White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blasts Republicans for circulating videos where President Biden appears confused or feeble during Monday's press briefing. REPORTER: There seems to be a sort of a rash of videos that have been exited to make the president appear officially frail or mentally confused. I'm wondering if the White House is especially worried about the fact that this appears to be a pattern. KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Yeah, and I think you all have called this...

The White House in the past week has railed against so-called “cheap fakes,” videos edited to look as if President Joe Biden has “frozen” or was wandering away at major public events, while media outlets amplifying the moments have done little to add context. The videos include one at a D-Day ceremony earlier this month, another at a Juneteenth ceremony last week and still another the G7 summit Thursday. The latest to go viral is a video at the end of Biden’s star-filled Los...

When I was 7, my dad told me a riddle."A man and his son are driving in their car when they are hit by a tractor-trailer.Photo via iStock.(We were driving at the time, so of course this was the riddle he decided to tell.) The father dies instantly.The son is badly injured. Paramedics rush him to the hospital. Photo via iStock.As he is being wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon takes one look the boy and says:'I can't operate on him. He's my son.'How is that possible?!"Without missing a beat, I answered:"The doctor is his mom!"My dad first heard the riddle when he was a child in the '60s.Back then, most women didn't work outside of the home.Few of those who did had college degrees, much less professional degrees.Female doctors were few and far between.Back then, it was a hard riddle. A very hard riddle.By 1993, when I first heard it, the notion that women could be highly skilled, highly trained professionals wasn't so absurd.To me, it was normal.I knew women who were lawyers. Bankers. Politicians. My own doctor was a woman.To be sure, women still faced challenges and discrimination in the workplace. And even 20 years later, they still do.But at its core, the riddle is about how a family can work. And that had changed. Long-overdue progress had rendered the big, sexist assumption that underpinned the whole thing moot.A very hard riddle was suddenly not a riddle at all.I never forgot it.Now, I'm 30 — almost as old as my dad was he first told me that riddle.I don't have kids, but I mentor a child through a volunteer program.Once a week, we get together and hang out for an hour. We play ping pong, do science experiments, and write songs. Neither of us like to go outside.It's a good match.One day, we decided to try to stump each other with riddles.He rattled off about five or six.I could only remember one: The one about the man, his son, and the surgeon.I thought it would be silly to tell it.I was sure that, if it was easy in 1993, it would be even easier in 2014. Kind of ridiculous, even.But a part of me was curious.It had been 21 years — almost as long as it had been between when my dad first heard the riddle and when he shared it with me.Maybe it wouldn't be so easy.Maybe I was missing something obvious, making my own flawed assumptions about how a family could work.Maybe the world had changed in ways that would be second nature to a 13-year-old but not to me.So I began:"A man and his son are driving in their car, when they are hit by a tractor-trailer. The father dies instantly. The son is badly injured and is rushed to the hospital by paramedics. As he is being wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon takes one look at the boy and says:'I can't operate on him. He's my son.'How is that possible?!"Without missing a beat, he answered: "it's his other dad"Times change. Progress isn't perfect. But no matter what shape a family takes, at the end of the day, #LoveWins.This article was written by Eric March and originally appeared on 06.21.16

A childhood game can go very wrong in the blink of an eye."You'll never get me!"“Freeze! Put your hands up."If you've ever played cops and robbers, you know how the game goes.John Arthur Greene was 8 and he was playing that game with his older brother Kevin. Only the two brothers played with real guns. Living on a farm, they were both old hands at handling firearms by their ages.The blast from the gun must have startled them both.“We were always extremely safe. They were never loaded," John said.Except this time it was. And John's brother died in his arms while he watched.It happens more often than you would ever want to imagine.In federal data from 2007 to 2011, which is likely under-reported, an average of 62 children were accidentally killed by firearms per year.Here's a chilling example from Everytown for Gun Safety:"In Asheboro, North Carolina, a 26-year-old mother was cleaning her home when she heard a gunshot. Rushing into the living room, she discovered that her three-year-old son had accidentally shot her boyfriend's three-year-old daughter with a .22-caliber rifle the parents had left in the room, loaded and unlocked."And the numbers may actually be getting worse.With an increase in unfettered access to guns and philosophical opposition to gun regulations, the numbers seem to be on the rise. Here's how many accidental shootings happened at the hands of children in 2015 alone, by age:From January 19-26 of 2016 — just one week — at least seven kids were accidentally shot by another kid.If the pace holds up for the rest of the year, America would be looking at over 300 accidental shootings of children, in many cases by children, for the year. That's far too many cases of children either carrying the guilt and pain of having shot a loved one or hurting or killing themselves by accident.John Arthur Greene has been able to manage his feelings of guilt and sorrow through music and by sharing his story for others to hear.He told his story during an audition for the final season of "American Idol." He says music has helped him keep his brother's memory alive:"Right now I lift him up every day and he holds me up. Music is how I coped with everything."It's a powerful reminder. No matter how we each feel about gun safety laws, guns should always be locked away unloaded and kept separately from ammunition.Our babies are too precious to leave it to chance.Watch John Arthur Greene's audition for "American Idol" here:This article originally appeared on 03.07.16

Craig Ferguson was the host of "The Late Late Show" on CBS from 2005 to 2014. He's probably best remembered for his stream-of-conscious, mostly improvised monologues that often veered from funny observations to more serious territory.In 2009, he opened his show explaining how marketers have spent six decades persuading the public into believing that youth should be deified. To Ferguson, it's the big reason "Why everything sucks.""In the 1950s, late '50s, early '60s, a bunch of advertising guys got together on Madison Avenue and decided to try to sell products to younger people. 'We should try to sell to younger people because then they will buy things their whole lives,'" Ferguson explained.The problem is, according to Ferguson, that young people are "kind of stupid.""So the deification of youth evolved and turned into the deification of imbecility. It became fashionable to be young and to be stupid," he continued.'Why everything sucks'On a deeper level, Ferguson makes the point that exalting youth and inexperience over wisdom and experience runs contrary to the way of nature."Then what happened is that people were frightened to not be young," he said. "They started dyeing their hair, they started mutilating their faces and their bodies in order to look young. But you can't be young forever, that's against the laws of the universe."Calling marketers' war on the over-49 set the reason why "everything sucks" may be a bit of an exaggeration. But the takeaway from Ferguson's monologue is spot-on. There's no reason to feel bad about aging. You've got experience, wisdom, probably better credit, and have learned that Saturdays are a lot more fun after you've been to bed by 10:00 pm on Friday.This article originally appeared on 2.17.22

Visitors to SeaWorld Sea Antonio, Texas have been doing double takes for the past 5 years after running into identical twin brothers Westin and Jakob Fenton. Guests often catch Westin educating children about exotic birds as a member of the Animal Ambassadors team near the park’s entrance. Then, a few minutes later, spot Jakob in a wet suit at the Orca Encounter.“Every day it's like, 'Didn't I just see you?’” Westin told Upworthy. “It surprises them,” Jakob added. When Westin had braces, countless visitors frantically approached Jakob with a confused look, asking, “When did you get your braces off?”The 23-year-old twins have been turning heads at SeaWorld since they were young boys and began attending the park’s summer camps at 7."They were the cutest. You could tell how obsessed they were with the animals. It made me so happy years later when they got hired here and to see how well they both do,” Kari Tomarelli, a trainer at Orca Encounter, shared with Upworthy.From a very young age, the Fenton twins knew SeaWorld was more than just a place they visited—it was their destiny. "It was during my time away from SeaWorld that I realized, 'This is where I'm meant to be,'" Westin shared. "We've always been the twins who do everything together. Same friends, same passions, extracurriculars... everything,” Jakob added.So, pursuing the same career wasn’t a big stretch for the twins.The twins are incredibly close, but they also allow plenty of space for their animal companions at SeaWorld. Jakob spends a lot of his time, energy and heart caring for two of the park's five orcas: Kamea, a 10-year-old 3,000-pound female, and Tuar, the park’s dominant male, who is 24 years old and weighs over 8,000 pounds.The pair couldn’t be more different."Tuar is very goofy; he has a great attitude," Jakob said, noting that even after a challenging training session, “he's just happy to be there.” Conversely, things haven’t been so easy with Kamea. “It took time to earn her trust, and it took months to develop a relationship,” Jakob admitted. “Now, I actually adore her."Even though park visitors see Jakob in a wetsuit, giving hand signals at the Orca Encounter presentation, most of his job takes place backstage, holding a scrubber. “Eighty percent of being a trainer is cleaning,” he told Upworthy. “We need to make sure that these animals are in a clean environment so our morning is 3 or 4 hours of maintaining habitats. Scrubbing ledges, cleaning glass, cleaning fish buckets."While Jakob's role as an orca trainer may seem glamorous, he sees it as a platform to serve the animals and educate guests. His responsibility is more significant given the scrutiny marine parks have been under in recent years and the fact that this is the last generation of orcas under SeaWorld's care.“Being able to introduce people who've never seen a killer whale and then have them walk away with an appreciation of the species and a desire to protect them in the wild means everything,” Jakob said.While Jakob is loading up buckets of salmon for the Orca Encounter, on the other side of the park, you’ll run into Westin, presenting one of SeaWorld San Antonio's 17 exotic animals—most of which were rescued and rehabilitated—to gawking park guests. As an Animal Ambassador, Westin educates guests about exotic reptiles, birds, and small mammals. He also travels with his animal companions to nearby schools, retirement homes and hospitals to introduce them to the public.When he’s not taking questions from park guests about his animal companions, such as Star the bald eagle or Azul the hyacinth macaw, he’s flashing his pearly (and recently straightened) whites for photos with guests. He estimates he poses for about 50 a day.While many would assume training means exerting authority over the animals to force them to do desired behaviors, Westin says it’s all about building relationships. "We're simply asking, 'Hey, would you like to come and participate?’ And Star has every opportunity to say no or to say yes,” he told Upworthy. “Everything is an ask. I'm not expecting Star to do anything. Whatever Star would like, we do."Even though people have difficulty telling the twins apart, the animals can tell the difference. "They learn our behavior just like we learn theirs,” he told Upworthy.The twins spend much of their lives together at SeaWorld and as Pilates instructors on the side, so what sets them apart? "Westin, a little more, tamed. More reserved and to himself himself. Whereas Jakob is the life of the party,” Cesi Buitrago, a trainer at Orca Encounter, said. They also have one big difference in diet: Westin can’t stand cheese on his burger, but Jakob loves it.For the Fenton twins, life at SeaWorld has taught them a lot about the animal kingdom, but it has also changed how they see humans.“I had no idea the impact these whales would have on my life and how they would teach me how to be a better human and mentor,” Jakob told Upworthy. “Building my relationship with them, I can use it when thinking about developing a relationship with a human. They teach me to be patient, to listen, to invest, to really get to know someone. Don’t fake it. I never would have imagined all of these life skills I would have learned from killer whales."It’s no surprise that Westin has come away with a similar lesson."So much of what we do is relationships. [The animals] have taught me what it takes to get to know someone; they’ve taught me patience, just really connecting on a deeper level,” Westin says. “I've learned a lot about life and, ultimately, connection."

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