So wait. Syria is now a narco-state with $3.3 billion a year in narcotics revenue? And... isn't Assad being propped up by Wagner? i.e.: Russia? (So many questions....) [Scary]

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Bitcoin Freefalls to Two-Month Low After SpaceX Write-Down

If the spectacular failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange wasn’t evidence enough, the crypto bubble has officially popped. Now, Bitcoin, one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies, has fallen to a two-month low.

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Woman who posed as boy to sexually assault teenager sentenced

Georgia Bilham given 24-month community order and made to join sex offenders register

A 21-year-old care worker who disguised herself as a boy and sexually assaulted a short-sighted teenager by kissing her has been sentenced to a 24-month community order.

A jury at Chester crown court in June found Georgia Bilham guilty of one count of sexual assault. She was cleared of 16 other sexual offence charges.

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Lucy Letby trial: why the babies remain anonymous

None of the 17 babies involved in the trial have been named and nine hospital staff cannot be identified

• Lucy Letby child murder convictions – latest updates

The trial of Lucy Letby was conducted amid levels of press secrecy for victims and witnesses rarely seen outside proceedings involving matters of national security.

Reporting restrictions meant the media did not name any of the 17 babies who formed part of the charges and could not identify nine of the doctors and nurses who worked alongside Letby on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital.

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Noma restaurant bringing spin-off to London for a day

Collaborative ‘series of bites’ to be served up as Noma looks to a future without its celebrated Copenhagen restaurant

Noma, the three-Michelin-star Danish restaurant that shocked foodies by announcing its closure earlier this year, is coming to London – for one day only – as it rolls out a series of spin-off ventures including its own seaweed farm on a remote fjord.

The Copenhagen restaurant, which charges 3,950 Danish kroner (£453) per person for a tasting menu of mostly foraged vegetables, will next month collaborate with a Mexican restaurant in Marylebone and a cocktail bar in Sea Containers House on the South Bank.

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Trump lawyers ask for January 6 trial to be pushed back to 2026 – live

Lawyers argue earlier date would violate ex-president’s constitutional rights but special counsel expected to oppose two-year delay

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked the judge presiding over his federal 2020 election interference case to schedule his trial for April 2026 – more than two and a half years from now.

In a 16-page filing on Thursday, the lawyers argued that putting Trump on trial this coming January – as federal prosecutors have requested – would mark a “rush to trial” that would violate his constitutional rights and be “flatly impossible” given the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through. Trump’s lawyers wrote:

The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.

11am: President Joe Biden will welcome the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for a trilateral summit.

3pm: Biden, Yoon and Kishida will hold a joint press conference.

6pm: Biden will leave Camp David for Andrews, where he will fly to Reno

The House and Senate are out.

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Is Trump about to start regretting not taking better care of his lackeys? [Dumbass]

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Mortgage rates are now at their highest level in over two decades. Yeah, that's the reason you're not buying a house right now [Obvious]

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25 Years Ago Steve Jobs Launched the First iMac—and the Strategy That Saved Apple

The curvy translucent plastic design of the iMac was the test case for Steve Jobs' “whole-widget” strategy that led to the creation of the iPhone.

How an Iowa School District Used ChatGPT to Ban Books

Under a new law, schools in Iowa have to remove titles with specific sexual content from libraries. Asking an AI chatbot proved to be the easiest way. It flagged The Handmaid’s Tale and Beloved.

What were Lucy Letby’s possible motives for murdering babies?

What led the serial killer nurse to commit her crimes may never be fully known, but jurors were told of several possibilities

Lucy Letby’s reasons for killing and attempting to kill babies at the hospital where she worked may never be fully explained. But jurors were given a number of possible motives by the prosecution during the nurse’s 10-month trial at Manchester crown court.

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Calls to force court appearances as Lucy Letby refuses to attend sentencing

Nurse convicted of killing seven babies is third murderer in recent times to avoid hearing

Lucy Letby child murder convictions – latest updates

Lucy Letby has become the latest killer to refuse to attend their sentencing, amid calls for a new law to force criminals to face their punishment in court.

The 33-year-old nurse told the trial judge through her legal team that she would not appear in court for the remainder of the proceedings after she was found guilty of murdering seven babies.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Steam Deck looks bad but plays great

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a delight on Steam Deck — even though I sometimes can’t tell what’s going on.

I suspected that might be the case going in. Everything I had seen about Baldur’s Gate 3 before I downloaded it promised a vast, sprawling adventure, and all the streams of the game I watched on Twitch featured incredibly detailed characters and worlds. I’m sure most of those streamers were running the game on top-of-the-line rigs. I suspected that the Steam Deck, which recently had some troubles with The Last of Us Part I, might not be the best place for me to play Larian Studios’ new RPG.

That said, the game just looked like so much fun, and since it won’t be coming to PS5 until September, I really wanted to find a way to play it sooner. I...

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Low interest rates and loneliness: the origins of the pandemic crypto boom

Glauber Contessoto, also known as “Pro,” records a video about Dogecoin. | Image: This Is Not Financial Advice

This Is Not Financial Advice and Easy Money attempt to explain the extremely online financial mania. Their very divergent takes show how difficult it is to fully understand.

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The First Reactions to Star Wars: Ahsoka Are Here

Star Wars fans have been waiting over five years for this. When Star Wars Rebels ended in March 2018, creator Dave Filoni teased a story where Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren would team up and go to find their friend, Jedi Ezra Bridger. Well, it took a while, and it’s not the way we expected, but the story will finally…

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Photoshop this Nancy Sinatra impersonator [Photoshop]

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New Covid strain hitting country with people who sued to be able to die from it [PSA]

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Abramovich ally Eugene Shvidler fails in attempt to overturn UK sanctions

High court rejects billionaire’s effort to have sanctions imposed in March 2022 declared unlawful

A billionaire and close ally of Roman Abramovich has failed in his attempt to overturn UK sanctions, ending a challenge that had been seen as crucial test of the government’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

London’s high court on Friday rejected the effort by Eugene Shvidler to have the sanctions on him declared unlawful.

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Lucy Letby, the ‘beige’ and ‘average’ nurse who turned into a baby killer

Her childhood seemed idyllic and she cried at reminders of her home life, but she was, the prosecutor said, ‘cruel and relentless’

Lucy Letby child murder convictions - latest updates

For a woman accused of such grave crimes, Lucy Letby cut an almost pitiable figure in the witness box at Manchester crown court.

Clutching a fluffy purple comforter out of sight of the jury, the nurse dissolved into tears at reminders of her home life. The 33-year-old wept at any mention of her cats, Tigger and Smudge, and sobbed when the court saw a photograph of her childlike bedroom, with four fluffy toys laid across her “sweet dreams” duvet, fairy lights on her bedframe, and art saying “leave sparkles wherever you go” pinned to the wall.

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Anti-Piracy Group Takes Massive AI Training Dataset 'Books3′ Offline

One of the most prominent pirated book repositories used for training AI, Books3, has been kicked out from the online nest it had been roosting in for nearly three years. Rights-holders have been at war with online pirates for decades, but artificial intelligence is like oil seeping into copyright law’s water. The two…

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How to delete your Twitter history

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Over the last few months, Elon Musk’s X, which was formerly known as Twitter, has been a bubbling cauldron of strange advertising decisions, continuous upheavals, and weird overflows of testosterone.

Not that Twitter has ever been calm waters. Before Musk, Twitter was the social media world’s most reliable double-edged sword. One minute, you were retweeting a funny meme account and enjoying some wholesome discussion about your current TV binge fixation, and the next, you were being buried by a harassment campaign or finding your day ruined by a thread that makes you want to throw your laptop through the window.

Either way, if you’re now on X or were ever on Twitter, it’s a good idea to take precautions with your posting history since,...

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News: The 1980s are coming back. Fark: "Poor Man's Cocaine" now costs $3 a pill. Booger now unimpressed with the street value of that mountain [Strange]

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Nurse Lucy Letby guilty of murdering seven babies at Chester hospital

Worst child serial killer in modern British history could receive whole-life sentence

A neonatal nurse has been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more, making her the worst child serial killer in modern British history.

Lucy Letby, 33, was convicted of the “persistent, calculated and cold-blooded” murder of premature infants on the unit where she worked at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.

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Lord Clark calls for freedom of information review after data breaches

Leading architect of FoI Act says system in weakened state due to resistance to openness among government and civil servants

A leading architect of the Freedom of Information Act has called for a parliamentary review into the system after serious data breaches by police forces in responses to FoI requests.

The call by Lord Clark of Windermere, author of New Labour’s 1998 proposals that laid the groundwork for the law, also comes after accusations that Rishi Sunak’s government is failing to disclose information under the act.

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Lucy Letby: nurse found guilty of murdering seven babies – latest updates

Nurse convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at Countess of Chester hospital between 2015 and 2016

Pascale Jones, a senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, said Letby’s attacks were a “complete betrayal” of the trust placed in her.

Lucy Letby was entrusted to protect some of the most vulnerable babies. Little did those working alongside her know that there was a murderer in their midst.

She did her utmost to conceal her crimes, by varying the ways in which she repeatedly harmed babies in her care. She sought to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as nothing more than a worsening of each baby’s existing vulnerability.

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