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Spoiled Kid Tries To Get New Ferrari By Setting Fire To Old One

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Spoiled Kid Tries To Get New Ferrari By Setting Fire To Old One

It’s easy for all of us cash-deprived near-animals to judge the actions of our monied betters. So I’m asking you to keep an open mind when considering the tale of a 20-year-old son of a Swiss millionaire who deliberately set his Ferrari 458 Italia on fire in the hopes of getting a newer, better Ferrari. Just think about it from his side: he wanted a new one.

See? I think you’re starting to understand here. According to the New York Daily News he wanted a newer, better Ferrari, and because he was afraid to confront his father (who, by the way, gives him up to $10,000 a month for the important job of holding his genes) and tell him that no, this Ferrari 458 Italia no longer suits my rigorous needs, he took the only course of action available: arson.

It’s worth mentioning that he has 14 other cars, so you can really see the bind he was in. Only one of those other cars was a Lambo, too. Kid’s up against a wall here.

Actually, the arson idea seems to have been proposed to him by a car salesman at a dealership where he had the Ferrari appraised. When the value of the car didn’t meet the amount the kid was hoping to get so he could upgrade, the resourceful salesman suggested taking advantage of the dealership’s unique ‘set-fire-to-your-car-to-scam-the-insurance-company’ plan.

The kid hired two people (at about $15,000 each) to set fire to the car, which they did after crossing the border into Germany. Meanwhile, the Ferrari’s owner and a friend developed a nice, relaxing alibi at a nearby massage parlor.

And it all would have worked, too, with everyone happy, if it hadn’t been for those meddlesome security cameras recording the whole act of arson going down.

The Ferrari is burned to a crisp, the kid gets 22 months probation and a $32,000 fine, though it’s not clear what charges his arson employees got. And now the kid only has 14 cars. Fourteen! Like some kind of filthy animal. I think it’s clear who’s the real victim here.

So, the lesson here is that while arson is generally a fantastic way to solve problems and get the things you want — no, scratch that — deserve, please, please, always check for surveillance cameras first.

More photos of the exotic conflagration over at 20 Minutes.


Contact the author at jason@jalopnik.com.


50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist

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50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist

At a recent staff meeting at the Southeast Division station of the Los Angeles Police Department, Ryan Whiteman, a tall, barrel-chested sergeant, ran down the mid-year crime stats for Jordan Downs, a public housing development in the Watts neighborhood of South L.A.. Jordan Downs is home to some of the most destitute families in Los Angeles County. “Five generations of abject poverty,” is how civil rights attorney Connie Rice described the 700-unit complex, which looks like a cross between a tenement and a dilapidated army barracks. “It’s Third World America.”

At the height of the crack trade in the 1980s and 1990s, Jordan Downs was controlled by the Grape Street Crips, one of the most notorious street gangs in the country. In that era, gang-related homicides at Jordan Downs and at two nearby projects, Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts, were so common that parents sometimes had their children sleep in bathtubs to protect them from stray bullets flying in the night. Those who weren’t murdered by the Bloods or the Crips were often victims of the LAPD, which, in South L.A., relied almost exclusively on a set of ruthless, and constitutionally questionable, repression tactics. “Ever since the fugitive slave laws of the 1840s a key mission of American policing has been to put the fear of God into African Americans,” Joe Domanick, a journalist and historian at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of a new book on the LAPD, told me. “From 1950 through 2000, the LAPD did that by being a racist, repressive army of occupation in LA’s ghettos.”

In the late 1980s, then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates declared war on the gangs. In practice, that meant war on the mostly black and Latino teenagers of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods. His vehicle for carrying it out was C.R.A.S.H. — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — an elite gang suppression unit whose flamboyantly aggressive paramilitary campaign, Operation Hammer, generated 50,000 arrests in three years, as well as more than 2,000 allegations of excessive force. “They did not see people as people,” said Nina Revoyr, COO of the Children’s Institute, which operates out of Watts. “They saw them as problems to be contained.”

In those days, if you were young and black in Watts — or worse, if you dared to venture out of your neighborhood to the affluent Westside —you could expect to find yourself at any given moment spread-eagled on the front of a squad car for wearing the wrong colored shoes. You could count yourself lucky to get away without being beaten or arrested. “We had times where guys was framed with drugs; drugs was put on people,” recalled Donny Joubert, an ex-Blood who grew up in Nickerson Gardens, and now works as a gang intervention worker. “We had officers that came here and took money from people.” The open contempt LAPD gang cops routinely showed for the civil rights of Watts residents was the accelerant for the community’s violent explosion in 1992 following the exoneration acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, just as it had been for the 1965 Watts Riots, 50 years ago today. “Hate” was not too strong a word for how many Watts residents felt about the police in those days — even those who reviled the gangs with equal fervor.

This year, crime is once again on the rise in Los Angeles, for the first time in a decade. But at the staff meeting at Southeast, Sergeant Whiteman reported to his colleagues that in the first six months of 2015, Jordan Downs had seen a 44 percent drop in violent crime compared to the same time period last year, and a 36 percent reduction in property crime. Lately, the most pressing issue the officers under his supervision were hearing about from Jordan Downs residents was illegal parking. There had also been some complaints about teenagers loitering. Sergeant Whiteman’s report from one of the most notorious gang zones in the world had all the blood and adrenaline of a suburban crime blotter.

Jordan Downs has experienced just one homicide in the last four years. Between 2011 and 2013, violent crime there dropped by 70 percent. In the same time period, Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts also saw their violent crime rates halved. The decline in violence in what were once the garrisons of L.A.’s most murderous gangs has been accompanied by a steep rise in public trust in the police officers that patrol the three communities. At a time when police shootings are a daily occurrence in the United States, and police relations with poor communities of color across the country are as bitter as they have been in decades, in the three Watts housing projects that were at the center of two massive uprisings against LAPD repression, officers are greeted with nods and waves from people who know them by their first names, and by kids running up to say hi.

Cops pulling up onto schoolyards near the three projects today are more likely there to tutor teenagers than to frisk them. Officers help organize backpack giveaways, neighborhood cleanups, and health fairs. Some have even adopted children from the projects to keep them out of the foster system after losing both of their parents to violence or incarceration. “You got hard core gang members shaking the police’s hand, in the corner, talking to them, having conversations, and talking sports — chilling with them,” said Joubert, describing a common scene at Nickerson Gardens. “These cops don’t go in like they’re afraid of people,” explained Revoyr. “They don’t go in like they think that all folks are out to get them. They see and respond to people like people.” Just a few years ago, parents wouldn’t let their children even talk to the officers; they didn’t want them mixed up with the police in any way. “If you go through there now,” Joubert said, “you see the officers toting them on their shoulders, carrying them on their back.”

The synchronous trends in the three projects of reduced crime and increased public trust in the police are not a coincidence. They’re the outcome of a new mode of policing, conceived of by Connie Rice and developed jointly by the LAPD and the Watts community, which is beginning to spread, tentatively, from a small, experimental unit in Southeast Division to the rest of the third largest municipal police force in the country. If its successes can be repeated throughout the rest of the LAPD, then it may provide an actionable vision for reform that could be applied in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, and every other American city with a dysfunctional relationship between its police force and its most embattled communities.

50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist


When Connie Rice first began frequenting the projects in Watts in the early 1990s, she was helping to broker a truce between the Bloods and the Crips. At that time, her relationship with the LAPD was strictly litigious. Along with her colleagues at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Rice had filed a litany of lawsuits against the department for brutality, discrimination in promotions against women and minority officers, and every other LAPD misdeed that came across her desk, which was many.

The truce, which began just days before the 1992 riot, held down the murder rate in Watts for years. But at the end of 2005, seven gang-related homicides occurred within a two-month period. Fearing a revival of the gang wars of the 1980s, the ex-gang members who had organized the truce, Donny Joubert among them, asked then-City Councilmember Janice Hahn to convene a meeting of Watts community leaders to find a way to stem the violence.

Hahn brought Phil Tingirides, the new captain of the LAPD’s Southeast Division, to the meeting. For many of the Watts residents in the room, that was a first. They had never before had a way to safely engage in a two-way conversation with the department.

Tingirides was the sixth captain of Southeast Division in five years, a fact that irked the community; the rapid turnover made it impossible to build any meaningful understanding between ordinary Watts residents and the station’s leadership. Fortunately for Watts, Tingirides wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. When he accepted his new post, LAPD’s current chief, Charlie Beck, had reminded him that there were only three ways out of his position: die, retire, or be promoted. Dying wasn’t in Tingirides’ plans, and with six kids to look after as a result of his recent marriage to Sergeant Emada Tingirides, an African-American officer who grew up near Nickerson Gardens, retirement was out of the question, too. And as Beck knew, Captain Tingirides couldn’t be promoted any further up the chain of command because he didn’t yet have a college degree. Watts would finally have some stability in the Southeast Division leadership.

At the meeting at Hahn’s office, Watts residents lit into the new captain. They voiced their long pent-up list of grievances with Southeast officers and their tactics. They pressed Tingirides relentlessly on what he was going to do about it. “I was getting my ass handed to me,” Tingirides said. “We had some real hard sit-downs in that room,” Joubert acknowledged. “He had to hear us out. And then, we had to hear him out.”

The group began to meet regularly, and Tingirides soon had his turn to recite his own complaints back to Watts residents: he believed many neighbors were too willing to ignore criminal activity happening next door. Eventually, the meetings became formalized as the Watts Gang Task Force, which convenes weekly to this day. Another regular meeting took place at Southeast station. Residents of the projects, including current and former Crips and Bloods, and LAPD officers would discuss their grievances with one another, and do their best to hammer them out. The conversations were not easy. They required careful diplomacy on both sides with their respective constituencies. “Everybody ain’t with peace,” Joubert remembered telling Captain Tingirides about the residents of the projects. “Everybody ain’t with the fact that we even trying to have a sit-down with the police department. But you going to have the same problem in your police station.”

Outside of the tense meetings in cramped conference rooms, residents of the Watts projects started organizing softball and basketball games against the LAPD. After decades of animosity, gang members, police officers, and ordinary Watts neighbors were getting to know each other, and talking frankly about their relationships with one another, every week. “He stood there and listened,” Joubert recalled of Tingirides. “And he started understanding.”

50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist


Tingirides grew up in South L.A., not far from Watts. His grandparents, who emigrated from Greece during World War I, ran a neighborhood butcher shop. His father joined the LAPD in 1956; Tingirides followed in his footsteps 24 years later.

For a time, Tingirides’ senior lead officer was a man named Randy Cochran. Cochran, like Tingirides, was a white cop operating in a black neighborhood. But unlike many white officers in Watts, he was neither fearful of the community nor physically aggressive. He routinely wandered through Nickerson Gardens by himself in search of suspects, at a time when officers rarely did so. Tingirides can remember only a single occasion in which Cochran used force, and afterwards, “he patted him off and said, ‘we didn’t have to do that.’” Cochran “made phenomenal arrests,” Tingirides recalled, because he was kind and respectful to members of the community he patrolled.

During a period in the 1980s, Tingirides was assigned to Metro Division, the elite paramilitary unit of the LAPD. Tingirides’ experience with Metro’s strong-arm tactics convinced him that they were ineffective in the long term, though he insists that at the time, it was the only tool they had. “We were not getting anywhere with just going out and arresting people, and we had to try something different,” Tingirides told me. “And I wanted to try that relationship-based policing that I saw Randy Cochran do on a different level.”

In 2008, the principal of 99th St. Elementary School launched an outreach program called Donuts with Dads, in which fathers from the neighborhood were invited to read to kids. But only about a quarter of the households in Watts had fathers in them, and the dads that were around were not easily able to take time off of work. So the school had firefighters and cops come in to take the place of the fathers. “It was a dog and pony show,” Tingirides said of the program’s kick-off. “The mayor was there, the chief was there, TV was there.” But he noticed something: these weren’t the kids that cops would see on a radio call, while they were angry or in the midst of a crisis. They were the same kids, but in a normal environment — “like my kids, except they had gold and silver in their teeth instead of porcelain.”

Tingirides had an epiphany. Here was a chance to begin to change the perceptions that neighborhood kids and Southeast officers had of one another. Officers could come to the school and see the kids in a different context than what they see on radio calls. The kids could see the officers as people other than the ones putting dad in handcuffs.

With his wife, Emada, Captain Tingirides began recruiting street cops to do readings at the school on a weekly basis. Slowly, perceptions began to change. When officers first started showing up at the school, the kids ran away, screaming, “He’s going to arrest us!” Within a year, the kids were running toward the officers instead.

Emada suggested to the principal that they start setting some goals. If the kids read a certain number of books, she said, officers would put on a pep rally at the end of the year, and Tingirides would jump out of a SWAT van in a chicken suit. The kids did their part, and Tingirides soon found himself doing a chicken dance in front of a bunch of screaming children. The next year, he found himself in front of the same kids, getting his hair dyed pink and then shaved off.

Back at the station, channeling the conversations he’d had at the Watts Gang Task Force, Tingirides pressed officers to start exercising their empathy. “Stop being so offended by a guy standing on a corner selling weed,” he told them. “If you didn’t have any food to put in your baby’s mouth, what would you do? How far would you go? What’s acceptable to you to feed your child, because you have no money, because you can’t get a job, because you don’t have an education, because you grew up in a dysfunctional family, because you couldn’t get to school without getting beat up, and so you couldn’t concentrate because you’re worried about how you’re going to get home safely?”

50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist


Southeast station is a mammoth concrete fortress that might fare well against an armed insurrection, or an alien invasion. It was built in 1978, the same year that Daryl Gates became the LAPD’s Chief of Police. Its brutalist architecture was congruous with its relationship with the surrounding community during Gates’ 14-year tenure: disparate, aloof, braced for attack.

Inside of its grim exterior, however, the Southeast Division was beginning to leave that past behind. Chief Beck and Connie Rice were paying attention to the changes underway, both within the division and among the residents of the three Watts projects. Then, in 2010, a group of P.J. Watts Crips at Imperial Courts attempted to gang rape the women in a Korean-American family during a home invasion. Rice went ballistic. She was afraid for the families in the projects, and she was afraid that the psychopaths who had perpetrated the crime might unravel all the progress that was being made in Watts. She met with Chief Beck and demanded that a new community policing unit be funded and built to keep Watts from spiraling once again out of control.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when the war between the Bloods and the Crips was at its peak, Beck was a sergeant in the C.R.A.S.H. unit. Rice had deposed, cross-examined, and sued him on a number of occasions. But by the time Beck became chief, Rice’s relationship with the department had been transformed. After the Rampart Scandal in the late ‘90s and the federal oversight of the LAPD that emerged from it, Rice worked hand-in-hand with then-Chief Bill Bratton to write and implement reforms aimed at transforming not only the behavior, but the entire culture of the police department. When Rice first heard that Bratton had made Beck the new head of the Rampart Division, she was disappointed. “Old wine in old bottles,” she thought. “He was ruthless, and he was aggressive, just like SWAT and gang units are,” Rice remembers of Beck’s days as a gang cop. But she soon discovered that he had changed. His old gang cop swagger was gone. When she asked Beck what had happened to him, he told her that he had realized that search-and-destroy policing was no longer working.

Now, as chief, Beck gave the green light to Rice’s proposal to build what became the Community Safety Partnership program. The twin goals of CSP were to avoid unnecessary arrests and to build public trust, and then put that trust to work in making the community safer. “We wanted to see if the populations that hate the police the most could learn to bond with them,” is how Rice explained the vision behind the program. “It’s community policing on steroids,” is how Sergeant Whiteman put it.

CSP officers — there are about 50 — are assigned to each of four housing projects: Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens, and Imperial Courts, in Watts, and Ramona Gardens, which is in the Latino majority neighborhood of Boyle Heights, on the east side of the city (the program is currently expanding to two more projects, Avalon Gardens and Gonzaque Village). By design, the CSP unit commands some of the highest salaries in the department, allowing it to attract the best candidates, and those who are tapped to join it are automatically promoted. It is made up largely of veteran officers. “Some of them are old SWAT and gang guys who want to make atonement for what they did,” said Rice. It is also disproportionately female (Rice insists, only half-jokingly, that women make better police officers than men).

When an officer starts with CSP, she is retrained by Rice’s organization, the Urban Peace Institute, in the fundamentals of “community trust policing.” That means un-learning years of standard LAPD procedure. “My concept was, these cops would not be promoted based on how many arrests they made,” Rice said. “In fact, if you made an arrest, you’d have to explain it, and it would not count in your favor.” Instead, CSP officers’ performance is evaluated on how they avoid making arrests, as well as on what programs they develop to keep kids safe when walking to school through gang territory, or how many kids in their jurisdictions stay in school, or how much trust residents say they have in individual officers. That means a significant amount of their time is spent mentoring children, hanging out at after-school events in parks and playgrounds, and participating in planning meetings with local community groups. It’s a jarring transition for some. “I come from a historically enforcement background,” said Whiteman, who joined the force in 1998 and came to CSP just eight months ago. “So I’m taking time to shift my thought process. I need to be reconditioned from how I’ve been trained for the last 17 years.”

When Rice first approached residents of the Watts projects with the idea of CSP, some of them jumped down her throat, accusing her of trying to bring a police state into their backyards. Those perceptions began to change as officers cleaned up a Jordan Downs alleyway that had been an open air drug market for years. Then, they brought in medical teams to screen people for diabetes and hypertension. Next, they distributed hundreds of pairs of bifocals to elderly residents. After that, they brought computers to school classrooms. In Ramona Gardens, CSP officers organized a farmer’s market. These were not the cops people in the projects had known all too well for decades.

Joubert remembered the first time he saw a CSP officer at a pickup basketball game at the Nickerson Gardens recreation center, around the time the program began. The players were mostly young men, including a lot of gang members. Joubert watched as the officer took off his holster, his vest, and the rest of his gear, put it in the trunk of his car, and joined the game. It was something he had never seen before. Soon, Chief Tingirides and other officers started bringing their families to the rec center when the community organized toy giveaways and other events.

Those relationships between CSP officers and community members are part of what accounts for the staggering drop in violent crime in Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts. As a gang intervention worker, Joubert’s job is to squash personal conflicts before they turn into gang violence and trigger the ever-escalating cycle of reprisals. He described a hypothetical scenario this way: a boy from Nickerson Gardens, which is associated with the Bounty Hunter Bloods, sleeps with a girl from Jordan Downs, which is Grape Street Crip turf. The girl has a boyfriend, who finds out about the affair. He gathers his friends to confront the boy, but he doesn’t want to admit to them that his girlfriend cheated on him. So instead of telling them the truth, he turns it into a gang thing. The gang intervention workers, who are respected former gang members themselves, start hearing rumors of a squabble brewing between the Bloods and the Crips. They then do two things: they contact the CSP officers at each of the two projects and loop them in, and they start interviewing all of the parties involved. The CSP officers and the gang intervention workers share information and work together to squelch the rumors, while the gang intervention workers get to the bottom of the real cause of the conflict. Then they separate the beefing parties until cooler heads prevail. If a hit does occur, Tingirides told me, the department will also put a heavy police presence on the streets, taking their cues about when and where from the gang intervention workers.

In addition to navigating potential gang flare-ups, gang intervention workers also act as liaisons between CSP officers and neighbors who don’t respond well to instructions from uniformed cops. The respect, Joubert said, must be mutual. “When officers say, ‘well you got these guys over here, they disrespecting, we cannot take this no more.’ So we step up. We tell the guys, ‘you can’t do this. You can’t smoke. You have to respect the officers.’”

Controlling crime, violence, truancy, and everyday quality-of-life issues has become a joint project of the police and residents of the projects, instead of a catalyst for hostility between them. The byproduct has been an environment that people want to be a part of, rather than a nihilistic world that invites only anger, violence, and disorder. “People feel like change is here,” said Rice. “And so they invest in it. They’ve been given the room to rise to the occasion.”

CSP is a small unit, which is radically different from the rest of the LAPD. Rice is somewhat skeptical as to whether the success of the program can be brought to the rest of the department; the old school mindset is so baked into its culture. Joe Domanick pointed out to me that because of Bratton, stop-and-frisk policing is at an all time high. And he warned that when crime rates rise, as they currently are in Los Angeles, chiefs feel pressure to revert to the old ways. He said community policing throughout Los Angeles is already beginning to teeter.

Still, Domanick believes that with the right leadership, the CSP model can be brought to other cities — though it will take a very long time. “It takes a long time to build up community trust through community policing,” he cautioned. And it takes a generation, he said, for a culture shift to take place within a department.

50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist


After the staff meeting at Southeast Division, Captain Tingirides — now Commander Tingirides — took me out in a black LAPD Dodge Charger on a drive through the projects. Most of the people we passed waved at Tingirides, or cocked their chins at him in salutation. “That would have never happened a while ago,” he told me. “People would have been mad dogging.” As we passed Jordan Downs, he pointed to a young man walking down the sidewalk. “That is something you would have never seen a while back — a guy walking through there with a bright red shirt. This is purple land.”

The Grape Street Crips still exist at Jordan Downs, just like the Bounty Hunter Bloods still exist at Nickerson Gardens, the PJ Watts Crips at Imperial Courts, and the Big Hazard gang at Ramona Gardens. But nowadays, Tingirides told me, people in the Watts projects don’t really see them as gangs anymore — they’re just the identities of each of their communities. People still sport their colors from time to time, on t-shirts and shoelaces, though the handkerchiefs and bandanas are gone. But it’s more in the spirit of wearing a Clippers hat to claim your team and your city. It’s no longer an invitation to get shot at.

That morning, a homicide occurred in Watts, though not in any of the three housing developments. We happened to roll past the brother of the victim standing outside of a church; Tingirides waved to him, and he nodded back. The Metro Division police, who were recently deployed to Watts in part to learn from CSP’s successes, were out looking for suspects.

I asked Tingirides whether the suppression-trained Metro cops looked down on CSP’s pacifist approach. “It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “That’s the direction the department is going in.” CSP’s crime reduction figures are so unmistakable that Beck has been able to say to the rest of the force, “Look what they’ve done in Southeast.”

On the way back to the station, we encountered the aftermath of a minor head-on collision. Commander Tingirides got out to make sure everybody was ok. We ended up waylaid for 40 minutes, waiting for another squad car to arrive. While we were standing around, Tingirides chatted with the tow truck driver, who he knows from the neighborhood. He asked him about the homicide. The driver told Tingirides that there was a carful of men rolling around the area in a silver Monte Carlo, armed with AK-47s, in case of retaliation.

When we finally left the scene, Tingirides called the tip in to the department. After hanging up, he allowed himself a moment of self-satisfaction. “That’s what happens when you know everybody in the neighborhood,” he said.

Outside of the Watts projects, the rest of the LAPD is still catching up with Southeast. It has a long way to go. Last year, a young black Angeleno named Ezell Ford joined the list of victims of lethal police violence whose names have become familiar to households everywhere: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose. The cops who killed Ford, Rice said, were doing the old style, search-and-destroy policing. I asked Donny Joubert whether the same situation could have unfolded at Nickerson Gardens, with a CSP officer. He doubted it. But even if it did, he wouldn’t expect the community to explode, as it did in Ferguson, and as it has twice in Watts’ past.

“We’re able to work it out,” he said. “We’re able to talk it out to where you’re not going to see this community blow up, or burn up stores. They believe in the system. They trust the system now.”


Leighton Woodhouse writes, draws, and makes videos in Los Angeles.

[Top photo from Getty. All other photos from author.]

Olsen Twins Sued by Intern Who Claims She Worked 50 Hours a Week for No Pay

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Olsen Twins Sued by Intern Who Claims She Worked 50 Hours a Week for No Pay

A former intern for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Dualstar Entertainment is suing the Olsens, claiming she worked 50-hour weeks under horrible conditions and was offered neither pay nor college credit in return. Shahista Lalani was in the nightmare position for four months in 2012, and says she and her fellow interns did the same work as some full-time employees.

Lalani says her duties for the Olsens’ fashion line, The Row, included photocopying, sewing, cleaning, and running personal errands, and that the work never stopped: “I was talking to [the head technical designer] all day, all night,” she said in the suit, “Other interns have cried. I’d see a lot of kids crying doing coffee runs, photocopying stuff.”

In one particularly egregious example, she claimed she had to go to the hospital for dehydration after attempting to carry “like 50 pounds worth of trench coats” in 100-degree weather and “sweating to death.”

Lalani is seeking to start a class action suit that 40 other unpaid Olsen interns would be eligible to join, alleging they were owed at least minimum wage and overtime for essentially replacing employees that Dualstar would have otherwise had to pay.

The former intern is now a fashion designer whose website bio says, “interning with Zac Posen as well as The Row greatly impacted her knowledge about the local garment district and ethical manufacturing processes as well as mastering care and quality in design.”

Her suit also notes that she rarely interacted with the Olsens directly, and that they weren’t the ones making interns cry and sweat to death. “They’re really nice people,” she said. “They were never mean to anyone. They’re business people.”

Mary-Kate and Ashley are believed to be worth a combined $300 million.

[H/T Page Six, Photo: Getty Images]

The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

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The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

The new Fantastic Four movie is unquestionably a box office bomb, which critics have savaged with scathing reviews such as “More like the Unfantastic Four!” For those of you who want to avoid sitting through it, I have taken the liberty of chronicling the movie’s major moments… as best as I can recall them happening.


(at high school science fair)

Reed Richards: So for my high school science project, I’ve built a teleporter.

Teacher: Well, since you have somehow never proven your genius to me at any point during in the seven years I’ve taught you, I assume you are an idiot and I will treat you as such.

Ben Grimm: Hey. Anyone else think it’s weird that a high school is doing a science fair, but every single exhibit looks like an elementary school science fair project?

Reed Richards: So basically, science science science. Here, let me steal a toy plane from a kid so I can teleport it for you.

Ben Grimm: Wait a second. Why is there an elementary school kid with an exhibit next to Reed? Is this an all-ages science fair?

Reed Richards: (presses button, plane is teleported). See? Science!

Teacher: Even though I am apparently judging this science fair, I know nothing about science and thus have to assume you used magic to make that kid’s toy disappear. I have to disqualify you, because you are obviously a witch.

Ben Grimm: And how the hell has a single teacher taught us for seven straight years? This movie has just begun and already nothing makes sense.

Dr. Franklin Storm: Hello, Reed. I am a man who attends random high school science fairs looking for brilliant geniuses. I would like to offer you a full scholarship to the Baxter Foundation.

Reed Richards: Cool! I’m in!

Ben Grimm: How do you get a scholarship to a Foundation? Is it a school? Are there classes? Why are we devoting so much time to our origin story if the movie is going to half-ass it?

Dr. Franklin Storm: You are not invited.


(flashback—young Ben enters the salvage yard that is his home)

Young Ben: Man, my life sucks.

Ben’s Big Brother: What? Shut up! I’m going to beat you! It’s clobberin’ time! (beats Ben profusely)

Ben’s Mom: Stop that! Here’s how you hit a child. Excelsior! (beats Ben profusely)

Ben’s Dad: No no no! You’re doing it all wrong! Here’s how ya do it—makemine Marvel! (beats Ben profusely)

Ben’s Dad: See what we’re doing here, son? Do you?

Young Ben: YES GODDAMMIT

Ben’s Dad: Then ‘nuff said! (continues beating Ben profusely)


The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

Ben Grimm: Um, does anyone realize we’re 45 minutes into a 105-minute movie and we don’t even have our powers yet?

Reed Richards: Okay, guys! We’ve built our big fancy teleporter! I think we should get drunk and take it for a spin.

Ben Grimm: That is an objectively terrible idea.

Reed Richards: Ben, you gotta come because we’re BFFs. Johnny helped build it, so he’s in. And then I guess… Doom should be the fourth.

Ben Grimm: Wait, what about Sue?

Reed Richards: What about her?

Ben Grimm: Sue’s coming along, right?

Reed Richards: Nah. Let’s keep it to us bros.

Ben Grimm: The hell?! We’re supposed to be the Fantastic Four. How is she supposed to get her powers if she doesn’t come with us to this other dimension?

Reed Richards: I dunno.

Ben Grimm: So you’re telling me, in this movie about the Fantastic Four, in a movie that is solely about our origin story, we’re going to exclude one of the core characters from the key moment in our origin story.

Reed Richards: I guess.

Ben Grimm: And, in 2015, we are really going to keep the one female character in the group sidelined? Do you not see the problem here?

Reed Richards: Not even slightly!

Ben Grimm: Are you okay with this, Johnny?

Johnny Storm: Sorry, my entire character description for this movie was “has daddy issues and likes cars.”

Ben Grimm: Goddamn it. Let’s just get this over with.

Sue Storm: I’m right here, guys. I’m not even invisible yet.

Reed Richards: SHUT UP SUE MEN ARE TALKING


The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

(teleporter shuttle arrives on an alien world)

Reed Richards: Here we are… on Planet Zero!

Ben Grimm: I thought this was the Negative Zone.

Reed Richards: We renamed it for the movie.

Ben Grimm: “Planet Zero” is a dumber name than “Negative Zone.” Why aggravate the comics fans when it’s not even an improvement?

Reed Richards: Hey, look at that green energy stuff!

Doom: I’m gonna touch it.

Ben Grimm: What? You are on an alien planet in a new goddamned dimension. Why would you possibly touch anything?!

Doom: No, dude, it’s cool. I saw a scientist do it on Prometheus.

(Doom sticks hand in green energy goo, blows up; planet starts freaking out and the others run back to the shuttle)

Ben Grimm: GODDAMMIT WHY ARE ALL THE GENIUSES IN THIS MOVIE IDIOTS


The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

Ben Grimm: Well, now I’m a giant orange rock dude with a disturbingly high-pitched voice and a visible butt crack. This sucks. At least I have the comfort in knowing that the one relationship this movie has even slightly established is the friendship between me and Reed. I know he’ll help me.

Reed Richards: (from vent) So about that…

Ben Grimm: Oh, for @#$%’s sake.

Reed Richards: We’re in some weird military installation and it’s kind of freaking me out. So I’m actually gonna skate.

Ben Grimm: Reed, you better goddamn fix me.

Reed Richards: No, I’ll totally fix you. Somehow. I’m sure that’s what I’m going to be working on, in some manner. But if you don’t see me in a year or so, don’t stress. I’m just gonna take my time with it. In fact, you should probably just plan on hunting me down and taking me back against my will.

Ben Grimm: I @#$%ing hate you.

Reed Richards: Dude, that’s a harsh thing to say. We’re the Fantastic Four! We’re like a family!

Ben Grimm: No we’re not! We’re not a family at all! I’m supposedly your best friend and you’re abandoning me for an entire year! You and Sue have absolutely zero chemistry! I met Johnny like five minutes before we went to Planet Zero! Sue and Johnny are actually family and they’ve barely even talked to each other in this dumb movie!

Reed Richards: Hmm? Sorry, I wasn’t listening, I was thinking about science. Anyways, see you later!

(Ben’s cell door opens)

Dr. Tim Blake Nelson: Ben, we want you to murder people for the U.S. military.

Ben Grimm: Of course you do. Sure, why not? I just loved the storyline in the Fantastic Four comics where the Thing joined the army and started killing enemy combatants with his bare hands oh wait I didn’t because NOTHING LIKE THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED IN FANTASTIC FOUR.

Dr. Tim Blake Nelson: To be perfectly honest, I’m pretty sure someone at Fox has confused you with the Punisher. But we need you to do something while Reed dicks around.

Ben Grimm: Goddammit.


The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

Sue Storm: So this is my scene? I just look pensively at a lot of computer monitors to find Reed?

Man in Authority: Yes.

Sue Storm: You realize that not only did I not get to go to the other dimension, but my job on the projects was making the environment suits? Making clothes? For the men?

Man in Authority: …

Sue Storm: I was on House of Cards, you know.

Man in Authority: Less gabbing more looking pensive, honey.

Sue Storm: This is some sexist bullshit.

Man in Authority: Hey, you should see the actual Fantastic Four comics from the ‘60s. You’re lucky you aren’t running the Baxter Foundation employee daycare.


(scientists make second trip to Planet Zero)

The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

Scientist #1: Let’s actually do some science, people.

Scientist #2: Uh, sir? It looks like someone is walking toward us.

Scientist #1: Okay, no one act even slightly surprised or concerned that there is something living on this alien planet in another dimension.

Scientist #2: Hey, it’s that Doom kid! And his face looks like a bootleg action figure!

Scientist #1: Let’s take him back to Earth.

(later, back at the base)

Doom: Hey! I gotta get back to my planet!

Dr. Tim Blake Nelson: Then why’d you even walk up to the scientists in the first place?

Doom: Shut up. (Dr. Tim Blake Nelson’s head explodes)

Doom: The world is bad so I’m going to destroy it! (everybody’s heads explode, Doom goes back to Planet Zero)

The Most Important Scenes from Fantastic Four (As I Remember Them)

Reed Richards: Oh no! Doom has made a bad thing that will destroy the earth! We have to stop him!

Sue Storm: But he’s more powerful than any of us!

Reed Richards: Yes, but he’s not more powerful than all of us. We can beat him if we work together.

Sue Storm: The concept of teamwork had not occurred to me!

Reed Richards: It’s probably because you’re a woman.

Sue Storm: (mutters) I’m going to fire the @#$% out of my agent.

Ben Grimm: I just want to point out that a 15-second speech does not come close to mitigating the fact that you abandoned me for an entire year after you turned me into a hideous rock monster that apparently lives in constant pain and self-loathing. So even though after this fight the film is going to pretend we’re suddenly a happy family, I still hate you, Reed. And I consider Sue and Johnny acquaintances at best.

Reed Richards: Less gabbing and more punching, Ben.

(Ben punches Doom into the bad thing)

Doom: Oh no! Save me, my ill-defined powers!

(Doom dies, the bad thing stops being bad)

Reed Richards: Now we’re one big happy family! Isn’t it… fantastic? (gives finger guns to audience)

Ben Grimm and Sue Storm: Goddamn it.

Johnny Storm: I like cars. (sighs)


(credits roll)

Fox Executive #1: Holy @#$%.

Fox Executive #2:

Fox Executive #1: Oh, sweet Jesus. This is terrible.

Fox Executive #2: It is, but don’t panic.

Fox Executive #1: Don’t panic?! I just said I think this movie is terrible, and I’m the person who approved the X-Men Origins: Wolverine script!

Fox Executive #2: I know. I know! But panicking won’t help.

Fox Executive #1: (to assistant) Clara! Bring in the cocaine we take when we’re sad! Not the happy cocaine.

Fox Executive #2: Okay. We can fix this. We polled some nerds a while ago and asked what they wanted from a Fantastic Four movie… where is that sheet… ah ha! Okay, here it is.

Fox Executive #1: (does copious amounts of sad cocaine)

Fox Executive #2: Here’s what they said: A strong sense of family. Fun super-powers. Wild science fiction. The romantic relationship between Reed and Sue. The teasing relationship between Johnny Storm and the Thing. Marvel’s greatest villain, Dr. Doom being a badass. Just a general sense of fun.

Fox Executive #1: ...

Fox Executive #2: Okay. So this movie has absolutely none of these things.

Fox Executive #1: We’re so @#$%ed.

Fox Executive #2: Yes we are. Pass the sad cocaine, please.


Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

What Is NASA Hiding? Aliens?

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Steven Tyler once sang, “Pink it’s my new obsession, pink it’s not even a question.” How wrong he was. A pink UFO was allegedly spotted hovering above the International Space Station in footage shot by NASA last week. A moment after the pink spot appears, NASA’s live stream cuts out. The nerve of NASA is astounding.

Some, including at least one YouTube user, believe this a cover-up meant to conceal the fact that the ISS is being monitored by alien life. Others believe it is just a glitch. NASA, according to the Daily Mail, refuses to comment either way. Very interesting.

(This is, of course, without even mentioning the fact that yesterday NASA tried to distract all of us with talk of “space lettuce”—a feckless sideshow. Now today I see a Daily Mail article also from yesterday about this UFO, the real story? Interesting.)

YouTube user Streetcap1 has this to say:

During a period when the camera is moving for a few minutes, Nasa captures a distant pink and gold object. Caught August 3rd, 2015. We need them to maybe start pointing the ISS cameras outward and stop treating people like children.

We are adults and deserve to know the truth. Are aliens monitoring the ISS? Might they invade at any moment? Are we waging an interplanetary war as we speak? Who is winning? The Mets? Or who? The Sun spoke to UFO expert Nigel Watson about the glowing pink orb:

“I’m a bit suspicious of this video, it could be of ‘real’ objects out there or some form of camera trickery. UFO spotters love to see any object or flick of light out there as proof that extra-terrestrial craft are monitoring our planet, and are keeping an eye on the ISS at a distance. Though if they are piloted by aliens using advanced technology, wouldn’t they have perfected the means to hide themselves completely from our cameras?”

Maybe, Nigel.

Or maybe what they desire, like anyone else...is to be seen.


Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Lawrence Lessig's Ideas Are Correct, Important, Too Boring for American Voters 

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Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor who has been one of America’s most active voices in the fight to reform campaign finance laws, is running for president.http://gawker.com/lawrence-lessi...

Lessig’s platform, detailed on this here website, focuses almost exclusively on reforming America’s political system: protecting and expanding voting rights, ending gerrymandering and instituting proportional representation, and enacting campaign finance reform to encourage the funding of campaigns by small donors rather than by the rich and big corporate and other special interests.

Lessig is absolutely right in his beliefs and he is doing the ever-unappreciated work of pushing for the sort of systemic change that is both absolutely necessary if we ever hope to have a well-functioning and fair democracy, and too boring for the general public to give a shit about. So let’s hope a more popular candidate steals his ideas.

Geno Smith Punched By Teammate, Out 6-10 Weeks

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Geno Smith Punched By Teammate, Out 6-10 Weeks

The Jets’ 2015 season has officially begun:

Head coach Todd Bowles announced today that QB Geno Smith will likely be out until October, after he was hit by LB Ikemefuna “I.K.” Enemkpali in a locker-room fight this morning. Bowles used the words “cold-cocked” and “sucker-punched,” and said Enemkpali has been cut. Enemkpali was the Jets’ sixth-round pick in the 2014 draft.

Smith’s broken jaw will need surgery. This means Ryan Fitzpatrick will be the Jets’ starting QB for at least the first month or so of the season.

Brooklynites answer: What did Sean Price mean to you?


Everything Is Not a "Hack" 

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Everything Is Not a "Hack" 

You can “hack” a computer. You don’t have to “hack” every last thing.

Instead how about “method,” “technique,” or just plain “way?” Then again if everyone used alternate terminology, I never would have gotten the opportunity to write this fun post.

[Photo: Flickr]

Megyn Kelly Is Receiving Death Threats From Rabid Donald Trump Supporters: Report

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Megyn Kelly Is Receiving Death Threats From Rabid Donald Trump Supporters: Report

Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine has a lengthy report about Donald Trump’s tense relationship with Fox News and its star anchor Megyn Kelly, whom Trump recently accused of unfairly targeting him during last Thursday’s televised debate (during which, Trump seemed to allege, Kelly had been menstruating). The internal conflict—placing Kelly and Trump in competition for the approval of Fox boss Roger Ailes—has apparently gotten so toxic that Trump supporters have begun threatening Kelly’s life:

For a few days, Ailes didn’t know how to handle Trump’s full-throated attack on Kelly, who accused Trump of sexism during the debate. Eventually, as I reported yesterday, he made the same choice he always does: follow the ratings, and mend fences with Trump. But that process has meant that Fox has had to mute its defense of Kelly, who is now watching uneasily as the Fox audience turns on her: According to one high-level source, Kelly has told Fox producers that she’s been getting death threats from Trump supporters.

Megyn Kelly ranks among Fox’s most prized talent, both publicly and within the channel’s pecking order; it would require extraordinary circumstances for Ailes not to vociferously defend her integrity or her ability to interrogate presidential candidates. But now we know the circumstances under which Ailes won’t go to bat for Kelly: When Donald Trump is attacking her. “Fox’s famously aggressive PR apparatus has not gone after Trump to defend Kelly,” Sherman notes, referring to the notoriously cruel tactics of Fox publicist Irena Briganti. Ailes’ initial defense of Fox News—“I’m extremely proud of all of the moderators”—didn’t even mention Kelly’s name.

Ailes and Trump seem to have patched things up—the latter appeared on Fox this morning—but not without fracturing Ailes’ seemingly omnipotent ability to bend Republican candidates to his will. According to Sherman, Ailes initially refused to talk to Trump after the candidate went after Kelly, but blinked after he began appearing on CNN and MSNBC to trash Fox and Kelly:

After Trump told Sean Hannity in a weekend phone call that he was “never doing Fox again,” appeared on four non-Fox public-affairs shows on Sunday, and did interviews with Today and Morning Joe on Monday, Ailes raised the white flag and picked up the phone on Monday morning. “Roger wanted a friendly relationship,” the source explained.

The rest of Sherman’s piece is well worth studying not only for Fox’s embarrassing loyalty to Trump, but also for the many holes Sherman punches in the story Fox News has been telling, through numerous interviews and profiles, about Megyn Kelly’s vaunted reputation within the company and her personal relationship with Roger Ailes. Ailes may have discovered Kelly, and mentored her; but his diplomacy toward Trump came at the cost of humiliating her. If Trump’s war on Fox exposed anything beyond Ailes’ cowardice, it’s the fact that you can be Fox’s most prominent female anchor and still be valued less than a joke candidate.

Email/chat: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · DM: @jktrotter · Photo credit: AP

Walmart Trucker Who Hit Tracy Morgan Was Awake for 28 Hours, Driving for 14

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Walmart Trucker Who Hit Tracy Morgan Was Awake for 28 Hours, Driving for 14

The Walmart truck driver who seriously injured Tracy Morgan and killed comedian Jimmy Mack McNair when he rear-ended their limo bus last June had been awake for 28 hours and driving for nearly 14, an National Transportation Safety Board investigation concluded.http://gawker.com/tracy-morgans-...

Kevin Roper was going 65 mph in a 45 mph zone when he hit the vehicle carrying Morgan, Mack and others. The NTSB found his fatigue likely caused him to miss obvious signs that traffic in front of him was slowing. If he hadn’t been speeding, he would have had time to brake and prevent the fatal crash.

Walmart settled with Morgan in May for an unknown amount (“Walmart did right by me and my family,” Morgan said at the time), but Roper still faces charges of death by auto. He’s pleaded not guilty. http://gawker.com/driver-in-trac...

The truly alarming thing about the situation, according to NTSB investigators, is that Roper was nearing the end of a 14 hour shift—the maximum legally allowed—and couldn’t have made it to his destination without going over.

He didn’t have to accept the final load on his shift without sleeping, the NTSB’s Michael Fox said. And, in fact, he would have made more money by turning it down, because Walmart would have paid for his rest time.

Roper had driven 800 miles, from Georgia to Delaware, before he even started the shift. After the accident, Walmart banned drivers from traveling more than 250 miles to work, unless they get nine hours of sleep between arriving and beginning their shifts.

The report also criticized New Jersey emergency workers for taking nearly 40 minutes to get the crash victims out of the limo bus, and moving them without precautions, and Morgan and his party for failing to wear seat belts.

[Photo: AP Images]

500 Days of Kristin, Day 198: Urgent Message From Kristin

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 198: Urgent Message From Kristin

ATTN: social media intern who runs the Twitter account for the shoe company Chinese Laundry–You have made a grave error from which you will never, ever recover. To make matters worse, it was Kristin Cavallari, lead designer of the Kristin Cavallari for Chinese Laundry shoe line, who discovered it.

It appears that when Chinese Laundry posted the photo below to its Twitter account last week, the company misidentified one of the shoes as its own exclusive design.

500 Days of Kristin, Day 198: Urgent Message From Kristin

Wrong.

WRONG.

Those are all from Kristin’s collection.

As Kristin explains, Chinese Laundry’s “arctic shoe” does not appear anywhere in the photo. The 2 fringe booties are CHARM.

Please correct and repost.

Literally repost it right now.

Thank you.


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Sources Who Are Definitely Not Ben Affleck's Publicist: The Nanny Was in Vegas for Business Reasons

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Sources Who Are Definitely Not Ben Affleck's Publicist: The Nanny Was in Vegas for Business Reasons

Earlier today, we brought you the news that Ben Affleck allegedly tricked his wife into watching their kids so he could have sex with the woman they were paying to watch their kids. Now we have an update: Yeah that sort of happened, but it was a work thing!!!! say sources who are definitely not publicists employed by Ben Affleck. http://gawker.com/report-ben-aff...

To wit, he had his wife watch the kids and took the nanny with him because he needed the nanny’s help with a poker tournament (for charity):

“Christine flew with Ben from the Bahamas to Vegas because she was helping him with his poker tournament for his charity,” the Eastern Congo Initiative, a pal told The Post on Tuesday — the same day the paper published an exclusive June 27 snap of a beaming Christine wearing Brady’s four Super Bowl rings aboard the private jet.

This, despite the presence of “other assistants and staff” who were seemingly unable to provide whatever help the nanny was providing:

“There were many other people on the plane, including other assistants and staff working for Ben who were helping with the event, and many of these also tried on Tom’s Super Bowl rings and took photos,” the source said. “Ben and Tom Brady are good friends, and he is grateful that Tom agreed to attend his charity event.”

Plus she wasn’t hiding because—obviously—it was all above-board:

“When they landed in Vegas, Christine helped out with the organization of the tournament, assisting clients and guests who attended. She was not hiding, she was there to help out,” at the tournament, the friend said. “After the tournament ended Ben returned to the Bahamas to the family. Christine went home to LA.”

There you have it—a totally normal correction that was definitely not vetted by a PR team from a real friend of Ben Affleck’s, who was there, on the plane, and just wants to set the record straight.

“There was no affair during his marriage to Jen nor since their separation,” the source, who again, most likely does not collect a paycheck from Ben Affleck, tells Page Six. And there you have it!


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

Prisoners Say They Were Beaten, Choked In Aftermath of Killers' Escape

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Prisoners Say They Were Beaten, Choked In Aftermath of Killers' Escape

In the days after convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped Clinton Correction Facility, corrections officers allegedly beat, choked, and threatened to waterboard the inmates remaining in their block, prisoners told the New York Times. The abuse was ostensibly part of an effort to find the escapees, but the Times reports it seemed more like “a campaign of retribution.”

The abuse reportedly centered on inmates from Matt and Sweat’s unit, the honor block, who were transferred to other prisons or put in solitary confinement after the escape. They’d made it to the honor block based on good behavior, and there’s thus far no evidence linking any of them to the escape.

Still, the man in the next cell over from Matt and Sweat, Patrick Alexander, says he was handcuffed, taken to a broom closet with a bag over his head, and slammed repeatedly against the wall while guards screamed “How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?”

He wasn’t the only one, according to the Times.

More than 60 inmates have filed complaints about being beaten or otherwise physically abused by corrections officers, but the state corrections department says there’s no “credible evidence substantiating the inappropriate use of force during the transfer of inmates from Clinton Correctional Facility.”

Alexander and other inmates say they were denied medical care after their brutal interrogations, and told not to tell medical staff how they got their injuries, and were allegedly made to sign documents covering for their abusers:

Paul Davila, another resident of the honor block, wrote in his complaint that after he was beaten during an interrogation, he was pressured to “sign a report stating, ‘I was not assaulted.’”

“Left with no other choice,” he wrote, “I signed.”

Now they’ve lost the honor block privileges and prison jobs they’d earned through years of good behavior, even though they say those freedoms had nothing to do with Sweat and Matt’s escape—the night shift guards’ laziness did.

And now, the Times speculates, the guards are taking that failure out on inmates in a frantic attempt to “exonerate themselves for the security lapses that contributed to the breakout.”

[NYT. Photo: AP Images]

Are Motorcycles in Constant Need of Repair or Are People Who Ride Motorcycles Just Assholes?

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Are Motorcycles in Constant Need of Repair or Are People Who Ride Motorcycles Just Assholes?

You always see motorcycle owners outside, tinkering with their motorcycles. Why? They’d have you believe they were out there fixing something all the time. La, la, la, fixing my bike, la, la, la. But are motorcycles in constant need of repair? Or are motorcycle owners just a bunch of assholes?

In pursuit of knowledge, I reached out to Wes Siler, known motorcycle man and contributor to Jalopnik’s Lanesplitter, to ask about whether motorcycle people are assholes, or what. Wes also writes Gizmodo’s Indefinitely Wild. He emailed me back very quickly, which was nice of him:

Working on motorcycles yourself is part of the fun. They’re relatively simple machines that provide easy access to the mechanical components, so provide you with more opportunities for tinkering than most cars do.

In comparison to cars, most motorcycles do require a little more maintenance. Chain final drives need routine adjustment, cleaning and lubrication, but give up less power to friction and heat than the driveshafts of cars do. Engines that make more power from less capacity need oil changes a little more frequently and stuff like valve adjustment just becomes more important to the riding experience while being easier to perform at home. And doing all this stuff yourself is just a satisfying thing to do.

That’s on real motorcycles at least. Harleys, in contrast, are just total pieces of shit that are always breaking. Guys that ride those are just being assholes.

Well, there you have it. Chain final drives need routine adjustment. Engines that make more power, etc., etc. Valve adjustments.

Now we know, and we don’t have to wonder.


Image by Jim Cooke, photo via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.


Soda Executives Are Just as Evil as Tobacco Executives

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Soda Executives Are Just as Evil as Tobacco Executives

A report out of the New York Times makes it one thing very clear: Big Soda is quietly killing people while funding bad smokescreen science that says the opposite. How long until the people who run Coke are held accountable?http://gawker.com/exactly-how-ma...

The gist of the Times piece is simple: the Coca-Cola Company is spending millions of dollars to fund semi-bogus research organizations that will put pro-soda talking points into medical literature, namely that fat people are only fat because they don’t exercise enough, not because they ingest trays of garbage and cheap sugary drinks.http://gawker.com/americans-repl...

Here’s the new word from Dr. Steve Blair, a University of South Carolina professor of medicine now on the Coke payroll:

“Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’ — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on,” the group’s vice president, Steven N. Blair, an exercise scientist, says in a recent video announcing the new organization. “And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”

This is a quite literally dangerous argument coming from a doctor: the things we eat (and how much) are absolutely crucial to our health, and the preponderance of modern medical understanding says funneling Mountain Dew into the mouths of babes is one reason why we’re all so bloated and sick.

This is awful, but somehow not as awful as this 2012 USA Today interview Coca Cola executive Katie Baynes, the “Senior Vice President, Global Sparkling Brands,” who doesn’t even bother to mask her food evil in mushy science. The delusion comes straight from the top.

Highlights include the following claims:

Soda is not inherently any worse for you than, say, skim milk or green tea:

Q: Is there any merit to limits being placed on the size of sugary drinks folks can buy?

A: Sugary drinks can be a part of any diet as long as your calories in balance with the calories out. Our responsibility is to provide drink in all the sizes that consumers might need.

Soda is part of a child’s balanced, healthy lifestyle:

Q: Is anyone at Coca-Cola trying to figure out a way to get sugar out of all drinks?

A: There is a large portion of the population that relies on the carbohydrates and energy in our regular beverages. When my son gets home from school, he needs a pick-up with calories and great taste.

Soda is a means of energy and hydration:

Q: But critics call soft drinks “empty” calories.

A: A calorie is a calorie. What our drinks offer is hydration. That’s essential to the human body. We offer great taste and benefits whether it’s an uplift or carbohydrates or energy. We don’t believe in empty calories. We believe in hydration.

This woman is in charge of children’s lives:

Q: Shouldn’t teens drink less cola and more milk and water?

A: Teens should get a healthy diet through food and beverage choices throughout the day.

Q: How much Coke should a kid drink a day?

A: We don’t make recommendations on what kids should drink. But a 12-ounce can of Coke has 140 calories, the same as a lunch-box-size bag of pretzels.

Pretzels! Sure, maybe an actual prison sentence for Katie Baynes Senior Vice President, Global Sparkling Brands is excessive, but she’s a danger to herself and others. Perhaps some sort of probation, or a tracking device.


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

NYPD Union Uses Flickr in Innovative New Push to Shame the Homeless

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NYPD Union Uses Flickr in Innovative New Push to Shame the Homeless

A Flickr account operated by the union representing New York Police Department sergeants has spent the last week or so prolifically shaming the city’s most destitute residents. So far, the Sergeants Benevolent Association has posted 241 photos of homeless New Yorkers, some alongside “funny” captions about their subjects.

The SBA initiative, incredibly, is called “Peek-a-Boo, We See You!”, according to the New York Post. One photo, of a person holding their head in their arms behind a sign that says “Hungry, Broke, Travelin’,” is captioned “disgusting.” Another, of a man sleeping on the sidewalk, reads “bed and breakfast.” A third photo is captioned “progressive agenda”—an apparent swipe at the policies of Mayor Bill de Blasio.http://tktk.gawker.com/source-new-yor...

The Post, no slouch itself when it comes to publicly embarrassing the incredibly poor for a few cheap political points, reports that SBA president Ed Mullins is hoping to use the initiative to critique the de Blasio administration and strike back against the trend of citizens recording the police.

Noting that more cops are being recorded on the job, Mullins wrote, “Shouldn’t accountability go both ways?”

“We, the ‘Good Guys,’ are sworn to protect our citizens. Shouldn’t our public officials be held to the same standard?” he said.

...

Mullins said he was responding to the past two years of “failed policies, more homeless encampments on city streets, a 10 percent increase in homicides, and the diminishing of our hard-earned and well-deserved public perception of the safest large city in America.”

Mullins correctly notes that it’s against NYPD policy for cops to photograph the public while on duty, but encourages members to send in photos “while traveling to and from work or any time off duty.” If you happen to see an officer in uniform pulling out his smartphone to snap a hilarious pic of someone sleeping on the sidewalk, we encourage you to take your own photo of the scene. And in the spirit of “Peek-a-Boo, We See You!”, why not send it to us?


Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Does Ted Cruz Regret the Eradication of Polio?

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Does Ted Cruz Regret the Eradication of Polio?

In today’s edition of No, I Hate Abortion More, Senator Ted Cruz attempted to one-up his GOP running mates in the form of an overwrought tirade against Planned Parenthood and—if we’re to take him at his word—the polio vaccine.

At first glance, Cruz’s latest campaign ad seems innocuous enough. Violins swell as a disembodied male voice promises us that a vote for him is vote for the final nail in Planned Parenthood’s coffin.

For a century, Americans have helped heal and care for millions in need. Our values propelled extraordinary innovation. America made the world better. So how did America become a country that harvests organs from unborn children? And who has the courage to stop it? Ted Cruz will prosecute and defund Planned Parenthood.

All of which would be typical conservative rhetoric and wholly uninteresting if not for one, little thing: Ted Cruz’s ad, which features a scene from the notorious and wildly misinterpreted “organ harvesting” Planned Parenthood video, opens with a shot of children suffering from polio, excerpted from the footage below:

Polio. The same crippling, potentially fatal infectious disease that has since been eradicated thanks to the help of fetal kidney cells. Cells that, of course, come from the same sort of voluntary fetal tissue donations that current researchers receive from Planned Parenthood. The same organization that Ted Cruz promises to shut down not ten seconds later.

So what exactly is Ted Cruz trying to say? Does Ted Cruz miss the days when polio ran rampant? Is a vote for Ted Cruz a vote for unbridled infectious disease? Does Ted Cruz want to inflict pain and misfortune upon our children?

Who’s to say. As for the Senator’s own[-ish] question: “Who has the courage to stop [researchers from getting the tools they need to create lifesaving vaccines]?”

Why, Ted Cruz does. That’s who.


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

Biologists at Yellowstone National Park say they have caught an adult female grizzly bear near where

Arlington Police: Officer Who Shot Christian Taylor Fired for "Poor Judgement"

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Arlington Police: Officer Who Shot Christian Taylor Fired for "Poor Judgement"

At a press conference on Tuesday, Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson said the officer who fatally shot Christian Taylor on Friday has been terminated “for exercising poor judgement” and had no physical contact with the unarmed teen before firing.http://gawker.com/new-video-show...

This account contradicts an earlier version of the incident given by Johnson, who told The New York Times this weekend that two officers “struggled” with Taylor before the shooting.

Johnson said on Tuesday he had “serious concerns” about Officer Brad Miller’s need to use lethal force, but a grand jury will ultimately decide whether he should be charged criminally. From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

While outlining the events leading up to the fatal shooting of Christian Taylor, Johnson said rookie officer Brad Miller “exercised poor judgment” that led to “cascading consequences.”

Miller’s “unilateral decision to enter the building alone and to pursue [Christian Taylor] helped create an unrecoverable outcome,” Johnson said, adding that the decision put other officers on the scene at risk.

On social media, Star-Telegram reporter Monica S. Nagy tweeted further details of the shooting as offered by Johnson on Tuesday.

As he was still in field training, Officer Miller is reportedly unable to appeal his termination.

[Image via AP Images]

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