Pirates versus America in a cutthroat battle for survival! Hero Captain America's escape attempt! A pirate flotilla races to reach its desperate pirate brethren! Killer Navy SEALs lock and load! Joe Biden!

The Somali Pirate Crisis is the story of our generation! Virtually every major paper has big stories on the new American sailor heroes battling the buccaneers. Only the most interesting parts, below:

"Banks That Spent the Most on TV Ads Performed the Best." Crisis: Solved.

We are closely following the breaking news at the student-occupied NYU food court, where protesters are fighting for Palestinian solidarity. The most important issues so far: vegan lunches and cigarette breaks. Things are getting tense!

You only get one chance at a 30th anniversary — much to the dismay of Dallas fans who last weekend paid as much as $1,000 to be essentially shut out of their favorite nighttime soap opera's cast reunion. Reports today cite a surge of gatecrashers at the show's famous Southfork Ranch last Saturday, when a barbecue and meet-and-greet with Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, Linda Gray and others deteriorated into a near-riot of confused, angry ticketholders and sobbing protests that Falcon Crest would never do its fans like this.The anguish persists into this week, with many attendees outraged at promoters who failed to honor their tiered ducats — $100 for the basic, "Corn on the Cob with Charlene Tilton" package, we hear, all the way up to the $1,000, "Who Shot J.R.?" VIP access featuring all-you-can-eat burgers and three attempts at the Larry Hagman dunk tank. In their defense, organizers argued that ranch officials allowed in 2,000 walk-ups in addition to the 2,000 ticketed guests, all of whom fought for vaguely enforced access once inside the ranch. But whomever is to blame, heartbroken fans who waited three decades for the chance to pray at the altar of Jock Ewing (God rest his soul) want answers now:

Email: it's no longer cool! Was it ever? Apparently it was, so I hope you didn't miss your opportunity to use your inbox as a "gauge of Digital Age machismo." Because now email, like The Blob, has turned into a monster that threatens to swallow us all in its pulsating, gelatinous walls. The problem has spread from nerds to regular people, and America is now paying attention. The LA Times even quotes one nerd proclaiming "EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL." Dang! "All your time are belong to email," I imagine internet scientists saying. And they're more right than you know!: Experts have discovered that Americans no longer go to work to perform actual work; they simply go to work to send and receive email about what would happen if they theoretically were to do some work. When they're not doing this, they're mentally recovering:

When extremely important news breaks at any hour of the day or night, we here at Gawker receive a BREAKING NEWS ALERT from the web liaison at the New York Post. They are a paper packed with pavement-pounding journalists that never sleep, and they want to ensure that we, the internet nerds, are able to communicate important news items to you, the other internet nerds, in a timely fashion. So we have to apologize for any loss in civic informed-ness that you may incur because of our lateness in bringing you this story, which the Post urgently emailed to us just as it was filed late last night. But better late than never, we're excited to tell you: "GYM MACHINE HURLS LARGE WOMAN." Three (3) Post reporters managed to track the down the details of this occurence:

Many members of your Gawker editorial team are not in the Gawker office at the moment. Why? Because the AC there is a crap shoot (or has been), and SOME PEOPLE don't want to take their chances in DANGEROUS HEAT like we have today. I'm in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, and I'm sweating here, too! But it's not just us; a trendworthy number of key media figures are facing air conditioning problems. The media cannot work like this!

McDonald's has pulled all tomatoes out of its stores because of a DEADLY POISON salmonella scare! Winn-Dixie, Ralphs, Vons, and Albertsons supermarkets are pulling some tomatoes from their shelves! Taco Bell, Chipotle, and (a tipster says) Subway: pulling tomatoes! For your safety. Again: THE RAW RED TOMATOES IN YOUR REFRIGERATOR MAY HARBOR DEADLY MICROBES PREPARED TO ROT YOU FROM THE INSIDE. In a servicey attempt to keep all of you in good health, we are pasting this weekend's FDA warning after the jump:

The Wall Street Journal is in the midst of a trillion-word ongoing series chronicling the downfall of Wall Street firm Bear Stearns earlier this year. Today's installment looks at the rapid compounding of the firm's financial problems, which builds inexorably into a crisis. That's nice and everything, but the really interesting part comes when the story reveals what threw a wrench into the multibillion-dollar firm's effort to save its public reputation: Eliot Spitzer and his stupid hooker! Not to mention their old card-playing stoner chairman of the board:

It's hard to be Matthew McConaughey. He has to deal with the paparazzi not just outside the hotel, but inside the lobby, up the stairs, and all around the door to his room! They were probably attracted by the irresistible scent of Dolce & Gabanna cologne wafting in his footsteps. But he was sick of it, apparently, since he has to rip off his shirt immediately upon entering his room. Dear Lord, will the celebrity shirtlessness never end? This company needs a new Chief Idea Officer. Full ad below[via JJ's Dirt], complete with the stoner actor's derivative top-shedding.