JEOPARDY BACKLASH
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.
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.
Mexico began clearing tents, both occupied and unoccupied, from the encampment in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, starting Tuesday.
Police in Indiana say a man was rescued after being trapped for six days in his crashed pickup truck and drinking rainwater to survive.
A caravan of thousands of migrants continues to trudge through southern Mexico, with some saying they expect nothing good from a planned meeting between American and Mexican officials about the migrant surge at the U.S. border.
The Powerball jackpot is sitting right now at $620 million ahead of Saturday night's drawing and depending on which state you live in, you may have a little bit of extra luck on your side.
Friday is set to be one of the busiest days of the holiday travel season.
