After being blown thousands of miles off course, cold-stunned, and beached, six exhausted sea turtles hitched a ride back to their home in the Azores onboard a Royal Navy ship. The 6 loggerhead sea turtles, whose home lies in the warmer seas far to the south of the British Isles, were likely blown off course […] The post Six Rare Turtles Blown Off Course Are Returned to Original Habitat Thanks to Royal Navy appeared first on Good News Network.

Books cover reveal Revealing The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death by Helen Marshall A young woman is seduced by the glamour of the circus and drawn into dangerous world of violence, cruelty and revenge… By Reactor | Published on October 15, 2024 Photo credit: Vince Haig Comment 0 Share New Share Photo credit: Vince Haig A young woman is seduced by the glamour of the circus and drawn into dangerous world of violence, cruelty and revenge… We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Helen Marshall’s The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death, a dark fantasy infused with mystery available June 10 2025 from Titan Books. Sara Sidorova lies dying. As she hovers between life and death, she receives a visitation from Amba, the tiger god who will devour creation if he is released from the chains that bind him. Amba gives Sara Sidorova an extraordinary gift: a glimpse into the future.Years later, her granddaughter Irenda will grow up in a wartorn country where survival means obedience. When a devastating attack robs her of her mother, she travels to Hrana City. There, her grandmother agrees to teach her the ultimate secret: how to tame death. But it won’t be easy…In the circus that offers her first taste of power, Irenda will have to tame another tiger if she is to survive. Amongst the magicians, the strongmen and the contortionists, she will start down a dangerous road, to carry out a revenge decades in the making… and bring justice into the world for herself and for her family.Rich with glamour and strangeness, brutality and deceit and the dark magic of the circus, this haunting fable will chill your bones and make your heart ache. Cover art and design by Julia Lloyd Buy the Book The Lady, the Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death Helen Marshall Buy Book The Lady, the Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death Helen Marshall Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Helen Marshall is Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and received endorsements from authors such as Kelly Link and Paul Tremblay. Her debut novel The Migration, was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction and fantasy books of the year. She lives in Australia. Find her on Twitter/X @manuscriptgal and on Instagram @hairside. The girl follows the road past the hidden sunflowers. It was her husband who showed them to her, a field of dry earth that would blossom like cloth-of-gold come the height of summer. Dead now, he must be, though she never saw his body. Her name is Sara Sidorova; she is eighteen years old and a widow already. Days pass as she searches the wildwood for his remains. She marks the hours as the sun rises in glory, then sets in a blue gloom. Birch and alder line the dusty track that brought her this way. Skeleton trunks. Alder is good for sleeping, she knows. Feliks taught her that. Before they were married, they’d lie beneath an alder as high as a steeple, listening to waxwings and bluethroats. Now she cares only for the shriek of the mourning birds, her guides in this terrible business. She knows these woods well, all this beautiful, terrible sliver land. Mountains in the west, the impassable spine between this little world and the next. The lakes, the coastland, wild and dark, the plains, then the forest, the killing zone, and beyond it the border. Nothing here is easy. In Strana, her people say: we are small but we will make you bleed. We are the bone that will choke you if you try to swallow us. Her people say: we are invaded but it will cost you to take us. Strana. Country. If this thrice-tenth nation had another name once they have forgotten it as they have forgotten so many things. She stumbles on, her clothes shredding to rags, her feet bloody, her painted nails gone wretched as talons. On the fifth day she discovers a body in the woods—not her husband. This one is too old, over forty. Tawny hair, thinning near the crown. Big shoulders, a big man. The hole in his woolen gymnasterka seems smaller than a thimble. She could dig out the bullet if she wished, but he is only so much meat now. Still, needs must. Sara Sidorova takes the dead man’s knife, misshapen from over-sharpening. His boots, which are too large. A week ago Captain Olender asked her to dance. Once she loved dancing. She knows she will never dance in these stolen boots, even as she hacks strips from the dead man’s uniform and stuffs the rags in her  toes. “Juniper, juniper, juniper, my juniper,” she sings as she goes about her work. “Under the green pine, lay me down to sleep.” Then in the distance—the livid shadows of other approaching: a legion of soldiers. The dead man’s friends? His murderers? They all wear the same jackets, speak the same language, so how could she know? Sara Sidorova vanishes beyond the tree line. Her grandmother told her a story about the devils in these woods who turn men into smoke. Remembering it, she fits herself between birches bleak as old houses—invisible. She doesn’t know these soldiers but she hates them anyway. She never knew hate before, but now it’s an animal inside her. Storm clouds gather, drench the earth and then retreat. Afterward, Sara Sidorova trails the legion with nothing but the knife in her hands. She could slit their throats while they slept in the mud if they weren’t so watchful—but they are watchful. And for all the days she has spent learning to hold herself straight, learning never to bend, still she is too weak. At night, she howls her grief. The soldiers huddle round their campfires, blowing warmth into their hands, pretending it’s the damp that has prickled their skin. “Listen, do you hear that?” says one. Local accent. He is sixteen, maybe. Younger than her and certainly younger than the others. A stripling with a mop of pale blond hair and a delicate, pointed chin. “It’s nothing. The wind.” “Listen, I said! There’s a tiger in these woods. A man-eater. I heard it tore through a camp not far from here. Gorged itself on the captain and ate everything but his heart.” The boy is canny but all they see is a coward. Perhaps they’ll kill him on their own. “Something is out there,” he says again. The old reflex: “What kind of man are you then? Are you afraid?” Soothsayer, prorok, elf-child. Sara Sidorova doesn’t expect anyone will listen to him. This time she is wrong. Their commander doubles the guard and no one sleeps that night. In the morning they muck out pits and whittle birch spears to lay inside. One among them knows how to hunt a tiger. The girl’s knife isn’t sharp enough, her body isn’t light enough. She still leaves too many tracks. She abandons them for a time to hunt for cloudberries and the tender shoots of cornflowers. She chances the mushrooms with their delicate fringed veils and wonders whether she might poison herself. If it would matter. What is she living for then? The baby kicks. Her name will be Else, if it’s a girl. If it’s a boy she will have to strangle him. She hushes her hate. Back to the road. It’s close to dawn when she makes her second mistake. All around her, the wildwood is alive, first with warblers and rosefinches, then the rest of the noisy lot. Sara Sidorova moves through the undergrowth, letting the birdsong hide her business. But she isn’t as silent as she thinks. Suddenly, a bullet slams into her shoulder. The crack like thunder comes too late in warning. She falls in a slow spiral. No pain, not yet. Was this how it happened, husband? she wonders. Is this how they killed you? Then there’s wet loam beneath her, sweet smelling. She wants to stay, sleep in her pain now death has come. She puts her thumb to the wound. Her blood is coming out in spurts, and, with it, her fury and helplessness. The soldier boy’s face hovers over her: pointed chin, fey-blue eyes. “I thought you were one of them!” Sara Sidorova doesn’t believe him. After all, she’s wearing the same jacket he is. “You’re just a girl,” he says, though she is older than he is. At eighteen strands of bone-white gleam in the tawny thicket of her hair. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, staring at the knife. “Go away!” “If I do, you’ll die. Gangrene or blood sickness. I’ve seen it before. Why are you so dirty? Why are you so thin?” Scarlet smears across his cheek as he tries to wrestle her up. Her belly is cramping, a deep, bleary pain that tightens and loosens. The child mustn’t come yet. Too soon. “Leave me alone!” she hisses, for above all, she doesn’t want him to see the bulge beneath the jacket. “I’ll take you with me.”  Now she is fumbling with the blade. She can’t work her right arm properly but all she needs is a bit of cunning. “Who are you?” he cries as she stabs out wildly. She doesn’t tell him she is the circus master’s daughter. She doesn’t tell him how loved she was in these parts once. The tiger’s wife. Instead she whispers: “My name is Baba Yaga and I’ll eat you if you stay. I’ll chop up your flesh and grind up your bones. I’ll put a candle in your skull and hang it from my belt as a lantern.” The knife point scrapes his thigh bone and he staggers away in fright. So young. She almost smiles. Dragging his poor limbs like that, leaving a trail of gore. She’ll find him later if she must. For now, soft needles beneath her and the world going dark. Noises in the forest, the silken swish of something out there moving. Two golden eyes, like two bad moons. The pale curve of teeth. “Hush now, my love. I’m with you,” says the Tiger. “It’s you then, is it?” asks Sara Sidorova. She feels as if her spirit has already left her body. “Old man, Grandfather Death. The devil in the wood.” “It was you who loosed me.” “I told you to take them and you did. Thank you.” Somewhere else, her breath whistles between her lips in little gasps but she is smiling now. “The boy was right. This wound will kill you.” But she isn’t afraid. “I stuck him. Follow his blood and you’ll find a meal big enough to sate your hunger.” “Is that what you want?” “I want an ending,” she says. “Good. Come away with me then,” the beast whispers in her ear. Sara Sidorova watches as a magnificent, curved claw drags itself through the air, which parts like the stripling’s flesh. Then there is a road—a second road, shimmering black, winding, impossible. That second road becomes a staircase, a great twined chain thrown down to the earth. Inside her the baby moves like a song. Or is it a white bird? Smoke? Sara Sidorova doesn’t remember standing. She doesn’t remember setting her feet upon the path, but there, it’s done. She is walking, then rising upward. She sees the black arc of the heavens, stretched like a widow’s veil above her, the forest beneath now, then all of Strana. She imagines the trembling of small creatures. “Welcome, princess,” says the Tiger. Excerpted from The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death © 2024 by Helen Marshall The post Revealing <i>The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death</i> by Helen Marshall appeared first on Reactor.

Books Poetry 5 Witchy Poems for Spooky Season Hop on your broom and grab your cauldron — here are some poems to bring out your inner witch. By Leah Blaine | Published on October 15, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Hop on your broom, grab your cauldron, and poison your apples as we head straight into all things spooky, witchy, and magical. Agatha All Along has been a wicked fun ride with witty quips and delicious tension, and we need to celebrate our walk down the Witch’s Road with some poetry.  Poems about witches have been around as long as witches themselves because out of all the magical entities that exist, witches truly do appreciate a good rhyming pattern. But as with witches themselves, witch poetry is also not always about magic, but about the lives of women and what happens to them when they fall outside of acceptable womanhood; sometimes they gleefully take a giant leap outside onto a flying broom and sometimes the lines that draw them in shift and change and they find themselves tied to a pyre. Here are some poems that offer us a unique view of the bubbling and boiling witches of lore. Let’s go, witches, witchlings, and sorcerers!  Her Kind by Anne Sexton We’ll start with one of my poetry mothers, the wonderful and harrowing Anne Sexton, and her poem “Her Kind.” Acutely aware of how the confinements of patriarchal womanhood affects women, Sexton identifies here with all the ways women have existed as she, too, has been their kind. The opening line, “I have gone out, a possessed witch,” shows us directly that our guide through this poem has been labeled and self-identifies as a woman we may or may not trust completely (we do, actually, it’s ok). A witch is someone who refuses to follow rules, a possessed witch may not be in her right mind. What she shows us, though, are women who nurture, women who are misunderstood, and she, too, is one of them. They are her kind, you see, but the invisible thread that connects women, a sort of magic, means that we can identify with all of them, even the possessed witch who flies out in the blackness of night. A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde Yet another poetry mother, Audre Lorde makes no mistake about her subject with the opening of “A Woman Speaks” when she begins with how she is “Moon marked and touched by sun  /  my magic is unwritten.” In many ways and in many traditions, the telling of witches is coded in whiteness—even the things I noted above associated with witches can be traced back to Salem and witch hunts and white fairy tales. Same, too, for feminism where intersectionality makes many a white woman blanch. As a poet and writer, Lorde was acutely aware of witches’ lore and as a Black woman and feminist all too familiar with the minefield left by white women on the feminist landscape. So she has the voice in this poem guide us through the ways she discovers magic, the ways magic lives in her: I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn And tells us from where this magic came with a reference to her sisters who wear her memory “inside their coiled cloths.” The punch here is at the end where she tells us that she’s been a woman for a long time, “beware my smile,” and ends with  I am awomanand not white. The word woman with its own line, the idea of woman with its own line, now Lorde with her own line makes space for her and other Black women. Both a remembrance and reminder, Lorde takes control of the legacy of what it means to be a witch and also a woman. Are You A Good Witch by Marisca Pichette  Moving to some more recent SFF poets, here Marisca Pichette offers us a view of modern witch-hood with plays on words and form and spacing in “Are You A Good Witch?” The question at the opening harkening back to the Wizard of Oz, “Are you a good witch / or a bad witch?” becomes another stanza that hits you between the eyes: Are you a   witchor a   witch? Because, you know what, a witch is a witch is a witch is a witch. The tenants of good and bad changes depending on the telling and so, just fall into witchdom. We cover our drinks out of safety and necessity, worry about being stalked on our way home, but wait! We can, just maybe, melt into the city like this: Perched on the lip of a bubbling cauldronI’ve spent decades learninghow best to melt.How to slide out of sightinto the creases between the red lightand the green– Magic does indeed exist, the closing reminds us, but it’s in the power to see it in ourselves. If the legacy and lore of witches does anything, offering up protection in puddles, car tires, and spaying salt makes believers out of us all. The Witch Recalls Her Craft by Angel Leal How witches love their stories! Origin stories, tales of woe, tales of homecoming, tales of magical powers, any and every kind of story delights and entrances witches and their listeners. Stories are a magic of their own, by extension storytellers are weavers and wielders of a particular kind of magic that seeks to enthrall as with Angel Leal’s “The Witch Recalls Her Craft.” Leal notes in the opening that “I used to write rainfall into existence.” This sets up a melancholy tone for us, but one that feels so vaguely familiar that it hooks us, like any good story. But this isn’t just any story about any witch, but one who remembers what her power could do and somehow, someway, it’s been lost or diminished. We are reminded that the “Recalls” from the title isn’t clearly a noun or a verb. The floor is littered with unfinished spells        the bones of beasts I don’t remember. The beauty of poetry is grafting yourself into the spaces between lines and Leal offers us just that with the structure of this poem. It is left unsaid what caused the pile up of unfinished spells, leaving each reader to their own devices. By turns, we can imagine a grief or a depression or some unnamed change occurring, but the telling of what it feels like after, something her mother says she also never knew how to regain, is a universal feeling of loss that starts inside and explodes outwardly around us.  The Witches Are Without Work by Angela Liu You know what happens to witches who don’t have things to do? They brag. But, like, useful brags like in Angela Liu’s “The Witches Are Without Work” about shooting down crows (the kinds on legs, not the flying kind; those are useful). Imagery here smacks you upside the head as you are brought into the now, here, don’t forget you are present, forgetful, unseeing. There is vivid imagery of cleaning women who disappear after their shifts, bones left on plates you forget–though they are part of you now, forever. But what use is that, really, the voice asks when you can find a witch without work who can change your being if she ate you, bones and skin and all that you decided you hardly needed anymore? There are too many things to consume you as a human formed person, so tell the witches,  Tell themyou don’t needthis lurid cage of lust and                                                              grief, That line break leading to grief, the space left open, telling us why the need to be rid of form is so pressing, but if lores and legends and stories and now poems have taught us anything, it’s that witches are wide, all-encompassing, magical, fearful, nurturing, and, perhaps most obvious, always with us.  [end-mark] The post 5 Witchy Poems for Spooky Season appeared first on Reactor.

Kubrick Daughter Endorses Full MAGA Jacket

Whitmer's Social Media Guru Is EXACTLY Who You Think

It’s also the equivalent of 150 bowling balls – consider us obsessed.

The sunken space may represent a one-of-a-kind structure with massive implications for how people stored food at the time.

A study of over 600,000 children aged 10-19 has identified an association.

Democrats are trying to cancel or at the very least spoil President Donald Trump's upcoming campaign event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, further evidencing their desperation in the final weeks before the election and their hostility toward American freedoms. New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, for instance, demanded last week that the arena dishonor its contract and cancel the Oct. 27 event, which he equated to a Nazi rally. Hoylman-Sigal failed in depriving his fellow New Yorkers of an opportunity to engage in the democratic process and hear live from their candidate; however, Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway III and other establishmentarians hatched another scheme: implore fellow travelers to register for free tickets to the event. The ostensible purpose of this plot is to ensure that fewer people will attend the rally or to maximize the number of agent provocateurs in the crowd. On Oct. 9, George Conway tweeted, "Could someone post the sign-up link for TFG's big event at MSG? I think we should all go. Thx bye." Conway was a one-time contender for possible Justice Department positions in the Trump administration who soured in the shadow of his successful then-wife, Trump's former senior counselor Kellyanne Conway. Deemed a "total loser" by Trump, Conway co-founded the Lincoln Project with a handful of former Republican operatives, including Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, and John Weaver, who reportedly had a habit of sexually harassing young men online. The Lincoln Project and its leadership has not only churned out pro-Harris content such as the recent "Be a Man, Vote for a Woman" ad and helped set the stage for the attempts on Trump's life with incendiary rhetoric — Wilson, for instance, told MSNBC's Chris Hayes in 2015 that the donor class will have to "go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump" — but staged a fake white supremacist rally in 2021 to smear then-candidate Glenn Youngkin ahead of the Virginia gubernatorial election. 'Get 'em just in case.' The co-founder of the false-flag outfit shared the link to the event on Monday, writing, "Enjoy!" — a message the Lincoln Project, which has spent years whining about supposed threats to democracy and election interference, subsequently amplified. Numerous Harris boosters responded, indicating they had signed up to attend or intended to do so in hopes of denying a seat to someone who might sincerely wish to attend. Trump critic and self-identified author Nancy Levine Stearns, for instance, boasted in reply to Conway that she had secured two tickets to the event. John Sipher, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, was less subtle than others, writing, "Get 'em just in case. The only downside is a few empty seats." Hollywood script-reader Mark Hamill similarly dumbed it down, tweeting, "Who would sign-up, then NOT go? (except everyone who puts country over party)," to which Conway replied, "Honestly I think we should go." Instead of once again recommending a bullet for the presidential candidate shot by a Democratic donor, Rick Wilson sarcastically wrote, "Oh no. This is totally wrong to flood the zone on this. No one should do this." Conway followed up by advertising the time of the event and various ways the rally could be accessed. According to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight polling, Kamala Harris is leading Trump in New York by over 13 points. While another successful Trump rally in New York City may not ultimately move the needle, it would nevertheless signal the survival of alternative viewpoints in the Democratic enclave. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!