It’s on the market for the first time ever

Have a nomination for a jaw-dropping listing that would make a mighty fine House of the Day? Get thee to the tipline and send us your suggestions. We'd love to see what you've got.

Location: Oakland, California

Price: $875,000

On the market for the first time ever, this unique A-frame house was built in 1960 and appears to have been barely touched since then. Perched above the Bay Area in Oakland, California, the 1,961-square-foot midcentury modern wooden abode features handsome split-level living, all done up in natural materials.

Tiled floors, brick and paneled walls, tongue-and-groove ceilings, rough-hewn beams, and glass expanses—with stained-glass detailing!—create a dynamic and open space with multiple common areas primed to take in the views.

The first is a handsome paneled living room with built-in seating and corner fireplace opens onto a deck by way of sliding glass doors. Adjacent to that is a period kitchen with gorgeous carved cabinetry and mosaic tiling, as well as windows boasting subtle stained-glass sections.

The soaring A-frame portion of the home combines carved beams, gallery balcony (where another retro freestanding fireplace is ensconced), and dramatic floor-to-ceiling glazing punctuated with Art-Deco inspired stained glass that opens onto another deck and incredible city views beyond.

Found of this section are two smaller bedrooms—one with a skylight and glass doors, another with walls of brick and textured fabric—and a master suite set underneath the high-pitched roof. Beautiful stained-glass windows and a skylight distinguish this space.

Basically perfect as-is, the property located at 5845 Scarborough Drive is offered at $875,000. Have a look.

Courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty

The Trump administration has proposed revising a rule that hasn’t even gone into effect yet, with the goal of making sure that nursing home residents and their loved ones can not sue these long-term care facilities in the event that something horrible happens.

Amid concerns about the treatment of patients at nursing homes and assisted living facilities, a growing number of the companies that operate these businesses have begun including forced arbitration clauses in their residents’ contracts.

These clauses take away the patient’s constitutional right to a day in court, and shunt all legal disputes into private (often confidential) arbitration. Additionally, most arbitration clauses also include a ban on class actions, so multiple residents of the same facility who were each wronged in the same way would nonetheless be barred from having their issue heard jointly. Rather, each resident would be required to go through the arbitration process on their own.

In 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) passed a new rule that would stop almost all long-term care (LTC) facilities from forcing new residents to sign binding arbitration agreements. Basically, if an LTC wanted to accept either Medicaid or Medicare it would need to abide by this rule.

However, the American Health Care Association — an LTC industry trade group — sued the government almost immediately to prevent this rule from taking effect, and in Nov. 2016, a federal judge in Mississippi granted an injunction temporarily barring CMS from moving forward with implementing the ban on arbitration agreements.

The Department of Health and Human Services had until last Friday, June 2, to file with the court to continue the government’s appeal, but instead allowed their appeal to lapse [PDF], indicating that HHS has no intention of defending this rule.

That intention was made clear this week, when CMS officially proposed a revision to the arbitration ban; rather, it’s less a revision than it is a deletion.

The new administration, which has openly derided the federal court system when judges have disagreed with the White House, is here embracing the opinion of the Mississippi judge, saying that “After [the Nov. 7, 2016] decision, CMS reviewed and reconsidered the arbitration requirements in the 2016 Final Rule.”

The CMS proposal — which comes only days after representatives for the industry actively lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill — claims to increase the transparency of arbitration clauses by making sure they are written in plain English, that they must be explained to the resident, and that the resident must specifically acknowledge this clause.

But what good does transparency do when the resident has no choice?

“Mr. Adams, signing this clause means you won’t be able to sue Sally’s Nursing Funhouse in court, even if we’ve been deliberately charging illegal fees to you and all the other residents for years.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound good. I don’t think I’ll sign that.”

“Okay then. You can’t live here.”

“Fine. I’ll just take my business to Jimmy’s Assisted Livatorium.”

“They’re actually owned by our parent company, and even if they weren’t, every other nursing home in the area has basically the same clause, so you’re likely out of luck.”

“Oh well, at least now I know I’m powerless to fight back. Thank you CMS for this new, glorious layer of transparency!”

The Fair Arbitration Now coalition, a group of consumer and legal advocacy groups (including our colleagues at Consumers Union), is calling shenanigans on CMS’s decision to let the LTC industry win this battle.

“Anyone who has ever had a family member move into a nursing home, or anyone with an ounce of sense and compassion, would recognize that seniors and their families undergoing an incredibly challenging transition are in no position to bargain over obscure contract terms – terms they probably do not even understand,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a member of the FAN coalition. “The Trump administration apparently thinks it is okay for nursing homes to force seniors into signing contract terms that give up their right to sue in court if they are subsequently victimized by neglect or abuse. It’s hard to imagine a more callous policy.”

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The reality star is looking to flip the home for big bucks

Alison Victoria, star of HGTV’s Kitchen Crashers home remodeling program, is looking to unload her Chicago home. Built in the “early 1900s,” the brick-clad Wicker Park property includes four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and—naturally—a completely remodeled kitchen.

In an an interview in HGTV Magazine, Victoria described the existing cooking space as a “mishmash of melamine cabinets, dated tile, and scratched-up butcher block” that had “zero personality.” Following a gut rehab, the bright kitchen now sports new cabinets, a custom island, lounging nook, built-in bookshelves, and wine rack.

Other upgrades to the single-family structure include a fully finished lower level and new shingle roof. As far as location is concerned, the home is convenient to the neighborhood’s top retail offerings. Situated directly across from Wicker Park, the lot is just around the corner from the Blue Line Damen stop and popular restaurants like Big Star tacos.

According to public records, Victoria and husband Luke Harding picked up the property at 1519 N. Wicker Park Avenue roughly five years ago for $315,000. With the renovated home currently seeking $1.5 million, the reality show star is hoping to make a major return on her initial investment.

• Wicker Park Home Owned By 'Kitchen Crashers' Star Asks $1.5 Million [DNAinfo]
• Inside Alison Victoria's Kitchen [HGTV]
• Wicker Park archive [Curbed Chicago]

It's experimental in all the right ways.

Mallory Ortberg, aka Dear Prudence, is online weekly to chat live with readers. An edited transcript of the chat is below. (Sign up below to get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week. Read Prudie’s Slate columns here. Send questions to Prudence at prudence@slate.com.)

US President Donald Trump renewed his criticism of London Mayor Sadiq Khan on Monday, a day after attaking his handling of the weekend's terror attack in the city.

Zip-Loc Introduces New Party Sub Sandwich Baggies

The Impreza has always been a smart, practical choice. Thanks to competitive fuel economy and a redesign that addressed its few deficiencies, the 2017 model is now our top-rated compact sedan. It...

June 2, 2017 is National Donut Day and a number of major donut chains are celebrating by offering a deal or freebie for donuts.

Here's what you can expect (while supplies last):

- Dunkin' Donuts - Free classic donut of your choice with any drink purchase at participating locations.

- Krispy Kreme - Free donut of your choice at participating locations. No purchase necessary.

- LaMar's Donuts - Free donut with a hole (i.e. no jelly-filled donuts). No purchase necessary.

- Shipley Do-Nuts - Free glazed donut with purchase at participating locations.

- Tim Hortons - Free classic donut with purchase of a brewed hot or iced coffee at participating locations. You must mention “National Donut Day” to get the deal.

Photo via Dunkin' Donuts.

Condo units in the building are priced between $1 million and $18 million

Well on its way to becoming the Windy City’s third tallest building, the upcoming 93-story Vista Tower will redefine Chicago's iconic skyline. Rising at 375 E. Wacker Drive along the south bank of the Chicago River's main branch, the tower will deliver 406 luxury condos and a 192-room five-star hotel to the Lakeshore East neighborhood.

Jointly developed by hometown firm Magellan Development Group and China's Dalian Wanda Group, the angular tower was designed by Jeanne Gang's Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects in collaboration with architect of record bKL Architecture. With a height of 1,186 feet, Vista Tower will become the tallest building in the world designed by a woman-led firm—a title previously held by Jeanne Gang's nearby 859-foot Aqua tower.

Though the ambitious skyscraper is still under construction, here's a preview of what future residents and visitors can expect to experience when Vista Tower officially opens in 2020.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on March 30, 2016 and has been updated to reflect the latest news and information.

Sales Center

The most tangible clue to what Chicago's Vista Tower will be like can be found in the the state-of-the-art sales gallery located at 345 E. Wacker Drive. Here, well-heeled prospective buyers have a chance to inspect sample fixtures and finishes as well as experience the exact view from any given unit via an impressive matrix of 52 flat-screen displays. The ability to electronically visualize an unbuilt space is a fast growing trend in high-end real estate sales and Vista gallery represents the first time this type of technology has been used as a sales tool in Chicago.

The design of the sales center also features many aesthetic nods to Jeanne Gang’s tower with the same alternating "frustums" (or truncated pyramids) that provide the tower its novel undulating appearance repeated in various displays and referenced in the gallery’s trapezoidal wall shapes and patterns. Even the building’s marketing tagline of "no parallels" makes an allusion to the Vista Tower’s angled frustum geometry.

The Residences

While the first 12 floors of the Vista Tower will be occupied by a Wanda-branded five star hotel, floors 13 through 93 will be dedicated to the building’s residents. Unlike Chicago’s other tall luxury towers like One Bennett Park and 113 E Roosevelt, Vista Tower's residences will be purely condominiums with no rental component whatsoever.

Units are offered in 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-bedroom configurations with prices starting around $1 million. Floors 71 through 91 will be occupied by full-floor "Sky Residences" with ceiling heights growing to 11’4" over the 9’4" height found on the levels below. A lone duplex penthouse will take up the tower's top two floors and is estimated to cost a staggering $18 million.

Building Amenities

Residents in the Vista Tower will also have access to Club Vista, an amenity suite occupying the building’s entire 47th floor. It will include a fitness center and pool along with a lounge, screening room, demonstration kitchen, private dining area, and a wine storage and tasting facility. The amenity club will also take advantage of the building’s luxury hotel and offer residents many of the same services such as spa treatments. The views from the 47th floor aren't too shabby either.

Construction on the super-tall skyscraper began in the fall of 2016 and is on track to be complete by 2020. With an estimated price tag of $1 billion, Vista Tower not only represents the single largest Chinese real estate investment in Chicago to date, but in the entire United States. While the pricy units within the tower may be out of reach for most Chicagoans, the project will create a bold new peak on the Windy City's world famous skyline.

The development will also pay dividends in the form of improved connectivity as it will extend Upper Wacker Drive to eventually connect with Harbor Drive, providing a new northern access point for Lakeshore East. Crews will also improve pedestrian access between the neighborhood's existing park and the popular Chicago Riverwalk.

• Supertall Vista Tower gets permit for complete build-out [Curbed Chicago]
• What the Studio Gang-designed Wanda Vista supertall means for Chicago [Curbed Chicago]
• Vista Tower Chicago [website]

The internet is chock full of articles and videos on how to be happier. But why chase happiness when making yourself miserable is so much easier? In this video, CGP Grey shares seven tactics to maximize your misery:

1. Stay still.
2. Screw with your sleep.
3. Maximize your screentime.
4. Use your screen to stoke your negative emotions.
5. Set vapid goals.
6. Pursue happiness directly.
7. Follow your instincts.

The video is based on Randy Paterson’s recent book, How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use.

Tags: how to   lists   video

The scene comes about halfway into Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, and it’s about as carefully prepared and elegantly executed a reveal as you’ll find this side of The Third Man. Our heroine, here only referred to by her given name of Diana, is being spirited through the foxholes of Eastern Front (the story is mostly set during WWI, in a not-at-all-obvious attempt to replicate the period innocence of the first Captain America movie), a brutal line that hasn’t moved in a year. “It’s a no man’s land,” she’s told. “No man can cross it.” No man, aha. And with that, she crosses that battlefield, revealing for the first time her iconic uniform – and the full scope of her power. This is a sequence not about plot (they’re en route to fulfill the mission the movie’s about; it’s literally a detour) or even about character, but iconography. It’s a crowd-pleasing moment, and it works. And as she crouches in the middle of that battlefield, her shield aloft, taking round after round of gunfire, it’s not hard to image its enthusiastic audience of women (women-only, even) feeling a genuine tinge of identification.

A moment like that reminds us that Wonder Woman is more than just a movie, but a long-overdue big-screen showcase of an honest-to-goodness female comic book legend, in a landscape (both on the page and on the screen) that is notoriously male-ccentric. But it’s also easy to get so wrapped up in what Wonder Woman represents – comic book movie about a woman, geared towards women, directed by a woman – that we overlook what it actually is; one shouldn’t necessarily confuse a movie whose existence makes you feel good with a good movie. So it’s no small relief that Wonder Woman is a decent piece of pop art, messy and unsuccessful in spots, yes, but engaging nonetheless, and an almost incalculable improvement on its predecessors in the “DC Extended Universe.”

It start a little wobbly, spending a fair amount of time on Diana’s home turf, a picturesque island of Amazons with vaguely Euro-Teutonic accents, led by an appropriately regal Connie Neilsen as Hippolyta. It’s an identity story, really; mom tells her a Greek mythology backstory, of Zeus and Aries and so on, while whispering to others, “She must never know the truth about what she is, or how she came to be.” Directory Patty Jenkins has understandable trouble transcending the inherent silliness of these sword-and-sandal scenes (much like the Krypton stuff in Man of Steel), but she does find an indelible early image of tiny Diana watching these warrior women train, shadowboxing from a distance, as many a little girl would with Wonder Woman herself.

Anyway, she gets older and tougher, and mere moments after she discovers her superpowers, Chris Pine crash-lands into the ocean near their island with a full German brigade on his tail, prompting a full-on, Private Ryan Omaha Beach-style battle sequence. Busy day! Once the dust settles and Someone Important To Her has died, Diana decides it is her destiny to follow this blue-eyed hunk back to the front, as she believes she can end “the war to end all wars,” and they set about assembling a team of good character actors who are thankfully getting some of that comic book money.

Jenkins directs these action beats with an infectious fastball energy; they (usually) have a sure sense of tempo and composition, even if she relies a bit too heavily on the pause-and-slo-mo-before-a-big-move trick. But her smartest move is her simplest: to keep the camera squarely on star Gal Gadot, whose robust athleticism and grace is the kind of thing that can’t be taught, merely captured. Much like her Furious 6 co-star Gina Carano in Haywire, it’s just fun to to watch her fight, run, and general exist. Hers is a powerfully reactive performance – dig the intensity with which she listens to her co-stars, and how, once she’s on the mission, she registers the parade of the wounded and the horrors of the front, giving the movie weight without sinking it. Yet it’s not just your typical morose-reluctant-hero turn (a DCEU specialty); in just a couple of brief, pleasurable scenes, she captures the thrill of discovering the extent of her powers, and the full scope of what she’s capable of.

And she and Pine have a good spark, generating real heat right off the bat. He’s clearly having a great time playing the wise-cracking American sharpy as a combination of foil and eye candy; they do a light and lively bit about sleeping accommodations on their boat, and even before that, Jenkins puts him in a hot tub so he and Gadot can engage in a zippy bit of watch/dick confusion (“You let this little thing tell you what to do?”) that has the giggling naughtiness of a Pre-Code movie. But it’s only later, when he’s honey-potting the nefarious female villain, that it becomes clear how fully Jenkins has pulled a full gender-swap superhero movie, without even straining to do it.

So Wonder Woman delivers, through most of its duration, the good time it promises – that is, until it reaches the climax, where the people at DC have somehow convinced themselves that we need yet another big, long, ugly sequence of super-humans smashing and hurling things at each other in a void of weightless flames and explosions. This is the third such sequence in four movies (it’s their version of Marvel’s repetitive sky-high destructo-climaxes), and it’s a fucking drag. The film gets its groove back slightly in the earnest wrap-up, but the climax leaves a bad taste; one of these days, some genius is gonna figure out how to end one of these things.

Until that day comes, Wonder Woman is a perfectly serviceable and occasionally inspired summer blockbuster – not quite great, but better than most, and certainly superior to the lifeless slogs that have thus far bore the DCEU imprimatur. It doesn’t solve that series’ problems, or those of the comic book movie in general. But it doesn’t drown under the weight of them either, and frankly, we’re at a point where that counts as a win.

“Wonder Woman” is out tomorrow.

I'm 18, and in the fall I will have a baby boy as a result of my deliberate failure to adhere to a pledge of chastity I signed at my school.

Until this year, I was an ordinary high school student at Heritage Academy, a Christian school in Hagerstown, Md. I was president of the student council and...

What’s in a (paint) name?

Artificial intelligence enthusiast Janelle Shane had just finished painting her living room when she began a paint job of a different shade: an AI experiment capable of creating new color names merely from existing paint colors.

In this exercise, Shane gave a recurrent neural network—which is just a kind of artificial intelligence that can generate new data (in this case, color names) from an original dataset—a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors, along with their color values. The neural network was then asked to produce sequences of letters to form new paint color names, while coming up with sequences of numbers that map to RGB values.

It’s not unusual for paint colors to have flowery, even fantastical names. There are people out there who get paid to create them. Shane wanted to see how well a neural network could manage the same task.

Not very well at all, as it turns out.

Lewis and Quark

At first, the output resembled a menagerie of little phonetic nightmares. The Atlantic even pointed out that “Caae Brae” sounds like it could be a Beowulf character. Shane gave the neural network more time to process. And the result? “Stanky Bean,” “Bank Butt,” “Dorkwood,” to name a few.

Ars Technica joked that this experiment would quell any fears of “the robot uprising.”

But a scientist’s job is never done. Last week, Shane issued an update.

At the request of multiple readers of her blog, she tried swapping out RGB values for other color representation values in hopes of better results. She tested HSV values (Hue, Saturation, and Value), but these changes didn’t make a noticeable improvement. She lowered the “temperature” so that the neural network would act more conservatively in choosing the next characters in a sequence. That helped a bit.

What really tipped the scale was a much larger dataset, compiled by one of Shane’s readers. It contains paint colors from additional companies such as Behr and Benjamin Moore, as well as user-submitted colors from a XKCD survey.

This time, the AI did much better. It generated paint color names that were actually descriptive of the colors themselves, rather than just flowery assortments of gobbledygook.

“The answer seems to be, as it often is for neural networks: More data,” says Shane.

Lewis and Quark

“I was pretty happy with this outcome. It was impressive how it would come up with the color that gray candy would be. And it is kind of gray and pink and frosty still.”

Shane says she finds new little gems each time she reviews the list, like a “Copper Panty” or a “Shivable Peach.”

Lewis and Quark

“I think one of my favorite ones that the new neural network came up with was ‘peacake bring,’” she says. “What does that mean? I don’t know and that’s why I love it.”

The secret history of the estates in Maryland and Long Island that had long served as compounds for Russian diplomats

As payback for Russian interference in the election, then-President Barack Obama ordered a pair of estates owned by the Russian government to be vacated in December. Owned for decades as out-of-town escapes for Russia’s elite diplomats, these properties—the Elmcroft Estate in Upper Brookville in Long Island and one in eastern Maryland, outside of D.C.—speak to the elevated nature of diplomatic life.

Yesterday it was reported that President Trump may return these properties to the Russian government, according to the Washington Post. Recent negotiations over the properties, which took place in early May between the two countries, have included suggestions that these compounds may not receive diplomatic immunity. The Russians have said the “seizure” of their property was at the top of their agenda.

Labeled “beachside spy nests” by the U.S., these buildings also represent part of the intriguing history of Russian-American relations, and how both have used this types of upscale real estate in their rival’s homeland for international relations, consular missions, and covert surveillance and spying. The Obama administration’s move, the largest expulsion of Russian officials since 2001, centers on a former governor’s mansion near Oyster Bay, Long Island, and a Georgian-style mansion on the Corsica River outside of Centreville, Maryland.

The mansion on the 14-acre Upper Brookville estate was built in 1918 and owned by New York governor Nathan Miller, before it was purchased by the Russians in 1952 for $80,000 as a home for the Soviet’s chief delegate to the United States. It’s a spacious, three-story mansion, but pales in comparison to Russia’s other retreat in the area.

AP Image

Another Soviet Long Island retreat, Killenworth, was built by George Dupont Pratt—son of the founder of Standard Oil, Long Island railroad employee, and co-founder of the Boy Scouts. It has played a key role in Russian diplomacy for decades after being purchased for $1 million in 1946, serving as temporary lodging for both Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro before they spoke at the UN.

Originally built in 1913, the sprawling English Renaissance estate featured 49 rooms and 12 fireplaces, and was County Life magazine’s Home of the Year in 1914. Designed by the Philadelphia firm of Trowbridge and Ackerman, the home is considered the apex achievement of landscape architect James Leal Greenleaf, whose work graces a number of high-end mansions in the northeast, as well as the Lincoln Memorial (a flower bed on the ground was once tended by 50 gardeners). It even earned screen time in the movie Sabrina, a 1954 love story starring Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

The USSR purchased the estate in 1947 to house the country’s United Nations delegation. Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov, a key Stalin ally who helped sign the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939, was one of the first to move in and use the estate. First occupied during the outset of the Cold War, the Russian retreat always had a somewhat tense relationship with its neighbors, though for decades, one of the main complaints of the city of Glen Cove wasn’t just Russian surveillance, but rather a refusal to pay taxes.

The city pushed for payment from the outset, which led to decades of court fights, with the United States ambassador to the United Nations warning that the quest would damage international relations. It got so bad that in 1970, Glen Cove mayor Andrew J. DiPaola was issued a restraining order from the Justice Department, and the city was forced to halt its quest for back taxes, which by that point had added up (estimates suggest the city was out $25,000 a year, while the school district was owed $50,000 annually, and Nassau County $25,000 a year).

''They threatened to put me in jail because I was impeding the free flow of the Russians,'' DiPaola quipped to the New York Times.

However, neighbors were also raising question about surveillance of the nearby defense and telecommunications industries in Long Island; President Reagan singled out the compound for spying in 1982. The accusations led the Glen Cove city council to vote 6 to 1 in support of a proposal to bar the Russians from obtaining free beach parking stickers, $15 seasonal tennis court passes and $50 golf course permits. The State Department shot back, saying it was a diplomatic breach to ban the Russians from using recreational facilities, and furthermore, U.S. officials didn’t pay taxes on their estate outside Moscow. The ban was lifted in 1984.

The Maryland estate at the center of this sanctions battle, located a 90 minute drive from downtown D.C., was purchased in 1972. Located in Pioneer Point, on the shores of Corsica River in Centreville, the compound was once owned by John J. Raskob, a former executive at DuPont and General Motors who helped finance the construction of the Empire State building. The estate features a three-story brick mansion, a retreat for the Russian ambassador, as well as a series of apartments and cottages that can hold up to 40 families.

Often referred to as a “hunting lodge” by Russian diplomats, the building was profiled in a Washington Life magazine feature in 1992—the article was titled “Dacha Sweet Dacha”—which included then-Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov showing off decorations such as a phone from a Russian submarine, as well as a laid-back life of grilling, steam baths, and celebrations with friends (the estate hosts an annual Victory Day party commemorating WWII).

Initially, locals were worried about Soviets in their midst, and were afraid the “Russian would bring their battleships” up the Chesapeake. But over time, the diplomats made nice with their neighbors, hosting elaborate parties featuring vodka and caviar. When the Russian Federation took over from the Soviets in the early ‘90s, residents didn’t complain or raise questions, and were described in an AP article as “curious, but not concerned.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday his country has “never engaged in” hacking another nation’s elections, but left open the possibility that hackers with “patriotic leanings … may try to add their contribution to the fight against those who speak badly about Russia.”  

“Hackers are free people, just like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting,” Putin told news agencies at a meeting in St. Petersburg, the Associated Press reported. “The hackers are the same, they would wake up, read about something going on in interstate relations and if they have patriotic leanings, they may try to add their contribution to the fight against those who speak badly about Russia.”

U.S. intelligence agencies say Russian hackers interfered in the U.S. presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump, though they add there’s no evidence to suggest those efforts succeeded.  Separately, congressional panels and the FBI are investigating figures close to President Trump for their links to Russia. Meanwhile European intelligence agencies have said Russia is using the same tactics in elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in favor of the populist candidates in those countries. Establishment-supported candidates won elections in France and the Netherlands. Germany’s elections are in the fall, and Chancellor Angela Merkel is widely expected to win re-election.

But Putin denied once again the Russian state was involved in interfering foreign elections:  “We never engaged in that on a state level, and have no intention of doing so.” He suggested that an unnamed entity had made it appear as if Russia were behind such actions.

“I can imagine that some do it deliberately, staging a chain of attacks in such a way as to cast Russia as the origin of such an attack,” he said. “Modern technologies allow that to be done quite easily.”

Still, Putin’s acknowledgment that it was “theoretically possible” that “patriotic” Russians may have engaged in hacking is his first admission that Russians could have played any such role. The slight change in his position is not new: Despite evidence to the contrary, Putin had previously rejected claims Russian troops were involved in the annexation in 2014 of Ukraine’s Crimea and that they were supporting rebels in eastern Ukraine. He later acknowledged their role in the fighting.

Putin also called Trump “a straightforward … frank person” who sees issues with “a fresh set of eyes.” But he said “Russo-phobic hysteria” was making engaging with the Trump administration difficult. Putin added “we are patient. We know how to wait and we will wait.”

With a bonus cameo from Lupo.

The Cleveland Division of Police announced Tuesday it had fired Officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014. Frank Garmback, the officer who was driving the patrol car at the time of the shooting, will be suspended for 10 days starting Wednesday.

The penalties were announced by Michael McGrath, director of Public Safety, at a Tuesday news conference. The decisions followed a review of the shooting by the department’s critical-incident review committee, which was established in February 2016, Chief Calvin Williams said.

Loehmann was fired not for shooting Rice, but for misrepresenting himself on his job application with the Cleveland Division of Police where he had been an officer for eight months—within the probationary period—at the time of the shooting in November 2014. Garmback’s suspension was for the violation of a tactical rule related to how he approached the area where Rice was shot. Williams said both officers were notified of their fates Tuesday.

“I think we’ve learned a lot from this incident and other incidents that have happened since 2014,” Williams said.

He pointed to the reduction in the use of deadly force by police following Rice’s death, with officers emphasizing de-escalation tactics; the increased use of body cameras by police; and officers being trained on the use of first aid.

“I think our officers have learned that there are best approaches to incidents and with the training that they are receiving, to bolster the training they’ve had in the past, hopefully we won’t have any more incidents like this,” Williams said.  

The decision comes more than a year after the city of Cleveland said it would pay Rice’s family $6 million to settle a civil lawsuit. As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the size of the settlement, which came months after a Cleveland grand jury declined to indict Loehmann, was unusually large. Here’s more:

The size of the settlement may reflect in part the circumstances of Rice’s death. Video of an unarmed black boy being gunned down by police just seconds after they arrived on the scene sparked national horror. (Rice had been holding an Airsoft gun.) As more information about Rice’s killing emerged, it added fuel to the outrage. The officers on the scene, Loehmann and Frank Garmback, hadn’t delivered first aid, a role left to an FBI officer who happened to be nearby. Rice’s sister was kept from running to her wounded brother. Damaging revelations about Loehmann’s prior police career added to the fury. He had resigned from another Northeast Ohio department after a bad performance review, and had been rejected by other area departments, information the Cleveland department apparently did not turn up.

Rice was shot and killed after Loehmann and Garmback responded to a call on November 23, 2014, about a man waving a gun near a city park. Loehmann shot and killed Rice, who was holding a pellet gun, within moments of the police cruiser skidding to a halt near Rice, who was holding a pellet gun. The shooting, which was captured on video, sparked outrage, as it came soon after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York at the hands of police officers. In December 2015, Tim McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, announced that a grand jury wouldn’t charge the two officers, calling Rice’s death a “perfect storm of human error.”

The mayor of Portland, Oregon, is trying to stop what he describes as two upcoming "alt-right" demonstrations as his city continues to mourn the stabbing deaths of two residents who intervened in a possible hate crime.

Crunch, chomp, munch, slurp. It might not be polite to chew loudly while you eat, but science says those noises might help you avoid overeating. Hearing your own crunching could eat help you eat fewer calories, according to a new Brigham Young University and Colorado State University study. Here's why you might eat less if you listen to yourself chew — and how to avoid noisy scenarios that might overpower your sense of hearing.

Mark Hunt has one of the toughest fights of his career (isn’t every fight on his resume tough as hell?) when he takes on Derrick Lewis at UFC Fight Night 110. Lewis is on a six-fight winning streak, and in victory, has never gone to the judges. It’s perfect matchmaking for Hunt, who is the ultimate knockout artist, but he’s getting old. Hunt is 43, and nearing the end of his career. That’s why his fellow New Zealanders, including Aquaman himself, Jason Momoa, are trying to pump him up for this beastly fight with an intense Haka dance.

Check it out:

This took place in Hunt’s home gym of Heartbreak Conditioning, and reinforces what we already know — few people are as universally beloved as Hunto. His gym (and Jason Momoa) know he’s nearing the end of his career, so a traditional war dance from his fellow Kiwis is due. You can’t see Hunt’s face, but you know he’s proud to get this dance from all of his brothers and arms (and Jason Momoa). The respect for Hunt is undeniable. They won’t even dare get up from their reflection until he does.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BUn0fzMghAg/?taken-by=markhuntfighter&hl=en

Really, there’s only one way to end this article — Mark Hunt is the best and if you think otherwise you’re wrong.

(Via TMZ)

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner has called Donald Trump’s presidency “a complete disaster”. The Republican – a longtime friend of Mr Trump who has previously complimented the President – spoke at an energy conference in Houston. Mr Boehner said that, aside from foreign policy, "everything else [Mr Trump] has done has been a complete disaster”.

When I quit drinking, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It was five weeks before the election, when everyone (including me) assumed Hillary Clinton would win, and I was in the midst of a personal mental health crisis that was exacerbated by my routine binge-drinking. I had picked up the habit as a young teenager and it decimated me through my college days and beyond. I drank when I was stressed out, tired, hungry, or bored; when I was celebrating, socializing, partying, and having fun. Drinking was entwined into almost everything I did, something that had become so routine I forgot who I was without it.

I used to ascribe to a "you need a drink" sort of mentality. Whether I had a long day at school or work or undergoing a personal crisis or feeling extra depressed, I would always tell myself I deserved a drink, treating alcohol as both a remedy and a reward for dealing with this very difficult world. It was a way of thinking about alcohol that I picked up from various pieces of pop culture: Drinking was a cure for stress and hardship, it loosened you up, it made not fun things fun again.

As it turned out, for me, alcohol was no fun. Drinking intensified my suicidal ideation, and rendered me constantly tired, ill, and forgetful. So I quit. But I'm terrified of what my life would have been like if I still drank with Trump in the White House.

I stayed in on election night, and as Trump's victory went from impossible to unlikely to guaranteed, I grew increasingly fearful of what would soon become reality. As I videochatted my soon-to-be boyfriend, a stream of drunk texts from my friends lit up my phone—sad dispatches from election night parties gone awry.

The version of me that drank would have been at those parties, messy and trashed. I remembered a note I drunkenly wrote in my phone months before the election: "if trump wins i'm gonna kill myself because i need an excuse."

On November 9, I woke up depressed and afraid for what the future would hold, but also with an underlying tinge of gratitude—as bad as everything was, at least I wasn't hungover.

As it turns out, abstaining from alcohol in the age of Trump is one of the best decisions I've ever made. His presidency has been chaotic and contradictory—on any given day, you never know who he's going to reveal classified information to, or who he'll abruptly fire. And since my job is writing about politics every day, just tuning out isn't an option. Remaining clear-headed, in control of my own body, is essential for staying sane.

Drinking always made me more inclined to give up. Dire political times can have a similar effect. The two combined would be a nightmare.

I don't think I'm alone in feeling like there's a thin film of anxiety clinging to everything, a sense that at any point our child president will break something that can't be put back together again. I dread the next New York Times notification informing me what fresh hell will unravel in today's news cycle. And in these distinctly turbulent times, not drinking stabilizes me, makes me feel more connected to the world. Drinking made me hasty, more self-absorbed, forgetful, and nonsensical. In the "post-truth" era Trump has spawned, I want things to make more sense. I want to feel alive and real in my own body. A good first step, for me at least, was giving up alcohol.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.

Never one to miss a chance to play Clueless Culture Warrior, Fox News asshat Tucker “No more bowtie jokes, that was years ago” Carlson offered a sort-of apology to Teen Vogue columnist Lauren Duca, who made a complete fool of him — like, more of a fool — the last time he tried to make her out as a mean leftist who approved of a guy who angrily confronted Ivanka Trump on an airplane. Never mind that Duca had said the exact opposite.

Well! Carlson had to find a way to pretend he’s a decent human being, so, in a brief segment Thursday in which he bemoaned Duca being chosen to give the commencement address at Bard College, he apologized for getting snappy at her back in December. But really, it was all her fault, and did you know that one interview pulled Duca out of obscurity and made her famous? Even though she fantasizes about the deaths of those she disagrees with? Here’s Thursday’s Tuckersnit:

Carlson is not afraid to apologize for losing his cool, no he is not:

Remember Lauren Duca? She’s a writer for Teen Vogue who appeared on this show just before Christmas and delivered a performance so mindless and nasty that I lost control and snapped at her. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. For that moment alone, though, Duca became a progressive hero. Within a month, she was the subject of a predictably fawning New York Times profile. Last weekend, she gave the commencement address at a university, Bard College in Simon’s Rock, Massachusetts.*

Now, we’re happy to make people famous, even not very impressive 26-year-old bloggers like Lauren Duca. But you’d think someone on the Bard commencement committee would have actually read what Duca has written before hiring her, maybe looked at her Twitter feed for a minute. It turns out that when she’s not barking on cable television or writing vapid pieces for teen magazines, Duca has yet another hobby: fantasizing about the deaths of her political enemies.

Gosh, how much wrong can you find in that, kids? It’s like a verbal version of one of those Highlights for Children puzzle pages with a teacher drawing on the blackboard with a fish and Donald Trump reading a book.

That silly little vapid progressive lady Lauren Duca had already become somewhat famous well before Carlson’s bookers invited her to be yelled at (and to end up pwning Carlson on his own set), seeing as how she’d written that badass piece on Donald Trump and gaslighting that everyone was forwarding to everyone else in early December. Carlson, of course, hadn’t read the article at all. But sure, Tucker Carlson made her famous all by himself, just like Donald Trump gave NATO the idea to fight terrorism, which they’d only dimly heard of before him. Oh, but what is this about Duca fantasizing about the deaths of her political enemies? Carlson offered a screenshot of this now-deleted tweet by Duca, which he took to mean as a wish for Donald Trump to die in a plane crash:

Carlson, who has apparently never heard the colloquialism “crash and burn” as a synonym for “fail spectacularly,” chastised Duca for having “bravely deleted the tweet, but fortunately, the Internet never forgets,” and to prove she is a homicidal leftist terrorist, he cited her replying to a critic on Twitter by saying, “I hope this person dies in a fire” — not a nice sentiment, but also a colloquialism that doesn’t indicate any intent to firebomb someone’s house. Carlson summed up sorrowfully, “So of course she gave the commencement address at an accredited four-year college. The left has gone insane.”

Yes, damn those academic elites for not examining the violence-filled Twitter feed of leftist Lauren Duca, who wants Donald Trump’s plane to crash — just like everyone who literally desires him to die in a flaming Amtrak derailment when they call his presidency a train wreck. Or Yr Wonkette, which clearly meant to imply Donald Trump should die when we used this gif of an airliner test crash to suggest (very naively, in retrospect) that Trump’s attack on John McCain would cause his campaign to crash and burn:

For her part, Duca seems a bit less than properly ashamed of herself:

In fact, she persisted, and now has that last screenshot set, for now, as her Twitter header image. The left has gone insane with all this political violence. Somebody’d better punch another reporter.

Oh, and here’s Duca’s dangerous, leftist, violence-tinged commencement address, in which she calls for death camps for all Republicans, probably:

We are kidding. She just tells “a story about a Fox News Potatohead named Tucker Carlson” starting at the 7-minute mark. Funny, Carlson doesn’t mention she made fun of him in her speech, which was online well before he called her a wannabe assassin. Funny, that. (Also at 8:12: “There is literally a spider on the microphone. Oh my God!” Fine, she can call for the deaths of her enemies, but she’s ascared of spiders?)

* He meant Bard College at Simon’s Rock, which usually goes by “Simon’s Rock” to distinguish it from its parent school, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The More You Know!

Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations and probably gun-running. You can help with one of those by clicking the “Donate” clicky below!

[The Wrap / Lauren Duca on Twitter]

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A pregnant teenager - an honour student with straights As - has been branded “immoral” by her school and told she cannot attend its graduation ceremony. Officials at Heritage Academy, a private Christian school in Maryland, said Maddi Runkles, 18, was not welcome at the event because she had to be held “accountable for her immorality”. “Maddi is being disciplined, not because she’s pregnant, but because she was immoral,” David Hobbs, the school administrator, said in a statement.