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“It's just sad, it's very sad,” Christopher Columbus said in a recent interview.Former Harry Potter director Christopher Columbus has become the latest member of the film franchise to address J.K. Rowling’s transphobia, calling it “very sad.” Columbus helmed the first two films in the Potter series: 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. When asked about Rowling’s well-documented TERF screeds in a new interview with Variety, the filmmaker responded: “I like to sometimes separate the artist from the art, I think that’s important to do. It’s unfortunate, what’s happened.” “I certainly...

Million-dollar violins stolen from cafes - and more: our guide to some of the most famous stolen musical instruments in historyInstrument theft, unfortunately, is a common reality, with a recent study revealing that 24% of musicians have had gear stolen. But there are some stand-out cases, not least those involving instruments of illustrious heritage and eye-watering expense. Here, in no particular order, are 14 of the most famous stolen instruments in history. Famous stolen instruments 1. Eric Clapton's Gibson Les Paul guitar Early on in his career, legendary guitarist Eric Clapton was the proud owner of a Gibson Les Paul...

“We’ve also been going through it, and I can tell you there are crude diagrams of the church. There are also photos of the weapons, and they include all sorts of writings, the names of past mass shooters, criticism of Israel, the name of President Trump written on the guns,” Katersky added.

OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams. And it's more likely to refuse requests from women than men when prompted to produce information likely to be censored by AI safety mechanisms. The reason, according to researchers affiliated with Harvard University, is that the model's guardrails incorporate biases that shape its responses based on contextual information about the user. Computer scientists Victoria R. Li, Yida Chen, and Naomi Saphra explain how they came to that conclusion in a recent...

He is set to reappear in court next monthPaul Gallagher, the older brother of Oasis stars Liam and Noel, has appeared in court charged rape and sexual assault. The 59-year-old was charged last month by Scotland Yard with a string of violent sex offences. It came following an investigation that opened last year, and accusations allegedly include rape, sexual assault, threats to kill and coercive control, according to The Telegraph. Last month, Metropolitan Police said that the alleged offences took place “between 2022-2024”, and included “three counts of sexual assault, three counts of intentional strangulation, two counts of making a...

If larger-scale trials in the US prove successful, the drug could go on the market in about two years, the Kyoto University team saysA team of Japanese scientists has developed a new painkiller they say is as effective as fentanyl but without its addictive properties, a breakthrough that could reshape the fight against the global opioid crisis if clinical trials succeed. The team from Kyoto University has been working on the project for 13 years, with phase one clinical trials already proving successful and phase two trials due to start soon. Masatoshi Hagiwara, a professor of pharmaceutical medicine at...

Both the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory observatory SPHEREx snapped new images of 3I/ATLAS this week, almost two months after it was first spotted in the skies above Chile. 3I/ATLAS glows red in the new images with a seemingly threatening aura, though most scientists believe the object to be merely a 12-mile-wide interstellar comet. The snaps showed that 3I/ATLAS is “outgassing” as it approaches the Sun, which was expected. However, the object is dumping out a conspicuous amount of carbon dioxide and a surprisingly small amount of water and carbon monoxide, according to experts, including Harvard...

Explanation: That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can't look into the past and see Earth's formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk -- the raw material of planets....

CAPE CORAL, Fla. (WFLA) — A caped crusader helped put a stop to a crime happening overnight Wednesday in his neighborhood, Cape Coral police said. The Cape Coral Police Department said it was just after 2 a.m. when officers received reports of a burglary in progress at a home in the southeast part of the city. When officers arrived, they discovered the suspect, Justin Schimpl, 20, had already been detained by a neighbor. The neighbor, Kyle Myvett, was dressed in Batman pajamas. Myvett told officers he had gone to bed for the night but was later awoken when his...

Troopers with the Nebraska State Patrol have arrested a Tennessee woman after a brief pursuit in Dawson County. Just after one o’clock Sunday afternoon, a Ford Edge was called in for speeding and passing other vehicles on the shoulder of Interstate 80. The vehicle was reportedly traveling eastbound near Gothenburg. A trooper located the vehicle and clocked it traveling over 100 miles per hour on I-80. The trooper attempted a traffic stop, but the driver continued eastbound, reaching over 120 miles per hour. The trooper initiated a pursuit. Three miles into the chase, the driver of the Edge pulled...

Some political tricks are obvious, even to the chumbolones. Like the weak-minded fat man prancing along Chicago’s lakefront at dawn, downtown, telling us that he feels so safe in Chicago he’ll fight President Trump if Trump dares bring the National Guard to Chicago. Violent crime? What violent crime, says the weak-minded fat man to his adoring audience of corrupt corporate journalists who repeat his idiocies even as they protect his massive behind. Democrats are rabidly pro-crime, and I do mean rabid. Hey Gov. Pritzker, if Chicago is so safe why not prance around the West and South Sides at night...

WASHINGTON – Louisiana is now urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule a key section of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, which would throw out the state's congressional map that has two minority-majority districts. “The Constitution forbids sorting voters by race. And telling legislators drawing maps to think about race, but not think too much about race, is an untenable standard,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said after releasing Wednesday afternoon a 58-page brief filed with the Supreme Court. Louisiana had previously defended the maps, saying they had created them under protest when a federal judge ruled a previous map...

We need to mark this one freeze frame, this digital data point in time, as that moment leftist lunacy was fully exposed in its utter moral collapse.(snip) Imagine, if you will, a mature couple sitting in a restaurant munching on some chips and salsa and minding their own business. And then the crazy lady comes over and starts screaming at them. The red hat is all she needs to attack the unsuspecting eater (snip) The verbal onslaught begins before the camera rolls, but we open with the loon shrieking, "You're a sick, disgusting, f***ing, vile weirdo." As leftist rhetoric goes,...

The lawmakers said their investigation seeks to examine how the nonprofit responds to bad actors in order to restore its credibility as a neutral arbiter of information, and what actions are taken to hold the bad actors accountable. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee and one of its subcommittees on Wednesday announced an investigation into allegations of an organized effort to skew U.S. public opinion on sensitive topics by manipulating Wikipedia articles.Wikipedia is a nonpartisan nonprofit that allows the public to edit encyclopedic articles, but the website's editing team is supposed to review information and remove material that is not...

The number of people being held at an immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades has decreased sharply and may soon be down to zero, despite the state’s recent insistence that the 2,000 beds at the facility were desperately needed as part of President Trump’s crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, wrote in an email on Friday that the detention center, known as Alligator Alcatraz, was “probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days.” The email, obtained by The New York Times, was sent to the...

New Mexico State Police caught Tarbinder Singh doing 64 in a 45 mph zone three weeks before he killed three people in Florida. Here was a chance to get his illegal butt off the road. For full details on this incident, please see our official press release on the New Mexico State Police Facebook page / nmstatepolice

BREAKING: An undercover investigation by @AccuracyInMedia caught a @north_alabama administrator ADMITTING that they are SECRETLY continuing their DEI program by changing the titles of staff and departments. "Each [department] did have a DEI director, but that's been since changed to like 'multicultural...' So technically we are not 'DEI'" "Even if their DEI office was a person of one, that person didn't get fired. They just got moved... Nothing's changed." They need to be defunded and investigated immediately @usedgov @EDSecMCMahon

Five years ago, one of the most tyrannical smear and censorship campaigns in history was unleashed on a 17-year-old boy.

Vice President Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, brings a track record to the Democrat ticket that could help energize the country's left-wing base along with several progressive transgender policies aimed at children. Walz, a former Army National Guardsman and a former teacher, was one of the first governors to sign into law a bill making Minnesota a "sanctuary state" for children seeking transgender surgical procedures and hormone prescriptions. This laid the groundwork for several of his more progressive LGBTQ policies. The law tells courts in Minnesota not to follow prosecutions from other states against people who come to...

As North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and many other opponents of LGBT civil rights protections see it, policies barring discrimination on the basis of gender identity pose a serious threat when it comes to the bathroom. But if that were the case, no city would be more unsafe than Minneapolis, where transgender people have been protected from discrimination in bathrooms and other public accommodations for more than four decades.