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Ray Tensing, the University of Cincinnati police officer who killed Sam DuBose during a routine traffic stop on July 19, pleaded not guilty to murder this morning. His bond was set at $1 million.
http://gawker.com/video-of-sam-d...

Tensing was indicted and arrested yesterday for fatally shooting DuBose in the head after pulling the 43-year-old over for an allegedly missing license plate. Video from Tensing’s body camera captured the horrific shooting and directly contradicted the police report on DuBose’s death.

JUST IN: Officer Ray #Tensing led into court to face charges of murder & manslaughter for killing #SamDuBose. pic.twitter.com/pUu8MKaaTy

July 30, 2015

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

AirBnB’s new advertising slogan is “Is Mankind?” Dumb as hell. Give me a break. There are many better slogans courtesy of the Gawker.com staff.

Slogans by Dayna Evans

“Is Beetlejuice? Watch out”

“Art No one? Yeah Me Too
Surfboards For Sale
these are all good”

“Rent a House for Sex”

“People Are Inherently Evil”

“Our Logo is A Paperclip Vagina”

“can you make sure to put mine in there
Airbnb: It’s Not Your House”

Slogans by Kelly Conaboy

“airbnb: Maybe there will be a minifridge with water bottles that you don’t have to pay for unlike in a hotel where you have to pay for them”

“airbnb: I stayed in an airbnb and there was a hammock and a hot tub”

“airbnb: they will give you a hard time if you don’t already have an airbnb rating, but how are you supposed to get an airbnb rating if no one will loan you their apartment”

Slogans by Jordan Sargent

“Airbnb: There’s probably still cum everywhere, just fyi”

Slogans by Hamilton Nolan

“airbnb: Stay in someone’s apartment instead of a hotel room, it could save you money. Check it out and see if it does.”

“airbnb: Adding to the existing stock of lodging in areas popular with travelers.

“airbnb: Ever wondered what other people’s apartments look like on the inside? Now you can find out, by renting them online.”

Slogans by Sam Biddle

“lol
I stayed in an airbnb in austin and it was a fucking dump, smelled bad and it was dusty, so I ate the girls’ frozen pizzas
and left a BAD REVIEW”

Slogans by Taylor Berman

“I love airbnb”

[Now all the comments will just be your own ideas for slogans, because you don’t even care about us—only about yourself. A sad way to live. Photo via.]

Movie villain James Woods filed a $10 million defamation suit Wednesday against a Twitter user who called him “a cocaine addict,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. The probably-pseudonymous Twitter user, “Abe List,” made the crack July 15 in response to an asinine Woods tweet that called Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce” and hyped up the bogus Planned Parenthood “baby parts” scandal in one foul breath.

USATODAY app features Bruce Jenner's latest dress selection, but makes zero mention of Planned Parenthood baby parts market.

July 15, 2015

To which Abe List retorted: “cocaine addict James Woods still sniffing and spouting.”

Not much is known about the Twitter troll, but the Hollywood Reporter made some guesses based on his(?) now-deleted account: “The defendant’s social media profile suggests that he or she is based in Los Angeles, a partner in private equity, possibly Harvard educated and luckily, married to an attorney.”

Abe List had previously called Woods a prick, a ridiculous scum clown-boy, and a joke, all of which are (delightful) opinions, and thus not anything on which to hang a defamation case. The “cocaine addict” crack (sorry) looks more like a statement of fact, one that Woods denies in his suit.

As THR points out, the burden of proof is on Woods to prove the statement was made maliciously. And, of course, he’ll have to identify “Abe Listed” first, probably by subpoenaing Twitter.

The defendant could attempt to vindicate himself by offering evidence that James Woods does cocaine, but basing a case on Woods’ cartoon alter-ego in Family Guy (who shares a dealer with Kate Moss) is probably not a winning strategy.

Better might be to argue that trolling tweets are a dime a dozen and a reasonable person wouldn’t treat them as true, and that Woods was better off reporting the tweet, blocking the troll (who only had 2,300 followers), and moving on with his life instead of filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

At least that way, he wouldn’t have entered the words “cocaine addict James Woods” into the public record and hundreds of Google results.

[Photo: AP Images]

During Donald Trump’s 1992 divorce proceedings, his wife provided a deposition that detailed an upsetting, ugly sexual assault. The episode was recounted in Lost Tycoon, a gossipy biography that’s now out of print—but you can read it right here.http://gawker.com/donald-trump-s...

After over two decades, Hurt’s book was back in the news after a Daily Beast reporter questioned Trump’s chief counsel Michael Cohen about the deposition (Cohen demurred, countering that one cannot rape one’s own spouse). But most of the voting public probably still isn’t familiar with this moment in Trump’s personal history, so we’re reproducing it below.

To set the scene, Trump at this time had just undergone a painful cosmetic surgical procedure to reduce the size of a bald spot, performed by a doctor recommended by his wife at the time, Ivana.

The “statement of Ivana Trump,” provided by the lawyers of Donald Trump and appended as a footnote, appears to claim that when Ivana used the term “rape,” she was referring not to the criminal act of rape, but something else that, even in 2015, remains pretty unclear.

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

Have you ever wondered how Kristin Cavallari, who announced her debut book roughly 500 days before its scheduled publication date, “does it all”? Beauty blog Byrdie.com conspires to exclusively answer this question in a new interview with Kristin. It’s titled:

Exclusive: How Kristin Cavallari Does It All (and Still Looks Amazing)

Damn.

DAMN.

The first sentence of “Exclusive: How Kristin Cavallari Does It All (and Still Looks Amazing)” is: “To say Kristin Cavallari has been busy would be an understatement.”

I’m going to lie down and read the rest later.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

New York City, a crowded land sorely in need of housing, is in the midst of its “biggest building boom in a generation,” issuing new residential building permits at a pace not seen for more than 50 years. Soon there could be tens of thousands of new apartments that you can’t afford.
http://gawker.com/manhattan-full...

Brazil, which I’m sure is a perfectly lovely country, has an overload of naturally occurring resource. That resource, unfortunately, isn’t diamonds or oil—it’s human excrement, which Olympic athletes will have to swim through if they want to win a medal next summer.

The country’s inability to keep its own feces out of its beautiful waterways isn’t exactly a new issue, but authorities claimed they were working on it. To that end, Rio mayor Eduardo Paes promised the beaches would be clean in time for the Olympics. That was a false promise.http://gawker.com/brazil-cant-cl...

A really false promise. This week the AP threw on some rubber gloves and actually tested for viruses, only to discover the shit has really hit the water.

Brazilian officials have assured that the water will be safe for the Olympic athletes and the medical director of the International Olympic Committee said all was on track for providing safe competing venues. But neither the government nor the IOC tests for viruses, relying on bacteria testing only.

Extreme water pollution is common in Brazil, where the majority of sewage is not treated. Raw waste runs through open-air ditches to streams and rivers that feed the Olympic water sites.

As a result, Olympic athletes are almost certain to come into contact with disease-causing viruses that in some tests measured up to 1.7 million times the level of what would be considered hazardous on a Southern California beach.

Despite decades of official pledges to clean up the mess, the stench of raw sewage still greets travelers touching down at Rio’s international airport. Prime beaches are deserted because the surf is thick with putrid sludge, and periodic die-offs leave the Olympic lake, Rodrigo de Freitas, littered with rotting fish.

Just to emphasize: there is so much shit in the water that it literally starts to smell like shit before you even get off the plane. And Olympians don’t even have to wait until 2016; they’re getting sick just training in Rio for the games.

It’s turning into a vicious shit cycle, according to the AP—some athletes have “already fallen ill with fevers, vomiting and diarrhea,” meaning they’re adding even more shit to the shit pile we once called the Atlantic Ocean.

Happy games :)

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Former Star Trek star William Shatner has made a slew of Trek documentaries in recent years, so when I saw he had a new one about the first few years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I wasn’t sure if it was worth watching. But it totally was.

Shatner’s new film, Chaos on the Bridge, is a retelling of the origins and shaky early years of TNG. And that’s a topic that’s been covered a lot before, in books as well as copious DVD/Blu-ray featurettes. But Shatner has managed to get access to a ton of executives who were involved in the shaky early years of the Trek relaunch, including people like Jeffrey Katzenberg, and then-Paramount Network Television president John Pike. And they’ve been surprisingly candid with Captain Kirk.

Basically, the main arc of Chaos on the Bridge is all about Gene Roddenberry’s involvement with TNG, and how Roddenberry’s input was mostly a net negative for the show. Roddenberry, of course, died in 1991 and isn’t here to defend himself—but pretty much everybody involved with creating TNG seems to agree that there were certain problems with Roddenberry, which nearly killed the whole thing on a few occasions.

The picture that emerges is of a man who was angry and bitter after years in the wilderness following the cancellation of the original Star Trek in 1969. Roddenberry, according to all Shatner’s sources, had also developed a huge ego after years of going to conventions and college campuses and speaking to huge, adoring throngs—and the “Great Bird of the Galaxy” had started to believe his own hype regarding his status as a great visionary who pointed the way toward a utopian future for the human race.

Meanwhile, Roddenberry was increasingly dependent on his attorney, Leonard Maizlish, who alienated both the studio execs and the creative people on the show. Maizlish was known for being an abrasive, difficult person, but also for attempting to control the creative direction of the show—writers would get scripts back with feedback that was ostensibly from Roddenberry, but was actually in Maizlish’s handwriting. Even after the writers lodged a complaint and got Maizlish banned from the Paramount lot, he still sneaked back in and tried to look through their computers when they were at lunch.

In one memorable bit of the documentary, Pike tells Shatner that during negotiations with Paramount, Maizlish started “almost clutching his chest,” and Pike yelled, “I hope you die!” In another bit, writer David Gerrold recalls fantasizing about pushing Maizlish out the window.

One of the surprising things in Chaos on the Bridge is the extent to which you find out that Roddenberry really didn’t even want to do a new Star Trek show. He’d resisted the idea for years, following the shelving of his Phase Two project in the 1970s. And it was only after Paramount started making serious plans to make a new Trek show without Roddenberry’s involvement that he freaked out and demanded to be involved. Roddenberry went into a meeting, and seemed startled afterwards to discover that he was actually signed up to produce a new Star Trek. At that point, in 1986, he’d been planning to retire officially in a couple of months.

But Roddenberry immediately started to spar with the execs about the future of Trek. The execs wanted the captain of the new Enterprise to be a Captain Kirk clone (but Roddenberry himself absolutely did not want Patrick Stewart, either. Interestingly, Pike pushed for Yaphet Kotto to be the captain.) And Pike recounts a meeting where he insisted that TNG needed to have a two-hour pilot, but Roddenberry was adamant the pilot should be only one hour—leading to a confrontation where the show was nearly canceled before it started.

And once Roddenberry was running Star Trek, he had firm ideas about how everything should run—and a lot of them were dictated by his new belief in his own status as a humanist visionary who saw the future of the human race as a kind of secular “heaven” where nobody ever had any conflict or disagreements of any kind. In one telling bit, Rick Berman (an exec who later became the show’s producer) says Roddenberry used to talk about being friends with L. Ron Hubbard—and Roddenberry would boast that he, too, could have started a religion if he’d wanted.

(And in one hilarious bit, writer Ira Steven Behr recounts telling Roddenberry about his plans for the pleasure planet Risa, which led to Roddenberry saying it should be full of women making out and fondling each other.)

To make matters worse, Maizlish and the showrunner that Maizlish hand-picked, Maurice Hurley, both pushed Roddenberry’s utopian vision further than even Roddenberry had wanted. Hurley recounts that by the middle of the second season, Hurley was fighting Roddenberry because Hurley had gone further with the “no conflict, everything is perfect” ethos than even Roddenberry felt comfortable with.

At the same time, it’s clear that Roddenberry had some of the best ideas for the new show, including introducing Q, and having an older, more mature captain.

Here are some clips from the documentary:

The combination of Roddenberry’s universally-loathed attorney and Roddenberry’s own insistence that the future had to be perfect (which others then pushed even further) led to a show that, as various writers point out, was largely driven by plots and “aliens of the week.”

Hurley tried to put a stop to “Conspiracy,” the story at the end of season one that showed the Federation had been infiltrated by alien parasites, on the grounds that it was too dark—but was overruled by the studio. Meanwhile, Hurley himself introduced the Borg, as part of a planned season two arc in which the Federation is forced to gather allies to defeat these new adversaries—and season two would have ended with the Borg defeated, once and for all. (But the writers’ strike happened.)

A lot of the details about why the first two seasons of TNG were so horribly uneven will be familiar to anyone who’s watched the Blu-ray extras. But Shatner, who worked with Roddenberry for years, is pretty merciless in dissecting his former boss’ flaws. Shatner pulls together a portrait of a man who was losing his hold on the thing he had created—and whose utopian ideals had gotten too unwieldy to allow for good storytelling.

All screencaps via TrekCore.com

Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka of Recode are reporting that Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal plans to invest $250 million in BuzzFeed. According to the Swisher and Kafka, the deal “will value the booming digital publisher at around $1.5 billion.”

NBCUniversal is also reportedly planning to invest in Vox Media—home of The Verge, SBNation, Polygon, the eponymous Vox.com, and Recode itself. Per Kafka and Swisher, both investments are intended to shore up NBCUniversal’s reach among Millennials:

People familiar with the proposed deals say they’re part of a new effort from NBCU CEO Steve Burke to bet on digital outlets he thinks can tap into millennial audiences, who are tuning out of NBCU’s TV networks and most others. The idea is that NBCU can get a crash course on digital content and distribution from its new investments — and that those companies may want to distribute some of NBCU’s content as well.

If you know any more details about BuzzFeed’s (or Vox’s!) financials, do get in touch.

Photo credit: Getty

The death of Cecil the Lion, slain by some bumpkin dentist whose life appears to now be hell, very quickly reached the point of hypothetical comparison, and today we keep moving down the line: eating chicken is “morally worse” than killing Cecil the Lion, says Vox’s Dylan Matthews. Now we must talk about why this is stupid.http://gawker.com/famous-lion-wa...

Matthews’ argument is essentially: the way chicken is produced for mass consumption in America is profoundly inhumane, and by purchasing and eating chicken you are playing a role in a process that kills more animals in worse ways than the way in which one bald man killed one lion named Cecil.

As far as his assessment of chicken production, Matthews is right. The mass churning of chickens in this country is repulsive and unbecoming of a society that thinks of itself as the crown jewel of civilization. Matthews’ article on Vox dot com sufficiently explainers many of the very bad things we do to chickens, and this New Yorker story from earlier in the year goes into detail about the horrifying illnesses you can contract from eating the meat.

Matthews is arguing that the method in which we kill a chicken—by raising it in obscenely cramped quarters where it stews in its own shit, at which point we inject it with chemicals so that it doesn’t fall ill before the slaughter—is worse than the method in which Walter Palmer murdered Cecil the Lion, which was by shooting him first with an arrow and then, 40 hours later, with a gun.

Matthews’ calculation is fairly simple. Maybe you think he is right about which method of murder is worse, or maybe you think he’s wrong. I think it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that there is a utility to the mass murder of chickens, which is that people have food to eat. It’s true that we don’t have to eat chicken, but humans must eat protein, and chicken is a protein that is readily available, relatively cheap and, if you don’t contract salmonella, more or less healthy. There are plenty of good reasons to not eat chicken, but there are also plenty of good reasons to eat chicken, too.

As an individual, you can step out of the chicken production cycle pretty simply by making a choice to not eat chicken. But if you want to eat chicken, there’s really not much you can do about the way in which chickens make it to your grocery store. It helps if you can find and/or afford organic chicken, but if you can’t then you’re a slave to a system that is controlled by people with far more power than you. Those people—the people who kill and sell chickens, with the help of politicians and bureaucrats who work tirelessly to protect them—have an ugly and repugnant goal: to make as much money as humanly possible. You, meanwhile, have a far more humble, and noble, goal: to not be hungry.

In the case of Walter Palmer, there is no utility to killing a lion. A dentist from Minnesota travelled to Zimbabwe to stalk and shoot a lion because he wanted to? Because he could? Because it made his dick throb? Because he could put its head in his home and measure himself as a man?

Consuming chicken is necessary, even if narrowly so. Killing a lion for fun is in no possible way necessary. If you make a choice to eat a chicken breast, you are lazy, maybe, or unimaginative, or merely just a pawn in a shitty world that values capital above all. If you make a choice to travel halfway across the world to shoot a lion, you are a villain, and you relish it.

[image via AP]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing has been indicted for murder in the shooting of Samuel Dubose, an unarmed black man. According to prosecutor Joseph Deters, video captured by Tensing’s body camera was the critical piece of evidence in the decision to pursue charges. Does this mean that cameras work?

Tensing shot Dubose during a traffic stop on July 19th, and later maintained that he had no choice but to shoot Dubose. Body camera footage told an entirely different story: An innocent man gets shot in the head when the conversation gets heated.

Deters was unequivocal in his language at the press conference announcing the charges. “It was a senseless, asinine shooting,” he said according to the New York Times. We never would have known for sure how senseless the murder was if not for body cameras, and the case has reignited the movement that started last year to strap cameras to all officers.

After condemning Tensing, prosecutor Deters served up a detail that tells us more about how cop cams figure into the future of policing. “This office has probably reviewed 100 police shootings, and this is the first time we’ve thought, ‘This is without question a murder,’” he said according to the Times.

In other words, it’s smarter to see this case as the exception. This only the second time body camera footage has led to charges against an officer in the United States. Back in January, two Albuquerque police officers were indicted in the killing of a homeless, mentally ill man.

More than 3,000 police agencies in the United States have adopted cameras, according to Taser, the company that makes them. Back in March, the company told me it had sold more than 25,000 cameras in the United States. That number is bigger now, since body cameras have been flying off the shelves.

Body cameras are overwhelmingly used to maintain the innocence of officers in cases of citizen complaints. There’s a strong bias towards not indicting officers for murder generally, and as I reported back in March, there’s very little evidence to suggest that cameras will be commonly used as a means for holding individual officers accountable for crimes against innocent civilians. The best we can hope for is that the cameras will be used in training and for meta-level corrections in police behavior.

More cameras are coming, thanks to loads of federal funding and widespread public support. Even surveillance-sensitive organizations like the ACLU back the technology. It may prove a useful tool in some capacities, but let’s not imagine that body cams have the power to solve the many problems with violent and racist police officers in America. These are problems that technology cannot fix.

Image: Sam Dubose moments before he is killed

The only thing crazier than paying $32 (plus water and shoes) to ride an exercise bike in the dark is the way SoulCycle is describing itself to potential investors, now that it’s going public. The word “SOULccolade” makes an appearance.http://gawker.com/5978735/we-cam...

It’s probably not even fair to describe SoulCycle as a cult, because membership in most cults is enjoyable, but in true cultish fashion, the boutique spinning outfit’s founders are cashing in on their following. But how do you get bankers and brokers to invest in a business that’s predicated on vigorously peddling? You write this—see how far you can get:

We Aspire to Inspire. Our mission is to bring Soul to the people. SoulCycle instructors guide riders through an inspirational, meditative fitness experience designed to benefit the body, mind and soul. Set in a dark, candlelit room to high-energy music, our riders move in unison as a pack to the beat, and follow the cues and choreography of the instructor. The experience is tribal. It is primal. And it is fun.

[...]

Your Soul Matters. We are a “culture of yes.” Our core values are service and hospitality. We believe every ride matters; every rider matters. All of our employees complete initial, as well as ongoing, hospitality training at our “Soul University” to ensure exceptional service across the organization. We empower our managers to treat their studio as their own business and believe this helps foster the entrepreneurial culture upon which we were founded. We care, we work hard and we work together as a team. We encourage our teams to ride as much as they can, as we believe that motivated, engaged and well-trained employees are the key to cultivating our rider communities. We invest considerably in celebrating our teams through programs (such as weekly “SOULccolade”) that reward hard work, creativity, resourcefulness and actions that embody the culture and spirit of our brand.

Pack. Tribe. Community. At SoulCycle, our riders feed off the group’s shared energy and motivation to push themselves to their greatest potential. In becoming part of our community, our riders are instilled with greater awareness of not only their bodies but also their emotions. We believe this awareness leads to healthier decisions, relationships and lives. We are not a business that values only transactions, rather we create a community that cultivates and sustains relationships. Our immersive culture of inspiration and empowerment contributes to the engaged and connected rider base in each of our studios.

What Sets SoulCycle Apart

We believe the following strengths define our lifestyle brand positioning and are key drivers of our success:

Our SOUL: An aspirational lifestyle brand. Great brands often begin with an authentic and powerful origin story, and at SoulCycle, we created a radically innovative business that has resonated with consumers and the press since day one. We believe SoulCycle ignited the boutique fitness category and remains the industry’s defining brand.

[...]

Our riders arrive early and stay after class to socialize with their fellow riders, the studio teams and instructors. Riders voraciously consume, comment on and share content from our blog and social media channels. SoulCycle apparel has become the uniform of choice both inside and outside the studios. Our silver retail bags can be seen in airports, on street corners and in households across the country. We do not have a target demographic because at SoulCycle, ANYONE can be an Athlete, a Legend, a Warrior, a Renegade or a Rockstar. It is the place people come, regardless of their age, athletic ability, size, shape, profession or personality, to connect with their best selves.

[...]

What we provide: A one-of-a-kind fitness experience that inspires and delights. Our focus is to change people’s relationship with exercise by creating a workout that doesn’t feel like WORK. We have accomplished this by consistently delivering an elevated fitness experience that is physically efficient and challenging, spiritually uplifting and above all else, FUN, paired with our focus on offering welcoming and personal service at every touchpoint.

Someone spent so much time writing all of those words about riding a stationary bike.

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

Morrissey, famous dirge singer and old-timey English racist, claims a TSA agent inappropriately fondled his junk as he was passing through San Francisco International Airport en route back to London Monday afternoon.

“I was approached by an ‘airport security officer’ who stopped me, crouched before me and groped my penis and testicles,” Morrissey wrote on the online Morrissey zine True to You. “He quickly moved away as an older ‘airport security officer’ approached.”

He writes that when he tried to confront the officer—who turned out to be the manager on duty—he was given the classic “that’s just, like, your opinion, man” runaround.

The conversation went thus:

You have just sexually groped this man.

Officer: That’s just your opinion.

What you have done is illegal.

Officer: That’s just your opinion.

You have no right to do what you have just done.

Officer: That’s just your opinion.

According to Morrissey, he didn’t trigger the scanner and nothing about his luggage was unusual—the pat-down was a groping, a sexual attack. He added that the British Airways employees accompanying him encouraged him to lodge a complaint, but he didn’t expect it to go anywhere, even though there was CCTV footage of the incident.

“Do people have minds?” he muses philosophically, in closing. That’s deep, Morrissey. Very deep.

The TSA responded Thursday, issuing a statement to Rolling Stone:

“TSA takes all allegations of misconduct seriously and strives to treat every passenger with dignity and respect. Upon review of closed circuit TV footage, TSA determined that the supervised officer followed standard operating procedures in the screening of this individual.”

Were Morrissey’s nuts not groped, or was he just dismayed—as he should be—to find that casual nut-groping has become part of American airport procedure? Without the video, it’s just a case of Morrissey-said, an-oppressive-and-wasteful-government-agency-said.

[h/t EW, Photo of the area in question via Getty Images]

io9 10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them) | Jezebel Why Do Popular, Attractive, and Talented People Commit Suicide? | Jalopnik How Did This Airstrike Hit Six Areas Of A Single ISIS Compound At Once? | Lifehacker Install a Whole-House Fan as a Cheaper Alternative to Air Conditioning | Kinja Popular Posts

Just in time for the beginning of August, the jet stream is undergoing a readjustment that will bring a noticeable change in the weather over the United States for the next couple of weeks. The shift should bring cooler weather to much of the eastern U.S., while the West Coast stays as hot and dry as ever.

An unusually strong low pressure system that formed on the U.S./Canadian border earlier this week—the one that brought snow to the Rockies and extremely strong winds to much of the Upper Plains—marked the beginning of the realignment. That low, which we’ll call the “Montana low,” is currently over Hudson Bay (pictured above) and dragging with it a cold front that stretches all the way down to the southeast states. This cold front is responsible for the lines of showers and thunderstorms affecting the East Coast this afternoon, including the storm that prompted the flash flood warning in New York City.

Elsewhere, we’re in that stretch of the summer where there’s a deep ridge of high pressure over the south-central part of the country. This ridge, which is responsible for the brutally hot weather seen in the Plains during the summer, is usually located over Texas, leaving the jet stream (and everything else) to go around the edge of the high.

The above animation (be warned: the gif is 7.02 MB) shows the progression of winds at the jet stream level over the next ten days as predicted by the GFS model. If you watch the animation all the way through, you can see the influence of the Montana low sticking around all the way through to the middle of the month, forcing a steady trough to develop in and around the Great Lakes and Northeast. This feature will help nudge the ridge that’s over the southern United States, forcing it to move out of Texas and into the southwest for a couple of days.

Confidence in model forecasts goes down with time, but since last week they’ve consistently shown this pattern taking place during the first two weeks of the month.

What does it mean for you?

Normalish Temperatures in the East

When the jet stream shifts next week, it will allow cooler air to filter down from Canada and start to pour over the northern states. Temperatures will dip to or slightly below average for much of the country east of the Plains and north of the 37th parallel. “Average” doesn’t sound too cool to most of us right now, but upper 70s in August is pretty nice even in areas where that kind of weather is normal for this time of the year.

Temperatures will likely tick back up a little bit for the second week of August, but it shouldn’t be anything unbearable.

Hot and Dry in the West

Parts of Oregon and Washington are experiencing the hottest weather they’ve felt so far this year, with high temperatures in much of western Oregon exceeding 100°F this afternoon. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is about to record the most 90°F days they’ve ever seen in one year, blowing past the record of 9 set back in 1958. Temperature records at SeaTac go back to 1945.

After a brief reprieve from the heat late next week, temperatures should steadily climb back up into “ick” territory and stay there for a while. Warm temperatures are bad enough—especially where people don’t have adequate access to cooling—but where there’s heat, there’s usually not any rainfall. Add to that the fact that the Pacific Northwest usually sees a drier- and warmer-than-normal winter during an El Niño year, and things look like they’re probably going to get worse over the coming months. There’s always hope, though.

[Images: NOAA, WeatherBELL]

You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

Police say six people were injured, one of them critically, when an ultra-Orthodox assailant began stabbing attendees of Jerusalem’s annual Gay Pride Parade on Thursday, Haaretz reports.

Authorities identified the attacker as Yishai Schlissel, who was released from prison this month after serving 10 years for stabbing three people at the parade in 2005. From NBC News:

About 5,000 people celebrating the event were marching along an avenue when a man jumped into the crowd, apparently from a supermarket, and plunged a knife into some of the participants, witnesses said.

“We heard people screaming, everyone ran for cover, and there were bloodied people on the ground,” Shai Aviyor, a witness interviewed on Israel’s Channel 2, said.

Left, right, secular and religious leaders in Israel immediately condemned the attack, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “a despicable hate crime.”

“We will mete out justice to those responsible for the act,” said Netanyahu in a statement. “In the state of Israel freedom of choice of the individual is one of the basic values.”

Police were able to subdue and arrest the suspect shortly after the attack began, but authorities are already facing criticism for failing to monitor Schlissel. From The Times of Israel:

Jerusalem Police chief Chico Edry said the police had “no advance information” on plans to attack the march. As Edry was speaking to reporters, a protester broke into a TV broadcast to denounce him for failing to prevent the attack. “Shame on the police,” the protester said.

“The writing was on the wall,” Channel 2’s reporter Moshe Nussbaum said. “Everybody knew, except the police… about Shissel’s intentions.”

[Image via AP Images]

Ray Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati Police Officer charged with murdering Samuel DuBose, was released from jail Thursday night after posting 10 percent of a $1 million bond, WXIX reports. His next court date is scheduled for August 19.http://gawker.com/u-of-cincinnat...

Three New Jersey teenagers were detained for several hours this weekend after they mistakenly knocked on the door of a state trooper who then shot at them as they drove away, the NY Daily News reports.

According to state prosecutors, the teens mistook the home of Trooper Kissinger Barreau for that of their friend who lived next door, knocking on the house’s front and back doors early Sunday morning. Believing them to be burglars, authorities say Barreau then chased the fleeing teens and shot at their car. From NJ.com:

The teens began to walk back down the driveway, and then ran to their car when the door opened, [18-year-old Jesse] Barkhorn said. As they maneuvered around two cars on the cul-de-sac, they saw a laser [gunsight], he said.

“We realize it’s a gun and we panic. I’m like ‘dude, dude, dude, accelerate,’” Barkhorn said.

The trooper fired three shots, one of which hit a front tire, Barkhorn said. About 1½; miles away, on Butternut Way, the car came to a stop

The teens say they then called police to report the shooting and were arrested for suspected attempted burglary. Nine hours later, they were released without charges.

CBS New York reports that no criminal charges have been filed against the trooper, who remains on active duty while the shooting is being investigated.

“This officer should have controlled himself,” former Union County Prosecutor Ted Romankow told NJ.com on Thursday. “To start waving a gun and shooting, I think is beyond the pale.”

[Image via CBS New York]

“Earlier this year, ‘Trump for President, LLC’ trademarked ‘Trumpocrat’ and ‘Trumpublican.’ The possible uses included ‘salt and pepper shakers; posters; shirts; ties; cufflinks; colognes; chocolate; nameplates; key rings; eye wear; playing cards; surfboards; editions of automobiles’ and more.”