The scariest thing about ISIS (if, like most Americans, you are in no actual danger of coming into contact with ISIS) is that the more members (or fanboys) you follow on Twitter, the more they resemble you and your friends, in that we are all petty idiots. Today, one militant is taking a break from building the Caliphate to beef with some guy on social media.

http://gawker.com/how-isis-makes...

Abu Yusuf Al-Jabarti is an avid tweeter (his handle, @AlJabarti42, indicates he’s been banned 41 times) and supporter of the Islamic State. Most of his tweets are like this, just trying to expand his brand like everyone else:

He’s also real fuckin’ pissed at @Jazrawi_Uuod, who is allegedly talking shit about Al-Jabarti’s fiancee, Umm Qaqa.

At first, he just wanted to stay out of the drama (don’t we all):

(Branding-wise, Twitter could do worse than “A place to read the news until the day you make hijra.”)

Meanwhile, Jazrawi was dropping some heavy subtweets:

But a man can only take so much. He tried to be civil:

Then he started taking shots (who hasn’t been there??):

Then it was time to throw down—Jazrawi, you’ve been called out:

Oh shit...

All I can say is “damn.” They tried to hold him back...

But you can’t make fitna (An Arabic and Quranic term that translates roughly to “persecution”) against a guy’s bride-to-be and expect him to stand idly by:

I think that we can all agree that, while the views and actions of ISIS are repugnant, “May Allah humiliate you so much that you wont even dare to come on twitter ever again” is an incredible line that I will be using to shut down all trolls in the future.

I asked Abu Yusuf Al-Jabarti for comment, and he blocked me. Now who’s making fitna?

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

A young man reportedly stabbed at least four U.C. Merced students inside a university classroom before responding officers shot and killed him early Wednesday morning.

According to reports, the assailant—who has not yet been identified—was a male student in his twenties. Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke tells ABC 30 the suspect was shot and killed by university police officers.

The total number of victims is still unclear, but KCRA is now reporting that at least five people were attacked.

According to ABC 30, medics are treating at least three of the victims on campus while a fourth was airlifted to a nearby hospital.

It’s still unclear what time the attacks began, but an alert warning students to stay off campus went out around 8 a.m. Wednesday.

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

A Day With SpongeBob SquarePants: The Movie, a straight-to-DVD unauthorized spoof of the Nickelodeon cartoon, appeared for sale on Amazon on November 22, 2011. Sometime shortly after that, stock of the film mysteriously vanished from the site and everywhere else on the internet. Have you ever seen A Day With SpongeBob Squarepants? If so, there are a whole lot of nerds who would very much like to talk to you.

Go to Amazon today and you’ll still find a page for ADWSS, as the film is known to its cult of obsessive fans. There are customer reviews, a corny DVD cover featuring the Canal Street knockoff version of SpongeBob’s pineapple, some basic information about its format and run time. But for as long as anyone has been looking for the film, there have been zero copies in stock.

ADWSS is a piece of what’s sometimes called “lost media”: art or entertainment that is known to exist, or to have existed at some point, but of which no known copies are currently available. For the last several months, a dedicated community of SpongeBob fans and other internet sleuths have been on a mission to track down a copy on DVD, or any ephemera at all that may have trickled out to the public. But even for a piece of lost media, the film has proved particularly elusive: No verifiable clips exist online, and the searchers’ only knowledge of the plot comes from a five-sentence plot synopsis describing a kid who wins a contest to spend 24 hours with his favorite cartoon poriferan. (“The lucky winner is Seth, and he is ecstatic about his day with SpongeBob. However the day becomes a rollercoaster ride as things don’t go quite the way they planned.”)

“I don’t know what it is about this movie that compels me so much,” a particularly devout ADWSS follower named Matthew Elder told me via email. “It could be that there’s no trace of it other than a few small details.” In July, Elder started a page for ADWSS on Lost Media Wiki, a Wikipedia-style website dedicated to cataloging forgotten movies, cartoons, and video games, during a bout of depression. To divert his attention from the difficult time he was having, he began gathering every minor piece of information he could find about the film, which he’d discovered and become strangely entranced by when he stumbled on an earlier mention of it on the site.

What started as a therapeutic solo endeavor eventually developed a cult following. Elder’s Lost Media Wiki entry now runs 2,300 words long and has over 800 comments, and the search has spilled over to other sites: 4chan, a popular thread on Reddit’s “Unresolved Mysteries” board, and a dedicated ADWSS web forum and IRC chat. A conspiracy theory-style ADWSS explainer has nearly 200,000 views on YouTube. Some supporters have begun acting like investigative journalists—calling, tweeting at, and visiting any person or entity they can find with even a vague connection to the movie.

They are attracted to ADWSS because of, not despite, the difficulty they’ve had finding it: On an internet that studiously preserves your inane workplace Gchats for posterity and makes century-old sound recordings available for streaming on Spotify, A Day With Spongebob Squarepants’ near-total unavailability gives it a strange and rare allure.

Even after a three months of hunting, the entirety of public knowledge about ADWSS can be summed up in about a paragraph. It was distributed not by Nickelodeon, but a small-time Atlanta company called Reagal Films, which specializes in no-budget unauthorized documentaries about celebrities and has no affiliation with the Viacom-owned network. Reagal has not responded to attempts from both the searchers and this reporter to contact it, and Inovisim Films, the production company credited on ADWSS’s cover, has no website, no contact information, and no entry in a nationwide database of registered businesses. The smiling kid in the image who appears to be “Seth,” the star of ADWSS, is actually a stock image model who happens to be the first Google Images result for “excited boy jumping.” And the generic praise that appears on the cover alongside him is attributed to film critics that don’t appear to actually exist, writing for outlets that don’t exist either.

“Fantastic, a total crowd pleaser” — Larry Fields, Tono Films

“Great film, very creative” — Tracy Levitz, Film Look Magazine

“Hilarious, fun, for everyone!” — Robert Fritz, Kids Toddler Wizard Magazine

It is probably very bad.

The ADWSS hunters know so little about their quarry that a single three-year-old tweet is considered a major piece of evidence in their search. On New Years’ Day 2012—month and a half after the film’s apparent release—a user named @TheDanielSean tweeted “Watching A Day With Spongebob SquarePants: The Movie.” His replies are filled with thirsty ADWSS fans. “Hey man we’re trying to get some information about this movie. If you can help out that would be great,” reads one. “DID YOU HAVE THE DVD?! IF SO PLEASE UPLOAD IT TO YOUTUBE!!!!!!” goes another.

Did @DanielSean get an ADWSS DVD for Christmas that year? Did he have any idea of the white whale he was witnessing? We’ll probably never know. As far as I can tell, he’s never responded to any of his pursuers, myself included.

Of course, when you’re searching for something strictly on the basis of there being so little proof of its existence, it’s only a matter of time before you run up against the uncomfortable possibility that it have never really existed at all. In August, when an anonymous 4chan user posted what he purported to be the first known ADWSS screenshot, another 4channer responded with “I really hope we’re not being rused. I have high hopes of watching some blatant shit.” It seemed legit at first: SpongeBob is ill-proportioned and creepy enough to appear legitimately bootleg, and the kid standing next to him vaguely resembles the boy on the cover. But soon, the sleuths at Lost Media Wiki revealed it as the ruse it was: the SpongeBob image had been taken from a fan-made 3D render video on YouTube, and the kid was copied and pasted in from an unrelated green screen photo. The very thing that makes you want to look for ADWSS also all but assures that it will ever be found.

The 4chan screenshot.

Since then, a number of ADWSS clips of dubious provenance have emerged on YouTube. There’s a poorly-animated video that claims to show the movie’s first scene, complete with an ADWSS-branded DVD inserted into a player at the beginning:

There’s “A Day With Spongebob Squarepants - Theme Song,” which sounds more like a forgotten Residents b-side than anything you’ve ever heard on Nickelodeon:

There’s a second supposed intro that’s even more disjointed and unsettling than the first:

And there’s a host of obvious fakes designed to lure eager fans into watching, rickroll-style:

I conducted my own brief search for the film while reporting this story. Every stone I overturned had nothing underneath save for scattered signs that the searchers themselves had already gotten there first. Reagal Films did not respond to several emails I sent to the address listed on its website, so I found the name of the agent who registered Reagal as a business in Georgia—Josh Weinstein—and set about calling every publicly listed phone number associated with that name in the state. No one knew anything about Reagal, and one woman accused me of repeatedly calling her despite her insistence that Weinstein didn’t live at her household. It was the first time I’d called. Had the ADWSS hunters reached this poor woman already?

I also contacted Jason Boritz, a filmmaker-turned-wellness-guru who directed Amy Winehouse: Fallen Star, one of the cheapo celebrity films listed on Reagal’s website. His connection to ADWSS was tenuous, but it was the only thing I had. He was hesitant to speak with me. “I’ve had a lot of strange people contact me lately,” asking about SpongeBob, he said. “I’ve had to block a lot of people on social media.” (A search of Boritz’s Twitter mentions confirms this.) He told me he knew nothing about Reagal or ADWSS and made it clear he wasn’t interested in discussing the matter further.

The searchers’ own ADWSS quest appears to have reached a minor climax when an anonymous 4chan user visited and photographed the office of Music Video Distributors, or MVD, a Pennsylvania company that lists ADWSS for sale on its website. Elder inquired to MVD’s customer service department about the incident and about Reagal Films, and received an uneasy email in response. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about another company, especially when people were taking pics of the MVD office and putting MVD’s voicemail on YouTube. getting a little weird for my tastes,” it reads in part. (The photos were posted to 4chan, which automatically deletes old threads. Just like ADWSS itself, they may be lost to time)

Elder told me he is certain that the anonymous channer forced his or her way into MVD’s office in hopes of obtaining an ADWSS DVD. That probably isn’t true, but its mere existence as a rumor speaks to the fans’ rabid desire for the movie. Clint Weiler, MVD’s publicity director, said that ADWSS searchers contacted the company several times, but denied any knowledge of a break-in. “I don’t know anything about that, honestly. No one here does,” he said when I inquired about the rumor. “I don’t know where they broke in, but it wasn’t here. Or if it was, we don’t know.”

At the end, the most important question about ADWSS remains unanswered: does it exist at all? The supposed proof offered up by Elder and others—the Amazon page, an entry on a barcode lookup site—is far from conclusive. Reagal Films, the one entity that might be able to answer, isn’t talking. And despite the ADWSS page on MVD’s website, the company never actually had it in stock. “This title was added to our distribution database but there was never any info added, and there certainly was never a copy of it. It was removed before the producer ever manufactured it,” Clint Weiler said.

Still, Elder is undeterred. “Of course I believe the movie exists. It was listed on Amazon, on the Music Video Distributors website, and on countless other websites,” he told me. “So really, there’s no doubt in my mind that the movie’s out there. Of course I’ll be the happiest person ever if I, or someone else, finds it.”

Early in the search, a 4chan user who claimed to be a former Reagal employee advised the pursuers to call off their hunt. “Why it’s so hard to find?,” he wrote. “Only a small number of copies were produced...I know you guys are committed to tracking it down, but it’s not worth it. It’s not terrible, it’s not amazing, it’s not even that much of a piece of history. I can see if I can do something, but I’m telling you guys. it ain’t worth finding.”

Maybe ADWSS isn’t worth finding, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be found. If you know where to look, email me.

Sad news: researchers have hit a dead end in the study of how kangaroo farts can unlock the solution to global warming.

Kangaroo farts, you see, produce less methane—a greenhouse gas—than other animal farts. Cow farts. Horse farts. Sheep farts. Don’t even get me started on hippo farts. Like a goddamn methane derecho.

The thinking, says this Guardian report, was that the gut microorganisms found in kangaroos could be transplanted into livestock, thereby de-methane-ing many millions and billions of animal farts per year.

Alas.

“We think that the methane is low because of the way food moves through the kangaroo stomach, and not because of a unique gut fauna,” study author Dr Adam Munn said.

The study sounds like fun: a group of red and western grey kangaroos were kept in “comfy, sealed chambers,” where they could rip ass to their hearts’ content, under the careful observation of fart scientists.

This is no laughing matter!

In the year to March 2015, agriculture accounted for 15% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agricultural sector is the nation’s dominant source for methane.

If only kangaroos could share their earth-friendly fart secrets with the livestock of Australia! The next frontier in this important research will be determining “the contribution various species make to greenhouse gas emissions” via their farts.

[The Guardian]

Image via Shutterstock

Oh good: “After a long period of quiet, the price of the virtual currency Bitcoin is surging again as signs of interest from China and Wall Street have helped kick off a new speculative frenzy.” Still don’t know who the real Satoshi Nakamoto is, though!

On Wednesday, New York Daily News reporter Shaun King was asked to appear on CNN with Don Lemon via email. He declined, rather emphatically: “I will never appear anywhere with Don for the rest of my natural life.” King then posted the email exchange on Twitter and Facebook and promptly received cease and desist notices from both platforms, along with threats to freeze his accounts. What happened?

The story begins with a Fox Lake, Illinois, police officer named Lt. Charles Gliniewicz, whose death on September 1 was initially reported as a homicide during a foot chase.

However, on Wednesday, investigators revealed that Gliniewicz had not only committed suicide but that he’d also been skimming from a local youth program that he’d reportedly been helping.

According to NBC News, Gliniewicz had embezzled at least “five figures” from the Explorers youth program over the years and enacted an orchestrated suicide plan when investors got too close to his crimes. One investigator said the late cop used the funds for “mortgage payments, travel expenses, gym memberships, adult websites and loans to associates.”

On September 1, police allege, Gliniewicz staged a crime scene and then shot himself twice.

Initially, Lake County police reported that Gliniewicz was patrolling when he saw three men (two white and one black), questioned them, and then radioed for backup. He was found dead at the scene. The police kicked off a manhunt for the supposed murder suspects; others memorialized him as a “hero” who helped kids.

Infowars, a conservative website, quickly blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for Gliniewicz’s death in a post called “Another Cop Executed in Illinois: Will it be linked to Black Lives Matter and other racist groups?” Ron Hosko, former Assistant Director of the FBI and current President of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, wrote an op-ed in USA Today echoing the same sentiment, claiming the movement “has too often drifted into the rhetoric of ignorance and hate.”

Shaun King pointed out these inconsistencies with a number of tweets on Wednesday and in a NYDN article. CNN, which initially covered the incident with Don Lemon’s usual off-color candor (“Is it going too far?” he asked BLM organizer Rashad Turner in a September 2 interview), emailed King offering him a guest spot on Lemon’s show to discuss the topic.

King declined in a spectacular way, and then posted his correspondence with a CNN booker both on Facebook and Twitter. Within hours, King says, he was told to remove the posts on both platforms or risk frozen accounts, and he obliged—but not before his accounts were locked anyway.

We’ve reached out to Twitter, Facebook, and CNN for explanations, and we’ll update when we hear back.

Contact the author at Hillary@jezebel.com.

Image via a Facebook screenshot.

If it has long been your wish to stand and marvel with your own two eyes at a brick wall coated in thousands and thousands of wads of chewed gum, do it soon—Seattle’s famous Gum Wall at Pike Place Market will be steam-blasted clean later this month.

Look at this disgusting thing.

Photo via Daniel Schwen, Wikimedia Commons

Via a Los Angeles Times report:

The brick wall, also known as the Market Theater Gum Wall, is in Post Alley under the market. As one of the most photographed sites in the market, it has been tagged 80,000 times on Instagram. The tradition began in the ‘90s when theatergoers started sticking wads of gum to the bricks while waiting in line.

Right, so, it’s gross—very gross!—but also cool, and it’s a bit of a bummer that it’ll be gone soon. The steam cleaning will begin at 8 a.m. on November 10 and is expected to take a couple days.

Happily, the wall is expected to return, just as quickly as thousands of people can cram their sticky, spit-coated chewed gum up there. This is reportedly the third time it’s been cleaned in its history, and it has always come back, in all its horrifying, disgusting glory.

[Los Angeles Times]

Images via Wikimedia Commons

A New Jersey pastor told police on Friday that three people attacked him at the New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church in Somerville, CBS New York reports. But after finding inconsistencies in his story, investigators found that he had faked his own assault.

Police found Jairon Pena on Friday with his legs tied, his hands tied loosely behind his back, and a piece of cloth stuffed in his mouth. Also, authorities said, he had a plastic bag over his head and a piece of paper taped to his torso with a misspelled Islamic phrase.

According to CBS, Pena told them that two men and a woman removed bibles from the church pews, scattering them around and making offensive remarks about his religion.

However, investigators noticed differences between what he told them and what he told police when they first arrived at the church. From NJ.com:

Upon transporting Pena to an area hospital for treatment, investigators and medical personnel observed that he didn’t have any of the visible injuries that would normally be present as a result of being assaulted and bound, authorities said.

An investigation revealed that Pena had lied to the police and that he had fabricated the entire event by staging a crime scene due to some personal events in his life, authorities said.

He was arrested and charged with third-degree false public alarm, fourth-degree false swearing, and fictitious report to law enforcement.

Photo via NJ.com/Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Former Los Angeles Times sports columnist T.J. Simers won $7.1 million in an age and disability discrimination suit against the paper, reports Law360. Simers initially asked for $12.2 million, but the jury decided to give him “$330,358 for past economic damages, $1.8 million for future economic damages, $2.5 million for past non-economic damages and $2.5 million for future non-economic damages.”

Simers, 65, was at the Los Angeles Times from 1990 to 2013, before taking a job at the Orange County Register. During the six-week trial, Simers’s lawyers argued that the Times made his job a living hell after Simers suffered a minor stroke during spring training and was diagnosed with complex migraine syndrome, according to Courthouse News Service. He says he was suddenly subject to strict scrutiny from his editors that he’d never faced before, that his column was cut back from three to two days a week, and that the paper lined up says Dylan Hernandez (the Times’s Dodgers beat writer) to take his place.

But according to the Times, they demoted Simers because of the circumstances surrounding a video of his daughter and Dwight Howard—then the Lakers center—having a free throw shooting contest, which he also wrote about for the paper. They say Simers failed to mention to his editors that he had a business relationship with the producer of the video, who was pitching a television show based on Simers’s life, and wanted to use the video to promote his sports media company. When he was threatened with demotion over the brouhaha, Simers bolted to the rival paper.

http://deadspin.com/dwight-howard-...

T.J. Simers, to put it bluntly, was a terrible columnist, embodying every cliche imaginable about the old, out of touch, cranky, hack of a print newspaper sports columnist. So what’s amazing about this story isn’t necessarily the $7.1 million verdict—though that’s crazy—but the surrounding details that came out during the trial.

The Times said that, if he had acknowledged his error, Simers would have been allowed to continue to write on his $234,000(!) salary—which he was paid, remember, to write just three columns a week—and they even offered him a one-year contract extension. They offered a quarter of a million-dollar contract extension to the hacky columnist who they had concluded violated their ethical policies by writing about a staged free throw contest used to promote his and his business associate’s fortunes!

Then, when Simers left, he somehow convinced the Orange County Register—in the middle of a poorly conceived and ultimately doomed plan to “flood the zone” and expand—to pay him $190,000. In the Year Of Our Lord 2013, there was actually a group of people that looked upon the work Simers had done for the Times and felt paying him an exorbitant salary for it was a worthwhile expenditure. When the Orange County Register began offering buyouts in 2014 (they declared bankruptcy on Sunday night), Simers took one.

The Los Angeles Times is going through troubles of its own, having fired their popular publisher and attempting to cut $10 million in expenditures, which led to buyouts that 15% of the staff raised their hand for. With their paper losing money and being strip mined of talent, Times staffers must be thrilled at having to give T.J. Simers $7.1 million.

[Law360/Courthouse News Service]

Screenshot via YouTube

E-mail: kevin.draper@deadspin.com | PGP key + fingerprint | DM: @kevinmdraper

In his new biography, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush, the former President reportedly takes a few good swipes at two of the most prominent sociopaths from the George W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld

There are at least two ways of looking at this: maybe this is a former president speaking with refreshing, mildly spicy frankness about a couple of world-historic assholes, or maybe it’s a dad working hard to insulate his son—who was the goddamn President—from responsibility for the all-time clusterfuck that is the ongoing War on Terror. Or maybe both.

At any rate, the elder Bush shared his criticisms of Cheney and Rumsfeld, according to a report from The Guardian.

On Cheney:

“I don’t know, he just became very hardline and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.”

[...]

“The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East,” Bush told Meacham in the book to be published next Tuesday.

On Rumsfeld:

“I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president,” referring to his son.

“I’ve never been that close to him anyway. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick-ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.

“Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow.”

Cheney, for his part, was unbothered by the former President’s comments, which surely represent the very-best-case-scenario for how history will remember him:

“I took it as a mark of pride,” he says. “The attack on 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor, in terms of the number of people killed, and the amount of damage done. I think a lot of people believed then, and still believe to this day that I was aggressive in defending, in carrying out what I thought were the right policies.”

People believed I was carrying out what I thought were the right policies. Uh huh.

Rumsfeld declined to comment. Destiny and Power will be released on November 10.

[The Guardian]

Photo via AP

Adacia Chambers has been formally charged with four counts of second-degree murder and 46 counts of felony assault in connection with the car crash at Oklahoma State University’s homecoming parade last month.

http://gawker.com/suspect-held-o...

Each murder count against Chambers is punishable by at least 10 years and up to life in prison, the Associated Press reports. Chambers, 25, is accused of running a red light and intentionally driving around a police barricade before crashing into spectators.

A judge has ordered a psychological evaluation for Chambers, and Payne County District Attorney Laura Thomas has formally requested a competency evaluation.

During her booking, according to a cause affidavit sign by Stillwater Police officer Kurt Merrill, Chambers said she had a history of treatment for mental health issues and felt suicidal at the time of the crash.

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

In an interview that was apparently filmed Monday with Philadelphia Fox 29’s Quincy Harris, Yusaf Mack announced, “I’m gay!” Monday was also the day that, per an initially dubious, lengthy statement (that crisis manager/hairstylist/singer Anthony Cherry eventually confirmed to me was “true”), the boxer supposedly announced he was bisexual and then he didn’t say a goddamn thing on TMZ Live. Last week, Mack said he was drugged in a porn he did for the company DawgPoundUSA. It’s been quite the two weeks for Mack. In the Fox 29 interview, he called his initial account of the shoot “all a lie.”

http://gawker.com/professional-b...

“I’m gay, I’m tired of holding it in, it is what it is, I live my life, I’m gay,” said the 35-year-old Mack who says he has known this for “about eight years.”

Mack claims he’s done only one tape (although an image of Mack and two naked men he wasn’t in the DawgPoundUSA shoot with may contradict this). Harris asked Mack to walk us through the filming and Mack said, “I went there...I just didn’t know when it was going to come out.” He also said he was surprised when people did see it: “I didn’t think nobody from Philadelphia would see it.”

As to why he filmed porn, his answer was pretty standard: “I was down and out, I asked friends, they wouldn’t help me, so I did what I had to do.”

Mack says news of the tape “hurt” him and made him suicidal. Additionally, his oldest daughter (of 10), a 23-year-old, told him to kill himself because he embarrassed the family.

Mack says he no longer wants to kill himself, though. “I’m free, I’m happy.” He’s no longer engaged to his fiance of five years. “She was good to me, I was good to her, but it was a lie,” he says.

“The truth is out, and I’m sorry,” Mack told the public. “You gon’ like me or love me regardless. I’m still me. So when you see me on the streets, I’m still Yusaf Mack.”

From the Black Youth Project’s report on Black Millennials in America: “More than half of Black youth said that either they or someone they know was harassed or experienced violence from the police, compared with a third of white youth and a quarter of Latino youth.”

A small, single-engine aircraft flying near Rockaway plunged from 1,000 feet into the ocean, and a man’s body has been recovered from the wreck, reports the New York Daily News.

Several witnesses reported seeing the plane go down just before 8 p.m. Wednesday. The New York Police Department and New York City Fire Department have been searching the waters in the hours since. The unidentified man’s body was pulled from the water around 11 p.m.

“The New York Police Department reported to the FAA that they found several aircraft parts off the shore of Breezy Point, Queens, NY tonight at approximately 8:30 pm,” the agency said in a statment. “The FAA has no reports of any missing aircraft in the area. The FAA will investigate.”

Officials are reportedly “sending someone” to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the plane’s destination, in the hopes of identifying the deceased.

The Daily News reports that the control tower at JFK had received neither a distress call nor any reports of a missing aircraft. The report indicates the plane’s tail number corresponds to a two-seat CTLS that departed from Philadelphia earlier Wednesday, and is registered to a James McGee, of Rye, New Hampshire.

[New York Daily News]

Photo via @NYPDSpecialops on Twitter

A federal grand jury indicted Sergeant Michael Walker, an Army medic, on Wednesday in the fatal stabbing last year of his wife Catherine, the Associated Press reports. Walker is accused of conspiring with his lover to murder his wife and cover it up to look like a burglary.

Michael and Catherine Walker lived in a house at Aliamanu Military Reservation near Honolulu, where Catherine was found dead by her husband last November, her throat slashed.

A few months later, in April, Aisla Jackson was arrested in Indiana on first-degree murder charges in Catherine Walker’s death.

On Wednesday, Jackson testified against Walker in order to take a plea deal, Hawaii News Now reports. According to court documents, Walker left Jackson a key to his home, which Jackson used to enter and kill his wife.

The federal indictment against Walker includes text messages and emails he sent Jackson about wanting to be free of his wife. From the AP:

“I want you so bad!!!” was one text message on Oct. 12, 2014. “If only someone was out of the way!”

In a November email, Jackson allegedly wrote about needing his permission to act: “The anticipation is exhausting. The thrill is faltering. I’m growing impatience, tired and hungry for action.”

He allegedly responded, “The sooner the better.”

Prosecutors say the two discussed carrying out the killing on Nov. 14, 2014, when Michael Walker would be at work. Around midnight, Jackson allegedly entered the home with a key left near the back door, grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed Catherine Walker multiple times in the upstairs bedroom where she slept.

Walker, a health care specialist, has reportedly been deployed once to Afghanistan, twice to Iraq, and has been assigned to Tripler Army Medical Center since 2013.

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

According to reports, cops are now investigating the wife and son of an Illinois police officer who allegedly staged his own suicide to hide the fact he’d been embezzling money from a youth program.

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

Lt. Joe Gliniewicz was found dead on Sept. 1 after telling a dispatcher he was on foot following three suspicious men near a swamp. He had been shot once in his bulletproof vest and once in his upper torso—a crime scene FBI investigators eventually came to believe he staged himself.

The discovery of his body launched a large-scale manhunt that lasted several days.

His motive, authorities say, was to cover up the fact that he’d embezzled thousands of dollars from a Police Explorers youth group. He allegedly used the money to pay for personal expenses like porn, vacations, and the mortgage on his house.

Gliniewicz may have died alone, but cops now say he certainly wasn’t acting alone. And according to reports, both his wife Melodie and his son D.J. are now reportedly under criminal investigation.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, text message transcripts provided by the police appear to implicate the pair, who are referred to only as “Individual 1” and “Individual 2.”

In one text exchange, Gliniewicz’s son said he hopes that Marrin, the village administrator gets a DUI, according to the transcript.

...

Gliniewicz also warns his son on June 25: “You are borrowing money from that ‘other’ account, when you get back you’ll have to start dumping money into that account or you will be visiting me in JAIL!!”

On April 14, around the time investigators say Gliniewicz began to stress out about the impending audit, his wife, apparently concerned about losing control of the Explorer bank account, said: “Maybe, seeing as we are on 503C [a reference to tax a designation assigned to charities] she can’t touch the money.”

In a statement issued Wednesday, the pair asked for their privacy, saying “Today has been another day of deep sorrow for the Gliniewicz Family. The family has cooperated with the Task Force’s investigation and will not comment at this time.”

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

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What’s that on your finger? Take a look again, closer.

Is your hand like this:

Or is your hand like this:

If the first option, you might be in the market for this diamond: “Blue Moon Diamond.” “Blue Moon Diamond” is one of the world’s rarest diamonds—a description not dissimilar to the description one might give of you—and it’s up for auction next week, potentially bringing in $35-55 million, according to Sotheby’s. David Bennett, worldwide chairman of Sotheby’s international jewelry division, explained something about it to Reuters:

“The market for vivid blue diamonds of this level, it’s so rare. Each stone is individual, in a sense.”

When you go out on the street, everyone will take note. It is my interpretation that this diamond is for you.

Where could you wear your new diamond?

• Gym
• Work
• Etc.

Anywhere, really.

Just think about it.

Image via AP. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

What would you say is a fair amount to pay a savvy, sophisticated hedge fund manager for taking a pile of your money and making it smaller?

Most hedge fund managers are paid both a percentage of the profits they make from investing your money, and a percentage of the total assets that they manage each year. If you are able to quickly grasp the fact that this arrangement enables hedge fund managers to get paid a lot of money each year just for having a lot of money to invest even if they lose money for their investors, then you may “have what it takes” to be a hedge fund manager, or small-time con man, depending upon the circumstances of your birth.

According to a new story in Chief Investment Officer magazine, the hedge fund industry as a whole lost about 1.6% in the year ending in September. What, do you think, would be a “fair” average compensation for these money management wizards? I would suggest that given the exorbitant amounts that hedge fund managers can make in good years, in years that hedge funds lose their investors money, a fair payment for them would be $0. (Even if this were the case I assure you we would still have thousands and thousands of people desperate to be hedge fund managers!)

In fact, though, CIO reports that “Annual compensation for managers of mid-sized portfolios—including base salary and estimated year-end bonuses—was projected to average $950,000, a decline of 8% to 11%.” To be clear, these are not the big hedge fund managers, who make much more; these are just the goons managing a few billion, essentially the struggling middle class of hedge fund workers.

A million bucks a year to lose money. From Wall Street to Main Street, everyone is struggling these days.

[Photo: Flickr]

Jennifer Lawrence, who recently vacationed with the comedian Amy Schumer, is now working on an as yet untitled film with her. Maybe you’ll see it, maybe you won’t, but consider this: There’s not really boys in it.

In an interview with People yesterday, J-Law described her character in the movie—“I’m a MESS”—and working with Amy—“We’re both very blunt.” She then responded to one last question from People, which was, Will there be any men in this movie—perhaps even men we know and love, like two guys from The Hunger Games?

Yeah—a real boner of a Q:

Asked if their will be any room for her Hunger Games costars, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth, Lawrence said, “No, no, no, no, no ...There’s not really boys in it.”

Good. All movies should be like that.

Photo via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.