IKEA Monkey

White Lives Matter staged a rally outside the NAACP's Houston headquarters on Sunday, sparking controversy and counter-protests in a city where racial tensions remain high after a string of recent incidents.

Clutching Confederate flags, white supremacist signs and, in several cases, assault rifles,...

Modern pentathlon competitors use unfamiliar horses for the show jumping event . Here’s the result of that rule.

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Sea Port Products Corp is voluntarily recalling a batch of its scallops after at least 206 people became sick with hepatitis A, prompting an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease control and Prevention.

Authorities said they have no plans to hunt down the bear.

We’ve talked about the wonder of waffle iron cooking before , and even about making cookies in them, but this video walks you through actually making those waffle iron cookies from start to finish.

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Your commute is about to get a bit more arty. [ more › ]

Jared Taylor hits play, and the first Donald Trump ad of the general election unfolds across his breakfast table. Syrian refugees streaming across a border. Hordes of immigrants, crowded onto trains.

"Donald Trump's America is secure," rumbles a narrator. "Terrorists and dangerous criminals kept...

Lou Pearlman, the man responsible for engineering *N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, has died in prison at age 62.

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“Money played no role for me and never has, except to the extent that I could donate it to charity and, in doing so, hopefully help those less able to defend themselves,” Amber Heard said in a statement Thursday announcing that she would be donating the entirety of her divorce settlement from walking Van Dyke mustache Johnny Depp to charity.

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kenyatta:

vmvalentine:

A montage made for my studio concepts class

I missed this last year. This is hilarious.

“Oh my God, the gold medal, I can’t believe we did it! Coach, come here! I’m gonna give you the biggest hug ever, I’m just so, so—[Chris Berman voice] WHHAAAAP! Haha, no seriously this time, get up and give me a—WHHAAAAP!”

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Romance novel cover model Jason Baca has been on 476 covers and is the only man to say he's beaten Fabio's record.

K-pop superstar and fashion icon CL is a member of girl group 2NE1, already hugely popular around the world. But with her latest tracks, she’s been set on further breaking through to an English language audience, and in brand-new video “Lifted,” she gets a cool cosign and makes it locationally clear, too, placing her squarely in New York and getting Method Man—whose namesake Wu-Tang Clan song is interpolated—to cheese in a cameo.

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Ryan Lochte’s rendevouz at a Brazilian gas station grows stranger by the day. Lochte initially claimed that he and other members of the U.S. swimteam were held up at gun point. The details of that particular story came off as strange from the beginning.

It didn’t take long for police to unravel Lochte’s troublesome tale. Security footage caught U.S. swimmers on tape fighting with a security guard on the night of the alleged robbery. The protocol when one lies about being held at gun point in a foreign country and then try to hop on a plane to avoid any repercussions is to apologize and explain your faulty decision making. These U.S. swimmers don’t have any plans to do that.

IOC spokesman Mario Andrada chalked up their decision not to apologize as completely normal; that we should “give these kids a break.”

Ryan Lochte is 32 years old. No one would call LeBron James, just a few months younger than Lochte, a kid. There are lots of crazy things about this Lochte story, but treating him like a kid takes the cake… so far.

(Via Twitter)

Nyla was delivered by Caesarean section and was the only one in her litter. She became a member of our family when she was 10 weeks old, and now we can't imagine life without her. She loves her family, including her best friend Sophie, our six-month-old kitten. Nyla and Sophie enjoy getting in trouble, chasing each other, sharing squeaky toys, and sleeping in Nyla's crate. Other than playing with Sophie, Nyla's favorite activities include rolling in fresh-cut grass, eating acorns, meeting new people and dogs, and chewing on her family's shoe laces.

Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin just swept the women’s 100m hurdles and made Olympic history in the process.

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In this episode of Autobiographies, we caught up with critically acclaimed actor Cillian Murphy to discuss the evolution of his career and what it means to be in the media spotlight. He talks about failing school, his passion for the theater, and examining the strange behavior behind his eclectic roles.

"It's like some little kid dropped their toy."

This particular bit of news is very local, but the issue it addresses is universal, and perhaps especially relevant to those of us with lives that may involve the ownership of cars and related machines. It’s about a guy in Schaumburg, Illinois, and his 25-foot trailer. Also, how much his neighbors hate his trailer.

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Photo via Flickr user jeffreyw

Breaking news from Nebraska, via the Omaha World-Herald:

"Omaha police officers were called to a house near 90th and Maple Streets about 9:45 PM Tuesday to investigate an accidental overdose. They learned that a 53-year-old man had been unloading groceries and found some brownies in the backseat of a car that his adult children had used earlier in the day.

The man ate four of the brownies."

The rule journalists are taught to follow is to report the unusual, the important, the world-shifting. Newspapers are therefore filled with exceptional moments: earthquakes, war, elections, controversies, arguments, crises. Even the death and marriage announcements represent important life events. The stuff of minute-by-minute existence, the ho-hum moments that make up daily life, are usually left to novelists and the earliest, greatest period of the Onion.

But here the mundane is leaking into the news via what should go down as a hall-of-fame level police blotter item. There's a bit of foreshadowing in the first sentence, but to start with, this is an entirely normal event in the life of a 53-year-old man. Wait, why eat some brownies that obviously weren't his that he found in his car? you ask. Well, I'll tell you:

1. Brownies, even subpar brownies, are tasty desserts.
2. They were there.
3. What are this man's "adult children" going to do? Ask where the brownies went? He'll just lie and say "what brownies?" or own up to eating them, depending on what kind of Midwestern Dad he is. He raised them! They owe him more than four brownies.
4. If you eat food you find in your car, you don't have to tell your wife and therefore don't have to have that cholesterol/weight conversation. Sometimes, hurriedly and secretively stuffing four brownies into your mouth in the backseat of your car is the best part of your day, and that's OK.

"The man's wife told police that as she and her husband were watching TV, he noted that he was getting 'bad anxiety.' She tried to call their children to ask them what was in the brownies but couldn't reach them."

Let me just say, shame on these adult children! You're not a teenager, pick up the phone when your mom calls! Even if you're with your friends, it's totally fine to answer a call from your parents, and if they make fun of you for that, well, they're not such good friends, are they? Also, if one of you doesn't know where your pot brownies are, you're probably pretty sure what this call is going to be about, right?

"As police were at the house, one of the couple's sons arrived and told officers the brownies belonged to his siblings. He told them he was 'pretty sure it was just marijuana in the brownies,' according to a police report."

It's sometimes hard to string together a proper narrative from police reports, which are notoriously short on details, but here's what I think happened:

1. The mom, unable to contact any of the kids, called the cops, a very Midwestern Mom thing to do.
2. The adult son who owned the brownies saw his mom's call and, in the way that the brains of adult children sometimes perform enormous leaps of logic in times of crisis, realized exactly what had happened.
3. He then rushed home, found the cops there—Oh shit, his brain, operating at normal speed no doubt thought, the cops—and was asked about the brownies.
4. Playing it "cool," in the manner of many adult children caught in a bad spot, he blamed his siblings, and, not wanting to appear too knowledgeable about the brownies, pleaded ignorance. Meanwhile, he had to watch this happen:

"Paramedics called to the scene who checked the man found his vital signs to be normal. But they noted he was displaying odd behavior—crawling around on the floor, randomly using profanities, and calling the family cat 'a bitch.'"

So, to understand this situation: Here are the cops writing their report, there are the paramedics ready to intervene, over there is the adult son and the Midwestern Mom having the kind of awkward conversation family members have when someone has done the inexplicable, and in the middle of all that, the Midwestern Dad is crawling around, cursing, and telling the cat, finally, what he really thinks of it.

Now, taking so many drugs that you are literally on the floor having full-blown arguments with the nearest animal/plant/couch cushion can be a worthwhile, invigorating experience. I'm going to guess, though, that Midwestern Dad did not have a good time because by the time you're 53 years old, you're pretty dang comfortable with your inhibitions. It's inconvenient, not to mention a bit shameful, to have them torn down unexpectedly and discover that what you really want to do, after a batch of drugs your shady adult children bought reduces you to your basest impulses, is call the cat a bitch.

Also I bet the cops were laughing a lot at this part. Having cops laugh at you is a literal Midwestern Dad nightmare.

"The man told paramedics he felt like '"he's trippin."'"

I mean, yeah, no shit.

"The paramedics helped the man to his bedroom, and he got into bed. The man and his wife were told to call 911 again if his situation worsened."

Let's end by applauding everyone involved in this. The man freaked out but apparently kept his shit together well enough to recognize that he was tripping and didn't get violent or say anything to make his wife sad. The wife called all the appropriate authorities, who responded appropriately. The man wasn't cuffed or arrested, everyone recognized he didn't need further help, and the whole thing died down. The cat was probably fine.

The only villain here, obviously, is the adult child whose drugs turned their adult parents' normal evening at home watching a DVR'd Dancing with the Stars episodes or whatever into a Withnail and I outtake. They should feel bad, and I hope they do.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Some pleasant news from one Taylor Swift: the singer has donated $1 million to Louisiana in the wake of a devastating flood that has displaced at least 20,000 people and left 11 dead.

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Wide stretches of southern Louisiana are once again flooded with more than two feet of water. Downpours have again damaged or ruined tens of thousands of homes, driving thousands into shelters and leaving many people homeless and some dead. State leaders have declared the situation “historic” and “unprecedented,” and the federal government has, yet again, declared a major disaster in the region.

The images coming from Baton Rouge and its surrounding low-lying areas, of submerged homes and streets turned into rivers, inevitably call to mind the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Only this time, most people might not have heard about it.

The Louisiana floods, which the American Red Cross on Wednesday labeled “the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since Superstorm Sandy,” have not dominated cable news nor the front pages of newspapers. President Obama, other than signing a disaster declaration, hasn’t bothered to interrupt his Martha’s Vineyard vacation of golf and fund-raisers to address the suffering residents of the Gulf. Hillary Clinton has mentioned the floods only in a single tweet, and Donald Trump has said nothing about them at all.

Leaders in Louisiana have noticed that the nation isn’t paying attention to its struggles, and they have a few theories as to why.

For one, Governor John Bel Edwards told reporters on Tuesday, this storm didn’t come with a name. “When you have a storm that is unnamed—it wasn’t a tropical storm, it wasn’t a hurricane—a lot of times people underestimate the impact that it would have,” Edwards, a Democrat, said during a storm briefing. “But this is historic, it’s unprecedented, and we are seeing unprecedented flood levels as the waters move south.” Edwards and his family were forced to leave the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge after water flooded the basement and the electricity had to be shut off.

Appearing alongside the governor, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate emphasized that the federal government was treating the floods as a “headline disaster” even if the national media was not. “You had the Olympics, you’ve got the election, and if you looked at the national news, you’re probably only on the third or fourth page,” Fugate noted. “FEMA understands this is a very large disaster impacting tens of thousands of people.”

A slow-moving, hybrid low-pressure system dumped between 24 and 31 inches of rain—some 6.9 trillion gallons of water—on parts of southern Louisiana over the course of 48 hours before moving into Texas. More than 40,000 homes have suffered damage, Edwards said, and authorities rescued more than 30,000 people and 1,000 pets trying to escape the rising waters. More than 8,000 Louisiana residents were in shelters as of Tuesday afternoon, and the official death toll from the floods stood at 11.

The displacements and damage remain far less than the devastation wrought by Katrina in 2005, but because the flooding occurred inland from New Orleans around Baton Rouge, officials are worried that tens of thousands of homes were not protected by flood insurance. “This is a 500 to 1,000-year event,” said Representative Garret Graves, a life-long Baton Rouge resident whose district was heavily effected by the flooding. “Financially, you’ve got some people who are absolutely deep in the red.”

Graves, a Republican, said people were caught “scrambling and flat-footed” because of a lack of communication from authorities in the days before the storm. “Overall there was a lack of preparation and really anticipation in this case that was inappropriate,” Graves told me by phone on Wednesday. “I think we could have mitigated some of the loss, in fact a good bit of the loss, had there been communication about the threat of the flood.”

As an example, the congressman said that when he went with search-and-rescue teams, he noticed that most people had kept their cars in their driveways. “Had people just been given more notice on this, they could have brought those cars to higher ground,” Graves said. “We were rescuing people in boats, and people were grabbing what they can in a plastic grocery sack and running out of the house or wading through the house.”

Fugate briefed Obama by phone on Wednesday, but the president hasn’t commented directly on the floods, and his silence along with the images of him golfing on vacation drew the ire of conservatives on Twitter. In addition to Fugate and other FEMA officials, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson planned to travel to Baton Rouge on Wednesday.

Yet the frustration in Louisiana seemed to focus less on the response from the federal government than on the lack of attention from the national media. “Such complaints aren’t trivial,” wrote Mike Scott on the website of The Times-Picayune in a column headlined, “National Media Fiddle as Louisiana Drowns.”

As Louisiana well knows, the loosening of the recovery purse strings is directly commensurate to the number of people who are made aware of the scope of the devastation. In this case, where national news coverage has been scarce, locals have every reason to worry that recovery funds will be just as scarce.

Money is a huge concern in a state that has been confronting an unprecedented budget crisis and a deficit of nearly $2 billion. Edwards sought to assure the public on Tuesday that the fiscal woes would have no bearing on the state’s emergency response, but he said Louisiana would “rely on the federal government to the maximum extent possible.” Graves said he already spoken with fellow lawmakers and Republican congressional leaders about the need for a separate recovery package, even though Fugate said FEMA would have enough disaster funds to cover short-term costs.

Another worry is just how extraordinary—or simply ordinary—this flood will prove to be. Fugate noted that FEMA still had staff on the ground in Louisiana from the last period of flooding in the spring, and experts say the recent spate of floods across the South may be a harbinger of climate change. Graves, a conservative, said he had been talking with like-minded Republican colleagues about the need to make “investments in resiliency” by spending millions of dollars to upgrade Louisiana’s infrastructure, in the hopes that the government could save billions in recovery costs after increasingly frequent disasters.

For the moment, however, officials are focused on saving as many people and homes as they can—whether or not Americans outside Louisiana are paying attention. “I want everyone to understand,” Edwards insisted on Tuesday, “that nobody has been forgotten.”

Appearing on CNN Wednesday night, Donald Trump’s special counsel and marital rape truther Michael Cohen repeatedly challenged the notion that Hillary Clinton was polling ahead of the Republican nominee, employing the (powerful but seldom-used) “la la la, I can’t hear you!” defense.

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Anna Jaskoviak keeps a seal on the dashboard of her car.

It is a pink plastic seal, and it is "kind of like a mascot," said the 17-year-old senior at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora.

It is a pink plastic seal that she watched an antique machine craft for her at Brookfield Zoo, one of a number...

Japan's omurice, which also goes by the names omumeshi and omuraisu, is an addictive dish of fried rice with an omelette. It's surprisingly easy to make at home. Here are two recipes—one with ketchup, the other with okonomiyaki sauce—to get you started. Read More

Stephanie Stella. Photo by Troy Manning

This post originally appeared on VICE Canada.

After she said she was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance, Stephanie Stella went home and looked up an article on consent she recalled reading when she was younger.

"I posted it on my Facebook," with the note, "I think the world is due for a timely reminder about consent," the Toronto resident told VICE.

That post—and others—would come back to haunt her during her sex assault trial a year and a half later, in February 2016.

The man accused of sexually assaulting Stella, Di Yang, was acquitted in March. While reading her decision, Ontario court justice Leslie Chapin said "the fact that did look up articles about consent when she was home leads me to think that there was some genuine confusion on her part as to whether or not she was consenting."

While that wasn't the sole reason Yang was acquitted, it points to a trend in which sexual assault complainants are being discredited in court based on things they post on social media.

According to evidence presented at trial, both Stella and Yang agreed that sexual contact took place. However, Stella said it started out consensual and became non-consensual. She told the court he penetrated her with his fingers after she told him she wasn't ready for that. Yang's defense argued the Crown couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt Stella withdrew her consent and that even if she had, Yang didn't realize it.

During cross-examination, Yang's lawyer Naomi Lutes brought up the fact that Stella had once posted a comment on Facebook that said "when a woman says 'no,' it is the beginning of a negotiation."

"I couldn't prepare for that," Stella told VICE, noting the post was six years old.

"It did a very good job of throwing me off my game. Not only is she starting to discredit me right from the word 'go,' but she's showing me how much she knows about me. She had gone into my account and scraped it all the way back. She knew everything I had posted from at least six years back."

Stella also posted about the fact that Jian Ghomeshi had surrendered to police on sex assault charges the day before she reported Yang to the cops. Ghomeshi's trial also ended up taking place at the same time as Yang's—in the same courthouse—something Stella noted on Facebook, where she was chronicling her journey through the criminal justice system.

"She... accused me of trying to get in on the spotlight," said Stella. Justice Chapin, in summarizing the defense's position, wrote, "Her social-media posts are indicative of someone who's come to court with an agenda."

Other sex assault complainants have also found their social-media feeds under heavy scrutiny, with some arguing such evidence has little to do with the alleged crime but is instead being used to prop up rape myths.

York University PhD student Mustafa Ururyar was recently convicted of raping fellow student Mandi Gray.

While cross-examining Gray, Ururyar's lawyer Lisa Bristow brought up a February 2016 tweet in which Gray referred to the court system as a "rape circus."

"And this was going to be perfect for your agenda, correct?" asked Bristow, adding, "your agenda to show how the criminal justice system doesn't work for sexual assault victims."

Mandi Gray. Photo by Canadian Press/Chris Young

"I was actually quite amazed by how many objectives she put on me, from me being jealous to me having an activist agenda," Gray told VICE. Despite the conviction, Gray has said she felt violated by the criminal justice system and that she would "never encourage anyone to report to the police, because of how emotionally, financially, and psychologically taxing it can be."

In March, three of four men on trial for gang raping a teenage girl from Ottawa were acquitted, despite the judge concluding that the victim, 15 at the time of the assault, was raped. (The DNA of the one man who was convicted was found on the victim's body.) The judge called the victim's credibility and reliability into question, noting that she refused to admit to smoking weed and drinking despite the fact that her social-media posts indicated otherwise.

Toronto criminal defense lawyer Michael Lacy told VICE the difference between preparing a defense now compared to 30 years ago is that back then you might have hired a private investigator to research a complainant, whereas now social media offers a wealth of information on the record.

However, he said there are rules that protect complainants from having a defense lawyer make assertions based on social-media posts that are irrelevant to the matter at hand.

"I also trust that judges are fully equipped to separate meaningful issues that affect the credibility of a witness and those that don't," he said.

Lacy said he has a Facebook account solely for the purpose of preparing for trials and has had "tremendous success finding things."

In 2012, he represented a 27-year-old man who was convicted of sexual assault and sexual interference after having sex with a 15-year-old girl. Lacy's client said the girl told him she was in college. At trial, Lacy asked the complainant if she'd ever lied about her age, which she denied doing; however, he discovered she had created a Myspace account, which requires a person to be at least 16 years old. The line of questioning was shut down at trial, but Lacy later successfully appealed the conviction for his client and a new trial was ordered.

"There's an example, I think, where it's quite properly used," he said, adding, "I'm surprised that people are so open with what they say or that they have Facebook accounts that are not protected."

Vancouver-based privacy consultant Caitlin Hertzman said there are lots of loopholes on apps like Facebook that allow defense attorneys to get information about a complainant. One of the most straightforward routes is simply asking a complainant's Facebook friend for dirt.

"You would be surprised how many people are willing to share that just to be part of a story," she said, describing each Facebook friend as a "loose end."

Hertzman told VICE that complainants in sexual assault trials are best off shutting down their accounts completely once they report a crime and not talking about anything publicly until the proceedings are over.

"If you felt like there was ever anything on there that was problematic, you should assume that it's already been screen-capped and saved," she said. "So before you shut it down, make sure you get copies of everything to the Crown, so they're prepared."

She advised against trying to scrub your account because "it takes too long, and you're not going to do a good job."

Gray told VICE she chose to waive her publication ban because "I realized very early on if I didn't remove that publication ban there was no way for me to speak out about the abuse that I was experiencing, through university, through the legal system."

For Stella, documenting her trial publicly, helped her cope with what she described as an "emotional breakdown."

"You could follow my ups and down on my Facebook. This was to show people this is what we go through—this is what the healing process looks like." The posts received many supportive responses, some from other survivors, she said.

"That was what really drove me, knowing that I was helping other people."

However, she said having those posts thrown back at her during trial—something she didn't even realize would be possible without her consent—made her feel violated all over again.

"When they say you get raped again on the stand, I initially didn't believe it to be true but it absolutely is."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

What’s happening to our website? Who owns us now? Who’s in charge? Nobody knows. Why don’t you bring us a dog?

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In response to a sexual assault controversy that’s currently engulfing the New York comedy scene, women’s satire site Reductress has devoted its entire landing page to humor articles (primarily written by women) about rape.

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