Comment on Russia, PNTR, Magnitsky, and Congress' Dereliction of Duty

The CTA says bus schedules will return to prepandemic levels during the last full week of 2024, marking the fulfillment of the agency’s plan to restore service by the end of the year. The additional bus service comes a month after the CTA said train schedules hit prepandemic levels, a vow CTA President Dorval Carter made to the Chicago City Council in early 2024 after schedule cuts and years of complaints about service, safety and conditions on transit. But on both buses and trains, service could still look different on individual routes and at certain times of day or days of the week than it has in the past, as the CTA adjusts schedules to reflect changing ridership.

As the Chicago White Sox pursue a new home ballpark, their current stadium has a new name. The Sox will spend the 2025 season at Rate Field, the team formally announced Wednesday. The Sox posted a video announcing the name change on social media Tuesday evening. The ballpark has been known as Guaranteed Rate Field since November 2016.

General Motors might have scaled back its electric vehicle ambitions in favor of more hybrids, but it's still accelerating its plans to build out EV charging infrastructure. Today, together with ChargePoint, GM revealed that it will deploy "hundreds" of new DC fast chargers under the GM Energy brand in 2025. "The transition to electric mobility continues to be driven by leaders such as General Motors offering innovative EVs and committing to make chargers as ubiquitous as possible," said Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint.

If you've been too busy fixing your video drivers to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win). In the first week or so of the drive, nearly 180 readers have contributed almost $16,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive (Child's Play is barely hanging on to a small donation lead at the moment).

For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms. Snowflakes, snowfall, and snowmen symbolize cocaine. Love hearts, lightning bolts, and pill capsules mean MDMA, or molly. Brown hearts and dragons represent heroin. Grapes and baby bottles are the calling cards for codeine-containing cough syrup, or lean.

In a wide-ranging interview with a Russian television station, the chief executive of Russia's main space corporation said the country is now planning to participate in the International Space Station project all the way to NASA's desired goal of 2030. "In coordination with our American colleagues, we plan to de-orbit the station sometime around the beginning of 2030," the country's chief space official, Yuri Borisov, said during the interview.