Eric Joe was flying his homebuilt hexacopter drone above his parents’ Modesto, California, orchard when his parents’ neighbor, Brett McBay, blasted the drone out of the sky with a shotgun.

According to Joe, McBay told him that the drone had been flying over his property, accused Joe of “testing surveillance,” and said that he had mistaken it for a CIA surveillance tool, Ars Technica reports. A series of rather surreal emails followed. They start with Joe’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement, “I have to give credit to the McBay school of marksmanship.”

That’s followed by McBay’s reply, “next time let us know your [sic] testing surveillance equipment in our area.”

Most of the hexacopter survived the crash intact, but Joe ended up needing to replace about $700 worth of equipment, which he asked McBay to cover, in light of the fact that he’d shot the drone down, and all. McBay said he would split the cost with Joe, but declined to pay the full amount, so Joe took his neighbor to court - and won.

Property owners have legitimate concerns about camera-wielding drones photographing their property, where the law says there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy, but it’s not yet clear what legal recourse you have if your neighbor is using a drone to peep into your bedroom window or just to be nosy about your gardening methods. Legal responses to trespassing vary from state to state, and the courts haven’t agreed yet whether drone flights count as trespassing.

California’s state legislature introduced a bill in February that would include drone flights over private property in the state’s definition of trespassing, but other states are still sorting out the issue, and even the FAA is still working out how to regulate drone flights. Part of the issue is that it’s not clear how much airspace property owners can claim. Traditionally, property ownership extended into the air above the property and into the ground beneath it, but the development of flight forced some changes to that definition, and now the development of drones is forcing the legal system, and the FAA, to figure out where property stops and navigable airspace begins. A Wisconsin lawyer wrote a great overview of the issues.

500 feet seems to be the altitude that’s being discussed in most jurisdictions, but that’s a pretty arbitrary definition and may not resolve all the issues. With a good camera, you can invade the living daylights out of someone’s privacy from 600 feet away, after all. And FAA safety guidelines for model aircraft, including drones, say they should operate below 400 feet, which would mean that, to avoid trespass, drone operators just shouldn’t overfly private property without permission - which actually seems like a good rule.

Of course, Joe says that his drone wasn’t over the McBay’s property at all, and he says that he has the GPS data to prove it, since his hexacopter’s GPS unit survived being shot down. At most, he says, the drone briefly flew above the county road between the two properties, so it’s possible that McBay misjudged where the drone was at that point. The judge ruled in Joe’s favor last month, accepting his version of events, and it looks like McBay will have to pay damages.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you think you’re defending your privacy, make sure you know the laws in your area - and make sure you’re right.

Top image: Eric Joe via Ars Technica

[Ars Technica]

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In this AP file photo from May 2000, activists watch, in front of the South Carolina Statehouse, as the Confederate flag burns; on the left, a Nazi flag has already been burned. The Confederate flag flew atop the statehouse’s dome until later that year.

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

What goes up must come down, and sometimes the ways in which gravity wins aren’t pretty. A SpaceX rocket sending supplies to the International Space Station exploded in the skies off the coast of Florida this morning, and weather radar was able to track what was left of the rocket as it fell into the Atlantic Ocean.

The SpaceX rocket, carrying 4,000 pounds of supplies for the three astronauts aboard the I.S.S., exploded about two minutes after takeoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Details about the explosion are scarce right now, with company CEO Elon Musk saying that preliminary data indicated that there was an “overpressure event” with the upper stage liquid oxygen tank before the failure.

About half an hour after the failed launch, the Doppler weather radar site in Melbourne, Florida, began picking up some returns about 45 miles to the northeast of the launch site. The first sign of debris showed up on radar around 10:45 AM EDT, and steadily grew stronger for the next hour.

There were thunderstorms in the area (which likely had no effect on the rocket launch) at the time, and it’s easy to mix up which returns are precipitation and which returns are the blown-up remains of years of hopes and dreams smoldering its way to a watery grave. Thanks to recent upgrades in technology, we can determine what’s rain and what’s rocket by looking at a product called “correlation coefficient.”

New technology recently added to weather radar sites across the country allows them to not only see the intensity and direction of precipitation, but the size and shape of objects it detects. Objects that are mostly uniform in shape (like raindrops) have a high correlation coefficient, while objects that widely vary in size and shape (such as tornado debris, or in this case, rocket debris) have a very low correlation coefficient.

The above radar animation shows correlation coefficient between about 10:20 AM—around the time of the explosion—and 11:45 AM. The reddish/purple colors show thunderstorms over land, while the patch of blue over the water off the coast of New Smyrna Beach shows the variasize rocket debris as it aims whichever sharks are swimming to shore to feast on swimmers this afternoon.

One of the many reasons Cape Canaveral was chosen as the main rocket launch site in the United States is that rockets are over nothing but ocean as they soar downrange into space, so when they explode—and some will explode—the weighty, flaming remains don’t destroy entire towns, since this is generally considered to be a bad thing.

The good news, however, is that rockets failing in a spectacular fashion over the open water allows us to gawk at weather radar and watch the debris fall into the ocean. Doppler weather radar is able to detect just about anything in the beam’s way—usually we only care about precipitation, but radar can often show us the location and movement of swarms of bugs, flocks of birds, smoke from fires, debris swirling around in tornadoes, airplanes, and even highway traffic or trains speeding down railroad tracks if the beam gets inverted on cool mornings.

Weather radar was able to track the debris of the Space Shuttle Columbia after it broke apart in the atmosphere over Texas, and more recently, radar in Delaware tracked the toxic cloud of smoke that resulted from the spectacular explosion of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket seconds after launch on Wallops Island, Virginia.

[Images: Gibson Ridge]

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

In February, three Massachusetts high schoolers building a website about James “Whitey” Bulger for a National History Day competition on leadership and legacy wrote a letter to the Boston crime boss, serving two consecutive life sentences in a federal penitentiary in Florida. And guess what! He wrote back.

The Boston Globe reports that Mollykate Rodenbush, Brittany Tainsh, and Michaela Arguin chose Bulger because they wanted to do something unconventional. Unfortunately, Bulger did not answer their questions about leadership. “It wasn’t what we were expecting at all,” said Tainsh. “He did not really reply to any of our actual questions. He was very apologetic.”

Bulger recommends that the three girls look to the veterans being treated at Walter Reed Hospital for thoughts on leadership, referring to himself as “best forgotten.”

He continues:

My life was wasted and spent foolishly, brought shame and suffering on my parents and siblings and will end soon — Advice is a cheap commodity some seek it from me about crime — I know only thing for sure — If you want to make crime pay — “Go to Law School.”

“I think the most interesting aspect of the letter is that he was almost regretful and nostalgic, but not in a positive way,” Rodenbush said. “It was a completely different side to what he shows to everyone else,” Arguin said. “It was kind of weird we kind of had an impact on him, three high school girls. You wouldn’t expect that. It was really shocking.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed to hear arguments for Bulger’s request to have his 2013 conviction overturned on July 27.

The full text of the letter, via the Globe, is below.

Feb. 24, 2015

1:10 a.m.

Hello, Brittany:

I’m sorry but I can’t help you with your school project — There are many people more deserving of your time and interests. I’m a myth created by the media to help them generate Revenue and to hurt a relation because they didn’t appreciate his independence and daring to support an agenda they opposed.

May I suggest you and Molly create a website about the heroic service men of Mass. that are patients in, for instance, Walter Reed Veteran Hospital — good men isolated from society due to war wounds — life for some in pain and loneliness — hearing from school girls that care would do wonders for their morale and recovery.

Don’t waste your time on such as I — we are society’s lower, best forgotten, not looked to for advice on “Leadership”. I’m a 9th grade dropout from school and took the wrong road — my brother 5 years younger applied himself in school and worked hard and spent 40 years in Mass State House and retired and was the President of Mass Senate in State House for second term and President of U. Mass after Retirement. Had 9 children all college graduates and 4 lawyers among them. A Better Man than I.

My life was wasted and spent foolishly, brought shame and suffering on my parents and siblings and will end soon — Advice is a cheap commodity some seek it from me about crime — I know only thing for sure — If you want to make crime pay — “Go to Law School.”

Brittany Best of Luck in the future to you and Molly and Michaela.

Sincerely James Bulger

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

“By... October, Alex was communicating with more than a dozen people who openly admired the Islamic State. Her life, which had mostly seemed like a blurred series of babysitting shifts and lonely weekends roaming the mall, was now filled with encouragement and tutorials from her online friends.”

David Sweat, the surviving Clinton Correctional Facility escapee, was reportedly shot twice by a state trooper on Sunday near Constable, N.Y, just south of the Canadian border. According to CNN, Sweat is in custody and in critical condition. From The New York Times:

The shooting occurred after a State Police sergeant saw Mr. Sweat walking down a road toward him, according to one of the people. The sergeant ordered Mr. Sweat to stop, but he broke into a run and the sergeant, a firearms instructor, opened fire, the person said. It was not immediately clear how many shots were fired or whether Mr. Sweat was armed.

The Press-Republican reports that no officers were injured in the shooting.

Two days ago, Richard Matt was shot and killed by a federal agent. An autopsy released on Sunday revealed that Matt was shot three times in the head. (No, the other head.)

According to the Times, the United States Border and Customs Protection agent who killed Matt on Friday said he opened fire when Matt, who was carrying a 20-gauge shotgun, did not raise his hands when ordered to do so.

Matt was killed in the woods around Malone, NY—approximately 40 miles from Clinton Correctional.

UPDATE 10:25 p.m.: According to CNN, hospital officials say that Sweat is currently in critical condition and is being attended to by “emergency, trauma, intensive care, radiology and vascular surgery specialists.”

UPDATE 4:30 p.m.: According to the Press-Republican, Sweat is in stable condition, contradicting earlier reports of serious injury.

UPDATE 4:15 p.m.: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has confirmed Sweat’s capture on Twitter.

BREAKING: #DavidSweat of the #PrisonBreakNY captured. Sleep peacefully New York.

June 28, 2015

UPDATE 4:10 p.m.: Citing a law enforcement source, The Buffalo News reports that Sweat is alive but bleeding badly with “life-threatening” wounds.

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

According to Buzzfeed, the FBI confirmed on Sunday that federal officials are investigating a series of fires that recently hit four predominantly black Southern churches, although the agency denied there was any evidence connecting the blazes at this time.

“They’re being investigated to determine who is responsible and what motives are behind them,” an FBI spokesperson told the site. “I’m not sure there is any reason to link them together at this point.”

Of the fires—which broke out this week in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina—three have been ruled arsons, with the cause of the fourth still being investigated. From Raw Story:

On Monday, someone set fire to College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church in Tennessee, according to local WATE. The arsonist placed bales of hay outside the church doors and lit them ablaze, fire officials told the station. They also burned the church van.

On Tuesday, God’s Power Church of Christ in Georgia was intentionally set on fire, authorities told ABC News. Electronics and other equipment were also stolen in the early morning fire. Authorities told reporters there is “no evidence” of a hate crime.

On Wednesday, Briar Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina burned in the middle of the night, causing $250,000 in damage, NBC News reports. Authorities are investigating whether the intentional blaze was a hate crime. It took 75 firefighters to bring it under control.

On Friday, Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in South Carolina, was virtually destroyed in an overnight blaze, the Aiken Standard reports. While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, the FBI has been called in.

But while the arsonists have yet to be identified, at least one church leader has already called for compassion.

“Honestly I can speak for this church,” Briar Creek Road Baptist Church pastor Mannix Kinsey told WBTV on Wednesday. “That we’ve already forgiven them and we want to move forward. And we are hoping this is an opportunity for Christ to show himself in their hearts.”

[Image via WBTV]

On Sunday, avant-garde performance artist Shia LaBeouf introduced his latest character, the white rapper persona “Shia LaBeouf,” with a freewheeling freestyle touching on everything from how he eats rivals (like tuna casserole) to how he gets it (like he’s got it).

In the undated, apparently recent footage, the rattail aficionado spits tepid fire for almost three minutes, dropping references to potatoes, astronomer Galileo Galilei and then potatoes again for some reason.

To be fair, for a genuinely spontaneous freestyle, LaBeouf’s performance could have been a lot worse. Still, it’s the sort of thing that partygoers would briskly walk away from if your name wasn’t “Transformers star Shia LaBeouf”—an association the MC really wishes you’d forget about, by the way.

“Transformers is the dummy rap,” says LaBeouf in the video, “and I’m so past that.”

[h/t Uproxx]

Rough week for this guy.

A staple of every single awards show is a celebrity reading copy off a teleprompter that everyone in the world knows they don’t believe in the slightest, but rarely does the presenter break kayfabe and laugh openly in the face of the people she is being forced to compliment. But that’s what happened tonight at the BET Awards when host Tracee Ellis Ross had to introduce a performance by Chris Brown and Kylie Jenner’s boyfriend Tyga.

Can we revisit that shade moment right quick? pic.twitter.com/1oieqmFiu3

June 29, 2015

“Equally a triple threat,” Ross’ script reads, and that’s about the only part she could get through while maintaining a straight face. After calling the duo “young, sexy, and black,” Ross laughs openly, then says the words “Tyga and Chris Brown” as if someone off camera is holding a loved one hostage.

This is the face of someone performing her job under extreme duress.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

On Sunday, a small plane crashed into a house in Plainville, Massachusetts, killing all three on board and leaving the residence “fully engulfed” in flames, CBS News reports.

According to The Boston Globe, neighbors say a family of four lived in the house, all of whom escaped uninjured.

“A miracle that the four occupants of the home managed to get out unscathed,” Massachusetts State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan told WCVB.

FAA officials say the crash occurred at around 5:15 p.m., but area residents report “hearing and seeing something amiss” before the impact. From The Sun Chronicle:

Mike Brown, of 1 Bridle Path, said he was outside barbecuing when he heard the plane and said when he looked up, he saw the plane begin to bank. He said the engine of the plane did not sound normal and that it sounded like it was sputtering. He then heard a crash and saw smoke.

The New York Daily News reports that the National Transportation Safety Board has been dispatched to the scene and is expected to arrive Monday.

[Image via YouTube/The Sun Chronicle]

On Sunday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a blistering condemnation of the Supreme Court’s recent same-sex marriage ruling, calling it “a lawless decision by an activist Court” and telling government officials they could refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on religious grounds.

“This newly invented federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage should peaceably coexist alongside longstanding constitutional and statutory rights, including the rights to free exercise of religion and speech,” wrote Paxton in a formal legal opinion. “County clerks and their employees retain religious freedoms that may allow accommodation of their religious objections to issuing same-sex marriage licenses.”

Critics of the memo have accused Paxton of supporting illegal discrimination. From the Austin American-Statesmen:

Austin lawyer Jody Scheske said Paxton’s opinion was legally and morally wrong.

“We settled the idea that public officials can pick which citizens to serve or not in the ’50s and ’60s civil rights litigation. They cannot,” Scheske said.

Formal attorney general opinions, which not binding but are considered legally persuasive, typically take six months to be issued.

In his opinion, Paxton warned that any official that denied a marriage license to a same-sex couple could face litigation, but promised, “I will do everything I can from this office to be a public voice for those standing in defense of their rights.”

[Image via AP Images]

The BET Awards were nearly four hours long this year. Nick Minaj beginning an acceptance speech and then pausing to ask what the award was even for is a good summation of how that felt.

Nicki Minaj accepts award, then has to ask what it was for pic.twitter.com/foSspMEWpk

June 29, 2015

Nicki Minaj has an entire closet full of BET Awards.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

According to a report in the Guardian, Monica Lewinsky came this close to sitting in the same box as Al Gore this weekend at Cannes before organizers wised up and tossed her out—narrowly averting a crisis, maybe, if this had happened in say, 1998. Mon dieu, quelle horreur. Can you even imagine?

It’s unclear from the Guardian’s report who tossed Lewinsky out of the box, but from what they’ve reported it definitely wasn’t her choice:

On Saturday, Lewinsky was invited to sit in the mayoral box for VIPs at the Palais de Festivals on the last night of the Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Gore, who served as vice-president to Clinton, was at the festival to receive the LionHeart, an honorary award presented to an individual who “through innovative use of commercial brand power has made a significant and positive difference to people or the planet”.

Lewinsky did not take up her seat in the box. Instead she joined the main audience, although it is not clear if the ticket was rescinded by the organisers of Cannes Lions or at the request of Gore’s team.

PR advisers for Lewinsky declined to comment on the incident.

Neither Gore’s PR advisers or Cannes Lions had responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

How gauche! Good thing someone was looking out for Gore’s reputation.

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

At a certain point, you stop being shocked by how many people have died here. The shock is how many are still alive.

The spot is easy to get to, and anyone is allowed there. Start at the grandstands and walk down the hill. Go past the t-shirt tent and the ice cream vans and the stunt rider show. Keep going past the parking lot and the picnic field, hop the little stone wall and walk through the public garden. It’s just past the bridge, the back side of a school. Perch yourself up against the fence and you’ll be just a few feet from them.

The riders. They’re doing 160, 170, 180 mph here, depending on the bike. It’ll be 190 at the bottom of the hill, called Bray Hill, where there’s a compression and the bike scrapes the ground before it hops up and wheelies.

You think of them as burly, out-of-the-past men. But seeing them on these bikes, even the biggest and the fastest ones, the impression isn’t of bravery or daring.

It’s fragility.

You only get a fraction of a second watching them coming, steaming down the hill on this two lane road. But you get a few seconds longer watching them going. They shoot past you in a flash, but there’s a couple moments to take in how they bend right up to the street gutter, nearly graze the curb, then drop away into the horizon.

Here at the Isle of Man TT Race, the infamously deadly motorcycle race that’s been running on public streets on this tiny island in the Irish Sea since 1907, the sound is hard to process. These races are the last of their kind — big feature races held on public roads.

In the earliest days of motorsports, nearly every major race was held on public roads. The last one of the first great era was the event that nearly banned motor racing altogether, the 1903 Paris-Madrid race. It was believed to be the deadliest up to its time. Eight dead, rumors of over a hundred injured. The reason for the huge number of wrecks was that the cars were faster than any of the turn of the century French or Spanish spectators could imagine. A number of drivers crashed avoiding people and children standing right in the middle of the road, not expecting a car to come down the road much faster than a horse and buggy.

And that’s what the noise is like here at the TT. You hear the bikes coming for what seems like an eternity, and they still shoot past you before you turn to look. It’s hard to whip your head fast enough to catch the riders go by. They pass you with such physical violence that it’s like the exhaust’s sound waves have collapsed into a solid.

Here, atop Bray Hill, the lasting impression is seeing the bike and the rider in a rear silhouette. The pair is widest in the middle, around the engine. It’s narrow at the top, peaking at the rider’s helmet, and narrower still at the bottom. You see just how thin the tire is, one small strip of a contact patch connecting this human to the ground. The whole shape looks like a flickering candle.

Everyone outside the TT races talks about the deaths. It’s hard not to. More than 200 people have died on the Snaefell Mountain Course. The island shuts down its 37-mile ring road every morning and reopens it every evening for two weeks in the early summer for racing. The course starts in the main town and snakes past open fields, through moors, into woods, and up past the Isle’s tallest mountain, Snaefell.

The sharpest corners and objects get some kind of protection — I saw hay bales on some of the more vicious looking embankments, and I saw a what looked like a mattress wrapped around a telephone box — but most of the course is just as it is for normal traffic.

The difference in the race is that these riders face the road’s hundreds of corners flat out.

Experience is the only way to survive racing in the TT. There’s a great video by the TT’s current most popular rider, the shitpiss straight-talking truck mechanic Guy Martin, where he narrates the course. He describes corners by how many days or weeks of practice it takes to get them right. It was the fastest TT ever, this year, won by one of the oldest riders in the field. Here’s the veteran rider himself, number one John McGuinness, on his 1000cc Honda.

Many of those who die aren’t even racers. They’re public amateurs trying their own on the public roads of the Isle. They’re even let loose on the course one day in the middle of the two-week spectacle that is the TT.

They call that day Mad Sunday, and they make the infamous mountain section of the course one-way, just like in the races. If you’re looking for the most hilariously tasteless merchandise to bring back from the IOM, get yourself something with Mad Sunday printed on it.

When I found myself at the TT races this year, shipped out by Subaru to tout their sponsorship of the event, the focus wasn’t on death at all. I sort of expected that people would have a cavalier attitude about risk and fatality. The Isle of Man has long been an anti-Health And Safety place. I always knew it as the little independent island where (outside of the small seaside resort towns) there were no speed limits.

Indeed that’s why there’s racing at the Isle of Man at all. Back around the turn of the century, the UK held a strict 25 mph speed limit on all of its roads and explicitly banned any motor racing on public highways.

That’s why the legendary circuits of other European countries like France and Italy are road courses, that’s why England is the site of the first purpose-built motor racing circuit (Brooklands, near London), and that’s why motorcycle enthusiasts started taking the ferry to the Isle of Man to hold their competitive events over a hundred years ago.

I thought this sort of free spirit in legal choice would extend to people’s feelings about the riders. I thought they would be maybe a bit flippant about assuming personal risk, or knowing the dangers, or not having the nanny state hold anyone’s hand.

But there’s real sadness when there’s a death at the TT. One rider died before I even arrived, during practice. A Frenchman. He crashed on a straight section of the course. Nobody is exactly sure why he lost it.

And another rider nearly lost his life while I was there, but was taken to a hospital and saved. Here’s a picture of him, Jamie Hamilton. I took it a few hours before he was airlifted away from his crash. At 24, he’s a year younger than I am.

Hamilton’s crash red-flagged the top race at the Isle of Man, the Senior TT. It’s the one with the fastest bikes, the ones that break 200 mph.

You have to race for years in lower classes of motorcycles before you’re allowed to enter the Senior TT. The race was stopped for an hour before the announcer even gave news of his condition, or any details of the crash. It was a long hour. People didn’t look exactly ashamed that they were cheering on this race not long before, but it wasn’t far off. Grey and anxious and concerned.

The Isle of Man itself is a very small place. “A rock in the Irish sea with 80,000 alcoholics,” one local called it. There aren’t a lot of hotel rooms, so some families put up racers in their homes. Every local I talked to seemed to know a rider one way or another. Deaths aren’t brushed away here; they’re mourned.

Given the loss of life that happens each year, it’s only natural wonder why the race is still allowed. The locals wonder this too. There are fears that the race could get shut down any year. It’s one thing for the riders to die, but if a spectator was killed, or if there was a particularly horrible series of wrecks, the TT could be resigned to history. And it’s not like the motorcycles running in the race are getting slower each year — quite the opposite. One has to imagine if the day will come soon when the bikes will be too much for these old roads.

But much as the the TT races already feel like part of history as it is, the event has been “out of its time” for nearly a quarter of its existence. The Isle’s tourism board took over the management of the races back in 1989, presumably starting the event’s current trajectory towards increasing international attention even as the race stays very much un-sanitized and pre-modern.

The more I spoke to people about the races in the face of their danger, the more I was left with a lot of double talk. I expected a kind of nihilistic bravado from the actual entrants of the race. McGuinness did once refer to TT racers as “a bunch of hard-nosed bastards,” after all. The TT does have a certain kind of cultish magnetism, an embodiment of some pent up self-destructive desire to ride so fast the wind tears you to shreds.

But the riders said they weren’t going because they thought they might die. They said they went specifically because they believed that they would survive and finish and succeed.

And then just as quickly as they started to affirm the living spirit of the race, they also talked about the “moments” they’ve had out on the course. When death was a few inches away. When they scraped that curb they were only supposed to graze. Ride along with them and they’ll readily point out each and every corner they know where another rider, another friend, ate it.

It’s the same with the locals. Their voices turn somber when I bring up death, but then they’ll turn around and tell you horror stories from when things go wrong on the TT. Midair impacts turning humans into rag dolls. Body bags on front lawns. Guts spilling out of chests. What I heard from a mechanic whose son runs in amateur auto races on the Isle — forget horror, they sounded like war stories. They’re anxious as the rest of us, maybe unsure of their role in this deadly circus.

But they keep showing up every year, all in a way that defies any sort of logic. The tourists, the sportbike pilgrims, the locals, the racers. The momentum keeps rolling along, like a tire skipping across a cat’s eye at 200.

Photo Credits: Raphael Orlove

Top illustration credit Sam Woolley

Contact the author at raphael@jalopnik.com.

On Monday, Mitchelle Blair pleaded guilty to murdering two of her children and storing their bodies in the freezer of her Detroit home. Police found the bodies of her 13-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son while carrying out an eviction notice in March.

“I don’t regret none of this,” Blair told Judge Dana Hathaway, according to ABC News. “I don’t feel no remorse for the death of those demons.”

Blair claimed she intended to kill her daughter Stoni, who she said “gang-raped” her then six-year-old son. “She raped my son,” Blair said about Stoni, according to MLive. “I intentionally killed her.”

From MLive:

Hathaway asked: “It wasn’t an accident?”

“No, not at all, and if I had the chance to do it again, I would,” Blair said. She said the death of Stephen was accidental, but she would have been “proud” if it were intentional.

Blair admits to choking Stoni and Stephen, suffocating them by putting bags over their heads until they lost consciousness, repeated beatings and throwing scalding water on them.

The autopsies revealed both children were malnourished, although Blair admits only to starving Stoni, whom she fed one bowl of oatmeal a day.

When asked why she didn’t call police about the alleged sexual abuse, Blair said she was worried her other children would be taken away from her.

Blair, who also has a 17-year-old daughter, will be sentenced to life in prison.

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

A Charlotte-bound flight was diverted to Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday evening due to strong storms over the Queen City. As if landing in South Carolina against your will isn’t bad enough, a storm developed over Columbia and zapped a passenger as she got off the U.S. Airways Express flight.

U.S. Airways Express flight 5137 completed its flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Charlotte, but the flight landed in Columbia due to bad weather. Diversions aren’t too unusual when bad weather affects a major hub, especially when it comes to regional jets with smaller fuel tanks, but it is unusual that the storms exact revenge on the storm-weary travelers.

Local news stations are short on details, but they all report that the woman was listed in stable condition at a Columbia hospital after the incident, a fate I would prefer to being stuck in Concourse E with 15,000 other people for hours on end while the toxic combination of fumes from Mrs. Fields’ cookies and Axe body spray wafts through the terminal.

Almost every commercial airplane is struck by lightning at least once in its lifetime, but much more often for those that travel through stormy parts of the world. Commercial airplanes are designed to handle most lightning strikes with ease, and airlines pump inert gasses into the tanks of larger planes so sparks don’t trigger explosions. Passengers are completely safe in an airplane when lightning strikes, but not so much when they’re getting out of one, apparently.

[Image: Getty Images | Correction: American Airlines informs me that the flight was under the U.S. Airways Express branding, not American Eagle as originally stated in the article.]

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

Donald Trump just got himself fired from NBC for being the big racist moron everyone always knew he could be.

Just days after Univision cut all ties with Trump, NBC followed suit, announcing the network has dropped the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants over his idiot remarks.

(Trump, of course, announced his presidential candidacy last week by declaring that he believes most Mexicans to be drug-addicted rapists. Turns out not many people agree.)

“Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump,” NBC said in a statement. “At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values.”

The Celebrity Apprentice is reportedly slated to stay on the network’s lineup, but a spokesperson says Trump will not appear on the show.

The full statement below:

NBC: "Due to recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump" on immigrants it is ending business relationship w/him. pic.twitter.com/Bii3z2xfKh

June 29, 2015

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Vague references to American tradition are all well and good when you’re just trying to move some madras shorts—but when you’re decorating your house you should make sure that the fantasy old-timey United States you’re worshipping isn’t actually fantasy old-time Confederate States of America. Just ask J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler.

Drexler, currently under fire as J. Crew undergoes layoffs, is trying to sell his 30-acre Hamptons compound for $85 million dollars. In the living room, as captured by marketing photos published by brokerage Douglas Elliman, there is a Confederate flag, framed and hanging on the wall.

Now, to be fair to Drexler, it’s not the Confederate flag that most people think of when they think “Confederate flag” (actually the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia). Rather, it’s the first official flag of the Confederate States of America—the so-called “Stars and Bars.”

When the pictures of Drexler’s property—once owned by Andy Warhol—were published on Curbed earlier this month, a commenter pointed out the flag’s meaning. Douglas Elliman have since removed the photograph from their listing, “because somebody pointed it out on some website,” said broker Paul Brennan.

“Somebody had to be pretty astute to pick up on that,” Brennan said. (Someone astute enough to remember that at no point were there seven states in the Union.) “Who in their right mind would think, Hey, there’s a Confederate flag, I’m gonna hang that on my wall?” Who, indeed!

A spokesperson for J. Crew did not return a request for comment.

Asked whether Drexler, who acquired the compound for $27 million in 2007, knew that he had a Confederate flag hanging on his wall, Brennan said, “I don’t think so. Why don’t you ask the decorator?” Asked whether the flag was still hanging on the wall: “I don’t know. I’ll go check later.”

Sales at J. Crew fell 5.2 percent in the first quarter this year, Bloomberg reported this month, and Drexler announced that 175 jobs were going to be cut. One of the executives who carried out some of these firings was himself fired for bragging on Instagram about not getting fired.

Drexler is reportedly also trying to sell his Tribeca apartment for $29.5 million and his Wainscott beach house for $26.5 million.

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

This weekend, as the elated masses took to the streets to celebrate Friday’s historical win for inclusiveness and equality, the hate groups of the world took it upon themselves to balance out all that joy. Or, in the case of the Orthodox Jews of the Jewish Political Action Committee, they took it upon the Mexican laborers they hired to dress up as Jews and do the protesting for them.

The New York Times ran across this ragtag group of supposedly Semitic protestors bearing signs that read things like “Judaism prohibits homosexuality” and “G-d Created Adam and Eve NOT Adam and Steve.” But upon being questioned, one of the men revealed that they were actually Mexican workers who’d been paid to show up and protest.

Protest set up across the street. Hired Latino men to dress up like Orthodox Jews. Shameful display of hate pic.twitter.com/iG5rvOAu5Y

June 28, 2015

From The New York Times:

Heshie Freed, a member of the political action committee, an Orthodox Jewish group based in Brooklyn, said that the men were supplementary troops, filling in for the Jewish students who would normally be called upon to demonstrate.

“The rabbis said that the yeshiva boys shouldn’t come out for this because of what they would see at the parade,” Mr. Freed said.

So lest the impressionable young men of the yeshiva see the odd man in a thong or two, these bigoted men of God decided it best to, instead, find some random laborers, dress them up in their holiest garb, and pay them to attempt to shame the jubilant attendees of New York’s pride parade. In which case, honestly, the kids would be better off just seeing the schmeckle.

Update 9:20 pm:

And the story gets weirder still. According to a tipster, the “Jewish Political Action Committee” may actually consist of just one man. What’s more, this isn’t his first hate-filled rodeo, as evidenced by these photos from last year’s Israel Day Parade.

If you know anything else about this bizarre little (one-man?) extremist group, send us an email here.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via David Gartenberg.