With a vote of 13 to 5, the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a landmark immigration bill that would offer a chance at citizenship to millions of immigrants living in America illegally.

A mystery respiratory illness has killed two people and infected five others in Alabama. All of the victims have shown signs of fever, cough and shortness of breath, but the Alabama Department of Public Health hasn't been able to identify the disease.

Officials collected samples from all of the victims and sent them to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, but results aren't available yet. One of the test samples tested positive for H1N1 influenza A, but officials aren't sure if that's what caused the illness.

"At this point it's too early to tell," [Acting state epidemiologist for the Alabama Department of Public Health Dr. Mary] McIntyre told NBC News. "That's why we called it a respiratory illness of unknown origin."

McIntyre did note that none of the victims had travelled – or been in contact with someone who'd travelled – outside the country recently, which would have put them at risk for several unfamiliar diseases.

In recent months, a new strain of Coronavirus surfaced in several countries, including France, the UK and Saudi arabia, killing 18 and infecting another 15. And there's been recent evidence that H7N9, a strain of the bird flu has killed 17 and infected 82 in China, might spread person-to-person, though Alabama officials said there was no evidence linking the infections to H7N9.

[NBC News/Image via Shutterstock]

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

A new nightclub in Scotland is being investigated by police and other Glasgow city officials after a newspaper investigation revealed the club had installed two-way mirrors in its women's bathrooms, exposing the women to viewers in two private rooms.

The Scottish Sunday Express broke the story this weekend, claiming they've seen photos showing men posing in front of the two-way mirrors, with women using the bathroom behind them. The paper said there were no signs or notifications in the bathroom or club notifying the women they were being watched.

Several female club-goers interviewed by the paper expressed shock at the revelations. “I find it absolutely outrageous that a club can get away with this, it is a complete invasion of privacy of the unsuspecting girls,” one said. “Nowhere is it made clear that this is the case so when visiting the bathroom for the first time, there are women bending over the sink, pouting into the mirror to redo their lipstick, adjusting themselves whilst unknowingly being watched by people on the other side.”

When reporters from the the Sunday Express contacted the club posing as potential clients, they were told the the private rooms, which cost over $1200 to rent, were not available to male or mixed gender groups. Photos online reportedly show otherwise.

Everyone, this is a photo of the "secret" two way mirror in the female toilets of@shimmyclub in Glasgow. Disgrace! twitter.com/codeinedrums/s…

— Lauren Martin (@codeinedrums) May 20, 2013

When the Express asked the club for official comment, they didn't receive a response.

However, on Monday the Shimmy Club responded to the growing controversy on their Facebook page, saying the two-way mirror was “created as a bit of fun, an interactive feature which we hoped would act as a talking point.” As for those offended by the concept, the club writes, “its (sic) clear that those who are negatively commenting on line may not have been lucky enough to get past the door staff yet.” The club did, however, say they would remove the mirrors “if your feedback (and not that of the media) is that you want the mirror area to change.”

Those changes, if they do happen, might occur too late for the club to avoid legal trouble; The Guardian reports that Scottish police and and Glasgow city council are investigating the club after receiving complaints.

[Image via Lauren Martin]

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

A goat made a daring, potentially life-saving escape Tuesday morning from a truck authorities believe was headed to a slaughterhouse. The goat, named Sky, fell or jumped while being driven across the Pulaski Skyway bridge, where she ran wild during the rush hour commute.

“The goat kept jumping over the divider and on top of cars,” Jersey City Police Capt. Edgar Martinez told 1010 WINS. “It was cornered and captured with a rope and we were able to walk it to the vehicle where it was taken out of the Skyway.”

But the capture Captain Martinez describes above didn't take place until after Sky caused a four-car accident. It also took five New Jersey police officers nearly two hours to lasso Sky, who reportedly dragged her feet as she was taken to the rescue vehicle.

Officials found a U.S. Department of Agriculture tag attached to the goat's ear, which led them to believe she was traveling by truck to a slaughterhouse. Sky was taken to the Liberty Humane Society in Jersey City. If she's not claimed, she'll be moved to a rescue farm.

[h/t Daily Intelligencer/New York Daily News/Photo via Pix 11]

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

For the third time since Mark Carson was shot and killed by a homophobe on Saturday, a gay man was attacked in Manhattan because of his sexual orientation.

The attack took place late Monday night. As the New York Times reports, two men – who had known each other for about a month – spent Monday afternoon drinking; later that night, at approximately 10:45 p.m., the conversation turned to the fact that one of the men was gay. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the conversation was friendly at first but unexpectedly turned violent.

“According to the victim, his assailant just snapped, became enraged and yelled antigay expletives,” Kelly told the Times.

The victim was struck in the head and knocked unconscious. He was later treated at Bellevue Hospital Center and released. The suspect, Roman Gronell, 39, fled and is still at-large.

Later that night, just a few blocks away at Avenue D and 4th Street, party promoter Dan Contarino (pictured above) was attacked by a man screaming "faggot" at him. A bruised and bloodied Contarino was later taken to a nearby hospital, where, according to his Facebook page, he underwent minor surgery. And early Tuesday morning, a gay couple was attacked in SoHo by two men making “antigay, derogatory statements in Spanish and English.”

The recent attacks bring the number of antigay crimes in New York City to 29, over double the number at this time last year.

[New York Times/NBC New York]

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

After months of speculation, it's official: Anthony Weiner is running for mayor of New York City. “I made some big mistakes,” the former congressman said in his first campaign commercial. True. But if Mark Sanford can make a political comeback, anyone can, though Weiner might want to figure out how many more of his dick pics are still out there.

A man in Orlando was shot and killed last night after being questioned by an FBI agent about his connection to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Ibragim Todashev was being interviewed by the FBI because he had been in contact with suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the Boston Marathon. He had recently traveled to Boston to meet with Tamerlan, and had also planned a trip to Chechnya.The FBI agents were interviewing Todashev in his apartment near Universal Studios.

Apparently the questioning, which began without incident, turned deadly when Todashev attacked the FBI agent. The agent then shot and killed Todashev just after midnight.

Khusn Taramiv, a friend of the suspect, tells NBC News in Orlando that the 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev knew Tsarnaev because both were MMA fighters.

“We are currently responding to a shooting incident involving an FBI special agent,” FBI Special Agent Dave Couvertier told NBC News. "“The incident occurred in Orlando, Florida. The agent encountered the suspect while conducting official duties. We do not have any further details at this time. We expect to have more information later this morning.”

Taramiv says that he and Todashev were interviewed for almost three hours last night.

"(The FBI) took me and my friend, the suspect that got killed. They were talking to us, both of us, right? And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back. They never brought him back," Taramiv told NBC.

"He felt inside he was going to get shot," Taramiv said. "I told him, 'Everything is going to be fine, don't worry about it.' He said, 'I have a really bad feeling.'"

By far one of the most iconic photos to emerge from Monday's top-of-the-scale Tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, is this one shared by "extreme meterologist" Reed Timmer of a near-perfect ten-pin frame still standing amid the ruins of Moore's devastated bowling alley.

Some have suggested that the photo was staged, but others have noted that a uniform blast of mud is clearly visible on the left side of the pins, making it highly likely that this is simply a freak of nature.

[photos via @reedtimmerTVN, @JEstevezWFTV, @aleithead]

io9 Christopher Nolan explains how Watchmen paved the way for Man of Steel | Lifehacker The Post-College Survival Guide | Jalopnik Did The McLaren P1 Just Obliterate The Lap Record At The Nurburgring? | Deadspin ESPN Is Now Hiring. Young And Cheap May Apply.

It looks like Mayor Bloomberg has found himself a cause worthy of his power and billions once he leaves office. "Fucking destroying" the taxi industry, according to The New York Post.

Bloomberg revealed his plan last week after the State Supreme Court ruled against his administration's Taxi of Tomorrow plan. The judge said imposing a near-uniform fleet violated a city provision requiring a hybrid car option for taxi operators.

For the "revenge-minded" politico, this time . . . it's personal. He also told Taxi Club Management CEO Gene Freidman, whose company operates a fleet of 925 yellow cabs and challenged Bloomberg's proposal: "After January, I am going to destroy all you fucking guys."

Friedman told the Post:

“He was very angry, very scary, very violent in a non-physical way. He was grinding his teeth, he was spitting, he was red and he was in my face,” the self-styled “King of the Road” claimed.

“The mayor was extremely disrespectful, and not ‘mayorly’ at all.

To be fair, Bloomberg likes to play fast and loose with the definition of "mayorly" conduct.

But as is typical for a post-blind rage blackout, the whole thing was a blur to Hizzoner, who accosted Friedman at the elite 1879 Club inside Madison Square Garden during the Knicks playoff game.

“The only thing I remember from that night was the [basketball] court. It was the court in the middle of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks won,” the suddenly memory-challenged mayor said.

Bloomberg's strategy for "fucking destroying" the taxi industry and destroying "all you fucking guys" gimme the fucking keys you fucking cocksucker is still unclear. But the self-stylized startup champion has expressed frustration with the taxi industry before.

The week that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission was forced to reach a compromise over apps that let you hail and pay for yellow cabs from your smartphone, Bloomberg said in his weekly radio address:

“The cab industry is a funny industry. I don’t know if there’s any other place in the world where the city gives a license and the people that have that license can then trade it and resell it and the city doesn’t have any interest and any ability to share in the value going up. And the politics, because they support candidates–a normal market would just say: Well, we’ll just issue more taxi licenses. Wrong! Because they have bought the legislatures and stopped the ability to do that. It is one of the great rip-offs of the public any place I’ve ever seen.”

Oh, just invest in Uber already. You know you want to.

We reached out to Bloomberg's office for comment and will update the post when we hear back.

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

As higher education in America grows both more expensive and more necessary (as an entry fee to a middle class life), community colleges— the last affordable path into college— grow more important. But they're not getting any more well-funded. Quite the opposite!

More than 40% of U.S. college students are in community colleges. But a new report from The Century Foundation says that government funding for community colleges is lagging, which translates to poor resources for the students who are most in need. From the NYT:

In 2009, community colleges spent $9,300 per student on educational resources, virtually unchanged from 1999 once inflation was taken into account. Public research universities spent $16,700, up 11 percent from 1999, and private research universities spent $41,000, an increase of 31 percent.

The report says that only 12% of community college students enroll at a four-year university within six years. That translates to billions of dollars in student aid, wasted, along with a student debt load that people must repay without the benefit of a college degree. When state governments underfund community colleges (which tend to serve poorer students, and consequently tend to be unable to just crank up their tuitions to cover any funding needs), they contribute to the likelihood that students will never actually receive a degree. And that their education will suck. This, in turn, contributes to the overall cleaving of America into the college-credentialed "haves" and the uncredentialed "have nots." This, in turn, contributes to the likelihood of a revolution in which the headlesss bodies of the "haves" are hoisted atop flagpoles on the university "quad."

So we should try to fund community colleges more.

[NYT. Photo: David Schott/ Flickr]

Can't wait until August for the new—and, sadly, final—episodes of Breaking Bad? Then follow the pitfalls of Stephen Doran, a 57-year-old middle school tutor with stage III cancer who was busted this week for allegedly trafficking meth.

Reports say Doran received a parcel to Match Charter Middle School on Tuesday, containing 480 grams of a substance authorities believed to be meth. After catching Doran with the suspicious package on his drive home from the school, police then searched the man's house and found $10,000 in cash, a digital scale, and 38 more grams of the substance in question.

Doran, who is also a former Massachusetts state representative, is currently undergoing chemotherapy for his illness. He's now being charged with obvious drug crimes and, because it appears he had drugs sent to his school, charges pertaining to the state's laws against drugs in school zones.

Noted comedy misogynist/part-time cross-dresser Jerry Lewis reiterated his distaste for women comedians at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival today. Here is the AP's recap:

Asked who his favorite female comics were Thursday at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, Jerry Lewis listed Cary Grant and Burt Reynolds. He then added: "I don't have any."

In 1998, Lewis famously said that watching women do comedy "sets me back a bit" and that he has trouble with the notion of would-be mothers as comedians.

Asked Thursday if he had changed his mind at all because of performers like Melissa McCarthy and Sarah Silverman, the 87-year-old Lewis said of women performing broad comedy: "I can't see women doing that. It bothers me."

"I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," he said. "I just can't do that."

Fuck this 87-year-old overused enema bag and his remedial ideas of what women should do and fuck the reporter who asked him to reiterate his idiocy. It's like asking a great white shark, "Do you still want to eat seals even after one wore sunglasses in the delightful 1994 family picture Andre?" Time is only going to set him deeper in his defective ways.

It's like someone said in the recent Showtime doc Why We Laugh: Funny Women, "Really? But falling on a banana peel's hilarious. It's so hilarious that when Dean Martin left you, you had to go to France, a place where they don't speak English. And that's your fan base? Non-English-speaking people is your fan base. That's who gave you a Medal of Honor." Actually, it's like this whole damn four-minute clip.

P.S. Cannes is in France.

[Image via Getty]

Who's the sexy Air Force dude on the beach cruiser? Oh and who's that cute little blond boy? This photograph of "the America we lost" shows Doctor Ron Paul and his son, board-uncertified ophthalmologist Rand Paul. If you're wondering how these two become so nutty in the 21st Century, all the clues are in this seemingly innocent photograph.

• That child isn't wearing a helmet. What is this, Somalia? No, it's (probably) Texas in the 1960s. (It might also be a suburb of Pittsburgh, where the Pauls lived before moving to Texas. All of these places looked exactly alike, just as today's stucco hell-box exurbs look exactly alike.)
• That's right, the 1960s. Rand Paul was born in 1963. This photograph was taken in the middle of the Sixties, our most heavily documented and mythologized decade of American craziness. Where's Malcolm X and John Lennon and Jane Fonda in a French space-monster bikini? Nowhere around suburban Pennsylvania or Texas, that's where. Texas is where the "Dreams of the 1960s" got shot in the head.
• Look at the charming old brick house, etc. But it's not really old at all—only the photograph is old. This is a newish suburb, circa 1965. This is how America killed the cities, with "white flight."
• Even in this idyllic suburb, the libertarian is angry. Why do I have to mow my lawn all the time and fix these brown spots on the grass? Ron Paul, also not wearing a bike helmet, has already had it with the soft tyranny of suburban lawn maintenance pressure from the community. He's tuning them out. And that's why you see a wire dangling from Ron Paul's ear: He's listening to Alex Jones, probably! We need a new American Revolution in this country before Johnson passes civil rights legislation or something. LBJ is a traitor!
• (It's technically "true" that Alex Jones wasn't even born when this photo was taken. Even though Jones looks like a furious old man about to blow a heart gasket, he's only 39!)

[Cute photo via Rand Paul's Twitter.]

An 18-year-old who earns pocket money impersonating Taylor Swift at "corporate events" says she was severely beaten by a bully jealous of her resemblance to the 23-year-old pop star.

Xenna Kristian of Shropshire, England, says a female classmate at Walford & North Shropshire College suddenly approached her and, without provocation, pulled her out of her chair by her ponytail.

The girl then proceeded to kick Xenna repeatedly, causing bruising to her face and potentially breaking her jaw.

"I've had to cancel three appearances this week," Xenna said. "If my jaw is broken I could be out of action for two months."

Xenna believes the attack was motivated by jealously over her appearance.

"Since I started being a lookalike people have been saying stuff. They must be jealous that I'm going off to do something with my life," she said.

The teen complained about the incident to the local police, but a spokesman refused to comment.

Xenna prodded at her detractors yesterday, tweeting, "Getting paid for yesterdays school behaviour jokes on you street pisser."

It was not well received by her followers:

YOU DON'T EVEN LOOK LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT. JESUS CHRIST WHY DO I KNOW SOME ABSOLUTE MONGS

— Zo Wyatt (@ZoeWyattx) May 22, 2013

Me and @morganpaige_x having a right laugh with tea and 20 benson and hedges �� Bitch needs to SWIFTLY realise everybody's laughing at her

— lew j (@lewisjohnjames) May 22, 2013

[photos via Getty, Twitter, West End ENT]

The U.K. Ministry of Defence has identified Wednesday's victim of the Woolwich psychopaths as Lee Rigby, father of a 2-year-old son and veteran of military campaigns from Cyprus to Afghanistan who was currently based in London as part of the drum corps.

Rigby was stabbed, beheaded and partially disemboweled near his Armory barracks in southeast London on Tuesday by two men claiming allegiance to Muslim countries where Britain has deployed its military.

Rigby was walking near the barracks, out of uniform but wearing a "Help for Heroes" military charity T-shirt, when the Woolwich Monsters aimed the car they were driving at the soldier, crashed into him, jumped out and began hacking away with meat cleavers and a machete. They were also armed with a pistol, which they waved around at bystanders after murdering Rigby.

The killers, now believed to be a British citizen of Nigerian descent and another British-born man, were shot and seriously injured by a female officer and a male police marksman.

Rigby was born in 1987, making him 25 years old at the time of his murder, and is father to a 2-year-old son.

Describing him as a "popular and witty soldier," the MoD posted this biography of Lee Rigby:

Drummer Lee Rigby or ‘Riggers’ to his friends was born in July 1987 in Crumpsall, Manchester. He joined the Army in 2006 and on successful completion of his infantry training course at Infantry Training Centre Catterick was selected to be a member of the Corps of Drums and posted to 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (also known as the ‘Second Fusiliers’ or ‘2 RRF’).

His first posting was as a machine gunner in Cyprus where the battalion was serving as the resident infantry battalion in Dhekelia. Having performed a plethora of tasks while in Cyprus, he returned to the UK in the early part of 2008 to Hounslow, West London. Here, Drummer Rigby stood proudly outside the Royal Palaces as part of the Battalion’s public duties commitment. He was an integral member of the Corps of Drums throughout the Battalion’s time on public duties, the highlight of which was being a part of the Household Division’s Beating the Retreat - a real honour for a line infantry Corps of Drums.

In April 2009, Drummer Rigby deployed on Operations for the first time to Helmand province, Afghanistan, where he served as a member of the Fire Support Group in Patrol Base Woqab. On returning to the UK he completed a second tour of public duties and then moved with the Battalion to Celle, Germany, to be held at a state of high readiness for contingency operations as part of the Small Scale Contingency Battle Group.

In 2011, Drummer Rigby took up a Recruiting post in London where he also assisted with duties at Regimental Headquarters in the Tower of London.

[Photos via Ministry of Defence.]

Bad news, Portland: You will not be benefiting from the sweet (well, tasteless) tooth-protecting power of fluoridated water in the near future. For the fourth time since 1956, Portland overwhelmingly voted down a measure to fluoridate its water like every other major city in America, because many Portlanders will throw a tantrum over anything that presents even a remote chance it will affect their idyllic lives.

The key point pushed by the anti-fluoride campaign, which was driven, as is practically everything in Portland, largely by liberals, was that the government wanted to force toxic chemicals into your body. At last night's victory party for the anti-fluoride campaign Clean Water Portland, they filled themselves with harmful chemicals—by their own choice .

From Willamette Week:

At the bar, a quartet of campaign supporters clink Champagne glasses with beer pints.

"Here's to unfluoridated beer!" says a man in a blue beret. "I was going to have to switch to drinking nothing but Ninkasi." [A very delicious Oregon beer -ed.]

At 9:15 pm, the party is getting merrier. The smell of marijuana is so thick in the sports bar that Mercury news editor Denis Theriault says he thought an actual skunk had arrived.

Hopefully the anti-fluoride folks have mellowed out after their victory, and all that pot. My post on Monday lamenting the fluoride controversy elicited a howling response from the anti-fluoridation side, upset with the admittedly broad brush with which I painted their camp. The media director of the Fluoride Action Network sent me a Livescience.com article about the science behind the anti-Fluoride movement. "Here's what science writing is supposed to look like on the topic of fluoridation," she said. "You are so way off base on this issue." I read it, and learned it was true that some scientists and experts think Fluoride is a cause for concern.

But it also true that the overwhelming majority of studies and experts agree fluoridated water is harmless and helpful. From Scientific American's Kyle Hill

Simply put, the refusal of water fluoridation doesn’t have any scientific support. A review on fluoride’s effect on IQ out of Harvard was waved about as the main scientific opposition, but has since been thoroughly refuted. Decades of studies in different cities in different states, involving millions of people, have concluded that there is a safe level of fluoride—one part-per-million—that can be added to water for enormous benefit to our teeth and oral health with little to no adverse effects.

[Cue one million ani-Fluoride campaigners in the comments linking to that Harvard study.]

Nobody can say with 100% certainty that there are no risks to fluoride. There are risks to everything. The point of public health institutions like the CDC, the American Medical Association, and the American Dental Association is to use their giant budgets to weigh the risks and benefits of things like fluoride and act accordingly. All three are strongly in favor of fluoride. While the risks of fluoride presented by a handful of studies is uncertain, there is overwhelming evidence of its benefits—especially to the poor. (One study estimated communities that fluoridate their water save an average of up to $18.62 per per person per year.) Of course, to believe this you need to trust the scientists at the CDC more than the crusaders of the Fluoride Action Network. Many Portlanders obviously don't.

And that's the bigger concern than Portlanders' teeth rotting out. The logic that defeated fluoridation lies on the slippery slope down which one slides into the foul pit of anti-vaccination activism. This reasoning is fed above all by conspiratorial anti-government thinking. The Fluoridation Action Network argues that the CDC is enforcing a conspiracy of silence to maintain its own credibility. So did disgraced autism researcher Andrew Wakefield accuse British authorities of engaging in a conspiracy to "shield the government from exposure on the vaccine scandal" when he was banned from practicing medicine in the UK over his infamous bogus autism study.

No amount of studies will convince those campaigning against fluoride or vaccines, because the fluoride debate rests more on a clash of worldviews than studies: Anti-fluoride and anti-vaccination campaigners would undermine our public health system, which requires some trade-offs in personal autonomy for the greater good, in exchange for a libertarian wonderland in which every person gets exactly the healthcare they want, exactly when they want to have it. Only then will bureaucrats not have control over our bodies. Fluoride opponents in Portland frequently suggested the city's healthcare system should just be "fixed" so that everyone gets perfect and equal dental care, rendering fluoride unnecessary.

This would be great, but it's a world that will never exist. That large numbers of Portlanders apparently believe a widely-accepted public health measure to fill in the gaps of our imperfect healthcare system is a horrific affront to personal liberty says a lot about the city's disconnect from the real world, which I can say from experience is not just a Portlandia cliche. It is also an inherently reactionary position, and a close cousin to the dumb shrieks of death panels that marred the Obamacare debate. There many great things about Portland, Oregon, but the fluoride rejection shows its worst: the tendency among progressive of that city (and many others!) to reframe the decades-old politics of selfishness as some hyper-enlightened liberalism. So they rationalize getting exactly what they want, all of the time.

[Image by Jim Cooke.]

Polish your Dothraki blade and down some... Game of Thrones wine (?), because it looks like the lavish Parker/Lenas fantasy wedding has hurdled California's pesky permits. A mere construction code violation will not stop the bedding ritual of a mega-rich Facebook investor.

It was looking dicy for a minute: state officials took issue with Parker's plans to literally build part of a castle in the middle of Big Sur's Ventana Inn campground (seen above), and claimed the required construction paperwork hadn't been filed. Castle paperwork. But the show will go on, says the Monterey Herald:

"We are in frank, candid conversations with the county and the Coastal Commission staff," Monterey attorney Aengus Jeffers said Monday, confirming that the plan is for the event to proceed as planned.

There's no code violation severe enough that a billionaire's lawyer can't fix it with an invisibiltiy spell. Documents pertaining to the matter are coveniently "confidential" at the moment, and the Herald notes that "the campground was reportedly already closed to the general public for sewer system repairs." What occult ceremonies are taking place there? We'll have to wait and see—but for now, we've got a few tipstery tips:

• Wedding invites are still being handed out—as rewards for being acquired by the companies of other invitees.
• The fare will be Greek, which is exotic enough to pass for medieval, I guess.
• Lenas' family is ticked off about her out of wedlock steampunk baby.

But it will be the richest steampunk baby to ever adorn itself in monocles and chainmail—does that count for nothing?

Richard Linklater says that he hopes to film Dazed and Confused: The Sequel this fall. It's going to be a "spiritual sequel," most likely set in college, probably to be titled That's What I'm Talking About, and hopefully featuring joyous ketchup flinging.

A would-be contestant on America's Next Top Model has admitted to authorities in Alabama that she faked her own abduction in a poorly conceived effort to win back the affection of her estranged boyfriend.

Kayla B. Earl of Hueytown was found by a Jefferson County sheriff's deputy lying in the dirt by the side of the road near a Pleasant Grove cemetery this past Tuesday.

Earl, who had a Walmart bag over her head and appeared unconscious, was taken by emergency workers to be examined at a nearby hospital.

After being released she told detectives that a man had approached her from behind while she was visiting the gravesite of a friend, and placed a bag over her head.

He then grabbed her and a struggle ensued.

Earl was able to break loose, and fled to the roadway where she was discovered, ostensibly passed out.

After several hours of investigation that included a review of surveillance footage and the alleged victim's cellphone records, detectives confronted Earl and she confessed to making the whole thing up.

Earl reportedly admitted she was "trying to lure back her estranged boyfriend with sympathy."

"She even said she put the bag on her head to make it look like someone tried to suffocate her," Pleasant Grove Detective Jason Davis told AL.com. "She is going through some personal problems. Between that and wanting attention, it turns out none of this happened."

Earl turned herself in yesterday afternoon and was charged with misdemeanor False Reporting to Law Enforcement.

Earlier this year, a man in Arkansas tried to impress a love interest by staging a fake rape attempt.

Jeffery Tyler Siegel's hoax ended in similar disgrace, but, unlike Earl, he was not charged with a crime.

[H/T: Guyism, photos via Model Mayhem, mug shot via AL.com]