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In her new book, “Say More,” MSNBC host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed President Joe Biden did not look at his watch during a ceremony transferring the remains of 13 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan in 2021. Jen Psaki claims in her new book that Biden never looked at his […]

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GNN has reported several times over the last three years about large baleen whales returning to waters in which they haven’t been sighted for decades. Now again, news from Argentina shows that the benefits of the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling are still compounding, with sei whales returning to the South American […] The post Majestic Sei Whales Reappear in Argentine Waters After Nearly A Century appeared first on Good News Network.

News The Umbrella Academy The Umbrella Academy Showrunner Teases the “Madness and Chaos” We’ll See in Season 4 …and hopefully more dance parties? By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on May 16, 2024 Credit: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix Warning! This post contains spoilers for the ending of Season Three of The Umbrella Academy. Do not read further if you don’t wish to be spoiled. At the end of Season Three of the Netflix show, we saw the Hargreeves once again in a new reality. This timeline, however, sees them without powers, something that showrunner Steven Blackman told Entertainment Weekly will be a throughline of the upcoming final episodes. “The first place I started with Season Four was: What happens if you were once a superhero and then suddenly you’re not?” he told Entertainment Weekly. “What does that do to you? Not only as an individual, but what is the family dynamic when suddenly they find themselves normal? I think it’s a challenge for all of them. What might’ve brought them together initially is the fact that, as a dysfunctional family, they found some connection in their abilities. With those superpowers stripped away, who are they as a family?” Blackman also said that Viktor, played by Elliot Page, will be the one who adjusts best to the new state of affairs. “Viktor is probably the one sibling who is most comfortable in his skin in Season Four,” he said. “He’s doing better than any of the other siblings in terms of adjusting to his new life. He’s the most accepting of their new reality.” The showrunner also teased that Season Four will be full of “madness and chaos,” and that the end of the third season gives a clue as to what we’ll see in the upcoming episodes. “Fans may remember that at the end of Season Three, Hargreeves wasn’t able to finish programming the Universe Machine, and Allison still pressed the button anyway,” Blackman said. “So we’re definitely in an altered version of our now. We’re back to the time period they’ve always wanted to get back to! At least they start in the right year, but we know that something isn’t right. My little teaser is clearly Hargreeves didn’t finish what he needed to do before Allison pressed the button, so that is going to have repercussions to their timeline.” The fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy starts streaming on Netflix on August 8, 2024. [end-mark] The post <i>The Umbrella Academy</i> Showrunner Teases the “Madness and Chaos” We’ll See in Season 4 appeared first on Reactor.

News The Librarians: The Next Chapter The Librarians: The Next Chapter Releases First Look Photos & Gets Premiere Date This fall on the CW… get ready to turn the page. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on May 16, 2024 Credit: Aleksandar Letic/The CW Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Aleksandar Letic/The CW The spinoff of the popular series The Librarians has finally gotten a release date. The new show, accurately called The Librarians: The Next Chapter will start turning its pages this fall on the CW. The network announced at their upfront presentation today that the show would air right after the final season of Superman & Lois on Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT. We unfortunately don’t know when exactly in the fall the show will start, so it’s best to set a calendar reminder to go off after Labor Day to find out when that first Thursday will roll around. Here’s the synopsis of the new show: The Librarians: The Next Chapter is a spinoff of the original TV series The Librarians, which followed the adventures of the custodians of a magical repository of the world’s most powerful and dangerous supernatural artifacts. The new series centers on Vikram (Callum McGowan), a “Librarian” from the past, who time traveled to the present and now finds himself stuck here. When he returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He is given a new team to help him clean up the mess he made, forming a new team of Librarians. In addition to McGowan, Jessica Green will also star in the show as a Guardian named Charlie Cornwall. Other cast members include Olivia Morris as Lysa Pascal, the Scientist and Bluey Robinson as Connor Green, the Historian. Dean Devlin (The Ark) is on board as showrunner. We also have two first look photos of the show, which you can see above and below. [end-mark] Credit: Aleksandar Letic/The CW The post <i>The Librarians: The Next Chapter</i> Releases First Look Photos & Gets Premiere Date appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Fantasy Read an Excerpt From Audrey Burges’s A House Like an Accordion A woman searches for her missing father in order to reconcile the many strange and fantastical secrets of her past… By Audrey Burges | Published on May 16, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A House Like an Accordion, a new fantasy novel by Audrey Burges, publishing with Ace on May 21st. Keryth Miller is disappearing. Between the growing distance from her husband, the demands of two teenage daughters, and an all-encompassing burnout, she sometimes feels herself fading away. Actual translucence, though—that’s new. When Keryth wakes up one morning with her hand completely gone, she is frantic. But she quickly realizes two things: If she is disappearing, it’s because her father, an artist with the otherworldly ability to literally capture life in his art, is drawing her. And if he’s drawing her, that means he’s still alive. But where has he been for the past twenty-five years, and why is he doing the one thing he always warned her not to? Never draw from life, Keryth. Every line exacts a cost. As Keryth continues to slowly fade away, she retraces what she believes to be her father’s last steps through the many homes of her past, determined to find him before it’s too late and she disappears entirely. The first time Papa got me a sketchbook of my own, I carried it around for days, its pages blank, its cover as pristine as I could manage to keep it. It wasn’t pink or sparkly. Its black matte cover showed me it was real—a real sketchbook, for a real artist. It meant Papa believed in me, and shining under the light of his faith, any lines I sketched could only possibly be a disappointment. I clutched my blank sketchbook while I flipped through Papa’s, filled with cupolas and arched windows and low adobe structures, incomplete fragments of stone and wood occasionally interspersed with whole buildings. Some were recognizable, and some we had yet to find. All of them came from the real world, and anything Papa drew from reality bore real consequences. But I didn’t understand that then. I was afraid to draw in my own book, but the images inside Papa’s looked stark and lonely, and I longed to give them company. He found me crouched over a page with a red pen, my imagined cardinal already half-sketched atop the graphite needles of a spruce tree he’d drawn, and he bellowed at me with a thundering voice I’d never heard him use before. I dropped the red pen as if it were made of lava. I’ve never used a red pen since. He knew I was frightened, and he dropped to his knees beside me, gathering me into his arms. “Keryth. I’m so sorry I scared you. But you didn’t know what you were doing.” I sniffed—louder than I meant to—and ordered my tears to stay where they were, burning behind my lashes. “I know I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t draw. Not like you. I’m sorry I ruined your picture, Papa.” “Is that what you think?” He smoothed my mousy-brown curls back from my face and looked into my eyes. “Keryth, is that why you haven’t used your book?” “I’m going to ruin it. I’ll only draw something stupid.” Buy the Book A House Like an Accordion Audrey Burges Buy Book A House Like an Accordion Audrey Burges Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget “You’re not going to ruin it. And nothing is stupid when you’re creating something new. That’s how we learn. I got the book for you because you said you wanted to draw together. I was going to show you some things.” “But I drew in your book, and now you’re angry.” “I’m not angry.” Papa sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled me into his lap. “It’s just that the lines in that book have a price, or at least they do when I draw them. I don’t know yet if it’ll be the same for you. That’s why I wanted to try it together first.” I looked at my scribbled cardinal, interrupted mid-beak. “Your tree was empty. Everything in your book is empty.” “As empty as I can make it, yes. And I still mess up sometimes. Have you ever seen a cardinal in person?” I shook my head. “Only in Gran’s Audubon book.” “Good. That’s good.” “Why is that good?” Papa stood up and reached for my hands, pulling me to my feet. “Follow me, and I’ll show you.” We walked through the creaking screen door of our small cabin, and the hiss of the hinge slammed it shut behind us. I followed Papa to the blackberry bushes that ringed the house. The fruit was so ripe that the canes drooped under the weight, surrounded by frustrated bumblebees. No animals foraged the berries, and birds would only swoop down close to investigate and then soar upward again, as if encountering invisible netting that blocked their beaks. The berries were only for us. Papa pointed out a determined Steller’s jay, the tufted crest on his head cocked to one side as he puffed out his chest on a ponderosa branch high above the blackberry canes. “He’s planning his next route of attack,” Papa said. “Why can’t he get the berries?” I watched the jay make another V-shaped dive, another perplexed perch on the branch. “Why can’t any of the animals?” “Because we’re the only animals I made them for. Now watch.” Papa flipped open my blank sketchbook and grasped the pencil he always kept at the ready behind his ear. I watched the line grow behind his hand, curving into a sketched approximation of the jay more rapidly than I could follow, right down to the tilt of his head. I looked up to the ponderosa branch to compare the likeness, but the jay was gone. I took back my sketchbook and peered at the shaded feathers, the intricate detail capturing even the minute fronds around the jay’s eye. And then I looked at the eye, and my heart stopped. “Papa.” I felt my breath quicken, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the jay’s. “Papa. He’s trapped.” “Yes, he is.” Papa’s voice carried a wistful finality as he tucked the pencil back behind his ear. I kept gazing at the bird on the page. His wings, his tufted head, his curled feet around the branch were all silent and still, but the curve of the page looked like a caught breath, and I could feel his silenced heart trapped in his hollow bones beneath his feathers, all captured in a two-dimensional cage. “Let him go, Papa! Please let him go!” The tears I’d held back earlier spilled over my eyelashes and burned my cheeks. “He’s scared! Let him go!” Papa knelt again and grasped my shoulders. “I don’t know how. I never have.” I was eight, and I was confounded by any reality where my father was unable to do something. Anything. I was named for a princess—an imaginary one, an old family story about a royal girl’s adventures in a kingdom full of saints and angels. But a princess nonetheless. And to my mind, that made my father a king. He was Papa, and his powers had no limits. “He’s all alone,” I whispered, looking at the bird. “Never draw from life if you can help it, Keryth. Every line has a cost.” I touched the shaded feathers around the jay’s still eye, and his expression changed. I didn’t know birds had facial expressions, but there was a relaxing in the tension of the lines—more of a sense of breathing and movement than had been there before. Something like trust. I looked at Papa with confusion. “If you knew he’d be trapped, why did you do it? And why in my book?” “So you would always remember the most important thing I ever taught you.” “You could have just told me not to draw living things. I would have listened.” “You wouldn’t have believed it, and the rule is bigger than that: It’s not just living things. You can’t draw anything from the real world. Or I can’t, at least, not without capturing it com- pletely, just like this bird. But that isn’t the lesson.” “What is?” Papa took the book from me and clapped its covers closed, snapping the bird inside, before he handed it back. “Don’t grow up to be like me.” Excerpted from A House Like an Accordion by Audrey Burges, published by Ace, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright ©2024 by Audrey Burges. The post Read an Excerpt From Audrey Burges’s <i>A House Like an Accordion</i> appeared first on Reactor.

The border crisis is a challenge to local law enforcement in most states, Sheriff Matt Gentry of Cullman County, Alabama, told senators Wednesday on Capitol Hill.  Gentry and other Alabama law enforcement officials visited the Texas-Mexico border last year, where he recalls “seeing how a president and a liberal media are lying about what we are facing.” Most of the illegal aliens pouring over the border weren’t women and children, the sheriff said, but men ages 18 to 25 from Somalia, China, and Haiti.  “Guess what? That is moving to our state. And you think, well, how does it affect local law enforcement?” Gentry asked rhetorically at the Police Week event sponsored by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.  “We’re going to deal with it first. We’re going to deal with the drugs coming across the border,” Gentry said, answering his own question. “We’re going to deal with the violence that they’re inflicting upon people in their homes. So, it’s really a unique time for law enforcement, especially local law enforcement, because we have open borders and we have a president that does not care about our country.” Current and former law enforcement officials spoke at the Capitol Hill forum, as did Tuberville and several other Republican senators, many criticizing President Joe Biden’s border policies.  “The opioid crisis continues to devastate U.S. communities, fueled by fentanyl smuggled into the country, which is killing our kids and making cartels filthy rich,” Tuberville said. “What people don’t realize is that it isn’t just our federal officers along the border who are managing the fallout of the president’s failed policies. Our state and local police in every community across the country are dealing with drug and human trafficking.” Tuberville said several police chiefs had told him that they never had heard of fentanyl until just a few years ago, and now it’s the most dangerous drug in Alabama. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said the solutions in fighting fentanyl are simple, but difficult to implement in the current political environment. He said Florida sheriffs are dealing with the problem. “The first thing we ought to do is secure the border. That’s simple,” Scott said. “The next thing we do is stop buying anything from China. … We need to pass logical legislation that would say our Border Patrol is going to update their interdiction guidelines, which is going to help them.” Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, acting as moderator for the event, said that today “every state is a border state.”  Activists advocating “defunding” the police, as well as “woke prosecutors” who are soft on criminals, continue to make it more difficult for law enforcement to do its job, the former Republican attorney general said. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said she spoke with local sheriffs and police departments in her state, as well as the Tennessee Highway Patrol, and heard similar concerns about recruitment and retention. And these challenges come as the homicide rate in Memphis skyrocketed by 50% from 2022 to 2023, she said. “One of the things they brought up to me was their concern was how to recruit and retain law enforcement officers and the impact that is having,” Blackburn said. “Resignations [by police officers] are up across the country as much as 47% since 2019. We need to make certain that the focus is on funding not defunding the law enforcement community, to be sure their work environment is as safe as it can possibly be.”  Mental health is also key to supporting law enforcement officers and addressing issues in the communities they police, said Nick Derzis, police chief in Hoover, Alabama.  “In the past, police officers’ wellness was determined by the physical fitness, but now our profession recognizes the important role that mental wellness plays in someone’s overall health,” Derzis said. Two years ago, the chief added, his department hired a mental health coordinator to provide on-site counseling services for officers and work with citizens on related issues.  “This position has already proved crucial to our department,” Derzis said, summarizing the benefit as “having a staff person who can facilitate communication between family, hospitals, probate court and use this knowledge to determine the next course of action.” Police also respond to military veterans in crisis, he said.  “We also have a veterans liaison volunteer group that currently has 10 police officers who are former service members,” Derzis said.  In 1900, Tuberville said, the United States had a population of fewer than 100 million but 500,000 were being treated for mental illness. Today, he said, the population is over 300 million but only about 30,000 are being treated for it.  “What the heck is going on?” the senator asked. “We’ve tripled, almost, our number of people, but we have less people that are being treated for mental illness. And we all know it is a bad, bad problem.” The post Why Biden’s Border Crisis Challenges Police in Every State appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Schools across the country are struggling to get students to show up reliably. The best estimates suggest more than 1 in 4 American students are chronically absent. That’s double the rate in 2019, when absenteeism was already a serious problem. School superintendents have resorted to pleading with families on Facebook Live, bribing students with field trips, and even knocking on doors to urge parents to ensure their children arrive each day. The futility of these efforts would be comical if there weren’t so much at stake. School closings due to COVID-19 wiped out more than two decades of educational progress. But the situation isn’t hopeless. Most education pundits and school administrators wringing their hands about the chronic absenteeism crisis are missing an essential remedy: educational freedom. Students won’t consistently show up for school until we have school models tailored to the needs of every family, learning experiences that engage students more than scrolling on a cellphone, and strong school cultures that say attendance isn’t optional. We can have these only if every family can choose the learning option that works best for their children. When schools shut down in the early days of the pandemic—and then dragged their feet reopening—they sent parents the message that school was no longer essential. Is your child a bit under the weather? Do they feel like taking a mental health day? Are you a little slow getting moving this morning? Just stay home and try again tomorrow. This cultural shift goes beyond schools. Church attendance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Companies still struggle to bring employees back to the office. In the years since the pandemic, surveys by EdChoice have consistently shown that roughly half of parents want to keep their children home from school at least one day a week. But if every school cut back schedules to fit these families’ preferences, it would fail to meet the needs of others who still want a full week of in-person classes. Educational freedom is the only answer. Let educators design a mix of high-quality online, hybrid, and in-person learning options, and let families choose the model that works best for them. The latest EdChoice survey finds nearly two-thirds of American teens think school is boring. More than 1 in 5 reported missing school because of lack of interest. We can do better. I lead an organization that uses virtual reality to deliver immersive learning experiences. When students can tour the Egyptian pyramids and study a whale’s anatomy in 3D, they look forward to history and science classes. At OptimaEd, we are expanding to states that offer Education Savings Accounts. These accounts allow families to direct public education funding to the options of their choice. When families make an affirmative decision to send their child to a specific school, and teachers make an affirmative decision to work there, they buy into a shared vision for how that school will run. If leaders set an expectation that students will show up, they can be confident that their families will comply. State leaders and school superintendents can no longer force students to show up for a one-size-fits-all system. Schooling in America will never return to pre-pandemic normal. Students and families are demanding more options. Let’s allow parents to direct their public education funding and to support entrepreneurs who create excellent schools that parents trust and students actually want. Originally published at WashingtonTimes.com The post Educational Freedom: The Overlooked Answer to Chronic Absenteeism appeared first on The Daily Signal.