House of Cards may be leaving Maryland thanks to the kind of political wrangling that makes the show so fun to watch. A bill to increase the amount of tax-incentive money allocated to film and TV shoots in the state failed late Monday night in the state legislature, all thanks to a single clause.

The Washington thriller has historically gotten what it has requested from Maryland's legislature. Although in past years only about $7.5 million per year has been set aside for production companies in advance, the first two seasons of the show managed to net $26.6 million in tax incentives. But this time around, the show was offered only $4 million. Producers wanted $11 million more than that.

But rather than granting the show the requested $15 million, Maryland's legislature has allocated that amount for tax incentives for all productions, including House of Cards and Veep, which also shoots in Maryland. The bill was intended to increase that funding to $18.5 million, and its demise all came down to a few sentences. After it passed the House, a committee of House and Senate members met to hammer out a final version. The three House members in the committee wanted to include a provision that that if a production that has received tax incentives leaves the state, Maryland could demand the money back–a clause that the three senators would not agree to. And so the committee sat in gridlock until the session ended at midnight.

Tax incentives have long been a way for out-of-the-way locales (that is, places that aren't Los Angeles) to entice film and television productions–and the jobs that come with them. The first two seasons of House of Cards alone reportedly created 6,000 jobs and contributed $250 million to Maryland's economy. The show also claims to have employed 60 local actors.

House of Cards already pushed its third-season filming back several months to accommodate the hoped-for incentive increase. Now that it's not going as planned, those months may be just enough time to pack up and move.

[Image via AP]

This video of a Dutch reporter doing a relaxed lean right off of a dock (and the mayor she's interviewing haplessly trying to pull her out of the water with his fancy mayor-necklace) is a blooper so perfect it has to be fake.

It probably is.

The interviewer, Martje Oesterholt, is a tourism marketing consultant working on promotion for Sail Kampen, the city of Kampen's huge Easter music festival. Sure, she could have slipped into the water—through that conveniently open gate—at the best possible moment in a promotional video, but post-Kimmel cynicism says it's unlikely.

Either way, it's a timeless mayor-meets-girl, girl-falls-in-water, mayor-is-pretty-bad-at-aquatic-rescues story.

[H/T: DPAF]

How did the American banking industry escape the crash of 2008 with so few scrapes and bruises, let alone so little jail time? It's easy to blame a general lack of regulation—but smarter to point the finger at the regulatory Securities and Exchange Commission itself. Last week one retiring SEC attorney, 66-year-old James Kidney, went out on a limb and agreed:

The SEC has become "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors," Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. "On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening."

Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency's penalties, Kidney said, have become "at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike."

I cannot decide if it is uplifting or depressing that someone has stood up and pointed this out directly to the SEC's face. Kidney's remarks cannot have come as a surprise to his colleagues, not least because, as Bloomberg notes, he was known for agitating internally for greater sanctions against Goldman Sachs. His goodbye speech is not so much an outburst, I suspect, as the tail-end of a rant that no one has been listening to there, and they weren't likely to start at the man's retirement party.

After all,

"People point to him as being very frank and not one to just say what people want to hear," said Crimmins, now a partner at the K&L Gates law firm in Washington. Speakers at the party even ribbed Kidney about it, Crimmins said.

"There were some high-ranking people in the room, and everyone took it in stride," Crimmins said. "Everyone there respected that."

They all had a little laugh, you see.

It would be nice if life was just as your conspiracy-theory-believing relatives told you, and the SEC's reluctance to fight was the result of some direct payoff.

Instead what we hear from people like Kidney is that it's more like an internal culture problem, one that's more diffuse, systemic, and difficult to fix. It's about wanting to be nice to bankers. That impulse is puzzling, because it's at best a wasted effort give that they still complain that regulators aren't being nice enough.

Or else, chuckle about how "very frank" you are, and get themselves another drink.

[Photo via AP.]

The cuckolded husband of the staffer caught on surveillance video snogging with Rep. Vance McAllister (R-La.) says he's leaving his wife, and the congressman is a dirtbag. "If people really knew him, he wouldn't be elected," the husband told Inside Edition. "This religious family man deal—this is completely false."

"Will Everyone Have Sex With Paul Rudd for $1?": An Experiment by Billy Eichner

Hypothesis: Everyone, regardless of age, gender, or sexual preference, would have sex with actor/comedian/chill dude Paul Rudd if offered $1.

Procedure: Run down the streets of New York with actor/comedian/chill dude Paul Rudd. Ask everyone you pass if they would have sex with him for $1. Mention his dreamy eyes at every opportunity.

Conclusion: The whole world, minus one old lady and one married woman, is at least open to the possibility of a bang session with Paul Rudd that pays well below the federal minimum wage. We can only conclude that humans, as a species, are a bunch of Ruddfuckers.

[H/T: Vulture]

If Pennsylvania still had a poet laureate, it would be Duane Sedlock, the "Outdoorsman" columnist for the Allentown, PA Examiner.com site—a man unafraid to denounce the "low-income" "Orientals" who are destroying the ambiance of PA's historic casinos.

Duane Sedlock (pictured)—a real person, whose Facebook likes include "Two and a Half Men" and "Rock Music"—is not the type to sit idly by as the local newspaper runs a story about poor Asian residents of New York City who ride free shuttle buses to the casinos in Bethlehem, PA every day, just to scrape together a living by selling the free gambling vouchers they get when they arrive. Duane Sedlock is a man who will tell you the dark side of this story.

Most of the hundreds of daily bus riders pay $15 for a bus ticket, which includes a $45 free-play cards the casino gives them. Then moments after traveling the 100-mile trip and stepping off the bus they sell the $45 free slot play card at a discount to what is considered the underground market. Then it's off to aimlessly roam the town looking for mischief and mayhem until the return trip later in the day.

Good god. What sort of mischief and mayhem are these marauders instigating among the helpless locals?

First, many do some shopping but most of it is at the Wawa and the Bottom Dollar Store across the Lehigh River on the Northside of the city on Stefko Boulevard. But that's usually only for eggs which are relatively inexpensive, especially when you put x-large eggs into the smaller size containers. There is a strict 2 dozen limit of eggs per customer otherwise the days' supply of eggs would be sold-out in a matter of minutes on a daily basis.

Store owners and shop keepers are very leery when the flash mobs of Orientals hit their stores. Some on the Southside limit the numbers in their shops or lock their doors allowing only actual customers to enter.

Duane Sedlock, whose six favorite movies all star Jackie Chan, has frankly had it with these marauding bands of dirty, egg-swallowing cave people from the Far East.

The Sands installed hand-drying machines in their restrooms because the paper towels kept disappearing. Oh, don't be surprised if you see some the of New Yorkers bathing in the restrooms, that includes washing their feet in the sinks. And the casino also has had past problems with fleas and lice.

Some stay near the casino, sleeping on benches and tables along the Southside Greenway and at the SteelStacks campus. Or they trespass in nearby neighborhood yards and gardens pulling flowers and vegetables.

Eggs, flowers, vegetables.... what's next?

Others venture over to the Lehigh Canal, to do some fishing and hunting. Of course they don't have licenses for these activities but that doesn't stop them. They have refined the art of catching geese though. First, you feed them, than you snatch them, snap their necks and finally stuff them in your bag or cooler (if there aren't too many illegal fish already in them) for the ride home. Also, they will take along some wild grasses and wildflowers which are planted as riparian buffers along the canal and river.

Here you have a small, bucolic town in Pennsylvania, just trying to make an honest living with slot machines and blackjack tables, under assault from penniless Oriental hordes intent on purchasing every last egg in town and making who knows what sort of wildlflower omelette on the bus ride home. It's just not right. "One final thought," concludes Duane Sedlock, who publicly advertises the fact that he is fan of Advance Auto Parts, "if you go for a walk or run on the canal towpath and take your dog along, keep it on a leash, a very short one!"

Duane Sedlock has also done some groundbreaking work on the topic of "Cell phones; both good and bad."

[Photo: FB]

The Republican leader of one of Florida's most populous urban centers was asked this week why his party was faring so poorly among voters in the area. His answer was that government-loving "semi-socialist" Puerto Ricans are moving in and changing things for the worse.

The Orlando Sentinel noted yesterday that voter registrations in Orange County, which includes Orlando, had changed significantly since the last election cycle in 2012: Democrats picked up a few thousand new voters, while the GOP actually lost 247 voters. In fact, registered Republicans are now the number three demographic in the region, trailing Dems and voters who registered as "independent" or "no party affiliation"—the fastest-growing segment.

The Sentinel gave both parties' county chairmen a chance to comment on the new numbers, and the Democratic head offered some banal boilerplate about Republican corruption. But Lew Oliver, the chairman of the Orange County GOP—pictured above with embattled Florida Gov. Rick Scott—went in another direction altogether, blaming his party's performance on new "demographics or national trends"—to wit, self-interested Hispanics with a poor work ethic:

The great grand irony of it all is that the massive predominantly Puerto Rican influx that has accounted for nearly all of this is the result of Puerto Ricans almost without exception fleeing Puerto Rico and other states whose economic opportunities have diminished. What do all those places have in common? Puerto Rico, Chicago, Illinois, New York? Democrat governments. You would think at least of few of them would figure that out. If you like a semi-socialist government where the highest aspiration is a nice secure government job, Puerto Rico is heaven on earth, PLUS nice weather!

"Sadly," Oliver concluded, Puerto Rico "is also a terrible basket case. As is Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Illinois, New York and just about every other Democrat-controlled state and city in the country."

Besides the fact that Oliver didn't offer much statistical evidence for his suspicions, he didn't answer exactly why, if all these leftist government-cheese-wanting Puerto Ricans are causing the GOP's recruiting problems, most new voters on his turf were opting to be independents, rather than Democrats.

But hey, semi-socialists are semi-crafty like that!

Some people are so amazingly stupid it's a wonder how they're able to function.

This is why the spread misinformation about contrails is dangerous. pic.twitter.com/L2DWUQ09a9

— Jacob Wycoff (@4cast4you) April 8, 2014

The "chemtrail" conspiracy theory (incorrectly) states that the condensation trails (contrails) left behind by high-flying airplanes are really chemicals sprayed by government aircraft to control/poison/do whatever to the population. It's so ridiculous that I'm getting tired of explaining it to people.

Contrails are cirrus clouds created by the warm, moist jet exhaust of high-flying aircraft meeting the extremely cold air in the upper atmosphere. There is no such thing as a "chemtrail," but the wackadoodles who believe in them won't take no for an answer.

The chemtrail conspiracy theorists are to the point where they're harassing and threatening meteorologists and their families for daring to take them on with science. And, apparently, at least one of them wants to aim laser beams at the cockpits of aircraft.

It is a federal crime to aim a laser beam at an aircraft, punishable with up to five years in prison, and they'll charge your dumb ass with terrorism if you make it crash.

If chemtrail believers spent as much energy studying real science as they did propagating conspiracy theories online, their lives might not suck so much that they think there are people out to get them.

[Image by Sergey Kustov via Wikimedia Commons]

What's the deadliest job in America lately? Working on cell phone towers! How much responsibility do cell phone companies and their contractors assume when a worker falls and dies? Virtually none! Mike Rowe, call your office.

Rev. Al Sharpton speaks during a news conference in New York on Tuesday. He says a report that he spied on New York Mafia figures for the FBI in the 1980s is old news. Image via Seth Wenig/AP.

Yesterday, Huffington Post published this infographic depicting "The Deadly Aftermath Of War Right Here At Home." It got hot on Digg's front page. It might give you the impression that war veterans are killing Americans out of all proportion to the rest of the population. You'd be wrong.

The chart and accompanying article use last week's fatal shooting at Ft. Hood as a jumping-off point for a conversation about how America's long, dumb wars have deranged their veterans, leading to a rash of murders by them here in the states. It's a conversation worth having, to be sure: Ivan Lopez, the presumed Ft. Hood killer and an Iraq vet, was being treated for mental health issues, and may have suffered from post-traumatic stress.

But conversations need context, and that's sorely lacking in HuffPo's treatment—to a point where readers could be misled.

There are niggling details that the chart gets wrong—they're military installations, not installments—but that's neither here nor there. More concerning is the overall charge that the victims of vets here in America are "collateral casualties of war." Does the evidence really bear that out?

HuffPo counts a total of 194 war vets who've been charged with criminal killings post-deployment. It's not clear when the tally stopped, but that's a good sight more deaths than were recorded by GOOD magazine in 2010, so let's assume HuffPo's numbers run up to at least last year, when the recorded number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans totaled about 2.5 million.

That's a hell of a number, by the way. It amounts to less than 1 percent of Americans, sure, but still, a city of nothing but "War on Terror" veterans would be the fourth largest city in the U.S., just behind Chicago.

But would it be an especially lawless, stabby, shooty city? Do the math: Of those 2.5 million vets, 194 have been accused of murder or manslaughter here in the States. So 0.0078 percent of returning vets are accused killers.

It would be nice if we could compare that to the percentage of Americans at large who are accused of killing, but those stats are hard to come by; the FBI doesn't publish the number of murderers each year, in part because many don't get caught. We do know how many Americans are victims of murder or negligent manslaughter in a given year, though: 14,827 in 2012, for example. Say we assume one murderer commits one killing—it's an inexact (and macabre) estimation, but it gives us a reasonable ballpark figure to work with.

In 2012, there were approximately 314 million people in America. Assuming 14,827 murderers, that means 0.0047 percent of Americans were killers.

By that admittedly rough measure, war vets are about twice as likely as members of the general population to be killers. But that doesn't tell the whole story, either: There are plenty of variables that make a group more likely to kill.

A recent Department of Justice study, for example, shows that men are nine times more likely than women to be murderers. Since the military—and, by extension, the population of U.S. war veterans—is about 86 percent male, while the U.S population is only 49 percent male, you might expect the percentage of vets who are killers to be about twice the rate for all Americans. Which it is.

So it isn't totally clear that killings by vets are an alarming trend, so much as a disturbing pattern that's reasonably within historical expectations.

There is another interesting area of the infographic: the chart at the lower left that shows killings by vets track pretty closely with casualties in the wars (except for 2009, when the Great Recession pushed all crime rates up). The chart seems to intimate that the likelier troops were to see comrades killed overseas, the likelier they were to experience combat stress and kill at home.

That's intuitive. But that's not the way it works. At the Iraq war's bloodiest points, deployments were 12 months or more for most soldiers, and 7 months or more for members of the other services. They can't kill American civilians when they're deployed overseas, but they can after they get home. So if HuffPo truly is suggesting a link between war casualties and vets' killings at home, that latter group should be a trailing indicator on the chart. It's not.

More likely, higher casualties in war meant more troops choosing to get out of the service, lest they might deploy again... and consequently more war vets in the general U.S. population, and a statistically expected rise in their numbers of accused killings as a result.

Beyond the stats, the HuffPo piece offers no real evidence linking veterans' service overseas to the killing they do here at home. It's absurd to say there's no link, but it's equally absurd to say one experience causes the other. Plenty of other variables exist—debt, poverty, disability, drug dependency, relationship trouble, behavior control issues—although even with these, it's impossible to say whether a war deployment caused or aggravated the issues.

And inconvenient facts are absent from the HuffPo piece. The first Fort Hood killer, Nidal Hasan, had never deployed to a war zone—in fact, he was slated to go to Afghanistan, and he says that prospect, and the fear that he might have to kill fellow Muslims, precipitated his murderous act. He is responsible for 16 deaths. You could even argue his killing was caused by the wars, even more directly than some of the killings included on this chart. But he doesn't even appear on it.

The whole affair is less a telling snapshot about the after-effects of America's long, dumb wars than a clear-cut example of the limits of context-free charty "explainer journalism", which makes people feel more informed even when it perpetuates innumeracy and reductive myths.

All of this is not to say that war doesn't suck on every level, and that war veterans' difficulties don't pose a huge challenge for us as a society. But they're a huge, diverse population, and they get jammed into a couple of archetypes for media purposes: heroes, or victims, or monsters. Many are none of these. Some are all three. However you categorize them, vets could use some help today, as could a whole lot of other Americans.

In the grand tradition of "American [Noun]" movies comes this new (and apparently real) documentary, American Blogger, the trailer for which is above. You will notice that its "American bloggers" are almost exclusively attractive, well-lit women.

Will this movie, as it claims, "change the way you see an entire industry?" I'm sure it will. Because the American bloggers I know—with a handful of notable exceptions—look like row after row of pale, unattractive men in a dimly lit space.

Don't believe the hype.

[Author strategically not pictured]

In the past 15 or so years, we've all learned to feel pretty safe on the internet. BigSite.com is surely handling your credit card information safely, at least as safely as any brick and mortar store. Maybe don't be so sure; there's been a bug lurking in one of the internet's most important security measures for years, and it's given attackers the keys to the kingdom. Enter Heartbleed.

Secret handshakes

The heart of having secure transactions on the internet relies on a pair of technologies called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and its slightly younger brother Transport Layer Security (TLS). For most intents and purposes, they're the same thing. You can thank TLS/SSL for the little padlock that shows up next to the address of a secure website, and the https:// those addresses start with. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, TLS/SSL is what brokers the exchange of cryptographic keys that lets a browser and a server know they are who they say they are. It's the guardian of the secret digital handshake that keeps your private information between just you and BigSite.com.

TLS/SSL is a huge part of the internet as we know it today, and fortunately it still works just fine. What's causing the dangerous breach is a software library called OpenSSL. It's basically a open source package that people can use to get the protection of TLS/SSL encryption quick and easy. The only problem? It's had a hole in it for years. A hole called "Heartbleed."

A look inside

OpenSSL works just fine in theory, but thanks to a minor coding error and the exploits result from it, malicious folks can abuse certain (and popular!) versions of OpenSSL to grab slices of private data that should be secured by the TLS/SSL code that keeps you safe. Attackers can look inside the secret handshake and see how it's done.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, if attackers take a peek at a secret handshake you are performing when you login to your email account at Yahoo.com, they can see your information. Your username, your password, maybe even your credit card number depending on what you're doing. There's all kinds of juicy stuff in there.

But that's small time spoils compared to the real danger. Attackers will also get a look at how the site that's taking your data identifies itself. And once that half of the handshake is out in the wild, all bets are off. Not only could ne'er-do-wells use their new-found key to fool people into thinking they are a fine upstanding place of business with a good ol' man-in-the-middle attack, they can also look back into transactions that already happened. And since they're getting in with the master key instead of breaking through a window, these sort of attacks leave no trace.

So how does this affect me?

Fortunately not all versions of OpenSSL are vulnerable to this kind of exploit, and there's already a fixed version of it out there. But considering how long it was broken for, that's a cold comfort.

There's a long list of sites that used the offending package, but because the attacks leave no trace, there's no way of telling how many were actually attacked; you just have to assume they all were. And if you're a user of one of them, assume your credentials are now out in the wild.

• yahoo.com
• imgur.com
• flickr.com
• redtube.com
• kickass.to
• okcupid.com
• steamcommunity.com
• hidemyass.com
• wettransfer.com
• usmagazine.com
• 500px.com

And even once those sites have patched up the actual OpenSSL hole, the problem is far from solved. Sites also have to perform the internet equivalent of changing their cryptographic locks. Even then, any data that attackers may have managed to stash before then is still vulnerable, and it always will be.

Fortunately there are no real juggernauts of internet commerce wrapped up in this, as far as we know. No Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft. Your LastPass and 1Password are still safe. But still, it's a potentially unprecedented breach though we'll never actually know how many sites got attacked.

In the meantime, there's not much you can do besides avoiding affected sites until they're fixed, and changing your passwords after the fact. You can also put on a tinfoil hat, but sometimes the best solution is just a close eye on your credit card statement.

Last fall, Sean Rad told Bloomberg Businessweek that he met his girlfriend of four months on Tinder, the same dating app where he serves as CEO. That young lady, who went unnamed, is 20-year-old Alexa Dell, the daughter of beleaguered billionaire Michael Dell. Alexa made headlines in 2012 when she turned up on Rich Kids of Instagram. Rad was 27-years-old as of September.

Rad's relationship with Dell is no secret. It's been apparent for months on their public social media accounts. The New York Times even hinted at in this intimate photograph accompanying a feature about how Santa Monica is the new Silicon Valley. (Like Snapchat and Whisper, Tinder's offices are based in Los Angeles. The staff seems to like hanging out at Soho House.)

The Times does not mention Dell's father or even the status of her relationship with Rad. However Dell posted the snogging photo on Instagram, accompanied by the Beyoncé lyric "Why can't I keep my fingers off it baby" and a coy surfboard emoji. Rad's profile picture on Instagram used to be a photo of the two of them; hers still is. It appears that he also deleted some images of them as a couple from his account.

Neither Rad nor Dell immediately responded to requests from Valleywag to verify that they are still involved. Her last photo, from two weeks ago, was of birthday cupcakes for Tinder cofounder Justin Mateen, taken at Tinder's West Hollywood headquarters.

This is probably not the first and certainly not the last romance between a tech CEO and a tech scion. What's surprising here is how very little Dell has changed since her costly social media disasters.

Alexa caused a ruckus for Dell Inc. in August, 2012 when her lackadaisical approach to privacy, which included GPS-enabled tweets and exact dates, times, and locations of where her parents would be, jeopardized a family security detail that regulatory filings confirm cost her father $2.7 million a year. The tipping point was an Instagram photo of her brother Zachary Dell en route to Fiji in the family jet in front of a breakfast buffet fit for a Kim Jong Un. It pretty much made the Rich Kids of Instagram brand.

When news of the security risk broke, Alexa shut down her Twitter account and the Instagram photo was taken down. At the time, a Dell spokesman declined to comment on whether it was for security concerns. No matter, because she's been tweeting as @alexakdell from a public and location-enabled Twitter account since at least July, 2012. Rad is one her followers. He and Tinder are the main subject of her tweets. From that public Twitter account, Dell tweets links to her private, location-enabled Instagram account. She's been posting on Instagram as alexakdell, since at least August, 2012—the same month her security faux pas made the news.

On her LinkedIn profile, Dell says she's a New York-based intern at Conde Nast's W magazine slated to graduate from Columbia University next year, although she mostly seems to checking in from L.A.

It's probably no fun to stay off social media just because your dad made a killing off of mediocre and occasionally defective computers. Perhaps the Ivy League student brokered some deal with her father not to expose any security-compromising details about the rest of the family? If so, he should add Throwback Thursday to the no fly list.

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

[Images via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram]

President Obama signed executive orders today—"Equal Pay Day"—leaning on federal contractors to pay women what they pay men. He also exhorted the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, bringing us closer to an America where female billionaires can have outsize political influence, too.

Chris Christie has long portrayed himself as someone who makes the "tough decisions" normal politicians can't—who stands up to society's leeches and tells them to stop sucking away taxpayer blood—a warrior who'll go toe-to-toe with anyone on either side of the aisle...unless that person is 71-year-old daytime television host Joy Behar.

Ryan Lizza's profile of Christie in this week's issue of The New Yorker opens with a long anecdote set at a recent roast of ex-New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne. As Lizza tells it, most of the comedians paid to tell jokes at the roast focused heavily on Christie, which is unsurprising considering he's a current and famous politician who also happens to be in the midst of a political scandal that could sink his presidential ambitions.

One of the roasters was Joy Behar, whom your mother knows from The View. Behar is a veteran stand up comic, but, as a creature of daytime television, comes across as pretty harmless.

In the video of the roast, which was shown on television by Chris Matthews last week, Christie attempts to wrench away Behar's notes before she even gets a chance to tell her jokes. The crowd seems to laugh along nervously as the comedian and sitting governor of the state get into what essentially amounts to a physical confrontation on stage. Eventually, Behar shouts him down, calls him a "coward" and says his political career is "toast."

Of all the things that should disqualify Chris Christie from being president, "getting legitimately offended by Joy Behar" is at least in the top three.

[via Huffington Post]

On March 14, 2014, The Los Angeles Times issued a retraction of an article in which reporter Jason Felch stated that Occidental College failed to disclose 27 sexual assaults in its 2012 Annual Security Report (ASR). The retraction states that "Occidental representatives approached the Times early this month to seek a correction. Documents reviewed by The Times this week show that the 27 incidents did not fall under the law's disclosure requirements for a variety of reasons."

However, The Los Angeles Times did not perform due diligence in their investigation of the numbers, and they never should have issued a retraction. Felch had incontrovertible evidence that the College did not include anonymous cases in their 2012 ASR and had verification that the college could not lawfully account for 27 missing cases.

Given the evidence, The Times should issue a mea culpa, and especially after Occidental spokesperson Jim Tranquada recently admitted to the LA Weekly that Dean of Students Barbara Avery ignored federal Clery reporting requirements that year. "In 2012, out of concern for student confidentiality, the Dean of Students office did not always communicate to Campus Safety when a student initiated the sexual-misconduct process or otherwise reported a sexual assault."

Due to the complexities involved, it is easy to see how institutions are able to dissemble with data. To really understand how the College and The Times have failed in their duties, we must pay close attention to several key dimensions: the specific demands of the Clery Act, the multiple and contradictory reporting numbers given by College officials, and the multiple and contradictory reasons provided for the reporting gap.

The Clery Act

The Clery Act was passed in 1990 in response to the rape and murder of Lehigh University student Jeanne Clery. Clery is intended to increase transparency about crime on and around campus, but many schools continue to distort their crime numbers.

Clery's two primary reporting documents are the Daily Crime Log and the Annual Security Report (ASR). The ASR is published on October 1st of each year, and it includes crimes reported during the previous calendar year (January – December), regardless of when the crime occurred. The ASR includes statistics on eight crimes — homicide, sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, arson, and hate crimes.

Schools are only required to report incidents that occur within the Clery reporting area, which includes the campus proper, property immediately adjacent to campus, and non-adjacent property that the campus owns or controls (e.g., fraternity houses).

For Clery, reports of a crime must be included in the daily crime log and the ASR, even if a formal complaint or police report is never filed, and even if the crime is not upheld in an adjudication proceeding. Additionally, student privacy laws cannot be used to circumvent Clery reporting requirements. Lastly, Occidental College is required to include reports of sexual assault/rape it receives through its anonymous reporting form if the crime occurred within the Clery reporting area.

The Number 27

In December, 2013, Felch wrote a story claiming that he had uncovered "27 additional sexual assault allegations made in 2012 that have not been disclosed. Dozens more may have been ignored by the dean of students' office since 2009 because they were made anonymously, records and interviews showed."

How did Felch arrive at the number 27?

He subtracted 7 (cases reported in the 2012 ASR) from 34 (cases reported by the Dean of Students to have occurred in 2012).

So the key number here is 34. This number was taken from the federal Clery complaint that we filed on behalf of nearly forty Occidental students, faculty, and staff on April 1, 2013 (a full eight months before Felch began an "inappropriate relationship" with one of his eleven Oxy sources that led to his firing).

Our federal complaint included this number because Dean of Students Barbara Avery stated that her office had received 34 complaints of sexual assault/rape in 2012 during three official meetings with the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition on this issue:

• Monday, May 21, 2012, 10 a.m. (Barbara Avery, Caroline Heldman, Danielle Dirks, six administrators, and three students were in attendance.)

• Thursday, September 27, 2012, 3 p.m. (Barbara Avery, Caroline Heldman, Danielle Dirks, and the Dean of Faculty were in attendance.)

• Friday, October 19, 2012, 3 p.m. (Barbara Avery, Caroline Heldman, Danielle Dirks, and the Title IX Coordinator were in attendance.)

During the first meeting where the Dean reported the 34 cases (May, 2012), Avery asked us (the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition) to revise the sexual assault policy because her office was "buried" under the 34. Avery clarified in this meeting that she was referencing cases that had come in since January, which made this statistic even more staggering because the reporting year was not yet half over. And there was never any question that the 34 referred to sexual assault/rape cases since we were there to discuss this specific crime, not motor vehicle theft or arson or cyber harassment.

During the second meeting where the Dean discussed the 34 cases (September, 2012), Avery confirmed that her office had received 34 reports of sexual assault/rape "that year." When we pressed her about why this number did not match the crime log, she replied that only 13 of the 34 had gone to adjudication, suggesting that only formal complaints need to be reported (a violation of Clery reporting requirements). The College has since established that Dean Avery did not lawfully report these cases in 2012 (see above).

During the third meeting where the Dean discussed 34 cases (October, 2012), we again pressed her about the inexplicable gap. Avery and the Title IX Coordinator gave two concrete reasons for the gap: 10 anonymous reports that were not included in the ASR (a blatant violation of Clery), and two cases involving Oxy students that occurred at other campuses. When I noted that the numbers still did not add up, the Title IX Coordinator made a vague reference to "non-sexual cases." In other words, the Deans were not able to lawfully explain the gap, they admitted to violating Clery by excluding anonymous cases, and they provided a set of "explanations" that differed from those that would later be given to the Los Angeles Times (see below).

We repeated the number 34 in about a dozen private and public meetings in 2012 and 2013, including a campus-wide informational session on October 25, 2012 with President Jonathan Veitch in attendance and the Faculty Meeting on November 13, 2013 where this number was entered into the meeting minutes. The number 34 was common knowledge on campus, and not a single administrator ever challenged it in a year and a half.

A few days ago, college spokesperson Jim Tranquada told the LA Weekly that Dean Avery was "speaking informally" when she repeatedly reported 34 cases, despite the fact that Avery presented this statistic in formal meetings on sexual assault/rape in her professional capacity as the head of the office that receives these complaints. Tranquada also responded that Avery was referring to the 2011/12 school year, not the 2012 calendar year, but even if this were the case, it still does not add up since the total number of cases reported in 2011 (11) and 2012 (7) equals 18 – far short of the 34.

Felch's Due Diligence

Jason Felch worked for nearly two months on his December 7, 2013 story on the 27 cases. He spoke with sources from the federal complaints who confirmed that Dean Avery could not legally account for the 27-case gap. The more evidence we provided, the more Felch seemed convinced that the College was purposefully covering up cases. Furthermore, Felch contacted Tranquada on multiple occasions for clarification on whether anonymous reports were included in the 2012 ASR, as documented in Felch's statement of March 19, 2013:

Regarding the Dec 7th story, I began seeking information and comment from Occidental on Oct. 14th. Suspecting the 27 cases may not have been disclosed because they were reported anonymously, I wrote the college spokesman Jim Tranquada on Oct. 14th: "I'd like some details on Oxy's sexual violence anonymous reporting form. When was the system first put in place? Who administers the system? What is the process for including reports submitted here into the Clery data? Has that process changed in recent years? In addition, please provide me with a copy of all data submitted through the form for the past five years, excluding the name of the accused. Finally, has this data been accurately reported in Clery Act reports in years past?"

On Oct 18, I received the following statement from Tranquada: "Given the two investigations currently underway by the Department of Education, we believe our students will be best served by the conclusions reached through these comprehensive, thorough, and public reviews. In the meantime, Occidental continues to move ahead with its efforts to improve its policies and procedures to ensure the College is a national leader in dealing with sexual misconduct." I immediately followed up with another email: "Jim, my understanding is that none of the complaints filed through the college's anonymous reporting form were being included in Clery reports. This oversight was discovered in the spring of 2013. So: How many reports have been made through the anonymous reporting page since the page was created in 2009 (the date of creation you provided in our conversation today)? Were all of those reports included in Occidental's annual Clery reports in a timely way?" His reply: "Our statement will have to stand as is."

I continued to press Tranquada during October and November, including the claim made in the federal Clery complaint that the Dean of Students' office had received 34 reports of sexual assaults in 2012, while Occidental only reported 7 of them. Tranquada said he had not seen the federal complaint and could not comment beyond his earlier statement. He requested a copy of the confidential complaint and I declined. Instead, I described the story in detail and requested interviews with three administrators who would be named in the story. He declined to provide any of them, and they did not return calls to home and work over several weeks. When pressed repeatedly on and off the record about the discrepancy in Occidental's reported statistics, Tranquada conceded the college had made reporting errors, without specifying what they were. To reflect this admission, he agreed to be quoted saying, "Clery reporting is clearly an area where we need to improve."

Felch was right to focus on missing anonymous reports since the Deans admitted they excluded these cases during our October 19, 2013 meeting. Also, the College had previously acknowledged that they failed to report 19 anonymous cases in their 2010 ASR to a Huffington Post reporter. Campus Safety Director Holly Nieto was quoted in Felch's story saying that a rapid jump in sexual assault reports in the daily crime log in 2013 "came from an anonymous reporting form that we — the institution, bigger than me — now understand need to be included in our stats. So we caught up, if you will."

Zero Anonymous Reports in 2012

Setting aside Dean Avery's repeated report of 34 cases for a moment, our federal complaint includes hard evidence that Occidental College did not report a single anonymous case in 2012, evidence that I shared with Felch last fall. The 2012 ASR includes a total of 7 cases, and our federal complaint includes a total of 7 students who reported this crime in person to the Dean of Student's office that year. This means that the 2012 ASR includes zero cases from the anonymous reporting system in 2012.

(As an aside, it is highly unlikely that our federal complaints would include all of the assaults/rapes that occurred on campus in 2012 since we only included cases that were woefully mishandled. If the College's ASR number is accurate, this means that 100% of survivors reported that administrators mishandled their case in 2012.)

So just how many anonymous cases did the College fail to report in 2012? We cannot know for sure since the College refuses to release this information, but we can generate an estimate based on a December 19, 2013 email from Jim Tranquada that the College averages "between 5-6 online anonymous reports per month." Using unrealistically conservative assumptions (5 reports per month during the 8 months students are on campus, and assuming that only half occurred within the reporting area), we can confidently estimate that College failed to report at least 20 anonymous cases in their 2012 ASR.

The Retraction

Last month, Oxy representatives from the crisis management PR firm G.F. Bunting met twice with Los Angeles Times editor Davan Maharaj. (President Veitch hired Bunting because of the firm's professional ties to The Times and personal ties to Felch. Senior Executive Ralph Frammolino is Felch's co-author and arch-enemy due to a contract dispute.) Bunting representatives convinced Maharaj that the College was not legally required to disclose any of the 27 cases to the public. It remains a mystery as to why they came forward now with information that the College has had for nearly two years but has repeatedly refused to share with others.

College representatives presented a new set of explanations for the gap — 18 involved sexual misconduct but not sexual battery, assault, or rape; 6 occurred off-campus; and 3 cases had already been reported in the 2011 ASR. They made no mention of the missing anonymous cases. The College has refused to release the PowerPoint presentation to reporters and the Oxy community, even to a committee that President Veitch established to improve sexual assault issues.

A week after The Times' retraction, a College representative furnished a fourth, contradictory explanation for the gap — that some of the 27 cases were explained away because the adjudication process found them to be consensual. This criterion is a clear violation of Clery reporting requirements.

So how did Occidental representatives convince the leadership of The Los Angeles Timesto issue such a drastic response to Felch's story given that the numbers do not add up? The red herring revelation of Felch's "inappropriate relationship" with an Oxy source undoubtedly backed Maharaj into a corner. The relationship is a red herring because the source in question was one of 11 sources, and any information she provided was duplicative of the federal complaints and other sources. I advised Maharaj that he had been misled about the numbers in a March 17, 2014 email, to which he never replied. But beyond the relationship, it is apparent that Oxy representatives played upon ignorance of Clery reporting requirements. For example, when faculty asked what information was provided to The Los Angeles Times, President Jonathan Veitch claimed that "people" were confusing "Clery reportable numbers" and "Title IX reportable numbers." There is no such thing as "Title IX reportable numbers."

In conclusion to a story that is far from over, Occidental College administrators have given conflicting explanations for the 27-case gap in the 2012 ASR, and some of their explanations are blatant violations of federal Clery reporting requirements. Furthermore, we have hard evidence that the 2012 ASR does not include a single anonymous report. Oxy under-reported its 2012 sexual assault/rape numbers, and The Los Angeles Times should not have issued its retraction. And if the numbers played any role in Felch's firing, The Times has an ethical obligation to reconsider this decision as well.

Caroline Heldman is the Chair of the Politics Department at Occidental College and a co-founder of the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition (OSAC). She is also the lead complainant on the Clery and Title IX complaints filed against Occidental College on April 1, 2013 and April 18, 2013, respectively. Dr. Heldman is one of eleven people that reporter Jason Felch used to source his stories on Occidental College's ongoing issues with sexual assault/rape. She was the primary source for Felch's December 7, 2013 article asserting that Occidental College failed to report 27 cases of sexual assault/rape in 2012.

This piece originally appeared on Caroline Heldman's personal blog. Republished with permission.

A 92-pound Yale history major says the university's health center told her she needed to gain weight or take a leave of absence from school. She's spent the past 6 months trying to put on pounds for her weekly weigh-ins.

Frances Chan, 20, told the New Haven Register that she tried everything to gain weight, but only put on 2 pounds from September to April.

"I ate ice cream twice a day. I ate cookies. I used elevators instead of walking up stairs. But I don't really gain any weight," she said.

Yale's health services staff also required Chan to meet with a nutritionist and a mental health professional to determine whether she had an eating disorder. Chan, who is 5'2", says she doesn't: Her parents and grandparents also had small frames.

In a Huffington Post essay titled "Yale University Thinks I Have an Eating Disorder," Chan argued that the school places too much emphasis on Body Mass Index as a measure of overall health.

Her argument apparently worked.

Chan said on Facebook that she and her parents are now working with new doctor at Yale, who said the university made a mistake by focusing too much on Chan's weight, and apologized for "months of anguish" caused by the mandate to put on pounds.

A Yale spokesman declined to comment to the Register about the situation, because the university can't publicly discuss an individual student's medical treatment.

[H/T Huffington Post, Photo: Facebook]

"New Marijuana Study Says Everyone Knows You're High And You'll Likely Be Stoned Forever" is the title of a new video report from The Onion's video news team, and though it is dryly hilarious in that particularly Onion way, the best part is that the video gets increasingly, uh, psychedelic the more you watch it. Trust us, just keep watching.

We've collected eight of the videos above. The original clip is below.

[via The Onion]

Jonathan Fleming, who spent the past 25 years in a New York prison after being convicted of murder, was freed today after prosecutors concluded he was innocent. Exonerations in America are on the rise, which is a mixed blessing.