'Martial law has lost its effect'

'I'm just really sorry that we couldn't do this. I apologize that this happened'

'Boy, it's shocking'

He's crashing out

Scientists have found a way to help dentures better stick to the mouth—which is a bigger problem than you think—by mimicking the powerful suction cups found on octopus tentacles. Since 1 in every 10 users of dentures have trouble keeping them in place, they sometimes have to resort to various denture cements and adhesives to […] The post Octopus Tentacle Suction Cups Could Help Dentures Stick to the Mouth appeared first on Good News Network.

News Quicksilver Netflix to Adapt Callie Hart’s Quicksilver Into a Movie The TikTok sensation has been snapped up in a bidding war By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 3, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share In a bidding war almost as heated as the sexual tension between Kingfisher and Saeris, Netflix won the rights to adapt Callie Hart’s romantasy novel, Quicksilver. According to Deadline, the deal was in the seven-figures, reflecting the novel’s popularity within a popular subgenre, in no small part because of its following on TikTok. Here’s the official blurb of the story: Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen’s reservoirs for as long as she can remember. When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently reopens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares… but it turns out they’re real, and Saeris has landed herself right in the middle of a centuries-long conflict that might just get her killed. The first of her kind to tread the frozen mountains of Yvelia in over a thousand years, Saeris mistakenly binds herself to Kingfisher, a handsome Fae warrior, who has secrets and nefarious agendas of his own. He will use her Alchemist’s magic to protect his people, no matter what it costs him… or her. Kingfisher’s past is murky. His attitude stinks. And he’s the only way Saeris is going to make it home. Spoiler: Saeris and Kingfisher have the hots for each other and conjoin in various ways, magical and otherwise, throughout the book’s 624 pages. Quicksilver is the first in the planned Fae & Alchemy trilogy. It was Hart’s first foray into fantasy, though she is a prodigious romance author with several series published, including the Crooked Sinners, Blood & Roses, and Dirty Nasty Freaks books. No news yet on when the adaptation will go into production. Let the dream-casting of Kingfisher and Saeris, however, begin![end-mark] The post Netflix to Adapt Callie Hart’s <i>Quicksilver</i> Into a Movie appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Julia Armfield Read an Excerpt From Julia Armfield’s Private Rites A speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world… By Julia Armfield | Published on December 3, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Private Rites by Julia Armfield, a speculative reimagining of King Lear available now from Flatiron Books. It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams, Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters’ lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world. ISLA On the afternoon of her father’s death, Isla takes a session with a man who was exorcised of evil spirits at the age of seventeen. He is a new patient, referred from the counseling program at the hospital—white teeth and a voice whittled down from a scream. When he clasps his hands around one knee, the veins bunch up between his knuckles, pale blue against the jut of the bone. Isla tries not to notice this, inspects her own hands instead and the bitten-off edge of a cuticle. Bad habits; both the tendency to chew the skin around her nails and to notice a tic or a physical trait of a patient and allow it to grow, blowing up until it becomes their entirety, the characteristic against which all else seems to pale. She lives in horror of slip-ups, practices saying their names aloud to counter her mental Rolodex: patients listed in order as Bug Eyes, as Taps His Foot When He’s Horny, as Big Hands, as Talks Like a Robot, as Tits. She’s good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs. Not unlike the irrational desire to dash a contemplative silence to pieces or to climb to some high place and jump, so it seems a compulsion born less of intent than of the simple fact of its own possibility. The fact that she could do it is more than enough. She reels it in, always. Reels herself in tight. Any minute now, she thinks, any second, I could crash this whole day into the wall. He tells her his parents were the ones who pushed for the ritual—the patient, hands unclasped, now sipping water. Isla pauses, looking up from her notepad, asks him to say that again. She’s heard of this once or twice before, archaic practices resurfacing the way trends will, exorcisms like bootcut jeans, like mixing pattern with print. Two years ago: not her patient but a woman on television, face pixelated, discussing her experiences as a child of the Cult of Our Lady. And before that: a patient recalling how her parents would often wake her at odd hours and lead her out to their Japanese garden, let the blood from her arm, and pray for deliverance. Not a rampant fad, but certainly a recurring one, things being as they are these days. A memory, briefly summoned and then swiftly, professionally set aside: Isla’s own mother, white to the lips and muttering. Isla’s own mother, her face very close: This will only hurt for a second. Her sister Irene once said that, at pinch points, people always turn to the divine, or if not to the divine, then at least to the well-trodden. It’s a backup, she said, like a tested recipe. People love a ritual when things get hairy, to feel they’re doing something that thousands of people have done before them. And so, the patient, telling a story that Isla suspects he has told before: the blood on the bed linen, his mother inviting the priest, the sensation of something first beckoned, then wrenched from his guts. He believes both that the ritual worked and that it didn’t, expresses appropriate levels of skepticism toward the concept of exorcism yet can’t seem to set aside the idea that his parents did what they did for the best. “I think they wanted to feel better,” he says. “I think they got it into their heads that something was wrong that could only be solved this way. They wanted to feel like they were taking action, given how little they could do anywhere else. It’s weird, because I don’t remember them being that religious, at first.” Toward the end of the session, Isla asks if he believes in the devil. “I don’t,” he replies—clasps his hands so the knuckles pulse as if filling and retracting—“I don’t, but I feel him anyway.” “Thank you, Ted,” she says, thinks Ugly Knuckles, reels it in again, thinks that she ought to get someone in to look at the dark spot on the wall. The air conditioner purrs. Someone in a consulting room across the hall appears to be weeping. D’you ever have the thought, says a voice along the corridor, that it might be getting worse every day but you’re just so used to it that you aren’t noticing? Like maybe it’s really terrible and I’m just so cut off from it that I’ve lost all sense of size? Half the time I can’t get back to mine because the train’s fucked or flooded or whatever. Last night I got home at ten to midnight and I’m just like… “Well, that’s not bad.” Fucking council. Isla operates from a suite of offices shared with two other therapists, and the noises around her are never quite muffled enough. The building is crisp, masculine, yet somehow fleshly—its walls vibrating the way a creature might breathe in its sleep. On occasion, she will sit across from a patient and listen to the noise of other patients and other therapists in adjoining rooms, imagining them all held safe within the mouth of something vast and slumbering, unlikely to turn to one side, unlikely to swallow. Buy the Book Private Rites Julia Armfield Buy Book Private Rites Julia Armfield Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget She sees the patient out, asks him to remember that their meeting will be half an hour later next week. Did you know, she hears a voice saying in reception, that magnolias evolved before bees? They’re one of the earliest flowering plants—as a species they’re something like ninety-five million years old. She heads back to her desk and removes her phone from the drawer, notes an unfamiliar number has called and left a message. She considers this for a moment, makes a mental list of probabilities: Morven might have a new number (but I don’t want to talk to Morven), Irene might have a new number (but why would Irene call), it might be the insurance company, it might be the bank. She presses a button on her phone and waits, grinding one heel into the carpet. From her vantage point near the window, she can see down into the plaza below. The water is high today, lapping up against the edges of the elevated walkways, the sunken string of high-rise buildings sharp in unaccustomed light. It is midafternoon, threatening rain, agapanthus dying in a pot beneath the heating vent, and Isla hasn’t eaten lunch. When the call connects, the voice on the line is kindly, professional. They would like to know her surname, her date of birth; they would like to tell her that her father is dead. IRENE On the train, a girl at the other end of the carriage vomits into her handbag and passes it to her boyfriend. The boyfriend holds the bag away from himself, makes long and meaningful eye contact with the floor. It’s too early for this, Irene thinks, then messages Jude about it. Either it’s too early or I’m getting old. Jude responds that two things can be true and asks what Irene wants for dinner. Three seats down across the aisle, a man is talking loudly into his phone while the woman beside him makes periodic tutting noises. Irene tips her head, tries to avoid the gaze of the woman sitting directly opposite. She hates making eye contact in public places, the idea of an inadvertent brush with someone best kept in peripheral blur. Some time ago, she accidentally winked at a woman while messing around with her contact lenses and the horror of that moment stayed with her well into the end of the day. Embarrassment, the potential for it, like something caught on the sole of the foot and hard to slough off again, a physical object she carries around at all times. The light in the uppermost edges of the train windows is starting to turn, evening bleeding as if from a leak-sprung ceiling: incremental, then thickening, swelling as it falls. The afternoon is wide, peach-ripe—rain incoming as always and the windows greased with mist, the city grown porous and slack around itself. The gaps between rain are so few and far between that they barely count as gaps so much as temporary glitches. It will start again, she knows, before her journey is over, before she has the chance to disembark and enjoy the respite. The irritation of that, of having missed it, will simply be something to shoulder, like everything else. Irene often feels she can detect a certain amphibious quality in the people with whom she shares transportation, shares offices, shares the ingrown cramp of city space. Some days, she will squint her eyes and imagine a waterlogged sheen to the skin of the woman who hands over change at the newspaper kiosk, the man who touches her knee on the tram. People at work complain of bloated joints, persistent headaches, though only as one complains about anything that has always been the case. I don’t know, Jude will say in the sanguine tone they tend to apply to things unrelated to the Now, that I’d even know how to go back to things being drier. I don’t know if it would suit me at all. But the whole point is that you were suited to it once, Irene replies on the days when she’s feeling disagreeable. When we were kids, when we were teenagers, even. The whole point is you were different once, too. I know that, Jude says, but what’s the point in dwelling. Once you start, you’ll never get to the end of it. Jude tends to operate like this, focusing solely on what’s going on right in front of them, as if everything else is irrelevant and incapable of causing them harm. That was Then, this is Now, like a screen set up to block peripheral vision. Irene has tried it, has sat and reflected that the house was Then but this is Now. That her PhD and all she planned to do with it was Then but Jude is Now, that work is Now, that the sofa and carpet and special soft furnishings she’s bought for the flat are all Now. The train is Now, she supposes, and the moment the girl at the end of the carriage recommences throwing up is Now, although then it is Now again and Now again and again until the girl is white and dry-heaving and the boyfriend sets down the still-reeking handbag, gets up, and moves toward the door. They are two stops away from the end of the line. This train route used to be longer, but old ends to old lines have long since been abandoned, stations drowned and duly cut off, trains diverted, raised above the water where possible or else supplanted by boats and water taxis, journeys thrown off course. Irene thinks about calling her sister and then dismisses it, thinks less seriously about calling her other sister but then leans her head back against the window and sighs. She was trying to get to the end of a thought about souls, about the strange internal silence of something one might assume to be essential and yet which serves no tangible purpose. This happens fairly often. Thoughts crop up, unwanted, despite the fact that her PhD is a relic, discarded long ago in a panic that feels foreign to her now. She works, these days, for an office that administrates payroll for remote staff and agile workspaces, and the memory of her studies operates rather like an atrophying muscle, unconditioned but still prone to spasm when pressed a certain way. She’ll think that if one assumes that the soul is distinct from the physical form, then the soul cannot communicate, for it has no recourse to speech or any other form of expression with which to sign out its meaning. She will think that if this is the case, then one might extrapolate that the soul has no need of language, which poses questions about how it enacts control or influence over the human body and what the divide between silence and language means in terms of spirituality. She will think, I should write this down, but then find that the notion recedes the more closely she looks at it, until it reveals itself as little more than a muddy act of pointillism. It’s depressing, all this thought that has nowhere to put itself, all this context and research with no place left to go. Give it a rest, she will think to herself. You have a job and it isn’t actually this. The train rattles over a series of point blades. The sky is closing in. Later on, the summer constellations will sharpen into being, though too far back behind cloud to be seen. Her phone vibrates in her pocket. She slides it out and checks the number, feels surprise quickly curdling into annoyance as she realizes her older sister Isla is calling. What, she thinks irritably, do you want. Whatever it is, can’t it wait. Excerpted from Private Rites by Julia Armfield. Copyright © 2024 by Julia Armfield. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. The post Read an Excerpt From Julia Armfield’s <i>Private Rites</i> appeared first on Reactor.

In the 1960s, film audiences became particularly interested in the weird and unknown, resulting in a spike in science-fiction films. Noticing the public's interest, filmmakers began to make science-fiction films with the hope of creating the next big one. During this time, some of the most classic and iconic science-fiction films were introduced to the world, which set the bar for what a film of... Source

THE CENTER SQUARE—Federal agents are arresting a record number of individuals on the terrorist watchlist at the northern U.S. border, including a Jordanian national with ties to terrorism who recently was removed from the country after illegally entering from Canada. Border Patrol agents in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Blaine Sector apprehended Jordanian national Mohammad Hasan Abdellatif Albana, 41, near Lynden, Washington, a few miles from the Canadian border. Lynden is roughly 22 miles to Aldergrove in British Columbia. There are 13 land ports of entry at the U.S.-Canada border in Washington, including the Lynden-Aldergrove Port of Entry. The port of entry is famous for the 1979 murder of U.S. Customs inspector Kenneth Ward, who was shot while performing a vehicle inspection by members of far-left domestic terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army. Albana illegally “entered the U.S. without being admitted, inspected, or paroled by a U.S. immigration official,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. He would have been considered a “gotaway” if he hadn’t been caught. Gotaways is the official CBP term for foreign nationals who illegally enter between ports of entry to intentionally evade capture and aren’t caught. Once apprehended, he was identified as a match on the terrorist watchlist, processed for removal, and removed to Jordan on Nov. 15 because he posed “a risk to the national security of the U.S.,” ICE said. Albana was among 44 individuals who’ve been arrested and identified as a known or suspected terrorist this fiscal year, according to CBP data last updated Nov. 20. By comparison, 8 known or suspected terrorists were apprehended at the southwest border over the same time-period. As The Center Square first reported, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists are being apprehended at the U.S.-Canada border. Overall, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists have been apprehend under the Biden administration in U.S. history: 1,903. The majority, 64%, totaling 1,216, were apprehended at the northern border coming from Canada between fiscal years 2021-2024, according to CBP data. A record 687 known or suspected terrorists were reported at the southwest border over the same time period. CBP publicly reports four known-or-suspected-terrorist data sets: apprehensions at land ports of entry and between ports of entry at the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders. Data is reported by fiscal year, from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. Those identified as known or suspected terrorists are matched to the Terrorist Screening Dataset, the federal government’s database that contains sensitive information on terrorist identities. The Terrorist Screening Dataset originated as a consolidated terrorist watchlist to hold information on known or suspected terrorists. Over the past decade, it evolved “to include additional individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watchlisted individuals,” CBP says. Over the last four years, most congressional reports and news reports have solely focused on known or suspected terrorists apprehended between ports of entry at the southwest border, ignoring the greater number apprehended, and unknown number illegally entering, at the northern border. Since 2017, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists have been apprehended every year at the northern border, except in 2019, The Center Square first reported. The greatest number apprehended in U.S. history at the northern border was 487 in fiscal 2023. Under the Biden administration, 1,209 known or suspected terrorists were apprehended at U.S.-Canada ports of entry and seven between ports of entry. By contrast, 989 known or suspected terrorists were apprehended at the southwest border; 604 at ports of entry and 385 between ports of entry. “The record number of people on the terrorist watchlist coming across the northern border” disproves the “most secure border in the world” claim made by Canadian officials, President-elect Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, told The Center Square. “It’s really simple math,” he said, pointing to CBP data. “What they won’t tell you are the unknown gotaways coming through the northern border.” Unlike the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border, there are no border walls and significantly less technological equipment and agents to patrol the U.S.-Canada border, the longest international border in the world totaling 5,525 miles, The Center Square reported. Because there are far fewer Border Patrol agents in the field, less technological surveillance and a lack of operational control, combined with national security threats posed by Canadian policies, among other factors, the number of known or suspected terrorists who’ve illegally entered from Canada between ports of entry is unknown, border officials tell The Center Square. Unlike the southwest border, where agents in the field can track illegal entry and report gotaways, no comparable capability exists at the northern border, where one agent may be responsible for 500 miles. “There’s always been a national security vulnerability there; it remains a national security vulnerability,” Homan told The Center Square. “There are hundreds of miles of open border that is not being patrolled and that’s just a stone-cold fact.” Homan told The Center Square the Trump administration will secure the northern and southwest borders. Originally published by The Center Square The post Northern Border Terrorist-Related Arrests Soar appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Department of Justice filed a reply on Tuesday supporting its motion for a gag order against Dr. Ethan Haim, a surgeon indicted by the Biden administration after he blew the whistles on sex change procedures for minors. “The prosecutors in @eithanhaim’s case are doubling down on their shameless effort to ask the court to censor us and our client on @X,” the Burke Law Group, which is representing Haim, said on X. “We will continue to zealously represent @EithanHaim’s liberty, and now his (and our) First Amendment right to Free Speech.” The prosecutors in @eithanhaim’s case are doubling down on their shameless effort to ask the court to censor us and our client on @X. We will continue to zealously represent @EithanHaim's liberty, and now his (and our) First Amendment right to Free Speech.— BLG Tweets (@BurkeLawTweets) December 3, 2024 Haim initially came forward as an anonymous whistleblower to expose gender treatments being performed on minors at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. He is facing four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, according to journalist Chris Rufo, who first reported on Haim’s story. The reply in support of its motion for a gag order said the order would “prevent the defendant and his attorney from making inflammatory and and unfairly prejudiced statements.” The DOJ did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about example of what types of speech would and would not be permitted. “Given the number of such statements readily available online, the defendant’s national platform and increasing prominence, and his avowed intention to continue to make such statements,” the order said, “there is a substantial likelihood of prejudicing the court’s ability to conduct a fair trial.” The prosecution argues Haim is advancing a “false narrative of government corruption,” which “ignores the facts and evidence.” Yet in the next paragraph, the prosecutors say most of “the defendant’s ire” is focused on the case’s former lead prosecutor, leaving the prosecutors unsure of Haim’s claims are true. Tina Ansari, the former lead prosecutor against Haim, withdrew from the case on Nov. 21 after conflict of interest concerns. Ansari’s family runs coffee and tea company FreshBrew Group, whose customers include multiple hospitals in the Texas Medical Center which house Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine are located. Ansari’s “close family members have substantial financial and political ties” to Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM),” Haim’s lawyers wrote in a Nov. 13 letter. Haim was a resident at the Baylor College of Medicine from June 2018 to June 2023. He worked at Texas Children’s Hospital during part of his residency. The gag order would “completely prevent Dr. Haim or his counsel from criticizing the prosecution, no matter how correct the criticism,” according to Burke Law Group. “The prosecution tries to make its case by painting Dr. Haim’s and the defense’s critical tweets as inaccurate,” the X post said. “But as the defense already explained in its own filing, all of the public criticism has been richly deserved. Indeed, many of the tweets included pictures from the court’s transcript showing where it was the court, not the defense, that took issue with the government’s shoddy work.” It is suspicious that the DOJ filed a motion for a gag order on the same day, Nov. 20, that Ansari withdrew herself from the case, Haim said on X. “So, my question is this – what do the remaining DOJ prosecutors know about these conflicts and when did they know it?” he asked. “Because if the case against me was brought under conflicted pretenses, the remaining prosecutors cannot cleanse themselves of the odor of corruption by simply kicking Ansari to the curb and continuing on like everything is kosher.” The DOJ particularly wants to prevent Haim from retweeting allies who have defended him on X like Ethics and Public Policy Center legal expert Ed Whelan; Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas; journalist Chris Rufo; and psychologist Jordan Peterson, according to Burke Law Group. DOJ is seeking a gag order on Dr. Eithan Haim, the courageous whistleblower its transgender ideologues are targeting with an outrageous prosecution. Any gag order will backfire, as those of us not subject to it will intensify our efforts to expose DOJ’s abuses.— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) December 3, 2024 Texas Children’s Hospital had 30 child gender transition patients before Texas passed a law prohibiting doctors from providing transgender medical interventions to minors, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s database. The hospital “took away all the public-facing indications that the program was still active,” “but within the hospital, they’re prioritizing it to the highest level,” Haim said. Haim said in Rufo’s City Journal article that a surgeon implanted a hormone device in an 11-year-old girl who said she identified as a boy three days after the announcement that transgender medical procedures had stopped at the hospital. Multiple colleagues told Haim over the next year they were implanting puberty-blocking devices in minors.  After revealing this information, two federal agents with the Department of Health and Human Services showed up on Haim’s door, saying the documents he sent to Rufo were published with children’s names, violating HIPAA. But Haim’s lawyers say all patient information was redacted and that HIPAA regulations allow protected information to be disclosed to “prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to a person or the public.” Virginia Allen contributed to this article. The post DOJ Revisits Effort to Censor Trans Children’s Hospital Whistleblower Eithan Haim appeared first on The Daily Signal.