If you joined Twitter at any point in the last several years, there’s a good chance the default ‘egg’ profile photo is the only one you’ve ever known. The egg, while fitting with the service’s bird-themed logo, has become synonymous with abusive trolls who create an account to spew hatred at others anonymously. This was one of three reasons Twitter … Continue reading
The turn-based strategy game ‘Plague Road’ will be arriving on the PlayStation 4 and the PS Vita, Sony has announced. The game, which is brightly colored and highly saturated with quasi-realistic designs, follows the story of a doctor who is heading back into a diseased city in search of survivors. It’s a milestone for the game, which first launched on … Continue reading
Gilbert Baker, the artist and LGBTQ rights activist who created the rainbow flag, has died at age 65.
The Bay Area Reporter confirmed the news Friday on Facebook. The newspaper’s post offered few details, but noted that Baker had died in New York.
Author and activist Cleve Jones, whose book, When We Rise, inspired the recent ABC miniseries of the same name, also shared the news on his Facebook page.
Baker, who was born in Kansas, designed the first rainbow flag in 1978 after he was approached by San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk to create a symbol for the LGBTQ community. Just months before his assassination, Milk rode in the city’s June pride parade under Baker’s original flag, which featured eight colored stripes: hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo and violet. The original design changed to the iconic, six-barred rainbow flag in 1979.
“The rainbow came to mind almost instantly as an obvious expression of diversity and acceptance,” Baker told CBS Chicago in 2012. “It’s beautiful, all of the colors, even the colors you can’t see. That really fit us as a people because we are all of the colors. Our sexuality is all of the colors. We are all the genders, races and ages.”
In a second Facebook post, Jones noted that a memorial would be held Friday in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.
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This is one bad-ass badger.
University of Utah scientists who spent the winter studying how scavengers in the Great Basin handle the cold weather discovered something unprecedented in the annals of science: A very industrious badger managed to bury an entire cow carcass by itself over five days, then feasted on it.
The scientists had set out the carcass of a 50-pound calf in the belief it might attract vultures or coyotes, according to Gizmodo.com. They were shocked to discover their time-lapse camera had filmed this super-bad badger cleverly excavating tunnels under the carcass until the whole thing collapsed into a pit.
After that, the badger covered the carcass completely with soil, then constructed a burrow, where it feasted on the beef for 11 straight days, according to National Geographic.
The scientists said no one had ever before witnessed a badger take on anything larger than a jackrabbit.
“I was really shocked by the fact that these badgers could completely monopolize and dominate that food source,” researcher Eva Buechley told National Geographic. “This is an interesting niche, and it may be badgers are playing a more important role in the nutrient cycle than anybody knew.”
A study on the badger’s behavior was published Friday in the Western North American Naturalist.
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Tongues will surely be wagging over this Guinness World Record attempt.
Sideshow performer Zoe Ellis, aka Zoe L’Amour, recently appeared on the “Guinness World Records Italian Show” in hopes of breaking her own world record for stopping the most electric fan blades using her tongue in one minute.
Ellis previously managed to lick the world record by stopping fan blades with her tongue 20 times in 60 seconds.
The GIF below will make it clear what she’s doing. Needless to say, this is a feat that should only be attempted by a professional. Do not try this at home ― or anywhere else.
For the record, literally, Ellis managed to beat her world record on the video above by stopping the blades with her tongue 32 times.
Shortly after filming this video, Ellis’s new world record was sliced apart by Ashrita Furman, who tongue-stopped 35 blades in a minute.
David Moye covers weird news and viral stories. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow him on Facebook or Twitter.
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Yesterday, Google said that an unspecified bug was delaying the Android Wear 2.0 rollout yet again. It looks like the delay hasn’t been too severe though. The company says that Wear 2.0 is now available for five more watches: the Polar M600, Nixon Mi…
We all hoped EPA head, Scott Pruitt, would eventually face consequences when he falsely claimed that there was “tremendous disagreement” about whether human activity cause global warming.
Mad Catz, the gaming peripheral company that has been around for decades, has officially shut down. The news is sad but not unexpected — the company has struggled for years with financial difficulties, and last year it assembled a committee to see about selling the company. According to a newly published release announcing the closure, no company was interested in … Continue reading
The Pussycats might be on the move.
The CW’s “Riverdale” hasn’t even finished its first season, but breakout star Ashleigh Murray already has her eye on a bright and leopard-spotted future for Josie and her bandmates, Melody and Val.
The homegrown rock band is pretty much the equivalent of Destiny’s Child in the “Archie” universe (even teen redheads solving mysteries go to concerts sometimes, OK?) and are clearly destined for bigger and better things than the Riverdale High football halftime show. For the record, they slayed that one, too.
“I would absolutely do a spinoff,” Murray told The Huffington Post during a recent Build Series interview. “I want to bring Josie to New York. I want her to have her first big city experience.”
Although “Riverdale” ditches everything that might be familiar to older generations of Archie readers for CW “regulation hotties” and major “Twin Peaks” vibes, a “Josie and the Pussycats” spinoff would actually stay true to the comic-book origins.
Josie made her first appearance in 1962 with Archie’s Pals ‘n’ Gals alongside Melody and Pepper, who was later replaced by Val. The girl group received their own cover seven years later and were a mainstay on comic-book store shelves until 1982.
An animated series following the group’s misadventures also aired 16 episodes in the early 1970s and was later reconceptualized as “Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space.” Yes, space.
“There have been discussions and wishful thinking,” Murray added about the potential of a spinoff. “I’ve been quoted saying that I didn’t want to, but it was solely because I didn’t want to live without the [cast]. They’re my family now. We talk all the time. I love them. To start this journey and then be pulled into another place, I know that’s what happens, but I don’t want to not be in school with Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. But I’ll do it.”
Watch Murray’s full Build Series interview below.
Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Mahershala Ali, Amy Poehler and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31, on Facebook Live.
You can support the ACLU right away. Text POWER to 20222 to give $10 to the ACLU. The ACLU will call you to explain other actions you can take to help. Visit www.hmgf.org/t for terms. #StandForRights2017
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Some 20,000 convicted drug offenders in Massachusetts will likely have their cases thrown out because of a rogue state police chemist who brazenly fabricated evidence.
“What we’re told is somewhere between 500 and 1,000 cases ― the ones they think are serious ― will be kept,” Carl Williams, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, told The Huffington Post.
Former chemist Annie Dookhan had been falsifying test results and tampering with evidence for nearly 10 years when she was fired in 2012 from her job at a Boston lab operated by the Department of Public Health. An investigation that year questioned the validity of her work, and in 2013 she pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including 17 counts of obstruction of justice and eight counts of tampering with evidence.
Williams said Dookhan was involved in roughly 24,000 questionable drug cases involving about 20,000 defendants. The cases were prosecuted in the Bristol, Cape & Islands, Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth and Suffolk districts.
The district attorneys’ offices have until April 18 to notify the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court which among the cases involving Dookhan can realistically be retried.
According to The Boston Globe, prosecutors have yet to comment on how many cases they plan to fight to pursue. However, Middlesex County Assistant District Attorney Robert J. Bender, at a recent meeting with Associate Justice Margot Botsford of the state Supreme Judicial Court, said the numbers are in line with Williams’ account.
“Without putting numbers on it, it’s in the ballpark that the court was looking for,” Bender told Botsford on March 16, according to The Boston Globe. “Hundreds of cases, not thousands of cases.”
The April deadline was set by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in January. The district attorneys’ offices were told at that time that they had 90 days to notify the court which cases they will pursue without drug lab evidence. All others must be dismissed.
The decision came after roughly five years of legal wrangling between prosecutors who fought to preserve the convictions and defense attorneys and civil rights groups who argued they should be tossed.
“It is a substantial victory,” Williams told HuffPost. “Prosecutors have been fighting for years and years to defend these cases in a time where more drugs are decriminalized than when this case began.”
For her role in what’s considered one of the largest drug lab scandals in U.S. history, Dookhan was sentenced to three to five years in prison. She was released on parole last year.
Dookhan’s sentence was, in some instances, less time than that served by the people she helped victimize.
Prosecutors from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office have said Dookhan’s crimes caused “egregious damage” to the criminal justice system. But authorities have yet to offer an estimated tally of the financial damages to defendants and taxpayers.
“People have had to live with convictions based on tainted evidence, and that’s not justice,” Williams said. “When you build a machine like the war on drugs, it is inevitable in the rush to incarcerate people that things like this are going to happen.”
David Lohr covers crime and missing persons. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow him on Twitter.
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