When police departments face criticism, they tend to dig in their heels, deny any wrongdoing, and accuse those who dare to point out their flaws of being crime-humping gang-lovers. That’s all very charming, but it’s nice to see Chicago police experimenting with a different approach.

Today, the Chicago PD announced, entirely of its own volition, that it would employ some modest reforms to its stop-and-frisk program. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report which found that, much like in New York, Chicago cops’ use of the practice was wildly racially biased: over a four-month period last year, there were roughly 250,000 stops that did not lead to an arrest. Seventy-five percent of those stopped were black, despite black people comprising just a third of the city’s population.

Under the new reforms, a former U.S. Magistrate judge named Arlander Keys will independently evaluate the department’s use of stop-and-frisk, publishing twice-yearly reports “to insure that stops on Chicago streets meet constitutional and legal standards,” according to a news release. It’s far from a full-scale dismantling, but it’s notable because the department did not even need to be taken to court to concede that an independent review might be a good thing. The program was announced in partnership with the ACLU.

Contrast that to what happened in New York when stop-and-frisk was challenged: the city went to federal court to defend it, and when the court decided that the city’s stops were unconstitutional, and ordered a federal monitor whose role is not dissimilar to that of Mr. Keys, the city—under Mike Bloomberg—filed an appeal. Stop-and-frisk reform ultimately came to NYC, but only after liberal-minded de Blasio was elected and dropped that appeal.

Chicago police are not perfect. Not even close. Witness the death of Rekia Boyd by the gun of Detective Dante Servin for all the evidence you need of that. But more police departments would do well to acknowledge that they are staffed not by steely and infallible demigods, but biased and emotional and unreliable people, just like everyone else.

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

In a crime that sounds as if it was from a James Bond film instead of real life, F1 driver Jenson Button and wife Jessica Michibata were robbed in a vacation home in the south of France. Burglars pumped anaesthetic gas through the home to knock the couple out before stealing over $465,000 worth of items.

According to The Sun, Button, Michibata and three friends were in the rented villa in Saint-Tropez, France, all five of whom were knocked out by gas pumped that burglars pumped through the air conditioning vents. Button and Michibata were in bed, not realizing that anything was happening until they woke up. The three friends were asleep in other rooms. Burglars waited until everyone was already asleep to make sure the robbery went off as seamless as possible.

Michibata’s three-stone diamond and platinum wedding ring was among the stolen goods. The ring alone is worth over $387,000.

A source close to the couple told The Sun that police are convinced that gas was used in the air conditioning units to knock the vacationers out, as it’s becoming an increasingly common way to rob high-dollar properties without fear of being caught. Robbers were likely staking out the property during the entire duration of their stay.

“The first they were aware was when they woke up groggy the next morning and realized the house had been turned upside down,” said the unnamed source to The Sun. “It was a terrifying experience for them to know these criminals were actually in the room with them.”

According to the unnamed source, the couple is most upset over the missing wedding ring. Michibata and Button tied the knot in December 2014. Fortunately, everyone was fine, but the source said that everyone was “unsurprisingly shaken” by the incident.

While an unnamed source in a British tabloid may not be the most reliable source to go on, the BBC cited several of the same quotes as The Sun, referring to that source as Button’s spokesman.

Per The Sun, the couple and their friends were shaken to the point where they left the day after the burglary. Police believe two criminals were working together on the robbery.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Contact the author at stef.schrader@jalopnik.com.

Abercrombie & Fitch has agreed to end its use of “on-call” scheduling, which forces workers to put their lives on hold and come into work on short notice. Banning this practice would be a good thing for a presidential candidate to promise, and then do. http://gawker.com/end-on-call-pa...

Deadspin Stop Pretending Donald Trump Is Running For President | Gizmodo Crazy people chainsawed a frozen lake to make a spinning ice carousel | Jezebel Leonardo DiCaprio Doesn’t Have Fleas in His Beard...Or Maybe He Does? | Lifehacker Jon Stewart’s Best Career Lessons |

John McAfee, an entrepreneur once associated with antivirus software and now associated with drugs and tropical murder accusations, is back in the news for illicit reasons. Police in his new home of Tennessee just busted McAfee for DUI and gun possession.http://internet.gawker.com/caught-on-tape...

According to The Jackson Sun, McAfee was “arrested Sunday night by Tennessee Highway Patrol in Henderson County,” and “charged with driving under the influence and possession of a handgun while intoxicated.” But because John McAfee is a volatile man, he took to Facebook to elaborate on the incident as only John McAfee can do (unhinged, inadvisably):

I just got a new prescription for Xanax and one pill felt good. Two seemed better. The shootout was nothing remarkable. No-one was hit.

[...]

Yes, I was arrested while under the influence of Xanax. It was a brand new prescription received the same day of the arrest (see photo) and the physician neglected to warn me about driving while taking it.

As to the weapons, I always carry them and, unless one is impaired, they are legal to possess and carry.

The shootout with the police was highly exaggerated and in fact no one was even hit by a bullet, let alone harmed by one. The Police knew me and I don’t believe their hearts were truly in the shootout, as it is not included in the official report. When I ran out of ammunition, I surrendered quietly and the officers and my self had a cigarette together and joked about my bad aim.

If there are any other questions I would suggest you call the arresting officer, I believe his name was James at 731 602 0394.

http://gawker.com/5966335/crazy-...

He continued, unprompted:

Lest anyone think I acted irresponsibly, here’s how it went down:

The day of my arrest I obtained a prescription for Xanax. People are trying to kill me and while most people might sail through such a situation unperturbed, I myself at time’s feel stessed. The Doctor said Xanax would calm me down. Unfortunately. It calmed me down too much.

The Police acted responsibly, politely and with restraint. At the sound of gunshots I naturally assumed that my ex wife had caught up with me and returned fire. Who wouldn’t. The only casualty was a 50 mph speed limit sign that0 intervened between myself and my presumed ex wife. I can’t shoot for shit on Xanax.

It seems likely he’s joking about the shootout, but given the look of that mugshot up top, the Xanax bit is plausible. McAfee is still facing a wrongful death lawsuit for the 2006 killing of a neighbor in Belize.

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

Last week, the Daily Mail ran a story about a financier who had given up big-game hunting for conservation.

Angus Murray, the money man in question, told the tabloid that he had an epiphany four years ago while on a hunt, and that he’s been giving to conservation groups ever since. The piece was accompanied by a photo of Murray posing alongside a dead ruminant, while a caption claimed that he “has devoted his life to helping endangered animals in Africa.”

The conversion story was timely, coming, as it did, just a couple of days after the exposure of Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist behind the bait-and-shoot slaughter of the famous Zimbabwean lion Cecil, had given all rich Westerners who travel to Africa to shoot things a bad name. Murray’s anti-hunting commentary also carried a lot of weight, given the awards he’s won for his jungle killings and his being named to at least one list of the greatest big game hunters of all time.

The Daily Mail story, unfortunately, is complete nonsense—something best proven by a variety of photographic evidence that has, since the story ran, all but evaporated from the internet.

Details from two photos of Angus Murray, until recently available on the website of Stone Hunting Safaris. According to their metadata, they were taken in August 2013—years after Murray supposedly stopped hunting.

By pure coincidence, I had been on the trail of Angus Murray, journalistically speaking, for several months before he showed up in the Daily Mail. I had gotten a tip that a banker with ties to the United States was making inquiries about buying citizenship in the Caribbean isle of Dominica in hopes of getting a slot on that country’s 2016 Olympics squad. (This would hardly be unprecedented.) Thomas Dorsett, secretary general of the Dominica Olympic Committee, tells me that Murray came down in the spring to talk about qualifying in shooting events, and is currently working with the Dominica Rifle Association to get sanctioned to compete in Brazil.
http://deadspin.com/dominicas-fake...

While waiting to see if Murray would actually pull off this feat of Olympian fakery, I began researching the background of the allegedly soon-to-be Dominican. I learned that Murray was born in Australia and studied in London; jumped into banking in the United States; founded Castlestone Management, a hedge fund registered in the British Virgin Islands; dealt with his fund’s offices being raided for alleged record-keeping snafus in 2011; took a hiatus and closed some European outposts; and, eventually, returned as CEO of the fund.

Most of what I learned about Murray, though, had to do with him and dead animals. It turned out that the internet was teeming with shots of Murray standing over or kneeling beside big things he’d ostensibly killed.

Murray is (or was), among other things, a seriously renowned lion hunter. Last November, Hunt Forever—a blog for Safari Club International members—credited him with the first- and fifth-best African lion kills ever, posting shots of Murray and his big dead victims in slideshow format.

Two of the few shots of Angus Murray posing alongside dead lions that haven’t been pulled offline recently, as they can be seen on Hunt Forever.

The internet actually had lots of photos of Murray with different dead lions at one point. The largest treasure trove of gruesomeness was found on the site of Stone Hunting Safaris, a full-service big-game hunting firm, or “outfitter,” with headquarters in Hawick, South Africa. There I found all sorts of photo galleries, broken up by type of dead animal. There were hippos and elephants and various jungle cats, and as far as I could tell, Murray showed up in every category except “rhino,” usually more than once. I’d never seen anything like it. I figured Murray’s man cave must resemble a Noah’s Ark of death.

These photo galleries have disappeared over the last week. When the Daily Mail asked Murray about one particular set of photos showing him posing with a dead lion, he asserted that the lion had been trapped in a snare and that he’d killed it as an act of mercy at the behest of local government. He and Stone Hunting Safaris denied the tabloid permission to run the photos, and, after being contacted by the Daily Mail, the hunting outfitter closed down its site, so that the most graphic evidence of what Murray does for kicks disappeared just like that.

The article says flatly that Murray denied ever using safari guides. (“Mr. Murray claims he never paid a tour company to take him on a hunt,” according to the Daily Mail.) It’s a difficult claim to swallow—but far from the most implausible element of his conversation narrative.

Detail from a photo which was until recently available on the website of Stone Hunting Safaris, a tour company offering guide services to hunters. According to its metadata, the photo was taken in April 2005, suggesting a long relationship with the tour company.

The main thrust of the Daily Mail report, after all, is that a conscience-stricken Murray gave up hunting in 2011 and has since nobly dedicated himself to the protection of wildlife. (“Mr Murray,” it reads, to be precise, “said he put down his gun four years ago when he realised he was wrong.”)

In 2014, though, Murray was honored by the committee of the Carlo Caldesi Awards, a regal international big-game hunting body based in Italy, for having killed an African elephant with tusks weighing 187 pounds. Jason Stone and Stone Hunting Safaris got credit with assisting the hunt. According to the Caldesi Awards entry regulations, only things killed “during the two (2) full years preceding January 1st of the year in which the award will be presented” are eligible. That would date the kill to after Murray’s conversion. (He also won acclaim from the Caldesi committee in 2010 and 2013 for shooting African lions.)

Meanwhile, at the Safari Club International’s 2015 convention, which brought more than 20,000 hunting enthusiasts from around the globe to Las Vegas this February, the group gave Murray an award for outstanding achievement in hunting the greater kudu—a large species of antelope—during the 2013-14 season. SCI released a photo of Murray posing with the trophy (at left) which celebrates his killing success with a crossbow—the same weapon used by dentist Palmer to kill Cecil. The plate reads, “Safari Club International/2013-2014 Major Award/1st Place/Crossbow/Angus Murray/Southern Greater Kudu/South Africa - 144 0/8.”

And as if this all this wasn’t enough of a hint that the conversion tale was bunk, one associate of Murray’s tells me the man spent several weeks in South Africa hunting last summer.

“He was using a drone to locate the herds,” says the associate, who requested anonymity given the negative publicity surrounding all things hunting since the killing of Cecil.

Murray has, interestingly, previously struck the pose of animal savior. The blog of a group called the International Anti-Poaching Foundation ran a piece in 2013 saying that Murray was trying to attract big donors for a fund he’d started in hopes of preserving a variety of jungle animals, including elephants.

“These are the animals that I, as a child, grew to love and adore from watching shows presented by David Attenborough,” Murray told the IAPF writer. “It is these same animals that we must protect for the survival of our planet and the future of our children.”

Nice childhood memories, but the internet contains plenty of visual hints that the grownup Murray fancies his elephants dead. Other big, lumbering jungle animals have every right to feel afraid when Murray’s in their hemisphere, too. An associate of Murray’s tells me that he was the client shown killing an inert buffalo on a company hunt in a Youtube video embedded, until recently, on Stone Hunting Safari’s Facebook page. (More on that in a moment.)

At left, a detail from a photo of Angus Murray posing with the elephant for whose death he won a 2014 Carlo Caldesi award; at right, a detail from a shot available on the Stone Hunting Safaris website. It was taken in September 2012, according to its metadata; the URL of the photo ends “101.2-X-86-pounds-taken-by-Angus-Murray.jpg”

I contacted Murray after the Daily Mail story ran. Asked if the piece was correct about when he gave up hunting, he at first said that it should have read that he had “quit hunting big game in 2011.” Asked about the awards that came after that date, he claimed that the animals killed to win those awards “would have been taken prior to that time.” Told that the Robesi rules clearly state that all 2014 awardees came after 2011, he said, “I can’t explain the discrepancy.”

As for his 2015 SCI award, Murray said, “That’s for a kudu,” by which he meant that the dead animal that brought him the trophy was not big game. (Greater kudus stand five feet tall at the shoulder and weigh from 400 to 600 pounds.) I pointed out that, kudus aside, I’d found plenty of evidence suggesting that he’d been hunting what everybody would consider to be big game—elephants, for example—after purportedly realizing in 2011 that such hunting was wrong. Murray said that only animals taken on jungle hunts lasting “between 21 and 28 days” qualify as big game.

When I indicated that Murray’s story appeared to be changing during the course of our conversation—few people would say someone had given up hunting just because he had stopped going on shooting expeditions of at least three weeks—he said, “I have plenty of money and I’m going to sue you.”

In a still from a since-deleted video, a man whom an associate says is Angus Murray stalks prey.

Many, many photos of Murray posing with various jungle animals he’d apparently killed disappeared from the internet as the outrage over the killing of Cecil went global. Stone Hunting Safaris’ photo galleries, along with most of the rest of the company’s website, vanished around the time the Daily Mail story went up. The pages that formerly held the Safari Club International’s hunting record books—which contained several references to Murray and pictures of him and his prey—also suddenly went offline this week. By a fluke, I happened to have downloaded dozens of these sad, awful photos, details from a few of the more significant of which you can see above. But the broad disappearance means a few more people will buy into the recent tale about Murray’s transformation from killer to conservationist.

“I have no desire to distance myself from what I have done,” Murray told me. He says he had no role in the disappearance of photos of him and dead animals. He says a lot of things.

After our conversation, I emailed Murray asking him to confirm that it was indeed him killing a buffalo in the Youtube video, as I was told by an associate. He declined to respond. But within hours of my query, the clip—a perfect jungle snuff film—was removed.

Know more about Angus Murray’s exploits, or anything else we should be aware of? Contact the author at dave.mckenna@deadspin.com. Top image by Deadspin, original photo via Stone Hunting Safaris.

Newly released surveillance video may be the key to breaking open a 25-year-old museum heist, the largest and most expensive art theft in U.S. history. Federal officials this week released a tape from the day before $500 million in art was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and it raises new questions about the role of a young security guard on duty at the time.

Richard Abath, who was 23 at the time of the 1990 heist, is shown on the video letting a man into the museum through the same entrance the thieves allegedly used early the next morning to make off with 13 works, including a Vermeer, a few Rembrandts, and several Degases.

Here’s the Justice Department statement, released with the video, that describes what you’re looking at here:

The video footage released today, captured by Museum security cameras 24 hours before the Gardner heist, shows an automobile pull up next to a rear entrance of the Museum. The car matches the general description of a vehicle that was reported to have been parked outside the Museum moments prior to the theft on March 18, 1990.

The video also shows an unidentified man exiting the automobile and then being allowed inside the Museum, against Museum policy, by a security guard. That event occurred at 12:49 a.m. on March 17, 1990, almost exactly 24 hours before the thieves entered the museum through the same door.

While the images of both the vehicle and the unidentified man are low resolution, law enforcement officials hope that releasing the footage will assist with identifying the man or the vehicle in the video.

Authorities have apparently had the tape since the beginning of the investigation, but it’s not clear whether they viewed it before 2013, when the case was assigned to a new prosecutor, Robert Fisher, for a “complete re-examination,” the New York Times reports.

It’s not clear whether Abath, now 49, is being investigated again. He’s the same guard who eventually let in the thieves, posing as police officers investigating a disturbance. When the real Boston PD showed up, they found Abath and his partner bound and blindfolded in a basement.

Authorities didn’t mention Abath’s name in connection with the just-released video, and the New York Times reports they’ve generally accepted that he wasn’t involved:

Investigators have kept an eye on him and his bank accounts for the simple reason that, according to F.B.I. statistics, most art heists involve someone on the inside. But by and large, they have taken him at his word.

Mr. Abath has spoken to F.B.I. agents throughout the years, without a lawyer. In 2013, when he sought to write a book about the case, he said he had passed two lie-detector tests after the theft and had cooperated fully with investigators and sketch artists.

The museum is offering a $5 million reward for info that leads to the return of the works in good condition.

[h/t NYT]

If you’re a conservative state representative having an affair with a colleague, you have a few options. You could fess up, you could keep lying, or, if you’re Michigan State Rep. Todd Courser, you could allegedly try to plant a fake male prostitution story about yourself to deflect attention from your relationship with fellow Tea Party “gladiator” Rep. Cindy Gamrat, news of which you fear is about to break.

The Detroit News reports that, according to secretly recorded audio, Courser asked an aide to send an anonymous mass email to hundreds of influential Michigan Republicans claiming that Courser was caught having sex with a man behind a club in Lansing. Unfortunately for Courser, the aide, Ben Graham, recorded the conversation and later released it to the News.

“It will make anything else that comes out after that — that isn’t a video — mundane, tame by comparison,” Courser said in the recording. “I need a controlled burn.”

In two recordings, according to the News, neither Gamrat nor Courser corrected Graham when he described their relationship as an extramarital affair, though neither explicitly confirmed or denied it.

After learning of the scheme during a meeting the night of May 19, Graham asked for more time to decide. An hour later, he responded to Courser’s texts, saying he wouldn’t participate. From the Detroit News:

The meeting ended at about midnight and he left the law office, Graham said. An hour later, Courser asked for an answer in a text message to Graham, which he released to The News.

“If you see another way then let me know,” Courser wrote. “But if I can keep this from blowing all to hell, then I would like to give it a shot.”

Graham replied by text that he wouldn’t participate in a “cover-up” and urged his boss to resign from office.

“This kind of stuff never stays hidden. It’s going to blow up, and I can’t help cover it up,” Graham wrote. “... My best advice, consider resigning. You may be able to protect Cindy and her family and your family.”

In a reply, Courser said he didn’t plan to resign “at this point.”

“If they have something, I think a crucifixion is in order,” the lawmaker wrote in a text.

The email was sent the next day, though it’s unclear by whom.

Six weeks later, Graham was fired, as was an aide who worked for Gamrat. Since taking office in January, Courser, a married father of four, and Gamrat, a married mother of three, have worked together closely, even sharing office operations. Both are vocal opponents of gay marriage (the values of “traditional marriage” are praised on both politicians’ websites).

Courser told the News that the voice on the recording was his, though he’s refused to comment on its contents and questioned its legality.

“I’m not commenting on what happened in my office between Ben [Graham] and I inside here,” he said. “... I don’t have any comment at all.”

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

The Wall Street Journal today states that roughly 30 percent of Americans have a criminal record of some sort. We’ve been over this before, but let’s take this opportunity to discuss exactly why the figure is so horrible. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, 30 percent of 318 million people may feel like an abstract concept, difficult to wrap your head around. The havoc wreaked upon those tens of millions of lives, however, couldn’t be more concrete.http://gawker.com/the-american-p...

The U.S. contains just five percent of the world’s population, and yet 20 percent of the world’s prisoners. Something has gone badly awry when a nation is branding nearly one out of three of its citizens as criminals. Now let’s look at the demographics of that 30-percent slice of Americans who have a criminal record. According to a Center for American Progress report that’s cited in today’s WSJ column, over 60 percent of the people currently imprisoned in America are people of color, and black men are six times as likely to be locked up as their white counterparts. The same report states that 80 to 90 percent of the country’s criminal defendants are poor enough to qualify for a public defender—meaning that theoretically, they can not afford a lawyer on their own. Assuming that the prison population looks something like the population of arrestees, the 30 percent is largely poor and not white.

Then there are the terrors of prison itself, which are well documented. But consider what happens to a person after they’re released from jail, or even if they never go to jail in the first place. Widespread and legal employment discrimination exists against people with criminal records in the U.S., as does discrimination for access to things like public housing and federal assistance for college tuition. Even if you’ve been arrested but not convicted of a crime, that arrest may remain on record and hinder your ability to get hired. If you’re convicted of a felony, your chances of procuring essentials like housing and a higher education are even worse.

Let’s say you’re a teenaged black male living in public housing in an impoverished neighborhood. Your local public schools are far inferior to those in wealthy neighborhoods, and you’re financially cut off from private schooling. Without a good education, your opportunities for economic betterment are few, so you turn to selling drugs. Because drug enforcement across the country favors arrests in poor and nonwhite communities, you’re arrested outside your apartment. You become one of the 30 percent.

You do your time, and when you get out you’re eager to turn your life around. But that isn’t so easy. Depending on the state in which you live and the nature of your conviction, you may be barred from living in public housing—the only housing you can afford. Employers may be allowed to ask about your criminal history and disqualify you for telling the truth. If you have a felony conviction, what meager chance you had of attending college to begin with may be demolished by reduced access to federal loans. You’ve got no place to live, you’ve tried and failed to make a living legally. What other option do you have besides selling drugs again? Eventually, you go back to jail, and as a repeat offender your chances of a felony conviction are higher. The process repeats itself.

Meanwhile, the white college senior across town has been selling coke to partygoers for his entire four-year tenure. The cops don’t patrol his dorm building like they do your housing project, and they don’t make Terry stops in his upscale neighborhood like they do in your ghetto. You’ve committed the same crimes, but he never encounters the police, never gets wrapped up in the criminal justice system. You are one of the 30 percent. He is not. He goes on to become a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, a cop.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

John Green, author of bestselling novels-turned-movies The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns, is a superstar. Teens love him. Adults love him. Taylor Swift loves him. The film adaptation of his first YA novel, Looking For Alaska, begins production soon in Michigan, and will almost certainly be his third box office hit in a row.

Do you wish you were as successful as John Green? Do you wish you could write bestsellers with titles like An Abundance of Katherines and characters named Quentin and Alaska? With Jezebel’s very own John Green Plot Generator, you can be! Just answer a few questions, tap a few buttons, and poof! You’ll have a summary of the next bestseller you can write yourself.

Good luck! Writing it is the hard part.

Full disclosure: The Fault In Our Stars made me cry openly on a train in 2012 like an emotional teen, and I’m delighted that authors like Green have found success writing books young people (and adults!) love to read.

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

In an age where elaborately-staged marriage proposals and tearjerking pregnancy reveals are YouTube commonplace, self-proclaimed vloggers must now go to extreme lengths to achieve maximum virality when announcing their most personal family moments online. One man brought this terrifying reality into stark relief Wednesday when he posted a video titled, “HUSBAND SHOCKS WIFE WITH PREGNANCY ANNOUNCEMENT!”, in which he steals his wife’s urine and subsequently “surprises” her with her own positive pregnancy test.

Men: they have ideas, and they go for them. The man who had this particular idea is a dad vlogger named Sam, who posts videos every single day with his wife, Nia. They’re best known for the viral YouTube hit “Good Looking Parents Sing Disney’s Frozen (Love Is an Open Door).”

This week’s video is much more inventive than a lip sync of a children’s tune, however. Sam reiterated the premise in the caption: “That’s right! For the first time daddy announces the pregnancy to mommy!”

Behold, the most cynical eight minutes of film ever posted to the web:

Are you crying?

Sam is happy that you’re crying. Every second of the video, which has now garnered over 4 million views on YouTube and was picked up by E! News, The Daily Mail, and The Huffington Post, is played to the audience. From the first moment Sam dips a pregnancy test into a toilet full of his wife’s pee—he knows that she “goes pee all night long”—to the last rambling bit where he announces he’ll eventually post a time-lapse video of her growing bump, the realities of what another child will mean for the couple are treated as an afterthought. But can you believe that Daddy surprised Mommy? Isn’t Daddy amazing?

That Sam appears to be wholly concerned with “going viral” is not even the video’s primary flaw. The conceit is, of course, unbelievable. In between mugging for the camera and doing cartoon voices while eyeing his wife’s stale urine in a (locked?) bathroom, Sam explains, in a series of takes eventually pieced together, how he’s going to pull this off:

So I’ve had this dream about announcing Nia’s pregnancy to her. [CUT] I want to find out before she does. And last night at 1:30 a.m., while I was at work, she randomly texted me and said that she’s two weeks late. [CUT] All night long Nia usually goes pee throughout the night. She has a bladder the size of a golfball. [CUT] And she doesn’t flush the toilet at night because she’s afraid she’ll wake up the baby [CUT]

He then produces a pregnancy test and dunks it in the toilet. And it’s positive!

Okay.

Okay.

Then the surprise: Sam enters the kitchen, where a bathrobe-wearing Nia is cooking breakfast for their two young children. Sam shoves the camera in her face, turns it back on himself to smirk at the audience, then—cue the swelling, emotional background music—ya pregnant! Nia is shocked and excited, the kids are confused, and Sam’s floating on air. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Nia exclaims. “I had all these plans to tell Sam myself when I found out. This isn’t fair!” Sam then explains to Nia that she must be “two weeks” along, and she kindly counters that no, that’s not how it works.

During the comedown from the emotional climax, Sam interviews his young daughter about the news, who sweetly says she’s excited about “holding the baby while Mommy makes dinner and breakfast.” Nia responds, “I can’t even handle it because those are the things that scare me the most, having to still cook dinner with a newborn...”

Now I’m crying.

Whether or not Nia actually learned of her pregnancy for the first time during the filming of the video, the idea that a man surprising a woman with the contents of her own uterus in front of millions of viewers is supposed to be—what? Heartwarming? A thoughtful gift? Extremely cool?—is insane. Let this woman have control over at least one thing.

Even if a man is absolutely sure that his partner will be thrilled she’s carrying his child, it is polite to let her discover this information about her own body herself (or together, if she asks).

But in the quest to make the Yahoo! homepage, everything must be sacrificed, including any last tether to reality. In the video, both Sam and Nia address the camera more than they address each other. Despite the fact that she’s getting the shock of her life, Nia habitually refers to “you guys”—the viewers—throughout the video, narrating her experience as it happens.

We’re having a baby. We all are.

Wow guys! One million views in 24 hours!! pic.twitter.com/iUW56OEVuR

August 6, 2015

Surprise.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Chris Christie (campaign slogan: Telling It Like It Is) repeatedly told it like it factually is not during last night’s GOP debate, twice claiming that President Bush appointed him U.S. attorney one day before 9/11. That didn’t actually happen.

“I was appointed U.S. Attorney by President Bush on September 10^th, 2001, and the world changed enormously the next day, and that happened in my state. This is not theoretical to me,” Christie said, in the midst of a debate with Rand Paul about intelligence agencies collecting U.S. citizens’ phone records.

He repeated the assertion in his closing remarks, adding “I spent the next 7 years of my career fighting terrorism and putting terrorists in jail.”

The debate wasn’t the first time Christie’s made that claim. He mentioned it in speeches and interviews in May or June, and as far back as 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed.

Chris Christie served as U.S. Attorney from 2002-2008, according to Chris Christie’s website. The year 2002 occurred after Sept. 10, 2001, according to the Gregorian calendar.

Christie was rumored for the appointment in early September, pre-9/11, but wasn’t officially nominated for the post until December of that year, and wasn’t confirmed until January 2002. ThinkProgress points out that the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the New York Times back up this version of events, not Christie’s “day before the attacks” narrative.

Christie wasn’t actually appointed, or nominated, the day before the attacks, but for the purposes of an argument with Paul regarding the Patriot Act and the counterterrorism value of domestic surveillance, wouldn’t it have been neat if he had? Hmm.

As Marcy Wheeler points out, the New Jersey governor has a personal interest in defending the phone surveillance program, because he likely made extensive use of it to do his job as a U.S. Attorney. Which started in 2002.

[h/t ThinkProgress, Screengrab from Chris Christie’s campaign website]

It starts around 6:30 a.m—“incessant, almost guttural cooing,” according to Michael Kelly, a 33-year-old opera singer who lives on a usually quiet stretch of 100th Street on the Upper West Side. He’s battling jet lag after a trip to Europe, but every morning for the last couple of weeks, Kelly is wrenched from sleep not by a blaring car alarm or construction noise on the street below, but jackhammering of a different kind: pigeons fucking.

“When is the pigeon sex outside my window going to stop so I can sleep past 7?” Kelly wondered in a recent Facebook status. “They’re just going at it,” he lamented later by phone, “one pigeon mounting another.”

Amused friends blew up the comments: “Pigeons. Always thinking with their peckers,” one cracked. “Ain’t no orgy like a pigeon orgy, ‘cause a pigeon orgy don’t stop,” quipped another.

But amid the classic rap references came proof the struggle is real: “There’s pigeon sex outside my window too,” Scott Sobol, 37, a real estate agent who lives in Hell’s Kitchen, commented.

“I’ll be sitting at my desk looking out my window and I’ll just see two pigeons totally doing it on the roof next door,” he told me. “Sometimes a third will come up and want to get in the mix, and it’s like being at the club.”

Summer is high season for pigeon sex—and it’s popping off all over New York City right now. Pigeons, which mate for life, breed year round, but speed up in spring and summertime because the warmer temperatures are friendly to their young’s survival.

Pigeons, like humans, are also prone to cockblocking, according to one of the 40,000 pigeon sex videos (pigeon porn?) on YouTube, which notes: “Sometimes the other birds get jealous when two pigeons are fooling around.” Although it’s actually cloaca-blocking, as both male and female pigeons have cloacas, sexual cavities they wedge together during the deed.

“We call it a cloacal kiss,” says Dr. Charles Walcott, a professor emeritus at Cornell University who studied homing pigeons for three decades as the former head of the school’s Ornithology Lab. “The male will stand on the back of the female, both of them will move their tail out the way and they will touch their genitals together. It’s really very quick.”

Mice and roaches get all the infamy, but procreating pigeons are a down-low woe for New Yorkers—a scourge on sleep, an assault on the eyes, and a prolific source of poop, which can corrode window sills, contaminate air conditioners (the underside of window units are popular pigeon fuck dens), and carry up to 60 diseases, including histoplasmosis, a nasty respiratory infection. Pigeon-related complaints to 311 also peak during spring and summer, according to data from the mayor’s office. Last year the number of calls to 311 lamenting “unsanitary pigeon conditions” (mostly “pigeon waste”) on window ledges, sidewalks and building exteriors peaked between April and August.

Dave Kane, owner of Bye Bye Birdie, a pest bird-proofing company in Flatiron says, “I definitely start getting more calls in the summertime.”

In some cases, a summer of pigeon sex means birds are getting more action than their human neighbors.

“It was a mood-killer for me and my fiancé to have pigeons doing it right behind our heads,” confessed Kelly Granito, 28, a researcher at a non-profit and a daily witness to pigeon mating before recently moving units with her Upper West Side building. “They were constantly fucking in a flower box left by an old tenant.”

Anna Breslaw, a freelance writer in the East Village, says summer is prime time for pigeons to do it in her backyard, then leave their droppings in their wake. And then there’s the cooing. “It sounds like a woman with a low voice,” she says. “When I first moved in, I really thought it was people having sex.”

Before she recently moved to Alexandria, Virginia, Leslie Golden, a 32-year-old publishing associate, made feeble attempts to evict horny pigeons boning beneath her air conditioning unit on the Upper East Side. “I would open my window to frighten them away, but they didn’t scare easily,” she recalled. “I saw missionary, from-behind, 69’ing—but because it was the Upper East Side, it was mostly missionary.”

Pigeon sex was entertaining for Golden—until it wasn’t. During a bed bug breakout at her office, her husband woke up with bites, prompting a full-scale fumigation of the apartment. But an exterminator later told her, in light of the pigeons roosting under her AC, that they could have been pigeon mite bites. “What do we expect,” she lamented, “from the same birds who eat throw-up the morning after Santa Con?”

Golden never logged a complaint to her landlord, 311, or a private pigeon-proofer. But Kane is quick to note that for those who do call him for help; he doesn’t kill birds, he just relocates them—by sealing off air conditioners, netting off windows, or affixing spikes to window ledges For bigger jobs, setting up feeders of pigeon birth control, called OvoControl (nicknamed Planned Pigeonhood), is an option. A 2007 report (“Curbing the Pigeon Conundrum”) by New York State Sen. Simcha Felder recommended implementing OvoControl, which prevents pigeon sperm and eggs from fertilizing, city-wide, following the lead of Los Angeles and smaller cities like St. Paul, Minnesota.

But even OvoControl CEO Erick Wolf admits he “wouldn’t even want to guess” at how many feeders or how many millions of dollars it would take to tackle New York’s porny pigeon masses (by some estimates, there’s a pigeon for each of the 8 million people here). For perspective, Wolf just gave a six-figure estimate to businesses on a 22-acre stretch of Waikiki, Hawaii; New York City occupies more than 190,000 acres.

The Mayor’s Office seems about on top of the pigeon sex pandemic as it can be: “Obviously we are concerned about any unsanitary condition,” Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Press Secretary Christopher Miller said in an email.

A completely free anti-pigeon tactic, Kane suggests, is opening your window shade, which is likely to scare pigeons away. Or simply plug your ears and have a little understanding while a pair of pigeons get theirs.

“Hey,” he laughed. “We’ve all been there.”

Michelle Ruiz is a freelance writer and reporter in New York. Most recently a senior editor at Cosmopolitan, she has written for ELLE, Vogue, The Cut, and Vanity Fair.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”

Image via Facebook

DELETE

As wildfires race across the West, this striking photo of a “highway to Hell” has been attributed to a number of different blazes currently raging in California, Oregon and Colorado.

In reality, however, the photo was taken by Adventure magazine reader Troy C. Whitman in 2003.

“It was the first place the fire crossed north of the Highway as it headed toward the communities surrounding Lake Arrowhead, [California],” wrote Whitman in 2004. “An ABC News van was completely demolished. The fire melted all of their equipment. Molten aluminum was running down the road. Remarkably, no one was injured.”

Image via Twitter

FORWARD

$6 asparagus water might sound like an absurd parody of Whole Foods hucksterism, but the above photo shows an actual product that could be found this week on one of the supermarket’s shelves.

“It was meant to be water with the essence of vegetables and/or mushrooms to be used as broth (similar to a bone broth), which are typically made over a long period of time soaking in water,” confirmed a Whole Foods spokesperson responding to the photo and the resulting veggie-infused wave of criticism. “The product was made incorrectly and has since been removed from the one store where it was carried.”

Image via Instagram

DELETE

This image posted by popular photo account @History_Pics on Wednesday has all the elements of a great internet story (pizza, history and annoying rude dudes), so it’s hardly surprising it blew up on Twitter this week. Unfortunately, that story happens to be false.

Not only was pizza a relative novelty in America until after World War II, the original scan of the photo is captioned “Pie eating contest at Tidal Basin bathing beach,” a dish that can be clearly seen in a full-sized version of the photo.

Image via Twitter//h/t @PicPedant/Snopes

FORWARD

On Saturday, this photo of a cartoonish police encounter went viral on Reddit bearing the title “They’ve been looking for him for 10 minutes.”

As a police spokesperson later confirmed, the photo shows a real domestic disturbance call that occurred in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“When police first arrived, no one answered the door,” the Detroit Free Press reports. “After some time, they were able to locate a suspect on the roof of the home.”

Image via Imgur

DELETE

I’m sorry, but this is honestly one of the dumbest hoaxes I’ve ever heard, is apparently more than 10 years old, and still was all over Facebook this week. In case you don’t understand why this scenario is completely impossible, Forbes explains:

The size an object appears in the sky depends on how big it is and how far away it is. The Moon is pretty close to Earth: 240,000 miles (384,000 km), which is practically on top of us in astronomical terms. By contrast, Mars and Earth will never get closer to each other than about 34 million miles (55 million kilometers).

[...]

Mars is roughly twice the diameter as the Moon, so for Mars to appear to be the same size as the Moon, it would need to get to about 500,000 miles away from us — something like 700 times closer than it can ever get.

“Disappointed? Don’t be,” wrote NASA when they debunked this claim over a decade ago. “If Mars did come close enough to rival the Moon, its gravity would alter Earth’s orbit and raise terrible tides.”

So maybe you won’t be able to see Arnold Schwarzenegger’s exploding head with your naked eye, but at least we won’t be drowning which is cool.

Image via Facebook

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that writers at Williamsburg-based Vice Media have voted to unionize:

The writers will be joining the Writers Guild of America, East, and Vice’s management has been informed, the people said. Vice’s attorney has already responded to the union saying the company is prepared to recognize it, one of the people said. The number of employees who have voted to unionize was not immediately clear.

The Vice writers have not yet released a statement regarding their vote and what they hope a union will accomplish. However the Journal adds (via an anonymous source) that Vice salaries* “have since gone up to an average of just under $70,000” after the company endured widespread criticism for underpaying writers—which suggests compensation will likely be the centerpiece of the writers’ collective bargaining agreement.

The vote makes Vice the fourth major online media company in New York City whose editorial staffers have formed a union this year. The others are Salon, Guardian US, and Gawker Media, the last of which voted to unionize on June 4.

The Republican debate held at 5 p.m. last night, which featured the current 11th through 17th most popular GOP candidates in the 2016 field, was perhaps the least consequential national debate in American history. This is, of course, exactly why it was so uniquely satisfying to watch.

For the country at-large, this undercard debate—featuring Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and someone named Jon Gilmore—offered next to nothing. The answers were canned and the sparring was nonexistent. With the exception of Graham, a high-ranking sitting senator, and perhaps Fiorina, a competent female politician in a party thirsting for them, it’s hard to imagine any “candidate” on that stage playing a meaningful role in national politics moving forward.

Together, the group was a buffet of sad career trajectories. Perry and Jindal had meteoric careers that exploded well before orbit. Along with Santorum, they once appeared to sit at the top of their party, only to be abandoned for flubbing on a national stage, or in the case of Santorum, merely for hanging around too long. Pataki, the ex-governor of New York, and Gilmore, the ex-governor of Virginia, were essentially interchangeable—just the latest old, flabby, anonymous white men to fall off a conveyor belt. Fiorina seems to check plenty of boxes—business experience, smooth speaker, not a man—and thus she appeared to be openly flabbergasted that she had been so quickly reduced to this. Graham, whose voice quavered all afternoon, legitimately sounded as if he was on the verge of tears.

The debate opened with the candidates asked to address questions regarding their “electability,” which essentially amounted to moderators Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum stating why each candidate sucks, and then having them try and argue that they don’t suck. “Why should someone vote for you now?” Perry was asked. After it was noted that she lost her only previous election, Fiorina was prompted to explain how comparing herself to Margaret Thatcher was not “a stretch.” To Santorum: “Has your moment passed, Senator?” To Graham: “How can [Republicans] trust you?” To Gilmore: “You ran for the White House once and lost. You ran for the Senate one time and lost. You haven’t held public office in 13 years.”

Throughout the debate, each marginal representative of the Republican party was forced to reckon with his (or her) own irrelevance. In response they delivered thunderous applause lines that were met with complete silence. When the cameras flashed back to the moderators, it appeared as if there were perhaps three dozen people sitting in an arena that holds 20,000. The candidates’ increasingly desperate promises to erase Obama’s legacy or destroy Planned Parenthood or pointedly surveil Muslims did not fall on deaf ears. They fell on no ears.

Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry—each at one point hailed as the savior of the party and of America, each evil and toxic in different and similar ways—frequently had to directly address Donald Trump, a reality television star who had reduced their life’s work to basically nothing without even really trying, and who was, at those exact moments, probably not even listening. Like watching a little kid wildly flail at a piñata he can’t reach, it would have been cruel if it wasn’t so funny.

Why were they there? Why was anyone there? Well, to not show would have been to admit total defeat with the calendar still five months away from the election year itself. After all, plenty of serious presidential candidates across history were given little chance with 16 months to go, including, as they were all extremely eager to point out, Ronald Reagan in his attempt to unseat incumbent president Gerald Ford in 1975. Reagan, of course, eventually slithered his way to the Oval Office.

And who knows, maybe one of these crying clowns will make their way up the polls in the coming months, as they all seemed to warn. It seems unlikely, but it’s not exactly as if the rest of the field is incredibly inspiring. Who knows. But, Fiorina aside, if one of them does, it won’t be because of anything that happened yesterday. Yesterday wasn’t for the candidates, and it wasn’t for Republicans. It was for the exact opposite population: people who savor Republican schadenfreude. (And also for the content mill.)

Granted, the supply of Republican schadenfreude has far outstripped demand in the seven-plus years of the Obama presidency. (That this meaningless debate between GOP carcasses was happening at the exact time that Jon Stewart filmed the final episode of his increasingly meaningless Daily Show was a funny little coincidence.) But, even still, this debate was something rare and special: a very public, formal and ritual flogging of both longtime and aspiring Republican villains.

For some reason, the debate lasted for two hours, I guess because the later debate was also scheduled for two hours, and keeping up an air of legitimacy was the only thing that allowed any of these people to retain even a sliver of dignity. But what it all amounted to was seven deeply frustrated fools eating shit for 120 straight minutes in front of a national television audience. I have always wanted them all to go away, but maybe they should in fact stick around for a bit.

[images via Getty]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Shortly after Donald Trump, a wispy corn husk wrapped around several stacks of sequential hundreds, announced his run for president in June, he suggested his nominee for Secretary of the Treasury would be billionaire businessman Carl Icahn. Icahn initially said he wasn’t interested, but after seeing Trump at last night’s GOP debate, has apparently changed his mind.

1/3 After last night’s debate I decided to accept @realDonaldTrump offer for Secretary of Treasury.

August 7, 2015

Nice of Trump to nominate his fellow billionaire. Probably doesn’t have anything to do with Icahn’s recent acquisition of the bankrupt Trump Taj Mahal Casino in exchange for $292 million in Trump Entertainment Resorts debt.

Casino workers marched against Icahn in May after he terminated their union contract as part of the Taj Mahal bankruptcy settlement, effectively cutting benefits for 1,000 employees. Icahn responded by blaming the union for the downfall of the casino business in Atlantic City, and claiming that ending health benefits was the only way to save the Taj.

[Photo: AP Images]

The post-debate consensus is in: “Fox News Moderators Bring a Sharpened Edge to the Republican Debate Stage,” raves the Times. They proved the haters wrong!

There was more than just good television at stake. For the journalists of Fox News, the debate offered a potentially defining moment in front of millions of people, during one of the most anticipated political events of the year. This was an opportunity to demonstrate that their network is not, as its critics have charged, a blindly loyal propaganda division of the Republican Party, that Fox journalists can be as unsparing toward conservatives as they are with liberals, and that they can eviscerate with equal opportunity if they choose.

This was an opportunity to get certain people to write something along those lines, yes, sure. And plenty of people took that bait, from the National Journal (“In a sea of men, two women stood out during Thursday night’s Republican presidential debates: Carly Fiorina, who dominated the undercard, and Megyn Kelly, who charged hard after Donald Trump in the main event.”) to Slate (“Fox News being Fox News and also Fox News at its best.”) to HuffPo (“Fox News Was The Real Winner Of The Republican Debates”).

Obviously one benefit of rarely demonstrating basic professional competency as a news organization is the lavish praise that rolls in when you sort of convincingly fake it.

Yes, in case you didn’t know, Ailes’s network is occasionally capable, when company’s coming over, of dressing up in grown-up clothes. Its more embarrassing personalities — the same personalities that host the channel’s most-watched shows and determine its overall voice — are sent on lengthy errands, and the vaguely plausible “serious news anchor” cosplayers are trotted out. This impressed those who apparently thought they were going to let Steve Doocy and Greg Gutfeld host this thing.

But please, let’s not get it twisted: The debate was an cynical theatrical satire of the democratic process even before it started. An arbitrarily determined number of candidates were selected to participate via an utterly opaque process designed to force candidates to direct their attention and ad buy money to Fox News. The candidates faced an adoring crowd of thousands, and that crowd was not discouraged from cheering for their favorites. (The audience was effectively only told to limit the length of its enthusiastic responses to applause lines, and no attempt was made to enforce even than limp directive.)

Roger Ailes has two mostly (but not completely) complimentary goals: Electing a conservative Republican in 2016 and making profitable television. Everything that happened last night was in service of those two goals.

That explains the aggressive questioning of Donald Trump, which has been much praised — they certainly didn’t go easy on the ridiculous cartoon clown man, who also happens to be extremely easy to provoke into saying something outrageous! — as if people honestly expected the anchors to lay off a man who is performing a lengthy and insulting pantomime of the conservative populism that has fueled Fox News since its start. It’s true that Fox had a major role in Trump’s rise, giving him more airtime than any other candidate, but if you view the pre-primary campaign as entertainment, well, what’s more entertaining than building a pompous man up only to drag him back down? The very first question, in which Trump was maneuvered into raising his hand to prove that his fealty was to himself rather than his (or, rather, Fox’s) party, was designed to provoke an oh-shit pro wrestling heel turn moment.

Fox didn’t set out to decapitate Trump, but to goad him into moving on to his next role as the pitiless plutocrat villain of Fox’s campaign-as-telenovela. Ailes may not want Trump to be the Republican nominee, but he certainly wants him to stay in the race as long as possible. He’s better TV than John fucking Kasich, especially when he’s pissed off. And making Trump a villain allows those two Ailes goals to come back into alignment after a brief period in which they seemed at odds — now Trump’s great TV that the “serious” candidates can define themselves against.

Those goals are also why all of the non-Trump questions were designed both to encourage bickering (compelling TV!) and to boost the profiles of some of the lower-polling but theoretically electable candidates. (The five p.m. debate, similarly, ended up being a lengthy exercise in willing a Carly Fiorina “bounce” into existence.)

As Scott Lemieux notes, Marco Rubio was given a ludicrously easy slate of questions, and Rubio wasn’t the sole recipient of softballs. A question about “Kate’s Law,” a noxious exploitation of one heavily publicized murder of a white woman by an immigrant, was asked of its Senate sponsor (Senator Cruz, do you support this bill you co-authored?). Every candidate was asked to affirm their chumminess with the Good Lord, besides Rubio, who was asked “about God and the veterans.” And while some of the early questions, on “electability,” appeared tough, not one question actually challenged the flimsy premises of modern Republican orthodoxy.

In fact, the toughest “gotcha” questions of the night were actually designed to police the candidates’ rare deviations from that orthodoxy, from Trump’s flirtations with single-payer healthcare to this gem, from Megyn Kelly: “You chose to expand Medicaid in your state, unlike several other governors on this stage tonight, and it is already over budget by some estimates costing taxpayers an additional $1.4 billion in just the first 18 months.” Kelly declined to mention that the Medicaid expansion extended health coverage to 270,000 of Kasich’s constituents.

Ailes clearly wants to play kingmaker, and he will crown the most conservative, but plausibly electable, candidate possible. What looked like a roast was actually the start of a coronation.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at pareene@gawker.com.

In early June, Kalief Browder, the Bronx native who battled mental health issues after spending three violent years in jail at Rikers Island without ever being convicted of a crime, committed suicide. His family, who believe Browder would still be alive had he not been subjected to “systemic and agonizing mental and physical abuse tantamount to torture” by officers employed by the NYC Department of Corrections, are suing the city of New York for $20 million.http://justice.gawker.com/rikers-island-...

Yesterday, Browder’s parents, Venida and Everett, submitted to the city comptroller’s office documents which specified the excessive and unjustified brutality their son faced during his time on Rikers and the multiple suicide attempts he made after his release.

According to the Huffington Post, the Browders believe the “city’s treatment of [Kalief] after his release from Rikers was ‘less than adequate and insufficient to treat his episodes and bouts with paranoia, depression, PTSD, and other aliments.’” From the Post:

The Browders’ pending wrongful death lawsuit — which names the New York City Department of Correction, the Bronx district attorney’s office, the NYPD and various city health agencies as defendants — seeks $20 million in damages for the city’s “willful, malicious, careless and negligent” actions. It also accuses the city of malicious prosecution, denying Browder of his constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial, and of “inhumanely and cruelly punishing” Browder by placing him in solitary confinement.

Browder was arrested in 2010, just days before his 17th birthday, for allegedly stealing a backpack. While on Rikers, Browder maintained his innocence—even when he was offered a deal by the Bronx district attorney to plead guilty, whereupon he’d be sentenced to time served. He was released in May 2013, after the Bronx DA’s office decided to drop all charges against him. Browder had spent three years on Rikers without ever being convicted of a crime.

On June 6, 2015, Browder wrapped an air-conditioning cord around his neck and pushed himself from the second story of his mother’s Bronx home. He was 22.

[Screen shot via The View]

It’s hard enough running an alt weekly in 2015 without evoking fascist iconography.

Just look at this thing:

Yikes. The paper debuted its new look Facebook, and was immediately met with the obvious:

Well, obvious to everyone except the SF Weekly graphic design squad. Good luck!

h/t Jake Swearingen

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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