The victim has been reported missing for around 12 months

'Now, hundreds more erroneously added to voter rolls have been identified'

He said he was only 16

'It’s very sad and unfortunate'

'That may not be a very satisfactory answer'

'It’s affirming for us'

This video has been altered using AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Cars have been a cornerstone of modern society ever since Karl Benz created the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine in 1885–1886. This invention set the stage for an automotive revolution that would reshape industries, transform societies, and fuel an ever-growing cultural fascination with cars. Henry Ford’s introduction of the Model T in 1908 further cemented the car’s place in history, bringing affordable, mass-produced vehicles to the public and changing transportation forever. From their earliest days, cars represented freedom and mobility, allowing people to travel farther and faster than ever before. As cars evolved from practical modes of The post 10 Best Songs About Cars appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Books book review A Gothic Spiderweb: The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins A review of Bridget Collins’s new gothic novel By Alexis Ong | Published on October 8, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share There is always gratifying schadenfreude in a well-told postcolonial parable, and I love the jaunty, measured confidence of a neat, polished story about naive 19th century English people about to do regretful things with all the self-awareness of a boiled potato. More often than not, when we first meet these characters, the sun is shining down on them, and the world is bright and beautiful and kind, and they have no clue of the hurricane of slow, creeping misery about to happen to them over the next 200-odd pages. The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins is one of these novels, and I devoured it like a hungry orphan in two days. It has, on the outset, all the right ingredients for period-drama messiness: an orangery, a terrible marriage, a guileless himbo, a screwed-up town, and all the arrogance and condescension that white civilized Britannia can spare toward the unknown. There are strange spiders, bad family legacies, and all the right period-appropriate lashings of tired resentment, nauseating sexism, and drawn-out homoeroticism one could hope for. Collins (perhaps augmented by her training as an actor) has a real gift for theatrical charm and pacing that shines through on the page. The Silence Factory is a meticulously-planned tour through twin narratives of colonial sins and can-do English entrepreneurialism (which goes hand-in-hand with wretched English hubris), led by a lively (at times, gleefully unforgiving) conductor with the timing and precision of a surgeon.  Things aren’t perfect for Henry Latimer, recently widowed and working a dead-end job for his father-in-law who makes intricate hearing aids. After meeting the wealthy, eccentric owner of a little-known spider silk factory, Henry’s future starts to feel bright and rosy, and on his journey Collins mercilessly imbues him with an intoxicating strain of ambition that constantly feels on the verge of disaster. Originally trained as a poet, Henry is finally given the opportunity to indulge in his penchant for romanticism and sentimentality; what his new employer-benefactor gives him isn’t just independence from grief and mundanity, but a passionate new cause. The language here has fantastic sense of momentum drawn from Henry’s swelling pride, small tastes of success, approval and acceptance—things Collins deeply understands are integral to building a sense of giddy, impossible hope, which, in turn, necessitates a brutally sober return to the reality of living in such a debilitatingly divided society.  Buy the Book The Silence Factory Bridget Collins Buy Book The Silence Factory Bridget Collins Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget We only know the other protagonist, Sophia Ashmore, through her old journal from the 1820s; Sophia’s husband, James, dragged her to a remote Greek island in search of a rare spider meant to have fantastical properties. Again, Collins leans on the sensibilities of tightly-laced upper class tradition and English cultural solipsism to contextualize Sophia, who struggles to support James in his Very Important Work. At times these characters (quite necessarily) veer into heady caricature—Sophia as a repressed, dutiful wife, and James as a sweaty, amazingly unhinged villain. Collins here indulges a bit with Sophia’s voice—often exuberant, anguished, desperate in the privacy of her diary entries—to craft a moody, borderline maudlin portrait of an Englishwoman who almost escaped the bonds of Englishness.  Together, Henry and Sophia make an exceedingly well-structured, extremely readable train wreck—really, two parallel train wrecks practically vibrating off their respective tracks—that hinges on each protagonist’s inherent drive toward qualities like determination and goodness and perseverance. In the context of the English identity at the time, so consumed with duty and maintenance and anglochristian-dictated hierarchy. Is it not English to want to be all these things? Don’t these principles distinguish the English from the inscrutable pagans on that cursed Greek island? Sophia’s enchantment and enthrallment with this prospective other life—a life of social and sexual liberation away from James—isn’t a new exploration of a new phenomenon by any means. What Collins shines at here is embodying the babbling rationalization and re-rationalization of a sheltered woman finally reckoning with the smallness of her designated place in the world: turbulent and rife with emotion and regression. Henry, also trapped within the confines of his proper station, has a lot going on. But he is my favorite, and the real neurotic icon in the story, because Collins has molded him from all the familiar failures and base thoughts and innocuous greedy little ideas that have been part of society forever. And when it’s much too late—when Henry finally realizes with glacial denseness that he has made some incredibly bad decisions—all of that giddy joy and excitement that he’s been coasting on suddenly melts away to leave behind the cold, sharp edges of reality. Whomst among us hasn’t been there, and whomst among us doesn’t take some delight from seeing all of this unfold for a character so clearly careening toward the private hell of public humiliation?  Collins may not have set out with moral instruction in mind, but at the end of the book, there’s nevertheless that familiar urge to gently pat Henry on the shoulder and tell him, ah, dear man, it was all a hard lesson learned. Naturally, these elements of regret, remorse, recompense, and shame have much wider meaning for modern reader—at least one who chooses to dig into the absolute shitshow of postcolonial literary analyses and metaphors and subtext connected to this genre. But for Henry, painfully humbled and unable to undo his sins, and for Sophia, living in service of a tyrannical buffoon, their failures aren’t meta-self-owns—they’re deep, personal blemishes that one must find a dignified way to live with. This is the famous stiff upper lip that colonial thinking is built on, which continues to define mainstream English culture today, and is an especially fine lens through which to pore over The Silence Factory while curled up with a cup of tea. Is that not the English way? [end-mark] The Silence Factory is published by William Morrow. The post A Gothic Spiderweb: <i>The Silence Factory</i> by Bridget Collins appeared first on Reactor.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Federal Emergency Management Agency in May 2023 launched a $12 million grant program designed to increase “equity” in disaster responses by making greater investments in communities with high concentrations of racial and sexual minorities, documents show. FEMA’s 2023 Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant Program sought to disburse multimillion-dollar grants designed to bolster disaster preparedness “equity” for what it called “underserved communities,” a label later defined in grant documents as “populations sharing a particular characteristic, as well as geographic communities, who have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social and civic life.” Examples of these groups cited in the FEMA documents include African Americans, Hispanics, Middle Easterners, LGBTQ+ people, and people living in rural areas, among others. “LGBTQIA people, and people who have been disadvantaged, already are struggling,” FEMA emergency management specialist Tyler Atkins said in a leaked Zoom recording that surfaced on Sunday. “They already have their own things to deal with. So, you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself.”  Maggie Jarry, an emergency management specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services, responded to Atkins by stressing that emergency management is moving away from providing “the greatest good to the greatest amount of people” and working toward “disaster equity.” Black and gay people disproportionately live in areas where the effects of climate change, alongside poor infrastructure and a lack of resources, make natural disasters more dangerous, according to the FEMA documents. The agency used this position to argue that investments in these communities are needed to “effectively address equity in emergency management.” FEMA instructed entities applying for grant funding under the program to use the Biden-Harris administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to identify disadvantaged communities where they would spend their federal grant dollars. The screening tool provides users with a map of every county the federal government considers “underserved” for the purposes of federal grantmaking. Many of the counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina and Northern Georgia were made ineligible for funding through this program as a result of the screening tool’s designations. Hurricane Helene had left 227 people dead as of Saturday and damages caused by the storm could reach as high as $35 billion, according to estimates from the reinsurance company Gallagher Re. North Carolinians have received $27 million in individual assistance approved by FEMA, The Associated Press reported. Entities that requested FEMA grant funding had their applications evaluated based on whether or not they selected communities labeled as “underserved” by the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool as well as the degree to which they centered equity in their proposal. “To advance considerations of equity in awarding RCPGP grant funding, FEMA will add additional points to the scores of projects that will benefit disadvantaged communities,” the grant document reads. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Wednesday. “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.” FEMA’s shortfall in funding comes after the agency spent nearly $1 billion on migrant assistance programs in the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years. Hurricane Milton is a Category 5 storm on track to hit the Florida Gulf Coast on Wednesday, CNN reported. Florida is still recovering from Helene. FEMA did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post FEMA Doled Out Millions Pushing ‘Equity,’ Prioritizing ‘Underserved Communities’ Leading Up to Hurricane Season appeared first on The Daily Signal.