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But rather than respond to that movement’s request for greater democracy, the Hong Kong government and those making Hong Kong policy in Beijing tightened political control. First, in 2016, the Hong Kong government retroactively ejected six newly elected pro-democracy candidates from the Legislature for taking the oath of office in a frivolous manner, costing the pro-democracy forces, known as the Pan-Democrats, the majority needed to block unpopular laws. Several “self-determination” advocates were then denied the right to run for office, and a pro-independence party was banned after discussing Hong Kong independence was ruled treasonous....

Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous sellers who commission positive reviews in order to mislead buyers into purchasing their second-rate goods. This deceitful practice means buyers often waste their time trying to return the inferior product and even lose their money in some instances. 1. ReviewMeta ReviewMeta is a customer review checker that analyzes reviews using a wide variety of tests to return a rating based only on legitimate reviews. ReviewMeta’s goal is to identify and remove ‘unnatural reviews’ using data and algorithms, and show what unbiased shoppers really think of a product....

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed his $100 billion 2021 California Comeback Plan last month that includes $8.1 billion for stimulus payments. Under the state’s recently approved economic recovery budget package, taxpayers earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year will receive a $600 check. Parents and guardians will receive $500 for each dependent child, and undocumented migrant families will also receive $500. Officials say the payments will be sent out in September, and about 26 million of the state’s 39....

Scientific studies have consistently found Formica archboldi ants tend to keep lots of old body parts around their abodes. “A lot of ants are very clean, they’ll remove dead workers or left over food scraps,” said Adrian Smith, the Head of the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Many ants carry their waste away, to outside the nest, and put it in a pile named a midden, which also functions as a cemetery....

Beanbag shooting is the most requested training class of the National Tactical Officers Association, and hundreds of departments around the country have ordered them. They work like regular shotguns, with a two-inch-square beanbag instead of a bullet inside the shell. But some suspects have been accidentally injured; others have escaped. In Cincinnati this fall, police tried to subdue a suicidal man by firing beanbags at his chest. The bags bounced off and the suspect ran away; cops later caught him the old-fashioned way, by tackling him....

In New York, as in most big cities, the squeegee men are just one more unpleasant fact of fife in the daily urban assault on sensibilities. Along with traffic and noise, vagrancy pales as a problem in comparison to violent crime. But New York, with a new mayor, is pledging to get tough (again) on the bums. Throughout his campaign, Rudy Giuliani said New Yorkers were filled with “a sense of dread,” their “civil right to safety” denied not only by car thieves and drug dealers, but by nuisances like panhandlers and squeegee people....

Research from BeenVerified found that though 172 have been removed, 1,712 still stand. Maryland and California have taken 70 and 50 percent of those in their states down respectively, while West Virginia is the only state to have left all of theirs intact. The analysis was conducted by looking at data on public symbols of the Confederacy conducted in 2019 by Southern Poverty Law Center alongside analysis of reports of those removed in recent weeks....

The company suggested the strong steps were necessary to preserve the rest of the company. The New York-based public company slashed 40 positions from its workforce in a cutback that affected all locations and departments. The company said it is shutting down its sister operation in the UK because it will run out of funds at the end of the year, and neither TheStreet.com nor investors in the UK site were willing to give it more money....

The 21-year-old Thidapa didn’t lose her concentration and led throughout the day to shoot a bogey-free four-under 68 in the final round for an aggregate of eight-under 208. She scored a three-stroke victory over first-day joint leader Valentine Derrey of France, who ran short of her maiden LET victory after a two-under 70 on Saturday. “It’s an amazing thing to win at the Hero Women’s Indian Open. I didn’t think that I am going to win this tournament since this course is very tough....

RELATED: What Sets Grand Theft Auto 5 Apart From Grand Theft Auto 4 As a new Grand Theft Auto game, GTA4 did a lot of things right, and plenty of things better than the other titles in Rockstar’s ever-growing library of commercially and critically accepted games. GTA4 was the perfect stepping stone toward 2013’s Grand Theft Auto5 and proves that Rockstar learns new things with every release. 8 Definitive Liberty City Liberty City is perhaps the main location of the Grand Theft Auto franchise....

RELATED: Kirby Or Karby? The Best Kirby Memes From The Forgotten Lands Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the soon-to-release game in the Kirby franchise. Thus, it’s possible that longtime fans of the series may be exploring previous installments or even visiting (or revisiting) the anime for the first time. Despite being based on the games, Kirby: Right Back at Ya! takes some liberties with the Kirby lore. 10 Kirby Is A Baby In the games, it’s unclear how old Kirby truly is....

While there’s a lot of debate on which game is the best in the series, it’s clear that each one offers something better than the others. Persona 4 Golden follows a murder mystery in a small Japanese town involving a strange midnight TV broadcast. It is often considered the best by many, and there are several good reasons why. 5 Town Soundtracks Picking the best Persona soundtrack is like picking a favorite child....

RELATED: The Hardest Online Multiplayer Games, Ranked It’s been about a year now since the initial 2021 release, and despite the fall from MMORPG grace, the New World has gone through some improvements since the launch. The game fills a niche, with few other MMOs using the same type of Age of Exploration aesthetic and lacking any binding class or profession choices at character creation. 7 New Map And Quest Indicators This is just one of many details in the UI that have been replaced with similar but better designs....

Oil Pan And Fabrication The reality is that when you swap an engine, you are not going to get exactly the same fit and alignment as the machine that came with the vehicle. This means that your cross-members will likely not be immediately compatible with the chassis in such a way that your oil pan has enough clearance. Aftermarket oil pans can provide a solution to a lucky few who can find ones that are compatible and in acceptable condition, but many engine swaps are going to require custom fabrication or alteration of an oil pan to get it to cooperate with the orientation of the new engine....

Scientists are reporting today that New Caledonian crows are no slouches when it comes to sophisticated tool use. As they report online in the journal Current Biology, the crows can spontaneously combine two tools to get a snack–and in a way that suggests they solved the problem not by trial and error, but by reasoning through analogy. That is, the crows were able to see that a novel situation was essentially the same as one they’d encountered before....

No, but perhaps his crazy uncles are. The dreamy, disheveled Uncle Arthur (Maury Chaykin) is an obsessive pack rat, filling the apartment he shares with his brother Danny with rubber balls, old newspapers, paper clips-objects he believes are invested with the soul of the city. Uncle Danny (Michael Richards) looks at the big picture-and sees conspiracies everywhere. A raving paranoid, he’s convinced that Idaho is the Cherokee word for Jew-hater, and I Like Ike" a code for “I hate kikes....

The Clown Prince of Crime isn’t the only DC character primed for a dark, R-rated character study. From Catwoman to Lex Luthor to Batman himself, a ton of the imprint’s darker characters are crying out for a one-off hard-R cinematic deep-dive exploring their stories’ more complex, disturbing themes. One Batman villain whose story could become a great film in the hands of a visionary director (i.e. not Todd Phillips) is Two-Face....

In the early ‘70s, directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola rejuvenated Hollywood cinema by injecting some much-needed edge and darkness into its stories. Reeves included nods to many classics of this era in The Batman. Shooting the opening murder from the point-of-view of the killer is a nod to John Carpenter’s Halloween (and it even takes place on Halloween night). The shocking revelation that Carmine Falcone is Selina Kyle’s illegitimate father is a reference to a much more harrowing paternal plot twist in Chinatown....

The Class B Spartanburg Peaches hosted the Knoxville Smokies at Duncan Park on July 11, 1947. As Spartanburg’s Pete Milne hit an apparent walk-off single, someone turned off the lights and caused a chaotic scene. MORE: Baseball’s best historic ballparks | Faces of baseball’s past, in black and white The Peaches celebrated, the Smokies protested and 2,355 fans confusingly cheered. Was the game over? Did the hit count? The umpire said yes....

The Lake House was released in 2006 and while it has an all-star cast, starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and the late Christopher Plummer, the movie doesn’t work very well. From a strange timeline to many unrealistic moments, there are many reasons why The Lake House is a totally confusing romance. RELATED: Keanu Reeves Reveals His Only Concern With The Matrix Resurrections The premise of The Lake House asks audiences to understand the time travel rules immediately....