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Nude Dude on Beach Uses Jail Time to Vibe Out and Do Some Chanting

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Nude Dude on Beach Uses Jail Time to Vibe Out and Do Some Chanting

I can’t find a picture of Paul Moran that I’m within my rights to post on this blog, so I’m going to tell you two things about him, and you’re going to imagine what he looks like. First, he was arrested recently for going fully nude at a place called “mushroom beach.” Second, when asked about it by a reporter, he answered, “I can’t let anyone kill my vibe.”

It’s not much, but it’s enough to conjure a reasonably vivid picture of our friend Paul. You’re thinking: White guy, long hair, tanktop, chest tattoo. You’re thinking: Prominent beaded necklace. You’re thinking: Like Brad Pitt in True Romance, if instead of screwing things up for Christian Slater, he was constantly talking about how Bonnaroo’s organizers have “lost sight of their roots.” You’re thinking: fedora with a unicorn horn(?) attached.

Look at you! Look at Paul! You’re good at this. Yes, your hero and your worst nightmare Paul Moran was cuffed for unleashing his devil stick and hacky sacks at a Kelowna, British Columbia, beach where it is evidently acceptable to go topless but not full naturale. According to Moran, a cop approached him and asked him to put some shorts on, and when he wrapped a scarf around his waist instead, that wasn’t enough. It was time to go downtown.

But it wasn’t really a big deal, he explained to the CBC:

“I’m a very light-hearted person so I enjoy every moment I can. I was doing some singing, some chanting. The jail cells are very acoustically sound.”

Police charged Moran with indecent exposure and obstructing a police officer.

However, the incident hasn’t deterred him whatsoever.

“I was at the beach today sunbathing in the nude. I can’t let anyone kill my vibe.”

Vibe on, Earth brother.


Photo of the extremely chill view at Mushroom Beach via Facebook. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.


Accused Child Molesters Heart Huckabee

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Accused Child Molesters Heart Huckabee

Duggars be damned: It turns out presidential Easter ham Mike Huckabee has another alleged child molester in his coterie. A prolific co-author of Huck’s and other Christian moralists’ books left his church and escaped prosecution when the statute of limitations ran out on his alleged sexual assaults of a young girl.

That’s the skinny on writer John Perry according to Buzzfeed News, which broke the story this morning:

Perry co-wrote Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America about Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign. He also did research and writing for Huckabee’s 2007 book Character Is the Issue, a memoir of his early time as governor. Perry also co-wrote So Help Me God, Moore’s autobiographical account of fighting to keep a monument to the Ten Commandments at Alabama’s Supreme Court.

That’s in addition to his work for leading conservative Bible-thumpers Richard Land, James T. Draper, Frank Page, and John T. MacArthur. Somewhere in there, Perry found time to alienate his wife by “admitted sexual abuse” of a girl repeatedly between the ages of 11 and 14—according to his ex-spouse and police, who concluded in 2012 that “the allegations of sexual battery were sustained” but too old to prosecute.

The victim, who first disclosed the abuse “to non-law enforcement” when she was 18, asked her confessors not to inform police, and they didn’t.

According to Buzzfeed, those non-law enforcement confessors included members of Perry’s church. Another member of that religious flock, Austin Davis, now alleges in a lawsuit that the church tried to keep Perry’s “numerous” instances of minor sex abuse hush-hush:

In Davis’s court case, he presents what he alleges are minutes from Covenant Presbyterian Church meetings that show Perry resigning from the church’s diaconate in 2008, and minutes from 2010 showing Perry was excommunicated from the church because he “has confessed to committing heinous and repetitive sin […] and has not shown evidence of repentance.” The minutes appear to have been introduced as evidence in one of Davis’ lawsuits against the church. The church does not appear to have objected to the introduction of the minutes or contested their authenticity.

Huckabee—an evangelical who has made conservative theocratic values a centerpiece of his presidential campaigns and broadcasting career—has doubled down recently in his embrace of reality TV star, family-values activist, and confirmed child-molester Josh Duggar, even sharing a damage control specialist with Duggar and his family.

Huckabee did not respond to Buzzfeed’s requests for a comment, but he did recently make time to ridicule trans people, saying in a speech that he wished he’d said he was transgender as a boy so he could take showers with girls.

[Photo credit: AP Images]


Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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Yes, Jurassic Park's Bad Dinosaur Science Still Matters

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Yes, Jurassic Park's Bad Dinosaur Science Still Matters

I was ten when Jurassic Park roared across the screen in the summer of 1993. I couldn’t wait for it. Both National Geographic and TIME ran dinosaur cover-stories leading up to the release, celebrating the new image of “hot-blooded” saurians set to make box-office records. In the week leading up to the movie, I finally read Michael Crichton’s original novel, the first “grown-up book” I was allowed to get my claws on. I devoured the book in less than a day, walking slow circles around the garage with the sci-fi tale when my parents admonished me to stop imagining prehistoric monsters in my room and get some sun.

The film itself was grander than anything I could have hoped for. Steven Spielberg, Stan Winston, and the rest of the creative team succeeded where John Hammond failed—they recreated amazing dinosaurs that left patrons unscathed. I had never seen dinosaurs like that before. The dinosaurs I first met were clearly men in suits, stop-motion models, alligators with fins glued on, and other impostors. I knew that Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs were technically effects, too, but they had a ferocious vitality never before realized. They were the closest I’d ever come to seeing Mesozoic life revived. In fact, the creators of Jurassic Park may have made their dinosaurs a little too realistic, a little too powerful.

More than twenty years later, on the eve of Jurassic World’s release, 90s-style dinosaurs are still running amok in the public imagination, totally overwhelming our ever-refined image of what dinosaurs were truly like. Fluffy, bird-like dinosaurs that would have enthralled Alan Grant are being pinned down by the hyperextendable killing claws of scaly nostalgia.

There have always been inaccuracies in Jurassic Park. Dilophosaurus didn’t have a neck ruffle and was not venomous. Velociraptor was only about the size of a turkey. Grant’s pet hypothesis on Tyrannosaurus-vision being “based on movement” was total bullshit. Of course, the common refrain to these points is “It’s just a movie.” A movie, yes—but not just a movie.

Ask someone to do an impression of a Velociraptor, and they’ll imitate the Jurassic Park version, right down to the “bunny hands.” (In fact, the raptor wrist required their palms to face each other—they were clappers, not slappers.) Go to an exhibition of dopey animatronic dinosaurs and you’re likely to find a Dilophosaurus that spits jets of water. Or bring up how to evade a Tyrannosaurus during dinnertime conversation and you’re likely to hear “Well, don’t move.” These are carryovers, all, from a film released when an interactive CD-ROM was still so impressive it merited a shout-out.

And now we have the engineered monsters of Jurassic World, which are the spitting image of their 1993 counterparts. More than a few paleontologists are bothered by this. Part of what made the original Jurassic Park so wonderful was that, despite some inaccuracies, the blockbuster instantly popularized the image of fast and smart dinosaurs that paleontologists had been piecing together. There was no going back to the stupid, tail-dragging, swamp-bound reptiles of the past. For Jurassic World to ignore everything paleontologists have done in the past twenty years in favor of visual continuity felt like a hell of a snub.

We could argue canon here. Thinking that they’re the first to point this out, both online and at some of my public talks, I’ve had diehard fans of the film tell me “The park’s dinosaurs were made with frog DNA, so that explains the inaccuracies.” I know. Mr. DNA told us all about it. And in Jurassic World, the returning Dr. Wu—played by B.D. Wong—explains that the park’s animals could have been true-to-form dinosaurs, but the executives in charge wanted “bigger, louder, more teeth.” Jurassic World’s attractions really aren’t revived prehistoric species. The dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles were made to be monsters.

But this doesn’t change the fact that Jurassic World will leave a deep impression on the public’s image of what dinosaurs “were really like.” The animals in the film don’t have new names to underscore their hybrid status; they’re still called Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Velociraptor. They still have a connection to real animals whose bones have been carefully pieced together from the wreckage of lost worlds. This is why some paleontologists I know—particularly those who teach—are dreading the questions they’re going to get about dinosaur behavior after the release of the new film. It’s also why I agreed to be the “resident paleontologist” for the Jurassic World website when Universal came calling early this year.

When Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow announced that there would be “no feathers” in the new film, I was one of his critics. From a scientific standpoint, it made as much sense as filming Pleistocene Park, but announcing that the mammoths and sabercats would be totally waxed. I was really hoping that Jurassic World would bring us the first real image of up-to-date, gloriously feathery dinosaurs, perhaps with a geneticist explaining how drawing from the DNA of birds resulted in more accurate versions of their prehistoric relatives. And, honestly, I would still love to see that. But despite my difference of opinion, I took the job because Jurassic World offered a rare platform to sneak in some science amongst the fiction. Even if the doomed park’s animals are dinosaurs in name only, they still offer a starting point to talk about what we’re learning about the real animals.

Despite their various inaccuracies, the uncontainable “dinosaurs” of Jurassic Park provide a starting point for conversation that can work to the benefit of paleontology. It gives paleontologists and science communicators a pop cultural landmark to start at and then wander into what we actually know—or don’t—about ancient DNA, dinosaur intelligence, prehistoric social behavior, and more.

Not to mention that the Jurassic Park films are just fun to watch. A week ago, after hours of rain doused our camp, I shacked up in the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry visitor center with the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh field crew I was volunteering with. There, in the shadow of a mounted Allosaurus skeleton, we pulled up a plastic buckets for seats, cracked a few beers, and fired up Jurassic Park on my laptop. There was no better way to spend the evening, and when I rolled out my sleeping bag under the Allosaurus that night, I tried to envision what all those bones would look like wrapped in flesh. But the Jurassic Park films have done more than that. They’ve recreated some of our favorite prehistoric celebrities through puppetry and pixels. Those dinosaurs will always be some distance from what paleontologists consider the most accurate mark, but, as creatures caught between science and fiction, they can do something few creatures can. By digging their teeth and talons into pop culture perception, Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs can help drag our imaginations further back into the Mesozoic.

Brian Switek is a science journalist who writes the Laelaps blog at National Geographic. He is the author of My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs and Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature.

The Best of the Tackiest: Talking Latin Freestyle With Morgan Geist

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The Best of the Tackiest: Talking Latin Freestyle With Morgan Geist

My friend, producer/DJ Morgan Geist, recently released a single under his Galleria moniker called “Calling Card”/”Mezzanine,” which is heavily influenced by Latin freestyle. Since there is nothing more that I like to do than get paid to talk about freestyle, I invited him to the Gawker office for a podcast about the mostly forgotten ‘80s/early-’90s sub-genre of dance music that helped define my youth while growing up in South Jersey.

We discussed our favorite songs by artists like Shannon, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Nocera, Stevie B, and Exposé, in addition to freestyle’s trademark tackiness, why the genre disappeared while house and techno thrived, and the hilariously flat singing that featured on many of the songs in the genre’s cannon.

Though freestyle has almost entirely faded from today’s pop, many of the genre’s acts continue to tour—last year, a Freestyle Extravaganza show sold out two nights at Radio City Music Hall. They’re doing it again this year. Pretty insane that such studio-based music lives on through live performance and that its audience remains loyal.

There are excerpts from over a dozen freestyle songs (and songs related to the genre) in the podcast above. For more context, including the full versions of most of the songs we discussed as well as a bunch of others that we didn’t talk about, I have assembled a Spotify playlist:

Republican Senator on Hot Mic: Lindsey Graham Is "a Bro With No Ho"

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Republican Senator on Hot Mic: Lindsey Graham Is "a Bro With No Ho"

Busting the spectre of communism is hard enough without your boys ragging you for still being single. But still, alleged presidential candidate and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) must endure moments like the one today when a colleague’s quip about Graham’s luck with the “hoes” got picked up on a nearby mic.

Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein caught normally staid Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) getting on the eligible bachelor’s case during a roll-call vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday morning. About 20 seconds in, you can hear Kirk challenging his bro’s game:

“I’ve been joking with Lindsey,” Kirk can be heard saying. “Did you see that? He’s going to have a rotating first lady. He’s a bro with no ho.”

Graham’s bachelorhood has been much-discussed since the launch of his presidential campaign. The senator is single with no children, which has raised questions about whether voters might find him unrelatable. Graham has laughed it off and even joked recently that he’ll have more than one first lady once he gets to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I feel real comfortable with who I am and the life I’ve lived,” Graham recently told The Huffington Post. “The last time I checked, I didn’t see a sign on the White House that said ‘single people need not apply.’”

Kirk was evidently so amused with the “ho” riff that he repeated it toward the end of the clip. Asked by HuffPo about the joke line, “Kirk’s office would only say that the senator was ‘joking around with his colleagues.’”

Graham, who apparently has not yet responded to Kirk’s remarks, has insisted for years that “I ain’t gay,” repeatedly offering to bomb foreign countries or murder Al Qaeda sympathizers to prove his straight white guy bona fides.

Update: A Chicago-based commenter points out that the Tribune managed to decipher the rest of Kirk’s otherwise unintelligible whisperings:

“He’s a bro with no ho,” Kirk said, apparently talking to a colleague. “That’s what we’d say on the South Side.

Recent Census reports indicate that the South Side area of Chicago is 97.4 percent black. The Trib reminds us:

Kirk has been criticized for remarks in the past, including his call in 2013 for the mass arrest of what he called the 18,000-strong Gangster Disciples.

He later said he still supported mass arrests of gang members but that he used the 18,000 figure to shock Illinoisans into seeing how extensive the state’s gang issue is.

In an interview this year with the Peoria Journal Star, Kirk said people drive faster through black neighborhoods.

[Photo credit: AP Images]


Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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The People Vs. Nan-Hui Jo: Domestic Violence Victim Becomes Criminal

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The People Vs. Nan-Hui Jo: Domestic Violence Victim Becomes Criminal

In the late afternoon on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, a petite Korean mother of one walked into the lobby of the Yolo County Jail wearing army fatigue pants, with tears streaming down her face. Convicted by a jury in February, she’d been locked up in the Northern California holding facility for a total of nine months. In the state’s eyes, 43-year-old Nan-Hui Jo was a child abductor; Jo herself maintains that, when she left the United States in 2009, she was fulfilling her visa obligations and fleeing a long history of domestic abuse.

Before her return to the United States in July 2014—upon which she was immediately arrested at the Honolulu airport—Jo had been living freely with her daughter in Korea. She’d ignored the long succession of emails sent to her by her ex-boyfriend Jesse Charlton, an Iraq war veteran whom she alleges was physically and emotionally abusive. Their relationship derailed permanently during an incident in which, according to both of their court testimony, Charlton choked Jo, lifted her up by the throat, and slammed her against the wall.

Charlton’s attorney says there was only one violence incident in the relationship, and that Jo’s actions denied him a chance to watch his daughter grow up. Jo, in contrast, said in court that she left in 2009 with one-year-old Hwi—who she called Vitz Da, which means “light of everything” in Korean—simply because she had to: Her legal status was linked to a marriage that she fled in 2007 after what she alleges was a pattern of physical and emotional abuse. Her relationship was over with Charlton, she said; she didn’t trust him around their daughter anyway, and she planned to allow the two to see each other when she felt it was safe.

As Hwi approached elementary school age, Jo started thinking about getting her an American education. In 2014, Jo applied for a tourist visa to visit schools in Hawaii; the application was approved. What she didn’t know—or by other accounts, refused to acknowledge—was that Charlton had for years been helping to build a child abduction case against her. There was a protective custody warrant out for Hwi in Sacramento, and once the US Embassy received Jo’s visa application, they tipped off the Yolo County police.

Arrested upon arrival in America, Jo was extradited straight to Yolo County. Charlton was given immediate sole custody of five-year-old Hwi, who spoke no English at the time, and has been parenting her ever since.

On April 28, Jo was sentenced to 175 days in jail and three years probation; she was subsequently released on time served. In the lobby of the Yolo County Jail, Jo’s lawyers and a dozen or so supporters welcomed her, arms open. The group of local activists who had taken up Jo’s cause were adorned in purple, a color symbolizing survival of domestic violence. They carried clothes for her to change into and a traditional Korean seaweed roll for her to nibble on. “Sad thing still. I couldn’t see my baby,” Jo murmured in English as she addressed the group. “My baby is strong. She will be okay.”

Jo only got 30 minutes’ reprieve before immediately being detained by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents who hovered just outside the jail’s door. She was moved to an ICE detention center in Yuba City, and she and Hwi, mother and daughter, have still not seen one another since the arrest.

Nan-Hui Jo’s story looks different ways as the light changes. In the eyes of the state, she’s a child abductor, an undocumented immigrant facing deportation; in the eyes of her friends and supporters, she’s a domestic violence victim who lost her immigration status because of one abusive partner, who may lose her daughter because of another. Jo’s relationship to Charlton and the subsequent child abduction case has been described as a “cross-cultural love story gone wrong,” but her supporters took to Twitter to call it a horror story—a tale of a woman victimized by two men as well as the immigration and criminal justice systems.

Yolo County Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Mount, who re-tried Jo’s child abduction case after it resulted in a hung jury the first time around in December 2014, told Jezebel that Jo “was not fleeing a household of continual abuse,” and that she would have ended up with custody of Hwi if she had gone through the proper channels.

“I’m inclined to be a little bit doubtful of that scenario,” said Hyejin Shim, a spokesperson for the Korean-American Coalition to End Domestic Violence. “She was still undocumented at the time. She was primarily Korean-speaking. I think those factors can count pretty heavily against you in a court of law.”

“It’s tough to know exactly what could have happened in 2009,” Jesse Charlton’s attorney Preston Morgan told Jezebel. “The one thing we know,” he said, “is that Nan-Hui Jo didn’t let that happen. So we’ll never know that.”

It’s true that Jo could have changed her visa status after she fled her marriage, that she had legal recourse to address Charlton’s behavior when she lived with him and Hwi. It’s true that she could have taken advantage of specialized provisions for domestic violence victims to stay in the country and settle her daughter’s custody case. If she had, she may have not ended up charged, jailed, found guilty, in the hands of ICE, cut off from the child she had never once before been apart from.

But, in order to take advantage of these special provisions, she would have had to trust the system to protect her—the same system that later jailed her and took her child away.



The prosecution of domestic violence, one of the most under-reported criminal offenses in America, relies heavily on victim testimony. For immigrant women, the strength required to confront and report an abuser is compounded by the fact that they may be reliant on their abusers for language assistance. Their abusers might also, as was the case with Jo’s husband, literally hold their immigration paperwork (which is complicated even for native speakers) in their hands.

When survivors finally either gain the courage to report the violence perpetrated against them or take matters under their own control—i.e. leaving, as Jo did—they often find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Both the criminal and immigration systems have a bad habit turning on victims; when these two systems intersect, this bad habit can get even worse.

For one: Claudia Valdez, an undocumented mother of three without any previous criminal history, was arrested in Denver in June 2012 after the local sheriff’s department mistakenly targeted her as the perpetrator of a domestic dispute. The department then turned her over to ICE, where she was separated from her children and began her deportation hearings.

Another undocumented woman, Isaura Garcia, endured severe violence from her boyfriend with documented history of 911 calls and visits to the ER. But in 2011, she called 911 and the police believed her boyfriend’s story over hers. She was then arrested and turned over to ICE.

Theoretically, the US immigration system carries many provisions to provide relief and protection to abused women. In practice, this relief is harder to come by.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) visa self-petition was designed for survivors of domestic violence, battery, and extreme cruelty to be able to apply for legal status independent of their abuser. But, according to a former senior official at the Department of the Homeland Security, the option often remains inherently hidden. By nature of their situation, immigrant victims of domestic violence are often not informed of the VAWA and forms of protection—even though immigration officials are technically required to notify recipients of fiancee visas of their legal rights and resources, including domestic violence protections.

Jo’s case presented a clear opportunity for that point of contact, which, according to her immigration attorney and Jo’s court testimony, never occurred.

Her Department of Homeland Security file acknowledges the restraining order against her husband that was court-ordered in Connecticut. The file bears a handwritten note from an immigration official, dated February 28, 2008. In it, the official acknowledges the protection order filed against “the Petitioner of I-129F” for the spouse.

In other words, immigration officials knew Jo had at least temporarily been in danger from her husband, who had a criminal record—but rather than granting her administrative clemency or even notification that she was eligible for VAWA’s provisions, the acknowledgment that Jo had been in danger from her husband was the thing that put her in danger from the state.

“As such, the validity of the marriage is in question,” the note concludes. Because of these concerns, ICE officials approached Jo’s husband in 2009, who said that he no longer wished to sponsor the visa.

Jo would have also been able to avail herself of U Nonimmigrant Status (U-Visa), a visa for crime survivors who have suffered mental or physical abuse, and who have been helpful to law enforcement in the investigation or prosecution of the crime. Jo would have been eligible for this after the court ordered the TRO on her husband. She was never notified of this option either.

Currently, ICE detention centers all over the U.S. are filled with immigrant women living in deplorable conditions, separated from their children, just like Jo from her daughter Hwi. Many of these women wind up in there after seeking refuge from the local authorities, who in some cases—if the woman was physically defending herself, for example—will arrest all parties involved. These women then fall into the grips of the Priority Enforcement Program, formerly the Secure Communities Act: a program that dictates that, if an immigrant has been fingerprinted by local authorities, he or she is legally susceptible to receive an ICE “detainer” (a 48-hour hold in a local facility that often stretches much longer), a potential first step on the path to being deported.

Nina Rabin, an immigration attorney who focuses on women in detention, says that women in ICE custody rarely know their rights—that domestic abuse survivors are usually not told about VAWA until they are already in the detention center. There are a few NGOs that hold Know Your Rights clinics in the centers when the women are already being processed for deportation. But by then, it is too late.



Nan-Hui Jo came to the US in 2002, on a student visa, to study film at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Shortly after arriving, she met the man who would become her husband. Jo returned to Korea, applied for a fiancé visa, and came back to the United States.

Now married, the two moved to a small town in Connecticut, where things soured quickly. Jo claimed in court that the man, whose name hasn’t been made public, was physically violent as well as psychologically abusive toward her: he stole her car keys and passport in order to control her movements, and sometimes called her coworkers up to 100 times a day to check on her whereabouts. Additionally, according to Jo’s immigration lawyer, her husband processed her green card application (which was dependent on their marriage) by himself; he didn’t call in the aid of a lawyer, or work with his wife to complete the paperwork, as is often customary.

In July 2007, after an unspecified incident, a temporary restraining order was filed against Jo’s husband to protect her. Later that year, still married, she fled her house and went back to California.

She enrolled in Sacramento Community College for the fall semester, and there, in a photography class, she met Charlton, a stocky man in his early twenties, a decade younger than her. Charlton had served two tours as a machine gunner in Mosul; he’d returned with severe PTSD and traumatic brain injury. He was on 70 percent disability, and has testified that he suffers memory loss and flashbacks. (Charlton’s attorney declined to make him available to Jezebel for an interview; his recollections are drawn from court documents and testimony.)

Jo’s English was spotty, Charlton said, but they shared interests: traveling, taking pictures. Soon, Jo—who introduced herself to Charlton as “Vitz,” a nickname that means “light” in Korean—found herself in another rocky relationship.

Charlton, unemployed at the time, moved into Jo’s trailer with just “a backpack, a camera and some clothes.” The two argued frequently: Jo didn’t like Charlton’s drinking and relationship to pornography, Charlton didn’t like Jo’s expectations. In his testimony, he stated, “I always lived my life really cavalier, and I didn’t take anything serious, but Vitz wanted me to be serious and around.”

The differences between them became clearer in 2008 when Jo found out she was pregnant. It was a surprise to both of them: Jo had lost a baby close to term a decade and a half prior, and according to her, doctors had told her she couldn’t conceive again.

In court, Jo described her pregnancy as a miracle—and says that Charlton was furious. “He wrote [a letter] saying that this baby would be a curse to us, all of us, and I had to solve this issue all by myself. So I was very afraid,” she stated. He demanded she get an abortion, she adds, which he denied in his testimony—although he admitted that he bought her a one-way plane ticket back to Korea, which she took.

After a month in Korea, Jo returned to California at the end of July 2008. She had the baby by herself in early September, listing no father on baby Hwi’s birth certificate. She moved into a friend’s house, where she shared a room with her newborn daughter, and didn’t speak to Charlton at all.

During Jo’s trial, prosecutor Steve Mount pointed out that she—long since parted from the marriage that her legal status depended on—did not change her visa back to a student visa when she left Korea and re-entered the States. “Did you tell [the embassy] that you left your husband and now you were back to being a student?” he asked.

“No, I did not,” Jo said.

As such, her legal status remained dependent on a marriage she had fled—and a man who, according to Jo’s immigration attorney Zachary Nightingale, never filed her citizenship papers. The fact that she had returned to America on her rapidly expiring fiancee visa started the chain of events that would lead, more than six years later, to federal agents meeting her at the airport in Honolulu with handcuffs.

“Isn’t it true that the reason you didn’t ever apply for a divorce was because you would lose your status to be in this country if you did?” Mount asked Jo in court.

“No,” Jo replied.

Later in her testimony, she explained: “I heard that to file a divorce you need a lot of money.”


As Jo’s status grew more precarious, her attention turned to the future that awaited her daughter. In October 2008, a month after Hwi was born, Jo applied for aid from the local Department of Child Support Services. In court, she said that her roommate and an interpreter had helped her do this; she claimed that she did not recognize the handwriting on the papers, just the signature.

Shortly afterward, the department served Charlton with child support papers. At this point, the two still weren’t speaking, and Charlton demanded a paternity test just “to be mean”; Hwi, as they both knew, was his. In his testimony, he talked about coming to think of child support as having some silver lining. It was a “one-way connection with my kid,” he said.

In early 2009, Jo and Charlton ran into each other at school, and tentatively began speaking again. Jo started allowing Charlton to come over and see the baby, and before too long, they rekindled their relationship. Jo’s roommate moved out and Charlton moved in. He and Jo became an unsteady “family unit,” as he described it, although their relationship stayed tumultuous. Charlton was still drinking more than Jo liked; she now suspected him of cheating, she still hated the fact that he watched porn, and Charlton was dealing with his PTSD.

“90 percent of the fights [between Jo and I], it would end up in me just leaving because I don’t like confrontation,” he stated in court. “I really don’t like it. It freaks me out from Iraq. I just get mad, so I just leave.”

In July 2009, Jo received notice that her green card application was denied. She understood the message of the letter: that she was now illegally in America, and that she would need to leave the country right away. But the notice was complicated, particularly to someone with Jo’s English skills. She didn’t understand that she had the right to get an immigration attorney, or that ICE would have to start a removal case against her to force her to leave. All she knew was that she needed to get out, or find a way to stay.

Consequently, the tension in their relationship escalated. Jo gave Charlton a ring for his birthday; Charlton thought she was proposing marriage. Jo stated in her testimony that this was just a birthday gift. (In Korea, couple rings are a common tradition—even teenagers exchange them.) It seems, anyway, that Jo understood that her marital status was at the center of her immigration problems. She couldn’t marry Charlton without getting divorced, and Charlton didn’t want to marry her. He also refused to help fill out her divorce paperwork, knowing, as he said in court, that it “was a big hurdle to her getting immigration.” In a later email to Jo, he wrote, “You always talked down on me, and I knew I wasn’t ever going to make you happy. This is why I didn’t do your divorce paperwork or put that ring on.”

The couple kept trying to sustain their relationship regardless of Jo’s legal difficulties. In September 2009, Jo and Charlton made plans to give the baby a first birthday party. The day before the baby’s birthday, the two got into a fight in the grocery store parking lot. “I went to the Korean market to prepare for the birthday, but Jesse didn’t want to. He want to skateboard,” Jo said in her testimony. Charlton slammed his hand against the steering wheel so hard he broke it, and left the car. Jo didn’t hear from him until 2 a.m., she said, when Charlton called from the Sacramento jail, asking for a ride home.

They held the party the next day as planned. Charlton described it as happy: “friends, family, great Korean food and birthday cake and presents.”

These, however, were the last two months of Jo and Charlton’s relationship. During her trial, Jo was asked by public defender Dean Johansson if, “specifically in the area of September, October [2009],” she was frightened of her partner. She answered yes.

“Did you ever yourself experience any violence from Mr. Charlton?” Johansson asked.

“Yes, on several different occasions,” she said, through her translator. “He was diagnosed to having brain damage. His personal characteristic completely changes, and you can see it from his eyes.”

The events that led to Jo and Charlton’s breakup took place on October 18, when Jo noticed that her one-year-old had, according to her court testimony, put a necklace in her vagina. Her “mother’s intuition” kicked in, she said. She checked her laptop’s history; Charlton had been watching porn while taking care of the baby.

In court, Charlton said that he “didn’t see anything like that ever,” when asked whether their baby had exhibited any strange or sexual behaviors. “But she thought that [the baby was acting strange], yeah,” he said, adding that “Mrs. Jo hates porn.”

After Jo checked her laptop history, she panicked and confronted him. During this argument, Charlton grabbed Jo by the neck and threw her against the wall. “I yelled her name with my kid in my left hand,” Charlton testified, “and I grabbed her by the throat by the right hand, and I threw her up against the wall. And she’s a lot smaller than me, and we were face-to-face, and I yelled into her face that everything is bad, something like that.”

Jo called the police, who once again told Charlton to blow off steam. In court, he described the officer asking “me to leave and give her space between us. I remember the police officer told me that he was married, he got in arguments with his wife, and I just needed to leave and chill out.”

The couple split up after the argument. They had another fight on October 30, when Charlton returned to the house. She called 911, running from Charlton; the police again left without arresting either party.

After this incident, Jo decided to get out of Sacramento and prepare for her return to Korea. “I lost my status. I didn’t have a working permit. I didn’t have a driver’s license, and Jesse didn’t care,” she said in court, adding, “I couldn’t survive here.” She stated later that “Jesse continued to be way violent, and that was not good for my baby’s safety.” She went to stay with friends in Southern California and applied for a passport for her daughter. She flew to Korea with Hwi at the beginning of November—but not before Charlton filed for custody.

Out of the country, Jo missed the family court dates: first in November, then in December, and then again in January of 2010. She was notified that she could appear in court remotely, via telephone; she asked for an interpreter, but then did not follow up with the interpreter or call in for her dates. Finally, with no word from Jo, Charlton filed child abduction charges.

Jo stayed in Korea, withdrawing child support from her bank account. (She applied for continuing aid from Korea, a fact that Steve Mount suggested in court may imply a facility with procedural paperwork inconsistent with the idea that Jo could not cope with her immigration or custody obligations.)

She ignored all contact from the States. With Hwi, she lived a relatively peaceful life on Jeju-do, a tranquil island at the southern tip of Korea. She worked several jobs, including restoring houses and writing children’s books.

For years, Charlton sent her regular emails, which he also submitted to the Yolo County Child Abduction Unit. In his testimony for the child abduction case, he read some of these emails out loud, their tone veering wildly from tender to furious. In one, he wrote:

My feelings about you are not easily defined or labeled. But as for my feeling for Da, I can only say that I’ve loved her unconditionally since day one… I believe our relationship between us would not only be healthy for me, but for her also. If you do deceive her from my presence, she will likely figure it out as I will constantly seek her out till I die.

He added, apparently referring to Jo leaving the country:

Can I forgive myself for pushing you to this? yes, but it takes a lot of painful introspection. I know I was ignorant of my consequences to a point where I avoided the truth and hoped that you would just stay with me unwed and illegal. Quite a selfish wish I admit.

The emails evince a sincere desire to see his daughter. In one, he fills Jo in on his day, using the affectionate nickname the couple had used for mother and baby alike: “Hey Mama Vitz, photograph [sic] and edited all day today, plus homework. It was good stuff, and wish i could just share it with you and Baby Vitz. Hope you had a good day as with Da Vitz. Guess she isn’t a baby anymore, just in my head, because I haven’t seen how she’s growing up.” He wrote wistfully that he’d gotten to spend time with a three-year-old child that day, which only increased his longing for his own daughter: “It was amazing and incredibly painful afterwards, but I was happy to be able to see a kid smile. I love you, Da Vitz.”

He obliquely references the child abduction case at least once:

You’ll probably be contacted by the federal government soon. Sorry, but the local cops got them involved, and they tracked you to Korea, but they don’t know shit about you. They say you’re really crazy. They say they can’t see any pattern to your trail. Cops are so dumb sometimes, but their work ethic usually pays off. If you really are in Korea, there’s nothing anybody can do to you.

And, in a few other emails, the volatility that Jo testified about in court becomes visible. In the message referencing Kelly, the bounty hunter, all affection is gone. “I have had to cut off Kelly. Just found out he used to abuse his wife, and now she’s left him. I mean really abuse the s-h-i-t out of her. He rolled her up in a mattress and raped her.”

If you do not respond to this letter, or the next few ones, I will write. I will come looking for you on Da Vitz’s second birthday. I’m not talking about flying to Korea with a picture of you two and nothing else. I’m talking about spending thousands of dollars on a scary bounty hunter that I’m not at all friends with, but have known for six years and tried to avoid.

In court, Jo testified that she only replied to one of these emails: to say, after Charlton announced his plans to come look for her in Korea, that she was living in New Zealand. (She was not.) Steve Mount summarized the email in court: “the view and the ocean and how beautiful it was, as if you were there and you weren’t.”

Charlton came to Korea, and never made contact with Jo on the trip. “For me, Korea is awesome,” he wrote in an email. “People here treat me very nice whether they like it or not. The Korea girls here really like me, but are very stupid, I think.”

During this period, Jo was also receiving communication from the Yolo County Child Abduction Unit. In court, Jo admitted that she lied in response to Angela Smith, an enforcement officer in the Child Abduction Unit, saying that she was still in the States. Jo claimed that this communication came shortly after Charlton’s email about the bounty hunter. “I thought that Angela Smith was from bounty hunter,” she said. “Would not anybody be afraid of such a threat?”

Answering Mount’s questions in court about why she didn’t respond to Charlton’s emails, Jo said, “I had responsibility for my baby. I mean, what else could I have done? What effort should I have put into [answering him]?” Jo said that she intended Hwi to meet her father “when Jesse is not dangerous to the child at the time.” She insisted that she didn’t understand that Hwi was considered abducted—that her actions could have been seen as a serious crime.



Jo was tried on child abduction charges for the first time in December of 2014; the trial ended in a hung jury. Steve Mount immediately stated his intention to retry Jo, saying, “Our Child Abduction Unit does its very best to help parents get into court. We only file charges in egregious cases where we have made contact and the defendants don’t do the right thing.”

Speaking to Jezebel, Mount acknowledged the activist communities who protested his decision, but suggested that the clear-cut motive they’ve attributed to Jo’s actions—that she was attempting to escape an abusive relationship—is inaccurate.

“Yes, there was a domestic violence incident,” said Mount, “and [Charlton’s] reaction was completely inappropriate, and he probably could’ve been charged at that time, but neither of them told the cops that that had happened.”

When asked by Jezebel if Charlton would refute the claims that he was abusive, Charlton’s attorney Preston Morgan said, “It depends on how you use the term abusive. There may be abuse in a relationship. There may have been circumstances surrounding it that may not be indicative of an abusive relationship. That’s not to undermine any physicality, and how it’s inappropriate in any circumstance, but it does happen.”

Steve Mount pointed out that Charlton had moved out of Jo’s house by the time she was preparing to go back to Korea, and that he was only trying to secure visitation and contact rights. He added that Jo spent some time in Southern California before going back to Korea, and that she did so freely, even staying with Charlton’s relatives for a short time. “She was not fleeing a household of continual abuse,” Mount said.

Mount expressed sympathy for the distrust Jo might have had of law enforcement, or of the United States legal system. He noted that domestic violence is particularly underreported in the Asian-American community.

Jo “was running out of options,” he said. “I think she was afraid of going to family law court, which is really sad, because she would’ve gotten custody. She would’ve been able to take her child to Korea. The court would’ve probably said that she had to let the dad come visit when he can afford to, and give him phone access. But she was clearly going to get custody; she was clearly the more competent parent.” At the criminal hearing, Mount called her a “tiger mom,” too competent to be a victim.

Is it possible to be too competent for victimhood? Would Jo qualify, if it were? Competence, interestingly enough, may be required to prove your victimhood in the first place. There’s a section in the California penal code for parental child abduction that makes a custody exception for parents fleeing domestic violence—parents who believe that either they or their children are in imminent danger of physical, psychological or emotional abuse. This exception, however, requires initiating custody proceedings in court.

Jo stated in testimony that she was afraid that if she went to court, she would not—contrary to the opinion of the office that tried her twice for child abduction—be seen as a good parent. “I did not have legal status to stay,” she says, “and what scared me most was to lose my baby and deported.” This, of course, is the likely fate that awaits her now.


At Jo’s sentencing, Charlton approached the podium in a wrinkled brown shirt. He read a prepared statement where he asked for the maximum sentence of three years. He stared at Jo as she sat shackled in her mint checkered Yolo County jail jumpsuit; the two of them locked eyes briefly. As he read about how the absence of Hwi affected him, he pounded his fists on the podium and muttered “fuck” audibly. Unable to control his emotions, he ran out of the courtroom, the door slamming behind him.

“He became emotional reading it,” says Preston Morgan. “I think at a time like that, you realize we’re coming to the end of one chapter of this, and there’s a tendency to view everything that’s occurred, from 2008 forward. He did get a little emotional.”

The judge didn’t sentence Jo to additional jail time. He ordered her released with time served. In the jail lobby, tears streaming down her face, she talked to her supporters and mentioned a letter she received from her daughter—the first and only contact since her arrest, facilitated through her lawyer. “It was short, just like “Mom I love you, I know you love me.” She told a Korean reporter, “I’m scared.”

At the front door of the lobby stood two male ICE agents, waiting. They had an order to take her into custody, but no jurisdiction inside the county jail.

Jo waved at them and pleaded nervously. “Please don’t take me now,” she said. But finally, she was led away, small in comparison to the ICE agents, who seemed twice her size. They led to Jo the jail parking lot and pushed her into an unmarked white van, while her supporters followed behind.

It is uncertain what will happen to Jo now that she’s being held in ICE custody, with immigration, criminal and custody cases all pending. If she’s deported, she will lose the opportunity to represent herself in family court, and she will not be able to return to the United States to see her daughter.

In the meantime, Jo’s immigration attorneys are requesting Jo to be released on bail, while they begin to work on temporary visa options for her, and her criminal attorney has just filed an appeal to her criminal child abduction case to the California Supreme Court. The family courts have granted Jo telephone contact with Hwi, pending approval from a mental health professional. A close friend to Jo told Jezebel, “They [Jo and Hwi] never been separated since the baby was born—until last year.” She added, “I want immigration to allow Nan-Hui to stay in the US so she can raise the baby.”

The case still sustains wildly different interpretations. Jo’s supporters describe this as an outrage: an immigrant mother and domestic violence victim arrested and jailed as a child abductor and separated from her daughter—all for following the law when her visa expired. Charlton’s attorney told Jezebel that it was “an extreme act on the part of the mother, to leave and not maintain any contact for five years.” He added, “It’s hard when you look and say this is an extreme case. Really at the end of the day it’s a misdemeanor with 175 days in jail.”

Jo is currently looking forward to speaking with her daughter on the phone. In court, still reeling, she said, “To be completely frank with you, I learned about the word abduction when I was arrested.”

Alyssa Jeong Perry is a journalist who has been published in The Guardian, Eloquence Magazine, and other publications. She is currently at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism under the mentorship of the Investigative Reporting Program.

Additional reporting was contributed by Anna Merlan and Jia Tolentino.

Illustration by Jim Cooke, source image from Alyssa Jeong Perry

Guitar Solo, Dick Shredded as Man Pours Fire Ants Into His Underwear

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A brave, stupid young man in Rayong, Thailand “wanted to imitate Jackass,” Tomo News Today reports, so he had some friends pull a nest of fire ants off a tree and shake those angry little fuckers directly into his underpants. The background music is gnarly, but not gnarly enough to erase the sound of his infinite screams.

Entomologist Justin Schmidt, who developed the Schmidt Pain Scale by letting a wide variety of insects bite him and taking detailed notes on the sensations, rated fire ants a 1.2 out of 4. He described the pain as, “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.”

But Justin Schmidt did not conduct experiments using his genitals, so our stalwart subject here had a chance to make a significant new contribution to the scientific literature. Here are his groundbreaking findings:

EEeeeeeeeeeeah! EEEEEEEEEaaaaaah! Eeee! Eee! EEEEeeeeeaaaaah!

[h/t Death and Taxes]

Three White Swans

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Three White Swans

Here is a photo of Taylor Swift and her new “beau,” the DJ Calvin Harris, enjoying a pool day and doing fun-but-ultimately-restricted poses for the camera. Do these two people like having sex (together), or do they LOVE having sex (together)? If you said yes to either, I’m sure this “hot couple” appreciates your faith.


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


Unemployed Misogynist Nobel Laureate Still Rich in Nose Hair

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Unemployed Misogynist Nobel Laureate Still Rich in Nose Hair

This week’s sexist idiot is Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt, a biochemist and honorary professor at University College London. Hunt, whose nose hair is longer than the list of fucks I give about him, said the following, via the Times:

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Mr. Hunt told an audience on Monday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

Silly crying-ass girl scientists. After his remarks blew up on Twitter, Hunt went on BBC 4 to apologize, sort of:

“It was a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists....I’m really, really sorry I caused any offence, that’s awful. I certainly didn’t mean that. I just meant to be honest, actually.

I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that people - I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me and it’s very disruptive to the science because it’s terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field.”

Speaking of leveling the playing field—your nose hairs could use some leveling. As in, cut your disgusting nose hairs so that they aren’t hanging out of your nose. You are supposedly a “genius” scientist. But you are a flaming idiot if you think any woman would be sexually attracted to a man with braidable hair streaming from his nostrils.

UCL released a statement on Wednesday that said Hunt, who was knighted in 2006 and who won the Nobel Prize in “Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for groundbreaking work on cell division” in 2001, resigned from his honorary professorship this week.

Unemployed Misogynist Nobel Laureate Still Rich in Nose Hair

Who’s crying now, mister?

Unemployed Misogynist Nobel Laureate Still Rich in Nose Hair


Images via AP/Getty. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Gawker Review Reviews: The OMG Shakespeare Book Series

These Are Good Shirts

Every Single Federal Employee's Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report

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Every Single Federal Employee's Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report

A breach of U.S. government computers—presumably launched by China—is looking immensely worse than first expected. The AP reports that a federal employee’s union now says literally every single government worker is the victim of an enormous personal information heist.

The revelation comes from a letter by federal union boss J. David Cox to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management:

Every Single Federal Employee's Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report

This means that extremely sensitive information—the kind identity thieves drool over—has been lifted from everyone from the EPA to DARPA, the AP explains:

J. David Cox, president of the American Federal of Government Employees, said in a letter to OPM director Katherine Archuleta that based on OPM’s internal briefings, the hackers stole military records and veterans’ status information, address, birth date, job and pay history, health insurance, life insurance, and pension information; age, gender, race data.

[...]

“Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees.”

The report adds that none of these millions of social security numbers were even encrypted in the first place, and the OPM (where the breach originated) sounds like it’s doing a poor job responding to the attack. From the letter:

Further, the fact that OPM has outsourced to a contractor, CSID, the responsibility for answering affected employees’ questions adds insult to injury. The terms of the contract apparently do not include guaranteed access to a living, breathing human being knowledgeable enough to answer questions.

You can read the full letter from J. David Cox, president of the AFGE union, to OPM director Katherine Archuleta, below:

Photo: U.S. Office of Personnel Management/Getty


Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

It Doesn't Take a "True Detective" to See Nic Pizzolatto Is a Schmuck

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It Doesn't Take a "True Detective" to See Nic Pizzolatto Is a Schmuck

Last August I described Nic Pizzolatto, the showrunner and novelist behind the HBO critical smash True Detective, as a “schmuck.” I feel as though I made a strong case, based on schmucky words that came out of his mouth, and this photograph of him inside an abandoned insane asylum:

As it happens, my post angered a number of fans of True Detective, who described me as, variously, “whiny,” “just another blogger with a useless opinion,” and “intimidated” by Pizzolatto’s masculinity. (“You make ‘masculine’ sound like a crime in this article. As if there aren’t enough vapid, feminine shows on television these days.”)

Well, commenting sirs and madams, allow me to direct you to this Vanity Fair profile of Nic Pizzolatto, which proves definitively that Nic Pizzolatto is a schmuck and True Detective’s second season will suck.

The show’s creator and executive producer, Mitch Glazer, was introducing me to the other writers when a young man in jeans and a leather jacket smirked from the couch, saying, “I know you. We had a serious conversation once, in Indiana. We talked about God. Don’t you remember?”

Hoo boy.

“I become very raw emotionally [when I’m writing]—a good steak could bring me to tears. I’m very porous. My membrane isn’t solid. And then I gradually come out of that. And it’s time to join the circus.”

:expressionless-emoji:

He described the new season as a detective story in the manner of Oedipus Rex, in which “the detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him.”

He described the new season as a detective story in the manner of Oedipus Rex, in which “the detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him.” (This direct quote from the article is not set aside in quotation marks here because in this instance it represents me repeating it out loud in a monotone.)

I spent the ensuing weeks across a table from Nic, hashing out plotlines. It gave me a chance to study him at close quarters. No one was more vehement about character and motivation than Nic. Now and then, he’d do the voices or act out a scene, turning his wrist to demonstrate the pop-pop of gunplay. He was 37 but somehow ageless. He could’ve stepped out of a novel by Steinbeck. The writer as crusader, chronicler of love and depravity. His shirt was rumpled, his hair mussed, his manner that of a man who’d just hiked along the railroad tracks or rolled out from under a box. He is fine-featured, with fierce eyes a little too small for his face. It gives him the aura of a bear or some other species of dangerous animal. When I was a boy and dreamed of literature, this is how I imagined a writer—a kind of outlaw, always ready to fight or go on a spree. After a few drinks, you realize the night will culminate with pledges of undying friendship or the two of you on the floor, trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.

Who is threatened by this guy’s masculinity now, huh?

image via HBO

Judge Finds Probable Cause to Charge Officer Who Killed Tamir Rice

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Judge Finds Probable Cause to Charge Officer Who Killed Tamir Rice

A Cleveland judge said on Thursday that there’s probable cause to charge the police officer who last year fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice with murder, manslaughter, and reckless homicide.

The Washington Post reports that Ronald B. Adrine, a Cleveland municipal judge, wrote in an order that Officer Timothy Loehmann should be charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter, and reckless homicide. Adrine also said that Officer Frank Garmback, Loehmann’s partner, should be charged with negligent homicide.

However, the decision doesn’t mean that either officer will be charged. “We are very much relieved and it is a step towards procedural justice and people having access to their government,” Walter Madison, an attorney for Rice’s family, told the Guardian.

Loehmann killed Rice, who was carrying a toy gun, just two seconds after arriving in a Cleveland park on November 22. Three years before the shooting, Loehmann was found unfit for duty by a smaller police force in Ohio.

UPDATE 6:08 pm: Prosecutor Timothy McGinty released a statement after the decision saying that he plans on taking the case before a grand jury. From the Washington Post:

In a statement released on Thursday evening, McGinty said he still plans to bring the case to a grand jury in order to determine whether or not to charge the officers.

“This case, as with all other fatal use of deadly force cases involving law enforcement officers, will go the the Grand Jury,” McGinty said. “Ultimately the grand jury decides whether police officers are charged or not charged.”


Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Jack Off to Executive Suite, With Dick Out

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Jack Off to Executive Suite, With Dick Out

Former comedian Dick Costolo will “step down” (Ha Ha) from his CEO perch at Twitter, a company that only recently started making money and hasn’t been making enough of it. His replacement is Jack Dorsey, former poet, and notorious monster and screwer of friends.

Speculation surrounding Costolo’s shitcanning has been swirling, like so many un-monetized retweets, a claim he has denied and “laughed off.” Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter who has a tumultuous history with the company, was most recently the founder and CEO of Square, a financial services startup that’s struggled to make money. It’s unclear how that leadership experience will help Dorsey fix Twitter’s problems, most notably the fact that very few people actually use Twitter.

Other headlines considered for this post include:

  • Dick Out, Jack Off the Market
  • Twitter Takes Dick Out, Gets Jacked
  • Man With Penis Name Replaced By Man With Masturbation Name
  • Dick Out, Jack In

Photo: Getty



Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7


500 Days of Kristin, Day 137: Don't B Afraid 2 B Kristin

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 137: Don't B Afraid 2 B Kristin

If have been looking for relationship and/or general life advice from Kristin Cavallari—and god, why wouldn’t you be—you can probably find some in her book, due out in 363 days. Until then, we must make do with what we’re given, which is the wisdom found in a Twitter “live chat” with @KristinCav hosted by Cosmo and sponsored by Revlon.

What did the little Twitter eggs #AskKristin yesterday? One requested “any tips for making a relationship work.” Kristin’s advice was as follows:

If you think it’s hard 4 u to be vulnerable, imagine how hard it is to do it while balancing in heels.


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

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Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

To prepare for your weekend viewing of the surprisingly satisfying Jurassic World, you can either A) go back and watch Jurassic Park, or B) relive the 1993 classic through the intense, almost frighteningly detail-oriented mind of a kid. You can only choose one. Don’t fuck it up.

The dossier comes via a Scottish internet user who goes by @michaelmphysics. Michael recently posted a bunch of scans to imgur under the heading “The Jurassic Park Dossier.” His description reads: “I found a dossier I made when I was wee detailing my fictional job as a computer programmer at Jurassic Park. Seriously. Here are some highlights.” What follows is a series of sketches of dinosaurs, park plans, memos, arguments with himself, and biological drawings based not on science but his own terrifying whims. Spielberg wishes he could visualize in such detail.

This one’s my absolute favorite for its inclusion of the non-inflated model:

Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

Michael’s caption on this “Velociraptor DNA Plan” reads: “I don’t have a clue what I based this on. Looks legit.”

Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

Unfortunately, you’ll have to resist the urge to memorize this chart of dinosaur teeth—

Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

—adult Michael reports that it is “completely fabricated.”

Interestingly, he in addition to stunning advances in the field of dinosaur resurrection, Michael also invented a boss with which he sparred firmly but good-naturedly:

Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

Insane Child's 1994 Jurassic Park "Dossier" Is More Detailed Than Film

There are seriously dozens more pages just like these. In another era, looking back, Michael could have felt like his hundreds of hours of hard work were a waste; the power of the internet makes that no longer so. This must be what it’s like to discover a mosquito preserved in amber that contains dinosaur DNA.

[h/t Marah Eakin]

Heat Wave to Bake Southeastern U.S. Through Beginning of Next Week, Ugh

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Heat Wave to Bake Southeastern U.S. Through Beginning of Next Week, Ugh

Once upon a time, it used to get uncomfortably hot in June. Remember those days? It was just a few years ago, but after last year’s cakewalk they called “summer”, this year’s heat is going to seem downright brutal and unforgiving. A heat wave is cranking up in the southeast right now, and it’s going to get ugly. http://thevane.gawker.com/do-not-leave-c...

Toasty temperatures are dominating the country this afternoon, with 90s being reported from the desert southwest straight into portions of the Northeast. New York’s LaGuardia Airport is sitting at 91°F as I write this. Today’s high in Indianapolis means they’ve hit 90°F twice already this year, a reading the city only saw three times in 2014. Compared to last year’s cooler-than-normal temperatures, it feels like hell and it’s not even the start of astronomical summer (which is June 21).

Heat Wave to Bake Southeastern U.S. Through Beginning of Next Week, Ugh

Why us? A solid ridge of high pressure is in the process of parking itself over the southeastern United States at the moment, and it should remain there through at least the beginning of next week. Ridges are boring—high pressure and sinking air go hand-in-hand, so locations stuck under the ridge tend to see warm, relatively calm weather. This is why California currently looks like Spongebob visiting Sandy’s house without his water helmet.

If any good comes from it, this heat wave is a wonderful example of seemingly-unrelated weather events all sharing a common connection. We usually see active weather around the edge of a ridge (see also: derechos), and the fine folks caught on the edge of this ridge will see days and days of heavy rain (sorry!). The ridge is also playing a part in Tropical Storm Carlos making a hasty exit stage left away from Mexico. It’s all related!

Heat Wave to Bake Southeastern U.S. Through Beginning of Next Week, Ugh

The worst temperatures will likely unfold across the Carolinas and Georgia in a corridor roughly between I-20 and I-95, where temperatures will push 100°F for at least four days if current predictions hold true. Beginning tomorrow, the average high temperature in Columbia, South Carolina, stay at or above 90°F through August 27. Keeping that in mind, here are the forecast highs in Columbia for the next seven days from the National Weather Service:

Friday: 99°F
Saturday: 98°F
Sunday: 100°F
Monday: 100°F
Tuesday: 99°F
Wednesday: 97°F
Thursday: 95°F

Each of those forecast high temperatures comes within a degree or two of tying or breaking record highs at Columbia Metro Airport, records at which extend back to 1948. We’ll see a similar story play out in cities across the area.

Dew points in the region will also hover around 70°F for the duration of the heat wave, so heat index values will likely exceed 100-105°F at times, which is dangerous if you’re outdoors for an extended period of time without breaks or adequate water. This is the southeast, though, so just about everyone is used to preparing for and dealing with the heat. We’ll get through it...it just sucks that it’s starting earlier rather than later, to put it in technical terms.

[Images: AP, Tropical Tidbits, author | Corrected to reflect that the forecast for Columbia, SC, was generated by the National Weather Service.]


You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

Outlaw Country Singer Killed In Shootout With Bounty Hunter

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Outlaw Country Singer Killed In Shootout With Bounty Hunter

The Associated Press reports that outlaw country singer Randy Howard was killed on Tuesday in a shootout with a bounty hunter. The bondsman had come to detain the singer after he missed a court appearance.

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesman Josh DeVine told the AP that there was a warrant out for Howard charging him with fourth-offense DUI, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of a firearm while intoxicated and driving on a revoked license.

When the bounty hunter showed up at his Lynchburg, Tennessee home, Howard opened fire, DeVine said. The bounty hunter returned fire, killing Howard. The bounty hunter was reportedly struck by a bullet as well but is expected to recover.

The TBI is investigating whether the bounty hunter acted appropriately in entering Howard’s home, where, WSMV Nashville reports, he had a right to defend himself.

According to SavingCountryMusic.com, Howard had performed with the likes of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Charlie Daniels, and Hank Williams Jr.

“He said he wasn’t going back to jail,” Howard’s friend and neighbor Terry Dotson said. “That’s what he told me.”


Image via YouTube. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

9 Misconceptions About Drones That Engineers Wish You'd Shut Up About

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9 Misconceptions About Drones That Engineers Wish You'd Shut Up About

They’re robots. They fly. They’re watching you. And they’re increasingly found everywhere: Yup, they’re drones. You may think you know exactly what they are and what they do. You don’t.

Like lots of emerging technologies, drones are often misunderstood, especially early in their existence. To help you navigate our brave new world filled with swooping, buzzing, photo-snapping machines, we reached out to some of the greatest experts in the field. We asked them, what are the most bogus drone myths? What drives you crazy? What do you wish you could shout from the rooftops? Here’s what they said.

1. They’re not actually called drones, nor quadcopters

Calling them “drones” in the first place is a no-no, according to Vijay Kumar, an engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania. (He’s not the only one who thinks so, either.) He and his research team work on aerial robots in his lab.

“The only thing that is drone-like about our robots is that they make a continuous humming sound,” Kumar says. “If I was an airforce pilot controlling a remotely piloted vehicle (which is what they are) and you called it a drone, I would be insulted. I can’t think of anything in the definition of a drone that is suggestive of what the pilot does. Certainly the characterization the pilot does no work does not do him or her justice.”

While we’re at it, Kumar also says calling a robot with four rotors a “quadcopter” is “just plain wrong English.”

“‘Quad’ refers to four. ‘Copter’ is short for helicopter. A quadcopter describes four helicopters. A robot with four rotors is a helicopter, perhaps a quadrotor helicopter. It is not a set of four rotorcrafts.”

What should you be calling “drones”—like the flying robots Kumar and his team make at his lab at Penn—instead? Kumar says: “The military uses RPVs (remotely piloted vehicles). When the vehicles are autonomous (like ours), they are robots.”

2. The biggest danger from drones isn’t invasion of privacy

Kumar admits that many people live in fear of camera-equipped drones. But the problem is that the legislation designed to combat these supposed privacy threats doesn’t actually deal with how RPVs actually work.

FAA regulations say you can’t fly personal drones above 400 feet over personal property. But is keeping drones at, say, 410 feet any more private? Your creepy neighbor leaning over your fence, taking photos with his phone is a bigger threat to your privacy than anything, as well as a more realistic one.

“Do people think about the number of pictures of them on the internet that were taken without their knowledge by smart phones and digital cameras?” Kumar asks. “Can you really prevent drones from taking pictures that [can’t already] be obtained on Google Earth?”

9 Misconceptions About Drones That Engineers Wish You'd Shut Up About

Predator UAS

Mary Cummings, associate professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University, takes the argument a step further.

“It is actually very difficult to make sense out of what a ground control person sees from a drone camera,” she says. “It is like looking through a soda straw.” The military has the resources and trained personnel to do much more comprehensive surveillance, so she believes you shouldn’t worry about some inept peeping tom’s personal drone, like the ones we sometimes hear about in the news.

Brendan Schulman, an attorney specializing in laws surrounding unmanned aerial vehicles, points out that we don’t need special laws to prevent drones from invading our privacy. He says, “People also don’t seem to realize that existing laws concerning invasion of privacy, peeping toms, stalking, or unlawful surveillance already apply to the kind of concerns people keep talking about [with drones], so there is no need for an overreaching law specifically targeting drone technology. If someone is actually invading someone’s privacy, it is the misconduct that should be unlawful, regardless of the technology used.”

But... you should still be a little worried. Not about surveillance, per se, but that like any technology, flying robots can be used for nefarious purposes if they’re in the wrong hands.

“Any ‘drone’ can be hacked by a smart student in an hour,” Vijay Kumar points out. “Should we not be worrying about this instead? While the FAA is flogged for not being decisive, they are the only ones thinking seriously about safety. It amazes me that hobbyists can use ‘drones’ in populated areas, when we need drivers licenses to drive cars.”

3. They’re not all killing machines

Drones rose to mainstream public consciousness in the last decade as the US started deploying them in conflict zones in the Middle East. This offensive UAV warfare cultivated a bad rap that haunts the ‘bots to this day.

“Drones are just a platform that we—the US—launch weapons from,” Mary Cummings says. “People often want to blame drones for collateral damage in war strikes, but there is no question that drones cause much less collateral damage than if the US military were to use manned aircraft. People want to blame the technology when it is policy that is the real culprit.”

9 Misconceptions About Drones That Engineers Wish You'd Shut Up About

A man examining UASes at the International Drone Expo last month in Chiba, Japan. Credit: Getty

4. They can’t take down planes

Jet engines accidentally slurping up sky-high drones is unlikely, and the chances of it actually triggering a crash are even smaller.

Attorney Schulman points out that pilots have spotted model airplanes in their vicinities for years, but it wasn’t until last year that the FAA started requiring pilots and air traffic control to report all drone sightings to a national security system. Of those 190 sightings, Schulman points out that a lot of the media described these incidents as “near misses.”

In a lot of these supposed “near misses,” Schulman says that many of these sightings were from the ground, or in other situations that didn’t pose a risk. In some cases, he says it wasn’t even clear if a drone was what pilots sighted. It’s unlikely a drone could even reach thousands of feet in the air—and even if they did, newer models like the Phantom 3 come with geofencing that automatically employs GPS to avoid swooping near airports.

5. You can’t hear them coming a mile away

While the name “drone” connotes constant insect-like humming, noisiness isn’t a trait you can assign to all flying robots.

“Commercial rotorcraft drones like those from DJI and 3DR are noisy enough, and Bezos has been rumored to say ‘they’re too loud’ of his current Amazon drones,” says Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. His research team at UT was the first to prove that UAVs can be commandeered via GPS signals from an outside source.

“But fixed-wing powered gliders, or rotorcraft in near free fall, can be as silent as a thief in the night,” Humphreys says. “This point is relevant for those who hope to detect drones by their acoustic signature, including the Secret Service guarding the White House.”

That could be a problem for the companies that already exist who promise to catch suspicious drones by those very acoustic signatures—that is, the unique sounds that each type of drone emits. Those kind of companies already exist in Japan and the US.

Reducing drone noisiness is one of the main goals in UAV technology: Over in the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds uses a tiny drone with six electric motors to monitor Britain’s endangered bird species. The society says that ambient noises like wind drown out the already hushed robot so as to allow the drone to sneak up on the animals.

9 Misconceptions About Drones That Engineers Wish You'd Shut Up About

Steve Roest operating a Shadow Rotor UAV for conservation purposes (via Shadowview Foundation)

6. They don’t need a human controlling them

There are lots of stories of supposedly-unsavory characters getting caught flying drones near sensitive areas, like tourist-filled attractions, from afar. But UAVs are becoming more and more autonomous in every sense of the word. As in, there’s no human controlling them. “A UAV may detect a target on the ground and automatically follow or track the motion of the target without involvement of pilot,” Hugh Liu says. He’s a professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies. He just won $1.65 million from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to train 150 new experts in using UAVs for a range of tasks, like agricultural and environmental monitoring.

We’re already seeing these autonomous capabilities in commercial drone prototypes, like this one that can be programmed to shadow the user automatically. DJI has a drone that allows you to preprogram GPS waypoints you want the ‘bot to hit, then let it go into the wild for a self-guided journey. And there’s research being done by engineers like Kumar to get drones to automatically follow one another—like bees or ants in a swarm following each other, or birds flying in formation.

7. They are not toys

While some UAVs are indeed essentially RC toys, most aren’t. They’re fully-fledged robots, and should be treated as such.

Liu says UAVs are “not just one vehicle,” but an “integrated system” chock full of onboard sensors, flight actuators, and more. And like Kumar, Liu prefers the term UAS (unmanned aerial system) over UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle).

“The obvious example is, when one flies a model airplane, it’s a fun sport to operate the machine,” says Liu. “When this machine is equipped with camera, all of a sudden, we are wowed by the aerial photos. I do prefer to use the term unmanned aerial system (UAS) rather than UAV to indicate this ‘system’ perspective.”

For context: Toys R Us sells an RC toy they call the Sky Viper Camera Drone—which is clearly different from the robots Liu, Kumar and company are talking about.

9 Misconceptions About Drones That Engineers Wish You'd Shut Up About

A drone assisting with rescue efforts in Nepal after this year’s earthquake. Credit: Getty

8. Jamming their signals doesn’t take them down

Todd Humphreys says that another myth he runs into a lot is the idea that we can drop drones out of the sky by jamming their communication signals. But he says almost all GPS-guided drones have a failsafe for just such an event called “lost link protocol.” This protocol ensures that a jammed drone will automatically guide itself to a safe, predesignated location, which a hacker can’t change.

“What’s more, drones can be configured to ignore communications from the ground during flight,” he explains. “In this mode, no one, not even a legitimate operator, could deter them from executing their mission. This ‘I can’t hear you’ mode might be attractive to vandals or terrorists who want to turn their fixed-wing drone into a home-brew cruise missile. This is essentially how the original drone, the V1 flying bomb, operated.”

9. They won’t be delivering your mail (or your pizza) anytime soon

Many people think drones will eventually buzz around neighborhoods and drop packages on stoops like weird flying robotic milkmen. But such a world is still be a way’s off.

Mary Cummings says delivery drones can’t go very far, and they don’t do well at all in bad weather. She says we might see some in the future; but that more likely we’ll see them used for search-and-rescue missions. Drones already have already saved lost hikers, for example, and there are plans to deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach areas or to deliver humanitarian aid in war zones.

But it’s not going to be happening quickly. Cummings says: “We need a lot of work in developing new air traffic control paradigms and also making sure this new technology is robust in the face of weather and human ill intent. My seven-year-old would definitely throw rocks at a drone trying to land.”

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

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