The man who set himself on fire on the National Mall yesterday died in a Washington-area hospital last night, according to the AP. The unidentified man's burns were so intense that police will have to use dental records and DNA to figure out his identity.

The Swiss really know how to kick us when we're down — while our congress is busy shutting itself down because it's run by soulless opportunists, the Swiss people have gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on whether they should guarantee $2800 in monthly income for all adults.

After 42 years in solitary confinement for a crime he was found guilty of based on "sparse evidence," Herman Wallace died a free man yesterday, just three days after he was released from prison. He had lived most of his life in a room the size of a parking space. He was 71.

Three Pennsylvania prison guards were suspended this week for allegedly arranging for inmates to fight each other and get hazed in exchange for snacks.

A crazy snowstorm dropped more than three feet of snow across Wyoming and South Dakota yesterday, stranding motorists and forcing more than 380 miles of Interstate 90 to close.

The Government Shutdown — which has left children with cancer in the lurch, food benefits cut off, and members of congress still handsomely paid, along with a myriad of other bad stuff — has barreled into its fifth day, with still no substantive progress on a deal that would restore the Federal government.

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before: Morrissey is publishing an autobiography. After reportedly having his book deal fall apart last month, Morrissey and Penguin Classics have announced that Moz' book will be published on October 17, according to the Guardian. The original draft was reportedly 660 pages.

Someone at the National Weather Service's Anchorage, Alaska, outpost had an acrostic for the federal government hidden in one of its updates today: "Please pay us."

It's a dark time on the Dark Net. This Tuesday the FBI shuttered Silk Road, a drug market that operated for more than two years with impunity. The Silk Road helped popularize the Dark Net as the Mall of Anarcho-Capitalism, where illegal drugs, stolen credit cards, child porn and weapons are traded openly. But a series of high-profile busts has seriously undermined the premise of the Dark Net.

What more appropriate use for crowdfunding than for a bunch of terrified techies living in Oakland to hire their own private police force?

The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers, a “PostPartisan” columnist, has been thinking lately: What if the recent closing of a WWII memorial in Washington, D.C., prompted by the federal shutdown, were somehow connected to those baseless allegations that the Obama administration sicced IRS agents on its political opponents?

What Fox News was thinking by allowing a National Taco Day segment on this morning's Fox & Friends other than "let's see how long it takes the hosts to say something incredibly racist to their one Hispanic coworker," I'll never know.

According to a report in the New York Post, one of the motorcyclists involved in last weekend’s violent road rage incident was an off-duty, undercover NYPD officer. Concerned about blowing his cover, the undercover officer reportedly stood by as Alexian Lien was dragged from his Range Rover and attacked.

Washington, D.C., police rushed to the National Mall this afternoon when a man doused himself in an accelerant and lit himself on fire, according to reports.

In a feat of either unbending loyalty or quiet ratfucking, today's New York Post allowed doomed Republican mayoral nominee Joe Lhota to comment on the recent acts of lurid violence on the West Side:

In a ruling that is likely to inflame the age-old debate rather than soothe it, one judge has declared that men are unequivocally better drivers than women.

If the word "Zen" leaves you feeling lost and confused, try this: stop. That's right: stop. Look around. What are you stopping? Exactly. Or is it stopping you? Do you see now? You shouldn't—this was all in your mind. Think about it—but with what?

Thanks to this unbelievably asinine government shutdown, thousands and thousands of furloughed employees are getting royally screwed. But a gentle reminder that even excepted employees have been shafted too, employees like the corrections officers who're tasked with the Very Important Patriotic Work of guarding marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

It has been a busy week for the Machine-Human Alliance. Sorry! The Human-Machine Alliance. Humans will always take precedence. First there was the deployment of South Korea's autonomous jellyfish-killing aquatic robot swarm. Now, in a completely unrelated development, the engineers at Boston Dynamics—working on behalf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—have released video of the WildCat, an untethered version of their quadrupedal Cheetah robot, capable of standing and running freely under its own power.

Twitter, the microblogging service, announced its intent to sell stock yesterday. Unfortunately, it's never made a profit. Fortunately, the banker in charge doesn't care—he's got a decade-long history of backing bad businesses.