These are the top maybe-not headlines from the past 36-hours presented by The Conversation Project from raw engagement data from our social media to the headlines posted over the past day.
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The 8 topics that our followers ranked as the most conversational are:
TESLA SOLAR PANELS HAVE BECOME A NIGHTMARE FOR SOME HOMEOWNERS, ESPECIALLY FOR ONE COLORADO WOMAN WHOSE ROOF WENT UP IN FLAMES
Briana Greer was out of town when the fire started in her Tesla solar roof panels. Luckily, her neighbors in Louisville, Colorado — a town outside Boulder — were vigilant, and they were able to put out the fire before the fire department arrived. That was on August 1. The day before, Greer said, Tesla had contacted her to let her know its system had been detecting voltage fluctuations for a couple of days. The company said it would send a crew to check it out on August 8. That was too late. Greer, an environmental consultant, said she had yet to receive a report explaining why any of this happened. Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article, but a local Fox station in Colorado reported last month that Tesla told it that “its solar panels are safe and very rarely catch fire.” The Fox report also said that Tesla said it was working with Greer’s insurance company.
[SOURCE: businessinsider.com]
GM AND UAW REACH TENTATIVE DEAL THAT COULD END MONTHLONG STRIKE
On the picket lines at a General Motors transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio, passing cars honked and striking workers celebrated a tentative contract deal by munching on 10 pizzas dropped off by a supporter. They had carried signs for 31 days and demonstrated the muscle the United Auto Workers union still has over Detroit’s three manufacturers. Details of the four-year pact weren’t released, but GM’s latest offer to end the monthlong strike included wage increases and lump-sum payments, top-notch health insurance at little cost to workers, promises of new products for many U.S. factories and a path to full-time work for temporary workers. That’s a big difference from what GM wanted going into the talks: to slash total labor costs at its factories, which are about $13 per hour higher than at foreign automakers in the U.S. Terry Dittes, the UAW’s chief bargainer with GM, said the deal offers “major gains” for 49,000 union workers who have been walking picket lines since Sept. 16. They’ll stay off work for at least a couple more days while union committees decide if they will bless the deal. Then workers will have to vote on it. The deal shows that the union, with less than one-third of the 1.5 million members it had at its peak in 1979, still has a lot of clout with GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler.
[SOURCE: apnews.com]
BELLA THORNE RECEIVES PORNHUB AWARD FOR DIRECTING X-RATED FLICK
Disney actress Bella Thorne accepted the Vision Award at Pornhub’s ceremony this weekend and announced that she’s helping the X-rated company to make the site safer. The adult film auteur explained that directing her skin flick “Her & Him” “opened my mind creatively and allowed me to really push the limits as an artist,” and allowed her to “be able to show the world a raw, new, fresh side of beauty … [that] was my end goal.” The movie explores “this relationship between a male and a female and this fight over dominance,” and has been called “a modernistic, sexually explicit ‘Romeo and Juliet’-like depiction of two star-crossed lovers who have unbridled sexual longing for each other.”
[SOURCE: foxnews.com]
PUERTO RICO GOVERNOR CALLS URGENT MEETING AFTER SIX PEOPLE WERE KILLED IN A MASS SHOOTING
Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced has called an urgent meeting after six people were killed in a mass shooting at a San Juan apartment complex. Four men and one woman were shot dead Monday night. Another man, 21-year-old Alexis Antonio Padilla, died Tuesday after being transported to a local hospital for gunshot wounds, Puerto Rico Police said in a statement. Police identified the five other victims: Ángel Henríquez Agosto, 21; Jordan Junior Castillo Cordero, 25; Ermes Omar Sanjurgo, 25; Emmanuel Enrique Báez Padilla, 43 and Kathia Matos Sandoval, 26. A group of people showed up to the complex with large guns before the shooting, police commissioner Henry Escalera said. He declined to provide further details, as the investigation had just begun. Vázquez said Tuesday criminal violence is an “urgent issue” for her office.
[SOURCE: cnn.com]
NEVADA GAMING REGULATORS SEEK BAN ON STEVE WYNN FROM STATE’S CASINO INDUSTRY
Nevada gaming regulators are seeking a ban on former Wynn Resorts Ltd chief Steve Wynn from the state’s casino industry, citing allegations of sexual misconduct that emerged a year ago, a regulatory filling showed. The Nevada Gaming Control Board lodged a complaint on Monday with the state’s Gaming Commission, saying Wynn was “unsuitable to be associated with a gaming enterprise or the gaming industry.” The U.S. casino mogul resigned as CEO of his company Wynn Resorts early last year following claims he subjected women co-workers to unwanted advances, becoming one of the most prominent business leaders to quit over sexual misconduct allegations in recent months. He has denied the accusations. Nevada’s gaming control board said it had undertaken its own investigation on Wynn’s conduct after the company failed to monitor and investigate the same, and has found numerous “potential instances of unwelcome sexual conduct.” Earlier this year, Wynn Resorts said it had agreed to an undisclosed settlement in response to a disciplinary complaint filed by the Nevada Gaming Control Board following the sexual misconduct claims. The casino company, which has operations in Las Vegas and Macau, and Wynn’s lawyer could not be reached for a comment.
[SOURCE: reuters.com]
FINALLY WORLD SERIES-BOUND, WASHINGTON NATIONALS PUT PAST FAILURES BEHIND THEM
There is no strain of joy quite like when a team, a town, gets its first taste of World Series glory in at least a generation. From Kansas City to Cleveland, Houston to Queens, baseball’s circus has in recent years arrived in long-forgotten places with a vigor strong enough to stoke the masses and hold off winter just a few more days. And now it is our nation’s capital’s turn. The Washington Nationals have advanced to the first World Series in their franchise history, an odd and curious past that began in Montreal and landed just south of the Capitol in 2005. Their D.C. period was an oft-blue one, marked first by ghastly teams that befitted the District’s sordid baseball history and then by star-crossed clubs that stubbed their toe in winner-take-all games in 2012, 2016 and 2017. These Nationals, though, are not staggering into the Fall Classic like an oversize Teddy Roosevelt tripping over the finish line of their iconic Presidents’ Race. After Tuesday night’s 7-4 dispatching of the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, these Nationals come in with credentials that belie their franchise – and their city’s – odd baseball past. Since their infamous 19-31 start, the Nationals are 81-40 – climbing from the nether reaches of the National League East to claw their way into a home wild card game. Since entering the playoffs, they have won eight of 10 games, a fascinating mix of derring-do and dominance – erasing 3-1, eighth-inning deficits in win-or-go-home games against the Brewers and Dodgers, followed by an utter splattering of the Cardinals, who never so much as took the lead in this NLCS.
[SOURCE: usatoday.com]
U.S., SOUTH KOREA BUST GIANT CHILD PORN SITE BY FOLLOWING A BITCOIN TRAIL
U.S. and Korean authorities say they broke up one of the world’s largest markets for child pornography, a crime that is proliferating at a furious pace with the rise of cryptocurrency and encrypted online content. The bust was revealed Wednesday as the U.S. unsealed an indictment against Jong Woo Son, 23, who prosecutors say operated a Darknet market that accepted Bitcoin and distributed more than 1 million sexually explicit videos involving children. Son, a South Korean national, is serving 18 months in prison after being convicted there. Since agents shuttered the site in March 2018, authorities have arrested 337 site users around the world. They were in countries including the U.K., Germany, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and in nearly two dozen U.S. states, according to U.S. authorities. The U.K. government said people in 38 countries were arrested. The site, which encouraged users to upload videos, included hundreds of thousands of illicit images not previously seen by authorities. Authorities say they rescued at least 23 minor victims in the U.S., U.K. and Spain who were being actively abused by users of the site, which operated from June 2015 until March 2018. Images of sexual exploitation have mushroomed since 2014, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received reports of 1.1 million incidents of child pornography. By last year, that number had risen to 18.4 million. The Darknet refers to encrypted online content that hides from traditional search engines. The anonymity of the Darknet has fostered crimes like narcotics trafficking, money laundering and child pornography, prosecutors say. Cryptocurrency also has been cited in a wide range of crimes in which people seek to move money anonymously around the world.
[SOURCE: finance.yahoo.com]
JUSTIN BIEBER IS BEING SUED FOR POSTING A PHOTO OF HIMSELF
Photographer Robert Barbera has filed a lawsuit against the “Love Yourself” singer for copyright infringement over a picture Bieber posted on Instagram. In the court documents, obtained by E! News, Barbera says that this action arises due to Bieber’s “unauthorized reproduction and public display” of the copyrighted photograph, which is owned and registered by Barbera. The photo in question is one that Bieber posted to his Instagram on March 13, showing him in a car with his pal, Rich Wilkerson. According to the court documents, Bieber “did not license the Photograph” from Barbera for his Instagram page, nor did he have Barbera’s “permission or consent to publish” the photo on Instagram. This lawsuit comes just over a week after Jennifer Lopez was sued for copyright infringement over a photo she posted to her Instagram Story in 2017. Splash News and Picture Agency filed the lawsuit against Lopez, seeking $150,000 over a picture she posted of her and Alex Rodriguez. Back in September, Gigi Hadid was sued for posting a photo of her ex, Zayn Malik, on her Instagram Story.
[SOURCE: eonline.com]
Eight Things To Talk About uses the raw engagement data from the social media engagement from The Conversation Project to generate the top-ranking headlines over the course of a weekend.
A full weeks’ data (from Friday to Friday) is compiled, weighed, and sorted to produce the content for the Wrap-Up Show with J Cleveland Payne, published every Saturday as a podcast available at ThisIsTheConversation.com or wherever your favorite podcasts are found.
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