There were 65 other passengers and four crew members on board the plane at the time of the incident. No injuries were reported, according to American Airlines. Following the incident, the plane was taken out of service and all of the passengers were rebooked on alternate flights.
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Following allegations of inappropriate behavior against actor Bill Murray on theset of âBeing Mortal,â Searchlight Pictures has halted production on the Aziz Ansari led film, reports say.
According to reports from multiple outlets, including the New York Times and Variety, the film studio issued a letter to cast crew on Wednesday saying the suspension occurred because of a complaint, but did not go into further details.
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Has anyone started a Late Stage Capitalist Assholes thread yet?
This is such an intersectional thing (below) that I canât decide whether to post it here, or one of the other wrath threads.
Because of course they are.
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dEmoCR4tS h4Ve iMmOr4l sEx liVeSâŚ/s
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Rachael Stonecipher, an English and journalism teacher at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, was suspended last September after posting rainbow-colored âSafe Spaceâ stickers outside her door that were later taken down, as the Dallas Morning News and other local media first reported. Now, Stonecipher, who was the schoolâs openly gay educator, could be fired over posting the stickers, as the Morning News noted in a follow-up report earlier this week.
The Irving Independent School District (ISD), which oversees MacArthur High, has previously tried to justify the suspension by claiming that the âSafe Spaceâ stickers could actually make straight and cisgender students feel excluded.
âLabeling certain classrooms as safe havens for certain groups could communicate to students who do not see themselves reflected in that classroomâs decorations that they are unwanted or unsafe in those roomsâ the ISD said in a statement at the time, as local NPR affiliate KERA noted.
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Totally, because we all know that if you wear a âSave the Whalesâ t-shirt youâre basically saying, âKill the Dolphins.â FFS. 
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âGood newsâ and âjust plain assholesâ. I flipped a coin.
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Interlopers who killed a bear on protected lands and tried to hide the evidenceâŚ
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Oh man, better call Xeni!
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Tobacco Giants doing something exploitive???
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(source: NYT)
April 26, 2022
Good morning. The worldâs richest person, unhappy with the policies of a major social media platform, is buying it.
The billionairesâ world
Two years ago, the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a statistic that you donât normally see. It was the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans.
That tiny slice represented only 18 households, Saez and Zucman estimated. Each one had an average net worth of about $66 billion in 2020. Together, the share of national wealth owned by the group had risen by a factor of nearly 10 since 1982.
Source: Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
This wealth conveys vast power on a small group of people. They can attempt to shape politics, as the Koch family has done. They can create a global charity, as Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates have done. They can buy a national media organization, as Jeff Bezos has done.
Or they can buy a social media network when its policies annoy them, as Elon Musk is in the process of doing.
Twitter announced yesterday that its board had accepted a $44 billion bid for the company from Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the worldâs richest man. He is using $21 billion of his own cash in the deal.
Musk, who calls himself a âfree speech absolutist,â has suggested that he will be less aggressive than Twitterâs current management about blocking some content â including misinformation, in all likelihood. He plans to take the company private, which will give him tighter control than he would have over a public company.
The deal is the latest example of how extreme inequality is shaping American society. A small number of very wealthy people end up making decisions that affect millions of others. That has always been true, of course. But it is truer when inequality is so high. In the U.S. economy, wealth inequality has exceeded even the peaks of the 1920s, as another chart from Saez and Zucmanâs research shows:
Source: Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
The Musk deal also recalls the Gilded Age, as my colleague Shira Ovide wrote: âThe closest comparison to this might be the 19th-century newspaper barons like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and the fictional Charles Foster Kane, who used their papers to pursue their personal agendas, sensationalize world events and harass their enemies.â
After news broke yesterday about the Musk-Twitter agreement, I asked Andrew Ross Sorkin for his reaction to it. Andrew, as many readers know, has been covering finance and business leaders for the past two decades at The Times. He created and runs our DealBook newsletter.
Andrewâs response got me thinking about these larger questions of inequality, and Iâm turning over the rest of todayâs lead item to him. Below his thoughts about the Twitter deal, we include more Times coverage, as well as analysis from elsewhere.
Friends and foes
Muskâs acquisition of Twitter will reignite big questions about the influence of the billionaire class and the power of technology over our national discourse.
This month, Musk was complaining that Mark Zuckerberg, Metaâs founder, had too much power, arguing that the way Meta was structured, âMark Zuckerberg the 14thâ would someday be running it.
Now Musk will own Twitter outright as a private company. He will report to himself. So if he decides to allow Donald Trump back on the platform â which seems like the elephant in the room â it will be Muskâs choice and his choice alone. (Trump has claimed he will not return, because he wants to support his own social media platform.)
Washington is atwitter trying to understand Muskâs ideology. He is a self-styled libertarian without an ideology. But is not having an ideology an ideology unto itself?
Musk has said he wants more âfree speechâ and less moderation on Twitter. What will that mean in practice? More bullying? More lewd commentary and images? More misinformation?
Perhaps a window into Muskâs approach is a tweet he sent on Friday making fun of Bill Gates with a crude reference to anatomy, as a way to get even with Gates, who had admitted to betting against shares of Tesla.
Which raised this question: When conspiracy theorists falsely posted that Gates was paying to develop Covid vaccines to implant chips in people, Twitter down-ranked the content and added fact-check notices. If Musk were running Twitter then, would he have left those posts up to needle his nemesis?
The deal will give Musk enormous influence over politicians, celebrities and the media, with the ability to platform and de-platform them at will.
But some will have sway over him, too, in ways that could distort what the public sees on Twitter. For example, Twitter has no presence in China. Musk does: A huge chunk of Teslaâs growth is dependent on that country. What happens when Chinese officials tell him to remove content from Twitter that they find objectionable?
Back here in the U.S., Muskâs SpaceX business relies, in large part, on contracts with the Defense Department. His Tesla business is in discussions with the U.S. government about a national charging station infrastructure. His Boring Company, which digs tunnels, relies on governments for contracts. If a politician that controls the purse strings for any of Muskâs companies were to publish misinformation, would Musk remove it?
There are no answers to these questions just yet. But we will find out soon. Likely on Twitter.
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Thanks for also posting the Sorkin op Ed! I saw that earlier but then couldnât find it to post. Brings up a lot of very valid points and questions I hadnât thought of yet.
I did think it fell short on a hugely major point, though: what we really need is not for Musk to act like a morally decent human (though, that would be nice), what we need are federal regulations around internet platforms like we have (arguably, had, theyâve slid) around broadcast radio and television. We canât rely on some benevolent dictator to act for the common good.
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