Vittorio Missoni was one of six people aboard a plane that has been reported missing off the coast of Venezuela. Missoni — as you could have guessed — runs the famed Italian fashion house Missoni along with his siblings Luca and Angela, neither of whom was on the plane.

Missoni, 58, was on vacation with his wife and two others when their plane left an archipelago and resort named Los Roques en rote to an airport in Caracas, which is about 90 miles away. The plane never made it there, though, and its whereabouts are either currently unknown or at least unreleased. Including the pilot and co-pilot, there were six people aboard the plane.

Missoni was founded in 1953 by Ottavio and Rosita Missoni — who passed the company on to their children — and is known for its colorful knitwear. The brand rose to prominence in the 70s but has remained popular ever since, most recently crashing Target's servers in Sept. 2011 when a low-priced crossover line became available online.

[via CNN, image via Getty]

It's hard to believe that only yesterday io9 introduced us to "Vomiting Larry,", the mannequin-like robot designed to vomit on command "not just forcefully, but in an anatomically accurate fashion." In some ways it feels like old Larry's been with us for years, teaching us all how to vomit correctly. But he's not just a novelty vomiting robot; he's here to help scientists stop the spread of the stomach flu:

On average, someone infected with norovirus spreads it to about seven other people through direct touch or contaminated surfaces and food. The virus sickens as many as 21 million Americans each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading to 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths.

Researchers at the Occupational Hygiene Unit at the Health and Safety Laboratory in Britain created "Vomiting Larry" to get a better idea of how the virus is able to spread so easily and quickly from person to person.

One in five Scots were struck with the vomit bug last year. Last month, fumes from a poisoned dog's vomit (sorry sorry sorry) sent four people in Colorado to the hospital with respiratory ailments. Early this morning, a man in Wheaton, IL, pretended to vomit, then ran away from the cab he had hired to avoid the $39 fare. And only a few weeks ago, Christmas was ruined for hundreds of Caribbean cruisegoers when an outbreak of norovirus turned their ships into floating vomit prisons.

Larry, can you fix this?

"Under normal lighting, you can only see the main area where Larry actually vomited," Catherine Makison-Booth, Larry's creator, told ABC News. "However, under UV light, you can see the particles spread much further than that – in excess of three meters."

That means the area that needs to be sanitized when someone with norovirus throws up is bigger than previously thought.

If someone who doesn't have norovirus throws up, of course, you can just leave it on the floor like you normally do.

Sometimes the New York Times profiles people that are genuine monsters of upper-class naiveté and privilege — like, say, the parents that have their kids flown to summer camp on private jets or The Ivy Plus Society. But sometimes the NYT does stories on well-meaning people whose lives end up looking really inane in print, like the non-married spouses who fret about the ridiculous names and phrases they call each other.

Here is writer Elizabeth Weil setting the stage for this scintillating trend story:

NOW that we've come to some consensus on same-sex marriage, let's move on to the next puzzle: what to call two people who act as if they are married but are not.

Here's the first thing: that isn't the next puzzle! There are so, so, soooo many more puzzles left to complete. The "what to call two people who act as if they are married but are not" puzzle is so far deep in the puzzle closet that no one is going to look for it for years. And when they find it, there will be three dead spiders in the box.

Here's our first subject:

"I went through a phase of just calling him Eric, even to people who didn't know who that was," said the master wordsmith Ann Kjellberg, 50, editor of the journal Little Star and the literary executor of the poet Joseph Brodsky. Eric Zerof spent 15 years as her live-in not-spouse and is the father of Ms. Kjellberg's child. "I kept thinking, ‘This should not be this hard!' I was very unhappy about the situation. I could never find a word I liked."

It shouldn't be this hard because it isn't this hard. "Eric" is just fine. You could never find a word you liked because you're a master wordsmith that edits a journal. It's your curse.

Next, Weil elaborates on the dilemma:

Everyone agrees that partner sounds awful - too anodyne, empty, cold. Lover may be worse - too sexualized, graphic, one-dimensional. Boyfriend sounds too young. Significant other sounds too '80s. Special friend or just friend (both favored by the 65-and-over crowd) are just too ridiculous.

It's almost — almost — as is if this entire discussion is just too ridiculous, and that adults should just explain the situation with whoever they're talking to. Even though we like to think that we live inside Seinfeld, we don't. There are real problems out there, you guys!

Anne Tierney, 32, a bodyworker in West Palm Beach, Fla., went for "fusband," which, she explains, is a catchall for "fake husband, future husband." (Ms. Tierney's fusband, Ozzy, calls Ms. Tierney "wifey.") Technically the two are engaged, but Ms. Tierney said: "The word fiancé makes me cringe. What am I, in France?"

Fusband!!!!!! You actually have to hand it to Tierney, "fusband" catches just about everything. Funny husband, facetious husband, frustrating husband, famous husband, fanciful husband, farting husband. Definitely farting husband. I love it.

Next suggestion?

Joan Linder, 42, an artist and associate professor of visual studies at the University at Buffalo, lives with the man she winkingly calls her baby daddy

Ahh, steamy. Wink wink.

"It's the last stage of connection to rebellion, punk rock, countercultural - all those pieces of my youth."

Oh.

Being gay does not make the terminology of unmarriage any easier. "I usually go with boyfriend, which makes people ask how long we've been dating," said Brett Berk, 43, who has been not-married to his boyfriend, Tal McThenia, 45, for 23 years. "But partner is disgusting. So it's boyfriend - or antagonist."

Things really shouldn't be getting this serious. They shouldn't! It's just a word. It's okay.

Oh, hey, it's Katie Roiphe.

The culture critic Katie Roiphe, author of "In Praise of Messy Lives," agreed that our lame vocabulary reveals our unease. "We have only stiff or silly phrases - like significant other, partner or baby daddy," she said. "To me this signals a discomfort and a lack of acceptance."

Uh huh.

Ms. Roiphe, unmarried herself, prefers "the older, more comic phrases: consort and paramour."

Now, that's what I call comedy.

Conclusion?

Still, Ms. Kjellberg, who eventually did marry for health insurance, remains puzzled by the lexicographic problem. "Not marrying really seems like a perfectly normal way of going about things," she said. "Do we really need to be stuck with such horrible terms?"

No, we don't. It's okay — here's a suggestion: fusband! I know it's weird, but it's just a word. It will all come out eventually. These poor people, without a single appropriate word to refer to another person. Also, these poor people, made to look like frivolous fools by the New York Times when in reality they're perfectly harmless and are more or less aware of the foolishness of the situation. The paper of record! The Grey Lady! Hey, that's a good one...

[via New York Times, image via Shutterstock]

New York's Journal News has hired armed security guards after receiving a barrage of criticism over its recent decision to publish interactive maps with the names and addresses of licensed gun owners.

What's more, according to the Rockland County Times, a relentless critic of the Journal since the maps were published, the information used to build the maps in the first place may be "grossly inaccurate."

Paul Piperato, the Rockland County Clerk, said at a recent press conference that about "25% of the addresses" provided by the County Clerk's office were incorrect.

When persons change their address or pass away it is supposed to be reported to the County Clerk's office, but the county has no means to vigorously enforce this regulation. Thus pistol permit and other permit registries are not reliably accurate as a source of addresses in Rockland.

Back in 2006, the Journal News ran a similar story, but Piperato convinced them to publish only names and towns of the permit holders, leaving addresses out of it. The Journal News has yet to comment on the accuracy of the maps, although it has defended the decision to publish them.

[Image via Getty]

Earlier this week, a 24-year-old Tampa-area resident named Cameron Mohammed was walking with his girlfriend into Walmart at around 3 a.m. when the two were approached from behind by a 25-year-old named Daniel Quinnell. Quinnell allegedly yelled racial epithets at the two, then fired 20 shots at Mohammed with a pellet gun — pictured above — striking him multiple times in the head and neck. Mohammed was armed, too — but with a real .45 caliber pistol. He chose not to shoot.

"I don't know. I just couldn't do it," Mohammed said, recovering at his Tampa home two days after the attack. "I couldn't blow this guy away for something he could change later in life. I'm not going to decide this man's fate."

The story is a bizarre, hard-to-reconcile mixture of both right and wrong. The genesis of the attack is something very, very far into the "wrong" column, and when coupled with the recent death of Sunando Sen in New York City, it illustrates just how terrifying America can still be for anyone that even in the vaguest terms codes to the ignorant as "Muslim."

Investigators had released surveillance video of the shooting and photographs of the suspect to the media Thursday. In the video, from Walmart in Lutz, a man deputies say is Quinnell approaches the couple from behind as they walk into the store about 3 a.m. Wednesday. He asked Mohammed if he was Muslim or from the Middle East, according to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. Mohammed said no, but, authorities said, Quinnell shot him at close range with a gas-propelled pellet gun while saying "n——- with a white girl."

Like Sen, Mohammed is not Muslim. Neither were from the Middle East — Sen was born in India; Mohammed was born in Trinidad and raised in Tampa. That didn't matter to Quinnell, who told police that "they're all the same" after being informed that Mohammed isn't Muslim. It also didn't matter to Erika Menendez, the woman who murdered Sen and used "Muslim" and "Hindu" as interchangeable terms in her statements to police. But an unexpected part of the story is that in Quinnell's case the system worked, at least as much as it can under current law.

Quinnell, who declined an interview request by the Times, has been arrested 10 times in Florida since 2006, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Many of the arrests involved battery charges and violent threats.

...

As a felon, Quinnell was banned from carrying firearms. That's why, he told deputies Thursday night, he carried the pellet gun instead. He told them he burned the gun after the shooting.

Mohammed will have surgery to remove a few of the pellets, and the most lasting pain will be the trauma of being the victim of a hate crime — one in which he was shot in the face for being something that he isn't. It could have been worse, and for many it has. But it also could have been worse — way, way worse — for Quinnell, had he chosen a victim that decided to do what almost any other person carrying a gun would have done.

[Mohammed] said he has been dating his girlfriend for a year and a half. He said she told him that night that Quinnell was staring at her menacingly as they pulled into the parking lot to get some food.

Mohammed says he remembers giving the man a wide berth as he passed in his car.

At some point during the shooting, Mohammed said, his girlfriend must have remembered a conversation the couple had months ago. He told her if they were ever in a dangerous situation, she should keep quiet and find safe cover.

In the Walmart surveillance footage, as the assailant sweeps from behind and levels his gun, Mohammed's girlfriend disappears behind a column, safe from fire.

After taking two pellets to his head and neck, Mohammed stands and watches the man flee, then notices a bystander who could have been hit if Mohammed had taken a shot. His hand is on his gun. But it stays in the holster.

[via Tampa Bay Times]

Early New Year's Eve, police in Brazil's Alagoas state thwarted a potential jailbreak when they captured a cat attempting to smuggle various escape tools into a medium-security prison. According to Google's probably very accurate translation of the State of Alagoas' official statement on the matter, the small black and white cat was found with " two saws, two drills for concrete, a headset, a memory card, a cell phone, three batteries and a mobile phone charger" taped around its stomach.

As for now, all 263 of the prison's inmates are considered suspects since, as a prison spokesperson correctly noted, "It will be hard to discover who is responsible since the cat does not speak."

The Daily News reports the "cat belonged to the prisoners and was frequently taken by relatives to their homes, returning to the prison on its own." This, apparently, is no longer the case, as police turned the cat over to animal control shortly after the attempted break-in/out.

There is not a detail in the story of France's Orson Welles Gérard Depardieu's apparently-real move to Russia to avoid higher taxes that will not delight you. After President François Hollande attempted to make good on his campaign pledge to increase taxes on the wealthy, Depardieu announced plans to leave France for Russia's 13% flat tax and his new best friend Vladimir Putin.

The flat tax is, of course, not all Russia has done to sweeten the deal. They have offered him a sweet bachelor pad:

Gérard Depardieu flew Sunday to the provincial town of Saransk, where he was greeted as a local hero and offered an apartment for free....The governor invited Depardieu to settle in Saransk and offered him an apartment of his choice.

Dinner with the president under an Olympic dome:

Putin granted his request last week and then welcomed the actor late Saturday to his residence in Sochi, the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Russian television showed the two men embracing and then chatting over supper, discussing a soon-to-be-released film in which Depardieu plays Russian monk Grigory Rasputin.

A chorus of happy, singing townspeople:

He was met at a snow-covered airport by the governor and a group of women in traditional costume singing folk songs. He flashed his new passport to the crowd before setting out on a tour of the town.

Perhaps even a village of his own in this frozen paradise:

Depardieu has not said where he would take up residence in Russia, only that he did not want to live in Moscow because it is too big and he prefers a village.

He is already a "popular figure" in Russia for his numerous appearances in national ad campaigns. Depardieu's Baltimor ketchup ads lack the frenzied intensity of Orson's Paul Masson commercials, but they show great promise nonetheless.

The French Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac called the move "pathetic." President Hollande spoke with Depardieu over the phone at length on New Year's Day, a conversation that addressed his "tax exile, politics and poetry." You can leave France, but not before you've had your official exit interview and poetry analysis with the president.

There's so much that France will be losing, and so much that Russia will gain. From the Guardian:

[Depardieu] has been involved in, and survived, more than a dozen motorbike accidents and in 1996 escaped unscathed when a small plane he was in collided with a Boeing 727 on the ground at Madrid airport.

In 2000, he had emergency multiple open-heart surgery – he turned up at the hospital on his motorbike. Afterwards, doctors warned him to cut out his four to five bottles of red wine and three packets of Gitanes a day. He stopped smoking.

Brigitte Bardot defended Depardieu the Deathless' decision, saying she thinks he's been the "victim of extremely unfair persecution. Even if he is a fan of bullfighting, that does not prevent him being an exceptional actor who represents France with a unique fame and popularity." Which really says it all.

[Image via Getty Images]

If you'd forgotten your drunken or embarassing tweets from 2010, bad news: the Library of Congress is reportedly weeks away from finishing their project to archive the roughly 170 billion tweets sent between Twitter's founding in 2006 and April 2010, when the initiative was announced. Why are they archiving your tweets? All in the name of science and research.

Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress, but an important one to its mission of serving both Congress and the public. As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing and in some cases supplanting letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries.

Archiving and preserving outlets such as Twitter will enable future researchers access to a fuller picture of today's cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.

Only public tweets that were published six months ago or longer will be included in the library, which has so far received over 400 requests for information from researchers around the world.

Sounds like an interesting and useful enough project, right? Well, don't get too excited yet; it reportedly takes a full 24 hours to perform just one search, which seems mindboggling and impossible (or, as the Library puts it, "an inadequate situation") until you consider the nightmarish labyrinthine manner in which the Library is organizing the information.

Gnip, the designated delivery agent for Twitter, receives tweets in a single real-time stream from #Twitter. Gnip organizes the stream of tweets into hour-long segments and uploads these files to a secure server throughout the day for retrieval by the Library. When a new file is available, the Library downloads the file to a temporary server space, checks the materials for completeness and transfer corruption, captures statistics about the number of tweets in each file, copies the file to tape, and deletes the file from the temporary server space.
…

The Library has assessed existing software and hardware solutions that divide and
simultaneously search large data sets to reduce search time, so-called "distributed and parallel computing". To achieve a significant reduction of search time, however, would require an extensive infrastructure of hundreds if not thousands of servers. This is costprohibitive and impractical for a public institution.

Yikes. If you're one of those 400 curious researchers, who are interested in such noble pursuits as "patterns in the rise of citizen journalism and interest in elected officials' communications to tracking vaccination rates and predicting stock market activity," you'll probably need to wait a while longer to get actual, usable information. Or, you don't have the patience, just hire a small army of interns.

[via Mashable//Image via Shutterstock]

A bank robber who broke out of downtown Chicago's federal jail in an "old man" disguise has been recaptured. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 38-year-old Kenneth Conley was arrested Friday while dressed as an elderly man wearing "sunglasses, a beret, an overcoat" and hobbling with "a cane."

A New Zealand (New Zealanders being fascinated with costuming news) report on the story elaborates:

Conley escaped from a high-rise lockup December 18, along with cellmate and fellow bank robber Joseph ‘‘José'' Banks, apparently by smashing a hole in a narrow cell window and climbing down 20 [stories] using a rope fashioned from bed sheets.

José Banks, who had already been recaptured by police, is also known as the "Second Hand Bandit" due to his habit of wearing "thrift store disguises" in an apparent nod to the Home Alone school of burglary.

Police officers were responding to a call about a suspicious man spotted sleeping in the basement of a condo under renovation when they confronted Conley, who was dressed like an old man, wearing a beret and glasses, and walking with a limp.

The most interesting member of the story, however, is the condo resident who aided the police in Conley's capture. A 33-year-old high school teacher who refused to give his last name, identifying himself only as "Dan," punched Conley in the face when he tried to enter Dan's home. Nothing gets past Dan:

"Where he met his end was here," [Dan] said. "He didn't get permission to enter my place. He got taken out of here in a bad way."

Careful readers will recall that back in November, an English teenager stole over $100,000 worth of jewelry from a London store while in disguise as an elderly man. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that all modern criminals have forgotten the masterful art of concealment; the truly well-disguised may be passing as old men in our midst even now.

I'm ashamed to say that I was completely unfamiliar with the exploits of Jose Mujica, the onetime guerilla fighter who has been president of Uruguay since 2010. (So this is not "news" per se, but education is power.) Having been brought up to date by an excellent Simon Romero story on Mr. Mujica this weekend, we are prepared to declare him The President of Our Dreams Who Is the President You Would Design in Your Imagination But Never Expect to Exist in the Real World. Consider:

• In the late 1960s, inspired by the Cuban revolution, he became an anti-government guerilla fighter. He was eventually shot six times by the police and sent to prison for more than a decade, including a two-year stint in solitary at "the bottom of a well."
• "His net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to about $1,800 - the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. He never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor." He keeps about $800 a month for himself.
• "Under Mr. Mujica, who took office in 2010, Uruguay has drawn attention for seeking to legalize marijuana and same-sex marriage, while also enacting one of the region's most sweeping abortion rights laws and sharply boosting the use of renewable energy sources like wind and biomass." LIBERAL DREAMBOAT.
• He decided not to live in the presidential mansion after becoming president, electing to say in his tiny-ass apartment outside Montevideo.
• He disparages the idea of serving more than one term as president.

[The full (excellent) NYT story. Photo: AP]

A "millionaire woman" from Wuhan City in Central China has spent the last 15 years working six days a week as a street cleaner in order to show her kids the value of a hard day's work.

Yu Youzhen, a former vegetable farmer who made her fortune through real estate development, has been employed as a sanitation worker since selling her land to the state in 1998.

Though she owns 17 apartments and has the net worth of a millionaire, Yu insists on waking up every morning at 3 AM to work a job that pays a meager 1,420 yuan (~$230) a month.

Yu, who has become something of a celebrity in her homeland, told local reporters that she was motivated after witnessing many of her fellow former landowners squander their earnings on gambling and drugs.

"I want to set an example for my son and daughter, a person can't just sit at home and ‘eat away' a whole fortune," said Yu.

Whether they want to or not, her kids are falling in line: Yu's son is currently employed as a driver and earning just over 2,000 yuan (~$320) a month, while her daughter is an office worker with a 3,000 yuan-a-month (~$480) salary.

[photos via NetEase]

Consider the predicament of today's aspiring member of the white collar leisure class: all of the old ways of doing things seem to be falling apart. Law school, once the fallback of choice for lightly-motivated college educated upper middle class twentysomethings who weren't ready to face The Real World after graduation, is no longer a safe bet at all. Well, how about business school? No, no, no.

The WSJ reports that M.B.A. graduates—who may have been laboring under the misapprehension that they had made a superior choice to all those suckers in law school—are staring at a chart that is trending the wrong way. At least they presumably have the skills necessary to interpret it correctly.

For [newly hired M.B.A. grads] with minimal experience-three years or less-median pay was $53,900 in 2012, down 4.6% from 2007-08, according to an analysis conducted for The Wall Street Journal by PayScale.com. Pay fell at 62% of the 186 schools examined.

Even for more seasoned grads the trend is similar

The majority of M.B.A. graduates also come out of school in debt. The WSJ implies (but does not explicitly state) that the value of the degree has been watered down by the great expansion in the number of graduates over the past decade, and, perhaps, by the fact that their undergraduate recruiting pool is perceived as kind of dumb.

Where, oh where, is that calm, idealized, white collar lifestyle to be found, then? Christ, every state university frat boy can't grow up to become a dentist. There just aren't enough teeth in the world. If the dream of becoming even a middle manager is now distant, what hope is there for anyone? Must all the young people who aspire to nothing more than a mid-grade Mercedes and a modest home on a golf course spend the rest of their days gazing jealously at those who were lucky enough to become law firm partners before the bottom fell out of this whole hustle?

Eh, those law firm partners are getting laid off too. If it makes you feel any better.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Dave Schneider did everything he could to get Delta to let him bring his classic 1965 Gibson ES-335 on board his flight from Buffalo, NY to Detroit — going so far as to offer to buy the guitar its own seat — but was rebuffed.

"I've always carried it on," Schneider, lead singer of the Zambonis and guitarist for "Hanukkah-themed rock band" the LeeVees, told Yahoo News. "Never been a problem before."

Indeed, he was even allowed to board his original flight from Portland, Maine, with the Gibson in tow. But, for an unspecified reason, the Delta staff in Buffalo made him check it in.

As his feet touched the ground in Detroit, Schneider said he already knew something had gone horribly wrong. Sure enough, he wrote on Facebook, a "musicians worst nightmare came true."

There at the gate was his guitar — stuck between the service elevator an a loading dock rail making "this crazy sound" of "metal on metal."

It was only after workers finally managed to dislodge the carrying case an hour later that the damage could be assessed.

His $10,000 instrument had sustained significant damage to the bridge, the neck, and the tail. All told, repairs were estimated at $1,980.

But Schneider's nightmare wasn't quite over: After declining a $1,000 check from Delta, Schneider filled out the proper claim forms but received no response from Delta.

Two emails to Delta chief executive Richard Anderson similarly went unanswered.

It was only after being contacted by Yahoo News that Delta suddenly perked up and issued a statement saying it apologizes and "will be reaching out to the customer directly to discuss how we can make this right."

[photo via Facebook]

The third season of Downton Abbey, ITV's counterrevolutionary paean to inequality and feudalism, is currently airing in the United States, where it will disappoint and frustrate the fans who are still sticking around in the hopes it might recapture some of the magic of the first season. Spoiler alert: it doesn't, and as with the second season I highly recommend that you don't invest any time or emotional energy in this new one, which doesn't even have a crowd-pleasing Christmas-special payoff.

That being said, the wonderful "Edith With Googly Eyes" Tumblr made me cry laughing and if it took two terrible seasons of a once compulsively watchable show to lead to its creation it might all be worth it. Behold its glories:

Google chairman Eric Schmidt arrived in Pyongyang today for the start of a controversial trip to North Korea on a "private humanitarian mission" with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. The State Department isn't too keen on the visit, coming so soon after North Korea pissed off the world by launching a satellite into orbit. But Eric Schmidt does what he wants, because he is from The Internet, and The Internet heeds no mortal law.

Richardson told the AP, "I'm sure [Schmidt] is interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect." There is not much to see when it comes to the "social media aspect" considering almost the entire population of North Korea is completely cut off from the internet. The government hasn't been too successful in using social media for promotional purposes, either: When North Korea joined Facebook in 2010 they had just 65 friends and inexplicably listed their sexual orientation as gay.

Bill Richardson, meanwhile, hopes to address the situation of U.S. citizen Kenneth Bae, a tourist who has been imprisoned in North Korea since November for "hostile acts." The whole world waits to see if they get to go to North Korea's world famous dolphinarium.

[image via AP]

Seriously, don't try these terrible pick-up lines at home. You could get seriously injured. All comes on in this video are performed on a closed track by a professional jackass.

[H/T: Brobible]

Justin Bieber fans are disappointed to learn that the 18-year-old singer will be spending eternity rotting in hell, instead of giving free concerts where everyone is in the front row in heaven, after photos of him smoking what appears to be a big fat blunt full of drugs surfaced online over the weekend.

According to TMZ, the photos were snapped on January 2nd, the day after a paparazzo was struck and killed by a car while trying to snap a picture of Bieber. (If Justin Bieber weren't famous, it's unlikely the photographer would have been trying to take pictures of him. It's almost as if Justin Bieber willed himself to become famous just so that a man could die.)

In the pictures, Bieber wears a sweatshirt like an unemployed person. A small caucus of young people (including Bieber's friend, the recording artist Lil Twist—belieber'd to have supplied the drugs) has gathered with him in a hotel room, perhaps to discuss the merits of online colleges. While others around him drink beer (Justin probably didn't have any – he is too young to drink), Bieber holds what appears to be a joint between his fingers. According to TMZ, one of the things about which the sky-high Canadian heartthrob rhapsodized was "how tired he was because he'd been staying up late recently." His personality glitters.

As soon as the pictures were posted online, Bieber began receiving impassioned pleas from fans to consider the consequences of smoking crack in an alley and pot in a room. Many expressed disappointment in his doing drugs, given that he had recently told Oprah he wouldn't do drugs.

Soon, Bieber himself took to Twitter to deliver an earnest #sorrysnotsorry-style non-apology:

He definitely means "growing [marijuana]," right?

[TMZ // Image via Getty]

For the past year, Spanish-speaking parents in Milford, Delaware, who brought their children to the playground facilities near the Lulu M. Ross and Mispillion elementary schools were greeted by a sign that warned them of possible police action if they attempted to use the playground without the proper permit.

That might have been fine, if not for the fact that the English version of the same sign required no such permit from visitors, only adequate parental supervision.

The widely differing signs went unnoticed until they were recently spotted by popular Delaware radio host Dan Gaffney, who made them a topic on his talk show.

"I don't speak Spanish, but it was obvious that the messages were different and that it was wrong," said Gaffney, who posted a photo of the signs on Facebook.

The photos eventually reached Milford School District Superintendent Dr. Phyllis Kohel, who immediately told her husband to take the signs down. "I didn't want to wait," she told Delaware Online.

Though some have referred to the notices as a modern-day "Whites Only" signs, Kohel says she assumes "there was not an intent to discriminate."

As to how the Spanish translation came to diverge so far from its English counterpart, Kohel offered this possible explanation:

The only reason she can think of is that someone duplicated the signs that are posted at the districts middle school and high schools. At those locations, where there are sports fields, there are warnings in English and Spanish that use permits are required and that violators are subject to police action.

[H/T: HyperVocal, photo via DailyKos]

The Google Translation of this harrowing story out of Guangzhou, China, leaves much to be desired, but the gist of it is that a mentally ill woman deemed "suicidal" in local media reports tried to stab passers-by on Baogang Avenue only to be thwarted by a teenager in hot pants and knee-high boots who apparently knows taekwondo.

The last line of the transliterated article says it all: "[An eyewitness] said that she looks younger than 20 years old, wearing boots with shorts in the cold, exposed legs suck very eyes."

Indeed.

[H/T: Fark, Uproxx, video via LiveLeak]

Today, New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that President Obama should be "absolutely" prepared to mint a one trillion dollar platinum coin and use it to pay the government's bills. It wasn't a typo: a lot of people are discussing the trillion-dollar coin as a way to avoid a fight over the debt ceiling. But what is it? And why? And whose face will be on it? Here's our guide.

What is the trillion-dollar coin?

Hypothetically, it's a platinum coin worth one trillion dollars, minted by the Treasury and deposited at the Federal Reserve, and used as a kind of loophole to avoid problems with the upcoming debt ceiling.

What's the debt ceiling?

The debt ceiling is the upper limit of what the U.S. government legally allowed to borrow in order to pay its bills. If the debt ceiling is reached, and Congress doesn't raise it, the Treasury won't be legally allowed to borrow more money, the government won't be able to meet its obligations, and will likely go into default.

When do we hit it?

We actually already did — on December 31. The Treasury is currently taking "extraordinary measures" to ensure the U.S. pays its bills, but can apparently only keep that up for a few more weeks before action needs to be taken.

Why won't Congress just raise the debt ceiling?

The Republicans in the House of Representatives want to use the debt ceiling approval as leverage with the president and Congressional Democrats: we'll raise the debt ceiling only if you cut spending, they're essentially saying.

But wouldn't the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling be horrible?

Yes. If the government went into default, it'd be catastrophically bad for the economy: interest rates would probably go up, the loss of government paychecks would lower consumer spending, and there'd be a widespread sense of panic over the United States' creditworthiness.

So this is why we're talking about minting a trillion-dollar coin.

Right. If the Republicans try to hold the debt ceiling raise — and by consequence the American economy — as a hostage in their war on government services, the trillion-dollar coin is a way to get around the vote entirely.

How does it work?

Well, like any other coin, basically? The Treasury prints it and deposits it in the Federal Reserve, and then, boom: the U.S. government has a bank account with a trillion dollars with which it can pay its bills. For a more technical explanation, involving the word "seigniorage," here's the Corrente post from last year that first proposed the idea.

Would it be bad for the economy? Wouldn't it cause inflation?

No: the trillion-dollar coin won't increase the money supply any more than raising the debt ceiling would. And consider the alternative — the U.S. government defaulting.

But how is this even... allowed? The Treasury can't just print whatever money it wants, can it?

Generally speaking, no, the Treasury can't just print money to pay off its debt. But there's a legal loophole, intended to deal with commemorative coins, that gives the Treasury secretary the ability to strike platinum coins to whatever specifications he (or hypothetically she) wants.

So he could make any coin he wanted, as long as it's platinum?

Yeah — both the denomination and the design are up to Tim Geithner, basically. He could mint a coin for $69 trillion or $420 trillion. He could make it a triangle and put John Boehner's face on it. He could make it the size of a horse and engrave "MEGADETH RULES" on the side.

Wow. This is awesome.

Yeah, you can see why it's so popular! Congressman Jerrold Nadler has endorsed the idea. Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal has started a Twitter campaign (#mintthecoin). And today, Nobel prize-winner Paul Krugman endorsed the idea. The president, Krugman writes, "will, after all, be faced with a choice between two alternatives: one that's silly but benign, the other that's equally silly but both vile and disastrous. The decision should be obvious."

What do Republicans think of this?

They think it's ridiculous. (They're not wrong!) But they might also be a little scared: today, Rep. Greg Walden introduced a bill "to stop U.S. Treasury from creating trillion dollar platinum coins to pay bills and expand debt."

What would the plot of a hypothetical Ocean's 14 centered around the heist of this coin involve?

I feel like, you get Julia Roberts to seduce Tim Geither, or something? And Matt Damon pretends to be a tourist who bumps into Ben Bernanke and picks the coin out of his pocket? Just spitballing here.