This is either the coolest thing we’ve seen in a while from a major retailer, or the most twisted. Or maybe a little bit of both? According to the folks at Boing Boing, Walmart is now selling toy replicas of LeMarchand’s Lament Configuration from the Hellraiser franchise. The Hellraiser puzzle box has become a STEM toy, one intended for children to play with as they learn about technology and engineering. Yes, the very puzzle box that unleashes the Cenobites onto the Earthly plane and brings forth sadistic pleasures for them.

Twitter owner Elon Musk pleaded with advertisers to keep using his platform on Wednesday as he sketched out his plans for user verification, content moderation and even his intention to add banking features to Twitter in front of a live audience of over 100,000 users. During an hour-long Twitter Spaces session attended by representatives from Adidas, Chevron, Kate Spade, Nissan and Walgreens, Musk said he wanted Twitter to “be a force that moves civilization in a positive direction.” An indicator of success, he said, would be whether his decisions lead to growth in users and advertising, while failure would mean the opposite.

According to the criminal complaint, after cutting off the foot the nurses didn’t really know what to do with the newly freed appendage. Eventually the nurses decided to put the foot into a zip lock bag, then a biohazard bag and leave it in the freezer they kept in the basement. Brown, according to several nurses interviewed in the criminal complaint, had a different idea. “(One nurse) stated that Brown came up to her after she cut the foot off and apologized and stated that her intent was to help (victim’s name redacted) and give him some dignity, and that her family has a taxidermy shop and she was going to preserve the foot and put it on display with a sign that said “wear your boots kids,’” reads the criminal complaint. This was something several of the nurses aware of the idea described as “weird.”

The 30-year-old billionaire was forced to sell his crypto firm empire on Nov. 8 to a major rival due to a cash crisis.

Baby O’s case is at the center of a lawsuit to bring down the Indian Child Welfare Act. But far from proving ICWA should be overturned, it shows why the law is necessary. In March of 2016, a newborn baby was left at a hospital in Nevada. In court documents, the child is called “Baby O,” but we will call her “Octavia.” When she was 3 days old, Octavia went to live with a couple named Heather and Nick Libretti in the small city of Sparks, Nev., just outside of Reno. At the time, Heather did PR for a classic cars festival, while Nick worked as a mechanic. The couple, now in their early 40s, had fostered and adopted two boys—and taken in a third—but Heather had always wanted a girl. And there was something else: Octavia’s paternal grandmother was a citizen of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a federally recognized tribe in El Paso, Tex. This meant Octavia was eligible for citizenship in the tribe and that her case would likely fall under a 1978 federal law known as the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which was created to prevent family separation in Native communities. Among other things, the law gave Octavia’s tribe the right to intervene in her case and required social workers to prioritize placing Octavia with extended family or another member of her tribe. Social workers from the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo told the Washoe County HSA that they would intervene only if the child wasn’t placed with relatives. Her placement with the Librettis would be temporary The Librettis, however, did not accept the news that they might not be allowed to adopt Octavia. Instead, they decided to fight. Over the next year, they would contact Octavia’s family members and talk them out of raising the child; ask her grandmother to renounce her tribal membership so ICWA wouldn’t apply; and hire lawyers to fight for custody. Eventually, the Librettis would prevail: They would adopt Octavia. But the Librettis didn’t stop there. In 2017, they joined a federal lawsuit seeking to strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act. That case, Haaland v. Brackeen, has now wound its way to the Supreme Court and brought the Librettis to the paradoxical place where they find themselves today: They have won custody of Octavia—over the child’s blood relatives—but claim that ICWA harmed them so seriously that it violated their constitutional rights.

Democrat John Fetterman has clinched a key victory for Democrats with a projected win in the Pennsylvania Senate race. His win comes on top of a series of Democratic victories in key House and Senate races that are blunting GOP hopes for a titanic red wave in the midterm elections.

An “exceptional” trove of bronze statues preserved for thousands of years by mud and boiling water have been discovered in a network of baths built by the Etruscans in Tuscany. The 24 partly submerged statues, which date back 2,300 years and have been hailed as the most significant find of their kind in 50 years, include a sleeping ephebe lying next to Hygeia, the goddess of health, with a snake wrapped around her arm.

Jail suicides under Hodgson have long been shown to surpass those in other counties. According to a statewide review of jail suicides in Massachusetts by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, Bristol County, home to about 8 percent of the state’s population, accounted for nearly a quarter of its jail suicides between 2006 and 2016. Lawsuits and protests over dangerous jail conditions, malnutrition and medical neglect have made Hodgson infamous among many jail watchdogs. “He’s earned the nickname ‘The Arpaio of the East’,” said Elizabeth Matos, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, referencing Joe Arpaio, the rightwing strongman and former sheriff of Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, whose brutal jails and discriminatory policing practices were so egregious as to earn him unusual national scrutiny and a criminal conviction. There are plenty of similarities: Both are staunchly anti-immigrant strongmen deeply embedded in far-right networks. Both support the movement of “constitutional sheriffs,” which preaches that sheriffs have ultimate authority within their counties. Both tied themselves closely with Donald Trump once he came to power in 2016. And both are also known for scandals and inhumane treatment inside their jails, and have faced heaps of lawsuits over dangerous conditions. Hodgson, Massachusetts’ longest-serving sheriff, is again seeking re-election on Nov. 8. He has defended his oversight of the jail, including releasing his own internal report on jail suicides that absolves his department of responsibility while ignoring key details. He has pushed back against a state probe into his jail practices, calling it a “political witch hunt.” After the most recent suicide on his watch, earlier this month, Hodgson said his staff had gone “above and beyond” to help the man, and should be applauded. There are no consistently Republican counties in Massachusetts, but Bristol County, where Trump claimed 43 percent of the vote in 2020, is widely considered to be the state’s most conservative. Hodgson’s Democratic opponent Paul Heroux, the mayor of Attleboro, a small and largely working-class city near the state’s Rhode Island border, is running with support from the state’s Democratic establishment. His campaign recently released an internal poll showing him within two percentage points of Hodgson. Heroux, who is Hodgson’s first election opponent in twelve years, criticized the sheriff’s treatment of incarcerated people. “How can anybody say that’s a good idea, to have this type of person, with his mindset, being our chief jailer?” he said.

Come now the election monitors—some to ensure Americans get to vote, others to make damn sure that those who look like they may vote for Democrats can’t. In Florida today, the DeSantis regime has said that a new Florida law prohibits federal Justice Department monitors from going to polling places to ensure that voters can vote. This has been a project of the Justice Department since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 charged the department with that duty, and it’s something that it has done thousands of times in thousands of counties since then, including in 64 counties across the nation today. This is the first time, however, that a state government has refused them entry.  DeSantis claims that state law supersedes federal law, much in the spirit of John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification, under which states can overrule those federal laws (initially, pertaining to slavery) that their governors don’t like.

People are fleeing Twitter for a tiny social network. Here’s what you need to know about it.

Texas authorities arrested a man Monday who allegedly hit Sen. Ted Cruz (R) with can of beer during the Houston Astros’ World Series parade. In a tweet on Monday, the Houston Police Dep…

A Morgan Twp. man charged with murder admitted to shooting and killing his neighbor in Okeana on Saturday, according to court documents. Austin Gene Combs, 26, was booked into the Butler County Jail on Saturday night and charged with murder. Bond was set at $950,000 on Monday during a video arraignment at the Butler County Historic Courthouse. Anthony Lee King, 43, died of multiple gunshot wounds, and his death was ruled a homicide, according to the Butler County Coroner’s Office. The victim’s wife then tells the dispatcher they were cutting grass and working in the yard when she came inside to let the dog out. That’s when she heard gunshots, she said. “I look in the backyard and that man is walking away from my husband, and my husband is on the ground,” the woman says “He has come over like four times confronting my husband because he thought he was a Democrat. Why, why … Please, I don’t understand.”

Full of life and smiles — that’s how 48-year-old Kenneth Vinyard is being remembered. “He was such a kind and good man as evidenced as he was acting as a good Samaritan,” Attorney Joel Sansone said. His family’s attorney is bringing light to his death, which happened in the parking lot of the Walmart in Monaca Sunday night. Sansone said Vinyard was helping a man who was shot right by his car while he was waiting for his fiance to come out of Walmart. “An unidentified man insisted he step away and violently pushed Mr. Vinyard to the ground where he struck his head on the pavement. His fiancé began to render aid to Mr. Vinyard including chest compressions because he had no pulse,” Sansone said. That’s when Sansone said the man identified himself to the fiance as a police officer with Center Township. Just a few hours later, Vinyard died from his injuries. “This appears to me to be another incident of senseless police violence. There was no excuse for the officer involved to engage in any physical act let alone a violence shove that caused the death of a man who was just trying to help another human being he did not know,” Sansone said.

In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced that it has arrested a “James Zhong” and seized over 50,000 bitcoins. The coins in question were originally stolen from the dark web marketplace the Silk Road back in 2012 — a full decade ago. The press release by the DoJ explains how Zhong used an exploit to steal the bitcoin from Ross Ulbricht, founder and owner of the Silk Road, in September 2012. The value of the stolen goods at the time was ~$500,000. Today, that same stash is valued at over $1,000,000,000. The statements from the DoJ also point to Zhong taking profit from a bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Cash, back in 2017 as helping to provide traceability to his maneuvers. While not mentioned in the initial press release, Protos reached out to Lt. Shaun Barnett of the Athens, Georgia police department to explain how Zhong was flagged. According to Lt. Barnett, in 2019 Zhong called the police to “report a burglary.” He mentioned that numerous assets had been stolen, including “a lot of bitcoin.” This was apparently enough to get the attention of the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit.

The Sonoran desert toad produces both deadly and psychedelic poisons. It faces increasing poaching pressure because of its trippy toxins.

Dialogue has never been more unintelligible. Is there anything we can do, other than turn on the subtitles? In short: not really

A fitting tribute to one of pop music's most unique figures

Schwarzenegger was replying to suggestions Stallone made to The Hollywood Reporter that the action star feigned interest to toy with him.

One year ago, Britney Spears was freed from a notorious conservatorship. What possessed her father to seize near-total control of her life?

Alexander Tominsky ate 40 chickens in as many days and brought cheers to his city.