Back before Russell Brand was the Nazi-joke-telling, MSNBC-destroying Messiah we all know and tolerate, he was an up-and-coming heroin addict trying to make it in show business by giving handjobs to random guys in Soho bar bathrooms.

China is afflicted with slowing economic growth, widespread poverty, and toxic air. And high prices at Starbucks. The Chinese government is definitely ready to address at least one of these issues.

If you've ever felt like you wanted to live in a land occupied and governed by the same people who brought you Facebook's privacy policies—you now have a movement to get behind.

There's a lot of phony ghost videos out there, but this footage from multiple security cameras is perhaps the most shockingly real ghost ever seen. While the entity is clearly visible moving through the aisles and examining the alcoholic beverages offered by the store, the ghost did not actually take any liquor, because ghosts cannot really carry things.

Neighborhood gal Robyn Rihanna Fenty, who has so often in recent memory violated the sanctity of our strip clubs, penguin exhibits, water-damaged basement sex dungeons, and oranges, was asked to leave the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi over the weekend for violating its sanctity with a grown and sexy tasteful upside down fashion shoot.

A full-on Internet manhunt is currently underway for a young man who callously assaulted a street performer in broad daylight, and then uploaded footage of the attack to his Facebook page.

Halloween is a special time when drunken adults dressed as horrifying clowns start crashing their cars and freaking people out down at the McDonald's. Over the next 10 days, hundreds of scary clowns will be arrested nationwide for all kinds of terrible behavior. When a person decides to be an evil clown for Halloween, they are basically planning on being arrested.

While some dads are dealing with their unruly children by lip-synching to their temper tantrums, other dads are throwing freakouts of their own in response to their offspring being unexpectedly good.

Kimberly Walker loved SpongeBob SquarePants.

Less than a month after George Washington University began construction of an enormous $130 million “Super Dorm,” the D.C. university admitted today that its admissions office had deliberately lied for several years about whether the school considered applicants’ financial need when assessing their fitness for admission.

After weeks of problems preventing Americans from being able to buy health insurance via the Affordable Care Act website, President Obama gave a speech at the White House today and acknowledged that his landmark healthcare legislation's tech issues are unacceptable. But he made sure to stress two things: 1. that the healthcare to be purchased through the A.C.A. is still a strong product, and 2. that the buggy system is a temporary setback. The question now is how much longer people's patience will last.

A Brooklyn man was arrested and detained for 24 hours by NYPD officers after they allegedly mistook the Jolly Rancher candies in his pocket for rocks of methamphetamine.

Peaches will be joining us in the comments to answer your questions. Ask away.

New York policy expert Michael Wolff believes you can take the subway "from Red Hook to Wall Street." (Also: the Guardian believes "sleaze balls" should be two words.)

Fox News, like its president Roger Ailes, is sensitive about its reputation. So sensitive, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, that in the late aughts, as part of a new, more muscular PR strategy, the channel instructed its staff to write thousands of pro-Fox comments on websites large and small, wherever anything slightly anti-Fox bubbled up. In his new book Murdoch’s World, about the Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch, Folkenflik reports:

The newest Banksy NYC piece is on 153rd St. in the South Bronx, and already getting tagged up, naturally.

On last night's episode of Watch What Happens Live, actress Jennifer Tilly repeatedly propositioned Andy Cohen, imitated her one-time co-star Gina Gershon's turn in House of Versace, showed off her poker face (it involves non-quivering bosoms), and said everything in her squeaky Godzilla voice, with which she seems to consume all of the oxygen in the room in one gulp and burp it out simultaneously. In other words, Jennifer Tilly was Jennifer Tilly.

Monday morning, a student at a Nevada middle school fatally shot one of his teachers and wounded two other students before killing himself, according to police.

Last week, 20 year-old New School student Rachael Sacks wrote a brash Thought Catalog essay that showed her to be a pompous rich girl full of self-regard. She quickly became the subject of a global media firestorm. In the end, Rachael Sacks may turn out to be more mature than we thought.

Police in Virginia arrested a teenager earlier this month after he allegedly hit his mother over the head with a frying pan for denying him the use of her Kindle.