A trove of celebrity nude photos and videos—reportedly obtained through an Apple iCloud leak—popped up online today. Here's one simple way to prevent this from happening to you.

It's called two-factor verification, and it's available on most of the platforms you use everyday. Go now, make haste, and keep those nudes (and other digital files) protected!

Police say the owner of an anatomy-focused cafe called Java Juggs may have taken the adage "sex sells" a bit too far, allegedly raking in millions of dollars with a less-than-legal side business.

Carmela Panico, who also owned a coffee shop called Twin Peaks, was arrested and charged with prostitution and money laundering Thursday. Police say baristas were required to wear bikinis to work and were docked pay if they weren't tan enough or if they failed to wear makeup or high heels during their shifts.

According to the Herald Net:

She bought property and coffee huts with other cash, sometimes bringing along a money counter to dole out the bills. Her baristas reported making hundreds of thousands of dollars out of her stands, working mainly for tips. The women told cops the price for a cup of coffee started at $6 and customers typically paid with a $20 bill. The baristas kept the rest to shake their breasts or expose their genitals. They charged more for sex acts with the droves of men who stopped at the stands, mainly located along Highway 99 in Snohomish County.

Panico, a former nude dancer, allegedly pocketed $2 million in less than three years with a profit margin prosecutors say was "twice that of well-run, established coffee stand."

And she apparently had help. Last summer, a sheriff's sergeant was arrested for tipping Panico off to undercover investigations—allegedly in exchange for sex.

[image via ABC]

A 16-year-old girl who allegedly attempted to fly to Syria to join a militant Islamist group was arrested at an airport in Nice on Saturday, French officials say. Her parents reportedly had no idea what she was planning.

According to TIME, police arrested the girl before she was able to board a flight headed to Turkey. Also arrested was an unnamed 20-year-old man who French authorities say recruited her and paid for her flight.

The facts of the case may sound startlingly familiar—that's because just last week, two female French teenagers were also picked up by authorities after allegedly attempting to travel to Syria to join militant groups.

French officials say as many as 800 French citizens have already migrated to Syria to fight alongside Islamist groups. According to NBC:

[French Interior Minister Bernard] Cazeneuve urged parents who suspect that their children are displaying signs of "violent radicalization" to call a hotline he created in late April. Since that time, 300 reports have been called in, a quarter of which were regarding children and 45 percent of which involved females, according to the Interior Ministry.

[image via AP]

[The Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador released ash as it erupted Sunday. The volcano became active in 1999. Image by Dolores Ochoa via AP]

As the dust settles after yesterday's seemingly endless parade of hacked celebrity nudes, it's become clear that some of the photos had been circulating around the web for a while. Even Deadspin readers were aware of them. But where did they originate, and how did they leak widely so suddenly? One anonymous image message board might hold the answer—if it's not the source of the leaks itself.

The board is called AnonIB, and according to Encyclopedia Dramatica it was started in 2006 after a mutiny temporarily splintered 4chan's infamous /b/ board. Its current manifestation—it's been shut down or changed design several times in its short life—has existed since March 1.

AnonIB, like /b/, is an anonymous image board, but one that focuses more or less exclusively on pornography—in particular, stolen or leaked nudes of non-celebrity women, arranged on the site in endless and unsearchable 4chan-style threads sorted by state or country of origin. In effect, the board's most infamous sections operate like an dizzying combination of Is Anyone Up? and Photobucket Plunder, served up in the anarchic and baffling style of 4chan.

Earlier this week (days before imgur galleries were passed around the greater internet) a thread dedicated to Jennifer Lawrence was bumped by an AnonIB poster who intimated that posters on /stol/—the forum's "obtained images" (read: hacked nudes, often for revenge purposes) sub-board—were in possession of some... interesting photos.

Naturally—given the general nature of the internet and that AnonIB has an entire board dedicated to fake celebrity nudes—many posters in the Lawrence thread were initially skeptical of the claims.

Meanwhile, over on /stol/other posters began hawking what they said were stolen celeb nudes for sale or trade.

Though that poster brags that he is "ripping iclouds"—allegedly the method with which the cache of nude photos was cultivated—it's unclear if he is one of the culprits or merely a peddler posing as one. Nonetheless, the posts make it apparent that the photos have been floating around the makeshift hacked nude black market for some time, a theory confirmed by an email sent to Deadspin weeks ago.

As the week wore on, posters alleging to have access to the photos had migrated over from /stol/ to the Jennifer Lawrence thread, though they were still being met with skepticism.

But by Sunday the regulars in the Lawrence thread started to get wind of the same images that were being passed around for the world to see, and as more of the genuine photos began to hit the thread, the cynicism about their existence began to melt.

Surfing around /stol/ and /c/, the celeb board (both of which have been experiencing outages), seems to indicate that grandiose claims about exactly how many female celebrities might have been hit may not be as crazy as they seem. One poster revealed screenshots of a master folder on his Mac that contains dozens upon dozens of sub-folders with names of female celebrities—from Cara Delevingne to Iggy Azalea to Lizzy Caplan to Mary Kate Olsen—who have not otherwise been involved in this mess.

At the same time, a number of fake or misidentified images—of Selena Gomez, among others—appear to have been caught up and included in some of the circulated galleries.

But while publicists and Redditors try to sort through the authenticity of each claim, some AnonIB users are teasing what appear to be still unreleased images as proof that there are many more hacked nudes than what trickled into the mainstream yesterday. One poster, when pressed to provide evidence, revealed truncated galleries that he says contain stolen photos of Kate Bosworth, Hayden Panettiere and Leelee Sobieski.

It figures that a sustained hacking enterprise with this sort of reach would have been conducted over the span of months, and another AnonIB user appeared to confirm that theory early Monday morning. (It goes without saying that anonymous message board postings should be treated as highly suspect.)

Meanwhile on AnonIB's /c/ board, a poster—in his own words "not the hacker, just a collector"—seeking bitcoin donations in exchange for further leaks claimed to have been IP blocked by AnonIB. "I didn't just take the money and run," he told the board. "I'll come back in the morning."

Screenshots of an apparent email conversation with one leaker (dating back to Friday) were also circulating on Reddit. It's unclear who "the guy" who came out of "hiding" is:

The hack should act as a wakeup call for just about anyone on Earth—from celebrities to normal grunts—who blindly followed the tech industry down the path of cloud storage. But, unsurprisingly, the users of AnonIB, at least for the moment, have much more local concerns.

Know anything else? Want to correct, clarify, contextualize or augment our information? Leave tips below, or over email at jordan@gawker.com.

Additional reporting by Michelle Dean.

This September will be particularly insane for novels. If it fits a back-to-school theme to have the big literary hits of the fall drop then, it's also confusing. Most people would otherwise read these while lying on the dock over Labor Day weekend. Instead that's a privilege reserved for the humblebraggers who get galleys over the summer.

It is a lot of books to sort through. Here are the four novels being published (three on the Tuesday after Labor Day) that I think will give you the best whirl around the nerdy dance hall that is the reading of contemporary fiction:

The Secret Place by Tana French

The latest in her series of Dublin murder mysteries that have a sort of effortless grace to them, this one set at a girls' school. If you've never read French before you're missing something awfully special; start with her first, In the Woods. They're all linked. [Powell's]

10:04 by Ben Lerner

A metafictional novel I have not myself read. The people who did, though, seem to have loved even more than his first much-beloved Leaving the Atocha Station. Warning: this is a writer's writer's book about a writer, a genre which turns some people off at the gate. [Powell's]

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

A book about, uh, hmm, hard to summarize: the struggle between good and evil? And also, in places, about a man putting his daughters to bed. Per Kathryn Schulz at New York, it "almost manages to make the rest of his work look hidebound and provincial." And remember, this is the guy who wrote Cloud Atlas, a book which weaves together six different plotlines across centuries. [Powell's]

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

The latest in the British author's series of historical romances about (often enough) lesbians. This one finds her with a lonely spinster taking in a pair of louche houseguests. Sex and blood ensue. It's perfectly transporting though like a lot of Waters' fans I'd be so happy to see her revisit the 19th century sometime soon. [Powell's; not out till the 16]

Get through those four and then we can talk about October.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

A 27-year-old Georgia man who accidentally included his personal information in a 4chan post claiming responsibility for hacking a trove of celebrity nude photos turned around and began denying his involvement as soon as his name was revealed online yesterday.

Bryan Hamade, a server administrator for Southern Digital Media, was linked to the massive hack after he allegedly posted a desktop screenshot to 4chan demanding bitcoins in exchange for his collection of hacked photographs.

Reddit users quickly noticed that the poster's network—visible in the 4chan screenshot—matched a post Hamade had previously made on Reddit.

Hamade, who is not answering his phone and has reportedly been "driving around trying to find an open law office so he [can] hire a lawyer", told a Buzzfeed reporter he was not the original hacker and posted the screenshot in an attempt to scam interested 4chan users.

"I am not behind this. It was so stupid — I saw a lot of people posting the actual leaks and bitcoin addresses and I've read a lot about bitcoin and how they're are valuable and I thought, oh cool I'll get free bitcoins," he told BuzzFeed. "I am just an idiot who tried to pull one over on 4chan and lost big time and stupidly left this identifying information. They took my proof and back traced it — it isn't remotely true. I am not a hacker. I have no idea how the hell someone could hack into all those accounts."

[image via Imgur]

What's Bill Murray up to these days? Oh, you know, collectin' ticket stubs at the ballgame and pinching his fans. Normal Bill Murray stuff.

Murray's latest irreverent public appearance was at a St. Paul Saints baseball game last week, and the results, as always, were magical. Murray, who is a partial-owner of the team living in a rum-tinged world, collected tickets and caught the first pitch before tossing it into the crowd, because Bill Murray is a goddamn American Hero.

Bill Murray taking tickets at the gates of Midway! @StPaulSaints pic.twitter.com/cC8mtL8DCK

— Katie Schutrop (@kshoop) August 28, 2014

#billmurray https://t.co/W3aYKoxSg3

— bengarvin (@bengarvin) August 28, 2014

[H/T Daily Dot, GIF via Ben Garvin]

Belgian photographer Bruno Brokken is in critical condition after having 396 gallons of water dropped on him from a firefighting plane at a height of only 22 feet near Girona, Spain. That's thousands of pounds of water.

Water weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon, which makes the weight of this aquatic payload just over 3,300 pounds, roughly the weight of a Toyota Camry. Now imagine having that dropped on you from 22 feet high. In addition to the weight, the speed at which the water was traveling is also a factor, so it's no surprise the guy was badly injured.

While there is no argument that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been a huge success in raising money and awareness for research, the compelling need of some people to become a viral video hit is alarming. There have been some fun results from people who have taken it to the next level, but sometimes that backfires. Less than a week ago, a Scottish teenager drowned in a cliff-diving stunt, thought to be linked to the challenge.

It's tragic (and perhaps coincidental, considering his name?) that Mr. Brokken suffered injuries as a result of this stunt. A little more forethought would have suggested using much less water. I wonder how his photos came out.

h/t The Independent

Top image via Getty

Chances are, you've heard that a bunch of celebrities allegedly got hacked yesterday. Chances are, you're also wondering, uh: These are celebrities?

It's true: the celebrity-nude-industrial complex has moved past the speed at which a reasonable adult can expect to keep up. Allegedly included among boldface names like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Kirsten Dunst, are a bevy of That Girls and Oh, Hers beloved by millennials and horny celebrity photograph-collecting creeps. If you didn't know Victoria Justice or Teresa Palmer until yesterday, we can help: Here's your guide to the lesser-known names on the leak list.

Jessica Brown-Findlay
Age: 24
You might know her from: Downton Abbey, where she plays Lady Sybil Branson (née Crawley). She has a starring role opposite Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy in the 20th Century Fox remake of Frankenstein, set for release next year.
Fun fact: She claims not to own a television.
Fan base besides creeps: American Anglophiles, British Anglophiles

Ariana Grande
Age: 21
You might know her from: Her single with Iggy Azalea, her opening number with Nicki Minaj at the VMAs, or her bad case of "peanut butter mouth." Most millennials will recognize her from a show called Victorious (alongside Victoria Justice, also named in the photo leak) and its spinoff, Sam and Cat.
Fun fact: That signature bouffant is totally fake. "My actually [sic] hair is so broken that it looks absolutely ratchet and absurd when I let it down," she wrote recently on Instagram.
Fan base besides creeps: None

Victoria Justice
Age: 21
You might know her from: The immensely popular Nickleodeon tween show Zoey 101, and later, alongside Grande, Victorious. Justice so far has turned out to be the JC Chasez to Grande's Justin Timberlake—her singing career stalled just as Grande's took off, and she left Columbia Records not long after her debut single, Gold, tanked.
Fun fact: According to IMDB, she has the ability to do "eyebrow waves."
Fan base besides creeps: Teen girls

Brie Larson
Age: 23
How you know her: Toni Collete's daughter on the short-lived United States of Tara? A recurring character on Community? Starring alongside Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street? She also appeared—alongside fellow hacked celebrity Mary Elizabeth Winstead—in Scott Pilgrim vs the World and The Spectacular Now? Right? Remember?
Fun fact: Her first language was French, she designs her own fonts, and when the Daily Beast asked her what hackers would find on her computer, she responded, "Oh, man! I'm not telling. We'll have to wait till the government releases it." Oops.
Fan base besides creeps: Homeless actress Shailene Woodley seems to like her.

Teresa Palmer
Age: 28
You might know her from: Palmer has done a string of films—including last year's Warm Bodies (alongside also-hacked Jennifer Lawrence paramour Nicholas Hoult)—but she's more well-known in the US for the famous men she's dated—Russell Brand, Adrian Brody, Topher Grace, and Scott Speedman. Now she's married to actor and musician Mark Webber.
Fun fact: She extolls the powers of rose quartz, crediting the stone for helping her to find lasting love. "I truly believe I manifested my husband," she told Malibu magazine this summer.
Fan base besides creeps: B-list actors

Krysten Ritter
Age: 32
You might know her from: Her small but pivotal turn on Breaking Bad's second season, or from roles on Veronica Mars or Gilmore Girls. Most recently you've seen her on the—now lamentably canceled—Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23.
Fun fact: She grew up on a cattle ranch in Pennsylvania, where she apparently trained and rode her cow "like a horse."
Fan base besides creeps: TV critics (non-creep division)

Hope Solo
Age: 33
How you know her: Her two gold medals in Olympic soccer as the goalkeeper for U.S. Women's National Team. She's reportedly set to shatter the WNT all-time shut-out record.
Fun fact: In June, Solo was arrested on domestic violence charges after she allegedly began drunkenly attacking her nephew, hitting him and berating him for being a pussy, fat and "unathletic."
Fan base besides creeps: Soccer fans and Seattle police

Yvonne Strahovski
Age: 32
You might know her from: The Australian actress has landed three major television roles. She first gained popularity with a five year run on NBC's Chuck, which she followed up with a two-season stint as Michael C. Hall's poison-obsessed love interest on Dexter. Now she's starring on FOX's 24 reboot.
Fun fact: She got punched in the face this season on Louie and likes to tell the same publicist-approved story about conquering her fear of surfing over and over and over.
Fan base besides creeps: Redditors? Assuming there are some who aren't creeps?

Becca Tobin
Age: 28
How you know her: The actress is mostly known for her season-long arc on Glee alongside fellow hacked actress Lea Michele.
(Not so) fun fact: Eerily, her boyfriend was found dead of an apparent overdose in his hotel room almost exactly a year after Michele's boyfriend, Cory Monteith, died under similar circumstances.
Fan base besides creeps: Gleeks

Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Age: 29
How you know her: Winstead's logged multiple appearances in blockbuster sequels including the Ring Two, Final Destination 3, and Die Hard 4. She's also somewhat of an indie darling with appearances in films like Scott Pilgrim versus the World and The Spectacular Now—both, coincidentally, alongside hacked actress Brie Larson.
Fun fact: She's related to Ava Gardner.
Fan base besides creeps: Horror movie fans, manic pixie dream girl shippers

[images via Shutterstock, AP]

Police say a southern California couple were so invested in a Parent-Teacher Association rivalry that they tried to frame a parent volunteer by planting drugs in her car.

Jill and Kent Easter were both arrested after allegedly conspiring to hide marijuana, Percocet and Vicodin inside PTA volunteer Kelli Peters' car. After receiving an anonymous tip, police detained Peters for more than two hours and searched her home before letting her go.

When the search failed to turn up additional contraband, police figured she had been framed.

Prosecutors say the Easters were retaliating against Peters, who allegedly called their son slow and left him unsupervised at their Orange County elementary school.

Last year Jill Easter pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and served a 120 day jail sentence. Prosecutors are having a harder time convicting her husband—an attorney, who they say physically planted the drugs and called in the anonymous tip to police.

According to the New York Daily News:

Kent Easter then called the Irvine Police Department and, using a false name and an Indian accent, told the dispatcher that Peters was driving erratically and had hidden a bag of drugs in the vehicle. Kent's attorneys have never denied that the man made the call.

He's reportedly blaming his wife for the incident.

[image via ABC]

In a particularly gruesome story out of the Bronx, a Hunts Point man apparently decapitated himself in broad daylight today.

According to the New York Daily News, an unidentified 51-year-old man parked his 2005 Honda CRV on the street on Monday around 9:35 am. He reportedly looped a chain around his neck, secured it to a pole, and got back into his car.

Police told the newspaper that the man then stepped on the gas, decapitating himself. According to the Daily News, "The man's head was left on the street by the pole after his vehicle hit a parked truck on the opposite side of the street."

[image via Shutterstock]

Over the last 24 hours, one portion of what's purportedly a huge, months-old cache of private celebrity nude photographs—the product of an "underground celeb n00d-trading ring," according to one anonymous 4chan poster—was leaked to anonymous image boards like AnonIB and 4chan.

Dozens of sexually explicit private photographs, reportedly stolen from the phones and cloud accounts of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, were published to the boards and uploaded to file-sharing services.

But where did the photos come from? How did they leak out? What's this "underground" ring? Here's everything we've been able to glean so far.

The cache has likely been circulating online for some time now.

As far back as "a few weeks ago," a Deadspin reader tipped the sports site to the alleged existence of a large collection of private photographs stolen from celebrities.

A few weeks later, on August 26, anonymous users were posting about a cache of "explicit vids and pics" on a thread dedicated to Jennifer Lawrence on AnonIB—the 4chan-offshoot image board where the photographs were initially being released.

A few hours before the photographs spread across 4chan, Reddit and Imgur, a Twitter user—whose account has since been suspended—referenced "nudes of like 20 celebs" and claimed TMZ had been offering the hackers cash for the photos.

The collection almost certainly represents months (if not years) of work by several hackers...

There's a great deal of evidence—including a statement from one hacked celebrity, Mary Elizabeth Winstead—to suggest many of the photographs were old or had since been deleted. But Deadspin notes that metadata suggests some of the photos were recently taken. (They've constructed a timeline of the photos of Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander, boyfriend of model Kate Upton.)

One anonymous poster claiming to be involved wrote on AnonIB Monday morning that the hacking had been "several months" in the making.

...who may even be part of "underground celeb n00d-trading ring that's existed for years."

While the above poster is likely telling the truth that the nudes were the result of "several months of long and hard work by all involved," most signs point toward not a concerted effort but a loose gang of hackers working independently and trading to create the collection.

Since the leak itself on Sunday, posters on AnonIB—which contains both a "stolen photos" board and a "celebs" board—and 4chan have hinted at some kind of nebulous crew of celebrity-focused hackers involved in trading or selling their "wins." The multiple dates on the photos and multiple apparent vectors for hacking provide some circumstantial support to this idea. One 4chan poster even outlined what he claims was a years-old "ring" of celebrity-photo traders—a group that you could only join by providing your own nudes, or buying your way in.

Just as there are multiple hackers, there are probably multiple leakers.

While the leak certainly started with a single braggart—possibly the aforementioned "rich kid" who bought his way into the alleged trading ring—once the existence of the cache had been confirmed, several others joined in, some hoping to get bitcoin donations in exchange for the photographs.

Some Redditors think this guy is the original leaker, though he vehemently denies it.

A 27-year-old server administrator admitted today to a Buzzfeed reporter that he had demanded money for photographs, but denied being the hacker.

Bryan Hamade, a server administrator for Southern Digital Media, reportedly uploaded a screenshot of his desktop, pictured below, and asked 4chan users to send him money in exchange for the uncensored celebrity photographs.

But Hamade apparently neglected to excise his hard drive and network drive names from the screenshot, and investigators on Reddit quickly matched them to previous uploads made by a user calling himself BluntMastermind.

Earlier today, Hamade told Buzzfeed's Charlie Warzel that he was only trying—unsuccessfully—to scam money from people and wasn't involved in the actual hack.

But despite the repeated denials, Warzel was apparently able to locate evidence suggesting Hamade had successfully ransomed photographs that appeared "only in Hamade's postings."

Hamade—who did not answer or return phone calls from Gawker—appears to have stopped responding to Warzel entirely after claiming to be "driving around trying to find an open law office."

Some photos were hacked through iCloud, but probably not all.

There's evidence that the hackers were able to grab some of the photographs by accessing certain celebrities' Apple iClouds—where, theoretically, archived backups of photo libraries could be ripped and unpackaged.

A Github user reportedly posted a Python script earlier today that allowed for a "brute force" attack against Apple's iCloud service, essentially allowing hackers to repeatedly guess passwords without being shut out. That bug has reportedly been patched, and Apple is reportedly investigating.

But it's likely that some photos were taken through other methods, potentially including Dropbox vulnerabilities or simple social engineering tactics (well known on AnonIB) like researching and correctly answering security questions.

There may be more hacked files out there, but not all are real.

4chan users uploaded a purported "master list" referencing about 100 actresses, singers and athletes. Blacked-out desktop screenshots suggest the existence of unreleased photographs, and users have repeatedly referenced videos that do not appear to be public.

However, several women have already denied the veracity of the photos, including Victoria Justice and Ariana Grande. (While one image of Justice was almost certainly fake, 4chan and Reddit users have gone to great length photo-matching to demonstrate the authenticity of others.) Old, also fake images of Selena Gomez are also reportedly in circulation.

The FBI is involved

"The FBI is aware of the allegations concerning computer intrusions and the unlawful release of material involving high profile individuals, and is addressing the matter," an FBI spokesperson told the LA Times. "Any further comment would be inappropriate at this time."

[image via AP]

Know anything more? Leave tips below, or email gabrielle@gawker.com or tips@gawker.com

Last night, we brought you the story of the Deadspin reader whose girlfriend was approached on Aug. 19 with a strange request—a Facebook user going by the (presumably fake) name of Jason Killan offered her $5,000 for nude pictures or videos. Our reader—we'll call him David—messaged Killan to tell him to fuck off, only to be offered nudes of Jennifer Lawrence, Alana Blanchard, Victoria Justice, and others in exchange for nude pictures of his girlfriend. He emailed us about this, and then we lost touch. On Sunday, when a massive cache of nude pictures of celebrities hit the internet, we realized in retrospect that David had been dealing with someone who'd had access to at least part of that cache two weeks before it leaked, and a week before word of it had even begun to trickle out online.

Earlier today, David got in touch with us and agreed to share portions of the exchanges he'd had with Killan. Those exchanges are reproduced below, with some redactions.

It should be noted here that despite the implausible claims made by Killan in these exchanges, the best theory right now is that the flood of celebrity nudes is probably due to a trading ring being cracked—in other words, loosely affiliated hackers were swapping independently obtained pictures. Know more about "Jason Killan," who may or may not have been affiliated with this group, or about anyone else trading or selling these images well before they leaked out onto the broader internet? Let us know at tips@deadspin.com.

[On Mexico's Hondo River, workers try to clean up the aftermath of a 4,000-gallon crude oil spill spill. Pemex, the state-run oil company, says the spill was caused by fuel thieves illegally tapping into a pipeline. The cleanup is expected to take another eight weeks. Image by Felix Marquez via AP]

The British Isles' version of Gentleman's Quarterly announced a bunch of superlative awards on Twitter yesterday, including its bestowal of "philanthropist of the year" to Tony Blair: ex-prime minister, herald of New Liberalism, and captain of private-sector giving.

@BritishGQ @HathawayFund more like cunt of the year.

— NICK (@mangomasher) September 2, 2014

Blair was Britain's highest-elected official from 1997 to 2007, famously pressing to launch the flawed Iraq War on a thin pretext, which may have contributed to an air of Middle East instability and skepticism against Westerners that has grown particularly complicated this summer with the rise of ISIS in Iraq.

@BritishGQ The man is a grade-A cunt.

— sofaofthedamned (@sofaofthedamned) September 2, 2014

A multimillionaire from political consulting since leaving office, he also made headlines just last week when a letter surfaced showing he had advised one high-paying client, the dictator of Kazakhstan, on how to publicly defend the massacre of 14 civilian protesters. He also came under scrutiny for diverting his millions of pounds in profits through a complicated series of shell corporations that paid a surprisingly small sum in taxes.

@BritishGQ Is there a tax-dodging, war-criminal cuntweasel award this year as well?

— SGA (@Grandnes) September 2, 2014

"The Tony Blair Faith Foundation provides the practical support required to counter and prevent religious conflict and extremism in order to promote an open-minded and stable society," GQ wrote.

@BritishGQ Are you sure it isn't the "Cunt of the Year Award" ??

Fuck me, how much did he pay you to give him that?

— Keith (@nicetrainers) September 2, 2014

Blair accepted the award with gusto. "I feel the pulse of progress beating a little harder," he said in GQ's press release.

R U CUNTING SERIOUS?! RT @BritishGQ: Philanthropist Of The Year goes to Tony Blair: http://t.co/QJGqvBgruB #GQAwards pic.twitter.com/riayQbmw5V

— JD (@_jawwaadh) September 2, 2014

It's unclear what comes next for Blair, but thanks to GQ, one thing is certain: When Britons think of him, the first word that will come to them is "philanthropist."

[Photo via]

Edward Lazear, a former economic adviser to George W. Bush, argues today that cutting carbon emissions enough to mitigate global warming is a lost cause, and we are better off pursuing a strategy of "adaptation" to a fiery new world. This is why pessimists should not be in charge.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Lazear is making a good-faith case for giving up on fighting climate change based on pure economic motives, rather than making a bad-faith attempt to fight environmentalism on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Lazear begins by projecting nearly three decades worth of growth for emerging economies like China, and argues that even with gains in energy efficiency, a larger and more prosperous China and other nations will almost certainly be emitting far more carbon than they are now. Can America cut its carbon emissions in a meaningful way, to offset possible growth from other countries? Lazear says no. He dismisses various straw man methods (locally sourced food, public transportation) as insufficient. And when he comes to the one method that would actually prove effective on a grand scale—a carbon tax—he has this to say:

Very high carbon taxes or severely restrictive cap-and-trade policies might provide substantial motivation to conserve. These could reduce carbon-intensive consumption and motivate a switch to lower carbon power sources like nuclear. But these actions are undesirable because of their adverse effects on the economy. Australia instituted a $22 per ton carbon-dioxide tax in 2012. It repealed the highly unpopular measure this July, mainly because of its economic costs and perceived ineffectiveness. Research and development are worthwhile. But they can be wasteful and ineffective—recall Solyndra—and if R&D is to be government sponsored, all developed countries should participate in funding.

So Lazear essentially admits that a carbon tax could succeed in providing the necessary motivation to cut carbon emissions to target levels, but then immediately dismisses the solution as "undesirable" because it would cost too much. His evidence: Australia tried it, and it was unpopular. That seems rather thin, considering we are talking about the future of life on earth. A carbon tax is not money that is tossed into an oven and burned. It is a tax to discourage an undesirable activity (carbon emissions), the proceeds of which can be used to fund a more desirable solution (the government-sponsored clean energy R&D that Lazear refers to ever so briefly). A carbon tax is a way to redirect economic activity away from a harmful activity and towards a more positive activity.

Would this tax's "adverse effects on the economy" prove too onerous, in the context of global warming? A little perspective: the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that pursuing Lazear's preferred strategy of adaptation to climate change (that is, just allowing it to happen, and dealing with the consequences) could be costing the world $100 billion per year by 2050. Even the highest estimates of the losses of Solyndra, which Lazear finds so profligate, are less than $1 billion. In the name of economic efficiency, Lazear is willing to accept a guaranteed future of tens of billions of dollars a year worth of weather disasters, crop losses, and human displacement in order to avoid a tax that might... negatively impact the coal industry and occasionally fund a solar panel company that doesn't work out.

"It is time to end the delusions and start thinking realistically about what can and will be done," Lazear concludes. What can and will be done is a matter of human will. Giving up the fight before it starts does not make you a realist. It makes you a fatalist. Edward Lazear will probably be dead by 2050. If you will still be around then, you might have a more expansive view of what is realistic.

[Photo: AP]

On Friday, humorless "satire" site Empire News published an article titled "Congress Approves Bill That Will Offer Free Automobiles To Welfare Recipients," supplying elderly Facebook users with their weekly requirement of anti-Obama outrage.

According to the story, a new White House-sponsored "Obama Car" program will "offer free motor vehicles to welfare recipients" after being approved by Congress in a "narrow vote." Predictably, conservatives on social media completely lost their shit, and by Wednesday the article had been shared over 50,000 times.

If this is true, i officially declare a revolt against the american government. http://t.co/VuUcCrwUJu

— Mitchell Bryant (@Cowboy2112) September 2, 2014

But as you may have suspected, this story is totally false. Not only does such a bill not exist, even if one did, Congress could hardly have passed it during their current five-week summer recess.

Faced with such evidence, those who spread the hoax graciously conceded almost nothing.

Fake story, but none the less, I wouldn't be surprised if it does happen in the future... @TamaraTuckerRN

— Tamara Hayman Tucker (@TamaraTuckerRN) September 1, 2014

Ironically, Obama's 2012 Republican opponent Mitt Romney did create such a program back in 2006. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney started the controversial Car Ownership Program, giving working welfare recipients free donated cars along with "one year's insurance, inspection, excise tax, title, registration, repairs and a AAA membership."

[ Image via Imgur]

Antiviral is a new blog devoted to debunking online hoaxes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Jimmy Fallon has returned from his break—did you notice he was gone?—with a challenge designed to play up his particular talents: The Wheel of Musical Impressions. Unfortunately, his guest is attractive douche Adam Levine, whose ability at singing impersonations turns out to exceed Jimmy's own.

In her GQ profile of Levine, Jessica Pressler described Maroon 5's sound as "vaguely embarrassing in the way it always is when a skinny white guy imitates Michael Jackson." Turns out Levine is much less embarrassing when he's intentionally imitating the King of Pop.

Still a douche, though.

[h/t TastefullyOff]

America needs a coherent strategy to deal with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Phil Robertson, that Duck Dynasty dad, makes guns, so maybe he has some ideas. Well, yes, he does, and basically they boil down to America being more like ISIS, only, you know, Christian.

Robertson told Fox's resident Grecian Formula expert, Sean Hannity, last night that there's a certain symmetrical beauty to the "convert them or kill them" approach, seeking to make the Muslim militants either Jesus-lovers or worm-feeders:

"In this case, you either have to convert them — which I think would be next to impossible," Robertson said. "I'm not giving up on them, but I'm just saying either convert them or kill them. One or the other."

Host Sean Hannity predicted the media would jump on that comment.

"I'd much rather have a Bible study with all of them and show them the error of their ways and point them to Jesus Christ ... however, if it's a gunfight and a gunfight alone, if that's what they're looking for, I'm personally ready for either one," Robertson later added.

It so happens that convert-or-die was the same ultimatum ISIS militants gave to Iraqi Christians after taking control of Mosul.

In fairness to Robertson, the comparison of his zealotry to ISIS's isn't entirely symmetrical: ISIS, after all, does kill Muslims. A lot of them.

Then again, ISIS insists that those Muslims prove by their behavior that they aren't really Muslims, much the same way that Robertson might assume a gay person can't really be a Christian... and might deserve death.

But on the other hand, "convert them or kill them" seems to have worked for Robertson's family: