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At least 10 people have died as torrential downpours over the weekend drenched parts of the south-eastern US, submerging roads and houses.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said nine people have died in his state, after making an emergency disaster declaration.

About 1,000 people stranded in flood waters had to be rescued, he also said on Sunday.

The same areas could now be affected by drier but colder conditions, and the risk of snow, ice and significant disruption - according to BBC forecaster John Hutchinson.

The other death over the weekend was in Georgia, where a man lying in his bed was struck by an uprooted tree that crashed into his home.

From the article:

Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica and other publications such as Wired and The New Yorker, was joined in the lawsuit by The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media.

From another article:

The founders sold Reddit to Condé Nast for $10M less than a year after launch (in 2006). Ohanian and Huffman stayed on for a few years after the acquisition but, eventually, both went on to start other projects. Neither of them would be gone for long.

So, does Condé Nast own Reddit? Not exactly. Condé Nast owned Reddit until 2011 when Reddit became an “independent subsidiary” of Advance Publications—the company that owns Condé Nast, among others.

https://www.makeuseof.com/who-owns-reddit-company-founders/

Several agencies are rescinding telework and remote work policies for their employees, following up on President Donald Trump’s mandate to send federal employees back to the office full time.

The Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding telework and remote work agreements for its employees, and setting near-term targets for all staff to return to the office full-time.

EPA’s Office of the Administrator, in an email obtained by Federal News Network, told its workers Wednesday that the agency “has determined that its employees’ duties require them to be face-to-face with their supervisors, colleagues, clients, and the public to the maximum extent possible

Yet contrary to what Republicans have long claimed, a “leaner” government does not necessarily mean less debt, and the Republican Congress has made it known that they’re less interested in reducing budgetary expenses than they are in giving tax breaks to America’s richest people. Indeed, the new budget that the GOP is currently attempting to pass would add $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, new estimates show. The way Republicans plan to pay for the renewal of Trump’s tax cuts is by making deep cuts to healthcare and anti-poverty programs that help millions of Americans (including many Trump voters) survive.

Using a simple and sweeping executive order, President Donald Trump has sought to further empower Elon Musk’s DOGE in its mission to gut the federal government. On Tuesday, Trump published yet another EO that enshrined DOGE’s authority to lay waste to the federal workforce, while also giving the organization broad new powers.

The Trump administration is working to massively expand the use of so-called expedited removal, which allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to quickly deport certain immigrants without their cases going to court.

Trump has unleashed ICE agents to use expedited removal beyond the border, and potentially on a much larger group of immigrants — those who have been living in the country for less than two years. He is the first president to exercise the law to the full extent allowed by Congress.

The president sought to expand its use beyond the southern border during his first term, but legal challenges prevented him from doing so until the final months of 2020, when an appeals court cleared the way for the expansion.

Termination notices were sent to employees at the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the General Services Administration (GSA), Reuters first reported on Thursday.

“The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment with the Agency,” according to letters sent to at least 45 probationary employees at the SBA.

After temporarily blocking a deadline for U.S. President Donald Trump's deferred resignation program to purge the federal workforce, a judge on Wednesday allowed the initiative to move forward, ruling that the labor unions challenging it lacked the standing to do so and the court didn't have jurisdiction over their claims.

District Judge George O'Toole Jr. initially halted the program's progress last Thursday, just hours before a deadline for federal workers to decide whether to take the "Fork in the Road" offer seemingly inspired by Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. The billionaire is now chairing Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the president further empowered last Tuesday.

The lawsuit—filed Wednesday in federal court by the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), and ACLU of the District of Columbia—was brought on behalf of several plaintiffs, including the sister of a Venezuelan man being held at the facility. It demands that all those being detained have immediate access to legal assistance.

According to the groups, the administration "has provided virtually no information about immigrants newly detained at Guantánamo, including how long they will be held there, under what authority and conditions, subject to what legal processes, or whether they will have any means of communicating with their families and attorneys."

"The Privacy Act [of 1974] makes it unlawful for OPM Defendants to hand over access to OPM's millions of personnel records to DOGE Defendants, who lack a lawful and legitimate need for such access," the lawsuit said. "No exception to the Privacy Act covers DOGE Defendants' access to records held by OPM. OPM Defendants' action granting DOGE Defendants full, continuing, and ongoing access to OPM's systems and files for an unspecified period means that tens of millions of federal-government employees, retirees, contractors, job applicants, and impacted family members and other third parties have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords."

The lawsuit names Musk as a defendant "in his capacity as director of the US Doge Temporary Service," which was created by President Trump and has a mandate lasting until July 4, 2026. The temporary organization is separate from the US DOGE Service, which used to be called the US Digital Service. DOGE, of course, is a reference to the popular meme involving a Shiba Inu and in the government context stands for the Department of Government Efficiency.

We updated our Supreme Connections database with new disclosures on Thursday, adding Justice Samuel Alito’s deferred 2023 filing and eight previously missing disclosures from Justice Clarence Thomas dating back to the 1990s.

Supreme Connections is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them.

This update includes Alito’s 2023 disclosure, which was released in August after he received an extension, as well as eight Thomas filings from the 1990s provided by Documented. Those filings were not previously available in our database. While federal ethics law requires judges to file these disclosures each year, the law requires most filings to be destroyed after six years, making many past disclosures hard to find.

The company then used a legal loophole that stripped the affordability protections from the apartments. The maneuver appears to have been lucrative for the company, which bought the property for under $20 million and flipped it two years later for $63 million. Today, advertised rents there have gone up by around 50%.

Similar stories have been playing out across the country for years, as developers and real estate investors take advantage of an obscure section of the tax code known as the “qualified contract” provision. It allows owners of low-income rental properties that have received generous tax credits to raise rents far sooner than the law typically requires.

The trustees of Alaska’s Permanent Fund, an $80 billion savings account whose earnings provide residents with annual dividends and help pay for government services, decided to invest more money in companies with ties to Alaska. More than $29 million went to Peter Pan, according to figures provided by the Permanent Fund’s current board chair.

The deal ended disastrously last year with the company’s liquidation, hundreds of unpaid creditors and a likely total loss for Alaskans on their investment.

A ProPublica investigation, in collaboration with the Anchorage Daily News and Northern Journal, revealed that the Permanent Fund’s leadership and its hired management firm ignored or overlooked warning signs leading up to the deal.