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Arkansassuspended tight end Jeremy Sprinkle for Thursday's Belk Bowl for what head coach Bret Bielema deemed, "conduct detrimental to the team," and it appears we now have the reason why. Sources confirmed to Jason Kersey of SEC Country that Sprinkle's suspension stems from an accusation of shoplifting during a Tuesday trip to the local Belk department store in Charlotte, N.C.

A Sydney council has enforced a summer-long alcohol ban on one of the city’s most popular beaches as a result of “the poor and inappropriate behaviour of a few” on Christmas Day. Coogee beach – a popular destination for backpackers, including many from the UK, on Christmas Day – was left strewn with a reported 15 tonnes of garbage by an estimated 10,000 revellers.

House Republicans are aiming to ensure there's no repeat of a Democratic sit-in last summer over gun control. GOP leaders are planning a vote on a set of rules changes when Congress convenes in January that includes fines for members who use electronic devices to take pictures or video from the House floor. The proposal comes six months after Democrats live-streamed a sit-in on the House floor for 26 hours last June to call attention to their demand for votes on gun-control bills. Republican leaders shut off the cameras in the House gallery throughout most of the protest, but Democrats...

The former Bronx student who got his teacher pregnant in 2012 has confessed to police that he killed the woman and their 4-year-old boy, police sources told The Post.

From the moment he joined, 8-year-old Joe Maldonado eagerly looked forward to camping trips and science projects as a member of the Cub Scouts. But his expectations were dashed after his mother said she received a phone call from a scouting official who told her that Joe would no longer be allowed to participate because he was born a girl. Kristie Maldonado said she was stunned because her son had been a member of Cub Scout Pack 87 in Secaucus for about a month, and his transgender status had not been a secret. But some parents complained, an official from...

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Four Washington state electors who cast their vote for someone other than Democrat Hillary Clinton will each be fined $1,000 next week, the secretary of state's office said Thursday. David Ammons, a spokesman for Secretary of State Kim Wyman, told The Associated Press that the electors will have 60 days to pay the fine, and said the office is putting together an appeals process in case of a challenge. Clinton won the state's popular vote last month, earning her 12 electoral votes. Under state law, presidential electors — who are chosen by their party at their state...

A deal to undo the North Carolina law known as the "bathroom bill" fell apart Wednesday night when legislators couldn't agree on a plan to repeal the measure, a sign of the bitter political divide within the state. The North Carolina General Assembly was called into a special session about nine months after they passed the law, which tarnished the state's national image as major corporations decided to pull up stakes, entertainers canceled concerts and the NCAA and ACC moved sporting events away. The wide-ranging law's best-known provision required transgender people to use restrooms in many public buildings corresponding to...

Donald Trump's upset win in the US presidential election astonished people so much that they rushed to the dictionary to look up the word everyone was using to describe the event: surreal. Indeed, Merriam-Webster's dictionary on Monday named surreal its Word of the Year 2016, the honor given to the word or term with the sharpest spike in look-ups over the previous year. Surreal, definition: "marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream." It actually triggered not one but a series of sudden jumps in people looking it up.

He didn’t book rooms at President-elect Donald Trump’s spectacular hotel in the nation’s capital just three blocks east of the White House. And he didn’t seek accommodations at a Motel 6 either. “New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was so eager to celebrateHillary Clinton’s presidential inauguration, he booked 200 hotel rooms in D.C. for family, friends and supporters of his own possible future bid for the presidency,” reports New York Post columnist Richard Johnson. Mr. Cuomo snagged this big reservation at the iconic Madison Hotel, three blocks north of the White House. Alas, his plans went awry for obvious reasons. What...

Star Trek: Discovery finally has its star. The Walking Dead's Sonequa Martin-Green will headline the first Star Trek series in over a decade for CBS All Access, TVGuide.com has learned. Martin-Green will play a lieutenant commander in the new series hitting CBS' streaming network in May 2017. This is the first time that a Star Trek series won't be anchored by a character playing a captain, but according to Entertainment Weekly, who first reported the news, Martin-Green's character's position as lieutenant will have "caveats." Casting an African-American female to lead the series was a big priority for the show's original...

"It's been likened to 'Ghost' meets 'Heaven Is for Real,' with a dash of 'God's Not Dead,' " Sorbo said of the film. Fox News' Sean Hannity has delved into filmmaking by partnering with Kevin Sorbo on a movie in which the former star of TV's Hercules: The Legendary Journeys will play a world-renowned atheist whose beliefs are dramatically challenged.

Metal girders and the roof of a crowded church collapsed onto worshipers in southern Nigeria, killing at least 160 people with the toll likely to rise, a hospital director said Sunday. Mortuaries in the city of Uyo are overflowing from Saturday's tragedy, medical director Etete Peters of the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital told The Associated Press. The Reigners Bible Church International was still under construction and workers had been rushing to finish it in time for Saturday's ceremony to ordain founder Akan Weeks as a bishop, congregants said.

Ever find yourself caught up in a vivid memory of an event that, you later realize with confusion, didn’t really happen the way you thought? According to new research by psychologists at the University of Warwick in the U.K., you are far from alone.  The study demonstrated that about half of individuals will come to believe a fictional event occurred if they are told about that event and then repeatedly imagine it happening.  More than 400 people participated in the study, led by professor Kimberley Wade

— A man who killed an Alabama convenience store clerk more than two decades ago was put to death Thursday night, an execution that required two consciousness tests as the inmate heaved and coughed 13 minutes into the lethal injection. Ronald Bert Smith Jr., 45, was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m., about 30 minutes after the procedure began at the state prison in southwest Alabama. Smith was convicted of capital murder in the Nov. 8, 1994, fatal shooting of Huntsville store clerk Casey Wilson. A jury voted 7-5 to recommend a sentence of life imprisonment, but a judge overrode that...

The Bensalem Police Department is asking for the public's help locating a man accused of theft.    According to police, on Wednesday Kevin Van Allen, 30, of Williamstown, was given a bank deposit bag from his place of work. It was to be deposited in the bank, but Van Allen never made the large deposit. Police reported that he quit his job through an email the next day. 

In total, Trump raised $339 million and spent $322 million - a far cry from the $565 million spent by Clinton, according to the latest Federal Election Commission disclosure reports. Trump spent $94 million in the final days of the campaign, compared with the $132 million spent by Clinton. Trump frequently promised to run a shoe-string campaign and argued his self-funding model meant he wasn’t obligated to any special interests.

A “Jeopardy!” episode airing next week has taken an emotional turn after one of its contestants, Cindy Stowell, died of cancer at the age of 41 on Monday. Stowell, a science-content developer from Austin, Texas, taped the quiz show back in August, and the episode is set to premiere on Dec. 13, a “Jeopardy!” spokesperson confirmed. This marks the first posthumous airing of a contestant’s appearance. “When Cindy Stowell taped her appearance on ‘Jeopardy!,’ she had Stage IV cancer. Competing on ‘Jeopardy!’ was a lifelong dream for Cindy, and we’re glad she was able to do so,” said host Alex...

The U.S. Supreme Court returns Monday to the issue of race in politics when it hears claims that North Carolina and Virginia packed African-Americans into a small number of voting districts to limit their statewide electoral power. Both cases present challenges to new maps drawn after the 2010 census. In North Carolina the issue is the boundaries for its congressional districts, while in Virginia state legislative districts are contested.

President-elect Donald Trump has a chance to stack the courts with conservative judges, thrilling Republicans who suddenly have the opportunity to remake the judicial system. Conservatives watched with dismay as Congress confirmed 327 of President Obama’s judicial nominees, fearing it would further entrench liberal control of the courts. Now the tables have turned. Trump could come into office with around 117 judicial vacancies to fill, and unlike Obama in his first term, will need only 51 votes in the Senate to confirm his nominees.

Fascism may be poised to join an elite pool of words — among them science, integrity, socialism, bailout, truthiness and the slang interjection “w00t” — that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has selected as word of the year. The word fascism, as Merriam-Webster noted on Twitter on Tuesday, spiked in November searches and was an object of interest all year long. The unusually high interest in its definition over the course of 2016 has propelled it to the fourth-most-searched word in the history of the dictionary’s website.