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The Verge’s Joseph L. Flatley delves into the world of Internet marketing scams (those stupid spam pitches you get for “lead generation” and such) in eye-watering detail. Fundamentally, these things are exactly what they appear to be: con artists who suck money out of desperate people by lying to them about the money they can make with “work from home” businesses. They’re pyramid schemes. But Flatley lingers on the personalities, the histories, the motivations and the unique innovations that the Internet has given rise to, providing insight into the feel of being inside one of these desperate, sweaty scams.

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Paige Sultzbach must be one hell of an athlete because she’s scaring away the competition.

Her school, Mesa Preparatory Academy in Arizona, doesn’t have a softball team, so she decided to try out for the boys’ baseball team. To no one’s surprise, she made it. They went undefeated all season (with a 9-0 record) and were excited to play for the Arizona Charter Athletic Association state championship on Wednesday night.

Unfortunately, her team faced the aptly-named Our Lady of Sorrows Academy… a school that doesn’t think women ought to allowed to play a Man’s Game:

Hopefully every other team in the league will now recruit a girl as well, forcing the Our Lady of Sorrows Academy to forfeit every game…

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The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

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"Last time it was Republicans who were against a flip-flopping, out-of-touch elitist from Massachusetts, and now it’s Democrats," Nyhan said.

Nyhan also contrasted the outrage in 2004 among Democrats who felt that Bush was politicizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks for political gain, and the outrage today among Republicans who feel the Obama re-election campaign is exploiting the killing of Osama bin Laden.

"The whole political landscape has flipped," Nyhan said.

Along with Jason Reifler at Georgia State University, Nyhan said, he’s exploring the possibility that partisans reject facts because they produce cognitive dissonance — the psychological experience of having to hold inconsistent ideas in one’s head.

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In a subsequent interview Thursday morning with Fox News Channel, Romney said he didn’t remember the incident but apologized for pranks he helped orchestrate that he said “might have gone too far.”

Oh bullshit. You do remember it, you just refuse to address your mistakes. You have no moral backbone and no leadership capabilities. You utterly lack character.

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In Mississippi early in the summer of 2010, emotionally spent jurors, some of them in tears, recommended that Curtis Giovanni Flowers be put to death for a quadruple murder. The judge agreed with the recommendation, sending Flowers to death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. The trial had lasted two weeks, and from beginning to end the Montgomery County Courthouse was filled with an unnerving sense of déjà vu.

That’s because the 41-year-old Flowers has now been sentenced to death four times for the same crime. The first three convictions were thrown out on appeal by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The fourth, handed down June 18, 2010, is currently on appeal at the state’s highest court. Two other trials ended with hung juries. All told, Flowers has stood trial six times—a record in the history of American capital murder cases.

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David Cameron, the British prime minister, allowed his former spokesman, Andrew Coulson, access to some of the government’s most sensitive secrets without full security clearance, an inquiry has been told.

Asked on Thursday by Robert Jay, the lead lawyer for judge Brian Leveson, who heads the inquiry, whether he had any unsupervised access to information designated top secret, Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, said: “I may have done, yes.”

“Did you ever attend meetings of the national security council?” Jay asked about a body of senior politicians, defence and intelligence chiefs which is chaired by the prime minister.

“Yes,” Coulson said.

The Leveson inquiry heard that Coulson had been asked few questions by Cameron’s Conservative Party about his past and that the party did not carry out full security checks.

As a member of Her Majesty’s Press he clearly doesn’t need to be vetted, old boy.

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JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, has said it lost $2 billion over the past six weeks in a trading portfolio supposedly designed to hedge against risks the company takes with its own money.

The company’s stock plunged almost 7 per cent in after-hours trading after the loss was announced. Other bank stocks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, suffered heavy losses as well.

“The portfolio has proved to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than we thought,” CEO Jamie Dimon told reporters. “There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment.”

Sounds like bonuses all round then.