A conspiracy ripping through the anti-vax world may finally drive some anti-maskers to do the unthinkable: wear a mask and keep their distance. The conspiracy—which comes in several shapes and sizes—more or less says the vaccinated will “shed” certain proteins onto the unvaccinated who will then suffer adverse effects. The main worry is the “shedding” will cause irregular menstruation, infertility, and miscarriages. The entirely baseless idea is a key cog in a larger conspiracy that COVID-19 was a ploy to depopulate the world, and the vaccine is what will cull the masses.  Experts say the conspiracy is born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work. It has been widely debunked and you can read about it here, here, and here, among other places.   Anti-vax influencers are instructing their fellow anti-vaxxers as well as anti-maskers (at this point the two communities overlap to a huge degree) that one of the best ways to defend themselves from this blight is to co-opt…social distancing, the very strategy they have long decried. 

The 16-year-old girl was fatally shot while threatening a young woman with a knife. She had spent two years shuttling among Ohio foster homes, hoping to return to her mother.

FEMA is reimbursing cities that want to relieve homelessness, but only 23 local governments have signed up.

Motorcyclists around the world routinely take their lives into their hands, sharing the roads with inattentive drivers. There is a lot of different safety equipment designed specifically for motorcyclists to help protect their lives in an accident. One of those safety devices is a vest that motorcyclists wear called an airbag vest. Just as the name implies, if the motorcyclist is involved in an accident and falls off the motorcycle, the vest inflates to help protect them from an impact. One airbag vest on the market is made by a company called Klim. The vest is the Ai-1 and sells for $400. Rather than selling the vest for that price and calling it done, the manufacturer has a subscription scheme. The airbag system is made by a company called In&Motion and is known as the In&Box detection module. The module has sensors and computer components inside that can detect a crash and inflate the airbag. After buying the vest for $400, which includes the module, users download an app and choose how to unlock the module to make the vest work. That means either spending another $400 for permanent access making the vest cost $800, or subscribe for $12 a month or $120 per year. The catch for those who subscribe is if your payment fails to go through, the company deactivates the vest. That opens the door to the life-threatening situation of having a motorcyclist wear a deactivated vest and have their lives put at risk by an airbag vest that the manufacturer has purposefully deactivated.

The exiled royal House of Savoy still maintains its claim to the throne and has chosen 17-year-old princess Vittoria as their future queen.

Bradley Schuetz has been arrested and charged with official misconduct in the first degree. Another Forest Grove police officer has been arrested in connection with an incident last October in which a family reported being terrorized in the middle of the night by an off-duty cop. Bradley Schuetz allegedly picked up Steven Teets, the off-duty cop, and gave him a ride home after Forest Grove homeowner Mirella Castaneda told a 9-1-1 dispatcher that Teets — a stranger to her — was on her front porch, pounding on her door and challenging the residents to come out and fight. Beaverton police were asked to investigate the Forest Grove Police Department's response. The Beaverton Police Department announced Friday afternoon, May 7, that its investigation led to Schuetz being arrested and charged with first-degree official misconduct, a Class A misdemeanor crime. A grand jury formally indicted Schuetz on Thursday, May 6, according to Beaverton police. Teets is charged with criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, for which he is awaiting trial. Castaneda has also filed a lawsuit against him. She believes Teets' behavior was triggered by him seeing a "Black Lives Matter" flag above her garage.

As a Palestinian watching the scenes unfold in my homeland on social media, I have been consumed by a range of conflicting emotions. I have felt pain and despair at these violent restrictions on basic Palestinian rights and freedoms; but I have also noticed a spirit of care and solidarity among Palestinians that has been inspiring. How did we get here? Over the past week, thousands of Palestinians have been gathering to pray at al-Aqsa compound – one of the holy sites of Islam – in East Jerusalem, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967. But they have also been standing alongside the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, the neighbourhood from which numerous Palestinian families are facing eviction, in a move by Israel the United Nations has described as a possible war crime, given that it involves the transfer of “an occupying [power’s] civilian population into the territory that it occupies”. Awaiting the worshippers at al-Aqsa has not been long nights of Qur’anic recitation or peaceful contemplation, as is the tradition during Ramadan, but rather a campaign of state-sanctioned terror. Israeli forces have launched a series of violent assaults on unarmed protesters. Twice in the last four days they have stormed the mosque itself, attacking worshipers inside the structure by firing stun grenades, teargas and rubber bullets, in what the media has too often wrongly described as a set of “clashes” or “skirmishes”.

Whether it’s Spaghetti-Os pie or table-top nachos, everything can be traced back to (literal) magician Rick Lax

Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s bill includes a waiver that allows the Postal Service to set its own delivery standards and weakens congressional oversight.

The Halifax Regional Municipalityhas revoked the demolition permit for a building at the corner of Oxford and North streets. The decision comes after stop-work orders were issued in December when the developer began tearing it down while a tenant still lived there.

AARP Fraud expert Doug Shadel meets a computer hacker who uses his skills to take down fraudsters and expose their schemes.

For some New Yorkers, the pandemic proved an ironic lifesaver: Spending a year living in clean, private hotel rooms allowed them to get some stability in their lives and finally see hope for the future — if they’re not kicked back into city shelters.

When an Army of the Dead star got called out, director Zack Snyder decided to scrub him from every scene — and swap in Tig Notaro.

How Medina Spirit’s positive drug test before the Preakness drew the ire of Donald Trump and Fox News

For those who can afford it, quitting has become the ultimate form of self-care.

To the scattered victories of abolitionists towards the tail end of last year—the weakening of police unions, severance of several law enforcement contracts with universities and public schools, the (token) shrinking of police budgets in a handful of major cities—we might add an ideological one: black radicalism has hacked a path back to the mainstream political scene.

Sigh...

The state just passed a law calling for 90 percent of its wolf population to be killed. It’s based on fear and lies.

Their uniforms were where we played around a bit. If we made the federation uniforms too close to military colors, they might feel uptight or just wrong, so we went with 19th-century a French tricolored-esq theme. For Zeon, we went with not Nazi but pre-war German-styled Prussian uniforms. They slightly resemble school uniforms here, but we were also thinking about how easy it would be to cosplay. It seemed like something assertive women would be able to convince their boyfriends to do couples cosplays (laughs). And wouldn’t you know it, people did cosplay. It was like, “Yes! They’re cosplaying!” We were so happy.

To perform the double copy, you throw away the color term and replace it with a copy of the kinematics term, turning 2 × 3 into 3 × 3. If 6 describes the outcome of a strong-force event, then the double copy tells us that 9 will match some comparable graviton event.