The Bud Light Platinum spokesperson and five-time Saturday Night Live host is streaming his long-awaited new album, The 20/20 Experience, on iTunes for free a week before its scheduled release. What do you think? Do you care? Is it better than the mediocre lead-off single "Suit and Tie"? Should he just go back to his overrated acting career? Let's discuss.
[iTunes/Image via AP]
Saturday night, undercover NYPD officers opened fire on and killed Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old resident of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. While reports of what exactly happened vary, the NYPD said the plainclothes officers approached a group of men at 11:30 pm, at which point Gray split from the group and reached for his belt in a "suspicious manner." After police reportedly asked to see his hands, the two officers said Gray turned and pointed a .38 pistol at them. The officers then fired 11 rounds at Gray, striking him several times. Gray was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. The .38 recovered at the scene was never fired.
"After the anti-crime sergeant and police officer told the suspect to show his hands, which was heard by witnesses, Gray produced a revolver and pointed it at the officers, who fired a total of 11 rounds, striking Gray several times," Paul J. Browne, the NYPD's chief spokesman, told the New York Times.
But as Think Progress notes, eyewitness accounts differ from the official police reports. One witness, Camille Johnson, told Pix 11 that Gray was "running for his life, telling the cops 'Stop.'" She went on, telling the news station,"They really are, seriously shooting little kids."
According to the Times, another witness told Gray's sister, Mahnefeh, that Gray was fixing his belt, not reaching for a gun, when he was shot. Mahnefeh, as well as Gray's mother, insisted that Gray didn't own a gun and that, even if he did, he would not have pointed it at police, telling the Wall Street Journal, "He has common sense...They killed my little brother for no reason."
Another witness, who lives across the street from where the shooting took place, told the Times that Gray pleaded with the officers, telling them, "Please don't let me die." The police reportedly responded by telling the wounded 16-year-old, "Stay down or we'll shoot you again."
There were also reports that Gray had just returned to the neighborhood after attending a baby shower. One woman, who identified herself as Gray's cousin, corroborated the police's story, at least somewhat, telling NY1 that the teenager was carrying the handgun for a friend.
The incident sparked protests—which some described as a riot—Monday night in Brooklyn. According to NBC New York, there were roughly 70 protesters, who according to police reports, threw rocks and bottles. The New York Post is reporting the group looted a nearby Rite-Aid, causing property damage and injuring three. An hour after the protests were first reported, the crowds seem to have mostly dispersed.
In the two weeks since a sinkhole killed a man in Florida, two new sinkholes have received a significant amount of press. One was reported in Washington D.C., but who cares; it was relatively small and no one was injured. The other one occurred Friday, when Mark Mihal fell into an 18-foot sinkhole during a round of golf with his friends in southern Illinois.
Mihal was on the 14th hole at Annbriar Golf Club when he noticed an unusual, bathtub-sized indention in the ground. Joking to his friends about what it would be like to hit a shot from it, the 43-year-old stepped onto the sunken spot, and wham, fell 18-feet through the ground.
"It didn't look unstable," he said. "And then I was gone. I was just freefalling. It felt like forever, but it was just a second or two, and I didn't know what I was going to hit. And all I saw was darkness."
…
"At some point, I said, 'I need to get out of here. Now,'" Mihal recalled.
At first, his friends thought it was a "crazy magic trick or something," but they came to his aide once they heard him moaning from inside the 18-foot pit. The fall dislocated one of Mihal's shoulders, which made rescue efforts difficult; after an initial attempt with a ladder, one of Mihal's friends climbed into the hole, made a make-shift splint for the injured arm out of a sweater and then tied a rope around Mihal to hoist him out.
Other than the injured shoulder, which may require surgery, and the temporary bout of claustrophobia, Mihal is fine – "I felt fortunate I didn't break both legs, or worse," Mihal told the Associated Press.
[h/t Deadspin/Associated Press/Image via golfmanna]
A six-month-old died Tuesday morning, the day after she was the victim of a shooting in Chicago. The baby, Jonylah Watkins, was shot five times, reportedly while her father, the reported target of the shooting, changed her diaper in his mini-van in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. The father, Jonathan Watkins, was also shot several times and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he remains in critical condition.
"I was trying to help. I was trying to help. I was trying to help her," Jonathan Watkins said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times shortly after learning his 6-month-old daughter, Jonylah, died.
"They told me she didn't make it," Watkins said in a brief phone interview, his voice cracking with emotion.
Jonylah was rushed by paramedics to to Comer Children's hospital, where she died the next morning. According to Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, the shooter was "firing at the father, and exclusively at the father." He also added that, as of Tuesday, no witnesses had stepped forward. "We don't have one individual who's stepping up to help us," he said in press conference. "We don't have cooperating witnesses."
Chicago police say the gunman walked up to the mini-van and fired at Jonathan, and then fled in a waiting blue van. Police sources told the Chicago Sun-Times that the shooting was likely retaliation from a rival gang.
The Chicago-Sun Times also reports that this wasn't Jonylah's first run-in with gun violence; when her mother, Judy Watkins, was eight months pregnant with Jonylah, she was shot in the leg, just three blocks from the location of Monday's shooting.
The man who secretly filmed Romney's infamous 47% video during a campaign fundraiser last September has finally agreed to reveal himself tomorrow night on MSNBC. The Huffington Post interviewed the man several times over the past few months and, while they won't reveal his name until after MSNBC's big interview, they have released some information about the filmmaker, including his job and how he was indirectly inspired by Bill Clinton.
Prior to his political fame, the filmmaker worked as a bartender for a high-end catering company. Before that company was hired for the Romney event, it catered a dinner at which Bill Clinton spoke. The bartender/Romney-ruiner told the Huffington Post that after the speech, Clinton went to the kitchen to thank the staff, posing for photographs and signing autographs.
So when the bartender heard about the Romney event, he decided to bring his camera with him, just in case the candidate met with the staff like Clinton did. But because he's Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate didn't greet or thank any of the staff working the event, and rushed out shortly after his speech, though not before bartender secretly filmed it, noting that Romney told the dinner guests it was off the record but not the staff working the event.
But even then, the bartender didn't have plans to distribute the video, at least not until he heard Romney's offensive comments. After that, he told the Huffington Post, he had no choice but to leak the video.
"I felt it was a civic duty. I couldn't sleep after I watched it," he said. "I felt like I had a duty to expose it."
So, in addition to Jimmy Carter's grandson, Mitt Romney can thank his own awfulness and Bill Clinton's graciousness for the video that helped doom his campaign.
[Image via AP]
The trial of two high-school football players accused of raping a 16-year-old girl at a party last year begins today in Steubenville, Ohio, following months of social media-fueled speculation and accusation. Trent Mays and Malik Richmond, two 16-year-olds who play for Steubenville High's massively popular Big Red football team (Mays is the starting quarterback, Richmond a wide receiver) both claim that all contact with the victim, whose name has not been made public, was consensual; their defense team will argue as such.. The case gained national attention last year thanks to a loose network of bloggers and "hackers"—in particular a woman named Alexandra Goddard and groups claiming affiliation with hacking collective Anonymous—who tirelessly publicized the case, accusing local authorities of protecting the football players and uncovering a disturbing social media trail, including Twitter messages from friends of the accused and fellow partygoers, and, most infamously, a 12-minute video of Steubenville student Mike Nodianos making a series of graphic jokes about the victim: "She is so raped right now... They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl." (On Sunday, one of the associated groups released audio of what it claimed to be Nodianos' voicemail inbox.) The trial's new judge—the original recused over ties to the football team—has allowed media to be present at the trial, but has forbidden cell phones, iPads and laptops. [NYT | The Atlantic Wire | Jezebel | Deadspin]
Possibly not coincidental with the recent resurgence of David Bowie's musical stylings, scientists have discovered a possibility of life on Mars. OH WOW WHAT DID THE ALIENS LOOK LIKE AND DID THEY HAVE LITTLE SHELTERS AND WERE THERE COOL PLANTS?
All unanswered and not really what Curiosity uncovered. The latest samples from NASA's Curiosity rover show that Mars was capable of supporting microbial life in the distant past. The rover drilled 2.5 inches into a rock on a Martian outcrop and found some of the chemical ingredients for life in the powder—like sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon. This amalgamation could have supported some microbes on the Red Planet.
While we have known for a while that there was water on Mars, the samples revealed that this aqueous environment could have been life-supporting. Scientists found some clay-type mineral, which could reveal exposure to a benign liquid source. Despite its searching, the Curiosity rover has not discovered life-giving organic compounds on Mars, though these compounds are not necessary for life—microbes can exist by ingesting types of inorganic carbon (like carbon dioxide).
While this is no god-awful small affair, the findings don't mean that Mars actually supported life (only that it could) and the conclusions don't hold up the idea that Mars could support some lovely plants and greenery today. The Red Planet is much colder and drier than it was three billion years ago (which is when scientists suppose life could have been supported).
After making this discovery just seven months into its mission, the Curiosity rover is very proud of itself and will probably continue to search for signs of complex organics. Good luck, little Wall-E creature.
[Yahoo, image via Getty]
Porn search site PornMD has, for the sake of publicity and social science, collected its most-used search terms for the last six months and accounted them by location—not just in the U.S. but across the world. Is your home state into Teen or MILF porn? What are Iranians jerking off to? All these answers—and more!
Given that PornMD is an English-language site it's not surprising that a lot of the global searches are topped out by people looking for porn in their own language, or at least starring their countrymen-and-women:
Some of the more repressive regimes—Saudia Arabia, for example—aren't represented. But Iran is there! As is much of the rest of the Middle East:
[Photos via Sergii Figurnyi and Steshkin Yevgeniy/Shutterstock]
The Welsh Sexagenarian who made international headlines after he was caught on camera using his bare hands to drag a 6-foot dusky shark away from children bathing in the ocean off Australia's Sunshine Coast revealed this week that he had been fired from his job at a children's charity after his bosses saw footage of his heroic actions.
Paul Marshallsea, 62, says he had been busting his hump for the past ten years as project coordinator for the Pant and Dowlais Boys and Girls Club, and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when a doctor advised him to go on vacation.
He and his wife, also an employee of the charity, decided to take a couple months of sick leave and travel to Australia for some much needed R&R.
But despite allowing him to take a leave of absence, his employers apparently expected Marshallsea to remain local, because news footage of the Merthyr Tydfil native fending off sharks in Queensland sent them off the deep end.
"Whilst unfit to work you were well enough to travel to Australia," the charity's trustees wrote in Marshallsea's dismissal letter, "and, according to recent news footage of yourself in Queensland, you allegedly grabbed a shark by the tail and narrowly missed being bitten by quickly jumping out of the way."
A second letter claimed that the incident led to a "breakdown of the trustees' confidence and trust in you and your ability to perform the role."
"You think being in charge and running a children's charity, they would have patted me on the back and congratulated me," Mashallsea said. "But to sack us both without any sort of discussions first is just disgusting."
The irony of it all, according to Marshallsea, is that he and his wife were the ones responsible for making the charity so successful that it ultimately became too time-consuming and stressful to manage.
"What am I going to do now?" he asked. "There's not much call for shark-wrestlers in Merthyr Tydfil."
If you happen to know the guy caught in this surveillance camera photo, you should probably give him a hug today, before he goes to jail. Emphasize what he is good at. Not everyone has to be some "great" bank robber, you know?
As the NY Post tells it, last Friday, this guy, Mr. Arch Criminal, walked into a Manhattan Chase bank and handed the teller a note saying, "I have a bomb. Give me some money now." It's not, you know, the best bank robbery note. A bomb? LOL OK. Who has a bomb, really? Outside of movies and terrorist operatives and fighters in wars, people just do not have bombs. It's just a poor threat. Even a finger pointed in a jacket pocket as a fake gun would be more believable. Also, "some" money? Specifics, please?
The teller—clearly the type of jaded New Yorker unfazed by anything less violent than the collapse of a major building—said to the robber, "I do not read notes." And then gave him a withdrawal slip! This lady! Can we get her on Letterman, please? Mr. Arch Criminal responded by writing "I have a bomb" on the withdrawal slip and handing it back in. We can just imagine him there, at the window, painstakingly scrawling his useless threat on a deposit slip. Poor guy.
And what did the teller do when he handed back his threat again? She "instructed the perp to swipe his bank card at the counter."
Her name is Melinda Lewis, everyone. Chase Bank should elevate her to CEO immediately.
Since our beleaguered friend Mr. Arch Criminal did not have a bank card (or a bomb!) he became so frustrated by all this paperwork and runaround involved in trying to rob a bank that he simply gave up and left with nothing but some lollipops. He went on to rob three other places that day in the same mopey fashion, for a total take of $300. That won't come close to covering his bail. Or even a decent set of bombmaking supplies.
Hey, just because you're named "Mr. Arch Criminal" doesn't mean you need to be some big arch criminal, man. I've read your poetry—it's good.
[A fantastic tabloid story. Pic via]
Where in the world is Dennis Rodman? Dennis Rodman is, at this moment, in Vatican City, where he is apparently campaigning for Ghanaian cardinal Peter Turkson and seeking to arrange a meeting with whomever is elected. On the one hand we don't want to encourage this; on the other, well, anything to keep Rodman out of North Korea.
Two friends who first met at a party four years ago received the shock of a lifetime after a random Facebook status update posted by one of them led to the realization that they're closely related.
29-year-old Abbey Donohoe of Iowa was given up for adoption at birth, but unlike many others like her, she never bothered to search for her birth family because she "was loved so much" by her adoptive family.
But Donohoe found her birth family just the same after Paula O'Brien, her friend of four years, posted a short status update on Facebook last week with a link to an article about a Davenport woman who had given her child up for adoption.
"On Sept. 19, 1982, my very first niece was born and given up for adoption," O'Brien wrote. "I know it wasn't an easy decision for my brother to make, but it was the right one for that baby girl."
She went on to encourage her friends to read the enclosed article and "be thankful for the selfless sacrifice of adoption."
Donohoe didn't read the article as O'Brien suggested — she was too busy focusing on the birth date O'Brien used in her caption.
"You sure it wasn't 1983? Because that's my birthday & I was adopted ... crazy!" Donohoe wrote in response.
O'Brien went back to check and, sure enough, she had gotten the year wrong. After some additional back and forth, the two women were able to definitively confirm that they were in fact aunt and niece.
"When I was a little girl, one of my older brothers and his girlfriend gave a baby up for adoption," O'Brien told Davenport's KWQC. "It really had an impact on me and for years, I had hoped to find her."
Despite not knowing where Donohoe was or how to find her, O'Brien's family held out for the possibility that they would be reunited, and made sure to celebrate Donohoe's birthday every year.
"My family had prayed for this for years," O'Brien said. "For 29 years we dreamed of this day and it's here."
[screengrab via KWQC]
A year-and-a-half ago, Carlsberg struck marketing gold with a viral ad that saw random moviegoers being thrust into a theater filled with ornery-looking bikers.
Those who toughed it out were rewarded with some free beer and gang membership for life. Or maybe it was just the beer.
Anyway, flash forward to present day, and the Danish brewing company is once again putting strangers to the test for lulz, except this time, the marketing arena is saturated with similar "prank ads," each attempting to be more shocking than the last.
To match or beat their pretenders, Carlsberg decided to set up a full-blown nightmare scenario, and see if people were willing to unwittingly play along for the sake of their friends.
Picture this: It's 3 o'clock in the morning and your best bud calls you up to tell you he's been playing poker with some bad dudes in the wrong side of town, and his luck has just run out.
Would you help out?
Once again the perennial questions must be asked: How far are marketing agencies willing to take this trend? Will we only find out the answer once one of these "pranks" goes too far?
And, of course, the most intriguing question of all: How would this have played out in the States?
[H/T: Mashable]
Four people are dead and two more injured following a shooting spree across two towns in New York state, and police are still searching for the suspect. A fire and possible explosion at a Mohawk, N.Y. apartment building is said to be connected to the spree.
According to the Utica Observer-Dispatch, two people were shot dead earlier this morning at a car wash in Herkimer, N.Y., and four more—two of whom died—at a barber shop in Mowhawk, a town across the Mohawk river. At the same time, a fire broke out at an apartment building in Mohawk near the barbershop; according to WKTV, witnesses say there was an "explosion." Police were at the apartment building and were seen removing firearms from it, but it's not confirmed to belong to the shooting suspect.
The suspect, who is said to have used "a long gun," is reportedly still at large. Police are looking for "a 50- to 60-year-old slender white male, about 5-foot-11, with white hair and a white beard, last seen wearing a flannel shirt." All Herkhimer County schools are on lockdown.
Update: Police have identified the suspect as 64-year-old Kurt Myers, a Mohawk resident whom they say they are "familiar" with. He is said to be "armed and extremely dangerous." The AP is reporting that gunshots were heard in Herkimer sometime around 1:45.
"Dark news cometh in an unholy land." A Bible verse that prophesied our modern Gomorrah called America? Actually it's just a phrase I made up. Now let us segue into the news that religion in America is at an all time low.
The United States of America, under god—a free land formed by men who embraced Christian values, like slavery—was founded, as I just mentioned, but will now reiterate, as a Christian land. Our founding fathers made very clear their feelings on what should be done with heathens, by reaching out a hand to the savage Red Indian. And in that hand was a gun, which slew him. Perhaps if Jesus had seen fit to bless the native savages with belief in Him, we all could have been saved a lot of genocidal effort.
The situation is not so ideal today. Like values, and the quality of music, and the modesty of women, religion is on the decline in This Great Nation. A new survey out of UC Berkeley finds that "Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s." (Theoretically it could have been lower at some point before the 1930s, but hating god has only been "cool" since the invention of the demon "jazz," so it's doubtful.) A full 1/5 of Americans now report no religious affiliation at all—not even with easy, entry-level cults like Mormonism, or Islam. Who is most to blame, my lord?
Liberals are far more likely to claim "no religion" (40 percent) than conservatives (9 percent)...
More than one-third of 18-to-24-year-olds claimed "no religion" compared to just 7 percent of those 75 and older.
Young liberals. How sadly typical. YE SHALL BE LEFT BEHIND.
[Berkeley via Counterparties. Pic via]
Gavin Robert Stevens is a 4-year-old boy who suffers from Leber's Congenital Amaurosis (LCA) — a rare hereditary retina disease that has left him completely blind.
Recently, after months of training with his parents on using his white cane independently, Gavin was finally ready to try navigating down a curb on his own.
"I wanted to help him too," says his mother, Jennifer, "but he just wanted to do it by himself. He's a stubborn one."
Gavin's tenacity in the face of adversity has inspired many to join "Gavin's Groupies" in an effort to help raise awareness of his condition, and hopefully, one day, find a cure.
You can learn more about Gavin and LCA by visiting the Gavin R. Stevens Foundation homepage.
[H/T: HyperVocal]
The annual Evolo skyscraper award celebrates novel, bizarre, and whimsical designs for vertiginous buildings. In its aim to award innovative use of materials, building organization, aesthetics, and technology, Evolo often opts for the most beautifully outlandish structures you ever did see—obvious with the three winning proposals and the 24 honorable mentions.
The selection committee has a history of selecting projects that err on the fantastical sci-fi side, like last year's twisted spiderweb of building that was supposed to harness the power of lightning. Click ahead for highlights from this year's crop of winners with affectionate nicknames and brief explanations.
The Frozen Do-Gooder: Evolo's first place went to Derek Pirozzi for his "Polar Umbrella" design. Pirozzi aims to help to rebuild the damaged arctic layers with this floating structure. The Umbrella would house NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) labs, renewable power stations, dorm-like housing units, and habitats for the lovely local wildlife. Not to be exceeded on the ecological front, the Polar Umbrella "also regenerates the ice caps using harvest chambers that freeze the ocean water."
The Transparent Brain: These floating jellyfish gliding over high-rises are intended to "restore pH balance" to cities. But who is to stop their tentacle arms from abducting random apartment residents?
The Buoyant Balloon: Evolo's third place award goes to Ting Xu and Yiming Chen from China for "Light Park," which provides greenery and recreation space above cities with no room for that sort of leisure and tomfoolery. But how does it float? Why a magical "large, mushroom cap-like helium-filled balloon at its top, and solar-powered propellers directly below." The birds already seem confused in the mock-up.
The One Most Likely To Make People Think They're Having a Bad Trip: This design, called "Skinscape" plays with the notion of contained structures by connecting a few freestanding buildings through angled sky-bridges that make each building appear to melt into its neighbor.
The Jenga Board: French designers Darius Maïkoff and Elodie Godo from France, won second place for their "Phobia Skyscraper." The stacked boxes aim to revitalize an abandoned industrial area of Paris, maybe by concerning the whole neighborhood about the well-being of residents at the tippy-top.
The Crater Scraper: This affectionate nickname is actually the moniker given to the proposed structure by the designers. The designers imagine a semi-doomed future in which an asteroid hits the earth. But how to recover, architecturally speaking? The Crater Scraper would follow the form of a potential crater strike, lining the walls of the former disaster site with residences and filling the center with glowing light.
The One That Might Up and Walk Away: This sinewy skeleton of a building looks like it has legs. It could just jaunt away.
[Evolo, image via Evolo]
Alas, it seems that Miley Cyrus' wedding/Super Sweet 16 three-part organza extravaganza blowout bash will not happen after all; Page Six reports that she and Australian actor Liam Hemsworth have separated.
Cyrus, 20, and Hemsworth, 23, met on the set of their 2010 film The Last Song, in which they played kids in love. The couple announced their engagement last June.
Three months later, Cyrus told E! news that she "already [felt] married," which at the time seemed romantic or maybe just an indication that they were doin' it. In retrospect, perhaps that was her way of saying she was bored and starting to resent him with a quiet, seething hatred.
In any case, she seemed in no hurry to plan her wedding, beyond deciding that there would be three of them. Three weddings at some point in time in a place TBD with different things and stuff at each one. Would two be enough? No, better make it three.
Now, it seems, 0% of those weddings will occur.
Multiple sources confirmed to Page Six that Hemsworth and Cyrus have, if not broken-up for good, at least separated. That's fine. That's why you have a long engagement. To make certain you're certain and also to give yourself enough time to plan your three weddings.
Hemsworth has been home in Australia since March 1st. Cyrus was recently photographed in Los Angeles not wearing her engagement ring.
Last week, Cyrus tweeted that she hadn't called off her wedding and that she was taking "a break from social media." (The break lasted 91 minutes.)
The impetus for the split, according to Page Six? Miley just bein' Miley. (A source said she "likes to party really hard," which "became a problem" for Hemsworth. He would have been a real wet blanket at the weddings anyway.)
[Page Six // Image via Getty]
Why were Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb wearing full-body dog suits on television this morning? Why were they begging for Facebook "likes"? Why are morning shows still on the air? I don't know. But I do know we are asking all the wrong questions. The real question is: what does "liking" Kathie Lee and Hoda on Facebook say about you, Internet?
Police arrested a young mother from Centralia, Washington, last week after footage surfaced on YouTube showing her allowing her 22-month-old son to inhale marijuana smoke from a bong.
24-year-old Rachelle Braaten was charged with delivery of a controlled substance to a minor as well as manufacture of marijuana after officers found as many as 40 marijuana plants inside her home. Several weapons were also found.
Asked about the incident, Braaten confessed to letting the boy smoke pot during a recent gathering of friends. "I guess it was a joke and stupid mistake that wasn't really funny," she told detectives.
Braaten went on to say that she felt "horrible" about what she did, because the child is two, and "he shouldn't have that in his body."
The unnamed toddler was placed in the care of child protective services along with Braaten's other child, a 5-year-old.
Braaten's fiance and the boy's father, Tyler Lee, was later arrested as well on charges of marijuana distribution and unlawful possession of a firearm.
Lee, who claims he was not present during the bong-smoking incident, was released after a brief stay in jail, but Braaten remains behind bars in lieu of $5,000 bail.
[H/T: The Daily Dot]
