A simple act of vandalism on dozens of Christmas trees made it appear as if a peculiar Ku Klux Klan chapter had sprung up in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg this week.

The wrapped trees had eyeholes daubed on their protective coverings giving the impression that a bizarre Klan gathering was taking place near the Primorskaya metro station on Vasilyevsky Island.

We are responsible for those we tame. And it's now a law in Russia as Vladimir Putin put his signature under new legislation, which bans killing, pitting and other forms of mistreatment of animals.

The Law on Responsible Treatment of Animals prohibits the killing of animals "under any pretext." It also outlaws shooting or poisoning stray dogs and cats, which has been happening in many Russian cities in recent years. Homeless animals are to be captured, sterilized, vaccinated and released with a special microchip.

Organizing animal fights and hounding beasts at other animals or people has also been made illegal.

The law orders pets to be kept in proper conditions by their masters. It bans contact or petting zoos from being opened at the malls, which is a common thing across Russia, as well as hosting animals at bars and restaurants.

Swedish state broadcaster SVT has come under fire for what some viewers are calling an effort to downplay the horrendous details of the murders of two Scandinavian backpackers in Morocco last week.

Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway were killed while backpacking in Morocco's High Atlas mountains. While both girls were stabbed multiple times, one of them was also beheaded on camera, shown in a video that has spread like wildfire around social media.

Previously recorded footage, which was authenticated by investigators, also shows the suspects in the brutal double murder pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, further confirming that the murders were an act of terrorism.

Footage has shown the aftermath of a double-decker bus veering off the road and crashing into the front garden of a south London home on Boxing Day night.

Police and paramedics were called just before 9pm to the incident that saw the bus smash through a fence and into the garden of a house in Streatham Vale, Brixton.

The area was immediately cordoned off by emergency services with two people treated for minor injuries and another taken to hospital, the Met police confirmed.

An eye-witness on Twitter claimed the bus had narrowly missed a car but footage shows a number of other vehicles that appear to have been damaged.

"It's all true: Everything is fake," tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a Wednesday New York Magazine article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they're bullshit.

Pao was responding to a tweet by the Washington Post's Aram Zucker-Schariff, quoting the following segment of the article:

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world's greatest data-gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its "Instant Articles," the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook's mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what's the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there's something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook's claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day - though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn't need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes. - NYMag

A black lawmaker in Florida filed a bill that would bar the removal of Confederate monuments in the Sunshine State. Such statues and other memorials have come under attack on American college campuses during recent years.

Republican state Rep. Mike Hill proposed the "Soldiers' and Heroes' Monuments and Memorials Protection Act" to ensure the preservation of "remembrances" constructed on public property from Mar. 22, 1822 and onward, the Pensacola News Journal reported.

Such memorials "may only be relocated, removed, altered, renamed, rededicated or otherwise disturbed if necessary to accommodate construction, repair, or improvements to the remembrance or to the surrounding property," according to the bill. While governments have bypassed similar laws by selling land on which Confederate memorials are located and permitting the new owner to remove them, Hill's bill stipulates that sale of public property containing a memorial must result in the memorial occupying a position of "equal prominence."

Author's note: It appears other outlets misrepresented this story, reporting John was found in violation simply for asking out a physically smaller woman. This is not true, nor is it what I reported. I reported that the comments from the Mizzou official were made during a deposition for a lawsuit brought by John. I then summarized the actions that led to his punishment and linked to a previous article with more information. Nowhere in that summary or the previous article do I mention physical size, because that's not what led to his punishment. That does not change the fact that a Mizzou official, during a deposition, compared a man asking out a physically smaller woman to a professor asking out a student.

Getting up the courage to ask someone out on a date can already be nerve-racking, but now that college campuses have completely gone off the deep end, that fear will be intensified.

Today's crazy comes from - unsurprisingly - the University of Missouri (Mizzou), best known for torpedoing its enrollment rates after campus protests led a professor to threaten a student journalist. An official at Mizzou indicated during a deposition that a male student who was physically larger than the female student he asked out may have violated the school's Title IX policy because his physical size gave him "power over her."

For years, we have been told that one must receive "affirmative consent" before anything of a dating or sexual nature takes place. Critics of such policies, such as this reporter, have often wondered what would happen if the mere ask is unwanted, does that also constitute sexual harassment or assault?

Now we appear to have our answer: Yes.

When a Mizzou official was questioned regarding a case where a black male Ph.D. candidate at the school asked out a white female fitness trainer, she bizarrely suggested that the fact that the male student was larger than the female student gave him "power over her" and violated school policy.

A new club has just completed its inaugural semester at North Carolina State University, welcoming students interested in Satanism.

The club calls itself "Satanic Students at NC State," and its leaders say they promote humanism and are working to build up the fledgling group at the Raleigh-based public university.

"This semester, the group has held public meetings to attract and gain interest," Satanic Students told The College Fix in an email interview. "These meetings have largely consisted of discussions with new and potential members about the type of Satanism practiced by the group."

A journalist in Tunisia - the first country to face the Arab Spring - has set himself on fire, triggering a protest against unemployment and poverty. The case resembles the start of the 2011 Western-hailed revolt.

"For our people who have no means of subsistence, today I start a revolution," journalist Abderrazak Zorgui told his audience in the poverty-stricken town of Kasserine.

Calling for people to rise up against poverty and poor living conditions, Zorgui then set himself on fire, invoking the well-known self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in late 2010.

Zorgui was soon pronounced dead at a local hospital, and his funeral service quickly snowballed into violent protests in Kasserine and other towns. Kasserine, home to 76,000 people, saw clashes between stone-throwing protesters and police who deployed tear gas to disperse crowds.

Hollywood elites are no stranger to the finer things in life. Luxurious cars. Extravagant homes. Lavish lifestyles. It's part of the territory that comes with being famous.

Actor Chris Pratt, best known for his role as Andy in Parks and Recreation, lives a different lifestyle than many of his Hollywood comrades. In fact, he has a farm and raises his own animals to feed his family. But now the simplistic lifestyle is being labeled as "problematic" by TV Guide:

When you take a deeper look at Pratt the man and not necessarily Pratt the actor, some of the shine wears off. Although he can be as funny offscreen as he is on - his recurring "What's My Snack" videos on Instagram are almost always delightful - it's impossible to ignore some problematic aspects of his life offscreen.