Anyone can express disinterest in traveling the globe and seeing the sights — but it takes some serious stoicism to express disinterest while standing in front of those sights.

As Europe's horse-meat scandal widens to include what seems like every single food product on the continent, South Africa is ready to get in on the fun too: according to an academic study, South African meat processors been mislabeling their meat projects, adding donkey, goat, and water buffalo meat to their "beef" burgers and sausages.

Another blizzard just touched down in the U.S., hitting the nation's midsection early this morning. After hurricane-force winds whipped through the Texas panhandle, the storm moved to Oklahoma and Kansas, cutting off power to thousands and closing highways. It's already claimed two lives: a 21-year-old man whose SUV hit an icy part of the road, and a bystander killed after 15 inches of snow caved in part of a roof.

Wondering how to address your correspondence to the Pope after he steps down? He'll be going by "Pope Emeritus."

Nineteen tourists are dead and two are injured following a hot air balloon explosion 1,000 feet above Luxor, Egypt. The balloon apparently collided with a high-pressure electrical cable, detonating one of its gas cylinders; as it plummeted to the ground, some passengers leaped out "from about the height of a seven-story building," a witness told the BBC. Eighteen, including tourists from the UK, China, Japan, France, Hungary, and Egypt died at the scene, their bodies strewn about the field where the balloon crashed, while the nineteenth victim died in surgery five hours later. The two survivors, the pilot and one passenger, a British tourist, may have saved their lives by jumping. A 2009 hot air balloon accident in Luxor, in which more than a dozen tourists were injured, prompted a six-month suspension of flights as safety standards were tightened and pilots were re-trained; today's accident, by all accounts the worst-ever of its kind, has prompted the city to indefinitely suspend flights. [BBC | AJE]

Like most of us, Bernard Bey knows the root of his problems: his parents. Unlike most of us, however, the 32-year-old Brooklyn resident is seeking compensation for the damage his parents caused; earlier this month, Bey filed a self-written lawsuit in a Brooklyn court, accusing his parents of physical and emotional abuse, which led to him feeling "unloved and beaten by the world."

The upcoming fourth season of Arrested Development on Netflix will likely be the series' last.

C. Everett Koop, who died today in New Hampshire, did a lot throughout the course of his 96 years, including play football at Dartmouth, help put into motion the war against second-hand smoke, and launch an ultimately failed medical website, DrKoop.com, in the primeval internet age of 1997. But Koop, who also moonlighted as a spokesperson for the Life Alert company, will perhaps be most remembered for introducing millions of Americans to—and destroying stereotypes about—AIDS, the deadly disease that started to rear its head in America the year before he took office in 1982.

The "advocacy group" One Million Moms is at it again. The group/collection of homophobic trolls, best known for protesting JCPenny not once but twice, has recently carved out a bizarre niche market for themselves by accusing popular commercials of promoting bestiality. Last year, it was Skittles; this year, it's GEICO, for the insurance company's creepy commercials in which a pig spends time with a young woman in a convertible. As ABC News describes the commercial:

Having a cancerous testicle removed is probably a stressful enough procedure; there's the actual surgery in a sensitive, important part, not to mention the life-threatening disease if the procedure fails. So odds are the 48-year-old Wiltshire man who went in for surgery last June to have a cancerous testicle removed was already worried before he awoke from surgery to discover a nightmare scenario come true: Surgeons at Salisbury District Hospital had removed the healthy testicle instead of the cancerous one. So the Wiltshire man made the appropriate decision to sue the hospital, citing concerns that the botched surgery might have ruined his ability to have children.

Seth MacFarlane did at least one thing right. Ratings for his Oscars were up 20% among viewers under 35 and 3% overall.

C. Everett Koop, the first surgeon general tasked with responding to an emerging illness called AIDS, is dead at 96.

Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man, which won Best Documentary Feature at last night's Academy Awards, is a puff piece that exists to deify its subject, Sixto Díaz Rodríguez. It is less a documentary than a montage of fawning over this American folk musician who released two albums in the early '70s, only to be ignored and then rediscovered by South Africa. We hear that he was bigger than Elvis and the Rolling Stones there, that he moved 500,000 copies of his debut Cold Fact there, that he's "like a wise man prophet" with "a genuine quality that all poets and artists have to elevate things." Someone says, "Bob Dylan was mild [compared] to this guy."

This episode of Girls is called "Video Games" but don't get too excited, geekboys, because it's actually about Jessa's relationship with her estranged father. Jessa, fetishized by most as the wisest of all the Girls, takes an impromptu road trip to Manitou to visit her father after receiving a mysterious text from him that, after Hannah's deduction, was probably a butt-text. "That's really mean," Jessa says to Hannah. They're cooped at the train station for hours, because Jessa's father is always late. Hannah has to piss, but the Manitou train station has no toilet. We also learn that Hannah has a UTI. Hannah is skittish about pissing in public but oh the burn.

A top level government official from China who missed his flight not once but twice took his frustrations out on the boarding desk — and the entire unfortunate episode was caught on CCTV cameras.

New veterans—those who left US military service recently—have higher unemployment rates than both older veterans and civilians, according to a new research paper from the Chicago Fed. Even taking into account the age and education level of new veterans, "neither demographics nor simply being a new veteran by themselves can account for the rise in relative unemployment rates for new veterans," the paper says. "Instead, our results suggest that prolonged deployments overseas account for much of the difference in unemployment rates between recent veterans and nonveterans."

Dov Hikind is the asshole New York assemblyman representing District 48, a swath of concrete in Brooklyn that includes Midwood and Borough Park, a famous Orthodox Jewish enclave in the borough's southwest quadrant. Hikind is an Orthodox Jew himself. To celebrate Purim this year, marking the deliverance of the Jewish people from extermination in ancient Persia, Hikind threw an elaborate costume party. Hikind's wife dressed as a red-faced demon and his son painted a yin-yang symbol on his face, reportedly to look like an "angel." And Hikind himself, the 62-year-old elected representative from one of the world's most diverse cities? Why, he went as a basketball player, in Afro and blackface, of course.

Tired of all the rumors that were not flying around regarding her wedding, Janet Jackson surprised the world today by announcing (apropos of nothing?) that she and obscenely wealthy Qatari businessman Wissam Al Mana have been married since last year.

Surfing porn sites at work is always tricky business, but probably never more so than when you're a university professor checking out PornHub inside a classroom on a computer that's hooked up to a working projector.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the bewildering fall of J.C. Penney, a $17-jean store named after a small denomination of legal tender that tried to rebrand itself as a fancy boutique by refusing to put items "on sale."