Whitney Houston drowned, with cocaine fresh in her system, following a possible heart attack, according to her newly-released initial autopsy report.

Organizers of the Orange County Fair called a halt to the event's twenty-five year tradition of offering elephant rides today.

A convicted murderer with the best bros in the world is back behind bars after making a daring escape from a high-security Russian prison earlier today.

On the same day that we learn that student loan debt in America has passed the $1 trillion mark—meaning that student debt is even worse than we thought just weeks ago—it's reassuring to also learn that this massive, shaky bubble is perched on a firm foundation of complete financial ignorance.

Twitter is freaking out over brown cargo pants which appear to be sold by Abercrombie and Fitch and are described as 'Nigger Brown.' It's a hoax: the pants are listed on abercrombie-and-fitchoutlet.com, a bogus website registered in China that appears to sell knock-off A&F gear. But how did these pants end up being described so racist-ly in the first place?

What is it about Wall Street Journal editors that makes tech executives give horrible, self-destructive quotes? They got Google's CEO to say children will someday change their names to escape their Google hits. And now they apparently got the inventor of the Segway to say many women and minorities are more interested in "bouncing balls" than studying computer science.

One of the biggest dilemmas facing slobs who live in fashion-forward cities like New York is what to do when faced with tiny children who are better-dressed than us.

A new government report says that 38% of American women aged 15-44 have never ever been married, not even once. What is wrong with them? Something. Nobody likes them? Apparently. Anyhow. They're not as hopeless as everyone thinks!

Reclusive comedian and recently-jacked human Dave Chappelle has apparently joined Twitter. Chappelle has had countless imposters on Twitter but according to Neal Brennan, who co-created Chappelle's Show it's him for real.

The question has been asked ever since the first wet-behind-the-ears whelp fresh from Ireland stumbled off a boat at New York Harbor, dying from scurvy: When does someone become a real New Yorker?

One of the most delightful products of our industrial farming system is "pink slime," aka "lean, finely textured beef," a slurry of ammonia-treated cow byproducts mixed into ground beef as a filler. It's widely used in school lunches because growing children should get three servings of slime-based food per day. But now schools are ridding their cafeterias of pink slime.

Vending machines—those metallic friends which got you through many a long afternoon of jury duty or school or waiting for your wife to have that stupid baby, already—are having a hard go of it, these days. Americans just don't love them as they used to. From the WSJ:

Earlier this month, Upper East Side mom Anna Gristina was arrested and charged with running a high end brothel catering to "powerful men." So who were those powerful men? The first big name has leaked, and it is... utterly unsurprising.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton totally geeked out at a State Department press conference Tuesday, at which researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) (rawr) announced their intention to return to Pacific waters in search of Amelia Earhart's downed airplane, which went missing 75 years ago.

Kraft Foods Inc. announced today that it plans to change its corporate name to Mondelēz International, Inc.

The residents of a small Wisconsin town have had their lives plagued by house-rattling underground booms for the past few nights. No one has yet been able to identify the source of the sounds.

A puppy so small and delicate she makes other puppies look like oafish Grendelian monsters is now up for adoption in California. The best detail of this story is that the 4-oz dog's name is Beyoncé, so when you read her harrowing biography (won't take long; she's only two weeks old), you can pretend you are reading about Beyoncé the First, Mother of Blue Ivy, Queen of All She Sees.

Breaking news out of Australia offers a fascinating glimpse of how your folk hero sausage gets made.

Last time we checked in on the Chinese microblogosphere, it was alight with false rumors that Kim Jong-Un had been assassinated in a violent North Korean coup. Now (probably equally fake) rumors of a military-backed coup that tried to take down president Hu Jintao are blowing up on Chinese microblogs. (Above is a bogus picture of tanks in the street that's beeen passed around.)

It's been almost one year since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google, and sometimes it seems like he's experienced a midlife identity crisis. Schmidt drives a Ferrari, will reportedly divorce his wife, and now he's calling on programmers, like those at Google, to speak out against any evil practices their bosses ask them to perform.