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Emails Link Kremlin Troll Farm to Bizarre New York Photography Exhibit

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Emails Link Kremlin Troll Farm to Bizarre New York Photography Exhibit

For about a month last year, posters advertising a touring art exhibition called Material Evidence. Syria. Ukraine were nearly impossible to avoid in New York City. The show itself stunk unmistakably of Russian propaganda, and recently unearthed emails suggest that it was financed in part by the Kremlin’s online propaganda agency.

Material Evidence, which ran through September and October 2014 in an enormous Chelsea warehouse space, presented large-scale photos taken during the recent civil conflicts in each of its titular countries. Its promotional materials promised to take an objective look at the Syrian and Ukrainian situations, without “taking sides” or “supporting a specific political goal.” The moral high-handedness felt like overcompensation for the exhibit itself, which was baldly pro-government, painting Syrian rebels as barbarians locked in senseless conflict with a benevolent state and Euromaidan protesters as reactionaries and neo-Nazis. http://gawker.com/whos-behind-th...

Because of Russia’s alliances with the Syrian regime and pre-revolutionary Ukrainian government, I and others speculated that the Kremlin or its supporters had financed Material Evidence. The exhibition’s organizers did not effectively dispel that notion. When I asked assistant curator Lana Andreeva last year how an ostensibly crowdfunded operation was able to afford a ubiquitous advertising campaign and a 12,000-square-foot space in the heart of Manhattan’s gallery district, she told me the implausible tale that an anonymous benefactor had dropped a large bag of cash with no explanation at Material Evidence’s last iteration, in Berlin. Benjamin Hiller, the lead curator of the New York installment, has since left the project, citing “misinformations” and a “nonjournalistic approach.”

Writers at the website Euromaidan Press recently sifted through a batch of leaked emails from the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency—a shadowy government office that employs internet trolls who attempt to sow pro-Russian and anti-U.S. sentiment on social media media and in online comment sections—and found several documents that appear to link the agency to Material Evidence. Among the emails were invoices documenting payments from Internet Research to Zhurnalistskaya Pravda, a far-right Russian newspaper that identified itself as the organizer of Material Evidence when the exhibit debuted in Moscow in January 2014. According to Euromaidan Press, “In general, IRA appears to finance the entire work of Zhurnalistskaya Pravda, all the way to the out-of-pocket expenses of its prominent editors.” http://internet.gawker.com/was-russias-pr...

Euromaidan Press also found documentation of a payment between two apparent shell companies, one of whose names translates to “Evidence” in English, for “services in the organization of an event from 20 December, 2013 until 20 January, 2014,” dates that roughly correspond to Material Evidence’s debut Moscow run.

In June, former Gawker writer Adrian Chen investigated the Internet Research Agency for the New York Times Magazine and found another apparent connection to Material Evidence: several puppet Facebook accounts created by the agency had signed up to attend the show.

Whatever the weird provenance of the exhibition, it does not appear to be slowing down. The latest installment of the exhibition, which focused on Ukraine specifically, closed in Moscow in April. A post on the Material Evidence Facebook page claims it will open in the rest of Europe and in the U.S. “in the near future.”


Image via Material Evidence. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.


Deez Nuts: The Day Every Local News Station Got BOFA'd

“In queer radical circles and in much of the left, the worlds in which I operate, there’s a widely h

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“In queer radical circles and in much of the left, the worlds in which I operate, there’s a widely held idea that one’s political radicalism can be attached to one’s sexual practices...But the sad truth... is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.”

Josh Duggar’s Apology: “I Have Been the Biggest Hypocrite Ever” [Updated]

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Josh Duggar’s Apology: “I Have Been the Biggest Hypocrite Ever” [Updated]

The Duggar family just released a statement from Josh on their personal website in which Josh not only confirms the fact that he has been “unfaithful” to his wife, but he also confesses to having developed a “secret addiction” to pornography over the past several years.

We already had evidence that Josh had at least been seeking out some sort of extramarital affair, but this is the first time we’ve head any mention of Josh’s porn habit.

You can read the statement in full below:

Statement from Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar:

Please see the statement below from our son Josh regarding recent media stories about him. When we learned of this late last night our hearts were broken. As we continue to place our trust in God we ask for your prayers for Josh, Anna, our grandchildren and our entire family.

Statement from Josh Duggar:

I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.

I am so ashamed of the double life that I have been living and am grieved for the hurt, pain and disgrace my sin has caused my wife and family, and most of all Jesus and all those who profess faith in Him.

I brought hurt and a reproach to my family, close friends and the fans of our show with my actions that happened when I was 14-15 years old, and now I have re-broken their trust.

The last few years, while publicly stating I was fighting against immorality in our country, I was hiding my own personal failings.

As I am learning the hard way, we have the freedom to choose to our actions, but we do not get to choose our consequences. I deeply regret all hurt I have caused so many by being such a bad example.

I humbly ask for your forgiveness. Please pray for my precious wife Anna and our family during this time.

Josh Duggar

A heartfelt apology that, unfortunately, sounds familiar to the ones we’ve heard before. But hey, maybe this time he means it.

Update 2:48pm:

According to the site Zap2It, Josh Duggar’s original apology had one extra line that has since been removed. This was the original fourth paragraph of Josh’s statement:

The last few years, while publicly stating I was fighting against immorality in our country, in my heart I had allowed Satan to build a fortress that no one knew about.

No definite word on why the Duggars decided to remove the reference to Josh’s Satan-infested heart, but I assume it has something to do with the fact that blaming your unfaithfulness and pornography addiction on anyone but yourself is, generally, not the best look.

Update 2:57 p.m.: Looks like Josh Duggar may have been a little hasty in his apology. The general idea is still there, but the letter itself has gone through several revisions since going up less than two hours ago. The first instance, as mentioned above, removed a reference to Satan, while the second revision removed any mention of pornography altogether.

It’s hard to imagine that the letter wasn’t vetted by anyone before the Duggars put it up on their website—but given the few typos in the original, it’s certainly possible. Either way, Josh of all people should know by now that the internet never forgets. You can see all the changes made to the apology thus far below.

Josh Duggar’s Apology: “I Have Been the Biggest Hypocrite Ever” [Updated]


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Art by Jim Cooke.

Nine days after agreeing to a $96 billion bail out, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has announce

2,000 Men Show Up to Steve Harvey Taping To Call Women Bitches

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2,000 Men Show Up to Steve Harvey Taping To Call Women Bitches

This past Sunday in Chicago, comedian and long suit enthusiast Steve Harvey held a taping for a two-hour special of his eponymous daytime program. The theme of the show was “What Men Really Think,” and to that end, Harvey packed 2,000 dudes into a theatre downtown. And those men, according to several attendees, did their jobs, calling female guests bitches, hounding them with catcalls, howls, and whistles, and lobbing homophobic slurs at one man in the audience.

On Facebook, one Chicago comedian named Tim Dunn described what he saw during the 10-hour, two-part taping. The show was apparently spun to the men in attendance as a sort of male-only summit on dating and relationships. (Before coming, the audience members were asked to answer a 53-question survey via email.) But when the taping started, Harvey revealed to the audience that there would actually be hundreds of women onstage, too. This turned out to be a bad idea. From Dunn’s Facebook post:

- Over a hundred women were seated onstage, and when they got up to speak they were catcalled. This resulted in the warm-up comic asking the men to stop catcalling, as the vibe in the room had become “too rapey.”

- When women skyped in to ask Steve for advice, their image was displayed on large screens, which men would either catcall or groan at based on the women’s looks. And like, if you looked at the guys groaning, spending a night with any of these women would be the absolute best night of their lives.

- During a segment about how often men want sex, a young man got up and mentioned that he is sometimes too tired from work to have sex with his girlfriend. He was immediately booed and had homophobic epithets yelled at him.

- During the same segment, a woman got up and described a time when she didn’t want to have sex because she had just finished a tiring road trip. In that time, she was first catcalled, then booed, ending with a man yelling “you haven’t done your duty!” in response to her story.

- To end that segment, Steve said it should be the woman’s decision whether or not to have sex. Only the women onstage, the comedians in our row, and a few other men throughout the theater applauded that statement.

All of these stories were echoed on a podcast composed of other local comedians in Chicago, hosted by one named Sammy Tamimi, who tipped me off to this story. On Tamimi’s podcast, Bryan Duff and Tyler Samples describe men in the audience essentially claiming some of the women on-stage—“I call the one in yellow!”—screaming things like “you bitch,” describing a woman who appeared via Skype as a “pump it and dump it,” and yelling “pussy” and homophobic slurs at the aforementioned man who said he was sometimes too tired to have sex.

To be clear, Duff and Samples aren’t exactly heroes here. During the podcast, Duff talks about going to the taping as a character called “Rape Culture” and—as he tells it, unintentionally—inciting the crowd by acting out misogyny while “in character.” In imitating the men in the crowd, they also slip into voices in which they are obviously referring to black men. (That said, photos from the taping make the crowd look relatively diverse.) They also argue that a male member of the on-stage panel was actually in the closet, and went on to parody his effeminate voice.

Nonetheless, both the Facebook and podcast accounts seem to argue that Steve Harvey, in his quest to show “what men really think,” got a little more truth than he might have wanted. Duff and Samples also noted that warm-up comic Rubin Ervin told the crowd it was getting too “rapey,” and say that they saw one woman on-stage try and tug the bottom of her skirt down in response to the catcalls.

Harvey, they say, did not exactly help matters. Per Duff and Samples, Harvey at one point threatened to fight someone in the audience who was complaining that the crowd hadn’t been fed. As far as his on-topic moderating went, they say Harvey frequently returned to the concept of men as hunters and women as prey, as well as the idea that women can be “meat” or “traps.” None of that is exactly especially regressive amongst the general population of straight men, except Harvey is a New York Times best-selling relationship author several times over. His book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy and Commitment was used as the fulcrum of the 2012 film Think Like a Man, as well as its sequel Think Like a Man Too, both of which have been criticized previously for turning back the clock on feminism.http://jezebel.com/5867730/think-...

It’s not clear yet when the two-part special will air, or if the show’s editors will choose to, or be able to, edit out audience members yelling “bitch” at female speakers or audibly and loudly groaning at women who they didn’t collectively find attractive. Steve Harvey is a syndicated show distributed by NBC Universal.

UPDATE (3:45 p.m.) According to an emailer, the special will air on September 8 and 9.

If you were at the taping and would like to relay your experience, feel free to email me.


Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Allow Us to Clarify the Doublespeak About Vice Salaries

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Allow Us to Clarify the Doublespeak About Vice Salaries

When you hear companies talk about how great their salaries are these days, it can make you wonder why their workers ever wanted to unionize in the first place.

The Wall Street Journal today has a story that looks at the ongoing movement to unionize digital media outlets in the context of “Will this scare off investors?” The story mentions the recent move to unionize by a small number of editorial employees at Vice—a request that was agreed to by the company and its CEO, Shane Smith. The story includes this paragraph for context:

In an application for a tax credit for building its new headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y., Vice stated that it paid editorial writers an average wage of $45,000 in 2012. Video production and postproduction employees received an average wage of $60,000. Creative and design employees were paid $70,000 on average. A person familiar with the matter says that salaries have since gone up to an average of just under $70,000 for nonmanagement employees.

That Vice salary breakdown was first published here. It clearly showed what many Vice employees had already told us: writers were poorly paid and at the very bottom of the company salary hierarchy.

But wait—what about this improvement? A “person familiar with the matter”—meaning a Vice spokesman who does not want to go on the record—says that “salaries have since gone up to an average of just under $70,000 for nonmanagement employees.” The exact same “person familiar with the matter” said the exact same thing to the Wall Street Journal when the Vice union news was first reported. The implication of this factoid is: sure, pay was low in the past, but those numbers are out of date, and pay is much improved now.

But please, dear reader, note the rhetorical ju-jitsu being employed here. The one official source we have for Vice salaries, a document submitted to the government, says that “written editorial” staffers had a $45K average salary in 2013. These are the very employees who, predictably, have now unionized. Vice Media would like to insinuate to you that their conditions have drastically improved. So does the company simply share their current editorial salary averages on the record? No, they do not. What they do instead is to offer, anonymously, a purported salary average “for nonmanagement employees”—a group that includes finance people and sales people and marketing people and every other kind of employee from every other department. All of whom we already know are better paid than editorial staffers!

Gee—you say that if you average together all the salaries for all the employees from better-paid departments, you get a number higher than what editorial employees were paid? Thank you for that thoroughly uninsightful (but successfully misleading) fact.

Which is all to say: no one should be surprised that Vice writers feel they deserve better pay.

[Pic via]

Donald Trump: Boston Bros Who Beat Up a Homeless Man Just "Want This Country to Be Great Again"

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Donald Trump: Boston Bros Who Beat Up a Homeless Man Just "Want This Country to Be Great Again"

It’s easy to look at the pair of Boston brothers who allegedly beat a homeless man in a xenophobic attack apparently inspired by Donald Trump’s rhetoric and think, Wow... racist criminals. Donald Trump, however, is much more charitable than you or I.

According to the Boston Globe, Scott and Steve Leader—who both have “extensive criminal records”—began the attack by urinating on their homeless victim’s face while he was sleeping. Then they allegedly began punching him in the head and face and beating him with a metal pole, apparently because he made the mistake of being Hispanic.

And lest you think the men had no defense, they did: Scott allegedly told the arresting officer, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

But where the arresting officer saw a pair of violent criminals, Donald Trump sees the future of our country.

Told of the attack, which also left the man soaked in urine, Mr. Trump said at a news conference late Wednesday that it was the first he had heard of it.

“It would be a shame,” Mr. Trump said, before adding: “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

In the meantime, the brothers are facing felony charges. Still, it sounds like Donald Trump has their vote—as long as they’re not convicted before 2016.


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


How The Hugo Awards Saboteurs Actually Disproved Their Own Best Argument

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How The Hugo Awards Saboteurs Actually Disproved Their Own Best Argument

The people who stuffed the ballot at this year’s Hugo Awards nominations have made a number of arguments in favor of their actions. We shared some of those with you a while back. But there’s one argument that the Hugo saboteurs keep making which seems especially strong—except they already disproved it.

In case you’re one of the lucky people who still doesn’t know about this situation, here’s the short version. A guy named Theodore “Vox Day” Beale, who’s best known for tweeting a racist article via the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s official account, took advantage of a legal loophole in the rules that allows a small group of people to control the nomination process, if they all nominate the exact same things instead of voting according to their individual tastes.

The upshot is that this year’s Hugo ballot is largely a celebration of Beale, his friends, and his tiny publishing company, Castalia House.

Beale’s own statements about the Hugo mess have been largely incoherent, but he has a cadre of supporters (and there’s a separate but related campaign, which had much less success in getting its choices onto the ballot.) And some of the more articulate supporters of this self-styled “Sad Puppies”/“Rabid Puppies” revolt have kept making one argument in particular: That progressive science fiction authors have been stuffing the ballot box for years, and now the conservatives are just doing what the left has always done.

In other words, some of the Hugo saboteurs apparently believe that progressives have had an organized campaign to rig the Hugo Awards for years, but it was held in secret. And the Hugo saboteurs (or “Puppies”) claim that by doing their ballot-stuffing publicly, via an organized slate, they’re actually being more open and transparent than the secret campaign run by people who want to see more diversity and more challenging ideas in science fiction.

This actually sounds like a compelling argument at first — but the saboteurs themselves have already disproved it. Their own success shows that their conspiracy theory is absolutely false. If there had been a left-wing conspiracy to stuff the ballot, it would have largely counteracted the efforts of Beale and his friends. The Beale strategem only succeeds if all the other nominations are scattered and disorganized. And that kind of disorganization is exactly what we saw in most nominations. It appears that everybody except Beale’s crew simply nominated whatever stories they happened to enjoy in 2014. Had there been a secret left-wing bloc nominating its own stories in lockstep, then Beale’s strategy would have failed.

Another piece of evidence against this: In the past few years, during the period when the saboteurs claim that there’s been an organized left-wing campaign to stuff the ballot, we’ve regularly run into a situation where the “Best Short Story” category has only had three nominees instead of five. That’s because only stories that receive at least five percent of the nominating votes can get on the ballot, and there weren’t enough stories that enough people agreed on in those years. Had there been some secret left-wing campaign to pack the ballot, then you would have seen a full complement of five “Best Short Story” choices—and in fact, that’s what’s happened this year, after the saboteurs did their work.

So this really is about people reading lots of books (including, one hopes, books from diverse authors) and nominating the ones they liked—versus groupthink, lockstep behavior from a group of people who care more about imposing their will than anything else.

But also, saying that “we’re doing the same thing as you, only openly instead of in secret” is a specious claim in any case. The fact that they did it openly is a huge part of the problem—because they announced publicly on a website which stories everybody should vote for, and loudly recruited people from various message boards to join the cause. The loud, public appeal for a group of people to nominate exactly the same stories is crucial to why they were able to sabotage the process so effectively. So in this case, “transparency” is actually another word for log-rolling.

Meanwhile, if you want to know the last word on this year’s Hugo mess, it comes from Beale himself. In the past week or so, there’s been a controversy over the fact that a Holocaust novel featuring a lovable Concentration Camp commandant was nominated for two RITA awards (the romance equivalent of the Hugos.) As Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books explained, “The stereotypes, the language, and the attempt at redeeming an SS officer as a hero belittle and demean the atrocities of the Holocaust.”

Beale has weighed in on this situation in an interview with Newsweek, and proclaimed that it’s the same thing as what’s been happening with the Hugo Awards. The book about the Nazis turning out to have “hidden depths and sympathies,” Beale says, is just like his own books and stories: terrific works of fiction, that have just been singled out for criticism by politically correct people. (And if you think that the Holocaust shouldn’t be portrayed as not all that bad, you’re a “Social Justice Warrior.” Congratulations.)

Both the Hugo Awards controversy and this Nazi-book kerfuffle are about “SJWs attempting to thought-police a particular industry or genre,” Beale said in an interview with Newsweek. He also said that Wendell shouldn’t be dismayed if she gets harassed for criticizing this book, because that’s par for the course.


Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com or follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane. Top image: 2013 Hugo Awards design, sculpted by Vincent Villafranca and photographed by Batwrangler.

LA Sheriff's Department Recommends Caitlyn Jenner Be Charged With Vehicular Manslaughter

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LA Sheriff's Department Recommends Caitlyn Jenner Be Charged With Vehicular Manslaughter

Six months after a fatal Malibu car crash left one woman dead, the LA Sheriff’s department is recommending Caitlyn Jenner be charged with vehicular manslaughter because she was traveling at an unsafe speed when the accident occurred.http://gawker.com/caitlyn-jenner...

Investigators say that although she was driving under the speed limit, her speed was reportedly “too fast for the day’s road conditions.”

“He should have either been going 0 or just barely rolling,” because traffic was at a standstill, a source tells TMZ.

The recommended charge is only a misdemeanor, so Jenner is facing—at most—up to a year in prison and/or a monetary fine. But because detectives determined there was “nothing egregious” about her conduct that day, there’s only a “50/50” chance she’ll be charged, Det. Richard Curry of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept. tells Variety.

The District Attorney’s office is expected to decide whether or not to charge her next week. But legal experts tell ABC News that even if she is charged and convicted, she’s unlikely to serve time because she has a clean driving record.

Jenner is also facing two civil suits stemming from the accident.


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

Bernie Sanders Released a Spoken Word Album in 1987 and Frankly It Rules

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Bernie Sanders Released a Spoken Word Album in 1987 and Frankly It Rules

“Can Bernie Sanders sing? No, he can’t,” writes Eusebius, the top-rated Amazon reviewer of We Shall Overcome, Bernie Sanders’ first an only spoken-word music album. “I wanted to have a chuckle at his expense, but I stayed and listened with deep admiration.” Eusebius, I agree.

Dangerous Minds notes the existence of Bernie’s 1987 opus, samples of which can be heard below. We Shall Overcome was recorded with the assistance of a Burlington-based musician named Todd Lockwood back when Sanders was the mayor of that city, and finds the progressive it-boy doing William Shatner-style orations of classic folk tunes like “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

“As talented of a guy as he is, he has absolutely not one musical bone in his body, and that became painfully obvious from the get-go,” Lockwood told the website Seven Days last year. “This is a guy who couldn’t even tap his foot to music coming over the radio. No sense of melody. No sense of rhythm — the rhythm part surprised me, because he has good rhythm when he’s delivering a speech in public.”

If that endorsement doesn’t convince you to head over to Amazon and buy the thing, I don’t know what will!


Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Cops: Teens' Brutal Machete Slaughter in Woods Ended With Sex Near Body

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Cops: Teens' Brutal Machete Slaughter in Woods Ended With Sex Near Body

In late June, three Florida teenagers and a 20-year-old allegedly led a classmate to the woods near their school, where they hacked him to death with a machete—until his “face caved in”—and buried him in a shallow grave. One of the teens and the 20-year-old then had sex to celebrate, according to Miami-Dade police, before returning to the school.

The Miami Herald reports that three students from Homestead Job Corps—Kaheem Arbelo, 20, Jonathan Lucas, 18, and Christian Colon, 19—have confessed to the gruesome murder, while a fourth, Desiray Strickland, 18, has been arrested.

According to police, on the night of June 28, the four suspects lured 17-year-old Jose Amaya Guardado into the woods, where the day before they’d dug a grave. After savagely beating Guardado, they forced him into the grave. From the Herald:

“The victim made one last attempt to fight off the attackers,” the detective wrote, “at which time, [Arbelo] struck the victim with the machete several more times until the victim’s face caved in.”

The group buried Jose, then wiped blood off a nearby fence before burning the dead teen’s belongings and their own clothes. “They also got rid of the machete and the shovel,” [Miami-Dade Detective Juan] Segovia wrote.

Following Guarado’s burial, the New York Post reports that Strickland allegedly “complained that she had missed the first series of machete strikes because she had walked away for a few minutes to urinate in the woods.”

Arbelo, an alleged drug dealer at the school who police say orchestrated the murder, and Strickland then had sex in the woods near the body, according to police reports.

Lucas, Arbelo, and Colon were arrested last week and have all reportedly confessed on video. Strickland was arrested yesterday and has so far been uncooperative, allegedly head-butting an officer and carving “MPD Go to Hell” on a table. A fifth arrest is expected soon, according to police.


Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Hurricane Danny Eyes Caribbean as Three More Storms Try to Take Shape

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Hurricane Danny Eyes Caribbean as Three More Storms Try to Take Shape

Talk about feast or famine—it’s like the tropics looked at the calendar and decided that they needed to shift into high gear. Not only are we tracking Hurricane Danny as it makes its way toward the Caribbean this weekend, but there are three more systems—two in the Atlantic and one in the central Pacific—that could try to develop into tropical cyclones as we head through next week.

Hurricane Danny

Hurricane Danny Eyes Caribbean as Three More Storms Try to Take Shape

It’s the little hurricane that could. Danny formed in the face of atmospheric adversity, fighting off an environment full of dry, dusty air from the Sahara in order to become the year’s first hurricane in the Atlantic basin. Danny’s a cute li’l storm, and extremely tiny compared to most tropical cyclones. As of 5:00 PM, hurricane force winds (75 MPH) only extend ten (!!!) miles from the storm’s eye, and tropical storm force winds (39-74 MPH) only extend 60 miles from the center of circulation.

That’s small. Very small.

Hurricane Danny Eyes Caribbean as Three More Storms Try to Take Shape

So small, in fact, that if you were to plop Hurricane Danny on top of Washington D.C. right now, its hurricane force wind field would barely cover the city and just about nothing else. If you were wondering, the smallest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin was Tropical Storm Marco back in 2008. The storm, which formed in the Bay of Campeche (extreme southern Gulf of Mexico), only had tropical storm force winds extend 10 miles from its center. There have been stronger thunderstorms in Alaska, but there it was, spinning in the Gulf with a name and everything.

Storms this small have a nasty habit of doing unexpected things, so it could rapidly intensify or collapse into the void with little notice. The models, limited in their spatial resolution to begin with, can have a hard time resolving storms that are this small. The National Hurricane Center’s latest forecast shows Danny maintaining its current hurricane status through early next week, just as it starts to interact with the Lesser Antilles. Once it reaches the Caribbean islands, it will start to feel the effects of dry air and start to weaken.

Unfortunately (or fortunately!), Danny is so small—and likely to stay small—that even if it crashes head-on into islands like Puerto Rico as currently forecast to do, it probably won’t be as prolific a rainmaker as locals would have hoped. That seems counter-intuitive—you usually root for the hurricane to go away—but this region is mired in a deep drought that’s taking an extensive toll on freshwater sources. The water shortage is so bad that 160,000 homes and businesses in Puerto Rico are facing two-day water outages—officials shut off the water for two days, turn it back on for one day, and the process repeats.

The storm is thousands of miles from the mainland United States, and it would take another two weeks for it to get here if it even survives and doesn’t shift out to sea, so ignore anyone mentioning the storm hitting the lower 48 at this point. There is no accuracy at such a long range. That being said, it is hurricane season, and you should always be prepared for storms if you live in a vulnerable area.

Areas of Interest

Hurricane Danny Eyes Caribbean as Three More Storms Try to Take Shape

The National Hurricane Center also points out two areas in the Atlantic that have the potential for tropical development over the next five days.

The most interesting area is located near Bermuda, and the agency gives this area a 60% chance of becoming a tropical (or subtropical) cyclone by early next week. Weather models show an extratropical low (your common, everyday low influenced by the jet stream) developing over the western Atlantic in the next few days, and they show this low developing tropical characteristics as it moves near Bermuda. It’ll be very interesting to watch, and anyone along the U.S. East Coast should keep an eye on the system due to its proximity to land.

Our other system is a complex of thunderstorms coming off the western coast of Africa, a typical event for this time of the year. Systems coming off of Africa are always of concern in August, since tropical cyclones like to form in this region of the world around this time of the year. We have a while to worry about what this system will do.

Hawaii

Hurricane Danny Eyes Caribbean as Three More Storms Try to Take Shape

At 11:00 AM HST, or 5:00 PM EST, the Central Pacific Hurricane Center will begin issuing advisories on a newly-minted tropical depression that’s located about 900 miles southeast of Honolulu. We’ll know more once they issue the advisory, but the system will generally move toward the northwest, bringing it close to the island chain by next week. However, models have diverging solutions on what will happen when the system gets closer to our fiftieth state. At least one computer model shows the system affecting Hawaii—and it’s not something that would be torn apart by volcanoes on the Big Island like the umpteen other tropical cyclones that have threatened the state in recent months—so residents and visitors to paradise need to monitor what this newly-minted storm decides to do.

[Maps: author | Satellite: NOAA | Updated at 4:45 PM EDT to reflect the newest advisory on Hurricane Danny from the NHC.]


Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

If you enjoy The Vane, then you’ll love my upcoming book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, which comes out on October 6 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

500 Days of Kristin, Day 207: Kristin Makes New Friends

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 207: Kristin Makes New Friends

Attention web people: Kristin Cavallari has made an official Facebook page. One of her first posts is a photo of a muffin and glass of creamy, speckled something:

500 Days of Kristin, Day 207: Kristin Makes New Friends

A commenter responds: “My God you become so healthy....or so Hollywood (even though you no longer live in Hollywood-old habits die hard). PS. though-glad you’re on fb.”

197 people like this.


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Breitbart’s Racist Story About Shaun King Has Completely Imploded

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[UPDATED BELOW] Yesterday, the nativist website Breitbart.com alleged that the anti-racism activist Shaun King had repeatedly and willfully misrepresented his racial background for money and publicity, highlighting the fact that King’s 1979 birth certificate indicates he was born to two white parents (instead of a “Caucasian mother and an African-American father,” as a 2012 profile of King noted). But now MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid is reporting—and King has since confirmed in an essay for DailyKos—a crucial bit of context: The father listed on the certificate, Jeffery Wayne King, is not the activist’s biological father. Today Reid told anchor Richard Lui:

I did talk to Shaun. I can tell you that Shaun King is biracial. There is no reason to doubt that he is biracial. The stories about what he said regarding getting his scholarship, etc, I think you have to consider the source. I don’t think they’re credible absent any actual reporting.

The story essentially is that the two people who are listed on Shaun King’s birth certificate, his mom and his dad, his mother is his biological mother, the man listed on his birth certificate is not his biological father.

I think getting into further details about who his biological father is, unfairly drags his mother into a story—and she is not a public figure. This is a very private story between his mom, dad, and the person who is his biological father. But Shaun King, since he was about 8 or 9 years old, has known that his dad is not his biological father.

Reid’s reporting goes a long way in explaining King’s oblique references to familial secrets during his lengthy rebuttal on Twitter:

Following Reid’s report, Breitbart encouraged King to submit a DNA sample to prove his blackness: yet another indication that Breitbart and its ilk are chiefly motivated not by a wish to expose Shaun King as a fraud, but their desire to intimidate and humiliate anti-racism activists. Congratulations to Breitbart on the efficiency with which they’ve proven this point.

Update, 7:05 p.m.

In an essay for DailyKos published on Thursday afternoon, King explained that he was told from a very young age that his biological father was a “light-skinned black man” with whom his mother had had an affair:

My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. My mother and I have discussed her affair. She was a young woman in a bad relationship and I have no judgment. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly 20 years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it.

Email/chat: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · DM: @jktrotter · Video via MSNBC


July was our planet’s hottest month since record-keeping began in 1880.

Deadspin What Do I Do With My Dead Father-In-Law’s School Bus Full Of Guns?

NYPD Sergeant Accused of Sexually Abusing Teen Girl Commits Suicide

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NYPD Sergeant Accused of Sexually Abusing Teen Girl Commits Suicide

A New York police sergeant accused of having sex with a 15-year-old girl he met online has committed suicide, The New York Times reports.

According to police, 43-year-old Joel Doseau was found dead in Brooklyn on Thursday in the home of a relative.

Earlier this month, Doseau was charged with 40 crimes related to his alleged years-long relationship with the young girl, including seven counts of rape and 11 counts of sexual abuse. From the NY Daily News:

In a 40-count indictment, a Brooklyn grand jury found that Doseau, who was assigned to Patrol Borough Brooklyn South, had an ongoing sexual relationship with the girl, now a woman in her early 20s, which started in 2008 when she was just 15, two years below the age of legal consent.

Sources said Doseau actually met the girl a year earlier, when she was just 14.

Doseau wooed the underage teen online, and lied to her about being more than twice her age, telling her he was younger than the 37 years he really was, sources said.

The girl believed him, according to the sources, and sent the police veteran nude photographs of herself.

Authorities say Doseau was arrested on August 5, but paid a $100,000 bond and was released the same day.

[Image via Shutterstock]

God to Delta: "Fuck Delta"

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God to Delta: "Fuck Delta"

On Tuesday, our Father in Heaven once again demonstrated his passionate opinions about #brands, smiting a Delta 737 as it waited for takeoff at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.

Speaking to CNN, Delta spokesperson Morgan Durrant confirmed that the plane suffered the wrath of our almighty creator, but said no one on board was injured by the fiery manifestation of God’s rage.

“Aircraft design allows lightning bolts to be safely redirected,” Durrant told the news network.

Even the most sophisticated airline, however, will never escape His judgement.

[Image via YouTube]

Explosion Rocks Bronx High School, Injuring Three

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Explosion Rocks Bronx High School, Injuring Three

Three workers were injured, one critically, on Thursday when a gas explosion damaged at least three floors of New York City’s John F. Kennedy High School, WLNY-TV reports.

According to The New York Times, seven people were working on the school’s sixth floor when a gas line exploded just after 8:00 p.m., blowing out windows and rattling nearby buildings. From the NY Daily News:

“It was a thunder, a really loud explosion,” said Addae Hicks, 21, a custodial worker on the school’s sixth floor.

The gas line exploded after a contractor hit it with a blowtorch, Hicks said.

“Honestly, I thought it was a bomb,” said Jason Osorio, a custodial worker who dashed out of the rumbling building. “I’m happy to be alive.”

Nearly 140 firefighters and paramedics reportedly responded to the explosion.

[Image via WNBC]

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