Well, this is starting to get a bit weird. For the second time in the span of a month, a man in New York City has been killed after being pushed in front of a subway train. The image above is the now infamous front-page of the New York Post from Dec. 4, when a freelance photographer working for the paper caught the imminent death of a man named Ki Suk Han. Tonight an unidentified man in Queens was pushed in front of the train by an also unidentified woman. Here is more or less what we know right now, courtesy of the New York Times' Ravi Somaiya.

Here's a general idea of how many weapons are just floating around this country right now. The LAPD held a gun buyback in Los Angeles on Wednesday (the image above is from a buyback in Bridgeport, Conn. last week) and they received the following: 901 handguns, 698 rifles and 363 shotguns. Oh, they also were handed two rocket launchers. No big deal. And these were just the people willing to turn over their guns in exchange for $100 gift cards (for handguns and long guns) or $200 gift cards (for rifles). In one city. Here's a photo of one of the rocket launchers:

Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, pictured above with George H.W. Bush, died on Thursday in Tampa, according to the AP. Schwarzkopf is one of the major American military figures of the 20th century, having led the U.S. in Desert Storm after widely being recognized as a heroic figure during the war in Vietnam. This passage, summarized from his biography on Wikipedia, describes an incredibly harrowing experience that earned him a Silver Star.

In mid-November in India, an unnamed 17-year-old girl was gang-raped in the Patiala region in the Punjab. She had reportedly spent much of December begging and badgering the police to take the case seriously and investigate and eventually arrest her attackers. Sadly, those things never happened — or they were happening very, very slowly as the police worked to convince her to give up. Well, on Wednesday night she did. She swallowed poison, committing suicide.

It's strange that in a year when the two biggest pop music stories dealt with the renaissances that R&B and dance music are undergoing, we lost icons from those respective genres: Whitney Houston and Donna Summer. Long gone is the time when what those divas brought to their respective genres was fresh and, for that matter, commercially relevant—but the passing of the baton, the out with the old and in with the new, rarely feels so pronounced and tangible.

Confronted about his life-size statue of President Obama eating a watermelon, Danny Hafley of Kentucky denied any racial motivation.

After a year in storage, Portland resident Julie Keith unpacked a box of Halloween decorations she bought at Kmart only to find what she claims is an authentic letter penned by a Chinese labor camp prisoner.

What happens behind the scenes at Gawker? We know you ask yourselves this question every single hour of every single day, and we don't blame you. We are fascinating. Sometimes we order sandwiches for lunch, and sometimes we order burritos. Sometimes we listen to music while we blog, and sometimes we do not. Sometimes Max Read picks his nose, but not always. With all this in mind, we're sharing with you our official "behind the blog post" backstories for all of the posts you clicked the shit out of this year. Next up: the day Reddit blacklisted Gawker for exposing Violentacrez, the site's biggest troll.

Boy oh boy, what a crummy year, huh? A quick glance at the Wikipedia rundown of all the biggest news events of the year confirms that absolutely nothing good came of 2012.

When there's nothing else to feel proud of, at least you can tell yourself, "Hey, I am an above-average American book reader, god damn it." Are you? Here are the latest stats, from the Pew Research Center:

Beware some SPOILERS in this piece.

George H.W. Bush is in intensive care at a Houston hospital thanks to a lingering fever relating to bronchitis. He's been there since before Christmas, and the fever has gotten worse, but he's "alert and talking to medical staff" and his doctors are "cautiously optimistic" — an aide tells CBS that the former president "would ask me to tell you to please put the harps back in the closet." And, luckily, Christmas wasn't ruined — he's been visited by his sons Neil, Jeb and George, whom you may have heard of. [WSJ]

A person claiming to be the sister of slain Sandy Hook shooting victim Rachel D'Avino posted a photo to Reddit this morning of what she said was "[Rachel's] seat at the table for Christmas dinner."

What happens behind the scenes at Gawker? We know you ask yourselves this question every single hour of every single day, and we don't blame you. We are fascinating. Sometimes we order sandwiches for lunch, and sometimes we order burritos. Sometimes we listen to music while we blog, and sometimes we do not. Sometimes Max Read picks his nose, but not always. With all this in mind, we're sharing with you our official "behind the blog post" backstories for all of the posts you clicked the shit out of this year. Next up: Rev. Phil Snider's surprising speech.

A 21-year-old college student has convinced a Cincinnati court to grant her a stalking order against her parents whom she claims have been following her around and monitoring her every move since she left home.

In August, a finback whale that curled up to die on a shore in the Hamptons was buried in the sand; in 1964, a whale found in the Hudson, off of 79th street, was towed out to sea and detonated with 500 pounds of explosives. For the last 24 hours, a 60-foot finback whale has lain mute and emaciated on the shore outside the burned husk of Breezy Point, Queens, slowly suffocating under the weight of its own, no-longer-buoyant body. This morning, it stopped breathing, and biologists from the National Marine Fisheries Service declared it dead.

This is the first installment of New Year's Absolutions, an exercise in unburdening guilt before 2013.

All of us have had moments in our lives that we wish we could do over, incidents from our past that gnaw at us in spite of our best attempts at repressing them - or sometimes, erasing them altogether - from our memories. When we say something hurtful we can't take back, or engage in behavior we know is wrong, even if it's a forgivable, human mistake. Some of our writers have volunteered to share their private shame. Please forgive them, and use the comments in this space to share your own absolutions.

Ever since the New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 amid the horse poop and scurvy of lower Manhattan, Ye Olde Stocke Prognosticationists have stood ready to predict how stocks would to in each upcoming year, in order to make YOU wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. And now, 220 years later, it is still not any more possible to predict the future of the stock market than it was then.

In response to the controversy surrounding the interactive map of local gun permit holders published by a Lower Hudson Valley newspaper, one blogger decided to punish the paper's staff members by invoking a well-established principle of biblical law: A dox for a dox.