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Lion Tacos Pulled from Menu at Florida Restaurant; Shark, Bear Remain

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A newly opened Florida taquería specializing in "exotic tacos" containing meats from carcasses of sharks, kangaroos, beavers, and other non-traditional fillers has been forced to remove its latest menu addition — lion tacos — due to significant uproar from social network users.

Taco Fusion opened in Tampa this past February, and has been making a local name for itself with its unusual fare.

But the line was drawn on their behalf when the restaurant began offering lion meat to customers earlier this week.

A prohibitively pricey taco at $35 a shell, it was unclear how many people actually tried the thing before it "sold out."

Though the restaurant said its lion meat came from a reputable vendor in Illinois, many people were outraged at its mere sale.

Big Cat Rescue told WTVY that lions are not endangered; and Taco Fusion's operation manager Brad Barnett advised those who opposed the item not to eat it.

But it seems the criticism has become too loud to ignore, and Taco Fusion subsequently pulled the taco from its menu, saying in a statement that it had no plans to offer it again.

However, those with an adventurous palate will still find plenty to satiate their hunger for weird shit.

In addition to serving gator, gazelle, and camel meat, Taco Fusion plans to introduce iguana, zebra and bear meat in the foreseeable future.

[H/T: Guyism, screengrab via WTVY, Yelp]


The Yids Are Alright: 10 Days of Spiritual Decadence on Birthright

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“I hope you’ve all been doing the hanky panky,” Sheldon Adelson said to us, over the microphone. The superannuated gambling-industry billionaire, financier of right-wing vanity candidates and causes, was onstage in an enormous auditorium somewhere outside Tel Aviv: a stout little figure, well groomed but vaguely unhealthy-looking, telling us all, through wet lips, that we ought to be fucking.

Everyone in the audience laughed. Partly it was funny when an old person said a thing like "hanky panky" when he meant "fucking," and partly it was funny because the young people truly had been doing a lot of the hanky panky.

Sheldon Adelson's interest in our copulatory opportunities was not a gag. It was as serious as his well-publicized hawkishness on the question of Israel's national security, and to the same end: He was addressing us as young Jews brought in from dozens of countries, by the thousands, to experience the Jewish nation firsthand—to see Israel, to feel Israel, to bond with the Israeli experience on the most intimate and personal level. To let Israel into our pants. Not for nothing are these biannual tours called "Birthright": God, or an organization acting on God's behalf, wanted us to be fruitful and multiply in this land.

Later that night, on the bus back to our hotel, our trip leaders informed us that the rooms could be co-ed for our final nights. “Orders from the higher ups,” they not-joked.

****

How did I find myself with hundred of other Jewish young adults, being urged to consummate my relationship with a foreign country? I was raised Jewish. But not Jewish Jewish. My parents had a sort of pick-and-choose approach to our Reform Judaism. My mom was raised in a small town on the border of Mexico, hers the only Jewish family for 90 miles. My dad was born in Romania and raised Orthodox, but for the last 30 years he has been deeply committed to skipping services for bacon cheeseburgers.

Like virtually all Jews I knew, we could opt out of the Torah and the treif and stay in it for the culture and the closeness. We didn’t keep kosher; I had a Bat Mitzvah. It’s true that most Reform temples come with those expanding doors to make room for the extras, like us, who only attend services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. What I remember most about temple isn’t wise words from our rabbi, but that one time this girl Harmony flashed her boobs to two friends of mine in the back of a Temple Emanuel coat closet.

That was Jewish enough for Birthright. Each year, the various companies and organizations that operate under the Taglit-Birthright Israel umbrella bring thousands of Jews between the ages of 18 to 26 from all over the world to Israel for a free ten-day trip. The goal, the Birthright website says, is “to change the course of Jewish history and ensure the continuity of the Jewish people by strengthening Jewish identity, Jewish communities, and solidarity with Israel via an educational trip to Israel for Jewish young adults around the world.” Their “hope is that our trips motivate young people to continue to explore their Jewish identity, support for Israel, and to maintain long-lasting connections with Israelis after their trip has ended.”

As long as you have at least one Jewish parent (or have converted) and have never been to Israel on a previous organized tour or educational trip (personal trips are fine), you’re eligible. Since those first trips in 1999, Birthright has brought in more than 340,000 Jews from 59 countries.

Taglit-Birthright Israel accredits the participating organizations and sets the logistical, educational, and security standards for them. Some of these sub-groups have themes of their own—niche trips, they’re called, catering to specific interests and hobbies. Into skateboarding? There’s a trip “specially offered to people who board.” Food, fashion, hip hop—each theme dictates the way you will see Israel. I don’t actually know anyone who’s gone on a niche trip, but I'm thrilled they exist. I chose one of the more popular trips, through Israel Outdoors via Israel Quest, which involves just enough time in nature that you can people you spent ten days hiking desert terrain, while offering no real deterrent to any of the indoor kids and their (my) inhalers.

Over the years, Birthright has cultivated a very careful and precise reputation of being a complete and utter shit show. Many friends and relatives enthusiastically relayed their Birthright experiences:

"It’s like, the most fun thing ever. I swear, I mean I’m still best friends with everyone on my trip.”

“It’s JUST like camp.”

“It’s fucking crazy. I was hammered the whole time. Seriously. It’s just so awesome.”

From that, I was expecting a Spring Break foam party at the Wailing Wall. For free.

****

Group bonding began almost immediately. Some were traveling together, others were alone. Everyone was open to meeting new people but cliques formed easily and quickly, because that’s what cliques do. Exhausted and jet-lagged, I became friends with two girls—both of whom I believe I will stay friends with for a long time—because we were dressed similarly. “We have the same jacket,” I said shyly. I forgot how strange it is to be alone and meeting new people. Three hours later, after trust-fall ice breakers, I loved each and every goober aboard our bus.

I had also heard that if you marry someone you meet on your trip, the organization pays for your honeymoon to Israel. This is completely true. Unfortunately for the grand plan, I already have a boyfriend—a lapsed Catholic one, yet. We joked for weeks about breaking up before the trip so that I could find my soulmate. When I got there, everyone single on the trip immediately became very busy sitting at the back of the bus playing Never Have I Ever and stealing each other’s hats.

Birthright’s application process is competitive. Every applicant is eventually assigned to a trip but most are wait-listed the first time they apply. Despite multimillion-dollar donations, the participating organizations often lack funding and have strict cutoff numbers. Fortunately there’s no cap on the number of times you can apply, so you just repeat the process until you’re in.

When you pass the initial application stage—a questionnaire and a brief essay asking you why you want to go and what it means to be Jewish—you are given a phone number to call and spend at most 10 minutes answering questions from a bored-sounding interviewer:

Is one or more of your parents Jewish? Yes. Do you consider yourself Jewish? Did you belong to a synagogue growing up? Do you belong to one now? Yes, yes, no.

It turned out most of my answers didn’t matter. As long as Birthright understands you’ve got at least one Jewish parent or you’ve converted, and that you can plunk down the $250 deposit (or have qualified for the deposit scholarship) you’re good. And the organization seems to favor the halfies and the non-practicers—without a religion or with half of one, these are the people Birthright can woo. The goal here is to motivate young Jews to “explore their Jewish identity,” especially those who never had one to begin with.

It took me three tries to finally get approved. Because I’m 26, I’m on the cusp of aging out; kind of a now-or-never situation.

****

Every group includes, along with the international population of variously undercommitted Jews, a select few locals, young soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces. Some have completed their conscripted service (two years for women, three for men) and are enrolled in universities around the country; some are simply on leave. As an incentive, the soldiers get several class credits by joining a Birthright trip.

But they're also doing it for fun. The soldiers aren’t on the trip to protect us, they're there to party, to flirt and hook up, to make friends. Because everything on Birthright is done with a specific purpose, though, really they are there to illustrate that there is no no real divide between us—the 22 to 26 year-old American Jews—and them—the 22 to 26 year-old Israeli Jews. And of course we aren’t particularly different, beyond the fact that they were raised knowing that no matter what, they would enter military service when they turned 18.

There was Mor, 22, who—while modeling possible outfits for the next day's 5 a.m. hike (one t-shirt had a puppy on it wearing headphones that said in glittery letters, “music is everything.” I obviously picked that one)—told me she had plans to come to New York to work in fashion when she had completed her service. Yinon and Boaz, 20 and 21, were still serving, though I never knew exactly where they were assigned. Boaz got so drunk on our last night out with them, he had to be carried out by two guys on the trip.

My two favorites were Lulu and Hila, both 20, whose military obligation had assigned them to something that sort of resembles escort services, without the servicing. When soldiers get sick or injured or go on leave for an extended period, the IDF sends in young (usually pretty) women to entertain them. They plan activities, they send cards, they visit, depending on what they need most. Lulu and Hila were gorgeous and fun, two best friends with the same long, thick hair, tight jeans, and stiletto boots. One of our trip leaders, an Israeli who was living in the U.S., rolled her eyes at them. “See, even Israel has JAPs.”

****

The night in the tent, we'd all heard, would be the sexual apex of the trip. It came right at the halfway point, in a sort of Bedouin-style tent hostel in the Negev desert. The tent was huge—it had to be to accommodate all of us in it together—and we fanned out to plot our sleeping spots for the night. I felt old, because I was on this trip, and also because I had a boyfriend at home and had no intention of getting freaky-deaky in a sleeping bag.

I had heard so much about this night from past participants, it was like watching a prophecy unfold. We slugged cheap vodka around a bonfire while a 20-year-old Israeli played the acoustic guitar and sang the wrong words to a Jason Mraz song. The air was crackling with sexual tension. The whole thing eventually came to a boil in a curly-haired cauldron of writhing hanky panky. Everyone around me seemed to be either snoring or getting fingered. I had downed just enough Nyquil and vodka slurpees to keep the noises to a foggy din and wake up my worst self the next morning.

****

I was cynical about visiting the Wailing Wall. A good friend had gone on Birthright two years ago. She loved it—no one doesn’t love it—but she told me that the visit to the Wall in Jerusalem was one of the strangest experiences she’s ever had. The spirituality of it, she said, is crammed so violently down your throat that you don’t feel anything at all. She felt totally disconnected and alienated, she said. She told me that everyone on the trip cries, but that their reactions felt so forced, so expected, the only thing she could manage was an eyeroll.

As we passed through security at the wall’s entrance, we were given scraps of paper and pencils. “Write a prayer for the wall,” they told us. The “prayer” could be anything: a wish, a dream, whatever we felt like rolling up and sticking in the stones alongside a million other tiny notes. I don’t believe in God but I am superstitious, so I carefully wrote down the names of each family member and a little request addressed to no one—to Whom It May Concern, I guess—to protect them and keep them healthy and safe.

Gathering at the top of the steps after the metal detector, Yaier, our militant tour guide, showed us the photograph of the Three Soldiers. He explained that the iconic image of three paratroopers at the Western Wall was taken at the moment of reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, following the Six Day War. As he talked, I picked at the grass growing out of the steps and tried to ignore the woman sobbing a few stairs behind our group.

We were given a meeting place and 45 minutes. The Wall is segregated—men pray to the left, women to the right—which has been the center of enormous controversy for years. A brilliant friend of mine who lived in Jerusalem for several years was arrested protesting the separation, and I was so proud of her as she recounted the unfairness of the IDF security that arrested her. But when I walked to the women’s side, every negative feeling I had wrapped so tightly around me immediately vanished. There were women of all ages everywhere. Mothers and grandmothers, babies, children, teenagers, tourists, locals. They covered their heads and shoulders; they wore jeans and smacked gum. And there at the base of the wall, overwhelmed by exhaustion and surrounded by women I didn’t know, I began to cry.

Aesthetically, the wall is a marvel. Ivy and moss grow in patches all the way to the top. Birds come to perch and pick at the small spaces edged in between different sized stones. All of them fall on a sort of beige-grey-green gradient, but no stone is the same color as another. Also, it has this interactive element—the birds, the women shuffling and gathering three deep along the bottom searching for the perfect spot for their prayers—that makes this big hunk of stone seem alive. Some women davened and covered their faces, but most just observed the wall.

I sat in one of the white plastic chairs set out and thought about my family as I watched two sisters run around. For me, it wasn’t a religious experience, but fuck if there wasn’t some very strong juju radiating from those stones, from the women there in front of them. Like how people who believe they’ve seen a UFO must feel at Roswell. I thought about what an Israeli, a co-worker actually, had said to me: What no one understands is that Jews have nowhere else to go. They fought when they had to because if they had had to leave again, after World War II, we would not have survived.” Geographically, the ocean is on the other side. There is literally nowhere to go. And as I sat and took in this hulking piece of history, I was struck by how permanent everything felt. That Israel is a country that isn’t going anywhere. And then I felt two things: enormous relief and gratitude.

In addition to a dress code (shoulders covered) and the gender separation, you’re technically never supposed to turn your back to the Wall. No IDF security guards are going to hurtle themselves at you if you do it (though they will if you are a woman attempting to pray with men), but again, with my family’s names stuck in there, I wasn’t interested in taking any chances and I slunk away in reverse. Katie, the friend I’d made to whom I had grown the closest on the trip, was standing near the exit looking at the wall one last time before leaving, and we hugged and said we loved each other and that we were so happy we went.

“I never want to leave,” she said.

Birthright is prepared for this type of visceral response. Every round-trip ticket to Tel Aviv Birthright buys comes with a built-in extension policy. No matter how late you change your mind, you can call El Al and extend your trip for a mere 50 bucks. When you’re already across the world for free, it’s an enormous perk to have the flexibility to stay longer for next to nothing. The trip ended on a Friday morning in Tel Aviv, the country’s most bar-crawly, decadent city. The rules of Shabbat on Saturday don’t apply as rigorously as they do in Jerusalem, so it’s just another weekend in a big city by the sea.

Our trip leaders were staying, and they promised to take us all out. The Israelis too, promised to introduce us to all their cool friends, to take us to the cool clubs. Phone calls were made, slowly at first. The “coolest traveler hostel!” was discussed, and one by one, most of my group began to extend their stay. Out of the 41 people in the group, me and four others were the only ones who did not extend. The rest were set up for however many more days of drinking, hanky panky, and the gorgeous landscape of the country all while surrounded by people who understand you, who want you there. Or at least, who seem to.

“Aren’t you staying?” Lulu asked as I hugged her goodbye. “I got us bottle service at this club and we’re going to party all night in Tel Aviv. You have to stay! It’s so important,” she laughed, “that you change your flight and stay.”

Image by Jim Cooke.

BuzzFeed may have pulled the greatest semantic LOL the world has ever seen.

It's been a bad day for New York's print tabloids.

Young People Are Growing Up Together and TIME Cannot Believe It

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On Thursday, TIME magazine was shocked once again to discover that humans who were born around the same time are suddenly becoming adults around the same time. In the millennial-centric cover story of the May 20th edition, titled “The ME ME ME Generation” (alternate title: Some Things About Millennials Are Great and Some Things About Them Are Bad But Pretty Much Nothing About Them Is Interesting When Committed to Ink In the Fashion of this Article I Now Realize), author Joel Stein observes that the past few decades' beautiful crop of young people may be “the last large birth grouping that will be easy to generalize about." Of course, this statement disproves his point even as he makes it. (Stay tuned for Post-Millennials: The Un-Generalizeable Generation.)

In honor of the "Generation Whaaa???" trend piece du jour (and all the identical trend pieces that will follow until the end of time TIME), we now present:

A History of Generations: 50 Years of TIME obsessing over young people.


[Images via TIME]

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

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Canada's Opposition Leader Uses Arrested Development Quote to Burn PM

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With the fourth season premiere only days away, it seems Arrested Development is on everyone's lips — even Canada's opposition leader Thomas Mulcair.

Mulcair, head of the New Democratic Party, was speaking in the House of Commons on the subject of $3.1 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism spending, when he dropped this gem: "Is the money just in the wrong filing cabinet, is it hidden in the minister’s gazebo, is the money in the banana stand?"

As Canada.com notes, there were only $250,000 in the walls of the Bluth family's frozen banana stand, so the question of the missing $3.1 billion remains.

"Sounds like someone’s made a huge mistake, or at least didn’t leave a note," quips Canada.com news editor Lauren Strapagiel. "You always leave a note."

[H/T: Uproxx]

North Korea Gives Details On Imprisoned American Kenneth Bae's Crime

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When North Korea announced it had sentenced imprisoned American tour operator Kenneth Bae to 15 years hard labor earlier this month, it gave no details about his crime other than he had attempted to "overthrow" the North Korean government. But now North Korea has presented more details about Bae's crime: They say he smuggled anti-government propaganda into the country, and preached the overthrow of regime as part of a Christian missionary-backed plan called "Operation Jericho."

The report from the Korean Central News Agency paints Bae, a devout Christian, as the leader of a plot to undermine the government called "Operation Jericho," according to a translation by NKnews.org. Operation Jericho was launched in 2006 by Youth With a Mission (YWAM), an international evangelical Christian organization Bae belonged to, according to KCNA. It consisted of mobilizing 250 of Bae's "followers" to infiltrate an area of North Korea near the border and create an "anti-government coalition." They would base their operation in a hotel.

KCNA also says Bae smuggled in "propaganda materials." This included a copy of the National Geographic documentary "Don't Tell My Mother I'm In North Korea," in which the reporter Diego Bunuel visits North Korea, and a book about persecution in North korea, according to NKNews.

How much of this is true? It's clear that Bae was a Christian minister with Youth With a Mission, and there's evidence to suggest he was using his tour agency, Nation Tours, as a front to sneak Christian missionaries into the country. NKNews dug up a video of a sermon in which Bae preached to a Korean congregation in the U.S., telling them that "I knew that Jesus wanted me to be a 'channel' to the North." Bae was dispatched to China by YWAM, and the tour operation was likely a front for some kind of missionary work.

In a 2011 note to a Korean church in St. Louis he wrote: "We plan to open up a new base from which mobilization and missionary works for North Korea can all be carried out from one location."

However, simply leading trips of missionaries into North Korea would probably not be enough to get Bae such a harsh punishment. The practice of Christianity is virtually banned in North Korea, but there is a community of foreign evangelical Christians living there—many of them run aid organizations. But they have to keep their religion quiet: they're not allowed to distribute Bibles or other material, or even visibly pray, one missionary told Foreign Policy. They instead must attempt to lead North Koreans to God by subtle example.

There are, however, Christian groups with more explicit anti-regime goals. One is the Voice of the Martyrs, which stages guerilla evangelizing by sending balloons with religious material, sending radio broadcasts of bible readings over the border, and connecting with underground Churches through contacts in the country. Todd Nettleton, the director of media development for the group, told me that his group's work directly attacks the government.

"The deification of Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il, their political system is built on that idea," he said. "A new religion coming in is not just a religion—it literally undermines the very foundation of the government. North Koreans who accept Christ aren't just accepting a religion, they're committing a treasonous act."

This fact is born out by the history of proselytizers being arrested in North Korea. The Korean-American minister Robert Park was imprisoned in 2009 when he illegally crossed into North Korea to proest human rights abuses, for example. He was released after a few months in prison. We don't know yet if Kenneth Bae will be so lucky.


Australia No Longer a Safe Place for Women, Sandwiches, Teens

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On Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was visiting a high school in Brisbane when someone threw a sandwich at her.

And then, for a second, the world stopped.

School authorities soon zeroed in on a suspect: 16-year-old Kyle Thomson, who was indeed present in the crowd of nervous, puberty-ridden Australians thronging the Prime Minister at the instant the wall between man and sandwich hurling beast dissolved.

Within hours, he’d been suspended from school for three weeks. But Thomson claims it's all a set-up.

You can watch video of the attempted assassination by sandwich here. The sandwich in question (embarrassingly) misses Gillard by a mile which could explain why the perpetrator, Thomson or otherwise, is reluctant to reveal himself.

(Because this story takes place in Australia, the sandwich was made with Vegemite.)

Thomson maintains that not only did he not throw the sandwich—he actually prevented another one from being lobbed by knocking it out of the real sandwich thrower's hand. (As a Brisbane Times reporter put it in what will probably be the most embarrassing interview of his career: “You in effect saved the prime minister from not one but two sandwiches yesterday.")

Thomson pleaded his case to Gillard directly in a radio interview Thursday, defending himself with the irrefutable evidence “I’m innocent and I did not throw it!”

Gillard, who can laugh because she’s not the one suspended for fifteen days on account of a sandwich she threw or possibly didn’t throw, declined to petition in the teen's favor, advising him to “have a chat with the school principal,” if he hoped to change his sentence.

‘‘His name is Alan Jones if you can believe it,” added Gillard of the principal, which…I guess is some sort of Australian reference that we Americans just don’t get. (His name is Paul Bunyan, if you can believe it. His name is Thefourthof July, if you can believe it.) Then again, at this point in the story, everything about it is so shocking—sandwich hero? sandwich zero?—that frankly I can’t believe his name is Alan Jones. Alan Jones? Can’t believe it.

The mother of the sandwich martyr/sandwich-wielding Gavrilo Princip, Anna Thomson, admitted that young Kyle “is no angel, don’t get me wrong,” but said she suspects “there is a lot more to the circumstances” surrounding what is shaping up to be Australia’s most sinister and convoluted criminal mystery in decades.

She also speculated that Gillard might simply be an irresistible target of projectiles.

‘‘I mean I’m sure she’s had more than a sandwich thrown at her throughout her life.’’

For his part, Kyle seems not to have let the incident dampent his fervent nationalism, observing to the Brisbane Times that the Prime Minister is "small," "famous," and "doesn't have a big nose like everyone's saying."

[Image via Shutterstock]

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

Florida Man Escapes Police Only to Be Mauled by Alligator

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Florida resident Bryan Zuniga had just successfully fled from a sheriff's deputy when the 20-year-old encountered a foe he couldn't outrun: an alligator.

The alligator run-in occurred as Zuniga was hiding behind a water treatment plant near Tampa, having just bolted from his car after a 2:40 am traffic stop nearby. The gator attacked Zuniga, mangling his arms and face severely enough to require a hospital trip.

Meanwhile, as Zuniga was hiding/being mauled by an alligator, the deputies who'd been chasing him issued an alert to local law enforcement officers. Several hours later, they received word from the St. Petersburg police, telling them a man that matched the description was being treated for “animal attack.”

Initially, Zuniga lied about how he was attacked, telling a St. Petersburg cop he “was watching fish jump when he fell in and was attacked by an alligator.” But once the sheriff's deputies arrived, having made the connection between the attack and the botched traffic stop, Zuniga confessed, though he didn't provide many details.

"He just said he was attacked by the alligator," said sheriff's spokeswoman Cristen Rensel. "It's still unclear how he got (to the hospital)."

Upon his release from the hospital, Zuniga was booked into the Pinellas County Jail on charges of breaking or injuring fences (which apparently is its own crime), fleeing and eluding, driving with a suspended or revoked license and resisting an officer without violence.

[Tampa Bay Times]

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

Cleveland Home Reminds Us Some Police Don't Rush to Poor Neighborhoods

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People from the Cleveland neighborhood in which three kidnapped women were recovered on Monday said that they'd been calling the cops on the suspected abductor for years, only to have police ignore them. It seemed hard to believe. The Cleveland Police Department itself disputes the claims, saying its records indicate officers had only visited the Seymour Avenue residence twice before this week: Once to respond to a street fight that Ariel Castro, the lead kidnapping suspect, had called in himself, and once to investigate allegations that Castro had briefly abducted a little boy while working as a bus driver in 2004 (when police went to the house to investigate, nobody looked to be home, so they left).

At least one neighbor maintained in an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday that the police are wrong. Israel Lugo says he called police about the Castro home in 2011 when his sister saw a woman with a baby banging on one of the house's windows as if she were trying to escape.

Memories and police records can both be spotty. But the prospect of cops overlooking alarming stories for so long is not unusual one. How could it happen? The people who live around Ariel Castro's house, like Castro himself, are poor. And the police don't patrol poor neighborhoods the way they do wealthier ones.

The Cleveland zip code in which the kidnapped women were found—44113—has a median income of about $23,000, nearly $18,000 less than the Ohio average. Almost 37 percent of the residents in 44113 live below the poverty line, and more than a quarter of its households bring in less than $10,000 in income annually.

Ariel Castro purchased the Seymour Avenue home in which the women were held for a scant $12,000 in 1992. Today the house is worth $36,000, but Castro owes $2,500 in back taxes on it. News reports say the home was in bad shape and had plastic bags covering the windows, but that wasn't cause for concern on a street blighted by abandoned homes.

Though a lot of Castro's neighbors were shocked to discover they were living next door to an alleged violent criminal, a rap sheet is not a rarity in 44113. The Smoking Gun yesterday reported that Charles Ramsey, the good Samaritan neighbor who helped free the kidnapped women before becoming a meme, has a history of domestic violence convictions. And a look at Ohio's sex-offender registries turns up more than one offender on Seymour Avenue, one of whom lives just a few doors down from the Castro house.

In destitute neighborhoods, things get overlooked. One can find no clearer example of this than another recent criminal case in Cleveland, when police simply ignored several pleas from women who'd been attacked by Anthony Sowell, a man who would in 2011 be convicted of murdering 11 women over the course of years in his rundown Cleveland neighborhood. The Daily Beast offers a thorough examination of the Cleveland PD's outrageous missteps in that grisly case:

At least some of those murders and rapes could have been prevented if the police had not reacted so indifferently when a distraught woman called them in September 2008, after being repeatedly raped, beaten, and choked by Sowell. She had at one point sought refuge in a bathroom, where she saw a headless body wrapped in plastic and positioned in a sitting position in the bathtub.

After managing to get away, the woman had stumbled as far as a bus stop before she could go no further. She would later testify: "I couldn’t walk no more. I was tore up. My body was tore up … My face, my female parts, my butt."

She called the police.

"They told me I had to come in and make a report," she would testify.

She further testified that she asked the dispatcher, "How do I get there?" The dispatcher told her: "Come in and make a report. We can’t take a report over the phone."

She told the court that after the call, “I felt less than human. I didn’t know who to turn to.”

...On December 8, 2008, another woman contacted the police, reporting that Sowell had accosted her outside his house and dragged her around to the back, where he beat, choked, and attempted to rape her. A simple check would have told the police that Sowell was a registered sex offender who had done 15 years for raping, beating, and choking a pregnant woman. Nothing happened.

Sowell was eventually caught after a yet another woman reported to the police on September 22, 2009 that Sowell had beaten and raped her. It took the Cleveland cops more than a month to obtain a search warrant for Sowell's house relating to that attack—by that time he'd attacked another woman, who ended up leaping from a third story window and breaking numerous bones—and on October 29 they entered his residence and found women's corpses rotting inside.

Cleveland isn't the only city that's suffered with a police force that responds lackadaisically to the tribulations of poor neighborhoods. A 1996 police analysis in Washington, D.C., revealed that residents of the city's most low-income pockets would wait up to eight hours for police responses to non-life-threatening calls about things like missing persons and burglaries. By contrast, people living in tony white neighborhoods like Georgetown would generally wait a half hour or less for responses to similar reports.

In 2003, in Canarsie, Brooklyn, a 21-year-old black girl named Romona Moore disappeared on the way to Burger King. When Moore's mother called police after the girl had been missing for 24 hours, a cop told her: "Lady, why are you calling here? Your daughter is 21." The next day the complaint was marked "closed." In actuality, Moore was in a basement just a few blocks from her home, where her captors would rape her, torture her by sawing at her limbs and burning her, and, ultimately, beat her to death over the course of four days.

Moore's case was made all the uglier by the fact that only two months prior, a white doctor's wife who'd gone missing on the Upper East Side had precipitated a massive NYPD-led search, complete with bloodhound trackers and two-dozen full-time detectives. Unfortunately, all the effort was for naught, as the woman's body was soon discovered floating in the East River with no indication as to how she ended up in the water. Enraged by the disparate support between that case and her daughter's, Moore's mother would later file a lawsuit claiming bias in how the NYPD investigates missing persons.

Chicago faced a similar lawsuit under liberal Mayor Rahm Emmanuel. In 2011 a Chicago woman named Seretha Reid called police more than once about a loud beating taking place outside her window. Cops didn't show up for three hours, long after the altercation had ended. Reid's was one of numerous incidents that prompted the ACLU to bring a civil suit against the city claiming that police response times to black and Latino neighborhoods were abysmal compared to those in white enclaves. Naturally, the Chicago police stonewalled requests for data about its deployments, claiming it had a "security concern." Late last year, a judge dismissed the suit, saying police deployment is "the stuff of law enforcement theory and political policy-making, not (legal) adjudication."

Elsewhere, in the struggling former auto empire of Detroit, journalist Charlie LeDuff last year waited for police for four hours with a woman whose home had been broken into. To better make the point that it takes a long time for police to be dispatched in Detroit, LeDuff went and got some lunch and took a shower before any cops showed.

Exacerbating all of this is that governmental cutbacks are eroding police services throughout the country, making it even less likely that cop budgets are going to be deployed fairly and effectively in America's harshest neighborhoods. Just last year, Camden, New Jersey, which has long struggled with poverty and crime, outright lost its police force, which was folded into a special section of the Camden County Police. The Chicago Police Department, citing diminishing resources, said in February that it would stop responding right away to things like property damage, burglaries, or other mid- to low-level crime scenes at which the suspect was not present. Of course Cleveland is not immune to our national scourge of municipal budget cuts, and it, too, has been laying off police officers in various scrapes in recent years.

Maybe Castro's neighbors are wrong when they say they'd warned police for years, and the Cleveland Police Department actually had been doing everything in its power to rescue the three women Castro had tormented for so long. Yet in the end what saved those women was not police work but Amanda Berry's quick thinking at a moment of opportunity and Charles Ramsey's willingness to assist a stranger. For 10 years the cops had been ineffective, and so the residents of Seymour Avenue were fending for themselves.

[Photo via AP/Image by Jim Cooke]

High Schooler Suspended for Posting Principal's Mug Shot to Instagram

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If you work at a high school as a teacher or principal and have a mug shot floating around somewhere online, it's probably safe to assume it will surface at some point. In keeping with basic rules of the internet, the proper reaction would then be to ignore its surfacing, instead of over-reacting and trying to squash it. Unfortunately for all involved, the principal at Riverdale High School in Clayton County Georgia did the exact opposite earlier this week and suspended a student who posted her mug shot to Instagram.

The ordeal went down last week, when high school senior Keandre Varner posted the picture to Instagram, writing in the caption that his principal, Jamille Miller-Brown, had been arrested for a DUI. This turned out to be incorrect. But instead of quietly correcting Varner or, better yet, ignoring the situation all together, Miller-Brown called the teenager into her office on Monday to confront him.

"And she was like, 'You said I got arrested for DUI.' And I was like, 'I think you got arrested for DUI,'" [Varner] said.

At that point, according to Varner, Miller-Brown tried to have a police officer arrest him, but the officer refused. Miller-Brown then suspended Varner for four days.

School administrators claim the suspension was the result of the disruption Varner caused, his “belligerent and disrespectful” attitude, and the fact that he allegedly uploaded the photo while at school.

“Regardless of how he uploaded the photo, he still accessed the site,” said spokesperson David Waller, adding that social media sites are supposed to be blocked on school computers.

“When a student becomes belligerent and disrespectful, we’re all human beings and our knee-jerk reaction is to throw a book at him,” Waller said

Eventually, Miller-Brown agreed to reduce the suspension from four days to two days – “After having time to think about her decision, she decided that two days would be sufficient,” Waller said – though not before allegedly threatening to suspend other students for merely having the photo on their phone.

As for Miller-Brown's crime: she was arrested for missing a court date for a speeding ticket, according to school officials.

Varner was allowed to return to school on Thursday, though, as he was quick to tell WSB-TV in Atlanta, not before missing valuable study time for final exams.

“I need to be in school,” Varner said.

[NY Daily News/WSB-TV]

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

Whole Foods Accidentally Tricked Vegans Into Eating Chicken This Week

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Bad news for vegans and chicken-eaters alike: On Thursday, Whole Foods announced it had accidentally switched the labels for its chicken salad and "chick'n" salad in stores in the Northeast.

The mislabeled salads – curried chicken salad and vegan curried “chick'n” salad – were sold on Tuesday and Wednesday in 15 stores in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. Aside from angering principled eaters, the switch-up was also potentially dangerous.

The Food and Drug Administration noted the vegan salad contains soy, and the curried chicken salad contains egg. It said people who have an allergy or severe sensitivity to soy or eggs run the risk of serious or life-threatening allergic reaction if they eat the salads.

Perhaps because of that risk, the Austin-based chain was quick to note that the mislabeling wasn't their fault.

Libba Letton, a spokeswoman for Whole Foods, said some of the company's bulk food comes pre-made from third-party vendors. She said the salads in question came with the wrong labels from a vendor. In addition to issuing a recall in line with guidelines set by the FDA, Letton said the company has posted signs in its stores alerting people of the error.

[Associated Press/Image via AP]

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

The death toll for the collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh has passed 1,000 and is still rising.

Two People Missing After Falling Overboard From Carnival Cruise Ship

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The cursed year for cruise ships continues: early Thursday morning, authorities aboard the Carnival Spirit in Australia realized two passengers had fallen overboard. Over one day later, neither has been found.

Paul Rossington and Kristen Schroder, a couple traveling with seven of their family members and friends, went missing roughly 65 miles from shore, just hours before the ship docked in Sydney, Australia at the end of its 10-day trip.

Surveillance camera footage from Wednesday night shows the couple falling from the ship's mid-deck, according to New South Wales Police Superintendent Mark Hutchings. Investigators are still analyzing surveillance footage to see if the couple fell or if they jumped. Hutchings said no life preservers were missing from the ship, but a major rescue effort was put into place; an airplane, a helicopter, and several police boats are searching the roughly 1,000 square mile area where the couple went missing.

"We're going to be going hard today — we've got a lot of assets we're throwing at this," Hutchings told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday.

The tragedy is the just latest in a long string of recent public relations disasters for cruise ship companies. Ten weeks ago, a Carnival Cruise ship lost power and quickly became a shit-encrusted hell-boat. Two weeks later, a gastrointestinal virus overtook a Royal Caribbean cruise. Not long after that, another Carinval ship had some bathroom problems of its own. And over a year ago, a Costa Concordia ship capsized off the coast of Italy, killing 32.

[Image via Shutterstock]

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


Everyone On Facebook Knows If You're Down to Bang

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The best things going for Bang with Friends, the app that lets you find folks that are down to bone, is that it's populated solely by people you know on Facebook (less risk than a sketchy rando) and that it promises anonymity (no risk that you're the one who looks sketchy). Well, almost no risk.

The Daily Dot unearthed a neat little link that shows you which of your Facebook friends have installed the app. Just log in, click, and oh god him? Him? But I thought he was . . . Wait til his lady finds outtttt. Buzzfeed then took the information for a whirl with Facebook Graph Search, the social network's ultimate stalking tool. (Married people who use Bang with Friends OFFICIAL, etc.)

One of the app's three anonymous male cofounders told Gawker the inadvertent exposure was likely due to people who signed up for the app when it first launched in January. At the time, Bang with Friends was installed with whatever privacy setting the user set as default for all apps, which could mean "Public" or "Friends." Later that month, they switched the default to "Only Me."

Our estimates are that it's only a few thousand people out of the 900,000+ users. Some of them may not care if others can see they use Bang With Friends, but we want everyone to know that just like any other Facebook app, they control who sees it.

Back in January, Bang with Friends was claiming a user base of about 30,000 and adding five users per minute. Through Facebook and Twitter, the company has tried alerting early users that its promise of anonymity comes with a Zuckerbergian asterisk.

We started this quickly (in a few hours) and it took off unexpectedly. Once it was getting big, Facebook Graph Search started opening up and we noticed that the default setting that Facebook has for apps is whatever the user has set for the default for all of their apps. Mine personally was set to "Friends". We immediately changed the default for our app to "Only Me" so that our users are protected and private.

Welcome to the velocity with which seamy info can become public.

All we found when we checked the link were a bunch of bloggers and editors, who could defensibly claim "research" purposes. But you, no doubt powerful reader, will probably find much more scintillating results. Let us know in the comments and remember, Kinja never met a screenschot she didn't like.

To reach the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

Hero Student Who Stood Up for Education Gets Support from School

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Jeff Bliss, the Duncanville High School student who became an overnight legend after he told off a teacher for doing her job poorly, spoke with local news outlets for the first time since his rant went viral.

"No. Not at all," Bliss, 18, told News 8 when asked if he had any regrets. "I believe that somebody needed to say this."

His passionate words certainly inspired many both online and off, including students, teachers, and administrators.

Even the Duncanville ISD superintendent had good things to say about Bliss and the teachable moment he incited.

"We love it when students are passionate about education," Dr. Alfred Ray told FOX 4.

According to Ray, Bliss's "outburst" even moved the world history class teacher, Mrs. Phung, who proceeded to follow Bliss down the hall and to the assistant principal's office where they arrived at an "agreement" allowing Bliss to return to class.

For his part, Bliss, whose mother is a teacher, says he understands the need for effective education more than most.

After dropping out of school for a year, Bliss returned to Duncanville High as a sophomore.

"What I soon realized is without that education I'm not going to make any steps forward into my future," he said.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Phung has been placed on paid leave pending the results of an internal investigation. The district released a statement late yesterday saying Bliss would not be punished.

"I don't want people to look up to me as something to idolize or anything," Bliss said. "I'm just as human as the next person."

[top video via HyperVocal]

Tea Party Furious Over IRS Thinking Tea Party Sounds Political

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Tea Party conservatives are furious over the IRS admission that self-declared non-profit groups with the words "Tea Party" or "Patriots" in their names were checked for political activity not allowed by the rules for 501(c) not-for-profit organizations. What's wrong with a good charity named Tea Party Patriots, anyway? It's not like such groups would engage in election year political activity or anything, right?

Jenny Beth Martin of the actual group Tea Party Patriots says the IRS engaged in "disturbing, illegal and outrageous abuse of government power" by checking new applicants for non-profit status. The IRS has apologized, but it's still unclear whether Tea Party groups were reviewed more or less than new 501(c) applicants with other political leanings.

Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations compliance for the IRS, said today "it was insensitive and it was inappropriate" to ask some of the targeted organizations for lists of donors to identify the would-be non-profit groups as fronts for active political campaign organizations.

Of 300 such groups reviewed by a team of "low level" Treasury Department employees based in Cincinnati, a quarter of those were affiliated by name with the Tea Party political movement, which is an active if now-fading part of the Republican Party—the list of the 225 reviewed non-profit applicants that didn't mention Republican tea party and patriot groups wasn't mentioned in coverage of Lerner's apology today.

In a "Fiscal Year 2012 Work Plan" signed by Lerner, the job of checking new self-declared non-profit organizations for prohibited political campaigning and lobbying is described as a routine part of election year monitoring of groups that should be 507 organizations—where donations are not tax-deductible—instead of legitimate non-profit groups that can advocate for causes but not for candidates or ballot measures.

II. Compliance: Using the Form 990

The IRS redesigned the Form 990 to promote transparency and compliance. The new form, which was effective in tax year 2008, has provided EO with a wealth of information on exempt organizations. EO has used this information to develop risk models to assess the likelihood of noncompliance by organizations, allowing more effective use of examination resources. In FY 2012, EO will incorporate information from the revised Form 990 in the following activities.

501(c)(4), (5) and (6) self-declarers

These groups – social welfare organizations; labor, agricultural and horticultural groups; and business leagues, such as a chamber of commerce – can declare themselves taxexempt without seeking a determination from the IRS. EO will review organizations to ensure that they have classified themselves correctly and that they are complying with applicable rules. In FY 2012, EO will send a comprehensive questionnaire to organizations based on Form 990 filings to assess compliance in this area.

Political activity

As in any election year, EO will continue its work to enforce the rules relating to political campaigns and campaign expenditures. In FY 2012, EO will combine what it has learned from past projects on political activities with new information gleaned from the redesigned Form 990 to focus its examination resources on serious allegations of impermissible political intervention. As in the past, information from outside sources about political campaign intervention will be reviewed by a committee of career civil servants. In addition, other potential violations identified through risk modeling of Form 990 data also will be sent to the committee for evaluation. The committee will focus on identifying the cases to refer for examination. EO will further refine its risk models based on the results of examinations. EO will also ensure reporting and payment compliance with section 527(f).

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell waddled out today to charge the Obama Administration with targeting Tea Party groups. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who was in charge of the tax-collection agency until after the November 2012 election, was appointed by George W. Bush six years ago.

[Image via Getty.]

Christian Finds Grave for Boston Bomber: "Jesus Says Love Our Enemies"

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For days and days Tamerlan Tsarnaev's corpse sat in the Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Home in Worcester, Massachusetts, not so far away from where police killed the Boston bombing suspect on April 19. Authorities were mostly done examining Tsarnaev's body, of course, but as of last Saturday, four cemeteries in three states had rejected requests to bury him. And so he sat.

Hearing reports of people who had showed up to Graham Putnam & Mahoney to protest Tsarnaev's burial—"Feed him to the sharks!" read one sign—a Richmond, Virginia, woman named Martha Mullen, a licensed professional counselor, decided she was going to be the one to assist the dead man's family with putting him to rest.

"Jesus says [to] love our enemies," Mullen, who is a graduate of Ohio's United Theological Seminary, told the Boston Globe today. "So I was sitting in Starbucks and thought, maybe I’m the one person who needs to do something."

On Tuesday, after seeking out traditional Muslim burial requirements, Mullen emailed the Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which was able to find her a plot within an hour. Mullen then contacted the Worcester Police Department to tell them she'd found a place for Tsarnaev to be entombed.

In the early morning yesterday, Tsarnaev's now famous uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, transported his nephew's body from Worcester to Doswell, Virginia, where his remains will be laid to rest at the Al-Barzakh Cemetery, pictured above.

"What Tsarnaev did is between him and God," an Islamic Funeral Services official told the Globe in a statement. "We strongly disagree with his violent actions, but that does not release us from our obligation to return his body to the earth."

[Image via Al-Barzakh Cemetery]

The Great and Powerless Gatsby

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We didn’t need another film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, but if someone had to do it, it had to be Baz Luhrmann. The kind of large-scale opulence that the book describes and critiques is the 50-year-old director’s wheelhouse. For a while, Luhrmann pulls it off, too: The first hour of his Gatsby is an ecstatic tear through '20s hedonism. The camera swoops and whizzes like it's just excited to be there. The music, which finds contemporary pop royalty marrying big-band with big-room house or just dipping into dubstep, blares. Bouquets of people dance in pools, spill out of convertibles, and cram into ample hallways. The words “chemical madness” and “kaleidoscopic carnival” are uttered. Luhrmann parks at the intersection of kitsch and hallucination, stumbles out of his Duesenberg and deliriously rolls all over in the road.

There is nothing natural about The Great Gatsby. Because that is intentional, it is a bold affront to the modern, often misguided infatuation with authenticity. (Perfectly, Lana del Rey is on the soundtrack, singing maybe her most relatable song.) Whether Luhrmann’s grandiosity works is a matter of taste—those who don't believe that tackiness (which is to say bad taste) can be an ideal (which is to say good taste) are unlikely to be won over at any point. I say give me visual candy till my eyes burst from it. Give me reams of flowing fabric. Give me so many streamers and glitter that they work as a filter, altering the color of the picture. Give me fireworks. The Great Gatsby does. This is a fireworks display of a movie featuring an actual fireworks display behind Leonardo DiCaprio, punctuating his announcement, “I am Gatsby!”

This movie goes for something encompassing Old Hollywood and vague notions of the way people used to carry themselves. Few of the actors, however, seem to know what they’re doing. People constantly speak like they’re adults telegraphing to each other that they’re telling lies for the benefit of unaware children (“Santa only comes when you’re asleep”). Carrie Mulligan plays Daisy like a cartoon battered woman—she rarely seems less than terrified by her task. As narrating nonentity Nick Carraway, Tobey Maguire looks similarly overwhelmed, his eyes bugging out, his head pulled back to threaten the delineation of his chin, a perpetual gulp in his throat. Kermit the Frog would have been a better casting choice. The high affectation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby feels more right than everyone else (“The way he spoke—no wonder people thought that he was lying,” observes Nick). But even in this best case, I still felt like I was watching an amateur magician attempt to convince everyone in the audience that he is a real magician.

There is no way the richness of Fitzgerald’s writing was going to translate entirely to the screen, not even by putting those words actually on the screen (Nick writes the story as we watch it unfurl), not even by peppering the dialogue with Fitzgerald’s splashy truths like, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time.” That said, Luhrmann doesn’t do nuance, and he stomps all over the intricacies of Fitzgerald’s social critique during The Great Gatsby’s final 90 minutes, which focus on the Gatsby-Daisy-Tom Buchanan (Joe Edgerton) love triangle. As in Luhrmann’s superior but far from perfect Moulin Rouge, the early set pace proves impossible to maintain. What we are left with is a 3D soap opera that blinks a green light at us with enough persistence to trigger a seizure. And the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes the eyes the eyes. Luhrmann flashes on them with mounting intensity but zero illumination, so that the film finally feels like all eyes everything.

In the case of Luhrmann’s Gatsby, the fall is not worth the ride. Perhaps that fact allows this movie to convey a theme of Fitzgerald’s uncomfortably well. Perhaps like Gatsby, Luhrmann has an extraordinary gift for hope. But the fruits of that hope are a chore to endure.

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