Hasta La Gadget!

Two men in southern Spain got away with playing hooky from work for 15 years before their bosses even noticed.

An investigation revealed that two local government employees never showed up for work, but the gardener and driver still regularly cashed their pay checks, The Local reports. 

“Two representatives of the General Confederation of Labor union (CGT) could have gone years without coming to work,”Jerez de la Frontera town hall said in a statement posted to its website on Wednesday.

“According to a written statement by the men themselves, this situation could date back 15 years,” it added.

The pair’s dismal work ethic first came to light after the authority’s human resources department started probing staff labor records, El Pais reports.

They initially discovered the duo had not worked a single day from January 2015 to the date of the inquiry in May 2016. Further investigations revealed they’d been skipping work since at least 2001.

A representative for the men’s union, the CGT union, claimed the employees had done nothing wrong. He cited a “tacit agreement” with previous councilmen that allowed union members to take off “accumulated days” and to share the vacation days of colleagues, per 20 Minutos.

One of the men has since returned to work. Both face disciplinary proceedings. It’s unclear what penalty they may face, as the investigation continues.

Investigators also discovered several members of the town’s SIP local police union were also not working as hard as they should have been. In 2015, One employee was found to have worked for just 96 days, another for 66 days and a third for 47 days.

The employees claimed they were attending meetings, but investigators found these events never took place, according to the municipal government’s statement. “In some cases it is curious that they claimed to have had these meetings on public holidays, obviously without it taking place at all,” the town hall’s statement added.

Despite the potentially damaging revelations, the authority claimed the issue of staff not attending work was not endemic.

The local government vowed to do all it could to stop the practices. “This government again confirms its decision to end the irregular labor situations that may have been happening for some time within the breast of the town hall,” its statement added.

The revelations come just five months after it emerged that a building supervisor in nearby Cadiz similarly went six years without showing up for work. He was caught out after getting an award for two decades of service.

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When we first met Malia Obama, she was a little kid wearing pink barrettes and patent leather mary janes. But since she first came to the White House, the girl has grown up. Now, she is arguably as much of a style icon as her mama. The 6’1″ beauty swans around in printed dresses, cute overalls and statement-making coats — all of which sell out the minute she wears them. 

So in honor of her 18th birthday on July 4, we’re taking a look at how much her style has transformed since her family first came on the scene. We can’t wait to see what this lady wears for years to come. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Want to hear some disturbing numbers? One-third of all the world’s food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. In the United States alone, up to 40 percent of food goes uneaten. Yet more than 800 million people are going hungry and 15.3 million children live in food-insecure households.

Those numbers can feel overwhelming, but that’s no excuse to bury your head in the sand. There is, in fact, plenty you can do to make a positive impact — and you can do a lot of it from your own kitchen.

As part of HuffPost’s “Reclaim” project, HuffPost Taste will focus the entire month of July on simple ways you can reduce food waste in your own home. We’re reclaiming the power of citizens to drive real change in society, and we’re also reclaiming our love for food.

Every day we’ll share easy tips and tricks that’ll transform your daily routine, making you mindful of the food you’re wasting and providing simple solutions to the problem. By the end of the month, you’ll become a resourceful wizard of a cook and a smarter shopper — but the best part is that you’ll also save money and eat crazy delicious foods.

Even if you’re already a mindful consumer, you may not realize how much food you waste. Consider the following:

• What’s the first thing you do after you cube up a watermelon? You toss the rind into the garbage.
• Where do your potato skins go after you peel them? Probably straight into the trash or down your garbage disposal.
• After you’ve eaten the corn off the cob in the summertime, do you even think twice before chucking the cob in the bin?

Not anymore. We’re here to help you get into a new routine. You’ll learn how to turn those watermelon rinds into tart, crunchy pickles, fry up those potato skins into chips, and enrich your summer chowders with the milky juices from those cobs of corn.

We’ll also teach you what expiration dates really mean, to prevent you from tossing out food that’s still perfectly edible. And every Sunday, we’ll provide you with a meal plan that’ll help you shop wisely and eat healthy throughout the workweek.

Get started today by making a cocktail out of that mess you make when you chop up overripe summer tomatoes. Then get in on the action by following us on Instagram and Facebook, and checking HuffPost Taste daily for your fill of tips and tricks.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

As part of HuffPost’s “Reclaim” project, HuffPost Taste will focus the entire month of July on simple ways you can reduce food waste in your own home.

We know that really good olive oil is expensive — too expensive. But we also know that a nice olive oil can elevate any of our homemade meals to restaurant status. Its naturally fruity flavor adds a richness to dishes with just a drizzle of the good stuff. If you don’t want to throw down a lot of cash, there’s a hack to making cheap olive oil taste better: olive pits.

Adding olive pits to your jar of olive oil will infuse the oil with a more olive-y flavor. We’re not saying this will make a bad jar of olive oil taste amazing, but it will add more flavor to a decent jar of oil. Plus, it gets you a little extra mileage out of the olives you bought at the store — and makes use out of a bound-for-the-trash kitchen scrap. Less food wasted, less money wasted and better tasting olive oil.

We learned this trick from Bon Appetit and it is a keeper. Making infused oils at home isn’t anything new, but infusing that oil with olives is pretty genius. However, once you add olive pits to your olive oil the shelf life of the oil will be reduced. We suggest doing this in small batches — infuse only what you’ll use in one week’s time — and store it in the fridge, just to be safe.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.