trump’s comments about the deal to make a case of interference.

The legal protest was filed under seal to protect trade secrets, but Amazon previously announced that it believed there was “political influence” and “unmistakable bias” involved in the decision.

“We … believe it’s critical …

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The biggest impeachment week yet

• The last scheduled public impeachment hearing wrapped up Thursday. Now Democrats and Republicans are fighting about whether the evidence presented is enough to impeach President Trump. Both sides complain that partisan opposition is holding up important evidence. [NBC News / Jonathan Allen]
• Here are the basics on how we got here — and what could happen

A group of roughly 200 Google employees and other protesters rallied outside of the search giant’s offices in San Francisco on Friday, demanding the company reinstate two colleagues who they say were unjustly punished for workplace organizing at the company — calling it an attack on accountability and transparency in tech.

Google has said the employees were placed on administrative leave for violating company policies about accessing sensitive internal documents and monitoring employees’ calendar events. But employees are objecting to those claims, saying the documents in question were not sensitive and that monitoring public calendar events is not breaking any …

The Amazon rainforest appeared in headlines this summer as thousands of fires raged month after month. Many blamed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for inspiring landowners, farmers, and ranchers to start the fires as a way to clear their lands.

The event marked a new crisis in the world’s largest rainforest. Widespread deforestation dates back decades, but since the early 2000s, the Brazilian government had the problem largely under control. They established a system that put nearly half of the Amazon under protection and worked with foreign countries and large corporations to reduce the forces that incentivized people to cut down …