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Ron, Hermione, and Harry Conjure a Dark Mark Above London

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On Friday, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge took Little Brother of the World, Prince Harry, on a trip to Warner Bros. Studios for the new Making of "Harry Potter" tour. According to People, while there, William shouted "Expelliarmus!" at a group of children also brandishing fake wands. It's unclear why he felt it necessary to disarm them.

[Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.


Dad Mad at School for Teaching Young Earth Creationism as 'Science'

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You may have seen this floating around online: A "4th grade Science Quiz" attributed to a "private religious school in South Carolina" that rewards students for answering "false" to statements such as "the earth is billions of years old" and "dinosaurs lived millions of years ago."

Well, Snopes did some, well, snooping, and learned that the quiz borrows its title from a kids DVD produced by the Young Earth creationist Christian apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, and that there is a second, even more alarming page to this so-called "science quiz."

A letter sent in to Snopes by a person claiming to be the concerned father of the 10-year-old test-taker contained page 2 of the quiz, which, for example, considers the correct response to "the next time someone says the earth is billions (or millions) of years old, what can you say?" to be "were you there?"

The unidentified dad tells Snopes that he was unaware his daughter was being taught fake science until she suddenly blurted out "were you there?" in response to a radio ad for an educational exhibit that started out by saying dinosaurs roamed the earth 65 million years ago.

The anonymous father insists the school, which is located "north of Greer" is great for "reading, writing, and math," but not so much for science, as it turns out.

Not wanting to cause any trouble for his kid, he says he plans "to be vigilant...about her science teachings" for the rest of the year, and then expose the school's name in June.

"She will not be attending the school next year," he concludes.

[H/T: JoeMyGod, images via Snopes]

Kitten Sex Prompts Call to Cops

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The week started out with a police blotter item about a girl being chased around a Colorado ski resort by mushroom-hungry giraffes, so it only stands to reason that it should end with a police blotter item about a Wisconsin Rapids woman who called the cops to complain that her neighbor's kittens "were having sex in her yard."

The report is actually a week old, but the trauma will undoubtedly feel fresh for some time.

[H/T: Arbroath, top photo via Shutterstock]

Bags of Nuts Recalled for Failing to Disclose the Presence of Nuts

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An upscale supermarket chain in the UK has been ordered by the country's Food Standards Agency to recall all 350g house-brand bags of Wholehearted Roasted Monkey Nuts because the packaging failed to properly note that the product contained nuts.

"Monkey nuts" is a regional term for peanuts sold whole, with their pod still intact.

Booths sold the peanuts in transparent packaging, but the Food Standards Agency ruled that it didn't do enough to warn customers with a peanut allergy of the dangers contained within.

The product has since been removed from shelves across all 29 of the chain's grocery stores, and the company has issued a statement of apology to its customers.

"If you have an allergy to peanuts, please do not consume this product and return it to your local store for a full refund," Booths said in its statement. "No other products are affected by this issue and we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused."

The director of clinical services at Allergy UK told the Daily Telegraph that she realized many would consider it "barking mad to require bags of nuts to carry a warning on the back that they contain nuts," but the label ensured that "there is no doubt that a product contains an allergen."

[H/T: Boing Boing, photo via Shutterstock]

White House, Congress to Allocate Funds to FAA After Sequester Cuts

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The Federal Aviation Association (FAA) says that the automatic budget cuts related to the sequester have forced them to furlough air traffic controllers. 149 air-traffic control towers across the U.S. were set to close to help save money. The FAA reports that the imposed budget cuts have delayed thousands of flights a day.

The FAA has to cope with $637 million worth of cuts. "We refuse to sacrifice safety even if it means less efficient operations," said FAA administrator Michael Huerta.

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proposed stopping the cuts by saying that curbed spending in Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in savings, Republicans say this is an accounting gimmick.

Meanwhile, the House has passed a measure to stop these furloughs at the FAA and sent it to President Obama for a signature. The Senate also voted yesterday to give the Department of Transportation the ability to transfer $250 million to the FAA. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that Obama will sign the bill.

[CBS, image via Brendan Howard / Shutterstock]

George W. Bush Learned To Paint The Way a Three-Year-Old Does

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For those of you who wondered how George W. Bush learned to paint his thought-provoking outsider art, the secret was revealed by Laura Bush on NPR's "Morning Edition" today: "an app on his iPad where he could draw pictures".

A transcript of Laura Bush's interview with NPR's David Green, via ArtFcity:

David Greene: Your husband has kept a pretty low profile since leaving office. But one thing that’s gotten some attention recently is his new hobby, painting. How did that come about?

Laura Bush: He was looking for a pastime. He got an app on his iPad where he could draw pictures. He communicated with me if I was on the road and with Barbara and Jenna with funny drawings.

David Greene: He was drawing you pictures to send you while you were on the road?

Laura Bush: Yeah, like he’d draw a picture of him in bed with Barney and the cat.

David Greene: Did you see a burgeoning artist or did you think he needed some work?

Laura Bush: Well, we did think they were pretty good. We thought they had a lot of personality and a lot of action. Then, he was looking for something to do and he chatted with John Lewis Gaddis who’s a presidential historian and he said ‘Why don’t you read Churchill’s book ‘Painting as a Pastime’? So he works at painting and paints for a few hours everyday.

iPad painting: just of the many similarities between George W. Bush and Churchill. [Artfcity]

Here's How You Can Live When Your Startup Is "Worth" a Billion

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Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shelhammer did something rare: they built Fab, a shopping website that's standing out from the other trillion shopping websites. Sales are up, and judging by the pictures they post of their fabulous lives, egos are up too. This is conspicuous consumption at its bubble best.

Goldberg has never much for subtlety—this is the same guy who appeared in a slew of shirtless, packed, gay cruise vacation shots. But with newfound success (at least on paper), Jason and his (business) partner Bradford are spending (and sharing proof online) like the boom is as real as the bookends they sell, and the revenue is never going to stop spiking. Who cares if they're actually making serious money? Spend the change you want to see in the world.

So what's it like to run a startup people actually like? You get to do fun things like hitch a ride to Tokyo in a helicopter.

Or a luxury convertible BMW selfie, for when Jason can't get chopper transit.

Bradford loves the helicopter life, too.

Now, nobody goes into the startup biz for any reason beyond making money—don't listen to David Karp. And as far as these two are concerned, they've made it (on paper). This is what success looks like, short of actually going public and making any verifiable profit. But for now, the Fab boys are riding (or flying) high, and while they're up, they're going to let all of their friends know, one JPEG at a time.

How else are they spending? At least part of the answer can be found on their wide open Facebook and Instagram accounts. So let's dig. Share your favorite below—the winner gets a jar of caviar.

Bradford Shelhammer's Facebook

Bradford Shelhammer's Instagram

Jason Goldberg's Facebook

Jason Goldberg's Instagram

Obama's French Ambassador Pick, Tied to Mob-Run Poker Ring, Bows Out

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Billionaire Marc Lasry made a number of friends during his time as cofounder and CEO of the hedge fund Avenue Capital Group. In fact, it was his close buddy Bill Clinton who let it slip that Lasry was President Obama's top choice for ambassador to France. A token of Obama's appreciation for helping to raise nearly $1 million for his re-election, perhaps?

(Chelsea Clinton also worked at Avenue, before declaring her three years there meaningless.)

But one of Lasry's high-profile friendships just cost the "'master of the universe' type" the title he badly wanted. The New York Post reports that Lasry turned down the position this week after the FBI started sniffing around his "close friendship" with Illya Trincher.

Trincher, a 27-year-old poker star and alleged Russian mobster, was indicted earlier this month, along with about three dozen others, in a $100 million betting and money-laundering scheme. The indictment names Trincher's pro-poker-playing relatives, a Russian national accused of fixing the skating competition in the 2002 Winter Olympics, and "poker madam" Molly Bloom, who had previously been charged with helping organize games for Hollywood heavyweights like Tobey Maguire, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

So the opening scene of Oceans 29, basically.

Also named in the indictment is Hillel "Helly" Nahmad, a well-known Manhattan art dealer and gambler himself. That's where the money-laundering came in, with Nahmad allegedly helping launder "tens of millions of dollars" through his art gallery in the Carlyle hotel.

The Post says Lasry's name surfaced on one of the FBI tapes and he dropped out rather than face questions about his involvement in the ring during the Senate approval process. A source told the paper Lasry didn't do anything criminal, more like crime adjacent.

“It’s not that he committed a crime, but it opens a can of worms,” a source said.

Lasry was fond of hosting winner-take-all poker games at his Upper East Side mansion with other hedgies, like Saba Capital Management founder Boaz Weinstein and TPG Capital's David Bonderman, "where the stakes can get as high as $20,000 per hand." But as he told Bloomberg TV last year, his interest was mostly academic.

“Poker is math, so I enjoy playing it because I think there’s a lot of math involved,” he said. “And it’s fun. It’s fun to play with others.”

There's little chance the Moroccan-born financier was unaware of U.S. gambling laws. In 2011, Avenue Capital and Donald Trump were named in a regulatory filing to form a joint internet gaming venture should U.S. regulators permit such businesses to operate.

In a letter to investors, Lasry assured them he would be staying put, a little awkward considering his sister and Avenue cofounder Sonia Gardner just sent out a letter essentially prepping them for a succession plan.

Not to be a closet bitch, but Lasry bankrolling his 18-year-old daughter's attempt to become the next Rebecca Black sounds more egregious than a few friendly card games.


Cult Leader on the Run After Sacrificing Baby for Being the Antichrist

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Four members of a Chilean cult were arrested yesterday for allegedly participating in the ritual sacrifice of a three-day-old baby.

According to local investigators, the cult's leader, 36-year-old Ramón Gustavo Castillo Gaete, ordered his followers to burn the baby alive because he believed it to be the Antichrist and a harbinger of doomsday.

"The baby was naked. They strapped tape around her mouth to keep her from screaming. Then they placed her on a board. After calling on the spirits they threw her on the bonfire alive," investigator Miguel Ampuero is quoted as saying.

The "healing ritual," which reportedly took place last November in the town of Colliguay, was attended by the baby's mother, 25-year-old Natalia Guerra, who allegedly gave the sacrifice her blessing.

Castillo Gaete is rumored to be the baby's father.

The cult is said to have 12 members in all, and was founded in 2005 by Castillo Gaete, who calls himself "Antares from the Light."

Police are still searching for Castillo Gaete, who was last seen in February on his way to Peru to purchase a hallucinogenic brew used as part of the cult's rituals and possibly start a new sect.

[H/T: The Raw Story via Christian Nightmares, photos via AP]

"When you see the headline 'Courageous Senators Stand Up to American People' or 'Facebook Unveils Ne

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"When you see the headline 'Courageous Senators Stand Up to American People' or 'Facebook Unveils New Waste of Time,' you know you’re reading Andy Borowitz." Can't argue with that.

Celebrating Erik Prince's Private Somali Army With The Project

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Since 1993’s Battle of Mogadishu (the disastrous U.S. Army operation fictionalized in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down), the United States has avoided a heavy military presence in Somalia. Instead, three successive administrations have preferred to use the CIA and the military’s Special Operations Command to fund and train Somali warlords, neighboring belligerents like Kenya, and private militias to fight Islamic radicalism and to destabilize any provisional government that might threaten Western mineral interests. The United States has been one of the main sources of instability in what Roger Carstens, the star and producer of a new documentary called The Project, calls “the most fucked-up country on Earth.” It is perhaps the vilest film of the year.

Carstens, a retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel, is the protagonist of The Project, which sympathetically follows the incompetent antics of a highly illegal paramilitary organization formed by Blackwater’s Erik Prince in the fight against pirates off the coast of Somalia.

“In this camp, I am the sultan, and you will listen to me!” a white South African yells to a group of impoverished Somalis. This “sultan” is a former military commander—one who fought and killed to protect apartheid—working for Executive Outcomes, a company funded by the United Arab Emirates and advised by Prince, who continues to establish private mercenary armies across the globe while living in virtual exile from the U.S. The would-be soldiers under the "sultan" are underfed Somalis, interested mainly in the food and shelter offered by the private army, and likely not motivated by any nationalist impulse that their white commanders might try to graft onto a clan-based society. Still, embarrassingly, the commanders try throughout the film to condition the men into a fighting force that will kill fellow Somalis in service of protecting international trade routes.

The Project was funded by the Moving Picture Institute, which looks to promote economic liberalism through the media, and it aspires to be the Waiting for "Superman" for the para-military set. It employs graphics that emulate a videogame; as the Somalis are directed to die and kill, rock music kicks in. This is more or less where the film reveals exactly what it is: an advertisement for private armies, and a bad one at that.

Carstens narrates the proceedings, informing the viewer that he had to leave the military to “move out on my own to answer some questions that are burning in me.” Namely, would private mercenary armies, with no international oversight, be the best way to provide security during the never-ending War on Terror? For Carstens, the answer is yes.

Puntland, an autonomous region in northeastern Somalia, is a haven for Somali pirates, which the film insinuates have ties to terrorist organizations like al Shabab and Al Qaeda (as Jeremy Scahill, the author of Dirty Wars, has shown, they don’t). The government of Puntland agreed to give the paramilitary organization some legitimacy (but no money—that came from the Emiratis) by sponsoring it and bestowing the title of Puntland Maritime Police Force. The South African “mentors” whip the Somalis into shape by physically abusing them. The film, unsurprisingly, omits an incident where a trainee died after he was “hogtied with his arms and feet bound behind his back and beaten,” as the New York Times reported last October.

The Project is uninterested in examining the structural causes for Somalia's present circumstances. It ignores the endless flow of weapons from the United States, and the role of the CIA in promoting rival warlords. Instead, we're given the impression, via a horrific string of images, that black people (black Muslims) don’t know how to behave themselves.

The film builds towards a climax when the graduates of the six-week training academy are given their first assignment: hunting down and killing a notorious pirate who is holding an Indian cargo ship ransom. The police force fruitlessly scours the coastline looking for its target (the white men with the big guns in a helicopter, the black men with shitty guns on the ground), only to find town after town abandoned. The South African mercenaries believe they have an informant in their midst, and as accusations fly and pressure mounts in the hot African sun, the Somalis turn on their “mentors” and kill one of the South Africans.

Their assignment considered a failure, the authorities in turn execute the Somalis they consider responsible for the death of the South African, and eventually the whole project falls apart amid mounting political and media pressure. The film also leaves the out the part where the Emirati company left behind 500 half-trained soldiers without pay and with an entire armory of weapons at their disposal. But that’s beside the point.

The Project would like to show the heroism of these war-profiteers. It mercifully ends with a lone South African leading a small group of Somalis (ones who volunteered to stay in the illegal, unpaid army) shooting at the hijacked ship, which had run out of gas and run aground. With no other options, the pirates surrender and escape, but not before a Somali soldier is killed in a disastrous attempt to board the ship. The film celebrates this weak moment as a huge triumph. Given a hopeless enemy, killers-for-hire can succeed.

The Project is screening as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

[Photos courtesy of the United Nations]

To contact the author of this post, write to max.rivlinnadler@gawker.com.

New York Times Uncovers Devastating Fraud in Minority Farmers Program

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Here's something you won't see on Gawker very often: Andrew Breitbart was somewhat right.

In a damning article published in the New York Times today, reporter Sharon LaFranier does a 5,000-word deep-dive into the fraud and abuse that is apparently rampant in the government's Pigford settlement, a program the late Breitbart had in his crosshairs for some time. Pigford v. Glickman was a class action lawsuit in which black farmers alleged they were systematically deprived of loans from the United States Department of Agriculture throughout the '80s and '90s. The suit was settled in 1999, but it eventually gave rise to a second settlement, Pigford II, which allowed women, Latinos, and Native Americans to file claims of government prejudice.

All of this by itself isn't a problem—government reports and a court of law found that some farmers had indeed been discriminated against by the USDA. But things soon spiraled out of control:

From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.

Yet those concerns were played down as the compensation effort grew. Though the government has started requiring more evidence to support some claims, even now people who say they were unfairly denied loans can collect up to $50,000 with little documentation.

As a senator, Barack Obama supported expanding compensation for black farmers, and then as president he pressed for $1.15 billion to pay those new claims. Other groups quickly escalated their demands for similar treatment. In a letter to the White House in September 2009, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a leading Hispanic Democrat, threatened to mount a campaign “outside the Beltway” if Hispanic farmers were not compensated.

The groups found a champion in the new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. New settlements would provide “a way to neutralize the argument that the government favors black farmers over Hispanic, Native American or women farmers,” an internal department memorandum stated in March 2010.

The Pigford fraud has gotten so bad, according to the Times, that claims have been filed on behalf of young children. Entire apartment buildings in Columbus, Ohio, have filed claims. Multiple claims using the same handwriting and describing almost the exact same tales of discrimination have been filed and paid out, and all as government officials and attorneys did nothing to prevent the infelicities. A black former Agriculture Department farm loan manager in North Carolina told LaFraniere: "You knew it was wrong, but what could you do? Who is going to listen to you?"

The details in this story guarantee it will be talked about constantly in conservative media circles for the foreseeable future: minority groups filling their coffers by scamming the U.S. government, unscrupulous lawyers abetting the scheming, a black president pressing for lots more money that went to fraudsters, conservative protestations ignored. Breitbart.com is already running a write-up of the article under the blaring headline "Breitbart Vindicated." The final scene of the article, in fact, which depicts a man who's made it his job to help black people get Pigford money saying to an entire church that they should file discrimination claims, is so wanton and grotesque it almost seems like a bit of right-wing fiction. After bragging to the hundreds of people assembled that he and all four of his siblings had gotten Pigford settlement money, the man, Thomas Burrell, tells the audience: "Let’s get the judge to go to work writing them checks! They have just opened the bank vault.”

The article contains a lot of surprising revelations, but the article itself is a sort of surprise in that it appeared in the New York Times and not Fox News or the National Review or any of the conservative media outlets that are already champing at the bit to roast liberals who had supported Pigford for their malfeasance. The right wing has been whining about Pigford for years. But rather than do the legwork to expose the true problems underlying the program, Breitbart and his ilk were content to put out misleadingly edited videos of Shirley Sherrod to try and smear the USDA as being a haven for "reverse" racism.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has a good and simple lesson on why Pigford got out of hand: "You can either set a high bar for evidence of discrimination, knowing that it will unfairly deny compensation to lots of people who were treated wrongly. Or you can set a low bar, knowing that this will unfairly give money to lots of people who don't deserve it."

But that explanation won't change the fact that many will look at Pigford as further evidence that blacks are lazy takers and that federal programs intending to right America's historical and racist wrongs are always wasteful. In other words, it's going to give fuel to racists who will in turn go on discriminating against blacks and Latinos, who will in turn push for institutions to help them get ahead in a racist country. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[Image via AP]

The Boston Bombing Suspects' Final Day On The Run: A Reconstruction

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One week ago, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev killed a police officer, engaged in a massive shootout that wounded another and left Tamerlan dead, and set off a manhunt that put Boston on lockdown. Many of the initial reports were a confused jumble, and we're only now able to recreate the Tsarnaevs' movements and actions on that final day with any precision.

The picture that emerges from reports by both local and national media, and from the criminal complaint filed against Dzhokhar, does not suggest a pair of experienced criminals executing a master plan. It shows disorganization—a police officer murdered for his gun (the brothers had only one), a vague idea of exploding more devices in New York City, and a meandering drive in and around Boston that couldn't help but alert authorities. In short, two scared, unprepared, and dangerous young men.

There was a robbery at a 7-Eleven near Kendall Square, on MIT's campus, on Thursday night. But despite early reports, it was not carried out by the Tsarnaevs, nor was 27-year-old campus police officer Sean Collier responding to it. He was a half-hour from ending his shift and was sitting in his patrol car in front of the Stata Building, two blocks from the 7-Eleven and about a mile from the Norfolk Street apartment where the Tsarnaevs lived.

Around 10:30 p.m., video captured two men approaching Collier's car from behind. Collier was killed execution-style, with one shot at close range through his driver's-side window.

Police believe the Tsarnaevs killed him for his gun—their photos had been released by the FBI hours earlier, and it was time to get out of Boston, but between them they had only one firearm and one pellet gun. But Collier's holster had a complicated locking mechanism, and the brothers were unable to free it. They quickly left the scene in an older model sedan (it's not clear if they owned the sedan, or how they acquired it).

About a half-hour later, shortly before 11 p.m., the sedan pulled up behind a Mercedes ML 350 on Brighton Avenue, just west of the Boston University campus. They did not carjack the SUV in Cambridge, as had been reported—they had crossed the Charles River and returned to Boston.

The Boston Globe spoke with their carjacking victim, a 26-year-old Chinese national who will identify himself only by his American nickname, Danny.

The man rapped on the glass, speaking quickly. Danny, unable to hear him, lowered the window — and the man reached an arm through, unlocked the door, and climbed in, brandishing a silver handgun.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told Danny. He asked if he had followed the news about Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings. Danny had, down to the release of the grainy suspect photos less than six hours earlier.

“I did that,” said the man, who would later be identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev. “And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.”

Tamerlan alone got into Danny's SUV; Dzhokhar followed in the sedan. The two-car convoy again crossed the river, taking the Arsenal Street Bridge into Watertown. Tamerlan told Danny to park on Fairfield Street, a quiet side street. Dzhokhar pulled up behind them, and the brothers got to work moving heavy objects from the sedan to the SUV: five pipe bombs and one pressure cooker explosive like the ones that had gone off at the marathon, we now know.

As Danny told the Globe, he played up his ethnicity and outsider status in an attempt to connect with Tamerlan Tsarnaev and save his life.

“Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?”

“No, no, I don’t remember anything,” he said.

Tamerlan laughed. “It’s like white guys, they look at black guys and think all black guys look the same,” he said. “And maybe you think all white guys look the same.”

“Exactly,” Danny said, though he thought nothing of the sort.

[...]

“Oh, that’s why your English is not very good,” the brother replied, finally figuring it out. “OK, you’re Chinese ... I’m a Muslim.”

“Chinese are very friendly to Muslims!” Danny said. “We are so friendly to Muslims.”

The brothers wanted money. They took $45 from Danny and forced him to give them his credit cards and ATM PIN. Now with Tamerlan driving, Danny in the passenger seat, and Dzhokhar in the back, they drove to a Bank of America branch in Watertown Square, a mile from where they'd left the sedan parked. There, Dzhokhar withdrew $800 using Danny's debit card; surveillance cameras captured him at exactly 11:18.

They drove west, away from Boston. The brothers spoke a language Danny didn't understand, but he made out the word "Manhattan." They asked him if his car could be driven out-of-state, "like New York."

They appeared heading for I-95 when they realized the SUV was low on fuel. They stopped at a gas station, but the pumps were closed for the night. They doubled back to Fairfield Street in Watertown and retrieved more things from the parked sedan. They then drove back to Cambridge, to a Shell gas station on River Street and Memorial Drive.

Just after midnight, Dzhokhar walked into the gas station's convenience store to pay for gas and to purchase food and drinks, including a case of Red Bull and a bag of Doritos. He was again captured on the store's surveillance camera. Tamerlan remained in the SUV with Danny. Danny was already planning his escape.

“I was thinking I must do two things: unfasten my seatbelt and open the door and jump out as quick as I can. If I didn’t make it, he would kill me right out, he would kill me right away,” Danny said. “I just did it. I did it very fast, using my left hand and right hand simultaneously to open the door, unfasten my seatbelt, jump out...and go.”

He heard Tamerlan yell "Fuck!" and felt him make a grab for his back, but he was out of the car. He sprinted across River Street, to a Mobil gas station.

The Mobil employee on duty, Tarek Ahmed, told the New York Times what happened.

“He opens the door,” Mr. Ahmed recalled in an interview. “I stood up. He was screaming, saying: ‘Call the police. They have bombs. They have a gun. They want to kill me.’ I thought he was drunk.”

“He ran behind the counter and ran into the back room, a storage room, and locked the door,” Mr. Ahmed recalled. “At this moment, I believe him. He was honest, that somebody wanted to shoot him. So I took the phone, and I called 911."

Tamerlan ran into the Shell and told Dzhokhar they had to go. Dzhokhar dropped what he was holding, the brothers dashed out of the store, and drove off in the SUV.

Police quickly arrived to question Danny, who told them that his carjackers had said they were the marathon bombers. That's when the manhunt swung into action. Police were able to track the SUV via Danny's iPhone, as well as through his in-vehicle satellite system.

The brothers returned to Watertown. They knew the Mercedes was compromised, as was, possibly, the location of the parked sedan. When authorities caught up with them, according to an account in the Boston Globe, one brother was driving the SUV and the other the sedan, and police believe they were looking for a location to transfer their explosives back to the sedan.

Shortly before 1 a.m., a Watertown police officer named Joe Reynolds spotted them, each driving one of their two vehicles. He radioed it in and was told to wait for backup. The Tsarnaevs pulled over near the intersection of Laurel Street and Dexter Avenue, just down the street from Fairfield, where the sedan had been parked. Reynolds pulled over, too, and waited.

Backup arrived in the form of a speeding squad car that caught the Tsarnaevs by surprise. One of the brothers, believed to be Tamerlan, opened fire. At that moment, it was the two brothers against just two officers.

More backup quickly arrived—a total of seven officers engaged, according to the Watertown police chief. A massive gunfight erupted that saw more than 200 shots fired, most of them by police, as the Tsarnaevs still had just the one gun. They threw at least two improvised explosives, neither of which caused any harm or damage.

According to the Globe, Sgt. Jeff Pugliese responded to the call for backup but did not join the gunfight. He parked on a nearby street, then crossed through yards to flank the brothers. Police believe it was his gunshot that brought down Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As officers were subduing him, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hopped in the SUV and took off toward the police, and toward his brother. He struck Tamerlan and dragged him, then broke through the cordon. He would not be seen for another 18 hours.

One bullet—the state police is investigating whether it might have been friendly fire—struck 33-year-old MBTA transit officer Richard Donohue in the thigh, striking his femoral artery. The officers on the scene applied a tourniquet and performed CPR. Donohue was rushed to the hospital—but not Beth Israel, which protocol called for. State and Watertown cops, transporting Donohue in a fire rescue vehicle, decided to go to Mount Auburn hospital, three miles closer than Beth Israel. It probably saved his life.

Officers cautiously approached Tamerlan's body, afraid he was wearing an explosive device. He was not, contrary to initial reports. He was taken to Beth Israel hospital and pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.

The Mercedes SUV was discovered a short distance away, with Dzhokhar nowhere to be found. Boston and its suburbs were effectively shut down, with residents ordered not to leave their homes. Authorities set up a 20-block perimeter around the SUV, and searched door-to-door with SWAT teams in an attempt to find him.

Friday evening, Gov. Deval Patrick lifted the curfew. Authorities had no leads on Dzhokhar's whereabouts. David Henneberry, a 66-year-old Watertown resident, stepped outside of his house on Franklin Street, about a half-mile from the shootout, but still within the authorities' perimeter. He had been cooped up all day, and he wanted a cigarette.

Henneberry's boat, the 22-foot Slip Away II, was stored behind his house and was covered in shrink wrap for the season. He saw two pads that had fallen to the ground. When he went to put them back, he noticed a strap was unusually loose. He retrieved a ladder and rolled back the shrink wrap. He saw blood inside the boat and then, an instant later, the inert body of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, lying near the engine block.

Henneberry ran inside and called police shortly before 7 p.m. Federal and local authorities quickly surrounded the area and escorted Henneberry and his family from their home. Thermal imaging from a helicopter confirmed Tsarnaev's presence, and a robot peeled back the shrink wrap from the boat.

Authorities did not realize it at the time, but Dzhokhar was unarmed. At one point, a volley of gunfire from police rang out, as the order to cease fire went out over police scanners. Flash-bang grenades were later lobbed in an attempt to disorient the already-injured Tsarnaev—a pool of his blood was found where he had earlier abandoned the SUV, "four or five blocks away" from the boat.

About 8:45 p.m., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was persuaded to leave the boat. He was taken down by authorities, loaded into an ambulance, and rushed to Beth Israel, the same hospital where his brother had been pronounced dead earlier that morning.

Map by Reuben Fischer-Baum.

This Is Quite Possibly the Most Florida News Story Ever Written

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Not even The Onion could make up a more Florida story than the real-life misadventures of one William Daniel Lloyd, AKA Florida Man.

The 31-year-old Gainesville resident, who has been in and out of mug shots for charges ranging from grand theft to drug possession to disorderly conduct, recently had a hankering for some dinner squirrel, so he tried to hunt one down with a BB gun.

To improve his chances of taking the squirrel out cleanly, Lloyd decided to tape a bullet to the end of his Pumpmaster 760.

Surprisingly, his MacGyver-esque troubleshooting backfired. Literally:

Lloyd fired the BB gun, causing the BB to strike the cartridge's primer. The cartridge discharged and fragmented, striking Lloyd in the upper arm and lower leg.

He was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Lloyd was subsequently charged with discharging a firearm in public and possession of ammunition by a convicted felon.

He later told police he found the cartridge while looking for scrap metal to sell.

As for the squirrel, one commenter suggested he probably died. Laughing, that is.

[photo via Shutterstock, mug shot via The Gainesville Sun]

Kathie Lee Made Today Staffers Sign a Note Saying Matt Lauer Is Nice

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The thing about Kathie Lee Gifford doing “something nice” for you is that it’s the worst possible thing that could ever happen to you. It’s like a person with bright red paint on their shoes breaking in through a plate glass window to sweep your kitchen floor. It’s like a monster truck giving you a surprise haircut while you sleep.

Recently, Kathie Lee Gifford decided to do something nice for Matt Lauer.

Her idea: write an open letter about how Matt Lauer is nice. Force Tell Ask every cast and crewmember of The Today Show to sign it. Run it as a full-paged ad in USA Today.

Matt Lauer is a good guy, he never hurt no one excep’ a bad person who deserve it MAYBE ok

Love,

[The complete cast and crew of Today]

Gifford told the New York Daily News that she found the media portrayal of Lauer (as a godless narcissist who stabbed Ann Curry in the aorta one morning on live television because he didn’t like the cut of her jib) "frustrating."

“No one seemed to be interested in the truth, and that was really frustrating for me because I have a deep sense of injustice about things….I certainly don’t like somebody taking blame for something that they’re not responsible for….So unbeknownst to anyone higher up at NBC, I just started this thing.”

The Daily News reports that Gifford spent three weeks collecting the signatures from staffers. Everyone, from the lowliest 4th hour Today Show wine slave to the mighty Al Roker signed the open letter. One line read, “No one has coerced us to sign this,” which is incredible because it’s the first time in her life Kathie Lee Gifford has ever referred to herself as “No one.”

Gifford showed Lauer the letter this past Monday. He thanked her but, perhaps realizing that it would come off like a full paged ad purchased by a serpent in support of Satan, “asked her to keep it ‘in the family’" and not publish it in USA Today. Though she was disappointed that no one but the people who had signed the letter would know how helpful she was, Kathie Lee agreed. Then she told the Daily News all about it, because we’re all family here!

All of us except Ann Curry. Ann Curry never signed the letter because Kathie Lee Gifford never asked her to and also because Matt Lauer chopped off her hands on her last day of work and keeps them in a gold box in his study. Gifford said she’d wanted to ask Curry to sign the letter, but unfortunately hasn’t seen her since she left her post at Today almost one year ago.

Also, fuck Ann.

“This wasn’t about Ann,” said Kathie Lee, of the open letter she wrote defending Matt from people who say he was cruel to Ann. “This is about our love and support for a different member of our family.”

But, of course, without Curry’s signature, the letter reads less like a “statement of support for Matt Lauer from those at the center of the controversy” than a “list of people who are currently employed by The Today Show.”

It’s a good thing they never went public with it.

Thanks for your help, Kathie Lee.

[NYDN // Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.


Wow, Kristen Wiig is coming back to SNL! (To host it.

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Wow, Kristen Wiig is coming back to SNL! (To host it.) Try this classic "gotcha!" style of news delivery on all your friends.

Almost 12 years after 9/11, someone in New York found what appears to be a piece of a plane wedged b

Here's the 95-Year-Old Lady Who Tasted Hitler's Food for Poison

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Margot Woelk now admits she spent two and a half years as Adolf Hitler's personal poison-detector. While other Germans subsisted on bland rations, she sampled the Führer's fresh vegetables and pastas in succulent sauces. Easy gig, if you didn't mind the constant chance of death, or the cascade of horrors that went with the falling Reich.

Woelk was conscripted into civilian service in the war and appointed to be one of Hitler's 15 personal Vorkosterin, as the Germans called it. She kept her war past secret from everyone, even her husband, for fear of ostracism and prosecution—until she began calling German journalists last December. Today, the AP published a long profile of Woelk, the first definitive one by a US-based outlet.

Hitler, she says, "was a vegetarian":

"He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there," Woelk said of the Nazi leader. "And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him—that's why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself."...

"The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine...But this constant fear—we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal."

Later, after a bombing attempt on Hitler's life failed, the war effort deteriorated, and an SS officer sexually assaulted her in the night, Woelk decided to slip away to her native Berlin. It turned out to be a wise choice: The invading Soviets reportedly executed all 14 of her colleagues—though Woelk's fate at the hands of the Red Army in Berlin wasn't much better:

"The Russians then came to Berlin and got me, too," Woelk said. "They took me to a doctor's apartment and raped me for 14 consecutive days. That's why I could never have children. They destroyed everything."

"I was so desperate," she told Der Spiegel earlier this month. "I did not want to live."

Yet she did live—long enough to tell her tale. The reason, she says, was simple: "I just wanted to say what happened there. That Hitler was a really repugnant man. And a pig."

[Image via AP]

Stop Worrying, Your Internet Past Is Not Embarrassing

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There's something on the internet that you desperately want to keep everyone from seeing. Something you're deeply embarrassed of. That would show all your friends how you're not actually as smart and fashionable and ironically self-aware as you pretend to be. And you really ought to get over it.

We all have stuff like this. Maybe it's a gross Facebook album from college. Or a Xanga or Livejournal or Blogger account, or a dance you did, or an a cappella YouTube video. Or, god forbid, your dating profile. (Thanks again for that, Sam. Dick.)

So what's the underlying holdup we have about this stuff? On one hand, yes, yours are the same skeletons everyone else has tried to scrub from the web. But just the same, they leave you feeling impossibly exposed—especially ones where you really tapped into your feelings, like those old personal blog entries. And it's all kind of earnest for the way the internet works now, where you're required to maintain a constant ironic detachment. Which is true. But at some point, all that earnesty really betrays is that you're a human being with human feelings.

Still, it's a tough sell. I asked Gawker's advice maven and wonderful person Caity Weaver what she thought (while she was starving and all crazy, she asked us to specify), and she said, "Oh my God that is like my greatest nightmare. People are vicious animals." But isn't everyone an awkward mess, and doesn't it just end up being endearing? "I meeeaannnn, I would not want that to happen to me, even with your sweet logic. I guess it depends how embarrassing. If your life was just boring, then enjoy your boring life, no one cares."

Point taken. But how boring is anyone's life, really? No one you know who's spent any amount of time on the internet—or really, any amount of time being a human being, because humanity is inherently sad and creepy and idiotic—is without humiliating memories. And the thing is, the entire internet, basically, has declared embarrassment bankruptcy. There's just too much stupid now, ours and the world's, to really shame you the way you feel you deserve.

That's relegated what at one time might have been life-scarring bungles into pieces of digital ephemera. Or actually, diluted the idea of embarrassment to the point that your polemic about how all these haters need to back the hell off of Travis Barker is basically the internet equivalent of those pictures your mom has of you when she used to dress you up like a baby duck whenever she took you to the mall, or that Homecoming lip sync video she refuses to let die. You bristle when they're brought up, but ultimately, they're usually more fun than they are mortifying unless you're a huge closet racist.

Obviously, this doesn't include things that can actually cause material damage to you, your loved ones, or your career. Yes, you should probably do everything in your power to scrub the photo of you peeing in the break room coffee machine off of the net. And that Ashley Madison account is probably asking for trouble. And if you're committing crimes, it probably doesn't matter if you're found out online or off.

But that horrid Facebook picture your jerk friend Ashley keeps re-tagging you in where you have nine chins and the pallid complexion of a Se7en victim? Who cares. How do you possibly expect that to compete for your friends' internet mindspace when you're competing with assholes dunking their heads in buckets of urine and futuristic dong thongs?

So you can go on imagining your past being held up to the internet's magnifying glass as a total nightmare. But unless you were doing something especially anatomical with that Labradoodle, no one's going to be half as embarrassed for you as you are of yourself. So embrace it. Own it. No one likes the girl who's too cool to make funny faces in pictures.

Tribeca Horror Review: V/H/S Is the Only Horror Franchise That Matters

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The idea that there are no new ideas is an old idea, but a true one; there are no new ideas. For confirmation, look no further than the state of horror movies–remakes and a bunch of found-footage clones (in which the camera is part of the story, characters are doing the filming and the movie is supposedly assembled from what they shot) abound. The last notable major horror release was a reboot of Evil Dead, and the only standing franchise that provides a serious box office threat is Paranormal Activity. There were no real horror remakes to be found at the Tribeca Film Festival, but almost half of TFF's horror features (three movies out of eight) are found footage. All three account for the staleness of the subgenre, attempting to cut what is now a seemingly endless loop of POV clichés on top of tropes that date back even further. (Would you like a jump scare? OK, here are two dozen.) However, only one of them truly transcends the format's trappings.

Karl Mueller's Mr. Jones looks better than virtually any POV horror that has come before it, as protagonist Scott is a filmmaker who's out to make the most beautiful documentary ever. He and his wife Penny retreat to nature to make a movie about...something, when they realize someone else is in the middle of nowhere with them. "What if you came to the woods to find solitude only to find out that you weren't really alone?" asks Scott in dreamy voiceover, making eloquent the premise/potential tagline for, say, half of the horror movies that have been made post-Friday the 13th. The presence turns out to be Mr. Jones, a Banksy-like art figure who trolls around in a papier-mâché mask that looks like a 6th grader's attempt to render Munch's The Scream into 3D.

Mr. Jones is known in the art world for his scarecrows, which he sends to random people. This intrigues Penny, a photographer with an eye as sophisticated as Scott's, so they stick around and film this monster, attempting to get close to him and rifling through his house and creations for the sake of their art. As far as horror-movie motivation goes, that's new. Soon they realize that Mr. Jones' scarecrows "get inside your mind and they explode," and that is exactly what happens to this film, as Penny and Scott's paranoia and hallucinations seep into the found footage. The entire conceit is rendered useless as the movie attempts to illustrate what it's like to be caught up in Mr. Jones' disorienting nightmare. Which Penny is the real Penny? Who's filming them from behind? Why isn't it light out at 8 am? Why doesn't Mr. Jones just fucking kill them already and put us all out of our misery?

You can sniff out the influences of most of these movies within the first 10 minutes. Mr. Jones' ominous bone and wood sculptures suggest that someone's taken their love of being scared by the pile of twigs from the Blair Witch Project too far. Meanwhile, Richard Raaphorst's Frankenstein's Army, billed in the Tribeca literature as "the wild steampunk Nazi found-footage zombie mad scientist film you've always wanted," has the exact same trajectory of the found-footage portion of Cannibal Holocaust – a bunch of brutes laugh and pillage and then get handed their asses by far stronger forces. In this case, it's a bunch of Russian World War II soldiers in Germany who stumble up on a lab full of truly inventive half-zombie-half-machines. One has a propeller for a head. Another has hooks for hands. Another walks like a monkey on all fours since his front two are giant serrated blades. In rapid, video-game succession, each distinct monster trots out, scares the soldier whose devotion to capturing it all suggests that he is decades ahead in his ideals (well, either that or this has no business being found-footage horror), and then either kills the dwindling group of Russians or gets killed or retreats. This happens over and over and over, and though the resolution is amusing (when we finally meet with the mad genius responsible for these atrocities, he reveals that he wants to create peace by grafting one hemisphere of a Nazi brain to one of a communist brain), this is like watching a first-person shooter and never getting to play.

Josh Waller's Raze is not a found-footage movie, but it is very much like a video game, itself. This one's more Mortal Combat than Call of Duty, as a bunch of abducted women are forced to fight each other to the death with their bare hands in the film's Battle Royale-meets-The Big Dollhouse setup. Death Proof's Zoe Bell plays the protagonist, and her hulking agility is arresting, but overall, the bare-bones brutality of this movie made me feel like I was getting my head banged against a wall, like one of the weaker fighters in this movie. Or maybe it was like getting my face smeared on a wall slowly, which also happens.

Raze collects a lot of women together and has them do stuff, but it has little to say about them except, "Isn't it awesome that some girls fight like dudes?" More sensitive and thoughtful is Marina de Van's Dark Touch. It's a British, pre-period Carrie, the story of a young girl who can move things with her mind when her emotions intensify. Neve is repeatedly abused by her parents and one day, she destroys them, her house and her baby brother. Yet, she remains haunted — Marie Missy Keating telegraphs this in her mostly silent performance via full eyes weighed down by fear. She looks haggard for a prepubescent child. The bland kindness of the adults she encounters – her social worker, her foster family – only emphasizes her discomfort. De Van does a lot with a little here – the scene of a "dolly party" in which Neve's peers pull apart baby dolls and Neve's mind-controlled fire causes them to melt is one of the most original hallucinations I saw in the entire festival – though the plot hinges on the stupidity of the adults and the resolution is predictable.

Child abuse is avenged in a more traditional way in the Israeli Big Bad Wolves by directors Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales: A father hunts down the man suspected of killing his daughter with help from the cop who found him (and then beat the shit out of him in a video that went viral on YouTube, sorry, Vid2cool). The father resolves to torture the alleged molester in the exact same way his daughter was tortured, except not for the sex stuff because, ew gay. It's Last House on the Left (and/or I Spit on Your Grave) meets Hostel with a twist of Silence of the Lambs. Fingers are broken, toenails are pulled, a chest is barbecued with a blowtorch. Torture tedium sets in during the second half, but everything leading up to it is funny (well, as funny as a movie about dead little girls can be without being a spoof) and ushered along with a camera that is always creeping, often from behind. I didn't quite buy all of its philosophy (sometimes a dude getting the life squeezed out of him is just a dude getting the life squeezed out of him and not a mediation on, I don't know, the nature of guilt and the Jew-Muslim divide), but its brain is certainly in the right place.

The same could be said for Neil Jordan's newest vampire movie Byzantium, which acts a lot like his previous vampire movie, Interview with the Vampire, in that it tells an epic tale of a few vampires' trajectories through centuries that led to their contemporary ennui. The film, which is somewhat slow and more than a little redundant, wouldn't be watchable were it not for the performances of Saoirse Ronan and especially Gemma Arterton, who play a daughter-mother pair. Ronan's Eleanor is eternally 16 and a writer who cannot tell her life story as her vampirism would, you know, freak people out and potentially land a stake in her heart. When she finally does, after all those years of writing and throwing her work into the ocean, it's in an autobiographical essay assigned at school. "It's as though Edgar Allen Poe and Mary Shelly got together and made a strange little child," says a teacher. Yeah, and then Bran Stoker jerked off all over her.

Arterton's Clara is a whore, and I love the idea that her line of work is so difficult, you have to be immortal to make it sustainable. These vamps are fangless creatures whose thumbnails grow when they are aroused, like little pointed boners. They are rebels, consuming men for their money, status and blood, and fugitives from a board of male vampires ("the pointed nails of justice," as one hilariously describes them) who are pissed that Clara broke a rule that says women cannot turn men into vampires. Oh, they are turned, by the way, not by being bitten and brought this close to death in the normal way, but by being rowed out to a remote island, and being placed in a cave. Once the transition is complete, the islands waterfalls run red with blood. Jordan loves this imagery and uses it three times. It's cool, but not that cool.

The funniest horror movie I saw was Danny Mulheron's Fresh Meat, which is from New Zealand and accordingly zany. A bunch of crooks on the lam crash into a suburban house and attempt to hide in it, except what they encounter is a family of Maori cannibals (and their daughter who's just came back from boarding school only to learn about her family's new interest in eating humans). Sorry, they're not Maori cannibals, as the patriarch corrects at one point — "We're cannibals that just happen to be Maori."

Tables turn, high jinks ensue, a beating heart is ripped out of a chest, a dick gets bitten, the insult "fuck-knuckle" gets dropped. It's very much in the spirit of old Peter Jackson productions (Mulheron wrote bad-trip Muppet satire Meet the Feebles) with a twist of Russ Meyer, mostly because female crook Gigi (Kate Elliott) is channeling Tura Satana in her hair, eye makeup and ass-kicking. Her sexual tension with the family daughter Rina (Hanna Tevita) is as hot as it is hilarious (to get the pepper spray out of Gigi's eyes, Rina sensually pours milk all over her). This also features the best coming-out scene that I've ever watched. "Sometimes to save water, me and the other girls would shower together. It's no big deal," explains Rina. "How sweet," says her mother, who has far more deviant interests to pursue.

But it was V/H/S/2 that impressed me the most out of all of the horror films I watched at Tribeca. As with last year's first installment, all of the constraints placed on the directors of this anthology – minuscule budget, found-footage premise, about 20 minutes to tell their story – do not hinder but in face promote creativity. There is a distinct lack of bullshit as these stories get straight to their points, while adhering to the franchise's commitment to creativity within POV horror – this franchise is on a constant quest to find new excuses to get the cameras in the characters' hands (and sometimes implanted in their heads). In fact, the least original segment is the series' own framing segment, in which private investigators attempt to uncover the whereabouts of one of the kids from the first movie (in its own framing segment) and end up rifling through his collection of snuff-trade VHS tapes. That is more of the same, more or less, but the tapes scanned that comprise this anthology are not.

The first, Adam Wingard's "Clinical Trials," is filmed through the robotic eye of a guy who just got a transplant – he sees dead people. This is the weakest of the shorts. The second, "A Ride in the Park," by Blair Witch Project directors Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale, charts the turning of a human into a zombie via cameras attached to his bike and helmet. It's a weird mix of slapstick (he is stabbed in the eye, shot and run over) and heart (you see a flicker of consciousness as he looks at his zombified face in the reflection of a minivan window). The third, and best, is Gareth Huw Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's "Safe Haven," in which a documentary crew attempts to capture the practices of a cult. I don't want to give anything away, but this thing is bursting with invention and bursting, period — it involves spontaneous combustion. The final one, Jason Eisener's "Alien Abduction Slumber Party," features two groups of kids – one group of young teens, one group of older ones – who film themselves doing shitty things to each other like squirting piss out of water guns, interrupting sex. To get back at the latter, the older kids mount a camera to their dog's head to get footage of one of the younger kids jerking off. And then aliens invade. This is everything Super 8 didn't have the balls to be.

As with the last V/H/S, there are some format issues – what we see is way to clear to be coming from VHS the tapes the characters are watching (most of it looks HD, all of it is in the 16x9 aspect ratio). For a bit of "Safe Haven," we see the blinking RECORD notification and the battery meter, which is maddening because that is something you'd never see unless you were looking through the viewfinder of a camera – those notifications don't show up on footage ever. This stuff usually drives me crazy, but there is so much right about V/H/S/2 (especially "Safe Haven") that I found it easy to forgive. With one eye on the way things are, these short films also look to how things could be. No franchise cares more about the state of the genre, no franchise is more concerned with fixing it.

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