Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year-old high school student who made news earlier this month after her misguided science experiment created a small explosion on school property, will not face felony charges for the incident after all.

The state attorney for Polk County, Florida announced on Wednesday that both felony charges had been dismissed against Wilmot, but that the teenager must undergo a “diversion program.” No details were released about the diversion program.

Wilmot was arrested April 22 and charged with two felonies after she combined household cleaning products with aluminum foil in a bottle, causing the top of the bottle to pop off and smoke to pour from the bottle. No injuries or damage occurred in the blast.

After the explosion, the school's resource officer detained Wilmot until police arrived. She was later charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device.

The teenager told authorities she'd been performing a science experiment, a claim her teacher denied. The school's principal, Ron Pritchard, supported Wilmot's side of the story, telling WTSP earlier this month, "She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did," before adding "honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone."

Pritchard, however, still expelled the teen, who will now "be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program," according to the Miami New Times.

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

Google has been trying to get its electronic payment service, Google Wallet, off the ground for years now, but as the months dragged on Wallet was getting about as much traction as its sister service Google Plus. That all might change with Wallet's latest development, introduced today in the video above. If Google has its way, you'll soon be able to send and receive money via your Gmail account in the length of time it takes to send any other email.

Beginning in the coming months, Gmail users who are 18 or older will be able to use Google Wallet to attach a money transfer to their emails. Transactions from bank accounts are free, while transactions with debit or credit cards will be charged a 2.9 percent fee. The person receiving the cash won't have to have a Gmail account, though they will have to sign up for Google Wallet to accept the transfer. And if the thought of sending lots of money via email creeps you out, "Google Wallet Purchase Protection" will cover "100% of all eligible unauthorized transactions reported within 180 days of purchase."

If this takes off, it seems like it could be the death knell of electronic payment giant PayPal. According to PayPal's own numbers, it has 110 million active user accounts. Gmail's user base—425 million active accounts as of June of last year—dwarfs that.

If you’re in a tropical country and looking to avoid malaria, the scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have an easy pro-tip for you: wash your damn socks.

Researchers placed several pairs of smelly socks –which they stank up by having someone wear them for 20 hours straight – in an enclosure filled with mosquitoes and several pairs of clean, non-smelly socks. The mosquitoes infected with the P. falciparum strain of malaria were more likely to land on and probe the dirty socks than the non-infected mosquitoes, though those also favored the dirty socks.

None of the mosquitoes – infected or not –showed significant interest in the clean socks.

[LA Times]

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

According to local officials, several people were killed and over 100 were injured in a powerful storm in north Texas. The National Weather Service said there were reports of a mile-wide tornado in the area.

National Review writer Kevin Williamson has an interesting post up at The Corner right now. The post describes his trip to the theater Wednesday night, which was disrupted by a woman next to him who kept using her phone throughout the performance. He asked her several times to stop, and she refused, telling Williamson to mind his own business. So Williamson did what any petulant child or criminal would do: he grabbed the phone from her hands and threw it across the room.

Or, as Williamson put it, “he minded [his] own business by utilizing [his] famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room” which caused the woman (whom Williamson describes as “of a certain age”) to slap him before storming “away to seek managerial succor.” A security guard then kicked Williamson out of the theater.

Williamson ends his post with this: “There is talk of criminal charges. I will keep you updated.”

Based on Williamson’s own description of his actions, he may have committed criminal mischief in the third degree, which is a class E felony:

A person is guilty of criminal mischief in the third degree when, with intent to damage property of another person, and having no right to do so nor any reasonable ground to believe that he or she has such right, he or she:

2. damages property of another person in an amount exceeding two hundred fifty dollars.

He may also be guilty of menacing in the third degree:

A person is guilty of menacing in the third degree when, by physical menace, he or she intentionally places or attempts to place another person in fear of death, imminent serious physical injury or physical injury.

Of course none of that is of any concern to Williamson. When asked by a commenter why he didn’t just report the woman to the theater’s manager, he responded, “I believe in direct action.”

[National Review]

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

A tornado outbreak ripped through north Texas last night, killing at least six, and leaving hundreds injured. Particularly hard-hit was the small town of Granbury, Texas, which saw two neighborhoods leveled by a single tornado.

"Some were found in houses. Some were found around houses," Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds told reporters at a midnight news conference. He cautioned that the death toll could rise as recovery efforts continue through the morning.

The Rancho Brazos neighborhood of Granbury, which is 65 miles Southwest of Dallas, has several house built by Habitat for Humanity, some of which were destroyed by the tornadoes.

"With these types of tornadoes, they touch down; they lift up; they touch down. They tend to hopscotch," Matt Zavadsky, a spokesman for EMS workers, told CNN. "The darkness doesn't help, but the crews on scene are doing a really good job to try and reach out to the folks who might be trapped or unable to get to a shelter or the triage area."

It may have been three separate tornadoes that hit the region.

"We heard the winds whipping and glass smashing everywhere," said Ranchos Brazos resident Elizabeth Tovar, 25. "It felt like a long time and when things died down I looked up and saw that the roof was gone."

[AP | CNN | Image via AP]

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one-half of the alleged Boston marathon bombers, left a note in the boat he was hiding in during the final hours of the April 19th manhunt, CBS News is reporting.

CBS News correspondent John Miller says sources tell him that the note was written by Dzhokhar on the interior wall of the boat's cabin, as Dzhokhar was bleeding from a gunshot wound he received earlier that morning.

The note stated that the bombings were in retribution for what the United States had done to Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and calling the bombing victims "collateral damage," much in the way that many Muslims have died during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," the note said.

Dzhokhar also revealed that he wasn't mourning his brother, Tamerlan, who died earlier that morning, because Tamerlan was already a martyr in paradise by then. Dzhokhar wrote that he soon expected to join him as a martyr.

[AP]

Sean "P.uff Di/addy" Combs took to his Twitter account yesterday to announce that, incredibly, he had been cast as the first black cast member of the popular Masterpiece Classic series Downton Abbey.

Incredibly, that is, because there was absolutely no way that was true.

WGBH Boston confirmed as much when they released a statement saying,"Very funny, but it's simply not true."

Not true, perhaps, but "very funny"? That's for the viewers to decide: As promised, Diddy released the "preview" of his Downton Abbey debut at midnight via Funny or Die.

Diddy plays Lord Wilcott, the new owner of Downton Abbey, who apparently doesn't know how to pronounce the name of his own house.

Something tells me this character will be cut before the show returns in January.

[screengrab via Funny or Die]

A pastor at a Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida who also worked as a custodial manager for Disney World was arrested this week for allegedly using the computer in his office to download child porn and solicit minors.

The Orange County Sheriff's Office was alerted last month to Cedric Cuthbert's on-the-clock activities by Disney, which noted that the 49-year-old was attempting to access blocked website through his work computer.

Investigators say that in addition to viewing child pornography, Cuthbert was also sending messages to underage girls on YouTube telling them he though they had a "great sexy bodi (sic)" and asking them to "send me a private vid."

The same computer was also used by Cuthbert on at least two occasions to pen Sunday sermons for Historic St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Sanford where he has been serving as pastor for the last three years.

Traces of semen were also found in his office.

Cuthbert was able to bond out of jail under the condition that he avoid all contact with all minors, except his 8 and 11-year-old sons.

[screengrab via WKMG]

Today is a terrible, awful, no-good day and I'm going to go get drunk now.

If you are an influential user of a Bloomberg terminal—the $24,000-per-year glorified computers that the company sells to Wall Street trading firms, politicians, and banks—there's a chance the company's news division has a file on you that's chock full of personal information about your family, your predilections, and your 24-hour contact information. And it's accessible to all 2,400 journalists at Bloomberg News.

Bloomberg has been facing down a maelstrom this week, ever since it emerged that the company's news division has for years encouraged its reporters to access internal company information to snoop on how the subjects of their reporting use Bloomberg terminals. Reporters could see when people logged on and off, read transcripts of their chats with customer service, even see when they were checking job listings. When Goldman Sachs learned that its executives had been surveilled, the New York Post got word and all hell broke loose.

In the wake of those disclosures, several former Bloomberg reporters reached out to Gawker to point out another way the company uses its terminals to capture and share personal information about customers: the "reporter's note" function.

Every Bloomberg subscriber has a bio page with the user's photograph, employment status, and office telephone number. At the bottom of each page is a link called REPN, accessible to any of the 2,400 journalists Bloomberg employs worldwide.

REPN, which is also searchable by name, is like an internal data dump where Bloomberg journalists share intel on sources. That's where reporters are encouraged to leave private cellphone and home phone numbers, email addresses, interests and hobbies, best time of day to call, whether the source is married or has a girlfriend or has recently separated, and details on how to get them to start talking—try to bring up his two daughters, hates the cost of private school tuition—all concerning highly-influential, market-moving bankers and politicians.

Many newsrooms keep shared internal files on sources—how to reach a deputy mayor after hours, etc.—and any reporter would love to get her hands on those dossiers. Information-sharing, whether formal or informal, is sort of the point of journalism. Banks also keep similar files on reporters.

But the extensive use of REPN at Bloomberg is notable for three reasons: 1) It's just one of many, many ways the company—where "stalking is simply part of the culture"—obsessively logs data about its employees and customers. It's another watch tower in the Bloomberg panopticon. 2) While most power players wouldn't be surprised to find that a private cell phone number they gave to a reporter was shared around a newsroom, they might not expect that personal details they divulged about, say the status of their marriage were being systematically recorded for corporate use.

And, most importantly, 3) former Bloomberg sources say they REPN information was sometimes misused or shared outside the newsroom.

One former Bloomberg reporter told Gawker:

I will give you an example how this was abused by me. My parents had an issue with an airline booking, and I wrote to the CEO of that airline (without mentioning I was from Bloomberg or how I got that email) and the issues was resolved. I have been told that many reporters also abuse that function for different reasons like asking for jobs.

"If someone did that, it's a clear violation of our policies," said Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet.

As journalism professor Chris Roush, a former Bloomberg News reporter, noted in Talking Biz News, Bloomberg's notoriously autocratic news chief Matthew Winkler once shared a source's REPN page with her:

(Editor in chief Matt Winkler once showed this feature to one of my beverage sources, who was incensed that I had entered into the system that she was sometimes difficult to work with.)

Added the former reporter:

The terminal gives blatant opportunities to pry into other people's affairs. And its not just clients. If I think Betty Liu is someone that I may be interested in knowing, I can check if she is married, her home address, spouse name, phone number, etc. I can give out the info to others [to] capitalise in whatever they see fit. It's eerie. There is no privacy for anyone, staff, clients, personalities.

That includes Bloomberg reporters themselves, whose keystrokes are also being logged. If the REPN data was used so cavalierly by Bloomberg News staffers, it's an open question whether it was ever accessed to help grease sales, which is of course the company's bread and butter. “It’s only available in the newsroom and not to any other part of the compay. Period," stressed a Bloomberg News spokesperson.

But as Bloomberg quietly starts to compete with its clients as a brokerage operation, "motivated in part by a slowdown in the core terminals business," that data only becomes more lucrative.

Update: A Bloomberg News spokesperson clarified that the REPN database covered heads of state and newsmakers, beyond just clients of its terminal service.

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

[Image by Jim Cooke]

"Right now is a horrible time to be a buyer or a renter" in Brooklyn, says one realtor. Thanks for that helpful insight.

It took three police officers to safely extract an adult McDonald's patron from a toddler's high chair in which he had somehow managed to get himself stuck.

The Cork, Ireland, resident was enjoying a late dinner last Tuesday at the restaurant's Winthrop Street location when he spontaneously decided to see if McDonald's' baby seats could comfortably sustain an adult-sized derriere.

While he was able to successfully lodge himself in the chair, he was unfortunately unable to subsequently remove himself from it.

Witnesses say alcohol may have played a factor in the man's ill-advised science experiment.

The police were eventually alerted to the situation, and arrived to free the customer from his childish prison.

Huffington Post UK notes that the man was apparently dining alone, but says it is unclear if he had arrived solo "or his friends left him after his practical joke went wrong."

After a photo of the incident went viral, McDonald's piled on with a tongue-in-cheek release reiterating its recommendation that "children don’t use the high-chair without adult supervision."

[H/T: Brooklyn Mutt, photo via Twitter]

Barack Obama's press conference today wasn't just about a couple of scandals and whatever's happening in Syria or Turkey. It was actually a metaphor, or a series of metaphors. Jessica Yellin knows this, because she was there, and she saw God punish Obama's lies with His rain.

Really, if it rains now it's symbolic of a president getting hassled over some political stuff? Is this like "when it rains on your wedding day," and how old was Jessica Yellin when that song was popular? She was the exact age to buy that record, that's how old she was.

Also: umbrellas are like "media shields."

Here, CNN's White House correspondent brags about her ability to yell at people and be ignored:

In an effort to simplify your morning routine, the inventors at Colgate-Palmolive have filed a patent for technology for regular toothbrushes containing chemicals that would slowly be released into your mouth as you brushed.

The chemicals include:

• Flavors like apple and lemon
• "Capsaicin, found naturally in chile peppers," which would be used to create a warming senstation, or "a tingle, a hot or warm massage"
• Something that causes cooling sensation (represented by a cute little snowflake)
• Caffeine
• Medication
• Benzocaine, "to be used for pain relief from teething or gum irritation in infants or children"
• Appetite suppressants for "for weight loss treatment"
• Painkillers

Here's what the patent has to saw about giving warnings regarding the toothbrush's upcoming secret powers:

"In each case, associated visuals may be present communicate the beneficial effect, such as the representation of a throbbing tooth for benzocaine, a human figure with a slimming waist line for the zo-caine types of medicine or an “Rx” symbol for pain relief medication."

The patches would last about three months, and would disseminate the chemicals slowly throughout that time. This new group of complicated toothbrushes could be crucial time-savers or more likely, things that cause a series of unintended consequences.

[image via Andrey_Kuzmin/Shutterstock]

The Guy Who Only Masturbates to Beyonce Videos, and other people you meet at "Skinny Mini Speed Dating."

That's because it was originally a Vine created by business major Eric V. Dunn.

It has since been picked up by Best Vines and uploaded to YouTube where it received the distinct honor of being referred to as possibly "the best video" on the site.

Not bad for six seconds.

[H/T: Pleated-Jeans]

Daft Punk's Random Access Memories emphatically exploits pop music's reliance on context. It's been eight years since the French house pop-crossover critical darlings released their last full-length album, 2005’s Human After All, which was initially a considered a disappointment. In that span, Human's furious pummeling and caustic textures went on to influence the prevailing style of house music more than any other single work of the past 10 years. If their prescience wasn't enough to bring Daft Punk back into the good graces of their audience, surely their 2007 live show performed on a mesmerizing light-up pyramid was.

Random Access Memories (which began streaming on iTunes this week) is a pointed response to their past work and the EDM it inspired. It turns away from their trusted synthesizers and drum machines for something more "live," something featuring disco god Nile Rogers on guitar and session musicians who played with Bowie and on Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall.

This is more than a stylistic shift. As the chattier half of the duo, Thomas Bangalter, recently told Rolling Stone:

Electronic music right now is in its comfort zone and it’s not moving one inch. That’s not what artists are supposed to do…[The genre is suffering] an identity crisis: You hear a song, whose track is it? There’s no signature.

If it was funny that their most suffocatingly programmed release was called Human After All, it's even funnier that after Human After All, these robots show us that they are human after all. "Emotion" is a word they have been using a lot to describe the record's objective.

To put their own signature on dance music in 2013, Daft Punk trace the hands of forebears like Rogers and electronic dance music pioneer (decades before EDM) Giorgio Moroder. The latter does a rambling spoken account of his musical history over watered-down approximations of his arpeggiated disco and his proggy flourishes on the nine-minute “Giorgio.” Random Access Memories is often disco, but when it is it's of the slow-chug variety. The stellar first single, “Get Lucky,” is as energetic as it gets. It also routinely dips into a slower, self-consciously smooth groove resembling lite fare like the Alan Parsons Project's “Eye in the Sky.”

Random Access Memories is album-oriented pop in a time of singles. It is full of drum-kit-workout breakdowns and little shimmies of guitar riffs that would have sounded trite within the late '70s/early '80s era that Daft Punk salute. But these references are self-evident enough to be easily forgiven. And if the retroism isn’t evident, well, Daft Punk will explain it to you—with features in Rolling Stone, GQ, The New York Times, Billboard, Dazed, and Pitchfork, the mystery-valuing duo are talking more than ever. Context is crucial for something this subtle.

Daft Punk marry these vintage influences with their affinity for slithering melodies and repetitive near-songs (on Random Access, the second verse is often the same as the first). To the Times, Bangalter rhapsodized the “infinity of nuance, in the shuffles and the grooves” made by human hands, not machines. But given its loopy, simplistic nature, this huge production—which took years to complete and roped in big names of varying genres like Pharrell Williams and Animal Collective's Panda Bear—feels akin to a rediscovery of the lost art of cursive or long division. Yes, it is more dynamic and warmer than the block waveforms of Top 40 radio. Yes, the drums have a satisfying spring no matter how mellow the groove. Yes, you feel space here. Yes, craftsmanship is a forgotten pop virtue. And that handmade garment with such lovely decorative lining is so special to the person who's wearing it.

For all of the work that went into it, and that went into making it an event (those SNL promos built such suspense that the release of “Get Lucky” felt orgasmic), there is something slight about this album. It would be one thing if we were actually living in the disco era and Random Access Memories were one album in a string of them—if this were Daft Punk’s C’est Chic, for example. But this is rare output from trusted tastemakers. The hype and possibility were more intoxicating than this rather dry work. I can’t imagine listening to most of this album after this week.

And yet, I admire Random Access Memories. I love Daft Punk for confronting a public that is more attentive than ever with the audacity of cheese. I think it's bold of them to force kids today to consider the past that their moment-fetishizing #yolo lifestyle is founded upon. I appreciate them for giving us disco to unite us in these gay times. But if these are its key strengths, Random Access Memories works better as an object than an album.

Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

I have a small shop and 2 shop dogs. There's a local lady with a dog who walks by daily. I recognize her from the pet store as being every shop owner's nightmare aka a time suck who doesn't buy anything. My dogs are great shop dogs, friendly and outgoing to customers. They will bark at another dog thru the window though make friends once the other dog is in the shop. I want to pretend my dogs are not dog friendly to deter this woman from entering my shop and wasting my time. Is that okay?

Thatz not okay.

What exactly is the plan here? For you to brace yourself in the doorway and scream, “AWAY, AWAY INNOCENTS! O THAT MY STORE WERE NOT GUARDED BY SUCH CERBERUSES! NOT REALLY SURE WHY I KEEP THEM IN A RETAIL SPACE, TO BE HONEST. WHO KNOWS WHY I DO WHAT I DO?”

Why would you keep unfriendly dogs in a store?

After receiving your email, I looked up the Yelp reviews for your shop, as this woman might, upon hearing that your business is home to vicious street curs. Many of the write-ups mentioned the “very sweet," “friendly” dogs who are only working at the store part-time to put themselves through cooking school. While these reviews reflect wonderfully on you, a responsible pet owner with well-socialized dogs, they hinder your harebrained scheme.

Phase I of preventing this one random woman from entering your shop because you hate her for no clear reason is to write a bunch of fake Yelp reviews for your boutique.

"The only thing more terrifying than the dogs was the terrifyingly excellent service.”

“The dogs are SO CUTE but I think one of them is a coyote and gave my Samoyed rabies.”

But! What if the woman wants to come back on her own, without her puppy chaperone? The dog in question is presumably not a guide dog. (If it is: you are the devil; your shop's scented candles burn with the eternal flames of hell.) How will you keep her out of the store once the (pretend) hell hounds are no longer an issue? Just stand on the sidewalk and yell "EVERYTHING I SELL IS BAD! I PROMISE YOU DON’T WANT IT"?

Not that logic or rational thinking is really a factor here, but I'm curious as to how, from merely watching this woman in a pet store, you deduced that she would not buy anything from your store. Do you own a pet store? Is the pet store you own the one in which you saw her not buying anything? How does she feed her dog if she doesn’t buy it food from the pet store?

Generally speaking, it is bad business practice to keep potential customers away from your store on the chance they MIGHT not buy anything. (This is why one rarely sees signs reading “Store is for customers only” and “You SEE it, you BUY it" hung outside souvenir shops.) If you must, a surefire way to keep this lady (and others like her) off your property is to throw a “closed” sign up anytime someone walks by; that way no customers will ever come in and waste your time.

Incidentally, everything I've just said is irrelevant, as this woman has given no indication she WANTS to enter your store. She walks by daily and yet has never set foot inside. It sounds like you’re already doing a great job of keeping her away.

At work, I get half-day Fridays in during our Summer Hours schedule. Husband decided to take half-Fridays off from work this summer, too. Problem is: I don't want to be obligated to spend this time with him; I like the 4-hour afternoon freedom & personal time. In fact, it annoys me that he intruded. Is that okay?

Thatz not okay.

If you don’t want to spend time with your husband, "Husband," on your summer Fridays, I would tell him what you just told me. Word-for-word. Print out the email and give it to him.

Just because your job gives you summer Fridays doesn’t mean your husband doesn’t deserve summer Fridays. See how that sentence doesn’t exactly make sense? That’s because your complaint doesn’t exactly make sense.

You’re fortunate that you have a job that gives its employees half-day Fridays. Your husband is fortunate that he has a job that allows him to decide out of the blue that maybe instead of working on Friday afternoons, he will just not do that. (What is his job? A neighborhood lemonade stand?)

“Summer Fridays” are not a concept invented by you for the enjoyment of you and no one else.

Yes, it is possible that your husband is hoping to spend time with you while you’re both off work. I can understand how this guy would have gotten the impression you wanted to hang out with him; it probably happened at or around your wedding. (Little did he know you were marrying him only to escape him. Keeping your enemies closer, etc.)

Does he come on vacations with you? Invite himself to breakfast when you’re having cereal A-L-O-N-E? When’s he gonna get a clue that you are a lone wolf: private; independent; crepuscular, becoming particularly active on Fridays?

Wanting time alone is fine. The newsflash here is that your husband probably does not plan to spend every one of his (equally precious) summer Friday hours Velcro'd to your side. What were you planning on doing with those four-hour breaks? Banging a stranger in your marriage bed? If it’s anything other than that, it probably won’t be adversely affected by his being home (or even more broadly: not being at work) at the same time as you. He’s probably got some plans too.

If you’re really desperate to avoid him, I’m sure your employer can find some work for you to do during what would have been your summer Fridays.

But my advice is to keep your chin up and muscle through it. Summer only lasts for a few months and you won’t be married much longer.

Submit your "Thatz Not Okay" questions (max: 200 words) here. Art by Jim Cooke. Source photo via Shutterstock.

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