Stephen Colbert sees your fine new beard, Alex Trebek, and raises you a trivia challenge to keep it.

The Late Show host compared his new Colbeard to the Jeopardy! host’s on Tuesday night. “Check out this new Daily Double. Look! He’s just sporting a cheap Canadian knockoff of the Colbeard,” said Colbert, accusing the host of stealing his new beardy look. 

“I’ve got a message for Trebek: Step off, Beardy-come-lately. There cannot be two Colbeards.”

Apparently there’s only one way to settle this, according to Colbert: a trivia face-off on The Late Show. “Loser shaves.” 

It’s an annual event almost as celebrated as Otev and the Zingbot. On Wednesday’s edition of Big Brother, the latest batch of contestant comic book covers will be unleashed! And we’ve got your exclusive first look at some of them right here. Read on to peruse the covers for each of the evicted non-jury members, along with thoughts from the contestants themselves about their new cover, and then look for the entire collection as part of Wednesday night’s veto competition on CBS.

Zach Urness, Statesman Journal and KGW staff
Published 3:37 p.m. PT Sept. 11, 2018 | Updated 6:36 p.m. PT Sept. 11, 2018

WELCHES — A missing hiker found dead in the Mount Hood National Forest was killed in a suspected cougar attack, according to the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office.

Wildlife officials said it would be the first fatal cougar attack in the wild in Oregon history.

“This does have every indication that this is the first fatal attack of a human by a cougar in Oregon,” said Brian Wolfer, watershed manager with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The body of 55-year-old Diana Bober was found on Monday off the Hunchback Trail near Welches. Her body was several miles from where searchers found her car last week near a ranger station.

Bober, an avid hiker who often trekked in the Mount Hood and Columbia River Gorge area, was last heard from by family and friends on Aug. 29. She was reported missing Friday and it’s still unclear when she started her hike, said Sgt. Brian Jensen of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office.

The Hunchback Trailhead has been closed to the public.

The medical examiner’s office said Bober’s injuries were consistent with that of a cougar attack. U.S. Fish and Wildlife will try to identify the animal that attacked Bober, the sheriff’s office said.

Wildlife managers will attempt to kill the cougar responsible for the attack, deputies said. There are about 6,600 cougars in Oregon.

“This is an unprecedented event in Oregon, we are asking people to avoid this area while we attempt to remove this cougar,” said Wolfer. “We don’t know what risk it poses to the public.”

More: As cougar sightings rise near urban areas, does Oregon have a big cat problem?

The number of cougars has been rising steadily during the past decade, resulting in more sightings and more conflict across Oregon.

Although this is Oregon’s first documented fatal cougar attack in the wild, other states with large cougar populations have seen fatal attacks.

Three people have died due to cougar attacks in California, and 10 people have been attacked and suffered non-fatal injuries, according to state records. Colorado also has had three fatal cougar attacks.

Earlier this year, a cougar killed a man near North Bend, Washington. It was the second time in the last 100 years a cougar killed a person in the state.

Beyond fatal attacks, cougars have also been more common around humans as their numbers have grown, officials said.

Complaints about cougars have tripled in the Willamette Valley since 2011. And the number of cougars killed due to human or livestock conflicts reached 169 animals in 2016, according to state records.

Oregon kills hundreds of cougars each year by hunting — 267 animals in 2016. But hunters say they have been limited in terms of cougar hunting since the passage in 1994 of Measure 18, which outlaws the use of dogs for cougar sport hunting.

“We should be using hounds to manage the cougar population and avoid this situation,” said Dominic Aiello, president of the Oregon Outdoors Council. 

Environmental groups disagree, saying the number of cougars killed causes disruptions in animal families, leading orphaned cougars to act out in unusual ways.

“A lot of cougar mothers are getting killed,” Dr. John W. Laundré, a professor at Western Oregon University told the Statesman Journal earlier this year. “Baby kittens who are orphaned don’t get the training they need, and end up causing the trouble.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

What to do if you encounter a cougar

• Cougars often will retreat if given the opportunity. Leave the animal a way to escape.
• Stay calm and stand your ground.
• Maintain direct eye contact.
• Pick up children, but do so without bending down or turning your back on the cougar.
• Back away slowly.
• Do not run. Running triggers a chase response in cougars, which could lead to an attack.
• Raise your voice and speak firmly.
• If the cougar seems aggressive, raise your arms to make yourself look larger and clap your hands.
• If in the very unusual event that a cougar attacks you, fight back with rocks, sticks, tools or any items available.

Read or Share this story: https://stjr.nl/2x4DxJE

Liberia president George Weah played in an international friendly for his country on Tuesday – at the age of 51.

Weah, the first African footballer to win Fifa’s World Player of the Year award, featured for 79 minutes of a 2-1 home defeat by Nigeria in Monrovia.

Liberia arranged the friendly to retire their number 14 shirt, worn by Weah at his playing peak.

The former AC Milan striker, sworn in as president in January, received a standing ovation as he was substituted.

Nigeria fielded a reasonably strong team, including Leicester’s Wilfred Ndidi and fellow midfielder Peter Etebo, of Stoke City. Ndidi’s club-mate Kelechi Iheanacho featured as a second-half substitute.

Etebo took the corner from which Simeon Nwankwo headed Nigeria into a 2-0 lead after Henry Onyekuru – on loan at Galatasaray from Everton – had scored the opener. The home side pulled one back with a late Kpah Sherman penalty.

Image: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY

Keeping on top of negativity online is a difficult task, with nearly one in five Americans having experienced severe online harassment. Google’s Perspective AI aims to fix those problems, but it doesn’t seem to be as smart as it needs to be.

As TNW reports, a group of researchers at Aalto University and the University of Padua have discovered Google’s artificial intelligence can easily be tricked and that state-of-the-art hate speech detection models only perform well when tested by the same type of data they were trained on. Simple tricks to get around Google’s AI include: inserting typos; adding spaces between words; or adding unrelated words to the original sentence.

Google’s method of hate speech detection is achieved through assigning a toxicity score to a piece of text, defining it as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable enough that you would be inclined to leave the conversation. However, the AI system is not intelligent enough to detect the context of expletives, and a simple change between “I love you” and “I fucking love you” sees a change in score from 0.02 to 0.77.

“Clearly ‘toxicity’, as Perspective currently classifies it, is not assimilable to hate speech in any substantive (or legal) sense” the paper states. Similarly, typos or ‘leetspeek’ (replacing common letters with numbers, so ‘GEEK’ becomes ‘G33K’, and so on), are also effective at tricking the AI while still retaining the original message’s readability and emotional impact.

The word ‘love,’ which does not correlate with hate speech, also “broke all word-models, and significantly hindered character models,” in some instances droppes a toxicity rating from 0.79 to 0.00.

With many social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube struggling to find the boundary between offensive and acceptable speech, an easily applicable artificial intelligence would clearly have its benefits.

Recently, Twitter came under fire for disabling conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account for a week when other platforms had removed his and Infowars’ (the publication Jones works for) accounts completely. Twitter claimed that Jones had not violated any of the platform’s rules, but the company has since suspended @realalexjones and @infowars after a Senate Committee hearing.

Unfortunately with this news, and the recent examples of artificially intelligent chatbots such as Microsoft’s Tay tweeting racist content, it seems AI will need to improve before we let it loose on the comments section.

This article originally published at PCMag
here

“The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” pulled the plug on Norm Macdonald’s appearance following the comedian’s controversial remarks on the #MeToo movement. 

“Out of sensitivity to our audience and in light of Norm Macdonald’s comments in the press today, ‘The Tonight Show’ has decided to cancel his appearance on Tuesday’s telecast,” a spokesperson said in a statement to USA TODAY.

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Tuesday, Macdonald, 58, admitted he was “happy the #MeToo movement has slowed down a little bit.”

He continued: “It used to be, ‘One hundred women can’t be lying.’ And then it became, ‘One woman can’t lie.’ And that became, ‘I believe all women.’ And then you’re like, ‘What?’ Like, that Chris Hardwick guy I really thought got the blunt end of the stick there.”

Related: Stephen Colbert calls out former boss Les Moonves, again, on CBS ‘Late Show’

Macdonald told THR that derailing the life’s work of a celebrity who admits to any wrongdoing “isn’t healthy,” referring to close friends Louis C.K. (who was accused by five women of sexual misconduct) and Roseanne Barr (whose namesake TV series reboot was abruptly canceled following her racist tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett).

“(Barr) was just so broken and just crying constantly. There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day,” Macdonald said. “Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.”

The former “Saturday Night Live” cast member added that Barr, who hired him as a writer on the original “Roseanne,” is “certainly not a racist.”

After facing backlash, Macdonald took to Twitter to apologize for “minimizing the pain” of sexual harassment and racial bullying victims. 

“Roseanne and Louis have both been very good friends of mine for many years,” he tweeted Tuesday. “They both made terrible mistakes and I would never defend their actions.”

More: Louis C.K.’s comeback performance sparks criticism from fellow comics

Macdonald’s new interview series, “Norm Macdonald Has a Show,” is launching on Netflix Sept. 14, but only time will tell if the the comedian faces further blowback from his comments. 

One Twitter user said: “‘Norm McDonald Has A Show.’ After saying that the victims didn’t feel as bad or lose everything like CK did, the title should be changed to ‘Norm McDonald Doesn’t Have A Show For Much Longer.’

More: Are #MeToo men ready for a comeback? Not all accused figures have slunk away in shame

 

 

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2N7bp2r

It’s been 15 years since actress Natasha Richardson died tragically. But Dennis Quaid is still grieving the loss of his co-star in “The Parent Trap.”

Quaid, 64, talked about his dear friend Richardson, with whom he starred in the classic 1998 Disney remake, in an interview with Us Magazine.

Richardson played Elizabeth James and Quaid played Nick Parker, divorced parents brought together by their identical-twin daughters (played by a young Lindsay Lohan).

“Now you hit my heart. She was such a beautiful person, such a beautiful, beautiful person. Just none of that, that actor stuff, prima donna stuff,” Quaid told Us of Richardson. “Someone easy to work with and such a great sense of humor.”

Richardson died in 2009 after a seemingly minor fall that led to a blow to the head while skiing at Quebec’s Mont Tremblant. The actress initially waved off medical care, but the head injury turned out to be fatal. She was survived by her husband, actor Liam Neeson, and their sons Micheal and Daniel, who were then 13 and 12, respectively.

More: Movies, like ‘The Parent Trap,’ turning 20 in 2018

“When that accident happened, it just devastated me and so many other people,” Quaid said. “She had such a beautiful love, married life with Liam, and two beautiful boys. She always had a smile on her face when she came to work. That really affected everyone around her.”

But the two actors have “The Parent Trap,” which has become a nostalgic classic for fans 20 years later. Quaid chalks the enduring love to the power of the VHS machine.

“When it came out on VHS I think every parent in America used it as a babysitter while they were at home. So many kids saw that like 40 or 50 times,” he said. “I usually say, ‘Yeah, I used to be a babysitter while your parents were doing what they wanted to do.’”

 

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2xf3yoX

Image: Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

It’s a sue and be sued world out there!

In August, Juul Labs filed trademark claims against 30 entities in China selling counterfeit Juul products on Ebay. Now, the company has announced that a federal court granted the company a temporary restraining order over the accounts, and froze the counterfeiters’ PayPals. Take that, counterfeiters!

For Juul, this isn’t a simple matter of copyright infringement, though. The company is fighting to reduce teenage use of the product, especially in light of a FDA investigation into why teens love Juuls so much (and whether that’s Juul’s fault). And maintaining control over online sales that are age-verified is a crucial component of that campaign.

Legitimate Juul products are only available online through Juul’s website. However, as of this writing, there were over 2,000 listings for Juul or Juul-related products on Ebay. Any Juul device or pod you might see on Ebay or elsewhere that’s not Juul’s website directly comes from a counterfeiter, or an unauthorized seller. 

But selling Juul directly through the company’s own site isn’t just important to controlling the company’s cashflow, or even for verifying that the product is the real deal. Keeping Juul’s site as the sole online seller is crucial to ensuring that teens don’t purchase the e-cigs online. 

“Keeping JUUL out of the hands of young people is a priority for us,” Victoria Davis, a Juul Labs spokesperson told Mashable over email. “We have a strict and industry-leading age-verification process on our Web site so no one under the age of 21 can access JUUL. However, counterfeiters do not utilize the same type of age verification systems, which may enable minors to purchase products.” 

Juul’s site requires users to register with their social security numbers in order to verify that they’re over 21. So circumventing Juul’s commerce system means that the counterfeiters are actually undermining the company’s very intentional efforts to keep the cute lil’ vapes out of the hands of kids.

Juul is going after the counterfeiters through the legal system, as well as directly with sales platforms like Ebay and Amazon. But Davis described the hunt for counterfeiters as a “challenge” because the sellers can easily make new profiles. That isn’t deterring Juul, though, since more counterfeiters are popping up as the company grows.

“The prevalence of counterfeiters has increased dramatically over the last year consistent with JUUL’s rise in the marketplace,” Davis said. “The process of tracking and identifying the culprits of counterfeit products is time intensive. We have dedicated resources to this initiative to ensure these products stay off the market and out of hands of underage users.”

In other words, Juul’s attempts to go after counterfeiters is like USB-vape whack-a-mole. And the nicotine habits of kids are on the line.