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Armed Men Take Eastern Ukraine Police Station

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Armed Men Take Eastern Ukraine Police Station

Dozens of armed pro-Russian protesters have seized a police station in Slaviansk, a city in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border. The group is part of several that have occupied government buildings in the Russian-speaking cities Donetsk and Luhansk in the past week.

About 20 masked men, carrying automatic rifles and pistols, guard the entrance to the police station, and another 20 are believed to be inside. According to a Reuters eye-witness, the men are wearing orange and black St. George's ribbons, a symbol of the Soviet victory in World War Two which has been adopted by pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov posted about the takeover on Facebook, saying, "Armed men in camouflage uniforms seized the police department in Slaviansk. The response will be very tough because there is a difference between protesters and terrorists."

Speaking to the AP, a masked guard in Slaviansk said that they took the building because they wanted to protect it from western Ukraine's radical nationalists, and that the group has "only one demand: a referendum and joining Russia."

[Photo credit: AP]


Holy Shit This Guy Is Bad at Wheel of Fortune!

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A Wheel of Fortune contestant named Julian recently lost his chance at winning one million dollars, a car, and trips to London and Jamaica. And he did it, again and again, in the most embarrassing ways possible.

Oh, Julian. You poor baby!

It wasn't all intensely incorrect guesses on pretty much already-solved puzzles for literally the best prizes on the wheel, though — about halfway through this video, he gets one right! "Science Project Runway."

"Hey, remember when I was on Wheel of Fortune and got 'Science Project Runway' right?" Julian will forever ask friends and loved ones. "'Science Project Runway!'"

While I don't think either "ay-chill-is" or "on the spot dice-spin" (hahaha) will soar to "Self-Potato" levels of infamy, I think it's safe to say that both will live quite comfortably beside "I Have The Wine By Johnny Cash."

[Video via Guyism]

German Store Accidentally Sells Romantic Hitler Tea Cups

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German Store Accidentally Sells Romantic Hitler Tea Cups

Dainty tea cups enrobed in poetry and roses showed up at Zurbrüggen stores in Germany bearing the face of Adolf Hitler with swastika to match. The image of the former Nazi dictator is banned in the country, but no one seems to know how this happened.

Zurbrüggen is a family-owned housewares and furniture chain, where 5,000 of the uncomfortable tea vessels were being sold, unbeknownst to the store's owner, Christian Zurbrüggen.

"Our workers are dismayed and embarrassed, the producer has apologized for the error, and we have apologized to our customers for this terrible mistake that resulted from a chain of unfortunate circumstances."

The original price for one tea cup was 1.99 € (around $2.75), and of the 175 sold, only 16 have been returned. The remaining stock has been destroyed, and Zurbrüggen is in communication with their manufacturers in China to figure out where this error originated from.

Many thanks and big ups to tea enjoyer Agnes T. for bringing the news of the mysterious whimsical cups to German newspaper Neue Westfälische.

[Image via New York Times]

The case of the 9-month-old baby charged with the attempted murder of police officers in a Pakistani

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The case of the 9-month-old baby charged with the attempted murder of police officers in a Pakistani court earlier this month has officially been dismissed. The judge announced the decision after Saturday's court hearing.

Daytime Nappers Die Young

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Daytime Nappers Die Young

A 13-year study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology has revealed that if you take naps during the day, your life is going to be short. Add it to the list.

The report, which was performed by researchers at Cambridge University, studied the habits of over 16,000 men and women in Britain and found that those who take naps during the day are almost a third more likely to die before they turn 65.

According to the report,

Among the 16,374 men and women who answered questions on napping habits between 1998 and 2000, a total of 3,251 died during the 13-year follow-up.

The biggest risks come from respiratory problems that napping is likely to induce (or as Stanford University calls them, SRBDs), and nappers who slept during the day for more than an hour had more than double the chance of dying from a respiratory illness than those who didn't nap at all.

But confusion remains: many pose that dormant or undiscovered illnesses actually inspire people to take daytime naps, not the other way around. The study itself admits to this:

In the United Kingdom, daytime napping is not part of the cultural norm, and in the absence of obvious disruptions in nighttime sleep patterns, it remains plausible that napping might be an early sign of system disregulation and a marker of future health problems.

The moral: take a nap if you're tired. But then wake up and go to the doctor.

[Image via AP]

Watch OutKast's Full Coachella Performance From Your Couch

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Are we at Coachella? Coa-hell-no. But we aren't above watching the entirety of OutKast's first reunion performance from the comfort of our own homes. The ATLien duo got right down to it with "B.O.B.", and shook Indio with visits from Janelle Monae and Future, the former of whom described the reunion as "witnessing history."

​Tough Guy Robber Laughed Out of Hair Salon, Then Arrested

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​Tough Guy Robber Laughed Out of Hair Salon, Then Arrested

A 29-year-old man from Baltimore was arrested last week after attempting to rob a hair salon in Annapolis, Maryland. He would have gotten away with it, too, had the receptionist not noticed that his "gun" looked suspiciously like fingers, causing her to laugh at him until he just eventually left! Ugh. Women.

Would-be robber Ryan Michael Trembly entered Bubbles Hair Salon with a finger pointed under his shirt, in an attempt to imply that he had a weapon. After demanding that the receptionist, Jacqueline, give him all of the money in the register, she says that she laughed, unable to believe his demands were serious, and told him, "Not today!" Adding, "Who tries to rob a salon? The bank's right there!"

According to NBC Philadelphia, the suspect then "tried to make small talk with her before eventually leaving the building." At that point, Jacqueline watched him enter another business before being picked up in a white Nissan.

Ryan Michael Trembly was found by police at his mother's house, and charged with one count of attempted robbery, one count of theft less than $1,000, and one million counts of embarrassment. :(

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Girl in casual attire holds disembodied head of HAIM bassist Este Haim as she perches atop the shoul

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Girl in casual attire holds disembodied head of HAIM bassist Este Haim as she perches atop the shoulders of another festival attendee at Coachella, a triple-decker of stacked heads that evokes the image of mythological Roman hellhound Cerberus. Via AP/Chris Pizzello.


Three Consecutive Poop Cruises Being Investigated by the CDC

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Three Consecutive Poop Cruises Being Investigated by the CDC

Is it time that we finally ban cruises? In one solitary week, three cruise ships have had to send CDC investigators on board in order to discover why over 100 people (each!) have come down with vomiting and diarrhea. The first two cases were discovered on the same boat—one week apart.

According to CNN, whose powerful lede is simply "Ugh.",

The double dose of ill-fated cruises struck the Royal Caribbean's Grandeur of the Seas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. During the ship's April 5 to April 12 cruise, 105 of the nearly 3,000 passengers and crew were affected — primarily with vomiting and diarrhea, the disease agency said.

During the ship's cruise the prior week, 117 passengers and crew members were struck, according to the CDC.

That's not even the worst of it—the same boat will be departing this afternoon, full inspection completed or not. A spokesperson for Royal Caribbean encouraged cruisers to reschedule their trips if they were worried about pooping their minds out in a disease-ridden latrine.

The third outbreak of this kind occurred last week on a Princess Cruise ship, the cause of which the CDC is saying is likely the norovirus.

A highly infectious virus that can be picked up through contaminated food or water or by touching contaminated surfaces. It causes inflammation of the stomach, intestines or both, often leading to stomach pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

For all the free lobster and shuffleboard in the world, this cannot actually be worth it, can it? (No.)

[Image via AP]

Johnny Depp to Testify in Fake Lover's Insane Murder Case

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Johnny Depp to Testify in Fake Lover's Insane Murder Case

In 2009, Nancy Lekon ran over and killed a pedestrian while driving her limo in downtown L.A.'s Skid Row. (Everyone in L.A. drives a limo, right?) She claims that it was all because she was in the area for a little rendezvous with her then-boyfriend, Johnny Depp. Gosh, I sure hope those two lovebirds had an amicable break-up, because he will now have to take the stand at her trial!

Lekon was charged with murder and plead not guilty by reason of insanity. In an attempt to prove that she was insane at the time of the murder, her public defender plans to have Depp, who was served with legal documents at last week's premiere of his upcoming film, Transcendence, take the stand and state that the two have never met.

Man, if only there were another way to prove someone's insanity before having a mega-celebrity needlessly show up at their trial, but — ahh, nope! Nope, can't think of one. I tried and I can't!

[H/T Uproxx]

British young adult author Sue Townsend passed away on Thursday.

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British young adult author Sue Townsend passed away on Thursday. She was 68. Townsend was best known for the beloved Adrian Mole series, which she began writing in 1982, and whose last installment was released in 2009. Townsend suffered from diabetes.

Colorado Gets Its First Pot Vending Machine, America Not Yet In Ruins

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Happily last night in Avon, Colorado, a giant green machine was wheeled onto the patio of Montana's Smokehouse to prepare for the official unveiling of Colorado's first weed vending machine this afternoon. Not yet in use, but in the first stages of excitement-stirring, the ZaZZZ machine will provide the masses with edibles at ease in the near future.

The catch is that only licensed medical marijuana cardholders can access the edibles within, and a valid ID will be scanned and verified. But barring that, the green goodies will flow. As American Green founder Stephen Shearin put it,

"Many people could look at this and say that's just a vending machine, and they'd be right but mostly wrong."

That's some knowledge right there. Shearin also told The Cannabist that the machine will be "great for shy folk."

As was covered in the Huffington Post last June, weed vending machines have taken hold in California, but only within medical dispensaries behind counters where "only budtenders have access to them." The ZaZZZ machine will be readily accessible by customers themselves.

Bruce Bedrick, CEO of Medbox, another weed vending machine company that has been operating as part of the niche market in California, told HuffPo:

"Some people want to see this free-flowing marijuana. They want to go from federal and state ban to marijuana for everybody. We don't believe that can happen. In order to gain respect and trust, it's better to go through gradual, medical adoption."

Less than a year later, and barely six months since weed legalization in Colorado, and Bedrick's comments are burning out.

New information has been added to the investigation of Thursday's deadly crash between a Fed-Ex truc

​Bryan Cranston, as Walter White, Helps a Young Man Ask a Girl to Prom

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Ah, if there is one thing more beautiful than young love, it's young love spurred on by a famous TV drug manufacturer and murderer's best-known threat. So sweet.

Here are the results of the making-of video seen above:

And here are the results of the entire operation:

Congratulations, Stefan! Maybe next time you can get Michael K. Williams to say something like, "You come at the prom king, you best give a kiss!" Or someone from House Stark? "YOU ARE COMING. WITH ME. (TO PROM.)"

[H/T Mediaite]

The Men Who Left Were White

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The Men Who Left Were White

There are three things you should know.

First: I'm not biracial.

"What are you?" people ask, and they expect me to say something thrilling and tribal. I answer, but still they press. "Where are your ancestors from?" people ask, and they want answers that aren't San Antonio and Wheeling, West Virginia. But that's all I got. My story is both simple and untold.

The bones of it, of me: I'm black, despite the skin that goes virtually translucent in the winter. Despite the thin unpredictable curls. My mom and dad are black, as are my grandparents. That's all she wrote. That's all there is, even as I write this sentence. My parents, usually liberal employers of nuance, have always been militant-clear about drawing that line. We aren't biracial.

When I tell people I'm black, they find it unsatisfying. "That's no fun," one girl joked to me recently. "I thought you were going to have a story."

Second: I'm 44% European, 49% African. Not exactly an equal split, but pretty damn close.

I hear the same sentence twice.

The first time from my mother. It's Christmas in Georgia. Outside the clouds are unloading cold sleet, icy and malicious and familiar. "It's gonna read my genes," I tell her. She's rifling through our miscellaneous drawer, filled with nails and old pictures and pens long dried-up.

She's skeptical. "Why?"

"Why what?" I ask.

"Why are you doing this test?"

I shrug. "Why not?" I'm eating freezer burned ice cream out of the container; no one has touched it since I was last home.

"Because. It's irrelevant." She closes the drawer and looks in her purse again. "They break you down into slices, you know." She looks up. "Do you have my keys?"

"No." I pat my pockets, find them. "Yes. See? Maybe I'll find out I have the losing things gene."

She laughs. "I could tell you that right now."

"You spent all that time researching our family tree," I point out.

She thinks for a second. "That's different."

I know what she means. My parents – faithful worshippers of the AUC, who went to black colleges, worked for black companies, took us to black doctors, sent us to black schools. There were no blond Barbies in our house; Rapunzel had long braids in our fairytales. You could point a shotgun barrel to my mother's head and she still would not utter the phrase good hair. My father wouldn't refer to us as light-skinned, not for love nor money. To them, the technical was irrelevant. The technical had no context. It was the history that mattered.

Still, I ask her. "Don't you just want to know?"

"Not really. What do I need to know that for? Some people want to know all that stuff." She's headed out the door. "Some don't."

Second time it's February in Brooklyn and it's night and through the window you can just make out a sliver of the water. He and I are eating tacos, each on our laptops murmuring half-formed ideas. I show him the e-mail. "Hooray! Your sample is at our lab!"

"The sheer potential of information is overwhelming," I say.

"Who would choose the word hooray?" he asks.

"One test that can tell me what I have brewing and what I might be passing onto my kids. Like, it could say I have schizophrenia."

"You'd probably know by now," he says.

"Or brittle-bone syndrome."

"You'd know that too." He looks at me. "I don't think you know how genes work."

"Or if my sons will have male-pattern baldness."

"What if you find out you're white during Black History Month?" He grins, but I don't.

"Maybe I don't want to know," I say, and he shrugs.

"Cancel it, then," he says. "You don't have to find out. Some people want to know about themselves and some don't."

But I do want to know. That's how I am. I always want to know.

And when the email comes it's in the middle of the night, and I scramble to wake up and open it. There's a map. Western Africa is shaded dark, but Ireland and England are shaded too, with a hint of highlight over South Asia, and another tiny note indicating Native American blood. I stare at it, trace the outline of my history with my finger.

Third: In my family, the men who left were white.

Let's go back.

They had land the size of which a city brain like mine can't fathom. Southern men with pale skin, the kind of men whose job it was to oversee the overseer.

These women – my ancestors – were the opposite. Not boss of a solitary fly. Exhausted from all the work they'd done and the years of work that laid ahead. Cleaned and cooked and picked, squinted and bent over and limping, working, working so hard for so long that they must have been sore in places they didn't know they could be sore— their bone marrow, their blood. Nothing to show for it but the injuries. Not a hint of a thing resembling victory.

The women must have known rape was coming. Dread has a taste, you know. It must have crawled up their throats. But by all accounts there was no fight. What would be the point? The sharp cut of a whip across your back? What a man like that wanted, he got. No one could save the women. If he wanted it, then eventually his pale hands would be forcing open her thighs. Eventually he'd force himself inside.

And afterwards just empty air space, him pulling up his pants, clinical. Before he retreated to his bed with his wife, did he instruct the slave to go back outside to where she slept? And where she slept – was that a thin layer of straw or grass? Or was she one of the unlucky ones, stuck with just a plank of wood?

"How much longer until I can die?" these women, my ancestors, must have wondered. "How many ways can one person own me?"

Even after Emancipation, slow as molasses in January, finished crawling across the finish line– even then it didn't end. Shit, maybe then it was worse. I bet once the man doesn't own you, he might have to scare you. He might have to beat you up a little more.

I don't know. I can only guess, because the only knowledge we have is in the missing spaces. Men who are missing from birth certificates, who never laid eyes on their child.

There's no love there, no romance, no babies made with care and devotion. My history tells the story of white men who raped, white men who coerced, white men who had black children, and then white men who disappeared.

I'm thinking about these men the night I watch Obama introduce My Brother's Keeper. It's the last day of Black History Month. Obama speaking about black men always gets me squirming in my chair, bloated with admiration and also disappointment. He's balancing on the same flimsy tightrope he's been walking forever. I'm grateful for a president that considers the plight of black men in America. But the condescension still tastes sour.

"We're dealing with complicated issues that run deep in our history, run deep in our society, and are entrenched in our minds," he says.

"Who's our?" I say to no one.

He talks about initiative, about ensuring that black men become "better husbands and fathers and well-educated hard-working good citizens." He says that we have got to "encourage responsible fatherhood."

I get tired of hearing about the epidemic of missing black fathers. It's always the same story, that old, tired, persistent-as-hell narrative, a troupe of vagabonds and thugs. It exists without context, without history.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to dismiss the very real pain of children raised without fathers, including black fathers. It is undeniable that too many kids have been left behind by the men that created them. I see the aftermath in many of the men I've loved, black men who never knew their fathers.

But I want to remind America of how criminally short its memory can be. In theory, the good thing about this country is that we all have our own story to tell, and there exist a whole host of stories, both parallel and perpendicular to mine. Countless fragile intricacies that are sometimes unimaginable to me, other times too familiar.

But in practice, some of these stories go missing. And I wonder - where's my story?

White supremacy remains the most powerful force in America's history, the trump card of socialization. The narrative of abandonment has been hijacked to only include black men. If you google "white men abandon children" you get this:

The Men Who Left Were White

But there's a history of abandonment in America, a history of leaving black women and black children, and it did not start with black men.

I want to tell America: you can't escape my story. After all, mine is a storyline threaded through all of humanity, the price women have been overpaying since the beginning of time and sex. As long as men have been fucking, they've been disappearing. Because women carry life we are also forced to harbor fear; history is saturated with the stories of babies born of coercion, of aggression, of deceit, of abandonment, and the stories of those babies turned full-grown.

When we talk about what slavery meant we talk about the ephemeral – what was and what ended. The details: plantation hierarchy, middle passage. We think That's it.

But what it meant – what it means – is worse than all of the details. What it means is a legacy of genetic material that courses through my own veins.

This is not a story about skin color. This is not a story about how race is a social construction.

I'd reckon such a story would be boring for you. If it's not, let me tell you – it would be boring to me. I'm not interested in narrating the tribulations of being, surefire bet, the lightest black person in the room. Nor am I informed enough to tell you of the triumphs. In America, skin color is the x in virtually every social equation. It is predictive. I am quite positive that being lighter has meant privileges that were not afforded to people with browner skin, many privileges that I have not even identified.

This is a story about history, about identity.

The way we've come to fetishize white features on black bodies is not only dangerous because of the way it reinforces the idea of white as better. For someone like me, it's complicated for an additional reason. The part of me that created those white features came from men who would deny me if given the chance. Indiscreet men who took advantage of women and left. Men who not only abandoned their children but, in some cases, sold them. Had their own children bent over in fields for no pay.

I'm a living remnant of that sexual assault. I'm a living remnant of that pain.

I can see it in my thinner hair, my lighter skin, my freckles.

I think of those children, also my blood, and what it means to grow up marred by that abandonment and shame. I think of those children the same way I think of children with no fathers today.

Surely we are all both prey and predator, snake and mouse. Surely our genetic material runs rife with strands of the conquered and the conqueror.

And maybe there's a fourth thing you should know: part of identity is choice. My identity is defined in part by rejection, including my own. I am black. The people who made me are the ones who never left.

Josie Duffy is writer from Atlanta. She's a lawyer at the Center for Popular Democracy, and blogs regularly at www.thetruefight.com.

[Image by Jim Cooke]


Malaysia Airlines Black Box Goes Silent

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Malaysia Airlines Black Box Goes Silent

After four strong signals were heard last week, no new electronic pings have been detected since Tuesday, April 8th, in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet. This means (or, keeping in line with nearly every new piece of information about the missing flight: could mean) that the black box's batteries have finally died.

The final ping was detected on Tuesday by a U.S. Navy device dragged by an Australian ship. Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas spoke with the AP about the possibilities:

"We're now into Day 37 of this tragedy. The battery life on the beacons is supposed to last 30 days. We're hoping it might last 40 days. However, it's been four or five days since the last strong pings. What they're hoping for is to get one more, maybe two more pings so they can do a triangulation of the sounds and try and narrow the (search) area."

Once officials are sure that no more sounds will be discovered, a robotic submersible will be sent down to search for wreckage. But for now, despite a lack of pings to go on, air and sea crews continue to search in the southern Indian Ocean for debris and any sounds that could still be heard.

[Photo credit: AP]

Spanish Village Called "Kill Jews" Thinking About Maybe Changing Name

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Spanish Village Called "Kill Jews" Thinking About Maybe Changing Name

A northern Spanish village will vote next week on whether or not to keep its current name "Castrillo Matajudios," which translates as "Castrillo Kill Jews." Hmmm. Tough call!

Castrillo Matajudios will convene its 60 resident families at a town hall meeting next week to vote on the proposal, which Mayor Lorenzo Rodriguez submitted. He has suggested that the name be changed to Castrillo Mota de Judios, meaning "Castrillo Jews' Hill," which is believed to be the village's original name before it was changed during the Spanish inquisition.

Mayor Rodríguez told local Spanish daily newspaper Diario de Burgos, via the Independent: "The majority decision will be respected, even if it is only by one vote."

"Matar Judios" is also the term used to describe the tradition of drinking lemonade spiked with alcohol at festivals held in the city square during Easter, which is an incredibly unfortunate name for something that sounds just delightful. The term is believed to come from medieval times when converted Jewish people were publicly executed around Easter in Spain. (Like drinking at a festival, you see.)

A spokesperson for the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain spoke with the Jerusalem Post about the expression:

"Regrettably, this type of expression exists in Spain in ceremonies and parties ... the people saying it are mostly unaware of the history. It is a complicated issue that is ingrained in local culture."

Last month, Ramon Benavides, the president of a local associations of hoteliers, told the news agency EFE, "When 'killing Jews,' it's best to take it slow and keep track of how much you drink to avoid excesses and its consequences the next day."

Huh. I'm starting to think that maybe they should change it?

[Image via Independent]

KFC Selling Fried Chicken Prom Corsages as World Falls Into Darkness

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The corsages come from a Louisville, Kentucky florist, cost $20, and contain a $5 gift card so you can customize your corsage with Original Recipe, Extra Crispy, or Kentucky Grilled Chicken.

Unfortunately, choosing to or not to buy a KFC Corsage does nothing to change the inevitability of death for both you and everyone you love.

[H/T Uproxx]

Ukrainian special forces have exchanged gunfire with pro-Russia militia in eastern Ukraine, where th

"Glow Parties" Are the Newest Thing to Scare Parents of Teens

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"Glow Parties" Are the Newest Thing to Scare Parents of Teens

Imagine the life of a teen in 2014. What do you see? A young man stumbling out of bed and sending his first sext before he even reaches his chewed gum and Toy Machine sticker covered doorway? A young lady calling somebody she knows from Twitter a "basic bitch" on an app you've never heard of? An emoji with a backwards baseball cap high on Molly? If you add some glow sticks to the last one, you have parents' new worst nightmare: "glow parties."

"Glow parties," which are billed as alcohol-free, are open to kids as young as 16, and boast loud, pulsing music, glow sticks, and strobe lights. (Like nothing you've ever heard of before!) The apparently heavily-promoted "Hyperglow Party" that was planned for last Friday in in Sayreville, N.J., is an example of one of these teen nightmares. The event, tickets to which cost $40, was allegedly postponed due to "scheduling conflicts," but Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey claims that the party was halted due to pressure applied by his investigators.

The glow sticks, according to CBS New York, "have a purpose the uninitiated might not catch onto." Carey explains: "Glow or 'Hyperglow' is how it's billed, because the kids that use the pills — they use the fluorescent glow-type sticks that enhance the effects of the drug." (Molly is the glow stick-accompanying drug of choice.)

He adds, "The parents dropping their kids off at these venues better be prepared to pick them up at a precinct – police precinct, hospital, or perhaps morgue."

So parents: please, do your teens a favor and keep them at home. For a few years, maybe? Use your discretion, of course, but teens may just be safest at home until their mid-twenties.

[Image credit: AP]

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