Melanie Porter was sitting on her porch in Quesnel, B.C., smoking a cigarette on Thursday night when a bear approached her and licked her hand.

A TikTok video on ‘inverted crosses’ at Astroworld racked up more than a million views in one day, in the latest sign that Q-style conspiracies are infecting the platform.

It's hard to live in the modern world without feeling like you should start committing some felonies

The spinning saxon, flying pigeons, polka batteries, jumping jacks and firecrackers, squibs and salutes, Aztec Fountains, Bengal Lights, and Egyptian Circlets, bangers or bungers, cakes, crossettes, candles, and a Japanese design known as kamuro (boys haircut), which looks like a bobbed wig teased out across the stratosphere. . . the language of fireworks has a richness that hints at the explosive payload it references. And yet, anyone who has ever held their camera up to the blazing sky knows that a brilliant firework show can rarely be captured to any satisfying degree. Perhaps this is what makes a nineteenth-century series of catalogue advertisements for Japanese fireworks so mesmerizing: denied the expectations of photorealism, these images are free to evoke a unique sense of visual wonder. Thought to have been invented in China around the second century BCE, fireworks began as modest bamboo sparklers, advancing toward today’s complex pyrotechnic spectacles with the piecemeal discovery of saltpeter, gunpowder, tubular projectiles, and colorizing salts. While Chinese and European firework histories are heavily documented, Japan’s traditions remain moderately more obscure. Despite excellent pyrotechnic craftsmanship, for example, it was still possible for researchers to write, as recently as 2010, that “comprehensive information encompassing the development of fireworks culture in Japan, the history, and any intricate symbolism, is not widely known or appreciated within Japan, let alone abroad.”

Customs restrictions, high transport costs, and a short shelf life have made the world’s greatest mangoes — grown in Pakistan — difficult to come by in the U.S.

It's committed to the truth, if you can find it

Business Insider reported several allegations of disturbing behavior with much younger women

The movie that made Terry Gilliam into a success is also one of his best, funniest, most ambitious and complex films.

They’re like skins in games, except for real people.

A fast-spreading bacteria could cause an olive-oil apocalypse. In early 2016, Giovanni Melcarne, an agronomist and the owner of an extra virgin olive oil farm in Gagliano del Capo, walked through the southern Italian countryside of Puglia. He was with a fellow olive-oil farmer who had called and told him there was something he had to see. The two approached a centuries-old olive tree growing at the edge of the street along a traditional stone wall. All around, the old olive trees that covered the red clay were either dead or in an advanced state of decay, filling the landscape with an unnatural greyness. Melcarne was not surprised: At least 2 million olive trees in Puglia looked this way, including many of his own. The cause of the blight was Xylella fastidiosa, a bacteria that researchers believe arrived around 2010 from Latin America, possibly from Costa Rica on an imported ornamental plant. Today, Xylella has infected at least one-third of the 60 million olive trees in Puglia, which produces 12 percent of the world’s olive oil. The bacteria leaves no chance of survival: Once a plant is infected, it’s doomed to die in a handful of years. Today, Xylella is spreading fast across Puglia, crossing into other Italian regions and Mediterranean countries, and upending the production of olives and olive oil, the symbols of the Mediterranean.

Reporter talks to most of the people who walked out of a McDonald's in PA due to making starvation wages.

The paper demands retractions but has no leg to stand on

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

DDoSecrets published the trove Friday afternoon. Privacy advocates say it shows how pervasive law enforcement's eye has become, and how lax its data protection can be.

The concert promoter behind Astroworld Festival has weathered a couple dozen tragedies amid years of market dominance in the live entertainment industry, including unruly crowds, overzealous security and faulty equipment at various venues. Live Nation Entertainment and its subsidiary Live Nation Worldwide have been linked to at least 750 injuries and around 200 deaths at its events in seven countries since 2006, according to a review of court records, Occupational Safety and Health complaints and news reports. The company has also come under federal scrutiny for work safety and antitrust violations. The artists whose names accompany events where people have died or been injured run the gamut — Radiohead, Madonna, Beyonce, Dua Lipa, Drake and Jimmy Buffett. Some of these incidents appear reminiscent of the horrific scene Saturday morning outside NRG Park, hours after eight people died in a rush toward the stage during rapper Travis Scott’s show. At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, hundreds of surging fans at a free post-hardcore concert caused a barricade to collapse, injuring 19. In 2016, a crowd forced a railing to give way at a Snoop Dogg concert in Camden, N.J., causing 50 people to fall about 10 feet onto a concrete pathway. The tragedies at Live Nation concerts include violent intrusions on the premises — an explosion set off by a suicide bomber that killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England in 2017; a mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 that killed 60; and a terrorist attack at a concert hall in Paris where 89 people were slain. The company settled for $50 million with victims of a stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair in 2011 that was prompted by winds of over 60 mph. That disaster killed seven people and injured 61. A jury awarded $101 million to a concert staffer who suffered brain damage when a forklift toppled the booth where he was working on Long Island, N.Y. in 2013. Fans who attended a 2018 concert in Central Park said in court documents they were “trampled, pummeled, assaulted” during a stampede. The company has also faced lawsuits, including one by a concertgoer who broke her leg during a stampede at an outdoor Gwen Stefani concern in North Carolina in July 2016.

After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing. They talked for 50 seconds. Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus. The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker. According to the SEC, Fauth has cited a medical condition for why he cannot comply with the subpoena, even as he has been healthy enough to continue his duties at the National Mediation Board. In its filings, the SEC accuses Fauth of engaging in “a relentless battle” to dodge the subpoena. In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Fauth to the three-person board, a federal agency that facilitates labor-management relations within the nation’s railroad and airline industries. President Joe Biden reappointed him to the board.

If you're tired of changing your clocks twice a year, there could be some hope on the horizon. But a change to federal law would be required.

The move gives another platform for a U.S. ally to fly the most advanced fighter jet in the world.

An oil tanker has exploded on the outskirts of Sierra Leone’s capital, killing at least 99 people and severely injuring more than 100 others after large crowds gathered to collect leaking fuel, officials and witnesses said on Saturday. The explosion took place late on Friday after a bus struck the tanker in Wellington, a suburb to the east of Freetown.

This week, Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly approved new maps for electing state legislators and U.S. representatives. The results are what you’d expect for a red state: Of the 14 U.S. House districts, including a new seat added after the latest census, Republicans can expect to win nine, 10, or perhaps 11; they can also expect strong and possibly veto-proof majorities in the state legislature. The problem is that North Carolina isn’t really a red state. Its electorate is roughly evenly split. In 2020, Donald Trump edged Joe Biden by 1.3 percentage points, but more than half of the state’s votes for U.S. House seats went to Democratic candidates—yet Republicans still won 10 of 13 races. The state has a Democratic governor. North Carolina Republicans are doing this because it increases their power, and because they can. They control the legislature, which draws the maps, and state law says the governor cannot veto the maps. Besides, they have reason to believe no court will stop them, given the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision washing its hands of concerns about partisan gerrymanders. Although Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that highly distorted maps—like this new one from North Carolina—are “incompatible with democratic principles,” he also said the high court had no standing to interfere.