All this to get a look at David Beckham, who'd come to a Shanghai university for a demonstration match with the school's soccer team. Thankfully, only seven people were injured, according to the Associated Press.

The six jurors selected for George Zimmerman's second degree murder trial are all women. Five of the six are white. The trial starts next week.

Jeffrey Jones, 56, was arrested on Tuesday night for throwing a spear at a car. After close analysis of his mugshot... he looks like the kind of guy who would own a spear.

CBS reports that Jones was standing at the wide intersection of Auburn and Annadale in Sacramento at 7:38 PM when he threw a spear at an unidentified passing vehicle. The spear lodged itself into the front fender.

Jones was found by the police and arrested for assault with a deadly weapon but, as it's clear in this mugshot, you could be forgiven for wondering if he wasn't also charged with illegal time travel from the Cro-Magnon era of human development.

No one was injured in the incident. The spear was booked for evidence.

(Hat tip to Leicester!)

Photo Credit: Sacramento PD

Bad news for all the Kaidence Donda West fake Twitter accounts: According to TMZ, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West named their daughter...North West. Really.

Of course, TMZ is not always the most reliable source, but considering they're basing their information on the birth certificate from Cedars-Sinai, where North was born, it seems credible enough.

The news comes two days after the false rumors about the girl being named Kaidence Donda West and, as BuzzFeed notes, three months after Kim denied to Jay Leno that she was considering North as a name:

That is not true, [North is] not one of the names on our list. But you know what name I do like but it probably won’t be on is, I do like — ‘cause it kinda goes with North — I like Easton. Easton West. I think that’s cute.

[TMZ/Image via Getty]

The anti-government protests in Brazil continue to grow as over one million people in at least 80 cities took to the streets on Thursday. Dozens of injuries were reported and a protester was killed in Sao Paulo, reportedly by an angry driver.

A two-year-old girl who took a terrifying tumble out of a fifth-story window after her parents left her home alone was saved from certain doom by a group of delivery men.

The incident, which took place yesterday in China's Zhejiang Province, was captured by a nearby surveillance camera.

In the footage, five men can be seen congregating beneath an apartment building, preparing to catch little Qiqi.

The men, who work next door, heard the girl's cries, and rushed out to find her crawling precariously on the windowsill.

She eventually lost her balance, but luckily the men were in place to break her fall.

One of the rescuers injured his arm while another hurt his neck, but Qiqi managed to escape the harrowing fall relatively unscathed save for a few cuts and bruises.

Interviewed by the authorities, the girl's parents said Qiqi was asleep when they left her home alone, but must have woken up before they returned.

[image via Sina.com.cn]

A business that "ostensibly lured clients who want to star in their own adult films" turns out to be a brothel. Is nothing sacred?

Peggy Olson's making moves in this Mad Men super-cut where she leans in, knows her value, and gets bossy before any of these helpful books were even a twinkle in someone's eye!

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does," - Jean-Paul Sartre

— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) June 21, 2013

The most recent Matt Taibbi story about financial chicanery and corruption concerns the ratings agencies, who happily doled out AAA ratings to packages of shit right up until the whole economy collapsed in 2008. Just how duplicitous were these allegedly impartial pillars of finance?

Well, very, as has been well established in the years since 2008. To briefly recap: ratings agencies like Moody's, S&P, and Fitch get paid to assign ratings to various securities cooked up by investment banks and the like, which investors use to assess how risky these securities are. Stupidly, these ratings agencies are paid by the institutions whose securities they are rating. They are therefore incentivized to give good ratings in order to retain business. (The fact that this payment system still persists to this day is one of the great leftover outrages of our post-recession financial system.)

Anyhow, ratings agencies routinely gave great ratings to shitty securities in order to help their own bottom lines, is the short version of this whole story. The risk was passed on to hapless sucker investors, who got screwed when the whole thing blew up. The agencies and the banks made out great. All of this is well known. Taibbi's story delves into a couple of specific instances of this transparently ridiculous ratings game, and comes up with some worthwhile anecdotes. Like this bit about S&P executive Elwyn Wong, who blew up after repeated entreaties from a Morgan Stanley banker to use a bad technique called "grandfathering" to assign a rating to a security whose real risk was almost unknowable:

Wong took the news that S&P was holding up deals over the grandfathering issue badly. "Lord help our fucking scam," he said. "This has to be the stupidest place I have worked at." Wong, incidentally, was later hired by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller Currency, our top federal banking regulator.

The S&P report was so brazen that it even shocked a Morgan Stanley banker involved in the SIV deals. "I cannot believe these morons would reaffirm in this market," chortled the banker in an e-mail the day after the paper was released.

Oh, not you. Your baby's name is great! But you know who I'm talking about. (You.) (Just kidding.) (Wow, that person picked a stupid baby name.)

But Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's baby, "North," as in "North West"—that's decent. Not bad at all, under the circumstances. And baby names are nothing but circumstances, which is why everybody else's baby names are so terrible and worth making fun of. Other people aren't you, and when they name their babies, they are gauche enough to demonstrate that fact.

And you certainly aren't Kanye West or Kim Kardashian (unless you are, in which case: Mazel tov!). So there are lots and lots of things that the West-Kardashian family does that you would not do, yourself, and when you contemplate the vast set of those things, their naming their daughter "North West" seems pretty admirable and restrained. Being named North West is probably not going to be one of the 200 most traumatic or weird or challenging things about this child's life, as it unfolds.

But even if we pretend the West-Kardashians are normal Americans: have you seen what normal Americans are naming their daughters? The top 50 baby girls' names of 2012 included Madison, Addison, Avery, Aubrey, Harper, Brooklyn, Hailey, Kaylee, Nevaeh, Taylor, and Riley. Every one of those is much worse than "North." Do you have to be reminded that if you choose to name your daughter "Madison," you are literally naming her after a dumb joke in a movie about a mermaid? Evidently you do have to be reminded, because you keep on doing it. Soon the lowest-common-denominator urges behind "Nevaeh" and "Brooklyn" will converge and today's children's children will be named "Nylkoorb."

Celebrities, meanwhile, go ahead and name their children "Apple" and "Rumer" and "Moxie CrimeFighter," because they know it just doesn't matter.

What's wrong with "North," next to all this awfulness? It's crisp and simple. People seem to be trying to complain that it's not a girl's name—as if they're somehow afraid that Kim Kardashian's daughter is going to grow up deprived of cues about how gender roles are enacted in contemporary society. Again, check those top names: Avery, Aubrey, Taylor, Riley. A girl's name is a name you give a girl, even if it's supposed to be a boy's name ("Aubrey" outranks "Audrey" nowadays). People figure it out.

The Internet had previously concluded that this baby was going to be named "Kaidence," which would have been truly atrocious, and which would have attached her to the Kardashian family tradition of treating daughters as objects for monogramming, like shirt cuffs. "Khloe" and "Kourtney" are inexcusable. Surrounded by bad precedent, little North came out lucky.

But her last name is "West"! That's not a problem. Of all the questionable impulses that guide people to name their children—hick aspiration ("Savannah"), ersatz traditionalism ("Isabella"), cautiousness ("Emily"), ersatz traditionalism plus cautiousness ("Sophia")—the desire to make a dumb little pun is relatively harmless. The West-Kardashian baby falls within an old and charmingly square tradition of goofy names. I went to college with a "Caraway Seed" and a roommate whose middle and last names were "Peter Pan." If Armand Hammer and Ima Hogg could handle it, North West can too.

Really, she should be immune to the pun. A jokey name is only a burden for otherwise anonymous civilians. No DMV clerk is ever going to say, "Haha, wait, what was that?" The DMV clerk will say "Ohmygod, it's North West!" Assuming her personal assistant doesn't pick up her learner's permit for her.

Google Street View has become a treasure chest of accidentally crude street photography, from pooping pedestrians to road-sex photobombs to public handjobs. But now the uncomfortably omniscient Google vehicles have managed to become a part of their own scenery.

Last year in Central Park, a Google trike and a Google car crossed paths and managed to document one other documenting one other, screenshots captured by Google Street View World.

Peekaboo?

[Google Street View World]

Rapidly decaying Georgia peach Paula Deen has just posted, removed, and reposted (UPDATE: and removed) a choppy, heavily edited YouTube video statement in which she solemnly begs for forgiveness from "you" (us) (black people?), her children, her team, her fans, and her partners "for the mistakes that I've made."

Quick refresher: The mistakes that she's made include having used racial slurs (to describe a robber; when relaying a conversation between black people) and discussing the possibility of dressing black staffers like slaves for a catered event.

Deen was scheduled to appear on Today Friday morning for what host Matt Lauer called "an open and candid discussion, no holds barred." However, shortly before the interview was due to be filmed, Deen backed out. Lauer announced the abrupt cancellation on air.

'Paula Deen was scheduled to do an interview with us this morning, live in our studio, but we just found out, she’s a no show' - @mlauer

— TODAY (@todayshow) June 21, 2013

He later added that Deen's representatives cited "exhaustion" as the reason for her no-show.

UPDATE: Deen's camp has just made the video "private" on YouTube for what appears to be the second time since it was uploaded earlier this afternoon. We've preserved the original version above. Here's a full transcript. (Note: [BREAK] signifies a moment when the video cuts to a white screen, indicating an edit has taken place.)

I wanna apologize to everybody. for the wrong that I’ve done. I want to learn and grow from this. [BREAK] Inappropriate, hurtful language is totally, totally inacceptable. [BREAK] I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way but I beg you, my children, my team, my fans, my partners – I beg for your forgiveness. [BREAK] Please forgive me for the mistakes that I’ve made.

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

After three years on the job, Rolling Stone publisher Matt Mastrangelo has been fired by his boss, Jann Wenner. No word yet on whether he'll be replaced by one of Wenner's children.

An Atlanta-area teen is suing her former school district for using a Facebook photo of her in a bikini as part of a student seminar on the importance of exercising caution when uploading photos to the web.

Chelsea Chaney, now a college freshman, says the Fayette County Schools Director of Technology found the photo on her Facebook page, and used it in a district-wide Internet safety seminar to illustrate the maxim "once it's there, it's there to stay."

Having apparently left the seminar hall before the director had a chance to explain the Streisand effect, Chaney decided to take her story to the local ABC affiliate WSB-TV, which proceeded to air a two-minute excuse to show Chaney in a bikini standing next to a cut-out of the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg.

"I was embarrassed. I was horrified," Chaney told Channel 2's Action News. "It never crossed my mind that this would ever, ever happen to me."

Chaney's lawyer Pete Wellborn told the station he believes the director broke several laws, including "Federal law, state law, and violations of the United States Constitution."

The district used the photo "out of context to suggest that Chelsea is a promiscuous, abuser of alcohol," the attorney said.

Wellborn is helping Chaney sue the district for $2 million. Why so much? Because "she wants her claim to be taken seriously," according to Channel 2.

A spokesman for the district said it was unlikely Chaney's case would hold up in court.

[H/T: Uproxx, screengrabs via WSB-TV]

If there's one downside to Edward Snowden's NSA leaks it's that they have offered a new platform for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's stateless self-aggrandizement. Although Wikileaks had nothing to do with Snowden's leaks, the washed-up whistleblowers are now forcing themselves onto the story like a government probe on a trans-Atlantic fiberoptic cable.

Icelandic businessman and Wikileaks associate Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson boasted to Bloomberg yesterday that he has chartered a private jet to fly Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland, where Snowden has hinted he'd like to seek asylum. Sigurvinsson says that, somehow, Wikileaks could try to secure Snowden Icelandic citizenship. Julian Assange claimed in a phone call to journalists that he has been "in touch with Mr. Snowden's legal team" and is "in the process of brokering his asylum in Iceland." How Julian Assange might positively influence Snowden's asylum case in Iceland, when he is himself currently a fugitive avoiding a Swedish sex crimes case, is unclear. Nor is the very public advertisement of Team Wikileaks' rescue mission likely to help much besides Wikileaks' Twitter follower count.

But now that Wikileaks' submission system is in shambles and whistleblowers like Snowden have wisely found other venues, the only thing for Julian Assange to do is hijack other peoples' stories. For example, there was the conspiracy theory-mongering tweet made hours after the death of journalist Michael Hastings saying he had come to Wikileaks' lawyer and told her he was under an FBI investigation. (He wasn't.) It's worth nothing that Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, the grandstanding jet-charterer, founded Datacell, the company that processes Wikileaks' donations. People are only going to donate to Wikileaks if it appears to be doing something.

[Image via Getty]

Paula Deen's 45-second "apology" for "mistakes that I've made," was delivered with several cuts and several more halting silences. Here are all of them. There is just as much content in this edit as there is in her original statement.

GQ's most recent July issue ran an excerpt from the book, Difficult Men: Behind The Scenes Of A Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Breaking Bad to Mad Men, by writer and author Brett Martin. The piece was from The Sopranos chapter called, "The Night Tony Soprano Disappeared," and it centered on the show's two main alpha males: creator David Chase and actor James Gandolfini. After Gandolfini's sudden death two days ago, the timing seems morbid, but is purely coincidental.

Martin will be here at 4:30 to answer your questions, Gandolfini-related and more.

An undercover cop has been exposed as one of the authors of a libelous anti-McDonald's leaflet that ended up resulting in the longest civil or criminal trial in English history.

In a new book called Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police, authors Rob Evans and Paul Lewis reveal that police officer Bob Lambert infiltrated the environmental group London Greenpeace and in 1986 helped around four other members pen a pamphlet that came to be known as the "McLibel leaflet." The publication, only a few hundred copies of which were ultimately distributed, put forth a thorough critique of the fast-food chain, saying its product were bad for the environment, people's health, and its own employees. The leaflet was "like his baby," a friend told the Guardian of Lambert's part in the matter, "he carried it around with him."

Lambert's undercover deployment ended in 1989, at which point he disappeared, "claiming that he had to flee abroad because he was being pursued" by his former employer, according to the Guardian. Lucky for Lambert, his vanishing meant he wasn't around when McDonald's sued two of the pamphlet's authors, Helen Steel and David Morris, for libel.

The trial, in which Steel and Morris defended themselves for lack of being able to afford an attorney, lasted 314 days, with McDonald's spending millions on attorneys. Steel and Morris eventually lost the trial, at which point they were ordered to pay £40,000 in damages. But the case didn't end there.

After losing to McDonald's, Steel and Morris went to the European Court of Human Rights to contest the fairness of their trial and English libel laws. In 2005, 19 years after helping to write the original leaflet, the duo won this new case:

The Strasbourg judges upheld their challenge today, saying the libel system broke their right to a fair trial under the European convention of human rights because they had been refused legal aid.

The verdict also said the system had breached their right to freedom of expression under the convention, to which Britain is a signatory.

Throughout the decades of drama around McLibel, Metropolitan police never thought it important to disclose that a police action had been involved with the leaflet's creation until now.

During his time undercover, Lambert also participated in sexual relationships with four women, one of whom he impregnated before disappearing. The woman and her child only discovered that Lambert was an undercover cop last year.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan police said that he "recognizes the seriousness of the allegations of inappropriate behavior" on behalf of the department and that an internal investigation is underway.

[Image via AP]