Yesterday, the New Orleans Police Department announced that its officers will begin wearing cameras to record all of their interactions with the public. This video is an example of why that might be necessary.

The video above, which appeared on WorlstarHipHop yesterday, shows a Jeffersons Parish Sheriff's Department officer forcing his way into a man's home, pushing the man onto his couch, and handcuffing and arresting him, all while the man pleads "You're scaring me" and "Why are you doing this?" The cop orders the bystander recording the interaction to "get out of here," to which the bystander replies, "But this is my house!" At one point the man being arrested begins to panic, yelling "Please don't shoot me!"

The Times-Picayune identifies the man who was arrested as Donrell Breaux, and says that Breaux was charged with "battery of a police officer, resisting arrest with violence, disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace." Breaux says that he had a verbal dispute with a neighbor, and the officer who arrested him is a friend of that neighbor.

These sorts of videos are all too common . From sea to shining sea.

DirecTV and WeatherNation have signed a 'multi-year' deal to keep the fledgling weather network on the satellite provider's channel lineup, according to a joint press release from the two companies.

"This new multi-year agreement strengthens our relationship with WeatherNation and ensures our customers will have a service that is fully committed to providing all weather related information all the time," said Dan York, Chief Content Officer for DIRECTV. "The overwhelmingly positive comments we've been receiving from customers made the decision to extend our agreement easy and expedient."

The competitor network to The Weather Channel was brought on-air by DirecTV this past January after a particularly ugly carriage dispute between the California-based satellite provider and the weather behemoth, which held a near-monopoly on television weather until WeatherNation replaced it in over 20 million households.

Despite losing over one-fifth of its viewership, The Weather Channel's viewership actually went up in the month after it was snuffed by DirecTV.

The new contract signals that the dispute between the two companies is effectively over for at least the next few trips around the sun.

WeatherNation prides itself on its 100% weather coverage with its slogan "Real weather. Pure and simple." While the network's presentations are not as flashy or engaging as The Weather Channel's, it provides continuous weather coverage, coming in stark contrast with The Weather Channel's increasing focus on reality programming and its new Today/GMA-style morning program starring Sam Champion.

WeatherNation is still seeing its share of glitches, though. The Weather Channel filed an FCC complaint against its competitor in January, citing WeatherNation's sometimes wildly-inaccurate closed captioning.

WeatherNation is channel 361/362 on the DirecTV lineup.

[Image via WeatherNation's Facebook page]

You know the balance of power has tipped when British royalty wants to become the next Ashton Kutcher. Yesterday Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, invited the entire London tech scene and their mums to St. James Palace to listen to startup pitches.

According to the event's website: "British prosperity, in all its forms, is central to The Duke of York's work" and as the fairy tale goes "Entrepreneurs are our wealth creators."

Pitch @ Palace is in response to the message that The Duke of York has been receiving: more is needed to support entrepreneurs at the early stage. While His Royal Highness cannot fill that gap single- handed, he hopes that by drawing on his experiences and convening Pitch @ Palace he can raise the profile of new businesses, amplify the excellent work being done to support early-stage entrepreneurship, and, most importantly, act as an accelerant for entrepreneurs.

With all his business acumen, the Duke decided the best way to amplify and accelerate early stage startups would be to hand out meaningless awards (an app that lets you collect loyalty points won "Most Disruptive") and take the "first Royal selfie." Not so differently from Silicon Valley, really, prompting Wired's David Rowan to stretch his editorial muscles to come up with "Silicon Throne."

So I coined "Silicon Throne" while moderating @TheDukeOfYork's #pitchatpalace tonight. Amazing turnout, fab startups http://t.co/7uYGifwOe5

— David Rowan (@iRowan) April 2, 2014

pic.twitter.com/sYUt8hGO6S

— The Duke of York (@TheDukeOfYork) April 2, 2014

>$5 billion of investor funds in one room #pitchatpalace (St James's Palace hence all suits) http://t.co/IgpGOlkW6z pic.twitter.com/SvQrmYlngL

— Eileen Burbidge (@eileentso) April 2, 2014

Want to follow the who's who of London tech? The folks tweeting from #pitchatpalace would make a great start...

— John Henderson (@JohnEHenderson) April 2, 2014

The only thing that could get this crowd more amped by this pomp and circumstance is if you told them the next royal baby was a robot.

Two small clues about the way in which the world is changing. Thank you @TheDukeOfYork and @WayraUK #pitchatpalace pic.twitter.com/c6KDgVdRwx

— Oli Barrett (@OliBarrett) April 2, 2014

The Duke of York was in the press earlier this week for his ties to the Kazakh oligarchy, including selling a country house to Kazakh billionaire Timur Kulibaev, and being photographed repeatedly with Kulibaev's mistress. Shadowy billionaires, polyamory, selling a house for $6 million above asking price—has his royal highness every been to San Francisco? Seems like he would fit right in.

[Image via @Spacioustweet]

Vybz Kartel, perhaps best known in the U.S. for his vocals on Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor," has been sentenced to life in jail, reports BBC Radio 1. Earlier this month, he and three associates were found guilty of murdering a man named Clive "Lizard" Williams, who was killed after a dispute with the men over illegal handguns.

The particulars are particularly grisly — a key piece of evidence was a text allegedly sent from Kartel's phone, which claimed Williams' body had been cut up in so many pieces it would never be found. The New York Times reported that the word "mincemeat" was used.

Vybz Kartel will be eligible for parole in 35 years.

[Image via Getty]

Firefighters had to lift a teenage girl out of a storm drain in Dover, U.K., after she wedged herself inside while trying to retrieve her mobile phone.

After the phone slipped from her pocket and down the drain, 16-year-old Ella Birchenough climbed inside to get it back. Getting out was a bit trickier, though, and she ended up stuck in the drain from the waist down while onlookers gathered and took Instagram photos.

DOVER update: This is the teenage girl, who somehow became stuck in a storm drain in Eaves Road this evening. pic.twitter.com/EVsx1wPksA

— Kent 999s (@Kent_999s) April 2, 2014

"I thought to myself, 'I'm not leaving this' and I jumped down to get it. I wasn't really even stuck, I just needed somebody to help lift me out but my mum got all panicky," she explained to the Guardian.

Firefighters were able to get the girl out of the drain unharmed, and she immediately headed home to wash off.

"When they pulled me out I ran straight home and jumped in the bath. I think it was just water but I wasn't taking any chances," she said.

The phone was a BlackBerry. It's now broken.

[Photo Credit: AP Images]

The good news: Mississippi is finally teaching sex ed. The bad news: "The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became."

Caity: This restaurant was like a restaurant J.Lo would work in for the first forty minutes of one of her movies.

Rich: It was several layers of drag. It was a restaurant masquerading as a train car, and also, a train car restaurant masquerading as a fancy restaurant.

Caity: It was the kind of restaurant where, when you walk in for the first time, it's exactly like you remember it. It was very easy to invent a fake memory of my grandmother taking me there as a kid, even though I had never been to Bloomingdale's before.

Rich: Yeah, and this was your FAVORITE restaurant. Now I'm in your memory.

Caity: Are you a grown man in my memory, or are you a fellow child?

Rich: I'm a man, who's laughing at you.

Caity: Oh, I don't like that. Let's get out of here.

The best restaurant in New York is

Le Train Bleu, located on the 6th floor of Bloomingdale's.

Menu style

À la carte.

Cost, before tip

$73.12

Rich: This train-styled restaurant is kind of a little-known restaurant but it isn't exactly a "secret." There were signs for it in the elevator. I was hoping we'd have to actually FIND it, and that it would be hard. I was hoping for an adventure. It's kind of New York's best-known secret.

Caity: It was a little hard to find. We had to ask for directions in the luggage department.

Rich: We didn't HAVE to, you just did immediately.

Caity: Well, anyway, we found it and thank God. To enter the restaurant, you walk behind a coffee display and up some plushly carpeted stairs. All of a sudden—BOOM—you're in front of an old-timey train car, and it feels really special. It feels like a New York Treat.

Rich: Just like that! It's like the Hogwarts Express or the Polar Express or something.

Caity: A magic, quasi-old train is basically everyone's childhood dream, right? Imagine if Harry Potter had pulled up to Hogwarts in an airport taxi. That trip is like two hours, door-to-door if you fly. A protracted, scenic train ride lends a dreamy tone to any kids' story.

Rich: You need time to think about how different you are from the other children.

Rich: We are immediately greeted by the woman who would be our waitress. She is wearing a lab coat. Her name is Gloria. She kind of looks through you, in a way that Whoopi Goldberg or Jackie Christie from Basketball Wives L.A. might.

Caity: Yes, all the servers (all both of them) were wearing white jackets embroidered with the restaurant logo in blue thread. The effect was more pharmacy than luxury locomotive, but I appreciated that they took a swing.

Rich: Gloria was into her job. Very Disney.

Caity: If Bloomingdale's is the best tourist attraction in Bloomingdale's and Le Train Bleu is the second best, Gloria takes home the bronze, and there's no shame in that. I liked her a lot. She was helping us to make real New York memories. Before she brought us our waters, she asked "Would you like some New York iced water or do you prefer bottled?"

Rich: Good old New York iced. Class is making cheap people feel like they're indulging.

Caity: Then she told us the specials for what I'm going to conservatively estimate was 41 minutes.

Rich: After she finished, she assured us she would "go over them again a few more times."

Caity: At a certain point, Gloria, a promise becomes a threat.

I think she promised to repeat herself because she thought we were morons who Were Not Getting It. You had a lot of questions about the chicken content of specific dishes: "Is it chicken stock? Are there pieces of chicken in it? Is it chicken stock with pieces of chicken floating in it? What is a chicken? Which came first: the chicken, the egg, or my questions?"

Rich: I eat fish, but that's it in terms of animals. I will turn a blind eye to chicken stock, even a WILLFULLY blind eye, as long as it's stock and not pieces. That's where I draw the line. This is complicated and I roped Gloria into my mess of a life. She went back into the kitchen and we could hear her asking each question. "I don't know, that's what they said, 'Chicken or the egg?'"

Caity: Yes, sound carries because it is a VERY small restaurant. In a good way. It's cozy. And you have a nice view into some strangers' sunny apartments.

Caity: I ordered the French Onion. It was DELICIOUS. A perfect French onion from start to finish.

Rich: I got a Caesar Salad. The California roll of salads. The Caesar dressing was not perfectly mixed; I like when it's so evenly mixed that I think it's just a very special lettuce that has cream coming out of its plasma membrane. But it was good!

Caity: After our appetizers, Gloria came around with some bread in a little metal basket. Le Train Bleu does that schtick where they use fancy tongs to place ONE roll on your bread plate, which is fine—I love glamor, I love tongs—but, when it comes to bread: I can handle it. Leave the basket. I'll take it from there.

When it came time to pick our entrees, I tiptoed through the anxiety minefield that is placing an order for Mussels Marinière. I didn't want to be THAT GIRL ordering mussels MAHREENYAIH, so I went with "mussels marynair," like an American mom in Paris. And then Gloria was like, "The moules! The moules are wonderful!" She used French that wasn't even on the menu!

Rich: I got the Puttanesca (or as Gloria pronounced it using every muscle in her face, "Putin NESKA"). It was great, definitely the best entree I've gotten in our journey through New York's most absurd eating spaces. The seafood—scallops, mussels, clams—was fresh. Or if it was frozen, it was really good at pretending not to be. The sauce was perfectly salty thanks to the olives and capers. And the portion was big! It was a giant bowl! If you put this bowl on my head to cut my hair with, you'd fail! You'd be a giant fucking idiot.

Caity: My moules were disappointing.

They were a good size, but tasted like air, and two of 'em hadn't opened. The accompanying frites were like McDonald's fries with sea salt on them (no complaints!). I wished I had gotten the burger instead.

Dessert was also a little disappointing for me. We ordered the Crème Brûlée, which the menu indicated was this train's signature dish. It was OK. It was the signature equivalent of an X.

Rich: It wasn't a wow. It was a "Well…"

Rich: I think the thing about Le Train Bleu is that the food is just good enough to not ruin the experience, which is one of environment and atmosphere. Although the atmosphere was kind of weird, too, because the music was standard old timey and French fare (Édith Piaf; Frank Sinatra; more accordion than I've ever heard in one place in my entire LIFE) plus...James Taylor?

The following things were adorable:

1. The overhead compartment for your bag.

2. The Vacant/Occupied switch on the bathroom door at the rear of the train/dining room.

3. The ancient woman with pink hair who was a waitress since the time that the train car we were dining in was actually in service. (It was never in service — this woman was infinity years old.)

Caity: This really felt like a restaurant run by and for grandparents. When we got back to the office, I looked up Le Train Bleu online and saw someone had left it a one-star review. That hurt my feelings.

Rich: That is hurtful! They try!

It really was a cast of weirdos, though. People kept doing mild, awkward things around us. Gloria said to the table behind you, "OK, you're not eating, what's going on?"

Caity: That was a foreign woman eating alone. She explained that she was full. There was a high percentage of people eating alone. The clientele consisted primarily of very old New Yorkers reliving the luxury travel accomodations of their youth, and very young foreign tourists who had decided to eat lunch inside a gigantic, expensive souvenir shop.

Rich: There was also a girl wearing giant Beats by Dre headphones who was dining with what looked to be her grandparents. She kept them on the whole time. What an ingrate.

Caity: The check took about 25 minutes to arrive from the time we asked for it. When it finally arrived, it did contain a nice surprise: Free soda refills! So hard to come by in New York City. If you are extremely thirsty and in no hurry, this is the restaurant for you.

It was also odd. The check was odd.

Rich: Heartbreaking!

"I'm a little slow. I add two or three times," Gloria said. Get this woman a calculator, or I don't know, if you wanna be old fashioned, get her an abacus.

And then the credit slip was on carbon paper! (Just kidding. Just a little old timey humor to go with your accordion score.)

Caity: Agreed. It didn't seem fair that Gloria had to do all the math herself, longhand, considering we were not actually on a train car in the 1890s. But I guess that's just life on the rails.

Is Everything Okay?

Questions about the Dining Experience

Would you go back?

Caity: While the American Girl Café remains the gold standard by which I judge all New York restaurants, I would definitely go back for some onion soup and a nice big glass of New York's famous iced water. I want to take an extended sojourn through the land of memory on that quasi-old timey fake train. I want to order a different entree.

Rich: As you said, going there already feels like going back, so going back to going back is some Inception-type shit. I guess if I went back I'd bring Marion Cotillard. The Édith Piaf would help her feel right at home.

Is it a good first date spot?

Caity: No. I would not feel comfortable going there with someone I didn't know well. It's a very off-kilter experience, but not in the over-the-top kitschy way of drinking champagne in a weird dolltopia for millionaires. You want this place to succeed, but you also want to be able to acknowledge its weirdness. The emotions are too complex for a first date.

Also, the walk to the restaurant through the luggage department would kill the mood, I think.

Rich: That makes sense. I would take a train conductor or MTA worker or Under Siege 2 enthusiast there for a first date, but no one else.

Is it a good place to have an affair?

Caity: It is an excellent place to have an affair: secluded, sparsely populated, AND if someone spots you at Bloomingdale's—Big deal I'm at Bloomingdale's! I had to buy something! I ran into my divorced neighbor, Alain, here! Big deal!

Rich: Trains are kind of sexy. See Madonna's "Justify My Love" ("I wanna...make love in a train, cross country"). I say yes to railway affairs.

Is it a good place to bring a doll?

Caity: I think Gloria would have had a lot to say to a doll, and every doll should have a chance to pretend to travel the world. So yes.

Rich: No. I think Gloria would have no time for such nonsense! There's only room for one doll on this fake train and it's Gloria.

There are a bunch of restaurants in the world, including some in New York City. But in a city of over 24,000 restaurants, how do you find the best? You begin your search in places that are already popular: New York's hottest tourist destinations. In The Best Restaurant in New York Is, writers Caity Weaver and Rich Juzwiak attempt to determine the best restaurant in New York. Photos by Caity Weaver and Rich Juzwiak

Previously: The Best Restaurant in New York Is LOX at The Jewish Museum ; The American Girl Café

That was relatively quick! After lots of angst and arguing, Recode reports the anti-gay CEO of the Mozilla Foundation just stepped down. What can't online dating accomplish ?

A blog post from the foundation adds some detail (and apology):

Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn't live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it's because we haven't stayed true to ourselves.

We didn't act like you'd expect Mozilla to act. We didn't move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We're sorry. We must do better.

Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He's made this decision for Mozilla and our community.

Good for Mozilla, good for OkCupid, and good for everyone, really. Now let's do racism next!

Photo: Getty

This map shows the average date that each National Weather Service forecast office issues its first tornado warning every year, based on data from 1986-2013. It's pretty illustrative of how tornado climatology tends to work in the United States. The Deep South sees its first round of severe weather during the winter, and it radiates outwards as the atmosphere begins to warm up through the country.

The earliest average date for the first tornado warning of the year is January 24th, claimed by the NWS in Jackson, Mississippi, and the latest is December 13, claimed by the NWS in Eureka, California.

For reference, the last time the NWS office in Eureka issued a tornado warning was December 15, 2002.

As of Wednesday, NWS Jackson had issued 1,547 tornado warnings since January 1, 2005.

[Image by IEM; h/t to Rusty Dawkins on Twitter]

"Only little boys and low-class men are into breasts." "I will tell me $2mm a year hedge fund DH from a prominent family that my natural 32DDs make him low class. He will love that." The patrician commenters of UrbanBaby.com discuss true beauty.

"Why doesn't America read anymore?" NPR asked on Tuesday.

"We totally do, NPR. Shut up. We read all the time. We're reading your article right now!" Facebook commenters screeched.

But they didn't read the article. If they had, they would've seen this:

Eventually, some commenters began to catch on and spoil the joke, but the quickest to reply were those eager to defend their own reading habits or discuss America's intellectual downfall.

The real question isn't why we don't read anymore, it's why we comment—passionately and with the utmost confidence—after reading only a headline. (Hint: The answer is probably not "because we literally don't remember what books are" or, "because our elders aren't familiar with traditional Greek storytelling techniques.")

[H/T: Mediaite, Photo: Shutterstock]

Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, spent yesterday being grilled by Congress for her company's years-long failure to fix a known safety defect in its cars. Barra's lack of answers is being blamed on the size of the organization she leads. Which is a great argument against the salaries that CEOs earn.

GM's failure to recall millions of dangerous cars goes back a decade. Mary Barra took over as CEO in January. That is a convenient way for both GM and Barra to elude blame, but the issue this speaks to is a structural one in corporate America. Mary Barra's pay package this year could add up to more than $14 million. The problem here is that high ranking corporate managers want to have it both ways: they want the pay of people who carry ultimate responsibility, without any of the responsibility.

Why, after all, do we pay CEOs tens of millions of dollars? The average CEO is paid hundreds of times more money than their average employee. Why? Research has shown there's no correlation between higher CEO pay and better company performance. Nor is there evidence that companies can can vault themselves ahead of their competitors by poaching their "superstar CEOs." The realistic reason that CEOs get paid so much, of course, is because their pay is set by a group of peers who all have a self-interest in keeping pay high, creating an upwards spiral that benefits all executives. But what of its alleged business justification?

The ostensible justification for executives getting paid more than everyone else is that they have more responsibility than everyone else. They make the hard decisions. They are paid for their judgment. They certainly don't work harder than the janitor, but we suppose that their wisdom and knowledge is so valuable that its benefits for the company at large will outweigh their hefty pay packages.

This is, in general, a farce. While executives of huge corporations are paid to make the tough decisions, the fact is that they don't know what the fuck is going on inside their own companies. It's simply not possible. GM's current crisis is a case in point. A law professor tells the Times that criminal liability against GM is a tough case, because "in a vast corporate structure with numerous rank-and-file employees and midlevel managers simply doing their job, it's hard to pinpoint where responsibility lay." That echoes Barra's own testimony about various noncommunicative "silos" within the company, all ignorant of what the others are doing. The Wall Street Journal today dedicates an entire story to this dynamic, which effectively renders CEOs unable to exercise perfect judgment, because it's impossible for them to know enough accurate information to do so: "The larger an organization gets, the less likely it is that bad news will travel smoothly up the chain. At big corporations, say organizational experts and former auto-industry executives, the mantra is "go along to get along," and doing the right thing—which can mean stopping work on products vital to the bottom line—is often incompatible with pleasing the boss."

Not only are CEOs unable to be the mythical Perfect Oracles of Business Judgment, but they tend to do everything in their power to avoid taking responsibility for failure. Too bad, since that heavy responsibility is a keystone of the justification for their pay. This is similar to the problem with how Wall Street traders and bankers are paid: they keep all of their winnings, but they disavow responsibility for their losses. Their losses are socialized, but any effort to socialize more of their winnings through higher progressive taxes is decried as un-American. The public picked up the tab for Wall Street's last meltdown. The people who had gotten rich by doing jobs that created the meltdown stayed rich. Nothing is taken back from them. Likewise, CEOs ensconce themselves in a world in which all of the successes of their enormous companies are translated into personal financial gain, and all the failures of their enormous companies are blamed on the fact that their companies are so enormous that no one can get a handle on them.

The biggest problem with CEO pay is not just that it costs shareholders tens of millions of dollars that they really don't need to spend. It's not even that the pay is unjustified. It's that it allows some of the most powerful people in the world—corporate executives—to operate in a world with different rules from the real world. That leads to decision-making designed to favor the self-interest of corporate executives to the exclusion of everything else. And that leads to things like 13 deaths from faulty GM cars, because no one wanted to rock the boat.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

In her new book, Thrive, web hegemon Arianna Huffington promises to “redefine what it means to be successful in today’s world.” On her own website, however, the definition of success remains the same: being friends with Arianna Huffington.

Gawker has learned that on April 1, the Huffington Post founder personally removed a charity industry expert’s skeptical opinion from an article about HugDug, a product-reviewing website that gives half of its profits to charity. HugDug was founded by the entrepreneur Seth Godin, a friend of Huffington’s and a frequent object of positive coverage among HuffPost’s stable of volunteer bloggers.

A pre-publication version of the HugDug article, written by reporter Betsy Isaacson, contained a paragraph quoting Charity Navigator’s Sandra Miniutti, according to multiple individuals familiar with the editing process. It read:

Sandra Miniutti, CFO of charity ranking institution Charity Navigator, told HuffPost that sites like HugDug shouldn’t be considered “substitutes” for traditional charitable giving. “The percentages given to the charity per purchase are usually so small, that this revenue model, so far, hasn’t been a windfall for most charities.” But if you want to share your enthusiasm for the paperback or watch you just bought, HugDug can help you do that and generate a few coins for a charity while you’re at it.

The entire passage was deleted at Huffington’s request shortly before publication. The timing was tight enough that Isaacson’s editor, Gregory Beyer, sent an email explaining the excision to several Huffington Post employees, including the website’s entire business vertical.

“So you know,” Beyer wrote, “Arianna asked that we remove the comment from Miniutti.”

“That email does not go into the conversation that Arianna and I had by phone regarding the piece,” Beyer told Gawker. “It was a shorthand way of letting our team know that it was not just my decision, but Arianna’s too.”

He added: “HugDug is not claiming to have created a substitute for traditional ways of charitable giving. They’re trying to give people a new way to give, so the comment from Sandra Miniutti didn’t really apply to the story.”

Former Huffington Post staffers offered varying accounts of Huffington’s control over individual stories. “She has asked that pieces be unfeatured for various reasons,” said one, “but I don’t know of any time she’s actually changed the content.” Another claimed that “if she didn’t like something, editors would have to tinker with it until her angry emails stopped.”

Isaacson’s article did not disclose Huffington’s ties to Godin, nor her role in its editing, but Huffington and Godin have a history of looking out for one another. In Thrive, for example, Huffington generously excerpts a 2013 blog post written by Godin, about the necessity of identifying “who’s part of the online community for the right reasons.” In return, Godin effusively blurbed the inspirational tome: “This is a generous, urgent, vital book, a chance to redefine how we keep score before it’s too late. Arianna has given us a gift, and delivered it with style. Read it!”

“Yes, Seth and I are friends,” Huffington said, when asked. She declined, however, to comment on the article’s editing process.

“I just finished my speech in Nashville and saw the email that Greg sent to you,” she said. “I don’t have anything to add to it.”

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

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

David Letterman announced his plan to retire in 2015 during Thursday afternoon's taping of The Late Show.

News of the announcement, which will air Thursday night, was first tweeted by R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, who is one of tonight's musical guests.

Dave just announced his retirement #2015 #muchlovedave

— Mike Mills (@m_millsey) April 3, 2014

CNN, Variety, and CBS News later confirmed the announcement. Letterman has hosted the Late Show With David Letterman on CBS since August 30, 1993; before moving to CBS, he hosted Late Night on NBC for more than ten years.

[Image via AP]

Wired is reporting that the activist/journalist Barrett Brown has signed a plea agreement. They have pieced together that conclusion from a motion to seal the plea they say is on the docket (I admittedly don't see that yet myself) and from the fact that earlier this week the federal government filed a new superseding indictment that lessens the charges pending against Brown. To layer on the irony in this controversial First Amendment-involving case, Wired's Kim Zetter couldn't confirm with Brown's lawyers directly, because the lawyers and Brown himself are under a gag order.

Brown has the sort of colorful personality that lead Times columnist David Carr to once call him a "real piece of work" and Gawker's own Adrian Chen to call him a "a megalomaniacal troll . Not to mention a real asshole." He has, nonetheless, become a kind of cause célèbre since entering prison in September 2012. There he's been awaiting trial on a variety of charges, including identity theft. The charges stem to Brown's having posted a link to stolen credit card information in the chat room of a group he'd formed called "Project PM." Project PM spent its time trying to derive information from the documents hackers obtained. As Carr put it:

If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Brown's indictment was roundly criticized for violating the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment. As Adrian Chen put it back when the indictment was handed down:

As a journalist who covers hackers and has "transferred and posted" many links to data stolen by hackers—in order to put them in stories about the hacks—this indictment is frightening because it seems to criminalize linking. Does this mean if a hacker posts a list of stolen passwords and usernames to Pastebin, the popular document-sharing site, and I link to them in a story or tweet I could be charged with "trafficking in stolen authentication features," as Brown has been? (I wouldn't typically do this, but I've seen plenty of other bloggers and journalists who have.) Links to the credit card number list were widely shared on Twitter in the wake of the Stratfor hack—are all the people who tweeted links going to be rounded up and arrested, too?

Brown's trial was set to be a battle over these crucial (and growing more crucial all the time) issues. Of course a plea will leave these issues unresolved. But the indictment against him was heavily stacked. There was a possible sentence of over 100 years attached. And as Wired notes, under this plea agreement "the maximum statutory sentence would likely be five years."

Tomorrow morning, George W. Bush will debut 24 paintings on the Today Show, including portraits of Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, and the Dalai Lama. To promote the occasion, the former president discussed his hopes and fears as an artist in an interview with his daughter, Jenna Bush Hager, who works as a correspondent for the show.

Bush believes Putin et al. will be surprised by his talent. "I think they're going to be (like), 'Wow, George Bush is a painter,''' Bush said. "I'm sure when they heard I was painting, and if they had, they're going to say, 'Wow, I look forward to seeing a stick figure he painted of me."

That, of course, assumes those leaders haven't seen Bush's other paintings, which were published last year on Gawker and elsewhere courtesy of the hacker Guccifer.

"I was annoyed. It's an invasion of one's privacy," Bush said of the hacking. "And yeah, I was annoyed. And nor do I want my paintings to get out."

But what about those famous nude self-portraits? "I found it very interesting the first painting that came out was the one I painted of myself in the bathtub," Bush said. "I did so because I wanted to kind of shock my instructor."

[h/t The Atlantic Wire/Image via AP]

Photographers take pictures of Thug, a pygmy hippo, exploring his new enclosure at the zoo in London on Thursday, when Thug and his lifelong companion Nicky were unveiled to the media in their new home as part of the zoo's "Into Africa" exhibit. Image via Matt Dunham/AP.

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An old story recently resurfaced that Harvard University's library had discovered a trio of books in its collection were bound with human skin, including skin from a man who was flayed alive in the 17th century. But the most famous skin-covered book in the Ivy League isn't what seems, says Harvard's Law Library.

The book in question, Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias..., bears the following interesting inscription on its final page:

"The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace."

But the heartfelt inscription may have been a morbid joke, because when Harvard had the book tested, its binding turned out to be sheepskin .

Daniel Kirby, a Harvard conservation scientist, used peptide mass fingerprinting to analyze samples from 9 parts of the binding, and concluded it was definitely not human. This method of protein analysis was invented in 1993—the year after an earlier test of the book proved inconclusive.

Langdell Law Library curator David Ferris told the Harvard Crimson in 2006 that the book was "almost certainly rebound" after it was first assembled.

The Crimson identified two other books in the school's collections that may be bound in peopleskin, but there are reasons to doubt both of those, too.

The Countway Library's Center for the History of medicine owns a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in French, which has "bound in human skin" penciled on the inside cover.

"I think even this is somewhat doubtful as [the book] doesn't greatly resemble others I've seen in the past," Countway reference librarian Jack Eckert said in 2006.

Harvard's Houghton Collection also holds Des destinées de l'ame..., an essay collection by French poet Arsène Houssaye. A note describing a memo that came with the book—the original memo has since been lost—says it was bound using "the back of the unclaimed body of a woman patient in a French mental hospital who died suddenly of apoplexy."

The doctor who owned the book in the 1880s wrote that "a book on the human soul merited that it was given a human skin."

Okay, that one is crazy enough to be true. Harvard may want to have it tested for sheepish protein signatures just to be sure, though.

"I haven't heard from the curator of ours if/when that will happen," writes Houghton Library Early Modern curator John Overholt on Twitter.

[Photo Credit: Harvard Law School]

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