Zach Braff has raised more than $2.1 million for his continued adolescence Garden State sequel, Wish I Was Here.

McMuffins all day long! Could McDonald's be ending their illogical policy of only serving breakfast during breakfast hours? CEO Don Thompson seemed to be flirting with that idea during a recent interview with CNBC, saying that McDonald's was working on "innovative ways of us expanding the breakfast hours, and some of those things we'll be seeing here in the near future."

In addition to breakfast, Thompson hinted that McDonald's could soon be rolling out mobile payment and loyalty rewards. The company already offers delivery in some densely populated areas, and hopes to expand that service across the U.S. The McDonald's CEO also mentioned that in an effort to target millennials, McDonalds was increasing its presence at "the music fests".

[Via, photo via Getty]

Russia recorded a conversation between Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, "vaguely discussing" the concept of Jihad. The conversation did not mention any specific attack on the U.S., but did discuss the possibility of Tamerlan traveling to Pakistan to get involved with militant groups.

This recorded call is perhaps what led Russia to ask U.S. authorities to investigate Tamerlan, who was living in the United States at the time. The FBI asked Russia for more information, but never heard back. In 2011, the Russians again requested an investigation, but again provided no further information to the FBI.

Newsday is reporting that Russia also found text messages in which the mother discussed how Tamerlan "is ready to die for Islam."

Both Tamerlan and his mother were put on the TIDE database, which contains more than 700,000 names of people suspected of being connected to terrorism.

The surviving members of the Beastie Boys have signed a deal to write a memoir. The New York Times reports the book, which is scheduled to be released in fall 2015, will be “loosely structured as an oral history.”

Looks like he wasn't too worried about the criticism he received for Jay-Z's recent trip to Cuba.

[via The White House's Tumblr]

On Sunday, Christian Caryl from The New York Review of Books caught up with "Misha," the man accused by the Tsarnaev family of influencing Tamerlan Tsarnaev's conversion to a more radicalized form of Islam. Caryl met “Misha,” whose real name is Mikhail Allakhverdov, outside of Allakhverdov's home in Rhode Island.

Speaking to Caryl in Russian, Allakhverdov admitted knowing Tamerlan but said he hadn't seen him since he lived in Boston roughly three years ago. He refused to elaborate on his relationship with Tamerlan, but did say that he had never met the Tsarnaev family members accusing him of influencing Tamerlan.

He also adamantly denied any role in the marathon bombings.

“I wasn’t [Tamerlan's] teacher. If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this,” Allakhverdov said.

Allakhverdov told Caryl he'd been interviewed by the FBI and was cooperating fully with the investigation.

I’ve been cooperating entirely with the FBI. I gave them my computer and my phone and everything I wanted to show I haven’t done anything. And they said they are about to return them to me. And the agents who talked told me they are about to close my case.

Caryl also spoke with Allakhverdov's father, whom he described as welcoming but nervous. “We love this country,” the father said. "We never expected anything like this to happen to us."

The FBI declined Caryl's request for comment. But recent reports seem to back up Allakhverdov's claim that he had no role in the bombings.

[New York Review of Books/Image via AP]

In order to gain access to Afghan president Hamid Karzai's inner circle, the CIA secretly sent tens of millions of dollars to Karzai's office for over a decade. The money, all straight cash, of course, was delivered approximately every month and was packed in suitcases, backpacks, and plastic bags.

The New York Times reports these payments – the first known to be given directly to Karzai – show the U.S. government's off-the-books payment to Afghan officials occurred more frequently – and on a larger scale – than previously known.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the money has done little to achieve the CIA's desired goals. Several American sources told the Times the cash “has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.”

Making the whole thing even more embarrassing for the CIA is the fact that the only other country known to have delivered cash to Karzai is Iran. When that campaign was uncovered in 2010, the U.S. was quick to condemn it, saying the country was bribing their way into influencing Afghan policy against the U.S. Of course, those officials didn't mention that the U.S was at that exact same time doing the exact same thing, and had been doing so for the past eight years.

Not that Iran's payments were any more successful that the U.S.'s.

Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.

Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target operatives of Al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.

But don't worry: in addition to being ineffective at garnering any sort of meaningful policy change, the CIA's cash has been used to fund to exact sort of people American troops were presumably fighting:

Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.

As one American official put it in an interview with the Times: “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.”

[New York Times/Photo via AP]

A fire broke out at the collapsed factory building in Bangladesh, hampering rescue efforts. The death toll for the disaster currently stands at 377 and is expected to rise. The building's owner was arrested on Sunday.

Over 40 people, and this one woman who looks just like Lindsay Lohan, were injured after an apparent natural-gas explosion rocked central Prague on Monday, causing the evacuation of several nearby buildings. Only four were seriously hurt in the blast, and there are no reports of fatalities.

The building, which houses Prague's FAMU film school, an art gallery, and an office of the International Air Transport Association, seemed to sustain significant damage, and nearby buildings had their windows blown out. "I was sitting quietly in my flat, making coffee. Then there was an incredible explosion. I thought the building would collapse. I looked out the window, and there was only dust everywhere," a witness, who did not look like Lindsay Lohan, told Reuters. The explosion was apparently heard as much as a mile away.

Lohan could not be reached for comment. Further examination reveals that the woman in question does indeed look a lot like Lindsay Lohan:

[Reuters, images via AP, AFP/Getty]

President Obama has named Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as his transportation secretary.

An attacker stabbed four members of a church choir in Albuquerque today, rushing in as the choir began their closing hymns and shouting "Fake preacher!" before stabbing the victims.

The name of the attacker, who was quickly subdued by churchgoers, has not been released. He is said to be in his early 20s, and not a member of the church. By most eyewitness accounts, he sounds deranged:

"I looked up, and I saw a young man with a very scary look in his eyes—fury, anger, hatred," choir member Brenda Baca King said. "He had a knife and was attacking our soloist, and our flutist tried to protect him and got stabbed also."

All four victims sustained non life-threatening injuries and were treated at the hospital.

[KOAT]

Kelly Nash, who covers the Tampa Bay Rays for Fox's Sun Sports, was in Boston Saturday for the Astros-Red Sox game, and decided to pass the time during batting practice by taking a few selfies around Fenway Park.

Here, let her tell it:

I was taking a picture of myself in the seats above the Green Monster during Red Sox batting practice.

Producer Art Dryce had called out 'heads up!' a few times while I was taking pictures around the left field section, but none of those balls actually fell close to me, so I took my chances turning my back on batting practice for a picture.

My whole family is from Massachusetts, and I knew they would be so excited to see me working at Fenway Park, and when I went to text them the picture I noticed the baseball by my head!

Nash credits her miraculous save to the copy of Angels in the Outfield DVD that she just so happened to have in her briefcase.

"Think the Angels in the Outfield saved me because I brought their DVD with me on the trip?" Nash asked her Instagram followers. "#ThoughtSo"

[H/T: BIOTV, photo via Instagram]

Tim Tebow [FAMOUS ATHLETE] has been fired from the New York Jets [FAMOUS SPORTS TEAM]. He simply did not make enough of the touchscores in the ball games, and coach Rex Ryan released him after drafting West Virginia's Geno Smith.

Mondays are bad news. So are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, as a matter of fact, but we'll get to them later.

For now let's just focus on getting through Day 1 of a new week full of spreadsheets and buzzwords and K-Cup politics.

Now, I can't promise that this white cockatoo rocking out to Daft Punk's "Phoenix" will do much to make your Monday go by more smoothly, but I can guarantee that if spend your entire day watching this video over and over, Monday will be over before you know it.

[video via Reddit]

If you are a nerd or a lady or a sportsman and would like to find out what's going on at other Gawker Media properties, but don't like Googling or typing out web site names, you can now find a handy drop-down menu next to our logo at the upper left of your computer screen. Click-click-click-click....

Amanda Palmer, the worst poet in all of human history, has, for maybe the first time in her life, written something correct. In an open letter to ex-frontman Morrissey, published on Salon, she suggests that he should "crowdfund" his next album:

So: what if you simply went into a studio, cut a record, and uploaded it to the Internet to those who backed it? And didn’t tour? And didn’t do any traditional promo? And didn’t release it commercially? And didn’t do anything else?

Just…emailed the songs out to the people who love you and paid for them?

What would happen? I’m not sure. But, dear Morrissey, I wish you could have read my Twitter feed.

Amanda Palmer is absolutely right that Morrissey should do this.Obviously, she's completely incapable of writing out even this single correct idea without drowning it in narcissism—

I once had the chance to meet you. My band, The Dresden Dolls, were playing at a festival in Germany about eight years ago and you were in the dressing room next to us. [...] I couldn’t stomach the idea of Morrissey meeting me and not liking me[...]

I am really sorry to hear that you are ill; I just read about your tour cancellation in the paper. I hope that you get better soon, and I hope you’re kind to yourself. I have been sick on the road, I’ve had vocal surgery, I’ve canceled tours…it blows for so many reasons.

—but the point still stands: Morrissey is "one of the best candidates on the planet to use crowdfunding, because of who [he is] and what [he] mean[s]."

That's why it also makes sense only for Morrissey (and Amanda Palmer) to "crowdfund." Palmer's managed to convince people, herself chief among them, that she's unlocked the secret to music as a business, and her new record label-free ask-people-for-money system is a radical new structure for the recording industry—"the Future of Music," she claimed on her last Kickstarter. As she asks Morrissey in her letter, "What does one need a record label for nowadays?"

Well. Funny you should ask, Amanda! Record labels are generally horrible, but there's one thing they're very good at: spending money on promotion and publicity. It's nice to think that "your fans will basically do the work of spreading the existence of your project for you," but you need those fans first. And you can get them by, say, spending years benefitting from the promotional capabilities of Warner Music Group subsidy Roadrunner, as Palmer did. Or by working with the various Warner, Sony and Universal subsidies that Morrissey and his bands have.

(No wonder Palmer sounds like a grifter wising another grifter to a location full of easy marks when she's trying to sell Morrissey on her plan: "They want to help. Help me, and help you. [... Y]our fans will basically do the work [...] for you.")

So, yes, definitely: Morrissey should "crowdfund" his next album. So should any artist for whom the benefits of the label system are in the past. Busking is a time-honored musical tradition, and if you've got the means to make it work for you, godspeed. Just don't call it the "future of music."

[Salon, image via AP]

A young couple from Sacramento who sought a second medical opinion concerning the health of their baby boy have had the child taken from them by police after the first hospital complained that the parents were putting the infant's life in danger.

Anna Nikolayev and her husband Alex had been bringing their five-month-old son Sammy to Sutter Memorial Hospital since birth to monitor his heart murmur.

Which is why they didn't think twice about having a Sutter doctor examine the flu-like symptoms he began exhibiting two weeks ago.

But Anna soon became unhappy with the treatment Sammy was receiving, particularly after witnessing a nurse administering unknown antibiotics.

"I asked her, ‘For what is that?’ And she’s like ‘I don’t know,'" Anna recalled. "And then I said ‘You’re working as a nurse and you don’t he know what you’re giving my baby?"

A doctor at the hospital would later tell Anna that antibiotics should not have been used on Sammy.

After a few days at the hospital, Anna began to hear the words "heart surgery" being floated by doctors and became nervous.

"If we got the one mistake after another, I don't want to have my baby have surgery in the hospital where I don't feel safe," she told News10.

Doctors argued against the need for a second opinion, but Anna insisted.

Eventually, she felt she was left with no choice but to take Sammy and leave the hospital without a formal discharge.

At Kaiser Permanente, a rival hospital, Anna had her first encounter with police, but that ended without incident after the officers concluded that the baby was not in danger.

"They told us that Sutter was telling them so much bad stuff that they thought that this baby is dying on our arms," Anna said.

Sammy's doctor at Kaiser Permanente confirmed that the child was "clinically safe to go home with his parents," and noted that he had no concern for the boy's safety.

But a second confrontation with police the following day, this time accompanied by Child Protective Services agents, did not end as smoothly.

"I was pushed against the building, smacked down. I said, 'am I being placed under arrest?,'" Alex described his interaction with the cops. "He smacked me down onto the ground, yelled out, 'I think I got the keys to the house.'"

After entering the home, an officer proceeded to grab Sammy from Anna before turning around and walking out.

Neither the police, nor CPS, nor the hospital would speak on record with local media outlets about the case, which is scheduled to be brought before a judge today.

Sammy, meanwhile, is in protective custody at Sutter Memorial Hospital, where Anna and Alex were allowed to see him for one hour last Thursday.

"We went from one hospital to another," Anna told KXTV. "We just wanted to be safe, that he is in good hands."

[photo via Facebook, video via USA Today]

When Beltway bright-boy David Petraeus left public service in disgrace last year, Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings threw down a gauntlet, detailing how his industry had gone soft on the ex-general for too long. This morning, Hastings' boss at Buzzfeed picked up that gauntlet and took a long, sugary piss in it.

That stream of saccharine waste is a newly published puff piece, "General Petraeus' Next Campaign," by Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith and staffer Emily Orley (lately the author of "11 Major Passover Food Fails"). In it, we learn that Petraeus has undertaken "a quiet and conventional path from shame to redemption" since he confessed to an affair with his biographer and resigned as CIA chief. He has an image makeover consultant, and is getting invited to DC dinner parties again! Now comes the shock and awwwwww offensive:

"The rollout is devised like the invasion of Iraq," said one person who spoke recently to Petraeus.

So expect it to be long and costly and to involve black hoods, naked prisoners, and car batteries at some point.

There's not much in the piece that couldn't be gleaned from a similar Slate piece from a month ago... except for a few new fawning Petraeus facts:

• "Petraeus has always been famous both for his intelligence and for his ability to manage the press, and he has signaled that he has thought hard about his predicament," Smith and Orley write. Hard thought! Can a think-tank presidency be far off?

• Clearly this is frealz, since Petraeus' betrayed wife Holly "appears to be on board for his rehabilitation." You don't walk away from greatness just because greatness inserted his penis into another woman's vagina.

• Petraeus is flinging himself into vets' causes, because who hates vets? Socialist jihadis, that's who. However, some of these vets, like ex-Navy Seal Kaj Larsen, were cautious about being used by the general for a photo opportunity, until Super P and his bulging biceps laid those concerns to rest:

But after a conversation, and after a "hellacious" dash down the beach in Venice at 6:00 the next morning — Petraeus, 60, insisted on engaging in a pull-up contest against the much younger former Seal — Larsen was persuaded.

Smith and Orley may be celebrating this military reporting coup with a couple of Bud Light Limes today. But they may also have a hard time reconciling it with Hastings' Buzzfeed postmortem on l'affaire generale last November, titled "The Sins of General David Petraeus":

More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image...it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened....

Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call "a blow job."

After detailing the general's professional sins—taking false credit for the pacification of Iraq, glossing over ethnic cleansing there, overselling the prospect of success in Afghanistan—Hastings asks:

How did Petraeus get away with all this for so long? Well, his first affair — and one that matters so much more than the fact that he was sleeping with a female or two — was with the media.

Judging from Buzzfeed's love letter this morning, Petraeus and the press still can't quit each other. Yet readers seem to be the only people who are getting screwed.

Update: I reached out to Hastings for a comment, and he replied after this post was published. Here's his reply in its entirety:

I disagree with your take on this one. I think Ben's piece is very well done and driven by original reporting about Petraeus's rehab campaign. The reporting is fresh and I haven't seen it elsewhere. I thought it read fair, on the whole. I think the way Petraeus is trying already to recover from his fall is a fascinating story that's worth closely scrutinizing, as Ben has done. Plus, classic picture of King David doing pull ups on Venice Beach!

[Image via AP]

"I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay." With those words, published in this week's Sports Illustrated, 12-year pro-basketball veteran Jason Collins just became the "first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport."

In a cover story for the magazine, Collins says that the Boston Marathon bombing spurred him to consider coming out:

The recent Boston Marathon bombing reinforced the notion that I shouldn't wait for the circumstances of my coming out to be perfect. Things can change in an instant, so why not live truthfully? When I told [former Stanford roommate] Joe [Kennedy] a few weeks ago that I was gay, he was grateful that I trusted him. He asked me to join him [at the Boston Gay Pride Parade] in 2013. We'll be marching on June 8.

No one wants to live in fear. I've always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don't sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I've endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time. I still had the same sense of humor, I still had the same mannerisms and my friends still had my back.

Collins, who spent most of his career with the Nets before embarking on stints with the Grizzlies, Timberwolves, Hawks, Celtics and Wizards, is currently a free agent.

[Sports Illustrated, image via AP]

A mother in Michigan has made it her mission to have a "pornographic" book being taught at her daughter's middle school pulled from the curriculum.

That book? The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.

"The problem is the school is giving the seventh graders inappropriate material and not explaining it to the parents," Gail Horalek of Northville told the local Patch.

Horalek has taken particular issue with a specific passage from the unedited "definitive edition" of Anne Frank's Diary, in which the young Holocaust victim "talks about the discovery of her own genitalia."

Here is the offending passage in full, courtesy of MyFoxDetroit:

Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris.

Horalek insists she thought it was "awesome" that her daughter decided to do a school project on the Diary, until Meads Mill Middle School student told her the book's "graphic passages" were making her "uncomfortable."

Horalek is demanding that the school go back to teaching from the older, edited version of the book that doesn't include the uncomfortable passages.

Northville Schools' Assistant Superintendent Robert Behnke responded to Horalek's petition with a statement suggesting that a committee will be assembled at a date to be determined to review her concerns.

[screengrabs via MyFoxDetroit]