Tyson Foods recalled 5,814 cases of "Fully Cooked, Whole Grain Golden Crispy Chicken Chunk Fritters" after consumers reported finding pieces of plastic in them. Fast Company:

The product was produced at one plant location on February 28, 2019, and each case bears the case code 0599NHL02 and the plant code P-1325 inside the USDA mark of inspection.

Previously: Enjoy delicious Tyson rubber nuggets while you can Read the rest

Two "giant" fatbergs were removed last week from the sewers of St. Andrews, Scotland, reports the BBC. 20 tonnes (22 tons) of congealed grease, sewage and toilet paper had to be broken down, and Fife authorities embarked upon an educational campaign to get locals to stop pouring cooking fat down the drain.

Mike Will, waste water operations general manager at Scottish Water, said that businesses had collectively spent about £500,000 fitting new grease trapping equipment.

Philip Soden, managing director of ECAS, added: "Most people simply didn't realise their own actions could potentially lead to sewer flooding, causing irreparable damage to their own community.

A fatberg near Cincinatti caused an overflow, report local media, with "odor and discoloration" shutting down Winston Lake.

The overflow in Winton Woods was caused by a so-called fatberg, a large, solid blockage that forms inside a sewer system. This one was made of grease, wipes and other waste that wedged into spaces between tree roots, clogging the sewer. The fatberg was about 15 inches in diameter and 2 feet wide.

Valencia, Spain, became home to a fatberg that sent sewer workers on a nightmare operation compared by Valencia Plaza (English, ish) to the movie "Alien."

It all started one day when they realized that "something was not working well," says [Sanitation Engineer Jesus] Ceniceros. During the routine review mentioned they discovered that "there was a sewage relief to the old Turia channel" from this collector. It did not make sense, since these reliefs can only occur in case of heavy rains and that was not the case.

Two officers at Cuyahoga Country Jail were filmed beating up a man strapped into to a restraint chair, and the video was released to the media. Nicholas Evans and Timothy Dugan are each charged with felonious assault, unlawful restraint, and interfering with civil rights. Evans also tampered with the evidence, prosecutors say, when he turned off his bodycam to prevent it recording the beating.

wall camera footage was released to News 5 – it clearly shows both officers punching the inmate repeatedly in the head as he sits in a restraint chair with both his arms bound with his mouth covered. The video shows the officers speaking to the inmate, but audio was not recorded.

The indictments allege that Evans and Dugan left the inmate in the restraint chair for over two hours after beating him, instead of immediately transporting him to medical.

Be warned: the video depicts a brutal attack on a man who cannot even raise his hands to shield his face. The machine-vision quality mades it particularly disturbing. Read the rest

One's a crazy guy in a bow tie. The other's Tucker Carlson. Read the rest

The 5-Minute Crafts youtube channel offers 35 wonderful uses for cement. You can put cement in novelty ice cube trays to make cement sticks. You can submerge books in cement to make beautiful, useful cement books. You can pour it into coke bottles or light bulbs to make unique home accouterments. Or into plastic bags, to create... gnome heads? Imagine a crowd of happy young people leaping together on a grassy hillside, captured aloft in a free-frame moment, arms high and smiles broad, a chorus crying out in joy: "Cement!" [via Metafilter] Read the rest

This alarmingly funny video shows an "Apple Engineer" explaining the company's forthcoming $999 monitor stand. This guy is better than the "Downfall" meme!

Also funny: to see people who had complained vocally about Apple's lack of truly "pro" gear denouncing it when it finally came along, because it was too pro. Perhaps Apple should have made a promotional video shamelessly explaining the stand and its veblen-tech price. People would have hated it, all the same, but at least it would have been clear who the customer was.

If by "pro" we didn't mean that kind of "corporate buyer" level, what does it mean? That fuzzy-edged class of designers, developers and "creatives" often identified as Apple fans?

Here's one way of looking at it: if you're all in for Apple and were waiting to spend $2500 on a modular computer to edit photos or book designs or write beautifully-typeset articles or the simple code that generates them—people like me!—Apple's answer to that is no. We can get a non-modular iMac, or we can get a Mac Mini with an eGPU and external monitor for the specialized work that requires those things.

If someone sold an eGPU that actually matches the Mac Mini (they're all either huge ugly PCI-slotted toasters or plasticy MXM-slotted bricks) I bet they'd clean up.

Hell, I'd be all in for a pro version with XLR connectors, phantom power—and maybe a SCSI port or two. Read the rest

After five years without an update, MS Flight Simulator is getting refreshed. The XBox exclusive was demoed at the E3 trade show Sunday. Some of the scenes are spectacularly realistic. I would have been unable to tell it was video of a simulation when I was a kid, playing stuff like F-18 Interceptor and Falcon. This makes it both more intense (because I can experience a more perfect replacement for reality) and less impressive (because I'm no longer afflicted with the xennial awe derived from comparing the quality of a simulation to the simulator's known technical limitations). Read the rest

If it's good enough for Dick Clark, it's good enough for me. [via Reddit] Read the rest

It's been 24 years since Black Isle got to work on Baldur's Gate, the classic computer RPG that melded AD&D rules with realtime-ish gameplay to make something immersive to play and gorgeous to look at. Though often counted among the top PC games of all time, the series ground to a halt after a superior sequel, with a third title announced but lost to time, the press of other projects, and corporate bankruptcy. Come 2019:

Developed by the creators of Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate III is the official next adventure in the venerable Baldur's Gate series. The teaser trailer shows a return of a malevolent presence to Baldur's Gate, intent on devouring it from the inside out, corrupting everything that remains in the Forgotten Realms. The fate of the Forgotten Realms lies in your hands. Gather your party: http://baldursgate3.game

No details of the game, just a teaser setting the scene.

It's funny that my first thought on seeing this was to wonder if it will import my BG2 party! If this is all game-grandpa talk to you, the originals have already been remastered for modern machines and are still pretty good, so long as you can teach yourself to ignore the deranged hidden spreadsheet of 2nd-edition AD&D throwing all its meaningless numbers at you. Read the rest

What better joke about American policing could be made than demanding "let me see your hands" of a deer? Read the rest

Read the rest

In a crackdown named "Operation Meltdown", New York City authorities have seized 46 ice cream trucks with unpaid fines.

To get away with not paying fines, the release said, the operators created dozens of "shell" companies and systematically re-registered trucks at the Department of Motor Vehicles under the names of different corporations. By the time the city's finance department would try to collect on a debt, there would be no trace of the offending company, according to the news release.

Previously in Ice Cream Wars:

· Ice cream truck drivers at war · Mr Yummy battles Mr Whippy in Blackburn Ice Cream War · The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars [links to the Wikipedia article] Read the rest

Australia "may well be the world's most secretive democracy," writes Damien Cave in The New York Times. It's cracking down on journalism that embarrasses the government, using arrests, raids and expansive warrants to chill reporting to an alarming extent.

The journalist whose home was raided Tuesday, Annika Smethurst of The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney, had the authorities rifling through her belongings for more than seven hours. At the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday, the police downloaded more than 9,000 documents based on a warrant giving them authority to examine phones and notebooks of many journalists that had nothing to do with the articles in question.

“No turf, no terrain is off the books,” said Joseph Fernandez, a media law expert at Curtin University in Perth. “The law is very very wide reaching, and it is very disturbing.”

He added that it was hard to imagine how any of these articles could have been construed as a threat to national security rather than simply an embarrassment for officials and politicians.

Quick Fix is an art installation—a vending machine—that sells likes and followers for your social media accounts. Read the rest

You can't get close to God on commercial.

Prosperity gospel preacher and measles aficionado Kenneth Copeland is closing in on his first billion dollars made.

“If I flew commercial, I’d have to stop 65 percent of what I’m doing, that’s the main reason,” he said.

Copeland said he was a “very wealthy man” and acknowledged using the private jets to travel to his vacation homes. Guerrero asked how he would respond to those who say preachers shouldn’t live so luxuriously.

“They’re wrong,” he replied “It’s a misunderstanding of the Bible that … if you go into the old covenant, do you think the Jewish people believe you should be broke?”

Guerrero follows up: “Are you saying that Jewish people appreciate money more?”

“They believe in wealth,” Copeland said.

A wealthy televangelist explains his fleet of private jets: ‘It’s a biblical thing’ [WaPo] Read the rest

Due to a mistranslation of the Dutch source material, the publish-now-edit-later nature of modern newsmedia, and perhaps a smidgen of hand-rubbing over the practice of euthanasia, everyone is falsely reporting today that a Dutch teenager was put to death with the consent of the state.

Naomi O'Leary, on Twitter:

A 17-year-old rape victim was NOT euthanised in the Netherlands. @euronews @Independent @DailyMailUK @dailybeast are all wrong It took me about 10 mins to check with the reporter who wrote the original Dutch story. Noa Pothoven asked for euthanasia and was refused. Infuriatingly, it's too late: this misinformation has already spread all over the world from Australia to the United States to India. Her name, #noapothoven is even trending in Italy. I spoke to Paul Bolwerk, a reporter who has been covering the story for @DeGelderlander since 2018. Noa Pothoven had been severely ill with anorexia and other conditions for some time. Without telling her parents, she sought and was refused euthanasia ... A decision to move to palliative care and not to force feed at the request of the patient is not euthanasia. Dutch media did not report Noa Pothoven's death as a case of euthanasia. This idea only appeared in English language pickups of Dutch reporting.

The "edit fuckscramble" is afoot right now at various outlets. This is when manifestly false stories are panic-edited one word or sentence at a time and republished, each version doomed to further revision until something defensible finally results—at least if you forget what the story was supposed to be about in the first place. Read the rest

A hiker got into trouble out in the Arizona scrub and needed a lift out. They ended up being treated for "dizziness and nausea" first.

Cliff Castle Chopper footage shows a helicopter rescue of injured hiker from Piestewa Peak in Phoenix.

NBC News reported that the spinning was caused by the rotors' downdraft. Read the rest