Scott Morrison has rubbished persistent rumours he soiled himself at a McDonald's more than two decades ago, calling it "the biggest urban myth ever".

The suspects received training while serving in the Colombian military, the Pentagon said.

They left their state to stop legislation from passing. Republicans in Washington hardly have to lift a finger to do the same.

Exclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy

Housing industry groups said some of HUD's proposed requirements would be too costly. But they now fall short of nationally adopted safety codes.

Gen. Mark A. Milley saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

Is a four-letter slur in Spanish deployed at stadiums capable of sinking El Tri's World Cup fortunes for the next two cycles?

Classes are being canceled, and teachers are being fired, as “anti–critical race theory” fights are coming to a head in Republican states. But the viral school board videos are only part of the story. The aggrieved white parent is perhaps the most potent reactionary figure in this country, and the American classroom is a common scene of their aggrievement, waging battles against school desegregation and leading efforts fighting the teaching of evolution. It is, much like the Tea Party, a movement that is animated simultaneously by grassroots energy, anger, and resentment and fueled from the top, dynamics that feed off one another in a vicious loop. One might think one’s seeing the true face of these laws in school board videos gone viral—angry white parents demanding redress for their children—but that’s only a partial view. According to reporting by NBC News, both the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation have been training up this new generation of right-wing activist parents, with the latter hosting at least one gathering of state lawmakers and activist parents to discuss model legislation. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose family foundation has long poured money into efforts attacking public education and unions, has lately used the furor over critical race theory to promote her anti–public education agenda. “Americans should continue to declare independence from the monopoly of government-run, union-controlled schools,” DeVos wrote recently in an op-ed.

In one hospital alone in Kermanshah, the largest Kurdish-speaking city in Iran, there were 172 cases of penile fractures In one particular hospital in Kermanshah, approximately 40 percent of the 172 patients who practiced taqaandan said they did so because it was a habit — just dudes being dudes. “Others did it to overcome an erection or unwanted desires,” reports DNB Stories (according to a 2017 study on the issue, the higher rate of penile fractures in Kermanshah is related to a lack of sex ed). However, about a quarter of the men surveyed found it “pleasurable,” “refreshing” or simply “enjoyed the sound,” similar to that of cracking knuckles.

One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day. The announcement, which left CrowdTangle’s employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings. On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly. On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much. They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets. These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves. Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.

The measure, which would include money to address climate change, expand Medicare and fulfill other Democratic priorities, is intended to deliver on President Biden’s economic proposal.

REvil, blamed for some of the most audacious attacks on the United States, suddenly cannot be found — even their negotiations with victims stopped. It is unclear if Russia or America disabled them.

The proposal would impose tariffs on some imports from countries with looser environmental rules. It would also mean the end of sales in the European Union of new gas- and diesel-powered cars in just 14 years.

Who’s the fastest? It depends on what exactly you’re counting, and who you ask.

“I went to hell for eternity.”

"For the brain, fake or real, faces are all processed the same way."

Since the beginning of the year, online outrage has become more and more powerful as a social force. We’ve seen this with “Bean Dad” and the TikTok bee lady, but it happened as recently as this week with the massive UFC Addison Rae temper tantrum. My fellow Sidechanneler, Charlie Warzel, in a live Discord audio chat on Monday said he thinks it’s because platforms like Twitter are warped from five years of Trump mania and now their recommendation systems are churning thousands of mini-Trumps every day. This is the “main character of Twitter” effect. I’m inclined to agree.

Bryan St. Pere, the drummer for Illinois alternative rock band Hum, has died aged 52, according to the remaining members of the group.

A Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on Tuesday broke out into a furious argument over the House’s package of antitrust legislation, pitting Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., whose district encompasses a large part of Silicon Valley, against the authors of the series of six bills moving through the chamber. The argument began when Lofgren, one of the most senior Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and an opponent of the legislation, noted that she had raised an extraordinary amount of money from Silicon Valley companies over the years, but because she ran in a safe blue district, she hadn’t spent any of it on her own campaign since 1996 and instead distributed it widely to other campaigns.

A North Haven cop was with Qinxuan Pan when the officer received a New Haven police broadcast that an alleged murderer was on the loose — someone driving a dark-colored GMC Terrain SUV. The officer already knew that Pan had been driving a GMC Terrain SUV with plates that didn’t match the registration. He had found Pan driving in a closed junkyard. Pan couldn’t really explain to the officer’s satisfaction what he was doing driving on railroad tracks in the junkyard, or the mismatched plates. Then he let Pan go. Pan fled the state, and has now returned to face murder charges only after a months-long nationwide manhunt caught up with him. How did that happen? A New Haven police dispatcher’s erroneous report that the man who allegedly murdered Yale grad student Kevin Jiang was Black played a critical role in allowing the true homicide suspect, who is Asian, to escape potential custody and flee the state.