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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."
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PS1gamenwatch said:
Possibly fake because it's too much to be true. Whoever published this must watch a lot of wrestling:

http://www.themideastbeast.com/al-qaeda-sue-antifa-copyright-infringement/

Al-Qaeda to Sue Antifa for Copyright Infringement

Saying that the radical leftist group had emulated both its look and political views without authorization, al-Qaeda announced that it is filing a lawsuit against the American “antifa” organization.

“Listen, we were doing the whole ‘dress in black, cover your face and run around screaming about hating America’ thing 20 years ago,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader, told The Mideast Beast. “Then out of nowhere, these antifa jackasses come out with the exact same routine and act like they invented it.”

Zawahiri added, “Listen, I think that it is great that they are taking on our mantle and attacking innocent Americans for believing in free speech. But they should be paying us royalties!”

As of press time, antifa reportedly faced further legal action, as the Taliban accused the group of stealing its idea of destroying ancient statues.
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Fake.
 
PS1gamenwatch said:
Possibly fake because it's too much to be true. Whoever published this must watch a lot of wrestling:

http://www.themideastbeast.com/al-qaeda-sue-antifa-copyright-infringement/

Al-Qaeda to Sue Antifa for Copyright Infringement

Saying that the radical leftist group had emulated both its look and political views without authorization, al-Qaeda announced that it is filing a lawsuit against the American “antifa” organization.

“Listen, we were doing the whole ‘dress in black, cover your face and run around screaming about hating America’ thing 20 years ago,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader, told The Mideast Beast. “Then out of nowhere, these antifa jackasses come out with the exact same routine and act like they invented it.”

Zawahiri added, “Listen, I think that it is great that they are taking on our mantle and attacking innocent Americans for believing in free speech. But they should be paying us royalties!”

As of press time, antifa reportedly faced further legal action, as the Taliban accused the group of stealing its idea of destroying ancient statues.
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http://www.themideastbeast.com/about/
 
Banana peel traumatizes college students

http://thedmonline.com/greek-life-retreat-ends-abruptly-bias-concerns/
This weekend, leaders from Ole Miss Greek life convened upon Camp Hopewell in Lafayette County for a three-day retreat designed to build leaders and bring campus closer together. The retreat was cut short Saturday night, however, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp’s cabins.
The students shared what they found with National Pan-Hellenic Council leaders, sparking a day’s worth of camp-wide conversation surrounding symbolism, intended or not. In the midst of the open and sometimes heated discussion, senior accounting major Ryan Swanson said he put the banana peel in the tree when he could not find a trashcan nearby.
Alexa Lee Arndt, interim director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, said she was one of the only university staff members acting in an administrative capacity at the weekend retreat. Monday afternoon, she sent a letter to all campus chapter presidents, council officers and chapter advisers, confirming the incident and outlining the university’s plans.
“To be clear, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred at IMPACT … Because of the underlying reality many students of color endure on a daily basis, the conversation manifested into a larger conversation about race relations today at the University of Mississippi,” Arndt wrote in the letter acquired by The DM.
Student members of Panhellenic Council, National Pan-Hellenic Council and Interfraternity Council were all present at the retreat, which was organized by Fraternity and Sorority Life and the national group IMPACT. IMPACT is a campus-based leadership institute designed to foster improved relationships among campus leaders through a retreat-type program.
Makala McNeil, president of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, one of the nine historically African-American sororities and fraternities, said she saw the banana peel after leaving a group discussion that addressed race relations. Saturday morning, all of the retreat’s participants ate breakfast together, followed by a session where they shared their feelings on race relations at Ole Miss. The breakfast options included a fruit cart with bananas.
“The overall tone was heavy,” McNeil, a senior integrated marketing communications and sociology major, said. “I mean, we were talking about race in Mississippi, at the University of Mississippi and in the Greek community, so there’s a lot involved.”
After the large discussion session, the students split into smaller conversation groups. McNeil said that around noon on Saturday, she was walking with friends to their group session across camp when one of her sorority sisters pointed at a tree 15 feet away. She said that about six feet up the tree’s trunk sat a lone, fresh-looking banana peel.

“It was so strange and surreal to see it there,” McNeil said. “We were all just sort of paranoid for a second.”
She said the image was especially disturbing in light of an incident on American University’s campus in May of this year. The morning Taylor Dumpson was to take over as the school’s first female black student government president, students found bananas hanging from nooses across campus. Some of the bananas were inscribed with references to Dumpson’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
“That, to me, was a slap in the face to see that banana hanging in a tree after talking about the personal truths of our campus,” McNeil said.
McNeil said that by lunchtime, people throughout the camp knew about the incident. As lunch rolled into the afternoon discussion group, the banana peel dominated chatter. That afternoon’s group discussion session served as an open forum on the incident.
“As the staff member responsible for the wellbeing of our community, I felt it was imperative to provide space immediately to students affected by this incident to allow them an opportunity to voice their pain and concern,” Arndt wrote in her statement.
At the start of this session, McNeil said one black student stood up and asked that everyone there google the American University incident to understand the banana peel’s significance. She said he explained how bananas have historically been used to demean black people. McNeil said her sorority sister then raised her hand to simply ask who put the peel in the tree.
She said Swanson stood up and came forward almost immediately after the question. He apologized and said he did not mean any harm by leaving the peel in the tree.
“I want to sincerely apologize for the events that took place this past weekend,” Swanson said in a statement to The DM on Tuesday night. “Although unintentional, there is no excuse for the pain that was caused to members of our community.
“I want to thank my friends in the NPHC for their candid and constructive conversations that we have continued to have. I have much to learn and look forward to doing such and encourage all members of our university community to do the same. We must all keep in mind how our actions affect those around us differently.”
McNeil said that if the banana peel incident was an accident, people need to consider the effects of their actions versus their intent.
“You see how much fear and how much anger you insight in black people just from an unintentional image,” she said.
The conversation carried on, and tensions continued to rise. White and black members of the Ole Miss Greek community shared their views on the day’s events and race relations in general. McNeil said people had a lot to say, but the conversation began to move in an unhealthy direction.
“There were a lot of emotions being showed and a lot of transparency,” McNeil said. “I just don’t feel as though it was being facilitated in a constructive way.”
The massive discussion session wrapped up as more and more students stood and left the room – some in tears, some in frustration. NPHC members began texting friends to come and pick them up from the camp since no one had been allowed to drive his or her car up to the retreat. The remainder of the retreat was canceled later that night.
“At that point, we didn’t feel welcome; we didn’t feel safe,” McNeil said. “If we didn’t feel wanted or safe at the camp, our best option was to leave.”
Katrina Caldwell, vice chancellor for diversity and community engagement, said her office was asked to put a plan together to handle the weekend’s incident on campus.
“Right now, we’re just talking to people on campus who have some experience working across diversity to help the students process what happened,” Caldwell said.
Caldwell said she needs to talk with a couple more faculty members before deciding “what makes the most sense” for the campus.
Arndt said it was important for the vice chancellor for diversity and community engagement to lead the response. Arndt reached out to Caldwell on Saturday night.
“We want to be sensitive to already-scheduled events that are taking place but also do not want to delay having these important follow-up conversations,” Arndt’s statement said.
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Are these gorillas who are chimping out aware that sometimes, people eat bananas, and might just have carelessly thrown the peel away without intending to offend chimpout gorilla apes who apparently live to get offended by nothing?
 
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No, an empty bottle of milk on somebody's doorstep would offend them.

Frankly, I'm more amazed at the length of the article.
 
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University of Arizona Professor's Ph.D. revoked after findings on violent video games questioned

Ohio State University took the extraordinary step of revoking a graduate’s doctorate last week. Now her future at the University of Arizona, where she is an assistant professor of communication, is unclear.

Jodi Whitaker’s problems started in 2015, after scholars in two countries noticed irregularities in the data in her 2012 paper on video games. The study in Communication Research, called “‘Boom, Headshot!’ Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy,” found that playing a violent video game improved real-life shooting skills. Initially, it was something of a boon for both Whitaker, then still a graduate student at Ohio State, and her co-author and dissertation committee chair, Brad J. Bushman, the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication there. That’s because Bushman served on President Obama’s committee on gun violence and his research challenges what he calls myths about violence, including that violent media have a trivial effect on aggression.
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So group of insane people salivate over chance to go YES VIDEO GAMES CAUSE VIOLENCE WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG and wait what's this?

But Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University -- whose own findings on video games clash with Bushman’s -- soon challenged the paper, as did Malte Elson, a postdoctoral researcher in educational psychology at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Together they alerted the Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State to what they called irregularities in some of the variables of the data set. The values of questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable, according to Communication Research, which in 2016 decided that a retraction was warranted.

Bushman was cleared of wrongdoing by Ohio State, but he agreed to the retraction. He also agreed to the retraction of another paper in which Whitaker was not involved -- one finding that watching violent cartoons inhibits children's learning -- earlier this year, as reported by Retraction Watch. Data on a second 2016 paper by Whitaker and Bushman (on which Bushman was the lead) also have been corrected; that study found that "catharsis beliefs" attract people to violent video games.

But Whitaker, the 2012 paper’s lead author, was found responsible for the errors. And Ohio State’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to revoke her doctorate, granted in 2013.
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Oh wow, her name was on a paper that was complete horse-shit and provably so, and she got it revoked based on that. I'll bet it's all the fault of the Patriarchy or something.

In a joint statement to Retraction Watch, Markey and Elson seemed to suggest that Whitaker had been thrown under the bus.

“There were two authors on the problematic ‘Boom, Headshot!’ study. That the female, junior researcher is found culpable for those problems while the male, senior researcher is not seems questionable,” they wrote. “During the investigation pertaining to the article in question, we discovered two different data files on the senior author’s computer between which the codes for variables were altered. These alterations occurred in a manner which supported the original study’s hypotheses. Additionally, the authors of the original study were unable to provide the raw data in order to confirm which data file was correct.”
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Jaimas said:
Oh wow, her name was on a paper that was complete horse-shit and provably so, and she got it revoked based on that. I'll bet it's all the fault of the Patriarchy or something.
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So she's the Andrew Wakefield of fake research about the eeeevulz of gaming (Wakefield being the guy who invented antivaxers with faked research in The Lancet).
 
http://m.hindustantimes.com/bhopal/...in-7-months/story-6BV3HIJNUjDQ8FHtsiDzjI.html



Again a toilet has been turned into a kitchen in Madhya Pradesh.

Seven months after a toilet in Bundelkhand’s Chhatarpur district was turned into a kitchen, exposing tall claims of the government’s awareness drive under swachh bharat abhiyan, this time in a similar way, a toilet has been turned into a kitchen in Shivpuri district.

When Janpad chief executive officer (CEO) Mehendra Jain and other officials went for an inspection of some villages to see whether people were using toilets, they saw smoke coming out from a toilet at the house of one Lakhan Prajapati at Kundai village.

When they entered the toilet they found a lady cooking food on an earthen hearth inside the toilet. When officials asked her why she was using the toilet as a kitchen, she said it was raining outside, so she decided to cook in the toilet.

In Raikuya, another village in Shivpuri, a tribal woman Sangita has set up a small shop inside a toilet. When she was asked why she had turned the toilet into a shop, she told local media that they didn’t have water supply for the toilet.

She said she covered three kilometres everyday to fetch drinking water. “When getting drinking water is such a struggle, how can we get water for the toilet and use them”, she said.
 
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