In 2014, Police Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. In that same year, police brutality increased rapidly, moving toward the center of the national discourse on race. Activists argued that the police needed more accountability, and the state provided body cameras as the preferred corrective.
The Obama administration’s Department of Justice offered more than $23 million in grants for new cameras in 2015, the year after Brown’s death, and another $20 million in 2016. Then-candidate Hillary Clinton called for mandatory body cameras nationwide. In 2018, a New York judge mandated that all NYPD officers wear them, as part of efforts to end “stop and frisk” tactics. The future of policing, it seemed, had arrived.
But something happened along the way, and some became more worried when body cameras were introduced.
This is Pipkin, an adorable young bunny. In order to wake him up, an unseen man puts carrots around him, and finally pokes him a little with a carrot. The bunny, now slightly awake, suddenly smells the carrots around him, and quickly opens his eyes. Pipkin hurriedly tries to eat the carrot that the man even helped him to stand up.
I've met a few of these adult Disney women. Not in real life, but on the internet. They will proudly own up to it with no shame at all. Enjoy this clever little ditty from Max Ash. -via reddit
The RMS Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg on April 14, 1912. The RMS Carpathia worked through the night to rescue survivors, but there were only 705 people alive of the more than 2200 aboard the Titanic. Someone would eventually need to go and collect those who did not survive.
Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, was the closest major port to the site of the disaster. A Halifax-based cable ship, the CS Mackay-Bennett, was quickly fitted out as a “morgue ship” and dispatched to where the Titanic had sunk two days earlier, more than 800 statute miles away. The Mackay-Bennett carried all the embalming fluid available in Halifax, approximately 100 wooden coffins, 100 tons of ice, and 12 tons of iron bars to weigh down bodies to be buried at sea. But it wouldn't be enough to cope with the huge number of Titanic victims.
The Mackay-Bennett arrived on the evening of April 19. By the next morning, the crew was ready to start recovering bodies. Captain Frederick Harold Larnder found far more victims in the icy waters than he expected. “We saw them scattered over the surface, looking like a flock of seagulls,” he later told The Washington Times.
Post Falls, Idaho — Every morning, 95-year-old Dan Rankin, a World War II veteran, arrives at the Dueling Irons restaurant at the same time. He sits at the same table and orders the same food from his favorite server, Maria. But he hasn’t paid for his breakfast for nearly three years. “Well, all of a sudden, somebody started buying breakfast [for me],” he said. It was someone who noticed his hat. Now, people want to line up for a chance to treat him.
“I just took a look and he has over $200 on there. Sometimes we’ll have little tears and we’ll cry. And he’s just really humble sweet,” says Maria.
Berlin, in times of freedom, has always been a haven for artists, outsiders, and freethinkers. But Berlin's freedom sometimes turns on a dime. The barriers that separated East Germany from West Germany fell on November 9, 1989, allowing freedom of movement between the previously-segregated sectors of Berlin for the first time since 1961. However, the technical reunification of the two nations was only accomplished a year later. Meanwhile, a group of young anarchists leapt to fill the political power vacuum in Berlin. They began by taking over an abandoned apartment building.
They appropriated the five-story building, 47 Schreiner Street, and, in so doing, sparked a chain reaction across the city. Throughout 1990, DJs, artists and wannabe artists, middle-class students, activist filmmakers, clubbers, musicians, and other free spirits would occupy hundreds of apartment buildings, vacant shops, shuttered warehouses, and long-forgotten subterranean vaults. They came from East and West Germany, as well as from across Europe and beyond, to initiate Berlin’s rebirth as a cosmopolitan center after decades of reclusion. The Iron Curtain’s breach and Communism’s demise unleashed a groundswell of utopian energy and DIY zeal, most powerfully focused in the occupied spaces of East Berlin’s inner city districts, such as Friedrichshain. One couldn’t have known it at the time, but this ethos would infuse Berlin for years to come and does even today, earning Germany’s capital a reputation as one of Europe’s hippest metropolises.
In late 1989 and 1990 I watched East Berlin’s transformation through the lens of the 47 Schreiner Street squatters. I was twenty-something myself, a novice journalist living between Budapest and Berlin during the year of tumult. The Wall’s breach ushered in an exhilarating period of people power, improvisation, and revelry, which I both chronicled and took part in.
Don't let the pressure of the holidays get you down. Embrace the cheerfulness of the season with the Christmas Krampus Cinnamon Air Freshener from the NeatoShop! This festively scented air freshener will have you dreaming of your favorite winter figure, the jolly Christmas Krampus.
With his shiny horns and half-demon smile, the Christmas Krampus has been enchanting villagers for ages. The jingle of his chains delighting adults since the time of yore.
Krampus is always enthusiastic to meet people. He loves to insist on having even the naughtiest of people over for a scrumptious holiday meal.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Car Accessories. New items arriving all the time.
Don't forget to stop by the NeatoShop to see our large selection of artwork by indie artists. We offer a huge selection of customizable apparel and bags. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months to adult 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and holiday loving people come in every size.
English die casters Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith founded Lesney Products in 1947 and, along with partner Jack Odell, began making small toys to fill slack demand during wartime. In 1952, Odell was inspired by a rule at his daughter’s school that permitted students to only bring toys that fit inside a matchbox. He scaled down Lesney’s road roller toy, packaged it in a matchbox, and sent his daughter off to school. The Matchbox car was born.
The American company Mattel introduced Hot Wheels cars in 1968, and they were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2011. Mattel now own both lines. Finalists that didn't make the cut this year include:
Care Bears, the Fisher-Price Corn Popper, Jenga, Masters of the Universe, My Little Pony, Nerf Blaster, Risk, the smartphone and the top.
The links in the first paragraph will take you to the history of each of the National Toy Hall of Fame inductees. -via Next Draft
Assigning household chores is deemed to be an essential component when it comes to child-rearing. However, it turns out that they may not help in improving children’s self-control, a new study published in the Journal of Research found out. The study was made by Rodica Damian, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston, along with Olivia Atherton, Katherine Lawson and Richard Robins from the University of California, Davis.
Damian examined data from the UC Davis California Families Project, a 10-year longitudinal study of Mexican-origin youth assessed at ages 10, 12, 14, 16 and 19, in which self-control was reported by the children and parents separately. Damian's team examined whether household chores and self-control co-developed from ages 10 to 16.
"We found no evidence of co-developmental associations between chores and effortful or self-control, with four out of four of our hypotheses receiving no empirical support," said Damian, who admits it was not the finding they expected. "These null effects were surprising given the strong lay conceptions and theoretical basis for our predictions." Still, she said, she would not use the results to discourage childhood chores.
While chores may not matter when it comes to personality development, Daiman states that it still can predict future chore behavior. "It is a stable habit and having a tidy home is not something to ignore."
Some 921 to 1,050 people sleep in public spaces like parks and unenclosed lobbies on any given night, a landmark study on homelessness in Singapore discovered. Most of these people are older men who sleep rough since they cannot afford housing, want to be near where they work, or have issues with family members or housemates.
The study was led by assistant professor Ng Kok Hoe at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, with the help of 480 volunteers, social workers mobilised by the government, and NGOs conducting fieldwork over three months.
Of the roughly 1,000 people found sleeping rough, 191 were awake and 88 agreed to be interviewed. Six in 10 of those 88 were employed, most commonly in cleaning, odd jobs, security and retail. Those who were paid monthly earned between S$560 (US$412) and S$3,000, with the monthly median income being S$1,400 – about 60 per cent less than the $3,467 of employed Singapore residents.
Find out more about this shocking, but saddening study over at SCMP.
If you woke up on Thursday welcomed by a weird text message, you’re not alone. Overnight, a mysterious wave of missive swept America’s phones, and largely unintelligible messages were sent to families, friends, and past relationships. The messages seem to have been sent on or around Valentine's Day.
Friends who hadn't talked to each other in months were jolted into chatting. Others briefly panicked.
The best explanation seems to be that old texts sent in the spring suddenly went through. Two people said they figured out the original messages were never received. It's not clear why this months-long delay happened. Phone companies blamed others and offered no further explanations.
Now that’s slower than snail mail.
More details about this odd news over at CBS News.
A new study finds that invasive grass species make wildfires more frequent in much of the United States. Bethany Bradley, a professor of environmental conservation at the University of Massachusetts, state that there are 12 non-native species that act as “little arsonist grasses.”
Wherever the common Mediterranean grass invades, including California’s southern desert, fires flare up three times more often. And cheatgrass, which covers about one-third of the Intermountain West region of the U.S., is a big-time fire promoter, Bradley said.
“I would not be surprised at all if invasive grasses are playing a role in the current fires,” Bradley said, “but I don’t think we can attribute to them directly.”
This is the M101, a beautiful spiral galaxy that is found some 170,000 light years across. It is almost twice as big as our own Milky Way Galaxy. It is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog. It is also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy.
M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed with Lord Rosse's large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsonstown. In contrast, this multiwavelength view of the large island universe is a composite of images recorded by space-based telescopes in the 21st century. Color coded from X-rays to infrared wavelengths (high to low energies), the image data was taken from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple), the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (blue), Hubble Space Telescope(yellow), and the Spitzer Space Telescope(red).
Breathtaking.
(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, JPL - Caltech, STScI)
Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Police pulled over a drunken, Sunday driver with a chicken on his shoulder. Officers responded after receiving reports from other drivers of a man swerving over the road with a bird on his person.
A 911 caller said a man was swerving down the road with a bird on his shoulder.
Sure enough, when police pulled the man over near Howell Avenue and Centennial Drive on Sunday he had a chicken with him.
Distracted driving is nothing new, and unfortunately, drunken driving is all too common, but the chicken took it to another level.
"There's a guy behind us. ... He's driving really reckless, but he has a hawk in his car," a 911 caller said.
Oak Creek police found out it wasn’t a hawk but a brown chicken.
They pulled it from the car and put it in the back of the squad car with the driver's cousin.
According to the officer's report, besides numerous open cans of beer, he also noticed "a live chicken that was fluttering around the inside of the vehicle."
I guess we finally know why the chicken crossed the road, or in this case all over the road...to get a beer! Please egg-scuse me for my corny joke, I'm a comedi-hen! P.S.-Don't drink and drive.
