The Australian island state is trying to drum up tourism during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter

Searching for a new job? Tasmania is looking for curious, adventurous professionals to fill a wide array of unusual roles—including a “wombat walker,” who will be responsible for taking the stocky marsupials on their morning jaunts and feeding them snacks.

Tasmania has posted a series of “odd jobs” in a bid to boost tourism during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, which runs from June to August. All of the gigs are unpaid, though the local tourism board will cover the cost of travel, lodging and food.

Someone asked him if being naked would be required, and he said “it is not about getting naked. It’s about experiencing different kind of sauna. And, if you knew anything about it, wetness level inside Bania or Steam one is around 90%. So, towel is extremely wet after few seconds. So, you can still do it, but it may result with fungal infection. Also, based on recommendation from Polskie Towarzystwo Saunowe [the “Polish Sauna Society”], you should be naked in Bania or Steam and with or without towel in dry one :)”

TikTok says the mechanism would have allowed the government the "explicit authority to suspend the platform in the United States at the US government's sole discretion" if it did not follow certain rules.

A draft "National Security Agreement", proposed by TikTok in August 2022, would have seen the company having to follow rules such as properly funding its data protection units and making sure that ByteDance did not have access to US users' data.

In the May lawsuit, three men - who were not seated together and did not know each other - said that every black man was removed from the flight between Phoenix, Arizona and New York City.

A total of eight passengers were removed.

In a separate incident in 2017, the NAACP warned black travellers to avoid the airline, citing a pattern of "disrespectful" and "discriminatory" behaviour as well as a "corporate culture of racial insensitivity and possible racial bias".

They lifted the advisory the following year after the carrier announced it had made changes to its operations.

Morris told the Christian Post: “In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of. I submitted myself to the Elders of Shady Grove Church and the young lady’s father. They asked me to step out of ministry and receive counseling and freedom ministry, which I did.”

Despite his admission, Morris will continue to be a primary speaker at the church on weekends and his son, James Morris, will assume his father’s senior pastor duties next year.

Morris was never criminally charged and by the time his accuser decided to explore legal action, she was advised the statute of limitations for criminal or civil action had probably expired.

Under the Data Protection Act 2018, you have the right to find out what information the government and other organisations store about you. These include the right to:

• be informed about how your data is being used
• access personal data
• have incorrect data updated
• have data erased
• stop or restrict the processing of your data
• data portability (allowing you to get and reuse your data for different services)
• object to how your data is processed in certain circumstances

You also have rights when an organisation is using your personal data for:

• automated decision-making processes (without human involvement)
• profiling, for example to predict your behaviour or interests

Plus more at the link.

Roughly a year ago, astronomers announced that they had observed an object that shouldn't exist. Like a pulsar, it emitted regularly timed bursts of radio emissions. But unlike a pulsar, those bursts were separated by over 20 minutes. If the 22-minute gap between bursts represents the rotation period of the object, then it is rotating too slowly to produce radio emissions by any known mechanism.

Now, some of the same team (along with new collaborators) are back with the discovery of something that, if anything, is acting even more oddly. The new source of radio bursts, ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0, takes nearly an hour between bursts. And it appears to have three different settings, sometimes producing weaker bursts and sometimes skipping them entirely. While the researchers suspect that, like pulsars, this is also powered by a neutron star, it's not even clear that it's the same class of object as their earlier discovery.

Under cross examination, a key government witness conceded that Hunter Biden might not have been using drugs continuously from 2015 to 2019, which covers when he bought the gun in 2018.

This is notable because, earlier in the day, prosecutors highlighted how Hunter said in his memoir that he was an “active” addict during that 5-year period.

That unusual therapy is all very well—or perhaps not—but its existence among some pre-Columbian peoples of the Western Hemisphere and some post-Columbian peoples of eighteenth-century Europe does little to explain why the slang expression "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" emerged only in the 1940s or later. My guess is that the historical practice is only coincidentally related to the modern expression.

But if the weird medical practice isn't the source of the slang term, what is? I suspect that the answer is amplification: sometimes a slang term that has been around for a while acquires new cachet thanks to a snappy word replacement or an edgier extension. But if this simply a case of amplification, a couple of other phenomena are likely: (1) we might see alternative extended versions of "blow smoke"—especially in the period before "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" comes into frequent use—that use less startling words than "ass"; and (2) we ought to see "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" being used not just for "blowing smoke" definition 2 above, but for definitions 1 and 3 as well.

Senate candidates are expected to submit 15,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot. Democrats claim that over half of Roger’s 30,000 signatures may be illegitimate, with lawyers working for the party claiming to have found "patterns that indicate the presence of potential forgery and other fraudulent signature gathering tactics."

Rogers, considered a frontrunner for the Republican nomination, was endorsed by former President Donald Trump in March. Primary elections will be held in August.

The Michigan Board of State Canvassers received the request for a probe late Thursday. The same concerned parties last week asked the board to look into the petitions of other GOP Senate candidates, too, among them former U.S. Reps Justin Amash and Peter Meijer (Meijer dropped out last month).

I promise I won't do this very often, but this is so well done. I've always wondered wtf she is saying. Kamala would be a great sleeping aid, her gentle voice and open ended thoughts.

After reviewing the resignation paperwork, Berry found that, if she signed, she would not be able to take any legal action against the district, would not be able to file any internal complaints or grievances against any district employee, and would not be able to seek another job in HISD.

Berry said she had two possibly performance-related run-ins with the district this school year. One was a memo notifying her she missed two deadlines pertaining to the file review of a teacher and getting her direct supervisor to sign stating he knew where STAAR testing materials were stored. The other was for "expressing (her) concerns" about printing more than 50,000 pages of special education students' Individualized Education Programs.

The special education department of the West Division of HISD sent her a screenshot of the district's operating procedures that said it was district policy to print the documents. But, she said, that rule was not accessible anywhere she could view, even though it was required to be posted on the Texas Legal Framework, a platform pertaining to students needing special education. She was written up in April, she said.

In a rare move, a federal judge on Thursday appeared to reverse his own ruling blocking the enforcement across Florida of one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ major immigration policies that criminalizes anyone who transports undocumented immigrants into the state.

Just hours after Judge Roy K. Altman made clear that his injunction issued Wednesday was meant to apply statewide, he issued a separate, conflicting order in which he pondered whether his own ruling from a day earlier was too broad — sparking confusion among immigration attorneys and advocates.

“On further reflection,” Altman wrote in an order released Thursday afternoon, “we now invite further briefing on the proper scope of the injunction.” Altman invited the attorneys on the case – representing Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and the Farmworker Association of Florida — to make arguments by June 6 about how widely the order should apply.

Sanders said he recognized the importance of the issue by attending town halls in his home state of Vermont, “and learning how hard it is to get dental care, how expensive it is and [how] dental insurance [is] totally inadequate”.

Sanders’ bill expands dental coverage by adding comprehensive benefits to Medicare; incentivizing states to improve dental benefits through Medicaid; and providing dental benefits to veterans through the Veterans Administration.

Additionally, the bill would attempt to tackle some states’ dentist shortage by creating student loan forgiveness programs for dentists who practice in underserved areas, and increasing funding to non-traditional places to see dentists, including at community health centers and schools.

The timing, they said, could be designed to create turmoil in yet another part of the world as Americans decide whether to send President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump back to the White House.

“We have no doubt that North Korea will be provocative this year. It’s just a matter of how escalatory it is,” a U.S. intelligence official said.

Guo, a former real estate developer once reportedly among China’s richest people, fled to the US in 2015. From a Manhattan penthouse that he bought for more than $67 million, with a reference letter from Tony Blair, he built a sprawling group of organizations he said aimed at deposing China’s Communist Party rulers, and gained a devoted following of tens of thousands of Chinese émigrés. With Steve Bannon, he founded the “New Federal State of China” which claims to be government-in-waiting set to take over governance in Beijing.

Guo has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges, including securities fraud, wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions and conspiracy, including conspiracy to launder money. Though it is not among the charges against him, prosecutors argued last month that Guo also has used supporters to harass and threaten critics.

Merchan agreed to delay the start of the trial from March 25 to April 15 to allow the former president's lawyers to review the material. But at a hearing in March, he rejected their claim that the case had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct, and denied their bid to delay the case longer, throw it out entirely or bar key prosecution witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels from testifying.

In a written ruling issued Thursday, Merchan reiterated that Trump didn't suffer any prejudice from the document dump because he and his lawyers were "given a reasonable amount of time to prepare and respond to the material."

"We must pass the Ohio Anti-Corruption Act, which would require dark money groups to identify their funders, disclose their spending, and strengthen the ban on foreign money," Walters said in a statement.

"Meanwhile, Republican politicians who hold supermajorities in both chambers at the statehouse must put politics aside and pass a clean bill to put Joe Biden on the ballot," she continued. "Despite Republicans' political gamesmanship, we're confident Joe Biden will be on the Ohio ballot."

Nearly eight years ago, convinced that she’d been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment.

Then she discovered the lengths Trump’s attorneys would go to hit back — and their unwillingness to stop.

Immediately, the campaign filed a counterclaim for $1.5 million. It won a $52,229 judgment, and the campaign froze her bank account and almost forced her into bankruptcy.

She found it humiliating when the campaign lawyers branded her a “judgment debtor” in a subpoena. They monitored her Twitter account, which had 32 followers, and submitted hundreds of pages of printouts to a judge. They even deposed her mother, grilling her about the family’s religious practices.

Following a lengthy and divisive debate, the court narrowly voted to withhold a $270,000 payment for work completed in February and March of this year because the vendor, DEMA Consulting & Management, is under investigation for allegedly double-billing clients. The decision means an abrupt halt to the Holistic Assistance Response Team, or HART, program.

Since launching in 2022, HART teams have diverted over 11,000 calls from law enforcement responses, instead dispatching mental health professionals and freeing up officers to focus on violent crimes.