Latest news with #Vines
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lafayette city council candidate arrested, denies harvesting ballots
LaFAYETTE, Ala. (WRBL) – Andrew Vines, a candidate for LaFayette's District B city council seat is facing multiple misdemeanor allegations related to Alabama's ballot harvesting laws after investigators say he illegally collected and mailed in absentee ballot applications for voters in his district. According to the Chambers County Sheriff's Office Vines was arrested Friday, August 8, following a weeks-long investigation into reports first made in mid-July. Monday, Vines told WRBL in a phone interview he is innocent. 'I've been falsely accused. Around 60 people in my district applied for absentee ballots and needed assistance with the applications — not the ballots themselves. They signed their own applications. I brought them blank applications, and they filled them out. I did assist some with answering questions, which I am allowed to do. I also prepared the envelopes.' The case began when investigators say a voter went to LaFayette City Hall and told the clerk Vines had filled out their absentee ballot application, had them sign it, and then took the form to mail it. The Chambers County District Attorney's Office called in the Sheriff's Office to investigate. Captain Jeff Hinkle says multiple witnesses told investigators Vines went door-to-door in his district with absentee ballot applications, either encouraging residents to apply or filling them out for them. Some alleged he even signed voters' names before taking the applications to mail. Investigators say they found around 50 envelopes with the same handwriting, along with evidence to support 15 misdemeanor counts of mailing in ballots for others, 11 misdemeanor counts of filling out ballots for others, and four misdemeanor forgery charges for signatures. Vines says according to Alabama Code § 17-11-4(b)(1), 'Any applicant may receive assistance in filling out the application as he or she desires, but each application shall be manually signed by the applicant, under penalty of perjury, and if he or she signs by mark, the application shall also include the name of the witness and the witness's signature.' Alabama law allows absentee voting only for specific reasons, such as being out of town on Election Day, illness, or physical disability. It is illegal to distribute pre-filled absentee ballot applications or to submit an application on behalf of someone else, except in limited medical emergencies. 'I'm not off the ballot, I haven't been proven guilty, and I didn't do anything wrong. My main goal has always been to make sure everyone in my district has the chance to vote. On Election Day, if anyone needs a ride, I will provide it — as I have always done,' said Vines. Under state law, misdemeanor charges do not disqualify a candidate from running for office. The city's election for mayor and all five council seats is set for August 26, with voting at LaFayette High School from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. A runoff, if needed, will be held September 23. WRBL has reached out to Lafayette's City Manager for further comment. The investigation is ongoing ahead of the election. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
05-08-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine's archive
Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine — sort of. The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered the video archive for the popular short-form video app, thought to have been deleted, and is working to restore user access. Vine — something of a precursor to today's TikTok, but with only six-second-long looping videos — was acquired by Twitter back in October 2012 for $30 million to expand the social media platform's video ambitions. Unfortunately for Vine creators and fans, the company fumbled the app's potential and decided to shut down Vine in 2016 by limiting all new uploads. The following year, it was fully discontinued, though a user archive remained for a time. Despite no longer having an App Store presence, Vine still has a place in the internet's collective cultural consciousness. Through online compilations of the best Vines uploaded to YouTube, and through the careers of numerous creators who got their start on Vine, the company lives on to some extent, and its content continues to be discovered by new generations. Musk himself seemed interested in bringing back Vine after acquiring Twitter in October 2022. In a poll posted on the social media app, he asked Twitter's users, 'Bring back Vine?' to which nearly 70% responded 'yes.' Axios reported at the time that Twitter had devoted some engineers to working on the Vine reboot, but nothing ever came of it. It's unclear whether Musk has any ambitions for Vine beyond getting its archive back online, however. In the same post about restoring Vine, he also touted that Grok's new video-creation feature, Grok Imagine, also available to X Premium+ subscribers, is 'AI Vine.' That suggests that his interests in video creation no longer lie with human creativity, but in human-directed AI prompting. Whether or not Musk will actually deliver on the promise remains to be seen, as the X post could have just been another way to draw attention to Grok AI, rather than being representative of a real effort inside the company to make old Vines available for reposting. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Engadget
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Elon Musk says the Vine archive is coming back
Elon Musk recently announced that he's bringing back the Vine archives , after teasing the return of the social platform over the last week or so. The X owner says that the company recently discovered the entire video archive of the once-popular short-form video app and is working to restore user access. Twitter bought Vine all the way back in 2012. Musk says that X users will be able to post these Vines, but it's just an archive. In other words, this doesn't sound like a renaissance for the actual platform. It remains unclear as to what Musk's intentions are for the brand, but the announcement about the returning archive was accompanied by an ad for the Grok Imagine video-creation platform . He called the service the "AI Vine." Why expand energy to make short-form content when you can type some words into a prompting field? There's also the Musk of it all. He doesn't have the best track record when it comes to delivering on promises . We'll just have to wait and see if the Vine video archive actually returns and what happens after that. For the uninitiated, Vine was sort of like TikTok before TikTok. It was a platform for 6-second looping videos. The app was extremely popular for a while, but Twitter never really capitalized on that after its $30 million purchase. It was shut down in 2016, which ended uploads, and was completely discontinued in 2017 .
Buzz Feed
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
22 Surprisingly Specific Habits That Instantly Reveal Whether You're A Millennial Or Gen Z
We all know the obvious generational cues — side parts, skinny jeans, saying "adulting" — but what about the subtle things that totally give away whether someone is a Millennial or Gen Z? When u/Ran_doom1 asked in the r/Zillennials subreddit, "What are some signs that give away your millennial/Gen Z identity?" the replies were full of oddly specific behaviors, aesthetic preferences, and deeply relatable habits that instantly expose where you fall on the generational timeline. Here are some of the funniest, most accurate, and weirdly relatable giveaways people shared: "Too young to be a MySpace teen, too old to be a TikTok teen. So maybe, my tendency to still quote Vines." "Probably that I've maintained my side part — it's what looks the best on me." "I use the acronym 'PMs' instead of 'DMs.'" "The fact my birth date has a 19 in the year." "I don't feel the need to tell everyone which Harry Potter house I belong to." "'And they were roommates.'" "Anyone who uses a phone or tablet over a desktop experience is just sabotaging themselves. I get that a mobile experience is good for accessing the internet anywhere, but a laptop or desktop computer is a million times more versatile than a phone or tablet." "I don't ever feel comfortable making big purchases or doing important tasks on that tiny phone screen. I NEED a desktop to feel good about what I'm doing." "To me, it's wild that there are people who need to buy things only on PC and big screens, and it's very funny because they say it like it makes sense. Not to mention, those who don't consider mobile gaming real gaming — as if the platform on which the games run is important, and the future isn't all in cloud gaming and the death of consoles. I don't think I need to say how much I dissociate myself from this nonsense way of thinking." "The same thing goes for people who think mobile gaming is 'real gaming.' It's not and never will be." "Most of my comfort shows are from the mid-late '90s to early-mid 2000s. I prefer physical media over digital. I had plenty of orange VHS tapes." "The obsession with physical media and the fact that I don't look extra. Zoomers in my country always look like they stepped out of an idealized TikTok video (this doesn't apply to older ones, as they are similar to us in that regard). Where I'm from, millennials are always very toned down in their style choices." "I still use 'legit' as an adverb. I've had social media accounts since I was 12 years old. I remember watching Happy Tree Friends using school computers because the internet wasn't restricted just yet. I use laughing emojis rather than 'LOL.'" "Smoky eyes, winged eyeliner, and nose rings made you a baddie in 2012 — I grew up out of most of it except the eyeliner. I admired clothes from American Apparel and Urban Outfitters in the early 2010s, but I was too young and too poor to afford them." "In terms of animé, Zoomers tend to be huge fans of Genshin Impact, Bungo Stray Dogs, etc. Millennials are more into Death Note, Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist. (Death Note especially is a HUGE giveaway.)" "I was born in 1999, but what I think gives me away is that my taste in music from older eras is nothing like my parents' taste. From the '70s, I love Big Star, Television, MC5 and The Stooges more than I do Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith. From the '80s, I love the Clash, The Cure, New Order, The Jam, and The Smiths more than I do AC/DC or Van Halen. A lot of those bands are commonly liked by Gen Z'ers — particularly ones a few years younger." "We remember that brief era of SMART Board in middle school." "I remember 9/11. Even though I was 5, I still have this memory glued to my mind. I was waiting at a takeout restaurant that night, and saw footage from earlier that day of the World Trade Center collapsing on the TV in the front of the restaurant." "I was never in high school under a Donald Trump presidency." "We were out of high school by the time COVID-19 hit. Living through the pandemic during high school is a pretty solidly Gen Z experience. The experience of attending Zoom classes and facing event cancellations, like graduation, due to the pandemic was vastly different from anything students encountered before." "The reasons why I don't feel like a millennial: I don't remember 2000–2001, I wasn't a '90s kid or a '00s teenager, and I didn't use MySpace. The reasons why I don't feel like Gen Z: I used VHS tapes, I don't have a TikTok, and my adolescence ended before COVID." "Millennials are typically more expressive performers (dancing, singing, acting, etc.) because we were the 'fame' generation — raised on competition shows and movies about becoming a star in any form. That's why we laugh at TikTok dancing. We came of age during an exciting pop culture boom. Many of us thought we would become famous stars one day, no matter what our hobby was. We are typically louder and more vain, but I've noticed we also laugh more. Gen Z is typically way quieter and more sensitive (which I'm not saying is bad at all!). I notice they think way more altruistically and tend to be more self-conscious about their mental health. They love to do the 'sexy Dua Lipa music video' version of Y2K fashion randomly, which is cute." Whether you're proudly Millennial, fully Gen Z, or somewhere in that Zillennial gray area, we all have those little tells that expose us instantly. What's your most obvious generational giveaway? Drop it in the comments below!
New Statesman
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
What's wrong with Sarah Vine?
What's the matter with Sarah Vine? Almost everything if How Not To Be A Political Wife, her puzzling account of 20 years 'inside the rooms of government, a sanctioned eavesdropper on the rise – and fall – of the Cameroon style of Conservatism' is to be believed. Coming to the end of Vine's self-gouging rampage-memoir, a straightforwardly insane mash-up of Cinderella, old footage of a rejected X Factor contestant weeping about their family and the nasty Freudian bits from the Patrick Melrose novels, the reader finds themselves hoping that those 'rooms of government' have been stripped, hosed, and given a thorough wipe down since she left. Vine, formerly Michael Gove's wife and currently one of those columnists on the Daily Mail who writes at least 6,000 words a week about Princess Eugenie's Instagram account, lists the ailments herself. Like demons in hell, they are legion. To begin with Vine was born overdue, two weeks late, with 'remarkably large feet'. She was 'catastrophically' short-sighted. She had 'thick' fingers. Later, she has 'ADHD' helpfully diagnosed – why not? – by 'one of my closest friends, who is an expert on these things'. She developed alopecia, hated herself, felt anxious, exhausted, overwhelmed. Something about Vine is always off, always wrong: 'slow metabolism', 'joint pain', 'underactive thyroid', 'muscle aches', 'mood swings', 'suppressed trauma', 'acute appendicitis'. She has a cranial scan for a Daily Mail health feature. The specialist asks her 'if I had ever sustained a serious brain injury'. Vine claims throughout the book that she has a 'bad memory'. But that's not accurate. She remembers every single thing that's ever been wrong with her – and everyone else she's ever known. Vine grew up a half-Welsh transplant in hot Italy, with a hotter mum and a drunken, homophobic, nightmare Boomer dad who 'despised fat women' in between puffs on his oedipal stogies. The Vines, who fled high-tax Britain in the Seventies, were – are – evidently and tastelessly wealthy. They paid for their Vine to become a Gove by flying one hundred guests to the South of France for their 'Riviera Razzmatazz' nuptials; they own sweet property in central London, as well as a patriotically located 'place in Monte Carlo'. They sent their daughter to a 'strange' boarding school, where an 'Anti-Sarah Vine Association' swiftly formed, eerily prefiguring the future. It is not Vine's fault that her parents, in her own high exposure telling, are dreadful. But the sheer soap operatic horror of the Vines – constantly and boozily breaking down, shagging random Italians they're not married to, slagging off their daughter for being crap at tennis – does help to explain who Vine is, in ways she is not quite cognisant of. About a third of the way through How Not To Be A Political Wife this personality becomes clearer: a self-loathing, self-dramatising, self-confessed 'outsider', who is in fact a casting call posho with a cruel, nouveau riche father and a distant mother. That is also the double helix running through a certain kind of journalist – a 'sanctioned eavesdropper' in Vine's words. It's not a role she invented. In 1919, Max Weber argued all journalists were 'pariah' figures 'with no fixed social position' who took psychological risks in consorting with the 'most powerful people on earth in their drawing rooms, on a seemingly equal basis' while those same powerful people secretly despised reporters. He warned such journalists risk falling into 'total superficiality' and 'self-exposure, with all its inexorable consequences'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Only the very strongest characters, Weber believed, could do the job responsibly: 'It is not for everyone – least of all for people of weak character, especially those who need a secure social position for their inner equilibrium.' And a 'secure social position' to restore a whacked out 'inner equilibrium' is what Vine needed more than anything. She's not a special 'outsider', nor is she the 'imposter syndrome' scullery maid victim of the class system she imagines herself to be in How Not To Be A Political Wife. Her early career in journalism, as it is described here, is little more than a prolonged and painful attempt to build social caché and so redeem her unpopularity at school. 'I had quite a little black book of my own,' she boasts, after a 1990s spell at Tatler and somehow barging her way into the editorship of the Times' arts pages. Vine quotes from a prophetic letter her then editor Peter Stothard received a few days into her new job from Garsington Opera, denouncing her elevation as a 'catastrophic drop in standards'. This sounds tough on Vine, but a few pages later she describes a bathroom miniature as 'exciting' and the reader begins to think Garsington Opera might have had a point. Suddenly, How Not To Be A Political Wife's pages begin to proudly swarm with comedy arrivistes and sub-ducal nobodies. 'Topaz Amoore', 'Jayne Dowle', 'Randal Dunluce', 'Tania Kindersley', 'Imogen Edwards-Jones' and someone literally called 'Venetia Butterfield'. Ludicrously, Vine calls them 'the best and the brightest', seemingly unaware that the phrase was borrowed by David Halberstram from Percy Shelley to describe the misfiring brains in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who expanded and lost the Vietnam War. Vine's mates don't wreck South East Asia, but so many of them end up in the Cameron governments that you could fairly accuse them of wrecking Britain. Weber also speculated about what would happen if journalists tried to become politicians. What type of journalist would win power, the 'weak' charlatans or the 'worthy and genuine' who made a success of an impossible profession? We immediately think of Michael Gove, whose ascent began on the Daily Telegraph's 'Peterborough' column. Vine first envelops him on a ski slope in the early Noughties as Kyle Minogue's Can't Get You Out Of My Head blasts out from chalet speakers. Gove was then a sparkly, effete and bookish presence, and a thunderous voice on the Times comment desk, where he had begun to zoom away from his origins as an adopted boy from Scotland. And Vine's account of their marriage underlines the fact that Gove too was an ambitious social mountaineer, not the hapless intellectual depicted. Gove may have presented as a drunken and waspishly entertaining court dwarf to powerful toffs such as Ben Elliot, Tom Parker-Bowles and David Cameron, but only so he could eventually extract eminence and position. At this point, the only sign that Gove had his gimlet sights set beyond clowning at country house suppers and bloviating on Radio 4's Moral Maze was his choice of aftershave: Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet, a favourite scent of Winston Churchill's. Vine thinks this made Gove smell 'fragrant', others thought it meant he was 'gay obviously'. But what it really meant was that he dreamed of becoming a great prime minister. Gove's scent was a charm, a spell, a hopeful but furtive prediction. In The Red and The Black, Stendhal's 19th-century novel of a rural outsider attempting to conquer a glittering metropole, his hero Julien Sorel obsessively reads a hidden copy of Napoleon's letters for spiritual ballast, dreaming of one day matching the achievements of his idol. If David Cameron had simply sniffed Gove he might have neutralised the political threat he posed much, much earlier. After Vine repeatedly explains why her ex-husband is not gay, How Not To Be A Political Wife moves from misery memoir to political score-settling. In the early 2000s, the Goves, along with Francis Maude, George Osborne, David Cameron, Theresa May, Dougie Smith, Rachel Whetstone, Steve Hilton, sundry others and the Policy Exchange think tank were 'Tory Modernisers'. An inner core of this group were 'rambunctious friends' stretching back to their days at Oxford University, friends who would eventually form a court around Cameron when he became prime minister. They wanted the Conservative Party to make peace with modern, liberal, Blairite Britain: to stop calling homosexuals 'tank-topped bum boys' as Boris Johnson did and to remove the fusty Iain Duncan Smith from the Tory leadership. The Conservatives, once Cameron secured power, would become associated with nice things like climate change, academy schools and gay people. Had the Conservative Party changed? They were still mostly rich posh people like Sarah Vine, or even richer posher people like the Camerons and Osbornes. Vine swoons over their 'innate confidence', 'effortless self-assurance', 'expansive kitchen suppers', 'enviable grace' and 'flamboyantly furnished' homes. The Goves spend one soggy weekend away at Samantha Cameron's mother Annabel and step-father William Astor's 19,000-acre estate on Jura, a world, Vine writes ecstatically, of 'faithful, elderly retainers and wise old ghillies, of deer stalking and fishing, early morning swims in the freezing sea'. To be invited into this world was to achieve the 'secure social position' she desired: she always had money, now she had class. Caught up in her clichéd reverie, she forgets to mention that the estate is not technically owned by the Astors but by a company registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. The one small glimpse of actually existing Britain in How Not To Be A Political Wife comes when Vine has to move from West London to Surrey Heath, where Gove has his safe seat. Ordinary life in Britain horrifies her: 'a somewhat soulless tangle of grey roundabouts, shopping centres and cul-de-sacs'. Vine had 'never even heard of Surrey Heath, much less been there'. The people she meets – Tory voters who don't register companies in tax havens – are 'for the most part' nice. Then she compares them to Hyacinth Bucket and calls their towns 'strangely nondescript'. Some of the towns, admittedly, are 'nice' but 'boy did they [all those Hyacinth Buckets] know it'. She forces Gove back to London, a move she compares to 'surfacing from a deep nightmare'. When the expenses scandal breaks and Gove comes under pressure after the Daily Telegraph reveals he bought a pair of 'elephant lamps' worth £134.50 from Oka, an upmarket interior design firm set up by Annabel Astor, Vine writes pathetically: 'It couldn't have come at a worse time for me.' Quite why public money was needed to buy 'elephant lamps' from her mate's mother-in-law becomes secondary to yet another hospital checklist of Vine illnesses brought on by the scandal: 'I caught swine flu, then tonsillitis, double pneumonia and even a quinsy.' Miraculously, she lives. By 2014, Vine was firmly established at the Daily Mail and in her own opinion 'one of the top political wives in the country'. She was happily familiar with grace and favour weekends at Chequers and Dorneywood, chauffeur-driven cars and meeting Royalty: 'a sanctioned eavesdropper'. Gove had become a hate figure for the political left after a controversial series of education reforms that would eventually improve test scores while making it increasingly difficult for schools to attract and retain teaching staff. The Goves had by now developed a reputation for scheming and leaking that Vine blames here on Dominic Cummings, then Gove's special advisor, who she also claims smelled so bad that his colleagues lit scented candles around him. Gove, the entertaining clown who ate his breakfast in cabinet meetings and was so hungover at a meeting with Pope Benedict in 2010 that he nearly vomited, was becoming an object of suspicion among the other Cameroons as the EU referendum loomed into view. Vine claims that she and her husband didn't really talk about politics – a suggestion contradicted by page after page of How Not To Be A Political Wife. Cameron's chief of staff Kate Fall wrote in her 2020 memoir The Gatekeeper that Gove took orders from his wife, who 'is used to proactively managing her brilliant but not very down-to-earth husband'. In that book Fall compared the 'clever, funny, powerful' Vine to a 'python'. That sinuous picture that makes more sense than Vine's limp self-portrait. Vine says she was not Lady Macbeth, but then again, that's exactly what Lady Macbeth would say. After the referendum, Gove twice tried and failed to become Prime Minister. All the puffs of Blenheim Bouquet were for naught. Vine's personal life, which was simultaneously a ware she flogged on Fleet Street for a salary, began to come apart. Vine blames amorphous forces such as 'politics' and 'Brexit' for ruining her marriage to Gove, which ended in July 2021 and was confirmed by Vine with an 'in-depth' Tatler interview the following January. In the book Vine laments an 'abyss of class' for separating the Goves from the Camerons, a cross-family friendship that ended after Brexit. They may simply have been annoyed by Vine's constant titillations in the Daily Mail and the small matter of Gove blowing up Cameron's government. Invoking the language of class to explain why a government minister and his newspaper columnist wife fell out with the prime minister and his wife, the step-daughter of a Viscount, is probably not what Marx and Engels invented such terminology for. Over the weekend, Samantha Cameron appeared in the Mail on Sunday, pictured at Glastonbury wearing a '£340 green v-neck dress from her label Cefinn' a few pages away from Vine's column, which included fulminations against Lime Bikes and a new sandwich launched by M&S. 'My favourite sandwich is Marmite,' added Vine bathetically. If you adopt the zero-sum lens through which Vine looks at the world, it is not difficult to see who won the battle between the families. How Not To Be A Political Wife terminates with a generalised call for kindness and an odd diversion in which Vine suspects that the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown may have given her 'mild radon poisoning'. Readers will have to make their own minds up about kindness. They will have to walk around their streets and their towns and wonder what they would be like if people as shallow as Vine had never had any influence over our country. They will have to wonder if they ought to feel sorry for people who feel very sorry for themselves already. In one of the only political insights that illuminate this book's dense fog of self-pity and thwarted ambition, George Osborne warns Michael Gove in early 2016: 'If you go for Leave you will confer respectability on the mob.' It's taken a while for this warning's snobbery to fade and its prescience to become clear but we are presently hurtling towards a near future where Lee Anderson is the Home Secretary. The mob is coming, and in her own small way, Sarah Vine helped lead it to the gates of power. In the end, it's not just self-exposure that has inexorable consequences. [See also: Has Caitlin Moran ever met a man?] Related
