In response to the controversy surrounding the interactive map of local gun permit holders published by a Lower Hudson Valley newspaper, one blogger decided to punish the paper's staff members by invoking a well-established principle of biblical law: A dox for a dox.

Christopher Fountain has spent the last three days posting the names and addresses of nearly every Journal News employee from Publisher on down.

In fact, as Talk of the Sound's Robert Cox noted after plugging the staffers' contact info into an interactive map of his own that some of the people listed by Fountain may no longer be at the paper due to several years of downsizing.

Asked today on CNN to justify his retribution, Fountain said he was offended by the paper's "conflating legal gun owners with some crazed tormented devil up in Newtown," and "wondered how they would like it if their addresses were published."

He went on to note that, since the map was published, he's received emails "from abused women who were under protective order and in hiding and they're terribly afraid that now their names and addresses are all over the Internet and accessible through that map."

Following the outcry over its decision to publish the map, the Journal News released a statement saying it "felt sharing as much information as we could about gun ownership in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting."

[screengrab via CNN]

Ever since the New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 amid the horse poop and scurvy of lower Manhattan, Ye Olde Stocke Prognosticationists have stood ready to predict how stocks would to in each upcoming year, in order to make YOU wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. And now, 220 years later, it is still not any more possible to predict the future of the stock market than it was then.

David Weidner takes a quick look back at how various stock pundits did this year, and this is all you really need to know:

Of the 65 market "gurus" tracked during the last few years by CXO Advisory Group, the median accuracy for market calls is 47%. If that sounds low, or you wonder about the quality of the pundit, consider that the list includes such well-known names as Bill Fleckenstein (37%), Jeremy Grantham (48%), Bill Gross (46%) and Louis Navellier (60%).

The record speaks for itself. Most of the smartest guys in the room are usually about as reliable as a coin flip.

The paid professionals are almost as good as a dart-throwing monkey. Maybe next year. In the meantime, index.

[WSJ]

All of us have had moments in our lives that we wish we could do over, incidents from our past that gnaw at us in spite of our best attempts at repressing them - or sometimes, erasing them altogether - from our memories. When we say something hurtful we can't take back, or engage in behavior we know is wrong, even if it's a forgivable, human mistake. Some of our writers have volunteered to share their private shame. Please forgive them, and use the comments in this space to share your own absolutions.

Let the healing begin. First up, Kiese Laymon.

This is the first installment of New Year's Absolutions, an exercise in unburdening guilt before 2013.

Dear Uncle Jimmy,

As a black boy growing up in Mississippi, I learned that there was a rickety bridge between right and wrong. And I learned that I would be disciplined more harshly than white boys for even leaning towards the wrong side. But like you, Uncle Jimmy, I sadly didn't give a fuck. I broke bets I made with myself, got kicked out of high school a number of times, was suspended from college, and had run-ins with police that broke Mama and Grandma's heart. Unlike you, though, I did all of this in close proximity to a lanky, living, breathing warning.

Uncle Jimmy, that warning was you.

On July 4th, you threw down your crack pipe, scrubbed yourself clean and bought my Grandma some meat. "This Mama's meat," you wrote in loopy black letters on a bloody paper sack. When your sister, my Mama, called me in my office at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, she had no idea that the 4th of July would be the last day she would see you alive.

You joked with your sisters before taking little Tre' to get more bottle rockets. Reeking of that familiar mix of sour scalp and Jordan cologne, you probably blinked those huge webbed eyes more than usual and actually asked questions of our family.

As with many of Mama's stories, you weren't the star, but you were the precocious paroled man on whom our family's emotional stability really rested. There was a terrible clarity in Mama's voice when she told me the story of July 4th. Mama's voice sounded like this any time you followed a crack binge or run-in with the police with something graceful like leading a Sunday school session or using your pension to buy that house over off Highway 35.

"You driving my sister crazy now," Aunt Sue told me, over twenty years ago, the night I drove my Mama into a nervous breakdown. "You heading down that same road as Jimmy."

I learned that night that the Uncle Jimmy road ran adjacent to the refined, curbed avenues that nearly all sisters, aunts, mamas and grandmas wanted their black boys to travel. Aunt Sue and Mama wanted me to know, without a doubt, that whatever consumed you would eventually consume me unless I prayed diligently, obeyed the law, remained clean, and got out of Mississippi by any means necessary. But even as I sprinted away from Mississippi to Ohio, then Indiana, and now New York, if I looked down I could never really distinguish your footprints from my own.

That's what I felt before July 7th.

On July 7th, three days after you toted a bag of meat to Grandma's house, I got a call. Grandma was looking for you. She drove over to your house because you wouldn't answer the phone. Grandma opened the screen door, and pounded on your door that evening. Grandma yelled your name over and over again, but you didn't answer.

You couldn't.

On July 12th, eight days after bringing Grandma her meat, your sisters walked into Mapp Funeral Home and readied your body, the body of Grandma's first child, and their only brother, for public viewing. Your sisters made the funeral director change your shirt.

Your sister, Sue, the most mesmerizing preacher in Mississippi, eulogized you in Concord Baptist Church. We were all were baptized there. At the core of Sue's eulogy were three ideas: 1. "Niggers" do not exist. 2. Perfectly sanitized, wholly responsible black people do not exist. 3. You, Jimmy Alexander, were equally wicked and wonderful and we had far more in common with you than we wanted to admit.

Sue made the church know that you lived a life of bad; not bad meaning good, or bad meaning evil, but bad meaning bad at being human. In traditional Old Testament style, she explored justice and recreated in you someone who had prepared themselves for death by finally accepting and earning life in the days before your passing. Sue told the Church the story of your bringing that meat to Grandma's house. She told us how you wrote, "This Mama's meat." She told us that you had gotten your finances in order.

"Jimmy wasn't that different than no one this church," she told the church. "No better or no worse. And that's what we have to accept. He was a part of our family. He was our brother."

While Sue stood in the pulpit teaching us about acceptance of our badness, I realized that you were the only child of Grandma who did not become a teacher. If you taught for a living, you might not have been any physically or emotionally healthier since we know that occupations are never shields from reckless sex, drug abuse, cowardice, deceptiveness and desperation. But Grandma would have found far more peace the day of your funeral if she knew her oldest child, a paroled black boy born in the late 1940s, taught somebody somewhere something before he died.

As Grandma's youngest daughter gave the church words to lean on, your mother, our teacher, the thickest, most present human being either of us has known, folded up at the end of the pew. Grandma cried herself breathless as your bloodless body lay right over the site of your baptism fifty-five years ago. I held Grandma, though, Uncle Jimmy. I held her just like she would have wanted you to hold her if I were stretched out in that casket.

I needed you, Uncle Jimmy. I needed you the day of your funeral. And when we were both alive, I needed you to be better than you were, but I never loved you enough to tell you. I could have shown you by calling you more or walking with you down Old Morton Road when I visited during the summer and Christmas. We could have wondered about the widened roads and the huge dying trees we both imagined fighting off Godzilla and King Kong. We could have joked and tossed ironic jabs back and forth as some nephews and uncles do.

Then, if we really cared, we could have harnessed the courage to knock each other's hustles.

I could have finally said, "Uncle Jimmy, you drowning yourself with that crack and all that hate. Ain't nothing really behind that smile, man. I love you and we need you to live." And you could have told me, "There's more than one way to drown, nephew. You looking pretty wet yourself. I know I'm under that water. You know where you at?"

But those words were never said. We talked, but we didn't reckon with each other. Hence, all of our communication created no echo, no meaningful reverberation outside our speculations about each other. The last thing you said to me the Christmas before you died was, "No matter how much right you try to do, white folks do everything they can to make a nigga remember they owned us." There was a silence after the sentence and I filled that silence with a mechanical nod of my head and a weak, "Yeah. I hear that."

By that point, though, I believed I knew you. I assumed that you coped with the weight of a paroled life as a black man in Mississippi by laughing, acting a fool, relying on crack cocaine, alcohol and the manipulation of/by women who were just as hopeless as you. And I assumed that you knew that I coped with a paroled life in many of the same ways you did. One of the only differences between you and me was that I fell deeply in love with the possibilities of written and spoken words. I used words to create stories, essays, and novels I thought you'd want to read, hear and see.

When I wasn't writing things that you might have wanted or needed to read, hear and see, I created fictive versions of you that were, sadly, more interesting, and more loving than I ever allowed you to be in real life. You inspired thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of scenes, but I never even showed you one sentence. I was afraid to know for sure that you thought my work was my hustle, a shinny indulgent waste of time. But more than that, I didn't want you to know that I wanted you to be better at being human.

I didn't want you to see that I saw in the real you someone I never wanted to be, a shiftless paroled "Nigger" worthy of only hollow awe or rabid disgust, a smiling "Nigger" who fought a few good rounds before getting his ass whupped fight after fight. I believed that you forfeited your right to be a beautiful black human being, Uncle Jimmy. And predictably I knew that I would become you.

I hated you and me for that.

This is a shameful admission, a confession that is even more sour with indulgent guilt when I acknowledge that all the of the women in my writing who are partially based in the characters of Grandma, Mama, Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda are far less moving, round and paradoxical than the actual women themselves. And this has less to do with my writing than it does about my love and understanding of these human beings, and our love and understanding of each other. I loved the women in our family enough to ask them questions. They loved me enough to answer those questions, often with questions of their own.

Echo.

Honestly, I don't know if I ever asked you any real questions other than why you looked so happy in your Vietnam pictures when I was ten, and why you said, "There's some fine bitches on earth," when you picked me up from grad school when I was twenty-four.

My recreating more interesting American characters based off of you to fit the specifications of a paragraph doesn't make me despicable; it makes me an American writer. What makes me despicable is that one of the responsibilities of American writers is to broaden the confines, sensibilities and generative capacity of American literature by broadening the scope of whom is written. You can't really explore the terror and wonder of being born, as Baldwin says, "captive in the supposed Promised Land" if one never conceives the captives as the crucial critics, not simply consumers or objects, of your work.

Anyway, only a fool doesn't actively regret. I wish we could have waded in the awkward acceptance that we are neither African, nor conventionally American, neither sub-human, nor superhuman, neither tragic, nor comic, neither defeated, nor victorious. I wish we could have affirmed our awareness that our black southerness is both perpetual burden and benefit, and that our masculinity must be perpetually reckoned with. Mostly, Uncle Jimmy, I wish you could have told me that we are fucked up, and much of the nation wants it that way, but we owe it to our teachers and our students to imagine new routes into unconventional beauty, healthy relationships, compassionate citizenry and imaginative inquiry. We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.

That's what I needed to tell you when you were alive. That's what I needed you to show me. That's what I need to believe.

One night while revising Long Division and How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America I thanked God that you weren't my father while feeling like the luckiest nephew in the world to call someone as tortured as you my Uncle. I wondered who and what I really would have become without you as my warning. I wondered how your life would have been different if I would have told you I loved you. What would you have done differently with your life if you really believed me? What would we have both felt?

Uncle Jimmy, no matter how I contort these words, we will never ever know. I am sorry I didn't love you.

Your Nephew

Kiese Laymon is the author of the forthcoming novel, Long Division, and a book of essays titled How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is an associate professor of English at Vassar College and a contributing editor for Gawker. He blogs at Cold Drank.

In August, a finback whale that curled up to die on a shore in the Hamptons was buried in the sand; in 1964, a whale found in the Hudson, off of 79th street, was towed out to sea and detonated with 500 pounds of explosives. For the last 24 hours, a 60-foot finback whale has lain mute and emaciated on the shore outside the burned husk of Breezy Point, Queens, slowly suffocating under the weight of its own, no-longer-buoyant body. This morning, it stopped breathing, and biologists from the National Marine Fisheries Service declared it dead.

Now the whale's body must be disposed of. That the whale died of natural causes makes the job easier; had the Park and Fisheries services euthanized it, the toxicity of its corpose would limit their options. They've ruled out blowing this whale up; instead the two agencies will coordinate to find a landfill, or possibly bury it in the sand, a few hundred yards from the charred remains of Breezy Point, surrounded by the debris and refuse of Hurricane Sandy.

On another shore we come across a second sick and soon-to-rot body: the lifeless, shriveled near-corpse of 2012, heaving weakly in the lapping waves of time. How do we dispose of the past year when it finally flatlines in five days? I vote detonation.

A 21-year-old college student has convinced a Cincinnati court to grant her a stalking order against her parents whom she claims have been following her around and monitoring her every move since she left home.

According to Aubrey Ireland, a music theater major at the College-Conservatory of Music, her parents, David and Julie, would regularly drive 600 miles from Leawood, Kansas, to Ohio to make unannounced drop-ins at her school.

They became over-involved in every facet of her life, Ireland told the court, going so far as to "inform" the head of her department that she suffered from serious mental issues.

Ireland says her parents accused her of drug use and "promiscuity," and even installed keylogging software on her computer and cellphone to keep tabs on her social life.

At one point Ireland decided to break off all contact with her parents, to which they responded by cutting off her college tuition.

The school sided with Ireland — a Dean's List student and the star of many department performances — and agreed to fund her senior year with a scholarship. The administration even hired security guards to ensure that Ireland's parents were blocked from attending her shows.

After an initial attempt to settle the case failed, Judge Jody Luebbers of the Common Pleas Court dismissed the Irelands' claim that their daughter was lying and ordered them to stay 500 feet away from her at all times and make no attempt to initiate contact before Sept. 23, 2013.

Aubrey is scheduled to graduate this spring.

[photo via Twitter]

What happens behind the scenes at Gawker? We know you ask yourselves this question every single hour of every single day, and we don't blame you. We are fascinating. Sometimes we order sandwiches for lunch, and sometimes we order burritos. Sometimes we listen to music while we blog, and sometimes we do not. Sometimes Max Read picks his nose, but not always. With all this in mind, we're sharing with you our official "behind the blog post" backstories for all of the posts you clicked the shit out of this year. Next up: Rev. Phil Snider's surprising speech.

Missouri Pastor's Fiery Speech Against Equal Rights for Homosexuals Has Stunning Twist Ending

Originally Published: Oct. 19, 5:28 p.m.

Total Pageviews: 1,273,248

Curated by: Neetzan Zimmerman

The Backstory, from Neetzan Zimmerman:

The Internet is so full of stuff that it's easy to miss many of the things that make it worthwhile. Case in point: Rev. Phil Snider's incredible "plot twist" speech to the Springfield (MO) City Council.

You know this one by now: The good reverend stood up to speak on the matter of Springfield's nondiscrimination ordinance being amended to included protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and it was your typical fire-and-brimstone bromide-a-thon until, suddenly, it wasn't.

In a moment, Rev. Snider flipped the script on its head by revealing that he had culled his remarks from identical rants given by white preachers who opposed racial desegregation during the 1950s and '60s.

The clever and poignant curveball failed to convince the council, which tabled the bill indefinitely, but the impact it had on the world writ large massively outweighed its local losses.

Millions of folks from far and wide viewed the video and expressed their support for the reverend's stance by inundating him with emails, Facebook messages, and comments.

And all over a speech that nearly went unnoticed.

Gawker gets sent scores of tips each day, which, as a microcosm of the net, makes it easy to miss many worthwhile things.

But that day, October 19, the Internet gods were smiling on a late-afternoon email from a first-time caller. The video linked to therein had been posted back in August, but had gone criminally under-appreciated, failing to gain the traction it clearly deserved.

Happily for lovers of worthwhile things, the Internet comes complete with a built-in fail-safe: Whatever we missed stays right where we missed it until it's found.

I'll say.

To revisit the Reverend's fiery speech with the stunning twist ending, click here.

A person claiming to be the sister of slain Sandy Hook shooting victim Rachel D'Avino posted a photo to Reddit this morning of what she said was "[Rachel's] seat at the table for Christmas dinner."

Redditors initially voted up the post, but quickly grew suspicious of the poster and their intentions, noting that it was unlikely the sister of a Sandy Hook victim would seek to honor her deceased sibling by posting a photo under the username "Pussyrammer."

"ITT: Everybody getting trolled," wrote one Redditor. "Sweet, sweet murder karma," wrote another.

But claims of photoshopping and "karma whoring" didn't unmask a troll — instead, it spurred "pussyrammer" to post photographic proof that she was who she claimed to be.

Among the evidence: A letter of condolence from President Obama to Rachel's mother Mary; a few personal effects; and a self-shot of herself holding a family photo and the word "pussyrammer."

To those Redditors who remained unconvinced, the OP offered this explanation of the spit-taking username:

We shared an account...Then my boyfriend started being an ass on that username so we created pussyrammer together. We shared a computer so it was easier than logging in and out to separate accounts.

When asked why she didn't create a new, less explicit account for the purposes of her tribute, Pussyrammer responded that the account was just as much a part of the tribute as the photo.

"I'm sorry if this offends anyone I'm just trying to share something with a community that both of us were a part of," she wrote. "We had created this account together so I did not want to make a new account."

[photos via Reddit]

George H.W. Bush is in intensive care at a Houston hospital thanks to a lingering fever relating to bronchitis. He's been there since before Christmas, and the fever has gotten worse, but he's "alert and talking to medical staff" and his doctors are "cautiously optimistic" — an aide tells CBS that the former president "would ask me to tell you to please put the harps back in the closet." And, luckily, Christmas wasn't ruined — he's been visited by his sons Neil, Jeb and George, whom you may have heard of. [WSJ]

Beware some SPOILERS in this piece.

To paraphrase Oprah, call it a "Django Moment." This is the moment when, while watching Quentin Tarantino's campy new slave-revenge movie, a person of color begins to feel uncomfortable with the way white people around them are laughing at the horrors onscreen. Though the film from which it stems has only been in wide release for less than 48 hours, if what I've heard in private conversations is correct, the Django Moment is already a fairly widespread phenomenon.

My personal Django Moment came when an Australian slaver, played by Tarantino himself, haphazardly threw a bag full of dynamite into a cage of captive blacks before mocking their very real fear that they might be exploded to nothingness. A white man behind me let out a quick trumpet blast of a guffaw, and then fell silent. My face got hot, and my nephew, who was sitting at my right, shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Throughout the film, I'd laughed along with everyone in the theater as a lynch mob of bumbling rednecks planned to slaughter the "fancypants nigger" Django, and when the villainous house slave Stephen, played pitch perfectly by Samuel L. Jackson, limped dumbly around his master's plantation, kowtowing to every absurd demand with an acerbic and foulmouthed loyalty. But for whatever reason, the dynamite in the slave cage was a bridge too far for me. What the fuck is he laughing at? I thought, and just like that, the theater went from a place of communal revelry to a battleground.

Just so we're clear, I really liked Django Unchained, and there's probably no other movie I'll discuss more with my friends—and friends of friends—over dinner in the coming months. I also don't think it's important for everyone in the world to have the same opinions about what is and isn't funny. God forbid, for instance, that Seth MacFarlane were forever allowed to be the one and only arbiter of comedy in the United States. Nevertheless, as Tarantino's latest continues making its bloody cultural ascent, it seems more important to recognize the difference in audience reactions to Django Unchained more so than, say, the difference in audience reactions to Love Actually.

Dave Chappelle once said that the impetus for him walking away from his hugely successful Comedy Central show was an incident in which he felt like a white employee was laughing maliciously at one of his more racially steeped sketches. "[S]omebody on the set [who] was white laughed in such a way—I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me—and it was the first time I had ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with," Chappelle told Oprah months after he'd quit the show. "Not just uncomfortable, but like, should I fire this person?"

Today, Django Unchained has me considering, like Chappelle did years ago, what exactly white people are taking away from a film in which a subject like slavery is treated with such whimsy and humor. Was my Django Moment just me being too touchy? And beyond that, did my tittering at some of Django's brutality or Samuel L. Jackson's pathetic moaning cause someone else, black or white, to feel awkward?

Relentless and over-the-top violence is a hallmark in most of Tarantino's work, but in Django Unchained, the gore seems different from the director's previous efforts. There is a wide gulf, for instance, between the ultra-bloody kung-fu fights from Kill Bill and the Django scene in which a pack of wild dogs tears apart a defenseless runaway slave. Also difficult to watch is Django's wife, Broomhilda, being whipped for attempting to escape her plantation, and then being branded on the face. Even Tarantino's other recent take on monstrous ethnic oppression, the WWII drama Inglorious Basterds, had but one scene—the tense opener—that rivaled the hideousness of Django's ugliest moments, made all the uglier because they actually happened.

Considering that some of the real-life, well-documented tortures inflicted upon nonfictional slaves were much worse than the ones shown in Django Unchained, it's almost impossible to not feel self-conscious when Tarantino asks you to rapidly fluctuate between laughing at the ridiculousness of Django's characters and falling silent with shame at the film's authentic historical traumas. It's in this disunity that the Django Moments arise. One moment you're laughing at Mr. Stonesipher's unintelligible bumpkin drawl; next you're wincing as Stonesipher's hounds shred a man limb from limb. (In my theater, one man in front of me scrambled out during this scene and only returned when it was over.) You smile as plantation owner Big Daddy attempts to figure out how to treat a free black man better than a slave but worse than a white person, but then you grimace while watching the vicious slave master Calvin Candie exalt phrenology, the bullshit pseudoscience many racists continue to cite as "proof" that blacks are biologically inferior to whites. And since Django runs close to three hours long, at a certain point you start to catch yourself laughing where you shouldn't or—worse, even—hearing others laughing at something you don't find funny at all. Eventually, you begin to wonder if you're being too sensitive, or if the movie and everyone else around you are insensitive. Then you start to consider whether any of that even matters.

The tradition of gleaning strength from self-deprecation and gallows humor is prevalent in oppressed cultures. Be it Jews or blacks or gays, there is comfort to be found in picking at your own failings and defeats before others get the chance. But Django Unchained inverts the tradition throughout the film: Tarantino is white, and there are few laughs to be had from seeing slaves tortured over and over again. Beyond that, black viewers are themselves offered times to provide their own Django Moments, such as when I cracked up after Django blasts Calvin Candie's feeble, widowed sister in the guts with a revolver, sending her flying out of the frame, or when, directly in earshot of my nephew's white high school classmate, I giggled at Django saying his dream job was to get paid to kill white people.

After watching Django slaughter every white person in sight, I felt strange as I exited the theater alongside the rest of the mostly white audience. I wanted to pick out the dude who had laughed at the dynamite in the slave cage, but I also hoped nobody had been too put-off by my delight at an unarmed white woman getting more or less executed. Still, the unease I felt walking out was probably my favorite part of Django Unchained: On the one hand, you're unsettled by the behavior of the characters in the film; on the other, you're also unsettled by how you and everyone else in the theater reacted to those characters. Were you laughing with the movie, or was the movie laughing at you?

When there's nothing else to feel proud of, at least you can tell yourself, "Hey, I am an above-average American book reader, god damn it." Are you? Here are the latest stats, from the Pew Research Center:

• 75% of Americans 16 and older read a book last year.
• The median number of books read by readers last year was 6; the average, pushed up by those always-reading outliers, was 15.
• The percentage of readers declined steadily with age, from 90% of 16 year-olds to just 67% of those 65 and older. Likewise, the percentage of readers increased steadily as household income and education levels rose.
• 81% of women read a book last year, but only 70% of men.

[Pew. Photo: m anima/ Flickr]

Boy oh boy, what a crummy year, huh? A quick glance at the Wikipedia rundown of all the biggest news events of the year confirms that absolutely nothing good came of 2012.

That's not to say the news itself wasn't worth watching.

Quite the contrary: As this compilation of the year's best local news bloopers clearly proves, 2012 was a banner year for people fucking up and/or acting really strange on camera.

Here's hoping that with society's steadily growing affinity for mean-spirited schadenfreude and the increasing permanence of Internet content, 2013 will be even bloopier.

[video via FunnyLocalNews]

What happens behind the scenes at Gawker? We know you ask yourselves this question every single hour of every single day, and we don't blame you. We are fascinating. Sometimes we order sandwiches for lunch, and sometimes we order burritos. Sometimes we listen to music while we blog, and sometimes we do not. Sometimes Max Read picks his nose, but not always. With all this in mind, we're sharing with you our official "behind the blog post" backstories for all of the posts you clicked the shit out of this year. Next up: the day Reddit blacklisted Gawker for exposing Violentacrez, the site's biggest troll.

Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web

Originally Published: Oct. 12, 5:00 p.m.

Total Pageviews: 1,266,418

Reported by: Adrian Chen

The Backstory, from Adrian Chen:

To be honest, I was caught off-guard by the firestorm this story set off (which began even before it was published). When I first learned about Violentacrez, I was interested mainly in the puzzle of how someone who was famous for being a horrible person had come to wield so much influence on Reddit, which has become famous for doing good. I didn't expected my identifying him would be of huge interest to people who weren't obsessed, like I am, by the inner-workings of Reddit and its outsized influence on internet culture. Of course I was wrong: the story set off a whole debate about anonymity on the internet, online vigilantism, etc.—but when I was looking into it I didn't see what I was doing as any different than what investigative journalists have done forever, which is learn sensitive facts and publicize them.

Since he was exposed as Violentacrez, Michael Brutsch appeared on CNN to defend himself, then immediately regretted it. He reappeared briefly on Reddit last month, but after a few sites took notice he vanished and deleted his account completely. Currently nearly 100 subreddits are still censoring Gawker links in retaliation for my article.

Adrian Chen for president of the internet.

To revisit the Violentacrez saga, click here.

After a year in storage, Portland resident Julie Keith unpacked a box of Halloween decorations she bought at Kmart only to find what she claims is an authentic letter penned by a Chinese labor camp prisoner.

"I fully believe it is real," she told Fox News, noting that the letter was found inside Styrofoam headstones that were sealed together.

In the letter, a person alleging to be a prisoner at the Masanjia labor camp in northeast China recounts the harsh conditions detainees are forced to endure.

"People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise they will suffer torturement beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month)," the author writes, adding that citizens get sent to Masanjia "without court sentence" and spend an average of 1 to 3 years at the camp.

A TV channel affiliated with the persecuted Falun Gong movement — mentioned in the letter as being prevalent at Masanjia — says it reviewed the note and corroborated some of the claims with former detainees.

However, China Director for Human Rights Watch Sophie Richardson told The Oregonian that while conditions mentioned in the letter line up with the group's knowledge of Chinese labor camps, "we're in no position to confirm the veracity or origin of this."

The Homeland Security Investigations department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has launched an inquiry into the letter and its claims, according to public affairs officer Andrew Munoz.

Huffington Post notes that it is against US law to import products made using either convict or forced labor. Kmart operator Sears Holdings Corporation released a statement saying the use of forced labor by its vendors and factories violates the company's "Program Requirements" and "may result in a loss of business or factory termination."

Meanwhile, Keith says she is done with Chinese-made goods.

"If I really don't need it, I won't buy it if it's made in China," she is quoted as saying. "This has really made me more aware. I hope it would make a difference."

[H/T: TwentyTwoWords, photo via AP, letter via The Oregonian]

It's the final week of 2012, so we're wrapping the year up the way movie people are supposed to wrap the year up: Lists! Yesterday, we each gave our five worst movies of 2012. Today, we each count down our No. 6-10 best movies of the year, and Friday, we finish off with each of our top five.

We'll confess to being overly nerdy about our top 10 lists. In fact, we're so weird about them that we won't even show each other our lists until January 14, the day before the Oscar nominations come out. This is a tradition that has gone on since we were sophomores in high school and will surely continue until one or both of us are dead. So as you read our top 10s—we each only hit Nos. 10-6 today—know that neither one of us will be reading each other's. We think this makes this the first blog post that requires spoilers for the people who wrote it.

For the sake of perspective, here are our past top 10s that have been published online:

2002
2003
2004
2008
2009
2010
2011
Top 10 of the 2000s

All right. Here's Nos. 10-6.

Grierson

10. Holy Motors, directed by Leos Carax.
A movie like Holy Motors makes everything around it, no matter how daring, seem positively dull by comparison. Director Leos Carax's adventurous tale focuses on a Parisian man (Denis Lavant) whose "job" it is to be chauffeured around in the back of a limo and play different characters in other people's lives: a motion-capture performer, a monster, a hit man. The film can be seen as a metaphor for the different seasons of our lives, a commentary on the actor's craft, or a statement about the fluidity of identity. Or you can simply enjoy it for the genre-bending, very funny, oddly touching fantasy that it is. (Original review here.)

9. Amour, directed by Michael Haneke.
Director Michael Haneke's films (Cache, The White Ribbon) often explore the evil lurking throughout society, which is why Amour's tenderness and compassion are so unexpected. The film grippingly examines how the slowly deteriorating health of an elderly spouse (Emmanuelle Riva) impacts not just her but also her relationship to her longtime husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Whereas in Haneke's previous works the terror was out there in the big, cruel world, this bare-bones drama suggests that the thing we should most fear is the inevitable collapse of our own bodies. That's a frightening thought, and yet Amour's honesty and superb performances make that realization the basis for a deeply moving film experience. (Original review here.)

8. Detropia, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.
This documentary from filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp, 12th & Delaware) offers up an impressionistic, poignant snapshot of Detroit as it struggles to reverse decades of economic decline. Neither "ruin porn" nor falsely uplifting, Detropia weaves together an Altman-like tapestry of different individuals—everyone from a blues-bar owner to progressive urban planners to a defiantly upbeat Chevy Volt salesman—to take the temperature of a city grappling with the same problems affecting much of America. Detropia has no overarching message, and the film proposes no solutions. But in their commitment to letting their subjects speak their truth without editorializing, Ewing and Grady have delivered one of the most mournful portraits of life during the Great Recession.

7. Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
Before it became a lightning rod for a ridiculously simplified "Is this movie pro-torture?" controversy, Zero Dark Thirty was simply a riveting dramatization of the U.S. government's 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. Recalling Zodiac in its meticulous attention to the many fruitless hours that often lead nowhere and slowly erode the morale and souls of those on the case, director Kathryn Bigelow's thriller is, if anything, a comment on the limits of "justice." And just like Zodiac, Zero Dark Thirty upends expectations with a finale that refuses to be broadly triumphant, instead producing emotions as complex and unsettled as the War on Terror itself.

6. Room 237, directed by Rodney Ascher.
The year's most fascinating piece of film criticism—and certainly the looniest—came in the form of Room 237, a documentary that collects some of the passionate theories floating around about the "hidden" messages embedded in The Shining. But what makes director Rodney Ascher's film so terrific is how it allows its speakers (whom we never see) their day in court, explaining in dizzying detail why, to use one example, Stanley Kubrick's film is really an indictment of the destruction of the Native American population. Using images from The Shining to compellingly illustrate its theorists' points, Room 237 makes us see that horror classic in several new lights and, at the same time, appreciate the value of the viewer's interpretation of a work of art as part of that work's power. Some of Ascher's subjects' ideas are incredibly farfetched, but not all of them. And even if Kubrick didn't intend any of these radical interpretations, Room 237 is a joyful reminder about why great movies enrapture us so.

Leitch

10. Argo, directed by Ben Affleck.
There's something almost charmingly old Hollywood about Argo, a tense, expertly made thriller that's nonetheless fun, breezy and reassuringly (if perhaps unrealistically) optimistic about human nature, American wherewithal, and the universality of movies. Ben Affleck still is sort of a drip as an actor—there's nothing wrong with him, but there's an inherent vanity to his performances that keeps him from ever really cutting loose—but as a director of action, as someone who understands basic story structure, he's like an old-time studio professional, the way they used to make 'em. The big payoff doesn't bear much of a resemblance to what really happened, but that's part of the point: The hostages and their keepers all know, deep down, that real life can never quite compare with the movies. (Original review here.)

9. Moonrise Kingdom, directed by Wes Anderson.
At this point, everyone's pretty much decided whether they think Wes Anderson is a genius or they think he's a twee little weirdo who constructs fake worlds around himself so he doesn't have to deal with the real one. Moonrise Kingdom, his best film since The Royal Tenenbaums, makes a solid case for both viewpoints. This one is perhaps the most Hiding In The Dollhouse of all his films, but it also might be his most plainly emotive. Anderson seems to trust what comes out of the mouths of babes far more than the mouths of adults, and it's obvious he believes in his Y.A. protagonists more than anyone else, perhaps more than is healthy. It all wraps up with a setpiece that feels both thunderous and personal, the stakes high and tiny, vivid and quaint, all at once. It might be the purest distillation of the Anderson aesthetic, which means you either went crazy for it, or because of it. I was definitely the former. (Original review here.)

8. The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
The creeping Kubrick-ism of Paul Thomas Anderson's work isn't necessarily a good thing, and I'm still far from 100 percent sure I understand completely what this movie is about, but it's impossible to ignore its power. The Master has less narrative thrust than Anderson's other films, which is occasionally off-putting but also (I think) sort of the point: Like its main character Freddy Quell (played by a nearly vibrating Joaquin Phoenix), it rattles around with the rhythm of life ... that's to say, almost no rhythm at all. Even if the movie didn't look so fantastic—and, boy, does it—it would work fine simply as an acting exercise: It's hypnotic just to watch Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman just go at each other. What one takes from The Master is almost a personal exercise—I find myself thinking more and more about Amy Adams' character each time I've seen it—and while few will consider it Anderson's "best" film, it might be the one that rattles around your brain, maddeningly, the most often. (Original review here.)

7. Killer Joe, directed by William Friedkin.
This is the Matthew McConaughey performance everyone should have been talking about this year. This nasty, hilarious, seriously-though-it's-really-quite-nasty dark "comedy" features as batshit a performance as you'll ever see from a top-shelf movie star, with McConaughey as a Texas lawman who has a side career as a professional killer, something that's about the sixth-most-disturbing thing about him. This is director William Friedkin's version of Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a late-in-life master pulling out every trick for a ballsy amoral crime thriller. But Lumet never went this far. Everyone's perfect in this, from Thomas Haden Church and Gina Gershon as a couple that's a little too stupid to be evil to Juno Temple as the unlikely object of Killer Joe's desire, but the movie belongs to McConaughey: He just goes for it, man. J.K. Livin' indeed. (Original review here.)

6. Looper, directed by Rian Johnson.
I'll confess a bit of initial skepticism for the pre-release buzz on Looper. I was a big fan of Johnson's first film Brick, but the excitement for Looper made it seem like a sci-fi kid's dorm wet dream rather than, you know, a movie. Boy was I wrong. Johnson delivers the goods—the movie is full of film nerd fist-pump moments—but not only do the holy-shit moments progress logically from the story, the film has an unexpectedly big heart. Johnson makes sure to invest the story in real people, with real stakes, which strips away any gimmicks and cuts to a universal story that would move anybody. It's almost insanely ambitious, jamming in everything without feeling overstuffed, never obscuring the film's sneaky secret: It's an existential thriller, about a man seeing who was and lamenting his errors, and a man seeing who he will become and wondering what went wrong. The struggle is between the two men trying to change each other, themselves, and everything. (Original review here.)

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Confronted about his life-size statue of President Obama eating a watermelon, Danny Hafley of Kentucky denied any racial motivation.

"The way I look at it, it's freedom of speech," the Casey County resident told Lex 18 News. "I don't know how other people will take it." A

t least one of Hafley's neighbors is taking it as a sign of disrespect.

"If he wants to place it someplace else that would be fine," the anonymous neighbor told the NBC affiliate. "We don't have black people in this community but I'm sure they travel this road like everybody else does. They could be offended. I don't agree with it."

Hafley, who initially put up the effigy just before the presidential election and recently moved it near the road that runs by his home, says he won't be taking it down unless it gets him in trouble.

"That's my buddy. He don't talk. Don't make no smart comments," he said. "If I had a dollar for everyone who stopped and took a picture of it I'd be a millionaire."

Pressed to explain the significance of the watermelon, Hafley again shrugged off suggestions that it could be seen as racist. "[I thought he] might get hungry standing out here," Hafley said.

According to one local resident, the watermelon made its first appearance after Obama was reelected. Prior to that the mannequin held up a sign that read, "In another 4 years, this will destroy us."

[H/T: HyperVocal, screengrab via YouTube]

It's strange that in a year when the two biggest pop music stories dealt with the renaissances that R&B and dance music are undergoing, we lost icons from those respective genres: Whitney Houston and Donna Summer. Long gone is the time when what those divas brought to their respective genres was fresh and, for that matter, commercially relevant—but the passing of the baton, the out with the old and in with the new, rarely feels so pronounced and tangible.

Where R&B was concerned, the big movement was one toward a heady, humid permutation big on ambiance, thick layered synths and a feeling of sonic vastness and depth. A year ago, when people were writing think pieces about Frank Ocean, the Weeknd and other purveyors of so-called "PBR&B," this stuff breaking into the mainstream seemed unlikely, but thanks to Drake's leading the way with last year's Take Care (and, more to the point, his right hand man Noah "40" Shebib's beats), moody music made a massive comeback. Ocean and Miguel released exceptional full-lengths, Usher's "Climax" redefined what an R&B ballad was for at least the first half of 2012 while people like Brandy and Keyshia Cole briefly dabbled in the clouds as well.

It's great to have so many listeners and critics on R&B's jock, especially because it repeatedly has proven itself as the most liberal of the commercial genres (pop's forward thinkers from Prince to Timbaland tend to converge around the form), but some of the most interesting work, I think, marked an alternative to the alternative. Georgia Anne Muldrow, who dabbled in soulful haze long before it become commercially viable, released her most down-to-earth album yet, Seeds, thanks to the organization of Madlib's beats. Elle Varner combined 808s and relentless fiddles to make one of the year's most gently out-there singles, "Refill" – the rest of her adventurous debut, Perfectly Imperfect, was stellar. R. Kelly released another vocal album that reminds everyone what a virtuoso singer he is (a point easily lost in the hype and unsavory reputation) – Write Me Back found him mimicking Barry White and Michael Jackson to tremendous effect at every turn. New jill swing trio SWV released their first album in 15 years, and it was as though no time had passed at all – with the second biggest trend being the reintroduction of breakbeats for a neo-hip-hop-soul look, they sounded remarkably contemporary doing what they always did. British duo Alunageorge invoked the melodies and forward-thinking spirit of the late '90s and Solange teetered on a tightrope pioneered by Janet Jackson, making music somewhere between electronic pop and R&B that doesn't seem noncommittal but in complete mastery of everything it suggests.

The dance music thing was all about EDM – festivals, the drop, synths so chafing they sound programmed to rub your skin off. For all of its popularity, EDM remains the redheaded stepchild of pop – I haven't read any prominent critic take a poptimist stance and actually defend it, but maybe that's because it needs no defense. It just works. Stand in the middle of a crowd that is waiting like a pack of drug addicts for their next hit of bass as it pulls out and build and builds and builds and you will understand exactly how infectious it is. Oh, and David Guetta/Sia's "Titanium" is the genre's premier crossover classic, not just a great EDM song, but a great pop song that just happens to be EDM.

Speaking of Frank Ocean, what a beautiful story it was that a man so closely affiliated with hip-hop, so entrenched in R&B tradition, could come out as having loved another man and be so warmly embraced by critics, audience and the establishment (six Grammy nominations, what?). Had his channel ORANGE not been a remarkable, specific, clever, gorgeous release, his celebrity would have quickly faded. However, that queerness seemed to work for a burgeoning superstar's image and not against it is wonderful evidence of how far we have come as a society (or at least, an audience of pop culture consumers).

That said, there were a number of other gay or gayish music releases that Frank's legend may have eclipsed in terms of mainstream attention, but not necessarily creatively or in terms of their crucial ability to represent all of the rainbow's colors. These include Scissor Sisters' gay anthem of the year, "Let's Have a Kiki," Adam Lambert's wonderfully flamboyant sophomore album, Trespassing, as well as his performance of Madonna's "Ray of Light" during VH1's recent Divas Live concert, the gay twist to the video for Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe," the rash of decent-to-great gay rappers including Le1f and Mykki Blanco ("Wavvy" was but one highlight on his consistently excellent Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss mixtape) and the chillest bitch track of all time, Zebra Katz's "Ima Read." These works were cohesive, they made it their thesis that being gay in music is an asset, with an infinite expressive range.

Last word on Frank: To reinforce his assertion in "Sweet Life" that "the best song wasn't the single" here is a list of album cuts that proved him right, or at least close enough:

Frank Ocean featuring Andre 3000 "Pink Matter"
Tanlines' "Nonesuch"
Brandy "Paint This House" and "Let Me Go"
Killer Mike "Southern Fried"
Santigold "The Riot's Gone"
Christina Aguilera "Red Hot Kinda Love"
Saint Etienne "Popular"
Teen "Charlie"
Elle Varner "Sound Proof Room"
Usher "Say the Words"
Miguel "Don't Look Back/Time of the Season"
Solange "Some Things Never Seem To Fucking Work"
Nicki Minaj "I Endorse These Strippers"
Sky Ferreira "Lost in My Bedroom"
Vitalic "Under Your Sun"
Corinne Bailey Rae "Chains"
Keyshia Cole "Stubborn"
Alicia Keys "When It's All Over"
Legowelt "Elements of Houz Music"
Ke$ha "Last Goodbye"
Wiz Khalifa "No Limit"
Big Boi featuring Little Dragon and Killer Mike "Thom Pettie"
Madonna "Love Spent"
Carly Rae Jepsen "Turn Me Up"

And speaking of Carly, even though she has gone Top 10 now twice (with her Owl City duet "Good Time" and, of course, "Call Me Maybe"), she isn't quite out of the woods from being branded a one-hit wonder per Chris Molanphy's new rules for the designation in his extremely clever 100 & Single column. Essentially, if Carly can't pull out another hit six months after her huge one, it will threaten to define her career, making her as good as a one hit wonder. While iTunes has done a lot to ensure relative longevity to artists that, in another era, would have lived up to their brand of disposable pop entirely, this year did contain a lot of hitmakers who seem destined to fade away as quickly as they came: Jepsen, Gotye, Psy, Karmin, Alex Clare, Phillip Phillips, Cher Lloyd, Imagine Dragons, Ellie Goulding (though she'll probably continue to make critically acclaimed work and retain a following, another hit like "Lights" seems unlikely)…hell, One Direction and the Wanted still have just one bona fide hit a piece. If any of these names seem unfamiliar now, just wait until five years from now. Long live throwaway pop!

Feminism also seemed particularly releveant to pop with Camille Paglia writing a smear of the megagrossing "mannequin posturing" Taylor Swift and "manic cyborg cheerleader" Katy Perry for The Hollywood Reporter. "Middle-class white girls will never escape the cookie-cutter tyranny of their airless ghettos until the entertainment industry looks into its soul and starts giving them powerful models of mature womanliness," wrote Pags in a piece that also praised Beyoncé and Rihanna. On the former: fair enough. On the latter: ehhh.

Rihanna certainly makes a compelling argument that she is going to do whatever the fuck she wants, public opinion be damned – this is why she hangs out with her abuser (after claiming she would never) Chris Brown and then proclaims in a duet with him that this "ain't nobody's business, but mine and my baby." That argument is less compelling. Rihanna makes choices so haphazard that they seem only her own – a feat in this media-trained, ironed-out day and age – but they often seem to be the wrong ones, and here we are left to judge. Rihanna's 2012 album (her third in that many years), Unapologetic, is a sloppy, unpleasant mess while she remains radiant and unmissable. She is better at being a star than a singer, and that is enough for her.

By the way, for their parts, both Swift and Perry disavowed the feminist label, sigh.

More to the point than Paglia (imagine!) was Crystal Castles' Alice Glass, who told NME:

We need an army because the mainstream hates women. I think a lot of kids are more sexualized now than they were now than they were years ago and I'm not sure it's a coincidence. Like fucking Katy Perry spraying people with her fucking dick, her fucking cum gun coming on fucking children. And little girls, like six-year-old girls wearing a shirt with 'I wanna see your [pea] cock' on it. Don't prey on vulnerable people like that. Don't encourage little girls to get dressed up, to have cupcakes on their tits to get people to lick them off 'cos that's what you're insinuating.

I enjoy this statement more than anything on Crystal Castles' 2012 album, III.

And then there was Grimes, whose unabashed girlishness in her music (high vocals, candy-apple melodies, girl-group sensibilities) and merchandise (pussy rings!) bespoke a determined embrace of femininity. She blew minds (at least mine) when she revealed to Spin that "Oblivion" is about sexual assault and she just as unabashedly described herself as a feminist in the same interview. "The more I've had to work in this industry, the more I've just been shocked at the way people behave," is how she explained it, as though invoking a survival mechanism. There's hope yet.

Hooray to what seems like a movement for the return of narrative hip-hop, led by Kendrick Lamar and his excellent album-long story about youth fuck-ups and redemption, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. Other notable entries include Killer Mike's "JoJo's Chillin'," Joey Bada$$' "Update" and "Little Rachel," Nas' "Daughters" and Big K.R.I.T.'s "Praying Man." For a while, it seemed like no one was saying much about anything, but that's turning around in a big way. The most impressively cohesive narrative and flat-out bravest song I've heard all year is Angel Haze's spin on Eminem's "Cleaning Out My Closet," in which the young rapper details years of sexual trauma in an astoundingly accessible manner. In raw honesty, the only thing that came close this year was Andre 300's apology to his OutKast partner Big Boi on T.I's "Sorry" ("And this the type of shit that'll make you call your rap partner / And say I'm sorry I'm awkward, my fault for fuckin' up the tours / I hated all the attention so I ran from it / Fuck it if we did, but I hope we ain't lose no fans from it").

Nicki Minaj grows more inconsistent over time – now three albums deep, she's yet to make one that's even close to listening to in its entirety, as her taste level couldn't be lower or more focused on generating revenue. She's open about it, which I suppose is admirable on some level, but she's taken the art out of celebrity, churning, churning and churning and squeezing out whatever happens to materialize. Her aesthetic has always included a breathless devotion to entertaining, but never has she sounded as joyless as she does now. She's still capable of hitting it out of the park (if she did nothing besides "Beez in the Trap," she still would have contributed more than most to music), but she runs the risk of diluting her importance with bullshit – let's not forget that just a few years ago, she showed a forgetful industry that female rappers could be commercially viable. At least the doors she reopened have been flooded with talent from Azealia Banks to Rapsody (her Soul Council-produced debut, The Idea of Beautiful, was shamefully overlooked) to Iggy Azalea (who's at least fascinating) to Angel Haze, the most likely newcomer to cut a future classic. And there's always Jean Grae, who's been around and brilliant for years and who runs maybe the best damn Twitter in existence.

The list, by the way, excludes Kitty Pryde, a shitty, young Tumblr rapper who is still young enough to think self-deprecation excuses incompetence. She seemed like a big deal for a hot second this summer. Thankfully, we are cooling.

(Oh, and could we cut it out with the self-drawn Marilyn Monroe comparisons? Nicki and Rihanna both employ them on their 2012 albums – neither makes a convincing case. It's been done. Neither of them are close to Marilyn Monroe or pop's original Marilyn biter, Madonna, for that matter.)

This is just a short word of praise for the reissue company Funkytown Grooves, which was responsible for some of my favorite releases this year, including an expanded version of Kashif's self-titled 1983 debut that sparkles like new. Shit, they made La Toya Jackson's Hot Potato sound good. It's not exactly polishing a turd, but polishing a potato didn't seem much likelier. And yet they did it.

And speaking of old-school, two of the very greatest concerts I attended in 2012 were from R&B vets: Millie Jackson at B.B. King and Grace Jones at Roseland. Millie, the definitive cranky old lady of soul, sang classics like "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" and "Phuck You Symphony" while imploring the crowd to eat berries ("If you gonna forget shit, at least you know you forgot it") and mocking her own material (after "Hurt So Good," she told the crowd, "If you believe that, I got a couple of bridges I wanna sell ya. Nothing hurts me good!"). Grace Jones, meanwhile, changed her outfit about a dozen times during a setlist that included tracks from throughout her catalog. "Oh god, do I need to suck some dick. You heard me," she said between songs to a sea of mostly gay men. She knew her audience well.

Oh, and here's my favorite video of the year, SSION's "My Love Grows in the Dark."

They had me at the dough.

In mid-November in India, an unnamed 17-year-old girl was gang-raped in the Patiala region in the Punjab. She had reportedly spent much of December begging and badgering the police to take the case seriously and investigate and eventually arrest her attackers. Sadly, those things never happened — or they were happening very, very slowly as the police worked to convince her to give up. Well, on Wednesday night she did. She swallowed poison, committing suicide.

Of course, that was a drastic enough action to finally make those in power take notice. On Thursday, three attackers were detained — two men and a female accomplice. One police officer has been fired and another has also been suspended over their actions in the case. According to the victim's sister, the police encouraged her to take hush money from the attackers or marry one of them.

Though this is an extreme case, it has brought the treatment of women in India to the attention of the Western world. According to Sky News, official figures in India state that 228,650 of the 256,329 violent crimes committed in India were perpetrated against women, though the number of unreported cases would certainly pump that figure up even higher.

Attitudes and laws are beginning to change there — the photo at the top of this post comes from protests over the actions of police. But for many women it's obviously too little and much too late. On Thursday, prime minister Manmohan Singh said that he would introduce new laws to cover attacks on women. In New Delhi, the names, photos and addresses of rapists will be posted online in order to shame them for their crimes. It's a start, and one that should make us ask ourselves if our country is really any better.

[UPDATE: Earlier in this post I had lumped two cases of gang-rape together. The victim who committed suicide was attacked during the festival of Diwali in mid-November. The opening sentence now reflects that. The woman who was attacked on a bus in New Delhi is currently hospitalized in Singapore.]

[via Sky News, image via Getty]

Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, pictured above with George H.W. Bush, died on Thursday in Tampa, according to the AP. Schwarzkopf is one of the major American military figures of the 20th century, having led the U.S. in Desert Storm after widely being recognized as a heroic figure during the war in Vietnam. This passage, summarized from his biography on Wikipedia, describes an incredibly harrowing experience that earned him a Silver Star.

He had received word that men under his command had encountered a minefield on the notorious Batangan Peninsula, he rushed to the scene in his helicopter, as was his custom while a battalion commander, in order to make his helicopter available. He found several soldiers still trapped in the minefield. Schwarzkopf urged them to retrace their steps slowly. Still, one man tripped a mine and was severely wounded but remained conscious. As the wounded man flailed in agony, the soldiers around him feared that he would set off another mine. Schwarzkopf, also wounded by the explosion, crawled across the minefield to the wounded man and held him down (using a "pinning" technique from his wrestling days at West Point) so another could splint his shattered leg. One soldier stepped away to break a branch from a nearby tree to make the splint. In doing so, he too hit a mine, which killed him and the two men closest to him, and blew an arm and a leg off Schwarzkopf's artillery liaison officer. Eventually, Schwarzkopf led his surviving men to safety, by ordering the division engineers to mark the locations of the mines with shaving cream.

He earned three Silver Stars in Vietnam to go along with a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and three Distinguished Service Medals. As a general, he directed Operation Desert Storm, which is generally considered a success, though the AP summed up Schwarzkopf's role in the aftermath well.

While he later avoided the public second-guessing by academics and think tank experts over the ambiguous outcome of Gulf War I and its impact on Gulf War II, he told the Washington Post in 2003, "You can't help but... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, ‘Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'"

After his retirement, Schwarzkopf campaigned for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, but was not a vocal cheerleader in the run-up to the Iraq war.

"What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan," he said.

Schwarzkopf, who stayed rather anonymous after his retirement with the exception of being an outspoken proponent in the early '90s of men getting tested for prostate cancer, was survived by his wife Brenda and three children.

[via AP/Washington Post, image via AP]

Here's a general idea of how many weapons are just floating around this country right now. The LAPD held a gun buyback in Los Angeles on Wednesday (the image above is from a buyback in Bridgeport, Conn. last week) and they received the following: 901 handguns, 698 rifles and 363 shotguns. Oh, they also were handed two rocket launchers. No big deal. And these were just the people willing to turn over their guns in exchange for $100 gift cards (for handguns and long guns) or $200 gift cards (for rifles). In one city. Here's a photo of one of the rocket launchers:

In LA gun buyback, someone turned in a rocket launcher. lat.ms/Ym2i8Y twitter.com/nytjim/status/…

— Jim Roberts (@nytjim) December 28, 2012

This is a big deal to a lot of us horrified by the idea of there being so many guns in one city, but to the LAPD this was just another day at the office. Here's a police source on the rocket launchers:

The official told us this is not that unusual, that "we've had them in the past."

According to the police, the rocket launchers are antiquated, non-working weapons likely picked up by collectors or passed down by family members. Sounds cool, right? Sleep tight!

[via LA Weekly, image via Getty]