If you’ve been wondering why Comedy Central landed on the “#CancelSouthPark” approach to promoting the 22nd season of South Park, perhaps this new teaser will illuminate things a little bit. The season-premiere episode, which is slated to air this Wednesday, has a fairly unassuming log line (“Randy is desperate to help Sharon get her emotions under control and Cartman unexpectedly fails his math test”), but as this teaser reveals, there’s a little more to the episode that might quali...

Earlier this summer, John Oliver called Facebook “History’s Most Profitable Data-Harvesting Machine,” which was charitable compared to Sunday night’s 20-minute takedown on the company’s hate speech policies and content moderation, especially in countries that are newly getting online. Oliver compared Facebook unfavorably to toilets, which “make shit go away, whereas Facebook retains shit, disseminates shit to your acquaintances, and reminds you of shit from seven years ago while allo...

Schitt’s Creek fans, it’s time to brush up on your Tina Turner: The quirky comedy will be back for a fifth season on Wednesday, Jan. 16, at 10/9c, Pop TV announced Monday. Season 5 will span 14 episodes, making it the series’ longest run yet. Read on for the official season description...

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, is resigning Monday, according to Axios, which cited a source familiar with the matter. NBC News' Pete Williams, however, reported that Rosenstein would not resign of his own accord, after his off-the-cuff comments about President Donald Trump were revealed last week. He will only depart if the White House fired him, and will refuse to resign if asked to do so, Williams reported....

Japan's space agency (JAXA) has made history by successfully landing two robotic explorers on the surface of an asteroid. The two small "rovers", which were despatched from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Friday, will move around the 1km-wide space rock known as Ryugu. The asteroid's low gravity means they can hop across it, capturing temperatures and images of the surface.

A French court ordered Marine Le Pen to submit to a psychiatric evaluation as part of its investigation into her decision to post images of Islamic State executions on Twitter, the far right leader said on Thursday and denounced the order. The investigation is one of a series that have distracted Le Pen's National Rally, formerly known as the National Front, as it seeks to rebuild after her loss to President Emmanuel Macron in the second round of an election last year.

Americans believe in the importance of a good day’s work. And so it’s understandable that the prospect of a universal basic income (UBI), in which the government would issue checks to cover the basic costs of living, rubs some people the wrong way. Writing in The Week in 2014, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry envisions a UBI dystopia in which “millions of people” are “listing away in socially destructive idleness,” with “the consequences of this lost productivity reverberating throughout the ...

Russia has said Syria shot down one of its military planes - but laid the blame for the deaths of the 15 personnel on board with Israel. The defence ministry said Israeli jets put the Il-20 plane into the path of Syrian air defence systems on Monday after failing to give Moscow enough warning of a strike on Syrian targets.

For Amazon's online sellers, a negative product review can be extremely damaging to businesses selling their products on the retail giant's site. In order to quash bad feedback, some sellers are offering Amazon employees bribes to obtain bad reviewers' email addresses or to erase the negative review from the site entirely, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. According to the Wall Street Journal's sources, this practice is especially common in China...

A North Carolina 1-year-old boy was found dead Monday after being swept away by rushing floodwaters from Florence when his mother lost her grip on the child. The body of Kaiden Lee-Welch was found by police Monday morning after search and rescue teams spent hours looking for him overnight. Kaiden went missing after water from the deadly storm flooded the highway his mother was driving on as she headed east to Wadesboro, North Carolina.

A $100,000 reward has been offered for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for deliberately putting needles in strawberries in Queensland. Police are warning people to slice the fruit before eating it amid fears six brands of strawberries in Australia have been contaminated with needles and pins. Strawberries sold under the Berry Obsession, Berry Licious and Donnybrook Berries brands have already been recalled – and it is now believed the Love Berry, Delightful Strawberries ...

Two Saudi students who died trying to save two young children from drowning have been awarded posthumous honorary degrees from the universities they were attending. Cousins Theeb Al-Yami, 27, and Jasser Al-Rakah, 25, were studying in the United States when they joined several other people in an effort to rescue the youngsters, who were in distress in the Chicopee river in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, on June 29, 2018. The children managed to reach safety but the two students were swept away and dro...

German police began to remove protesters on Thursday who have been living in tree houses for the past six years in the ancient Hambach Forest, located in the western part of the country. German utility company RWE is seeking to expand mining operations in the 12,000-year-old forest, and protesters have been camping out in an effort to save what is left. “This year’s clearing measures are necessary to maintain opencast mining operations and coal extraction over the next two years,” RWE said...

Documents uncovered by investigative journalists have provided the first public evidence that the suspects in the Salisbury novichok attack have formal ties to the Russian ministry of defence. British authorities have charged Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov with conspiracy to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. The former Russian spy and his daughter were found collapsed on 4 March; the police officer fell ill after trying to help them. Prosecutors say Petrov...

Donald Trump has claimed that nearly 3,000 people did not die in Puerto Rico due to the impact of Hurricane Maria, despite the island’s government putting the official death toll at up to 2,975. The president wrote on Twitter that Democrats inflated the death toll to make him “look as bad as possible” in the wake of criticism over his handling of the response to the disaster.

Authorities say a New Hampshire man who allegedly tried to “buy” and kidnap a 13-year-old girl near Faneuil Hall carried $11,000 in cash and asked her parents how much it would cost “to take her out,” according to The Boston Globe. Alfred Patterson, 20, of Raymond, was arraigned Monday in Boston Municipal Court where he was ordered to stay out of Massachusetts and away from the girl, her family, and witnesses, the newspaper reports.

Native American tribes in Montana and South Dakota sued the Trump administration on Monday, claiming it approved an oil pipeline from Canada without considering potential damage to cultural sites from spills and construction. Attorneys for the Rosebud Sioux tribe and Fort Belknap Indian Reservation asked U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Great Falls, Montana, to rescind the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, issued last year by the U.S. State Department.

Goldman Sachs raised its price target on Apple stock all the way to $240 per share from $200 per share on Thursday, admitting they got the stock completely wrong this summer as it rallied to a $1 trillion valuation. Goldman laid out its expectations for the next generation of iPhones and reversed its previous bearish position on the technology giant. "We also take this opportunity to eat our hat somewhat on our cautious stance this Summer," Goldman analyst Rod Hall said in a note. &quo...

With Red Dead Redemption 2 coming later this year, interest in Wild West games is at a heightened level. So it’s interesting to take a look at a game in development that seems broadly similar to RDR 2, but is taking a very different approach to the subject. This Land is My Land — due out in the first half of next year — is an open-world game set in late 19th century frontier, but it’s played from the point of view of a Native American.

An Emirates plane has been quarantined at JFK airport in New York after multiple passengers reported feeling ill, the airline has said. Local news outlets originally reported that up to 100 of the passengers on the flight from Dubai to New York were suffering from coughs and fevers. But the airline said in a statement that only 10 passengers had fallen ill, and “were immediately checked by local health authorities". The other passengers were expected to disembark shortly.

Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale. Alan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers.

A cancer patient who lost most of his penis to a flesh-eating superbug after routine surgery has won a six-figure payout. Andrew Lane, 63, contracted the potentially fatal infection necrotising fasciitis after an operation to remove his prostate gland in March 2013. His bowel was punctured during the procedure at Southend hospital in Essex, but staff only noticed the injury six days later, his lawyers said.