President Obama will announce Monday a ban on the federal transfer of some military-style weapons to local police departments and impose stricter regulations on others.

The Obama Administration’s move to ban local police departments from using federal funds to purchase military-style weaponry, the New York Times reports, will come in tandem with a report completed by a policing task force assembled late last year following the civil unrest and “militarized” police response in Ferguson, Mo.

Obama, NBC News reports, will speak from Camden, NJ, Monday and detail a host of weaponry that will be prohibited from being purchased with federal funds or provided by the federal government:

In previewing the president’s trip, the White House said that effective immediately, the federal government will no longer fund or provide armored vehicles that run on a tracked system instead of wheels, weaponized aircraft or vehicles, firearms or ammunition of .50-caliber or higher, grenade launchers, bayonets or camouflage uniforms. The federal government also is exploring ways to recall prohibited equipment already distributed.

Additionally, some equipment and weapons, “including wheeled armored vehicles like Humvees, manned aircraft, drones, specialized firearms, explosives, battering rams and riot batons, helmets, and shields” will be “under tighter control.”

Local police forces have been steadily upping their inventories of assault weapons after 9/11 through grants and transfers from federal agencies, namely through the 1033 Program. From the Washington Post:

One of the ways police departments have armed themselves in recent years is through the Defense Department’s excess property program, known as the 1033 Program. That program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in equipment since its inception in 1997. In 2013 alone it gave nearly half a billion dollars worth of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, according to the program’s Web site.

According to the 116-page report by the policing task force to be released Monday, the weapons banned posed “the substantial risk of misusing or overusing these items, which are seen as militaristic in nature, could significantly undermine community trust and may encourage tactics and behaviors that are inconsistent with the premise of civilian law enforcement.”

About $75 million, the Post reports, has also been earmarked for use across the next three years to buy 50,000 body cameras for police officers.

Image via AP. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

TMZ reports that Robin Thicke’s dog—named Bincy; bought for his 20-year-old girlfriend—has gone to the hospital twice now for accidentally ingesting weed. On her private Twitter account, girlfriend April Love Geary reportedly blamed the incidents on Thicke: “Some falls on the ground or she sits by him smoking and just inhales it hahaha.”

Hahaha.

Per TMZ, “April says a day after they took the pooch home it somehow got into their stash and got sick. Bincy went to the vet, but apparently she still had a taste for the green stuff. Three days after returning home, Bincy was back at the animal doc, for the same problem. This time April insisted it was more of a contact high...”

Bincy’s O.K. now—relatively speaking, of course. It is crazy to think that Robin Thicke is also the father of an actual child.

Photo via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

The big controversy in the political pseudo-journalist world this week: the stunning revelations that ABC news anchor George Stephanopoulos made undisclosed contributions to the Clinton Foundation. Allow us to point out that George Stephanopoulos never should have been a news anchor YOU IDIOTS!!!!

Is this the most scoff-worthy “media ethics” scandal of our time? Gentle reader, I propose to you that the answer is: yes, this is the most scoff-worthy “media ethics” scandal of our time. Consider, if you will, the cognitive dissonance displayed in the actions of ABC News, purportedly a serious mainstream news organization that takes journalistic impartiality very, very seriously:

1. ABC News is shocked and upset to learn that a news anchor made undisclosed donations to a nonprofit foundation led by the Clinton family.

2. Starting in 2002, ABC News hired and then promoted up its political journalism ranks George Stephanopolous, a man who worked as communications director for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and as an advisor to the Clinton White House.

Now, the fact that Stephanopoulos made recent undisclosed donations to the Clinton Foundation has allegedly created a “crisis” at ABC News. George Stephanopoulos has—due to these donations—allegedly “forfeited all trust as a newsman.”

Really? Did George Stephanopoulos, a professional political operative, ever possess trust as a newsman? No. George Stephanopoulos is a career political operative who was hired as a “newsman” due to his boyish photogenic face and pillowy hair. ABC News imagines that the fact that its news anchor was the communications director for a president has no impact on his imaginary journalistic credibility, but these undisclosed donations do. Wrong. The scandal is not that George Stephanopoulos made undisclosed donations to the Clinton Foundation. The scandal is that George Stephanopoulos was ever hired as a “journalist” in the first place.

THERE ARE MANY QUALIFIED JOURNALISTS AVAILABLE FOR HIRE WHO DID NOT WORK FOR THE PEOPLE THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO IMPARTIALLY COVER.

ABC News boldly perpetrated the very definition of “conflict of interest,” and now is shocked, shocked to learn that it may lack some credibility.

Stop hiring political operatives as “journalists.” What a fucking joke.

[Photo: AP. Yes, this post would have been more timely last week, but you can’t have everything.]

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Chicken: We love it! Chicken production in the U.S. has doubled over the past 25 years, to 160 million chickens every week. That makes it sound like it’s a great time to be a chicken grower, but John Oliver explained Sunday night that it is most assuredly not.

The industry is dominated by four huge poultry companies—Tyson, Pilgrim’s, Sanderson Farms, and Perdue—who control the lives of chicken farmers living at or below the poverty line.

Ninety-seven percent of chicken is produced on contract farms, where farmers pay for the land and equipment, while companies just provide the chickens ... and a lot of rules about how they have to be raised (i.e. without fresh air or sunlight.)

Although the growers technically own their facilities and equipment, the companies force them to pay for upgrades that sometimes cost more than their original buildings, and they typically have to take out loans for all that stuff. If the farmers say no? Well, no more chickens.

But it’s actually more subtle and ruthless than that: Growers all compete in a tournament with other farms in their area, and companies punish the losers with heavy financial penalties. They can also retaliate against complainers or weaker performers by providing them with lower-quality chicks, guaranteeing that they lose future tournaments (and risk losing their farms altogether).

The Obama administration offered reforms that farmers desperately needed, but congress has neutered them every year thanks to Rep. Steve Womack, who “coincidentally” represents the Third District of Arkansas, home to ... wait for it ... Tyson Foods.

It’s a fucked up situation, but Oliver hopes to prevent it this year with a campaign to call Appropriations Committee members (here’s the list) and have them kill Womack’s anti-chicken-reform rider. Hey, it worked for Net Neutrality. Why not chicken?

[h/t Last Week Tonight]

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South Carolina Senator and sentient mint julep Lindsey Graham is busy running around hinting coyly at a “big announcement” he has coming up on June 1. But he managed to find some time to let a group of Iowa republicans know that, should any of them even think about joining ISIS, Lindsey Graham will find them, and he will kill them.

In the Senator’s own words:

If I’m President of the United States and you’re thinking about joining Al Qaeda or ISIL—anybody thinking about that?—I’m not going to call a judge, I’m going to call a drone, and we will kill you. *laughs*

The hawkish message was likely an attempt to distance himself from his war-weary competitor, Rand Paul, who, as NPR points out, has been telling voters, “I want to catch terrorists, but I also want to protect the constitution.”

Graham also took this as a chance to weigh in on the Iraq war of his own accord. Because while his future fellow running mates have all been tripping over themselves to place blame on the intelligence community, Graham has other ideas.

When it comes to blaming people about Iraq, the person I blame is Barack Obama, not George W. Bush.

Sure, why not.

Anyway, here’s Lindsey Graham talking about cookies.

[h/t Talking Points Memo]

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via AP.

She’s missing out.

[h/t New York Post; Photo via Getty]

Hamdi Ulukaya, the recently demoted CEO of garbage yogurt company Chobani, is now focusing his efforts on “developing new products like Flips, a yogurt with toppings on the side.” The only way that could be a more blatant ripoff of Fage would be if Chobani also tasted good.

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

In person, he was pretty much what I imagined — he talked almost 90 minutes non-stop and I took notes and drank tea. He explained why Iraq didn’t withdraw from Kuwait under international pressure before the 1991 war but yet how it was also okay that Iraq was defeated by the whole of the world’s army — a matter of physics, he said.

(Bill Arkin will be discussing conspiracies and the Iraq War after a screening of “Three Kings” at Nitehawk Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Tuesday night at 7:30 PM with veteran British foreign correspondent and author Peter Pringle. Tickets are still available here.)

And yet one thing I didn’t imagine as I mused about my black backpack sitting at my feet the whole time was that I wasn’t searched and I didn’t have to wash my hands with disinfectant soap. I could have had a gun or a bomb or even a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I didn’t know exactly where I was, having been taken at three in the morning in the back of a Mercedes limo with black out curtains to a building on the other side of the Tigris river, to that place south of the bend of the river where no normal Iraqi ever wanted to go, or be forced to go, a decade before it was known as the green zone.

The Iraqis were convinced I was a secret emissary from the new Clinton administration, there to normalize relations, rumors of which were in the air in February 1993. Was I?

I was one the first experts to visit Iraq after the 1991 Desert Storm, “military adviser” to something called the Harvard Study Team, a group of doctors and lawyers who visited post-war Iraq to assess civilian damage from the bombing campaign. I came with a list of targets that had been bombed and a sheaf of military maps and many of the do-gooders were pretty much convinced that I was CIA.

After 20 years of being a Washington arms control and nuclear expert, and as an ex-Army intelligence analyst from Cold War Berlin, the abrupt shift after the fall of the wall — and then Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait — forced everyone to become an instant expert in something else. So while I was learning the difference between a CBU and a GBU and figuring out how to tell if something was hit by a missile or a bomb, and whether the bomb was guided or unguided, I also had a shitload of fun, those months I spent in Iraq. We picked dates right from the palms, we visited here and there, I went bowling in the basement of the Rasheed Hotel.

And I started my collection of Saddam memorabilia and stolen artifacts. I prowled the back alleys of Baghdad’s bazaar to buy black market Saddam watches, which the doctors and lawyers tsked tsked until they sheepishly asked for their own. I bribed my way into Baghdad’s main bunker (that hadn’t been bombed). I blew up an unexploded American cluster bomb in the desert near Amarah, ending up in Saddam General Hospital, the “man who hurled the stone” at a bomb.

And my crowning achievement: I stole a sensitive part of a Tomahawk cruise missile from the Museum of the Aggression and brought it back to America, showing it off at a talk I gave at the Naval War College. When the two NCIS agents later visited my office to retrieve it — it belongs to the United States, they said — I told them to get stuffed. They thought I must have been CIA. And so in that conspiracies are made.

You can hear more of this story and more about Iraq after the war as part of our Conspiracy Film series tomorrow night at Nitehawk Cinema. Details and tickets available here.

Photo: AP

A Texas mom says she stopped by her son’s elementary school Wednesday after he got in trouble for a cafeteria food fight, and was shocked to discover the 9-year-old had been locked in a tiny, frigid “focus room”—basically solitary confinement for kids.

The boy, Alex, told his mom that the staff at Carl Schurz Elementary in New Braunfels made him sit in a small circle in the center of the room and told him that if he kept still for 90 minutes, he’d be allowed back in the classroom. But Alex said he couldn’t do it because the room was too cold. He ended up in a corner with his arms tucked inside his shirt, while an administrator allegedly sat on an exercise ball, taunting him with her warm jacket.

On a blog Alex’s parents set up to document the incident, they’ve posted what Alex told them about the “focus room,” along with the photos his mom was able to take before a vice principal allegedly made her leave.

Parents - What is that room Alex?

Alex - It’s called the “focus room”. And it’s where bad children go and serve their in-school suspension (ISS).

Parents – How many times have you been in that room?

Alex – Almost every day, once for two straight days.

Parents – is it always cold?

Alex – Yes! I asked if I could get my jacket and was told no, the teach put her own jacket on and said “It’s sure nice to be warm”.

Parents – Are they mean to you in that room?

Alex – Yes, sometimes they shout at me and say rude things.

Parents – What rude things do they say?

Alex – I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about it.

Parents – What if you get hungry or need to go to the bathroom?

Alex – You’re not allowed! You don’t get your regular snack either!

Parents – Are you allowed to get any exercise?

Alex – No, I’m stuck there all day and if I don’t do what they tell me they make me stay there longer, I have to go back tomorrow since I couldn’t sit in the circle because I was too cold…

The school sent a letter to parents after the incident, according to local ABC affiliate KSAT, but it doesn’t do much to address what allegedly happened to Alex, or why:

Due to privacy laws, we are not able to provide any more detail about the student or the situation. You may hear the term ‘focus room’ or ‘safe room.’ These are two different environments. A ‘focus room’ is a classroom environment that allows for behavior intervention such as social skills lessons and counseling. A ‘safe room’ is used in times when a child is a danger to himself/herself or others.

If what Alex says is true, then “social skills” means sitting in a circle, and “counseling” means being taunted by an adult.

The Texas Education Agency is now investigating the school’s focus room, KSAT reports, because its rules forbid isolating a student in a room with less than 50 square feet of space.

This isn’t the first elementary school in Texas to be investigated for subjecting students to solitary confinement. Less than a month ago, Dallas’s NBC 5 aired an exposé on the Plano Independent School District’s 15 “calm rooms” that are too small to meet state regulations.

Among the incidents they found on security video: an 8-year-old boy with autism screaming to be let out of a 36-square-foot padded room, and a teacher knocking him down and physically blocking the door.

The Plano district has 100 calm rooms in total, and told NBC 5 it’s not standard practice to use them as jail cells, hold the door closed, or lock students inside.

[Photos: Helping Alex]

On Friday, a beautiful Boston couple celebrated the end of the work week by stopping for a apparent blow job in the middle of the Boston subway.

A concerned straphanger snapped a photo of the alleged sex act at the State Street station last Friday at about 7:30 pm and sent it to the MBTA with a nice note attached. From Metro Boston:

“Dear MBTA, I understand you are having financial problems and it is difficult to maintain a broken system, however my tax dollars should be going to pay your police force because I shouldn’t have to stand next to a man receiving oral sex,” wrote the irate passenger.

Transit Police Lt. Richard Sullivan told Metro that officials won’t “tolerate” mid-station acts of fellatio.

“In my 20 years on the job I’ve very rarely encountered something as brazen as this,” he said. “In my opinion they could care less who happened by. More importantly, what if a young child came by?”

Just one more reason to keep young children out of Boston.

If the couple is identified, they face a charge of open and gross lewdness, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in jail and would require both offenders to register as sex offenders.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé inherently can’t do anything normally, even when they try. Case in point, is the new video for Minaj’s single “Feelin’ Myself,” which looks like some sort of Coachella home video but is actually browbeating promotion for Jay Z’s music streaming service Tidal.

Here the two are at Coachella in front of a sign that apparently exists.

Coachella, the place where celebrities go to feel as normal as possible—just one of thousands of flowers in the meadow, intermingling with the rest of humanity under faded skies for a brief moment.

They found a place to stay, perhaps on Airbnb. It looks very nice. Like almost every house you might rent for a weekend, this one has a bounce house in the backyard.

Later, they went swimming in the pool. I wonder what the squirting of this gun represents.

Nicki made something to eat. As you can see their fridge is stocked with drinks such as only bottles of champagne.

Still hungry, they ate hamburgers.

Nicki threw a french fry into Beyoncé’s mouth from an inch away, and Beyoncé reacted to this extremely mundane feat with an everyday lack of emotion.

You can watch the video here until you can’t.

“If I had a rocket launcher some sonofabitch would die,” said Bruce Cockburn once in a song that could be, but isn’t, about these not-kidding-around dudes, who allegedly amassed a disturbingly large arsenal of weapons and drugs in a quest to blow up a Florida police station.

Authorities say Christopher Conger, 32, and Jeremy Robertson, 29, were both arrested last week after an apparently bogus tip about a rocket launcher led cops to their still-extremely-illegal storage shed. Via the Orlando Sentinel:

“There is some sophistication to this outfit,” sheriff’s Maj. Terry Bovaird said. “This isn’t like somebody found a joint somewhere and a guy had a small, little weapon. This is something that is significant.”

Among the items seized were 22 guns, including at least one rifle with a scope, several containers of black powder sheriff’s officials said could be used to make explosive devices, two bulletproof vests along with powdered and crack cocaine, prescription pills and more than a pound of marijuana. Also discovered during Friday’s raid were devices resembling detonators that are under evaluation by agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to sheriff’s Lt. Brian Dotten.

Thankfully—or perhaps worringly—cops found no evidence of the aforementioned rocket launcher in the shed. (It appears no one informed the Daily News).

Both men are facing felony charges.

Image via Marion County by way of the NYDN. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

At least 170 suspects representing five different gangs have been arrested for engaging in organized crime in the wake of Sunday’s deadly shootout between rival bikers and police in Waco, Texas, The L.A. Times reports.

“We still have 100 people waiting to be booked,” a McLennan County jail employee told the paper. “It’s going to be very slow going.”

Authorities say it’s currently unclear how many of the nine bikers killed in the gun battle were shot by police, who returned fire after brawling gang members began shooting at them. From The New York Times:

The police had anticipated trouble and were out in force before the confrontation. “There were multiple people on the scene firing weapons at each other,” [police spokesperson Patrick] Swanton said. “They then turned on our officers. Our officers returned gunfire, wounding and possibly killing several.”

Law enforcement officials said the gun battle was primarily between the Bandidos and Cossacks, though members of the Scimitars, who are affiliated with the Cossacks, and two other groups were also involved. It remained unclear what had caused the first fight in the restaurant that led to a larger fight in the parking lot.

On Monday, the Texas Joint Crime Information Center issued a memo to law enforcement warning that gang members of both biker clubs “reportedly have been instructed to arm themselves with weapons and travel to north Texas.”

“We have been getting reports throughout the day that bikers from out of state are headed this way,” a police spokesperson told reporters yesterday. “We would encourage them not to, because we have plenty of space in our county jail to put them there.”

[Image via CNN]

An old man will live to limp another day after toppling off Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon while trying to take a picture last week.

The 71-year-old was apparently trying to capture the natural beauty of a nearby sign when “he stumbled backwards over a stone barrier and into the canyon.” Via the Washington Post:

“According to staff on scene, the man was extremely lucky. The crevice and the angle of his body during the fall helped the man stop at the top of a 200 foot drop,” the park service statement reads. “A fall just inches to the left may have resulted in a fatality as the canyon wall is mostly steep loose rock.”

Another tourist saw the man fall and called 911. Two park rangers threw the man a rope that they then tied to a sign and tree at the top of the canyon.

He maybe suffered a hip injury, which all things considered is pretty freaking great!!!

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

The masked vigilante known as “The Batman” went to prom on Sunday, dressing up as cartoon superhero Jaden Smith for the occasion.

The Bat was last seen at the wedding of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in May 2014, where he posed with fellow comic book characters Joe Francis and Kourtney Kardashian.

[Image via Instagram]

The FBI says there’s no evidence anyone shot at the Amtrak train that derailed last week, pointing out that it’s still unclear if the train’s fractured windshield even contributed to the crash.

The FBI found no evidence of damage to #Amtrak 188 windshield that could have been caused by a firearm.

May 18, 2015

On Friday the agency announced it would begin investigating the possibility that a projectile hit the windshield of the train shortly before the crash, citing a grapefruit-sized fracture that “did not even penetrate the entire windshield.”

“You know when a pebble hits a windshield and it goes through a layer and the window fractures and it kind of looks like a spider web? That’s sort of what it looks like,” an anonymous “law enforcement official” tells the New York Times. “It’s a small hole, but the glass around it is broken.”

According to the Times, investigators say the hole could also have been made during the derailment, but the NTSB is still investigating and “has not ruled out the possibility that another object may have struck the windshield.”

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Investigators believe the D.C. family found dead in their burning home last week may have known their killers, who were able to bypass a complex security system that witnesses say was always on.

Savopoulos, his wife, Amy, their son, Phillip, and their housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa, were all found dead Thursday when firefighters responded to a fire at their $4.5 million northwest D.C. home.

The nature of the family’s security system, which was apparently always on and chiming—even when everyone was home—has led cops to believe there was a relationship between the killers and the family. Investigators tell NBC Washington there was no sign of a forced entry and that they believe the killers “had easy access.”

Police also believe the family was held captive overnight, NBC Washington reports.

Investigators believe it’s likely that the killers gained access to the home Wednesday and kept the victims bound and threatened through Thursday afternoon, when Savvas Savopoulos gave them what they were looking for, sources said.

There’s already some public evidence to support that theory: Nelitza Gutierrez, a second housekeeper referred to as “Nelly,” says the family behaved oddly in the days before the murders.

For example, she claims she received a bizarre phone call from Savvas Wednesday night explaining that Figueora—who was spending the night—had been unable to charge her cell phone. He then allegedly requested Nelly “tell that to anyone who might be worried about [Figueora].”

Nelly also tells CNN she received a text from Amy just a few hours before the fire that read, “I am making sure you do not come today.”

Police say a high school student in Billings, Montana was accidentally shot and killed on Sunday by a friend who was startled awake by pebbles the victim had thrown at his bedroom window.

“It’s a tragedy,” Capt. John Bedford told the Billings Gazette. “We have to investigate at this point for what it is, but it’s a tragedy all around.”

According to Bedford, the victim was 15-year-old Mackeon Schulte, a sophomore at Billings Senior High School. From KHQ:

The statement says Schulte and another boy showed up at their friend’s house around 2:30 a.m. Sunday. They knocked on his window and threw pebbles to wake him.

Police say the unnamed boy was startled and did not recognize the faces outside. He fired a gun that was in his bedroom, striking the victim in the head.

KTVQ reports that the 17-year-old shooter was questioned by police but later released. Authorities say investigators are meeting with county prosecutors to decide whether to file charges.

[Image via KPAX]

In a new interview aired Monday, former tiny child and current attractive adult Elián González said he’d like to visit the United States, specifically for the purpose of giving you love.

“To the American people, first I say thank you for the love they give me,” the now 21-year-old González told ABC News. “I want the time to give my love to American people.”

González also mentioned several other (super boring) non-love-related things he’d like to do on his imagined trip to the horny country he briefly called home: go to a baseball game, visit museums in Washington, D.C. and “talk to Americans.”

Unfortunately for any U.S. nationals hoping to take their love-exchanging relationship with González to the next level, ABC reports that the newly hot adult is engaged.

Oh well. If you’re really desperate to satisfy your lusty year 2000 nostalgia, I hear Al Gore is seeing people.

[Images via ABC News]