Thirteen-year-old Carter Pope woke up in his home near San Antonio, Texas last Sunday to the sight of a hairless, grey creature moving slowly across his backyard. "That's a chupacabra," thought Carter before grabbing a rifle and firing three deadly shots at the animal. So did Carter really kill a chupacabra, the elusive beast of lore, or was it simply a really ugly bear/coyote/raccoon? Watch this video and decide for yourself. [WOAI]

A string of strangely motivated assaults in McDonald's restaurants continues to grip the nation. Yesterday, we brought you the story of a woman who launched a half-melted ice cream cake at an employee and then struck her in the face. Today brings the story of a McDonald's in Cobb County, Georgia, where the manager was charged with having punched a woman, seemingly for having entered the premises with a service dog used to help her care for her autistic twin sons.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have responded to Larry Summers, the former Harvard president who earlier this week said of his first encounter with the litigious dyad (famously dramatized in The Social Network), "One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case."

The few who had seen the failed pilot for NBC's Wonder Woman — a proposed series about the DC Comics superheroine from Ally McBeal-creator David E. Kelley — said the network had laid a pterodactyl-sized egg. Campily, laughably terrible. Which didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. All five networks had already passed once on the script, after all, and it took a regime change at NBC to finally get someone to crunch the numbers (numbers = breasts) and greenlight the thing. But then, all kinds of magic can come with casting, with direction, with post-production wizardry. "You never really know until it's off the page and on the screen!" - Some wise Hollywood person.

We've always wondered what would happen if a cybercrime dragnet collided with artsy Brooklynites. Earlier this week, denizens of one Williamsburg loft complex found out as the feds raided their weed-laced bohemian paradise.

Today we heard the obvious fact that Americans be drinkin'. Oh how we be drinkin'. But are we all binge drinkers? That definition seems a little stringent, says one commenter.

A Finnish economist took one of those ridiculous worldwide penis studies that are always circulating and charted it against GDPs, to study that critical ratio between penis size and wealth. It's the classic golddigger's dilemma—are any of the rich ones worth fucking?—but on a global scale!

San Francisco supervisors voted 10-1 to require mobile phone dealers to warn customers about radiation from wireless handsets. Can't wait to see where they put that sign in the Apple store.

One of television's most likable workhorses may still be in this race. Also today: a long lost Joss Whedon movie sees the light of day, the VMA nominations then cast all that light away, but then Annette Bening brings it all back.

So this guy proposed to his girlfriend while giving a Power Point presentation in the conference room at Deutsch, the advertising agency where they both work. She said yes. This true story is also a Rorschach test. [Ad Age]

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library released 500,000 documents today, and among them is an operatically abject and desperate letter of apology from a then-25-year-old young press aide named Diane Sawyer.

The city of Los Angeles' "Summer Lights" program, which keeps public parks lit up at night in order to discourage gang violence, is having... mixed results. "A 15-year-old girl was shot in the back and a 19-year-old man was shot in the hand [in an apparent gang shooting] as they were leaving a Summer Night Lights event" this morning. Oh. God. It's just too much. It's like some horrible, horrible movie. "A man was shot in the face near a South Los Angeles park after the lights were turned out last week. It provided all-too-real drama for actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena, who were on scene at the time while on a police ride-along to prepare for an upcoming movie."

Whenever the thermometer creeps north of 90 degrees in NYC, you can be sure an intrepid wire photographer is going to head out and start snapping pictures of kids playing in fountains and people lounging in their underwear on park benches. Since it's so damn hot, here are some of the best "damn, it's hot" photos we could find.

Did you know beer wasn't officially classified as alcoholic in Russia until yesterday? The country's president, Dmitry Medvedev, just signed a bill to make it so. Apparently, until now, any beverage with less than 10% alcohol was considered a "foodstuff."

While America struggles to get out of its current economic shit-pit, its desperate citizens are resorting to interesting methods of relieving their financial stress. Namely they're buying lots of sex toys and getting off like crazy.

Word has been trickling in from a variety of sources all day about the basic outline of a deficit-reduction deal that President Obama and Speaker John Boehner are nearing. While both sides are denying it in their preferred arenas — the White House through its spokesperson at a press conference, John Boehner with a telephone call to Rush Limbaugh — it still seems like we've got our hands on the latest trial balloon! Summary: It sucks for Democrats.

Wendi Deng deserves credit for containing husband Rupert Murdoch's worst impulses. Not only did her fearsome bodyguarding distract the world from hubby's hacking scandal, it's now clear that she preserved a friendship with Google that Murdoch tried to explode.

Fish lead! Sperm coats! Bald hair! Tall cancer! Dissolving tobacco! Tortoise leg! Calorie counts! Lung damage! And the fatalistic approach to our own mortality! It's your Thursday Health Watch, where we watch your heath—soberly!

Former News of the World editor Colin Myler and former News International legal manager Tom Crone have issued a terse joint statement saying James Murdoch was "mistaken" when he told a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday that he didn't know about an email that directly implicated News of the World reporter Neville Thurlbeck in phone hacking. It's likely he will be called back to clarify the issue.

As you know, Google is the world's most frugal company. So they must have really thought the founders of the now-flailing iPhone app Color were on to something when they offered to buy the company for $200 million earlier this year.