[...] Obama met with top Biden advisers in March and, according to the sources, requested that the ex-veep’s team do what they can so that Biden does not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy.”

Workers at a massive new Shell plant in Pennsylvania had to attend a speech by President Donald Trump there earlier this week to be paid — and were ordered not to protest, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Attendance was not mandatory for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical plant north of Pittsburgh, but they had to forfeit pay for the day if they skipped, according to attendance and comportment information obtained by the newspaper.

That’s why filmmakers have a responsibility when playing with people’s perceptions of admired historic people to maintain a basic truth about the content of their character. Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does not live up to this standard. Of course, Tarantino has the artistic right to portray Bruce any way he wants. But to do so in such a sloppy and somewhat racist way is a failure both as an artist and as a human being.

Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey doubled-down on a controversial take that he had earlier this summer.

Last month during an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, Morey stated that Rockets All-Star guard James Harden is a better scorer than Michael Jordan -- who is widely considered to be the greatest player in the NBA's history -- was.

Morey, predictably, received a lot of flak for his take, but he hasn't changed his mind, and on Thursday he took it even further by saying ...

Congressional Republicans recently circulated talking points on gun violence that falsely described the El Paso massacre and other mass shootings as “violence from the left.”

A document obtained by the Tampa Bay Times and sent by House Republicans provides a framework for how to respond to anticipated questions like, “Why won’t you pass legislation to close the ‘gun show loophole’ in federal law?” and “Why shouldn’t we ban high-capacity magazines?" The answers are ...

The Hillsboro Hops are known from a couple of things -- being a more serious baseball team than the Portland Pickles for one, and totally over-the-top stadium food for another.

Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, will have to answer to a charge with the National Labor Relations Board that his recent tweets amounted to an illegal effort to discourage his employees from joining a union.

MY MOTHER WAS AN ACTIVIST. During the ’80s and ’90s, when Central American refugees came to the US fleeing death squads, she taught English and citizenship classes at Progreso Latino, an immigrant advocacy group in Central Falls, Rhode Island. While she taught her students, I watched their children in the daycare center. Over the past years, I have cried many times as I pictured the kids I used to play with languishing in cages and weeping for their parents.

But in a Facebook post last week, Biggs announced that the FBI had visited him in his Florida home after a pair of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. “I wanna say again to all attending rally in Portland,” Biggs wrote, apparently in reaction to the visit. “Tone down rhetoric.”

Biggs has not withdrawn from the rally, but began vanishing from social media platforms this week, extremism researcher JJ McNabb noted.

You can’t put a price tag on the value of sticking it to the man—specifically, trying to own an official surveillance system. Except maybe when you are owned right back.

A security researcher going by the name of Droogie attempted to fuck with Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems by customizing a vanity California license plate with the word “NULL.” The word was a play on the term used in programming to indicate no value, and Droogie hoped that it would mess with the ...

If you think about your student loans in the usual manner – “crushing”, “demoralizing”, a “financial tragedy of grotesque proportions” – you would be correct, but that line of thinking will kill you.

Instead, try picturing your debt as an amiable but hungry ghost, rooting around in your refrigerator at night, using up the milk and cereal, falling asleep on your couch with an empty pint of ice cream clutched in its incorporeal fingers. Since I began thinking of my debt as a ...

She claims Epstein asked to give The Simpsons creator a foot rub while flying from Carmel, California, to Los Angeles.

Virginia, now aged 35, claims the alleged incident happened around 20 years ago when she was aged 16.

In the court docs, the alleged victim claims she almost vomited when she saw Groening’s “yellow crusty toenails.”

In most time lapse videos you see of the night sky, the stars wheel through the sky as the heavens revolve around the Earth. But that perspective is really only valid from our particular frame of reference standing on the Earth. What’s actually happening is that our tiny little speck of dirt is twirling amid a galactic tapestry that is nearly stationary. And in the video above, you see just that…the Earth rotating as the camera lens stays locked on a motionless Milky Way. Total mindjob.

A New York couple’s luxurious Florida vacation home has been taken over by dozens of black vultures that are vomiting and defecating everywhere.

The Palm Beach Post reports the Casimano family can’t even visit the $702,000 home they purchased earlier this year in the Ibis Golf and Country Club.

Siobhan Casimano describes the smell as “like a thousand rotting corpses,” and says vultures have destroyed their screened enclosures, overtaken the pool and dented their cars with their ...

Colorado’s legislative session ended in May with plenty of movement on criminal justice reform.

The state narrowed disenfranchisement, defelonized most drug possession cases, required jails to provide free menstrual hygiene products, barred law enforcement from honoring ICE detainers, shielded some immigrants from facing deportation due to misdemeanors, and restricted cash bail.

But reform stalled on some major fronts, including the death penalty, prison gerrymandering, and ICE’s ...

At a post-workout press conference earlier this week, Louisiana-Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns coach Billy Napier announced a rather odd initiative for the members of his football team. Napier said that, starting this year, all scholarship members of the team will be required to donate a minimum of $50 to the Ragin’ Cajun Athletic Foundation.

That seems like a punitive rule to enforce on a group of unpaid college football players, though Napier clarified that, “it’s all about gratitude,” ...

Americans love their grilled cheese, at least according to a poll of more than 1,200 people by the public opinion and data company YouGov. But what are the most despised sandwiches?

Data viz guru Nathan Yau decided to use the YouGov poll to map out people’s preferences, from least liked to most liked. The result? People are really not into cheese and tomato sandwiches, and it’s no wonder. Is that even a real sandwich? Also, not a single goddamn person objected to the exclusion of hot ...

A dozen centimeters is a pathetic epoch, but epoch or not, it would be an extremely interesting layer. It’s tempting to think a whisper of atomic-weapons testing would remain. The Promethean fire unleashed by the Manhattan Project was an earth-changing invention, its strange fallout destined to endure in some form as an unmistakable geological marker of the Anthropocene. But the longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout, iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. If ...

A raccoon got busted after it broke into a vending machine at a Florida high school.

Portland is preparing for a large far-right rally on Saturday that may be the largest in a series of demonstrations that have descended on the city in the Trump era.

Police in the Oregon city are fearful of an outbreak of violence at the “End Domestic Terrorism” rally, which is targeted at Portland’s antifascist groups, who in recent years have clashed with rightwing activists in running street battles.

The protest has been promoted primarily by Floridian Joe Biggs, a member of the ...