Police confirmed on Saturday that Christopher Harper-Mercer, the gunman who killed nine people at a community college in Oregon this week, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound following a shootout with police officers.

http://gawker.com/everything-we-...

Harper-Mercer was armed with six guns, multiple ammunition magazines, and body armor when he opened fire on an English class in which he was enrolled at Umpqua Community College on Thursday. Altogether, the New York Times reports, police have confiscated 14 guns from Harper-Mercer. (The rest were at his apartment.)

According to the Times, all of the gunman’s weapons had been purchased legally—either by Harper-Mercer himself or by a relative. Harper-Mercer’s father, Ian Mercer, spoke to CNN from his home in Tarzana, California, saying that he had not known his son owned so many weapons. (Harper-Mercer’s parents divorced 10 years ago; he lived with his mother.)

“How was he able to compile that kind of arsenal?” Mercer asked, going on to say that the killings “would not have happened” if his son had not been able to get his hands on the weapons.

“It has to change,” Mercer said. “How can it not? Even people that believe in the right to bear arms, what right do you have to take someone’s life?”

Police arrived on campus five minutes after the first 911 calls were made, the Times reports. Two minutes later, police officers exchanged gunfire with Harper-Mercer, and, two minutes after that, they reported that he had gone down.

Before his death, though, Harper-Mercer terrorized the classroom, telling some of his victims to crawl across the floor as he shot them, and killing another after telling her to beg for her life, the Associated Press reports.

According to the mother of a student who witnessed the killings, Harper-Mercer gave one student—the “lucky one”—something to deliver to authorities. Other survivors’ relatives confirmed the account, the AP reports: Pastor Randy Scroggins said his daughter, who survived the shooting without injury, had told him Harper-Mercer said to one student, “Don’t worry, you’re the one who is going to survive.” He gave the student his backpack, which contained “all the information that you’ll need. Give it to the police.”

Police have not said whether they received anything from Harper Mercer, although the AP reports that a law enforcement official said that a several-pages-long manifesto had been recovered.

Photo via AP. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Prosecutors have accused a priest in New Jersey of pointing a functioning, Civil War-style musket at an 8-year-old boy because he was a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, NBC New York reports. The priest is a fan of the New York Giants.

Kevin Carter, a 54-year-old priest at St. Margaret of Cortona Roman Catholic Church, in Little Ferry, New Jersey, was arrested Friday on charges of endangering the welfare of a child and aggravated assault by pointing a firearm.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said that Carter asked to see the boy in one of the rectory rooms after Mass services on Sunday, September 13th. There, he allegedly told the boy to stand against a wall, picked up his musket, and pointed it at him.

“As he raised his weapon and pointed it at the boy, he said, ‘I’m going to shoot you,’” Bergen County prosecutor John Molinelli told NBC New York.

“The young boy was apparently a fan of a particular football team, the priest was not. So perhaps we have indication it started out as that,” Molinelli said. “There’s no such thing as joking around with a weapon when you’re dealing with an eight-year-old kid.”

Someone who witnessed the incident reported it to Newark Archdiocese officials on September 25th, and the Archdiocese reported it to the prosecutor’s office on September 28th. On Friday, police found a musket, gunpowder, and ammunition in the rectory.

Carter was arrested and held on $15,000 bail. Earlier this month, the Giants lost to the Cowboys 26-27.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The Manhattan aunt suing her 12-year-old nephew for allegedly breaking her wrist with an enthusiastic hug on his 8th birthday has lost her case. A Connecticut jury took just 25 minutes to find in favor of the nephew Tuesday, the New York Daily News reports.

http://gawker.com/manhattan-woma...

Jennifer Connell had sued young Sean Tarala for $127,000, claiming her wrist injury made it difficult to walk up the three flights of stairs to her Upper East Side apartment, and that—I am not making this up—she had trouble holding her hors d’oeuvres plate at a recent party. She said he was negligent in excitedly jumping into her arms, and a “reasonable eight-year old” would know better.

“We do not take great pleasure in bringing a minor to court,” Connell’s lawyer, William Beckert, said, according to the News, “She is not here enjoying a moment of this.”

But the jury found the case for 12-year-old Sean, whose mother died last year, more persuasive.

“Kids will be kids,” Sean’s attorney Thomas Noniewicz said, “He was an 8-year-old boy being an 8-year-old boy...Sean was not negligent.”

He added that Sean was guilty ... of wanting to give his beloved aunt a hug.

“Connell showed no emotion as the verdict was announced but later pleaded with judicial marshals to escort her to her car through a throng of media waiting outside the Main Street courthouse,” the Connecticut Post reported.

“She ignored shouts for comments as the marshals led her away.”

[Photo: Facebook via NYDN]

Politics aside, few would argue that GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson—a retired pediatric neurosurgeon—isn’t a bright guy. So what does it mean that, while serving on Costco’s board from 2002 to 2005, Ben Carson was accused of granting over 1.01 million shares worth of illegally backdated stock options?

The allegations stem from two shareholder derivative complaints and their consolidated settlement: documents obtained by Gawker that list Carson as a co-defendant alongside most of Costco’s board and several of its C-level executives.

The suits accused Costco’s board, and in particular members like Ben Carson who served on its “compensation committee,” with essentially cherry-picking the issue dates for Costco’s incentive and nonqualified stock options. By changing the option grant date to a previous day on which the company’s stock price was exceptionally low, the board guaranteed that these stock options would have a greater profit margin once Costco’s executives chose to exercise them (i.e. sell shares). These cheap stocks—real bargains in direct violation of the company’s own policies—were then passed on to Costco’s senior management and, in some cases, bestowed upon the discount retailer’s rank-and-file employees. It was like an elite Costco, inside the Costco.

All told, the beneficiaries of this scheme allegedly wrested over $173 million away from the company in pumped-up stock sales and unrecorded compensation during the 10-year-period covered by the two civil suits. And, incidentally: The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington state came to similar conclusions after conducting a two-year investigation into Costco’s executive compensation practices. The U.S. Attorney’s Office investigation was looking at backdating from 1996-2003. But this shareholders’ derivative suit covered a slightly wider range, 1995-2005, for the backdating fraud itself, and covered up to the date of the filing, 2009-ish, for all those “by-product” charges, like the inaccurate SEC filings. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and their multiagency task force, however, ultimately declined to pursue criminal charges after considering “multiple actions taken by Costco executives, including the fact that Costco self-reported the backdating to the SEC [in 2006].”

The complaints were filed in September 2008 and June 2009 respectively, by Pirelli Armstrong Tire Corporation Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, a Tennessee-based employees beneficiary association, and by Daniel Buckfire, a random guy from Michigan with, you know, Costco stock. Their stats-heavy, 141-page consolidated complaint (which you can read in full here) was settled in plaintiffs’ favor in June 2011, forcing Costco to overhaul its corporate governance. The settlement mandated, for example, in-person votes on key decisions over the less reliable “unanimous written consent” procedures that the company had previously used. It also required Costco and its executives to pay $4.85 million to the plaintiffs in legal fees and expenses.

You can be forgiven for not remembering this, but stock options backdating was something of an epidemic in the mid-00s, during the go-go “Let’s see if we can wreck the whole economy!” exuberance that preceded the financial crisis. Household names like Cablevision, Apple, and Home Depot; lesser known firms, like Sunrise Telecom and Vitesse Semiconductor; video game giants like Activision and Electronic Arts; Pixar(!); and, perhaps most distressingly, The Cheesecake Factory—all these firms and more found themselves under SEC scrutiny, alongside Costco, for the clear statistical evidence of stock options backdating.

In the Costco case, the lawyers for Pirelli’s retiree benefits trust (and Daniel) used no less than six court-accepted methodologies, including binomial distribution probability analysis and a statistical ranking system similar to the one used by the Wall Street Journal in their 2006 investigations into options backdating. Plaintiffs’ counsel found that the likelihood of Costco’s board landing on these options grant dates by chance was over 1 in 1 million—which is to say, less likely than your getting struck by lightning or being killed in an extinction-level asteroid impact in your lifetime, but more likely than your winning a multi-state Powerball.

For right now, though, it will be sufficient just to look at some of the fortuitous option dates chanced upon while Ben Carson was on Costco’s board of directors:

They just look lucky, don’t they? Serendipitously low.

Carson himself allegedly personally benefited from the falsified options. According to the complaint, the concealment of the backdating scheme led to the misrepresentation of Costco’s actual net income, its shareholders’ equity, and the full tax obligations involved—and all this had the ancillary benefit of artificially inflating Costco’s stock price. In April 2006, Carson sold roughly 12,000 shares of the company at this elevated price, netting $655,460 in what was alleged in the operative complaint to be, effectively, insider trading (just one of the many charges leveled against him by the plaintiffs).

Yet, it’s also true that this was penny ante stuff compared to the illicit gains made by some of Costco’s other senior executives, according to the complaint. The company’s cofounder and CEO, James D. Sinegal, to cite one example, received backdated shares in the hundreds of thousands, unlike Carson, and sold 2.38 million inflated shares during the life of the backdating scheme, for a cumulative payout of $94.6 million. (Among the considerations that lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office to decline prosecution was that Sinegal and Costco’s CFO, Richard Galanti, generously slapped themselves on the wrist, forgoing some fresh stock options and about $1.2 million in bonuses between them. These masochists had clearly suffered enough.)

According to the complaint, the fact that Carson only profited in the meager six figures from the backdating changes nothing about his lead role in supervising and signing off on the fraudulent compensation program, for years.

As one of four members of Costco’s compensation committee, as well as through his work done on behalf of its audit committee, and his general directorial duties, Ben Carson’s signature is all over years’ worth of documents authorizing the questionably dated stock options; written communications with Costco’s external auditors; and official reports misrepresenting those stock options, along with the rest of Costco’s financials, to both shareholders and the SEC.

“Options backdating, you know, it seems ‘juicier’ the more there’s self interest involved, and a conflict of interest, and that sort of thing, profit for individual directors,” says Anita K. Krug, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Law. “But even if that’s not there, not adequately dealing with the ‘being informed’ part of furthering the duty to be non-negligent—even if liability often doesn’t attach under state corporate law—it can still be problematic.”

Krug, a Harvard law graduate who has spoken internationally on corporate governance and securities law, feels it’s “never a good idea” to discount the potential damage done by breaches of this kind of fiduciary duty, known as duty of care, over the more legally actionable duty of loyalty breaches, which cover conflicts of interest.

As a director, Krug says, “Your obligation is to not be negligent, but under most states’ corporate law, you will not be held liable unless you acted grossly negligently—so super negligently.”

“That’s a really low standard—and most directors, even [those] that are negligent, pass it.”

Carson received a nominal $45,500 annually for his mental and physical exertions as one of Costco’s board members, according to financial disclosures recently filed with the FEC, in addition to another $50,000-$100,000 in annual dividends as a shareholder. It was a real job, in other words, with real pay and real obligations. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that Ben Carson bears some culpability here, in one of the few large managerial roles he has held that’s even remotely comparable to holding national office.

“Signing-off, in the board context, is something more than simply saying, ‘Oh, it’s a document. Sure. I’m sure our counsel prepared it well. Let’s sign off on it,’” Krug says. “It means actually reading the thing.”

“Typically—and I don’t know what Carson was given, in terms of information—but typically directors are given a lot of information before a board meeting,” she says.

“I mean, each board typically has a counsel devoted toward advising the board on legal issues. The counsel certainly doesn’t want to be charged with any sort of malpractice later on. Maybe it’s not the counsel that’s responsible for providing the information, but whomever is wants to make sure the board has sufficient information to make all appropriate decisions in a well-informed manner.”

Presidents of the United States, you may recall, are similarly required to manage complex bureaucratic institutions, and to sign off on written materials that they are expected to have read, comprehended, and actually endorsed.

An accounting of the documents that Carson either had a hand in preparing or ostensibly ratified with his signature ought to provide some perspective on the severity of his involvement.

According to the complaint, for seven years beginning in December of 2002, Ben Carson annually signed off on materially false proxy statements (Form DEF 14A “definitive proxy statements,” if you’re nasty), that were filed to the SEC and then subsequently used by Costco’s shareholders to make crucial, “informed” votes about the company’s business at their annual meetings. Beginning in October of 2002, Carson’s position on the compensation committee meant that he was “delegated ultimate responsibility for administration of the Company’s 1993 Stock Option Plan and 2002 Stock Option Plan” according to the consolidated complaint, attending no less than four meetings from 2002-2004 “during which he engaged in backdating options.” For the duration of Carson’s appointment on the compensation committee, he also prepared and signed off on committee reports submitted with the annual proxy statements.

Carson also communicated and sometimes worked with Costco’s external auditors on behalf of the board’s audit committee, withholding key information about the stock options fraud with these auditors over the course of six meetings of the Audit Committee in fiscal year 2002, seven meetings in 2003, nine meetings in between 2004 and 2005, and seven meetings in 2006, and possibly more, according to the complaint.

And, finally, the complaint states that from 1999 until 2008, Carson joined the rest of the board in signing off on falsified Form 10-K reports to the SEC.

Based on this voluminous paper trail, the complaint accuses Carson of a litany of wrongdoing, beyond insider trading, that included unjust enrichment, corporate waste, constructive fraud, gross mismanagement, violations of the Exchange Act, breach of his fiduciary duty, and others.

Given how quickly the Costco case shifted into mediation and settlement mode, it is still an open question whether Ben Carson was merely signing off on anything and everything like an irresponsible idiot, if he was somehow tricked, or if he was knowingly engaged in the fraud—or for that matter which of these versions of Ben Carson voters will find more presidential.

We’ve reached out to the Carson campaign, via the media contact form on the Carson 2016 website, and to Dr. Carson directly via an available email address. They have yet to respond, but we will update this post if they do.

Ben Carson stepped down from Costco’s board of directors this past May to focus on his presidential campaign.

Image by Jim Cooke, photos via AP

Contact the author at matthew.phelan@gawker.com.

Jim Webb (who?) tweeted an article this afternoon entitled “Debate Preview: Why My Money’s on Jim Webb.” Unfortunately for Jim Webb, that article was intended as comedy.

Webb—or Webb’s social media manager—eventually deleted the tweet, and it’s easy to see why. The blog post, penned by somebody calling himself Carl “The Dig” Diggler, read in part:

Webb is liable to have his big breakout moment at the debate when Democratic voters get a look at his square jaw, burly muscles, and big heavy combat boots. Adding to his long list of positives, the former Virginia Senator has a wife from another country, something very popular with Millennials. Furthermore, his habit of carrying a gun in this age of mass shootings could lead him to personally stopping a spree killer in the act, a moment that would almost certainly go viral.

The only knock on Webb? He might be too perfect a candidate.

It’s not particularly good satire, but it’s obvious that satire is what it is: the joke is that Jim Webb is not the perfect candidate, but its opposite. Even if he can’t find an earnest writer to predict him as victor for tonight’s big showdown, Webb can at least take comfort in remembering that he isn’t Lincoln Chafee.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Hillary’s on top (currently leading the polls at 43 percent), the kids love Bernie (he’s reached a million online donors faster than any candidate ever before), and Joe Biden is playing coy. But with the first 2016 Democratic debates just hours away, one question remains: Who the hell are those other guys?

With Larry Lessig left out for essentially being presumed a troll, that still leaves Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chafee—all names you may very well be reading for the very first time. So let’s give these generally forgettable figures the spotlight for once, and learn a little about exactly who it is we’ll be spending our time with this evening. Here are our white-haired, besuited extras in the Bernie and Hillary Las Vegas Showdown.

Martin O’Malley

Currently polling at 0.4 percent, the most notable thing about nondescript white man Martin O’Malley is that, as a generic Democrat with no real discernible weakness (yet!), he’s the establishment fallback in the event that Hillary finally crumbles. (Except that he can’t even build a base of support as the anybody-but-Hillary candidate, so the Democrats may need a fallback to the fallback.) O’Malley is a former governor of Maryland, a gay-marriage pioneer, and the former lead guitarist of Celtic rock group O’Malley’s March.

But O’Malley boasts more than just rock chops—as a governor for eight years and a mayor for eight more, he certainly has the most executive experience on stage tonight. He also benefits from the fact that he vast majority of people have absolutely no idea who he is. In other words, if he can come out Celtic harp (he is also a major proponent of gun control) blazin’, he may see a Carly Fiorina-esque (media-assisted) “bump.”

Jim Webb

Coming in at a hearty 0.9%, Jim Webb actually hasn’t actually been a Democrat for all that long. Before 2006, he was a (sorta left-of-center) Republican who switched sides to (successfully) take on Republican Senator George Allen for the Virginia Senate seat. He’s also the only combat vet (Webb fought as a Marine in Vietnam) in the entire current presidential field, a best-selling novelist, and, uh, a staunch defender of the Confederate Flag, writing on Facebook:

But we should also remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, including slave holders in the Union Army from states such as Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and that many non-slave holders fought for the South. It was in recognition of the character of soldiers on both sides that the federal government authorized the construction of the Confederate Memorial 100 years ago, on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

Sure, Jim!

Conservative leanings and racist sympathies aside, the most notable thing about Jim Webb is that, despite his appearance tonight, no one’s totally sure that the man is actually running for president. Mother Jones even went on a quest this past week to find out, writing that “calls to Webb’s campaign headquarters (listed as a post office box) brought me to three different voicemail boxes, and a message wasn’t returned.”

Lincoln Chaffee

Ranking in last place at a relatively depressing 0.3%, Lincoln Chafee is just glad to be invited. Coming from a long line of Republican politicians, Chafee himself served as Republican in local government as the mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, and later as a Republican senator from that state. He finally left the GOP in 2007 before serving a single term as Governor of Rhode Island, for which he ran as an independent. Ideologically, though, Chafee is the most libertarian-leaning dem on stage.

Chafee is probably going to lean heavily on the fact that he was the only Republican senator to vote against going into Iraq—something Hillary certainly can’t say and a fact that Chafee loves to remind her of. But despite his Republican (and independent) past, Chafee has been a huge supporter of Obama, voting for him in both elections.

More important than all this, though, is the fact that he attended Montana State University’s Horseshoeing School, later working as a blacksmith at racetracks all over the United States. A vote for Lincoln Chafee is a vote for blacksmiths.

Joe Biden’s Spare Podium

Never to be used, never to be forgotten.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Images via AP. GIF by Jay Hathaway.

A message from Kristin Cavallari, via the Official Kristin Cavallari App for iPhone and Android: “You’ve been throwing out the healthiest part of avocados this entire time.”

The healthiest part is the seed—you can read more about that on the app.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

On Tuesday, Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker Prize in the award’s 47-year history for A Brief History of Seven Killings, an “expansive and near-mythic survey of his homeland.” Revisit our interview with the author here.

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A documentary about trans women and the men who love them called Sex Diaries: Trans Lovers aired on the U.K.’s Channel 4 last night. It was a regularly fascinating glimpse into a subject that’s still so taboo, host/director Charlie Russell reported early on that finding men to talk about their relationships with trans women wasn’t easy.

“Is this a new kind of relationship, one that is neither gay, straight, or bi, but perhaps something entirely different instead?” he mused in the intro. What complicates matters the most, per Russell’s thesis, is the fact that many of these straight-identified men seek out trans women who have penises. While trans women are too often reduced to their body parts in interviews and culture in general, exploring how their lovers and admirers engage with said parts potentially helps expand our idea of sexuality. This is intricate stuff that is very much worth considering.

For the record, Andy and Mark (who appear respectively in the clip above), are pretty chill about other people’s penises.

Less chill is 41-year-old Morris, who compares trans women to Ferraris and says trans women are easier to have sex with than cisgender women.

It feels reductive and, in fact, incorrect to say, “Men are men,” within a discussion about the fine gradients of sexuality and gender identity. Maybe the better call is: Douchebags come in all stripes and tastes.

Many trans women were interviewed for Trans Lovers, including Paige, who reported that she finally found love after a frustrating search. She described her relationship with her newfound man as an alternative to previous partners. “All you’ve had is men before treating you like a piece of meat, basically, and it’s not nice,” she said.

Earlier today, Uber released a new “Uber Partner app, designed to give drivers more information so Uber works better for them.” It also inadvertently gave anyone access to an untold number of sensitive scanned documents for almost 1,000 of these same drivers.

It takes about 16 minutes for anyone in the world to create an Uber driver account—all you need to do is fill out a few forms (name, email, password, etc.) and watch a 15-minute welcome video. After that, you’re prompted to upload basic driver documentation like your license, registration, and insurance. But according to one driver who tipped me off, Uber chauffeurs who try to add or edit that very information today are instead warped to a screen that contains documents for complete strangers, a legion of Uber drivers around the United States.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/uber-allegedly...

Clear, high-resolution pictures of drivers licenses, W-9 tax forms, livery car company articles of incorporation, and other sensitive personal documents—many of which contain social security numbers—can be easily viewed and downloaded:

It appears at least 179 pages of documents for drivers from Washington to Virginia were inadvertently exposed, just months after Uber showed its privacy weakness by hosting a large database of user information on a public GitHub page.

A representative for Uber told Gawker “As soon as we were made aware of this we immediately fixed it.” The vulnerability existed up until roughly the time at which I asked Uber about it. No further details as to the extent or cause of the security hole were provided.

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

An upstate New York couple have been charged with beating their 19-year-old son to death inside the Word of Life Church in New Hartford, New York, the Associated Press reports. Four other members of the church have been charged with assault.

Bruce and Deborah Leonard—65 and 59 years old, respectively—of Clayville, New York, were arraigned and charged with first-degree manslaughter on Tuesday before being sent to Oneida County Jail. Bail was set at $100,000 each. A motive was not disclosed.

Their son, Lucas, was brought to the St. Luke’s campus of the Mohawk Valley Health System early Monday afternoon, the Utica Observer-Dispatch reports, with injuries to his stomach, genitals, back, and thighs. (Police could not confirm whether he had also been shot.) He died later on Monday.

The couple’s younger son, 17-year-old Christopher Leonard, was also hospitalized in serious condition, the AP reports:

The investigation began at about 12:30 p.m. Monday when family members brought Lucas Leonard to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Investigators determined that the Word of Life Church was the scene of the crime, and the building was surrounded by special operations teams from state and local police agencies.

Police eventually entered the church, a three-story brick building on a residential street that originally housed a school. Several church members were interviewed, and several children were turned over to child welfare officials.

According to CNYCentral.com, Joseph Irwin, 26, of Chadwicks, David Morey, 26, of Utica, Linda Morey, 54, of Utica, and Sarah Ferguson, 33, of Clayville, were all charged with second-degree assault. Bail was set at $50,000 each.

All six of those charged in Leonard’s death have plead not guilty.

Bruce Leonard’s lawyer, Don Gerace, told the AP that his client would not make bail but declined to comment further. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Friday. “We expect to learn more about the evidence and charges at that time,” Gerace said.

The New Hartford Police Department said more arrests are expected.

Image via CNYCentral.com/Oneida County Sheriff’s Office. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Badger Guns, known as “the number one crime gun dealer in America” for a history of selling guns that later turn up in crime scenes, has been ordered to pay $6 million to Milwaukee police officers Bryan Norberg and Graham Kunisch for the negligent sale of a handgun that was used in a shooting that seriously injured the two officers, reports the Associated Press and FOX 6 News in Milwaukee.

Norberg and Kunisch were shot by Julius Burton in 2009 when they attempted to stop him for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. Norberg has since returned to the force, but Kunisch’s injuries were severe enough that he was forced to retire. Burton is now serving 80 years behind bars for the shooting, and the Badger Guns lawsuit came about after the particulars of the sale that eventually transferred the handgun to Burton were revealed to be sketchy as hell.

From a FOX 6 News report:

His 18-year-old friend Julius Burton was too young to buy a gun himself, and told Burton he’d pay him $40 to get him one.

During his testimony in court on Monday, Collins indicated Burton picked out the gun he wanted purchased.

Surveillance video from inside Badger Guns shows Burton pointing to the gun he wanted, helping Collins fill out the forms, and going to the parking lot with Collins to get more money. According to the lawyer for the officers, Bryan Norberg and Graham Kunisch, these were all red flags — and Badger Guns shouldn’t have made the sale.

[...]

Despite Collins crossing out and changing answers on his gun application, he walked out of Badger Guns with a gun.

Today a Milwaukee jury agreed that the sale should not have been made and found Badger Guns liable for the consequences of that sale, ordering the store to pay Officer Norberg $1.5 million and Kunisch $3.6 million, plus another $730,000 in punitive damages.

[AP] [FOX 6 News]

Over the weekend, new Daily Show host Trevor Noah performed a short standup set at a convention in Los Angeles called Politicon. There, he did a bit about the varying extremes of racism he has experienced across America, which was insightful, but also a nearly exact replica of a decades-old Dave Chappelle joke.

These transcriptions come from The Hollywood Reporter, who first reported the story, emphasis mine. Here is the joke Chappelle was telling back in the late-90s:

Traveling has made me a racism connoisseur, if you will. You know it’s different region to region. Anyone ever been down South? So you guys know what I’m talking about. The racism down there is just fucking [bon appétit gesture]. It’s perfect. Stewed to a perfection. It’s comfortable. It’s out in the open. There are no secrets in Mississippi. Everybody knows the deal. “Morning, nigger!” “Morning, sir!” Not up here. Here in the big cities, man, it’s different. It’s always a secret. And we should be like them. We should keep our shit out in the open and vent a little—I mean with limits. You don’t want to say whatever comes to your mind, that might be a little much. White dude be walking down the street minding his business and a brother walk up to him: “Hello, you white oppressor, you slave master rapist of Africa.” “Why hello, my big lips spear-chucking friend.”

Here’s Chapelle telling the joke in an HBO special shot in San Francisco in 1998:

Now, here’s Noah at Politicon last weekend:

Before I came to America, I thought I knew all kinds of racism. I’ve always considered myself something of a racism connoisseur. I appreciate the finer racism. Not to say I appreciate all racism, but a finer racism. Before I came here, blatant racism was my favorite. Blatant racism, where you know exactly where you stand, often perpetrated by old people, which I have always appreciated. They’ll just tell it to you like it is. “This is what I think about you!” Yeah, you’re going to die soon. Charming racism in America changed my life. I discovered it in a place called Lexington, Kentucky. Probably one of the most wonderful places I’ve ever been— charming, friendly people. Racism with a smile and a tip of the hat. I was walking through the streets, a man walked up to me, didn’t know me from a bar of soap, came straight up to me and looked me dead in the eye and he was like, “Good afternoon, nigger.” “Good afternoon.” I’ve never seen racism with a smile. I didn’t know what to do. He just said it like it was a fact. As if I fought him, he would have been like, “What, didn’t you know?”

Though the details in each bit are slightly different (i.e. Mississippi versus Kentucky) the thesis is the same, as are the introduction—including the phrase “racism connoisseur”—and the punchline, in which both comedians are warmly greeted by an old white man using the N-word.

Noah had previously been accused of joke thievery by the Canadian comedian Russell Peters, and this racism bit is suspiciously similar to Chappelle’s. One conclusion is that Noah knowingly ripped off a joke he thought was funny while assuming that it was old enough that nobody would notice. The other conclusion is that he absorbed Chappelle’s joke years ago then had the same experience in his own life, and talked about that experience without realizing that he was regurgitating another famous comedian’s joke.

You can watch more of Trevor Noah weeknights on Comedy Central. Surely you haven’t forgotten about his very existence.

[image via Getty]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

McDonald’s, a protracted practical joke whose punchline is cardiovascular disease, is apparently still sore enough over Super Size Me that they’ve produced a documentary of their own to refute its depiction of their so-called “food.” Only this one—entitled 540 Meals—is being shown as educational material to school children around America. Dammit.

The film chronicles the efforts of an Iowa high school science teacher named John Cisna to lose weight while eating only McDonald’s food for 90 days. Cisna challenged his students to prepare daily menus for him, with the stipulation that his diet must be capped at 2,000 calories per day but must include every item on the McDonald’s menu at least once. And it worked! Sorta! Cisna claims to have lost 37 pounds by the end of his experiment. Which, hey, right on, way to slim down, my dude.

Here’s the 20-minute video, if you’re curious:

If this were just some dipshit Iowa nerd going solo to debunk Super Size Me, it would still be a stupid and unscientific undertaking—weight loss is a thing that will happen if you go from eating more than your particular caloric needs per day to less than your particular caloric needs per day and incorporate a little exercise into your routine (which Cisna did for this experiment). You don’t need to be a big fancy science teacher to figure it out, and you damn sure don’t need to subject yourself to three months of McDonald’s food, for crying out loud. But that’s not what this is—it’s now been grabbed up as another deeply cynical marketing ploy by the gasping corporate artifact that is the McDonald’s Corporation.

The Lunch Tray has the details, and they are, well, they’re about what you’d expect from as soulless and desperate an operation as the golden arches (emphasis added):

McDonald’s has since officially retained Cisna as its paid brand ambassador and he now travels around the country to promote the fast food chain to middle and high schoolers, as well as dietetic students.

The message being sent here—again, this is to kids, in schools, who are being required to sit through a McDonald’s advertisement for reasons passing understanding—is that it is perfectly healthy to eat from the McDonald’s menu, and that, in fact, an all-McDonald’s diet can actually be good for you. Never mind that different people have different caloric needs (like, say, a 280-pound middle-aged man and a 140-pound middle-school kid, for example)—the question ought to be just why in the hell the dietary suitability of McDonald’s food is deemed valuable classroom material for, like, any student, ever.

Cisna has turned this ridiculous experiment into a second career: he’s got a self-published book and now spends his days touring the country as a paid McDonald’s spokesperson, infiltrating schools with the mission of telling kids that eating repurposed goose shit dressed up in an assload of sodium is good for their health.

Listen to this asshole:

Some of the skeptics said, “Well, he only ate salads.” No. I had everything. I had Big Macs, I had the Habanero, I had Quarter Pounders with Cheese, I had ice cream cones, I had sundaes. And what’s really amazing, that people find unbelievable, is probably 95% of every day, I had French fries. I love French fries and that was a great part of it.

Cisna carefully omits the part where he had to dramatically shrink his intake on certain days to make up for the brutal caloric overload of having eaten a single Big Mac on a previous day.

Parents of America! Find out if your childrens’ school system is planning on hosting this dipshit and his corporate propaganda and, if they are, demand that someone be fired for this shit. Also, fart in your neighborhood McDonald’s. Just walk in, stand in front of the counter, and let it rip.

[The Lunch Tray]

Tonight at 8:30 p.m., all of our grandparents are going to fight in the Wynn hotel and casino in Las Vegas for the chance to be our Democratic nominee for President of the United States. And we’ll be liveblogging every crotchety, godforsaken second of it.

Will Twitter implode under the weight of its own endless Benghazi tweets? Will everyone gang up on nice Old Man Bernie? How long will it take for CNN’s moderators to realize Biden isn’t actually coming ? And does anyone know the names of the other three guys? Join us as we find out.

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

A majority of UC-Berkeley’s astronomy faculty have signed a letter calling for the dismissal of Geoffrey Marcy, an astronomer at the university since 1999, who was found to have sexually harassed his students.

As first reported by BuzzFeed News on Friday, a six-month-long investigation conducted by the university found that, between 2001 and 2010, Marcy had violated campus sexual harassment policies. Marcy, a preeminent researcher in his field, was put on probation, meaning that a subsequent harassment violation could lead to his immediate dismissal.

“After all of this effort and trying to go through the proper channels, Berkeley has ultimately come up with no response,” Joan Schmelz, formerly of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, told BuzzFeed. “I’ve seen sexual harassers get slaps on the wrist before. This isn’t even a slap on the wrist.”

Last week, just two days before BuzzFeed piece was published, Marcy apologized to the astronomy community in an open letter.

“While I do not agree with each complaint that was made, it is clear that my behavior was unwelcomed by some women,” he wrote. “It is difficult to express how painful it is for me to realize that I was a source of distress for any of my women colleagues, however unintentional.”

But the department Marcy works in wants him out: “We believe that Geoff Marcy cannot perform the functions of a faculty member,” Monday’s letter, signed by 23 of his colleagues, reads.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Janet Broughton, Berkeley’s vice provost for faculty, said, “The university has imposed real consequences on Professor Geoff Marcy by establishing a zero-tolerance policy regarding future behavior.”

Photo credit: Getty Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Here is a video of a kid who just so damn badly wants to shout “holy shit” but just can’t get any closer than “holy crud,” which, if we’re being honest, is a poor substitute.

Also, a seal gets eaten by a great white shark, or whatever.

Another few years, kiddo, and you’ll have the whole arsenal at your disposal. Shit, damn, hell, ass—you can’t believe all the choices. Hang in there, homie.

The New York Post reports that the NYCLU has requested to file an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit filed by the website ProPublica against the NYPD three years ago seeking information about the police department’s unmarked vehicles carrying mobile body scanner technology, called Z Backscatter Vans.

http://gizmodo.com/5775944/the-de...

ProPublica filed the suit after the NYPD denied a reporter’s request for information about the vans. According to the Post—over the department’s appeals that it would undermine counterterrorism efforts—a judge ruled that the NYPD should turn over the requested records.

“While this court is cognizant and sensitive to concerns about terrorism, being located less than a mile from the 9/11 site, and having seen firsthand the effects of terrorist destruction, nonetheless, the hallmark of our great nation is that it is a democracy, with a transparent government,” New York State Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan wrote in the December 2014 decision, which the NYPD appealed.

“People should be informed if military grade x-ray vans are damaging their health with radiation or peering inside their homes or cars,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman, whose organization is seeking to uphold the lower court’s decision, said on Tuesday. “New Yorkers have a right to protect their health, welfare and privacy.”

Bratton has doubled—tripled?—down on keeping information about the vans secret. “Those are issues I’d prefer not to divulge to the public at this time,” the commissioner told the Post. “I will not talk about anything at all about this—it falls into the range of security and counter-terrorism activity that we engage in.”

“They’re not used to scan people for weapons,” Bratton said. “The devices we have, the vehicles if you will, are all used lawfully and if the ACLU and others don’t think that’s the case, we’ll see them in court—where they’ll lose! At this time and the nature of what’s going on in the world, that concern of theirs is unfounded.”

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

A researcher from the American Museum of Natural History tracked down an extremely rare bird in Guadalcanal and, after consideration, collected a specimen. With extreme prejudice. What I’m saying here is he killed it.

The bird was a rare Moustached Kingfisher, a species that hadn’t been officially observed by anyone in 50 years. There are believed to be fewer than 1,000 Moustached Kingfishers left in the world.

Scientist Christopher Filardi spotted one on a research field trip last month and possibly had some sort of blood vendetta against the tiny thing. Anyway, it’s over now—he killed the absolute hell out of it.

Filardi responded to alarmed criticism of this act in an essay posted to the Audubon website entitled “Why I Collected a Moustached Kingfisher,” in which he addresses concerns about the bird’s rarity and conservation status:

Though sightings and information about the bird are rare in the ornithological community, the bird itself is not. Elders of the local land-owning tribe (now living at lower elevations) relate stories of eating Mbarikuku, the local name for the bird; our local partners knew it as unremarkably common. With a remote range so difficult to access, there has been a perception of rarity because so few outside people or scientists have seen or otherwise recorded the bird. As I wrote from the field, this is a bird that is poorly known and elusive to western science—not rare or in imminent danger of extinction.

And so, like anything poorly known and elusive to Western science, the right thing to do was drop that fucker like a bag of dirt. Blammo.

In this context, the decision to collect an individual specimen of the Moustached Kingfisher as part of our survey work reflects standard practice for field biologists.

[...]

Ethical collection of any individual organism is determined by basic criteria including collection below levels that will impact populations, adherence to permitting guidelines, and consideration of the importance of voucher specimens. With this first modern voucher of the kingfisher, the only adult male, we now have a comprehensive set of material for molecular, morphological, toxicological, and plumage studies that are unavailable from blood samples, individual feathers, or photographs.

Filardi goes on to outline in great detail the broad anticipated benefits of collecting a single specimen of the Moustached Kingfisher—the study of ecosystems, the impact of pollutants, even a positive conservation benefit. Not to mention man’s dominion over the natural world! We win again, tiny birds.

Look. Scientific discovery is often brutally ugly. Filardi has spent the last 20 years of his life studying bird populations in the Solomon Islands, so it is unlikely in the extreme you or PETA or anyone else cares more about the survival of the Moustached Kingfisher than he does.

Through a vision shared with my Solomon Island mentors, and focused keenly on sacred Uluna-Sutahuri lands, the Moustached Kingfisher I collected is a symbol of hope and a purveyor of possibility, not a record of loss.

We’ll cut you some slack this time, Filardi. Just stay the hell away from Big Bird.

[SFGate] [Audubon]