Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up. This community has been getting flooded with content from a site called "Townflex" that looks like it just republishes stories from elsewhere. I'm provisionally banning the site, because it's difficult to assess their credibility, and the sheer flood of posts from it were beginning to look like site promotion - i.e., spam. Over the next few weeks, I'll work on a bot to automatically remove submissions from the site.

If you've got a good reason for me to rethink this policy, please let me know below.

Look, I get it. The gargantuan shit-show that is U.S. politics and the American descent into fascism is on everyone's minds. It's certainly on mine.

But the point of this community is to highlight weird news stories that make you go, "By golly, I thought I was reading a headline from The Onion. You know, America's finest news source." A lot of stories being posted lately don't even remotely fit that.

That doesn't mean political stories aren't allowed here, but they must have headlines that would make people pause and wonder if it's a story from The Onion. Straight up regular, non Onion-y headlines don't fit.

Politico notes that the appeals panel hearing our case had deep reservations about the government’s arguments, with Judge Patricia Millett asking: “Can the president then offer on eBay to sell them, all of our national security secrets, to the highest bidder?”

The government’s response was, in short, “yes.”

The prisoners at Lavi prison had saved up food over several days to make the cake in order to express hope that the vote will lead to [Itamar Ben-Gvir's] exit from the government.

Prison guards found the cake in a cell, prompting officials to take disciplinary measures against the eight and send them to solitary confinement.

Ben-Gvir praised prison officials for the decision and mocked prisoners' lack of access to food.

"The terrorists in Lavi Prison sat and hoarded what little food they had, a spoonful of jam here, a slide of bread there, day after day," he wrote in a social media post.

"They did this for several days, all so they could make an improvised cake and celebrate if I am not elected," he continued.

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/usa/p/1271268/police-called-on-3-year-old-black-boy-because-he-was-too-good-at-soccer

Palmer Luckey of Anduril is teaming with Ben Lamm of Colossal Biosciences to launch Warhound, a startup dedicated to genetically engineering and cloning dogs for service in war, police work and first responder work.

Speaking to Wired, Lamm explained that the project was twofold. One part of the project would oversee the genetic engineering and cloning of the ideal dogs for war, and the other would develop tech for them to use on battlefields.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53497698

AI slop corporation working on AI slop solution, right...

"I said, 'Sundar, I'm thinking of the Atlantic Ocean. Can you handle it?'

"'No, no, no, this time I'm not doing it,' he said, 'Oceans are different, sir. They cover a lot of - really a lot of countries. Please don't ask us to do that.'"

The US president later said he would "probably pass" and keep the name Atlantic, before saying, "We're going to call it the American Ocean".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72701129

Using a stacked difference-in-differences design covering shootings between 1990 and 2025, I compare cohorts at affected universities before and after the shooting with cohorts at matched control universities. I find no detectable effects on time to degree, but undergraduates enrolled at the time of the shooting are 4.2% less likely to pursue further studies. Those who do continue shift toward health: the share of exposed cohorts who later enroll in a health degree rises by 1.3 percentage points (8.8%), and this effect persists among cohorts who enroll after the shooting. Effects on students present during the shooting are consistent with a response to trauma; for later cohorts, I find evidence of sorting, as master’s students with prior healthcare experience become more likely to enroll in affected universities. These results suggest that mass shootings leave institutional and cultural legacies that outlast the students who witnessed them.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72623197