Ella Langley, distractions and Lane Kiffin: Pete Golding calls Ole Miss-LSU'high school homecoming' 'A win is a win' says athlete who didn't let a little diarrhea keep her from finishing in first place Kansas City Chiefs' roster concerns linger as they host the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football Florida State fires AD Michael Alford, as Mike Norvell's seat reaches a boiling point in Tallahassee Madison Beer's bid to become the NFL's next Taylor Swift hits road bump, Browns are a mess & a Daejon Love fan WWE broadcaster believes'the pieces are all in place' for an upset as Penta challenges Roman Reigns for title Denny Hamlin says forward-facing sonar in professional bass fishing has gone'a little overboard' NASCAR driver says quiet part out loud about Sophie Cunningham, the WNBA looks even worse & car goes airborne! Rams' Sean McVay reveals wife's reality check after mulling media jump following losing season in 2022 Caitlin Clark says she and Angel Reese have'always been friends' after winning FIBA Women's World Cup If half of what AI leaders are saying is true, it's scary stuff: David Asman US declassifies footage of downed airman's rescue in Iran OutKick Sports Mother Jones' WNBA'trans panic' story shows what happens when activism masquerades as journalism The outlet's framing of XX-XY Athletics revenue as motive sits uneasily alongside its own fundraising appeals In this episode of The Riley Gaines Show, Riley sits down with Jen Sey, founder of XXXY Athletics, to discuss Sophie Cunningham, Caitlin Clark, WNBA fan censorship, women's sports, corporate messaging, and why the culture around protecting female athletes is shifting in real time. Riley and Jen break down the controversy surrounding fans being told to cover up shirts and signs, the rise of Sophie Cunningham as a joyful and fearless figure in women's basketball, and why major institutions like the WNBA, Nike, and Dick's Sporting Goods appear out of step with the public. They also discuss sex-based protections in sports, the WTA's testing policy, and why the truth about women's athletics still matters. Mother Jones wants you to know XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey is making money.

Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant.Mother Jones illustration; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma; Arthur Ogleznev/Unsplash; Logan Weaver/Unsplash In April 2024, the American police tech firm Axon, which leads the market for police body cameras, released a tool it billed as "revolutionary": Draft One, an AI-powered software package that would turn body camera footage and audio into intelligible police reports. Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant, providing more than 5,000 police departments across the country with a suite of cloud-based products to manage evidence collection and storage. Draft One, the AI tool, connects with the company's body cameras and evidence storage service to write police reports with little human intervention. At least 21 departments have experimented with the software. The use of artificial intelligence in generating police reports has been particularly troubling, according to civil rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, because of generative AI's propensity towards racial and gender bias, and its tendency to insert inaccuracies into texts--including wholesale inventions known by technologists as "hallucinations." "I can almost guarantee [AI] reports have been used in plea deals," a police captain wrote.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conducts a news conference to discuss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network survey.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying "disease" that "destroys," as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by "environmental factors," a still-speculative thesis that's clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines. Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism.

For a brief moment in November, the TheoBros, a network of militant Christian nationalist influencers, made news when Trump nominated one of their allies, former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth attends a church that is affiliated with the TheoBro movement, and he has cited TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, as someone who has had a major influence on him. While the controversies surrounding Hegseth's alleged alcohol abuse and mismanagement of funds meant for veterans continue to make the news, the TheoBros have receded into the background. But as it turns, out, they are embroiled in a major controversy of their own. A simmering divide over how Christians should regard Judaism has ignited into a conflagration.

By now you've seen the scenes of young and middle-aged Americans wearing cargo shorts and Patagonia Baggies Brimmers in front of movie studios holding ironic picket signs, such as "Chat GPT doesn't have childhood trauma!" As the battle grinds into its 12th week, with no end in sight--and the actors' union now part of the strike too--it's easy to think that a fight between a bunch of "rich Hollywood writers" and the big studios and networks may mean nothing to you, but it's quite the opposite. This is the labor fight of our generation. While in the broader labor force, the share of union members has fallen from 34 percent in the 1950s to 10 percent today, Hollywood remains a devout union town. Except for reality TV and some indie films, the majority of all personnel involved in film and TV production are part of organized labor.

In a new letter, more than 1,600 Google workers are demanding that the company end its work with police departments across the country. "The past weeks have shown us that addressing racism is not merely an issue of words, but of actions taken to dismantle the actual structures that perpetuate it," the workers wrote in a draft of the to-be-released letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and obtained by Mother Jones. The letter was signed by 1,670 employees, according to a screenshot that was shared with Mother Jones by someone with access to the signature list, and was organized by Googlers Against Racism, an advocacy group within the company. "While we as individuals hold difficult but necessary conversations with our family, friends and peers, we are also incredibly disappointed by our company's response," the letter continued, referencing Google's lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement. The letter also demands that the company "stop making our technology available to police forces."

This fall, Gabon was facing an odd and tenuous political situation. President Ali Bongo had been out of the country since October receiving medical treatment in Saudi Arabia and London and had not been seen in public. People in Gabon and observers outside the country were growing suspicious about the president's well being, and the government's lack of answers only fueled doubts; some even said he was dead. After months of little information, on December 9th, the country's vice president announced that Bongo had suffered a stroke in the autumn, but remained in good shape. Despite such assurances, civil society groups and many members of the public wondered why Bongo, if he was well, had not made any public appearances, save for a few pictures of him released by the government along with a silent video.

David Byrne performs at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in April.Amy Harris/Invision/AP Since the late-1970s, when David Byrne formed the iconic (and alas, now-defunct) Talking Heads, his career has been an endless stream of fascinating side projects, starting with his super-weird, super-cool Brian Eno collab, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and his scoring of choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel. He founded his own World Music label, Luaka Bop, and wrote half a dozen books, including the best-selling quasi-memoir How Music Works. His obsession with the National Color Guard Championships led to a documentary called Contemporary Color. Most recently, his American Utopia tour featured dancers and musicians untethered from the standard concert setup by means of wireless and wearable instruments--nary an amp nor drumset in sight. In November, as the tour wrapped up, came the re-release of Byrne's 1986 film, True Stories, which explores the inner lives and outer quirks of residents of a fictional Texas town and is based on stories from tabloid newspapers.

One candidate fled the violence of Colombia with her mom at age nine. Another fled the Taliban at age six. A third says his parents were almost deported from the United States. Catalina Cruz and Safiya Wazir won their primary elections in New York and New Hampshire respectively last week, while William Tong is campaigning to become Connecticut's first Asian American attorney general. They're representative of a surge of minority candidates in this year's midterm elections, in which more women and people of color are not only running for office--but also winning votes and unseating entrenched politicians.

On Monday, a group of 650 Salesforce employees called on CEO Marc Benioff to "re-examine" the company's relationship with US Customs and Border Protection in light of the agency's role in separating children and parents at the border. "Given the inhumane separation of children from their parents currently taking place at the border, we believe that our core value of Equality is at stake and that Salesforce should re-examine our contractual relationship with CBP and speak out against its practices," states the employee letter, which was obtained by Buzzfeed. Last week, employees at Amazon and Microsoft released similar letters, calling on their CEOs to end relationships with policing agencies at the border. The protests come about a month after an employee protest at Google resulted in the company deciding to not renew its contract providing the Pentagon with artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage. Salesforce, a cloud computing company based in San Francisco, is best known for its customer relationship software.