“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.

A 'Cyberpunk 2077' article warning epileptic users about triggers prompted gamer trolls to send videos intended to trigger seizures.

The smallest terrestrial mammal, the Etruscan shrew (Suncus etruscus), has a neat trick to potentially save energy during the winter: It can shrink its brain, The Scientist reports. No heavier than a playing card, this mammal needs to eat eight times its bodyweight every day, and therefore cannot hibernate.

The Democratic lawyer’s sickening defense of corporate immunity in a Supreme Court case reveals a growing moral rot in the legal community.

ITER will teach valuable lessons about a “burning plasma,” researchers say. But they add that its cost of more than $20 billion is far too steep for an actual power plant. So, after ITER, U.S. fusion researchers want to build a much smaller, cheaper power plant, leveraging recent advances such as supercomputer simulations of entire tokamaks, 3D printing, and magnet coils made of high-temperature superconductors.

The electric carmaker has been clearing forest to make way for a 'Gigafactory' close to Berlin.

An artist was commissioned by a local business owner to create a mural of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster on the side of his building. There was only one problem: This patron of the arts didn’t actually own the building, and he’s all but disappeared.

ByJuly, Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland had become accustomed to the gray, black, and colorless tear gas that wafted through the city streets every night. But that month, they started seeing plumes of an unusual green smoke, too. Puddles of greenish residue seeped into the city’s storm drains. Human rights advocates and conservationists called on the local government to investigate the environmental impact of these chemical weapons, which had been deployed by the police, but no new chemicals were identified to the public. Juniper L. Simonis, PhD, a volunteer protest medic whose pronouns are they/them, scanned Portland’s storm drains for clues. Simonis, who is also a quantitative investigator with a doctorate in aquatic ecology, knew that identifying the new substance would be essential to protecting protesters and the environment from its effects. In lieu of information from the government, they hoped for harder evidence: the cast-off gas canisters, which might contain traces of the chemicals. They didn’t expect to read the evidence right on the label. Simonis and other volunteers eventually collected dozens of canisters they traced to the new weapon. Several still bore the logo of their manufacturer, Defense Technologies, and the label “HC,” indicating that these canisters had once contained a chemical agent that was unlike anything Black Lives Matter protesters had seen in Portland or elsewhere.

Weare living in one of the most generative eras of Southern cultural production since Dolly went pop and Designing Women said “y’all” once a week on network television. From country music to digital and print media, we are trying to figure out the American South…again. I say “again” because American popular culture has an ongoing, cyclical obsession with the U.S. South. “The South” is a stand-in for how the nation wants to see it itself at any point in time. Debating the morality of Southern cultures is one way that the nation reckons with empire and economics. We are not well versed in international or global cultures in this country. Therefore we do not have the vocabulary to talk about geo-politics “out there”. Instead we talk about the geo-politics “in here” — in the Appalachias, in Mississippi, in Texas. Extracting natural resources, controlling the “borders”, policing what it means to be a “real American” — we hash all of that out in our disdain of and attraction to the South. The South does not stop existing when popular culture moves on. It is always engaged in its own Civil War over what the place means or who is even included in “The South”. Right now, The South is making sense of two phenomena that are shaping how the region sounds and how it talks about itself: people are coming “home” and they’re bringing their ideas about home with them to a place that has its own ideas about what that all means.