A spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s campaign says two people who were dressed as armed security guards outside a Pinellas County early voting location on Wednesday were not hired by the campaign. Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Julie Marcus told 8 On Your Side Wednesday night the two people set up a tent outside an early voting site in downtown St. Petersburg and claimed to be with the Trump campaign. “Sheriff [Bob Gualtieri] told me the persons that were dressed in these security uniforms had indicated to sheriff’s deputies that they belonged to a licensed security company and they indicated – and this has not been confirmed yet – that they were hired by the Trump campaign,” Marcus said in a video interview with 8 On Your Side’s Chip Osowski Wednesday night. 8 On Your Side obtained photos from the City of St. Petersburg showing the scene outside the polling location on Wednesday.

Almost 21,000 Election Day polling places have been eliminated heading into the 2020 U.S. election, a drastic dip in voting locations driven by a heavy shift to mail voting, coronavirus-related consolidations, cost-cutting measures, and voter suppression. VICE News obtained data from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., on the number of physical polling locations they will have in place on November 3, and compared their numbers to how many sites they had in 2016 and 2012. What emerged was a patchwork of cuts large and small across the country. Many states made these cuts as they were expanding mail voting — 23 states made it easier to vote by mail this year because of COVID. But the overall trend is clear: Most states are eliminating polling locations, a trend that could disproportionately impact poor, young and non-white voters.

"We are not telling you how to vote," a copy of the letter sent to 9NEWS says. "We are just telling our tenants what we will do according to the results."

For the entirety of my career as a journalist covering paleontology, I’ve been wanting to know: What does a dinosaur’s butthole look like? When I wrote My Beloved Brontosaurus, a book about dinosaur biology, the chapter on reproduction required a lot of time imagining the nature of a Jurassic behind; one had yet to be found preserved. Even dinosaur models and sculptures often demur on the point of the dino butt, leaving the terrible lizards with terrible constipation. Now I finally have a clearer view, thanks to a fossil of a horned dinosaur called Psittacosaurus, described in a paper online earlier this month. These dinosaurs, which lived over 100 million years ago in what’s now northeastern China, were odd little creatures. While belonging to the same branch of the dinosaur family tree as Triceratops, these Labrador retriever–size dinos walked around on two legs and had beaks like those of parrots, cheeks that were each adorned with a flared horn, and, jutting from the tail, a spray of featherlike bristles. Now we also know that they had buttholes like those of crocodiles. It’s rare to get a look at something soft and fleshy on a dinosaur. We know most of what we know about Psittacosaurus the same way that we know things about most dinosaurs: from their bones. Durable skeletal parts are much more likely than skin and organs to survive the fossilization process, which involves burial and at least partial replacement of the original tissues. Most of the time, after a dinosaur dies, all the soft stuff just decays. But every now and then paleontologists find dinosaur “mummies” that preserve remnants of the soft bits either as impressions or geologically modified pieces of the original flesh. There’s no one way to make an exquisitely preserved dinosaur: Sometimes it happens when a dinosaur is quickly buried in ash; others dry out in the open for a while. For whatever reason, experts have uncovered several Psittacosaurus with preserved soft tissues. The fossilization in some of these specimens is so refined that we even know what colors these dinosaurs were, brown on top and lighter along the belly. The new fossil is one of the more detailed ones. It includes patches of skin and scales as well as the ornamental bristles on the tail. The most remarkable part is a patch of tissue between the hips and the base of the tail—aka a butt.

One man says he lost his savings after being sued by Proctorio, whose software tracks physical movements to detect “abnormal” behavior during exams.

The deadly violence that forced Ocoee’s Black residents to flee the area a century ago was, at its crux, an attempt at terrorizing people into forgoing their right to vote. But even in 2020, the long legacy of suppressing the Black vote remains alive.

Happy 63rd birthday to the Arch Drude! I have loved and revered Julian Cope since I was a teenager with a keen interest in LSD listening to the Teardrop Explodes. He’s one of my biggest heroes. The guy’s as cool as anyone’s ever been, he doesn’t care what you think about him and he has the best guitar riffs since the Kinks. I’ve seen him in concert four times, read all of his books and I interviewed him once around the time Peggy Suicide was released, in 1991. He was a fascinating person to talk to, full of energy, his mind wandering off in every direction at once. My guess is also that he was probably pretty stoned that day! My friend Wm. Ferguson (now a longtime editor at the NY Times) and I met the Arch Drude at the Island Records offices near Tower Records in lower Manhattan. During...

The Illinois Department of Public Health knows talent when it sees it.

St. John’s University students posted adjunct professor Richard Taylor’s police complaint history after what they called a racist lesson. The school suspended him — fueling cops’ latest argument for keeping their records under wrap.

But amid a global pandemic, the content is losing its appeal.

The mistake that cost a village its children

Woodwork talent show 'The Chop' has been suspended after viewers alleged that a contestant Darren Lumsden's tattoos represent neo-Nazism.

It’s over: According to The Wall Street Journal, Quibi Holdings LLC is finally shuttering after only six months, making it the shortest living streaming service to date. This comes after a weeks-long, last ditch effort to garner additional backers, lure new meme enthusiasts with new features, and outright sell the company to the highest bidder. We’d say we’re shocked, but we—like everyone else—have been paying attention.

We all could have ignored the Westboro Baptist Church, theoretically, but the opportunity to be party to a morality play seemed unusual and interesting, back then. It was a sunny day in 2014, just before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and protesters from the church had come all the way from Topeka, Kansas, […]

The privately-run psychotherapy centre Vastamo announced that sensitive information about its clients was leaked after its database was recently hacked, according to a company release issued on Wednesday. The Helsinki-based company said that the hackers who stole the data made attempts to extort money in exchange for its return. (both the username and the password for the root account were "root", full psychotherapy notes for tens of thousands patients up until late 2018 compromised, hacker now leaking 100 per day into the dark web until demands are met, i personally was not affected by this but motherfuck do i love adding this to my list of existing anxieties)

Data for Progress polling shows that support for a fracking ban fell 16 points among Democrats after Biden and Harris opposed it in the debates.

A rare, hopeful image of a Siberian tiger in Russia's Far East won Russian photographer Sergey Gorshkov the honor of Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

Trump’s personal attorney has indiscreet encounter with actor playing Borat’s daughter in hotel room during pandemic.

Efrén Pare­des Jr.’s life out­side prison was over before he was old enough for a driver’s license. With no crim­i­nal record, 15-year-old Pare­des worked part-time as a bag­ger at a Michi­gan gro­cery store. One night, after hours, his co-work­er was shot and killed dur­ing a rob­bery. Pare­des, who main­tains his inno­cence, was charged as an adult and con­vict­ed in a wide­ly pub­li­cized 1989 tri­al, in which the rap lyrics he copied into a high school note­book were used against him as evi­dence of pre­med­i­ta­tion. The judge gave Pare­des the manda­to­ry sen­tence for first-degree mur­der in Michi­gan: life with­out parole. More than two decades lat­er, the U.S. Supreme Court began a series of deci­sions that would all but deem that sen­tence uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for minors. But of the more than 2,800 peo­ple sen­tenced to life with­out parole as juve­niles in the Unit­ed States, approx­i­mate­ly 2,150 remain in prison, includ­ing Paredes.

In a year when Tesla might have been forgiven for extending its timeline on a key initiative, Elon Musk is forging ahead with a vision for what he calls “Full Self-Driving.” This week, a group of drivers was selected to receive a software update that downloaded automatically into their cars, enabling the vehicles to better steer and accelerate without human hands and feet. According to Tesla, hundreds of thousands of its cars will be able to drive themselves as soon as this year, probably making them the first large fleet of vehicles billed as autonomous owned by ordinary consumers.