Glossy Is ‘OK!’ With $500K Death Photo of Michael Jackson

Bottom feeding celebrity rag OK! Weekly actually paid a half-a-million dollars for the rights to this ghastly cover photo of a dying (or already dead) Michael Jackson being carted away in an ambulance. It’ similar to the controversial image that Entertainment Tonight shamelessly slapped an “Exclusive” on and posted to their website. The money hemorrhaging mag’s editorial director, Sarah Ivens, attempted to justify the use of the photo with some statement about trying to needle the little readers it has left: “I hope the cover will provoke readers. It celebrated the man, but it also does expose that he was an eccentric character who lived a very controversial life.” |PDNOnline|

City Hall Cops, Art Critics?

The Public Art Fund’s latest installation doesn’t officially go on view until Thursday, but that’s not stopping whiners from getting started on the temporary work. In his new project, “Wall and Door and Roof,” British artist Richard Woods is decorating a door inside City Hall with an image of a door and wrapping the City Hall guardhouses in a façade of exaggerated red bricks, similar to an installation in Wimbledon. Along with predictably jocular art critiques from the cops who staff the security booths, Councilmember Letitia James claims the installation somehow “makes a mockery of a serious subject, public safety.”

Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./NYT

Somali Muslims Employ Ancient Jewish Tradition To Punish Rapist

In the United States, capital punishment consists of electric chairs, lethal injections, and in extremely rare situations, death by firing squad. But in some pockets of Somalia they keep it a little more old school, biblical (Koranic?) even. They stone people to death. According to the AFP, a man convicted of raping and murdering a teenage woman was executed by Islamic fundamentalists using the ancient method in a town 55 miles outside of Mogadishu:
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