IKEA Monkey

President Donald Trump graded his administration a "ten" out of ten for its response to Puerto Rico's hurricane devastation Thursday, despite the continued and widespread lack of electricity and drinkable water across the storm-ravaged island.

A Georgia doctor claims that Delta Air Lines prevented her from singing the national anthem to honor a slain soldier whose casket was on her plane.

No, literally. This is from a bridal line.

Nothing quite says "Halloween" like the ritualistic mutilation of gourds, but some Canadians just took things to a whole new level.

On Sunday, a bunch of folks in Saskatoon with a crane, a giant pumpkin, and way too much time on their hands got together to loft a half-ton pumpkin 120 feet in the air and send it crashing to Earth—right on top of a Nissan Maxima.

According to CBC, some local insurance companies dreamed up the idea as a way to raise money for the Saskatoon Fire Fighters Pediatric Fund while also getting to watch a big-ass pumpkin brutalize a sedan. The giant pumpkin was completely decimated and, unsurprisingly, so was the car—which was donated by Saskatchewan Government Insurance.

"What else are you going to do on a Sunday in October?" Brennan Mills, one of the guys who helped put the pumpkin drop together, told CBC. "It's kind of a shame... It's actually a nice-looking car."

The event wound up raising $9,000 for charity and dropped a total of three pumpkins, but only one of them got to bust up a vehicle. A second was hollowed out with a bunch of ping pong balls, which onlookers could buy for $5 a pop. This pumpkin was dropped on top of a massive target, and the ball the landed in the bull's eye won a prize. The third was just filled with candy, like a massive orange piñata.

About 2,000 people came out to watch the pumpkin drop, and, thankfully, one of them decided to take video of the whole thing. Watch the gold Nissan meet its untimely demise above and fill in your own Billy Corgan joke.

Ten days and more than 200,000 scorched acres later, Donald Trump has tapped out a Twitter response to California’s devastating wildfires. The president regularly uses Twitter to communicate with the American people, issuing 140-character policy proclamations or messages of support. Finally breaking the Twitter silence, Mr Trump wrote that “Our hearts are with all affected by the wildfires in California”, praising the first responders who have been battling the blazes.

The long list of restaurant chains filing for bankruptcy amid slower sales added another name today: Romano’s Macaroni Grill. 

Romano’s Macaroni Grill owner RedRock Partners announced today that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as a way to reorganize the company and reduce debt.

The Italian restaurant chain — which operates 93 locations in 25 states — said in a FAQ [PDF] the filing for bankruptcy was done after “very careful consideration and consultation” with financial and legal experts.

“Macaroni Grill decided that this would be the most effective path for it to shed legacy liabilities and obligations, as a result of decisions by past ownership,” the company notes.

The chain will operate in a “business as usual” manner during the Chapter 11 process, meaning that the company’s locations will remain open, loyalty programs will continue, and employees will be paid.

The Latest Problem
RedRock Partners, which bought the chain through its Mac Acquisition LLC in 2015, said in a bankruptcy court filing [PDF] that the company’s current woes stem from the same slow sales that have been affecting dining establishments in recent years.

Romano’s Macaroni Grill joins a long list of chains to have filed for bankruptcy or closed, including Cosi, Logan’s Roadhouse, Fox & The Hound, Champs, and others.

In addition to feeling the pressure from fewer customers, the company notes that debt resulting from its sale in 2015 has continued to weigh on the chain.

As the company has struggled to pay its debts — estimated to be more than $23 million — the chain has already closed 37 underperforming locations.

Through the bankruptcy, the company seeks to restructure its current liabilities. To do so, the chain has obtained $5 million loan from Raven Capital Management to remain in business.

If the president's proof is anything like the evidence he’s promised to offer for some of his other controversial assertions, the nation will believe it when — or if — it sees it.

Defending Jeopardy! champion Manny Abell wasn’t doing so hot heading into Final Jeopardy last night. Abell had accrued just $1,000, trailing both Carlos Nobleza Posas and Fran Fried by a cool $11,300, and he needed a lot to break in his favor for him to make up that difference. Thanks to a panel-wide misunderstanding…

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Workplace sexual harassment has been illegal in the United States for 53 years. It still happens every day. High-profile examples abound: President Donald Trump—who has boasted of committing sexual assault—is being sued for sexually harassing a contestant on The Apprentice, one of 15 alleged victims of Trump’s sexual misconduct. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by dozens of women. Both Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were pushed out at Fox News after a flood of sexual harassment allegations. The problem is not limited to famous men or prominent workplaces. In fiscal 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received nearly 7,000 complaints alleging sexual harassment. State agencies received thousands more. And these numbers don’t begin to tell the full story: The EEOC estimates that roughly 3 out of 4 individuals who experience workplace harassment do not report it. An overwhelming majority of harassment victims are women.

It was a faint signal, but it told of one of the most violent acts in the universe, and it would soon reveal secrets of the cosmos, including how gold was created.

Astronomers around the world reacted to the signal quickly, focusing telescopes located on every continent and even in orbit to a distant...

In between its silly chatrooms and custom emojis, Slack is a place where real work gets done. But in some offices—no offense—the projects managed on the messaging platform are way cooler than others. Some even have cosmic significance.

On August 17, observatories in the United States and Italy detected gravitational waves, forces that bend the fabric of the universe, as they washed over Earth. Space telescopes observed a short gamma-ray burst, a powerful beam of radiation, coming from about the same part of the sky about two seconds later. Astronomers around the world quickly jumped into action, mobilizing dozens of ground-based and space telescopes to search for the source of these mysterious events.

There were calls and emails and, in the case of a few scientists who work for the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their associates, there were Slack messages. Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the university, was in Copenhagen when the alert went out. He started giving orders at 8:51 a.m. Pacific Time, then jumped on a bike and headed to his office at the city’s Dark Cosmology Center, where Dave Coulter and his fellow astronomers were already working.

A few hours later, they would find the source of the mysterious observations: a massive collision of neutron stars in a galaxy 130 million light-years from Earth. The discovery, announced Monday, would produce the first-ever image of a cosmic merger powerful enough to generate gravitational waves, spawn scientific reports from some 3,500 scientists, and open a new chapter in astronomy.

But Foley, Coulter, and their colleagues didn’t know that yet.

The team drew up a list of galaxies in the region of sky where the near-simultaneous events were detected and started looking for the source. Screenshots of their messages, which they published along with their paper in Science, show a cascade of real-time coordination and information. Several people were typing. (The full exchange starts on page 26 here.) The astronomers searched images from the Carnegie Institution’s Swope telescope in Chile, looking for a “transient,” an object that hadn’t been observed in the data before.

The first few images didn’t turn up anything, said Charles Kilpatrick, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz, who was in California at the time.

Then, in their ninth photo, they found something.

There it was, the spectacular afterglow of a cosmic explosion.

The Swope telescope was the first to capture the light from the merger. In the coming days, dozens of observatories would study the event at every wavelength of light, from gamma rays to radio waves.

Chat services like Slack have become ubiquitous in many offices in the last several years, tethering modern workers to their jobs in new ways that, by now, seem pretty standard. There’s nothing special these days about real-time, and often nonstop, communication among coworkers, whether they’re down the hall or across the pond. But there’s something particularly interesting, even mesmerizing, about watching extraordinary moments unfold in an ordinary space. When all is said and done, the participants can return to this strange day in their chat history and look at the exact moment when things started to change.

Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast, has a similar record, from January 2016. Back then, Bannister and a small group of researchers, spread out in locations in Canada, the United States, France, and Taiwan, were working on the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, a search for objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Bannister’s colleague was processing images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii when he noticed something unusual and pinged her on Flowdock, a group-chat client.

Bannister headed to J.J. Kavelaars’s office, which was two floors down from hers, and examined the picture. There was a tiny spot of bright light. “We found ourselves our very own dwarf planet,” Bannister said. The dwarf planet, they eventually determined, is among the 20 largest worlds that have been discovered so far beyond Neptune.

Bannister said she enjoyed seeing the messages that preceded UC Santa Cruz’s big find. Before they knew what they had, the chat seemed to resemble just another day at the office.

“It’s so much a typical workday for all of us,” she said. “And most of the time, it’s something that you expect to get in your data. And every so often, it’ll be something like, oh, okay. That’s fun.”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says he thinks NFL players should stop protesting during the national anthem and instead speak out against domestic violence.

The Republican former presidential hopeful sent a letter Monday to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Players Association Executive Director...

Breaking his public silence about four American soldiers killed during an ambush in Niger, President Donald Trump said Monday he'd penned personal letters to their families and planned to phone them later this week.

Modern materials engineering allows us to build what looks like precarious glass skywalks perched thousands of feet off the ground. They’re completely safe, but knowing that doesn’t make them any less terrifying to traverse—especially when the glass skywalk you’re on uses transparent LCD screens to make it look like…

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The Nationals continued their existence-long stretch of playoff futility tonight, falling to the Cubs in an NLDS Game 5 that combined a shaky Gio Gonzalez start, a blown lead, a historically weird inning-long meltdown, some very intense replay review and a failed attempt at a comeback before finally losing, 9-8. It…

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Credit reporting agency Equifax already earned its place in the history books for a "cybersecurity incident" that impacted more than half of all adult Americans.

In President Donald Trump’s retelling, a mysterious Chicago police officer’s plan to solve the city’s crime problem keeps getting better.

On Wednesday, the president told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the unnamed Chicago motorcycle cop whom Trump claimed he met on the campaign trail said that...

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Pierre Klein, Cuggi, and Lewis Vooton. Like shit jewelry and "I<3 Kush" caps, knock-off brands are a staple of market stalls around the world. And on my many travels around these stalls, there's one brand I've come across more than any other: Georgio Peviani.

Google the name of this apparently Italian man, and you'll find page after page of his denim jeans. But he doesn't exist, obviously. He's absolutely a knock-off. But for who? If it's Armani, Peviani isn't benefitting from the brand association, as the logo doesn't look anything like Armani's. Whatever: People are buying his stuff nonetheless. He has a brand in his own right and is doing everything a designer should do. Apart from existing. There's a void where he should be.

I'm going to fill that void: become Georgio Peviani and help him fulfill his potential, by becoming the toast of an industry fake enough to be deceived by a fake man. I'm taking Georgio Peviani to Paris Fashion Week.

Becoming Georgio Peviani

The first step: buying the domain to www.georgiopeviani.com.

Touchy, I know, but given the whole "this man doesn't actually exist" thing, I'm not expecting a knock on my door from a lawyer.

Within ten minutes of screwing around, I have something—something that says literally nothing but looks good. That's what matters, right? Oh, and a new email, georgio@georgiopeviani.com, which brings me to my next move.

As good as a passport. The final step is acquiring a few of Georgio's products to show off, so I head to Brixton Market to pick out a few pairs of premier Peviani.

Day One: Georgio Has Landed

I've never been to Paris before, so I cross the city on foot to get my bearings. Also, I've absolutely no idea where fashion week is taking place, so there's no point in taking the train anywhere. I'm hoping I'll just bump into someone wearing a very complex skirt and some of those Balenciaga lost property sneakers and follow her to the shows.

I've been following the resiliently distant shape of the Eiffel Tower for over an hour when, suddenly, a surge of color spills down the steps of an old hotel: A show has just finished. I enter a swarm of six-foot tall people in bright yellow puffer jackets and hats that cost more than my rent—the bloggers with their heads down, thumbing into phones. The crowd is dispersing in a million different directions, slipping through my fingers, when I feel a tap on the shoulder.

"Bonjour, monsieur! J'adore vos vêtements!"

A man dressed head to toe in denim, holding his belt buckle like a prospector, is staring at me, expressionless. I hand him a card and ask what he thought of the show. "I watched the show from here." He points at where he's standing.

I ask him, nonchalantly, if he knows where to head for fashion week. He pulls out a scruffy piece of paper covered in scribbled addresses: "Palais Brongniart." I look at his map of locations, making a note of Vivienne Westwood tomorrow, before, suddenly, his spine straightens. "Comme des Garçons, the Russian embassy!" He taps his watch and opens his side bag, allowing me a peek of a Vladimir Lenin costume: "I must get changed!"

Before I can thank my guide, he's gone.

I get to Palais Brongniart, and security shepherds me toward the reception. "I'm sorry, monsieur, but we're going to need some identification and credentials." Without saying a word, I toss my card on the desk. The lady taps away at a laptop, speaking French rapidly with a colleague. After a hushed discussion, they return.

I receive the badge and her apology with a huff.

While I expected that "summer vacation!" hue you find at film or music festivals, this is more like a networking event. Outside, I get chatting with somebody who looks to be enjoying herself. I'll later learn she's renown for being one of the first digital influencers in the fashion industry and is now a respected creative director.

"You don't know Peviani?" I ask. She shakes her head. "Let's just say streetwear is a religion, and Peviani constantly sins." She raises an eyebrow. "Peviani… as in you? That explains the photographer." I tell her that VICE is doing a feature on me as a widely sold but unknown anomaly.

We swap cards, and she recommends a party I could go to in just over an hour that will be swamped with press. Peviani has leveled up.

I follow the absent patter, snarling at jokes in languages I don't understand. These people are beneath Peviani; he doesn't care for them. In the corner, however, I spot somebody striking.

"I need to see you in these." Jean, a German menswear model, takes the Peviani pants and disappears behind a curtain.

"I really love them. It's so populist. You designed this?" I nod. Everybody is glaring. Jean lets on to an event that sounds far more suited to Peviani's tastes, and as he truly can't bear these squares any longer, he heads out into the Parisian night.

Through the narrow alleys near Bonne-Nouvelle train station, I come across a huddle outside an inconspicuous door throbbing with Balearic house music.

Inside, I'm met by a slender Italian guy. "Mickey," He smiles. "Georgio."

Mickey launches into a flurry of Italian. I nod, making Italian sounds, quickly requesting that we speak English so my photographer can understand. Turns out he's not only the designer of this collection but also highly from Italy. I let him know I'm a designer, too, and all of a sudden I'm being carted around the party.

People look confused, and it dawns on me that I've fallen into the only task more impossible than convincing fashion people that I'm a fashion designer: trying to convince Italians that I am Italian.

Eventually, I'm led to an industry buyer from Milan. Somebody who has the power to put Georgio on every butt in Bologne. "Georgio Peviani." She stops and closes her eyes, taking a deep breath through her nose. "The way you pronounce your name, Peviani, makes me want to cry." Bad start.

Name pronunciation aside, I ask if she'd buy my clothes.

"Would I buy this? It depends on the clients. But remember: Milan couture is different. It is haute couture." She's crushing me. "However, I love the structure here; I love the shapes." She looks closer. "I can see you've done your research with this button, it's very beautiful. I love these initials too."

I hand over a card, finish my drink and make for the exit. Day one: success.

Day Two: Aiming for the Stars

I wake up early and switch on the news. I can't see Peviani anywhere—it's all Rick Owens. I need to go bigger. Working up an appetite, I email every fashion brand PR office at fashion week. Something else appears on the news, and I smell opportunity: Getty Images have banned the "touching up" of images. If the world wants more un-edited flesh, I'm going to give it to them.

Today needs to start on a big win: I need to find a way into the Vivienne Westwood show.

Security is tight. All the paparazzi are flocking around this person.

After striking a pose, I follow her toward the door, half pretending to link arms. I take a deep breath and clutch onto my Georgio Peviani name tag. Don't let me down now, Georgio.

We're in! I peer across the front row of A-List names—the editor of Vogue, model Arizona Muse—before discreetly placing Georgio cards on each of their seats. I spy an opportunity.

I'm not exactly sure who that is, but, if he's in the front row, he's got to be important. The show kicks off.

Bravo. I hang back as the room empties. It becomes a mess of naked models, Westwood's staff sipping bubbly. I get chatting with a guy dressed in a Margaret Thatcher–esque power suit and ask about the team's plans for later. "Alexa Chung's," he replies. "You got the invite handy?" He holds it out on his phone and forwards it over.

Outside, flashes spark off in my face. People think I'm a big deal, and I'm beginning to believe it myself. Around the corner, I'm stopped by a group of women dressed like love interests from Miami Vice.

Influencers, flown in from Brazil, especially to report on the hot new things at Paris Fashion Week. And baby, it looks as though Raquel Minelli—she of 627,000 Instagram followers—has taken a liking to Peviani's threads.

Peviani is being broadcast to this influencer's followers all over the globe, via an Instagram story. I can barely believe it; the dream is happening. With the digital world in my hands, I have an afterparty to conquer.

This place is filled with the coolest kids the fashion industry has. I need to blend in, seamlessly.

"Mark my words," I say to a man I've just met, crossing my Iceland frozen chicken legs, folding my dolphin fin knees, "the next ten years are going to be all about Punkyfish and Peviani. Punkyfish, Peviani: the new Cavalli and Kors."

The guy purses his lips. This is the vibe of the party.

All of a sudden, somebody flings themselves onto the bouncy castle, and every head in my vicinity turns. It's Alexa Chung. I realize icons are the people everybody has their eyes on. I need to amp things up.

Stepping off the bouncy castle, I notice the perfect chance to make my mark.

I introduce myself, and Alexa repeats my name back to me (admittedly, with a lot of prompting, but still).

Georgio Peviani is quite literally on the tongue of one of the most influential people in the fashion industry.

Hours pass, and drinks flow. Things get hazy. Peviani mixes with the trendsetters and trailblazers of modern Paris. I'm left with little more than the memories of balconies, bars, and the rising sun of–

Day Three: The Emperor's New Dress

I wake up, late, my head feels like a kicked-in toilet, and I have an inbox full of emails. An invitation to Lutz Huelle, a suggested coffee date from designer Esther Maud, a seat at the Masha Ma show at YOYO Palais de Tokyo. But there is one that I just can't believe.

I've cracked the influencers, the hip, and the stars, but this is a private viewing of the brand-new collection of one of Paris's most prestigious designers, Véronique Leroy. It's an opportunity to access the impenetrable upper echelons of the capital's scene.

I arrive at the address, and an older lady with a slender face and dusty long blond hair meets me. "Georgio!" We kiss both cheeks. With her black netted dress and white tights, she looks like an illustration from a Pink Panther book.

We enter a beautiful 17th-century Parisian apartment—the kind of place that looks bare without a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. An older Southeast Asian gentleman and a younger lady, both in full Prada suits, study catalogs. Two six-foot models are there to try on anything we want to see them in. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I sip coffee, manically, and yell out looks from the board.

This is OK, but what would an icon do?

"This dress—it's stunning! How much?"

"I'd like to try it on. I've got an award ceremony soon, and I want to make an impact. I'm the Young Thug of fashion." She tries to hide her confusion, before disappearing off behind a curtain.

After ten minutes going back and forth with voila, I'm floating around a Parisian flat, surrounded by millionaires, wearing a dress worth more than all my clothes combined. The senior seller whispers, "You look lovely."

I feel as though I've reached a higher plane of privilege. Georgio is now a man whose name and Casper the Friendly Ghost legs will be vaguely remembered by designers, influencers, and fashion fans worldwide. He is a man who, as far as Paris is concerned, exists.

I'm ready to leave him here.

End of Days: Who Is Georgio Peviani?

After spending three days living as Georgio, I'd found a lot of answers to a lot of questions, yet there's one that's consistently evaded me: Who, really, is Georgio Peviani?

Back home in London, I decided to do what I'd normally do: Google it. Three pages in, I see something—a trademark, taken out in 1996, which expired last year, and an Aldgate address underneath it. Bingo.

Tucked away off Whitechapel Road in London is my apparent target: Denim World. I enter, and see in front of me a treasure trove of overalls, combat jackets, jeans, and jorts. Looking closer, every single item is Georgio Peviani. I approach the counter. "Does Georgio Peviani work here?" I ask, and the sore clerks split off, leaving one—who looks like the patriarch—shaking his head. "Oh, but you sell a lot of his stuff?" He looks perplexed. "Well, yes. That's because I made him up 30-odd years ago."

Adam left Zambia and arrived in Britain in 1982. He's been working in clothing ever since.

At some point in the early 90s, he came up with the name Georgio Peviani and liked it. Why? To him, it "sounded nice, sounded Italian." His favorite designer is Armani. Adam refers to the 90s and early 2000s as the "peak of Peviani," and it's no surprise: At their height, they were selling 35,000 Georgio Peviani pieces a week, worldwide. They still sell all over the world.

"The thing I love about the brand is every Tom, Dick, and Harry can afford it. It's not like Armani, where only certain elite people can afford them," he says. "It's been very successful for us. It's been what's kept this family and this business going all these years."

I begin to explain my fascination with Georgio, and then tell Adam my Paris story. He keels over with laughter. As we continue talking, something occurs to me: I'm no longer Georgio Peviani. I never was, really, but now I know who is. "You're Georgio Peviani, aren't you, Adam?"

Adam bursts into laughter. His colleagues join in, and I follow.

"I'm as close as you'll ever find."

Follow Oobah Butler and Jake Lewis on Twitter.

More than 30 students at a Maryland high school were stung by a swarm of bees on their way to school Thursday morning, officials said.

"The New Yorker" reportedly obtained a tape recording of Harvey Weinstein coaxing a young actress admitting to groping a woman that was secretly captured during an NYPD sting operation. CNN is trying to confirm the authenticity of the tape with the NYPD, but the department confirms they investigated a misdemeanor sexual abuse complaint against Weinstein. His reps say they have no comment on the tape.

Here’s a fun, West Wing-esque reminder that the people who work in the White House aren’t all that different from the average American: Donald Trump apparently hates them, too. That’s per a new Vanity Fair article tracking the latest leaks from the dented, boiling pressure cooker that is the Trump administration, a…

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Twitter suspended actress Rose McGowan from using its service for 12 hours after she told Ben Affleck to "fuck off" and called Matt Damon a "spineless profiteer" in relation to Harvey Weinstein's alleged history of sexual assault and harassment.

McGowan, one of the most vocal critics of Weinstein and among the first to call out his alleged misconduct, revealed on Instagram Wednesday night that her Twitter account was suspended by the social media giant.

According to the New York Times, McGowan reached a settlement with Weinstein over undisclosed claims in 1997. In the last week, numerous women have come forward accusing the Miramax founder of assault, harassment, and rape stretching back to 1990.

Continue reading on VICE News.

But it’s only available in two locations.

Scandal rocked the Japanese celebrity snack food industry today, when representatives for FilmNation International issued a press release denying that actor Nicolas Cage had ever given his consent to have his face used for the promotion of a tasty puffed corn treat, or that the so-called “Nicolasticks” were endorsed…

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The great soul songstress Sharon Jones’s death last fall of pancreatic cancer was tragic if not shocking – after all, label Daptone Records had been open about her battle with pancreatic cancer, and it was documented earlier that year in Barbara Kopple’s wonderful film Miss Sharon Jones!. In the film, she beats the disease, but it returned as the film hit the festival circuit, and she was gone by November.

But she left us with one last gift. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ final studio album, Soul of a Woman, will be out this fall, with eleven brand-new tracks that combine the band’s brassy, old-school sound with Jones’s electrifying vocals. And the band has released a video for the record’s first single, “Matter of Time,” a warm montage of intimate backstage clips, one more valentine to this singular talent.

Watch:

Soul of a Woman drops November 17; you can pre-order it direct from Daptone here.

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In the multitude of articles that have emerged over the past week detailing sexual-misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein, perhaps none is so damning and excruciating to read as Ronan Farrow’s long-form New Yorker piece published yesterday. In it, Farrow details several in-depth interviews (compiled over 10…

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Donald Trump “likely obstructed justice” when he fired FBI director James Comey during his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and could face impeachment as a consequence, a new report has claimed. The report, entitled Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J Trump, by The Brookings Institution, an established think tank, states that there are significant questions over whether the president obstructed justice.

As allegations of rape, abuse, and other forms of sexual misconduct against him mount, Harvey Weinstein's wife of a decade has announced she's leaving him.