Headlines Edition

Thursday Headlines: The state of the union is wrong.

Amid economic turmoil in Venezuela, protestors are calling for President Nicolás Maduro to step down. The leader of the country's legislative body, Juan Guaidó, who has argued last year's elections were rigged by Maduro, has publicly assumed the presidency, and has now been backed by the Trump administration.

Reminder: The State of the Union is bad, and needs to stop. (Thomas Jefferson agreed, and discontinued the practice until Woodrow Wilson restarted it in 1913.)

Never mind the factual inaccuracies, such as that federal workers would not miss paychecks until Jan. 11, weeks after the meals, or that the food almost certainly was ordered and frozen well before the shutdown began. Multiple news outlets acted irresponsibly by picking up a story contrasting inmates’ extra meals against the government shutdown.

Trump's border wall would seize land from the Tohono O'odham tribe—which likely would require an act of Congress.

Michael Cohen, citing verbal attacks from Trump, says he will postpone indefinitely his congressional testimony, which was scheduled for next month.

Documents show just how far Trump Tower Moscow had progressed; it was planned to be Europe's tallest skyscraper.

The wealth gap is increasing rapidly: The world's top 26 billionaires have as much total wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion.

It will take years, if not decades, to recover. Trump is undoing the diversity of federal judgeships.

AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the US Government Accountability Office’s website. A journalist experiments with removing Amazon from her life, and learns that means living without the internet.

A company is offering Facebook ads targeting individuals, and marketing it as a way to manipulate people into sex.

Facebook has introduced a new service that will block Facebook for $20 a month.

Anti-rejection drugs for organ transplants can damage other organs. Scientists hope to instead train bodies to accept transplants.

When injuries end tennis careers—and they often do—there's no team contract to fall back on. It's all over, and it's emotional.

A video of Google Earth aerial stills sequenced to show the world moving below us.

An interesting chart depicting the evolution of the English alphabet from 1750 BCE to today.

New work from artist Kate Jenkins, of crocheted-food renown: knitted and crocheted seafood.