Off-duty NYPD officer Michael Pena was arrested in uptown Manhattan last month after a woman said he grabbed her, flashed a gun, took her into an alley, and raped her. Police caught him red-handed, drunk, and armed. Innocence personified!

Hopeless romantic Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to release his memoir next October—and according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster, the book is tentatively titled Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story.

Prosecutors have charged two Fullerton, California police officers involved in the death of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic, homeless man who was brutally beaten during a confrontation with six Fullerton cops in early July. It sounds like they're not kidding around, either.

The only Starbucks-related complaint that just-fired barista Christopher Cristwell fails to make in his little ditty here is that the once-classy chain now attracts too many camera-hiding perverts. Oh, and that they still don't serve 25-cent hot wings, though that particular issue might just be mine.

After finding God in the Lynwood Celebrity Jail, one-time trainwreck Nicole Richie rode out her 20s having perfect babies, writing perfect books, and designing perfect fashions. Today she celebrates her 30th birthday, probably with sorbet. [Image via AP]

As part of the TSA's efforts to stop black women from always trying to board airplanes with their hairdos full of explosives and boxcutters, an agent at Atlanta's airport made Dallas-based hairstylist Isis Brantley submit to a thorough Afro search. And a free head massage! Security checkpoints are the new spas.

On the one hand, you have Fox's The X Factor, an atrocious, over-hyped reality show that seeks to lavish $5 million on a nobody's recording career, yet can't seem to properly mike its own judges. On the other, you have The Queen Extravaganza, a lesser-known talent search that will offer "shit hot vocalists and musicians" the opportunity to tour with a massive, Cirque de Soleil-esque Queen tribute show. By way of talent, X Factor has thusfar provided us with, uh, this. Extravaganza, on the other hand, has already minted one guaranteed winner, in this startlingly accurate Freddie Mercury sound-alike. His name is Marc Martel, and he's the singer for a Christian rock group from Saskatchewan called downhere. Freddie would probably have taken a perverse pleasure in that fact. [via Reddit]

Poietic Studio is a London firm that describes itself as "a multidisciplinary practice with backgrounds in interactive & spatial design, art & engineering." But after seeing this video of its new Floating Orchestra product—which lets you use your iPhone to conduct 19 levitating spheres, each its own instrument that increases in volume as it physically rises—I'm more inclined to say it's one hell of a badass invention company and just leave it at that. [via BuzzFeed]

Here's footage shot on Sept. 10 at the Greenlands Labour Club in Lancashire, England, where an enterprising promoter had the inspired idea to pit two, bloodthirsty 8-year-old boys against one another in a cage fight battle royale. You call it a brutal form of child exploitation; they see it as their only ticket out of council flats. Watch in amazement as these scrappy young chavs and/or future looters get their first taste of young blood, then proceed to gut-kick the crap out of one another until one is declared victor and the other breaks down in tears. There is no crying in Pee Wee Mixed Martial Arts Fighting, children! Well, OK. Maybe there's a little crying. [Daily Mail, BBC]

On Monday, we tried to explain why a bunch of anti-corporate hippies had set up camp (and begun eating lots of pizza) on Wall Street as part of some Anonymous-backed protest called Occupy Wall Street. Well, we weren't the only ones who were a little confused. Stephen Colbert sent a camera crew to the protest to try and make some sense of it, as you can see in this clip from tonight's Report.

David Alan Anderson is not an exemplary traveler. After the 60-year-old Salt Lake City native recently boarded a Las Vegas-bound Delta flight, he immediately started elbowing the passenger seated directly next to him in an attempt to "claim" the armrest, according to a federal complaint. That led to Anderson putting his "foot on the passenger's leg," to which the passenger responded: "Sir, you are going to have to move over."

We've been having some trouble getting psyched up for consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren's Senate run, mostly because the Senate is more or less the modern U.S equivalent of the elephant graveyard in The Lion King. But then we saw this video!

On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocked some of the recent statements about taxes uttered by out-of-touch rich men—like Bill O'Reilly and that one Republican congressman who spends $200,000 a year on food—before spoofing Sarah McLachlan's annoying late-night ASPCA ads and asking, "Will you be an angel for a helpless multi-millionaire?"

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A year after Simon Cowell abandoned ship on American Idol to produce an American version of his other popular televised singing competition, he returned to Fox tonight—and reunited with a no-doubt hysterical Paula Abdul—as The X Factor made its stateside debut.

Troy Davis, the death row inmate whose guilt in the 1989 murder of Officer Mark Allen MacPhail has been seriously called into doubt, was executed by lethal injection at 11:08 p.m. ET after the Supreme Court refused to stay his execution. With his last words, he reportedly maintained his innocence to the McPhail family.

Getting home with your big bag of Taco Bell only to find that the guy behind the counter forgot your "Border Sauce"—we've all been there, right? The thing is, most of us probably didn't go back to the Bell with a shotgun.

Speaking at a conference in South Africa, Apple board member Al Gore blabbed about "the new phones coming out next month." Now everyone's expecting two new iPhones. Apple'll probably be cool about it. It's pretty laid back about iPhone launches.

Remember that possibly-looming government shutdown we told you about? Well! Today the House "defeated a routine bill to finance the government through mid-November[.]" I might put that October trip to the Smithsonian down in my address book in pencil.

This weekend, Amazon.com was revealed to have repeatedly landed warehouse workers in the emergency room because it refused to open doors amid extreme heat. Now the online retailer is hiring medics to care for workers the next time it refuses to open warehouse doors amid extreme heat. Progress!