Even within the context of this upended-Gathering-of-the-Juggalos-outhouse of a presidential election cycle, Ted Cruz’s crescendoing spingasm on the Planned Parenthood shooting is shocking and bizarre. This really could go anywhere.

Robert Lewis Dear, the man who shot and killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado last Friday, was charged with rape over two decades ago.

“Jiminy Cricket!” began Ted Cruz, preparing to give a diatribe on his nostalgia for the easygoing availability of contraceptives at his alma mater, Princeton.

Two hippopotamuses, the BBC reports, descended from those imported into Colombia by Pablo Escobar in the 1980s, have been seen grazing in fields with cattle in the town of Puerto Triunfo, near the city of Medellin, forced there by drought.

Sheldon Silver, who has been speaker of the New York State Assembly for 20 years, was found guilty today in federal court of seven corruption charges deriving primarily from two fraud schemes that netted him nearly $4 million.

The Chicago police officer who was being held for the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was released on Monday evening, after posting the requisite 10 percent of his $1.5 million bail, or $150,000.

As you may have heard, technology is changing everything. Including, according to this New York Times story, treasure hunting! Actually, technology isn’t “changing” treasure hunting: it’s making it easier, which is catalyzing the dispute over to whom a deteriorating, treasure-laden, underwater shipwreck actually belongs.

The State Department just released a new batch of Hillary Clinton’s private emails, so you know what that means: lots of corny, goofball emails asking for articles to be printed out, plus some genuinely interesting items. Like Madame Secretary trying to do an HR favor for some friend of Sid Blumenthal.

Today, classes were cancelled and the campus closed at the University of Chicago after an online threat was made against the school’s white students. That threat, it was later revealed, was written in the comments section of the pulpy rap culture website Worldstarhiphop.com.

Earlier today, Donald Trump met with “over a hundred” black pastors in a private meeting after it came out that Trump was (falsely) framing the event as a public endorsement. Even so, Trump still sort of got the press conference he wanted—albeit with only about half a dozen pastors flanking him. And also Omarosa was there.

Kristin Cavallari’s favorite celebrity news outlet is perhaps E! News. E! does not drag her into drama and shit, like Us Weekly does, and it was E! that first broke the news that Kristin was writing a book.* Kristin has done a lot of interviews with E!, including an E! Entertainment Special about her life, which I keep forgetting to post here. (It’s 22 minutes long.)

Last week, we published emails in which Mike Allen, the chief White House correspondent of Politico, promised to provide completely positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton in exchange for a sit-down interview at a brunch hosted by the political news outlet. Allen initially claimed ignorance—“I don’t remember this e-mail”—but today, in his early-morning Playbook newsletter, he acknowledged he had sent it and regretted it:

This afternoon, prosecutors announced felony charges against the four defendants in last week’s shooting at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis. A criminal complaint for one of the alleged shooters reveals that he is exactly the pants-wetting idiot one would expect.

Marc Thiessen would like everyone in politics to please stop comparing their opponents to Nazis. Or rather, he would like everyone to stop evoking comparisons to Nazis, as the two politicians he calls out in his latest Washington Post column never actually said “Nazi” or “Hitler.” It’s not a very surprising or notable argument, really, especially from Marc Thiessen, whose continued participation in public life is dependent on enforcing a particular standard of “civility” in our political discourse.

During this election season, you will hear candidates argue about lots of things. Only two things are really important.

Though many have condemned Donald Trump for repeating his claims that “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on 9/11, and that there is old TV news footage somewhere out there to prove it, one brave, bumbling Fox & Friends host defended the “idea” of Trump’s story this morning. That man was Steve Doocy, of course.

Red-hued retail giant Target has had a tough year, but a new CEO and strong holiday shopping demand seem promising for the corporation. How do Target’s workers feel?

There are about 30,000 little people in America, according to Joanna Campbell, executive director of the largest little people organization in the country, Little People of America. Campbell estimates that the amount of little people are equally divided by sex. If there are 15,000 men with dwarfism in America, and like the general population according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, five percent of them are predominantly attracted to men, that means there are 750 gay little men in America. That’s .000233 percent of the population, or one in every 430,000 people.

As a gay little person, Joey Navedo, 30, lives one of the rarest of lives. Despite the incredibly low number of people who share his specific experience, though, he has plenty in common with the average-sized gay men he parties with frequently as a nightlife entertainer. This installment of Rare Lives features a very frank conversation about hooking up, fetishization, and the prejudice Navedo faces (and has roll off his back).

If you’ve been following the Sheldon Silver corruption case at all, you might be forgiven for assuming the jury room is some kind of court-appointed torture chamber—in the last week alone, at least two jurors have sent handwritten notes begging the judge to release them from the case.