Rawiya Kameir

Few things bring me as much joy as watching traditional media outlets cover Internet stories and explain online phenomena. In this Fox 11 news segment, the topic at hand is trolling. Trolls, as you know, “lurk in chatrooms or on YouTube until they unleash mean-spirited, menacing attacks on unsuspecting victims.”

If it seems like I can’t stop talking about the end of the world, that’s because strange things just keep happening. The latest in apocalyptic news is this video of an unidentified flying object in Jerusalem, pieced together from two different camera perspectives.

Forget dead birds. If anything’s signaling the apocalypse, it’s the rate at which people around the world are taking to the streets to protest their governments. Not that protests for democracy mean it’s the end of days—just that we’ve clearly reached a cracking point.

The journalist, Rahimullah Yusufzai, explains that the Taliban are gaining momentum because they are ingratiating themselves with a poor, fed-up populace that’s receiving no support from the Pakistani government. According to a Taliban leader he interviewed, Yusufzai says there are thousands of young men who are willing to die as suicide bombers because they are “pissed off and vengeful beyond belief.”

In all of my years of watching things go down throughout Africa, I have never seen anything like this. As the YouTube description reads, “People are behaving as if they are ready to die.” Video inside.

Instead of another bit of depressing news, here’s something to cheer us all up. If this video of some super-cute SpongeBob-loving Japanese kids doesn’t get you through the week, I don’t know what will.

In thinking about the Tunisian “revolution” and the ongoing demonstrations in Egypt, let’s not jump to conclusions. What happened in Tunisia is not a model for the region’s regimes, nor is Egypt the new Tunisia. That would be a nice, clean, easy narrative and a great story, but it overlooks the realities that distinguish each of these countries from the other.

A 14-year-old in Spartanburg, South Carolina shot and killed three family members last week. The boy’s father and great-aunt died on the scene, and his grandmother died at the hospital a few days later. His motivations aren’t clear, but NBC station WYFF4 reports that the weapon in question, a .22 caliber rifle, was given to the boy by his father.

This Indonesian underwater hunter has trained his body to do something incredibly unmammalian: he can spend extended periods of time deep into the sea without any fancy scuba equipment. In this clip from a BBC Human Planet episode, Sulbin the hunter swims down 20 meters—just over 65 feet—below the surface to search for fish on the sea floor.

But why is Hollywood more accepting of fat black women than of fat white women? My guess is it has more to do with social politics than with the entertainment industry: Black women are invisible in America. Despite the fact that women like Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey are among the most public of public figures, black women make up America’s most invisible group.

The Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), a government-funded benefit to support teens from lower-income households who are furthering their education, is up for debate this week in the British Parliament. And that’s what MP Nadhim Zahawi, representing Stratford-upon-Avon, was discussing when he was rudely interrupted…by his tie.

Last week, the Internet went nuts over the discovery of Chet Haze, Tom Hanks’ son and, apparently, a frat boy rapper supreme. Chet’s newly released “White and Purple (Northwestern Remix),” a version of Wiz Khalifa’s ubiquitous “Black and Yellow,” is a college-themed ode to Northwestern University, where he’s currently a student and minor campus celebrity.