A scuba diver caught his near brush with death on film when a shark tried to attack him as he swam in a reef in the western Caribbean Sea.

Jason Dimitri was scuba diving near the Cayman Islands killing lionfish with a short spear when he noticed a Caribbean reef shark circling him. Dimitri, who says he was in about 70 feet of water, was able to fend the shark off with his spear.

Dimitri said on his YouTube page that he was culling the lionfish in an effort to protect the reef from the destruction they cause. The predatory breed has destroyed reef ecosystems from Florida to the Caribbean by eating all the native fish.

Despite the scary moment, Dimitri may yet face the shark down again: "The shark was acting in his natural environment. I have no ill will toward him and will get back in the water and continue to protect the reef for future generations."

Authorities still have no idea where the missing Malaysia Airlines plane is, but they've found a new place to refocus their efforts—the pilot who said, "All right, good night," a few minutes after the plane was diverted.

The phrase was the last thing recorded after the flight's signaling system stopped transmitting and the plane diverted from its flight path. It's not clear which pilot was speaking.

The plane made a sharp, deliberate turn just after it last communicated with Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers, and before it would have to communicate with Vietnamese controllers, according to the U.S. official with knowledge of the latest intelligence thinking.

"This is the perfect place to start to disappear," the official said.

Malaysia's defense minister revealed the final message today, refocusing scrutiny on the flight's two pilots, 53-year-old Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah and his 27-year-old first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid.

Police have searched both the pilot's homes, albeit a week after the flight's disappearance. Officials are also investigating the flight's 239 passengers, looking for anyone with flying experience.

The authorities may also be looking at an aviation engineer who was among the passengers. The New Straits Times, a newspaper published in Malaysia, interviewed a man who said that his son, an aircraft engineer, had been on the flight en route to China to work on Malaysia Airlines planes.

Officials from 25 countries are now participating in the search, which has yielded scant clues since the plane went missing last Saturday.

[image via AP]

[Kermit the Frog rings the the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on Monday. Stocks are now sharply higher in early trading. Image via Richard Drew/AP.]

Two men who claim they were arrested after refusing to give cops their White Castle sliders are now suing the NYPD.

On Halloween 2012, Danny Maisonet and Kenneth Glover said they were walking through Coney Island when they passed a group of NYPD officers. The cops, who were in the midst of detaining a group of suspected post-Hurricane Sandy looters, allegedly demanded the two hand over their burgers. Maisonet and Glover refused.

The police officers reportedly beat the two with flashlights and arrested them. Officer Angelo Pizzarro later claimed the two stood in his way and prevented him from dealing with the alleged looters.

Maisonet and Glover were initially charged with obstructing government administration officials and disorderly conduct, though all charges were later dismissed. No word on what happened to the burgers.

[via Gothamist/Image via Flickr]

A 9-year-old My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan won't be allowed to bring his favorite lunch sack to school anymore because administrators say it's a bully magnet that leads to class disruptions.

Grayson Bruce says he's been bullied before at his North Carolina elementary school, but it's gotten worse since he started carrying a Rainbow Dash bag.

"They're taking it a little too far, with punching me, pushing me down, calling me horrible names, stuff that really shouldn't happen," he told Asheville ABC affiliate WLOS.

The school says it's "continuing to take steps" to stop the bullying. But the first step it took was to tell Grayson last Thursday that he had to leave his pony gear at home because it's "a trigger for bullying."

Grayson's mom, Noreen Bruce, disagrees.

"Saying a lunchbox is a trigger for bullying, is like saying a short skirt is a trigger for rape. It's flawed logic, it doesn't make any sense," she told WLOS.

She's campaigning for punishment for Grayson's bullies, and for her son to be allowed to bring My Little Pony stuff to school again. And she's not alone. A Facebook page started by Grayson's friends caught the attention of the brony community, and he now has nearly 16,000 fans supporting him.

[H/T: ThinkProgress, Photo Credit: WLOS]

Around New York City, one often hears petulant calls for the city to return to the days when it was "real," meaning infested with crime, rather than with Pret A Manger locations. Such pleas are immature. Crime should only be returned to the Times Square area.

This is not some nostalgia-addled bleat for the "Times Square of old," populated by cheap strip clubs and X-rated theaters and wall-to-wall hookers. That sounds fun, sure. The hookers, especially. Man. All those hookers. Can you imagine? Just imagine it.

Stop imagining it. The Times Square of old is long gone. That ship has sailed. And it has docked, today, in an Olive Garden. Times Square in 2014 is populated by comically overpriced strip clubs, massive chain movie theaters, and wall-to-wall tourists. Until the dirty bomb hits, it is not changing back.

And therein lies the problem. The god damn tourists. They are the single worst demographic group in New York City. Far more dangerous to the smooth functioning of society than alcoholics, or mobsters, or juvenile gang members. Tourists, like an infestation of army ants, turn every sidewalk for thirty square blocks around Times Square into a shuffling, bumbling parade of random movement that moves at the collective speed of lava proceeding into the sea from Mt. Kilauea. This human centipede of pedestrian blockage is clothed in the tackiest plumage, cackling at top volume, and prone to whirling about rapidly with an unfolded map in hand, smacking everyone in a five-foot radius in the face. And, at night, drunk. So drunk. Tourists are drunk. And not fun drunks. "Your mom is drunk" drunk.

"Well, just stay out of Times Square," you say. Great idea, until your parents visit and take you to a Broadway play, or you get a temp job at an office on 43rd St., or the train stalls and you have to get out and walk down 8th avenue past the ESPN Zone. It is neither practical nor just to tell people who live in New York to forfeit a large chunk of their city to a bunch of lost, obnoxious revenue-producers. We did that once. It's called "Wall Street." We can't afford to sacrifice any more territory. It's crowded here.

Police cannot regulate tourists. They're not breaking any laws, just basic standards of human conduct. Neither will politicians or corporate interests regulate tourists; they're making too much money off them. You know what would really keep this plague of tourists in check though? Some good old fashioned criminals.

Nothing terrible. We don't need any murders. Just a simple diet of muggings, purse snatchings, pickpocketing, smooth-talking hustlers, and Three Card Monte dealers. Tourists enjoy being ripped off legally, by the fine folks at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. They do not enjoy being ripped off illegally, by being mugged and then pickpocketed and then stripped of their final nickel by a shell game operator. Tourists resent that. Street crime tends to generate very negative reviews on Yelp.

Prisons are overcrowded. Solid employment is hard to come by. Tourists plague our city. All of these problems can be solved by throwing open the jails, paroling everyone directly into Times Square, and allowing a thriving, authentic, historically accurate culture of grifting and robbery to spring up organically in The Crossroads of the World. Designate it as a protected urban cultural zone. Do not fear lost revenue. Quite the opposite. Tourists will flock to see what Authentic Gritty New York City looks like. Then they will flock out at equal speed after being robbed. For paroled felons, locked out of most gainful employment by discrimination and economic inequality, the wallets of the tourists of Times Square will provide a much needed source of financial support for those willing to do the work. Indeed, under this plan, tourists will have their hands up—not a hand out. The rest of New York City, where real people live, will continue to enjoy the crime reductions that have been so critical to the past two decades of the city's growth. Those who have suffered in jail for years are given meaningful jobs. And the sidewalks will finally be clear enough to fucking walk down.

We can also bring back the hookers if you guys want (I have no preference).

[Photo: Flickr]

GitHub, an immensely popular and influential social network for software code, is in the midst of a harassment controversy that's captivating (and horrifying) the industry. But the married couple at the center of Julie Ann Horvath's harassment story have remained anonymous—until now.

Tom Preston-Werner co-founded GitHub, and accordingly ran the place. But in a detailed report provided to TechCrunch by Horvath—one that only described a GitHub "founder" and a "wife" as chief antagonists—we can see that Tom Preston-Werner's wife, Theresa, positioned herself as a workplace bully and power-tripper beyond any actual GitHub executive.

From the TechCrunch account, all emphasis added:

According to Horvath: "I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be causal turned into something very inappropriate. She began telling me about how she informs her husband's decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was 'made very happy' so that I wouldn't quit and say something nasty about her husband's company because 'he had worked so hard.'"

[...]

The wife also claimed to employ "spies" inside of GitHub, and claimed to be able to, again according to Horvath, read GitHub employees' private chat-room logs, which only employees are supposed to have access to.

[...]

The aforementioned wife began a pattern of passive-aggressive behavior that included sitting close to Horvath to, as she told TechCrunch, "make a point of intimidating" her.

[...]

The next thing I knew the wife was in my face at my work station verbally attacking me. She demanded to speak with me in private to which I said no. I asked her in a very calm way to leave me alone and told her she was making me uncomfortable. There is an eye-witness to this event.

[...]

I was shaking in horror and felt my adrenaline pumping harder than ever before. I was proud of myself for not reacting, though.

We've confirmed with a GitHub employee that "the wife" is in fact Theresa Preston-Werner, making her husband complicit in covering up (or at least condoning) repeated allegations of harassment and abuse at the company he helped create. We're told this is certainly not the first time the Preston-Werners have treated a female employee this way: Melissa Severini, the company's very first hire, was allegedly paid to sign a non-disparagement agreement after being victimized by Theresa Preston-Werners and subsequently terminated. Other employees have been pressured to do pro bono work for Theresa Preston-Werner's own startup, Omakase.

Responding to a query from Valleywag, GitHub said it has no comment at the moment beyond a blog post from last night:

We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that's ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer. The founder's wife discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in the office.

The duo have been silent on social media and and unresponsive to questions from Valleywag since Horvath went public with her story, beyond this quiet reference:

Was just gonna tweet that Jackson got into my favorite school, and then discovered this whole mess. Flabbergasted.

— TheresaPrestonWerner (@tpdubs2) March 16, 2014

Even if Preston-Werners never had actual "hiring or firing power," the regular presence of a co-founder and company president's wife in the office has its own de facto power.

If Horvath's allegations have any weight, it would appear that's power she and her husband have abused for years.

Photo: Flickr

Seems legit.

[h/t Fuse/Facebook]

A conservative Alabama state senator who may attempt a jump up to Congress used a newspaper interview this weekend to hail McCarthyism and assail a bevy of popular books and authors that he thinks are too subversive to teach to children.

Scott Beason has kept himself busy in recent years backing draconian anti-immigrant measures and a law that forces employers to let workers keep guns in their cars at the office. But now, buttressed by Tea Partiers and local GOP leaders, he's declaring war on Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien, Arthur Miller, and even Southern icons Harper Lee and William Faulkner.

At issue are the federal "Common Core" standards for grade-school education, developed in part by the nation's governors and used by the Department of Education to dole out performance-based awards to public school districts. While the standards have met with substantive criticism from many on the left and right about their effectiveness across disparate districts, they've also been targeted by far-right fringemeisters as anti-Murka gubmint socialism.

That seems to be the tack that Beason and his Alabama allies have taken. "I want a conservative, honest, traditional, American values worldview, yes," he told an interviewer two months ago. "Education has always been about worldview. I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Always has been. I think the left understands the power of education far more than the right."

In a new interview with the Anniston Star, he showed a reporter his copy of a literature anthology approved for use in the state's schools under its Common Core standards. He'd used sticky notes to flag all the content he and his Tea Party ilk found objectionable, including:

• "[A]n essay by 19th century naturalist John Muir, which decries 'those who are wealthy and steal timber wholesale.'"
• "[T]he poet Randall Jarrell, who documented the savagery of the air war over Europe in World War II."
• A story by Vietnam vet and acclaimed The Things They Carried author Tim O'Brien. "What is the message that's being put across?" Beason says. "Is it that we were the bad guys in Vietnam, or was it that we were the good guys in Vietnam? I think we're the good guys. But I don't get that out of this argument, I mean, of this story."
• "[A]n excerpt from John Hersey's Hiroshima, a story of the atomic bomb 'told from the Japanese view,' he said. There's a lack of balance, he said, that undermines American values. 'It doesn't sound like we're being very good folks, does it?' Beason said."
• "The Crucible, Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials. The senator thinks it's unfair that the textbook attached a sidebar asking students about parallels between the witch trials and Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the early 1950s, in which numerous writers and others — including Arthur Miller — were accused of having communist sympathies... 'So we're comparing the McCarthy investigations of the 1950s, in which he turned out to be right, with the Salem witch hunts,' Beason said."
• Also, the Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye, which a Tea Party leader recently decried as smut to a state Senate committee.

Beason is apparently supported in his efforts by local GOP leaders. The website for the Talladega Republican Party lists dirty works it thinks inappropriate for Alabama's schoolchildren because of their smutty content. That list includes To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, The Grapes of Wrath, and As I Lay Dying, according to the Anniston Star. ("Please help us defeat Common Core in Alabama and save our children and grand children from the Federal propaganda machine of deception, control and dumbing down of our children," the site says elsewhere.)

Beason recently announced he would not seek re-election to the state Senate. Last election cycle, he challenged Rep. Spencer Bachus (R) for a congressional seat and was face-smashed. But Bachus is retiring, and Beason has hemmed and hawed on whether he'll run for the open seat again. "I really am in one-decision-at-a-time-mode here," he's said. Presumably, he'll take stock of his political prospects as soon as he's done making Alabama textbooks safe for impressionable young minds.

[Photo credit: AP]

Newsweek has posted a reply to Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto's denial of its story that Nakamoto was, as Newsweek's headline put it, "The Face Behind Bitcoin." It reads:

Newsweek has not received any statement or letter from either Mr. Nakamoto or his legal counsel. If and when we do, we will respond as necessary.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is just stalling. Nakamoto challenged the entirety of the story in his widely distributed statement . That his statement was not personally sent to Newsweek doesn't really affect their obligation, as journalists, to respond on the substance of his denial. But then as I said this morning, it seems clear we're headed for litigation here. And Newsweek's statement certainly sounds like the kind of thing a lawyer might instruct you to say if you're just waiting to be sued.

More goodness from this weekend's True Life mini-marathon : "I Want To Be an Obscure Pageant Queen" profiled 27-year-old Adrienne, who competed in the Miss Star Trek Universe beauty pageant. Adrienne dressed as an Andorian, sassily answered a question in which she was compared to a Smurf, and sang a song that she wrote. It did not go well for her. Her blue painted face was left streaked with tears.

One of her friends, who was also dressed as an Andorian, put things into perspective: "You know, the concept of a Miss Star Trek Universe beauty pageant is a little weird to me. 'Cause Star Trek fans are not usually, you know, people that can enter beauty pageants. We're the people who got bullied by the pretty kids in school." Indeed. The point of this pageant also sort of makes it...pointless.

Nonetheless, Adrienne told producers that she plans on entering the pageant again next year. I hope her alien heart can take it.

The NFL is trying to get M.I.A. to pay $16.6 million because she flipped the bird during her 2012 Super Bowl performance with Madonna. M.I.A. has some choice words in response, but the funniest is, "@madonna ummm ..... can i borrow 16 million ?"

Print out your bracket, place your bets, throw on your team colors and heat up some nachos because March Madness 2014: Drugs vs. Alcohol BEGINS. RIGHT. NOW.

It's Day 1, folks, which means the top seeds will be facing off against the bottom seeds in a battle yet unseen by the likes of (wo)man. From the Illegal Drugs Regional, stepping first into the ring we have Weed (1) going head-to-head with Crack (16). Will weed's easygoing and gentle attitude make it an easy victim to the aggressive life-ruiner known on the streets as rock? Or will the spliffs rise above and conquer, all through the sheer power of their ultimate chillness? Your votes will decide!

Next up, the Legal Drugs Regional: We have a war brewin' between Caffeine (1), the most socially acceptable drug that you probably do multiple times a day, and Glue (16), the drug most easily obtainable at your local hardware or school supply store. One helps you get up in the morning and the other helps get you up off the ground (in your mind, at least), but which will float its way to victory?

Switching on over to the beverage side of the bracket, the competition between alcohols both hard and soft(er) is already white hot! In the Hard Alcohol arena, we've got Margaritas (1), the most perfect of warm weather drinks, slamming its salted rim against the highly undrinkable (really, it can kill you or make you go blind) Rubbing Alcohol (16), which, thankfully is well-prepared to disinfect any wounds it might might sustain in the bloody battle to come.

Finally, it's a Soft Stuff ruuuuuumble between Champagne (1), the delicious and effervescent beverage of the elite, and Smirnoff Ice (16), the sugary bottled vodka that frat bros hide in laundry baskets in order to trick each other into getting drunk. Chin chin, ladies and gents! The competition is on!

You have 24 hours to cast your votes!

A third person has died from injuries sustained during last week's car accident at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. Sandy Thuy Le was 26.

Angus T. Jones, formerly one of the highest-paid child actors in TV for his work on Two and a Half Men, has fully backed out of the show to pursue a new beard and his relationship with God.

Appearing at the World Harvest Outreach Church in Houston, Texas, on Saturday, 20-year-old Jones stood by the negative comments he made about the show 9 months ago, which ensured his contract wouldn't be renewed.

"That was making light of topics in our world where there are really problems for a lot of people," he told Houston's KHOU. "I was a paid hypocrite because I wasn't OK with it and I was still doing it."

Jones' fee for professional hypocrisy was reportedly $300,000 an episode.

Having left Hollywood, Jones, a Seventh Day Adventist, has been speaking about his faith at various churches. The only acting he's considering is in "a few different productions that do Bible-based stories."

"I really want to come into the light because I know that is where the healing is and I've seen God do amazing things," Jones told KHOU.

When he first attacked Two and a Half Men and began discussing his faith last year, Jones hooked up with fringe evangelical YouTube channel Forerunner—best known for conspiracy theories about Jay-Z, the Freemasons, and Satanism—but now seems to have embraced a more mainstream religious practice.

[H/T: Mediaite, Photo Credit: KHOU]

"The odds that Congress will pass an increase in the U.S. minimum wage before the November elections are so low that even the nation's lobbyists are largely ignoring it."

The scientists at Facebook, in the interests of pure research, have been working to improve the ability of software to recognize the same person's face in two different photos. They now report that their DeepFace software has reached 97.25 percent accuracy.

The software rotates facial images to correct for the different angles at which they were taken, to produce a consistent numerical map of features that can be compared from one photo to another. As machines continue to study the celebrity-photograph dataset known as Labeled Faces in the Wild, the scientists write, their performance "marches steadily toward the human performance of over 97.55."

Steadily, the machines of Facebook are marching toward mastery of the relationship between faces. The MIT Technology Review, reporting this news, makes sure to remind humans that this is strictly laboratory knowledge, at present. DeepFace:

performs what researchers call facial verification (it recognizes that two images show the same face), not facial recognition (putting a name to a face).

Obviously these are very different tasks. The fact that a face in one photo is the same as a face in another photo does nothing, in itself, to identify the person in that photograph. Without a name attached to one of the photographs, the whole exercise would be a dead end.

Before this technology could ever begin to move from the realm of theory to any real-world application, Facebook would need to possess a large database of photographs linked with names.

[Image via Facebook]

On Marc Maron's WTF podcast on Monday, Lena Dunham—unlike many in Hollywood —reiterated her support for Woody Allen's daughter Dylan Farrow: "In the latest Woody Allen debate I'm decidedly pro-Dylan Farrow and decidedly disgusted with Woody Allen's behavior."

And in quite possibly her ballsiest move yet, Dunham also announced that Allen's movies have gotten "really bad."

But while Dunham insists she's "nauseated" by Allen "the person," she said she doesn't understand why people are responding to the abuse allegations by looking at Allen's work:

But for me, when people go through his work and comb through it for references to child molestation, that's not the fucking point.

According to Dunham, she's not comfortable using art to "convict people of crimes":

I think that you can decide that you don't want to support the work of somebody who has molested a child. That's a completely appropriate choice. But going through it and saying, look, he's told us in 57 ways that he rapes kids — that's not the thing. The thing is to look at the actual evidence that exists in the world, which I think strongly suggests that Woody Allen is in the wrong. But for me the point is not to go through his one-act plays looking for references to child molestation. Because I'm not comfortable living in a world where art is part of how we convict people of crimes."

The 27-year-old actress then pointed out that it's possible to love Allen's films and still believe he's capable of molestation:

People who really believe Woody Allen is guilty have not felt comfortable saying that. Because they're so afraid to lose their connection to his work. And the thing is, I feel like people need to understand that you can hold two positions in your mind. You can know that someone's made work that's meaningful to you and also know that they have most likely molested their daughter… I was so unimpressed by people's inability to think in less binary ways and to just experience the ambiguity that life is constantly offering up.

Lest you think Dunham sounds reasonable and refreshing here and you feel yourself starting to like her, don't worry. She also shared how many photographs her mother has housed at the MoMA, admitted she uses her boyfriend's songs on Girls so they can both benefit financially, and talked a lot about barfing. Some things never change.

[h/t The Wrap, Image via AP]

The final victim in the suspected gas explosion that leveled two East Harlem apartment buildings last Wednesday has been identified. The AP is reporting that Mayumi Nakamura, who died from burns, is the eighth victim in the blast that injured more than 60 people.

Good news for anyone in need of a pen pal. Chris Brown, who was kicked out of rehab on Friday for breaking the rules and making cool threats like "I am good at using guns and knives," will stay in jail until April 23.