The new biopic Michael, about the tortured King of Pop, had a record-breaking opening weekend — despite the fact that the film celebrates the musical legacy of Michael Jackson, a man credibly accused of sexually abusing multiple children. 

After the success of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, it was tempting to think that there was a permanent asterisk next to Jackson’s name. Advertisers stopped using his music, and The Simpsons pulled his episode from syndication. Now, however, Leaving Neverland has been wiped from HBO after legal finagling from Jackson’s estate, and Michael is an enormous hit. We have clear proof that audiences are ready to put that unpleasantness behind them and instead embrace Jackson’s inarguable musical genius.

Some audience members have doubtless made the calculation that with Jackson long dead, the accusations against him are distant, too, leaving them with no particular ethical reasons to deprive themselves of the pleasure of seeing a Michael Jackson concert recreation on the big screen. (“Forget what the ‘professional’ critics are saying theyve completely missed the mark on this one,” begins one audience review on Rotten Tomatoes. “If you want to experience the magic of the King of Pop, this movie delivers.”)

Other Jackson defenders have decided that Jackson was innocent. TikTok is full of videos laying out the basics of the case and asking “Guilty or innocent?”, with the majority of commenters saying “innocent.” “The world owes Michael an apology” is a sentiment that pops up a lot. 

Then there’s a variation on that defense, rooted in the long, ugly history of racism in the criminal justice system in America. Some of his defenders — including Michael director Antoine Fuqua — believe that Jackson was unfairly smeared by a system looking to bring down a successful Black man, in the same way that so many other Black men have been wrongly accused and maligned before.

“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua told the New Yorker. He added that an early cut of Michael showed Jackson brutalized by the police over the course of their investigation, “being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” before it was excised from the film for legal reasons. According to the New Yorker, he doubts the intentions of some of the accusers’ parents and says he doesn’t know whether the allegations are true or not. 

“This may sound like an excuse, but what many don’t understand is how hard it is for older generations to square what has so often happened in the past — the fear that society is just tearing down another good Black man — with the reality that these men could have been, or are convicted of having been, harmful,” wrote Nadira Goffe for Slate, in an article about Jackson’s loyal older Black fandom. 

Talking about Michael, then, requires pitting two marginalized groups against each other: Black men and abused children, neither of whom is served by the American justice system. It makes discussing the case even sadder and harder than it already is.

To be clear, the case against Michael Jackson really is extraordinarily strong. At least 10 people have publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them as children, in remarkably consistent and detailed stories. Only one accusation resulted in a criminal trial, in 2005, and Jackson was found not guilty. That, however, is par for the course when it comes to child sex abuse cases, even those in which the accused adult doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend in their defense. A 2019 study shows that fewer than one in five of all child sex abuse cases lead to prosecution. Of those, about half result in a conviction. 

On the rare occasion that there is a trial, it is almost always a bad experience for the child at its center. There are persistent myths about how child sexual abuse — that children will always have physical injuries, that they will immediately tell an adult, that they can be manipulated into lying about accusations — that affect how their allegations are perceived. A 2017 study of defense tactics in child sex abuse cases found that “just as women are met with doubt when they report sexual assault, the justice system remains skeptical of children’s testimony.” Their mothers are often blamed for allowing the abuse to happen. In Jackson’s 2005 trial, his defense lawyer sarcastically referred to Jackson’s child accusers as “these little lambs,” suggesting that they were involved in “the biggest con of their careers” against Jackson. 

At the same time, there’s a reason that a story about the American state attempting to take down a Black man at the top of his game resonates so deeply. It’s based on the real problem of how our criminal justice system treats Black people: unjustly. 

According to the ACLU, Black people in the United States are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, while one in 81 Black adults in the US is serving time in state prison. There is also a long, long history in this country of Black men being falsely accused of sex crimes. That was the stated reason for the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys and the Central Park Five, the racist murder of Emmett Till, and thousands of monstrous lynchings. You can understand why someone would look at this history and cry foul.

But boys and children of color — the alleged victim in the Jackson case that made it to trial in 2005 is Latino — face unique barriers when they are sexually assaulted. “As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature,” writes Aisha K. Gill, a professor of criminology and co-editor of the book Child Sexual Abuse in Black and Minoritised Communities. Both racism and culture affect whether they are believed and the support they receive.

All of these numbers and statistics and sad moments in American history represent groups of people whom the justice system bludgeons with the law as though it were a weapon, who are routinely humiliated and rarely protected. To put them in opposition to each other is a dark and uncomfortable thing. It is far, far easier to watch a glorified concert film of Jackson’s greatest hits and bask in the glee of it. But an honest reckoning with Jackson’s legacy would require facing the strength of the evidence against him, darkness and all, and not looking away from it.

Almost three years ago, sudo-rs was announced to the world. Just last week, it became the default sudo implementation in the Ubuntu LTS release Resolute Raccoon. Now is a good time to reflect.

A controversial bill in Colorado that would have undone some repair protections in the state has failed. The bill had been the target of right-to-repair advocates, who saw it as a bellwether for how tech companies might try to undo repair legislation more broadly in the US.

Colorado’s landmark 2024 repair law, the Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment, went into effect in January 2026 and ensured access to tools and documentation people needed to modify and fix digital electronics such as phones, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. The new bill, SB26-090, would have carved out an exception to those repair protections for “critical infrastructure,” a loosely defined term that repair advocates worried could be applied to just about any technology.

SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.

Danny Katz, executive director of the local nonprofit consumer advocacy group CoPIRG, says the battle was a group effort. Speaking against the bill were a cohort of repair advocates from organizations such as PIRG, Repair.org, iFixit, Consumer Reports, and local businesses and environmental groups like Blue Star Recyclers, Recycle Colorado, Environment Colorado, and GreenLatinos.

“While we were making progress at chipping away at the momentum for it, we had still been losing,” Katz wrote in an email to WIRED after the hearing. “So, we took nothing for granted, and I believe the incredible testimony from the broad range of cybersecurity experts, businesses, repair advocates, recyclers, and people who want the freedom to fix their stuff made a big difference.”

Supporters of the bill, backed by companies like Cisco, had pointed to the potential for cybersecurity risks as their motivation for altering the law’s language. If companies were required to make repair tools available to anyone, the theory goes, what’s to stop bad actors from using those tools to reverse engineer critical technology like Internet routers? Withholding those tools, they posited, would make them less available to hackers who could misuse them. Advocates of the bill said that companies should be allowed to keep their secrets if it ensured security, though that argument starts to fall apart with a little scrutiny.

At one point in the hearing, Democrat Chad Clifford, a Colorado state representative and the House committee’s vice chair who was also a prime sponsor of the bill, pointed to what appeared to be a reference to Cloudflare’s very public use of a wall of lava lamps to help randomize Internet encryption, citing that as an example of the need for sensitive systems to be inscrutable to be secure.

“I don’t know why anybody has to have lava lamps on a wall to keep the Chinese from getting into a network, but it’s what they came up with that worked,” Clifford said. “How they do that, I believe they should be able to keep it a secret, even in Colorado.”

The problem with that argument, as cybersecurity experts pointed out during the hearing, is that the vast majority of hacks are not carried out via replacement parts or by taking apart individual machines. They’re remote hacks, where the attacker makes changes in real time, and the people defending have to make changes on the fly without worrying about acquiring permission from the company that makes the equipment.

“There is no time,” cybersecurity expert and white hat hacker Billy Rios said during the hearing. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Besides the cybersecurity argument, the other point of contention was the economics of angering the big tech companies that have invested in the state.

“They’re not going to comply and give away the keys to their kingdom for the things that are securing billions of dollars of interest for their customers over the law that we passed,” Clifford said. “What they’re going to do is just not have commerce on those items here.”

That argument didn’t carry enough weight to change the vote in supporters’ favor. By the end of the hearing, it was clear that everyone was exhausted and not entirely clear on how exactly the new bill and amendments would pan out.

“What are we really trying to do here?” said Colorado Representative Naquetta Ricks in her no vote at the end of the hearing. “Are we protecting just one company, or are we looking at really critical infrastructure? I’m not convinced.”

Nathan Proctor, senior director of US PIRG’s Campaign for the Right to Repair, said he was relieved to see lawmakers understand that repair isn’t inherently dangerous. But he knows this isn’t over. He fully expects lobbyists to keep up the fight in Colorado and more broadly. He points to recent repair laws in other states like Iowa and to the increasing number of states considering repair legislation, readying up for the inevitable battles there, too.

“The fact of the matter is, unfixable stuff is everywhere,” Proctor wrote. “This is a widespread problem, and it requires a widespread response.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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In my misspent youth, I once worked a summer job as a waiter at Shoney's. It is an experience that I do not recommend. But it did teach me two valuable things: 1) How not to drown in a puddle of my own embarrassment when marching around the dining room with my fellow servers and singing a birthday song that began, "Happy, happy birthday, we're so glad you came"; and 2) That when the surly line cooks ran out of chicken fried steak, they would shout "86 the chicken fried steak!" through the pass.

To "86" something, in restaurant slang, is to say that it is out, finished, gone, through, not on the menu anymore. This is the only sense in which I have heard the term used in my entire life.

But according to Wikipedia, which naturally has an entry about the term, two further meanings do exist. "86" can also be applied to people a restaurant refuses to serve, and some slang dictionaries say it can refer to murder.

Which brings us to former FBI director James Comey, Instagram, and a picture of seashells.

86 the shells!

In 2025, Comey posted to Instagram an image of shells arranged in the shape of two numbers: "86 47."

James Comey's seashell post.

Trump, our 47th President, has long harbored a grudge against Comey, going back to Comey's investigation of Trump's possible Russian ties. Trump famously fired Comey in 2017—then, for good measure, fired his prosecutor daughter in 2025.

Trump has been clear for years about his desire to use the power of the federal government to make life more difficult for Comey, and federal officials in his second term have been willing to comply.

Fortunately, they have also been pretty stupid. Through a series of staggeringly incompetent actions, the administration already had its first Comey indictment tossed out in Virginia—a loss so epic that it got Trump's interim US attorney for Virginia booted, too.

Today, on completely new and unrelated charges, the Department of Justice has indicted Comey again, this time in North Carolina. The charge is nothing less than a threat to murder the president.

And it's all based on that single seashell image.

The new indictment says that Comey "did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out '86 47,' which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

You might expect more details in a case this serious and against such a high-ranking former official; there are none.

The DOJ held a 15-minute press conference in which three men in suits tried to make this all sound normal and natural.

Get in the clown car

A case this ridiculous, and about such a weighty matter, may be the bulbous red nose that completes the full-on beclownment of the Department of Justice under Trump. (The DOJ is currently run by one of Trump's personal lawyers.) Popular legal blog Above the Law, for instance, called today's move a "new low point for DOJ integrity."

As we have learned just in a single day, the federal government is willing to come after your broadcast licenses if you make a joke that Trump doesn't like... and your freedom if you make social media posts that Trump doesn't like. These are apparently the ways in which Trump is fulfilling his promise to halt government "censorship" of US citizens.

Trump himself is, of course, a famously peace-loving—sorry, "peace prize"-loving—man, most recently seen warning Iran that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" in a social media post so unhinged even the pope had to step in and tell him to knock it off.

But apparently, it's James Comey's restaurant-slang seashell Instagram image that's the real crime, the sort of thing stopping America from being truly great again.

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The Federal Communications Commission today opened an unusual review of ABC's broadcast licenses, one day after President Trump and the first lady called on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a recent joke in which he said Melania Trump looked like an "expectant widow."

There are no TV station licenses for any company up for renewal until 2028, and the legal process for revoking licenses is so difficult that it's been described as nearly impossible. But the FCC today issued an order instructing ABC owner Disney to file early license renewal applications for all of its licensed TV stations by May 28.

"FCC rules provide that whenever the FCC regards an application for a renewal of a license as essential to the proper conduct of an investigation, the FCC has the authority to call the broadcaster’s licenses in for early renewal," the agency said. "Doing so both allows the FCC to conduct its ongoing investigation and enables the FCC to ensure that the broadcaster has been meeting its public interest obligations more broadly."

The demand apparently stems from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's opposition to Disney's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices, which he claims are a form of discrimination. Carr previously opened an investigation into the matter, and today's order said the FCC "has been investigating Disney’s ABC stations for possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s rules, including the agency’s prohibition on unlawful discrimination."

"While Disney’s ABC has purported to respond to two FCC Letters of Inquiry (LOIs) as part of this investigation, the FCC has determined that additional actions are appropriate at this time," the agency order said.

Kimmel's pretend roast

The license probe reportedly was sped up after the Kimmel joke. An NBC News article said that, while the proceeding ostensibly is about DEI, a source indicated that it was "fast-tracked after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about first lady Melania Trump."

The uproar is over a Kimmel joke during a skit in which he pretended to deliver a roast at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. "Our first lady, Melania, is here... So beautiful, Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow," Kimmel said. Kimmel also suggested in his pretend roast that Trump and his wife were introduced to each other by Jeffrey Epstein.

ABC owns eight TV stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, and Fresno. The stations' licenses were originally scheduled for renewals between 2028 and 2031, a Disney spokesperson told Ars today.

"ABC and its stations have a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules and serving their local communities with trusted news, emergency information, and public‑interest programming," Disney said in a statement provided to Ars. "We are confident that record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels."

"Retribution for a joke Donald Trump didn’t like"

Anna Gomez, the only Democratic FCC commissioner, said in a statement today that the Disney review "is the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the First Amendment to date. As part of its ongoing campaign of censorship and control, the White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic, and this FCC has now answered that call. This is an unprecedented and politically motivated attempt to interfere with how broadcasters operate, and this unlawful overreach will fail. This should be a lesson to media companies that no amount of capitulation to this administration will buy them protection. The only choice is to stand up and stand firm in defense of the First Amendment.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that demanding an early license renewal "is an extremely rare escalation." Free Press co-CEO Jessica J. González said, “Carr will try to dress up this latest attack like a legitimate FCC procedure, but his motivations are clear. He is using his position of power to silence dissent at the president’s beck and call... The timing of this move suggests unconstitutional retribution for a joke Donald Trump didn’t like."

An ABC probe could examine DEI, Kimmel's comedy, and other shows. Carr threatened ABC station licenses in September 2025, alleging at the time that airing Kimmel's show might violate the rarely enforced news distortion policy. He later opened an equal-time rule investigation into ABC’s The View, even though the interview portions of talk shows have historically been exempt from the rule.

Carr's investigations into media generally haven't gone very far, but the probes cause trouble for news organizations even if they don't result in penalties. Carr has also used merger reviews to impose requirements related to DEI and news coverage, since large companies are willing to make concessions in exchange for transaction approvals.

Trump's fight against comedy

Trump skipped the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in previous years but attended this year's event on April 25. The dinner was cut short by gunshots in an apparent assassination attempt.

Kimmel's monologue and skit aired last week, before the dinner occurred. Kimmel said the event typically includes remarks from a comedian, but that this year's event had no comedian because "our president is a delicate snowflake." Kimmel introduced the skit by saying he had decided to "do some of the jokes a comedian might do if our president wasn't a trembling drama queen who's scared of comedy."

In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump linked the "expectant widow" joke to the shooting. "A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason," Trump wrote. "I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC."

Melania Trump called for Kimmel's firing in an X post. "His monologue about my family isn’t comedy... People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him," the first lady wrote.

Kimmel defends "very light roast joke" about age gap

Kimmel discussed the controversy over his skit in last night's monologue. "There was no big reaction to it until this morning when I greeted the day facing yet another Twitter vomit storm and a call to fire me from our first lady, Melania Trump, saying I should be fired because of a joke I made five nights ago," Kimmel said.

Kimmel said he made "a very light roast joke about the fact that he's almost 80 and she's younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination, and they know that. I have been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence."

Addressing the first lady, Kimmel said, "I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject, and I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it."

Today's FCC announcement of the Disney probe came several hours after a group of former FCC chairs and commissioners asked a federal appeals court to compel the FCC to respond to a November 2025 petition to repeal the agency's 1960s-era news distortion policy.

"If the writ is granted, the FCC will be required to take a position on whether to repeal or uphold the news distortion policy, which FCC Chair Brendan Carr has abused to chill free speech in the press," said a press release announcing today's court filing. The filing was submitted by former FCC leaders from both major political parties along with the Radio Television Digital News Association, which represents broadcast journalists.

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Seems like kind of a big deal:

The United Arab Emirates will next month leave OPEC, a cartel of oil-producing countries, its government said on Tuesday, a decision that will weaken the group’s influence over global energy markets.

Emirati officials had long floated the idea of quitting the cartel, complaining that its quotas had unfairly curtailed its oil exports.

The government is now expected to increase its energy production to serve its own national interests. Before the war, the Emirates was producing about 3.6 million barrels of oil per day, according to the International Energy Agency — roughly 12 percent of OPEC’s overall production. OPEC countries supplied more than a quarter of the world’s oil before the war with Iran.

A coalition of the world’s largest oil exporters, OPEC was able to steer prices by setting quotas for those countries. But the organization’s power had slipped in recent years as U.S. oil production soared.

I don’t have a good sense for the immediate impact of this… obviously when you’re a consumer and not a producer weakening a cartel is on balance a good thing, although oil markets are so complex and I confess I can’t fully understand the downstream implications. Does seem to suggest a pretty significant political rift between UAE and KSA, though, and that’s undoubtedly related to the prosecution of the war.

The post OPEC Shakeup appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.