Groundfloor, a modern-day social club devoted to the purpose of making friends, will officially open its first Los Angeles location in January 2024 in Echo Park, but it’s already hosting events in its work-in-progress space to drum up membership interest. The San Francisco-based startup has three locations in the Bay Area with nearly 1,000 members. (Ding, Los Angeles Times)
Read MoreWhat began in 1969 as a peacekeeping mission to maintain law and order evolved into the British Army's longest-ever deployment, involving a quarter-million troops over four decades. More than 3,500 soldiers, rival paramilitaries and civilians were killed. (Frayer, NPR)
Read MoreThousands of people… are trapped in long-dead marriages in the Philippines, the only country in the world, other than the Vatican, where divorce remains illegal. They live completely separate lives from their spouses, after splitting up for reasons like abuse and incompatibility. Steep legal fees and mounds of paperwork make annulment practically impossible for many. (Wee, The New York Times)
Read MoreArtificial intelligence is fueling an unprecedented boom this year in fake pornographic images and videos. It’s enabled by a rise in cheap and easy-to-use AI tools that can “undress” people in photographs — analyzing what their naked bodies would look like and imposing it into an image — or seamlessly swap a face into a pornographic video. (Verman, The Washington Post)
Read MoreThe Indonesian government announced last month that it will stop using the Arabic term for Jesus Christ—Isa al Masih—when referring to Christian holidays and will instead use the Bahasa term Yesus Kristus beginning in 2024. The change will alter the names of three national holidays: the Death of Isa al Masih (Good Friday), the Ascension of Isa al Masih, and the Birth of Isa al Masih (Christmas). Fulton, Christianity Today)
Read MoreOver time, a wild idea took shape in DiPasquale’s imagination. What if El Paso could instead be sacred ground, a place where pilgrims came to seek the heart of God?
(Lee, Christianity Today)
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