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In a Twitter video that has over 1.1 million views, a police officer starts crying while telling viewers that she was made to wait for her McDonald’s meal after ordering ahead.

A Twitter user who posted the video wrote, “Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop [sad face emoji, angry face emoji] Come on America. We are better than this.”

The police officer, identified by the Twitter user as “Stacey,” films herself describing her experience waiting a long time for her McMuffin meal.  In the video “Stacey” notes that she has paid ahead of time “so people don’t pay for my stuff because I just always like to pay for it myself.” She appears to be referencing the common practice of police officers being given free food and drinks at restaurants.

When “Stacey” is finally given her coffee without her meal, she tells the employee who hands it to her, “Don’t bother with the food because right now I’m too nervous to take it. Right now I’m too nervous to take a meal from McDonald’s because I can’t see it being made.”

6月12日，临汾市纪委监委针对备受关注的“仝卓以伪造应届生身份参加高考等问题”通报调查情况。

来源：凤凰新闻

https://ishare.ifeng.com/c/s/v004R57–p–wGF-_qzA–otF–0H0Yn4y8WGZJY3ItyUk–ETDrwlyNysmNp14qJ–gLd2MrWN?spss=np&aman=4tfb9kb11d4bfe0dfT56d&from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0

Multiple influencers told WIRED that their videos had been copied from other platforms and reposted to Zynn without permission.

LATE LAST MONTH, a mysterious new video app called Zynn began appearing at the top of app store charts, beating out household names like Instagram and YouTube. Zynn is a near identical copy of TikTok, and both apps are the product of Chinese tech giants. The biggest difference is that Zynn, in an effort to attract new users, is currently paying people in the United States and Canada small sums to watch videos and invite their friends to join. The tactic has seemed to work: Zynn has already been downloaded over 3 million times, according to the market research firm Sensor Tower, and ranked number one this week on Apple’s list of the most popular free apps.

As of Tuesday, however, Zynn is no longer available for download from the Google Play Store, and a link that previously went to the app’s listing is now dead. It’s unclear why the app was removed, and Google did not immediately comment. A spokesperson for Apple said it was looking into Zynn, but did not have any additional information as of publication. Twitter and Instagram accounts claiming to represent Zynn posted a statement Tuesday afternoon acknowledging the app had been removed, and said the company was “in communications with Google and working to fix this ASAP.”

Meanwhile, Zynn is filled with videos that appear to be stolen from creators on other social media platforms, including TikTok celebrities with massive followings like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae. Many of the clips are aggregated by accounts centered around a single theme, like “pranks.” Other videos appear on lookalike profiles impersonating individual creators. Four influencers who spoke to WIRED said videos they originally published to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube were uploaded to Zynn without their consent, under accounts they didn’t open.

“I didn’t create this,” Max Mazurek, a Polish dancer and model with almost 190,000 TikTok followers said after WIRED showed him a Zynn profile using his name. The account has nearly 25,000 followers and featured many of the videos Mazurek had previously uploaded to TikTok and other platforms. “It’s not my account. I can’t download this app in Poland,” he said.

The launch of a new social media platform often sets off a rush to grab famous or valuable usernames, and it’s not uncommon for scammers to impersonate celebrities on social media. Reposting other people’s content without credit has also long been an issue online. What’s strange about the Zynn accounts, however, is how many of the copied videos have timestamps that date back months before the app went public.

Zynn officially launched in the Apple App Store on May 7, and was first installed by Google Play users on May 5, according to Sensor Tower. Many of the impersonator accounts reviewed by WIRED, including the one under Mazurek’s name, uploaded their first posts on February 19. The significance of that date isn’t clear, and Zynn did not respond to a request for comment sent to an email address listed on its website. Its Community Guidelines state that it respects intellectual property rights, and forbids users from posting “anything that you do not own or do not have permission from the owner to share.”

“I feel that it’s honestly sad that they are stealing creators’ content and impersonating people,” said Chloe, a TikTok influencer with almost 18,000 followers. Until WIRED brought it to her attention, Chloe says she was unaware that a Zynn profile had been created using the same handle she uses on Instagram and TikTok, @ebonychlo. The account also began posting videos taken from her official social media profiles on February 19, months before Zynn became available for download.

Tiffany Hunt, a makeup artist with over two million followers across TikTok and Instagram, said she also had no idea someone was impersonating her on Zynn. “Never heard of this app, certainly never posted to it,” she said. A Zynn profile with a name similar to the one Hunt uses across social media, @illumin_arty, began posting videos taken from her legitimate accounts on the same date as the others: February 19.

Zynn is brimming with similar profiles that appear to exclusively post content taken from elsewhere on the internet, particularly TikTok. Many videos feature watermarks or other visual elements indicating they were lifted from other platforms. While digital creators do often repost videos across different sites, that possibility seems unlikely in cases where the videos are time-stamped from before Zynn’s launch.

Since its launch, an avalanche of suspicious accounts capitalizing on the app’s reward system have also appeared on Zynn. In addition to earning points by watching videos, which the app says can then be redeemed for cash or gift cards, users can also earn money when their friends enter their referral code at sign-up. Critics have called this system a pyramid scheme; at the very least, it seems to encourage scammy behavior. An account impersonating TikToker Addison Rae, for example, uploaded a video on May 25. “Hey y’all it’s Addison!!” the caption reads. “Decided to join Zynn to earn some quick cash. Use my code DJMA8VS to receive a special offer of $20!!!” The comments are filled with hundreds of similar offers, promising instant money or follow backs. “Let’s get rich together,” dozens of different accounts exclaim.

In an additional twist, Zynn appears to have been created to compete with TikTok by a rival of its parent company, ByteDance. Zynn’s listed developer, Owlii, is reportedly owned by Kuaishou, a billion-dollar Chinese company. Kuaishou is the second most popular video platform in China after Douyin, ByteDance’s domestic version of TikTok. The companies are two of China’s most powerful tech giants, and have a longstanding rivalry. Both apps have hundreds of millions of users each, with Douyin being more popular in cities and Kuaishou in rural areas. Now, they’re fighting for the upper hand in the West.

Kuaishou and ByteDance compete closely in China, but the latter is currently doing far better abroad. While an international version of Kuaishou’s app is used in some countries like Brazil, ByteDance has succeeded in making TikTok popular around the world. The app has now been downloaded over two billion times, and has become a major cultural force in the United States, on par with American platforms like Instagram and YouTube. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

Kuaishou did not respond to two requests for comment, but a spokesperson told the tech news site The Information last month that Zynn was tailor-made “for the North American market.” So far, the app has earned millions of downloads. But it’s not clear Zynn’s fast rise means lasting success—especially if people realize they can find much of its content elsewhere.

The answer hinges on a peculiarity of the Japanese language.

In the Old Testament, God wrought ten plagues upon humanity. In modern times, we have our hands full with just one: covid-19. Or so we thought, until it was reported, in the May 2nd edition of the Times, that a new pestilence is afoot. “Murder hornets” with “mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins,” we were told, were descending upon North America from their native habitat of Asia. Within twenty-four hours, the hashtag #murderhornets was trending on Twitter, fuelled by all the excitement befitting what sounds like a newly discovered species of homicidal Pokémon. Sensing a rare non-virus viral story, major media outlets ranging from the Washington Post to Fox News pounced. They began amplifying the insect threat with their own details, many of them simply rephrased from the original piece; by the middle of last week, Jimmy Fallon was interviewing a “murder hornet” in costume on “The Tonight Show.” (“Look, we’re just regular old bees who happen to make things fall asleep forever.”)

This is a familiar story of how trending topics drive the modern news cycle, but it’s also a testament to the power of a catchy label. Murder hornet is the nickname bestowed upon Vespa mandarinia, the already formidable-sounding Asian giant hornet, which is native to large swaths of East Asia. The Japanese call it ōsuzumebachi: literally, giant sparrow-hornet. They aren’t actually sparrow-size; the biggest specimens come in at just under two inches long. But that is cold comfort when one hears their menacing, resonant buzz approaching, which is something that occurs with disconcerting regularity if you spend time outdoors during the summer months in Japan.

The monsoons and humidity that can make Japan difficult to bear during the summer also make it a haven for insects and other creepy-crawlies. Some of them grow to truly enormous proportions. To the sparrow-hornet you can add startlingly large cockroaches, enormous orb-weaver spiders, and centipedes that can reach six inches in length. So, too, palm-size rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles. Unlike the dreaded hornet and its ilk, these gentle giants are beloved traditional playthings. The males use their horns to wrestle each other away from sources of food and from potential mates. Collected by children and squared off in sumo-style matches, these giant armored beetles provided the cultural template for the virtual battles that Japanese video-game designers would perfect in the eighties and nineties.

I know these things both because I love bugs enough to have flirted with majoring in entomology during my university studies, and because I have lived in Tokyo for close to twenty years. Even in the city, one has occasional run-ins with giant hornets during the summer months. Here, they are rightfully feared even without nicknames, and incidents involving them regularly make headlines. Like all wasps and other hornets, and unlike honeybees, giant hornets have smooth stingers that allow them to attack repeatedly. The Asian giant hornet’s barb packs an especially potent poison, and, every year, dozens of Japanese lose their lives as a result of anaphylactic shock. Asian giant hornets tend to nest in hidden places, such as the hollows of trees or ground burrows. Removing, or even simply approaching, these hives is dangerous work. Their stingers easily penetrate standard beekeeping suits, necessitating thick protective gear and specialized equipment such as vacuums to suck the creatures out of the air as they mass to protect their homes.

For all their ferocity, however, I had never once heard them referred to as “murder hornets” in Japanese. The first time I saw the name was, as for many Americans, when I read it in the Times that weekend. The phrase immediately piqued my interest. The closest analogue I knew, satsujin bachi, is simply “killer hornet,” Japan’s matter-of-fact equivalent of the English-language “killer bee.” Even that usage was largely relegated to tabloid news and variety shows. I had never heard a hornet called a “murderer”—how could it be? A murder requires premeditation. We don’t speak of bears or tigers murdering people. Why, suddenly, hornets?

I had a guess. Linguistically, the common Japanese word satsujin—written with the characters “kill” and “person”—does not clearly distinguish between a person being “murdered” or “killed.” This ambiguity means that if one looks up satsujin in a Japanese-English dictionary, they will be presented with a list of options that includes the words “murder,” “manslaughter,” and “killer.” It is up to the translator to select the proper word based on context. I strongly suspected that this linguistic subtlety had been lost in translation. For, as terrifying as the giant hornet may be, I have never heard anyone in Japan portray it as possessing homicidal intent. Curious, I approached Junichi Takahashi, a Japanese entomologist, who was quoted in the Times’ original report. When I explained my mission, it seemed that Professor Takahashi didn’t want to stir the hornet’s nest with another interview, but he did aver that “giant, killer, and murder are general names used by the media.”

Not everyone is happy about the dramatic nicknaming of the creatures. “They are not ‘murder hornets.’ They are just hornets,” the Washington Agriculture Department entomologist Chris Looney told the Washington Post. “It’s kind of a sensational term,” agreed the Texas A&M entomologist Molly Keck in an interview with a San Antonio television station. The linking of the foreign-born insects with a scary word, in this case “murder,” skirts dangerously close to uncomfortable territory: those of a certain age will recall the “Africanized killer bee” scare of the seventies, with all of its race-baiting overtones, and, more recently, the Trump Administration’s strenuous efforts to relabel the coronavirus as a specifically “Chinese” virus.

The phrase “murder hornets” leapt into the lexicon mere weeks ago, but its rapid percolation throughout the mediasphere evokes the way new dangers spread so fluidly through a globalized modern world. The ōsuzumebachi hornets have troubled the residents of Japan since time immemorial. That these tiny terrors have suddenly appeared on the American side of the Pacific is only the latest curveball from Mother Nature, and another reminder that the borders we surround ourselves with, whether lines drawn on a map or nicknames given to things that frighten us, are meaningless to natural threats like insects or viruses.

US President Donald Trump, with Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow (L), holds a press conference on the economy, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on June 5, 2020. 

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the May jobs report, the latest snapshot of the US labor market. The report contains reason for optimism in the face of the crippling pandemic and reveals how much more support is needed to ensure a return to full employment.

Devil in the details

The big headline was what would be in any other circumstance a massive surge in employment: the monthly employer survey showed 2.51 million more employees on payrolls than there were in April when economic effects of COVID-19 were largest.

This gain came as a shock given that economists had projected a drop of more than 7 million jobs in the month. The gloomy predictions were based primarily on recent initial unemployment claims data. And the estimates seemed logical since the number of Americans receiving unemployment insurance (including those covered by Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which extends benefits to more Americans than the traditional unemployment insurance program) continued to rise in May.

But survey-based approach of the BLS showed what is, on the face of it, a much brighter picture. There are, however, some caveats. In the report, the BLS emphasized that responses to its surveys appeared to be making things look a bit better than they otherwise would. BLS economists estimated that the 13.3% unemployment rate was about 3 percentage points lower than it would be if not for irregularities in survey response patterns.

ESPN Wide World of Sports, a sprawling 220-acre complex at the mega-resort in Florida, is poised to become the center of the basketball universe.

American Eagle Outfitters created a touchless returns process. 

Retailers are bracing themselves for a flood of returns as they reopen stores.

Now that stay-at-home orders have been loosened — to varying degrees — in all 50 states, some shoppers may be ready to part with items they purchased online while at home, or even in stores before restrictions began.

Optoro, a Washington, DC-based startup that helps retailers including Target, Best Buy, and Ikea manage their returns processes, recently conducted a survey of 2,000 US consumers about their return habits while staying at home. More than 60% said they were holding on to at least one return while stores were closed.

Since, according to Optoro, shoppers tend to prefer making returns and exchanges in stores over mailing items back, stores that are reopening appear poised to be inundated with returns. Meanwhile, some stores, including Target, that remained open as “essential” retailers, barred shoppers from making returns for a period of time.

“There is going to be a huge surge,” CEO Tobin Moore told Business Insider. “I would liken this to the holidays, when you see a return surge all at once after a big event, although this will be even more condensed.”

For many stores that were closed for weeks in response to the pandemic, a surge in returned merchandise could end up exacerbating a problem they have been trying to abate — that is, unsold inventory piling up in stores.

“They’re going to have to deal with a lot of excess they’re trying to get out, and with getting new goods for the next season, and with a surge of returns coming in,” Moore said.

Lots of retailers have decided to extend their returns period to give shoppers more time to bring items back.

Shoppers walks past a Nordstrom window display at The Grove shopping center Wednesday, May 27, in Los Angeles.

Far from an ordinary returns process

But then another question arises: How do you process clothing and other items that may have been in people’s homes for an extended period of time during a pandemic?

Nordstrom is putting shoes in “quarantine.” American Eagle Outfitters erected bins for a “touchless” return process in stores, Chief Commercial Officer Andrew McLean told Business Insider.

“As part of our comprehensive reopening plan, we worked with medical experts to create a seamless and efficient process which helps to ensure the health and well-being of both our store associates and customers,” McLean said.

He added that clothes “remain out of circulation for 72 hours before being steamed and returned to the floor.”

Gap Inc. stores are also holding merchandise for a period of time before putting it back out for sale.

Moore said that he had heard of a retailer discussing processing returns outside during the summer, hoping that warm temperatures and sunlight could slow the spread of any bits of virus living on packages.

But despite the extra safety measures retailers might have to implement during the pandemic, having customers make returns and exchanges in-store is still largely the preferred method. Shoppers who visit stores to make a return might spot something else they want to buy, plus it helps businesses to cut down on the waste that results from packaging items up and shipping them back.

Shoppers can also get refunds and make exchanges more quickly when the process is done in stores.

Overall, Moore said retailers’ getting their whole returns process on the same system will be key in making sure they keep the whole process as efficient as possible.

“The name of the game, especially now, is minimize the amount of touches in between getting that return back and getting it back to market,” Moore said.

Larry Kramer was a pain in the ass as a matter of policy. He was also our beloved family friend.