Maybe just get the fresh fruit? At least thirty people have contracted Hepatitis A from a Costco frozen berry and pomegranate mix, and although the product has been pulled from shelves, officials are bracing themselves for more outbreaks linked to restaurants that purchased the product.

The outbreak is derived from a Townsend Farms Organic Anti-Oxidant Blend Frozen Berry Mix product, and so far cases have been reported in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. Health officials say that the mix is often used in restaurants to make smoothies, frozen bar drinks, and desserts.

The CDC says this strain of hepatitis is common in North Africa and the Middle East, but rarely seen in the United States. The frozen berries were apparently sourced from the United States, Argentina, Chile, and Turkey. The same hepatitis strain was involved in a 2013 Europe outbreak and a 2012 Canada outbreak. Both outbreaks were also tied to frozen berry blends.

[via, photo via AP]

Jean Stapleton, best known for playing Edith Bunker on All in The Family, has died.

Don't you hate it when you want to eat your mouth-watering Burger King Whopper, but find that your pesky hands are doing something else entirely?

For loyal BK customers in Puerto Rico, that's no longer an issue — to celebrate its 50th anniversary of serving customer in the U.S. commonwealth, Burger King gave away 50 hands-free Whopper holders to its most loyal fans.

Imagine the possibilities! Well, actually, imagining takes effort. Instead, here's a wonderful video Burger King produced that shows Puerto Ricans playing guitars, giving tattoos, walking dogs, and trimming hedges, all while enjoy the sweet caloric joy of a delicious Whopper. The singer laments that you need hands to work, you need hands to dance, but you also need hands to eat your Whopper. Not anymore, though.

We can only hope that a few of these make it back to the mainland, and replace Google Glass as the de facto cool face-accessory.

It may not be the forest cosplay fest we all had our fingers crossed for, but we'll take what we can get. Former Facebook prez and impenitent tech party boy Sean Parker is officially hitched to Daenerys Targaryen.

Forget what you heard about Sean Parker's wedding. It elegant, tasteful, and magical. moby.to/kveb5k

— John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) June 2, 2013

Still waiting to see exactly where that $10 million wedding budget went before we can say this wedding was entirely uninfluenced by fantasy lore—they were building something up in them woods!—but in the meantime, mazel tov to Sean and his Khaleesi.

What are they feeding their professors over there? Another (former) NYU professor made the news this week after he was arrested on Friday for some truly bizarre behavior.

Hans Shmidheiser, 30, allegedly began his mini crime spree around 8 a.m. when he spotted a man out walking a dog in Brooklyn. According to the New York Post, he approached the man, picked up the dog, and asked the dog, "Who the fuck are you?"

After the dog ostensibly did not answer the question, Shmidheiser approached a female pedestrian and told her he needed to go to the hospital because he had been drinking a lot of blood. He proceeded to dump a red liquid on her — which thankfully turned out to be juice and not blood — and was promptly arrested. He's being charged with menacing and harassment, both misdemeanors. Shmidheiser was a professor at the university from 2004 to 2008.

[via, photo via AP]

Three members of the TWISTEX storm chasing team including Tim Samaras, his son Paul Samaras, and chase partner Carl Young were killed on Friday in El Reno, Oklahoma when a tornado made a direct hit on their vehicle. The storm's total death toll now stands at 12.

The TWISTEX team, pictured above, was tracking a powerful EF3 tornado when it made a sudden turn to the northeast and slammed into them. They were unable to escape after losing control of their car, according to the Facebook page created in their memory. Jim Samaras, Tim's brother, posted this message this morning:

"I'm Jim Samaras - Tim Samaras's brother. Thank you to everyone for the condolences. It truly is sad that we lost my great brother Tim and his great son, Paul. Our hearts also go out to the Carl Young family as well as they are feeling the same feelings we are today. They all unfortunately passed away but doing what they LOVED. Chasing Tornado's. I look at it that he is in the 'big tornado in the sky...' We (the family) will keep folks aware of what the funeral estrangements are, but please in the meantime keep Tim and Paul in your thoughts and prayers."

A picture on TheWeatherSpace.com's Facebook page actually illustrates how quickly the tornado turned, catching the experienced storm chasers off guard. It appears to have made a sharp turn to the northeast at 45 degree angle out of nowhere, after steadily moving east-southeast for quite a while.

It's not clear how often storm chasers are killed in the course of their profession, but it seems relatively uncommon considering how experienced many chasers are.

Tim Samaras and the TWISTEX team were known for their multiple television appearances on both the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic Channel.

In case anybody is still doubting the power of this tornado, this is the same one that tossed the Weather Channel's truck and created that giant sinkhole.

UPDATE: This is a video of the actual tornado, shot by storm chaser Dan Robinson. According to the video description, the twister turned so suddenly and violently that Robinson was forced to abandon his vehicle and take cover in a ditch when it could no longer drive against the fierce winds:

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Michael Douglas says he got cancer from going down on someone (Catherine Zeta-Jones?).

A 50-year-old man was caught having sex with a pit bull while on a tour of a Chicago pound.

Gerardo Perez was charged Saturday with a felony for having sexual conduct with an animal, as well as burglary, after he was found having sex with a pit bull while on a tour of the Chicago Animal Care and Control Facility.

Perez was found in a cage with a white and grey pit bull on May 29th when an employee told him to leave the cage. A short while later, the same employee found Perez on his hands and knees by the side of the dog. Prosecutors believe Perez was witnessed only moments after he finished having sex with the dog.

Perez then left the pound, but apparently made incriminating statements about his sex act before leaving. Police arrested him at his home on Friday. This continues a rough few weeks for pit bulls.

Beautiful photographs of black Chicago in the 1970s, taken by trailblazing Pulitzer winner John H. White, who was laid off by the Chicago Sun-Times last week.

Prison gangs and entrepreneurial criminals are shifting from drugs into a new racket — cigarettes.

In a world where a loosie (that's a single cigarette) goes for $20 and prison guards tend to look the other way, gangs like the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood are making a killing off the cancer sticks.

Gorilla Conflict founder Seth Ferranti reports that although tobacco products are banned in federal prisons and in most state systems, the punishment for possession is typically light and outside law enforcement is generally not interested in investigating. It doesn't hurt that many of the guards smoke, and some actively aid the prisoners.

According to The Daily Beast's inmate source, a $3 pouch of Bugler tobacco can net around $600, while a pack of Newports can cost $200. Inmates can't have cash, so they purchase stamps (about $6 for 20 stamps) in the commissary and trade them for goods.

“When I first came into the feds in the ‘90s, cigarettes were used as money,” a prisoner tells The Daily Beast. “Let’s say you want a piece of chicken, that was one pack. Some weed or hooch to get you lit might set you back 2 or 3 cartons. That was how we did business... But when they outlawed tobacco in 2004, we started using stamps as money in here… Now if I want to buy a Marlboro or Newport to smoke, it’s like three books of stamps.”

Inmates smuggle tobacco inside in bulk, usually concealing pouches in boxes of supplies entering the prisons. Most prisons have a low-security outside warehouse manned by inmates, making it easy to hide the pouches and coordinate deliveries with other inmates who unpack the boxes inside. Interestingly, everyone gets paid through PayPal and Western Union.

Punishment tends to be low-level — a low-level write-up or a brief stint in solitary. Furthermore, most of the money is transacted outside of the prisons, and prison enforcement officers don't have the resources to investigate the funding.

“If you got several homeboys in place, someone on the outside to do the money transactions, some muscle to back your play and no problem with the minor consequences you can get rich off the cigarette hustle in no time flat,” the inmate told The Daily Beast. “For real, the guards and administration don’t sweat it. Just don’t front them off. If you keep it on the low, it’s all good. Dudes are supporting their families from their hustles in here. It’s crazy, but that’s just the way it is.”

[via The Daily Beast, image via Shutterstock]

If you're smart, you have a different password for your email, Facebook, work email, etc. If you're dumb and lazy (like me) you have the same password for each, but still, sometimes it escapes you.

But what if instead of remembering which variation of your pet dog's name gets you on Twitter, you simply swallowed a computer chip? Last week, a Motorola executive named Regina Dugan proposed a simple solution to all this password craziness: a small pill that you ingest, allowing your stomach to act as an electrolyte in the chip’s battery and power it. Like a fob on your keychain, your whole body would know function as one large authentication device (for yourself).

“Authentication is irritating,” Dugan said while presenting the new pill. “So irritating that only about half the people do it even though there’s a lot of information about you on your smart phone.”

Just swallow an electronic chip in the morning, and you can prove that you are, in fact, you.

Of course, this could lead to some awkwardness when you return to the cubicle from a bathroom break to find your boss waiting for you to pull up the newest figures. You try to log in, but the computer says you're not authenticated. Your boss awkwardly waits as you swallow another pill, having just passed your last one.

Cell phones are great. But they are also replaceable. And certainly not worth dying for.

But not everyone agrees. A 22-year-old man risked his life for his iPhone early Saturday morning, and lost the gamble. Francisco Diego Jr. apparently dropped his phone on the subway tracks at Wakefield-241st Street in the East Bronx and jumped down to retrieve it. He was struck and killed by a No. 2 train.

Police say that the Bronx DJ, who went by the name Tech Trackz, was electrocuted before the train hit him. The MTA cautions people to alert an officer to retrieve dropped items, and apparently Diego did alert a toll booth clerk that he had dropped his phone. It's not clear why he then jumped down on the tracks anyway, but Diego's sister says he had done it before.

It's a disturbing trend — a woman in Brazil almost died in April going after her cell phone, but a security guard was able to pull her to safety just seconds before the train passed.

[via, photo via Shutterstock]

Americans are not a joyful lot at the moment, with only 33 percent of Americans reporting that they were very happy in a recent poll.

This is a drop from 35 percent in 2009, when the economy collapsed, causing much unhappiness in our glum land. In fact, the poll found that Americans who happen to be minorities, the disabled, or recent graduates, were especially less happy then they've been in quite some time.

“For certain groups, such as minorities, recent graduates and the disabled, they are actually sub-segments of the American population where ‘happiness’ has trended downward in the last couple years,” Regina Corso, Senior Vice President of Harris, said about their poll.

But there's hope! According to the poll, as Americans get older, they also become happier. Unless that's because older Americans amassed wealth during a much brighter economic time and are just using their money to make more money. Hmmm.

But why be so bummed out about this? Americans are generally an optimistic bunch. The survey found that 67 percent of respondents were optimistic about the future, even though prospects are pretty grim. And we're also not even as optimistic as the rest of the world, where 89 percent of citizens feel that the future will be as good or better than the present. Not being as optimistic as the rest of the world probably makes us even less happy.

Either way: Chin up, America!

On Thursday, 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali won the Scripps National Spelling Bee with the word "knaidel," a Yiddish word meaning a matzoh ball or dumpling put into soup.

On Friday, the mishegas began.

Yiddish experts are saying that the spelling bee's version of the word was incorrect, and that the proper spelling is "kneydl". The New York Times is reporting that the dispute derives from the source material; the spelling bee uses Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, but the Yiddish linguists at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (generally regarded as the authority on all things Yiddish) say the dictionary has it wrong. The problem is that Yiddish was never formalized by a government, so organizations like YIVO are the only real authorities.

The folks at Merriam-Webster say their spelling is the most common Roman variant of the word, which is written in Hebrew. And even people familiar with the word can't agree on the spelling — the Second Avenue Deli in midtown spells it "kneidel," and a Yiddish woman questioned by the New York Times spelled it "knadle".

[via, photo via Shutterstock]

According to an intriguing but frustratingly vague report in the Daily Mail, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and his office at No. 10 Downing Street are in the midst of dealing with a sex scandal described by the Mail's sources as “stunn[ing],” “dynamite,” “a complete mess” and “of great personal distress to innocent parties.” But what's the scandal, and who exactly does it involve? No one who knows is saying, at least not publicly.

The Daily Mail reports the scandal is serious enough that it inspired “crisis talks” at Downing Street after a "stunned" Cameron “immediately realized the importance of the story.” In addition, the Mail said the scandal would likely generate a public reaction similar to the one in 2002, after it was revealed that former Prime Minister John Major and former Parliament member Edwina Currie had a four-year affair in the late 1980s. The Mail also noted that the affair does not involve anyone serving in the Cabinet. Otherwise, the paper — for legal reasons, they said — avoided releasing any other significant details.

For legal reasons, The Mail on Sunday cannot disclose the identities of the people involved or any details of the relationship – even its duration – other than that they are middle-aged figures. The affair has now concluded.

So, two (or more!) middle-aged people with ties to Cameron's office (but not Cabinet members) are involved in a sex affair so scandalous that it would, according to the Mail, "blow out of the water" any political agenda pushed forward by the Prime Minister in the next few months.

Any guesses on who it might be? Let us know in Kinja (the comments)!

As you might expect, Cameron hasn't addressed or even acknowledged the report, though it seems worth noting that recently he's been especially forgetful. Last week, police officers had to rush 30 miles from Cameron's home on Downing Street to Gatwick Airport after the PM realized he'd forgotten his passport at home. Then again, this is the same guy who once accidentally left his eight-year-old daughter at a pub, so who knows how much the alleged sex scandal is to blame.

[Daily Mail/Image via AP]

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

After Earth bombed at box office this weekend, grossing just $27 million and finishing in third place behind Now You See Me and Fast & Furious 6. The last Will Smith summer film not to debut No.1 was 1993's Made in America.

Just over a week ago, Amanda Bynes was arrested for (allegedly) throwing a bong from a window in her luxury midtown Manhattan apartment. That arrest led to a bizarre court appearance, which was followed by claims of sexual harassment at the hands of the NYPD, a strange Twitter battle with Rihanna, and an announcement that she was taking up rapping. As a result of all this strange behavior, the management at Bynes's apartment has reportedly evicted Bynes from the building.

From In Touch Weekly:

The troubled star, who was arrested at her apartment on May 23 following a complaint that she was smoking marijuana in the building’s lobby, “was notified that she is no longer welcome as a tenant in the building in light of recent events,” an insider reveals.

“At 9 p.m. on Tuesday, movers showed up and removed Amanda’s belongings from her apartment,” the insider adds. “She is officially gone from the building.”

According to In Touch's definitely reliable source, management at the apartment building had been looking for ways to evict Bynes for weeks before her arrest. “Even before her arrest, residents had constant complaints about the smell of marijuana coming from her apartment,” the source told In Touch. “She had also cursed out residents and the doormen, and the smell of pot from her apartment was really annoying people.”

[via NY Daily News/Image via Getty]

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

The Wrap is reporting that Nikki Finke has been fired from Deadline Hollywood for, among other things, sending emails saying “I'm going to f—- you.” UPDATE: An editor at Deadline published the company's official response, which calls The Wrap's report "libelous, false, and defamatory."

A 23-year-old woman gave birth to naturally-conceived quintuplets in Prague on Sunday. Officials say it's the first time in Czech Republic history that such a birth has occurred.

According to a report on the BBC, it took doctors just under two hours to deliver the five babies – four boys and one girl – by caesarean section. Zbynek Stranak, one of the doctors who delivered the quintuplets, said the birth took place “without any complications.”

The mother, Alexandra Kinova, originally thought she was pregnant with twins, but in March doctors said she was having quadruplets. In April, they told her to expect quintuplets instead.

The quintuplet's father told local newspaper Ceske Noviny about the train ride from his hometown to Prague. "I was crying all the way since I feared I would not manage it," he said. He eventually made it in time to witness the birth. “They are beautiful, but they look quite alike,” the father said after to the BBC. “I hope this will change. They cried a lot, and I'm glad they're in good shape."

According to Dr. Stranak, the quintuplets have a 95% chance of growing up healthy. Another doctor put the odds of giving birth to naturally-conceived quintuplets at 48 million to one.

[BBC/NY Daily News/Images via AP and BBC]

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

The launch of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship last year looked like it went perfectly, except holy crap it looked like it exploded and killed a lady. Everyone survived, there were just injuries. So what happened?

The NOAA's ship the Reuben Lasker launched on June 16, 2012 at Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin. Pamela Lasker, the daughter of the pioneering fisheries scientist for whom the ship was named, christened the boat in some pretty sweet lab goggles, the boat totes looked like it was going to fall over, but then it rights itself in dramatic fashion. As far as ship launches go, this looked like a good one.

One video from Momentum Media & Mktg, LLC picked up no less than 333,000 views.

The NOAA posted their own video racking up just under 30,000 views.

Another video posted just after the launch didn't gain many views, but it showed something a little unusual. While the other videos show the ship from the front and the side, this one showed the rear.

Look closely and you'll see what appear to be people running for cover after the launch.

Now the video at the top, possibly first posted by Jason Bundoff is going viral as it finally shows that the people standing behind the ship were showered with what seem to be deadly fragments of wood.

Reddit poster djt832 claimed to have attended the launch stated that the person was not killed, but just knocked unconscious.

Why was there wood in the first place? Djt832 explained that the ship's rails were made of wood, and when spectators were allowed to be too close, somebody got hit by the shards.

I may have been at this ship launch. If it is the same one, the person did not die, but was knocked unconscious.

The boats normally have steel rails welded to their hulls that ride along the metal bleacher looking things when the boat is set free. After the launch these are obviously removed. However, with this boat design, they were unable to attach these steel rails and had to use wooden ones instead. I have a friend that works for the shipyard and basically someone made a huge misjudgement and the wood split and flew everywhere, as you can obviously see from the video. After this incident viewers were no longer allowed to be so close to the launches.

Now you know what happened to the person filming this video, you know what ship it was that got launched, and you know not to stand right near a humongous ship crashing into a body of water. Let's keep that last bit in mind next time we go to a ship launch.