'Reduce the burden and to increase the yield'

'The decision has kind of been made for us'

'New wave of debt caused by climate finance'

'Help him out!'

"No contest pleas are often used as part of a plea bargain or in cases where the victim is likely to file a civil suit."

News 1313 The Munsters to Get a “Dark Reimagining” in New Series Called 1313 Do we really need to grimdark the Munsters family? By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on May 22, 2024 Screenshot: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Universal Pictures The 1964 television series, The Munsters, was a sitcom affair, more full of laughs than moments of sheer terror. Universal Studios, however, who holds rights to The Munsters as part of their “Universal Monsterverse,” is looking to take the suburban supernatural family to the grimdark side. According to Deadline, Universal Content Productions is working on a series called 1313, which is a “darker reimagining” of The Munsters. The title comes from the home address of the family in the original show: 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional town of Mockingbird Heights, California. This isn’t the first reboot of The Munsters in recent history. In 2022, Rob Zombie released a film centered on the family, which received mixed reviews. We don’t know much more about this upcoming grimdark take on The Munsters other than Lindsey Anderson Beer is on board to showrun. Beer’s previous credits include writing and directing the critically maligned Pet Sematary: Bloodlines , which currently has a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and also penning a script for other announced projects in development (or development limbo), such as Short Circuit and an adaptation of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle. Horror legend James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring, Malignant) and Ingrid Bisu are working with Breen to develop the series. No news yet on whether the show will go into production, much less who would take on the darker version of the characters from the original series. [end-mark] The post <i>The Munsters</i> to Get a “Dark Reimagining” in New Series Called <i>1313</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books book review I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle is a Moving Tale from a Fantasy Master A review of Peter S. Beagle’s new fantasy novel. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on May 22, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons is Peter S. Beagle’s first new work of fiction in eight years, and those who are enchanted with his previous works, particularly his iconic 1968 story The Last Unicorn, will find another humorous and, at times, surprisingly dark and moving fairy tale within its pages. A young man named Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax (who prefers to just be called Robert, thanks) has inherited his dead father’s business as a dragon exterminator in the tiny kingdom of Bellmontagne. Dragons in this world are considered mere pests—vermin that the local villagers hire Robert to remove or kill. Robert hates his job. He abhors potentially harming the dragons he’s paid to eradicate and dreams of escaping the violent drudgery of his work to take on the infinitely more prestigious role of becoming a prince’s valet.  Escaping his situation, however, seems impossible. Even though his work makes his stomach turn, the money he gets ensures his mother and siblings have enough to live on.  And so Robert does what he can to save the dragons he’s hired to exterminate, which means that his home is secretly full of tiny dragons who have become part of the family.  One day, the king of Bellmontagne seeks him out (in quite a comedic fashion, I should add) and orders him to the castle to do a full expunging of the hundreds of dragons who live there. Robert’s services were not called for in recent years because of benign neglect, but when Princess Cerise falls for the heroically handsome Prince Reginald, she begs her family to rid the royal abode of all the firebreathing beasts scurrying in its walls so as not to embarrass herself in front of her new beau’s eyes.  Buy the Book I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons Peter S. Beagle Buy Book I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons Peter S. Beagle Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Robert, Princess Cerise, and Prince Reginald have all been shoehorned into the expected roles that often arise in fairy tales: a young man of modest origins with unrealized powers, a beautiful damsel whom everyone is looking to wed (and as such, a bevy of princes who follow her around), and a dashing royal who looks every part the hero. All three of them, however, bump up against those archetypal expectations. Robert just wants to stop killing dragons for a living, not become a hero; Princess Cerise has agency and forges her own path no matter what those around her say she should do; and poor Prince Reginald thinks he doesn’t have the fortitude to play the part he was born into.  As such, a main message of There Might Be Dragons is that others’ expectations don’t define who you are, but in certain cases, neither do your perceived limitations about yourself. In the novel, for example, Robert tries to explain to Cerise why Reginald is making such foolhardy choices in his quest to become the hero everyone expects him to be: “My mother, sometimes she says that everybody in the world is a donkey with the heart of a lion. Everybody. Only most people don’t ever discover it—they don’t have to, they get along all right just being donkeys. But it’s there, always, if you really need it. If you really want to find it. If you look for it.” [page 164] Reginald (and Robert, and Cerise) find the lion inside themselves before the end of the book, though in ways they didn’t expect.  The adventure starts for them when Robert is coerced by Reginald’s valet to go on a dragon hunt with the prince, with the expectation that the prince will get the credit for any magical animal he slays. Unsurprisingly, however, dragons are also more complex than humans realize, and there is another malevolent force at play that brings danger to the three of them.  Like much of Beagle’s other work, the story told in I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons is light in tone and self-aware of the tropes it is upending. But under the book’s whimsical visage lie deeper, darker themes. Some moments are downright disturbing, such as when we read in gruesome detail how Robert has to go about killing those hundreds of tiny dragons who have taken up home in the castle. Later on, more than one human meets a grisly, gory, and charred end, giving depth and gravitas to a tale that is more complex than the fanciful vibes Beagle’s writing gives off. The last quarter or so of the book, when the three face off against a formidable magical foe, falters a bit, as the foe in question doesn’t arise beyond the cookie-cutter traits one might expect from a Big Bad in a fanciful tale. How the Big Bad exacts their revenge on those who tried to kill them, however, is at least creative, and their downfall ties in with another takeaway from the book: No human can ever truly understand or control creatures as mythical and otherworldly as dragons, and to try to do so is folly.  But overall, I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons will delight fans of Beagle’s work. The story resolves in satisfying and unsurprising ways. The ending also feels open: There is more story there to tell, both about the three main characters we follow as well as the dragons that inhabit the world they live in. I would love to see another book or three set in this world, and here’s to hoping that Beagle has some other story ideas percolating so that we get more of Robert, Cerise, Reginald. And, of course, the dragons. [end-mark] I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons is published by Saga Press. The post <em>I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons</em> by Peter S. Beagle is a Moving Tale from a Fantasy Master appeared first on Reactor.

Connecticut law enforcement officials released an illegal immigrant convicted of killing two young children in a drunk driving accident, despite a detainer request lodged against him, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. ICE agents arrested the man, identified as Israel Alejandro Gonzalez-Arcinega, 40. The Mexican national was convicted 10 years ago of two counts of manslaughter, illegal operation of a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, and other crimes in Connecticut, the agency announced in a press release Monday. ICE criticized local officials in Connecticut for releasing a noncitizen despite an immigration detainer placed on him. “Israel Gonzalez was convicted of driving under the influence and killing two Connecticut children,” Todd M. Lyons, director of Enforcement and Removal Operations at ICE’s Boston Field Office, said in a written statement. “His actions shattered a family.” “We cannot allow unlawfully present convicted felons to victimize the residents of our communities,” Lyons said. “ERO Boston will continue to prioritize public safety by apprehending and removing egregious offenders like Mr. Gonzalez from our New England neighborhoods.” Gonzalez was arrested in 2013 after a car crash in Meriden, Connecticut, that killed two children and injured others, according to local reporting at the time. Authorities said he fled the scene after the crash killed an 8-year-old boy and his 5-year-old sister and hospitalized their parents. ICE said it lodged an immigration detainer for Gonzalez with the Meriden Police Department immediately following his arrest. The Mexican national was convicted on April 21, 2014, in Connecticut Superior Court in Meriden of two counts of manslaughter; three counts of second-degree assault; operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol; and evading responsibility for death or serious injury, according to the agency. Gonzalez was sentenced to 12 years in prison. About a year after his sentencing, an immigration judge in Hartford ordered Gonzalez to be deported to his native country of Mexico. Despite this deportation order and a detainer request, ICE said, the Connecticut Department of Corrections released Gonzalez on April 2 without notifying ICE. However, deportation officers were able to arrest Gonzalez on May 1 during a vehicle stop in Meriden, the agency announced. The arrest was part of ICE’s drive to arrest and repatriate criminal illegal immigrants, despite a lack of cooperation from numerous states and other jurisdictions across the country. The agency has taken particular umbrage with New England communities recently, issuing press releases about local authorities in Massachusetts and Connecticut who refused to honor detainer requests. “Detainers are critical public safety tools because they focus enforcement resources on removable noncitizens who have been arrested for criminal activity,” ICE said Monday. The Center for Immigration Studies identifies Connecticut as a “sanctuary” jurisdiction, citing state legislation enacted in 2019 that prevents local law enforcement from holding an illegal alien on an immigration detainer unless “accompanied by a warrant signed by a  judge and the person is guilty of a serious felony or is on a terrorist watch list.” The Connecticut Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Illegal Alien Convicted of Killing 2 Children Released Despite ICE Detainer appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A deposition given by the former head of the former Disinformation Governance Board in April 2023 to the US House Committee on the Judiciary has revealed that the parent agency of the short-lived censorship entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), wasn’t even sure how to define “disinformation.” No “good definition” of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation – collectively referred to as MDM – was anywhere in sight, even though DHS decided it needed a whole new entity, the Disinformation Board, to deal with it. That is what transpired from Nina Jankowicz’s deposition, leading to the inevitable question of whether “countering disinformation” was ever supposed to be the Board’s task – or if setting it up was yet another example of mis/disinformation being used to cover up political bias and censorship. After all, this kind of accusation was what eventually, and quickly, discredited and brought the Board down. In turn, the tone of Jankowicz’s deposition reads like herself trying to discredit DHS for the way it handled the whole operation and treated her personally. Even though the entity existed for three months before it was dissolved, and “disinformation” was in its very name, it never got around to settle on a “good definition” of what it was supposedly there to fight. Jankowicz told the Committee that during her time at the helm of the Board, they did not “develop any protocols supporting the identification of MDM.” When asked by Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to define “disinformation,” she said: “Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up, Congressman, because there’s kind of a, I would say – not necessarily a difference of opinion within DHS of what constitutes disinformation, but CISA has one definition, and one of the things that occurred to me while I was at DHS is that different entities were dealing with different definitions. So that was one of the things that I had hoped to work on.” Andy Biggs, the majority member of the House Judiciary Committee, tried to get some clarity on these astonishing revelations and asked whether Jankowicz “went in with kind of a vision, some idea of what you would want to do there” – in terms of coming up with protocols that would identify disinformation. But some might say that the reply was “clear as mud”: “That wasn’t really at the top of the list for me,” said Jankowicz. “I thought there was some pretty big gaps in terms of the understanding of the concept. And so, to get to identification, you first have to kind of have an agreement about what you’re talking about.” Eventually, she said that had the Board lived, “identification” would have likely been done by the Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Disinformation Governance Board Couldn’t Clearly Define “Disinformation” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sign Up To Keep Reading This post is for Reclaim The Net supporters. Gain access to the entire archive of features and supporters-only content. Help protect free speech, freedom from surveillance, and digital civil liberties. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post From Bookstore to Big Brother: How Amazon Tracks Your Every Move and What To Do About It appeared first on Reclaim The Net.