WASHINGTON—Responding to a damning Washington Post report alleging he had shared highly classified information with Russian officials, President Donald Trump addressed the concerns of the press, his fellow government officials, and the public at large Tuesday by announcing that he was an incredibly stupid human being. “I am a big idiot,” said the president, adding that the reason he always messes everything up is that he is a dumb moron who doesn’t know better. “I do a lot of things that don’t make sense and are bad, and that’s because I don’t understand much. If I was smart, I would do stuff better, but I’m not. I’m really, really stupid.” The commander in chief added that it was probably best if somebody stopped him from doing dumb things all the time because he was too stupid to know how.
Good. That video is upsetting. I hope they also question that guy's friends who just walked away like nothing happened.
A man has been charged with punching a female security guard outside a condo building in River North, an attack caught on surveillance video.
Matthew DeLeon, 23, of the 4900 of West Eddy Street in the Portage Park neighborhood, was charged late Tuesday with three felony counts of aggravated battery,...
Back in January, just as President Donald Trump was taking office, there were rumors of despair coming out of the intelligence community. President Trump couldn’t be trusted, veteran CIA officials were claimed to have said, and they told the Israelis he’d soon start spilling their secrets. And now that’s exactly what…
Uh, ok. Or, maybe its the 30+ women who he DRUGGED AND RAPED.
In a rare interview airing Tuesday, Bill Cosby says he does not expect to testify at his upcoming felony sexual assault trial and that he believes racism played a big role in the scandal that has engulfed his life.
During a 30-minute conversation with Sirius-XM host Michael Smerconish, the 79-year-old...
Henderson Island is about the most remote place you can visit without leaving the planet. It sits squarely in the middle of the South Pacific, 3,500 miles from New Zealand in one direction and another 3,500 miles from South America in the other. To get there, Jennifer Lavers had to fly from Tasmania to Tahiti, catch a small, once-a-week plane to the Gambier Islands, join a freight ship that had already sailed for 10 days from New Zealand, and ask it to change course for Henderson. No ship travels there unless you specifically ask it to.
And yet, somehow, Google Street View has been there. Lavers took virtual strolls along two of the island’s beaches before she made her epic journey. That’s when she realized just how much plastic there is.
You can see for yourself. Pull Henderson Island up on Google Maps and drag the yellow avatar to the bottom of the eastern beach. Now, start walking. It starts unobtrusively: a bottle here, a bit of tubing there. But soon, the scraps pile up until the sand is carpeted in multi-colored junk.
When Lavers actually arrived on Henderson, she found that the situation was even worse than the images had suggested. At her landing site, her team immediately came across a truck tire—so large and deeply buried that they couldn’t move it. “That was a warning,” she said. “It got worse and worse. There’s an area that we call the garbage patch, where you can’t put your foot down without stepping on a bottle cap. The sheer volume really took my breath away for all the wrong reasons.”
Henderson should be pristine. It is uninhabited. Tourists don’t go there. There’s no one around to drop any litter. The whole place was declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1988. The nearest settlement is 71 miles away, and has just 40 people on it. And yet, seafaring plastic has turned it into yet another of humanity’s scrapheaps. “It’s truly one of the last paradises left on earth, and one of the least visited but heavily protected bits of land on the planet,” Lavers says. “But I don’t think I’ve stood somewhere and been so utterly and completely surrounded by plastic.”
The team found several purple hermit crabs that had taken to shoving their junk in junk, using bottle caps and other detritus in lieu of seashells. Other island residents weren’t so lucky; at least one sea turtle had become fatally entangled in fishing line. And the team themselves struggled to cope. “After a while, your brain has to shut off,” says Lavers. “You focus on things like a toy solider or some dice—something that reminds you of something fun from your childhood. That’s the coping mechanism.”
A purple hermit crab on Henderson Island. Credit: Jennifer Lavers
Lavers, a researcher at the University of Hobart, has been documenting the extent of plastic pollution on the world’s far-flung islands for years. She and her colleagues, including Alexander Bond from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, arrived on Henderson in 2015, and spent three months counting its junk.
It was not an easy experience. Sure, there were sandy beaches, swaying palm trees, and breathtaking vistas. But the island has no fresh water, and it’s frequently hit by storms that would launch coconuts—or entire trees—onto the team’s tents in the middle of the night. Also, Henderson is a coral atoll, which means that most of its land consists of razor-sharp rocks that sliced their way through the team’s shoes. They ended up scavenging rope from the beach to lash their disintegrating footwear together. “Except for some narrow stretches of sandy beach, the rest of the island wants to kill you,” says Lavers.
On those beaches, the team ended up finding more than 53,000 pieces of human-made debris. By their estimate, the island’s 14 square miles are home to more than 37 million pieces of junk, weighing a total of 17,000 kilograms. Every square meter of Henderson’s beaches has between 20 and 670 pieces of plastic on the surface and between 50 and 4,500 pieces buried in the topmost 10 centimeters. Also, the junk keeps on coming. Lavers estimates that every day, at least 3,750 fresh pieces of litter wash up on the island’s north beach—an accumulation rate that’s 100,000 times greater than what’s been reported at other places.
If these estimates are right, parts of Henderson have the highest densities of plastic debris reported anywhere in the world. But Jenna Jambeck, from the University of Georgia, notes that the data are incredibly variable. And Denise Hardesty, from CSIRO, Australia’s federal research agency, says that it’s hard to compare across sites because different sampling methods can produce vastly different results. Still, whether the numbers break records or not, it’s clear from the photos alone that Henderson is home to an ungodly amount of garbage—as are other supposedlypristineislands.
The surface layer of the oceans now contains more than five trillion pieces of plastic, mostly in the form of tiny millimeter-wide fragments. “It’s impressive, the amount of plastic just floating in the middle of nowhere,” says researcher Leandra Gonçalves, who has spent time doing surveys of oceanic plastics. Coasts act as sinks for that floating litter, especially if they sit within circular ocean currents called gyres. Once our trash enters these currents, it can go on an long voyage until a shoreline interrupts its path. Henderson, however, is only on the outskirts of the South Pacific gyre. “It shows that just about any major current can transport plastic,” says Lavers.
Once plastic washes up, it tends to break apart. “If a milk jug or water bottle washes ashore on a remote island, it’s brittle from UV radiation,” says Hardesty. “It’s in a location where wave and wind, acting against hard physical objects like sand and stones, can break it into smaller pieces. Now that single item has now become hundreds or thousands of very small fragments.” And those become buried—a permanent part of their island homes.
The sources of the debris are manifold. Lavers and Bond traced the items to 24 different countries from every continent except Antarctica. “That told us that no country is more or less to blame for this,” she says. “It’s not just commercial fisheries or cruise ships. A lot of this came from storm drains, and probably litter on beaches in—goodness knows, pick a city anywhere in the world.”
For Henderson, “clean-up is not an option,” she says. It’s too hard to get to, and too hard to live on. The only way to stop this problem is to cut the plastic off at its source.
The total junk on Henderson—all 17,000 kilograms of it—represents just 2 seconds of the world’s plastic production, which has increased by 180 times over the last six decades. “We need to factor the environmental costs into that production, so that it’s not just 1 or 2 cents to buy a straw, or a takeaway container,” says Lavers. “We use plastic in every single aspect of our society, and we can’t just change one or two things.”
My mom made a pilgrimage there in 1991. She claims to have seen things, but now that she's older she's like, I don't know what happened. Wanting to believe something so badly sometimes makes you see things that aren't there.
By Philip Pullella ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) - Pope Francis has voiced serious doubt about the authenticity of alleged continuing apparitions of the Madonna in Medjugorje, a once-obscure village in Bosnia boosted by the pilgrim business. "These presumed apparitions don't have a lot of value. Six children first reported visions of the Virgin Mary in 1981 in a scenario reminiscent of famous apparitions in the French town of Lourdes in the 19th century and 100 years ago in Fatima, which Francis visited on Friday and Saturday.
Fat, dumb kids become fat, dumb adults that are a lot easier to control.
One of the former first lady’s signature legacies was an effort to reduce childhood obesity. Earlier this month, Donald Trump’s administration froze regulations that would cut sodium and increase whole grains served in school meals.
President Donald Trump denied allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives in an interview Saturday night on Fox News, adding that he wants "to get to the bottom" of the questions about Russian influence in the election.
Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents, but there’s a special weirdness between a teen girl and her super hot mom. Luckily, I’ve aged enough to appreciate my mom for who she is—a great lady with some wild stories. For Mother’s Day, I interviewed her about her life working as a model and actress in…
President Trump claimed Thursday that he made the decision to fire FBI Director James Comey because Comey was a “grandstander” who left the FBI in “turmoil.”
If you can think of something whiter than a college lacrosse team entering the field to an EDM track remixed with a Donald Trump speech in which the soundbite poorly aligns with the beat, spill it. Until then, this is the reigning champion.
John Cena is currently on another hiatus from WWE to film Daddy’s Home 2 and The Pact, and to work on some other non-wrestling projects. This follows his lengthy hiatuses (hiatii?) that he’s taken over the past couple of years, as he gets more and more focused on outside projects, like American Grit, and being a legitimate movie star.
But does Cena need to take so much time off from WWE to film these other projects? We’ve seen him host Today and make it to Raw in a different part of the country in the same day, for example. We’ve seen that several times, in fact. But it turns out Cena’s schedule is dictated by the big-budget movies he’s in — more specifically, the bottom line regarding any given major studio’s concerns about liability. He explained during an interview with Metro.
You have been quietly creeping back into movies, taking small roles here and in “Trainwreck” and “Daddy’s Home,” plus a leading role in the forthcoming “The Pact.” You have said you’re trying to wrestle less, act more.
“I would do both at the same time, but the movie guys are a little weird with their insurance. They don’t want me to go smashing my face up. [Laughs] I’m excited for all the opportunities outside the WWE ring, only because it raises awareness of the WWE. I take great pride in my profession, but I’m very aware of the perception of it. I think a lot of people think we are just what we are, and that’s it. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there are plenty of talented people who travel with the WWE and produce wonderful entertainment every week. We do live sports entertainment, and it’s like no other. To be able to do stuff like this outside of the norm and for people to say, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good,’ that bodes well for getting more eyes on the ring.”
So as it turns out, when you’re putting tens of millions of dollars into a movie, you don’t want your star going out and getting Styles Clashed or Phenomenally Forearmed or Sister Abigailed every night. Who knew?
Now all I can think about is Brad Pitt taking piledrivers between days of shooting World War Z or whatever. Maybe I would have seen World War Z if that had been a real thing.
You may remember Bill Wurtz from his video history of Japan, which I called “the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen”. I still stand by that, but his new video on the history of the Earth from before the Big Bang — “a long time ago, actually never, also now, nothing is nowhere” — to the present day is just as good. On the development of the ozone layer billions of years ago:
Proving himself to be pretty fly for a recognized academic, The Offspring singer Dexter Holland has announced that he’s about to receive his PhD in molecular biology from USC. Holland came out swinging—in a strictly academic sense—in the band’s newsletter this week, announcing that he’s just finished defending his thesis on microRNA interactions in HIV. (MicroRNAs are small molecules that bind to the RNA that encodes the proteins in our body; needless to say, it’s hard to keep them separated.)
Holland, who joins the rare ranks of well-known musicians with doctorates that includes Brian May (astrophysics) and Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin (zoology), seems rightly proud of his not-inconsiderable accomplishment, which we have to assume will be good for his self-esteem. Now that his thesis—which you can take a peek at here, and which looks pretty legit—is done, Holland can finally come ...
Whenever you tune into a Detroit Pistons game, you will see Stan Van Gundy storming up and down the sidelines, wearing all of his emotions on his sleeve. His face will amusingly contort to how the game is favoring the Pistons, and Van Gundy’s voice will often grow hoarse from arguing with officials and shouting out instructions to his players. But while Van Gundy pours his heart into the Pistons and usually seems unrelentingly frustrated during games, off the court he is quite different.
Possessing a great sense of humor and truly just a dad, Van Gundy has a passion for other areas of life besides basketball. Like animals, for instance, as he and his wife Kim have had a plethora of family pets. And thanks to the Michigan–based BISSELL Pet Foundation, the Van Gundys have added another member to their family that sadly no one else wanted – Eastwood, a one-year-old Labrador retriever mix that is nearly blind and was born with leg deformities.
Due to his special needs, Eastwood was the last dog left at the Little Traverse Bay Humane Society during BISSELL’s “Empty the Shelters” event on April 29. But knowing that they could accommodate his special needs, the Van Gundys adopted Eastwood and quickly welcomed him into their family.
Corey and I have decided to convert to solar w/in five years, if possible (or some other reneweable resource). The technology is changing so quickly and will be much more readily available then.
A day after firing the FBI director who had been overseeing the sweeping probe into his campaign's ties to Russia, President Donald Trump has just one event on his public schedule: An Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The sit-down between Trump and Lavrov, the first...
When you're making lobster rolls, sous vide is your friend, delivering the most tender, buttery, flavorful lobster meat around. Here's how to do it.
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Scientists have discovered the first instance of a deer which eats human remains. The animal was caught mid-feast by a motion-sensitive camera at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility at Texas State University, a 26-acre area where forensic scientists study how human bodies decompose in the wild. Deer are mostly herbivores, although they have been known to scavenge small mammals or birds and occasionally eat other meats.
Charles Barkley hopes his American Race miniseries starts a conversation about race in America. The problem is he invited Richard Spencer on the program, whose views on white privilege rendered Barkley speechless.
In the past, he’s made outlandish, inflammatory comments, like suggesting white people should stop watching football because it makes them like people of color, which makes him the perfect guest for Barkley’s TNT miniseries, which was released online on Monday.
“To be sitting close to somebody who has zero respect for me — he doesn’t believe in equality,” Barkley says. “He doesn’t believe we should race mix, live in the same neighborhood — that was very disheartening to me.”
Barkley asked if Spencer believes in white privilege, which is usually a talking point conservatives roundly dismiss. Spencer, however, is a big fan of the advantages that come with being white in America.
“Yeah, white privilege is wonderful,” Spencer said. “I want to expand and deepen white privilege.”
Barkley was a bit stunned by the admission.
TNT
The clip ends with Barkley asking Spencer about racism, pointing out that Spencer wouldn’t call himself a racist.
“I would never say something like ‘I don’t like black people,'” Spencer said.
“But you don’t want me in your neighborhood,” Barkley offered.
Barkley has been outspoken about racism in the lead up to the show’s airing, and it will be interesting to see how he responds to Spencer in the show. The show’s other topics are scheduled to cover immigration, Hollywood stereotypes, the role of police in America, and Muslim culture.
It was bound to happen: A homeowner has filed suit against online realty giant Zillow, claiming the company's controversial "Zestimate" tool repeatedly undervalued her home, creating a "tremendous road block" to its sale.
The suit, which may be the first of its kind, was filed in Cook County Circuit...
1) I thought those were the same people in the photos before I read the headline 2) MAYBE THATS WHY HARRY LIKES HER HMMMMM
Update on the nearest-thing-for-now-to-a-royal wedding: Meghan Markle, girlfriend to Prince Harry, will be attending Pippa Middleton’s nuptials, after all. Adjust your fantasy royal family league selections accordingly.
Not a moment too soon. [ 
