IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler discussed in a wide-ranging "Pod Force One' interview the "unprecedented" level of corruption they said they observed while investigating Hunter Biden before a pardon from his presidential dad Joe swept everything "under the rug."
Conservationists appeal to public for help after rare birds disappear in suspicious circumstances
One of the first white-tailed eagles to fledge in England for hundreds of years has vanished in suspicious circumstances, alongside two more “devastating” disappearances of the reintroduced raptor.
Police are appealing for public help as they investigate the disappearances, which are a setback to the bird’s successful reintroduction. Their disappearance is being investigated by several police forces and the National Wildlife Crime Unit.
An unnamed source told the New York Times the Reiners’ daughter, Romy, had discovered only her father’s body, and disputed reports the couple argued with their son, Nick, at a party the previous evening
New details have emerged about the deaths of film director Rob Reiner and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, whose bodies were discovered at their home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on Sunday.
A report in the New York Times, quoting a “person close to the family” who remained anonymous, says that a massage therapist arriving for an appointment first raised the alarm after not being able to gain access for an appointment on Sunday. The therapist contacted their daughter Romy Reiner, who lives nearby, who entered the house and found Rob Reiner’s body. The Times said that Romy “fled the house in anguish” without realising that her mother’s body was also inside, and that her roommate, who had accompanied her, called 911. Emergency responders then discovered Michele Singer Reiner’s body.
From the October 7 massacre by Hamas to the slaughter at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday, Islamists would have the world believe that the cause of all the mayhem is the existence of Israel. For Islamists and their apologists, the problem is simple: are you with the oppressor or the oppressed? Read More
When permanent resident Navinder Singh was caught with child pornography on his phone in 2018, he didn’t understand what was so wrong about it. He thought that his 19 videos of sexual abuse were “funny” and told a forensic psychologist afterward that things “were different in India.” Read More
A female nurse did not want to undress in front of a biologically male doctor. The nurse complained, and then the doctor complained about her. The nurse was suspended. An ongoing legal battle ensued. Unfortunately, this is a true story. Read More
OTTAWA — If the road to Canadian prosperity is to now be built on growing exports to markets other than the United States, as Prime Minister Mark Carney has vowed, a major new pothole may need attention. Read More
MONTREAL — Montreal for Palestine stopped by the city's downtown Christmas market on Sunday to harass and intimidate its patrons — on the same day that an antisemitic terrorist attack took place in Australia. Read More
Earlier this year my four-year-old tried out an AI soft toy for a few days. New research indicates I was right to be creeped out
If you’re thinking about buying your kid a new-fangled AI-powered toy for the holidays, may I kindly suggest you don’t? I’m sure most Guardian readers would be horrified by the very idea anyway, but it’s going to be hard to avoid the things soon. The market is booming and, according to the MIT Technology Review, there are already more than 1,500 AI toy companies in China. With the likes of Mattel, which owns the Barbie brand, announcing a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, you can bet more of the uncanny objects will be in a department store near you soon.
Let me offer myself up as a cautionary tale for anyone who might be intrigued by the idea of a cuddly chatbot. Back in September I let my four-year-old use an AI-powered soft toy called Grem for a few days. Developed by a company called Curio in collaboration with the musician Grimes, it uses OpenAI’s technology to have personalised conversations and play interactive games with your child.
The dismissal of a a renowned health leader who refused to ignore Palestine highlights false claims of universality in human rights, global health and academia
Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.
It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians. Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughlydisgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.
AI promises to have far-reaching effects in music-making. While some welcome it as a compositional tool, many have deep concerns. Here are some of your responses
With this in mind, we asked for your thoughts on music composed by AI, the use of AI as a tool in the creation of music, and what should be done to protect musicians. Here are some of your responses.
Doug Ford has a plan. Yes, another one. The Ontario premier wants Niagara Falls to be the “Vegas of the north.” And he doesn’t mean a wasteland of cheap-and-dirty hotel rooms, all-you-can-eat buffets that used to be a great bargain but aren’t anymore, increasingly house-friendly blackjack odds and redlining customer dissatisfaction across the board, which is pretty much the story of modern Las Vegas. No, Ford wants some old-school razzle-dazzle. Read More
The surprise defection of former Conservative MP Michael Ma to the Liberals has prompted allegations of an overly close orientation to Chinese-government views, as well as protests outside his office and a petition urging him to resign. Read More
“And everybody hates the Jews.” In his satirical 1965 song “National Brotherhood Week,” after listing a host of specific ethnic, economic and religious hostilities, Tom Lehrer hit on a vital truth. Most bigotry is petty, localized and transient, though the human capacity for cruelty endures. But antisemitism is different and it matters. Including that when Islamists massacred Jews on Bondi Beach in Australia on Hanukkah, there was rage against … Jews. Read More
Company admits operator error led to Carey surviving
Wrong stump mic used so audio did not match picture
England are considering a formal complaint over the Snicko technology being used in this Ashes series after Alex Carey received a lifeline en route to a telling century on the opening day of the third Test.
Carey, who made 106 in Australia’s 326 for eight by stumps, was on 72 when Josh Tongue believed the left-hander had edged behind. He was given not out on the field and the third umpire, Chris Gaffeney, felt he did not have enough evidence to overturn the decision despite a spike showing up on the review.
Exclusive: DNA advances show Roman-era skeleton, once hailed as first black Briton, came from southern England
Beachy Head Woman, a Roman-era skeleton once hailed as the earliest known black Briton and who scientists later speculated could be of Cypriot descent, has now been shown to have originated from southern England.
The mystery of the skeleton’s shifting identity was finally resolved after advances in DNA sequencing produced a high-quality genetic readout from the remains.
From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seen
Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger
It Happened on Fifth Avenue is available on Plex and to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia
The woman Quentin Tarantino called ‘the goddess of go-go’ is one of the most connected and accomplished in Hollywood. At 82, she recalls working with Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra, David Byrne, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio - the list goes on - and the time Bing Crosby made a pass at her
If your knowledge of Toni Basil begins and ends with her cheerleader-chanting smash hit Mickey, that’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. By the time Mickey topped the US charts 43 years ago this week, in 1982, Basil had already spent four decades in the entertainment industry. The deeper you go, the more places you realise she was. When Elvis Presley sings “See the girl with the red dress on” in his 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas, and points across the dancefloor, the gyrating girl in the red dress is Basil. When Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper take LSD at the end of Easy Rider with two sex workers, one of them is Basil. When dance troupe the Lockers showcase their pre-hip-hop street dance moves on Soul Train in 1976, it’s six guys and … Basil. By the time of Mickey she had already worked with everyone from David Bowie to Tina Turner to Talking Heads, with more to come.
Basil has been-there-done-that in so many places, for so long, and over the course of our two-hour conversation she’ll casually drop asides such as “… so I went to see Devo with Iggy Pop and Dean Stockwell” or “… me and Bowie had just come from dinner with Bob Geldof, Paula Yates and Freddie Mercury” or “I was just at Bette Midler’s 80th birthday party, what a bash!” She’s now 82 years old but on Zoom, from her dance studio in Los Angeles, she doesn’t look much older than she did in the video for Mickey – and she looked like a teenager in that, even though she was 38 at the time. Her memory is perfectly sharp, too, and her energy levels are as high as ever, as she shares her packed life story with animated diction. If she has a secret to eternal youth, it’s that she has danced her whole life, and she still does, she says. “Dance is my drug of choice. You get high from it, and it gives you community.”
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