I’m back from my doctor’s visit! It was nothing but good news. The outside walls of the clinic are covered with swarms of chironomid midges! Everywhere I looked, there they were, clinging to the brickwork. This is one big buffet for spiders that I’ll have to check again later, but I didn’t see many today […]

Currently making the rounds: I was suspicious, though. It’s too good to be true. So I snooped about, and found the original on the ADL website. OK, now, really — who thought they needed to edit the original sign to make it less evil and more obviously stupid? That was a waste of effort. Just […]

Eric Bailey shares some thoughts on creating, maintaining and evaluating accessible technology. Adam Silver passes on loads of knowledge about form design. High-quality and customizable Gatsby themes and more. Enjoy.

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Marianne Bellotti passes on some great advice that has stuck with her during the process of becoming a better manager. With Chrome 76, you'll be able to use the new "loading" attribute to lazy-load resources. Robin Weruch explains how to fetch data in React with Hooks and lots more. Enjoy.

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Adam Noffsinger explains how Dropbox Design migrated to Figma. Harry Roberts dives into 'Time to First Byte'. Linzi Berry, Product Design Systems Manager at Lyft, shares the story and core principles of their design system. Enjoy.

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Hui Jing sheds some light into why reading CSS specifications is immensely helpful to build a strong understanding of CSS. A look into how visual elements affect our perception, recognition and memory by interacting with digital products. Philip Walton explains how to bundle modules and lots more. Enjoy!

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Is the internet boring now? Jake Underwood reflects on the years gone by and asks the questions, where did the web’s old personality go? Virginia Start shares a 5-step guide for designing global addresses that she devised during her research for Shopify’s International team. A handy tool that automatically generates splash screen and image assets for your Progressive Web App and lots more.

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Mark Boulton shares his concerns he has with the current thinking of what constitutes a good design system in our industry. Rachel Andrew explores the situations in which you might encounter overflow in your web designs. Firefox 69 features a number of nice new additions and lots more. Enjoy.

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Milica Mihajlija covers how browser rendering works and how to navigate DevTools to diagnose animation performance issues. Travis Almand look at how to use intersection observer watches and lots more. Enjoy.

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A look behind the scenes at how Netflix keeps you engaged and addicted. An insight into how Design Ops at Spotify work. A look into moving from Sketch to Figma and lots more. Enjoy.

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Rachel Andrew looks at some common layout patterns that we can’t yet do on the web. All the React Conf 2019 videos are now live. A dive into making Instagram faster and so much more. Enjoy!

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Robin Rendle has some wise words around the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer. Figma posted about gathering the data behind your design systems. The Cloudflare team did a deep dive into how they went about reworking the use of colour within their products and so much more. Enjoy.

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Using DNA to track down 67-year-old James E. Zastawnik, police made an arrest in the 1987 murder of an Ohio girl.

More than 90% of the families, children and single adults that Border Patrol encountered in April were swiftly expelled under a public health order.

At his daily press conference on Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he feels like, for the first time, the state is “ahead” of the coronavirus because of efforts made to control the outbreak.

The workers fell asleep on the tracks while trying to make their way home during India's lockdown.

Jordan Goudreau once pushed a plan to protect U.S. schools. Then he moved on to a more daring pursuit, which also didn't end well.

The governor's order names the Dallas hairdresser who was jailed on Tuesday for staying open.

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department's decision to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, even though he had twice pleaded guilty to lying to investigators, was extraordinary and had no obvious precedent, a range of criminal law specialists said Thursday."I've been practicing for more time than I care to admit and I've never seen anything like this," said Julie O'Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at Georgetown University.The move is the latest in a series that the department, under Attorney General William Barr, has taken to undermine and dismantle the work of the investigators and prosecutors who scrutinized Russia's 2016 election interference operation and its links to people associated with the Trump campaign.The case against Flynn for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador was brought by the office of the former special counsel, Robert Mueller. It had become a political cause for Trump and his supporters, and the president had signaled that he was considering a pardon once Flynn was sentenced. But Barr instead abruptly short-circuited the case.On Thursday, Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, told the judge overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, that prosecutors were withdrawing the case. They were doing so, he said, because the department could not prove to a jury that Flynn's admitted lies to the FBI about his conversations with the ambassador were "material" ones.The move essentially erases Flynn's guilty pleas. Because he was never sentenced and the government is unwilling to pursue the matter further, the prosecution is virtually certain to end, although the judge must still decide whether to grant the department's request to dismiss it "with prejudice," meaning it could not be refiled in the future.A range of former prosecutors struggled to point to any previous instance in which the Justice Department had abandoned its own case after obtaining a guilty plea. They portrayed the justification Shea pointed to -- that it would be difficult to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the lies were material -- as dubious."A pardon would have been a lot more honest," said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at Duke University.The law regarding what counts as "material" is extremely forgiving to the government, Buell added. The idea is that law enforcement is permitted to pursue possible theories of criminality and to interview people without having firmly established that there was a crime first.James G. McGovern, a defense lawyer at Hogan Lovells and a former federal prosecutor, said juries rarely bought a defendant's argument that a lie did not involve a material fact."If you are arguing 'materiality,' you usually lose, because there is a tacit admission that what you said was untrue, so you lose the jury," he said.No career prosecutors signed the motion. Shea is a former close aide to Barr. In January, Barr installed him as the top prosecutor in the district that encompasses the nation's capital after maneuvering out the Senate-confirmed former top prosecutor in that office, Jessie K. Liu.Soon after, in an extraordinary move, four prosecutors in the office abruptly quit the case against Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone. They did so after senior Justice Department officials intervened to recommend a more lenient prison term than standard sentencing guidelines called for in the crimes Stone was convicted of committing -- including witness intimidation and perjury -- to conceal Trump campaign interactions with WikiLeaks.It soon emerged that Barr had also appointed an outside prosecutor, Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, to review the Flynn case files. The department then began turning over FBI documents showing internal deliberations about questioning Flynn, like what warnings to give -- even though such files are usually not provided to the defense.Flynn's defense team has mined such files for ammunition to portray the FBI as running amok in its decision to question Flynn in the first place. The questioning focused on his conversations during the transition after the 2016 election with the Russian ambassador about the Obama administration's imposition of sanctions on Russia for its interference in the American election.The FBI had already concluded that there was no evidence that Flynn, a former Trump campaign adviser, had personally conspired with Russia about the election, and it had decided to close out the counterintelligence investigation into him. Then questions arose about whether and why Flynn had lied to administration colleagues like Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the ambassador.Because the counterintelligence investigation was still open, the bureau used it as a basis to question Flynn about the conversations and decided not to warn him at its onset that it would be a crime to lie. Notes from Bill Priestap, then the head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, show that he wrote at one point about the planned interview: "What's our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"Barr has also appointed another outside prosecutor, John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to reinvestigate the Russia investigators even though the department's independent inspector general was already scrutinizing them.And his department has intervened in a range of other ways, from seeking more comfortable prison accommodations last year for Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, to abruptly dropping charges in March against two Russian shell companies that were about to go to trial for financing schemes to interfere in the 2016 election using social media.Barr has let it be known that he does not think the FBI ever had an adequate legal basis to open its Russia investigation in the first place, contrary to the judgment of the Justice Department's inspector general.In an interview on CBS News on Thursday, Barr defended the dropping of the charges against Flynn on the grounds that the FBI "did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage."Anne Milgram, a former federal prosecutor and former New Jersey attorney general who teaches criminal law at New York University, defended the FBI's decision to question Flynn in January 2017. She said that much was still a mystery about the Russian election interference operation at the time and that Flynn's lying to the vice president about his postelection interactions with a high-ranking Russian raised new questions.But, she argued, the more important frame for assessing the dropping of the case was to recognize how it fit into the larger pattern of the Barr-era department "undercutting the law enforcement officials and prosecutors who investigated the 2016 election and its aftermath," which she likened to "eating the Justice Department from the inside out."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has told employees to expect to work from home for the remainder of 2020, but will open offices for certain exceptions.

Abayev and members of his search team rummage the steppe for remains of the Red Army soldiers who fell in the autumn of 1942 in fierce fighting with Nazi troops pushing toward the Caspian Sea south of Stalingrad. Stiff resistance by the Red Army stopped the Wehrmacht onslaught in the steppes of Kalmykia, and months later the enemy's forces were encircled in Stalingrad and surrendered, a major defeat for the Nazis that marked a turning point in World War II.

Ministers say they will drive a "hard bargain" but Labour say they must be "wary" of President Trump.

The UK's chief scientist tells MPs mass testing is "part of the system that you need to get right".

Almost half a million people are at "high risk" of homelessness, local councils warn government.

As his great grandson launches a competition to "inspire like Churchill", we look at the PM's wartime words.

From boosting the economy through to health benefits, Westminster has been talking up the measure.

Some governments want to channel their economic recovery plans into low-carbon industries.

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton says he feels certain benefits from his enforced time away from Formula 1.

The lockdown has led to huge growth in the number of people buying garden seeds.

How closely have you been paying attention to what's been going on during the past seven days?

A selection of the week's best photos from across the continent and beyond.

A selection of news photographs taken around the world this week.

The self-styled "king and queen of rock 'n' roll" - who inspired Elvis and The Beatles - dies at 87.

It reportedly planned to re-open on Friday, but authorities say this could lead to more virus cases.

The self-styled "king and queen of rock 'n' roll" - who inspired Elvis and The Beatles - dies at 87.

The UK is testing its own design but a Google-Apple initiative is winning over many other nations.

More than 10 leading bodies say porn sites stream content featuring child sexual abuse and sex trafficking.

If universities are teaching online next term students will still have to pay full tuition fees.

What's it like in a school that has re-opened? Denmark and Germany show how it might look.