"I had a dream where there was a food called 'King’s Hand', a hollow hand made of m&m cookie, filled with Greek salad. I could not stop thinking about it. Here is the culmination of a week long effort," they wrote in a tweet that now has over 138,000 likes and 13,000 retweets (and counting). The post included a photo set of the finished product and a cross section of the cookie and salad concoction.

Have you heard the news? The world’s tallest mountain got a little taller yesterday. At the start of the week, Mt. Everest’s officially listed consensus height was 29,028.87 feet, but after Chinese and Nepalese authorities agreed on the results of a recent survey, it is now 29,031.7 feet. Headlines around the world blared that Everest had just undergone a growth spurt. It hadn’t—the only sudden change in Everest’s height in the last decade, as we’ll get into, was actually a negative one. But more to the point, the sudden confluence of the messiness of a seemingly simple question like “What is the shape of the Earth?”, the inscrutability of geologic time, and scientifically illiterate headlines was more or less made for me. Before I took to writing for a living, I was on the honest path of an Earth scientist, and I graduated with a degree in geology. A fellow student of mine in those days, Curtis Baden, is now in his seventh year of his PhD study at Stanford. During our time, we mapped a chunk of the Argentinean Andes, and though I split dramatically with my education, he is now on a lifer’s path. The reception of the Everest news was inevitably overblown, and while well-actuallying it might be worth it, I think it’s the perfect opportunity to get into the weeds on this stuff. What really is a mountain range? How special are the Himalayas? The geoid was in the news, for chrissakes.

Sludge produces investigative journalism on lobbying and money in politics. The American Prospect is re-publishing this article.

After pausing in the months before the election, federal authorities are now actively investigating the business dealings of Hunter Biden, a person with knowledge of the probe said. His father, President-elect Joe Biden, is not implicated. Now that the election is over, the investigation is entering a new phase. Federal prosecutors in Delaware, working with the IRS Criminal Investigation agency and the FBI, are taking overt steps such as issuing subpoenas and seeking interviews, the person with knowledge said. Activity in the investigation had been largely dormant in recent months due to Justice Department guidelines prohibiting overt actions that could affect an election, the person said. CNN contacted Biden's attorney and the campaign this week seeking comment about the investigation. On Wednesday, they released a statement acknowledging the probe.

Tax records obtained by CMD reveal two donors to the right-wing publication's new, affiliated nonprofit.

Joe Biden has offered Marcia Fudge the role of HUD secretary, even though she is more qualified for the Department of Agriculture... Fudge lamented that in her view, Black politicians tend to be relegated to a limited number of cabinet positions. “As this country becomes more and more diverse, we’re going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in. You know, it’s always ‘we want to put the Black person in labor or HUD,'” she said.

Facebook becomes the latest Silicon Valley giant to be hit with an anti-trust lawsuit for its possible monopolistic practices

Theresa Toledo was known for her delicious Mexican food and had been preparing tamales to deliver to relatives. But she struggled with her 28-year-old grandson, Alexander Toledo, who lived in the basement of her south-central Omaha home. Theresa had grown fearful of him, and on Monday she filed an application for a domestic abuse protection order. In the petition, she said he used methamphetamine and hallucinogenic mushrooms. “I need Alex out of my house now before he destroys my house or harms me, the drugs make him crazy,” she wrote. Theresa, 73, and her 45-year-old daughter, Angela Toledo Miller, who is Alex’s mother, died Tuesday morning when Theresa’s house exploded. The blast and resulting fire leveled the family home at 4810 S. 51st St. and damaged neighboring houses. Theresa’s partner, Larry Rodriguez, 72, and Alex Toledo were taken to Nebraska Medical Center in critical condition, family members told The World-Herald. Alex was then flown to a burn unit in Kansas City for treatment, family members said.

“There is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” one of the editors of a new report on the Arctic climate said.

I don’t go to church much anymore but from time to time I’ll end up at one and I guess they changed the wording of the Lord’s prayer ever so slightly in the intervening years since I was a regular and whenever I hear it spoken differently it’s alien to me it’s like if you went to karaoke and found out they surreptitiously changed the lyrics to Don’t Stop Believing behind your back and they told everyone else but you.

Patricia is suffering from an unexplained skin condition - but a misunderstanding about what might have caused it set off a chain of events that turned her foot into fodder for anti-vaccine activists. The picture showed purple and red sores, swollen and oozing with pus. "Supposedly this is a [vaccine] trial participant," read the message alongside it. "Ready to roll up your sleeve?" Within a day, those same feet had been mentioned thousands of times on Instagram and Facebook. The picture went viral on Twitter as well. "See they are trying to deliberately hurt us with the vaccine," one tweet read. The feet belong to Patricia - a woman in her 30s living in Texas. And it's true - she was a participant in a trial for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that started to be administered on Tuesday. But this is also true: Patricia never received the actual vaccine. Medical records show that she received a placebo, a small injection of salt water. (Researchers do this as a matter of routine, to compare groups that receive a drug or a vaccine with those who receive the placebo.) Her illness had nothing to do with injections. But that didn't stop activists twisting her story to advance their own agendas. And on top of the physical pain caused by her condition, Patricia received a wave of online abuse.

Workers at an Upper Manhattan Chipotle restaurant say they’ve been fighting a losing battle against hordes of hungry rats — and a management team that let the infestation get so bad that four staffers have been bitten by the massive rodents. The besieged fast-casual Mexican joint on Broadway near West 169th Street in Washington Heights closed to customers indefinitely late last month, but only after rats chewed through the wiring of a computer system that handled orders, two employees told The Post. In the meantime, those workers are still going into the store to clean, in an effort to keep the vermin at bay.

A lost song cut from the original The Muppet Christmas Carol movie has been found and reinstated, director Brian Henson has revealed. Henson told BBC Radio 2 he was "excited" and "happy" that When Love Is Gone could again be heard in forthcoming versions of his film. The ballad is sung to a young Scrooge by his fiancée Belle in the 1992 reworking of the classic Dickens story. It was removed as Disney felt it wouldn't appeal to young viewers. In the process of cutting the song for the cinema release they lost the video master and couldn't find the negative either, Henson (son of Muppets creator Jim) previously explained in a 2018 interview.

A loudmouth with a gigantic pro-police flag cursed out an NYPD cop in Rockefeller Center when the officer stepped in to settle a social-distancing dispute, according to cops and video. A two-part clip posted online from a Sunday encounter shows a maskless protester wearing a red Trump hat arguing with another man when an NYPD cop steps in. “I asked him to get away from me,” the masked man says. “Four years I had to put up with your s–t!” the protester retorts as the cop steps in. “I am talking!” the officer then bellows, briefly silencing everyone around her. “I don’t give a f–k,” the protester snaps back — gripping the pole to a large Thin Blue Line American flag waving over his head. “Then get the f–k out of here,” the cop responds. “No! Don’t even think about it… Who the f–k are you,” the protester continues. “I’m the f–king police,” the visibly annoyed cop says. “Wow,” he responds. “Go get more, go get more.”

There’s a really interesting conspiracy theory that talks about how the Titanic never actually sank. Instead, it’s believed that the ship that sank was actually The Olympic. The conspiracy theory doesn’t deny that a ship sank or that the ~1500 passengers aboard that ship didn’t die. The conspiracy simply suggests that the ship was not actually the technical marvel that the ship’s parent company, the White Star Line, had promised. Rather, the White Star Line swapped ships for the voyage from Southampton to New York and the ship billed as the top-of-the-line Titanic was actually an older ship, the Olympic. This was all an insurance scam gone wrong.

Rocket projects aren’t the only thing the world’s two richest peoplehave in common. Theirfacilities are in areas designated as opportunity zones, giving them a path to low-tax expansion.

The Supreme Court has rejected Republicans’ last-gasp bid to reverse Pennsylvania’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the electoral battleground. The court without comment Tuesday refused to call into question the certification process in Pennsylvania. Gov. Tom Wolf already has certified Biden’s victory and the state’s 20 electors are to meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes for Biden. Biden won 306 electoral votes, so even if Pennsylvania’s results had been in doubt, he still would have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania and other plaintiffs pleaded with the justices to intervene after the state Supreme Court turned away their case. The Republicans argued that Pennsylvania’s expansive vote-by-mail law is unconstitutional because it required a constitutional amendment to authorize its provisions. Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016. Most mail-in ballots were submitted by Democrats.

Last month, between tweets disputing his election loss, President Donald Trump posted an article from a conservative website that said his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau had just joined Twitter to publicly back her brother’s fight to overturn the vote. “Thank you Elizabeth,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “LOVE!” But the Twitter account that prompted the article was not his sister’s. It was a fake profile run by Josh Hall, a 21-year-old food-delivery driver in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

President-elect Joe Biden is considering a high-profile ambassadorship for Pete Buttigieg, possibly sending him to China, people familiar with the matter tell Axios. The 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, whom Biden has compared to his late son, Beau, played a key role in Biden's nomination. Letting him deepen his foreign policy chops could boost Buttigieg's future, since many inside the Democratic Party believe his return as a presidential candidate is a matter of when, not if.

However, law enforcement officials say the equipment helps small cash-strapped agencies.