In an effort to boost tourism, Abbottabad, the Pakistani city where Osama Bin Laden was killed, is building an amusement park. There will be all sorts of fun activities, including a zoo, a paragliding club, a rock climbing wall, water sports, and even mini-golf. But will there be a Zero Dark Thirty ride or anything else related to the city's one-time most famous resident? Alas, no.

"This project has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden," [Syed Aqil Shah, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's minister for tourism and sports] said, adding: "We are working to promote tourism and amusement facilities."

The park will cost an estimated $30-$50 million and should be completed in the next five years, so plan your schedules accordingly.

[Image via AP]

I'm not sure what's more amazing: That a two-year-old Little Dude Perfect is putting pros to shame with his ridiculously precocious basketball trick shots — or that his name is Titus.

His parents write: "He began shooting baskets shortly after learning to walk, we started filming some, and then got totally carried away."

Word on the street is Titus has since moved on from doing trick shots to hustling sixth graders out of their lunch money by pretending he "totally sucks at HORSE."

[Tastefully Offensive]

Today, in movie news, we learn that Johnny Depp will be playing the role of notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in an upcoming film based on Bulger's life. This should not be confused with the other Whitey Bulger Boston gangster movie that Ben Affleck will be making after he makes a movie based on a Dennis Lehane novel that is also about Boston gangsters.

Sweet Jesus for the love of all that his holy, I beg you, Boston film people, on behalf of the rest of America, PLEASE GOD stop making movies about Boston gangster. There are gangsters. In Boston. They're Irish. OKAY, WE GOT IT.

Gone Baby Gone. The Departed. The Town. Mystic River. The Boondock Saints. And all of the Whitey Bulger movies and Dennis Lehane screen adaptations to come. Some of these are very good stories. Some are great movies. So can we all, together, accept that the "Irish Boston gangster" movie has been done? It has been done. Again, and again, and again. Did Ben Affleck grow up in Boston, I wonder? Sometimes I wonder.

Boston's Southie: Like South Central, But More Relatable to White People. The reason why there are so many Boston Irish gangster movies, of course (besides the fact that Ben Affleck's brain is occupied by a tiny canary repeating a single short mantra over and over again), is that gangsters make for great movies, and movies must be relatable to white people in order to be big time and not be pigeonholed as mere "genre" pulp entertainment, and there are only so many white ethnic subcultures with a strong tradition of gangsterism, so, boom, there are one million Boston Irish gangster movies. Menace II Society, for white people. Thank god for Irish gangsters—if they weren't real, Hollywood would have had to invent them, more so.

Which is fine, okay, but what about all the other gangsters in other cities who have no movies made about them at all? Is it really fair to make the dozenth "Southie brothers turn to crime and maybe one of them is a cop" flick when there are so many gangsters in St. Louis, and Kansas City, and Dallas, and Chicago, and Denver who are totally unrepresented on the silver screen? Irish gangsters in Boston have so many god damn Hollywood characters to model themselves after at this point that the number of movie gangsters threatens to exceed the number of real gangsters. Yet the gangsters in Houston, and Nashville, and Seattle are forced to find their own way with no fictional role models at all. Even on the streets of L.A.—a gangster-filled city where Hollywood is actually located—young gangsters must constantly squabble over who gets to be O-Dog and who gets to be Doughboy, because the number of legitimate gangster movie heroes they have to choose from is shamefully small.

Boston has fewer residents than Columbus, Ohio. You don't think that if Ben Affleck and Marky Mark grew up in Columbus, Ohio and made a half dozen god damn movies about the same people doing the same things in the same neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, there would be an outcry in Hollywood at some point? "Look, Ben, you know, you're a great director and all, but I have to be honest, this new proposal for Streets of Columbus is really similar to Guns in Columbus and Hard Times and Crime in Columbus. I mean... we get it. There are other fucking cities, you know?"

Boston partisans try to play this dynamic off as if it's the natural outcome of Boston's imaginary rich depth of character, as if Boston is far more interesting than cities many times the size of Boston. No. It is the result of a few real powerful guys in Hollywood who happen to be A) from Boston and B) not good at coming up with new ideas. Shit, nobody thought Baltimore was a great rich subject for pop culture exploration until a genius named David Simon came along, and now all of a sudden Baltimore is so interesting. Yeah right. These upswells in pop culture are the largely random results of individuals who happen to create the right products at the right time. Every city is interesting.

Except Boston. A multi-volume encyclopedia could—and should—be written about why Boston sucks. But for our purposes here we will confine our discussion to the gross and exaggerated proliferation of Boston Irish gangster movies only. Except to note in passing the irony of the fact that Red Sox fans believe they occupy some moral high ground over Yankees fans when in fact the collective smugness of Red Sox fans exceeds the entire amount of smugness in the nation of France—a smug nation in its own right.

There are even more movies in Boston than there are in Philly which is objectively speaking an East Coast city with far more character and tough guys than Boston.

In conclusion, I, an American of Irish descent, respectfully ask assholes like Ben "Look at My Face" Affleck and those who enable him to quit with the fucking Boston Irish gangster movies already, and think about tapping into the far richer vein of gangster stories that could be explored in other cities that can properly be defined as "interesting," like, for example, New York City. The collective underrepresented gangsters of the rest of America thank you in advance.

Image by Jim Cooke.

The lies in Chris Brown's community service progress reports are so egregious, so bald-faced, so flabbergastingly, blatantly untrue, that it's shocking to think anyone ever intended to pass them off as factual.

Fortunately, a human being with eyes capable of reading words saw the reports and realized that everything written in them was probably a lie. Now California prosecutors have asked a judge to order Chris Brown to complete the 1,400 hours of community service he was assigned after his conviction for felony assault for beating Rihanna.

Here are the highlights of the 19-page motion filed by the L.A. County District Attorney's office, in which Deputy District Attorney Mary Murray describes the records of Brown's community service (provided by the Richmond, VA police department) as "at best sloppy documentation and at worst fraudulent reporting."

(Full document available at the L.A. Times):

• On October 23, 2010, Chris Brown picked up trash for eight hours in Richmond Virginia while in Washington, D.C.
• On March 15, 2012, Chris Brown picked up trash for eight hours while on a private jet headed to Cancun.
• On December 12, 2011, at 6:44 a.m., Homeland Security records show that Chris Brown's passport was cleared at Dulles Airport outside D.C. (He had just flown in from Dubai.) Beginning at 9 a.m., Chris Brown picked up trash for eight hours in the same one block area in Richmond.
  

  Richmond is approximately 120 miles from Dulles airport. It would be unreasonable to believe that after a 12-13 hour flight, the Defendant rushed through Customs and the Washington D.C. early morning rush hour traffic, traveled directly to Richmond in just over two hours, and then worked eight straight hours picking up trash in a one block area.

• On November 8, 2011, the Richmond police department reported that Brown had completed "103 days of community labor" — the equivalent of 824 hours. On February 8, 2012, the Richmond police department reported that Brown had "completed 701 hours of community labor thus far," indicating that, in the three intervening months, Chris Brown had invented a time machine, traveled back to 2011, and un-picked up trash for 123 hours.
• Although the corrections office of the Richmond, VA police department accepted supervision of Chris Brown, "no one from that Department ever approved, scheduled, supervised, monitored, or verified any of the community labor reported to this Court." In other words, every once in a while, Chris Brown would inform the police that he had performed some community service, and the police would write that down.
• According to the police documentation, Chris Brown completed more than 500 hours of community service at the Tappahannock Children's Center (where his mother used to serve as director), located an hour outside of Brown's Richmond "community."
• Brown's set-up at the children's center can best described as "Shoemaker and the Elves"-esque: all his work stripping, cleaning, and waxing the floors was allegedly performed after hours, under the supervision of his mother, who would let him in with her old set of keys.
• Ida Minter, the Center's new director, told investigators that every once in a while she would arrive at work to discover the floors had been magically cleaned, stripped, and waxed by a terrifying, angry elf. On these occasions, she would cancel the regularly scheduled floor maintenance, but pay the maintenance man anyway.
• The maintenance man told investigators that the floors had never been cleaned by anyone other than him, and that he never accepted payment for work he didn't perform. He says that the director never canceled regularly scheduled floor maintenance.
• Then this:
  

  Shortly after speaking with the Investigators, [the maintenance man] was contacted by Ms. Minter. Ms. Minter attempted to tell him how to answer questions the Investigators may have about the Defendant's work at the center. He told Ms. Minter he would not lie to anyone about anything.

• When Chris Brown wasn't not-working at the Children's center, he was not-working in "various alleys" around Richmond. According to the police department, the specific locations of Brown's community service work were not recorded due to "intense media interest."
• In a letter dated September 14, 2012, Chief Bryan Norwood of the Richmond police signed a letter stating that, as of August 24, Chris Brown had completed 202 days (1616 hours) of labor. Brown's official spreadsheets claim only 162 days (1402 hours) of labor.
  

  Even if it were reliable, the spreadsheet does not satisfy the Court ordered 180 days, or 1440 hours, of community labor.

The District Attorney's document ends with a catalogue of all the other bad things Chris Brown has done while on probation, including (BUT NOT LIMITED TO):

1. Beating a man in a parking lot
2. Stealing a fan's phone when she tried to take his picture
3. Throwing a chair through a glass window while being interviewed for a Good Morning America segment.

Looking forward to seeing what he gets up to in L.A.

[Los Angeles Times // Image via Getty]

Members of the Asian Students Association at Duke are incensed over a fraternity's decision to throw a themed party replete with offensive Asian stereotypes, including conical hats and geisha outfits.

"Herro Nice Duke Peopre!!" read the opening line in the email inviting Dukies to "the return of Kappa Sigma Asia Prime."

According to The Duke Chronicle, the off-campus party was later renamed "International Relations" after a report was filed with the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life.

But the Asian Students Association says the "racist rager" went on as planned despite the name change, and it has the Facebook photos to prove it.

Several of those photos were posted around the school this morning in protest, but most were removed by Kappa Sigma members by late afternoon.

"This is not just about Asians, one party or one frat," senior Ashley Tsai told the Chronicle. "This is a consistent thing happening. We want serious things to be done by the student body and the University so that this never happens again."

A more formal protest is planned for tomorrow.

Kappa Sigma was welcomed back on campus and into the Interfraternity Council (IFC) just last year. It had removed itself from the IFC in 2002 following a string of policy violations that had resulted in impending sanctions. Between 2002 and 2012 it operated unofficially under "Eta Prime" — its chapter name.

This latest controversy involving a fraternity party comes just a few months after the Chi Omega Nu Gamma sorority at Penn State drew criticism for holding a "Mexican fiesta themed" costume party that was seen as racist by many.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Ashley Tsai as the president of Duke's Asian Students Association. The current sitting president is Ting-Ting Zhou.

[H/T: Brobible, images via Facebook]

Believe it or not, five-time Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte is still a thing. The swimmer, who took America by storm last year after winning five overall medals in the London Olympics despite barely being able to form complete sentences, is still hanging around the edges of pop culture before Dancing With the Stars or whatever inevitably comes calling. What does this month bring? Well, a magazine cover, of course.

The man who trademarked the word phrase "Jeah!" (shh, nobody tell him that's not a real word) will appear in ESPN the Magazine's upcoming music issue, which like Lochte himself, is a thing that exists for reasons no one can explain. Lochte will appropriately be playing the role of the baby in Nirvana's iconic cover for Nevermind, and as promotion for the issue, ESPN decided to make Lochte look dumber than one of the Subway sandwiches hawked by Michael Phelps.

Lochte's cover comes out this week, but ESPN has released a preview in which the gold-medal swimmer says the following things:

— "Iconic Nirc-vana"

— "The cover is definitely global, brah."

— "If you look at the baby, he's definitely happy in the water. And that's what I am."

— "He's chasing after a dollar bill. So he's always on the grind."

— "Trying to perfect the perfect the shot in the water was kinda easy for me. Just because I spend about four hours a day, every day of my life, in the water."

— "Usually when I go swimming, I have goggles on. So when I didn't have my goggles on for this shoot my eyes were definitely burning."

— [Blinks five times in two seconds] "Am I blinking a lot, cause I feel like it."

— "Hopefully everyone's reaction when they see it, they'll be like, daang, look at that guy. I honestly think I nailed the shot."

Whatever. Anyway, the most notable aspect of this entire ordeal is that Lochte was shot wearing a speedo, despite the Nirvana baby letting it all hang out. You could say that this robbed us of being able to find out if Ryan Lochte's penis is comparable to that of a toddler, except that we already know the answer to that one.

[via USA Today, image via ESPN]

Police in Greenville, South Carolina, say a 3-year-old boy was killed Friday night after a pink gun he mistook for a toy accidentally discharged.

Temorej Smith and his 7-year-old sister were in the bedroom of their unit at The Plantations at Haywood apartments, playing around with a pink handgun.

Their parents were out of the house at the time, but their grandparents were reportedly sitting in the nearby living room.

As the two siblings were playing with the weapon, it suddenly went off and Temorej sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head.

Greenville Police have since ruled the boy's death an accident. No charged have been filed, but the investigation continues.

Police spokesman Johnathan Bragg said the incident tragically illustrates the importance of securing all household weapons.

"If you have guns, if you own guns mostly we would prefer you have them in a lock box," Bragg told News 4. "At least have them out of the reach of children."

Funeral services for Temorej will be held tomorrow afternoon at Golden View Baptist Church in Fountain Inn.

[screengrab via American Guns via Raw Story, photo via Patch]

Yesterday, we discovered that Kanye West had apparently forced the photo wire service Getty to remove a series of photos of himself in a skirt. Today, Beyoncé's publicist is going around trying to get these unflattering photos of her famous client performing at the Super Bowl taken down.

Kanye was successful—as far as we can tell, you can't buy a photo of the rapper in a skirt, anywhere. But Beyoncé? You can still get those unflattering photos.

On Monday, our pals at Buzzfeed assembled an incoherent list of 33 Beyoncé pictures and GIFs taken from her Super Bowl performance, and posted it under the title "The 33 Fiercest Moments From Beyoncé's Halftime Show."

On Tuesday, they received an email from Beyoncé's publicist ("head worker bey"), politely asking them to DESTROY ALL UNFLATTERING PHOTOS OF BEYONCÉ IN EXISTENCE.

"Thanks for taking my call. As discussed, there are some unflattering photos on your current feed that we are respectfully asking you to change. I am certain that you will be able to find some better photos.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/the-fiercest-moments-from-beyonces-halftime-show

The worst are #5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 19 and 22.

Thank you very much.

Yvette

Obviously, we'd never want to displease Beyoncé's publicist. But she clearly doesn't understand her client. According to the Third Immutable Natural Law Of Beyoncé, there is no better photo of Beyoncé than the photo of Beyoncé you are viewing, because at that moment, it is the best of all possible Beyoncé photos. This is one of the great Mysteries of Beyoncé. Therefore we present to you Six Moving, Amazing Photos of Beyoncé. Please enjoy.

These are the photos Beyoncé's publicist asked Buzzfeed to remove

Hilarious Michelle .gifs be warned. You are next.

(J/K, Michelle probably doesn't have a publicist.)

[Buzzfeed // Gif via Tumblr // Images of anonymous woman via Getty]

Touré (pictured above interviewing T.I.) is a fine writer — or at least he was at one point. Now he mostly spends his time as a helium-filled talking head, floating drably across MSNBC's midday airwaves. This is a pretty cushy job, seeing as you can say basically anything without anyone giving a shit since the only people watching cable news during the day are those being crushed to death by boredom in lobbies across the country. But there's a catch: when you get paid to talk in circles every day, sometimes you'll find yourself arguing a position you probably should not be arguing. And if you're stubborn enough and your argument is stupid enough — you are on cable news, after all — then you might find yourself in the center of a firestorm.

And so we come to the ballad of Touré, who today expressed his support of Barack Obama's right to kill American citizens — specifically, American citizens that have joined Al-Qaeda — via unmanned drones.

MSNBC's The Cycle erupted into a heated verbal battle over the ethicality of drone warfare on Tuesday. Co-hosts S.E. Cupp and Steve Kornacki expressed serious reservations over a memo leaked to NBC News by the Justice Department detailing the legal framework that allows for the targeting and killing of an American citizen abroad by an unmanned drone. Touré, however, found his fellow hosts' objections to be misguided, and repeatedly said he was "comfortable" with the White House's guidelines governing drone warfare.

Touré then dug deeper.

"It's hard to say, ‘let's not do things because we might radicalize other people,'" Touré said of his co-host's objections to drone strikes.

"But that was the argument under Bush," Cupp interjected.

"But when we say, ‘this person is leading Al Qaeda to do things' – as soon as you join Al Qaeda, you become an imminent threat," Touré added as his fellow hosts exploded

This continued to go on, with Touré standing his ground as his fellow panelists exhaled in exasperation around him. Then he went on Twitter and dug the hole even deeper.

He's the Commander in Chief. RT @kirstenpowers10: You are fine w the White House deciding who is guilty and who should die?

— Touré (@Toure) February 5, 2013

No. RT @mchastain81: Dear @toure. A US citizen is allowed due process no matter what they have done, even an AQ leader.

— Touré (@Toure) February 5, 2013

You'll never see the right care so much about civil liberties as when you start talking about the rights of Americans in Al Qaeda. #Weird

— Touré (@Toure) February 6, 2013

And so Touré caught the wrath of the Twittersphere, from Glenn Greenwald to Andrew Kaczynski to our own Mobutu Sese Seko. But of course, tomorrow is a new day, and someone else will be the village idiot. It probably won't be Touré, who will happily live on in the land of afternoon nothingness... until he says something beyond-the-pale once again.

[via Mediaite, image via Getty]

Congratulations are in order for hopeless romantic, imagined boyfriend and soon-to-be NFL linebacker Manti Te'o: he's finally made a sound decision. Te'o — who was of course duped into believing that he had a girlfriend and that she died of cancer when in fact "she" was actually a he — has deleted (or at least suspended) his Twitter account as he prepares for April's NFL Draft.

According to ESPN, it's gonna stay that way for the indefinite future.

Manti Te'o's Twitter account no longer exists.

The account using the handle, @MTeo_5, disappeared from the social media platform during the Super Bowl broadcast Sunday.

A source told ESPN.com the former Notre Dame linebacker will be off Twitter for an indefinite period of time to prepare for the NFL draft. Twitter accounts that are deleted can be reactivated by that person.

Te'o's advisors obviously hope that giving up Twitter well help keep him out of the type of trouble that has engulfed his life in the last month or so, but the entire ordeal does make you wonder if Twitter was really the root of the problem in the first place (hint: it wasn't). If Te'o fell for a story as unbelievable as Lennay Kekua's then pushing him off Twitter might just cause him to fall in love with... I don't know, a plotted plant? Pick any inanimate object, really.

But, hey, let's not miss the forest for trees ("Lennay Kekua" "attended" Stanford, whose mascot is a tree). Manti Te'o has finally made a good decision. A round of applause for the dunce!

[via ESPN, image via AP]

The saga of the kidnapped five-year old in Dale County, Alabama has come to a conclusion. The boy is safe and resting in a hospital and his captor, Jimmy Lee Dykes — who kidnapped the boy after shooting his bus driver dead — is dead himself following an FBI raid.

Now, the FBI has released images of the exterior of bunker where Dykes held the boy, and well... it looks like what I guess a bunker would look like, but still a stunning sight nonetheless. The photo above shows a wide-angle exterior shot of the bunker, which all told doesn't look very conspicuous at all. The photo below is a closer shot, that shows the long PVC pipe used by the FBI in order to communicate with Dykes.

[via Buzzfeed, images via FBI]

Following an Internet-wide survey conducted on Facebook, Hasbro this morning unveiled which one of the five new Monopoly tokens it proposed would be added to the classic board game later this year.

And because the decision was handed over to the Internet, you already know the cat won.

Hasbro also announced that the iron token was picked to be removed from the box to make room for the feline.

The other tokens — an old-style shoe, a racecar, a thimble, a top hat, a wheelbarrow, a battleship, and a Scottie dog — will remain the same.

[images via Facebook]

The US Postal Service is preparing to announce its decision to stop delivering first-class mail on Saturdays in a last-ditch effort to save itself from total ruin.

According to CBS News, a 150-year-old tradition will end this summer when postal workers stop delivering most letters, bills, and catalogs to non-paperless homes across America.

Packages, medicine, and letters marked priority or express will continue to be delivered on Weekends.

"The American public understands the financial challenges of the Postal Service and supports these steps as a responsible and reasonable approach to improving our financial situation," said postmaster general Patrick R. Donahoe in a prepared statement. "The Postal Service has a responsibility to take the steps necessary to return to long-term financial stability and ensure the continued affordability of the U.S. Mail."

The USPS, which is still hemorrhaging as much as $25 million a day despite having already cut its workforce by 35 percent, is expected to save some $2 billion a year by eliminating Saturday mail deliveries.

However, according to David Walker, a member of a postal reform panel, the Postal Service "won't come close" to solving its financial problems with this change. "It's got to look at more fundamental changes in its infrastructure, its compensation costs, its retirement obligations, and also what it does and who does its business," he told CBS News.

By law, the USPS needs congressional approval to reduce its delivery schedule, but Postal Service attorneys don't expect Washington to put up much of a fight considering the President himself has already expressed support for the cut.

[photo via Shutterstock]

Normally, the last thing in the world you'd ever want to do is wake up a sleeping baby.

But, in the case of little Amaya, it's impossible not to make an exception, considering how adorable it is when she wakes up dancing to her favorite song.

Another reason it's impossible? Her favorite song is always on.

[H/T: Daily Picks and Flicks]

Stewie the Cat, who, at 48.5 inches from nose to tail-tip, was officially recognized as the World's Longest Domestic Cat by Guinness World Records, passed away earlier this week of cancer.

A Maine Coon cat like his predecessor Leo (48 inches), Stewie — whose full given name was Mymains Stewart Gilligan — earned his title in August 2010, and has held on to it since.

With fame and hundreds of Facebook fans came the opportunity to give something back. Stewie was certified as a therapy animal, and paid regular visits to a senior center in Reno to bring cheer to the residents.

"Stewie was always very social and loved meeting new people," owner Robin Hendrickson, a who brought Stewie from an Oregon breeder in 2005, told the Associated Press. "He has touched many lives, and for that I am grateful."

Sadly, Stewie was diagnosed with Lymphosarcoma last year, and even though he was said to be free of the disease after undergoing chemotherapy, the cancer eventually returned, and was even more aggressive the second time around.

A final video of Stewie was posted on Monday. He passed away later that same day, surrounded by his family.

[screengrab via Guinness World Records]

Do you own a dog? Is your dog's name "Ranger?" Why not? Do you sometimes—because you love Ranger very much—go to the special pet store and buy him special, more expensive "Science Diet" dog food that is scientifically formulated to be food, for dogs? You monster. You're feeding your dog science? How is that even natural?

For decades, the Colgate-Palmolive Co. thought it was pretty hot shit for selling its fancy "Science Diet" dog food at a mark-up to pet owners who only wanted the most scientific diets, for Ranger. But now the joke's on the Colgate-Palmolive Co.: when it comes to "shit you feed to your dog," scientific is out, and all-natural is in. After all, is your dog a robot? Most Americans don't think so. That's why sales of Science Diet are DOWN, and sales of Just A Can of Ground-Up Buffalo Meat With Some Berries Tossed In There are WAY UP. From the WSJ:

When Brian Saunders, a 28-year-old electrician in Tenafly, N.J., got a puppy four years ago, he researched pet foods online before choosing a brand whose main ingredients include venison, bison and berries.

"I wanted to make the best choice for Tyson," he said, referring to his 55-pound brindle pitbull. Mr. Saunders spends roughly $30 a month on Taste of the Wild dog food, made by Diamond Pet Foods Inc. "If I can't eat the ingredients, I won't feed them to my dog," he says, referring to animal byproducts and plant fillers in many commercial dog foods.

Brian Saunders' dog Ranger won't be eating any animal byproducts, thank you very much. Only natural things, like the flesh of animals. Plus berries, because dogs love berries. Don't you, Ranger? He does. He loves the antioxidants, and he really appreciates the higher quality of organic bison meat versus the cheap regular bison meat you usually get in the corporate dog foods like... Ranger. Ranger. Stop eating the plastic hot dog package from the trash can. No.

[WSJ. Photo: Yolanda/ Flickr]

If you enjoyed the heart-pounding action of Saving Private Ryan and the taut intrigue of The Da Vinci Code, you'll love dynamic thrill ride that is: The Son of the Star of Those Movies Lost His iPad.

SCENE: Monday afternoon, at Northwestern University. Chet Haze feels a creeping sense of dread:

SCENE: The situation grows frantic.

SCENE: Desperation sets in.

SCENE: A twist ending.

-fin-

[Pic: FB]

An elementary school in Colorado has suspended a second grader for violating one of its "absolutes" prohibiting games involving pretend weapons.

But 7-year-od Alex Evans insists the imaginary grenade he threw at an imaginary box was necessary to rid the world of evil.

"I pretended the box, there's something shaking in it, and I go ‘pshhh,'" Alex told FOX31 Denver. "I was trying to save people and I just can't believe I got dispended."

There was nothing in Alex's hand during the course of the game, which he calls "rescue the world."

Superintendent Stan Scheer told the Reporter-Herald that the Thompson School District doesn't have a policy against imaginary weapons, but that every school is allowed to "enhance" the student code of conduct as it sees fit.

Mary Blair Elementary has a strict set of rules it calls "absolutes

"Honestly I don't think the rule is very realistic for kids this age," Mandie Watkins, Alex's mom, told FOX31. "I think that when a child is trying to save the world, I don't think he should be punished for it."

Though he wouldn't discuss specifics, Scheer said the mother's point of view was "a bit one-sided," and that "there's a whole student side that we just don't talk about."

But Watkins insists that the rules need to be more "realistic," and she intends to speak with school officials in the hopes of getting them to lift Alex's suspension.

[screengrab via KDVR]

Have you heard the one about the disgruntled cuckold who discovered his editor wife was cheating with a literary-agency heir and forwarded their sexts to the scion's powerful father, agency partners, and a few other innocent bystanders? Oh no? Let the New York Post tell you.

Earlier this week, Page Six ran an "exclusive" item about notable fashion photographer Paul Costello (at left in the photo above), who'd apparently learned that his wife and the mother of his children, former Domino Magazine creative director Sara Ruffin Costello, had long been carrying on with Luke Janklow, a shaggy musician-turned-literary agent. Costello forwarded their correspondences to Janklow's tony colleagues, his father, and at least one of Luke's other romantic partners. Janklow's lawyer Ed Hayes confirmed the Costello-Janklow affair to the Post, but specified that Costello had been separated from her husband when it happened. What the Post didn't say: Costello's vindictive text outing was motivated not by his discovery of the affair—he'd long known about it—but by the fact that his wife persisted in stepping out long into her pregnancy with the couple's third child.

Why does anyone care beyond rubbernecking the schadenfreude of psuedo-elite humiliation? Well, not only are the Janklows the sort of family who show up as style icons in Esquire, but Luke's inherited agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, is the New York literary powerhouse, co-founded by Luke's father Mort and Lynn Nesbit, that's responsible for negotiating landmark deals for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. Mort has built his legacy representing such mass-audience writers as Danielle Steel and Barbara Walters. Lynn is a Joan Didion confidante (she's the first person to be with Didion after her husband John died) and Jimmy Carter's agent. Luke has personally represented clients like Demi Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow; he's also, for example, credited with wrangling Anderson Cooper $1 million for his memoir. Having Luke's "racy pictures" (read: dong shots) widely passed along isn't befitting for the likely successor to Jimmy Carter's agency.

But since the Page Six item ran, we've heard from a number of tipsters who insist the Post only has part of the sordid story. For one, the Janklow and Costello couples were all friends before the affair—here's a Patrick McMullen photo of Sara, a Wall Street Journal contributor, at a holiday party thrown by Luke and his ex-wife Julie. For two, sources say Janklow's girlfriend at the time, Vogue editor Meredith Melling Burke, received them too, which might help explain why they apparently broke up around the same time.

For three, one tipster in particular writes in to offer the real reason Luke's dick pics made the rounds. "Paul Costello discovered his wife Sara was fucking lit agent Luke Janklow during her pregnancy with their third child. They had a four year affair which was discovered more than once which is why Paul moved his family to New Orleans... to get away from Janklow." The tipster continues, "[Paul Costello] found text messages between the two where Sarah cautioned Luke 'Paul must never find out we were fucking during this pregnancy...he'll hate the kid.' Luke was having a torrid affair with Sarah during her entire pregnancy!"

Oh, you'd like to see some people having a worse week than you? Here they are.

[NY Post; photo by Getty Images; composite by Jim Cooke]

We would all like to know as much as we can about the Obama Administration's top-secret program of assassinating U.S. citizens with drones, so we can figure out how best not to get assassinated. But don't look to the pages of U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post, which cooperated with the Administration to cover-up the location of a key drone base.

In advance of CIA chief nominee John Brennan's big Senate confirmation hearing tomorrow, the New York Times reported today the existence of a CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia, from which was launched the drone strike that killed American radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in 2011. This prompted the Washington Post to follow up with its own story, which revealed the paper has been co-operating with "several news organizations" and the Obama Administration to keep the base secret for over year:

The Washington Post had refrained from disclosing the location at the request of the administration, which cited concern that exposing the facility would undermine operations against an al-Qaeda affiliate regarded as the network's most potent threat to the United States, as well as potentially damage counterterrorism collaboration with Saudi Arabia.

The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year.

So the dearth of information about the U.S.'s scariest policy has been in part perpetrated by the Post and these other organization. The concern about undermining the hunt for terrorists might be legitimate, if the Obama Administration hadn't determined that even officially acknowledging the extrajudicial drone assassinations of U.S. citizens would "undermine" it. Bottom line: If you have any information about the drone program, it's best to give it to Gawker.

Update: The New York Times also withheld the location of the base for "many months," according to a blog post by the Times' Public Editor.

[Image via AP]