FlashMobOfOne

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to target Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the country’s desalination plants. Such a move — and Iran’s possible targeting of the plants of its Gulf Arab neighbors — could have devastating impacts across the water-starved Middle East.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said if a deal to end the war isn’t reached “shortly” and the Strait of Hormuz, where much oil passes via tankers, is not immediately reopened, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

The biggest danger, analysts warn, may not be what Trump could do to Iran, but how Tehran could retaliate. Iran relies on desalination for a small share of its water supply while Gulf Arab states depend on it for the vast majority.

Artist: Grickle at gricklemart.com

n 1976, a horrifying discovery was made at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California.

A camera crew for the television show The Six Million Dollar Man was visiting the park to film a scene in the funhouse. While preparing the set for filming, one of the crew members went to move what he thought was a mannequin hanging from a noose.

North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the United States that is not on Google Maps Street View. YouTube documentarian Chris Parr, who grew up not too far from North Oaks, set out to change that earlier this year. For a brief few days, he literally put North Oaks on the map. And then it was gone again.

“It’s known by Minnesotans as a place where executives and CEOs live,” Parr told 404 Media. “Famously Walter Mondale is from North Oaks, but also like United Healthcare executives and Target executives.”

Five Guys’ chief executive officer, Jerry Murrell, said he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of his US-based burger restaurant chain because “I didn’t want anybody shooting me” after the company recently “screwed … up” a buy-one-get-one-free promotion.

Murrell did not elaborate on the comment, which he gave to Fortune in an interview published on Wednesday – but it came a little more than a year after the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on a midtown Manhattan street in what was widely considered a murderous rebuke of the US health insurance industry’s profit-driven practices.

Fortune’s conversation with Murrell revisited a two-for-one promotion that Five Guys organized in February to celebrate its 40th anniversary that proved to be much more popular than the chain expected. Five Guys’ app crashed as customers sought to take advantage of the promotion, and many overwhelmed chain locations discontinued the offer early, inviting backlash on social media.

Hey all, feel free to delete if sharing YT videos isn't permitted, but I made a video on the Fediverse last week and specifically talking about Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Peertube.

Just thought I'd share in case anyone wanders by and wants an overview.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for access to evidence they say they need to independently investigate three shootings by federal officers, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The lawsuit claims that the federal government reneged on its promise to cooperate with state investigations after the surge of federal law enforcement in Minneapolis. State officials are seeking a court order demanding that the Trump administration comply.

“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters.

The lawsuit marks an escalation in the clash between Minnesota leaders and the Trump administration over the investigations into the high-profile shootings by federal officers that sparked public outcry and protests. The Trump administration has suggested that Minnesota officials don’t have jurisdiction to investigate, but state officials insist they need to conduct their own probes because they don’t trust the federal government to investigate itself.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.

TotalEnergies has agreed to what’s essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead, the Department of Interior announced Monday.

President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to halt offshore wind construction, but federal judges repeatedly overturned those orders.

The Interior Department hailed the “innovative agreement” with the French energy giant and said, “the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.″

Environmental groups denounced the deal as an alternate way to block wind projects, with one group calling it a “billion-dollar bribe” to kill clean energy.

I've never seen labeling like this before. Interesting.

A Louisiana man who resigned as a Roman Catholic deacon after a priest molested his son and then was excommunicated from the church entirely by his local bishop is asking global church leaders to inform him of the fate of his appeal against the prelate’s decision, something that was supposed to be resolved more than a year earlier.

In a letter to the Vatican entity in charge of clerical discipline, a canon – or church – law attorney representing Scott Peyton asserts that his case is “nuanced and requires careful consideration”. “To the extent that the delay reflects such diligence, he is grateful,” said the letter to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), prepared by Dawn Eden Goldstein on 3 February and obtained recently by the Guardian.

Nonetheless, the letter continued, Peyton “wishes that I convey to you that, from his perspective, the unduly long span of time with no communication from your office only compounds the injustices that he and his family have suffered from the church”.

Word of Peyton’s plight earned international news headlines in March 2024, with many outlets characterizing his excommunication as a remarkably harsh consequence that his child’s molester does not appear to have ever faced because the church, in sum, does not consider the abuser’s offense on its own excommunicable.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy was supposed to start the year with a bang, fueled by an unusually large jump in tax refunds from President Donald Trump’s tax cut legislation. Yet spiking gas prices are on track to eat up those refunds, leaving most Americans with little extra to spend.

“Next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time,” Trump said in a prime-time speech in December that was intended to address voters’ concerns about the economy and stubbornly high prices.

But that was before the Iran war, which began Feb. 28. Oil and gas prices have soared since then, with the nationwide average price of gas reaching $3.94 Sunday, up more than a dollar from just a month earlier.

An AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed a large amount of Meta’s sensitive data to some of its employees, in the latest example of AI causing upheaval in a large tech company.

The leak, which Meta confirmed, happened when an employee asked for guidance on an engineering problem on an internal forum. An AI agent responded with a solution, which the employee implemented – causing a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed to its engineers for two hours.

“No user data was mishandled,” a Meta spokesperson said, and they emphasised that a human could also give erroneous advice. The incident, first reported by The Information, triggered a major internal security alert inside Meta, which the company has said is an indication of how seriously it takes data protection.