The NYPD officer who tackled and handcuffed retired tennis player James Blake has been placed on desk duty in the wake of his headline-generating mistake, the New York Times reports.

Blake, a former top-10 player, was accosted outside his hotel yesterday when the officer apparently mistook him for a suspect in a credit card fraud case. The NYPD’s explanation of the incident, via the Times:

According to that account, plainclothes officers were investigating a ring believed to be using fraudulent credit cards to buy cellphones, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the internal investigation into the episode involving Mr. Blake was continuing.

As part of the credit card investigation, the police had a private service deliver phones to a suspect at the hotel, the official said. Once the delivery took place, the suspect was arrested, the official said.

The delivery person then pointed out to the police two other people in the lobby to whom he said he had delivered phones the previous day.

Blake was only released, the Times reports, after “a retired police officer recognized him.”

Several officers were reportedly involved in handcuffing Blake in a takedown New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton described as “very disturbing.”

(Still, Bratton later told the Times the real suspect “looks like the twin brother of Mr. Blake.”)

Blake, who says he was standing still and never resisted, reportedly has cuts and bruises resulting from the detainment.

“He has a right to be upset about it,” Bratton reportedly told NY1 Wednesday.

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

In a week when Stephen Colbert’s debut is easily the biggest news in Late Night, what’s reigning ratings champ Jimmy Fallon’s strategy for holding onto the crown? Having Donald Trump on, when Colbert could only get Jeb! Bush, of course. But that’s not until Friday. On Wednesday night, Fallon dipped back into his show’s deepest, most reliable well, the History of Rap with Justin Timberlake, and came up with a sixth medley of hip-hop classics.

http://morningafter.gawker.com/what-the-hell-...

Here’s a sweaty Fallon sprinting and a fresh, immaculate Timberlake strolling from Whodini and Slick Rick all the way up to Drake, Kendrick, and Fetty—making an embarrassing stop at Snow’s “Informer” along the way.

Colbert’s Tuesday debut understandably crushed Fallon in the ratings, but Timberlake helped Jimmy pull even on night two, and he hasn’t even played his Trump card yet.

I hope you’re ready for six more years of this, because Fallon’s locked in until 2021, when he and Justin will perform a medley of Blue Ivy Carter singles in History of Rap 12.

[Tonight Show]

*******PRECIOUS SILENCE*******

Lincoln Motor Company has come to its senses and realized that it is far better for everyone if Matthew McConaughey is not allowed to speak. In his new series of ads for the car company, which show him “joining friends for a high-class game of poker,” he “doesn’t say a single word.”

In its next series of ads after this, Lincoln can erase McConaughey’s visual image as well, and in the next series of ads after that, go out of business.

Previously, Lincoln paid Matthew McConaughey to talk to a bull.

[Via Ad Age]

I pay Time Warner Cable $70 a month for broadband that works 70-percent of the time. Just for fun, I recently upgraded to the company’s best, fastest service—300 Mbps—and guess what. After weeks of speed tests, I can confidently say that I don’t get those speeds. Ever.

This is all too common in the United States, the country that invented the internet. It’s not that Time Warner Cable’s customer service is bad. (It really is, though.) It’s not our pipes can’t handle higher speeds. (They can.) The reason I ended up getting stuck with slower internet for a higher price is simple: I didn’t have a choice.

I live in Brooklyn, New York, just three miles away from one of the most important internet hubs in the world. Over 100 carriers converge in downtown Manhattan, and yet, I have only one choice for getting broadband internet service into my home. Time Warner Cable must know it, too, because in my recent experience, the company’s swindled me out hundreds of dollars by overcharging me service that’s been dependably slow but hardly dependable. You can probably sympathize, since America’s internet is historically shitty and slow. As Bernie Sanders recently pointed out, a shocking 63 percent of Americans have only one choice for a high-speed broadband provider. This isn’t how the internet was supposed to work.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Around the country, there are new internet service providers (ISPs) stepping up and local governments stepping in to ensure more people get access to better, faster internet at lower prices. And creating a better internet really is as simple as that: more reliable connections with higher speeds for less money. This is a story about some of the innovations that might allow it to happen.

A Brief History of Internet Architecture

If you drew a picture of the internet on December 5, 1969, the day it was born, it would look like a little bit like a house turned on its side. The four corners of the house were the original nodes which spanned the American West. Over four decades later, the internet hardly looks like a house any more. It’s an infinitely complex metropolis, built of genius and light.

How this incredible piece of infrastructure came to be is a very long story, long enough that some have written entire books on the subject. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), laid the groundwork for the internet as we know it with its ARPANET. In the beginning the internet was a tool for the Pentagon as well as research institutions. Only over the decades that followed this genesis did hooking regular people up to it become a business—and a very lucrative one at that.

Following the success of discussion networks like Usenet, several technology companies began offering online services in the ’80s. America Online started as a service for Commodore computers called Quantum Link, or Q-Link. In 1989, the first internet service provider, The World, offered dial up to the public for the first time, and things really opened up.

The next two decades of technology history would be defined by the internet. Yet there are still frightfully few companies that sell internet access to the general public. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are effectively natural monopolies, with little incentive to improve their service. As such, America’s internet will improve if and only if we find a way to enable more competition between ISPs.

There are a few ways that might happen. One option involves a bold company building a new internet infrastructure all at once. The other, more optimistic option involves enlisting cities to build a patchwork of new or improved infrastructure. The third is a hybrid model, something that hasn’t really been attempted on any sort of scale. It involves cities working closely with internet carriers to guarantee better service to everyone.

That’s the ultimate goal. Now let’s talk about how we might achieve it.

The Internet Is Out There, If You Can Reach It

By the 1990s, with millions of people on the internet, it became apparent to network engineers that the existing infrastructure of copper telephone cables would soon buckle under the weight of ever-increasing internet traffic. Some cable companies, like Comcast, realized that the relatively larger bandwidth of coaxial cables could bring faster speeds to consumers. Others, like Level 3 Communications, realized that building the best networks would require the very best technology. So in 1998, Level 3 started laying fiber optic cable all across the U.S.—lots of it.

“We got started with the premise of: If you built a telecom company from scratch, what’s the basic infrastructure how would you build it?” Level 3’s chief technology officer Jack Waters told me in an interview. “In 30 months, we built 16,500 miles on a combination of the railroad right of ways, state and interstate high way and local municipalities.”

The bet paid off. Level 3 now operates a Tier 1 network and the third largest fiber optic network in the U.S. based on area, one that participates in the internet backbone. (A Tier 1 network can send traffic to any part of the internet, and since there are only a handful of them in the world, Level 3 plays a key role in making sure the everything works.) Unlike other massive networks like Verizon that carry traffic directly to consumers, however, Level 3 specializes in connecting businesses and has chosen not to be a last-mile provider. This has made the company a key player in controversial interconnection agreements between content providers and companies that don’t operate Tier 1 networks, like Comcast. In fact, Level 3 was caught in the middle of the controversy when Comcast strong-armed Netflix into paying a fee so that its customers could watch movies without stuttering or buffering. In other words, Netflix had to pay Comcast to ensure that its network capable could handle traffic—which is basically Comcast’s number one job.

Those charges trickle down to the consumer—which is really shitty, as so many Americans have no choice over their ISP. Waters, for one, would rather that ensure consumers can choose whom they pay for internet service. “If we believe, in the long run, that internet infrastructure is becoming more and more critical to the world economy, then it’s gotta be a fair place to compete and do business,” says Waters. “The technology is awesome.”

The technology is awesome, but the vast majority of Americans don’t see the benefits in their home connections. The U.S. isn’t even amongst the top ten countries in terms of average connection speed, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report. The U.S. is in 12th place with an average of 12-megabits-per-second, just a tiny bit faster than Romania. Despite being home to advanced networks like Level 3, the average American suffers from last-mile providers who just can’t seem to upgrade their infrastructure. Why would they when many of them don’t have any competitors?

How you ensure a fair, competitive marketplace is a matter of debate, however. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is doing its part by putting strong open internet rules into place. The market itself is also playing a role as consumers demand faster, cheaper internet service, and companies like Google are stepping up with fiber services of their own. Level 3 has strived to build a future-proof infrastructure that could serve their clients and, ideally, the end user for decades to come. When the monopolies that control the last mile of infrastructure refuse to upgrade their technology, though, consumers suffer from spotty service and slow speeds.

A City’s Successful Gamble

For all the behind-the-scenes work Level 3 is doing, someone still has to fight for the end user. Somebody has to fix the last mile.

Some cities are simply taking things into their own hands and building their own networks, treating the internet more like a public utility. With the support of President Obama, this municipal internet approach might just be the best path forward. Take Chattanooga: This medium-sized city in East Tennessee was once a railroad and manufacturing hub, but suffered in the 1980s, when it de-industrialized. The next three decades saw various revitalization efforts, one of which included upgrading the city’s power grid to run on a fiber optic network.

In the mid-Aughts, the city’s Electric Power Board (EPB) started strategizing how it would upgrade to a smartgrid and also bring more business development to the city. Like Level 3 before it, the city realized that fiber was the future of infrastructure, and the more advanced technology would perform better than any alternative for decades. Furthermore, the smartgrid would enable the city to deliver energy more efficiently, since it had much exponentially more data points. In the event of a major storm, for instance, the power company could see exactly what caused the outage in a matter of seconds and make the repairs in hours rather than days.

The EPB also realized that because fiber optic cables can carry such vast bandwidth, Chattanooga could fix the last mile problem and start offering its citizens high-speed internet—like a gigabit-per-second fast. The proper equipment was already being installed across the entire city. Why not offer internet service?

“The simple answer is because we can,” EPB chief Harold DePriest told The New York Times not long after Chattanooga rolled out the nation’s first municipally owned gigabit network in 2010. “The overriding consideration is that this is a real tool for economic development for our community.”

The city’s gigabit internet wasn’t cheap at first. After all, it cost a whopping $330 million to build Chattanooga’s smart grid—$111 million of which came from federal stimulus funds. In the years since the launch, however, the EPB experimented with pricing and now offers gigabit connections at bargain prices. By 2014, the citizens of Chattanooga could get the fastest internet service in the country for less than $70 a month. (By comparison, 25-megabits-per-second service from Comcast costs about $70 a month in the area.) At gigabit speeds, you can download a two-hour-long high definition movie in a little over 30 seconds.

Chattanooga’s insanely fast, cheap internet doesn’t just help the residents, either. The so-called Gig network also attracted dozens startups. In an interview, Chattanooga mayor Andy Berke told one story about a company called South Tree that digitized old video tapes and could upload higher quality files to the cloud for customers to download because of the Gig. Another company called Quickcue was able to boot strap a service that let people make restaurant reservations via text message. OpenTable bought the company for $11.5 after just 18 months.

“[The Gig] changed our conceptions of ourselves,” Berke told me. “Six years ago, we just weren’t on the list of tech communities now no matter where you go people are looking at Chattanooga as being ahead of the curve. We have a vibrant startup scene.”

But it wasn’t easy. The city of Chattanooga faced fierce resistance from big cable companies who didn’t want a new competitor in the internet business. Back in 2008, a year before the fiber rollout, Comcast sued the EPB in an effort to prevent the Gig from being built, claiming that the city had funded the project illegally. The case—which DePriest called “a frivolous lawsuit designed to slow us down”—was eventually dismissed. Fast forward to May 2015, and Comcast announced that build its own gigabit network in order to compete with the EPB.

Chattanooga is now trying to expand its gigabit network, but again, it faces opposition from big cable. Earlier this year, the city successfully petitioned the FCC to change state laws that prevented municipal broadband networks from expanding. Now, Chattanooga and the EPB’s Gig serve as models for cities all across the country to build their own high speed networks.

A Compromise Worth Considering

Not every city can do what Chattanooga’s done to address the last mile problem. Building a fiber optic network from scratch costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not just the money either. Political and logistical hurdles complicate the process, even for the most bottomless pockets.

Take Google Fiber, for instance. The private gigabit internet service is now available in three cities nationwide, but Google can’t yet brag about being available in every part of the city, like Chattanooga can. This is due in part to restrictions Google’s faced problems with expansion since it doesn’t have easy access to utility poles. In Austin, Texas, the search engine giant faced fierce resistance from AT&T which controls about 20 percent of the utility poles in the city. Google needed to pay extra high prices to use the utility poles, AT&T said, because Google was not a telephone or a cable company. (Utility poles are typically owned and controlled either by big telecom companies or local power companies, and you need permission from the pole owners if you want to string up your cables.)

The FCC’s new open internet rules reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, a meaningful change that Google said would resolve its utility pole problem. Even then, access to poles remains an on-going battle with big telecom companies, enough so that Google is building its own poles. That costs money, a luxury that many small American cities don’t have.

Some cities and private companies are working together to offer customers a choice for better, cheaper internet service that doesn’t come from a company called Comcast. A wireless service provider called Ting, for instance, is carving out a new business to offer gigabit internet service in partnership with municipalities. This involves buying carriage on larger networks like those run by Level 3 and its competitor Zayo, and then connecting cities directly to those networks. Finally, Ting installs fiber and the equipment needed to handle gigabit connections directly in people’s homes. In essence, Ting wants to help cities and their citizens plug right into the internet backbone, skipping over the slow coaxial cable that still powers the last mile in many of the big telecom networks.

For now, Ting’s footprint is pretty small. The startup ISP is starting in Charlottesville, Virginia and Westminster, Maryland, about an hour north of Baltimore. Ting is partnering with cities as well as larger networks in order to bring fiber speeds directly to homes and businesses. The key for success here is the ability to streamline the challenge of building out the fiber optic network in a given city.

“You tend to be able to build much easier much faster if the city is positive about what you’re doing and helpful,” Elliot Noss, the chief executive of Tucows, told me in an interview. Tucos is a Canadian telecommunications company that started Ting in 2012. Noss added, “Once the network is built inside of the city and once it’s connected to the back bone the rest is about hooking up homes and lighting them up.”

Ting did just that on June 26, when it turned on the fiber optic network in Westminster. The city will now enjoy gigabit speeds and more choice when it comes to picking a provider. Westminster Mayor Kevin Utz boasted about how the new fiber network would attract new businesses and residents.

Noss took a more idealistic angle in his statement. “For too long, people and businesses have had no choice, or at best the illusion of choice, as to who provides them with access,” Noss said in a press release. And the federal government has the stats to back up that claim. A better internet means more reliable connections, faster speeds, and lower prices. Experts and politicians seem to agree that we must have more competition if this is actually going to happen.

Anything But Another Monopoly

This year has been a good year. The FCC passed the strongest open internet rules in history. Comcast’s god awful merger attempt to acquire Time Warner Cable and become an even bigger monster failed. And President Obama laid out a damn sensible plan to increase competition and give Americans more choice over their ISP. He even did so in Cedar Falls, Iowa, yet another city that built its own municipal broadband.

Nevertheless, this is just the beginning. The FCC’s rules still face an assault of litigation from big cable companies that want to keep the status quo. Charter Communications is now trying to buy Time Warner Cable and become the second largest cable company in the country. The election in 2016 also stands to unravel all the hard work done in recent years, especially if some idiot who doesn’t understand how the internet works wins. And inevitably, the fact that individual states have restrictions that make it hard for startup ISPs—from the well-funded Google Fiber to startups like Ting—to enter the market and compete with the monopolies.

For me and my crappy Brooklyn internet, the situation seems a bit hopeless. Sure, Time Warner Cable could turn a corner and start offering me the speeds I’ve been paying for. And maybe, if I’m really lucky, another ISP could edge its way into my neighborhood and give me another option. Neither seems very likely in the very near future.

If America wants a better internet, it’s going to take work. We’re going to have to dig holes and install new equipment. Local governments will need to help startup ISPs compete with big telecom in a fair way. We need to hold companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable accountable for selling shitty service for high prices.

After all, we invented the internet. We should make it better.

Illustration by Jim Cooke / Photos via Flickr, AP

Contact the author at adam@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22

The saga of the three children jailed by a judge for refusing to see their allegedly abusive father has taken a strange twist since it played out in a Michigan courtroom in July: the kids now live with their dad after five days of intensive, controversial therapy to make them like him again.

http://jezebel.com/judge-jails-ki...

The kids—who are 9, 11, and 14—told judge Lisa Gorcyca in July that they didn’t want to have a relationship with their father, Omer Tsimhoni, claiming he was violent and that they’d seen him hit their mom.

“I do not apologize for—for not talking to him because I have a reason for that, and that’s because he’s violent and he—I saw him hit my mom and I’m not gonna talk to him,” the 15-year-old said at the time.

Gorcyca found the kids’ resistance unreasonable because their dad had “jumped through hoops” to see them and had never been charged with domestic abuse, so she sentenced the kids to a juvenile facility called Children’s Village. (They were later transferred to a summer camp after public backlash against the decision.)

The judge chided their mother, eye surgeon Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni, for raising them like “Charlie Manson and the cult he has.”

That seems a little ironic, considering what’s happened since then. According to court records obtained by the Detroit Free Press, the three kids were court-ordered into five days of intensive parental alienation therapy with their father in August. Their mom wasn’t present at the sessions.

They moved in with Tsimhoni, his new wife, and their half-brother on August 13.

The Free Press explains that although records relating to the therapy were sealed, it’s both costly and extremely controversial:

The intensive treatment is rare - only a handful of firms provide it - and expensive, costing as much as $40,000. Proponents say it is a way to end high conflict custody disputes and ensure that children have relationships with both parents. Critics say it doesn’t do enough to protect children from parents who may, indeed, be abusive.

Judge Gorcyca, whose unqualified support for the father in this case has caused a huge public outcry, implied in July that there’s more to the story than the media is aware of.

“There are eight files,” Gorcyca said, “No one has reviewed those files and, as of right now, no one has requested to watch any video. As a result, we have a frenzied, and misinformed, misguided public.”

The case was supposed to go back to court Wednesday, with Tsimhoni asking for the kids’ mom to be kept away from them for 90 days, and also for a break on his $1,700 per month child support, but the Free Press reports the case was adjourned.

[Photo: AP Images]

“I like it. A lot of good things. I don’t want to talk to you now, but lot of good things. A lot of good points,” said Donald Trump, man of principle, when Reason asked for his views on Libertarianism yesterday. When asked to name a single specific thing he likes about the ideology, Trump demurred.

Previously, Trump directed his gimlet eye to the Bible, which he calls his favorite book. In August the Christian Post reported what happened when a reporter asked whether there are any particular verses he prefers:

“I wouldn’t want to get into it. Because to me, that’s very personal,” Trump said Wednesday on Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect.”

He was asked again if there is any one particular verse that means a lot to him, to which he said: “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.”

A third time he was asked to cite a verse that he likes, but Trump replied “No, I don’t want to do that.”

When asked whether he prefers the Old Testament or the New Testament, Trump said “probably equal.”

Is Donald Trump a spineless pandering huckster or the future of presidential politics in America? Hmmm. Not sure. Probably equal.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

“Let me just say up front: I hope that this conversation can be as much about humanity and dignity as it is about politics and polling, because I want to try to better understand to the extent that I can...the motivation behind your rhetoric and that of Donald Trump and some others,” is how Tavis Smiley kicked off his interview with Ann Coulter that ran on last night’s episode of his eponymous talk show. Smiley never deviated from his m.o., and Coulter articulated her caustic rich-white-woman rhetoric as clearly and sharply as ever. The result was a spirited, truly compelling half hour of TV.

Coulter was on to promote her recent anti-immigration manifesto, Adios, America. Smiley announced that book’s title and subtitle (“The Left’s Plan To Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole”) virtually through gritted teeth. Smiley can be polite to the point of fawning over his guests (see last week’s two-part D’Angelo interview), but he was unrelentingly tough on Coulter, especially regarding race matters.

“Your argument suggests that if these other persons weren’t here, that somehow we would be fairer and better by those who are already here,” said Smiley, really laying into the pragmatic lapses in Coulter’s message. “The evidence doesn’t support that. And that’s why black people have been toiling for as long as they have been. Before somebody came across the boarder, black folks still weren’t being respected. They were still the last hired and first fired. The unemployment rate was still triple, quadruple the national average. I could do this all day. The health disparity still exists. Before anybody came across the boarder, negroes were still being treated the way they’re being treated right now.”

Ann Coulter maintained that without having to allocate resources to undocumented immigrants, “a lot more effort would be spent on the black community.”

“I’m not buying it for two reasons,” said Smiley. “One, because the problem existed long before we had a basic immigration problem. The problem of disrespecting fellow citizens already existed. For example, we got people running across the boarder everyday. Negroes are still getting shot in the streets by white cops all the time. Every other day, you see that.”

“And by Mexicans,” Coulter added.

I could watch them do this all day, and I get the feeling they could go at least that long, themselves.

On Monday, a black man named James Blake was assaulted by a New York City police officer outside his east Midtown hotel. The officer executed what his commissioner later called a “fast approach” takedown on Blake—grabbed his arm, threw him to the ground, and cuffed him—and leaving him cut, bruised and in cuffs for 10 to 15 minutes, all for a crime he didn’t commit. The only difference between Blake’s experience and that of countless other black men in New York is that he received an apology.

http://gawker.com/police-officer...

James Blake, you see, is a famous tennis star. In fact, the officer only released Blake after a retired cop on the scene recognized him from his accomplishments on the court, which are considerable: before he retired in 2013, he was once ranked the fourth-best men’s tennis player in the world.

The Blake incident came while cops were investing an alleged credit card fraud ring; officers set up a sting in which a delivery person brought cell phones to to the hotel with the hope that suspects would buy the phones with fraudulent cards. Blake apparently resembled a man police believed to be involved with the ring based on an Instagram photo.

City officials were quick to prostrate themselves before Blake, as well they should have been. Mayor Bill de Blasio called him personally to apologize this morning—Blake was reportedly unavailable—and NYPD Comissioner Bill Bratton apologized as well, expressing concerns about “the inappropriateness of the amount of force that was used during the arrest” at a news conference. The officer who tackled Blake, who has not been named, was asked to turn over his badge and gun; he was placed on modified leave.

But would the city be so quick to say sorry if Blake didn’t happen to be rich and well-known? Let’s look at a few other instances of the NYPD using undue force against or otherwise mistreating people during the de Blasio-Bratton era.

• In December of last year, NYPD officer Evans Mazile smashed an alleged fare-jumper’s face so hard with his baton he may have injured his own wrist. No apology was issued to Donavon Lawson, who received the beating.
  
• In October, an NYPD officer stole cash and a cell phone from the pocket of a black man named Lamard Joye during his 35th birthday party in Coney Island, then pepper-sprayed Joye when he objected. No apology was issued to Joye, and the officer was cleared of wrongdoing.
• The same month, an NYPD officer knocked out a black teenager who was smoking a cigarette in Clinton Hill because the officer believed the cigarette contained marijuana. A year before, the cop who hit him was accused of tackling a black woman in her apartment because he believed she’d carried something suspicious into the hallway. She was carrying a lollipop. Apologies were not issued to either of the victims.
• Also in October, two cops were filmed pistol-whipping Kahreem Tribble, a black teenager who allegedly dropped a bag of weed while the officers were chasing him. Tribble had stopped running and was standing with his hands up when he was struck. “We just want some type of justice,” Tribble’s father told the New York Daily News at the time. “Somebody should have called and apologized.” No one did.
• In September, an officer was filmed slamming a pregnant woman named Sandra Amezquita belly-first onto the ground in Sunset Park. The officer responsible was investigated by the internal affairs department, but no apology was issued to Amezquita.
  

The list goes on. Aside from being victims of police violence, what the people listed above have in common, including Blake, is that none of them are white. Blake has been on TV, so he got the apology from Bratton. (Usually, it takes someone getting killed.) But even the assault of a world-class athlete couldn’t get the commissioner to recognize what’s right in front of him. “This rush to put a race tag on it; I’m sorry, that’s not involved in this incident at all,” Bratton told reporters a the same conference where he called the officer’s use of force inappropriate. “We have probable cause on the part of the officer, two witnesses who say: ‘That’s him.’”

The commissioner added that Blake looks like he could be the Instagram suspect’s “twin brother.” That guy, who was presumably black as well, turned out to have nothing to do with the alleged crime being committed either, the New York Times reported today.

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

On North Avenue in the Station North Arts district—a midpoint between East and West Baltimore—a wall is affixed with a wheatpaste image of legendary dirt-biker Wheelie Wayne popping his namesake alongside the words, “Pick up a bike, put down a gun.” It’s popular slogan among the 12 O’Clock Boys, a black dirt-bike crew who’ve been local antiheroes since their founding in the early ’90s, and who’ve become a far more visible presence in recent months as the city, just like much of the rest of the country, has suffered through an exceptionally violent summer.

Their presence lately is especially magnified in the West Baltimore neighborhoods where most of the riders live. Bikers ride not away from the city, but through it, both in protest, and as a symbol of freedom and escape from the neighborhoods they’ve been forced into by segregation. Parents ride with their children; teenagers ride with their friends. “You know how we squash the beef? From us riding dirt bikes together,” a father of four told reporters after a cop car hit a biker. “East, West, South Baltimore … around the whole town.” He bought bikes for all four of his sons, in fact. “It’s stopped a lot of killing. Because we get together.”

There are hundreds of riders in Baltimore, most of them young black men; they ride dirt bikes and ATVs, both of which are illegal in the city as of 2000. Named for their signature move of popping their front wheels and aiming their bikes skyward to simulate clock hands striking midnight, the 12 O’Clock Boys are among the most infamous of the organized groups, serving as a national face for the local biker community after the release of the 2013 documentary Twelve O’Clock in Baltimore.

Largely from poor areas of the city, the riders come up young and help novices out as they get older. As documentary director Lotfy Nathan acknowledged in a 2012 VICE interview, immersing yourself in the city is an integral part of the sport: “It’s a chance for kids who would otherwise be stuck in their own neighborhoods to parade through the whole city and declare it as their own.” And once it’s theirs, they take care of it: In April, following West Baltimore resident Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody and the nationally televised protests that followed, the bikers provided live, impromptu entertainment amid the turmoil, performing tricks for the gathering crowds and curbing the high tension between the police and the protestors. Dirt-bike crews never appear politically affiliated, but they are community-affiliated.

But they’ve also long been a public-safety concern in the city—in May, a woman died after a dirt bike struck her and its rider fled; in July, a 21-year-old biker was struck by a car and killed—and an ever-intensifying police crackdown has been in effect all summer. Cops use road blockades to prevent riding, conduct heavy surveillance to serve warrants, and even physically chase dirt-bikers through the streets, which contravenes official law-enforcement policy meant to curb accidents. Two Sundays ago, a police car hit a 16-year-old dirt-biker and left him with a broken ankle; a week later, witnesses say a police car hit a stalled dirt bike while its rider was still on it, and watched as officers tased the rider in the back when he fell down trying to get away. There was no mention of the incident in the press.

At Druid Hill Park in Northwest Baltimore, where dirt-bikers have met up every Sunday for months, police, some openly carrying riot gear, have begun to assemble every Sunday as well, citing an alleged early-August fight between onlookers as their reason to watch the area more closely. During their first en-masse appearance, on August 9th, one officer brandished his gun at a crowd that had gathered to watch the bikers. (The officer is now on administrative leave.) A week later, policemen equipped with riot shields and helmets tapped their batons on the ground while a small group of children hung around news cameras on the side of the road. More recently, hundreds of orange traffic cones dot the street, slowing traffic and creating room for the dozens of parked police patrol cars that fill the negative space. It’s a turf war the bikers are losing, and it’s not the first one.

In Baltimore, which creates its public policy within a segregationist paradigm, the ability to occupy space is a big deal. Though built into the city’s laws for over a century, the assumption that black people must move elsewhere to accommodate white interests is still frequently baked into tangible policy. Last month, the city closed one of its highest-performing and well-appointed schools; a primarily black elementary school, it was the only building that fell within the “redevelopment zone” surrounding the racetrack where American Pharoah won Preakness this year. That May event made more than $85 million, while a crowd of 131,680 mostly white onlookers drank in and around the Pimlico Race Track. The demographic makeup of the surrounding neighborhood, whose median household income sits under $24,000, is around 90-percent black. Children displaced from that elementary school in Park Heights—the neighborhood dozens of police officers now spend full Sundays discouraging dirt-bikers from entering—are now being sent to an underperforming and overcrowded school nearby.

That Baltimore’s segregation is policed by the government might seem insane in 2015, but its roots are some of the oldest in the country. Over a century ago, in 1911, the city’s then-Mayor J. Barry Mahool signed an ordinance that constituted the first municipal-housing segregation law in the United States. At the time, white residents blamed black residents for a tuberculosis epidemic, and began vandalizing the homes of their black neighbors. The unrest persuaded officials to place legal barriers between residents of different races; today, government-funded “urban renewal” projects aimed at recreational areas around the Inner Harbor, previously DIY art spaces in Station North, and the neighborhoods around the Pimlico racetrack serve as their own, subversive way of furthering the racial divide by driving locals out.

The bikers, however, have challenged this systemic separation simply by riding through it. They ride from their homes—poor areas of the city often sensationalized by shows like The Wire—through the wealthy, whiter neighborhoods that sit directly next to them. For much of the city’s black population (holding strong at 63 percent), they’re real-life examples of how to survive in a deeply segregated city: They’re powerful because they can go where they please, and because no one can catch them.

While everyone, including the bikers themselves, acknowledges that the sport can be dangerous, riders use hand signals and even ride in grassy areas to avoid intermingling with car traffic. As the bikers see it, they’re extreme athletes willing to accept personal risks or even injuries if it offers them a rush. Most started riding as young children and were mentored by those who came before them; now they pop wheelies, stand on their handlebars, and perform other stunts for their families, friends, and potential crushes.

The police scanner blows up as they ride, with officers mostly monitoring them from afar and occasionally pulling a bike over to check ownership papers. In mid-August, officers pulled over a truck riding down Reisterstown Road (which sits next to Druid Hill Park) with a few bikes in its bed, and removed each to check their legality before sending the driver back on his way. Another rider, when asked whether bikes were sought out when not being used, claimed that earlier this summer, officers raided a warehouse full of bikes, impounding even those with ownership papers. Over the scanner on Sundays, officers talk about looking in backyards throughout the city to find bikes they might serve warrants on. In places where bikers keep to grassy areas, officers park their cars nearby.

Their pursuit is militant. The police department uses helicopters, social-media surveillance, and iPads to monitor dirt bikers. And despite the city’s policy of avoiding outright chases out of ostensible concern for public safety, some officers on the scanner can still be heard claiming to be “right up on” individuals and small groups of riders as they drive all over the city. With each successive Sunday, the police’s frustration is more and more audible; many bikers say cops have chased them or hit their bikes at one time or another.

Police officers have, through repeated public statements implying that Baltimore is not or will not be safe so long as dirt-bikers hold sway, created a situation that bodes ill for the city. They have turned a false prophecy of black violence into a concrete policy that requires them to present a preemptive show of force so that the people they’ve frightened with rhetoric will feel safer.

It’s “broken windows” policing, a cute term Rudolph Guliani made famous in New York City, and Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley implemented himself back in 1999; here, at least, that philosophy still holds up today. And now, as homicide rates are at an all-time high, it has been laughably used against the bikers in an attempt to curb the violent crime they’ll allegedly bring with them, even though there’s no definitive proof that suppressing community events will lower death tolls.

If there is any tangible evidence of success to this “broken windows” policing, it’s in the government’s ability to control the optics of space. People in areas that have wealthier and whiter populations are encouraged to feel safer because they see less graffiti when they drive around, or because they see fewer groups of young black men riding by on illegal dirt bikes. The city’s infrastructure seems overwhelmed by its own policies, though. Currently, riders and anyone assisting their activities (including gas-station attendants) may face penalties of up to 90 days in jail, a fine of up to $1,000 or both, if convicted. Riders caught by police may also have their bikes impounded. In East Baltimore, one of the city’s impound lots holds so many confiscated bikes in various states of disrepair that it’s running out of space; those bikes have not yet been sold, donated, destroyed, or otherwise deemed unfit for forfeiture, as the city code states they must be.

None of this has stopped the bikers yet, but it certainly has highlighted an unbridled animosity between gentrifiers and the black residents they’re displacing, where previously there’d been an unspoken understanding. During the earliest Freddie Gray-related protests, marchers from predominantly black districts entered areas of relatively low permanent residency (mostly around City Hall, Camden Yards, and the Inner Harbor), and as they did, white passersby would occasionally call out, “Get out of our neighborhood!” to peaceful demonstrators. Before and after these marches, black city residents and police officers would stare each other down over police barricades and riot shields. When dirt-bikers would arrive and perform tricks under these conditions, they seemed to be providing relief from that fear and anxiety, not adding to it.

In a city with more than 200 murders under its belt so far in 2015, and a clearance rate sitting at less than 40 percent, the bikers should be among the least of the city’s problems. Some community leaders—and many riders themselves, and even at least one city councilman—have suggested creating a dedicated park for the dirt-bikers as an effort to remove them from the streets, and curtail these philosophical and physical crashes with the police. Residents seem to agree; over 81 percent of respondents to a Baltimore Sun poll view the pastime as a sport and are in support the construction of a dirt-bike park, which in addition to increasing street safety could help riders could become licensed, encourage the use of protective gear, and maybe even turn a profit for the city.

So what’s the holdup? Law enforcement is against it. The issue isn’t safety or profit: A police department whose union won’t concede that black lives matter will never protect those lives to the same degree that it protects white interests. If the issue were about the city’s well-being, more than 70 percent of Baltimore police officers would not live outside the city limits, where they avoid having a greater investment in and better understanding of the communities they police.

In the meantime, the bikers and their families will continue to look out for each other and their neighborhood, and they’ll continue to serve as unspoken heroes among a group of West Baltimore youth who are still distrustful of cops in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death. If anything, a sense of togetherness surfaces with every new clash between police and the bikers. The night the 16-year-old biker was hit, even as the kid was taken off in an ambulance, children turned to the remaining riders with admiration. The father we spoke with went home with his sons, while another small boy walked his bicycle off while humming, “Vroom, vroom!”

Caitlin Goldblatt is a freelancer writer whose work has appeared City Paper, Jacobin, and Guardian US. She lives in Baltimore and tweets @trustpunch.

Photos via Andrew Burton/Getty.

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Most of the time when you see a post here on The Vane, it’s about some horrible weather event somewhere that killed lots of people and destroyed most of their belongings. I have good news for once! We’re about to have an exceptionally nice weekend across the eastern United States, featuring crisp temperatures and mostly clear skies. Such a universally nice weekend is rare, so enjoy it while you can.

A scalpel-sharp trough in the jet stream—one that models suggest will stretch from far northern Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico—is taking shape at this hour, and it will bring a big change in the pattern for most of us who live east of the Rocky Mountains. The cold front that serves as the leading edge of the Canadian invasion is already draped across the Upper Midwest, and it will steadily make its way southeast over the next three days.

The strong cold front crashing into warm, humid air to its east will fire off some thunderstorms—some of which could be severe along the Mid-Atlantic coast on Saturday, according to the SPC—but many of us need the rain anyway, and the reward behind the storms will be worth the 30-minute hassle.

The end result here is abnormally cool temperatures and drier air than many of us have seen since early last spring. The graphics below show surface temperature anomalies, in degrees Celsius, as predicted by this morning’s run of the GFS model.

Here’s 18z Saturday, which is 2:00 PM EDT/1:00 PM CDT:

...and the same time on Sunday:

...and for Monday:

Brr! Well, sort of. It will definitely feel chilly to those of us used to nothing but the crushing finger of heat and humidity for months on end, and folks up in the far north (near the border) will have to wear jackets for the next couple of mornings. Lows in the 30s will cover the northern Plains and Upper Midwest through Saturday, and a few spots in northeastern Minnesota could dip into the upper 20s.

Here are the forecast high temperatures for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (according to The Weather Channel) for select big(gish) cities affected by the cool-down, compared to the average high temperature in each city.

Chicago is expecting a high temperature in the low 60s on Saturday, which is 15°F below average for this point in September. Even Mobile, Alabama, down along the northern Gulf Coast, will get in on the coolfest, with high temperatures seven degrees below average and humidity levels practically unheard of in mid-September. The NWS predicts a dew point of 50°F (!!!!) in Mobile on Sunday afternoon. That kind of dry air nirvana usually doesn’t make its way down that far until mid- to late-October.

The Canadian invasion will largely stay in interior parts of the eastern United States, with the nicest rock-bottom temperatures staying west of cities like New York and Boston (sorry!). Still, many of us will experience temperatures at or slightly below average through Monday before the chill peters out and a ridge brings in more warm weather.

This cool pattern will shift late next week, with temperatures ticking back above average for most of the country east of the Rockies, while the West Coast dives back into cooler (and for some, possibly wetter!) weather.

Fall is nothing but the dying gasps of summer and the first breaths of an eager winter duking it out for dominance, and the result is two or three seasons’ worth of weather occurring all at once. The roller coaster is just beginning. Enjoy the nice weather while it lasts.

[Model Images: Tropical Tidbits | High Temp Forecasts: weather dot com | Chart/Forecast Map: author]

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.

Kristin Cavallari, whose debut book Balancing in Heels f.k.a. Balancing on Heels hits shelves in 272 days, wrote something yesterday. It was a post on the Official Kristin Cavallari App for iPhone and Android titled, “Fall Night Outfits.”

“Fall Night Outfits” by Kristin Cavallari, reads, in its entirety:

This fall’s night-outfits [sic] take inspiration from designers like Alica and Olivia [sic], Herve Leger, Free People, Stella McCartney and BCBG.

The sentence is followed by some unlabeled photos of dresses that Kristin presumably found online.

“Fall Night Outfits” replaces “Fall Shoe Style” as the app post on which Kristin has tried the least.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

The new iPhones, Apple announced yesterday, will be set by default to automatically record a constant stream of sound and video whenever the camera app is in use, without the user pressing the shutter button and even if the camera isn’t set to take video.

Apple being Apple, it presented this opt-out-only automated surveillance system in different terms, as a newly enhanced feature, called Live Photos. This is how Apple describes it:

A still photo captures an instant frozen in time. With Live Photos, you can turn those instants into unforgettable living memories. At the heart of a Live Photo is a beautiful 12‑megapixel photo. But together with that photo are the moments just before and after it was taken, captured with movement and sound.

The only way the iPhone can preserve the sights and sounds from the moments before you’ve pressed the shutter is if it is already recording everything it sees and hears.

Anyone who’s recorded Vines knows that the world is full of incidental sounds you would rather not record and share—snippets of conversation, especially. It’s hard enough working around those when you’re shooting video. Now the iPhone will grab them while you’re focused on shooting a still image.

But you’re not supposed to think about what your phone is capturing. Your phone will take over the job of thinking.

This is a natural extension of Apple’s contempt for, and interference with, the user’s individual choice and judgment. It’s why iTunes went from a simple player that helped index your music to a bloated and confounding mess that will more readily select your music for you, or try to sell you new music, than let you play your own music.

Now Apple is rejecting the basic concept of photography, the photographer’s decision to capture a single image in time. To you or me, a photograph may be a work in a global medium, understood by all, with a rich tradition and discipline behind it. To Apple it’s an inefficient approximation of the “unforgettable living memories” that can be captured by a pocket computer through automated surveillance.

Several generations of technology ago, people invented a prank in which they would exploit the video function on their digital cameras by convincing other people to pose for a snapshot, only to shoot footage of their victims staring patiently and awkwardly into the already-recording lens. Now the same switcheroo is supposed to produce a more meaningful and desirable product than a proper photo.

As usual, Apple didn’t invent the underlying function; what Apple did was find a way to copy and repackage an invention—in this case, by turning it into the default mode, gathering up unintended sights and sounds. (It’s also, incidentally, replacing simple image files with bigger chunks of video, on phones that still offer a paltry 16 GB with entry-level models.)

Inside the airlocks of tech culture, where new features are considered only on their own terms, this is no big deal. The involuntary recording will have to be constantly erased, after all, as long as the shutter goes unpressed. Lots of apps are spying on you at least as much as Live Photo will, harvesting your location and activity data for their own purposes. By the standards of what’s already going on in the phone you already have, Live Photo is an incremental change.

But that attitude is exactly why we live in a world where most every app is busily tracking where you go and paging through your contacts and looting whatever other personal information it can. Is it a good idea to automatically store recordings of the user’s surroundings whenever they snap a picture? Would the users want to record it all, if you asked them? It doesn’t matter: If you don’t ask the users, the question doesn’t exist.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

What happens when you were was famous but are no longer famous? Can you still hang out with your old friends who still happen to be famous—much more famous than you are now? Here are two stories that suggest: no!

“But when we are apart I feel it, too”

Here is a sentence that is entirely true and which pertains to our collective lived reality: Lance Bass is now a panelist on the Meredith Viera program. What did they talk about on today’s show? I’m going to be honest: I couldn’t really tell you. That said, one subject was Bass’ old bandmate Justin Timberlake, who Bass apparently ran into at Rockefeller Center the day before.

“You had a celebrity sighting right here at 30 Rock yesterday. Tell us about it,” Viera says icily, with that exact tone of faux-surprise you use when you want to goad someone into reciting a story for the tenth time. “Well I have to come all the way to NBC just to see my friends,” Bass replies, letting a whole bottle of bitch spill all over the table. “Justin was in the building. He was shooting Fallon or Seth Meyers.” Here, Lance Bass is pretending to be so ignorant of Justin Timberlake’s life that he’s acting like Timberlake would actually appear on Seth Meyers’ show, as if Lance didn’t take a job on the Meredith Viera program knowing that one day Justin Timberlake would show up at Lance’s workplace specifically to visit Jimmy Fallon, who Timberlake is so good of friends with that they make plans to go watch tennis together. “Oh, what show was Justin doing? Steve Harvey was it? Steve Wilkos shoots in this building, right?” Lance, friend, you’re fooling nobody.

The chat continues. “Where’s the shirt you were wearing yesterday?” asks Lillian Vazquez, who is another person on the Meredith Viera program. “Would you like to borrow the shirt?” Bass responds to her. Then he turns to the crowd: “He smells so good, ladies.” Lance makes a face implying that he could just wretch over the fact that anyone would care about how Justin Timberlake smells.

Meredith then cuts right to the bone: “Have you seen him since he became a dad? Is this the first time?” This is a nice way of asking if Lance Bass is in any way important in Justin Timberlake’s life. The answer? Well...

No, this is my first time since he became a dad, it’s been five months and it’s so amazing to see a friend go through this because you know I grew up with him since he was 14-years-old but to see this amazing dad now and all he wants to talk about is the kid.

“So he’s changed?” asks Meredith, which is a funny question considering Lance Bass had just established that he hadn’t seen Justin Timberlake in five months before they ran into each other at an office building. Lance quickly changes the subject, noting that he would love to be a father, too. Then he talks about how in two years scientists say eggs will be able to be created from male skin cells. There’s a lot going on in Lance Bass’ life, is what I’m saying, very little of which involves Justin Timberlake.

After the interview concluded, a lowly employee of the Meredith Viera program was tasked with putting a clip of the interview on YouTube. That person titled the video, “Lance Bass Ran Into Justin Timberlake!” Nobody can believe that Lance Bass happened to cross paths with Justin Timberlake.

“So no one told you life was gonna be this way”

The second story is about a group of... friends. Jennifer Aniston (Rachel Green) got married in August in a secret ceremony at her home in Los Angeles. How secret was it? Well, some people were there. Matt LeBlanc (Joey Tribbiani) was there. Matthew Perry (Chandler Bing) was definitely there. Some other people, though, weren’t there.

One of those other people was David Schwimmer (Ross Gellar). David Schwimmer was not at Jennifer Aniston’s wedding, and he is not afraid to let it be known.

Via InTouch:

While grabbing dinner with Matt LeBlanc in Beverly Hills, a source reveals to In Touch magazine that David Schwimmer didn’t hold back when the topic of Jennifer Aniston’s Aug. 5 wedding to Justin Theroux was brought up.

“Someone nearby overheard them talking about how they weren’t invited. David was really angry,” a source says. “He said he couldn’t believe he’d been snubbed, because he was an important person in Jen’s life for 10 years.”

Now, it’s important to remember that Matt LeBlanc was at the wedding, so it’s unclear who InTouch’s source is referring to as “they,” or why the source suddenly switches back to the pronoun “he.” Maybe this source has no idea what they are talking about, or maybe David Schwimmer was so mad that Matt LeBlanc, who was at Jennifer Aniston’s wedding, got mad on his behalf.

UPDATE (9/11) As you can see in this article on People dot com, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry clearly did not attend Jennifer Aniston’s wedding. Why did I read this article and think they did? That’s a question for the gods. In any event, David Schwimmer was still the maddest.

Anywho, the source continues:

“[David] thought he would be the first one invited!”

David was not the first one invited. David was not invited at all.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Earth’s hottest layer is the core, we use uranium to build nukes, and ocean tides are created by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Like, duh! But did you also know that the boiling point of water decreases with increasing altitude, or that amplitude determines the loudness of a sound wave? Huh?

Maybe you’re a smartypants who did know all those sciencey facts. (Or you’re going to tell me you did, regardless). But if so, you’re ahead of the curve, according to a new Pew Research Study that polled 3,278 adults on 12 basic science questions.

Overall, Americans gave more correct than incorrect answers — good! And unsurprisingly, people with college or graduate degrees got the most questions right. But only 6% of survey respondents received a perfect score, suggesting that some pieces of “common” knowledge aren’t so common, after all — such as how light travels through a magnifying glass.

And there are a few widespread misconceptions that I’m trying really hard not to smash my face against a wall over. For instance, nearly a quarter of survey respondents said that astronomy is “the study of how the positions of stars and planets can influence human behavior.” I’m sorry, but that’s a different field of study entirely — it’s called bullshit. Write that one down.

Of course, the questions in the Pew survey represent only teensy tiny slice of basic scientific knowledge, and a rather physical-sciencey one. That bias could explain why men tended to score slightly higher than women — previous Pew research surveys note that gender gaps on scientific knowledge disappear on health and biomedical topics:

But despite its limitations, the survey does manage to tease out some interesting patterns. For instance, the vast majority of young people know that radio waves transmit cell phone calls, while only 57% of adults over the age of 65 have figured this out. On the other hand, adults aged 65 and older schooled American’s youth when it comes to correctly identifying the developer of the polio vaccine (hint: it wasn’t Einstein).

Wait, so....young people are into technology and bored by history? Okay, maybe we already knew that. Read the full report — and take the interactive quiz, now that I’ve given you half the answers! — here.

Contact the author at maddie.stone@gizmodo.com or follow her on Twitter.

Top image via Shutterstock

A Florida college student described as an “online troll” responsible for “hoax events” is in custody after allegedly instructing an FBI informant to place a pressure cooker bomb at an event commemorating the September 11 attacks, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

According to charging documents, officials first became aware of 20-year-old Joshua Ryne Goldberg in June when he claimed online to have “encouraged” the attack on an anti-Muslim cartoon contest in Texas earlier this year. From WTLV:

Between July and September, Goldberg had been in contact online with an individual, who—unbeknownst to Goldberg—was actually an informant. Goldberg had allegedly provided the individual with details on how to construct a bomb and instructed him to fashion a pressure cooker bomb and fill it with nails, metal and other shrapnel dipped in rat poison.

According to the complaint, Goldberg directed the individual to place the bomb at a memorial in Kansas City, Mo. that was commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Put the backpack near the crowd,’’ Goldberg allegedly told the informant. “But make sure it’s in a place where the (police) won’t think anything of it.’’

After his arrest, authorities say Goldberg claimed he planned to either encourage the informant to kill himself prior to the bombing or alert law enforcement and get credit for stopping the attack.

On Friday, Australian Federal Police sent the FBI an interview with a source that said Goldberg was an “online troll” and “proponent of radical free speech” who carried out hoaxes by adopting multiple personalities on the internet.

In one IRC conversation, Goldberg allegedly said, “These guys are pussy keyboard warriors” when asked if he was worried about jihadists actually killing someone at his command.

In another, Goldberg allegedly asked the source, “You’re not gonna turn me into the feds for pretending to be ISIS, are you?”

Goldberg has now been charged with distributing information relating to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

[Image via AP Images]

One U.S. Marine was killed and 18 other service members were injured on Thursday when a vehicle rolled over during routine training at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, the Associated Press reports.

Further details on the accident—including the identity of the deceased Marine, the type of vehicle involved and the extent of the injuries suffered by the wounded—were not immediately available.

“The command’s priorities are to take care of the Marines, sailors and families of the unit,” said a Marine spokesperson in a statement. “We want to ensure the Marines and their family members are being provided for during this difficult time.”

The crash, which occurred at around 2 p.m., is currently being investigated, KSWB-TV reports.

In November 2013, four Marines were killed at Camp Pendleton when a grenade round exploded during a routine sweep of unexploded ordinance.

[Image via AP Images]

According to a new report from the Center for Public Integrity, Skyfall star Daniel Craig gave nearly $50,000 to a super PAC accused of falsely representing an affiliation with Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/09/10/179...

In July, Craig donated $47,300 to Americans Socially United, a super PAC that was forced to change its name from “Bet on Bernie 2016” after the FEC determined it did “not appear to be an authorized committee of that candidate.”

Craig later confirmed that he made the donation, telling Variety he gave the money “in good faith as I understood it to support Senator Sanders’ candidacy.”

Sanders, however, has repeatedly spoken out against super PACs and pledged not to accept their support. In June, his campaign sent a cease and desist letter demanding Americans Socially United take down their web domains “pledgesanders2016.com” and “betonbernie.com”—a request that has so far been ignored.

According to CPI, the founder of the organization is Cary Lee Peterson, a man with long history of financial and legal woes including two warrants for his arrest in Arizona:

Americans Socially United is just one of eight political groups Peterson has registered with the FEC this year.

He’s also created the American Friends for Micronesia, the Congressional Committee on Cuban Affairs, the Congressional Committee on Eurasian Affairs, the Congressional Committee on Law Enforcement and Public Safety, the Congressional Task Force on Human Trafficking, the Every Vote Counts Restoring America Super PAC and the Independent National Committee.

Like Americans Socially United, none have filed campaign finance disclosures. And despite their names, none are officially affiliated with Congress.

“Those who are confused know very little about [the] difference between [a] PAC and Campaign Fund [sic],” Peterson said in an email to CPI. “Their lack of knowledge is not our fault.”

[Image via Getty Images]

On Thursday, a camerawoman who was fired from a Hungarian news station after being caught tripping and kicking migrants—including small children—apologized for her actions while denying she was a racist or had any ill intent.

http://jezebel.com/hungarian-came...

“Camera was shooting, hundreds of migrant broke through the police cordon, one of them rushed to me and I was scared,” wrote Petra Laszlo, according to Buzzfeed, “then something snapped in me….I just thought that I was being attacked and I have to protect myself.”

Elsewhere in her letter to Magyar Nemzet, Laszlo said she was “truly sorry” and sincerely regrets what happened but does not deserve to be the target of “the political witch hunts” against her. Via Google Translate:

I sincerely regret what happened. Just now I was able to collect myself enough to write about. In fact I am in shock from what they did and what they did to me.

Camera was shooting, hundreds of migrant broke, broke through the police cordon, one of them rushed to me and I was scared. I was scared as she poured me and then something snapped in me. I have not seen a camera in my hand, who are coming towards me, I just thought that was attacked and I have to protect myself. It’s hard to make good decisions at a time when people are in a panic and many hundreds of people rushing to her face. It will, at the moment it failed. I’m sorry about what happened and the mother as a separate regret that fate points a twisted kid in my way, I will not even noticed. I panicked as I can see in the images, as if it would be me. I did my sincere regret, and I take responsibility for it.

I’m not heartless, racist children kicking cameraman. I do not deserve it not for the political witch hunts against me, nor the smear, the death threats many times. I’m just a woman, since then, an unemployed mother of small children, who brought a panic situation, a bad decision. I am truly sorry.

According to AFP, Hungarian prosecutors said Thursday that they’ve opened a criminal investigation against Laszlo for breach of the peace.

“In the course of the investigation, the authorities will also examine if more serious crimes ... can be established,” a prosecutor told the news agency.

Joe Biden, in New York on business, was the first guest on Stephen Colbert’s third show last night, and where most late night interviews are jovial and lighthearted, the chat between Biden and Colbert was sober and sincere, with Biden discussing the life of his son and how he dealt with his recent death.

http://gawker.com/beau-biden-son...

After asking Biden how he, in the host’s estimation, remained unpolluted despite the impurities of Washington, Colbert prompted the vice president to tell a story about his son Beau, who died in May from brain cancer. Biden, who at points seemed to be on the verge of tears, chose to talk about the selflessness of a four-year-old Beau in the wake of the 1972 car crash that killed Biden’s first wife Neilia and his daughter Naomi, and left Beau and Biden’s youngest son Hunter in the hospital.

When he was in that accident, lost his mom and his sister, he was very badly injured, almost every bone in his body broken. He was in a cast from his ankles, both legs, his chest, his arms, I used to carry him around with a hook in his back. My other son, Hunter, his best friend, a year and a day younger, was just about three and had a severe skull fracture. You’d sit in the room in the hospital, and you’d turn and he’d say, “Hunt, look at me. Look at me. I love you. I love you.” Four years old.

After that, Colbert asks Biden to explain the role religion played in his life after that first tragedy. Biden then talks about being inspired by fellow grievers, and asks Colbert to elaborate on how his family picked up the pieces after Colbert’s father and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash in 1974.

In the second part of the interview, Colbert prods Biden on whether he is going to run for president, to which Biden is noncommittal. The two also recount a story about Beau Biden from when Biden visited Baghdad.

http://theslot.jezebel.com/joe-biden-show...

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Last night Stephen Colbert brought on Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick as a guest and things didn’t go as you saw them on TV: according to reports, cab drivers disrupted the interview at least twice, prompting Colbert to address their concerns in a segment that was ultimately cut from the final broadcast.

A woman who was evidently at the taping of the show tweeted a long timeline of events that apparently culminated in at least two cab drivers confronting Kalanick on-camera over the effect Uber has had on the taxi industry:

So, so excited to see this interview. Some insane stuff went down. I’ll talk about it if they don’t show it.

First thing got cut.

Extremely edited. Makes sense.

Two separate times during the interview with Uber guy, some cabbies in the balcony yelled stuff and interrupted the conversation.

They were criticizing Uber’s disruption of the NYC cab system, and they were very aggressive and made everyone rather uncomfortable.

I mean, I don’t blame them, their argument is valid. But I initially thought it was a bit, but the crew started looking around frantically.

Instead of having the men removed, Stephen acted with complete respect and control. He listened intently to what they had to say.

When the guy finished, Stephen said that he was planning on asking a similar question, and politely asked the man to be seated.

He then turned back to the interview and addressed exactly what the man had yelled about. It was very smooth. The whole thing was cut, tho.

Then five minutes later, another man got up and yelled something else. The Uber guy started to talk back to him, but Stephen calmly touched his arm and quieted both him and the cab driver in the balcony. He said that he would ask the man’s question “in a more respectful way.

Then he again respectfully asked the man to sit down, and he asked exactly what the man had yelled about. Very, very smooth transition.

Both encounters and all references to them were cut for the air.

The Uber man actually had some decent (prepared) answers to the questions, & Stephen was able to make it funny, but Biden deserved more air.

But - it was truly remarkable to see how Stephen handled the whole interview. He easily could have had the men removed.

But instead, he truly listened to what they had to say and directly incorporated their concerns into the interview, completely smoothly.

It was incredible to see how well Stephen handled it all. Absolute class and respect, the whole time.

And he had complete, *complete* control over the entire theatre. The audience, the band, the crew - we were all confused/a little scared, but Stephen calmed and quieted everyone. He didn’t call for security, he just dealt with the men and then continued an excellent interview.

It was a fantastic thing to watch happen. He handled it with class and earnestness & showed just how skilled he is as a performer and host.

I’m actually sort of sad none of it made the cut. They must’ve talked for at least 15 mins, & what they showed was kind of awkward & short.

But I understand why they didn’t show it all. I’m just glad I got to witness it and see in person just how phenomenal Stephen Colbert is.

Another witness tells Business Insider the drivers at one point called Kalanick a liar:

The first time, the protester stood up during the taping and accused Kalanick of destroying taxi-industry jobs. Colbert let the protester speak for awhile, before saying that he had a question about that in his cue cards anyway.

Kalanick maintained that Uber pays better and offers more flexible hours than the taxi industry, an oft-repeated stance by the company.

Later, after Colbert did ask about “disruption” and potential negatives to Uber’s business model, someone started yelling again and claimed that everything Kalanick was saying was a lie.

Colbert apologized for his audience in the end, saying that there was a lot of “passion” around the issue in New York City.

And via CNN:

Kristin Condon, a guest who was seated in the orchestra section, said that the crowd reacted with “stunned silence.”

Condon added that Colbert let the protester speak, and didn’t kick him out of the taping.

“He was angry, but he wasn’t obscene,” Condon said of the protester. “It was also interesting that Colbert was really respectful... and allowed it to be an issue rather than just silencing it.”

Even so, the interjections were cut from the broadcast version of the interview. If you were there or have video of the interview, contact us at tips@gawker.com.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.