The Kansas mother of a 13-year-old boy says he son was suspended from school indefinitely because he refused the assistant principal's order to stop wearing a purse.

Today in Rob Ford press conferences: "I was very, very inebriated...I was extremely, extremely inebriated."

Today on Today, viewers were treated to a segment in which Matt Lauer and his cheeriest frenemy Al Roker received digital rectal prostate exams live on air. As you might expect from a television program that devoted equivalent Twitter promotion to this as it did to this week's Throwback Thursday theme ("favorite chick flicks"—tweet using the hashtag #TODAYtbt), the segment was handled with all the gravitas of a clown's funeral.

The new Pope, Francis: great guy. He loves the poor. He's cool with atheists. He's even pretty chill about gay marriage and abortions. Yesterday's photos of him embracing a severely disfigured man were genuinely touching. Still, the best thing that this nice Pope could do would be to dismantle the Catholic Church.

Boy wonder Arden Hayes last appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! back in July, when he wowed both Jimmy and America writ large with his precocious presidential knowledge.

The Toronto Sun has broken an important turn in the ongoing saga of Rob Ford, Toronto's crack-smoking mayor. A half-hour ago, the Sun posted snippets of a video of a probably drunk and/or high Ford beating his chest and ranting about stripping to his underwear and ripping someone's throat out for calling him a bird and a nerd.

The Wayne County prosecutor's office has requested further police investigation into this weekend's Renisha McBride shooting before deciding if it will file charges in the case. "We will not be able to make a charging decision until the requested work has been completed," said a press release.

Clown chanteuse Celine Dion recently appeared on the Canadian show Le Banquie (which her site describes as "a Quebec version of American game show Deal Or No Deal"), where she was treated to watching footage of herself rehearsing a song in a bathroom. And I do mean treated: In an oversized reaction, she turns hysterical while herself be her normal weird self. I want to see footage of her reacting to her reactions, and then footage of her reacting to that. I wonder how many it would take her to cease breathing from the exponential hilarity. Something tells me not very many at all.

A father's attempt to teach his son a lesson for taking his truck without permission ended in tragedy Monday after a local police officer shot the teenager dead.

On Tuesday the Commonwealth of Virginia elected Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fundraiser and failed businessman, as the state’s next governor. Due to a flood of donor money, however, you’ve probably only heard about his Republican opponent Ken Cuccinelli, whose campaign built an entire website dedicated to his support of anti-sodomy laws. This is somewhat troubling because McAuliffe is his very own kind of shitshow. Here’s what you should know.

[A Soyuz rocket and capsule carrying new crew—and the Olympic flame—to the International Space Station blasts off in Kazakhstan earlier today. Photo by Dmitry Lovetsky via AP]

If you missed last night's meteor in California, or last winter's exploding asteroid in Russia, you'll probably have another chance soon: Scientists now believe large asteroids, like the one in Russia, could strike Earth far more often than previously studies had indicated.

As Deborah Cohan entered the operating room at San Francisco's Mt. Zion Hospital to undergo a double mastectomy, she would have been fully within her rights to go ballistic and throw stuff around.

"This is my escape," pop singer Justin Bieber writes of this photo, posted to his Instagram. That monkey figure sure looks familiar! It looks just like, what's it called, centuries of racist caricatures of blacks. Good week for Justin so far.

Dick Metcalf is an editor at Guns & Ammo. In the latest issue, he made the mistake of writing a column suggesting that some common sense gun regulation might be a good thing. Now he's gone and made the gun people very, very mad.

Attorneys for a Florida college student accused of raping two women and beating a third have their work cut out for them after their client essentially confessed to the crimes in two letters of apology to his victims in which he called his actions a "mistake" and wished the women the best.

This is the anti this: Two-year-old Marshall Shaffer visited Tacoma, Washington's Point Defiance Zoo on Halloween, and got to run around with Kali the tiger cub while dressed as a tiger cub himself.

Time magazine notes on its new cover that New Jersey governor Chris Christie is fat. [Time]

As part of a voluntary contract, the CIA pays AT&T more than $10 million per year for access to the company's giant database of international phone records, which includes information on Americans, according to a report in the New York Times.

When it rains, it pours.