Dale Irby, a gym teacher in Texas, retired earlier this year after 40 years on the job. And 40 years of taking his yearbook picture in the same disco-era outfit.

The Statue of Liberty has reopened to the public for the first time since Superstorm Sandy. It had only been open for a few days last October after a year of renovations when Liberty Island was pummeled by the storm, leading to another shutdown of the statue.

The chief justice of Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court was sworn in as president today, after four days of protest led to a military coup against the democratically-elected Mohamed Morsi.

A Texas man has now been arrested and jailed two separate times for having sex with the same horse. Hidalgo County sheriff's deputies arrested Cirilo Castillo earlier this week after they allegedly caught him – on video, no less — having sex with the horse, named Nadia, in her corral.

California lawmakers today approved a bill that would allow transgender public school students to choose which restrooms they use and which sports teams they join based on their gender identity rather than their chromosomal gender. The bill is now headed to Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.

Late Wednesday, rescue workers found the body of Randy Udall, Senator Mark Udall's brother, in a remote area in the Rocky Mountains. Udall went missing over a week ago after embarking on a multi-day solo hike in Wyoming.

An Oklahoma man who caught a burglar breaking into his home wasn't content to simply scare the criminal away; instead, the man bum-rushed the burglar, pinned him to the ground, hogtied him, and left him in the front yard for police to find because the homeowner was late for work.

As nations continue arguing over who might take in American fugitive Edward Snowden, the Ecuadorian embassy in London claims it discovered a bug hidden in ambassador Ana Alban's office.

There are a few kinds of ethically depraved humans that the animal-rights activists behind the Vegan Sellout List will not tolerate. One type is the "paleo-terrorist," those bloody-fingered 21st-century neanderthals who gorge on innocent murder victims, quite literally, for breakfast. Another strain is the "haughty, nose-turning carnist," those sniveling foie-gras elitists who dismiss veganism as a trendy affect of socio-economic privilege.

A Wells Fargo branch in Montebello, California did its part to make one cancer patient’s life a smidge more hellish last Friday, when tellers mistook mild-mannered lymphoma patient Joe Jaramillo for a serial robber nicknamed “the Surgical Mask Bandit," and attempted to have him arrested.

Perhaps you are under the impression that if you do not use email or the telephone, both of which we now know subject you to government surveillance, you can fly under the spies' radar. Perhaps you think a postcard sent to your sick grandmother in Ohio is free from bureaucratic scrutiny. You are wrong.

Americans are currently drowning in student debt. Debates over this issue tend to descend into arguments over whether college is "worth it." Meanwhile, debt-hobbled graduates scrounge unsuccessfully for living-wage jobs. Oregon has a better idea.

Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail is not so much an album as a co-branded multimedia content delivery platform, Presented By Samsung™ Galaxy™. He announced it, after all, during an epic commercial for the phone, and Samsung is giving away a million copies to people who download a special app by July 4th. But now another, more unsettling use for the new album has become clear: It's a massive data-mining operation. Fans used to obsess over album liner notes; now they freak out about terms-of-service.

ExaroNews a British investigative web site, has just published the full transcript of a secretly recorded meeting between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the staff of The Sun, a U.K. tabloid owned by News Corp., in which Murdoch admitted that he was aware for decades that journalists from his newspapers had been bribing both police and public officials.

Researchers have found that merely by manipulating whether or not a newborn common lizard gets fed right away, they can change the entire trajectory of the lizard's subsequent life and behavior. Obviously this also applies to human children, which means that by the time you start sending them to test prep for preschool admissions, you've already missed your chance. Better give them away and start over.

The fourth and fifth moons of Pluto have officially been named Kerberos and Styx, respectively. The Earth's moon is still named fucking "Aiden."

Lord knows everyone's had some troublesome times in their lives. Maybe you didn't even realize you were pregnant until cramps started up again, the hollow, throbbing ache that left you so doubled over it was all you could do to crawl on your hands and knees to the cool tiles of the bathroom floor and rest your forehead against the porcelain lip of the tub, and that's when you noticed your thighs were wet. Maybe you wandered much further from the campsite than you intended, searching for a better vantage point to watch that thunderstorm roll across the basin, and as soon as you saw the meticulously tended fire and the horrible hunk of charred meat in it, the half-full water bottle you'd just passed made sense and you realized the coppery smell carried on the wind wasn't "ozone" but blood. One time Jennifer Aniston ate a Big Mac.

Independence Day is the worst of America's joyless national celebrations, the day when everyone will predictably act like a buffoon and nobody has the decency to Opt Out. From Park Slope to Silver Lake, from Phoenix to Saint Paul, the whole nation of grudge-laden bores will wrap themselves in the old Red, White and Blue in another futile attempt to out-patriot their enemies.

Here in America, the land of They Hate Our Freedoms, we don't tolerate racism or discrimination of any sort, as long as you don't look too many pages back in the history book. But you know who's really racist? People of every other race but mine.

Alec Baldwin is cranky. Alec Baldwin doesn't know "what the young people listen to," and Alec Baldwin definitely doesn't want his unborn child's future best friend Susie to recognize him on the tellyvision. So Alec Baldwin is quitting Twitter and (threatening) to quit acting forever.