Faced with climbing gas prices weeks away from midterm elections, the Biden administration tried in vain to stop Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ countries from cutting oil production last week, according to the Wall Street Journal. Adding insult to injury — and creating more tension between Washington and Riyadh — Saudi Arabia lobbied even harder to pass the cuts after U.S. officials warned it that failing to delay the cuts would be tantamount to supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine.

New DNA evidence prompted Baltimore prosecutors to drop charges against Adnan Syed, whose 1999 conviction for murder and decades behind bars became the subject of the hit podcast Serial. Syed’s DNA did not match previously untested DNA on the shoes of victim Hae Min Lee, said Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday it won’t hear a case that could have paved the way for abortion to be charged as murder. A Rhode Island couple, whose case was dismissed by state courts, had hoped to argue that state law allowing abortion violated the due process and equal protection rights of embryos and fetuses. The “fetal personhood” argument is seen as a next step for abortion opponents after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June.

Thousands of independent contractors in the U.S. should actually be considered employees with workplace protections and eligibility for benefits, the Labor Department said in a rule proposed Tuesday that would make the differences clearer. Gig apps have strongly opposed treating their workers as employees, and stocks for Uber, Lyft and DoorDash dove following the news.

Just producing electric vehicles isn't going to be enough to make them prolific. GM has plans for making sure drivers can charge at home and along the way. “When you put all that hardware together, and you link it to what we call the GM energy cloud, we're able to help customers … manage their energy in both a daily manner to optimize energy usages, or in resilient situations in the event of a power loss,” Travis Hester, vice president of GM EV growth operations, told Cheddar News.

Holiday spending is expected to increase or stay the same as last year, according to a survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, despite recession fears and a four-decade high in inflation. Millennials are apparently helping to even out the numbers, as they ramp up their spending due to "bigger wallets" and plenty of consumer credit. The global economy, meanwhile, is about to hit the rocks. The International Monetary Fund downgraded its growth outlook for the coming year and noted that the "worst is yet to come." 

Last month NASA tried to knock an asteroid off course — and it worked! The space agency launched the Dart spacecraft right into a space rock that was millions of miles away. This time Earth was not in any danger, but it's good to know that if we should find ourselves under threat from space, we might have a way to save humankind.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the updates for his vision of the metaverse at its annual VR developers conference Connect 22. In addition to the Meta Quest Pro, a $1,500 headset built for working in a virtual world, the company announced partnerships with Microsoft and NBCUniversal. But the most exciting news? Avatars in Meta’s virtual Horizon Worlds will no longer just be floating torsos. That’s right, we’re all getting virtual legs to explore the metaverse. 

IN MEMORIAM: ANGELA LANSBURY: The actress, whose career spanned eight decades across film, theater and TV, died just five days before her 97th birthday. Perhaps best known as crime-solving mystery writer Jessica Fletcher in the long-running series "Murder, She Wrote," London-born Lansbury was nominated for three Academy Awards — she received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2013 — and won five Tonys among many other honors.

MORE IN ENTERTAINMENT: Here are a few of the entertainment headlines we've been watching over the last 24 hours: Blink 182 is making a comeback, starting with a new music release this week, and Sade is also staging a comeback after Brad Pitt revealed the singer recorded a few tracks at his studio in France. And Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin wants to be Static Shock.  

Ai-Da, “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist,” addressed the UK’s House of Lords on Tuesday, testifying that artificial intelligence offers both pros and cons to the future of art. Ai-Da’s appearance went a bit off the rails when she “fell asleep” and had to be reset by creator Aidan Meller.

When is the dragon not a dragon? Cheddar News explains why these mythical beasts are now getting their day in the sun, and why they don't seem the same as the dragons our grandparents heard about.