Here’s my favorite joke. I have no idea where it comes from, but I’ve never heard it outside of Australia. It goes like this: One day, Job, a prosperous and loyal servant of God, wakes up to find his livestock all afflicted with a horrible disease. As he watches the last of his cattle succumb, he turns to the heavens and shouts “Why, God?! Why!?” Later, he receives news that all ten of his beautiful children have been killed by marauding invaders. Once again, Job turns his head skyward and wails “Why, God?! Why?!”. Not long after that, Job is struck down with a terrible sickness. He lays in bed in agony, with no children to comfort him, his life and livelihood in ruins, and as his fever rises and he feels certain that death is near, he lets out an anguished cry — “Why, God!? Why?!”. And God goes, “Oh, I dunno, Job, ya just shit me.” Possibly some of it is lost in writing it down, possibly more is lost here because God’s punchline is most effective when delivered in a lazy Australian drawl. Possibly American readers will not be familiar with the regional idiom “ya just shit me,” known to most Australians as it’s in Latin on our coat of arms. In any case, there’s a reason I tell this joke: I want to talk about the liberating joy of hating something for no good reason.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the biggest challenge to abortion rights in decades, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Wednesday signaled they would allow states to ban abortion much earlier in pregnancy and may even overturn the nationwide right that has existed for nearly 50 years.

In the brief it submitted to the Supreme Court, the state of Mississippi did more than outline its case for banning abortions before a fetus is viable: It revised history. “The march of progress” has left Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey “behind,” attorneys wrote. Decisions in those landmark cases, which established a right to abortion and separately upheld that right, have been “undercut” by certain developments. “Today, adoption is accessible, and on a wide scale women attain both professional success and a rich family life, contraceptives are more available and effective, and scientific advances show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months before viability,” according to the brief. Mississippi’s attorneys have crammed several remarkable ideas into one sentence, among them that women these days have it all. “They’re saying there’s no need because people like Amy Coney Barrett exist. Women can have big families and successful professional lives and there’s no need to choose,” the legal scholar Mary Ziegler told the New York Times. In a statement, Lynn Fitch, the attorney general of Mississippi, said as much. “A lot has changed in five decades,” she claimed. There was once “little support for women who wanted a full family life and a successful career,” she added. “In these last 50 years, women have carved their own way to achieving a better balance for success in their professional and personal lives.” Fitch sells purposeful fiction. Two years of economic hardship pushed women workers out of their jobs by the tens of thousands. Those who wish to return to their professional lives may find the way blocked, both by traditional gender expectations and the absence of universal paid leave. Mississippi now seeks to add another burden to women’s lives. Women’s ability to control their reproduction is not central to their professional or personal success, the state insists, contradicting both the available research and basic common sense. Should the court uphold Mississippi’s abortion ban, justices will give the conservative movement what it has wanted for years: the body as a prison. Few will escape.

This is proper police state stuff. The last-minute amendments crowbarred by the government into the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill are a blatant attempt to stifle protest, of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt. Priti Patel, the home secretary, shoved 18 extra pages into the bill after it had passed through the Commons, and after the second reading in the House of Lords. It looks like a deliberate ploy to avoid effective parliamentary scrutiny. Yet in most of the media there’s a resounding silence. Among the new amendments are measures that would ban protesters from attaching themselves to another person, to an object, or to land. Not only would they make locking on – a crucial tool of protest the world over – illegal, but they are so loosely drafted that they could apply to anyone holding on to anything, on pain of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment. It would also become a criminal offence to obstruct in any way major transport works from being carried out, again with a maximum sentence of 51 weeks. This looks like an attempt to end meaningful protest against road-building and airport expansion. Other amendments would greatly expand police stop and search powers. The police would be entitled to stop and search people or vehicles if they suspect they might be carrying any article that could be used in the newly prohibited protests, presumably including placards, flyers and banners. Other new powers would grant police the right to stop and search people without suspicion, if they believe that protest will occur “in that area”. Anyone who resists being searched could be imprisoned for – you guessed it – up to 51 weeks.

"People (think), ‘Oh, it’s Maine, it’s idyllic, it’s beautiful, it’s peaceful,'" he said. "No, it looks that way, but if you peel the veneer off here, it’s still Stephen King… (Y)ou don’t get to 175-0 unless there is something very, very wrong."

The chemical's presence in a small sample of deer has led to a "Do Not Eat" advisory for venison in a six-county region in Maine.

The officer shot a wheelchair user nine times in the back and side at close range, police say.

Two young women move into an impossibly available Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, only to discover that it was once utilized by (dum dum dum) the dead child-trafficking mogul Jeffrey Epstein. That’s the grotesquely button-pressing premise of The Scary Of Sixty-First, the bold but uneven debut feature from actor-podcaster-director Dasha Nekrasova. This is clearly a film with no interest in making friends—a proud provocation made in the sturdy spirit of ’70s exploitation movies. Nekrasova borrows from the best, courting comparisons to more highbrow pictures like Eyes Wide Shut and The Tenant. But she clearly started with an aim to get a rise out of people, and working backwards from there resulted in some slapdash storytelling. The movie feels on brand for Nekrasova, who cohosts the “dirtbag leftist” Red Scare podcast, where the r-word flies freely and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones shows up for giggles and photo ops. Though being winkingly offensive for the lolz is a phase many blessedly grow out of after high school, Nekrasova has turned it into a shtick. In theory, it could be a fantastic fit for horror. The pair’s disdain for a generation of self-appointed web sleuths with no self-awareness comes out in the dialogue between their heroines, college buds Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn). “Reddit’s for bottom-feeders, but there’s some really good threads,” Noelle mutters, staring at her laptop screen. Addie is the spiritual type, hooked on crystals and sage bundles that make her vulnerable to a supernatural invasion. She has boundary issues and acts childish—cooing baby-voiced at her boyfriend through her fingertip like a pathetic millennial bastardization of The Shining’s Danny Torrance—even before she’s possessed by the spirit of an an underage trafficking victim.

Authorities in the Netherlands say testing has confirmed that COVID cases identified on November 19 and 23 were the new strain — days before researchers identified it.

Santa Inc. is the story of Candy Smalls, the highest-ranking female elf in the North Pole. When the successor to Santa Claus is poached by Amazon on Christmas Eve, Candy goes for her ultimate dream— to become the first woman Santa Claus in the history of Christmas.

Lamb in 1997 started Daystar, the largest religious TV network in the United States that calls itself a church. Opposing vaccines was a central Daystar focus.

How else can they stop Japanese people from going abroad for New Year?

At least three teenagers were killed Tuesday afternoon in a shooting at a high school in Oakland County, Michigan, according to authorities. Another eight people were injured, officials said. The 15-year-old suspect, a sophomore at the school, was taken into custody after authorities responded to the shooting, officials said.

Russia claims Aunon-Chancellor made the hole after a blood clot developed in her jugular vein that she had to treat herself, leading to an 'acute psychological crisis'.

The New York Times has reported that Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden spent years sending emails with homophobic and sexist remarks with his friend, then-Washington Football Team president Bruce Allen. Within an hour of the report, which followed a separate account days earlier of Gruden sending a racist email, Gruden had resigned.

Spotify users and artists have responded to CEO Daniel Ek's €100 million investment in AI defence tech company Helsing. On November 9th, Ek announced the investment into the British-German company, whose technology will initially be sold to the French, British and German militaries. As part of the deal, Ek is also joining Helsing's board. Helsing says it will use "world-leading AI technology for defence and national security" to provide "information advantage for democratic governments" and "keep liberal democracies from harm." The €100-million deal, which arrives via Ek's €1 billion Prima Materia investment company, has angered some Spotify users, who responded to Ek's tweet by closing accounts and jumping ship to competitors like Bandcamp and Tidal.

The Biden administration is preparing stricter testing requirements for all travelers entering the United States, including returning Americans, to curb the spread of the potentially dangerous omicron variant, according to three federal health officials. As part of an enhanced winter covid strategy Biden is expected to announce Thursday, U.S. officials would require everyone entering the country to be tested one day before boarding flights, regardless of their vaccination status or country of departure. Administration officials are also considering a requirement that all travelers get retested within three to five days of arrival. In addition, they are debating a controversial proposal to require all travelers, including U.S. citizens, to self-quarantine for seven days, even if their test results are negative. Those who flout the requirements might be subject to fines and penalties, the first time such penalties would be linked to testing and quarantine measures for travelers in the United States.

This week, the New York Attorney General’s office released a tranche of transcripts and exhibits they produced during the course of their investigation into the many sexual harassment and groping allegations against former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The state AG’s investigation is not to be confused with a parallel investigation carried out and recently concluded by the New York State Assembly, nor the criminal case Cuomo is facing in Albany County, though the state AG released all their documents because of said case. The interview transcripts and thousands of pages of corresponding documents paint a damning picture of Cuomo as a tyrannical figure who serially harassed and inappropriately touched women, then used the power of his office and its climate of “fear and intimidation” to retaliate against, discredit, and attempt to silence accusers.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon best known as the host of TV’s Dr. Oz Show after rocketing to fame on Oprah Winfrey's show, announced Tuesday that he is running for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat as a Republican. Oz, 61, will bring

No one contributed more to Castaneda's debunking than Richard de Mille. De Mille, who held a Ph.D. in psychology from USC, was something of a freelance intellectual. In a recent interview, he remarked that because he wasn't associated with a university, he could tell the story straight. "People in the academy wouldn't do it," he remarked. "They'd be embarrassing the establishment." Specifically the UCLA professors who, according to de Mille, knew it was a hoax from the start. But a hoax that, he said, supported their theories, which de Mille summed up succinctly: "Reality doesn't exist. It's all what people say to each other."