Burger-flipping robots are changing the food service industry by offering their services to restaurants for about $3 an hour.

Miso Robotics' machine named Flippy is "the world's first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant that can learn from its surroundings and acquire new skills over time," according to the company's website.

This is good news for restaurant owners because it would cost them less to employ Flippy than a minimum-wage worker, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

The article continued:

Off-the-shelf robot arms have plunged in price in recent years, from more than $100,000 in 2016, when Miso Robotics first launched, to less than $10,000 today, with cheaper models coming in the near future.

As a result, Miso can offer Flippys to fast-food restaurant owners for an estimated $2,000 per month on a subscription basis, breaking down to about $3 per hour. (The actual cost will depend on customers' specific needs). A human doing the same job costs $4,000 to $10,000 or more a month, depending on a restaurant's hours and the local minimum wage. And robots never call in sick.

Jennifer Lopez and Shakira's Super Bowl 2020 performance sparked outrage in the US, with many viewers condemning the sexual nature of the show which was compared to 'soft porn' inappropriate for a family event.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received a total of 1,312 complaints from outraged viewers condemning the organizers for converting the highly-anticipated sporting event into a "disgraceful and amoral" show.

The vast majority of the viewers who shared their anger with the FCC were outraged with the singers' tight-fitting outfits and gyrating dance moves which they found offensive and non-family friendly.

"I do not subscribe to The Playboy Channel, we do not buy porn for $20 a flick, we simply wanted to sit down as a family and watch the Super Bowl," one complaint read. "God forbid we expected to watch football and a quick concert but instead had our eyes molested."

Reddit seems to have decided that special rules need to be enforced for the most popular pro-Trump subreddit, the_Donald. Subredditors there claim half their moderators have been purged and new ones are being installed from above.

There aren't many bigger gathering places on the internet for Trump fans than Reddit's the_Donald subreddit. Boasting over 790,000 subscribers, it is a massive hub of fans of Trump. Like all subreddits, it serves as a forum to share and discuss news, in this case political stories related to the United States president or to his policies. Threads will commonly be created to discuss immigration policy, the media's issues with Trump, anti-socialism rallying calls, and so forth. The most distinctive feature is that the board has always had a strict "no cucks or leftists" policy, meaning they don't tolerate people of the extreme left politically, or people they deem to be political sellouts. It's a sort of He-Man Trump-Lovers club.

In February, the Atlantic published a much discussed essay by David Brooks entitled "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake." Brooks noted that the conditions that once made nuclear families viable — strong unions, plenty of jobs that paid living wages, inexpensive housing and transportation and education costs, stay-at-home mothers, high numbers of churchgoers — were products of a very brief window of time that only lasted from about 1950 until about 1965. For centuries prior to that, Americans tended to divide themselves into extended families, vast networks of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives, all of whom remained connected to one another by some sort of family enterprise. Here's how Brooks sums up the extended American family:

In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands...Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents — a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens — when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

Up to 30,000 people were estimated to have seen Greta Thunberg's 'School Strike for Climate' in Bristol. But with police warnings and the shadow of coronavirus looming over Europe, should parents be condoning their kids' activism?

As sporting events around the world are canceled and schools across the UK weigh up the prospect of closing their doors for two months due to fears of coronavirus infection, the idea of 30,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, gathering in Bristol for a Greta Thunberg rally on Friday seems a bit irresponsible on behalf of the organizers.

Bearing in mind that most schools only finished their mid-term holidays last week and Friday of this week would mean another day skipping school, police also warned parents that the expected number of people flocking to hear the 17-year-old Swedish activist speak puts children in danger of tripping, falling or being crushed.

Thousands of people attended marches in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, on Saturday, to commemorate Russia's former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered five years ago in the capital.

The memory of Nemtsov, a veteran politician who became a leading figure in the western-leaning opposition after the turn of the century, is a unifying point for various anti-Kremlin political groupings who are frequently at odds with one another.

Leaders of the march, who have described themselves as "pretty much the entire democratic spectrum" in Russia, expected that as many as 30,000 people would participate in the Moscow event, according to their application to the mayor's office. The opposition-aligned "White Counter" monitor claimed 22,300 took part, while authorities estimated the number of attendees at 10,500. News outlet 'Znak' said 1,500 were at the Saint Petersburg commemoration.

Is this just mass hysteria, or is a major play in the pipeline?
Another day, another round of shrill headlines. The coronavirus could spread to "every country in the world" (like chickenpox), we might have to cancel the Olympics. Ban handshakes! We're running out of masks!


We've been over the statistics, there's no need to go over them again. Thus far, scientifically speaking, the Coronavirus is nothing all that remarkable.

And yet... here we are. A world on the verge of all-out, no-holds-barred panic.

Two days ago the scare was related to a woman in Japan who allegedly got the disease twice.

Today the authoritarians' mouths are watering over discussion of stadium quarantines in Australia and the possibility of the military having to aid the struggling NHS in the UK.

Catalonia independence supporters flocked to the French town of Perpignan for a huge rally to listen to former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont speaking to them in person for the first time since his exile.

The small southern French town of Perpignan is located in what Catalan independence supporters consider to be Northern Catalonia. With a population of 120,000, Perpignan suddenly witnessed just as many Catalonians flooding its streets. The town, located just 30 kilometers from the French border with Spain, became the venue for an event featuring a speech by Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan pro-independence leader who fled his home country following the ill-fated 2017 referendum.

Over 100,000 people joined the rally at a Perpignan Exhibition Center parking lot, according to various estimates. The organizers put the number at as many as 150,000. Some demonstrators went to the city the day before to not miss anything. The number of those trying to attend the event, organized by a group called the Council for the Catalan Republic and headed by Puigdemont himself, was so big that thousands of people were still stuck in traffic on the border when the exiled pro-independence leader was about to begin his speech.

Allegheny County is being sued after being accused of not properly clearing voter rolls.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation filed the lawsuit that claims the voter rolls have more than 7,000 voters registered multiple times and lists more than 1,500 voters who are now dead.

The group also says one voter was registered seven times to vote.

"We are not assigning any kind of bad intent to the registered voters of Allegheny County. We don't even really believe they know this is happening. This appears to be errors that are occurring inside the four walls of the elections office," Public Interest Legal Foundation spokesman Logan Churchwell said.

This is not the first time that Allegheny County has been accused of not clearing records.

Action News Investigates found some of the same issues in 2004, including thousands of voters being registered twice and multiple votes being cast by the same people in the same elections.

The legal foundation is asking the county to increase its efforts to maintain voter lists.

In a major international survey, only 37 per cent of Israelis said human rights groups should be able to operate freely, as reported by the Times of Israel.

The 34-nation poll, conducted by the US-based Pew Research Centre from May-October 2019, focused on views of, and support for, democracy and democratic institutions.

Support in Israel is "significantly lower than in most countries for freedom of expression, including an uncensored press, internet freedom and freedom for human rights groups to operate freely."