Russian oligarchs have had a pretty crazy week (as opposed to their standard weeks, which range from the "insane" to "delightfully sinister") — Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov watched as Jay-Z walked away from the franchise and called his ticket-holders "dweebs," while fellow-oligarch Roman Abromavich's insane luxury yacht, The Eclipse, remained mysteriously docked on Manhattan's West Side. Oh, and the daughter of billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev (you guessed it — oligarch), bought an entire Greek island.

The mystery surrounding The Eclipse (which btw, has its own missile defense system and a submarine) was finally cleared up last night as sources tell Animal that Abromavich's long term girlfriend Dasha Zhukova gave birth to a baby girl at Roosevelt Hospital. The birth-after-berth bestows on the young Abromavich both U.S. citizenship and wealth beyond anyone's wildest dreams. But is her dad cool enough to buy her an island?

The 24-year-old daughter of oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev has bought a Greek Island from the last remaining descendant of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The island, Skorpios, is where Onassis famously married Jackie Kennedy. Rybolovlev, who bought the island for "not only for leisure but also business purposes" (where exactly on the tax form do you put down "greek island" as a business expense? Haha, these dudes don't pay taxes), Rybolovlev "regards the acquisition as a long-term financial investment," and an amazing place to party and think about money, wealth, eternity, and the most dangerous game of all.

But all is not sunny in the world of Russian oligarchs! Mikhail Prokhorov's marketing-friend Jay-Z has sold off his shares in the Brooklyn Nets franchise in pursuit of becoming a sports agent, while also calling Nets ticket-holders "dweebs." Not only that, but the Nets are on course for an unenviable NBA playoffs showdown with the Miami Heat, and with salary-cap concerns and an aging roster, they might never be able to win a championship within the next three years, meaning Prokhorov might have to follow-through with his promise to end his playboy ways. A sad situation, indeed. The saddest of all situations.

A Lion Air jetliner crashed on landing in Bali this morning, missing the runway and cracking in half in shallow waters. Amazingly, no one was killed in the accident.

The Boeing 737 was a domestic flight that missed the runway by about 50 meters and landed in the ocean next to the runway. Terrified passengers grabbed life jackets and made their way out of the plane, which was quickly filling up with water. The plane never became submerged, however.

The BBC Reports:

"The plane plunged into the sea at high speed," passenger Ignatius Juan Sinduk, 45, told AFP from his hospital bed in Denpasar, where he was being treated for a chest injury. "Everybody screamed and water suddenly surged into the plane. Passengers panicked and scrambled for life jackets. Some passengers fell, some ran into others, it was chaos. I managed to grab [a lifejacket] and slowly swam out of the plane and to the shore."

The plane was quickly surrounded by rescue workers in dinghies, who helped the passengers swim out of the plane. The fuselage, as you can see above, cracked in half on impact. The plane was carrying 108 passengers, with up to 45 being injured, but none seriously.

No reason has yet been identified for the airplane missing the runway, but carrier Lion Air is at the moment banned from flying to Europe due to broader safety issues in the Indonesian airline industry. It has been involved in six accidents since 2002, according to the AP.

Photographs, he likes to say, are the only things that remain.

On their road trip from Tacoma to Alaska, Dad takes too many of salmon: muscly gray things swarming in shallow water. It's the end of their spawn, a return to the rivers in which they were born. After a year or two eating and growing in the salty Pacific, they have come to mate and lay eggs, then give their lives over to glacier-cold Alaskan streams.

"Did you know they go back to their place of birth?" my mom says in Korean. "And their bodies fall apart. They even stop eating," she tells me, narrating my father's pictures.

"Well, I guess we all go that way. My body, too—my hair is thinning."

In a photo from 1971, my mother is a decade younger than I am now and leaving everything she knows. She wears a tweed bowler hat and matching knee-length coat. Eleven family members come to see her off at the Seoul airport. I only recognize a few of them.

"Did you plan to go back to Korea?" I ask.

"Yes," she says.

What I don't ask is When? or How would you have known it's time?

My mother's mother fell ill six years later, in 1978. Mom scrambled for cash and days off but failed to land in time for anything but the funeral.

I uncover a picture taken three years earlier, of my mom, with hers, at Disneyland. They stand at the edge of a manmade river flowing beneath an imitation steamboat, the "Mark Twain," and a Tom Sawyeresque raft. My mother and grandmother face each other, rapt and smiling; a short-lived reunion. They seem oblivious to all else, even the small child—hat, right arm, Mickey Mouse toy-behind Mom's profile.

I conjure a similar shot of my brother and me, reluctantly posed side by side, knobby arms folded behind us, sweaty Disney mascot in the background. A road trip to southern California in 1993.

We vacationed this way through our childhood: the four of us in a used, sputtering Volkswagen camper—first light blue then white—zipping along blue-black stretches of interstate. Dad always drove. Mom slept in the passenger's seat.

America was gas stations, rest stops, and campsites; never hotels or restaurants. We hiked evergreen trails and built kindling fires. We fished for river trout, transformed on the spot into spicy fish jjigae, Korean-style stew.

My teenage years were busier; hectic anticipation. We all saw less of nature. First me, then my brother: we left home for college and settled in anonymous East Coast metropolises, where ties to each other, our parents, and land and sea loosened like aging rope.

In our absence, things became easier and lonelier for Mom and Dad. They embraced a degree of leisure and relearned life for two. They wore out another used VW Westfaila with the pop-up sleeper top.

They finally splurged, in 2006, on a compact Airstream RV, which resembles a tall, silver snail. It's the width and length of a van but tall as a commercial truck. It folds down and rearranges like a Rubik's Cube or tiny modular apartment. There's a dining area for four, two double beds, a kitchen, and a miniature bathroom complete with sink, shower, and toilet-but not all at once.

The Airstream is their weekend home in the wilds and tamed tracts of the Pacific Northwest. There isn't much of the region they haven't seen, so they explore the far-off, obscure, and tucked away.

They also have several haunts. "We're regulars," Mom says of Mount Si, as though it were a neighborhood pub.

On visits home, I shed the city and molt into a fleece jacket. Mom, Dad, and I pack warm socks and fill the camper with gas and banchan, side dishes eaten with rice and savory soup. I sit shotgun and play navigation backup to a suction-cup GPS.

Last August, during the scarce, hot weeks of Northwest summer, we rolled down the windows and zoomed through a wind tunnel of our own making. Dad's left elbow poked out like a rudder, guaranteeing that his forearm would bake five shades darker than his right. We camped in Oregon, along Cannon Beach, where volcano-black rock formations rise into thickets of cloud.

At a private RV park not far from the shore, we were, as usual, the only non-white campers on the grounds. "Annyonghaseyo!" a middle-aged, bearded man hollered as he drove past. "Annyonghaseyo," my dad responded, amazed at the man's ethnic acumen.

I walked the figure-eight of the campsite, observing my temporary neighbors. Those on multi-night stays erected awnings, weather-proofed picnic tables, and hung decorations of all kinds. Welcome mats, inflatable pink flamingos, flowery centerpieces, American flags, and sports team pennants spilled from enormous, house-like RVs. Gear-loving car campers in Himalaya-grade raincoats put up spindly stoves, propane lanterns, rain water collectors, and insect electrocution devices. REI's version of homesteading.

My brother wasn't with us, on account of work and distance. The last time we all gathered in the Northwest was a full five years ago, for Dad's sixtieth birthday. Recent photographs show just my parents and me, separated by months at a time, each of us visibly older.

The outdoors are only mostly peaceful. My parents squabble, provoked by the contradictions of camping: wide-open spaces versus a Tokyo-tight Airstream; communion with nature and forced communion with each other.

There had been some fighting on their Alaska trip. On the return leg, Mom says, they bypassed two mountains and a magnificent, eagle-encircled lake-to get home more quickly. I imagine them picking up speed through the Yukon: Mom erupting in angry bursts, Dad's mouth distended; pristine forests a windshield blur.

How to deal with what came before has always been a point of contention. Watching the salmon spawn had got Mom thinking about Korea. Among her many regrets is the fate of her deceased parents, who are buried in separate, distant cemeteries in Gyeong-gi province.

We'd visited their graves in 2009, when my parents, brother, and I traveled to Korea for my mother's 60th birthday, a traditional milestone. With the not-estranged half of her family, we wound through the cool, verdant countryside: first to my grandfather's public plot; then to the nicer, private hillside where my grandmother rests. We raked leaves and debris from their Korean-style burial mounds, and laid down fresh flowers and offerings of pear, shredded beef jerky, and rice wine. Mom cried as she bowed, forehead to ground.

Sitting beside my grandmother's plot, Mom said to her brother, "We really need to move Father to Mother's cemetery. How much do you think that'll cost?"

"A lot ... it's already a lot just to pay upkeep," my uncle said.

"I know. You've been taking care of everything, paying for everything all these years." She paused. "I don't have the words to thank you."

My uncle was pragmatic: "You know, these rituals are obsolete. Koreans are too busy to keep them up, to spend their holidays in traffic, to cook all day for dead ancestors. And now my children are going abroad. No one will be around to visit. I think I'll be cremated to save them the trouble."

My dad was silent. I watched him seethe. He picked at the grass distractedly. On the drive back to Seoul, I asked him what was wrong. "Your uncle," he sputtered, "you just don't talk that way about an elder. You just don't do that."

A few days earlier, we'd gone to see my father's father, who lies beneath a mound overlooking the few remaining farms of Cheonan city. We righted the silk flowers and dusted the stone altar, before which my devout Christian uncle said a long, whispered prayer. We put down a mat and bowed before the grave.

Grandparents are a dusky concept. My mother's parents died before I was born; I never got to really know my dad's.

I lived with his mother for nearly a year after college but had trouble forming a bond. Sitting in her dusty Seoul apartment, I wondered why blood did not feel thicker. Last month, at her funeral, I felt confusion and deep regret.

Before the Internet, Korea was no closer than outer space, no more real than trans-Pacific bundles of hanbok and dried anchovies, or half-hearted annual-then not-so-annual-phone calls to faceless relatives.

My piano teacher was the closest thing to extended family. From elementary through high school, I took weekly lessons with Dr. Knapp, a music professor with a curved back and unruly tufts of white hair. He and his wife, whom he met at Julliard, deigned to teach unpracticed children like me.

I remember driving up the their cobblestone street, parking under an awning of pale-pink miniature roses, and entering their unlocked door—to the smell of roasted potatoes and the strange harmony of etudes and cuckoo clocks. I would watch Dr. Knapp's calloused fingers and try to coax my own sounds from ivory.

I visited him once or twice during college; after that, I was too guilt-ridden—having abandoned piano playing—to call. Later, just lazy or forgetful.

Two summers ago, back home at my parents', I finally searched for him on the Web, only to find that he'd recently passed on. I felt my chest tighten as I studied the obituary photos: one in particular, black and white, of a younger, tuxedoed Dr. Knapp, leaning pensively against a Steinway grand.

My parents and I paid our respects at Haven of Rest, a funeral home in Gig Harbor. His grave was difficult to find-marked, to our chagrin, by an ugly plastic pot of marigolds and a tiny American flag. Perhaps Mrs. Knapp wanted an eventual, joint tombstone.

On our way back across the new Narrows Bridge, we were quiet and red-eyed, thinking the same, inevitable thoughts. I finally asked my parents, "Where do you want to be buried?"

"Well," Mom said. "It's a hard decision. We have to see where you end up. With both of you on the East Coast, it wouldn't make sense to be buried here."

"But your whole life is here," I said. "And what about Korea?"

"We need to be where you can visit us," Dad said.

A few months after Dr. Knapp's passing, 100 miles northwest of his grave, removal of two notorious dams began on the Olympic Peninsula. Though the river had been blocked for 99 years, dozens of spawning salmon were found butting their heads against the concrete wall on the first day of demolition.

Power companies had built the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams along the Elwha River, starting in 1910. Against the protests of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, they were erected without safe passageways for salmon.

"Elders remember watching those big fish waiting below the dam, trying to get upstream. They remember pools below the dam full of dead salmon which had not spawned," a tribal pamphlet reads.

My parents and I visit the Elwha reservation. At the community center, I peek into the tribal elders' room, a circle of sofas and office chairs draped with Native American textiles, drawings of salmon on the walls.

Neither the Elwha receptionist nor a federal park ranger believe we will be lucky enough to spot a salmon. We hike down to the turbid water nevertheless, imagining the Coho that once spawned, red and determined, in their natal streams.

Mom and Dad walk through cantaloupe-size gravel and dip their fingers in icy, sun-tipped water. I snap a few pictures, nature-colored but for Dad's bright-red shirt.

The river dwarfs us completely, in life and on film. Sitting on the Elwha's jagged bank, I imagine a century of detoured salmon winding their way back home. I think, too, about the wandering strays-the 10 percent of adult salmon that end up lost, dam or no dam.

Scientists hypothesize the cause: an olfactory malfunction or magnetite deficiency; perhaps daring. Whatever the reason, the strays adapt, reproducing in new lakes and rivers.

E. Tammy Kim writes in Brooklyn and hankers after the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Nation, Salon, The American Prospect, and Guernica.

In a project overseen by contributing editor Kiese Laymon, Gawker is running a personal essay every weekend. Please send suggestions to saturdays@gawker.com.

A man in Lincoln, Nebraska was brutally beaten by a bus driver after asking the driver a question about the route of the bus. The video of the attack, which was released by the City of Lincoln, shows a 40-year-old man asking the driver a question. After a brief pause, the bus driver screams at the man about asking the question, and then proceeds to stop the bus and pummel the passenger, before savagely dragging him out of the bus and into the road.

The driver, Troy Fischer, phoned his dispatcher before the attack, which happened on March 23rd, about the apparently unruly passenger. The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the driver was instructed "to tell the passenger to get off the bus or he would contact police." The driver then took matters into his own hands.

After the attack, Fischer asked his supervisor "not to watch the tape and whether he can erase the footage." Taking this as a pretty clear sign that something bad had happened, his supervisor pulled him off the road. After an investigation by the city, Fischer was fired. Fischer has also been cited for misdemeanor assault.

"Mr. Fischer's actions are reprehensible," Lincoln Public Works and Utilities Department Director Miki Esposito on Friday. "This type of behavior is not, cannot and will not be tolerated by the city of Lincoln."

Investigators have been unable to track down the man assaulted on the video.

In his New York Times op-ed yesterday, University of Texas professor Jeremi Suri writes that the United States's best course of action during this whole North Korean affair would be to bomb North Korea and knock out their weapons capabilities. Probably slighting from North Korea's devious plans to wipe his home, Austin, off the map, Suri believes that, "the Korean crisis has now become a strategic threat to America's core national interests. The best option is to destroy the North Korean missile on the ground before it is launched. The United States should use a precise airstrike to render the missile and its mobile launcher inoperable."

Suri believes that the bombing would succeed for multiple reasons. It would discourage other nations like IRAN (gotta discourage that naughty boy) from doing the same kind of posturing. It would force China and the United States to come to an agreement about the balance of power in the pacific, and usher in a new area of communication between the sometime-rivals. And, finally, it would save Austin from its imminent destruction.

He envisions only great repercussions from this drastic, heroic bombing mission:

Destroying the North Korean missile before it is launched is the best of bad options on the Korean Peninsula. A prolonged crisis would undermine regional security and global efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. And a future war would be much worse. The most prudent move is to eliminate the most imminent military threat in self-defense, establish clear and reasonable limits on future belligerence, and maintain allied unity for stability - not forced regime change - in the region.

Or, the State Department could completely ignore the armchair ramblings of an addled war hawk and instead strengthen diplomatic ties to China by talking to them and not just dropping bombs on things (because the bombing thing always works out, right?).

But according to Private Jeremi, we should just bomb them and let god (and us, and the world thrown into a panic) sort it out.

An Ohio police chief woke up very hungry a few weeks ago. So he went to the kitchen and ate all of his daughter's cake. "I got up in the morning and I ate it. The entire thing," he told reporters. He then began to feel... strange.

"All I can describe it as is that it was the worst feeling in the world," he said. "I thought I was dying."

Laurelville Police Chief Mike Berkemeier then got into his car and drove to the police station, where he was met by his fellow officers and taken to the hospital, where he explained to doctors that "it wasn't getting any better. I felt like I was out of my mind."

Finally his daughter revealed that the cake was "laced" with cannabis oil, and that Berkemeier was just insanely high. Doctors then gave him a sedative. "It was probably the scariest thing that's ever happened to me in my entire life," the police chief reflected.

Moral of the story: don't eat your daughter's cake, dude! And even if you want some, because you know, it is your house, and you are the police chief, it doesn't mean you should eat the whole thing. Geez. Manners.

A former justice of the peace was arrested Friday and his house was searched, in connection with the two shooting deaths of North Texas prosecutors, who were each killed a few weeks apart.

Eric Williams, 46, was convicted last year of stealing county equipment and was prosecuted by Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland (whose funeral Rick Perry spoke at) and Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse, both of whom were shot to death in the ensuing months.

The LA Times reports that on Friday "investigators searched the homes of Williams and his in-laws in Kaufman, blocking the road to Williams' home."

Williams would fit the description of the 'lone wolf' theory put forward by investigators yesterday. The New York Times wrote that slain DA Mike McLelland had even "told colleagues that he believed the victim [Hasse] was the target of a specific disgruntled defendant whom his office had successfully prosecuted."

Instead of an intricate plot by the Aryan Brotherhood, the prosecutors were most likely killed by someone they had prosecuted.

Williams is being held without bond while the investigation continues and authorities try to figure out if he is that "lone wolf."

If you told me 10 years ago that La Toya Jackson's media presence in 2013 would eclipse that of all of her siblings except for her dead brother Michael, I would have laughed at you harder than I ever laughed at her — and I have laughed at La Toya Jackson hard over the years. An entertainer of sorts whose underdog status is tattooed on her existence given her DNA and failure to achieve even Rebbie's levels of chart success, La Toya has long been something of a pop cultural joke, defined by desperation that living in the Jackson family shadow produces. From nearly a dozen failed attempts at pop stardom to multiple Playboy layouts to hotlines of the psychic and Jackson Family Secrets variety, to telling all about her notoriously private family whether by book or by press conference, La Toya's decades of bidding for attention resulted in what seemed to be an impossible to overcome public scorn.

But then, something happened to La Toya: reality TV. Given the medium's commodification of eccentricity, it was there that La Toya flourished with her Kewpie-doll persona, her titmouse voice, her Wizard of Oz munchkin laugh and the worldview of someone who was kept in a cage for decades. Emancipated from her abusive marriage to the now-dead Jack Gordon, whom she says forced her to make all manner of terrible career decisions including Playboy and addressing the press to say that her brother Michael was a child molester, La Toya grew increasingly bolder over a reality TV career arc that has included The Celebrity Apprentice twice, Celebrity Big Brother UK, multiple guest spots judging RuPaul's Drag Race. With her genuinely odd (and, in my opinion, endearing) demeanor and birthright, La Toya Jackson is the perfect reality specimen. Her existence begs to be studied, and OWN has answered the plea with Life with La Toya, a 10-episode reality show that starts tonight.

The premiere of Life with La Toya is mostly inert. It captures La Toya moving into a hotel (so she can move somewhere else after, I think?), talking to childhood friend Kathy Hilton, taking a road trip back to her hometown of Gary, Indiana, with her mother Katherine and doing a lot of explaining about the current chapter of her life that finds her starting over (also, Starting Over is the name of her most recent memoir, the contents of which negate much of what was printed in her 1991 book La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family).

What it lacks in action, it makes up for in personality — La Toya giggles, poses, uses the word "mediocre" to describe the kind of place she'd like to live in (as in "not too big...mediocre") and asks her right hand Jeffré Phillips, "What do I know how to play?" because she can't remember what card games she knows. She says with a straight face, "Picture Buckingham Palace, that's my style." She says with a mere smirk, referring to the tour bus Katherine inherited from Michael, "Rock it, mother, rock it." In the season preview package that concludes the episode, she seems to have an emotional breakdown when Kathy Hilton asks if she's a virgin. In another scene, we watch her sitting down with her father Joseph (she calls him by his first name), in the most literal attempt at a heart-to-heart that I have ever seen: "I wish that my heart could speak to your heart. If hearts could speak to each other without us verbally speaking, meaning if my heart can tell your heart what my heart truly feels about your heart, but..."

I watched this premiere earlier this week in OWN's New York office. Also there was La Toya, Phillips (who is prominently featured on the show) and their small entourage. After the screening, there was an informal Q&A with the assembled writers, La Toya and Phillips, who often interjected to explain or contradict things La Toya said. (They disagree, for example, on whether she has ever actually "dated" before this point in her life: she says yes, he says she met with men when she was younger with no real agenda to ever see them again, thus though she went on dates, she never really was dating anyone.)

I asked La Toya if she likes her show. She does. I asked if she likes watching herself and she said it's "very difficult." So she likes difficult things, I can relate. I asked if it ever gets confusing that she has two nephews and a dog named Prince. "It's kind of cute sometimes because when Prince is playing with Prince, I'll go, 'Prince, stop it!' And they'll both look," she told me, punctuating this anecdote with her trademark giggle: "A-hee hee hee."

I asked what it's like to be the most relevant Jackson — the only other remaining one with any shot at a continued career is Janet, who's had exactly two songs to go Top 40 in the U.S. since her exposed boob undermined everything at the 2004 Super Bowl. La Toya is the cult favorite, the family representative, the astonishingly conflict-avoidant, level-headed Jackson (she steered far clear of that whole Katherine Jackson kidnapping debacle last summer). "I think that we have a very talented family, a very wonderful family," is how the Jackson family diplomat responded. "That's nice of you to say that, but I think all of my siblings are very special. Every last one of them. Very special and very talented. Every last one of them."

After the Q&A, I cornered Jackson for some more questions. I asked if she has a sense of humor about her much-derided musical catalog, as she seems to exhibit in the opening moments of the show when she recaps her career. "You have to live life lightly when it comes to that," she told me. "Music has never been a major factor in my life. It was something I was pushed into doing. It's not my main focus and never has been, and that's why I can take it with a grain of salt."

("Bet'cha Gonna Need My Lovin'," though, I don't take with a grain of salt so much as heaping mounds of joy. It is her masterwork. I told her this and she seemed vaguely flattered.)

I wondered if her fans ever freak her out. Yes, they do. "They do a lot of interesting things," she told me. "They'll pop out of nowhere. It's like 'Oh my god where'd you come from? How'd you find me?' I know it's out of love, but it's like, 'Oh my,' because there are always those who are a little bit different and believe you belong to them."

I asked her what the weirdest question she's ever been asked was. She told me that was a good question before answering, "I think this was the strangest, and I didn't have a clue what it meant and everyone started laughing. A guy said, 'Will you be my slave? I will be your slave if you be my slave.' I go, 'That's weird. Slavery doesn't exist.' I didn't get it. That's probably the strangest. I don't know if it was the weirdest. I thought it was weird, and I didn't know what it meant at all."

So it was the strangest, not necessarily the weirdest, although La Toya thought it was weird but had no idea what she was talking about.

La Toya was taller than I expected (her leopard-print platforms helped) and, though eccentric as ever in her speech, she was more assertive than I would have predicted. I told her that given her life and general manner, she is perfect for reality TV — if anyone needed a show (and make no mistake: no one needed a show but whatever, they're still giving them out), it was her. She seemed to agree, especially given her perspective as someone who grew up simultaneously sheltered from the general public and exposed to its greatest aspirations in the form of celebrities and lifestyle luxury.

"There's a lot that I don't know, and I'm not going to try to hide it or run from it," said La Toya. "That's who I am." For knowing what she doesn't know, one could make the argument that La Toya Jackson is, of all things, wise. Whoever would have thought?

One year ago today, draft-dodging, venison-fueled gun nut Ted Nugent pledged at a Missouri NRA conference that he would be "either be dead or in jail by this time next year" if President Obama were reelected. At the time the Secret Service vowed to investigate Nugent's latest vague threat—previously he'd said he wanted Obama to "suck my machine gun"—but ultimately it turned up no real merit to the ranting.

One year later, there is apparently still no reason to worry about the greying rocker's saber-rattling. Obama won in November, and Nugent, who at 30 made himself his 17-year-old lover's legal guardian, is neither dead nor in jail, because he is exactly what you've always expected: a sad old man who riles up hillbilly sycophants with lies for fame and profit.

Congrats on your year of craven bullshit, Ted. Perhaps you can die or go to jail sometime in 2013.

Last night, Justin Bieber, along with a few friends and guards, paid an after-hours visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The Anne Frank House is the house where Anne Frank, along with several other Jews, hid from the Nazis for two years before eventually being found by them and killed. It's where she wrote her famous diary, the one that has become required reading in school rooms everywhere. And if she could have just escaped the Nazis and been born in 1992, Justin Bieber would like to believe that she would have been a big fan of his.

The Anne Frank Museum posted on their Facebook page a transcription of what Bieber wrote in the guest book after his moving visit, "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

Here's a picture of Justin swaggin' out at the museum. Hell yeah, Justin.

BBC Hague correspondent Anna Holligan reached the Anne Frank House press office, who commented that, "He's 19, it's a strange life he's living, it wasn't very sensible but he didn't mean bad..."

Sex workers in Silicon Valley have begun catering to their tech-savvy, incredibly wealthy clients by accepting payments through "Square" (those little boxes that attach to iPads that your favorite coffee shop uses), taking to Twitter, and playing out a nerd's fantasies (including, but not limited to, simply talking to a girl).

CNN's Laurie Segall reports on the booming industry, which has led to an uptick in prostitution arrests as newly-rich geeks pay up to $400-500/hour (the average wage in San Jose is now over $96,000), making millionaires of some sex workers. San Jose has seen an increase of 35% in prostitution arrests, with a good number of sex workers taking payment by credit card, labeling the payments as "consulting services" for their clients.

Johns come from several large tech companies in the area, looking for companionship in the form of sex workers who are up on technology, wear t-shirts that say things like "Geeks Make Better Lovers," hosting podcasts talking about sex, or going by the names of female X-Men. The sex workers have even seen clients come and go as their start-ups go boom or bust (yeah, yeah, insert joke here).

Clients have asked questions to sex workers like, "How do I get a girlfriend?" Or, "If I buy a puppy will girls like me more?"

[Shutterstock]

The BBC gained access to North Korea last month by using a London School of Economics student group as cover and posing as professors, while risking the unknowing students the ire of the North Korean regime.

In a letter from Professor Craig Calhoun, the director of the London School of Economics, the BBC is accused of deliberately misleading a group of students as to the involvement of the BBC. The BBC has told the school that the students were kept in the dark about the true identities of the reporters to protect the students from interrogation by the North Korean authorities (the same authorities that have detained foreign journalists (okay, probably spies) in the past). However, Calhoun is unsatisfied with that reasoning,

It is LSE's view that the students were not given enough information to enable informed consent, yet were given enough to put them in serious danger if the subterfuge had been uncovered prior to their departure from North Korea.

The trip was organized by The Grimshaw Club, a student society of the International Relations Department. The students acted independently of the school, but trips by the society to foreign countries are common. BBC journalist John Sweeney (above, with DPRK official), along with other BBC staff members, then posed as faculty of the school, using a real office address on campus and being addressed by the North Koreans as "professor."

The BBC used the trip to film the documentary "North Korea Undercover," which will air tomorrow in the UK. The LSE has asked the BBC to pull the documentary from its schedule, but the BBC has told them that the show will go on air as planned.

A student who went on the trip told The Beaver, the official newspaper of the LSE Students' Union, that "we were not made aware of the presence of several BBC journalists at the time of the flight to Pyongyang. We were led to believe that John Sweeney was a History professor, although it was later implied that he was not a professor at the LSE."

Calhoun writes of the damage the BBC might have done to academic study of the secretive nation, "The BBC's actions may do serious damage to LSE's reputation for academic integrity and may have seriously compromised the future ability of LSE students and staff to undertake legitimate study of North Korea, and very possibly of other countries where suspicion of independent academic work runs high."

The series the documentary is a part of, Panorama, was also recently mired in scandal when it was revealed that it had bribed a security consultant who was working for luxury property developers.

[BBC]

Charismatic criminal Redoine Faid escaped from prison on Saturday, after a "brazen" breakout from a French penitentiary that including holding four guards at gunpoint, and then detonating a series of explosives that blasted through five doors and led him to freedom. His whereabouts are now unknown.

Faid, who is something of a celebrity in France, evolved from a petty thief to a theatrical killer, one time sporting a hockey mask à la Michael Mann's Heat. He would often attack armored trucks, and was about to stand trial in the death of a 26-year-old policewoman.

Having spent a decade in prison before, Faid became popular on the French talk show circuit, vowing to stay away from crime. He wrote an autobiography "Robber: From Suburbs to Organized Crime," which detailed his rise to the top of international wanted lists. In 2011, he found himself back in jail.

"He is remarkably intelligent, and he is using his intellect to serve his ambitions," his lawyer told French media. "(And Faid) cannot stand being imprisoned anymore."

No one was injured in Faid's escape. A European arrest warrant covering 26 countries has been issued for Faid, with Interpol assisting on the case as well. Police say he is armed, and still probably has his explosives.

Hugh Jackman, walking muscle of joy, was attacked on Saturday morning by a fan while doing his morning workout in Manhattan.

Stalker Kathleen Thurston burst into Gotham Gym around 8 a.m.. Thurston, who was sobbing, threw an electric razor filled with her pubic hairs at Jackman while screaming "I love you." Jackman backed away from Thurston, believing she was withdrawing a weapon from her pants instead of the dirty electric razor. She slipped past security again, but was quickly apprehended by police a few blocks away.

The Post reports that "the NYPD Crime Scene Unit recovered the weapon and had to pick the hairs out of it to match them with her DNA."

Thurston had stalked and confronted Jackman in the past, and currently resides in a shelter for the mentally ill. Jackman told reporters that, "Here's a woman who obviously needs help so I just hope she gets the help she needs."

Extra points to The Post for their restraint on this one, as their original headline, which can still be found as part of the URL for their article, was "Hugh's Pubic Enemy."

Bitcoins, the currency of the future (the future dominated by the dickhead Winklevoss twins), while an annoying Libertarian fantasy, would at least not end up destroying the environment, right? How much harm can it do, really?

A lot, apparently. Looking to mimic real-world resource extraction, Bitcoins are "mined" so that they cannot be minted too quickly. Mark Gimein at Bloomberg explains,

Before Bitcoins can be traded, though, they need to be created.

That's where "mining" comes in. Mining is a process in which powerful computers create Bitcoins by solving processor-intensive equations. The idea is to keep the supply of Bitcoins from multiplying too quickly. Bitcoin mining, like mining of precious metals, is supposed to be arduous. By design, the more miners there are, the more processing power is required to mint new coins.

The processing power, it turns out, is a huge expense when it comes to the energy necessary to do these "intensive" equations. The energy use is massive:

About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That's enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider.

If Bitcoins continue to gain popularity, this archaic principal that keeps the value of the Bitcoin high will use massive amounts of energy, replicating some of the worst consequences of the industrial age for the digital one.

Here's hoping (for many reasons), that it will never happen.

Three months after Gun Appreciation Day resulted in several accidental shootings, another gun-advocating event has been marred by gun violence. On Saturday, it was reported that a man died from gun shot wounds suffered at NASCAR's NRA 500 race at Texas Motor Speedway. Late Sunday afternoon, medical investigators ruled the shooting a "self-inflicted injury," saying the man shot himself in his head.

Fort Worth police said the incident occurred shortly after the man, 42-year-old Kirk Franklin of Saginaw, Texas, engaged in an argument with other campers at the event. There were several witnesses to the incident, but no other injuries were reported. Police also said that alcohol may have been a factor.

(via Deadspin/USA Today/Image via AP]

The situation in North Korea has gone from bad to worse since Dennis Rodman's VICE-sponsored trip to the country. There's been declarations of entering a "state of war," veiled threats to diplomats, and hacking attacks; things have gotten so bad that even the mayor of Austin is concerned. So naturally, the thing to do is for Rodman to go back to North Korea.

"I'm going back August 1," the former rebounder told Gossip Extra exclusively. "We have no plans really, as far as what we're going to do over there, but we'll just hang and have some fun!"

"Fun" and "hanging out" aren't the first words that come to mind when thinking of North Korea. But based on the sensitive tweets from the VICE crew and the video of Rodman's bizarre welcoming ceremony with Kim Jong Un, "fun" is probably an accurate-enough description of time spent in Pyongyang if you're a former NBA star or VICE correspondent.

As for North Korea's increasingly antagonistic actions, Rodman doesn't think they're so bad, at least not compared to the Soviet Union.

"The Russians were way out there, and they were acting on their threats," Rodman said. "He (Un) just wants to be loved. He just wants to sit down and talk. That's all."

Rodman also said he's still waiting for that phone call from President Obama.

Regardless of Rodman's intentions, at least he isn't using college students as cover to enter the country.

[via The Atlantic Wire/Image via AP]

Florida has a new problem: Giant African land snails. The snails, which can grow as large as rats, were first discovered in South Florida by a homeowner in 2011, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture. Since then over 117,000 have been found and more than a thousand more are caught each week.

Denise Feiber, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture, told NBC News that, despite their apparently friendly appearance, the mollusks pose a danger to various plants and homes in the region.

"They're huge, they move around, they look like they're looking at you ... communicating with you, and people enjoy them for that," Feiber said. "But they don't realize the devastation they can create if they are released into the environment where they don't have any natural enemies and they thrive."

Feiber noted that the snails eat over 500 species of plants, or "pretty much anything that's in their path and green," as well as stucco and plaster. In seven weeks, even more of the snails – each female can produce 1,200 eggs a year — will emerge from the ground after Florida's rainy season ends. In some Caribbean countries, enough snails emerge that roads, lawns, and homes become covered with the creatures, resulting in damages to car tires and lawnmower blades, not to mention the slime and shit stains on building walls. "It becomes a slick mess," Feiber said.

But where did they come from? Some experts suspect it began with a Miami-based Santeria group that was found using the snails in a religious ceremony in 2010. But others have a far more concerning, and stomach-churning, theory.

"If you got a ham sandwich in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, or an orange, and you didn't eat it all and you bring it back into the States and then you discard it, at some point, things can emerge from those products," Feiber said.

And if all that's not disconcerting enough, there's this, too:

The snails also carry a parasitic rat lungworm that can cause illness in humans, including a form of meningitis, Feiber said, although no such cases have yet been identified in the United States.

[via Gizmodo/Image via Getty]

The trailer for Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games, was unveiled late Sunday night during the MTV Movie Awards. It looks...exciting for fans of the franchise. Jennifer Lawrence is back in serious action hero mode ("Go ahead," she tells some soldier guy pointing a gun at her), and all your favorite actors are back playing characters with strange names. Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy. Donald Sutherland as President Snow. Jeffrey Wright as Beetee. And, in what's apparently a big deal, Philip Seymour Hoffman is Plutarch Heavensbee.

The movie, directed by Francis Lawrence, will be released on November 22.

[Vulture]

There's a first-time op-ed writer on today's New York Times Opinion Pages. His name is Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, and this is his first published op-ed because he's a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, and can only "write" by dictating to his lawyers, through a translator, over the phone. "I've been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months," he writes. "I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. I could have been home years ago—no one seriously thinks I am a threat—but still I am here." Moqbel, like many of his fellow detainees—between 40 and 60, depending on who's counting—is undertaking a hunger strike to protest his detention; in the editorial, he describes his twice-daily force-feedings: "I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I'm sleeping." This weekend, after the Red Cross had left and during a media blackout, prisoners and military guards clashed as the authorities attempted to end the protest by moving prisoners from the communal blocks into individual cells—a step back toward the Bush administration's maximum security-style detention policies. The protests were sparked by what prisoners described as mistreatment of their Qurans during searches, but Moqbel writes that its aims are broad: "I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late." [NYT | Miami Herald]