J. Dennis Hastert—the former House speaker who allegedly spent several million dollars paying off a male teenage victim—has reportedly agreed to a plea deal which would effectively bury the details of his alleged sexual misconduct.

How many Americans do you think were killed by police in, let’s say, 2012? You don’t know? Neither do I, and neither does anyone else—including the FBI.

Before vanishing in a puff of smoke a week ago, Republic House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy asserted that the House’s select committee on Benghazi had been very successful ... in damaging Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers. The backlash against those comments may have led to McCarthy’s abrupt withdrawal from the Speaker of the House race, but this week, one of his Republic colleagues admitted what McCarthy said was basically true.

The Intercept has obtained a new cache of top secret documents detailing how the U.S. government hunts and kills suspected terrorists from the sky. It reveals a sprawling, labyrinthine machine for remote executions—and one that leaves unintended bodies by the craters.

President Obama just announced that he’s abandoned his plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2017. At least 9,800 troops will remain in the country through next year, after which the number will, Obama claims, drop to about 5,500.

In our digital age, there are increasingly more ways for young women to become famous. Perhaps the fastest growing exposure industry is YouTube, where content creators in their early twenties cosplay “high school life” for a legion of pre-teen viewers. “I hope your message is that this is fucked up,” a mom of a 10-year-old YouTube fan told me Monday night.

Women: a liability to the smooth functioning of the patriarchal labor system? I didn’t say it—science did.

Jennifer Connell, the woman who briefly looked like a monster to the world because she sued her nephew for breaking her wrist by jumping into her arms for a hug, went on the Today show this morning to clarify that she was actually trying to recover money from an insurance company, not a small child.

A Southampton principal who put the “pal” in rap video this summer won’t be principaling much longer—she’s reportedly losing her position after appearing in a Trey Songz video.

In China, “Pepsi has confirmed it’s working with a licensing partner on a line of mobile phones.” Okay.

Brooklyn district attorney Ken Thompson announced on Wednesday the arrest of eight men and women in three states, charged in a 541-count indictment for trafficking guns bought in Atlanta, Georgia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to be sold in Brooklyn.

A Missouri man whose garbage fire got a little out of control decided the right way to put it out would be to drive over it again and again in a van full of live ammunition. Bitchin’!

In June, three Cairo-based street artists were approached by a production company to make the set of a refugee camp on hit Showtime series Homeland feel more authentic. Instead of putting up some pro-President Bashar al-Assad nonsense, though, they filled the walls with puns and clever transliterations.

Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post reported this morning on the results of a search for media reports of instances of toddlers shooting people, and the numbers aren’t good. According to his findings, American toddlers average roughly one shooting per week in 2015.

TMZ reports that, according to people at the brothel where he was found unconscious, Lamar Odom took 10 Reload pills over the course of three days. The FDA sent a warning about Reload in 2013: “Consumers should stop using this product immediately and throw it away.”

In a message addressed to the UC-Berkeley campus community, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and Provost Claude Steele announced that Professor of Astronomy Geoff Marcy resigned from the UC Berkeley faculty on Wednesday morning: “Professor Marcy’s conduct, as determined by the investigation, was contemptible and inexcusable.”

Star is a duck. There’s no avoiding this reality—even booze can only take you so far. This is a hard lesson, but Star has learned it, courtesy of Maggie, who is a dog. A dog who reaffirmed what I am all too happy to describe as the “pecking order” in this story about a duck.

Northern Arizona University police have filed a formal complaint against 18-year-old freshman Steven Jones, charging him with second-degree murder in the campus shooting that left one dead and three injured last week.

Here comes a crazy-ass paragraph, via the Guardian. Strap in!

Hey, look—it’s our old friend, What You Do In The Privacy Of Your Home Is None Of My Business, But. It’s been a while!