Monday night's episode of Jeopardy spurred an online debate and some fans were not happy after all three contestants struggled to pronounce the last name of one Russian author. The contestants all guessed the correct author under the category "the quotable Alex" but failed to pronounce his tongue twisting last name — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — correctly. Afterwards, fans said the show and host Mayim Bialik should have given the guests some leeway. One person tweeted that it set an awkward precedent and that contestants should be able to "pronounce a response in a reasonable way.
SPOTIFY'S BILLIONS CLUB
Another song has just joined the billions club on Spotify. That's the songs that have had more than one billion streams on the platform.The Beatles' hit song "Here Comes the Sun" was added to the list this week, becoming the 406th track to join. Seven years ago, Drake became the first artist to be inducted into Spotify's Billions Club for his song "One Dance" from his 2016 album Views. Miley Cyrus' song "Flowers," which was released in January, became the fastest song to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify.
Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot beyond its earlier estimate of $810 million to $842.4 million at the time of the drawing, making it the fifth-largest Powerball jackpot and 10th-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won.
A New Jersey mayor says buses of migrants bound for New York City have been stopping at the train station in his town and others in an apparent effort to evade an executive order by New York's mayor trying to regulate how and when migrants can be dropped off in the city.
The world population grew by 75 million people over the past year and on New Year's Day, it was estimated to stand at more than 8 billion people, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.
UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow. Wisconsin-La Crosse fired Gow on Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023, after learning Gow and his wife have been producing and appearing in pornographic videos. Gow maintains the firing violated his free speech rights.
The U.S. military is now putting independent lawyers in charge of its investigations of sexual assault and other major crimes, what Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has called the "most important reform" to the military justice system in recent history.
A decades-old law bans Medicare from paying for weight loss drugs. Now, drugmakers and a wide-ranging bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are gearing up to push for that to change next year.
Barring a court order, in March Texas police will start being able to arrest people they suspect have entered the U.S. illegally, but increases in border crossings since a 2021 law authorizing some arrests shows the limits of that approach in the face of desperation that causes people to risk everything and travel thousands of miles to the U.S.
