Not The Onion

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Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
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Look, I get it. The gargantuan shit-show that is U.S. politics and the American descent into fascism is on everyone's minds. It's certainly on mine.

But the point of this community is to highlight weird news stories that make you go, "By golly, I thought I was reading a headline from The Onion. You know, America's finest news source." A lot of stories being posted lately don't even remotely fit that.

That doesn't mean political stories aren't allowed here, but they must have headlines that would make people pause and wonder if it's a story from The Onion. Straight up regular, non Onion-y headlines don't fit.

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Fake videos show frustrated, unmarried, childless middle-aged women crying and venting in hospital hallways about their life choices.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/57655378

fucking pathetic; also apologies for posting the trash...

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The nation’s largest organization for medical examiners has issued a warning about a controversial, centuries-old forensic test that has contributed to cases in which pregnant women have been charged with murder.

The premise behind the lung float test is simple: If a baby was born alive and then died, air from its first breaths would cause its lungs to float in a jar with water. If the baby was stillborn, the lack of air in the lungs would cause them to sink.

But the many critics of the test have long labeled it junk science and drawn parallels between the test and witch trials, where women were deemed witches based on whether they floated or sank.

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A group of shamans gathered Monday by the sea in the Miraflores district of Peru’s capital, Lima, to carry out an annual ritual in which they make predictions for the upcoming year.

Dressed in traditional Andean ponchos and headdresses, the group performed a ceremony, and made predictions about the course of international relations, ongoing conflicts and the fate of world leaders.

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I feel like that's probably the one thing a vehicle marketed as bullet-proof needs to be... like, actually bullet-proof.

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Founding father Benjamin Franklin secured the alliance with France that led to victory in the Revolutionary War, negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending said war, signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S Constitution, discovered that lightning was electrical, invented bifocal glasses, wrote the famous Poor Richard’s Almanac, and ran newspapers.

He also had some thoughts on farting.

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A Virginia Beach nurse claims a controversial artificial intelligence upstart manipulated her 11-year-old son into having virtual sex with chatbot “characters” posing as iconic vocalist Whitney Houston and screen legend Marilyn Monroe, after which she discovered X-rated exchanges on the boy’s phone that left her “horrified,” according to a federal lawsuit reviewed by The Independent.

Throughout one “incredibly long and graphic chat” on the Character.AI platform, which has been accused of driving numerous young people to suicide, the chatbot portraying Houston took things to such an extreme that portions of “her” messages were automatically filtered out for not complying with the site’s terms of service and community guidelines, the complaint states.

During the conversation – a screenshot of which is included in the complaint – the system cuts “Whitney” off as an extremely graphic passage becomes even raunchier.

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/52115494

“Welcome to hell,” one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.”

Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment “did not advance the ball” and merely echoed others’ reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was “ready,” insisting that holding stories “for whatever reason” happens “every day in every newsroom.”

But Weiss apparently did not realize that the “Inside CECOT” would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended.

Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss’ block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to “to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent,” including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire.

It’s currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public’s response so far, writing, “cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth.”

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The move comes amid outcry from Democrats after the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts affixed Trump's name to its sign in Washington.

Donald Trump’s name is being attached to a new class of U.S. battleships that will have nuclear capabilities.

Making the announcement at an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Navy Secretary John Phelan referred to the warships as “Trump-class battleships" and said a forthcoming vessel dubbed the USS Defiant will be “the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”

Trump’s eponymous battleships will be armed with guns and missiles, as well as hypersonic weapons, electronic rail guns and high-powered lasers.

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