A gun safety instructor in Ohio accidentally shot one of his students in the arm after violating the number one rule of gun safety.

Anthony Stokes, a 15-year-old boy from DeKalb County, Ga., has less than six months to live. A heart transplant would save his life. But his hospital refuses to put him on the transplant list.

Vegan activists covered the Iowa State Fair's famous butter cow with fake blood (red paint) early Sunday morning. But worry not: the butter cow, which has been a fair tradition since 1911, was quickly repaired, with more butter, and was ready for display again by Monday morning.

One week after Oprah Winfey told Entertainment Tonight about a run-in with an allegedly racist sales clerk in Zurich, the sales clerk is fighting back, calling Winfrey a "liar" with "absurd claims."

Detroit police are looking for a killer who left a woman dead and on fire in her home last weekend on the city's west side. The woman, who was dead when police found her, is the third victim to be found beaten and burned in Detroit since July 26. Authorities are now trying to figure out if they've got a serial attacker on the loose in the Motor City.

If you're arrested and issued a citation for drinking in public, the best way to get home from the police station is probably to take a cab. Or, if you're short on cash, call a friend or take the bus. What you shouldn't do, as a 33-year-old Arizona man learned this weekend, is steal an ambulance parked in front of the police station from which you were just released.

A federal judge in Georgia has just thrown out the claims of racial discrimination filed as part of a $1.2 million lawsuit against gooey butter cake Paula Deen by former employee Lisa Jackson. Good thing they nipped that one in the bud before it exploded into the sky like a magnificent fireball, melting the sugar-windows, liquifying the gumdrop roads, and incinerating the gingerbread infrastructure of Paula Deen's candy kingdom.

Police in Boise recently arrested a man accused of sexually abusing a cat on multiple occasions over the course of at least 12 months.

Inscrutable person who does things Miranda July announced earlier this summer that she was up to her old tricks, doing a thing yet again. This time the thing was a series of private emails from celebrities’ personal inboxes (grouped by theme), and what she was doing was forwarding them to anyone who wanted to read them every Monday for 20 weeks.

In a speech before the American Bar Association in San Francisco today, Attorney General Eric Holder advocated for sweeping changes in both how nonviolent drug offenders are sentenced in the United States and how we use our prisons. It only took decades and countless taxpayer dollars, but someone with some power is finally admitting that maybe we're going about the drug war all wrong.

Tired of trying to imagine what it would be like if Bonnie Tyler's classic '80s power ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart" were sung by 19 other divas, including Adele, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears, Kristin Chenoweth, and Julie Andrews?

A new study shows that raising cigarette taxes may also lead to lower alcohol consumption, because if you can't chain smoke while getting drunk, then fuck it.

"Gamification" is an increasingly popular con to trick people into doing horrible things by pretending they are fun games. From dieting apps that bestow badges on users for eating broccoli, to a "virtual incarceration system" that gives prisoners points for adhering to their house arrest, nothing is so unpleasant that bureaucrats and Silicon Valley thinktrepreneuers have been unable to gamify it. Unsurprisingly, the NSA is a big fan of gamification, expertly exploiting humanity's universal love of accumulating points and meaningless trophies in its quest to preserve the world's Facebook status updates and Google searches for future generations of spies.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire stop-and-frisk advocate who systemically faked riding the subway, plans to install a $13,300 copper bathtub in his Upper East Side townhouse. Agence France-Presse recently spoke with the coppersmith in northwest France whom Bloomberg personally commissioned to fabricate the metal vessel:

Over the last week, congregants from St. John's Cathedral in Fresno, California, have been steadily amassing around a tree outside the church that they believe is weeping the tears of God.

Law school, long a cushy institution that charged steep prices in exchange for steeper rewards, is seeing its popularity crumble along with the job prospects of law school graduates. Now, it seems, the crisis's claws are sinking into the most vulnerable victims: law school professors.

When a poem is powerful enough to get the Internet to stop and take notice, you know it must be something truly special.

With record numbers of Americans keeping dogs and cats as pets, we are plagued by many unwelcome consequences. House cats are inflicting brain damage on their human hosts with a feline disease spread through the animals' fecal matter, which people store in their homes—usually in the kitchen. When the cats are sent outdoors to defecate, they kill staggering numbers of wild birds, leaving many of our cities without any avian life beyond the feral pigeons roosting safely upon the ledges of tall buildings. Then there are the dogs, which use the entire city as one great, unflushable toilet. There are valid arguments against the existence of all dogs, but even animal lovers can agree we need to do something drastic about the "toy breeds."

After finding herself locked alone inside her local church with no one around to let her out, Sarah Greep knew there was only one higher power she could turn to for help in this time of need: Twitter.

A jury today found notorious Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger guilty of 31 of the 32 racketeering and murder charges brought against him, including money laundering and 11 killings. The jury also ruled, however, that some of the homicide allegations pinned to Bulger remain "not proven."