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Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult review – wildly juicy TV about the guru possessed by an alien

This tale of the Studio 54 stunner-turned-extraterrestrial who lured models to his Manhattan apartment for sex, money – or to give them mint face masks – is fascinating … yet fails to explain quite why so many believed his baloney

Documentaries about cults all have the same task, at which they nearly all fail: explaining exactly how so many people fell under the spell of a man (it’s always a man) who was, to outside observers, so obviously a damaged charlatan. None of it makes sense; it wouldn’t count as a cult if it did.

Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult does a messy job of telling the story of Frederick von Mierers, who spent the 1980s luring models into his spiritual enlightenment society, Eternal Values. Von Mierers’ life was all lies, chaos and mystery and it would be hard to set it out coherently, however diligently you tried. But this is like trying to keep up with an erratic bar-room raconteur who keeps glossing over the important bits so they can skip on to the next bit of gossip. Admittedly, each new piece of info is wildly juicy.

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Prepare for imminent return of El Niño, UN warns

UN agency predicts phenomenon that supercharges weather extremes has 80% chance of forming before September

The world must prepare for the imminent return of El Niño and the supercharged weather extremes it brings, the UN has warned.

The powerful natural weather pattern, which raises global temperatures and worsens some rainfall, has an 80% chance of forming before September and a 90% chance of persisting until November, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.

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Cobolli and co left surveying wreckage as men’s seeds keep falling in French Open

Second major of the year is wide open after exits of Sinner and Djokovic, paving way for a first-time finalist in Paris

In the immediate aftermath of one of the most significant wins of his career, a victory over the unheralded Zachary Svajda that sent him into his first quarter-final at Roland Garros on Monday, Flavio Cobolli was posed a straightforward question. The Italian had been easing through the match, leading 5-1 in set four, when he almost capitulated. After desperately dragging himself over the line in an excruciating tie‑break, the 10th-seed’s evaluation was succinct: “I almost shit on my pants.”

The majority of men at this year’s French Open have similarly had to closely monitor their bowel movements on the court considering the world of opportunities available for them. Carlos Alcaraz, the champion here for the past two years, is not playing because of a wrist injury. So the defeats in consecutive days of the top seed , Jannik Sinner, and Novak Djokovic, the 24-time grand slam champion, meant from as early as the third round that a new major winner would be crowned.

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Germany World Cup 2026 team guide

Julian Nagelsmann will rely on a Bayern-based core, but individual class is in worryingly short supply

This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.

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ClickHole

Because All Content Deserves To Go Viral.

Fuck This: Your Acquaintance’s Instagrams About Her New Baby Aren’t Nearly As Good As What She Posted When Single And Manic

There comes a time when everyone grows up, but tragically, that growth often comes at the expense of a comically immature social media presence. Case in point: Your acquaintance’s Instagram posts about her new baby aren’t nearly as good as what she posted when she was single and manic.

Well fuck this.

Sure, it’s nice that at age 38 this girl seems to love her baby and the super normal-looking guy she had the baby with, but boy oh boy are lighthearted trips to the zoo NOT what you follow this girl for. Previously, clicking on her story could have brought you myriad gifts: a drunken thirst trap, a screengrab of a customer service live chat interaction in which she was clearly in the wrong, or a new installment in the whole years-long saga where some magician she was dating cheated on her. But gone are the days of her Instagram lives where she’d show up at the magician’s house univited and call him a cocksucker. Now, it’s just videos of a moderately cute kid learning to eat grapes.

Oh, where have the good times gone?

Foolishly, you thought those hospital gown selfies she was taking last year were from an abortion, time in the psych ward, or, based on her enigmatic caption that read “No one ever gets close enough to know the real me,” somehow both. Sadly, it now seems she was there for a pregnancy-related visit, thereby cementing the end of her time as a worthwhile follow. 

Seriously, if it’s just gonna be videos of this kid saying “moo moo” when she means milk, we’re out. This is precisely the type of thing that this woman would’ve captioned “stupid bitch can’t even say milk” during her single days, which would’ve at least given us something.

But this? This is nothing. Unfollowing now.

And whenever she inevitably goes off whatever mood stabilizers are to thank for her new personality, we’ll consider re-following, but for now, this is the end of the road. Like she told the magician over her final IG live, “Bye bye, cocksucker. I’m done with your games.”

Compleet krankzinnig. 'Syriërs' plegen extreem geweld in Groningen

Social

De politie vraagt uw aandacht voor het volgende. Vier mannen worden gezocht voor 'EXTREEM GEWELD' gepleegd in een supermarkt te Groningen. Kijk maar effe naar de video hierboven hoe een negentienjarige jongen, die 'een opmerking' gemaakt zou hebben, de vernieling in wordt gebeukt door een roedel hyena's. "Zij hoeven niet uit Groningen of omgeving te komen, aangezien er die avond op de Grote Markt een demonstratie plaatsvond rond mensenrechten in Syrië. Daar waren veel mensen van buiten de stad op afgekomen." De mannen hebben in het politiedossier de namen C, G, H en I gekregen. U weet wel: Cornelis, Gerrit, Henkie en Ivo. Van Wely: "Volgens de politie zijn het inderdaad waarschijnlijk Syriërs." Misschien had Judith Sargentini (GroenLinks) tóch gelijk en zijn het helemaal geen IS-strijders die op vluchtelingenbootjes naar Europa komen. Het zijn gewoon compleet doorgedraaide potentiële moordenaars die hier de boel terroriseren als ze een 'opmerking' naar hun hoofd krijgen. Wat een gekkenhuis.
Instant update - Verdachte Henkie heeft zich gemeld, zo lijkt het. C, G en I blijven over

C

G

H

I

Word onze held

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Kabinet wil arbeidsmigrant beter beschermen tegen onderbetaling

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Werknemers die te weinig betaald krijgen, kunnen straks makkelijker hun achterstallig loon terugkrijgen. Vooral arbeidsmigranten worden onderbetaald. Minister Hans Vijlbrief (Sociale Zaken, D66) wil werkgevers sneller verantwoordelijk maken.

De Arbeidsinspectie, die controleert of het minimumloon wordt betaald, kan door een gebrekkige administratie bij een bedrijf niet altijd vaststellen of er sprake is van onderbetaling. De ondernemer kan dan een boete krijgen, maar de werknemer krijgt zijn achterstallig loon niet terug.

Vijlbrief wil de bewijslast omdraaien. Als de inspectie vermoedt dat de werknemer te weinig salaris krijgt, kan ze de werkgever dwingen het achterstallige loon te betalen. De inspectie mag dan "een fictieve onderbetaling van het loon berekenen", aldus het ministerie.

Ook in een rechtszaak komt de bewijslast bij de werkgever te liggen. Op dit moment moet de werknemer nog aantonen dat hij te weinig geld heeft gekregen en dat is vaak lastig. De komende maanden werkt Vijlbrief zijn wetsvoorstel uit.


ホタルブクロ

marikoroid has added a photo to the pool:

ホタルブクロ

何処からか種が飛んできました。

The Daily WTF

Curious Perversions in Information Technology

CodeSOD: Blocked the Date

Volodya sends us some bad date handling code in PHP. Which, I know, you're just reaching for the close tab and yawning when you hear that. You've seen it before. But bear with me, this one still has some fun bits to it.

$monthes = array(
        1 => 'Января', 2 => 'Февраля', 3 => 'Марта', 4 => 'Апреля',
        5 => 'Мая', 6 => 'Июня', 7 => 'Июля', 8 => 'Августа',
        9 => 'Сентября', 10 => 'Октября', 11 => 'Ноября', 12 => 'Декабря'
);

This creates a list of months.

if ( $team->have_posts() ) :
    // Start the Loop.
    while ( $team->have_posts() ) : $team->the_post();

Today, I have learned something about PHP. PHP has an alternate syntax for blocks. Instead of if { statements }, you can do: if : statements endif. Just one more quirk of PHP to make the language more confusing.

This block checks have_posts in an if, and then checks it again in a while, meaning we don't need the if at all, but so it goes. We haven't gotten to the date handling yet, so let's look at that.

        $date = get_the_date();
        $d1 = explode(".", $date);

        if ($d1[1][0]=='0')
            $m = $d1[1][1];
        else
            $m = $d1[1][0];
        ?><div class="date"><?php echo $d1[0]." ".$monthes[$m]." ".$d1[2]; ?></div>

We get the date as a string, and then split it out into date parts. This is, of course, highly locale specific, but clearly they know what locale they're in. Then they look at the array of date parts. The second element holds their "month" string, as two digits, so they look at the digits. If the month string starts with a 0, they grab the second character and put it in $m. Otherwise, they grab the first character and put it in $m. Then they use $m to look up the $monthes.

Unless there's some substring weirdness going on that I don't know about, this code… doesn't work? Right? Since they're grabbing only a single character out of $d1[1] every time, for months later in the year, $m is only ever going to hold 1, and thus we only output Января, meaning we get four months of January, which just seems cruel, honestly, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

As with all bad date handling code, this could easily be fixed by just using the built in functions, even in PHP. What I'm going to take away from this though is that PHP's syntax lets you write in Visual Basic or Ruby if you're determined enough. And you can mix and match, so enjoy a codebase that has :/endif and {} scattered throughout.

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Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Auto raakt betonblok en belandt op z'n kant op rotonde

Op de rotonde Eike's Hof voor het politiebureau in Gorinchem is maandagavond een auto op z'n kant terechtgekomen. De bestuurder raakte gewond en werd door ambulancepersoneel behandeld.