If your reaction to the Ted trailer wasn't instant arousal, there's a good chance you're not a plushie. But if you are, in fact, a stuffed animal fetishist, Seth MacFarlane's first full-length live-action feature is kind of the holy grail. This is a mainstream film with a talking, highly sexualized teddy bear.

Several states are reporting deaths, power outages, and record-breaking temperatures as summer storms ravage the Mid-Atlantic area of the country.

This week, News Corp announced that it would spin off its publishing division, thereby sequestering the moldy old newspapers and other not-so-good-but-romantic businesses in their own little quarantine area, while the moneymaking TV and entertainment properties shed the dead weight and continued to print money. It's a common-sense move that News Corp executives not named "Rupert Murdoch" have been advocating for for years. But with all due respect to the mean old man, he's organizing this thing all wrong.

A tipster tells us (and Twitter confirms) that Bloomberg's website has been blocked in China thanks to their publication this morning of this lengthy investigative story detailing the wealth of various relatives of Xi Jinping (pictured, with Hank Paulson), the man likely to be China's next president.

Fourteen elderly women between the ages of 74 to 97 were picked from a pool of 300 registrants to walk the red carpet at an unusual event that took place yesterday at a reception hall in the Israeli city of Haifa: The first (and last) Miss Holocaust Survivor beauty pageant.

Congratulations 2012 MFA graduates. Kim Kardashian's little sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner (aged 16 & 14 respectively) announced via E! News Thursday they are writing a book for young adults, to be released next summer.

Everyone in California has lost their damn minds in advance of the state's foie gras ban that goes into effect this Sunday, July 1st.

If you read "the business section" or invest in a "portfolio" or are a member of or have ever gotten into an argument with a member of "the Republican Party," you're probably familiar with the argument that corporations have a moral and legal duty to act solely to grow their value for their own shareholders. If you are not a corporation's shareholder, in other words, it has no duty to do shit for you. Now, this idea is being challenged. BUT: should it be?

John Roberts, former character actor as "the dad who wears khaki shorts and stands with his hands on his hips a lot," joined the liberal wing of the Supreme Court in upholding the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare." In doing so, he gave a lot of people who don't pay attention reason to celebrate him on Twitter. They're idiots.

Ink may run in Rupert Murdoch's icy veins, but he's dumping his first love—newspapers—for the bitch-whore of film. News Corp. announced today that all of its newspapers and publishing assets (the dying, scandal-ridden ones) will be spun off into a new stand-alone company called Papers'n'Shit, leaving its film and television assets to make fistfuls of money unmolested by dinosaur media.

The ongoing slumification of America's suburbs is a slow motion train wreck that it is preferable to observe far away from the slumburbs themselves. Good, because people are moving back to cities now. Goodbye, The Age of Suburbs! And good riddance.

The regional court in the western German city of Cologne ruled yesterday that male circumcision performed for religious reasons could cause permanent and irreparable "bodily harm" to the child and should be banned.

The state of Texas is, as one would expect of Satan's favored playground, hot. Texas is also "tough on crime," meaning it enjoys locking people in jails but cares little what happens to them afterwards. So while Americans love air conditioning for themselves, Texans don't see the point of giving it to prisoners. What next—water?

Colorado is fully on fire. A number of devastating blazes are currently raging across the state in various stages of non-containment. Governor John Hickenlooper is already calling this "the worst fire season in the history of Colorado."

Police arrested a Massachusetts man for allegedly assaulting his stepdaughter with a dangerous weapon. His weapon of choice? A batch of McDonald's French fries.

The whole "big idea" behind having a system of public schools to educate our nation's children is that the public schools are free to attend. We pay taxes, and those taxes pay for schools. The schools are open to all the kids, for free. If you're paying money in order to attend a school, that's called a private school. New system: all schools are private!

The jury at the trial of Jerry Sandusky had already gone into deliberations when Sandusky's son Matt made allegations of sexual abuse against his father. The now-grown man, whom Sandusky and his wife Dottie adopted when he was a teenager, had previously denied any wrongdoing by his father.

In a much anticipated ruling, the Supreme Court struck down major parts of Arizona's immigration law, allowing the federal government and not the state to set immigration policy. The controversial "show me your papers" clause, however, was left in.

Hundreds of passengers had to be rescreened and at least eight flights were delayed after a TSA agent at New York's JFK airport accidentally let people pass through an unplugged metal detector.

Ed Shadid, the cousin of dead New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, caused a stir over the weekend when he claimed in a speech that Anthony pre-emptively blamed the Times for his death in Syria, telling his wife: "If anything happens to me, I want the world to know that the New York Times killed me." In an interview with Gawker, the surviving Shadid confirms the account and says the Times knew a trip to Syria was too dangerous, but sent him anyway.