It’s the end of the academic semester for many students around the globe, so here comes the flurry of DIY projects. Always a great time to check out all the cool hacks from our readers all over the world. One project that piques our interest comes courtesy of [Jason Ummel] …read more

Total production minutes for TV anime in 2018 is 2nd highest in history

Game launched in October 2019

There's no denying that a Wendy's roast is not like the rest of them. They just hit different. These roasts pulled zero punches, and for that we are grateful. 

Man, these people sound like a ball of toxic energy. You have the one dude offering nothing but generosity and understanding to the rest of the roommates, who are basically going around, freeloading, and taking advantage of one's good nature. A kind of icky feeling can arise just thinking about it. Well, the freeloading roommates ultimately learned their lesson, and were introduced to the court system. Maybe that will set them on a different path in the future. Who knows? 

This fun Tumblr thread explores a notorious art world drama. The drama started with Anish Kapoor being a prick about ownership over colors. Then, we see another dude named Stuart Semple, come into the mix, and take things to petty heights like never before. It's honestly an awe-inspiring level of petty. Art world dramas are fun. 

Here's a video that took the Ken Burns Civil War documentary and remorselessly smooshed in a much E.T. as it could handle. Dear god it's so stupid and wonderful. Bravo.

As long as the choosing beggars continue to present themselves, it's up to the rest of the world to serve them up reality checks, free of charge. This particular impatient choosing beggar experienced a nice wakeup moment, after pestering an artist to rush a free drawing, after they already received one free drawing. The artist absolutely delivered. 

Our friends at Cracked are back at it again with a fresh installment to their weekly video series, "Your Brain On Cracked." This one's just too much fun. 

We have a lot of great stuff happening this week, including a gorgeous new jewelry piece and a virtual convention appearance this Friday! And don’t forget: We also have a cosplay contest running, a series read-along on Goodreads, discounts going on the first three Dresden novels, and a mini-giveaway of coloring pages in exchange for [...]

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/taffeta/2463140032/

via http://www.volkmarweiss.com/

Coronavirus will overshadow Earth Day's golden anniversary, but the movement's successes are worth celebrating, says Gary Paul Nabhan

Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, often spoken of as the birth of the green movement. Denis Hayes helped coordinate the first event, and speaks to New Scientist about its impact

People born prematurely may have weaker hearts that recover less well after exercise, potentially explaining their increased risk of heart disease

Faraway galaxies have been spotted unexpectedly flashing up to 100 times their usual brightness, and it seems to be caused by eddies in Earth’s atmosphere

An AI-powered application lets you create real-time deepfakes during video calls, making you appear to be speaking as anyone from Albert Einstein to the Mona Lisa

Rocks from a 3.2-billion-year-old formation in Australia show changes in the direction of their magnetism over time that suggest plate tectonics started earlier than we thought

While an alarming 9 per cent of insects on land are being lost each decade, the state of the world’s insects is much more nuanced than warnings of an insect apocalypse

Many people are turning to virtual therapy and mental health apps to cope with the stress of the coronavirus pandemic, but they may not be as helpful as talking face to face

A 3D printed grate can be used to make a smart window that blocks heat from sunlight out in the summer while letting it through in the winter, conserving energy

People with rheumatoid arthritis often take medicines that can have damaging side-effects, but a system that uses red light to deliver drugs exactly where they are needed could help

Astronomers found a star that appeared to be orbiting nothing at all – but it’s actually the closest black hole ever at just 1000 light years away

Many countries are focusing coronavirus testing on people who have covid-19 symptoms. But regularly testing all essential workers would have more of an impact

Global warming has already made parts of the world – including cities in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates – hotter than the human body can withstand

New York has given Franklin Graham the boot. After weeks of scrutiny, it was announced over the weekend that the Central Park tent facility run by Graham’s charity Samaritan’s Purse will be wound up, closing to new patients from May 4, before the site is disinfected and dismantled. The eight patients currently being treated at […]

This batch of hearts from Ron Lehocky has an energy that I can’t quite explain. They buzz and vibrate in an unusual way. We’ve got a Skinner blend base with a layer of opposing Skinner blend slices that are accompanied by depressed dots. Up/down, in/out over shifting colors.  My impulse is to fondle these delicious […] Read more

U.S. loses record 20.5 million jobs in the month of April; White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow weighs in on ‘America’s Newsroom.’

South African Fredie Blom celebrated his 116th birthday on Friday unfazed by the coronavirus crisis, over 100 years since the Spanish flu pandemic killed his sister. "I have lived this long because of God's grace," said Blom, possibly one of the oldest men in the world. Lighting a cigarette, he recalled the 1918 pandemic that left tens of millions dead worldwide including his sister.

A lower court had ruled that the prisoner’s gender-affirming surgery is a medical necessity, and denying it constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

On Thursday, the country reported its largest one-day increase in new cases of 11,231 — yet President Putin already has his eyes on reopening.

Coronavirus has robbed the Democrat of his typical back-slapping approach as he faces growing scrutiny and a third-party challengeThe Tampa, Florida, rally for Joe Biden on Thursday evening began as it normally might have, before a once-in-a-century pandemic transformed all aspects of American life, including the presidential campaign. A local high school student recited the pledge of allegiance, a campaign organizer pleaded with supporters to volunteer and a local DJ spun R&B music between speakers.But in a sign of how profoundly the coronavirus crisis has reshaped American politics, that was where the similarities ended.With much of the US still in lockdown, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been forced to take his campaign to unseat Donald Trump online. It has not always been easy.His campaign’s first attempt to recreate a traditional rally – part of a virtual swing through the battleground state of Florida – was later described by his opponents as an “unmitigated technological failure”. The video stream was glitchy and pixelated. The audio was choppy, rendering some remarks nearly incomprehensible. And there were lengthy delays between speakers and at one point, the feed went dark for several minutes.“Am I on?” asked Biden, beaming into the telecast from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he has been isolated since the middle of March. An off-camera voice replied that he was. Biden removed a pair of aviator sunglasses as he walked toward the camera.“Good evening, Tampa. Thanks so much for tuning in,” he continued, a hint of irritation in his voice. “I wish we could have done this together – and it had gone a little more smoothly.”For nearly two months, Biden has been the test subject in a novel political experiment: running for president in the age of Covid-19.Social distancing restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the virus have already starved the campaign of a victory tour to mark his ascent to the Democratic nomination. It may well deny Democrats the chance to formally nominate him in person at the party’s national convention this summer. Endorsements from former rivals and party leaders occur online to varying degrees of fanfare. . The remote set-up, anathema to Biden’s back-slapping, glad-handing approach to politics, has left the candidate walled off from voters and competing for visibility.Yet, technical difficulties aside, his campaign of confinement seems to be working.In recent weeks, Biden has widened his lead over Trump as the president’s support slips amid growing disapproval of his response to the pandemic. Surveys from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona – key battlegrounds that Trump won in 2016 – show Biden ahead. At a recent virtual fundraiser last week, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, his new campaign manager, expressed optimism about Biden’s prospects in Florida and Arizona.“The natural state of this race is to be a referendum on Donald Trump and every time Donald Trump steps to the microphone he hurts himself,” said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic pollster. “That’s a pretty good position for Joe Biden to be in.”Biden initially struggled to adapt to his cloistered reality. In March, the campaign turned a recreation room in the basement of his home into a studio, though not fast enough for his critics, who launched a “Where’s Joe” campaign to mark the candidate’s relative disappearance from the national stage.But since then, Biden has been busy. Nearly every day he makes appearances on local TV news channels or national talkshows. He launched a podcast, where he has hosted conversations with prominent Democratic governors and potential vice-presidential candidates. He spends time each day speaking with a voter – a frontline worker, campaign volunteers – and he participated in what the campaign billed as a “virtual rope line”.“So what’s up?” he said to Ashley Ruiz of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of several voters on the rope line. “Tell me about your situation, Ash.”•••Biden’s rise in the polls comes as he contends with an allegation from Tara Reade, a former aide in his Senate office who accused him of sexual assault in 1993. In an interview this week with Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News and NBC television host, Reade said he should withdraw from the presidential race.Biden has forcefully denied the allegation. “It’s not true, I am saying unequivocally. It never, never happened,” he said last week, in an interview addressing her claim for the first time publicly.Publicly, Democrats, including prominent MeToo advocates, have rallied around Biden, though privately some in the party have expressed concern about the continuous drip of reporting on the matter.So far the allegation appears to have marginally dented his reputation, but not his lead. Most voters – 86% – are aware of the allegation, according to a Monmouth poll, which found the electorate divided over whether they viewed the claim as credible. At the same time, the poll showed Biden nine points ahead of Trump.Despite Trump’s falling electoral fortunes, many Democrats remain anxious about Biden’s position – and his strategy.David Axelrod and David Plouffe, two of Barack Obama’s top campaign strategists, implored Biden’s campaign to expand its digital footprint in a joint New York Times op-ed that compared the atmospherics of the candidate’s home videos to “an astronaut beaming back to earth from the International Space Station”.“Online speeches from his basement won’t cut it,” they wrote.Lis Smith, the former top adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, followed with an op-ed on Thursday that offered a blueprint for turning Biden into the “hottest bad boy and disrupter in the media game”. She suggested his campaign use TV appearances and digital content to highlight Biden’s empathy, a trait even supporters say the president has lacked in response to the rising coronavirus death toll.Part of the campaign’s evolving digital strategy includes partnering with groups that already have an online presence, like JoeMamas2020, a national coalition of “moms, caregivers, moms to be, aunts & all the parental figures in between” with about 27,000 Facebook and 1,200 Twitter followers. The group has helped amplify Biden’s appearances and policy proposals while spreading the word about upcoming events.Julie Zebrak, the group’s co-founder, said the online army is growing with women energized to help elect a candidate who would end the Twitter presidency.“We are all extremely enthusiastic for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump,” she said.Yet the same traits that endear Biden to a growing coalition of suburban women and Never Trump Republicans have largely failed to excite younger, progressive voters. It’s not that they prefer Trump – they don’t – but a lack of enthusiasm among those voters could spell trouble in November if they stay home or vote for a third-party candidate.The campaign has also ramped up its outreach to young people, who overwhelmingly supported Biden’s rival Bernie Sanders. On Friday, Biden presented his economic pitch in an appearance on NowThis, a social-media-heavy news outlet with a young, progressive audience.“This crisis hit harder and will last longer because Donald Trump spent the last three years undermining the core pillars of our economic strength,” Biden said in remarks that attacked Trump’s stimulus efforts a kind of “cronyism” and corporate welfare. Before he began speaking, Biden removed a face mask, a pointed rebuke of the president who had refused to wear one.Still, new research conducted on behalf of NextGen America found many young people weren’t convinced Biden’s policies meet the scale of the challenges bearing down on their generation.This makes the efforts of groups like Progressive Turnout Project, which endorsed him this week, all the more important. In the coming months, the group is investing more than $52m to turn out low-propensity Democratic voters – including young people and people of color – in 17 key battleground states.“The best thing we can do is go and knock on doors and have face-to-face conversations with voters,” said Alex Morgan, the group’s executive director. “We are still looking to do that. But it’ll be knocking on that door and then taking a few big steps back and having a more distant conversation.”•••Biden’s campaign also faces another looming threat. The Michigan congressman Justin Amash, who left the Republican party last year after voting to impeach Trump, recently announced that he would seek the Libertarian party nomination.His entrance has alarmed Democrats, who fear he could siphon off Never Trump voters who might otherwise back Biden, particularly in Amash’s home state of Michigan, where third-party candidates pulled away a combined 5% of the vote share in 2016. Hillary Clinton lost the state by just 10,704 votes, less than 0.25%.Many Democrats believe Biden’s fate may well rest on his ability to persuade their own side to vote.“Trump has shown no desire or ability to moderate for those swing voters in this election,” said Addisu Demissie, who served as Cory Booker’s presidential campaign manager. “So those voters are now likely going to end up either Biden voters or non-voters or third-party voters, and that’s the competition.”This week, Trump traveled to the battleground state of Arizona, where he toured a medical mask facility without wearing one himself. The visit was a symbolic show of his administration’s push to reopen the US economy but there were unmistakable elements of his signature campaign rallies, including the music that played when Trump finished his remarks (the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want).Trump’s cross-country venture stood in striking contrast to Biden’s virtual swing through Florida – which included a rally, a roundtable in Jacksonville and an appearance on the local news in Tampa. The technical glitches only further highlighted the limitations of his confinement.But the coronavirus has also upended Trump’s strategy, erasing the booming economy he has made a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. In recent weeks, his campaign has all but abandoned championing the president’s leadership, instead focusing its efforts on diminishing Biden.Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, previewed the onslaught on Twitter this week, comparing the Trump re-election juggernaut to the Death Star from the Star Wars movies. “In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time,” he wrote.As Trump prepares to make even greater use of the advantages of incumbency, Biden faces his biggest test yet. Can he really lead a Rebel Alliance from his basement?

“I want you to know he died in the hospital alone, isolated, and scared,” she wrote in an Instagram message to Smithfield Foods.

A person died Thursday night after being hit by a plane as it was landing at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, according to airport officials.

"It was obvious that this event had a very traumatic effect on (Reade), and that she is still sensitive and effected (sic) by it today," Dronen wrote.

U.S. and U.K. intel agencies are reviewing the private report, but intel analysts examined and couldn't confirm a similar theory previously.

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department's decision to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, even though he had twice pleaded guilty to lying to investigators, was extraordinary and had no obvious precedent, a range of criminal law specialists said Thursday."I've been practicing for more time than I care to admit and I've never seen anything like this," said Julie O'Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at Georgetown University.The move is the latest in a series that the department, under Attorney General William Barr, has taken to undermine and dismantle the work of the investigators and prosecutors who scrutinized Russia's 2016 election interference operation and its links to people associated with the Trump campaign.The case against Flynn for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador was brought by the office of the former special counsel, Robert Mueller. It had become a political cause for Trump and his supporters, and the president had signaled that he was considering a pardon once Flynn was sentenced. But Barr instead abruptly short-circuited the case.On Thursday, Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, told the judge overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, that prosecutors were withdrawing the case. They were doing so, he said, because the department could not prove to a jury that Flynn's admitted lies to the FBI about his conversations with the ambassador were "material" ones.The move essentially erases Flynn's guilty pleas. Because he was never sentenced and the government is unwilling to pursue the matter further, the prosecution is virtually certain to end, although the judge must still decide whether to grant the department's request to dismiss it "with prejudice," meaning it could not be refiled in the future.A range of former prosecutors struggled to point to any previous instance in which the Justice Department had abandoned its own case after obtaining a guilty plea. They portrayed the justification Shea pointed to -- that it would be difficult to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the lies were material -- as dubious."A pardon would have been a lot more honest," said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at Duke University.The law regarding what counts as "material" is extremely forgiving to the government, Buell added. The idea is that law enforcement is permitted to pursue possible theories of criminality and to interview people without having firmly established that there was a crime first.James G. McGovern, a defense lawyer at Hogan Lovells and a former federal prosecutor, said juries rarely bought a defendant's argument that a lie did not involve a material fact."If you are arguing 'materiality,' you usually lose, because there is a tacit admission that what you said was untrue, so you lose the jury," he said.No career prosecutors signed the motion. Shea is a former close aide to Barr. In January, Barr installed him as the top prosecutor in the district that encompasses the nation's capital after maneuvering out the Senate-confirmed former top prosecutor in that office, Jessie K. Liu.Soon after, in an extraordinary move, four prosecutors in the office abruptly quit the case against Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone. They did so after senior Justice Department officials intervened to recommend a more lenient prison term than standard sentencing guidelines called for in the crimes Stone was convicted of committing -- including witness intimidation and perjury -- to conceal Trump campaign interactions with WikiLeaks.It soon emerged that Barr had also appointed an outside prosecutor, Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, to review the Flynn case files. The department then began turning over FBI documents showing internal deliberations about questioning Flynn, like what warnings to give -- even though such files are usually not provided to the defense.Flynn's defense team has mined such files for ammunition to portray the FBI as running amok in its decision to question Flynn in the first place. The questioning focused on his conversations during the transition after the 2016 election with the Russian ambassador about the Obama administration's imposition of sanctions on Russia for its interference in the American election.The FBI had already concluded that there was no evidence that Flynn, a former Trump campaign adviser, had personally conspired with Russia about the election, and it had decided to close out the counterintelligence investigation into him. Then questions arose about whether and why Flynn had lied to administration colleagues like Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the ambassador.Because the counterintelligence investigation was still open, the bureau used it as a basis to question Flynn about the conversations and decided not to warn him at its onset that it would be a crime to lie. Notes from Bill Priestap, then the head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, show that he wrote at one point about the planned interview: "What's our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"Barr has also appointed another outside prosecutor, John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to reinvestigate the Russia investigators even though the department's independent inspector general was already scrutinizing them.And his department has intervened in a range of other ways, from seeking more comfortable prison accommodations last year for Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, to abruptly dropping charges in March against two Russian shell companies that were about to go to trial for financing schemes to interfere in the 2016 election using social media.Barr has let it be known that he does not think the FBI ever had an adequate legal basis to open its Russia investigation in the first place, contrary to the judgment of the Justice Department's inspector general.In an interview on CBS News on Thursday, Barr defended the dropping of the charges against Flynn on the grounds that the FBI "did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage."Anne Milgram, a former federal prosecutor and former New Jersey attorney general who teaches criminal law at New York University, defended the FBI's decision to question Flynn in January 2017. She said that much was still a mystery about the Russian election interference operation at the time and that Flynn's lying to the vice president about his postelection interactions with a high-ranking Russian raised new questions.But, she argued, the more important frame for assessing the dropping of the case was to recognize how it fit into the larger pattern of the Barr-era department "undercutting the law enforcement officials and prosecutors who investigated the 2016 election and its aftermath," which she likened to "eating the Justice Department from the inside out."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

President Xi Jinping expresses concern about the threat to its neighbour, and offers to help.

Biden has repeatedly denied Reade's allegation.

The officer used a “takedown measure” to gain control of the woman because of “other threat factors in the store,” a police official said.

Labour's General Secretary Jennie Formby standing down is a sign the party is under new management.

The former Unite official says it is the "right time" to move on with the party under new leadership.

Leaked letter from shadow minister reveals attempt to impose discipline on top team, writes Iain Watson.