V-MODA has introduced its new Crossfade 2 headphones, a pair of over-the-ear headphones that feature both a wireless and a wired mode. When in wired mode, the Crossfade 2 are said to meet the Japan Audio Society certification for the Hi-Res Audio standard, making them suitable for use with lossless media players and streaming services. The wireless mode, meanwhile, gives … Continue reading
Actor-singer Ben Yahr channeled Justin Bieber, Amy Schumer and Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine for a new music video that he hopes will inspire members of the queer community to embrace their bodies.
Yahr, who is based in Los Angeles, recreated steamy photos of the aforementioned superstars in the video for “Shape of Me,” which can be viewed above. The 27-year-old “body positivity activist” struck Bieber’s Calvin Klein campaign pose as well as Levine’s charity photo for prostate and testicular cancer awareness in the March 23 clip, which was directed by Matthew Dean Stewart. He also put his take on famous nude or semi-nude shots of Schumer and Miley Cyrus.
“Fit me in the puzzle, ‘cause I am the perfect piece,” Yahr sings in the song, which features music and lyrics by Ryan Amador. “I’ll show off my body, ‘cause I love the shape of me.”
Yahr shot to viral fame in February after he recreated Beyoncé’s pregnancy photos in a stunning pictorial that was featured in The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, People and other media outlets. He told HuffPost that he hopes to further spread his message of body positivity with “Shape of Me,” which he said is “about loving yourself from head to toe, warts and all.”
Recent buzz over Logo’s forthcoming reality series, “Fire Island,” reminded Yahr that “only one type of gay man” is represented in popular culture. “We are conditioned from such a young age by the media that only certain shapes should be celebrated, which is why I decided to use iconic photos of celebrities,” he said. “If there was a brochure of our community, would all of us be included?”
Despite the serious aim of “Shape of Me,” Yahr hopes viewers are inspired to “let loose and shake it” after watching his “silly, naked and joyous” video. “All bodies are beautiful and praise-worthy,” he said, adding, “Life is too short not to dance around in your underwear, right?”
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Another day, another Sean Spicer classic.
During Tuesday’s White House press conference, press secretary Spicer tried to laugh off President Trump’s alleged Russian connections by making a joke about Russian salad dressing.
Obviously, it did not go well and people on Twitter quickly seized the opportunity:
Spicer also apparently forgot to research the origins of Russian dressing, as it was actually invented in Nashua, New Hampshire by a man named James E. Colburn, according to the Portland Press Herald:
And it generally goes on Reuben sandwiches:
Others pointed out that given Trump’s fast food habits, there’s no way he would even eat a salad:
For what it’s worth, someone did a deep dive and couldn’t find Russian dressing on the salad at Mar-a-Lago:
We can’t wait to see what “Saturday Night Live” and Melissa McCarthy do with this Russian dressing bit.
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The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Texas was wrong to rely on an outdated medical standard to assess the intellectual disability of a defendant facing the death penalty. The decision effectively gives the prisoner, Bobby James Moore, the opportunity to be re-sentenced, most likely to life in prison.
The justices have been raising the bar on the sentencing of people with mental disabilities over the last several years. In a landmark 2002 ruling, the court said the Constitution prohibits states from imposing the death penalty on the intellectually disabled. In 2014, the justices explained that courts determining intellectual disability can’t just rely on rigid metrics and must look to the judgment of medical experts.
Tuesday’s 5-to-3 decision said the factors that the Texas state court considered in weighing Moore’s level of impairment create “an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed.”
Among other factors, the Texas court had turned to a 1992 manual for assessing mental disabilities, which has since been superseded by a more updated version that takes into account developments in mental health science. The standards adopted by the state court were “wholly nonclinical” and not in accordance with “the medical community’s diagnostic framework,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Texas was based on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, which has been interpreted to bar the death penalty both for children and for people like Moore, who has an average IQ score of 70.66. Moore, now 57, was convicted of capital murder in 1980.
Ginsburg noted that Texas couldn’t “satisfactorily explain why it applies current medical standards for diagnosing intellectual disability in other contexts,” such as public education or the juvenile justice system, and “yet clings to superseded standards when an individual’s life is at stake.”
“If the States were to have complete autonomy to define intellectual disability as they wished,” Ginsburg wrote, the 2002 decision exempting the intellectually disabled from execution “could become a nullity, and the Eighth Amendment’s protection of human dignity would not become a reality.”
“States have some flexibility, but not unfettered discretion, in enforcing” the Supreme Court’s prior rulings in this area of law, Ginsburg added.
The decision was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The majority’s approach “constitutionalizes rules for which there is not even clinical consensus,” Roberts said, and provides little guidance to states on what constitutes a proper assessment of intellectual disability.
The bottom line for the dissenters was that “clinicians, not judges, should determine clinical standards; and judges, not clinicians, should determine the content of the Eighth Amendment.”
A spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general’s office said the state was disappointed in the ruling but declined further comment.
In an unrelated decision issued last month that also looked at the Texas death penalty system, the Supreme Court ordered a new sentencing for an inmate who had been condemned to death on the basis of racist testimony introduced by his defense attorney. Roberts was in the majority in that case.
The issue of capital punishment deeply divides the justices. Breyer has on repeated occasions called for a case to consider whether the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.
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A Florida woman who botched cosmetic butt injections using tire sealant, rubber cement and superglue has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for a patient’s death.
Oneal Ron Morris, 36, also known as the “Toxic Tush Doctor,” appeared before a Broward County judge on Monday after pleading guilty to manslaughter, ABC affiliate Local 10 reported.
The sentence, which includes five years’ probation, follows a year in prison that Morris has already served for practicing health care without a license. Though Morris is transgender, she will serve her sentence at a men’s facility.
Family and friends of 31-year-old Shatarka Nuby, who died in 2012 after turning to Morris for cosmetic surgery, appeared in court and pressed for a harsher punishment.
“My daughter died the most inhumane death,” Sherri Pitts, Nuby’s mother, told CBS Miami.
“Eighteen months she suffered with not knowing the full of what he put in her body. The doctors couldn’t do anything until they knew what portion they put in her body,” Pitts said.
Nuby told authorities that she paid Morris $2,000 for treatments to enhance her butt, hips, thighs and breasts from 2007 to 2010, according to the arrest affidavit.
Just before her death, Nuby said she found discoloration and hardening at the injection sites. A witness to the procedure claimed to have seen Morris superglue cotton balls to Nuby’s injection sites, according to investigators.
Prosecutors said they were unable to confirm exactly what had been injected into Morris’ patients, The Washington Post reported.
Morris denied intentional wrongdoing.
“I have never ever or would dare ever to inject or have injected any human with any type of unknown substance,” Morris said at her sentencing, reading from a prepared statement.
Defense attorney William Lanphear argued that Morris’ patients knew she wasn’t licensed as a medical professional.
“All parties share the responsibilities and the blame for their own actions and the role they played,” the lawyer said, according to the Sun Sentinel. “There was an assumption of risk obligation from the victims.”
Another woman who received injections to her face ― and at one time had been dubbed “cement face” ― underwent surgery by a licensed doctor in 2014 to fix Morris’ hack job. Before then, she said she was too embarrassed to leave her home.
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President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order on Tuesday aimed at reversing much of former President Barack Obama’s efforts to shrink the United States’ carbon footprint.
The long-awaited order instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s signature policy for slashing greenhouse gas emissions from the utility sector, by far the country’s biggest emitter. This review marks the first step toward scrapping the regulation.
“Perhaps no single regulation threatens our miners, energy workers and companies more than this crushing attack on American industry,” Trump said at the 2 p.m. signing at the EPA. “We’re ending the theft of American prosperity and rebuilding our beloved country.”
Trump’s order also directs the Department of the Interior to lift a temporary ban, put in place last year, on coal leasing on federal lands. In addition, it eliminates federal guidance instructing agencies to factor climate change into policymaking and disbands a team tasked with calculating the “social cost of carbon.”
By undoing the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration is putting projected carbon emissions back on an upward trajectory. It is also abandoning any hope of meeting the U.S. emissions reduction targets set out in 2015 in the 195-country Paris Agreement, the first global climate pact to include China and the U.S., the world’s top polluters.
China ratified the Paris climate deal in September. In January, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged the U.S. not to withdraw from the agreement. Trump’s executive order does not contain language critical of the Paris accord, reflecting pressure from Trump’s few advisers who don’t take a hard-line stance against climate science.
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To be sure, the Trump administration can’t just get rid of the Clean Power Plan outright. In his previous role as Oklahoma’s attorney general, EPA chief Scott Pruitt sued the Obama administration to block the plan, claiming the rule overstepped the EPA’s legal mandate.
In a victory for Pruitt and other Republican state attorneys general, the Supreme Court issued a stay on implementing the plan in February 2016. But the high court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which categorized greenhouse gases as a pollutant, legally compels the federal environmental agency to police emissions.
“It looks like there’s going to be a reopening of the whole question of the best way, the legal way, to get at the largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in our country, which is the fossil fuel-fired power plants,” Frank Rambo, head of clean energy and air pollution at the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, told The Huffington Post in an interview ahead of the order’s release.
Environmentalists are likely to sue to protect the Clean Power Plan, forcing the White House to prove in court that the regulation meets the legal standard of “arbitrary and capricious.” To successfully employ this standard to overturn a previous court ruling, White House attorneys would have to debunk the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.
The biggest problem with dismantling the Clean Power Plan is that the plan itself represents only a preliminary step toward reaching emissions reduction goals. Even if the plan were to be perfectly implemented, the U.S. would still be progressing only halfway toward achieving its emissions goals for 2025. Trump may fail to completely undo the plan, but his administration seems unlikely to enact other policies to reduce emissions.
Trump pledged to boost the U.S. economy by gutting environmental regulations he blames for holding back businesses. Earlier this month, he proposed slashing the EPA budget by nearly one-third, eliminating popular programs like Energy Star and hampering the agency’s enforcement division. The EPA already rescinded a rule this month requiring oil and gas drillers to report leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas 40 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Kneecapping U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement could jeopardize the future of the deal itself. The accord, signed in December 2015, set out global emissions targets far below what’s required to prevent world temperatures from surpassing the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit increase that scientists say will irreversibly damage human civilization.
The language of the Paris deal urges the United Nations to reconvene every five years to set new, more stringent goals. If a country as wealthy and powerful as the U.S. fails to meet its baseline commitments, it’s unlikely that poor, developing countries that depend on fossil fuels to grow their economies will make ambitious emissions cuts themselves.
The failure of previous global deals, such as the 1992 Kyoto Protocol, hinged in large part on the U.S.’s refusal to implement emission cuts. And already, Trump has proposed curtailing payments to the U.N.-administered Green Climate Fund, which helps poorer countries build renewable energy infrastructure and prepare for the effects of climate change.
“The world is safer when America is strong,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in a speech before Trump. “Our strength relies on energy.”
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WASHINGTON ― Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos held an event at the National Air and Space Museum Tuesday, promoting the administration’s support for young women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. They even appeared with astronaut Kay Hire and showed the movie “Hidden Figures,” a story about the achievements of African-American women at NASA.
Trump paid homage to the women featured in the movie for “paving the way for greater representation of women and African-Americans in these fields.”
“My father’s administration has expanded NASA’s space exploration mission and added Mars as a key objective,” she added.
President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget, however severely undercuts this women-friendly image put forward by DeVos and his daughter Tuesday.
If Trump gets his way, his budget will eliminate the $115 million NASA Office of Education. The popular NASA initiative provides internships, enrichment programs, camps and scholarships for young scientists, and tries to get more underrepresented communities into STEM.
Advocates say it’s a critical way for more women and minorities to enter these fields, and that axing it would be devastating.
“It’s how I started my career in the space industry. It’s how so many people I know got started in the space industry,” Laura Seward Forczyk, a planetary scientist, told The Washington Post.
“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump are feigning an interest in STEM careers with a photo op at the National Air and Space Museum while eliminating all funding for NASA’s education programs. This takes chutzpah to a new level,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers labor union.
Growing up in Virginia, Leland Melvin thought he was going to go to college and eventually play professional football. But then he learned about a NASA program that would pay for him to take classes towards his master’s degree in materials science engineering. After a football injury sidelined his original plans, he continued his science education with additional NASA funding ― all funneled through the NASA Office of Education.
“If it hadn’t been for NASA Education I wouldn’t have been funded to go to school, to work at NASA Langley, to become an astronaut,” Melvin told The Washington Post. He eventually went on to run the education office as well.
NASA has said that if the education office is eliminated, it will absorb those programs into the Science Mission Directorate, another office at the agency. The directorate’s budget for education and outreach, however, is much smaller, meaning some of the education office’s programs would still be cut or eliminated.
The president recently signed legislation that requires NASA to encourage more women and girls to go into STEM, even though his budget takes away critical funds for such efforts. His budget also proposes taking away billions from the federal Pell Grant program, which helps low-income students attend college.
Ivanka Trump didn’t mention these cuts at the event Tuesday, although she did reveal that she and her 5-year-old daughter will be attending a coding class this summer.
Want more updates from Amanda Terkel? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth, here.
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Wine lovers, rejoice! Thanks to inventor Daniel Perlamn, a biophysicist at Brandeis University who’s also a wine enthusiast, a world with drip-free wine bottles could be within our grasp. When you pour a glass of wine from a bottle, it seems inevitable that one drop will make its way down the side of the bottle. It’s OK when it’s white wine, and not such a big issue when dealing with rosé, but it can make a mess when you’re enjoying a bottle of red.
Perlman felt our pain and put his biophysicist mind to work on a solution. He cut a circular groove ― 2 millimeters wide and 1 millimeter deep― just below the lip of the bottle and just like that, he stopped the drip. Look:
The same basic wine bottle design has been used for years without change, and with one simple groove Perlman has drastically improved it.
To arrive at this solution, Perlman watched slow motion videos of wine pouring. He noticed that wine tends to curl backward over the lip ― because wine bottles are made of glass, which attract liquid ― and run down the side. The addition of the small groove stops wine in its tracks. The drip can’t easily cross the notch, and so instead it follows gravity and drops immediately into the glass ― right where it belongs.
Perlman is currently talking to bottle manufacturers about adopting his design, but there’s no word yet on when or if we will see his upgraded bottle in a wine store near you. In the meantime, mind your drips.
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A woman posing as a Target store employee scammed the superstore out of thousands of dollars in merchandise, authorities in Virginia said.
According to the Fairfax County Police Department, the unidentified woman “portrayed herself as an employee” when she walked into a Target store in Alexandria on March 15. Wearing khakis and a black shirt, similar to what Target employees wear, she managed to gain access to the stock room, where she allegedly filled a box with dozens of iPhones.
Surveillance cameras captured the suspect leaving the store. When employees realized what happened, they notified police and the company’s corporate headquarters.
The value of the haul, authorities said, totaled about $40,000.
”The suspect is not affiliated with the store, but appeared to have knowledge of the store’s procedures, employee hours and the location of the iPhones in the stockroom,” Fairfax police said in a press release.
Target has been targeted by thieves impersonating employees before.
In October 2015, a man posing as an employee entered a Target in Sandy Springs, Georgia. After convincing customer service it was his first day on the job, he allegedly walked out with nearly $18,000 in cell phones. The same man reportedly pulled a similar scam at another Target, netting a much bigger haul, worth nearly $30,000.
Contacted by The Huffington Post on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Fairfax County Police Department said no additional details about the most recent theft are being released.
Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 703-691-2131.
David Lohr covers crime and missing persons. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow him on Twitter.
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One boyfriend is putting his Disney fanatic girlfriend in “a whole new world” with nothing but his stylus pen and some epic drawing skills.
Amin Fouzi and his girlfriend Lyana Azman are both 21-year-old students from Malaysia who are currently studying in Melbourne. Last week, the couple was waiting for food at a restaurant when Amin snapped a quick pic of Lyana.
This wasn’t just any dinner with bae photo, though; Amin proceeded to turn the pic into bonafide art on Instagram Stories:
Lyana, a huge fan of all things Disney, was very impressed.
“I didn’t know he was actually going to draw me as Snow White, so when I saw it, I thought it was so cool,” she told The Huffington Post. “I especially love the ‘poisonous apple’ line, referring to my iPhone.”
Since then, Amin has turned Lyana into a number of classic Disney princesses. Here’s his take on Mulan:
And here’s Alice from “Alice in Wonderland:”
Heres’s Lyana wearing Aurora’s iconic pink gown from “Sleeping Beauty”:
Lyana told us that her boyfriend finishes each drawing in less than five minutes.
“Every time Amin has to draw anything, he can do it in a short period of time and they’ll all come out amazing,” she said.
Her favorite Instagram doodle is one depicting her as Belle from “Beauty and the Beast:”
“I love it because she’s my favorite Disney princess and also because I just watched the new live-action movie!”
People on Twitter ― where Lyana first posted the pics ― are super impressed with Amin’s drawings.
Yep, we’d have to agree.
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