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The annual migration of red crabs has brought traffic to a standstill on an Australian island. Apart from the epic journey, the species is also notorious for eating its own young.

Tens of millions of crustaceans are swarming Canberra-governed Christmas Island, which is almost a thousand miles northwest of the Australian mainland. Parks Australia, a government body in charge of wildlife conservation on the island, has deployed its staff to manage traffic, rake crabs off roads and provide advisories to local residents regarding road closures. Authorities are well-prepared to deal with the epic crab march as it repeats every year, usually in October and November. There are even special bridges and tunnels in place, built over and under busy roads so as to minimize the number of crabs crushed by cars. The sight of millions of these creatures making their perilous trek has become one of Christmas Island’s main tourist attractions.

Millions of crabs have flooded the roads on Australia’s Christmas Island pic.twitter.com/Qa2CbSzwMW

— RT (@RT_com) November 18, 2021

The exact timing of the red crabs’ journey from forest to ocean is defined by rainfall and lunar phases. The march is led by male crabs, which are later joined by females. On reaching the ocean, they mate and spawn, with each female capable of producing as many as 100,000 eggs. However, most of the young crabs never make it back to the forest as they end up being eaten by fish and whale sharks for whom this is a veritable feast. To make matters worse, the crab larvae that do make it to the beach are often devoured by returning adult crabs of the very same species, hence one of their names – the cannibal crab.

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Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable, Colombia’s president Ivan Duque has insisted, after photos of police academy cadets dressed up in Third Reich uniforms were uploaded online, causing outrage.

“Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable,” Duque stated in a tweet on Friday. The president said he condemned any references to those who were “responsible for the Jewish Holocaust that claimed the lives of more than 6 million people,” adding that “anti-Semitism has no place in the world.”

Policía colombiana homenajea a Alemania con una fiesta ‘nazi’

Indignación en Colombia por la fiesta que organizó un grupo de estudiantes de la Escuela de Policía Simón Bolívar en Tuluá, en la que varios uniformados recrearon escenas alusivas a la Alemania nazi pic.twitter.com/UnF4ajUd8z

— RT en Español (@ActualidadRT) November 19, 2021

Duque had earlier made demands for “heads to roll” at an academy that “promotes such criminal practices,” with its director, Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Ferney Bayona Sanchez, already having been sacked.

Toda una polémica ha provocado el evento realizado en las últimas horas en la escuela de Policía Simón Bolívar de Tuluá. Los uniformados se disfrazaron de Adolf Hitler, haciendo alusión al nazismo durante la semana de la internacionalización. #VocesySonidos pic.twitter.com/EoS4JqvzrC

— BLU Pacífico (@BLUPacifico) November 18, 2021

Colombia’s defense ministry, which oversees the country’s police, also insisted in a statement that that its training programs “don’t envisage in any way an activity such as the one which took place” at the academy.

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The images of police cadets in Nazi uniforms caused anger and bewilderment among internet users.

The German and Israeli embassies in the country reacted by issuing a joint statement, in which they expressed “total rejection of any form of apology or demonstration of Nazism.” The US embassy in Bogota also said that it was “shocked and deeply disappointed” by the development.

The controversial images, in which aspiring officers were caught sporting black SS outfits with red swastika armbands and grey Wehrmacht uniforms from the World War II era, weren’t revealed in some bombshell media report, but were actually published on the official Twitter account of the Colombian police this Thursday.

The photos were taken as part of a “cultural exchange” event at the police academy in the city of Tulua, aimed at commemorating Germany and “strengthening the knowledge of our police students.” The cosplay was apparently intended to illustrate the history of German law enforcement, with more cadets pictured wearing more modern versions of the country’s police uniforms in the pictures.

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People are weird. They cook and eat the strangest things. This time it’s an octopus stuffed inside a turkey, sitting on top of crab legs, and (optionally) garnished with bacon strips. This monstrous culinary invention was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and honestly… it looks like a crime against food.

If this gallery wasn’t disgusting enough for you, you should also check out pre-cooked canned chicken that we’ve previously featured on this fun and useful site. We know you’ll love it!

The post Meet Cthulhu Turkey: It’s a Turkey Stuffed With Octopus That People Actually Make first appeared on .

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American billionaire Bill Gates has claimed Covid-19 deaths and infections may drop below seasonal flu levels next year as more people get vaccinated and treatment improves, unless we encounter a new, more deadly variant.

Speaking on Thursday in a virtual interview at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, founder of Microsoft stated that vaccines, natural immunity and emerging oral treatments mean that “the death rate and the disease rate ought to be coming down pretty dramatically.”  

The tech mogul, who has been particularly vocal during the pandemic, said issues around vaccine-production capacity are likely to be replaced by distribution challenges and even waning demand.

“The vaccines are very good news, and the supply constraints will be largely solved as we get out in the middle of next year, and so we’ll be limited by the logistics and the demand,” he noted. 

He also told his audience that it remains to be seen how much demand there is for Covid-19 shots in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Calling for more work to eradicate flu, Gates claimed Covid-19 rates and deaths would possibly fall below those of flu by the middle of next year, unless more deadly coronavirus variants emerge. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has involved itself in the development of vaccines and virus surveillance, calling for a global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The foundation has invested hundreds of millions dollars in the development and distribution of potentially lifesaving shots. 

According to the World Health Organization, influenza kills up to 650,000 people each year. At least five million people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began in late 2019.

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Once you’ve reached optimal cat lady status, there comes a time in your life where you think it’s necessary to start massaging your cat’s head. Luckily, someone has already created a cat head massager, and it is most likely the most specific niche product you could think of. You can get it on Amazon or AliExpress.

If your cat didn’t love you before, rest assured he will love you now. Your cat will be so thankful for the head massage that he might even ignore you for less time throughout the day, and if you’re really lucky, your cat may even acknowledge your existence. …Or you can use it on yourself if you have a particularly small head.

In case you feel like you should have this thing in your (and your cat’s) life, you can get it on Amazon or AliExpress.

The post Cat Head Massager Is The Cutest Thing Ever first appeared on .

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French luxury giant Dior has taken down a controversial photograph that had been criticized in China for “smearing Asian women” by pandering to Western stereotypes while “distorting Chinese culture.”

The photo, which was part of the brand’s ‘Lady Dior’ exhibition in Shanghai, depicts an Asian model wearing a traditional dress and clutching a Dior handbag. It came under fire this week from Chinese media outlets for featuring “spooky eyes, [a] gloomy face and Qing Dynasty-styled nail armor.”

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Although Dior has not released a statement regarding the controversy, it confirmed to fashion trade publication Business of Fashion that the photo had been removed from the exhibition. The brand has also reportedly taken the photo off Chinese social media platform Weibo.

The image, which was shot by Chinese photographer Chen Man, had drawn both media ire and public outrage. However, there were apparently no calls for a boycott of the brand.

In an editorial on Monday titled “Is This the Asian Woman in Dior’s Eyes?”, the Beijing Daily paper had noted that the image makes Chinese consumers uncomfortable. The publication criticized Man for “playing up to the brands, or the aesthetic tastes of the Western world.”

For years, Asian women have always appeared with small eyes and freckles from the Western perspective, but the Chinese way to appreciate art and beauty can’t be distorted by that.

Warning that both the brand and the photographer had “gone too far,” the China Women’s News paper ran an editorial on Wednesday that claimed it “indicated their intention of uglifying Chinese women and distorting Chinese culture.”

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“Again, from… Dior’s ghost-style picture, which makes the public feel uncomfortable, it’s easy to see some Western brands’ ‘pride and prejudice’ in their aesthetics and culture,” said the newspaper, which is run by the All-China Women’s Federation.

Meanwhile, the Global Times noted that the “lingering controversy could pose a delicate situation” for Dior and other global brands – for whom China’s “massive” luxury market was one of the biggest sources of revenue. The paper said that the Chinese public had become “increasingly sensitive” toward the depiction and treatment of Chinese people and culture by foreign companies.

While pointing out that Chinese social media users had demanded the company and photographer explain their intention, a number of media outlets also highlighted how some netizens had praised the photo as a departure from typical standards of beauty in the country, often characterized by “fair skin and large eyes.”

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence to “predict” formulas for new designer drugs, with the stated goal of helping to improve their regulation. The AI generated formulas for nearly nine million potential new drugs.

Researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) used a deep neural net for the job, teaching it to make up chemical structures of potential new drugs. According to their study, released this week, the computer intelligence fared better at the task than the scientists had expected.

The research team used a database of known designer drugs – synthetic psychoactive substances – to train the AI on their structures. The market for designer drugs is ever-changing, since their manufacturers are constantly tweaking their formulas to circumvent restrictions and produce new “legal” substances, while cracking their structure takes months for law enforcement agencies, the researchers said.

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“The vast majority of these designer drugs have never been tested in humans and are completely unregulated. They are a major public-health concern to emergency departments across the world,” one of the researchers, UBC medical student Dr. Michael Skinnider has said.

After its training, the AI was able to generate some 8.9 million potential designer drugs. Afterwards, researchers ran a data sheet of some 196 new drugs, which had emerged in real life after the model was trained, and found that more than 90% of these have been already predicted by the computer.

“The fact that we can predict what designer drugs are likely to emerge on the market before they actually appear is a bit like the 2002 sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where foreknowledge about criminal activities about to take place helped significantly reduce crime in a future world,” senior author Dr. David Wishart, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, has said.

Identifying completely unknown substances remains an issue for the AI, the research team has noted, but they hope it might potentially help with that task, since the computer was also able to predict which formulas of designer drugs were more likely to be created and hit the market. The model “ranked the correct chemical structure of an unidentified designer drug among the top 10 candidates 72 percent of the time,” while throwing in spectrometry analysis, which is an easily obtained measurement, bumped the accuracy to some 86%.

“It was shocking to us that the model performed this well, because elucidating entire chemical structures from just an accurate mass measurement is generally thought to be an unsolvable problem,” Skinnider stated.

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Instagram is looking to channel the anger of its users by introducing a new feature that allows them to report various problems with the app by shaking their phones.

“Have you ever used Instagram and it wasn’t working like it was supposed to? It was just really getting you… really just pissing you off?” Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri asked his followers in a clip uploaded to Twitter on Wednesday.

Well, precisely for infuriating situations like that, the platform has developed a feature it’s calling “rage shake,” he announced.

Covering ✌️ this week:
– Carousel Deletion (finally!)
– Rage Shake

Did you know about these 💎s? Any other features you’d like me to cover? Let me know 👇 pic.twitter.com/Yx0q4UGFfb

— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) November 17, 2021

Shaking your phone will, from now on, cause a special form to pop up on screen, allowing you to instantly report issues such as photos not uploading or audio not playing.

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The form is also the perfect place to let out “all the emotions and feels you’ve got going on,” Mosseri insisted, assuring Instagrammers that these reports would be promptly dealt with.

Thanks to their feedback, Instagram will be able to optimize its bug-fixing process, he said. The option, which he described as a “hidden gem,” is so far available only in the US, on both iOS and Android.  

The Instagram boss gently shook his own cellphone in the clip to demonstrate the feature in action. However, it’s likely upset users may well end up rage-shaking with a good deal more passion, which could increase the risk of a gadget being damaged, or their owner or even a passerby being struck should the phone fly out of their hand.

Mosseri also didn’t advise the public what to do with their rage over media revelations about alleged shady practices by Instagram and the platform’s owner, Facebook.

Among the trove of papers recently leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen was an internal study from 2020 reporting that Instagram was causing many of its young users, particularly teen girls, to suffer mental health issues and suicidal thoughts. However, the platform kept operating in the same manner despite this finding, with changes being promised only after the study made headlines this September.

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Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb has described an anti-lockdown protest in his city as an “orgy of violence.” The Dutch demonstration devolved into a violent riot that saw police open fire on protesters.

Aboutaleb described the events of Friday night as an “orgy of violence,” after protesters packed Rotterdam’s central Coolsingel shopping street to voice their opposition to an ongoing partial lockdown, a ban on New Year’s Eve fireworks displays, and the possibility of a two-tiered system of freedom in the Netherlands, one of liberty for the vaccinated and restrictions for those without the jab.

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The protest soon got out of hand, and police said on Saturday that 57 people were arrested. Protesters were seen torching police vehicles and launching fireworks at police, who shot at them in response.

Aboutaleb said that the cops had been “forced” to use their weapons. “On a number of occasions the police felt it necessary to draw their weapons to defend themselves,” he told reporters. “They shot at protesters, people were injured.”

Police say at least seven people were injured. Two of these injuries were caused by police bullets, and the victims are still in hospital. One officer was hospitalized, while several others were treated at the scene for minor injuries.

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When you think the internet can’t get any more niche, it finds a way to get even more specific. We’re, of course, talking about an Instagram account @BagDogs that is solely dedicated to sharing people’s photos of dogs chilling in bags as they are being transported from point A to point B. Scroll down to see some of their best photos!

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