Curt Long

“When Wildwood arrived, she was too weak to stand on her own,” Gillian Kocher, director of public relations for the Pennsylvania SPCA, told The Dodo. “She was emaciated, anemic, she had open wounds. Right now, she isn’t using her back legs, but that may be a result of her condition.”

“They haven’t made it into my yard yet, but the puppy really tried,” Weiss said. “It was pretty comical to watch. He was on a mission to get into my yard, but he just couldn’t squeeze through.”

Though it was startling at first, Weiss has since gotten used to having a close relationship with his three furry neighbors.

“I joke with a friend that one day I’m gonna show my neighbor those pictures and tell her, ‘Look, you had a good run, but they’ve made their decision. They’re mine now,'” Weiss said.

“A lot of times I don’t even realize they’re there,” Weiss added. “I just turn around and there’s a snout sticking out from under the fence.”

And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Though the note introduced the dog as Zanny, rescue workers gave him the nickname Folly, after the place where he was found, and the name stuck. A veterinary exam at the rescue revealed that, other than a rash on his stomach, Folly was in relatively good shape.

“Folly is a muscular boy whose tails wags nonstop,” Carrie Browning-Perez, marketing manager for Pet Helpers, told The Dodo. “It’s obvious he didn’t miss many meals.”

It was clear that the dog had been well taken care of at one point in his life, but if Niketas hadn’t come along when she did, things might have turned out differently.

“It was extremely hot on the day he was abandoned,” Browning-Perez said. “Just a matter of another hour or so could have greatly changed the outcome.”

After the original sighting, people kept a watch on the kittens to see if the mom was coming back. After 24 hours, no mother arrived and the kittens had started to stray closer and closer to a road.

“It seemed likely they had been abandoned or orphaned and were in grave danger,” O’Donoghue said.

That’s when rescuers decided they needed to do something. They managed to capture the kittens while a wildlife filmmaker, Steve Piper, set out remote cameras to make sure their mother wasn’t looking for them.

“Sadly, this is not the first time we’ve seen a case like this,” Lexie Beach, communications coordinator for Sea Turtle Conservancy, told The Dodo. “Most commonly, the issue we see regarding beach chairs and sea turtles is that they actually run into them when trying to nest on the beach. Many times they’ve actually gotten stuck in a chair and rescued the next morning, or running into the chair causes them to false crawl (not nest) and head back to the ocean.”

For Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, every life lost is so significant. There are only around 1,000 left in the wild today, mainly due to habitat loss, illegal hunting and pollution.

Oh, fandom. So passionate, so partisan—and, too often these days, so prolifically peevish. From Tumblr and Wattpad to more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Instagram, online communities have served as rallying points for stan armies: obsessives who comb over every interview and shred of non-news for information about the object of their adoration. But increasingly, fandoms’ emotions have been curdling into a different kind of potion; something petty, entitled, conspiratorial, even abusive. So on the occasion of San Diego Comic-Con, one of the biggest fan events in the world, it’s time for some tough love.

First, a note: this is a look at toxic strains that exist within a larger fandom, not an indictment of a given artist or person. Fandom is a pure and precious thing, and no one should feel conflicted about being invested in a pop-culture figure or property. If you express that investment by being a worse person, though—treating appreciation like warfare, demanding dogmatic purity tests, attacking people, or seeing yourself as some kind of a crusader—than it’s probably time to take some time and re-assess things. We’re sure nothing in the following catalog sounds like anything you’ve done in the name of fandom, right? Enjoy Comic-Con!

10. Barbz (Nicki Minaj Fandom)

The Barbz are a fiercely loyal sort. Case in point: In April, upon the release of Invasion of Privacy, a writer for British GQ explained how Cardi B had adopted Nicki Minaj’s style in a much more accessible way. “Nicki intimidates; Cardi endears,” she wrote. Minaj disciples responded with an all-out attack. The GQ staffer was flooded with malicious tweets, ranging from the direct (“I will kill u bitch”) to even more direct (“You better to delete that before we get your address and start hunting you and your family down!!”) The following month, the Barbz turned on one of their own when a self-proclaimed fan wondered aloud on Twitter: “You know how dope it would be if Nicki put out mature content? No silly shit, just reflecting on past relationships, being a boss, hardships, etc.” (Minaj took it further and DMed a disgustingly petty reply to the fan). For Barbz, fandom doesn’t allow for dissent—even when it’s not dissent but a valid, healthy appraisal. This may come as a surprise, y’all, but love and criticism are not mutually exclusive.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump appeared to downplay Russia’s efforts to interfere with US democracy for a third time this week.

The first had come during a joint press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, a 45-minute exercise in kowtowing to a hostile foreign leader. The second, remarkably, came during the “clarification” of those remarks; on the heels of reading a prepared comment acknowledging Russia’s actions in 2016, Trump improvised, stating that it “could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”

And then came Wednesday, when a reporter asked Trump before a Cabinet meeting if Russia is still targeting the US. The correct answer, according to repeated warnings from US intelligence officials, is absolutely. Trump said no.

Later in the day, press secretary Sarah Sanders framed the answer differently, suggesting that Trump in fact meant “no more questions.” Given the broader context of his almost pathological resistance to admitting that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, that explanation seems wanting. And even if it’s a correct interpretation, Trump still declined an opportunity to assertively back up the intelligence community he has repeatedly spurned.

Columbo was injured, but he eagerly accepted the cyclists’ food and affection. Little knew he needed to do more, and that meant getting creative.

“We couldn’t leave him,” he said.

So, after trying a few methods of carrying the dog on his bike, Little settled on this: placing Columbo’s legs in his rear pockets and letting him ride piggyback style to safety.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the escalating showdown between Airbnb and New York City’s hotel industry will not be surprised that the $31 billion startup just lost, handily. This afternoon, the New York City Council passed a bill that will force Airbnb to provide the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement with the names and addresses of its hosts. Other cities have passed similar laws, resulting in precipitous declines in listings. Because New York has strict laws about the homes that are allowed to be listed, and many hosts choose to skirt them, this could have more detrimental effects as the city identifies and fines these hosts more easily.

It’s the latest in a long history of battles between the startup and the city. “In 2010, I said, ‘This is gonna be a one-year challenge.’” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said, while addressing New York regulatory challenges at the Code Conference in May, adding that now “it doesn’t seem like the end is in sight with that challenge.”

But regardless of how many rules officials impose, Airbnb can’t afford to abandon New York City. That’s not because it’s one of the company’s largest markets — Airbnb’s listings are so diffuse that its top five markets, which include the Big Apple, account for just 4.3 percent of its listings. The New York political fight is resource-intensive enough that if the market were purely about revenue, there’d be a good argument for Airbnb to pull out of New York altogether.

Simply put, you can’t be a travel company in the 21st century and not operate in New York City. Airbnb has to maintain and grow its New York listings because it’s one of the top spots for travelers.

Even more, what happens in New York will influence how the world perceives the company, and it’ll set a precedent for other markets. As Airbnb looks for new ways to grow in the run-up to its initial public offering, the company is encountering regulatory crackdowns across the globe. The New York situation mirrors legislative efforts underway in Los Angeles, and comes months after San Francisco passed a measure mandating that hosts register with the city. Should Airbnb pull out of New York, caving to the special interests of the hotel industry, it sends a message that it might be willing to do the same in other places over time, eventually losing ground in markets where it has brokered a fragile peace.

Amazon Web Services is the world’s biggest cloud provider. As a result, its security directly influences that of countless websites and online services. And those concerns aren’t just theoretical; dangerous lapses happen all the time. Customers store all sorts of datasets and raw information in AWS repositories, which then become part of their own infrastructure. If a customer makes a mistake in how they set something up, or they don’t understand the full implications of an AWS feature, it can expose them to the risk of unauthorized access and data exfiltration.

AWS account misconfigurations have exposed everything from voter registrations, to FedEx customer data, insurance information, and even the systems of the massive accounting and consulting firm Accenture.

Two new tools might help alleviate the problem, though. Known as Zelkova and Tiros, the offerings from the AWS Automated Reasoning Group analyze crucial AWS security configurations, evaluating access control schemes and mapping possible paths to the open internet from an S3 bucket. They also offer automated feedback on the practical ramifications of different setups, helping administrators avoid dangerous errors.

“What we’re hoping to achieve is to get a kind of provable security out of our systems,” said Greg Frascadore, security architect at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, which has been testing Zelkova and Tiros at an AWS conference in New York City Tuesday. “By provable security I don’t mean that what we get out is infallible security. Instead what we’re trying to get is a formal analysis, and a methodical way that we have gone about verifying that the security controls we put into place are working the way we think they’re working. Our security objective here is to stop data exfiltration from AWS.”

European regulators took a big swing at Google Wednesday for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system, fining the company €4.34 billion ($5 billion) and ordering changes to Android designed to put Google rivals on a more level playing field. But it’s not clear that the fine or the operational changes will have much effect.

“Google has basically won,” says Maurice Stucke, cofounder of the Konkurrenz Group and a law professor at the University of Tennessee. “They already dominate mobile. Just think about the number of apps, like with Google Play and the like. There’s no way you’re going to have another operating system that is going to threaten that. Bing invested, gosh, billions of dollars in its search engine, and it still hasn’t really made a significant dent.”

The decision by the European Commission, the EU’s regulatory arm, found that Google manages Android, which runs roughly 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, in ways that illegally harm competition. The ruling focused on three practices: the bundling of Google’s Chrome web browser and its search app as a condition for licensing the Google Play store; payments Google makes to phone manufacturers and telecom companies to exclusively preinstall the Google search app on their devices; and Google’s practice of prohibiting device makers from running Google apps on Android “forks,” or alternative versions of the software unapproved by Google. In its ruling, the commission ordered Google to stop all of those practices.

The drones rise all at once, 30 strong, the domes of light on their undercarriages glowing 30 different hues—like luminescent candy sprinkles against the gray, dusky sky. Then they pause, suspended in the air. And after a couple seconds of hovering, they begin to move as one.

As the newly-formed flock migrates, its members’ luminous underbellies all change to the same color: green. They’ve decided to head east. The drones at the front approach a barrier, and their tummies turn teal as they veer south. Soon, the trailing members’ lights change in suit.