He runs over a police officer(not really, but he is being charged like he did) about 3 hours before his tee time, gets yanked out of his car and arrested right in front of the course entrance, taken to the station and booked, released about an hour and a half before his tee time, gets to the course about an hour before, tees off on time and birdies his first hole(10th as we started on the back 9).

Even Tiger couldn't pull that off! Crazy....

Giant pandas are coming back to Washington.
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo announced Wednesday that two new giant pandas — Bao Li, 2, a male, and Qing Bao, 2, a female — will be arriving from China later this year.
Bao Li has family roots in the District.
He is the son of Bao Bao, a female giant panda who was born at the zoo in 2013, and the grandson of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, the panda couple whose departure from the zoo last year broke hearts and signaled the end of an era.




But now comes a new era and a chance for fresh generations of zoo-goers to experience the thrill of pandamania and the hope that the new bears will someday produce cubs.
“I am filled with such joy right now,” said Brandie Smith, the zoo’s director. “It’s hard to express it.”
“The program is so important to giant pandas,” she said in a telephone interview last week. “We are working to save an endangered species.”
Smith said giant pandas have drawn millions of visitors to D.C., and millions more have watched the zoo’s pandas on the panda cam. “I’m excited for us. I’m excited for them.”
The announcement was a surprise, given the tense relationship between the United States and China, which owns and leases all giant pandas in U.S. zoos, and the short period of time since the departure of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and their son, Xiao Qi Ji, late last year.
The new pandas are coming on a 10-year lease, ending in April 2034, during which the zoo will pay the China Wildlife and Conservation Association $1 million a year, the zoo said in its announcement.

“Some of the officers called themselves “The Goon Squad” because of their willingness to “use excessive force” and not report it”

ConocoPhillips agreed on Wednesday to acquire its smaller rival, Marathon Oil, the latest deal in a wave of consolidation sweeping the oil industry.
The all-stock deal values Marathon at $22.5 billion, including debt. The acquisition “further deepens our portfolio and fits within our financial framework, adding high-quality, low cost-of-supply inventory,” Ryan Lance, Conoco’s chief executive, said in a statement.
Marathon’s operations are in some of the most sought-after oil fields in New Mexico, North Dakota and Texas; it also drills offshore of Equatorial Guinea.
Marathon traces its roots to the 19th century, and like ConocoPhillips, its predecessors were once part of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire. In 2011, Marathon Oil spun out its refinery business, which now operates as Marathon Petroleum.
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The oil industry in the United States, the world’s largest producer of crude, is made up of many small and medium-sized oil companies, ranging from family operations with a few wells in one state to global giants like Exxon Mobil. Wall Street values ConocoPhillips at about $140 billion, making it about 10 times as big as Marathon Oil but around a quarter the size of Exxon.
Oil companies have pulled off some of the biggest acquisitions of the past year despite regulatory scrutiny from the Biden administration and volatility in the oil market. The U.S. giants have been harnessing record profits, giving them the firepower to acquire smaller players with operations in oil-rich regions like the Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas and in the Gulf of Mexico.
There was $250 billion in deal-making activity in the oil and gas industry last year, according to Reuters, including Exxon Mobil’s $60 billion acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources and Chevron’s $53 billion takeover of Hess, which was approved by Hess’s shareholders on Tuesday.
The boom in oil deals is due in large part to the robust recovery in commodity prices since the early days of the pandemic, when oil prices plummeted.
The U.S. benchmark crude oil price is now trading at around $80 a barrel. While prices are about a third lower than the peaks that prevailed in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, they are high enough to allow Western oil companies to make robust profits and buy other producers. Conoco said that the purchase of Marathon would add over two billion barrels to its portfolio, with an average cost of less than $30 per barrel to supply.

​

Conoco was in the running to buy Endeavor Energy Resources earlier this year, but lost out to Diamondback Energy, which announced an agreement in February to buy the company for $26 billion.
Conoco’s agreement with Marathon is subject to regulatory clearance and a vote by shareholders. The companies said they expected to close the deal in the fourth quarter.
In the year after the deal is closed, Conoco said it expects to cut at least $500 million in costs at the combined company. Conoco also said that it was planning to raise its dividend by 34 percent at the end of this year and buy back more than $20 billion of its shares in the three years after it takes over Marathon.

Has to be up there with the biggest collapses in golf. She could barely swing a club and could not putt at all the last 4 or 5 holes.

To mention this garbage on Memorial Day, as though he died defending his flag, country and people. Psycho bitch went AWOL...nothing more, nothing less! 🤣 Hope it hurt!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🤣 You sure showed those "colonizers," Toastie!! 🤣🔥💩 Comrade Well Done!! 🤡

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New Delhi recorded its highest temperature ever measured on Wednesday — 126 degrees Fahrenheit, or 52.3 degrees Celsius — leaving residents of the Indian capital sweltering in a heat wave that has kept temperatures in several Indian states well above 110 degrees for weeks.
In New Delhi, where walking out of the house felt like walking into an oven, officials feared that the electricity grid was being overwhelmed and that the city’s water supply might need rationing.
The past 12 months have been the planet’s hottest ever recorded, and cities like Miami are experiencing extreme heat even before the arrival of summer. Scientists said this week that the average person on Earth had experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures in the past year than would have been the case without human-induced climate change.
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Extreme heat can cause serious health issues and can be fatal.
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Although late-afternoon dust storms and light drizzle in New Delhi brought hope of some reprieve on Wednesday, the weather station at Mungeshpur, northwest of the capital, reported a recording of 126 degrees around 2:30 p.m. Dr. Kuldeep Srivastava, a scientist at the regional meteorological center in Delhi, said it was the highest temperature ever recorded by the automatic weather monitoring system, which was installed in 2010.
For weeks now, temperatures in several states in India’s north have reached well over 110 degrees, and hospitals have been reporting an uptick in cases of heatstroke. In the Himalayan states, hundreds of forest fires have been reported.
The heat wave has coincided with campaigning for India’s general election, with last phase of voting set to take place on June 1. Candidates, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and opposition leaders, have continued holding large public rallies, and Nitin Gadkari, a cabinet minister who is running for re-election, fainted from the heat while addressing a rally.
On Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi, the opposition leader, took a break during a speech to pour water from a bottle onto his head. “It’s quite hot, no?” he said.

Oh the humanity...
.

Just perfection.

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The Iowa High School Sports Network will begin charging viewers for live-streamed high school championship games — something the Iowa High School Athletic Association opposes and has filed a court petition to stop.

IHSSN plans to charge viewers to watch state baseball tournament games July 17-21. A single game will cost $9.99, or viewers can pay $18.99 to view the entire tournament.

The network holds the media rights for the nonprofit IHSAA and has provided free viewing access to state tournaments via television and streaming formats. The IHSAA sanctions annual boys state tournament events in baseball, basketball, bowling, cross country, football, golf, soccer, swimming, tennis, track and field and wrestling.


In a statement on Twitter, the IHSAA said it objects to the network's plan to charge the public. On Wednesday, the organization filed a petition for declaratory relief in Polk County District Court.

"IHSAA will continue to strive for free public access to broadcasts of its championship events," it said in the statement.

The IHSAA has provided free event broadcasts since the 1950s, when it aired the boys state basketball tournament.

In 2010, the IHSAA entered into an exclusive broadcast, marketing and media rights agreement with IHSSN. The agreement says IHSSN will offer a free livestream of the state baseball tournament finals, according to a letter the association's lawyers wrote to the network and that is included in court documents. The agreement is valid through the 2023-24 school year.

Pope Francis apologized Tuesday after he was quoted using a vulgar term about gays to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s ban on gay priests.



Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni issued a statement acknowledging the media storm that erupted about Francis’ comments, which were delivered behind closed doors to Italian bishops on May 20.


Italian media on Monday had quoted unnamed Italian bishops in reporting that Francis jokingly used the term “******ness” while speaking in Italian during the encounter. He had used the term in reaffirming the Vatican’s ban on allowing gay men to enter seminaries and be ordained priests.




Bruni said Francis was aware of the reports and recalled that the Argentine pope, who has made outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics a hallmark of his papacy, has long insisted there was “room for everyone” in the Catholic Church.


“The pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who were offended by the use of a term that was reported by others,” Bruni said.


Francis was addressing an assembly of the Italian bishops conference, which recently approved a new document outlining training for Italian seminarians. The document, which hasn’t been published pending review by the Holy See, reportedly sought to open some wiggle room in the Vatican’s absolute ban on gay priests.


The Vatican ban was articulated in a 2005 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, and later repeated in a subsequent document in 2016, which said the church cannot admit to seminaries or ordain men who “practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture.”





Francis strongly reaffirmed that position in his May 20 meeting with the Italian bishops, joking that “there is already an air of ******ness” in seminaries, the Italian media reported, after initial reporting from gossip site Dagospia.


Italian is not Francis’ mother tongue language, and the Argentine pope has made linguistic gaffes in the past that raised eyebrows. The 87-year-old Argentine pope often speaks informally, jokes using slang and even curses in private.


He has been known for his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, however, starting from his famous “Who am I to judge” comment in 2013 about a priest who purportedly had a gay lover in his past.

Interesting to see that consistency pays off in weird ways..

Because the officiating sucks. They need to clean up the contact. I really don t know how they can call anything because there is no consistency.

u like burger?

I've seen more flopping in the playoffs than I can remember all time NBA. Refs are buying into it as well. Not a good product.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A University of Florida research employee and students have been implicated in an illegal, multi-million dollar scheme investigated by the Justice Department to fraudulently buy thousands of biochemical samples of dangerous drugs and toxins that were delivered to a campus laboratory then illicitly shipped to China over seven years, according to federal court records….

The materials smuggled to China included what the government described as purified, non-contagious proteins of the cholera toxin and pertussis toxin, which causes whooping cough. Cholera is a generally non-fatal intestinal infection that can cause severe dehydration. Whooping cough is a highly contagious bacterial infection that can lead to violent coughing, vomiting and even respiratory distress — but is preventable with a vaccine.

Other materials smuggled to China in the scheme included small amounts of highly purified drugs – known as analytical samples — of fentanyl, morphine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, acetylmorphine and methadone, court records showed. Such small samples would generally be used for calibrating scientific or medical devices.

The substances can’t legally be exported to China.

Well? Have ya?

Chase Oliver is gay and pro choice. At first blush that sounds like a problem for Biden, since those are traditional Dem strongholds. Could he attract enough unhappy Dems to matter?

OTOH, to the extent that many American libertarians are religious conservatives, could Oliver push enough libertarians to the Republicans to matter?

This is turning into an even sadder story than I realized. This is a long article with lots of details and quotes from his family that explain what happened.

http://nyti.ms/1OXeVC7

Let’s do this!