As a very ugly standoff develops between legacy cinemas and legacy studios, Disney appears to be playing its cards close to its chest.

The road to haircut hell is paved with good questions. Questions like: Is the coronavirus pandemic the Flowbee’s time to shine?

While this experiment may sound odd, it could represent the start of a whole new field of research.

This solar contact could provide a potential explanation for the asteroid's weird, two-tone surface.

Boba Fett has been on Lucasfilm’s to-do list for a while now.

Google has been folding in a score of updates to help delineate Duo from the dozens of other video chat services available.

The hacker in question hasn't even graduated high school yet.

If you think you’ve got something of value to share with the world – or maybe you just want a project to tackle to fill the hours – then we’ll take you through what you need to know.

Only the best images are used to create a mosaic of the entire planet, resulting in a super-crisp, high-definition view.

The majority of these children have tested positive for the virus or seem to carry antibodies from an earlier infection.

A South Dakota teenager has admitted to slaying a 16-year-old girl who “ran away” from home to live with him after they met on an online dating website, authorities said.

Michael Campbell, 17, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter on Thursday for the death of Shayna Ritthaler, a 16-year-old from Moorcroft, Wyoming, who was reported missing from a local coffee shop on Oct. 3. Less than a week later, her body was found in the basement bedroom of Campbell’s home.

“We got into an argument and then I shot her,” Campbell said during a change-of-plea hearing on Thursday, before referring to the teenager as his girlfriend, according to the Associated Press. “I shot her in the head.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Alison Roman’s latest comments about Marie Kondo have not sparked joy.

In an interview with The New Consumer about her increased popularity and the avenues she might pursue to capitalize on it, the popular food columnist discussed her hesitance to put her name on a product line—citing the Japanese organization maven and Chrissy Teigen as examples of what she did not foresee in her own future.

“I have a collaboration coming out with [the cookware startup] Material, a capsule collection,” Roman said. “It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere—vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Roy “Captain Roy D” Davis has devoted much of the last three years to the QAnon conspiracy theory, writing books pitching the concept to new fans and getting his car repainted with an enormous “Q” on the hood. Through it all, he’s been utterly convinced that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn—a central figure to much of the Q community—was the victim of an anti-Trump cabal orchestrated by the leaders of the deep state. He corresponded with other Flynn supporters following his legal case, and donated proceeds from one of his books to Flynn’s legal fund. 

So when Davis saw on Thursday that the Justice Department would drop its charges against Flynn for lying to the FBI, Davis was euphoric.

“He’s a hero of mine,” Davis said. “I wouldn’t do all of these things just out of the blue.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden told the world that he “unequivocally” denied accusations by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his Senate office, that he sexually assaulted her in the early ’90s.

On Friday evening, Reade responded: Prove it.

“Joe Biden should take the polygraph,” Reade told former television anchor Megyn Kelly, in an interview that aired on Kelly’s YouTube channel. “I will take one if Joe Biden takes one, but I’m not a criminal.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Marissa Guale is like all too many Americans right now. Her husband and father of her two children, Raul, is on a ventilator in a hospital on Long Island, fighting for his life while sick with COVID-19. Raul, a 34-year-old nurse, likely caught the disease while working in a nursing home. When the National Institutes of Health announced an emergency use authorization for the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, Marissa scrambled friends and family on Facebook to figure out how to get access for Raul, emailing hospital administrators, senators, and doctors. They pressed the Guale family’s case for a potentially lifesaving treatment on social media to anyone who would listen.

Her confusion about where and how to get access to the drug isn’t unique. All over the country, families, doctors, and hospitals are wondering how to get the drug and on what basis it’s being distributed. The Trump administration, which is in charge of allocation, hasn’t published any guidance on how it’s making decisions about the scarce supplies of the drug.

So who decides which hospitals get remdesivir? And what’s the most ethical way to prioritize access?

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Roy Horn, half of the iconic magician duo Siegfried and Roy, has died from complications of the new coronavirus in Las Vegas. He was 75.

Together with Siegfried Fischbacher, Horn, born Uwe Ludwig Horn, created one of the most widely known magic acts in the world, staging shows filled with sleights of hand and exotic animals for packed audiences in Las Vegas for more than a decade. At its height, the glitzy show grossed $45 million per year, according to The Hollywood Reporter, among the highest ever in Las Vegas.

“Today, the world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend,” Fischbacher said in a statement. “There could be no Siegfried without Roy, no Roy without Siegfried.” Fischbacher thanked the doctors and nurses who cared for his friend.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

On Friday afternoon, I had a fun, wide-ranging conversation with Rosie O’Donnell, the renowned comedian, daytime TV host, philanthropist, and Trump Enemy No. 1.

The occasion for our talk was I Know This Much Is True, an HBO miniseries premiering May 10 which sees the A League of Their Own star flex her dramatic muscles like never before as Lisa Sheffer, a no-nonsense social worker at a mental health facility housing Thomas Birdsey (Mark Ruffalo).

Over the course of our chat—which will run Monday, May 11—we touched on not only the show (she is excellent) but Trump’s years-long vendetta against her, the Tara Reade allegations, and the untimely death of SMILF amid claims of misconduct against creator and star Frankie Shaw.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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SAVANNAH, Georgia—Allegations Friday that a Georgia district attorney blocked police officers from arresting the killers of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery were just the latest blow to a local law enforcement apparatus that has been rocked by a series of troubling and deadly scandals.

Brunswick DA Jackie Johnson’s office allegedly prevented the Glynn County Police Department from arresting Travis and Gregory McMichael in connection with the shooting death of Arbery, an unarmed black man, in late February, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Johnson has recused herself from that case. But one Glynn County commissioner suggested she personally intervened in early plans to make arrests “to protect her friend” Gregory McMichael. McMichael was a former cop and investigator in the Brunswick DA’s office for 25 years who had reportedly investigated Arbery in the past. 

It is far from the first time the office—and local law enforcement more generally—had come under scathing scrutiny. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It seems like during quarantine, everyone has taken up cooking. Some people have been baking bread. Others have been perfecting their pie crust. Even my brother, who I’ve never seen cook a thing in his life, made a chicken pot pie the other day. But berry season is almost upon us and so, I have been prepping my jam making skills. 

While jelly is translucent and made from the juice of fruits, and marmalade is made from citrus fruits and can be overly complicated, jam is fairly easy to make. It’s made with whole or cut fruit and cooked with sugar, and can end up either chunky or completely smooth, depending on how you like yours. 

Jam is all about being assertive, about testing out different add-ins and sugars. To help you get the most out of the berry season, we’ve rounded up everything you need to make ideal jam.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Morningside USA was supposed to be apocalypse-proof. 

A gated, stucco fortress in the southwest corner of Missouri’s Ozark mountains, Morningside is an evangelical Christian community built to rent condos right through the end of the world.

“Where are you going to go when the world's on fire? Where are you going to go? This place is for God's people and this place, we need some farmers to move here,” Morningside’s founder, the disgraced doomsday televangelist Jim Bakker, said in a May 2018 sermon. “Did you know people from the government, from NASA, research from so many of them, they have said in their research, the safest place to live in troubled times is right here?”  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Campaigns and consultants have spent the last four years worrying about the Trump campaign’s digital operation. Even before COVID-19 upended the election and forced candidates online, the Trump campaign was geofencing campaign rallies, micro-targeting digital ads, and amplifying deepfake videos.

And now, as both the crisis and the general election enter their third month, panic is beginning to set in about the startling digital gap between the two parties, amplified by the recent Trump campaign announcement of both a new app experience and the start of a $10 million digital push against Joe Biden. 

President Trump’s campaign manager has called what he’s built a “juggernaut” and is likening his digital infrastructure to a Death Star. In reality, what he's built is a trap.  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey—After five years fighting to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Russia now appears inclined to dispose of its infamous client. Assad’s persistent brutality and corruption, and his inability to establish even the semblance of a functioning state, has grown to be a burden Moscow would prefer not to bear.

And then there’s the problem of Iran. Assad, members of his family, and his Alawite clansmen enjoy close, perhaps unbreakable, bonds to the regime in Tehran and to Iranian-backed militias in Syria. All of which undermines Moscow’s primary mission there: to rehabilitate the Assad regime as a symbol of stability capable of attracting hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment for reconstruction, which Russian firms would then be poised to receive. 

As long as Assad’s relatives continue to function as a mafia and give free rein to Iranian troops using Syria as base of operations to threaten Israel and plan attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq, those countries likely to foot the bill for Syrian reconstruction—the nations of Europe and the Gulf—are unlikely to come up with the cash. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” 

That’s how epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding began a since-deleted 14-tweet thread on Jan. 25 warning about the “thermonuclear pandemic level bad” infectiousness of the coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China.

The first confirmed U.S. case had been announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) days earlier outside Seattle. But the disease was not widely understood to be a potentially nightmarish pandemic. Many infectious disease experts had been ignored despite warning for years that the U.S. was not prepared for a seemingly inevitable health crisis. Feigl-Ding, a visiting scientist at Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, wanted to help ensure their message was heard.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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By Rachana Pradhan and Fred Schulte | Kaiser Health News

The Trump administration has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic-related bailouts to health care providers with checkered histories, including a Florida-based cancer center that agreed to pay a $100 million criminal penalty as part of a federal antitrust investigation.

At least half of the top 10 recipients, part of a group that received $20 billion in emergency funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, have paid millions in recent years either in criminal penalties or to settle allegations related to improper billing and other practices, a Kaiser Health News review of government records shows.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Two years ago, the voices of survivors of sexual harassment and assault launched an unprecedented movement the world over, using Tarana Burke’s MeToo framework. That one moment was a spark into the unknown, but the movement itself was no happy accident. It was built to fuel a reclamation of power for those who had been silenced for too long, a laborious undertaking by activists, advocates, and organizations including mine—the National Women’s Law Center, which also houses and administers the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund.

Since then, the #MeToo movement has enabled considerable progress, including making space for more and more people who have claims of sexual misconduct to come forward. People like Tara Reade.

But despite this dramatic cultural awakening, our institutions and systems are just beginning to stir. The lack of necessary legal and policy changes both in our government and in our workplaces, schools, houses of worship, and otherwise have created a world that very imperfectly serves the needs of survivors. Every domestic worker who is entirely unprotected by our federal and most state civil rights statutes, and every person who is classified as an independent contractor and left out of civil rights protections, have proven that our work must take on the reform and re-envisioning of the very systems that excluded them in the first place. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

This post contains spoilers for Dead to Me Season 2.

Maybe it’s the surreality of, well, everything lately—or maybe it’s just aged like the fine wines all of its characters toss back by the bottle. Whatever the reason, Dead to Me Season 2 hits even better than Season 1—fighting off a sophomore slump with a fresh batch of twists, dramatic ironies, and, most importantly, some more Christina Applegate angsting out to metal. Perhaps this season’s smartest move, however, is a trope pulled straight out of Soapy Dramas 101: Bringing James Marsden back to play his own twin.

Series creator Liz Feldman was sending the usual thank-you notes back and forth with cast and crew after Season 1 wrapped when she received a particularly amusing message from Marsden.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A 7-year-old boy from Westchester County is the second child in New York state to die from pediatric multi-symptom inflammatory syndrome tied to COVID-19 since the pandemic began. A 5-year-old boy died earlier in the week from the same syndrome at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital in New York City.

The childhood ailment has affected at least 73 children in New York state and authorities are now looking for other potential cases across the country. Cases have also been reported in Washington, D.C., California, Delaware, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington state and New Jersey, where a 4-year-old died with symptoms last month.

It has been previously thought that children are less likely to suffer any serious complications from the coronavirus.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Being at home this long, or really, just in one place for this long, has led me to see how much waste I produce. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot more than I thought. But I’m not here to shame anyone, in fact, quite the opposite. I think there are plenty of small ways we can cut down our carbon footprint, from driving less (check), to not using a washing machine or dryer (also, sadly, check), but gardening is what I’ve been doing, and is something that I’d recommend everyone give a shot now that we all have a little more times on our hands.

GETTING STARTED

Composting is a natural way to recycle all of the organic materials in your house through decomposition. Compost can improve your soil’s water retention, which saves you money on your water bills, and helps keep excess garbage out of landfills, too. To get started you need two things. The first is a compost bin for your kitchen. This is great whether you want to start a compost at home or if you have a compost center you can bring them to. You want something sleek, designy, yet simple because after all, it’s really just a trash can. This is an excellent one.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Last year the release of Google's Pixel 3a heralded a shift in the mid-range phone market. Coming in at $649 and packing some flagship specs, it changed what people should expect from a a phone at that price. Other brands followed suit, including Apple with its recently released iPhone SE. Suffice to say, the arrival of Googles new budget device, the Pixel 4a, is cause for some excitedment. Here's what we know about it so far. More »

Last year, Google turned the mid-range phone market on its head by introducing the ludicrously-priced and well-specced Pixel 3a. A few other brands have followed suit since then, but none have been quite as exciting as the new iPhone SE. Now it truly seems like flagship inclusions at lower price points are here to stay - and it's about damn time. The trend of $1,500 - $2,000 becoming the norm for new phones over the last few years has been bad for buyers. A new middle ground has been long overdue and we welcome it. But is the resurrected iPhone SE actually a good phone to buy in 2020? More »

With the three Skywalker trilogies over and done with for now, what better than to celebrate the made-up Star Wars holiday than to re-examine some weird facts we all glossed over. Here's 10 strange (and some downright freaky) facts you probably didn't know about to celebrate. More »

Vodafone might be one of Australia’s biggest names in mobile connectivity, but it's relatively new to NBN and has only been offering plans since 2017. While Vodafone has a reputation for offering bang-for-buck mobile plans, is it the same for NBN? Let's take a closer look. More »

Circles.Life is a little-known telco with a questionable name choice. But it also happens to have a real hectic SIM-only plan deal right now. For $38 a month you get a whopping 103GB data -- also per month. And you don't even need to sign a contract. More »

Over the past week we have been hearing about issues that some rural Australians are having installing the COVIDSafe app. This is because Telstra, unlike Vodafone and Optus, didn't have SMS over Wifi, which prevented 2FA texts from being received by people who don't have mobile phone reception. Importantly, is an issue that also impacts other 2FA SMS as well as emergency texts. During our investigation into this Telstra started quietly rolling the feature out. More »

With Mother's Day right around the corner, there's still time to book in a last minute gift. It's 2020 and all the best gifts are basically gadgets now so here's our roundup to help you out. More »

There's only a few days left before Mother's Day and if you've forgotten to pop in online orders, it's probably a little too late now. Don't fret because the internet is a wonderful place and can serve up a number of experiences you can buy mum instantly without having to resort on physical deliveries. Here's the best experiences you can gift your mum this Mother's Day. More »

Samsung just released the smaller version of its Galaxy Tab S6 tablet in Australia. Though it did appear in some online stores a little early, now it's official. Here's what its packing and how much it will cost in Australia. More »

Over the past few years plant-based meat has become increasingly popular. Thanks to the popularity of brands such as Impossible, we;re now seeing increasingly more vegan-friendly meat alternatives in the supermarkets and even being sold by fast food chains. Meal kit delivery service Marley Spoon has even begun offering plant-based options, using v2food mince. This is what they taste like. More »

I'm a huge podcast tragic. From true crime to weird radio plays, I like shoving as much of them into my ear holes as possible. But despite my efforts, I realised that I don't listen to as many Australian podcasts as I'd like. Sure, I have a few favourites, but I could be doing more to support local creators. So I asked around the office to find out what the best Aussie podcasts are, and why I (and you) should be listening to them. More »

The cast of Community is reuniting for a virtual table read to raise money for coronavirus relief. Almost all of main cast will be back for the online event, including Donald Glover who left the show in season 5. It will also include a Q&A where fans can submit questions via social media. This is how you can watch it live. More »

While considering a new phone plan your first instinct may be to compare the big three - Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone. But over the past few years smaller telcos have come in swinging with plans that have high data allowances and smaller monthly fees. By looking a little deeper you can grab a great bargain. Here are five of our favourite deals these telcos are packing right now. More »

Researchers at a Sydney university have discovered how some female bees have managed to reproduce despite never doing the deed with another. More »

MONEY saving hacks are something which many people will look to adopt in their lives, be it for a financial milestone or for a rainy day fund. And, there may be a way in which some soon see their spare cash add up.

THE CORONAVIRUS lockdown is now causing serious damage to the UK's economy, Tory MP Steve Baker has warned - stressing he was now "gravely concerned" at the situation

BRITAIN'S summer holiday destinations will face some of the biggest economic hits of the coronavirus pandemic with fears of massive job losses in coastal communities, a study has claimed.

APRIL saw 20.5 million job losses in the United States, the biggest rise in the jobless rate since the Great Depression.

FRENCHIC, the British paint brand with eco-friendly formulas for breathing new life into furniture, homes and garden decor, has seen sales surge 500 percent recently as lockdown sends DIYers into overdrive.

COMPUTER services company PTC is using augmented reality , the enhanced visual technology seen in Pokemon Go smartphone games and Iron Man movies, to produce ventilators in record time for the NHS.

STATE PENSIONS are calculated by National Insurance contributions - but can you top up any missed years?

MERVYN KING, the former governor of the Bank of England, once issued a brutal analysis of the global banking system and argued for its reinvention, it can be revealed as the Government fine-tunes its economic response to the coronavirus pandemic.