Cheating scandal rocks World Conkers Championships in England

The Dodgers aren't changing anything with Shohei Ohtani.

Despite the dip in 2023, CEOs were still paid 290 times what the average worker earned that year, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute.

Few legacy athletes have jumped from one side of a major New York rivalry directly to the other as Barkley did. 

A ocho jornadas por disputarse, se esclarece el panorama para algunas selecciones que esperan sellar sus pasaportes al Mundial de 2026 que se celebrará en Norteamérica.

The Southern California Independent Bookstore Bestsellers list for Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024, including hardcover and paperback fiction and nonfiction.

Avril Benoit from Doctors Without Borders, which has teams on the ground in Gaza providing medical assistance, speaks with "CBS Mornings" about the humanitarian crisis amid the war.

The Spiritualism movement preached positivity and an accessible, benevolent higher power — just like modern New Age spirituality.

Amid Israel’s existential seven-front war to root out terrorists on its borders, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton says U.S. humanitarian aid might have got into the hands of terrorists.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Paramount PicturesArriving on the heels of Joker Folie à Deux and Terrifier 3, Smile 2 is the third multiplex offering in as many weeks to boast creepily grinning fiends. And while this latest clown-ish sequel is superior to those recent duds, it remains a small step down from its 2023 predecessor.Once again charting a woman’s attempts to stave off insanity and death at the hands of an invisible demon that possesses and feeds on its human hosts, writer/director Parker Finn’s follow-up is technically accomplished and ambitiously unconventional, at least insofar as it sets its action in a milieu—the pop stardom universe—that isn’t a natural fit for unholy frights. Alas, that environment as well as a dearth of genuine surprises ultimately handicaps this polished thriller, even if it does reconfirm the filmmaker’s standing as a preeminent purveyor of jump scares.There are two excellent jolts in Smile 2, and the fact that there aren’t more is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this supernatural nightmare. Finn is adept at utilizing silence, empty background space, and slow zooms to create anticipation for disturbing shocks, and he’s just as skilled at supplying startling payoffs.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/GettyA score of Democratic Party officials and allies in Pennsylvania are alleging that Kamala Harris’ operations in the all-important state are “poorly run” and weakening her chances there, according to Politico.Twenty elected officials, party leaders, and affiliates spoke to the news outlet to express concern that the Democratic nominee’s campaign may have “set them back.”Their complaints zeroed in on concerns that the campaign wasn’t doing enough to attract voters in metro Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and in the state’s Black, Latino, and Asian communities, where Democrats likely need to win large majorities to offset Republican-leaning rural counties.Read more at The Daily Beast.

She's a cool mom.

On October 17th, the full Hunter's moon will rise and rage in super size in the Mars-ruled, impulse-prone sign of Aries. The supermoon in Aries will be the biggest and brightest supermoon of the year. Read on to learn more about the meaning and astrology of this supermoon and whether your zodiac sign is among...

Rachael Ray will get into her "highs and lows" on her new podcast, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead."

Family members and supporters of Erik and Lyle Menendez will gather outside a Los Angeles courthouse Wednesday to push for the brothers to be resentenced on lesser charges. They've been in prison for 34 years for killing their parents, but new evidence has led the LA district attorney to reopen the case. A letter allegedly written by one of the brothers to a family member in 1988 referenced alleged abuse by the brothers' parents.

A record number of people are showing up for early voting in the crucial state of Georgia. Early voting is beginning as a Georgia judge blocked a new hand-count election rule passed by a Trump-aligned state election board, saying it could undermine confidence in results.

The Chiefs tight end talked about going to Monday's game with "an unbelievable crew" in the latest episode of his "New Heights" podcast.

The chief strategist of Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign argued that Republicans will engage in violence to prevent Black American votes from being counted.

Pharmacy giant Walgreens announced its plan to close around 1,200 stores over the next three years as retail sales decline. Walgreens has also been dealing with other challenges, including rising operating costs and low reimbursement rates for pharmacy care.

As the war in Ukraine drags on with no end in sight and mounting casualties, the country desperately needs international assistance and must quickly train and equip new soldiers.

Travis Kelce's ex-girlfriend, Kayla Nicole, said she thought she handled questions about her personal life with grace during a recent interview on Angel Reese's podcast, until her mom called.

The passing of Donnie Marshall last week at age 92 evoked memories of a long-ago and perhaps forgotten first version of the Letter.

A new report from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) categorizes fifty different threats to election integrity according to whether they concern the influence of “dark money,” lawfare operations, voter fraud, or election fraud. The post Peter Schweizer: GAI Study Details 50 Threats to Election Integrity appeared first on Breitbart.

Jessica Meidinger's mother is one of the nearly 100 people who remain missing in North Carolina from Hurricane Helene. She said floodwaters swamped her mother's home in North Carolina and the now treacherous terrain has hindered the weeks-long search for closure.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign is working to shore up support among Black voters. Polls show their support is holding steady compared to what President Biden earned four years ago. However, there are signs Harris may struggle to turn out Black male voters as a higher number are signaling interest in former President Donald Trump.

The Los Angeles district attorney publicly released a letter he cited as "new evidence" in the infamous Erik and Lyle Menendez case -- as he mulls whether to review the brothers' life sentences for murdering their parents.

According to a video online, the "Jealous" singer was forced to stop the show and sprint off the stage at the O2 Arena in the capital of the Czech Republic.

After a torrent of runs at Dodger Stadium, the Mets and Dodgers can resume the NLCS at Citi Field in Wednesday’s Game 3 with a more modest line on the total.

Jerry Jones wants some homers on the payroll.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics is announced in Stockholm, Sweden, October 14, 2024. | Zhang Yuliang/Xinhua via Getty Images The Nobel Prize in Economics awarded this week to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson allows a lot of people to feel like winners. (Especially those in the know who refer to the group by the acronym “AJR.”) The general public wins in that all three have, unusually for academic economists, written extensively for lay audiences; Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2012 book Why Nations Fail was a bestseller, and Johnson has had several prominent books on financial regulation and innovation. Economic historians get a win, in that Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s most famous work was on historical processes of development in former colonies. Lefties win, in that Acemoglu has of late become a vocal proponent of policies to expand worker power and has mused about the possibility of “AI-enabled communism.” This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. That said, you don’t get to 4,400 citations without earning a few critics. The fairest hit against the three is that while their theories are elegant, the data underlying them are shaky at best, and the results don’t hold up to scrutiny. That’s not as terrible as it might sound. All science progresses through new findings that themselves are later overturned. I think Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson are great economists and even flawed empirical findings can be important in advancing a field. The physicist JJ Thomson — another Nobel winner — famously and erroneously proposed that atoms lacked a nucleus, but that doesn’t make his previous discovery of the electron any less important.  But this week, with considerable and mostly uncritical public attention on the Nobel winners’ work, I think it’s important to talk about its shortcomings, and the need to subject influential findings like theirs to further testing. AJR for beginners AJR’s most famous was an intervention into one of the longest-running debates in economics: Why are some nations so rich and other nations so poor?  The collaborators sought to rebut geographic determinists (notably Jared Diamond) who argued characters of the land were responsible for, say, Europe being richer than Africa. AJR’s answer was that some countries had better, more “inclusive” institutions that allowed the fruits of economic growth to be broadly shared, whereas others had “extractive” institutions where a small cabal could capture all the gains. The former grow over the long run; the latter don’t. Their most famous paper, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” sought to measure the effect of inclusive versus extractive institutions. To do this, they had to find some factor that caused certain areas to have certain kinds of institutions, but that was otherwise unlinked to their economic development. In econometrics this is called an “instrumental variable,” and the theory is that controlling for such variables lets you isolate the causal effect of the independent variable (in this case, institution type) that you’re studying. Their instrument was “how often European settlers died.” Think about Australia on the one hand and Nigeria on the other. Both were colonized by the United Kingdom; Australia has, I think it’s fair to say, stronger, less corrupt institutions.  What AJR proposed was that Australia became Australia because it was reasonably hospitable terrain for the European colonizers, the many sharks and spiders notwithstanding; they could, and did, move there in large numbers. They then had incentives to build institutions that benefited white settlers. In Nigeria, by contrast, diseases like malaria and yellow fever killed off huge numbers of British settlers, so a similar settlement project couldn’t get off the ground. With comparatively few white settlers, the British didn’t give a shit about building fair institutions, because they were effectively building them for Africans — and the British cared far less about black people’s welfare than white people’s. Sure enough, AJR found that countries with high European settler mortality during colonization have lower per-capita incomes today, which they saw as evidence for their view that institution type is determinative. A nearly as-famous paper the following year, “Reversal of Fortune,” extended the argument, finding that among countries colonized by Europeans, those that were most successful in 1500 (where “success” is measured by urbanization or population density) are disproportionately poor today.  Those results point against geographic explanations, AJR argued, and toward institutional changes wrought by European colonization. Why the finding is shaky There’s a lot that’s appealing about the AJR worldview. Government institutions do seem important; there’s no other plausible reason why South Korea is one of the richest places on Earth and North Korea is perhaps the poorest. The theory is a hopeful one: While countries cannot change their geographies, they can adopt new, better institutions. But do the specific empirical claims AJR made hold up? It doesn’t seem like it. Economist David Albouy offered the most persuasive reply to their 2001 “Colonial Origins” paper by digging into the actual data. AJR used a sample of 64 countries, but only had real data for 28 of them. The other 36 had data that were assigned based on “conjectures the authors make as to which countries have similar disease environments.” As you might expect, making up data on settler mortality for places where we have no data is difficult, and Albouy finds serious flaws in how AJR do it; for six countries, he finds, their estimates “are based on an incorrect interpretation of former colonial names for Mali.”  Once you only look at the 28 countries with non-synthetic data, there’s no relationship between settler mortality and present-day economic outcomes. Worse, even the real data tends to be about soldiers rather than civilian settlers, and soldiers are more likely to die from disease when actively fighting than civilians are.  This biases the results in AJR’s favor, and makes the underlying relationship they posit (that places with higher death rates developed worse institutions) much weaker.  Another reply, by Ed Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio López de Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer noted that AJR’s data doesn’t distinguish between the effects of institutions and the effects of human capital: Settler colonies like Australia and Canada didn’t merely get more inclusive institutions, but also settlers who were generally much richer and better-educated (at least from a modern capitalist vantage point) than native inhabitants. The researchers conduct their own tests and argue that human capital does a better job explaining growth trajectories than institutions. That doesn’t necessarily make for a bleaker story than AJR (countries can invest in schools and boost human capital), but it’s a different story. Glaeser and co. also highlight problems with the measure of “expropriation risk” (the risk that the government takes all your stuff) used in AJR’s work. This is an important indicator for AJR of whether institutions are inclusive or extractive, but it turns out to just be a subjective 0 to 10 ratings system AJR took from the private firm Political Risk Services, and one with huge problems. “In 1984, the top ten countries with the lowest expropriation risk include Singapore and the USSR,” Glaeser et al note. Are we really expected to believe that your risk of getting your stuff taken by the government was low in the Soviet Union? AJR’s claim of a “reversal of fortune,” with the leading nations of 1500 becoming laggards today, has similarly withered under scrutiny.  Areendam Chanda, C. Justin Cook, and Louis Putterman reevaluated the claim but measured what happened to the descendents of those actual 1500s people, not just the geographic places where they lived. There have been huge movements of people from 1500 to the present, and it doesn’t strictly make sense to compare the Incan Empire to Peru today given how wildly different the people in each were. Chanda et al find that fortune has not reversed, but persisted when you account for population movements: People descended from countries thriving in 1500 were doing better in the 21st century. That’s evidence, they conclude, for the Glaeser et al claim that human capital rather than institutions is the crucial factor here. Again, my takeaway here is not “Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, Nobel-winning economists, are useless.” They’re incredibly useful, and greatly amplified the prestige of these kinds of tough economic history questions within the economics profession.  But I also think their work is a reminder of the old academic cliché that you can either learn something very small about something very big, or something very big about something very small. They were tackling a very big topic, and seemed for a second to grasp something very big about it. Upon inspection, though, it looks a great deal smaller.

"I always liked Cameron Crowe, we had a good rapport. I was real proud of him when his career took off."

The Yankees might not be where they were Tuesday, playing in Game 2 of the ALCS, without Gio Urshela. 

The settlement requires the Foster House Apartments owners to make at least 76 units there permanently affordable or pay millions in additional penalties.

In 2023, the gender wage gap between men and women working full-time widened year-over-year for the first time in 20 years.

Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone fired shots at the "soft" NBA as he questioned his team's conditioning in a preseason loss on Sunday.

The Giants coach is in good shape, as far as his relative security in the NFC East.

Months of drought in southern Africa triggered by the El Niño weather phenomenon have caused the region's worst hunger crisis in decades.

A new poll reveals that nearly a two-thirds majority of American Jews agree that former President Donald Trump is on Israel's side -- and yet 62% of American Jews still intend to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, regardless. The post Poll: 65% of Jewish Voters Say Trump Supports Israel; Most Back Kamala Anyway appeared first on Breitbart.

Mets manager Carlos Mendoza sat at the dais in the bowels of Citi Field and expressed confidence that Francisco Alvarez will find his groove in the postseason.

“There are some people who might think it was irreverent and offensive, but I think it sounds about perfect,” Charles Boehm said of his father’s obituary.

Former President Trump extended his lead on the economy, but Vice President Kamala Harris continues to hold a slim lead in national polls.

This week's weather is set to send shivers down your spine as a freeze warning was issued for several counties in New Jersey and the Hudson Valley, while parts of Connecticut are under a frost advisory.

NASCAR star Bubba Wallace revealed why he isn't politically active after previously bashing Trump in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.

A local mayor says the balls littering two beaches in the Sydney area could be "tar balls," which form when spilled oil clumps together with debris in the water.

Hours after three people died in a suspected arson, a new fire marshal assumed the office that investigates fires and enforces fire prevention.

Control of the House of Representatives is up for grabs, and a small number of seats will determine whether the next president will be able to advance a legislative agenda through Congress. The post ELECTION SPECIAL: These Under the Radar Races Could Determine House Control appeared first on Breitbart.

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