Claw-Machine Master

35-year-old Chen Zhitong deserves an award. Truly. Last year, Zhitong won 15,000 stuffed animals. He is so renowned in his neighborhood that the owners of various local restaurants and amusement parks beg him to not play with the claw machine. Zhitong stated that they offer him meals and precious metals, and in return he promises not to play. When asked tips on how to defeat the claw machine, he stated that the claw must first be tight enough. You have to be aware of the claw’s angle rotation and the layout of the toys. Zhitong has stated that his abundance of toys have left his apartment cluttered, so to help slightly remedy this issue, he donated 1,000 of the toys to schools for the deaf and blind. So, not only is Zhitong a bonafide winner for defeating the elusive Claw Machine, but he is also a winner for just being an all-around decent human being. Props to you, Chen.

Find Our Girls

If you haven’t heard by now, there are currently thousands of young black and Latina girls missing not only in the D.C. and Chicago area, but nationwide. According to the Black and Missing Foundation, there are 64,000 black women and girls missing as of 2014. In the most recent months, there’s been a Twitter campaign launched in hopes of spreading the word about these missing girls with the hashtag “MissingDCGirls.” Many people are outraged (as they should be) with the media’s blatant ignorance when it comes to the missing girls, claiming that the media is only willing to cover stories about missing white children. To put it in perspective, 35 percent of the country’s missing children are black and 20 percent are Latino. So, if we are looking at the numbers, why aren’t these children getting equal, if not more, media attention?

A Whole New Word(s)

For all you English language buffs out there, listen up. Dictionary.com has added 300 new words to its online database. Terms like “cheat day,” “dabbing,” “dad bod,” “man bun,” and “mic drop,” along with other millennial phrases, all made the cut. While some of these words seem out of place in the dictionary, Dictionary.com Lexicographer Jane Solomon says there is a method to the madness. When on the hunt for new words to add to the dictionary, she does extensive research by searching through multiple texts and social media in order to search for patterns. That is, after all, how Dictionary.com acquired the terms “burkini” and “Black Lives Matter.” Another way they find new words to add is by using “lookup data,” where they see words people tried to search for on their site but couldn’t find. Although the most recent words they have decided to add already seem obsolete, you can’t knock them for trying to adapt to our rapidly changing lives.

The Next Apocalypse

Kudos to the Washington Post for bringing us the latest uplifting news. Like their charming story that explains how spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year. Yes, you read this correctly. European biologists Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer decided to tally up the amount of food eaten by the world’s population of spiders in a year. To get this estimate, Nyffeler and Birkhofer did some fancy math and research about how many spiders live in each square meter of land on Earth and how much different kinds of spiders eat in a year. Their findings were a little scary. In any given year, the world’s spider population eat between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey. In other words, spiders could eat as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet and still be hungry enough for a few more million tons. You can read more in-depth details about their results here, but we’re going to leave that statistic alone.

Hot Off The Presses

A high school newspaper from Kansas just broke the story of a lifetime. While investigating the credentials of a principal recently hired by the school, they found multiple discrepancies. The principal told the school that she got her master’s and doctorate degrees from “Corllins University, but after further research, the high schoolers discovered that Corllins is a place where people can buy degrees. It is not actually accredited by the US Department of Education and has no known physical address, so the students knew that something wasn’t right. In an Skype interview with the journalists, the principal’s answers were incomplete, with conflicting dates and inconsistencies. The student newspaper, The Booster Redux, published an article Friday that revealed these discrepancies and raised questions about the legitimacy of her degrees. A few days later, she resigned. Now, the high school paper is being praised by journalists across the country for uncovering what was overlooked by adults.

It’s Pay Day

Iceland’s waving goodbye to the wage gap. Last Tuesday, it became the first country to introduce legislation that requires employers to prove that they are paying their male and female employees equally. Remember that thing called the wage gap? In Iceland, it means that women are earning 14-20 percent less than men. Iceland is saying, “No more,” and they now plan to close the wage gap in five years or less. In other areas of women’s rights, Iceland ranks highly. About half of its parliament are women. 80 percent of women work. Nearly half of board members are women. So, the diminishing of the wage gap has been a long time coming. Starting next year, companies and government agencies will have to undergo audits in order to prove that they are complying with equal pay rules. Every job will be examined to make sure that there are no existing wage gaps of more than 5 percent. Now, women all over the world are hoping that their country is next.

Oops!…I Did It Again

My goal in life is to be so important that a government would postpone their election just because I am coming to their city. This exact situation happened in Israel because of an upcoming Britney Spears concert. Britney is performing her first concert in Tel Aviv on July 3, which just so happens to be the same day as the Israeli Labor Party’s primary election. The obvious solution? Postpone the election. The election will now be taking place on July 4. It is reported that the reasoning for this delay is because it would be hard to get security for the election, and there would be a lot of traffic in the city. We prefer to believe it is actually because all of the government officials will be front row at the Britney concert.

Vehicular Terrorism

Stockholm police made an arrest this afternoon in connection to what is being called a terror attack. A truck was driven into pedestrians in the busiest street in the city. So far, two people have died with many more injured. The perpetrator used a stolen truck. This is just the latest of similar attacks using trucks in Europe. Just yesterday, one of the victims of the Westminster Bridge attack was declared dead at the hospital. Other similar attacks include the Berlin attack, killing 12 people, and the attack last summer in Nice which left more than 80 people dead and 200 injured.

Syrian Crisis

On Trump’s orders, an airstrike was launched against what was said to be the airbase where the Syrian chemical attacks were launched. US warships launched 59 missiles at the airfield. 6 people have been reported dead. This attack is the first direct US military attack on Syria and Assad’s regime since the country’s civil war began. This attack could be interpreted by many, including the Syrian government, as an act of war. The fallout of Trump’s decision to launch an airstrike is yet to be seen.

Pop Culture Announcement

John Cena, the man, meme, and legend, just proposed to his girlfriend, Nikki Bella. Normally, this would not be news because who cares about celebrity engagements, right? But this time, the proposal happened during the WrestleMania broadcast in the middle of the wrestling arena after his match. I guess you could say that he won twice on Sunday.