Country singer Mindy McCready committed suicide Sunday afternoon, according to a report from NBC's Andrea Canning. McCready's life and career has been in steady decline since her debut 1996 album, Ten Thousand Angels, which sold over 2 million copies. Since then, she's battled with substance and mental health issues, including several overdoses and arrests. Her 2013 had been especially turbulent; in early Feburary, she entered a rehab program, just three weeks after David Wilson, McCready's boyfriend and the father of her nine-month-old son, reportedly killed himself.

Hours after her sister sat behind President Obama during his speech in Chicago on Friday, 18-year-old Janay McFarlane was killed by a gunshot wound to the head. If this sounds familiar, it's because it is; not three weeks ago, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was killed by stray gunfire in Chicago, just days after performing at Obama's second inauguration. MacFarlane's 14-year old sister Destiny is a student at Hyde Park Career Academy, the school Obama visited on Friday to speak about Chicago's gun violence.

While clubbing in London last night, Rihanna was injured when a man "enraged" by her reunion with King Scumbag Chris Brown threw a bottle of Lucozade (think British Gatorade) at her. She fell to the ground and cut her leg, but was otherwise unhurt.

Over 35,000 people marched in Washington today in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.

Iceland could (but probably won't) become the first Western democracy to censor Internet porn. Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country's anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:

When the banks got bailed out, people were reasonably upset — why should huge corporate banks be given public money to recover from the disaster of their own greed and incompetence? Others argued that letting those banks fail would send the economy into a further tailspin. Either way, it happened, and that was that. The banks weren't going to get even more public money, right? Not exactly.

Turns out "gun raffle" isn't just a folksy term for Russian roulette. The New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police will give away a gun a day in May, with the proceeds from ticket sales to defray the cost of police cadet training. In North Dakota, a youth hockey league will raffle off 200 guns as a fundraiser next month.

"Local Voice" Kathleen O'Brien Wilhelm, writing in the Avon Lake, Ohio Patch, thinks it's just downright wasteful to put up "Deer Crossing" signs. Why? Because they can't read, silly!

Last week, Maker's Mark faced a public backlash after announcing they would lower the alcohol content of their whiskey to meet increased demand with a limited supply (read: they think you can't handle your liquor and it's starting to get really embarrassing for all of us). They changed their minds in a Facebook post this afternoon:

Despite this winter actually acting wintry and cold, NYC homeless shelters have been turning away homeless families on freezing nights if they cannot prove they have nowhere else to go, the Daily News is reporting. Turning homeless individuals and families away has long been a practice of New York City's Department of Homeless Services, which relentlessly insists that you must stay with a relative or at some prior living arrangement if it is still available to you, leaving many homeless no choice but to sleep on the street rather than return to a bad living situation.

Early Saturday morning, a trio of thieves made off with $2 million in jewelry from a Jacob & Co. case in the lobby of Manhattan's Four Seasons Hotel. Although the New York Post insists on identifying the robbers as "slick," this wasn't exactly Ocean's Three.

Tuition-free arts school Cooper Union, whose new academic building peeks out of Cooper Square like a beautiful, serene spaceship, will most likely start charging students tuition to make up for a shortfall of about $12 million each year. The school began charging tuition for graduate students last year, a decision that was met with student protests, including a group of students who barricaded themselves inside of the iconic original Cooper Union building.

Last night, two space aliens sat down on a couch and drooled at each other in a pantomime of human interaction on Oprah's Next Chapter. For an unilluminating hour Oprah Winfrey surrendered her usual alpha role probably because that was part of Beyoncé's intergalactic rider. With the big, timely but ultimately fluffy interviews, Oprah tends to endlessly ass kiss, but this was over the top even for her. She referred to Beyoncé as the "preeminent mistress of the universe"" praised Bey's small number of cell phones and unleashed a string of adjectives to praise Beyoncé's anti-exposé of an HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream, which ran immediately after. In Oprah's estimation, the film is "familiar, unfamiliar, exciting, exhilarating, riveting and personal and intimate and empowering."

Oscar winner Forest Whitaker was wrongly accused of shoplifting and subjected to a humiliating pat down at a Morningside Heights deli on Friday morning.

The average price of a gallon of gas has risen to $3.67 across the U.S. Maybe cars can run on printer ink instead?

During the year it went public, Facebook made $1.1 billion in profits. But thanks to some nifty accounting, the company won't be paying any federal or state taxes on it — instead, it will actually be receiving a federal tax refund of about $429 million.

A study published yesterday in The New Zealand Medical Journal suggests that you—yes, you—should fart on airplanes. Congratulations.

New York City's month-long school bus strike has finally ended. Expect fewer hop-ons during your morning commute.

Writing in the winter issue of Emory Magazine, President James Wagner rhapsodizes about the need for compromise in a politically turbulent society. He points out that the constitution was in itself a compromise. Another example he cites, is the Three-Fifths Compromise, which legally represented slaves as less than a person. He writes:

Just when you thought the Boy Scouts of America had a monopoly on organizational misbehavior, CBS Los Angeles discovered a video showing more than 13,000 boxes of unsold, unexpired Girl Scout cookies knowingly trashed last May. How many innocent Thin Mints have to die to satisfy your corporate greed?