This 2006 economy is heating up fast! It's not just the record stock market highs and the M&A boom and the rapid growth of incomes in the top 1% and hedge fund guys buying $155 million paintings—home prices are on the rise again. Everywhere! From the WSJ:

Prices rose by 8.1% in January from a year earlier, the largest such gain in 6½ years, according to figures from the S&P/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 major metropolitan cities released Tuesday. All 20 cities posted annual increases...

Housing demand is revving up at a time when the number of homes for sale has fallen to the lowest level in decades. Low mortgage rates also are helping homeowners who can qualify for a mortgage take on more debt without a big increase in their monthly payment.

Our recommendation: buy, buy, buy real estate. Everyone is doing it. No money? No problem! Thanks to modern financial innovations available to us in 2006 2013, Wall Street can issue loans to you and then package that debt, slice it up, and sell it to investors—making the risk disappear! And the skeptics? You can blow smoke into their faces from the cigars you lit with $100 bills. I guess they'll have to learn the hard way that real estate values never go down.

[Pic: Flickr]

If your Netflix has been slow lately, it's because of a bunch of pissed-off Dutch guys in a five-story bunker. A massive online war between a web hosting company based out of a NATO bunker in Holland and an international anti-spam organization has spilled over to the rest of the internet, causing widespread delays—and potentially escalating to the point where email and online banking could become inaccessible.

The attack, which exploits the very infrastructure of the internet to create the largest DDoS attack ever seen, was launched earlier this month by Cyberbunker, a hosting company known for taking on controversial clients (it brags it'll host any kind of site "except child porn and anything related to terrorism"), against The Spamhaus Project, which compiles blacklists of spammers for email providers. Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to its list a few weeks ago; Cyberbunker objected and, as is often the case, responded with a DDoS attack. Only this time they went nuclear:

The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks have reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second. "It is a real number," Mr. Gilmore said. "It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet." [...]

In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet's core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS. [...]

In the latest incident, attackers sent messages, masquerading as ones coming from Spamhaus, to those machines, which were then amplified drastically by the servers, causing torrents of data to be aimed back at the Spamhaus computers.

Because DNS servers are required for the internet to function, those machines can't be taken down as a way of stopping the attack. "The only way to deal with this problem is to find the people doing it and arrest them," security researcher Dean Kamintsky tells the Times; when those people are locked in a bunker, arresting them is a slightly more difficult proposition. ("Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force," Cyberbunker claims, dubiously. "None of these attempts were successful.")

Cyberbunker and its allies, for their part, believe themselves to be standing up against a dangerous vigilante group. "Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet," says attacker spokesman Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Welcome to Cyberwar, 2013: Dutch dudes slowing down your Netflix.

[NYT, images via Wikipedia]

Purveyor of celebrity-themed puns and hybrid creatures, street artist Hanksy has adorned Los Angeles with yet another creative cast of characters. As a sort of antithesis to the serious sanctimoniousness of some street art, Hanksy prefers to make jokes that involve Will Ferrell Cats or Nicolas Cage Against the Machine.

Hanksy was taken in by the police just as he added the finishing touches onto the Weird Gal Yankovic design—though the police were reportedly delighted by the pun and took lots of photographs as they handcuffed the street artist. Hansky is preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery1988 in LA, which opens May 24.

Scroll down for an abundant offering of the jokester's latest inventions, including a ferociously overjoyed Ghost-Buster Bluth, hook and all.

Pee-Wee Merman with a gingham tail, obviously.

DJamie Foxx looking mildly displeased.

Toe-bias Fünke. Did anyone else see Walter Egg White for half a second? I mean, it's a toe for sure, this was just a momentary lapse.

The Walken Dead, although I will point to you to my favorite Walken pun, here.

Flock of Segels. That man always looks so happy to be where he is.

Weird Gal Yankovic. Eh.

The Whizard of Oz. That would be one James Franco, apparently giggling on a toilet seat.

[Hansky, image via Jared Soule]

A bus driver in China narrowly escaped being impaled by a large blue lamppost that slammed into the windshield of his bus as he was conducting his daily route.

Though the post struck his head, Mao Zhihao's lightning-fast instincts managed to move him out of the way of more serious danger, and he was able to recover quickly and stop the bus.

"I was pinned down by the lamppost and put the bus into gear instinctively," he said in a follow-up interview from a hospital bed. "I just wanted to slow the bus down."

The incident, which took place in the province of Zheijang, was caught on camera by the bus's surveillance system.

Local authorities say two cars crashed into the street light, causing it to tip over.

[H/T: BroBible, video via SkyNews]

Joann and Mike Moser weren't even mad when they found out their 2-year-old son Kyle was using fingernail clippers to break into his sister's room late at night to steal a stuffed unicorn.

"Kyle has always been one to fiddle things and try to see how things works," Mini-MacGyver's mom told ABC News. "We were impressed that he found the fingernail clippers in his room, flipped them open and used those to open the door."

Kyle's impressive talent was recently caught on camera after his parents set up a sting to catch him in the act.

Joann described to Huffington Post how it all went down:

Our 8-year-old daughter came to us one night and told us our 2-year-old was taking stuff at night out of her room. We told her to ... just lock the door. A couple nights later she told us he had opened the lock on his door. We were VERY skeptical so we set up the camera in the hall to see what would happen. Sure enough within a few seconds of closing his door and locking hers he was at the door opening the lock. The rest is on the video. We could not stop laughing afterward and we let him sleep with the pillow pet that night.

Still, being the proper thing to do, Joann and Mike sat Kyle down the following day to explain why unlocking other people's doors is wrong.

"He said, ‘OK, and went about his business," Joann said. "He hasn't done it since."

[video via Joann Moser]

Just one day after hearing arguments regarding California's gay marriage ban, the Supreme Court is back in session to consider the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. DOMA, as it's commonly called, is the act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996, that restricts the federal government from acknowledging same-sex marriages, even if those unions are recognized in the states of their origin.

Whereas yesterday's Prop. 8 hearing saw the needle move only slightly for gay rights, some experts estimated that today's arguments would bring about a more significant change. And if early signals are right, it looks like those experts were correct.

In the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, the court said it would consider whether it could even decide the case, given that President Barack Obama's administration has said that the law is unconstitutional. ... Jackson, who joined Harvard Law School last year from Georgetown University Law Center, will argue that the Obama administration's position strips the Supreme Court of authority over the case.

In the wake of Jackson's statements, the conservative justices leapt on the Obama administration for seemingly passing the buck, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Conservative justices sharply questioned why the Justice Department is refusing to defend DOMA as unconstitutional but yet enforcing the law and placing the gay-marriage question before the Supreme Court. Justices also questioned whether the case belonged before the court at all.

Chief Justice John Roberts told attrorney Sri Srinivasan, the principal deputy solicitor general, that the government's actions were "unprecedented." To agree with a lower court ruling finding DOMA unconstitutional but yet seeking the Supreme Court to weigh in while it enforces the law is "has never been done before," he said.

At one point, Chief Justice Roberts even went so far as to say of Obama, "I don't see why he doesn't have the courage of his convictions."

The Wall Street Journal also reported that the justices seemed to disagree with Jackson in that they didn't have the authority to decide the DOMA case:

Justices asked skeptical questions of Ms. Jackson, suggesting that they didn't buy her arguments that neither the House members who defend DOMA nor the executive branch have an interest in the case.

Once they'd moved beyond their standing question, the justices heard Paul Clement, who is representing the House Republicans advocating for DOMA. Clement took tough questions immediately about the potential conflict between DOMA and states' rights, a famous GOP darling. This from Bloomberg:

During initial arguments today ... Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that a federal law that doesn't recognize gay marriages that are legal in some states can create conflicts. "You are at real risk of running in conflict" with the "essence" of state powers, Kennedy said.

Justice Ginsburg, a liberal member of the court, likened gay marriages not recognized federally—and thus left out of certain benefits—as "skim-milk" marriages. "One might well ask, what kind of marriage is this?" she said.

Justice Sotomayor also joined in this line of inquiry.

One of the main cruxes of Clement's responses was that the federal government has very good reason to want uniform treatment of marriages, regardless of in which state those marriages take place:

Mr. Clement said the federal government has a particularly acute interest in couples being treated equally across state lines. That wouldn't happen if same-sex couples in states with gay marriage could receive federal benefits, while same-sex couples in other states could not. It was rational, he said, for Congress to treat all same-sex couples the same.

When it was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's turn to speak, he attempted to steer the conversation away from the states' rights and tax benefits discussion and toward the discriminatory genesis of DOMA. The law isn't the "Federal Uniform Definition of Marriage Act," he told the court. "It's called the Defense of Marriage Act."

Justice Kagan took Verilli's suggestion of prejudice and ran with it, according to the Huffingon Post:

Justice Elena Kagan pushed a similar point. She told Clement ... "that maybe Congress had something different in mind than uniformity" in the definition of marriage. Suggesting the law was "infected with prejudice, fear, spite, and animus," Kagan read a portion of the House Report, which said DOMA was meant to reflect Congress' "collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality."

Along with sharply negative comments about DOMA by the Court's four more liberal members, Kennedy's stance could put the law on the edge of constitutional extinction. But, if the Court were to do that based on states' rights premises, the final ruling might not say much at all about whether same-sex couples were any closer to gaining an equal right to marry under the Constitution.

In other words, we are moving forward, but slowly enough that it can sometimes feel like we're frustratingly stationary.

Here, if you're interested, is audio if the SCOTUS hearing on DOMA.

And here is the hearing transcript in full.

[Image from Getty.]

America, a nation composed primarily of suckers, is always ready to fall headfirst for this or that new "health trend." Some are outright scams, while others are merely true facts that have been manipulate to render them indistinguishable from scams in practice. Behold: protein.

Protein! The hot new trend in American packaged food is that everyone is buying anything that says "PROTEIN" on it, whether the protein comes from roadkill or genetically modified soy. The point is that "PROTEIN" sends a very clear signal consumers, which says: You, the consumer, do not remember one bit of high school chemistry, yet you have the vague feeling that "PROTEIN" is somehow good for you, so buy this product now. The WSJ reports:

When people eat food that promises to be a good source of whole grains, fiber or protein "it makes you feel smart as a consumer that you've done something good for yourself," says Doug VanDeVelde, senior vice president of food marketing and innovation for Kellogg's...

In past decades, consumers responded to messages like "low fat," "low sugar," and "no cholesterol." Now over half of consumers are looking for more protein and fiber for breakfast, Mr. VanDeVelde says.

You, the consumer, have absolutely no idea what is or is not healthy, nor do you have the tools to determine what is or is not healthy. Instead, you simply float from fad to fad, encased in a warm cocoon of marketing slogans by the Kellogg's™ corporation. Soon, the "PROTEIN" craze will fade away, to be replaced by some other food data point unrelated to the concept of a healthy, well-balanced diet. Consider, America: you are the most obese nation on earth. You'll pardon us if we doubt your ability to analyze food marketing trends properly.

In the meantime, try the Jimmy Dean Meat Lovers Breakfast Bowl. It has protein.

[WSJ. Photo: Brett Jordan/ Flickr]

Officials at a special needs school in the South East England town Godalming are facing disciplinary action after it was revealed that a student was intentionally allowed to inflict harm upon themselves using razor blades handed to them by the school.

The so-called "controlled self-harm" policy was instituted at Unsted Park School for a brief period of time in January of last year, causing an uproar among staffers at the specialist education facility for children and teens with Asperger's and other forms of higher-functioning autism.

The unnamed student's mother was also allegedly involved in designing the policy, which involved providing the pupil with access to sterilized Bic safety razor blades, and escorting them to the bathroom, where they were permitted to cut themselves while teachers waited outside.

Their wounds were then cleaned and dressed by staff members.

"This was a short-term, local procedure introduced by the head teacher and school principal who genuinely believed it was in the best interests of the pupil," said a spokeswoman for the Prior Group, the school's operator. "However, they accept that the procedure should not have been implemented without further approvals having been obtained from key stakeholders and senior management prior to its introduction."

The local police said it was aware of the policy, but after the practice concluded it was determined that there were "no criminal offences to investigate," and the case was closed.

The Department of Education, however, has released a statement calling the experiment "deeply worrying," and noting that the matter had been handed over to the Teaching Agency for review.

It's unclear, however, what will come of the investigation, as a recent governmental inspection of the school yielded a report praising the school for putting in place "robust risk assessments and health and safety processes which protect young people from harm."

[photos via Geograph/Shazz, Shutterstock]

Chris Brown wants you to know that he is a passionate, positive, self-actualizing young man. In a series of in-studio interviews he arranged in advance of his upcoming single, he sold this nice-guy image hard.

"I'm past the bullshit now," the kinder, gentler Brown told MTV.

"I'm passionate about everything I do, whether I'm driving my car or hanging out," the fervent chiller told USA Today.

"[Brown's upcoming sixth album X] also represents me focused on overcoming adversity. When you see an 'X' on a vial, it's like it's forbidden, a poison. But for me, it's also like a release, where I'm able to identify with both the reject and the good guy...Basically, I'm saying the negativity is in the past for me," pop's most celebrated diplomat told Rolling Stone.

"I do a lot of charitable stuff that I don't try to put out there to get a pat on the back for; I do my own thing. But in the process, everything I do is positive. I don't have a negative focus," the contortionist told Ebony, his left hand resting in the small of his back.

Rolling Stone posted some lyrics of the new material. "I'm not dangerous," he says in the upcoming single "Fine China." Got that? He will not make any part of your body swell with his bare hands, he will not break your face like, well, fine china. In the title track, he sings, "You can start a fight, but I ain't fighting back/I'm cool with it/I simply came here to party/Why would I trip off the bullshit/When I'm on the good shit?" He's clearly changed so much in the past two months. We're watching him develop before our eyes.

The line between self-promotion and propaganda is sometimes entirely unclear, and so while all of this is dubious and hilariously ridiculous given, oh, everything we've ever heard about Chris Brown, it's not exactly unexpected behavior from a pop artist. However, he did flat-out lie when Ebony asked him about leaving Twitter and Instagram (as he did after his infamous feud with comedian Jenny Johnson). He stopped social networking not because he's an uncontrollable, hostile, seemingly bigoted hothead — according to Brown, he doesn't tweet or 'gram anymore because he needs to preserve his magic.

EBONY.com: How have you negotiated the whole social media thing? You want to let your music speak for itself, but you also speak for yourself...

Chris Brown: Used to [cracks a knowing smile]. I detached myself from social media only because it just takes away the magic. Twitter is a good outlet for certain people, but I think for me and the message I'm trying to portray, it's all about the music, the magic, and the creativity of what I'm doing.

If you show somebody how to do a magic trick, it's not a magic trick anymore.

And for his next trick, Chris Brown will shit on your eye.

[Image via Getty]

Well, they did say that sooner or later God (of The Great Flood fame) would come to punish the world for the sins of the gays (marriage in particular), but who knew He would be so damn boring about it? Hours ago, CNN contributor Jeffery Toobin was lightly tapped by a possessed umbrella while proclaiming that "DOMA" may be "in trouble."

Asked to comment, God said he thought about another flood or maybe a couple of plagues but he "didn't want to be that big of a troll." Fair enough.

It was a concern about being typecast that ultimately led Jessica Brown Findlay, AKA Downton Abbey's Lady Sybil Crawley, to exit in dramatic fashion from the popular series midway into the third season.

"My contract was ending and I was unsure about signing away another year," she recently told Radio Times magazine. "What scared me more was to keep going and then one day discover it was all I could do and wish I had pushed myself more."

But Findlay is also setting limits on how far she's willing to push herself, having reflected on things in her past that she would not have done had she known better.

Namely, her topless scene in 2011's Albatross (NSFW).

"To be honest, Albatross was naivete and not knowing that I could say no," she told the publication. "I had no idea what was going to happen and thought I was going to be shot from behind."

Findlay says she did learn one thing from her nude scene experience, and that is to "be honest and natural."

The 23-year-old tells other actresses not to stress out about their bodies. "I was drinking pints and eating burgers," Findlay said. "But actually, it's not something I would do again."

Before closing up shop for good, however, Findlay is giving fans one last look around by taking it all off for her latest historical TV series, Labyrinth.

The two-parter is set to air this weekend on Channel 4, but if you're only tuning in for noodz, you can skip all the talk and go straight to the bedroom by clicking here (NSFW, with bonus Katie McGrath from Merlin casting a sexy spell on The Paradise's Emun Elliott).

[photo via Getty, screengrab via Fleshbot]

Sex scandals in the upper echelons of the yoga world are endlessly compelling: The highest aspirations of body and mind collide with the basest instincts in terrible ways. And the guru worship among some practitioners can add a creepy undertone of cultishness to what would otherwise be run-of-the-mill awful behavior by dudes. The latest high profile sex scandal in the yoga industry centers on a new lawsuit filed against Choudhury Bikram, the 67-year-old founder of the popular Bikram Yoga franchise, alleging sexual harassment and assault.

A 29-year-old former student named Sarah Baughn claims in a lawsuit that Bikram sexually assaulted her and subjected her to near-constant sexual harassment during her time training to be a Bikram yoga instructor in 2005. Baughn, who has won numerous yoga competitions—yes, there are yoga competitions—alleges he tried to torpedo her career out of vengeance after she rejected his advances.

If you've lived anywhere near a critical mass of young urban professionals in the past ten years, you know that Bikram Yoga is the kind of yoga you do wearing skimpy outfits in a sweltering room while sweating away a large proportion of your body mass in a masochistic purge. Bikram Yoga adds hardcore edge to the serenity typically associated with yoga. Choudhury Bikram started the practice in the late 70s as a new immigrant from India. Now, it's a multimillion-dollar business that licenses thousands of standardized franchises around the world, McDonald's-style. Bikram's poses and techniques are copyrighted and he is known to aggressively sue anyone who copies him. This includes a lengthy and controversial legal battle against Greg Gumucio, a former student who founded New York City's Yoga to The People, which is beloved for making Yoga affordable (often donation only) and accessible to normal folks.

In his personal life, Choudhury Bikram can seem like a cartoon version of the celebrity Yogi, but that's because he pioneered the entire concept. His famous clients include Madonna and Ashton Kutcher and three presidents: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. He stores his collection of luxury cars in his Beverly Hills mansion. And for all his claims to higher spirtual planes, ("I'm the most spiritual man you have ever met in your life," he told ABC News) Choudhury is also a notorious horn dog and blowhard, the "Walter White of yoga," according to BoingBoing.

"Bikram has his 'bad boy' reputation we've been hearing about for years… so [the lawsuit] is not surprising," Jennilyn Carson, the proprietor of the yoga culture blog YogaDork, explains in an email. "With the power and hubris Bikram wielded (and the stories that have been floating around for years) it was almost expected, like we were all just waiting for it to happen." Carson believes Baughn's accusations may just be the tip of the iceberg.

A fantastic 2011 profile in Details by Clancy Martin describes Bikram's teacher training retreats, during which hundreds of aspiring Bikram instructors pay thousands of dollars to be taught by Bikram, as a combination of the Navy SEAL's Hell Week and an extended orgy.

Here's how Martin describes Bikram leading a class:

He's in a black Speedo, bare-chested, his hair tied in a topknot. His triceps stand out like pistons. Sometimes a woman will brush his hair or wash and massage his feet. He resembles a cartoon genie on his magic carpet. Between cell-phone calls, he barks Bengali-inflected criticisms and corrections into his headset. He speaks only in exclamation points.
"You, Miss Teeny-Weeny Bikini! Spread your legs! You, Mr. Masturbation! Until I say 'Change,' you do not move a muscle!"

Sarah Baughn was taking one of these class in 2005 when, she claims, Bikram began his campaign of harassment and assault. She'd dropped out of college and taken out loans in order to afford the $7,500, nine-week training course with her "hero." But on the fifth day of the course, she says, he propositioned her. He'd been giving her an unusual amount of attention during the class. He gave her his diamond-studded Rolex, which she returned. He then later called her into his office and admitted he was uncontrollably attracted to her:

"What should we do about this? Should we make this a relationship?" Bikram asked, according to the lawsuit. "I know you from a past life, and I have this feeling about you… I have never, NEVER felt like this about ANYONE."

Baughn rejected his advances and reported the incident to the director of the training program, who told her to ignore Bikram. "Separate the man from the teacher," the director said, according to the lawsuit. Bikram's advances culminated in an assault one night, the suit alleges, where Bikram "pinned her against the door, and sexually assaulted her by kissing her neck, chest, and face, and grinding his penis against
her leg." Baughn alleges Bikram iced her out of teaching jobs and otherwise sabotaged her career to retaliate for her rejection.

The lawsuit isn't the first time Bikram's been in trouble; former student Pandhora Williams has sued him over disparaging remarks she said he made during an instructor retreat in 2010, including, "Women are bitches and whores. They're here for one thing, and that's to make babies."

To those who follow the comings and goings of Yoga's power-elite, Bikram's story sounds strikingly familiar to that of disgraced Yoga impresario John Friend. Friend started the super successful Anusara brand of Yoga and was cast by the New York Times as the sort of Steve Jobs of Yoga, infusing corporate values and business cunning into the practice of spiritual renewal. But Friend was also leading a sex cult called the Burning Suns comprised of some of his attractive female employees. When the cult was exposed by a disgruntled I.T. worker, Friend resigned from his company and is now undergoing a lengthy process of rehabilitation. His finances, it turned out, were in shambles as well.

Now yoga insiders are again questioning whether the cults of personality surrounding some of yoga's biggest names necessarily breeds this kind of exploitation. "Are we blowing up these super egos to become more self absorbed than absorbed with servicing hoers with their journeys of self exploration?" asked yoga instructor Sinda Anzovino on the Yoganonymous blog.

But Jennilyn Carson of YogaDork believes the main lesson is that the problems of the real world don't vanish inside the studio. "Sex scandals are not some kind of pandemic specific to the yoga community,' she said. "Sure it's more surprising, but not any more shocking than the Catholic Church or our democratically elected government officials. We should be wary and vigilant about any person in power that people go gaga over, or are subordinate of out of fear."

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's new book, Lean In—a kind of workplace feminism manifesto—has inspired a range of reactions from critics. Some were positive; some less so. But none was as negative as the response Sandberg spokeswoman and former Facebook flack Brandee Barker had for Katherine Losse, an erstwhile Zuckerberg speechwriter whose rigorously critical take on Sandberg's book was published in Dissent this week:

Barker is, according to her Twitter profile, "helping Lean In ignite change." Her identification of a special place in Hell is, we should note, probably a formulation of Taylor Swift's favorite quote about "women who don't help other women"—an odd call for solidarity, given that Losse charges Sandberg with placing the well-being of her company over the well-being of her female employees:

By arguing that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the workplace to maintain a commitment to them. And by launching a feminist platform, Sandberg is able to contain the broader threat that a feminist critique poses to Facebook's business, simultaneously generating more power for herself and her organization - Silicon Valley "revolution" at its finest. This maneuver, as I learned in my years at Facebook, is how the game is played, and both Sandberg and Zuckerberg play it well. The question the rest of us have to ask is, what does the game do for those not at or near the top? Are workers playing or are we getting played?

[Dissent]

Parents in Dietrich, Idaho, aren't very happy with the way science teacher Tim McDaniel is teaching their children human anatomy.

That is to say, they're unhappy that he is teaching them human anatomy at all.

In a formal complaint made against the 18-year Dietrich School veteran by at least four parents, McDaniel is chided for using the word "vagina" during a tenth-grade biology class on the human reproductive system.

Among other complaints submitted to the school: McDaniel explained the biology of an orgasm, taught students about STDs and birth control, and showed a clip from An Inconvenient Truth, which led to a discussion about climate change.

"I teach straight out of the textbook, I don't include anything that the textbook doesn't mention," McDaniel told the Twin Falls Times-News. "But I give every student the option not attend this class when I teach on the reproductive system if they don't feel comfortable with the material."

No student has ever opted out, McDaniel said.

The parents made other allegations against McDaniel, including that he "shared confidential student files with an individual other than their parents," and "told inappropriate jokes in class."

But The Raw Story reports that some students who are rallying around McDaniel believe those who complained about the teacher's methods may be motivated by religion.

Per the most recent statistics, nearly 66% of all Lincoln County adherents are affiliated with the Mormon Church, which specifically requires parents to "ensure that the [sex education] instructions given to their children are consistent with sound moral and ethical values."

Though the Idaho State Department of Education is currently investigating the complaint, Dietrich Superintendent Neil Hollingshead told the Times-News he doesn't expect the review to result in McDaniel's dismissal.

"Maybe a letter of reprimand from the school board," he said.

[H/T: The Atlantic Wire, photo via Shutterstock]

After months of half-assed speculation and heartless anticipation, Ashley Judd, America's Charlize Theron, has decided she is not going to run for a Senate seat to represent her home state of Kentucky.

She tweeted the news today:

Had she run, Judd, a Democrat, would have been pitting herself against longtime incumbent Mitch McConnell, a turtle-headed Republican who even other Republicans hate. Judd probably would have been able to keep up with McConnell in fundraising, but the Washington Post notes that "McConnell's path to victory involves savaging his opponent," a relatively easy task when that opponent is an inexperienced Hollywood actor.

Surely relieved are certain leading Kentucky Democrats, some of whom worried a widely talked about Judd campaign would cause moderate voters to pivot hard away from other Democrats downballot. In a February interview with Roll Call, a Kentucky Democratic strategist said a Judd run would be "a catastrophe."

Perhaps predicting her stunted political career, the new movie Olympus Has Fallen finds Judd starring as the First Lady. It is said to be a very bad film in which Judd dies right away.

[Image via AP]

After experiencing a throbbing pain and noticing redness in her right eye, Ashley Hyde, an 18-year-old high school senior, went to several doctors. None of them could figure out the problem.

"They did multiple cultures where they scrape your eye," Hyde told Local 10 in Florida. "One time, they had to drill into my eye. It was really nasty."

Eventually her doctors identified the infection as acanthamoeba, a microscopic parasite found in water that, if left untreated, would have eaten through Hyde's cornea. The doctor's blamed the infection on dirty contact lenses.

One of the doctors who spoke to Local 10 recommended tossing disposable contacts after each use.

"Every day, we see people come in with contact lens related to infections, complications, ulcers," said Dr. Adam Clarin, an optometric physician. "There are all things that are potentially blinding."

Clarin recommends patients use disposable contacts for daily use.

"There is nothing safer or healthier than throwing out the lens every day and starting with a new one the next day," added Clarin.

As for Hyde, she now has months of treatment ahead of her. Her advice? Change your damn contacts.

"I wouldn't risk it," she said. "It hurts like, oh my gosh, you can't even...I had to take so many antibiotics."

As with the woman who leaked brain fluid from her nose, the lesson here is clearly: always assume the worse. Or: change your contacts every day. Either works.

[via Daily Mail]

When Georgia resident Lindsay Scallan lost her digital camera during a 2007 vacation to Hawaii, she was understandably upset.

"It was towards the end of the trip and my pictures were on there and it was my first experience there, so I was pretty upset about it," Scallan told CBS Atlanta. "I took a lot of pictures, did a lot of snorkeling, a lot of scuba diving and a night dive. A night dive is when I lost my camera."

Scallan took a reasonable, if still sad and resigned, approach to the ordeal. "What are you going to do?" she said to CBS Atlanta. She then went about her life for six years, not giving the missing camera much thought. Until last Saturday, when she received a random message on Facebook.

"I get this random message on Facebook from a guy I went to high school with, saying his wife found an article and he thought it was about me and my camera," said Scallan.

That high school friend had spotted a report on Hawaii News Now, which detailed how the camera washed ashore on a beach in Taiwan. A China Airlines employee found the camera and flipped through the images on its memory card, which amazingly still worked. The employee then got in touch with officials in Hawaii to try to identify its owner. Those officials contacted Hawaii News Now, whose story on the camera went viral and was spotted by Scallan's friend.

"It was social media at its best," said Scallan to CBS Atlanta.

And to make things better for Scallan while also providing China Airlines with almost free advertising, Scallan is getting a all-expenses-paid trip to Taiwan courtesy of the airline to meet the employee who found the camera. And, hopefully, to do some diving.

"China Airlines has offered to pay for me to go out there and my room, board and my food and everything," Scallan said. "An all expenses paid trip to come out there and get my camera back and meet the guy that found it. It's been a wild ride...I went from normal and boring to a news crew sitting in my living room."

[AP/CBS Atlanta/Hawaii News Now]

In case you needed yet another reason not to taunt animals 10 times larger than you, here you go: A man visiting Antelope Island State Park in Utah provoked a 1500 pound bison and the bison, being a bison, rammed the man into a nearby fence.

"This person is very, very, very lucky that he wasn't killed," said assistant park manager John Sullivan.

Sullivan said the man seemed uninjured immediately after the ordeal, and "other than being a little dusty ... embarrassed and shell-shocked," he was "none the worse for wear."

Yes, shell-shocked seems to be a good way to describe the feeling of surviving an attack from an animal that weighs almost a ton. Witnesses to the attack said the man went out of his way to attract the attention of the bison, which was on its way elsewhere.

"The [bison] had gone through the gate section that's located real close to where he got hit and looked like he was going to run off the field," Wayne Ebenroth of Boise, Idaho, said during an interview Wednesday on KSL NewsRadio. "He had to have done something to catch the [bison's] attention, because that's when he turned around and decided to pay him a visit."

Ebenroth is the same person who snapped the above photo. He started taking pictures when he noticed several people gathering near the bison and – thankfully for us all – didn't stop until after the attack. ""[The bison] just was not comfortable with how close he was hanging out with him," Ebenroth said.

Park officials decided not to cite the man, saying it would "add insult to injury." The man, who wasn't identified, denied provoking the animal, instead saying he just raised his arm. Sure.

Since bison attacks seem to be increasingly common (as in, I've now seen visual documentation of two), here's what you should do if you encounter a bison in the wild, courtesy of our friends in Canada: "Never try to chase or scare bison away. It is best to just cautiously walk away." Seems obvious, but based on the evidence above, maybe not.

[h/t Deadspin]

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and icon of resistance against Burma's brutal military dictatorship, was a "V.I.P. guest" of her former captors at a military parade yesterday held in honor of the country's Armed Forces Day—marking the latest in what the Times calls a "fledgling partnership" between Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta that once kept her under house arrest for more than two decades. Her openness to work with the country's president, former general U Sein Thein, may be a shrewd political calculation that recognizes the military's continued hold on power even as the country slowly moves toward democracy, but it leaves many of her former allies troubled, and may end up neutralizing her: "[S]he is essentially making herself irrelevant," Burmese politics expert Josef Silverstein says. Worse, she has largely remained silent as the plight of Burma's ethnic minority Rohingya Muslims worsens. The rise of the 969 group, which exiled dissident Dr. Muang Zarni describes as a "neo-Nazi ‘Buddhist' nationalist movement" has led to brutal violence, genocidal in its intent, against the Rohingya—largely poorer, darker-skinned, and unrecognized by by the state—creating a human rights crisis in the face of which Aung San Suu Kyi's reaction is disappointing at best and infuriating at worst. "When asked if the Rohingyas are Burmese citizens, Aung San Suu Kyi, the moral exemplar of the pro-democracy movement, simply said that she did not know," Min Zin writes at Foreign Policy. "Aung San Suu Kyi has even said that she will refrain from applying any kind of 'moral leadership' by taking sides in the communal unrest. In this respect, her actions reveal quite a bit of continuity with the ruling military." [NYT | Vice | Guardian | FP | image via AFP/Getty]

Nelson Mandela was readmitted to the hospital just before midnight local time due to a recurring lung infection. The former South African President spent over two weeks in the hospital this past December, undergoing treatment for a lung infection and gallstones.

A spokesperson for Mandela said:

"[The doctors] prefer to act on the side of caution, and the moment they felt there was a recurrence of the lung infection, they felt that it warranted immediate hospitalisation given his age and given his history."

Despite the reassuring statement, the late hour of the hospital visit has caused concern. The current President Jacob Zuma called for prayers:

"We appeal to the people of South Africa and the world to pray for our beloved Madiba and his family and to keep them in their thoughts. We have full confidence in the medical team and know that they will do everything possible to ensure recover."

The 94-year-old served as South Africa's first black president in President from 1994 to 1999, after braving nearly thirty years in prison for his activism. He earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership, and has spent the years since leaving office as a global statesman.

[BBC, image via AP]