PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — A man apparently shot himself by accident while showing Florida bar customers his gun Thursday night, The man can be seen on surveillance video showing his gun to customers at O'Riley's Uptown Tavern in Pensacola before making a quick motion as if putting it into a pretend holster below his shoulder.

Jackie Mason, the sometimes-controversial standup comedian who unapologetically embraced Jewish themes and political incorrectness, achieving a national profile through a series of successful one-man shows on Broadway without substantial work in film or television, died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 93. The New York Times said his death was confirmed by his friend Raoul Felder. […]

Kentuckian Alexis Toon explained on her TikTok that she was invited to the town hall Q&A "so I took the opportunity and ran with it."

The Fox host got an earful when he popped into a fly fishing store.

For Lucy, a 59-year-old metastatic breast cancer patient from Washington state, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 was a matter of life and death. After undergoing aggressive chemotherapy for months, the coronavirus almost certainly would have killed her. Yet as relief washed over her upon receiving her final Pfizer dose in March, she knew she’d have to keep it to herself. Her husband had begged her not to get the shot. At the outset of the pandemic, Lucy’s husband and partner of seven years, Shane, was as cautious as anyone about the virus. He kept a big container of hand sanitizer in the car and fanatically washed his hands, keys and other items. He wore a face mask everywhere he went, showered and changed his clothes immediately upon returning home from necessary outings, and was anxious for Lucy and her elderly mother, who lives with them, to get vaccinated as soon as possible due to their heightened vulnerabilities. But as the crisis dragged on, 60-year-old Shane spent months cooped up inside on YouTube and Facebook, where a vortex of coronavirus conspiracy theory videos was waiting for him. Many declared that the virus was nothing to fear — that it was the vaccines he should really be afraid of. Before long, he was also tuning into the increasingly malicious disinformation networks Newsmax and OAN, which regularly rehashed the lies he’d been fed online. He was completely enthralled, Lucy said, and over time, his worldview “did a 180.”

Generations are social constructs. No natural law distinguishes people born between 1981 and 1996 from those who came before or after. Too often, generational analysis elides class divisions (by using “millennials” as shorthand for “relatively young college graduates with white-collar jobs in major urban centers”), or else veers into the astrological (per McKinsey, millennials are “questioning” individuals who value “experience,” while zoomers are “communaholics” who prize “uniqueness”).

The Georgia congresswoman apparently wants to go full Red Scare.

Civil rights groups have reached a settlement with the City of Charlotte and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department over last year’s use of tear gas on protesters.

Police are calling a Florida lawn care worker a hero after saving a man's life despite allegedly being yelled at by homeowners to do it somewhere else.

Local research claims Pfizer shot now only 41% effective against symptomatic COVID, while British stats have it at 88%

It is splendid news that jumping spiders can tell if you’re alive or dead. Harvard scientists have discovered that these tiniest and prettiest of arachnids possess an ability thought to be the fief of vertebrates, i.e., higher animals: noticing “biological motion” – meaning, movement by living beings as opposed to inanimate objects. Ergo, they can tell if you are alive and don’t have to waste their time hunting leaves blown by the wind and whatnot. And how did Massimo De Agrò, Daniela C. Rösler, Kris Kim and Paul Shamble discover this unexpectedly advanced “spidey sense”? By putting the spiders on a special spidey treadmill and using an animated point-light display, they explained on Thursday in PLOS Biology.

"I don't want to sound cynical now, but there are those who don't want [Israel] to import ice cream or export technologies."

A U.S. delegation and other dignitaries were hurried to vehicles as reports emerged of shots fired and crowd control gas used on protesters outside the funeral of late Haitian president Jovenel Moise on Friday.

In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town. Forty-five years later, we revisit the story.

A quiet divide between President Biden and the leaders of the voting rights movement burst into the open on Thursday, as 150 organizations urged him to use his political mettle to push for two expansive federal voting rights bills that would combat a Republican wave of balloting restrictions. In the letter, signed by civil rights groups including the Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, activists argued that with the “ideal of bipartisan cooperation on voting rights” nowhere to be found in a sharply divided Senate, Mr. Biden must “support the passage of these bills by whatever means necessary.” The issue is of paramount importance to Democrats: Republicans have passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country this year that are likely to make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities, which lean Democratic. Several of the laws give state legislators more power over how elections are run and make it easier to challenge the results. In a fiery speech in Philadelphia last week, Mr. Biden warned that the G.O.P. effort was the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” But the president and voting rights advocates are increasingly in disagreement about how to pass that test. Mr. Biden, a veteran of the Senate who for decades has believed in negotiating on the particulars of voting rights legislation, has faced calls to push Democratic senators to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow the two major voting bills proposed by the party to pass with a simple majority. The president and his advisers have repeatedly pointed out that he does not have the votes within his own party to pass federal voting legislation, and does not have the power to unilaterally roll back the filibuster even if he supported doing so. But voting rights groups say that Mr. Biden is not expending sufficient political capital or using the full force of his bully pulpit to persuade Congress. They point to the contrast between his soaring language — “Jim Crow on steroids,” he has called the G.O.P. voting laws — and his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster.

Pandemic relief measures are hobbled by serious failures of program design and implementation.

Cornett, the lifelong restaurant worker from Kentucky, has watched the wage issue get tense on his local food service Facebook group. Any job posting below $15 an hour would get jeers and demands for higher pay. Then the employers would get defensive, saying they couldn't afford big raises. "The immediate response every time was: 'Then you can't afford to be in business, bro,' " Cornett said.

When Tommy Fisher heard the call for a big, beautiful wall, he erected a 3-mile fence along the Rio Grande. Now all he needs is someone to buy it back.

Officers were filmed shoving, pepper spraying, and hitting people as they dismantled a park encampment of fewer than 20 residents. Toronto police violently destroyed a homeless encampment in a city park, at times hitting and shoving protesters, pepper spraying them, and arresting 26 people. Dozens of officers and security guards showed up to Lamport Stadium park in the city’s west end Wednesday morning to take down a homeless encampment with an estimated 14 to 17 people. Activists showed up and created a makeshift barrier of wood, plastic, and other materials. Video footage shows police moving in on the demonstrators, ripping apart the barriers, and at times charging people, shoving them and dragging them on the ground. In one video, police shove a group of people who’d linked arms in front of a tent, destroying the tent. Officers could be seen ripping apart some of the tents on site. One photo shows an officer using the “knee-on-neck” hold to a person on the ground; last year, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, former Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said the force does not use that tactic. In a statement to VICE World News, Toronto police spokeswoman Connie Osborne said the photo was taken “during a dynamic response and captures one moment in time, but not any wider context.” She also said the officer’s knee was not on the person’s neck. In response to one video showing cops violently picking someone up and using batons on people, one person tweeted that police gave them a concussion. “The cops beat the shit out of me and threw my whole body on one final blow and knocked my head backwards onto a curb, giving me a concussion,” the person said.

Two white men in Kansas shot into a car of Latino teenagers and went home. Almost a year later, neither shooter is in custody.