Perhaps MLB should ensure the person they are hiring to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" knows the words?

This is Aaron Lewis of the shitty noise band Staind, and don't ask us why he's singing in San Francisco tonight because Staind is from Massachusetts. Huey Lewis is still available, jerks, and he knows the words.

And, hey, GET THIS: Aaron Lewis once ripped Christina Aguilera for her national anthem performance!

[Fox]

Americans, who—in general—are not scientists, or even very literate, are nevertheless convinced that they must eat "gluten-free" food in order to, uh, [something about health]. Spoiler: if you think this, you are probably wrong!

Yes, there are people who have celiac disease, who are genuinely intolerant of gluten. That's around 1% or less of the population. The rest of you—the other tens of millions of households who buy gluten-free products because of a vague and unsubstantiated belief that it is healthy to do so—are probably just wasting your time, money, and taste buds. And perhaps making yourself less healthy, in the process.

In The New Yorker this week, Michael Specter takes on the gluten-free trend, and comes to the following reasonable conclusions: 1) Wheat has been around for thousands of years, and "provides about twenty per cent of the world's calories and more nourishment than any other source of food." It is unlikely or at least odd that a large portion of humanity would have spontaneously developed an inability to eat it in the past few decades. 2) Maybe all the gluten that's added to bread these days is bad for us? But we don't know! 3) Based on the science we do have, it seems quite possible that even those who do feel bad after eating bread are not responding to gluten, but to another type of carbohydrate called FODMAPs. 4) If there is any real fact-based finding on this subject that people should take away, it is this assessment of the gluten-free trend from the Mayo Clinic's Joseph Murray: "I would have to say that at least seventy per cent of it is hype and desire. There is just nothing obviously related to gluten that is wrong with most of these people.''

Maybe eat more vegetables, drink fewer Big Gulp beverages, get enough exercise, avoid sunburns, stop sitting so much, stretch more, stop smoking, drink less beer, stay away from drive-thru restaurants, and repair your failing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure before you go worrying about gluten and shit, America.

[Photo: Flickr]

Kaci Hickox, the nurse who returned from Sierra Leone on Friday only to be forced into "inhumane" quarantine in Newark, is now being permitted by New Jersey governor Chris Christie to self-quarantine at her home in Maine. Hickox tested negative for Ebola on Friday.

"I'm hopeful that this morning if all goes well we'll be able to release her and send her back to Maine," Christie said Monday morning, according to the New York Times.

Governor Christie and Governor Cuomo announced plans on Friday to force patients into mandatory 21-day quarantine if they had been treating Ebola patients in West Africa. The policy was immediately slammed by health experts, who say mandatory quarantines will only add to Ebola panic and could deter health workers from volunteering in West Africa.

In response to her forced detainment, Hickox has said that she plans to sue.

[Image via AP]

Did you hear? America's favorite boobs—those belonging to Katy Perry—are performing at the Super Bowl XLVIV Halftime Show. Did you also hear? Taylor Swift, b. 1989, hates those boobs. So naturally, Radar reports, Tayla is gonna destroy the halftime show.

According to Radar, Swift has issued an "ultimatum" to concert tour director and production designer Baz Halpin, who's been employed by both Swift and Perry in the past. Halpin absolutely cannot produce Perry's halftime show, or else:

Now that Perry ... has scored the high-profile Super Bowl XLVIV Halftime Show, she's asked Halpin to design it. "He's working out the money details right now, but it's obviously a huge career highlight for him and he wouldn't pass up the chance to do it," says the insider.

That dedication to Perry isn't exactly sitting well with 24-year-old Taylor. "She got word of Baz agreeing to do the show for Katy and Taylor's flat out said she will not hire him ever again for any performance or tour if he goes ahead with his decision."

Katy reportedly found the ultimatum "quite amusing."

It was announced today that Taylor will headline New Year's Rockin' Eve 2014, which is almost as good as the Super Bowl halftime show.

[Photo via Getty]

Jim Carrey's spot-on Matthew McConaughey impression was the buried lede from this week's SNL. McConaughey's self-serious Lincoln commercial is old news at this point, but not as old as the recycled Mask and Cable Guy jokes from that unwatchable family reunion sketch.

You don't have Carrey host the show so you can force terrible Ace Ventura impressions on your Stockholm-syndromed audience, you do it for shit like this: Carrey perfectly channeling McConaughey-channeling-Rust-Cohle while he casually rolls a booger between two fingers.

Making fun of an Oscar winner for stooping to car commercials is especially brutal coming from someone who's never been nominated for an Academy Award, but still does a better McConaughey than McConaughey.

[h/t 22 Words]

In addition to a place where prison guards beat inmates to death with impunity, Rikers Island is also a place where inmates die from medical mistreatment and their families are lied to about it, DNAinfo reports.

Working from documents received through a Freedom of Information Law request, reporters Rosa Goldensohn and James Fanelli tell the stories of three Rikers inmates who died in prison due to substandard medical care. Though state-commissioned reports revealed that neglect or mistreatment were contributing factors in each death, New York City's Department of Correction never shared that information with the inmates' families.

John Loadholt died in 2006 after receiving poor care for his asthma:

"Loadholt's asthma was inadequately managed by Prison Health Services, a business corporation holding itself out as a medical care provider," Frederick C. Lamy, the commissioner of the State Commission of Correction, wrote in a report reviewing Loadholt's Jan. 9, 2006 death that was issued a year later.

The report said Loadholt was never taken to several appointments at the jail's medical clinic, and that staff from Prison Health Services never followed up with him. State investigators wrote that PHS routinely overbooked its clinic schedule, only seeing a fraction of the inmates who had appointments each day.

The report, shared with the DOC commissioner and high-ranking officials at the city Health Department, also found that Rikers guards failed to follow the rules when Loadholt told them he had difficulty breathing.

Instead of immediately contacting medical personnel, a guard walked him from his housing unit to the clinic, despite him having a "staggered gait" and being unable to talk. Loadholt collapsed on the walk and died.

Loadholt's family, like the families of all victims mentioned, was not told about the substandard care. "I'm pissed off that this was never forwarded to my family," Loadholt's brother told DNAinfo after learning of the report. "I didn't know there was an investigation as to what happened."

Prison Health Services, the company responsible for providing medical services at Rikers, has since changed its name to Corizon. Its Rikers contract was renewed in 2012.

[Image via AP]

Whiskey finally surpassed vodka this year as the dominant ingredient in America's afterparty vomit. That sounds like good news, because vodka is the world's worst-tasting gin, but it's deceptive. All it really means is that we're drinking more Fireball, that cinnamon-tinged whiskey-in-name-only.

The obnoxious rise of Fireball collides with the equally obnoxious rise of putting GoPro cameras on everything (every video feels like a GoPro ad, even when it's not) in this ingenious snapshot of the U.S. of A., circa 2014.

I want to laugh, but it's too real. This is how we wedding now.

[h/t Daily Dot]

An American Airlines flight from LAX to London was delayed for 17 hours after a passenger noticed an available WiFi network named "Al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork" and alerted the plane's crew.

As ABC Los Angeles reports, passengers, told there was "some sort of maintenance issue," were forced to wait on the plane for three hours. The flight, originally scheduled to take off from LAX Sunday night at 8 p.m. was rescheduled until 1 p.m. local time today. (Yeesh.)

Anthony Simon, Head of Digital at the UK Government Communication and a passenger on the flight, put the WiFi network and its spelling-challenged owner on blast, telling the Daily Mail, "Thanks to the idiot who did this meaning I won't get back to London for another day."

Police told ABC Los Angeles that they are "gathering more information" and "assessing the situation."

All said, it looked like "Al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork" had a pretty strong signal...

[Screengrab via ABC Los Angeles]

After 13 years of a spectacularly destructive and unnecessary "War on Terror" it is disheartening that this must be said, but it's better to say it now, before its legend grows: fear not the "lone wolf." All you have to fear is the myth of terror itself.

Last week, a deranged man named Zale Thompson attacked four NYPD officers in Queens with an ax. One of the officers was left in critical condition. The attacker was shot and killed on the scene. The next day, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said, ""I'm very comfortable this was a terrorist attack, certainly."

In the sense that Thompson was trying to cause terror, then yes, this was a terrorist act. Many acts of domestic violence could also be considered "terrorist acts" by the strictest definition. We don't call them that, though. In America in 2014, though, "terrorism" is a loaded word with very specific connotations. In American in 2014, the phrase "terrorist act"—particularly in New York City—conveys the sense that this act is just one more in a long and connected line of direct assaults on our way of life, by subhuman religious extremists whose only goal is to kill and destroy us. Each and every "terrorist act" in America provides implicit justification for the "War on Terror," and for the enormous surveillance and security state that has grown up around us in the wake of 9/11. Declaring something to be a "terrorist act" is dreadfully meaningful. William Bratton knows this as well as anyone.

What did Bratton mean when he said that this random attack by a single man wielding the most rudimentary of weapons was a "terrorist act?" Specifically, he was signalling to the public the launch of a hot new trend in Things to Be Worried About: the "lone wolf" terrorist, an individual who has gotten himself radicalized and who sets out to inflict terror on the populace all by his lonesome. It's not just swarthy Middle Easterners you need to fear any more, America—anyone can be the next Bin Laden on your block. Question everything. Suspect everyone. Report anything.

"There is a growing number of these individuals out there," Bratton said last week, ominously. Law enforcement officials warn that anyone can fire up the internet, view ISIS propaganda videos, and find themselves radicalized and ready for war against the good folks of the western world. From the Wall Street Journal:

Last week's attacks in New York and Ottawa, Canada, where a lone gunman shot and killed a soldier at a national war memorial and then stormed Parliament before he was gunned down, underscore a rising concern of U.S. and Western counterterrorism officials: One-off, homegrown attacks are much harder to pinpoint and disrupt than the more complex terror plots that have been the focus of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for more than a decade...

New York City has one of the world's most sophisticated antiterror efforts, an apparatus built up after the 9/11 attacks, working with counterparts around the world. But the New York attacker, identified by police as Zale Thompson, wasn't on its radar. Police say that after the attack they learned that Mr. Thompson was visiting extremist websites, including those linked to terrorist groups including al Qaeda, ISIS, and al-Shabaab.

Already, Congressional leaders are calling for the police and military to be "on guard" against the new lone wolf threat. Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson has said that the detection of lone wolf terrorists is now one of our country's top security concerns. Terrorism, you see, has taken a new form, and the counter-terrorism industrial complex must respond in new and expensive ways. The implication of all of this is clear. Spending $60 billion a year on homeland security and $4.6 billion a year on the NYPD has not been enough to protect you from these mysterious, predatory animals that could lurk behind any door. More must be done. More soldiers and cops must be deployed. More intelligence must be gathered. More phone calls must be tapped, and more emails must be intercepted. All in service of stopping the terrifying lone wolf. You never know where he might strike next.

There is a better name for "lone wolf" terrorists: criminals. Zale Thompson, who attacked cops with an ax, and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who shot up Canada's parliament building and killed a soldier, are criminals. The fact that they may have been motivated by online jihadi videos does not mean that they were something other than criminals. In the week before Zale Thompson's attack, New York City had seven murders and 388 felony assaults. Judging by the lack of William Bratton press conferences, none of them were directly inspired by ISIS Youtube videos. But all of those crimes had victims, who were just as devastated as the police officers who were attacked by Zale Thompson. Each of those crimes caused damage, just like Zale Thompson did. But none of them caused an entire city, or an entire country, to be terrorized.

Only government officials calling crimes "terrorist acts" can do that.

[Image via]

I am driving down the familiar stretch of I-40 that leads from Lineberger Cancer Center to home when my mom asks me to pull over the car so she can vomit.

My mother, through a life that included not just one but two rounds of breast cancer, is one of the strongest women I'll ever know. When she made that first call telling me that her breast cancer had returned after fourteen years of remission, she wound up comforting me. She had even called friends of mine ahead of time to come to my apartment so I wouldn't be alone when I got the news. In public she was so well put together that friends would often comment to me that they couldn't believe my mother had cancer.

However, this time it was only the two of us in the car, coming back from her latest round of chemo. For once, my mom could be vulnerable. After she threw up on the roadside and got back in the car, she looked me directly in the eye. "If there is anything you can do to avoid going through this," she said, "do it."

She was 28 the first time she was diagnosed, and I was too young to really understand what cancer was. I did know that my once vibrant mother was now tired all the time, and that she was in the hospital constantly, for a lumpectomy along with a round of chemotherapy and radiation.

Later that year, they found her cancer-free, but breast cancer remained a nonstop presence. My mom kept in touch with her support group and watched her friends succumb to more advanced stages. During self-exams, she'd find lumps in her breasts that would scare her, although they all turned out to be scar tissue from her surgery.

Until, one day, the lump was something different. 14 years after her first diagnosis my mom's cancer came back in a different breast. Because she was so young during her first occurrence, the doctors suggested she undergo genetic testing, and this revealed that she had a BRCA2 mutation.

Since 2007, I've known that there was a 50/50 chance that I was a carrier for the mutation as well. But for complicated reasons, I avoided getting tested: I wanted to wait until I was in a stable place in my life. I wanted a career and a romantic partner before I knew. This summer, I finally did it, and I learned I had inherited the mutation, which is what I had always suspected deep down all along. All I needed to see was the faces of my doctors whenever I told them how old my mom was at her first diagnosis: the look was always the same, and it read, "You're doomed."

Women with the BRCA2 mutation generally have three alternatives. Number one, you can undergo high risk surveillance which consists of having a mammogram and ultrasound every six months; number two, you can take Tamoxifen, a chemo-preventative drug that has been shown to potentially reduce the risk of getting cancer in women who have BRCA mutations; number three, you can undergo a preventative double mastectomy, which reduces the risk of getting cancer from around 80% down to roughly 3%.

My mom took Tamxoifen after her second incidence of cancer. The medicine left her constantly tired and nauseated, and my memories discouraged me from considering it as an option. And, when recommending options, doctors use the age that your first-degree relative developed cancer as a benchmark; because my mother was abnormally young the first time she had cancer, the doctors strongly recommended that I consider having surgery.

Surgery can feel like an alarmingly drastic step, and at first, it did to me. I briefly considered enrolling in NYU's high surveillance program as an alternative, but the thought of spending every six months worrying about the results of my mammogram was not the way I wanted to live my life. I also wanted to do anything possible to avoid the possibility of having to undergo chemotherapy, which affects your entire body. And luckily, I am fortunate enough to be just the right size for a direct-to-implant or one-step breast reconstruction. This means that I will wake up with my new implants already installed.

So I scheduled surgery for December of this year.

I thought I was prepared for all of this, after all my mom had gone through with me at her side. I had done plenty of advance research before getting tested myself. But despite all this I found myself floundering through the whole process, starting even before I got my test.

Like almost everything in New York City, getting an appointment to get genetic testing is a competitive sport. I first made the call to schedule BRCA testing in December 2013, and was told the first available appointment was May 2014. I took the appointment, but then switched jobs in April, which meant that I would be without insurance coverage for a month. When I tried to push back the appointment by a week or so I was told that I would need to wait until October for another appointment. (Luckily, I do volunteer work for a breast cancer organization in NYC, and the executive director pulled strings to get me an appointment. If I hadn't had the connection, I might have waited almost a year.)

Another thing that I thought I'd prepared for was the cost. But the doctor's appointments kept coming. I needed to see a gynecologic oncologist to monitor my ovarian cancer risk, because BRCA mutations also give carriers an elevated risk of developing ovarian cancer. I needed to get see a dermatologist and eye doctor since BRCA mutations also create an elevated risk of melanoma. The appointments and procedures snowballed from there: a CA-125 blood test to make sure I was a cancer free; a transvaginal probe to check my ovaries; a mammogram and ultrasound; meetings with breast surgeons and plastic surgeons. I've had more doctors' appointments in the past three months that I've had in the past three years. Even with health insurance, the bills have added up to the point that I dread my mailbox.

(One crucial thing that was affordable was the test itself, which I wish I'd known before the fact. I'd heard that the costs of BRCA testing can range between $3,000 and $5,000. That's true out of pocket, but many insurance plans will cover the test if you have a first degree relative who has a mutation. Additionally, if your parent already has a known mutation, Myriad Genetics can test the genome for that sole mutation instead of running a full panel. Because I had my mother's test results, my test was only $300 before insurance.)

But maybe the most impossible thing to prepare for was how this would affect the way I thought about love. When I started this process, I had a boyfriend. I had this fantasy that he would be the Brad Pitt to my Angelina Jolie. When I had told him about my decision to get tested he had been incredibly supportive. But whatever pressure you feel about commitment in a normal relationship is multiplied by a thousand when you get diagnosed with a BRCA mutation. The day I got the test results, my boyfriend took off work to go with me. We had been together for roughly nine months at that point, and after telling me the news, the doctor asked us point-blank if we were planning on having children. "If you are, you should do it sooner than later," she said.

At a later appointment, an OB/GYN echoed this. "If you're in a relationship, you need to figure out if it's serious or not," she said.

I can only speculate as to whether we would still be together if I hadn't gotten the diagnosis. But we're not, anymore. One day last month, I got the "I'm not happy anymore" speech, and we went our separate ways. I was prepared for this, because I'm the type of person who always prepares for the worst-case scenario, and I knew that this was enough external pressure to drive anyone apart. But still, I panicked for a little bit. I thought about postponing the surgery until I found someone who could go through it with me.

But then I remembered I wouldn't want anyone who couldn't deal with my scars as a long term partner. And in truth, it's not romantic love that's gotten me through this, but a different kind. It's my friends who have gone to doctor's appointments with me, cried with me, kept me encouraged.

Now as I get ready for my surgery, I'm left wondering about the future, and whether or not I'll be able to have children. My doctors have recommended that I have my ovaries removed at some point between the ages of 35 and 38: unlike with breast cancer, modern medicine can't catch ovarian cancer as early. I've only got six or seven years now, and I'm single, and don't know if I should freeze my eggs. I've always felt I wanted a baby someday but the costs of egg freezing (roughly $10,000-$12,000) plus another $1,000 in yearly maintenance fees has made me question how sure I am about this desire. (My OB/GYN also explained that if I had my eggs frozen, I could eventually screen the embryos to see if it tested positive for a BRCA2 mutation, which freaks me out a little because it sounds too much like Gattaca.)

I've kept most of this inside for now. Telling people I have a BRCA mutation is somewhat awkward because I'm not actually sick: I just have a very high risk of being sick in the future. Since I'm not actually sick, sometimes I feel guilty about being sad or worried because I know that my situation could be so much worse if I was actually dealing with cancer right now. Anyway, I've always had the reputation among my friends for being the "strong and resilient" one, and when you know everyone is worrying about you, you do anything you can to make them worry less.

Sometimes I think about something that my professor said in my entry-level psychology class my freshman year: "Sadness is an emotion just like any other one. We never tell people that they are experiencing too much happiness. You have to let yourself experience sadness just like any other emotion."

So I try to let myself cry when I need to. I've cried quite a few times over the past couple of months. I've cried because I worry my new body is going to feel unnatural. I've cried from the fear that I won't get married and have a baby before my ovaries have to be removed. I've cried when yet another ridiculous bill from NYU shows up in my mailbox. After my breakup, I stood in my living room and asked the universe why it was taking my breasts and my boyfriend away from me. I've come to terms with the fact that those moments don't negate my strength. They simply mean that I am human.

This experience has also been a reminder to me that we can't always rigidly control our lives. When I moved to New York City four years ago to start my career as a lawyer, I thought that when I was 29 I would be planning a wedding instead of picking out breast implants. I had actually switched firms back in April with the idea that I wanted to speed up my development as a litigator but now I'll be taking three weeks off from the job (not to mention the countless billable hours that have been lost to doctor's appointments). I have never been good at taking things one day at a time: it took circumstances this drastic to teach me how.

After my diagnosis I did a lot of searching online for stories from women who were dealing with a BRCA mutation, and I couldn't find a single one written by a woman of color. I suspect that this is because of the well-documented fact that African-American women are less likely to have access to the financial resources (which includes insurance coverage and ability to take off time from work) to undergo genetic testing and counseling. However, a 2013 study from the University of Chicago of African-American women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer revealed that almost 10% of participants in the study had a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation.

If you're an African-American woman reading this and you have a family history of breast cancer (particularly with relatives who were diagnosed before the age of 45) I would encourage you to speak with a genetic counselor to assess whether you should undergo testing. If you have a first degree relative who has already tested positive for a mutation, most insurance plans are required to cover the costs of testing. There are also organizations that will help cover the costs of high-risk surveillance if you test positive, including the organization that I volunteer with, the Breast Treatment Task Force.

The past couple of months have not been easy, but I feel empowered by my ability to make a choice about my health. So I decided to write this piece, with the goal that someone who may be dealing with BRCA might read it and feel a little less alone and a little bit more understood. Or that someone who knows she has a family history of the mutation might be motivated to get tested and assess their options. If that happens, then all of this will be worth it to me.

Erika Stallings is a Tar Heel and a lawyer living and working in New York City. You can find her @quidditch424.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

Young sprite and recent crossover pop artist Taylor Swift has been named the Global Welcome Ambassador for New York City. Swift purchased a $20 million penthouse apartment in New York this April, making her the most appropriate foreign diplomat to represent our glitzy city to the outside world. Put on your dancing shoes!! It's a hell of a town! Bright lights! Skyscrapers! Boiled hot dogs!

As a result of her new side job, and after Swift's latest practically unlistenable single "Welcome to New York" had many wondering if this was a chicken-or-egg-or-unforgivable-nightmare public relations stunt (not that it matters), Swift has also been given the rare pleasure of performing at NYC's New Year's Rockin' Eve event. New Year's Eve in New York is a night so thoroughly New York that it's as painful as the tinnitus-induced mania one might experience if forced to listen to the saxophone solo in the SNL theme over and over for six solid hours. Times Square: a place to meet New Yorkers. (I should mention that Swift has performed at this event before.)

Her ambassadorship comes on the day of her fifth album's release, a convenient promotion within a promotion to get everyone, including me, talking about the pop singer—a person I hardly cared about until now. In a series of videos on NYC's tourism website, Swift gives a few thoughts culled from a Fodor's travel guide that explain why she's so romantically invested in this big ole town:

• "You can find humanity that inspires you."
• "I was intimidated by the fact that it was bright and bold and loud."
• "Having a good cup of coffee or a good latte is really important to me. No one does it better than New York."
• "Sometimes what I like to do is pick a neighborhood, not necessarily pick a destination in that neighborhood. I'll just say, 'Today I want to walk around the West Village' or 'Today, I think I want to walk around the Lower East Side' and you just find places, these little kind of secret treasure places that you love, and the day kind of just happens in New York."

One video features Swift defining key New York vocabulary—bodega, Houston Street, NoHo, SoHo, and stoop.

I'm not sure who comes off worse in this public relations horror: New York City or Taylor Swift. When affordable housing is near impossible to come by and as monolith branded-cool companies push out arts communities and while entitled rich children run through the streets proclaiming ownership over everything and while minority arrests continue for low-level crimes, the least (or most?) likely choice for the promotion of a city with equal problems and triumphs is a whitebread out-of-towner who says, "Hey, don't think about those scary, unjust things! Let's talk about that night we stayed out late dancing instead!"

Swift's role is to attract tourists to the ol' Big Apple, sure. But her antiseptic pandering, riddled with platitudes as boring as "like any true love, it drives you crazy," is embarrassing for New York because the image she paints for out-of-towners is as dull as one can get. Swift trades in the same reductive simplification of this enormous, culturally vibrant, changing, frustrating city as say, Humans of New York does. Her version of a 300-square-mile area, the most densely populated city in America, can be flattened into a good latte in the East Village and delivered via iconic yellow taxi cab a whole ten blocks without paying tip. If anyone represents a New York not worth actually visiting, it's the musician behind "Welcome to New York," a song as welcoming as the cluster of billboards cupping the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey.

But what do I know? Have Taylor Swift, 24-year-old millionaire from Nashville-by-way-of-Wyomissing-PA, tell you what a bodega is.

[Image via NYC Tourism]

Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, commander of U.S. Army Africa who last month was dubbed "the man who will lead the war on Ebola," has been quarantined along with about 10 other soldiers on their arrival to Italy from West Africa.

CNN first learned today from military officials how Williams and his crew have been whisked away for three weeks of isolation, despite Pentagon guidelines to the contrary and no clear signs of illness:

William's plane was met on the ground by Italian authorities "in full CDC gear," the official said referring to the type of protective equipment warn by U.S. health care workers.

There is no indication at this time any of the team have symptoms of Ebola...

Officials could not explain why the group was being put under into controlled monitoring, which is counter to the Pentagon policy. The current DOD policy on monitoring returning troops says "as long as individuals remain asymptomatic, they may return to work and routine daily activities with family members."

Infection of American service members with the highly deadly virus has been a cornerstone of wacky conspiracy theories about the use of Ebola to control the U.S. population.

The general and his advance team had been in Liberia for the past month setting up Operation United Assistance, the U.S.'s plan to build Ebola treatment units to coordinate response to the illness' spread in West Africa. Williams could be seen in this State Department photo shortly after his arrival in Liberia with U.S. Ambassador Deborah Malac:

Williams, who will be stuck in his quarantine on an isolated part of the Army garrison in Vincenza, Italy, for at least 21 days, had remarked earlier how little risk and how much caution his team had used in Africa, according to CNN:

"We measure, while we're here — twice a day, are monitoring as required by the recent guidance that was put out while we're here in Liberia. I — yesterday, I had my temperature taken, I think, eight times, before I got on and off aircraft, before I went in and out of the embassy, before I went out of my place where I'm staying," William said during the October 16 press conference.

[Photo credit: U.S. Army]

It's hard to cast a better clusterfuck—or a worse caricature of Silicon Valley hustle—than what happened to tech investor Jason Calacanis. "Someone hacked my voicemail and changed my outgoing message to get me to invest," he wrote on Instagram yesterday, along with a recording of the new message.

That someone was Avi Zolty, a graduate of Y Combinator, the prestigious Mountain View accelerator and the founder of Skurt, a startup that promises to "disrupt the $24bn a year US car rental market." (It's never a good sign when your pitch starts with hackneyed buzzword, followed by a meaningless number about the size of a market.)

Zolty also thought it would be a good idea to write about his brainless scheme on Medium, in a post that since been deleted:

I figured the kind of people calling Calacanis would be the ideal demographic to target for our seed round.

Jason, if you're reading this. I'll be happy to reset (You can reach me at avi@skurt.co). This wasn't meant to be a malicious hack, but rather a simple social experiment to see how much traction/investor interest I could get.

Zolty got the voicemail idea after noticing that Calacanis and Tim Ferriss, the one-man lifehacker bro brand, had the largest syndicates on AngelList, an investment platform. (Think of AngelList syndicates as sort of loosely-policed popularity contest to help regular people part with their money.) In his post, Zolty also accidentally revealed that there was precious little technical know-how involved in this "hack."

Besides the legal implications for people who break into personal accounts for sport, just look at all the brands names involved in this incident: Y Combinator, AngelList, Medium—even the victim, inveterate bombast Calacanis. On Hacker News, an industry message board run by Y Combinator, commenters laid the blame on the lawlessness currently in vogue among startups with multi-billion valuations, and encouraged by Y Combinator:

If only he'd found a way to systematically make money by breaking the law and "disrupting" things, he'd be getting a valuation in the billions.

People are told to "hustle", "be naughty", and "break things" - and are applauded for it in founder stories. Small wonder something like this happens.

A natural extension of "it's easier to apologize later than to ask for permission."

I'm curious to see how this plays out in terms of YC's response, because as a prominent player and popularly accepted thought leader in the start up "industry", their response will set the tone and draw the line in what is seen as acceptable for " getting things done ".

The EFI fine [1] demonstrated that it often pays to be illegal. The banks demonstrate this on a regular basis with their paltry funds and settlements. Will startups/small-tech follow suit? (Well, maybe only towards lay people rather than investors with power and money. Today's lesson: don't mess with people who actually have power!)

Those commenters were anonymous. Reddit alumni Mike Schiraldi also weighed in on Hacker News:

I know [Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham] looks upon a certain amount of "naughtiness"[1] as a potentially positive indicator, but it should be clear to anyone with an inkling of common sense that this is way over the line.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

YC couldn't have been that surprised by this tactic. On AngelList, Zolty includes turning phishing into a game as his first credential for entrepreneurship:

Created 170,000 + daily active gamified social phishing site in high school. Ran multiple record breaking successful event promotion companies. Ran marketing at top ten nightclub. Early Bitcoin pioneer. Y Combinator winter 2013.

Y Combinator president Sam Altman apologized for the incident on Twitter and on Hacker News:

We expect ethical behavior from our community, and this fell well short of that standard. Obviously we didn't suggest or approve it, but we are still sorry it happened.

@Jason @ycombinator ugh, very sorry about this jason, we are on it...

— Sam Altman (@sama) October 26, 2014

"Ugh" indeed. When I asked Altman if YC had taken any further action against Skurt, he wrote by email: "yes, obviously. we take violations of our ethics policy really seriously," but declined to specify, adding, "pretty sure responding to a reporter with details about something like this is against every HR practice i've ever heard of."

1/2: I made a mistake and took what I thought would be humorous introduction a bit too far. So I apologize sincerely. I thought my "hack"

— Avi Zolty (@AviZolty) October 26, 2014

2/2: would be a great conversation starter but ended up really upsetting @Jason - so again, I apologize.

— Avi Zolty (@AviZolty) October 26, 2014

Calacanis said he does not intend to press charges and—with the last of his phone battery—posted his email to Zolty on Twitter:

I forgive the kid who hacked my phone today. I know he was just an overzealous fan, but... #jcalgate pic.twitter.com/bTtONeGMv9

— jason (@Jason) October 27, 2014

Just what we needed: another #gate.

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

[Image via Instagram]

The Hills star Audrina Patridge cried on the streets of Hollywood Saturday night after a Halloween party (Glee star Matthew Morrison's) went south. Her costume: "leather." Her complaint(s): Uber was late and her contacts hurt. Sounds like your Saturday night!

Especially if you take a look at this TMZ video, which 100 percent shows Audrina fighting with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Corey Bohan, a world-class BMX biker.* He's dressed like a sheriff. Dumb.

God, Halloween is so stressful and dumb boyfriends do not get it.

Audrina Patridge ... - http://t.co/aqs02gFgHM - #B #Blog #Gossip #MusicHits #MusicNews #MusicUpdates pic.twitter.com/X0qj1fg39k

— The Cutting Suite (@TheCuttingSuite) October 27, 2014

*You may remember Corey as JustinBobby's foil on The Hills.

[Photos via TMZ video]

Alice Woodruff walked outside to her backyard in Waterbury, Conn. last Tuesday to find her naked neighbor allegedly raping her tied up pit bull.

"I thought my dog had killed somebody because I saw a man underneath her," Woodruff told WTNH. "I started to scream. I had a citronella candle and I threw it at him, screaming 'Get off my dog, you have to get out of here.' He said, 'No, today is the day we are going to spend the rest of our lives together.'"

Woodruff told WTNH that the neighbor, whom she had never formally met before, appeared to be suffering from mental illness—he apparently explained ISIS had order him there to rape her dog.

"He pranced through the yard naked, yelling 'This is our day and you have to prosper in it,'" Woodruff told the TV station. "'ISIS sent me,' and I was thinking 'Did something like this just land in my back yard?'"

According to CBS Connecticut, Woodruff then ran inside her own, grabbed her gun, and returned back outside, showing him that she had loaded a clip.

"He kept saying this is the plan, that we were going to die today in a massacre. He didn't seem to care that I had the gun, and I kept it down," Woodruff said. "Then I gave him a warning and shot the gun to the right into the dirt."

But even at gunpoint, the neighbor appeared undeterred.

"No, he put his arms out and started walking toward me, telling me to kill him, but to know that as soon as I kill him that we were going to die," Woodruff told WTNH. "Honestly, the whole time I thought there was a bomb or gun and he was going to take it out and do a massacre."

Police took the neighbor, so far only identified as being 22-years-old, to the hospital for a mental health evaluation. Upon release, police intend to arrest the man for cruelty to an animal, sexual assault, and breach of peace.

[Screengrab via WTNH]

A new report from an investment firm estimates that legal marijuana sales in the U.S. should reach $21 billion-$35 billion a year by 2020. Meanwhile, the U.S. alcohol industry already has almost $200 billion in annual sales. Get your fucking shit together, weed heads.

A teenager in Spartenburg, South Carolina was arrested on Tuesday for doing what any teen might have done in the face of desperation: Young Karla Farmer stole Rock Hard erection cream, handcuffs, and Deep Throat desensitizing spray from a local mall before getting scooped up by the cops. Teens have to teen.

Farmer, 18, went to the WestGate Mall in her town and after entering Spencer's, a purveyor of furry blacklight posters, she stole Rock Hard erection cream and Deep Throat desensitizing spray. Not quite satisfied, though, she returned to the store and pilfered a pair of handcuffs as well.

According to the Smoking Gun, mall security caught up with Farmer. They discovered two pairs of Victoria's Secret panties in her bag, which security alleges she had also stolen. Sounds like a fun night was completely ruined when Farmer was booked in county jail and released late Tuesday.

[Image via Shutterstock]

As news broke of the Jian Ghomeshi's firing from the CBC amid sexual misconduct allegations, I found my Canadian self inundated with questions like, "who the hell is that," and "why are people freaking out"? Because Gawker lives to serve, here's some Canadiansplaining for you.

Who the hell is Jian Ghomeshi?

He first achieved that most self-contradictory of statuses, Canadian fame, as a member of a band called Moxy Früvous. Moxy Früvous played silly twee songs like "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" to an eager audience of mid-1990s Canadian teenagers like myself.

Then he became a cultural journalist. Eventually, he ascended to having his own daily arts program on CBC Radio, called Q. He also went on TV a lot. He became a household name on his own.

Keep in mind that in Canada we tend to trust journalists a little more than Americans do, mostly because our own media outlets are, on the whole, calmer and more measured in tone. Ghomeshi managed to fill a weird spot in the culture where he sounded sort of highbrow but also covered enough popular culture items and public debates (like this one about rape culture, which seems creeptastic in retrospect) to keep himself relevant.

So he's like Ira Glass?

Sort of, I'd actually say Glass is more... serious? Ghomeshi traffics in less personal storytelling, more celebrity-interviewing and slobbering over them whilst doing so. Floppier hair, too.

I should also point out here that while CBC Radio is analogous to NPR, my own sense has always been that CBC Radio is more influential in Canada than NPR is here. I have neither time nor inclination to look at numbers, so I can't definitively say more people listen per capita. But it has a way of being part of what "national conversation" in Canada exists in a way NPR has not yet managed.

Why should we care?

America likes a good scandal, and as someone tweeted yesterday, Canada seems to be on some kind of subconscious campaign to change how Americans view it. It'd be very kind of you to listen to us, we like that, Americans never do it, it's frustrating...

Also, Q was broadcast via Public Radio International in some American markets, for what it's worth.

Why is Canada so upset?

Well, we had a bad week last week with that shooting on Parliament Hill, for one thing. People were not in a great state of mind.

Two, lots of Canadians loved Jian Ghomeshi and Q. His show provided an easy digest of what was going on that made them feel up-to-date, urbane and intelligent. A similar function seems to be provided to Americans by, say, the New Yorker, but Canada's own attempts at bourgeois literary journalism have produced mixed results, so the public sticks to radio for this sort of quasi-education.

And three, look. Canada's trust of public figures has, over the course of the past ten years, been dramatically eroded. Some of that is Rob Ford, but few trusted him in the first place. A lot more of it is that there has been an unending flow of corruption scandals. For a long time it was possible, in Canada, to live in a slight state of innocence about how we were governed. I wouldn't say that Canadians were naïve — bitching about the personal qualities of our politicians has been a long and proud tradition since Brian Mulroney was in office — but there was once a hope that people in powerful positions were trying their best to do well by the country. That is gone, and people are, I think, sad to see that they now must extend the cynicism and bad feelings to cultural figures as well.

Why does anyone even begin to doubt this guy is a creep?

For the same reasons people doubt that Bill Cosby is a creep, in spite of the ample documentation of his creep behavior. Celebrity has a way of making people feel they know the person at its core, and then they say they "know" he wouldn't do creepy things even though they do not know the man.

This problem is compounded, in Canada, by a genetically-encoded reticence of the press to print anything about personal failings of powerful people. As detailed in this pretty-good overview of the press politics of the Rob Ford affair, some of this has to do with the peculiar arrangement of Canadian defamation laws. But the legal thing is a kind of excuse; the Canadian press is timid about self-criticism.

Exhibit A: the standard joke among my 25-40-year-old Canadian friends is that we'll all now have to explain to our parents that there have long been rumors that Ghomeshi-the-person (rather than the celebrity) is not-so-nice. These rumors have been passed around in a certain Toronto-dwelling, media-adjacent demographic for longer than I care to remember. So much so that when the news of just the firing broke yesterday afternoon, I immediately suspected we were about to hear allegations of sexual misconduct. Which we promptly did.

If you'll allow me to rant for one second here: what is so infuriating about that closed-off press culture is that it puts the women who have accused Ghomeshi of misconduct are in an awful position. There is tremendous pressure against them to "go public," because the Canadian media wants an airtight case before they public. And the kind of sexual misconduct we're talking about here is messy, evidence-wise.

Meanwhile, someone with powerful access, like Ghomeshi, has lots of places to air his own side of the story. And as he does so, no one is imposing on him the absolutely impossible burden of proof they demand from his accusers. He gets to call these women liars and conspirators against him without their being able to respond in kind. The scales are weighted in his favor because he has the microphone and the power. It's pretty awful.

What are the reactions to his firing/CBC Lawsuit/Facebook post?

Friends, colleagues and relatives of mine "liked" the Facebook post, which is vaguely disturbing. I can't speak to the veracity of the facts reported in the post, of course, but for me it was a bit incoherent and also grandiose in a way that made me uncomfortable.

It seems like there is a strong public tide that believes Ghomeshi is telling the truth when he says he was fired for consensual kink. I speak only for myself, but that doesn't pass my personal smell test. The CBC is cautious, and if there was really nothing here to worry about, I think they would have stuck by Ghomeshi.

That said, there seems to be a small conspiracy-theory growing that Ghomeshi was fired for being critical of the federal government, which is a possibility, I guess, and one I can't dismiss totally. But it's a remote one.

Why do Canadians trust a man who wears leather wrist cuffs?

Gosh, we believe in not judging books by their covers, okay?

[Image via Getty.]

A former Gitmo military policewoman who headed into her local VA clinic earlier this month for a regular appointment to cope with her PTSD learned that her and other vets' sessions been canceled, because the staff was attending an inspirational speech for Mental Illness Awareness Week.

Maj. Leslie Haines, now an Army reservist after that tour in Guantanamo Bay and another in Iraq, was one of 19 veterans at two different VA-run complexes in northern Indiana whose mental health appointments were canceled so staffers cold earn "continuing education credits" for listening to the speaker, Military Times reports:

The session had been on the books for months; Haines says she attends appointments like clockwork to treat her "high-level PTSD, that's often exacerbated" by her civilian job — counseling troops and veterans.

But on Oct. 9, the clinic receptionist told Haines her appointment that day had been canceled.

The reason?

Mental Illness Awareness Week...

"Do they see the irony in that?" Haines said. "I was thinking, I'm glad it wasn't National Suicide Prevention Day."

Haines—who herself works with troubled vets as the director of Lutheran Military Veterans and Families Ministries—worked directly with her counselor to get a makeup session on a lunch break, and she's filed a grievance with the VA over how the original session got canceled. "This was definitely one for the 'you can't make this [shit] up' file," she told Military Times.

[Photo credit: U.S. Marine Corps]

Today's New York Times treats its readers to two whole articles about Facebook's News Feed (capital letters because it's a brand name). One, by Ravi Somaiya, focuses in part on the 26-year-old engineer who runs the News Feed team; the other, by David Carr, examines Facebook's pitch to publishers: Let us host your content, and also, uh, serve ads against it.

This is a terrifying new development in the rapid rise of Facebook as the only essential website on the internet for publishers, and it's nice that the paper of record is turning its eye toward the company; outside of John Herrman's excellent "Content Wars" series on The Awl, there's far too little being written about the Facebook-driven present of digital publishing, by which I mean Content Provision.

(One reason for the general silence, Carr notes, is that publishers are genuinely terrified of pissing off Facebook:

It is a measure of Facebook's growing power in digital realms that when I called around about those rumors, no one wanted to talk. Well, let me revise that: Many wanted to talk, almost endlessly, about how terrible some of the possible changes would be for producers of original content, but not if I was going to indicate their place of employment. (Many had signed confidentiality agreements, so there's that as well.)

It's not that Facebook has a reputation for extracting vengeance, so far as I know; it's just that the company has become the No. 1 source of traffic for many digital publishers. Yes, search from Google still creates inbound interest, and Twitter can spark attention, especially among media types, but when it comes to sheer tonnage of eyeballs, nothing rivals Facebook.

A monstrous, future-defining corporation is also the number-one source of new traffic for publishers! This is by most standards a conflict of interest.)

Herrman has already written a smart analysis of the big news in Carr's column. But it's not all gloom and doom: Facebook is "boost[ing] quality content," as one anonymous publishing executive puts it.

Hmm? Facebook's "quality content" push is one of those weird "facts" that is widely acknowledged but rarely examined. Here's Somaiya:

When Facebook made changes to its algorithm last February to emphasize higher-quality content, several so-called viral sites that had thrived there, including Upworthy, Distractify and Elite Daily, saw large declines in their traffic.

Did they really? According to Quantcast, Upworthy has stayed in a 40 to 50 million uniques range all year, with a notable exception for July (we got crazy burned in July, too); Distractify climbed from a seven-million unique February to a 46-million unique May, before dropping down to 11 million in September; and Elite Daily almost doubled its February traffic (18 million to 33 million) in a record August, and will likely hit a new record October record. If the "quality content" push was meant to hurt Upworthy, Distractify and Elite Daily, it hasn't really succeeded.

Carr similarly allows the Facebook line on "high-quality content" to pass unchallenged:

The social network now has over 1.3 billion users — a fifth of the planet's population and has become a force in publishing because of its News Feed, which has been increasingly fine-tuned to feature high-quality content, the kind media companies produce.

As Herrman pointed out on the Awl a few weeks ago, the ten most-shared stories on Facebook in September (according to the analytics company NewsWhip) were seven quizzes ("Which Badass Woman Were You In Your Past Life?"), one death hoax, an article called "Scientists Find Drinking Wine Is Better Than Going to the Gym!" and...an Elite Daily post. [Grimace emoji] To be fair to Carr: Elite Daily is a media company, and "12 Reasons Why Your Brother Is The Most Important Man In Your Life" is the kind of content it produces.

"High quality," like many things, is in the eye of the beholder; in this case the beholder is an algorithm processing the distracted clicks and comments of millions of bored people in line and on the toilet. Carr paraphrases Facebook's chief product officer: "[T]he interests of Facebook and digital publishers are pretty much aligned."

[Image via AP]