Mars One, the Dutch company that is looking for a few individuals with the "right stuff" (the "right stuff" being wanting to leave Earth and never, ever return), reports that more than 78,000 people have applied to be chosen for a trip to the red planet.

The company is aiming to put four people on Mars every two years, starting in April 2023 (April, not May, not June — they've got this whole thing figured out already), and will help fund the project through a lucrative reality television show that will follow the astronauts on their harrowing journey.

“Going to Mars would make me feel like I am a true 'Star Trek' officer,” Michael Archavia, an applicant, told NBC.

“This is turning out to be the most desired job in history,” Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a press statement. “These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants.”

Talk about a stiff job market, eh?

While the one way trip to Mars could be compared to colonists setting of to Jamestown or Australia, I'd have to say the major difference is that both Virginia and Australia had a breathable atmosphere.

Sill, intrepid adventurers are ready for the journey:

Ashley Owl, a 21-year-old Cuban-American in Miami who volunteers at a hospital there, admitted that watching too many science fiction movies and TV shows had “desensitized” her to fear. “It just makes me to want to explore even more,” she said.

While the Mars One trip will most likely never happen, the project won't be a total failure for its CEO: the application itself costs between $5 to $75, depending on the country.

For actual harrowing space exploration, be sure to check out the livestream of the emergency spacewalk happening at the International Space Station right now.

Buried in the midst of WWD's fawning profile of Jennifer Aniston's hair care line, hidden like the Where's Waldo of interesting 90's facts, is stylist Chris McMillan's assertation that he was totally, totally high when he created the Rachel.

"I’m 14 years sober, so I feel safe enough to say that,” McMillan told WWD.

Though McMillan's internal statute of limitations has clearly ended, we're left with more questions than answers. High on what? Was he hallucinating? Did he imagine her hair was coming to kill him and attacked it with a pair of scissors? (For what it's worth, Aniston called it "the ugliest haircut" she'd ever seen.)

But WWD doesn't appear to have followed up on the question — the article continues with Aniston bemoaning her "wavy, frizzy hair" — so the world may never know what exactly McMillan smoked, or whether Aniston is now smoking it.

[via, photo via Getty]

With Marxist doctrine fading among many of the Chinese, superstition has become increasingly common with party officials looking to achieve a promotion or better workforce cohesion.

In particular, Feng Shui, a system of geomancy popular among feudal Chinese (and Dads deciding where to put couches), has seen a resurgence among China's political class. Faced with mounting political pressures, the Times describes how one group of officials dealt with their problems:

For top officials at the local land resources bureau beleaguered by these and other headaches, there could only be one explanation for the miasma of misfortune they believed was threatening their careers last year: the pair of ferocious stone lions that guarded the state-owned China Tobacco building across the street from their offices.

And so the local land resources bureau constructed a wall between their building and the ferocious lions:

“Our bureau wasn’t doing so well until we erected the barrier last year,” said the official, who gave only his last name, Chen. “Now things are a lot better.”

The leaders of the Communist Party are not too keen on this resurgence of superstition, especially the part where officials used public money to move a gigantic boulder for no reason (okay, okay, bad luck):

In 2009, county officials in the western province of Gansu spent $732,000 transporting a 369-ton boulder six miles to the county seat, a move feng shui masters said would ward off bad luck.

Just try getting that through congress! (Although, this is really no different than building something to a symbolic height. But at least that wasn't public money).

Many officials who have used feng shui are trying to make sense of the controlled world of party promotions, where a whole career can be made or broken on a single impression. Some officials have taken it a little far...

In February 2010, People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece, reported that Cui Xinyuan, the party chief of Gaoyi County in Hebei Province, had installed a decommissioned fighter jet in the middle of a boulevard opposite the government headquarters so he could soar to the empyrean of Chinese power. The jet was intended to block the flow of bad luck, according to local residents, but it ultimately just blocked traffic. Despite Mr. Cui’s public denials, his career crashed and burned a few months later, when he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for bribery and selling official titles.

Maybe the fighter jet should have been bigger?

Leave it to Canada to do something nice with drones.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced Friday that they were able to save a 25-year-old man's life by using a small drone helicopter to locate him after his vehicle rolled over in near-freezing temperatures. Because who knew drones could be used for non-killing purposes other than filibustering and terrorizing Brooklyn?

The drones came into play early Thursday morning after RCMP responded to a car crash but were unable to find the injured driver. After fruitless ground and air searches, police recieved a 2:10 a.m. 911 call from the driver saying that "he was cold, did not know where he was and could give no directions to his location. He was only dressed in T-shirt (no jacket), pants and had lost his shoes."

Using the GPS coordinates from that call, the Mounties first sent out more traditional responses, including air ambulances with night vision and searchlights. But by 3 a.m., when they were still unable to locate the driver, they launched a small Draganflyer X4-ES helicopter drone with infared vision (like with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, except in an unmanned and cute way). The drone quickly identified three heat signatures, one of which turned out to be the driver, curled up unresponsive in a ball at the base of a tree next to a snow bank. Police say without the drone they would not have been able to locate him until daylight. If you're interested, RCMP has also published a video of the rescue.

And it's not just our mounted neighbors upstaging our drones — other countries are also pushing the idea that drones can be used for good — dropping beers at South African music festivals, for example. But adding to Canada's overwhelming niceness, this might be the first (public) occasion of a drone being used to save a person's life by finding them in time to provide medical attention.

[via, photo via Getty]

Sometime in April 2010, my father, Victor, a veteran who spent most of his life as an engineer, hanged himself in a garage in Blackwood, New Jersey. He and my mother, Marguerite, had a thing in the late 1970’s. That thing bore me.

I got the call about my father’s suicide on a Saturday morning in April 2010. I was working as a journalist in an empty newsroom. One of my father’s seven sisters told me that he had been dead for weeks in a garage in New Jersey. Though I had not forgiven him for being absent most of my life, I sobbed.

When I told my mother about his death, she responded differently.

"OK," she said. "Wow. OK."

My mother had been undone by my brother Jose's death in 1976, and her manic depression hung a shadow over both of us through a lifetime of stops and starts. When I was a child, my mother and I moved like gypsies through the tri-state area. There were weeks in Harlem at my Aunt Claire and Uncle Bea's apartment in a building that was just for senior citizens; days at the Roberto Clemente Shelter in the South Bronx; months in welfare hotels, halfway houses and other homeless shelters for families with children in New York City.

Those of us adult orphans, with parents who tried their best but failed to nurture, know that we have more to forgive our parents for than reasons to mourn them. My mother and father made me, but for most of my life, they functioned as my toxic, well-intentioned friends. If we’re lucky, we accept the possibility that our parents’ lives were harder and often much more terrible than we ever imagined. We forgive them and refuse to blame ourselves for their failures. Then we do what we can to grow in spite of them. The problem, of course, is that most children are not so lucky.

In August 2011, my mother, a woman who sent emails to me in all caps and once called to tell me that she had found her soul mate in Raja, the Pakistani bodega owner, went missing.

My mother was a heavyset black and Cherokee woman with broad angular cheekbones. She wore a wig that she couldn't bear to take off so she slept in it until the gray cap beneath the wig rubbed off a lot of the hair on the back of her head. My mother believed that she was Tina Turner's doppelganger and that every man who laid eyes on her would eventually fall in love. Among her many suitors were a Russian portrait artist in Central Park who wanted to get married so he could stay in the country, and a Native American flutist who performed with a band inside the Grand Central Station terminal. I remember the latter because he had done a sun dance ceremony and showed us the scars on his back where hooks had held him up from a tree.

When my mother hadn't called me for weeks or left her daily voice mail in one breathless sentence of exclamation points, I started to worry. The rest of my family called my cell phone to ask if I had heard from her.

I was busy, I told them. I had a life and a job as a reporter. Letting them know that I was worried somehow felt weak.

It turns out my mother had locked herself in her Philadelphia Section 8 house. I had forged her signature when I was in fourth grade to get her on the waiting list.

"The doctor said I had cervical cancer," my mother whispered to my sister when they finally got her to open the door. She refused to eat or drink for days in the middle of the summer and was convinced she was dying. I was convinced that memories were eating her up.

***

In 1995, my father wrote a letter. It was the only letter he ever wrote to me. “Time lost can never be recaptured,” he wrote. I was this elderly little girl, shirts buttoned up to the top of my neck like a choker, though my mother fancied tight-fitting polka dots bodysuits for me. I bought our groceries and stole money from church altars. I went into the pockets of my mother's classmates at Career Blazers, back when she still thought she had a chance to get a college degree and get us off welfare. I was the mother of our family. Marguerite was the child.

In The Orphaned Adult, Rabbi Marc D. Angel writes that adult orphans become the keeper of familial memories. We are the last ones standing. What I remembered most for years about my mother was that she had not been mother at all in any pragmatic way, and all of her support had been emotional. Her talent for hyperbole was the reason that I, even today, have a filter for praise.

"Everything you touch turns to gold!" she often said. "You are beautiful. I love you. I'm so proud you belong to me."

In kindergarten, after she'd followed some man to New Mexico, when I was learning how to write pretty cursive on soft green paper, the teacher told her I was gifted. My mother’s interpretation of that was literally, "Joshunda, you've got the IQ of a college student!"

I was exasperated by her strange energy, by days that began at 4:30 a.m., by her pinning a huge safety pin of Catholic medals to the inside of her bra with a clumsiness that made them rattle like a wind chime. But I also had a child's reason because, well, I was a child. I couldn’t understand how I could be so great if she left me so much.

I learned later that my mother had borderline personality and bipolar disorder, which informed everything she did or didn’t do. She was a tall, thick woman with a beautiful gap between her front teeth. She only ever did what she wanted to do, which — depending on her manic episode — included gambling all her money away in Atlantic City and attending daily Catholic Mass in Manhattan at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, even though we mostly lived in the Bronx.

Maybe if she had been medicated, she wouldn’t have hit me like she did. Maybe we would have grown up in one place. Maybe the medicine would have stopped us from being homeless. When pushed, my mother claimed that medication interfered with her relationship with God.

I ran away for about a week when I was 15, after the last time my mother tried to hit me. When I told her I got a scholarship to boarding school, she sobbed and begged me not to go. She came up to Emma Willard, about four hours north of New York City to visit my junior year. My mother was the reckless one, the one we all labeled crazy. She was the one I stayed up nights in boarding school worrying about, the one who would take off missing for weeks at a time, the one I thought for sure would die the way she lived – in some self-imposed suicidal mayhem.

Marguerite was a force of nature, and died as she lived. She did what she wanted to do. Always. When the cervical cancer really took its toll, my mother fought the doctors who tried to perform MRIs or body scans. She tried to run out of the nursing home even though she was too weak to fight.

At her bedside in an assisted living center, I looked and listened to the voice of a big broad woman who had been was shrunken by cancer. I had never seen her so gaunt, and the reality of sickness made me burn with regret. I understood finally that she had loved me with her whole heart, even if that heart was broken, crazy, tired and sick. I remembered the times I tried to pull the keloids from her neck, thinking that little black dots that looked like mini chocolate chips had sprung from her pores. I remembered slicing layers from her calloused feet after smothering them with Vaseline lotion. I also remembered never once embracing her.

But there I was in a sterile room, at 33, silently begging my mother to get better. I wanted her to heal so I could be the kind of daughter that could love her mother back to health.

Please God, I prayed, tears running down my cheeks onto her hands, don't let the days of hunger, or the time she threatened to kill me be the clearest memories I have to keep. Please give us time for a few new memories.

During the chaos of my childhood, I wished often for my mother’s death. But as a grown woman, every time I visited her in that sad place, with mothers and fathers dying all around her, all I could do was put my head on her hand and weep.

I said goodbye to Marguerite on Christmas Day in 2011. I tried to let go of my visions of what could have been while I told her I loved her. She looked at me and she told me not to cry.

“God takes care of us,” she said.

My mother died six days before I turned 34. That day, I was forced to give up hope for a better past.

Every Mother’s Day since my mother died, I have wished my mother would call. I don’t want to change the past; all I want is more time with the weird, reckless woman who brought me into this world. This Mother’s Day, my friends will celebrate their children. They will have their children celebrate them. And I will painfully miss what could have been with my mother. But I know, finally, that the best parts of me — my sense of humor, the love I have for education, my passion for connecting with people, even when I'm really weird about it — come directly from Marguerite, my mother. My childhood was not perfect, and neither was my relationship with my mother. But I am her child. I finally accept everything that means. Marguerite is my mother, and on this Mother’s Day, I only wish we had more time.

Joshunda Sanders is working on a memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans. Her work has appeared in Bitch Magazine, The UTNE Reader, Publishers Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle. She blogs at http://jvictoriasanders.com/ and spends too much time on Twitter, @jvic.

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

A bus driver in Bartow, Florida has been charged with false imprisonment, child abuse, and neglect after pulling over and encouraging two students to fight in her own front yard.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd probably said it best, when he expressed his disbelief to the local ABC affiliate:

"Girl what were you thinking?"

Patrice Sanders, 29, heard two girls arguing behind her as she drove the bus along, and decided that perhaps having the girls settle their differences in a physical manner, rather than a verbal one, was a bit better. This is all so insane, I'll let the Sheriff's Office just say what happened:

Sanders picked up kids from three Bartow schools – Gause Academy, Summerlin Academy, and Bartow High School – as part of her normal duties, but when she heard two young females, a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old, verbally arguing on the bus, she made the statement, “This is going to be handled today and they just need to fight.”

Sometimes when you gotta fight you gotta fight, I suppose.

Sanders then drove the school bus directly to her house located on Enterprise Drive in Lakeland – bypassing any and all stops she was supposed to make to let kids off the bus.

Sorry kids, you're not going home today, maybe tomorrow. We got a score to settle.

She ordered all of the children to get off of the bus, and told the two females – a 13-year-old Hispanic female and a 16-year-old black female – that she would give them Vaseline or baby oil to put on their faces so their faces wouldn’t get scratched during the fight.

If you're going to fight, you should probably get greased up first, right?

The 13-year-old told Sanders that she did not want to fight.

Too bad. Patrice Sanders has decided you're going to fight today, so you're going to fight. She's kind of like Dennis Hopper in Waterworld in that way.

Sanders went inside her house to try to find Vaseline or baby oil and couldn’t find any. The girls then physically fought in Sanders’ front yard, as witnessed by Sanders and all of the other children who had gotten off of the bus. At least one child videotaped the fight on a cell phone. Sanders did not try to stop the fight, but stood by and watched. The girls fought until they decided to quit. Sanders then ordered all of the kids back onto the bus.

Once the bus was back in motion, the same two girls began physically fighting again. Sanders pulled the bus over and watched them fight until they were done. She did not try to stop the fight. When they were done, she told all of the kids on the bus, “What happens on the bus, stays on the bus,” and then proceeded to take them all to their bus stops.

I'm honestly not sure what the worst part is here. Is it the vaseline? The fact that she insisted that any and all instances of World Championship Child Wrestling happened on her front lawn? The part where she ordered everyone off the bus so that they can watch? How about when she didn't try to stop it at all, and then pulled over a second time so it could happen again?

And then there's the Las Vegas attitude of "what happens on the bus, stays on the bus."

Vegas, baby. Vegas.

Etta Mae Lopez was ready. She was ready to finally quit smoking. But she knew it wouldn't be easy. No, it was going to be a Herculean effort. Ms. Lopez considered her options — perhaps a few months in rehab? Brilliant. No one would ever smoke in rehab. But her smokers' insurance probably wasn't going to cover that. So she picked the next best place to be when you want to stop smoking for free: jail. Because nothing stops those cravings like the thought of having to shank someone for a $30 "loosie."

But how to get there? Lopez — whose dreams of going smoke-free in jail had presumably already been quashed once, when she was given mere probation for a drunk-driving incident —needed something splashier, something that would get her put away, once and for all.

So she slapped a cop.

The story itself is almost as hilarious as her logic. Face-slapped Sacramento County sheriff's deputy Matt Campoy recounted the events to the Sacramento Bee, telling reporters that Lopez just appeared as he left the county jail at 4:20 p.m. Thursday. It was surreal, he added.

"I stepped to the left, she stepped to my left," Campoy told the paper. "I stepped to the right, she stepped to my right. I stepped to the left again and she suddenly stepped into me and slapped my face."

And Campoy soon learned how premeditated Lopez's crime of passion (emphasis on the "ash") was.

"She knew that the only way to quit smoking was to go to jail because they don't allow tobacco in the jail," Campoy explained, displaying some dubious logic. "She waited all day for a deputy to come out because she knew if she assaulted a deputy she would go to jail and be inside long enough to quit her smoking habit."

And Lopez was dedicated to her cause. According to the SacBee, Lopez told police that she had been outside the jail waiting for a uniformed deputy "for so long that she got hungry and had to go get something to eat - and then she had returned."

But in the end, everyone involved won. Lopez was sentenced to 63 days in jail for misdemeanor battery on a peace officer, and Campoy got a new nickname.

"I've been telling everybody that I have a new Irish name: Nick O'Derm," Campoy told the SacBee.

[via, image via Getty]

A dispute over a bar bill is the supposed cause of the beating that killed Malcolm Shabazz (grandson of Malcolm X) on Thursday morning in Mexico City, according to the AP.

Shabazz, who led a troubled life, was visiting his friend, recently deported activist Miguel Suarez, when "they and several other people had gone to a bar near the downtown plaza that is home to Mexico City's mariachis."

After being confronted with a $1,200 bar bill by the owner of the establishment, a fight ensued and Shabazz was taken behind the building and beaten. Suarez told the AP that he "found Shabazz injured outside the bar and took him to a hospital where he died on Thursday."

Shabazz had recently been enrolled at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and was writing a memoir about his life while traveling around the United States, speaking out against youth violence.

His family has released the following statement:

"We are deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved El Hajj Malcolm El Shabazz. To all who knew him, he offered kindness, encouragement and hope for a better tomorrow. Although his bright light and boundless potential are gone from this life, we are grateful that he now rests in peace in the arms of his grandparents and the safety of God. We will miss him."

Watch out for that cougar! Fox is trying to reboot the 24 franchise with a "limited series" of 13 episodes. The timing is perfect - both Keifer Sutherland and Elisha Cuthbert's series were canceled this week.

A federal judge continued his criticism of the Obama administration's attempts to delay making the morning-after pill available to all women, of any age, without a prescription.

Judge Edward R. Korman has grown frustrated with the Obama administration, specifically Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who have tried to slow down the process that would make the morning-after pill available to young women. The government is arguing for a stay of his decision.

“If a stay is granted, it will allow the bad-faith, politically motivated decision of Secretary Sebelius, who lacks any medical or scientific expertise, to prevail — thus justifiably undermining the public’s confidence in the drug approval process,” Judge Korman wrote.

Basically, the administration would, for political reasons, like to put an age limit on when women can purchase the morning-after pill. Scared of what religious groups would think of a United States where women can choose what do with their bodies, the Obama administration is lobbying against the findings of both the judge and the FDA, who have found the drug to be perfectly safe for women of any age.

In 2011, Sibelius overruled the decision of the FDA in finding that anyone could use the morning-after pill, and instead limited it to just women 17 and over. Last week, the FDA ruled that women 15 years and older should be able to purchase the pill without a prescription.

The judge also dismissed the government's argument that women might be becoming confused about the availability of the pill, and that it's best to just wait until the courts and the FDA and the Obama administration finally come to an agreement.

Judge Korman called that argument “largely an insult to the intelligence of women.”

Scientists are reporting the possibility of a lost continent off the coast of Brazil.

Brazilian and Japanese geologists announced this week that they found granite about 8,000 feet underwater, 900 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. They say the discovery of granite, which is found in continental crust, indicates that a continent could have been lost in the separation of Africa and South America.

“This could be Brazil’s Atlantis,” Roberto Ventura Santos, the director of the Geology Service of Brazil, told reporters.

Of course, there are other ways for granite to make its way from land to the seabed, and the scientists will continue to drill for samples, but other "lost" land has recently been discovered, including a microcontinent near Madagascar and a massive landscape of hills and valleys near Scotland.

Newt Gingrich is puzzled by a new device he owns — the video-playing cellular telephone.

Yesterday, Gingrich released the video above, titled "We're Really Puzzled." In it, Newt is puzzled as to what to call his cellular telephone, which no longer just makes calls.

"But think about it, if it's taking pictures, it's not a cell phone," Newt reasons. "If it has a McDonald's APP that tells you where the closest McDonald's is based on your GPS location, that's not a cell phone."

It most definitely is not.

"This device is something new and different," Newt continues. "I've been calling it a hand-held computer."

Or, Smartphone?

"Now we've been here before. When we first invented the automobile, we called it the horseless carriage."

Smartphone, Newt. Smartphone.

"I want your help in figuring out what to call this."

SMARTPHONE, MAN. SMARTPHONE.

"What would you call this, so that we can explain it to people."

Damnit, Newt.

Bloomberg reporters didn't only use Bloomberg terminals (the machines most widely used by the financial sector to monitor the market) to spy on Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan. They also spied on the activities of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

CNBC has learned from a former Bloomberg employee that while at Bloomberg, he was able to monitor the usage information of both Bernanke and Geithner. Bloomberg employees could look at what Geithner and Bernanke were using the terminals for — information regarding bonds, equity markets, and news.

While the information itself was quite general, a lot could have been learned from it:

With thousands of functions, the information could apparently get quite specific. And knowing how often a user looked up individual information and how often the user was logged in could provide valuable information.

The Fed and Treasury Departments told CNBC that they were both looking into the situation.

A Bloomberg spokesman told CNBC that "What you are reporting is untrue," but declined to elaborate as to what was specifically inaccurate.

The information was also used by Bloomberg employees to show how "powerful" they were:

The former Bloomberg employee who worked in the editorial section recalled calling up the information on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "just for fun" and displaying the information to new recruits "to show how powerful" the Bloomberg terminals were.

Bloomberg has since stopped the function that allows reporters to look at the usage of customers, but for "a company that tracks everything from what stories people read to what pages they click on" (as a source told Gawker), this might mean changing how they do business entirely (or not). Funny that this comes from the company of a man so devoted to his own privacy.

The film was shot by Claude Frisse-Greene, an early British pioneer of film.

See? London wasn't always such a drab, horrible place as all other photographic representations make it out to be.

[Via Vimeo]

Today the New York Times takes us into a new kind of dating world, a world fraught with insecurity, inappropriate behavior, and heartbreak. That world is the college admissions waitlist.

Forget finding a spouse at school — these students are pouring their hormonal adulation into the admissions process, pursuing universities with a fervor that would convince courts to compel lesser men to stay away 1,000 feet. Waitlisted students are "bombarding" schools with "baked goods, family photos, craft projects depicting campus landmarks, and dossiers of testimonials from civic and religious leaders." And that's just the students who are trying to demonstrate good behavior.

Because just like in the dating world, some suitors are psychotic. Admissions directors recount waitlisted students insulting the college, disparaging accepted students, threatening the admissions officers' jobs, showing up for unscheduled interviews, and of course, showing up at the admissions office with a camping tent.

And it's not just the stalkers that admissions officers have to watch out for. These kids also have parents — insecure parents.

“There’s a mother who e-mails me every third day — they must have timers on these things,” Union College admissions head Ann Fleming Brown told the Times. “There’s one parent who calls up and yells at me: ‘I can’t believe this happened! This is a horrible thing!’ And then he calls 10 minutes later and says, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then he calls and says, ‘I know you don’t like me. I’m being a complete pest.’ ”

Nor do dowries seem to rescue these doomed relationships.

The Times notes that "at a time when top academic institutions now recieve nine-figure donations, there is little point" in trying to buy your kid into the school. Nor can Michael Motto over at Yale be swayed by love notes, cookies with his name on them, two free pizzas a week for a year, rotator cuff surgery or carpal tunnel surgery, all of which he claims suitors offered him and he callously rejected.

But despite this seemingly one-sided courtship, sometimes the schools get their hearts broken too.

Moncia Inzer, the dean of admissions at Hamilton College, recalled the day she lost her naïveté.

"Last year, I had a girl who wrote to me every day,” Inzer said. “She’d send me e-mails; she’d send me letters; she had alums write to me. We all knew that this girl wanted us more than anyone else.”

When a spot opened up, Inzer immediately thought of the girl. After all, they'd been talking every day, things were going well, Inzer even dared to think that maybe she'd finally have someone to show off at those Admissions mixers. But it was not to be.

“She said, ‘Eh, I’m going someplace else.’"

[via, photo via Getty]

Three people are dead, and three are alive, after a 36-hour standoff between police and an armed man in Trenton, New Jersey ended early Sunday morning.

The hostage-taker, identified as Gerald "Skip" Murphy, 38, was killed during the rescue. Officials found the bodies of homeowner Carmelita Stevens, 44, and her 13-year-old son, once they entered the home.

The freed children were a 4-year-old boy and 16 and 18-year-old girls.

Trenton police were called to the home after relatives of Stevens grew worried when they hadn't heard from her for a "long period of time." When officers forced entry into the home on Friday afternoon, "they immediately smelled the stench of a rotting corpse, and could see maggots."

Police spent almost two days negotiating with Murphy, who had taken the three children hostage upstairs. Murphy claimed he had a gun and explosives.

After determining that Murphy had a "deteriorating state of mind," officers entered the room and killed Murphy with a single shot, as they claim "he made a violent move toward one of the children."

Murphy already had a warrant out for not registering as a sex offender. He had a long criminal history which included assault, robbery, weapons and child endangerment.

[Reuters]

Nearly half of the critically endangered tortoises seized from smugglers in Thailand last month have died since the rescue, and the fate of the remaining tortoises is in the air.

In March, Thai officials caught two smugglers with hundreds of endangered tortoises at the Suvarnabhumi Internatioanl Airport. The haul included 54 critically endangered ploughshares from Madagascar, representing about 10 percent of the entire remaining species.

No one is really sure why the animals died after authorities rescued them from the poachers. Eric Goode, president of the Turtle Conservancy, a Thai wildlife rescue center, says it is unlikely that they died from dehydration or starvation. He said that trauma during the journey could be a possible cause, but that it was unlikely to come from the smugglers' transport due to their financial incentive to keep the tortoises healthy.

Poachers usually collect the small ploughshare tortoises during Madagascar's wet season, then transport them through the city of Mahajana and islands in the Indian Ocean, before sending them through Kenya and on to Thailand. When rescued, tortoises can be sent through multiple Thai provinces before they reach a wildlife rescue center.

And authorities are divided on the question of what to do with the remaining living tortoises. Some believe the animals have to be held as evidence until the smugglers are tried. Turtle Conservancy scientists are fighting to use photographs of the tortoises instead. Madagascar has expressed interest in bringing the tortoises home, but political turmoil has taken precedence in the country. Even then, scientists are unsure if the tortoises can even be returned to the wild because it is still unclear whether they have been exposed to disease.

In the meantime, the Thai government is working to send veterinarians and conservation team members from Madagascar to keep the remaining tortoises alive until their fate is decided.

[via, photo via Getty]

Not content to merely terrorize adults, Chris Brown is now frightening Los Angeles children with "grimacing, sharp-toothed, red-eyed goblin" murals around his home. Brown argues that his neighbors are trying to suspend his First Amendment rights.

Matt Drudge would like to spend as little as four to five hours sitting down, working on his blog each day. But sometimes a sex survey or the N-Word happens and he is compelled to stay blogging for up to 17 hours a day. I know what you're thinking. Matt, but your back!

Good thing Drudge has incredibly perfect posture, ideal for blogging a wonderful mix of paranoia and bigotry. Writes the New York Times,

To ease his back, neck and shoulder pain, Mr. Drudge says he has learned how to adjust his posture. Whether he’s typing in the car, from the wooden folding chair in his Miami home office, or from a boardwalk bench at the beach on cloudy days, he makes sure to tilt the top of his pelvis forward, roll his shoulders back, elongate his spine and straighten his craned neck.

Mr. Drudge then unhinges his jaw, rolls his eyes backwards in his head, and devours a newborn.

Drudge is a student of Esther Gokhale, a Silicon Valley-based posture specialist who helps people throughout the tech sector, who often subject themselves to grueling days almost entirely behind a keyboard.

“I needed her touch, her observations and her humanity,” Drudge said of Gokhale.

Nathaniel Troy Maye and Tiwanna Tenise Thomason stole thousands of identities. And they might have gotten away with it, had it not been for a Morton's steak with macaroni and cheese, a meal so perfect and delectable it just had to be photographed and turned into food porn. It just had to be uploaded to Maye's Instagram account, uploaded with the perfect caption: "Morton's."

They must have known the risks. Smartphone users across the nation have noted the chilling effects of restaurant crackdowns on food photography. But for these Instagrammers, the consequences were much greater.

For IRS agents had already been tracking the Bonnie and Clyde of identity theft. They came up on the IRS radar after the couple met an informant at — no joke — YOLO Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. Maye told the informant his name was Troy and that he had stolen 700,000 identities, but the IRS could not yet crack the thief of identities' identity.

So two days later, the informant arranged to meet with the couple at Morton's to discuss exciting new identity theft innovations. Specifically, the couple brought a flash drive of identities to use to file fradulent income tax returns. IRS agents found hidden data on the drive linking it to a "Troy Maye."

As part of a thorough investigation, a special agent went on Google and immediately found Maye's Instagram profile. Maye's public Instagram profile. Maye's public Instagram profile with a photograph of the dinner he ate with an IRS informant, captioned "Morton's." Just to be sure, agents had the informant positively identify another photo of Maye from his own Instagram.

The IRS arrested the couple and found around 55,000 identities on flash drives in Thomason's home. And, in a judicial first, the Instagram photograph was cited as evidence in the federal felony complaint. The couple pleaded guilty Friday to aggravated identity theft and possession of unathorized access devices. They face up to 12 years in federal prison.

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