By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/3/2025 2:12 PM
A bear managed to close itself inside a parked car in Colorado and demolished the interior of the vehicle before being freed by a sheriff's deputy. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/3/2025 1:39 PM
More than 300 people donned inflatable dinosaur costumes and took to the track at Emerald Downs in Washington for the annual T-Rex World Championship Races. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/3/2025 11:27 AM
Firefighters were called to a stretch of interstate in Pennsylvania after a crash involving three tractor-trailers resulted in mozzarella cheese being spilled across a 200-yard area. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/2/2025 4:18 PM
The South Carolina Highway Patrol shared video of two troopers chasing a loose pig found running through traffic on a busy stretch of highway. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/2/2025 11:03 AM
The first ROBO League robot soccer tournament took place in China, pitting AI-powered teams of robot players against one another in 3 vs. 3 matches. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/1/2025 4:15 PM
The national lottery operator in Norway apologized after at least 47,000 people who won small amounts were mistakenly told they had won much more. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/1/2025 1:00 PM
A 21-year-old British woman rowed 4,366 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the youngest person to ever do so -- and earning three world records in the process. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 7/1/2025 11:53 AM
The newest ride at Ohio's Cedar Point amusement park "experienced a delay" on the first day it opened to the public and left riders stranded in a vertical position for at least 10 minutes. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 6/30/2025 2:06 PM
A Chinese man known as the Card Architect for his stacking skills broke four Guinness World Records in a matter of days, including one for stacking 3,149 Jenga blocks on a single block placed vertically. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 6/30/2025 2:05 PM
An Australian snake catcher responded to a Queensland home where a venomous red-bellied black snake was found hiding out in a resident's closet. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 6/30/2025 1:54 PM
An angler out searching for fish in a Massachusetts reservoir ended up capturing something more unusual -- video of a mother bear swimming across the water with two cubs on her back. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 6/30/2025 11:35 AM
Animal Services officers teamed up with public works employees and members of the public to rescue a family of nine ducklings that fell into a North Carolina storm drain. ... Read full Story
While China's men's soccer team hasn't generated much excitement in recent years, humanoid robot teams have won over fans in Beijing ... Read full Story
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 3, 2025 is:
desultory \DEH-sul-tor-ee\ adjective
Desultory is a formal word used to describe something that lacks a plan or purpose, or that occurs without regularity. It can also describe something unconnected to a main subject, or something that is disappointing in progress, performance, or quality.
// After graduation, I moved from job to job in a more or less desultory manner before finding work I liked.
// The team failed to cohere over the course of the season, stumbling to a desultory fifth place finish.
“One other guy was in the waiting room when I walked in. As we sat there past the scheduled time of our appointments, we struck up a desultory conversation. Like me, he’d been in the hiring process for years, had driven down from Albuquerque the night before, and seemed nervous. He asked if I’d done any research on the polygraph. I said no, and asked him the same question. He said no. We were getting our first lies out of the way.” — Justin St. Germain, “The Memoirist and the Lie Detector,” New England Review, 2024
Did you know?
The Latin adjective desultorius was used by the ancient Romans to describe a circus performer (called a desultor) whose trick was to leap from horse to horse without stopping. English speakers took the idea of the desultorius performer and coined the word desultory to describe that which figuratively “jumps” from one thing to another, without regularity, and showing no sign of a plan or purpose. (Both desultor and desultorius, by the way, come from the Latin verb salire, meaning “to leap.”) A desultory conversation leaps from one topic to another, and a desultory comment is one that jumps away from the topic at hand. Meanwhile a desultory performance is one resulting from an implied lack of steady, focused effort.