Day eight of the Bollea v. Gawker Media jury trial in St. Petersburg, Fla. starts right now. Watch the livestream here, IF YOU DARE. Or don’t. It really makes absolutely no difference to me.

Live stream via Wild About Trial.

Last night’s primaries likely provided great clarity in the presidential races on both sides. On the Republican side, Marco Rubio dropped out after a drubbing in Florida and John Kasich took the mantle as establishment favorite after a relatively easy win in his home state of Ohio. As for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton swept Bernie Sanders in four important states. And then there’s Missouri.

The state once known as an important presidential bellwether, is, as of this morning, still too close to call in both races. On the right, per the New York Times, Donald Trump leads Ted Cruz by .2 percentage points, with Kasich 30 points behind them in third. On the left, Clinton is up on Sanders, also by .2 percentage points. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the margin on both sides is actually closer than less than one-half of one percent.

Late last night, NBC News called Missouri for the current leaders, but according to Talking Points Memo. According to CNN, some absentee and provisional ballots have yet to be counted. Per the Post-Dispatch, Missouri law allows candidates to seek a recount if the vote comes in at less than one-half of one percent.

In the Republican race, those delegates matter. But with the Democrats, they almost certainly do not.

Breaking news—President Obama has decided on a Supreme Court nominee. Do you know who it is?

(It’s Merrick Garland.)

Otto Warmbier, the 21-year-old University of Virginia student who was imprisoned in North Korea early this year after allegedly drunkenly attempting to steal a sign from a hotel, was sentenced to 15 years hard labor on Wednesday.

According to the AP, Warmbier was tried before the country’s Supreme Court during a trial that lasted approximately one hour. He was found guilty of subversion under Article 60 of North Korea’s criminal code. The AP explains:

The court held that he had committed a crime “pursuant to the U.S. government’s hostile policy toward (the North), in a bid to impair the unity of its people after entering it as a tourist.”

A few weeks ago, Warmbier was paraded before North Korean press to give a distressed confession that seemed to be at least partly coerced. In that press conference, Warmbier admitted to attempting to steal a sign from a staff-only area at the Yanggakdo Hotel with the goal of “harming the work ethic and the motivation of the North Korean people.”

http://gawker.com/american-stude...

Warmbier was further accused of, and apparently forced to admit to, being in cahoots with at least three groups: A secret society at UVA; his church back home in Cincinnati, which was allegedly going to pay his family hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sign; and of course, the United States government.

Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, who has dealt with North Korea on diplomatic issues in the past, met with two representatives from the country at a hotel in New York on Tuesday to urge for Warmbier’s release. But if Wednesday’s proceedings are any indication, that doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

The video below, via the AP, shows Warmbier being dragged out of the courtroom in handcuffs, his upper body limp and moving like a David Byrne performance piece. It is very, very bizarre.

On Monday, Mark Dougan, a former deputy with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, noticed a truck that had been idling outside his Palm Beach Gardens home for an unusually long time. He stepped outside to question the driver and was quickly surrounded by at least a dozen FBI agents.

They slammed him on the ground, he says, then handcuffed him and began asking about his friends in Russia. “If you want, you can tell us about these people and it will make it easier on you,” Dougan remembers one of the agents telling him.

The agents were apparently there to investigate the recent hacking of thousands of names and addresses of law enforcement officers and others living in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, which were published last month on a website founded by Dougan. A significant portion of the targeted individuals were FBI agents themselves. A few days after the first of these hacks, the local press reported that the sheriff’s office was launching an official investigation. One strange detail in those reports stuck out: The suspected hacker was apparently located in Russia, 5,000 miles from the beachfront county he targeted.

The man who claims to be responsible calls himself БадВолф, or BadWolf to his English-speaking friends and enemies. He lives in Moscow, where he works in IT for a local government agency (he won’t say which), and is alternately puckish and self-righteous when describing his strikes against American law enforcement. He says he lifted the Palm Beach names and addresses from a database maintained by the county property appraiser and published it as retaliation against the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, which he believes is a deeply corrupt institution. The Miami-Dade address dump, which was published weeks later, also appears to target the PBSO.

“I was born in the Soviet era and I remember the fight for honesty in our government,” he told me via an encrypted messaging app, his preferred mode of communication, several weeks before the raid on Dougan’s home. “We have long to go but we strive to be like America. Now I see a sheriff leader in American government trying to be dictator like Stalin.”

At first blush, Palm Beach County would seem an unlikely place to compare to Stalin-era Russia. A two-hour drive north from Miami, it is a land of emerald golf courses and outdoor shopping complexes, where wealthy New Yorkers buy retirement mansions in gated communities. The beach is dotted with luxury resorts, among them Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Bernie Madoff was a man-about-town with a membership at the exclusive local country club until it was revealed that he’d victimized many of his neighbors and associates as part of the largest fraud in U.S. history.

Alas, not even our classiest zip codes are immune to vulgar corruption and venality. A 2013 article in the Palm Beach Post makes reference to a “conga line” of public officials who went to federal prison on corruption charges, including one county commissioner who made seven figures on an underhanded land deal and another who took bribes from business owners in exchange for favorable commission votes. “Is Palm Beach County ready to retire its ‘Corruption County’ reputation?” reads another Post headline, from last year. The answer to that question put forth in the editorial that followed was a resounding “maybe, maybe not.”

In vague terms, BadWolf alleges that the culture of corruption in Palm Beach County extends to its sheriff’s office. He claims that PBSO deputies used official resources to harass and intimidate political opponents and journalists who gave critical coverage to the sheriff’s office, namely two reporters who contributed last year to an investigation of hundreds of shootings by PBSO deputies.

That investigation, published in April 2015 as a joint effort between the Palm Beach Post and the local NBC affiliate WPTV, triggered a typically outspoken defense of the office by Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw. “Channel 5 and the Post have tried to literally just beat law enforcement into the ground, and especially the sheriff’s office,” Bradshaw said in a video statement that was played at a law enforcement convention and later leaked to the press. “I can be like some of the police officials, and tuck my tail between my legs, and say, ‘Yeah, you know what, maybe we need to talk about this.’ No, that’s not it, and I’m not going to back up, because we have not done anything wrong.”

Before his election to the office of Palm Beach County Sheriff in 2004, Bradshaw worked as commissioner of the West Palm Beach Police Department, one of the many municipal departments within the county. A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article about his first electoral campaign characterized him as an obsessively dedicated cop, and noted that he’d faced accusations of racism from black employees of the West Palm Beach department. “He’s nothing but deceptive,” one black ex-cop was quoted as saying about Bradshaw. “He’s not tough or a good decision-maker at all.”

Bradshaw went on to win that election and each of the two that followed. Three men who ran against him over the years all believe that the PBSO improperly used its resources against his opponents during campaign seasons. Two of them told Gawker that when they looked out their windows at night, they routinely saw PBSO helicopters buzzing overhead, looking back at them.

BadWolf’s unlikely interest in the PBSO came after he befriended Mark Dougan, who is an unceasing and occasionally hyperbolic critic of his former employer. Dougan is the founder of PBSOTalk.com, an anonymous web forum and wiki site where members, many of whom purport to be current and former deputies themselves, gather to commiserate and talk trash about the titular sheriff’s office. Their discussions run the gamut from internecine department drama to dissections of leaked documents or PBSO rules and regulations. Often, they are outright cruel, such as a recent thread devoted to a particular deputy’s weight. (“Besides being only like 5-2, he must be pushing 300 pounds. No wonder he’s a miserable fuck.”) When BadWolf needed a place to publish his cache of hacked personal information, he chose PBSOTalk.

Dougan is well known as a thorn in the side of department officials. In 2012, a local scandal sheet called Gossip Extra reported that Ric Bradshaw’s electoral campaign attempted to buy the PBSOTalk domain from Dougan for $20,000, presumably with the intent of shutting it down. That same year, Mike Gauger, Bradshaw’s second-in-command, sued Dougan for defamation, accusing him of running a “shocking anonymous campaign of character assassination.” The animosity goes both ways. “This motherfucker is Hitler reborn!” Dougan recently texted me of Bradshaw.

He cited the example of Jeremy Hutton, a 17-year-old with Down’s Syndrome who was shot by a PBSO deputy in 2010, as evidence of what he sees as corruption at the department. The deputy who shot Hutton stated that he did so because he feared that Hutton would hit him with the minivan he was driving after Hutton made a sharp turn toward him. However, in a subsequent lawsuit against the department, the Hutton family’s attorney noted that dashcam footage from the incident seemed to show Hutton’s vehicle turning away from the deputy, not toward him. Investigations by PBSO’s internal affairs department and the state’s attorney found that the shooting was justified, but the PBSO reportedly settled with the family in January, paying out about $500,000. “They use their power in an absolutely corrupt manner. In Palm Beach County, there is no checks and balances,” Dougan said.

Dougan worked for the PBSO for four years beginning in 2005, and said that he resigned after submitting a tip to a superior that one of his colleagues was repeatedly alluding to beating up suspects on Facebook. (“Like a good batterer i know the areas that hide the marks well,” one of the posts read.)

After that, Dougan said, a number of internal affairs complaints were opened against him, which he believes were frivolous and designed as retaliation against him for tattling on a colleague.

Now, Dougan works as a cybersecurity contractor. The job often takes him to Moscow, where he fell in with a local community of hackers that included BadWolf, he says. BadWolf, who shares Dougan’s affinity for hyperbole, told me he thinks of his friend as an American counterpart to Alexei Navalny, a prominent Russian anti-corruption activist and enemy of the Putin administration.

I first contacted Dougan and BadWolf after reading an article about the Palm Beach hack on the website Photography Is Not a Crime. Taken at face value, the details of the story were sensational, but they ultimately left me with more questions than answers. Why does this Russian guy care about what goes on at a sheriff’s department halfway across the world? Are deputies in Florida really spying on journalists? Does BadWolf even exist?

It was easy to imagine Dougan or some other local PBSO critic fabricating a “Russian hacker” persona to avoid being prosecuted for breaking into a government computer. A Russian-American colleague and I even tried to devise a way to subtly test BadWolf’s Russianness during my first chat with him, until he slipped into his native tongue and called someone a крутой—a slang word roughly meaning “badass” or “tough guy”—and allayed our skepticism. Over weeks of subsequent correspondence with BadWolf, it became clear that he, at least, was the real deal.

The warrant that FBI agents served to Dougan on Monday alleges probable cause that a search of his home would reveal evidence of federal conspiracy and computer fraud crimes:

Dougan said that the agents informed him that they would be seizing his cell phone and all of his computers. They were accompanied by local police, and by two or three deputies from the PBSO. Monday afternoon, an FBI agent called Dougan to tell him that the agency had concluded its search, but that he couldn’t go home quite yet. The Palm Beach County State Attorney had also procured a warrant, the agent said, and the PBSO would be conducting a search of its own.

BadWolf claims that in addition to the database of law enforcement officers’ personal information, he also accessed the personal computer of a contractor and part-time PBSO investigator named Mark Lewis and found a “treasure box” of information implicating Lewis in schemes to intimidate PBSO critics. He wasn’t able to produce much of this information, however. Lewis took his computer off of the internet before BadWolf obtained copies of these allegedly compromising documents, BadWolf said, and the sole piece of supposed documentary evidence for the hack that he provided to me was a file with the improbable title “Reporter Sabotage Campaign.”

The document uses an antiquated encoding system, and it is jumbled and full of non-text characters. BadWolf said that he recovered it from partially overwritten fragments of data on Lewis’ hard drive. It appears to contain logs of surveillance against Lawrence Mower of the Palm Beach Post and Katie La Grone of WPTV, each of whom contributed to last year’s joint investigation into PBSO shootings. It is dated May 15, 2015—just weeks after the investigation was published.

Mark Lewis did not return multiple calls asking him for comment on this story. The PBSO also declined to comment, citing an active investigation. It should be stressed that a text document would be trivially easy to forge for a person with advanced computer skills. Without confirmation from Lewis or the PBSO, it is virtually impossible to authenticate what BadWolf gave me. That said, it is not unthinkable that a person with the ability to hack a government database would have been able to access an employee’s personal computer as well.

Lawrence Mower has covered the PBSO as an investigative reporter for the Palm Beach Post for three years. Among his contributions to April’s sprawling Post-WPTV investigation was a story which found that the deputies involved in every single one of the 45 PBSO shootings between 2010 and 2015 had been cleared of wrongdoing by the department, including 10 deputies who fired at unarmed suspects. Mower’s piece also found that PBSO deputies shot at unarmed people much more often than officers in other departments across the country. “While many shootings were unquestionably justified, The Post investigation confirmed what critics have been saying for years: Many PBSO shootings didn’t have to happen,” he wrote.

The Reporter Sabotage Campaign document lists Mower’s name, address, and date of birth, and gives an apparent account of surveillance at the reporter’s home. “Got a friend to watch Mowers apartment. Used wire camera to see inside. Looks like a patrick bateman movie. Very modern d?cor. Need to check his background more to see if he is wanted or anyone else in investigating,” it reads. Mark Lewis’s name is listed as the author.

Mower himself is skeptical of the idea that he is the target of surveillance or any other underhanded tactics from the PBSO. “It would be pretty extraordinary. I’ve never heard of a local police department doing that,” he said when reached by phone. “On its face, it’s not something I would take seriously, unless there was some kind of evidence for it that was credible.”

He said that there is a gap “big enough to slip a couple magazines or a day’s newspaper” under his door, or a wire camera, depending on the size. However, the document’s allusion to the sleek, modern apartment from American Psycho did not strike him as fully correct.

“The description of my apartment is pretty vague—many of the downtown West Palm Beach condos have pretty much the same interiors, right down to the cabinet handles. I suppose my kitchen table would fit the Bateman description, but the rest of my furniture wouldn’t,” he said.

Katie La Grone, the other reporter mentioned in the document, did not wish to comment on the record for this story. The description of her home is even more jumbled than that of the Mower section, and it strikes a similarly flippant tone. “Spent the day watching the Lagrone apartment...8'?MF crack reporters??6??i?Rk??5????1'9??????;??a?G??(?’q??c?g??Xx?ZmB????-N??03 soon become victims of the crime in their community. I still think we can Q?k?UJ a road unit to stop them and arrest them on a 322 violation,” the file reads in part. (322 seems to refer to a driver’s license violation.)

La Grone’s entanglements with the PBSO may involve more than alleged surveillance. In May 2015, the same month as the date on the Reporter Sabotage Campaign document, the Florida Department of Children and Families began an investigation into La Grone and her husband, Gossip Extra reported. The DCF was reportedly acting on an anonymous tip that the La Grone’s six-year-old child was often seen wandering around their gated community alone, without supervision. La Grone said at the time that she was surprised by the investigation. “We do let our child play outside. He’s got parameters and he’s fully aware of them. He is a healthy, active 6-year-old who does exactly what I or Paul did as children. We also played outside,” she said.

Gossip Extra also reported that a PBSO deputy who was involved in a 2014 shooting lives on the same block as Katie La Grone. The shooting was one of many examined in La Grone and Mower’s joint investigation from April, which accounted for every PBSO deputy-involved shooting between 2000 and 2015. Without providing any evidence or outright accusing the deputy or the PBSO of any wrongdoing in the matter, Gossip Extra unsubtly used that tidbit of information to lead readers on, calling the coincidence “troubling at best.”

The DCF investigation into the La Grones was closed six weeks after it began. It reportedly found no instances of negligent behavior.

Jose Lambiet, who operates Gossip Extra, is a seasoned reporter—he worked for years at the New York Daily News and other papers, and now has a gossip column at the Miami Herald—and is well-sourced at the PBSO. He believes that whoever called in the tip on La Grone was acting on the PBSO’s behalf. “It fit the mold of what they do when they are starting to look at people they don’t like,” he told me. “Is there ever proof that PBSO called DCF on Katie? No. It was probably an anonymous tip. But, I think if you put two and two together, there’s a lot there.”

In December, an audio file was posted to PBSOTalk that seems to support the idea. It contains a recording of what Dougan says was a conversation between himself and another former PBSO deputy, whom we’ll refer to by the pseudonym Hank Moore here. “Who is Mark Lewis investigating?” Dougan asks at one point on the recording, talking loudly over the thumping dance music of a nightclub or bar.

“He went after Channel 5, the people who were doing the investigation. Any time anybody fucking goes after Ric, he puts Mark Lewis on him, to try to get shit on them,” the other man answers. (Channel 5 is WPTV, Katie La Grone’s network.)

Later, Dougan mentions the DCF complaint against La Grone, noting that it came after La Grone “broke a big story on the sheriff’s office.”

“What a coincidence, huh?” the other man answers knowingly.

Speaking over the phone, Moore sounds quite similar to the man on the recording. He told me that he worked with Mark Lewis, and that he did not know him to act underhandedly or carry out retaliation campaigns at Sheriff Ric Bradshaw’s behest. “I don’t know who’s telling you it’s me,” Moore answered when asked if he was familiar with the recorded conversation between him and Dougan. “Let me tell you this: It’s not me. How’s that? I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but no, I haven’t listened to it. So I can’t tell you anything about it.”

I asked him whether he remembered talking with Mark Dougan about Mark Lewis investigating Channel 5. First, he said that he did not, and then added, “I spoke with him, months ago. If we sit and have a conversation, are you going to remember, four or five months ago, what you and I talked about casually?”

I said I wasn’t sure whether I would. “There you go,” he shot back. “Again, I haven’t listened to it. Have I spoke with him? Of course I have. Exactly what we talked about? No, I don’t remember that. Again, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, so I can’t help you, man.”

After my conversations with the Moore, Dougan provided me with screenshots of text messages that show the two men arranging to meet at a restaurant roughly five months before, seemingly corroborating Moore’s timeline.

Two men who have run against Bradshaw for Palm Beach County Sheriff over the years told Gawker that they believe they have also been caught in the PBSO’s web.

Alex Freeman is a retired major with the police department of Riviera Beach, a city in Palm Beach County. Later this year, he will appear on the ballot against Bradshaw, who is running for a fourth term as sheriff. Freeman said that he has noticed the increased presence of PBSO helicopters over his home ever since declaring his candidacy.

“Initially, when I saw them, I didn’t think much about them. Then, I noticed that they would hover over my house on the weekends, and at night,” he said. “Is it necessary for them to keep my daughter and my wife awake at night?”

Freeman regularly has breakfast and lunch at a restaurant in Lake Park, a town in northern Palm Beach County. Once, he said, he was greeted by a high-ranking PBSO deputy. “Alex, I thought I’d come over and say hi to you, because the aviation unit told me you were here today,” he said the deputy told him.

“It’s $1,800 per hour to keep that chopper in the sky. That is a waste of taxpayer dollars,” Freeman lamented later. “All because they want to intimidate any candidate who runs against Ric Bradshaw.”

Joe Talley, who served a decorated 22-year term with the Baltimore County Police Department before running against Bradshaw in 2012, has strikingly similar stories. “When I ran, I got harassed like crazy by his aviation division,” he said. “They would fly over my house, where I work.”

Finally, there is Jim Donahue, who also ran against Bradshaw in 2012. Four weeks after he filed his candidacy, PBSO deputies arrested him on charges of “uttering a false instrument,” allegedly for misrepresenting information on his application to become a deputy four years earlier. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against him, but not before the arrest rendered him unable to put his name on the ballot.

The auspicious timing was not lost on Donahue. “Bradshaw saw me as a potential competitor for sheriff,” he told the Palm Beach Post. “He saw me as a threat.”

This month’s hack of officer names and addresses was not the first time the PBSO ran afoul of BadWolf. Last year, the hacker published hours of recorded phone calls between Mark Lewis and a fawning, helium-voiced woman named Jessica. Lewis talks candidly about his work for the PBSO on the calls. “Whenever we have a bad contractor or person who attacks one of our judges or the sheriff or the state attorney, that’s one of the things I do,” he is recorded as saying at one point. “I start picking their life apart, and their businesses, their family.”

On another call, he discussed the demographics of Riviera Beach, a primarily black city, in troubling terms. “You have a lot of poor, uneducated blacks. And that’s a lot of what’s on the city commission. And they make, in my opinion, a lot of really stupid decisions,” he said. (Alex Freeman, the retired Riviera Beach major running against Bradshaw, is black.)

“In my career, I have never worked a case where a white guy has broken into a black guy’s house or stole a black guy’s car. Never,” Lewis said later in the same conversation.

Later still, Jessica expresses her own feeling about the types of people who live in communities like Riviera Beach. “They seem to act, well, I don’t want to say like animals, but—” she says, before Lewis cuts her off: “Well, some of them do.”

Listening to these recordings, it can sound like Jessica is egging Lewis on, provoking him to divulge sensitive information or make an outrageous statement. That’s exactly what she was doing. Jessica was a fabrication, invented by BadWolf and others for the sole purpose of catching Lewis with his guard down and recording him.

BadWolf laid out the plot on the website where he posted the audio:

Jessica is woman in her mid 30’s who contacts contractor Mark Lewis to renovate a home for her and her boyfriend, who is moving from New York to Florida. Jessica breaks it off with her boyfriend and turns to Mark Lewis for solace and comfort. In the course of their conversation, Lewis announces to Jessica he is also a special investigator with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office with nearly unlimited resources to investigate people with differing opinions (attacks, as he calls it) than those held by Palm Beach County Elected Officials, judges, politicians, the State Attorney, the Sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, and the Chief Deputy, Michael Gauger. In other words, people in a position of power.

When the story broke, Lewis did not attempt to deny that he was the man on the calls. In an interview with Katie La Grone for WPTV, he admitted that Jessica had contacted him through the website for his contracting business, and that they had struck up a personal relationship. He claimed that he suspected quickly that Jessica might not be what she seemed, and explained counterintuitively that he’d only divulged information about department operations in hopes that Jessica would let slip some secrets of her own. “We said this, ‘Let’s just play along, see what we can do and if we can get some information,’” he told La Grone.

Lewis can also be heard on the tapes discussing Jim Donahue, the man who was arrested while campaigning against Bradshaw in 2012. He claims to have spent two years investigating Donahue before his arrest. “I went to Michigan, I went to Canada, I went all over the place,” he said.

After BadWolf published the recordings, PBSO announced it would investigate Lewis’ conduct. According to an anonymous FBI source contacted by Jose Lambiet of Gossip Extra, that agency is investigating as well.

Voters in Palm Beach County will go to the polls to elect a sheriff in November. In his last two elections, Bradshaw won with overwhelming public support, taking 89.1 percent of the vote in 2008 and 78.5 in 2012. Alex Freeman said that he is not deterred by the numbers—or, for that matter, by the helicopters. “They were simply trying to intimidate, which didn’t impact me one way or the other. I’m not worried,” he said. “I believe without a shadow of a doubt that I will be the next sheriff of Palm Beach County.”

It is not clear whether the searches of Dougan’s home are part of a larger investigation into his own conduct, or into BadWolf or PBSOTalk. Dougan says that he no longer owns the website, having passed it to a friend in Russia. (The site’s registrar data was updated in January and contains a Russian name and address.) He said that he did not pass BadWolf’s identity or any information about him to the agents who searched his home.

BadWolf could not immediately be reached following the raid. Weeks before, he claimed that he will continue hammering the PBSO until a change is made. “I was little boy when all Stalin statues pushed over and crushed. People were cheering. Now is time for that to happen in Palm Beach County,” he wrote to me, with characteristic bluster. “If we wanted we could have destroy al [sic] systems and they would have to restore. This was never goal. Goal was to bring awareness to people. To waken police to illegal behavior. We do not wish to destroy. It is like navy sending shot across bow of ship as warning.”

Today the US International Trade Commission issued an order banning virtually all imports of hoverboards into the United States. But this time it has nothing to do with safety.

The reason for the ban involves Segway’s patent claims on self-balancing personal transport technology in the United States. Hoverboard imports, most of which are coming from China, will have to be halted almost entirely for the time being.

Previously the US Consumer Product Safety Commission has warned about hoverboard imports because the products have a tendency to overheat and cause massive fires. The US ITC’s decision was based solely on patent disputes.

Some of the biggest hoverboard brands currently being imported from overseas are expected to be affected by this decision, including names like Swagway and IO Hawk. Any infringing products will be seized at the border.

Segway holds over 400 patents involving technology that allows so-called hoverboards to balance. But the main one they’re hanging their hat on is 8830048, which was filed as recently as April 2013. [Update for clarification: That same patent claims priority in 1999.]

The Commission says that any company wishing to temporarily import hoverboards will have to post a bond equal to the entire cost of the hoverboard until a final decision about the fate of imports is determined.

The US ITC has also issued a cease and desist order against Ecoboomer, a company that has already imported hoverboards, and is prohibiting them from selling the hoverboards that have already entered the country.

Segway’s complaint named 13 companies in particular that it felt were infringing on its patents. These companies include UPTECH, U.P. Technology, U.P. Robotics, FreeGo China, EcoBoomer, and Roboscooters—all of whom export hoverboards to the United States.

There is countless litigation currently taking place amongst hoverboard manufacturers, much of which doesn’t even involve Segway and instead deals in contested IP law within mainland China.

We’ve reached out to Segway for comment on this story and will update this post when we hear back.

[United States International Trade Commission]

A few days ago, many people were shocked—shocked!—at a pair of new studies that found that many Americans have authoritarian tendencies. They want a strong leader, who can sort out “those” people. This went against everything we had lazily chosen to believe about America! But it’s also pretty apparent if you pay any attention at all to the headlines about police violence and the rise of a certain would-be strongman. And that makes it especially fascinating that this year’s two biggest superhero movies appear to be, at their root, about the seductive power of fascism.

Minor spoilers for Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War ahead...

So first off, full disclosure: I have not seen either Batman v. Superman or Civil War yet, but between the trailers and the interviews, I feel like I have a pretty good idea what they’re about. And they’re surprisingly similar, at least on the surface level.

In both films, heroes are held to account for mass destruction. (In Metropolis, or in the fight against Crossbones.) The main person who’s held responsible is a youngish boy scout who dresses in patriotic colors, and who defends his right to use his incredible powers, even if people might get hurt.

Opposing the boy scout is an older rich guy, who wears a high-tech suit of armor and believes that no man should have as much uncontrolled power as the boy scout. They fight. And fight. And fight and fight and fight. In the end, they realize they’ve been played and unite against the real enemy: Lex Luthor, or Baron Zemo. (Civil War has not chosen to show us as much of its ending as Batman v Superman, so that last bit about Baron Zemo is just guesswork on my part.)

These films are all about a man with superpowers and colorful clothes, and the question of whether he (and his friends, in Civil War) have too much power and too little accountability. Even though Captain America and Superman have, at various times, been symbols of state power (or tools of the state), this time around they’re rogue actors whose individualism, it’s argued, needs to be crushed for the good of the masses.

The crucial distinction between Civil War and Batman v. Superman is twofold, of course: In Civil War, there are teams rather than just two heroes fighting. And in Batman v. Superman, there’s no quasi-governmental organization (like the “Sokovia Accords”) trying to get Superman under control, although we do see him answering to the government in hearings ‘n’ stuff. There’s just a crazy rich guy.

So how are these films dealing with the question of power and authority, and how could that speak to the zeitgeist in our very, um, special election year?

Bruce Wayne = Donald Trump

In Batman v Superman, Bruce Wayne is a grandstanding billionaire whose defining trait is his xenophobia. Sound like anyone we know?

By all accounts, Bruce makes a number of speeches in the film about how Superman cannot be trusted because he is an alien. (And in these sorts of stories, fear of aliens is routinely a proxy for real-life debates about immigration, terrorism, crime, etc. Just see Syfy’s new series Hunters, which is explicitly about terrorism, only with aliens as the terrorists.)

In addition to his xenophobia, another one of Batman’s defining traits is his brutality: He’s vicious in his assaults on crime. He apparently goes around burning a Bat-shaped brand into the criminals he catches.

People routinely describe Batman as a fascist, because he’s a wealthy elitist who goes into the inner city to beat up poor people, and he uses his immense wealth to arm himself for this urban combat. (Google “Batman fascist” and you get around 300,000 hits.) But all the imagery we’ve seen of Bats in this movie seems to play up his jackbooted thug side—and Snyder has said many times it’s loosely inspired by The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynne Varley, the one Batman comic where he stops fighting the tendency of random people to wear his emblem and follow him. In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman willingly assembles an army of young skinheads, who become his shock troops in taking back Gotham City.

And meanwhile, the trailers foreground some weirdly fascist imagery about Superman. At one point, he’s actually surrounded by stormtroopers wearing his “S” insignia on their shoulders, but that’s a dream sequence where Batman imagines the worst that could happen if Superman is left unchecked. I think this is supposed to be Batman projecting his own fears onto Superman—so of course, he imagines Superman becoming a Nazi leader. But we also see scenes of ordinary people mobbing Superman and trying to touch him, like a religious icon, which is just weird and plays into the “Jesus” imagery in the previous film, Man of Steel.

As much as Batman v Superman superficially owes a debt to Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, it’s also clear that Snyder is drawing stylistically and thematically on Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins—which Snyder previously adapted to a film in 2009.

Watchmen takes a lot of the critiques of superheroes that people had been making, both inside and outside comics, and makes them the main text for arguably the first time. The comic’s supersoldier, the Comedian, is compared explicitly to a Nazi, and his brutality in helping America to win an alternate version of the Vietnam War makes him not only an instrument of state power but also an avatar of the state. Joining him in this is Dr. Manhattan, a being of nearly limitless power, who then becomes the ultimate American deterrent and proof that “God exists, and he’s American.” Another character, the vigilante Rorschach, carries on a war against urban crime every bit as cruel and obsessive as Batman’s.

Here’s how Snyder described Watchmen in 2007: “In my superhero movie, the bad guy wants world peace, Superman doesn’t really give a shit about humanity, and Batman can’t get it up.” That combination of impotence and heedless violence seems to be at the root of Snyder’s vision of superheroes in general.

Snyder’s movie of Watchmen is often at its most vivid when it’s dramatizing these wartime atrocities and other moments of brutality, and his somewhat fetishistic lens seems ideally suited to conveying the allure (and dark side) of fascist hero-worship. He seems very much to be bringing that same aesthetic, and some of those same concerns, to Batman v Superman.

In any case, the fact that we’re getting a highly stylized movie about a billionaire who categorically hates and distrusts the “other” and wants to know if you bleed, at the exact moment that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has been advocating bizarrely harsh policies against Mexicans, Muslims and others, is sort of fascinating. But more on that in a minute.

Civil War’s roots in the War on Terror

Meanwhile, Marvel’s new movie Civil War jettisons all but the basic idea of the 2006 comics event of the same name—Captain America and Iron Man clash over whether superheroes should be under the control of some kind of state-sanctioned entity. But the roots of this storyline are still very much connected to the War on Terror, which pop culture was just beginning to question 10 years ago.

Civil War is, at its heart, one of the many stories about “liberty versus security” that people were writing in the wake of 9/11 and America’s punitive response to a terror attack on our soil. The freedom of superheroes to do their superheroic thing is placed against the need of ordinary people to feel as though everything is under control. And if you follow the “liberty versus security” thread to its ultimate extreme, the nightmare scenario is a world of total state control in the name of safety.

The Civil War comics push the parallels with the War on Terror to their limit—including a superheroic Guantanamo Bay (in the Negative Zone) and a super-charged surveillance state. We definitely will not be seeing super-Gitmo in this movie. But the basic conflict, of Captain America’s individualism against Iron Man’s authoritarianism, is baked into the story.

[Updated: Commenter Kenny Powers points out there actually is a super-Gitmo in the most recent trailer for Civil War, but it’s in the ocean, not the Negative Zone.]

And just as Batman v. Superman depicts Batman as a billionaire thug and Superman as a Jesus figure who risks being held up as a sanctified leader, there are two conflicting visions of “superhero as fascist” at play in the Civil War concept. Captain America and his Avengers risk being so powerful that he decides what’s right for everyone, but Iron Man risks becoming the tool (and representative) of the very same military-industrial complex that he rejected, back in his 2008 origin-story film.

So these two movies draw their inspiration from Watchmen (and The Dark Knight Returns) on the one hand, and Civil War on the other. Both pieces of source material are often heavy-handed in grappling with questions like whether it’s worse to be a tool of the state or a rogue strongman, and also how high a price you’re willing to pay for safety and comfort. And in fact, these questions have been major concerns in superhero stories for decades—and they’re probably the main reason why superheroes are so inherently political.

Power and Responsibility

So if you accept that both Batman v Superman and Civil War have themes of authoritarianism, violence, whether we can trust outsiders, and the responsible use of power, then the timing appears to be spot on—as Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump calls for a ban on Muslims entering the country and suggests that mosques should be monitored, if not shut down outright.

Anything that gets us thinking and talking about the abuse of power is a good thing at this moment.

Of course, this incredible timing is at least partly an accident—these movies were planned years ago, and Hollywood production schedules don’t allow for lightning-fast, up-to-the-minute political commentary. But at the same time, these questions about just how far we’re willing to go to feel safe, and just how much trust we ought to place in a few powerful individuals, have been bubbling up for over a decade. (Witness Civil War’s 2006 publication.)

And at the same time, superheroes, as a nebulous genre, are pretty much made for discussing these types of issues. Superheroes have always been metaphors for power—both the power of the individual and the power of the state. At his most basic, a character like Superman is a fantasy about being completely unfuckwithable.

As Gerard Jones writes in his indispensible history of early superhero comics, Men of Tomorrow, part of the appeal of the somewhat thuggish early Superman was his purity as a power fantasy. Jones (who wrote some great superhero comics himself) writes of the discovery that “a young man could graft the superheroic fantasies that adults thought were sweet and silly onto a real rage... That had always been Jerry and Joe’s special insight: You could want the invulnerability and the power, but you had to laugh to keep people from knowing how badly you wanted it.”

http://www.amazon.com/Men-Tomorrow-G...

The basic appeal of the superhero is that nobody can tell you what to do—and it’s not a huge leap from that idea to the notion that maybe you can decide what’s best for everybody else.

You could argue the central premise of superhero comics has usually come back to Spider-Man’s motto: “With great power comes great responsibility.” The word “responsibility” in this context has two different, almost opposite, meanings. It can mean “obligation,” as in “the responsibility to help those in need.” Or it can mean “restraint,” as in “using your powers in a responsible manner.”

Spidey’s early comics mostly dealt with the first meaning of “responsibility,” but over time, the tension between those two meanings of the word has come to more prominence.

When superheroes clashed in comics back in the day, it was usually either a misunderstanding, or some version of the “tool of the man” argument. Batman sees Superman as a tool of the man in The Dark Knight Returns, and Superman in turn accuses Batman of being a lawless renegade in John Byrne’s Man of Steel #3. Green Arrow accuses Green Lantern of being a tool of the (blue) man in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, and a few years later, Captain America discovers that Richard Nixon is a supervillain and changes his name to Nomad.

So baked into the superhero genre is an acknowledgement of deep-seated rage, against those who have made us feel powerless, and a craving to have the power to make everybody respect us. Over the decades, the superhero genre has gotten more self-aware and has tried to critique and examine that rage and that craving—with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns standing as two of the most prominent attempts.

I don’t expect either Batman v. Superman or Civil War to offer an explicit critique of our collective fantasies about power and invulnerability—fantasies that all our political leaders, to some extent, have been pandering to for years. But both films seem at least to be raising potentially uncomfortable questions about why we crave the ability to beat up absolutely everybody, while wearing a shiny uniform.

In the end, I can guarantee that nobody will “win” in either showdown (or any victory will be pyrrhic at best)—but along the way, countless moviegoers might be forced to think for a moment about what kind of responsibility goes along with the use of power. Let’s hope so, anyway. For all our sakes.

http://www.amazon.com/All-Birds-Char...

Islamophobia and terror-angst have gotten so bad in Europe that the classroom doodles of a 4-year-old are now potential red flags for jihadi radicalization.

The BBC reports that a very young student in Luton, England was referred to local police after his teachers saw the above drawing of a stick figure cutting up a cucumber:

Staff in Luton told the child’s mother they believed he was saying “cooker bomb” instead of “cucumber”.

Personally I think the drawing is very good and very cool, and have a hard time understanding how “cucumber” could be misconstrued as “cooker bomb,” even taking into account a British accent and the various possible speech impediments a pre-schooler could possess. Even harder to understand is why a little boy’s teachers wouldn’t strive to be absolutely sure he was describing a violent terror bombing—rather than a vegetable—before calling the government for deprogramming.

The BBC notes that “Teachers and public service workers have a legal obligation to report any concerns of extremist behaviour to the authorities since July,” which frankly sounds like exactly the kind of policy that winds up ensnaring innocent 4-year-olds and their terrified parents.

Hark! The Fox News Channel hath graciously saved us Americans from the pain and weariness of another Republican presidential debate. The Fox News Channel is not always a kindly god, but when it deigns to give, its treasures are bountiful.

Fox News canceled the debate, which was scheduled for next week in Salt Lake City, after frontrunner Donald Trump announced he wouldn’t be participating. John Kasich quickly followed suit, saying he would not be there if Trump was not. Even the Republican candidates are tired of the Republican candidates shouting at each other on a stage.

“This morning, Donald Trump announced he would not be participating in the debate. Shortly afterward, John Kasich’s campaign announced that without Trump at the debate, Kasich would not participate. Ted Cruz has expressed a willingness to debate Trump or Kasich — or both,” read Fox’s statement. “But obviously, there needs to be more than one participant. So the Salt Lake City debate is cancelled.”

Thank ye, o benevolent deity!

Last night, PBS NewsHour ran a story on the Tilly family of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Tillys do not have a history of being active in politics, but various members of the family—both old and young—are being motivated to vote or work for a campaign for the first time by Donald Trump.

If you can put aside the fact that the Tillys are rallying behind Trump, this is a small but almost heartwarming story of a family choosing to engage with democracy. That’s also if you can put aside the fact that Grace, one of the central characters in the story, has large white power tattoos on each of her hands.

Above, you see Grace phone banking for Donald Trump, with the Celtic Cross tattoo on her right hand. Despite the tattoo being in plain view of PBS’ cameras, the story never acknowledges that it is interviewing a walking white power billboard. The Anti-Defamation League explains that the Celtic Cross is one of the most “commonly used white supremacist symbols.” Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the ADL, tells me:

The Celtic Cross is an ancient and revered Christian symbol typically not associated with extremism at all. However, one particular version of the Celtic Cross—a squarish cross with a thick circle intersecting with it (also known as Odin’s Cross), has become one of the most popular white supremacist symbols around. In the past 20 years, its popularity has done little but grow, thanks to its use as the logo by Stormfront, the largest white supremacist website in the world.

In another shot, we see Grace’s left hand, which bears the number 88:

Per the ADL’s website, “88 is a white supremacist numerical code for ‘Heil Hitler.’” Finally, a connection has been made between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump.

Pitcavage—who noted that the ADL “does not support or oppose any candidate for elective office”—provided me with an example of these symbols in the wild:

Here is the beginning of the PBS story, which features both shots of Grace’s tattoos:

Unless you work in a restaurant, you may not have noticed that many restaurants no longer include “automatic gratuities” on the checks of large groups. But if you do work in a restaurant, this little change may have left you financially destroyed.

Adding a mandatory tip to the checks of large parties was once standard practice in the restaurant business. It ensured that servers who worked on large groups wouldn’t end up getting screwed out of a proper tip percentage. (Tip percentage often goes down as the size of the bill goes up, thanks to human nature and greed.) A rule change by the IRS that took effect in 2014, though, mandated that restaurants treat these automatic gratuities as regular salary and deduct payroll, Social Security, and other taxes from them. Restaurants saw this as a massive new accounting headache. In turn, many of them simply did away with automatic gratuities altogether. Now, many checks carry printed “suggested tip” guidelines for customers, but those tips are no longer added onto the bill automatically.

The end of auto-gratuities happened to benefit restaurants, including many large chain restaurant companies. For workers, it was bad news. Virtually since the change was made, servers have been complaining that it hurts their earnings by allowing large groups—which can monopolize the attention of servers for a whole shift—to skimp on tips, leaving them well short of what they would earn in a normal night serving many different tables.

How bad could the damage really be? In the context of a restaurant employee’s take-home pay, very bad. Coworker.org, a website that allows workers to build online campaigns and petitions, is currently home to petitions on this very topic from employees of at least eight separate major restaurant chains, including TGI Friday’s, Cheesecake Factory, and Darden Restaurants. The petitions, which collectively boast thousands of signatures from employees, all call on the restaurants to bring back automatic gratuities on the checks of large parties. Workers say that the end of the practice is killing them financially, thanks to stingy tipping on large checks that can often average 10% or less.

Coworker surveyed nearly 150 servers in across the country about the effect of the end of auto-gratuities. Their findings:

The majority of servers at major restaurant chains say they’re losing between $50 and $200 per week as a direct result of not having automatic gratuities added to the checks of large parties. In a field where even full time workers might pull down less than $2,000 per month, that is an enormous hit.

It is hard to imagine that this is what the IRS wanted to happen. It is equally hard to imagine that some of America’s biggest restaurant companies cannot manage their own accounting well enough to reintroduce automatic gratuities, so that their valuable employees do not plunge even deeper into poverty.

In the meantime, be sure that you leave a decent tip.

Watching Ted Cruz speak in any capacity isn’t pleasant. He’s smug, over-rehearsed, and likely wearing someone else’s skin. But as soon you notice this one odd, slightly nauseating little tic, watching Ted Cruz speak gets so, so much worse. We’re sorry.

The video above comes entirely from his Super Tuesday victory speech last night, but if you look back at pretty much any speech Ted Cruz has given during his presidential run, every last applause line is punctuated with this bizarre, stifled, lip-biting smirk. Is it a tic his handlers tried to beat out of him? Is whatever’s living inside his mouth trying to escape (again)? Will we ever be able to look at anything but Ted Cruz’s mouth whenever he speaks from this moment on?

The answers, of course, are: Probably, definitely, and god help us all.

Video by Chris Person.

Welcome to Midweek Madness where we get a call from Us Weekly, are told to provide a list of 25 things people don’t know about us, and tell them our daughters’ favorite game is “Attack the Daddy.”

This week, Taylor and Calvin are going to have a boring wedding in Hawaii, Teresa Giudice is going to have a baby while Joe is in prison, Blake and Gwen are going to release revenge music, and Adam and Behati did a thing.

3...2...1! Attack the daddy!

Taylor Swift & Adam “Calvin Harris” Wiles

Rumors about this terrible wedding have been going around since what feels like the beginning of time, but today’s OK! cover story is more believable than any item that has come before it. After the mind-numbing public displays of affection they published to social media earlier this week, insiders say Taylor and Adam “have thrown themselves into the wedding planning process” and are “hunting for the perfect Hawaiian estate at which to host the nuptials.” This is a boring location for a wedding, but Taylor and Adam are boring people with plenty of money to spend, so I believe it. Only 50 of her 847 best friends will be invited, and Harry Styles will not be one of them.

Adam Levine & Behati Prinsloo

The fact that these two are on the cover of Star should tell you a lot about the shamefully low quality of gossip this week. The headline begins with “ADAM AND BEHATI” as though Adam and Behati are famous enough as a couple to be presented without surnames. Listen, Star, I barely know who Adam Levine is, and to be honest, I’d prefer to Eternal Sunshine my way into knowing even less. The frail hearts of America should only be allowed one Voice-related romance at a time, and Gwake have already claimed that miserable spot. But enough ranting—do you want to know what the story is about? Of course you don’t, but I’m going to tell you because that’s my job, and my parents instilled a good work ethic in me. Behati is three months pregnant, the impending child has saved the couple from divorce (as babies are designed to do), and Gwake are the godparents.

How does it feel to be hypnotized?

Blake Shelton & Gwen Stefani

Speaking of Gwake, that crumpled beer can and his loving koozie are about to release a “tell all” about how Miranda Lambert sucks. But this act of revenge won’t be in book form—no, it will be musical in nature. Sources are telling In Touch that the two of them won’t be “holding back” on their upcoming albums, and will use the songs as “outlets to ease [their] pain.” And, they claim, it was all Gwen’s idea. “She encouraged Blake to find songs that spoke to him and allowed him to tell the world the truth about his life. She told him to channel what he’s feeling into recording all the songs on his new album.” If that is indeed the case, I suspect we’ll see a track listing that looks something like this:

1. “Pour Me Another One, Little Lady (ft. Gwen Stefani)”
2. “I Got Mud In My Tires”
3. “I Left My Heart In Oklahoma, Next To the Guns”
4. “Oh Dammit We’re Out of Toilet Paper. Whatever.”
5. “Miranda Who?”
6. “Hahaha Fuck Miranda”
7. “Make It a Double This Time, Little Lady (ft. Gwen Stefani)”
8. “Don’t You Dare Put Your Finger Up There Again”
   
9. “Gavin Keeps Calling”
10. “We’re All Out of Whiskey”
11. “I Hate Tequila (But It’s All We Got In the House)”
12. “Where’s That Damn Dog”
13. “I Don’t Think I Can Tonight, Babe”

I can’t wait to listen.

Teresa Giudice

So here’s what happened. Teresa Giudice is pregnant. That means she bolted out of prison, started ovulating, fucked her husband, and got pregnant—all in the span of like 12 hours. I suppose that’s not the most shocking thing that could have happened, given how often children are conceived on this planet, but it’s notable because Joe will soon be leaving her to serve his time in prison—which means Teresa will be alone with four children, a baby boy on the way, and a home filled with Bravo cameras for 41 months.

Fortunately, Teresa’s sister-in-law and former enemy Melissa Gorga will be there to help out. They’re reportedly “ready to step up the support even more” now that Teresa is expecting baby number five.

Mariah & That Billionaire

Mariah Carey is a “bridezilla,” and her fiancé James Packer is “only now beginning to see the truth behind Mariah’s reputation.” Her wedding plans are getting “bigger and bigger,” and will likely take place in Tahiti, “where James likes to take his yacht.” Same. But wait, what if it takes place in Sydney! She’s also considering that! Or maybe Disney World! Star calls her a “psycho” and claims she’s just gonna go ahead and plan weddings in all three locations. When you’re marrying a billionaire, why not?

I’LL TELL YOU WHY NOT: Because Life & Style says they’re just going to have one wedding, and that it will take place in St. Barts. I believe their version of the story, primarily because of all the floral details they’ve provided. “They want imported mixes of 17th century tulip bulbs,” whatever that means, as well as “Shenzhen Nongke orchids, which were developed in a lab and cost more than $200,000 per plant.” Get me an invite to this, and throw the one I got from Taylor and Calvin in the trash.

We’re All Doomed:

And Also:

• Bachelor Ben has secretly been calling his ex-girlfriend, and it’s “going to start a war.”
• Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch may be in it for the long haul, which I am OK with. Not that my opinion matters.
• Lea Michele looks better than ever now that she’s broken up with that male escort.
• Duggar thing.
• Duggar thing.
• Pawn Stars thing.
• Scott Disick is telling his new “20-year-old model girlfriend” tons of secrets about Kourtney.
• Louis Tomlinson is going to propose to some woman who isn’t his baby mama.
• Kendall Jenner is sad about something. I have a few ideas as to what this is about, but will not speculate here.
• Anne Hathaway and Kristin Chenoweth are “battling” each other to play Dolly Parton in an upcoming biopic, which would make a good biopic itself.
• This headline: “Rumer Willis BROKE & LONELY: How She Wasted $4 Million Fortune”

Wrong Answer:

Appendix:

This morning, after weeks of speculation, President Obama tapped Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Court of Appeals to assume the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Justice Scalia. But the president’s formal announcement of his choice from among many attractive, well-qualified candidates is just the beginning. (No, this does not work like The Bachelor). A Supreme Court justice gets a lifetime appointment to a job in which he or she is expected to wear pajamas to work every day. With perks like this at stake, filling the occasional vacancy is a competitive, exhausting process that can take months to complete (and even then, it still might not work!). With Chief Judge Garland officially on the clock, here is your mostly legalese-free guide to how America makes a Supreme Court justice.

Who picks new justices?

The president–kind of. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint” justices to the Supreme Court. Depending on how well your AP Government exam went, the phrase “checks and balances” might come to mind. If so, good! The Constitution empowers the president to suggest the next would-be justice. But to prevent the court from being composed entirely of presidential lackeys, the Senate must agree before the president can actually install a nominee on the bench.

Although White House staffers vet candidates for dubious tax returns and racist Facebook posts, there are no formal qualifications for serving on the Court. A justice need not even be a lawyer, so if the Donald isn’t president come November, nothing other than, one hopes, common sense prevents Justice Trump from becoming our new national nightmare. (“LAWS, yes, I know many laws, and I will enforce them BEAUTIFULLY”).

Technically, Senate approval requires just a simple majority vote. But after President Eisenhower nominated John Marshall Harlan II in 1955, Senator James Eastland, a horrible old man who called segregation the “correct, self-evident truth” and “the law of God,” furiously urged the Judiciary Committee to require that Harlan appear to defend his “pro civil-rights agenda.” Harlan was easily confirmed, and when Eastland died the New York Times called him “little more than a symbol of a vanished age of white supremacy.” But Harlan’s nomination kicked off the modern practice of requiring all Court nominees to first testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Testimony before a Senate Committee.” Sounds … scintillating.

You might be surprised! Some have turned out to be VERY entertaining and also EXTREMELY dispiriting. Clarence Thomas’ 1991 hearings centered on Anita Hill’s lurid sexual harassment accusations and excruciatingly detailed discussions of exactly where he placed his pubic hair. (Alleged answer: on a Diet Coke can. Kerry Washington will be starring in an HBO movie on this topic next month.) The Senate confirmed him by the narrowest margin in history, and Justice Thomas, presumably still mad, has said barely a word since. Four years earlier, the Senate rejected Robert Bork after he spent his hearings awkwardly defending writings in which did things like call the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”

Bork earned his own Merriam-Webster’s entry as a cautionary tale for nominees, who now uniformly refuse to discuss their ideologies in Committee hearings. Unfortunately, these are the only questions to which Committee members really want answers. With personal beliefs off the table, filling several days’ worth of hearings can be … challenging. Justice Kagan mocked this dynamic years before her nomination, chiding Committee members for engaging in a “peculiar ritual dance” in which “they propound their own views on constitutional law, but neither hope nor expect the nominee to respond.” But with her own appointment at stake, she clammed up, too.

For nominees, this is good strategy. The Senate confirms more often than it rejects, and hopefuls know that they are more likely to say something stupid than they are to deliver an eloquent, flawlessly reasoned line that convinces opponents to change their minds. So nominees grit their teeth, deliver answers boring enough to drive attending Senators to crossword puzzles, and pray Diet Coke doesn’t come up.

Although some bemoan the EMPTINESS OF IT ALL, there are some good separation-of-powers justifications for this kabuki dance. Despite the fondest wishes of bad people, Supreme Court justices are not elected officials whose performance is subject to ballot referendum. The Court protects minority interests that the unfettered political process might otherwise ignore. Thus, nominees do not make political promises because they do not view their ideologies as relevant to their task of fairly applying the law.

(I know. That’s the IDEA. Please stop laughing).

If everyone knows the nominee won’t say anything, why have hearings at all?

Prepare to be shocked: politics. Although nominees tend to be respected, well-qualified jurists (sorry, Harriet Miers), the Committee members charged with evaluating them often are not. During her 2010 hearings, then-Senator Tom Coburn asked Justice Kagan for a very specific favor.

COBURN: It’s my appeal for you to go back and look at The Federalist Papers … I thought they had tremendous wisdom. They weren’t—they didn’t get it all right, but they sure got a lot of it right, and the proof’s in the pudding of where we are today.

KAGAN: Senator Coburn, I said in my opening statement that I was only going to make a single pledge … but I’ll meet you another. I’ll re-read The Federalist Papers.

Refresher: the Federalist Papers are a collection of essays written by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, and are probably the most famous documents in the Constitutional law canon after the Constitution. Coburn, an obstetrician, asking the then-Solicitor General of the United States to read The Federalist Papers is roughly equivalent to me, an enthusiastic pickup player who got cut from my high school team, suggesting that Steph Curry watch some YouTube videos on jump shooting. This is not to suggest that non-attorney senators are simpletons who must supplicate themselves before the Holy Grail of Learned Law Men. But even with help from staff attorneys, most Committee members cannot be expected to ask nuanced, incisive questions about the outer limits of jurisprudential thought.

However! Confirmation hearings are high-profile opportunities to score points with constituents, and like all good politicians, Committee members do not pass such things up. Hearings therefore consist largely of senators from the president’s party offering softball questions to make the nominee look good, and the other side conjuring up a treasure trove of reasons why confirmation would signal the end of democracy as we know it. Questioning order proceeds by seniority, so staffers review the record of the senator that precedes their boss, anticipate likely talking points, and craft questions designed to trap the nominee or give them the opportunity to defend themselves, as the case may be. Although questions may sound disjointed and scattered, confirmation hearings are actually a series of carefully orchestrated partisan arguments, rebuttals, and rebuttals to rebuttals.

If substantive grounds for opposing a nominee are scarce, senators sometimes just make stuff up, which is fun. Straight-faced (?) Senate Republicans urged the rejection of Justice Kagan because she held “anti-military” beliefs (she briefly and legally barred recruiters from Harvard because the late “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy violated the school’s nondiscrimination rules) and was a secret SOCIALIST (she wrote a paper in college about socialism). When a candidate’s past contains neither smoke nor fire, opponents shrug, pull the manual alarm, and hope that the fire department soaks everything anyway.

But wait, are hearings going to happen this time?

Right. Given the proximity of Justice Scalia’s death to the upcoming election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has loudly promised that the Senate will not consider or confirm ANY replacement under ANY circumstances until after Inauguration Day. Part of me wants President Obama to nominate a robe-clad robot capable only of quoting Reagan just to see McConnell’s bewildered, crestfallen press conference.

McConnell’s plan is a terrible idea. But is it allowed? Because this is law, the answer is an infuriating “maybe.” This Court vacancy has spawned a slew of scorching takes over whether the Senate has a “duty” to act, and if so, what that duty entails. Republicans astutely note that nothing in Article II compels them to consent to anyone, while Democrats retort that McConnell’s stance runs afoul of the myriad courtesies and traditions on which the Senate operates. Since both sides have fair points, your opinion on whether this is okay probably correlates strongly with which party’s presidential candidate you plan to vote for in November.

Say the Senate caves and holds hearings. What’s next?

The Committee sends its non-binding recommendation on the nominee to the full Senate, where the candidate needs a simple majority vote to win confirmation. However, practically speaking, nominees need 60 senators in their corner, not 51. In order to defeat a filibuster threat, three-fifths of the Senate must vote for cloture, a motion that ends debate and forces a yes-or-no vote. Unless a nominee can secure cloture, their opponents can threaten to keep debate open indefinitely until everyone gives up because they are tired and cranky and have to pee.

Supreme Court filibusters are rare. The last successful attempt came during the Johnson Administration, and even a candidate’s staunchest opponents are usually reluctant to resort to this level of obstructionism. However, Republicans hold enough seats to defeat a cloture vote, and certain GOP senators are VERY interested in reserving this power for the next president, so don’t rule it out.

This whole process sounds inane.

Pretty much. In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the Court’s job is to “say what the law is” (again, maybe AP Government bells are ringing right now), and since then, it has been the closest thing the country has to a secular moral compass. Because this has resulted in both good and profoundly depressing things, people sensibly want to know how its members view the world. The process designed to find this out, though, has become a silly charade that is no less silly just because it runs on C-SPAN. Just remember that the next lucky pajama-wearer will make it to the bench by being reserved, mysterious, and boring. Keep your crossword puzzles ready.

Jay Willis is a lawyer and writer in Seattle. He misses the Sonics and covers politics, sports, and Taylor Swift at Needs Further Review. Find him on Twitter @FarragutWest.

Photo by Getty.

A $35 mechanical keyboard, Contigo travel mugs, and Anker vacuums are just the start of today’s best deals.

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http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CM220CK/

If you’re already set for vacuuming, here’s a great set of deals on desk lamps starting at $20, some of which sport USB ports.

Anker Lumos A1 LED Desk Lamp | $20 | Use code JVWCZACT

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B015VVRJ3S

Anker Lumos LED Desk Lamp | $34 | Use code 8AUZEI5A

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01194JHPE

Anker Lumos E1 LED Desk Lamp | $60 | Use code 593V92ZG

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AUHKZCU

Last but not least, monitor your home and spy on your pets with the AnkerCam.

ANKER AnkerCam Wi-Fi Wireless Camera | $50 | Use code CQGOATM9

http://www.amazon.com/AnkerCam-Wirel...

Mpow has been one of the forerunners of the impulse-priced bluetooth headphones craze on Kinja Deals, and their newer Antelope models feature noise cancellation 6.0 and better battery life, to name a few features. [Mpow Antelope Bluetooth 4.1 Wireless Sports Headphones, $30 with code EXXWJP8O]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AVVEMFG

Pair (get it? pair, because they’re bluetooth) them with a discounted running band. $12 with code B6GE3GDH.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BBVT7PK

The best toaster oven, which is also your favorite, and the #1 seller in the category, and rarely discounted, can be yours today for $212 with code SMARTSAVE.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001L5TVGW?...

http://co-op.kinja.com/most-popular-t...

If you hurry, Amazon’s selling your undisputed favorite travel mug, the Contigo Autoseal West Loop, for as little as $14, one of the best prices we’ve ever seen, and a solid discount from its usual $18-$20. Just be sure to grab one before the deal cools off. [Contigo Autoseal West Loop, Black, $14]

http://www.amazon.com/Contigo-Autose...

http://co-op.kinja.com/the-best-trave...

Never want for a clean cutting board with these ridiculously cheap 3-packs.

http://www.amazon.com/Surpahs-Kitche...

http://www.amazon.com/MEGALOWMART%25...

If you’re pressed for kitchen space, Cuisinart’s popular Griddler is actually a griddle, a contact grill, and a panini press all rolled into one compact package. It normally sells for about $85-$100 new, but today on eBay, you can get a refurb for just $50. I bought one for $85 last year, and I love the thing. [Refurb Cuisinart GR-4N 5-in-1 Griddler, $50]

Plus, you can pick up some waffle iron plates to give it even more versatility.

Quick, what do you think this is an image of?

...

The correct answer is tea balls. 6 of them for $7. Use promo code QTFGVLMI.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0146EHZ3K

http://co-op.kinja.com/five-best-tea-...

Grab a 2-pack of OXO-looking silicone and steel tongs for just $8. Your kitchen impulse purchase of the day. [Ouddy Silicone Stainless Steel Tongs, 2 Pack, $8 with code YAKJHWFV]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PXVTPXO/

The HomeKit-ready ecobee3 “Smarter” Thermostat is down to a new low $190 on eBay today, beating out the Nest on both features and price. [ecobee3 with Remote Sensor, 2nd Generation, $190]

http://gizmodo.com/you-can-buy-a-...

Amazon’s Prime Pantry program is great for stocking up on household goods and non-perishable foods without actually having to visit a store, but the $5.99 per box shipping charge has always been a drag. This month though, if you buy five select items, you can get that fee waived.

They ran a similar promotion last month, but this time around, the eligible items are different, and include popular picks like soda, pasta, and a Gillette razor. Just add five of them to your box (plus anything else that will fit), and use code PANTRYMAR at checkout to get free shipping. [Free Prime Pantry shipping with five eligible purchases, promo code PANTRYMAR]

Bonus: If you already have a no-rush free shipping credit in your account, this deal actually appears to stack, netting you an extra $6 discount.

Let’s say you’ve already upgraded to a good toothbrush; what’s the next step for cleaner teeth? Judging by the user reviews, this 20-count box of Crest 3D Whitestrips is a great place to start. As an added bonus, you’ll even get a pair of express one-hour treatments, for when a whiter smile just can’t wait. [20-Count Crest 3D Whitestrips + Two 1-Hour Express Treatments, $37 after $7 coupon]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

This product image is burning my eyes, but here’s a 6-pack of cable organizers you probably desperately need for $6, all in black.

http://www.amazon.com/ONME-Organize-...

You know all of those little Apple USB charging bricks sitting in your drawer? The clever NomadPlus USB charger can transform one into a travel-friendly portable battery pack, and it’s back down to just $15 today.

While undoubtedly clever, the NomadPlus has always been a tough sell at its usual $40, but you can grab one on Amazon right now for $15 shipped. That’s still a decent price premium over a standalone battery pack, but if you appreciate good design, and only want to carry around a single charging solution, it’s a fantastic deal. It would also make a great gift for your less tech-savvy friends who would never remember to charge a standalone battery pack. [NomadPlus iPhone Charger, $15]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

If you’re still listening to any of your TVs through their built-in speakers, here’s an easy fix for $150.

This Vizio Sound Stand pumps out up to 101 dB of crisp stereo sound, and includes a built-in subwoofer for extra bass. Plus, you won’t even need to find a place to put it, because your TV sits right on top. This might not be ideal for for your main home theater setup (personally, we’d recommend this 5.1 channel Vizio system), but it’s a perfect little integrated system for your other TVs around the house. I might just get one for my bedroom.[VIZIO S2521w-D0 2.1 Channel Sound Stand with Integrated Subwoofer, $150]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

Been wanting to try a mechanical keyboard? You won’t do better than $35. [Monoprice Blue Switch Mechanical Keyboard, $35]

Dell’s P2415Q 4K monitor has always been the most affordable 4K IPS display on the market, but today, it’s all the way down to $390 on Amazon, the best price we’ve ever seen.

To be clear, there have been arguably better deals on this monitor from Dell, but those all involved Dell promo gift cards; this is the best cash price we’ve ever seen.

If you aren’t familiar, IPS displays boast superior color accuracy and viewing angles compared to the TN panels you’ll find in most cheap 4K monitors, and with this deal, you’re basically getting IPS for “free” compared to the going rate for similar 4K displays. I happen to own this exact monitor, and I absolutely love it. [Dell P2415Q 24” 4K IPS Display, $390]

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Monitor-P...

Own all of Farscape on Blu-ray today for $45 today. Lots more great deals in our Media section including Game of Thrones.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E688720/

Put some classic Arthur C. Clarke on your Kindle for $2.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AHGSVKS/...

Tech

Storage

• Sony 64GB Class 10 UHS-1 Micro SDXC up to 70MB/s Memory Card ($15) | Focus Camera
• Seagate 3TB Expansion Portable Hard Drive ($90) | eBay
• WD 2TB Blue My Passport Ultra Portable External Hard Drive ($80) | Newegg

Audio

• Audio-Technica AT-LP120-USB Direct-Drive Professional Turntable ($239) | eBay
• JBL Xtreme Splashproof Bluetooth Speaker ($210) | Harman Audio
• Skullcandy Uproar Wireless On-Ear Bluetooth Headphones ($42) | Amazon

Home Theater

• RCA 32-Inch 1080p 60Hz LED HDTV ($160) | Walmart
• Onkyo 1190W 7.2-Ch. Network-Ready 4K Ultra HD and 3D Pass-Through A/V Home Theater Receiver ($430) | eBay

Computers & Accessories

• Intel NUC Kit w/ Intel Core i5 and 2.5-Inch Drive Support ($319) | Amazon
• HP 15-af130nr 15.6-Inch Laptop (AMD A8, 6 GB RAM, 750 GB HDD) ($400) | Amazon
• Nextbook Flexx 10.1" 2-in-1 Tablet 2/32GB Quad Core Windows 8 ($100) | Walmart
• Acer K242HQL Bbd 23.6" Full HD LED Monitor ($92) | eBay
• Dual Monitor Stand, Up To 27" ($30) | Amazon
• Full Size Blue Switch Mechanical Keyboard ($35) | Monoprice
• DYMO LabelWriter 450 Turbo Thermal Label Printer ($70) | Staples
• HP LaserJet Pro P1102W Wireless Black and White Printer ($90) | eBay
• Canon Pixma MG2520 All-In-One Print Scan Copy Inkjet Printer ($20) | eBay
• NETGEAR - Nighthawk X4 AC2350 Smart Wi-Fi Dual-Band Wireless-AC Router ($150) | eBay

PC Parts

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 4GB GDDR5 PCiE Graphics Card ($165) | Amazon | After $20 rebate

Mobile Devices

• Motorola Moto G (3rd Generation) - Black - 8 GB - Global GSM Unlocked Phone ($149) | Amazon
• Galaxy S7 Edge / Apple iPhone 6 Plus / 6S Plus Armband Case ($3) | Amazon | Use code GSSPORT9
• iPhone 6 6s Armband Case ($3) | Amazon | Use code GSSPORT9

Photography

• Refurb Nikon Df FX-format DSLR Camera w/50mm f/1.8G SE Lens ($1950) | Adorama

Home

• Hoover FloorMate Deluxe Hard Floor Cleaner ($93) | Amazon
• Therapure Mini Air Purifier ($30) | Best Buy
• Geneva Home Fashion 7-Piece Ella Pinch Pleat Comforter Set, Queen ($56) | Amazon
• Travelers Club Luggage Chicago 2.0 3PC Hardside Luggage Set ($100) | eBay
• Regency Seating Glass Computer Corner Desk ($148) | Walmart
• Fisher-Price Comfort Curve Bouncer ($22) | Amazon
• Home Depot has Select Garden Beds, Plants, and Supplies On Sale Today | Home Depot

Apparel

• 50% or More Off Spring Break Clothing | Amazon
• Adidas Puremotion Climacool Chest Stripe Polo Golf Shirt ($24) | eBay
• FILA Men’s Edgewater Boots ($20) | eBay
• Canari Flurry Bike Jersey - Women’s ($28) | REI

Beauty & Grooming

• Walmart Limited Edition Spring Beauty Box ($5) | Walmart
• Philips Norelco StyleShaver ($50) | Best Buy

Kitchen

• Zojirushi Tuff Mug, 16-Ounce ($23) | Amazon
• Cuisinart SS-700 Single Serve Brewing System, Silver ($130) | Amazon
• Simply Calphalon Nonstick 4-Quart Saucepan ($30) | Amazon
• Refurb Blendtec Total Blender, WildSide Jar ($190) | eBay

Camping & Outdoors

• Intex Queen 2-in-1 Guest Airbed ($24) | Walmart
• 2-Pack of Zero Gravity Chairs ($60) | eBay
• Laluz Traveling Backpack ($9) | Amazon

Fitness

• Healthrider AbRider Plus ($50) | Sears
• CAP Barbell 30-Pound Enamel Coated Cast Iron Kettlebell ($27) | Amazon
• Cap Barbell 50-Pound Enamel Coated Cast Iron Kettlebell ($45) | Amazon

Tools & Auto

• Cobra CDR-855-BT HD Dash Cam w/ Bluetooth, GPS, iRadar ($129) | eBay
• WeatherTech Black All Vehicle Front and Rear Universal Mats. ($35) | Sears

Media

Movies & TV

• Preorder Rick and Morty: The Complete Second Season ($25) | Amazon
• Outlander: Season 01 Ultimate Collection ($50) | Best Buy
• Game of Thrones: Season 5 ($30) | Amazon
• Game of Thrones: Season 4 ($30) | Amazon
• Game of Thrones: Season 3 ($30) | Amazon
• Fading Gigolo ($5) | Target
• Rambo ($5) | Target
• The Devil Wears Prada ($5) | Target
• Paper Towns ($10) | Amazon
• Escape from Planet Earth ($5) | Target
• Farscape: The Complete Series (15th Anniversary Edition) ($45) | Amazon
• Roots: The Complete Original Series ($43) | Amazon

Books

• Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke Collection) [Kindle] ($2) | Amazon
• Pretty Little Things [Kindle] ($2) | Amazon
• Six of Crows Audiobook ($3) | Audible

Gaming

Peripherals

• ROCCAT Kone Pure Laser Core Performance Gaming Mouse ($40) | Best Buy

PC

• Stardock Bundle 2016 ($50) | Steam
• ARK: Survival Evolved ($18) | Steam
• Subnautica ($12) | Steam
• The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut ($15) | Steam

PlayStation 4

• Just Cause 3 ($40) | Amazon
• Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair ($30) | Amazon

Xbox One

• Xbox One Console Gears of War Bundle w/ Minecraft, Windows 10 Tablet, and Controller ($399) | Walmart
• Refurb Xbox One 500GB w/ Forza 5, Sunset Overdrive, and Ryse ($239) | eBay
• FREE Lords of the Fallen | Xbox Live Gold

3DS

• Bravely Second: End Layer Collector’s Edition ($70) | Gamestop

Board Games

• Risk: Star Wars Edition Game ($15) | Amazon

Toys

• Sportcraft 48" Football Foosball Table ($100) | Sears
• LEGO Minecraft 21119 the Dungeon Building Kit ($18) | Amazon

Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter. We want your feedback.

Send deal submissions to Deals@Gawker and all other inquiries to Shane@Gawker

Jacai Colson, a Prince George’s County (Mary.) cop, was killed over the weekend by friendly fire during a shootout outside PGC police headquarters. Today in a press conference, police chief Hank Stawinski said that Colson was shot not accidentally, but instead “deliberately,” by a fellow officer who mistook him for one of the three suspects who participated in the offensive.

According to Stawinski, Colson, who was an undercover narcotics detective, was not in uniform and had gotten out of an unmarked vehicle at the station prior to being shot. It’s also worth noting that like the three suspects—Michael, Elijah, and Malik Ford—Colson was black. But Colson, pictured above, looked nothing like the suspects, who are pictured here.

Michael Ford, 22, was the leader of the attack on the police station. While no officers aside from Colson were wounded, Ford was shot and hospitalized. While Michael Ford fired at officers, his brothers filmed the assault on their phones. In an earlier press conference, per the Washington Post, Stawinski said the brothers will face dozens of charges, including second-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder.

The Prince George’s County PD has a long history of recklessly using its weapons. In a study of police shootings across the 1990s, the Washington Post found that the PCG PD had the highest rate of fatal shootings per officer of any major city or police force in America. In 2001, the same year the Post investigation was published, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a long examination of the PCG PD’s history of violence against its black citizens in Washington Monthly.

Five deputy sheriffs in the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office have been disciplined in connection with the assault of Rakeem Jones, a protester, at a Donald Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier this month.

The deputies, who witnessed the assault and did not respond appropriately, faced disciplinary action for “unsatisfactory performance and failing to discharge the duties and policies of the office of the sheriff,” Sheriff Earl “Moose” Butler said in a statement.

“The actions of the deputies and their failures to act in situations such as that which occurred during the Trump rally at the Crown Coliseum have never been and will never be tolerated under the policies of this office.” On Monday, the sheriff declined to charge Donald Trump with inciting a riot.

All five of the deputies have been placed on one year of probation, WRAL.com reports, and three were demoted. The statement continued:

The sheriff’s office said that several of the disciplined deputies were involved with the confrontation of Andrew Michaelis, who went on a deadly shooting spree killing family members and assaulting deputies with an assault rifle in July 2014. Their actions in that situation factored into their punishment, Butler said.

“I have taken into account the past bravery and exemplary conduct, including the life-saving and other actions of these deputies in assessing the discipline, and in imposing the sanctions,” he said. “We regret that any of the circumstances at the Trump rally occurred, and we regret that we have had to investigate all of these matters.”

After the rally, the assailant, 78-year-old John McGraw, who is white, told Inside Edition that the protester, Jones, who is black, deserved it. “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him,” McGraw said. He has been charged with assault and battery and disorderly conduct, as well as with communicating threats.

I have questions... Why has Ashanti gone to court three times to deal with an allegedly deranged stalker? How is this alleged stalker able to represent himself in court? And why is he asking her questions like, “You do lap dances for your performances, correct?”

In Manhattan Supreme Court on Wednesday, Ashanti directly addressed the man, named Devar Hurd, while testifying. “You continuously tweeted over and over again disgusting, derogatory, disrespectful things to me after you had already gone to jail for doing the same thing,” she said. “I wish you to stop. I just wish you to stop.”

New York’s Daily News reports:

Hurd, a delusional creep who claims he had a romantic fling with the star, fired back a promise.

“Ya’ll twisted and two-faced,” he barked. “This will never happen again, believe that!”

If the case isn’t disturbing enough, Hurd is also serving as his own legal counsel and this is the third time Ashanti has had to confront him and his harassment in court.

Following a mistrial (after a juror got sick), Hurd was convicted on nine counts this past October during a second trial for the same charges of sending offensive, sexually explicit messages to Ashanti over Twitter (reportedly hundreds of them). One count of felony stalking is currently being retried.

Hurd also has a prior 2009 conviction for stalking Ashanti’s mom Tina Douglas (including sending dick pics he referred to as gifts).

“I’m here because I have to let everyone know how I feel about how you stalked my daughter,” said Tina in court.

Wednesday’s trial involved Hurd recapping the history of gross tweets he’s sent to Ashanti dating back to 2013 (like: “eating pussy from the back tastes better from a flight to Russia”) and asking her whether she noticed them or not, thus forcing Ashanti to reply in court: “I saw the disgusting tweet and was insulted.”

Hurd’s response: “Why didn’t you tell me to stop or block me?”

How is this happening? Hurd, who’s already been in jail since 2013, could get four more years if convicted. In his opening remarks, he stated, “You’re not going to see a lick of evidence where she said stop communicating with me, I don’t want to hear from you, you’re scaring me.”

Image via Getty

On Tuesday, Jason Brian Dalton, the 45-year-old man charged with murdering six people in a shooting spree last month, filed a $10 million federal civil rights lawsuit against Uber. Dalton, a driver for the ride-sharing company, told police that the Uber app on his phone “literally took over his mind and body.”

In the two-page, handwritten lawsuit, Dalton accused the company of ripping him off, failing to pay him back wages and neglecting to invite him to “corporate parties.”

His court-appointed attorney, Eusebio Solis, told the Battle Creek Enquirer on Wednesday that he had not been aware of the lawsuit until reporters called him to ask about it. Kalamazoo Count Sheriff Paul Matyas said the same thing.

Dalton is also charged with six counts of murder, two counts of assault with intent to commit murder, and eight counts of felony firearm use in connection with the February shooting spree, and his mental competency in that case will be determined no later than May 2.

“Uber treats their drivers like crap,” he wrote in his letter, dated March 11. “Uber discriminates against my mental health.”

In a statement, the company said: “It’s hard to know how to respond to someone who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions.”

“Our hearts go out to the victims’ families who have to live with the consequences of his terrible crimes.”

Dalton is seeking a jury trial in his civil rights lawsuit.

Update – 3/17/16

Investigators have determined that the letter attributed to Dalton is bogus.

http://gawker.com/police-10-mill...

According to the Associated Press, more than a dozen U.S. military personnel have been disciplined over mistakes that led to the October bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Forty-two people were killed; no criminal charges have been filed.

On October 3, a U.S. Air Force special operations AC-130 gunship bombarded a Medecins Sans Frantieres hospital that Afghan officials said had been overrun by Taliban fighters—it had not. Earlier reports indicated that some personnel were suspended subsequent to the incident.

President Obama has apologized for the attack, and Army Gen. John Campbell, who was the top American commander in Afghanistan at the time of the incident, said it was a “tragic but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error.” From the AP:

The punishments, which have not been publicly announced, are largely administrative. But in some cases the actions, such as letters of reprimand, are tough enough to effectively end chances for further promotion. The military has previously said some personnel were suspended from their duties but has given no further details.

The disciplined include both officers and enlisted personnel, but officials said none are generals.

The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the outcomes publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity, said the disciplinary process is nearly complete. It is derived from a military investigation of the Oct. 3, 2015, attack, the results of which are expected to be made public in a partially redacted form in coming days.

Sandra Murillo, a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders, said the charity would not comment on disciplinary actions until the Pentagon communicates its decisions directly to the group or makes a public announcement.

The AP acquired one report conducted by the United States into the incident, which indicated that the AC-130 fired 211 shells at the MSF compound in less than half an hour before word reached the crew that there had been a targeting mistake.

The primary U.S. military investigation, completed on November 15, is 5,000 pages long. U.S. Central Command rejected Freedom of Information Act requests from both the AP and Gawker for the report in December.