British intellectual Eric Hobsbawm, the pre-eminent historian of his generation, died Monday morning in a hospital in London, where he was being treated for pneumonia. He was 95.

Amanda Clayton, the Michigan woman who gained national notoriety earlier this year after it was revealed that she continued to collect welfare benefits despite winning a $1 million lottery jackpot, was found dead inside her home Saturday morning.

The Adam Sandler-voiced Hotel Transylvania was a big hit, setting a September box office record with a $43 million take over the weekend. It also sort of reestablishes Sandler as a reliable box office draw after his last two films, That's My Boy and Jack and Jill, bombed.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan say they have a tax plan. According to the Associated Press, they want a 20 percent decrease in all income tax rates. Ryan says they'll pay for this tax reduction by limiting loopholes and deductions.

Jack White played a show last night at Radio City Music Hall. It was heavily hyped. Understandably, people were very excited to see the ex-White Stripe frontman do his thing. The feeling, apparently, was not mutual as White stopped playing after just 45 minutes. While it's not entirely clear what set White off, he was at one point upset with a lack of crowd participation, or something.

As predicted here on Friday, Paul Ryan gave a pandering, non-sensical speech to the National U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance's 16th Annual Save Our Heritage Banquet. Amongst other things, the vice-presidential candidate said:

Assuming for a moment that Obama had anything to do with killing Bin Laden — and that this wasn't all part of an Al Qaeda plan, as Rush Limbaugh theorized — he really should have done it sooner.

Yesterday's blurry bottomless pics of Kate Middleton reignited the right to privacy vs. the right to see the Duchess of Cambridge's vagina debate, but Danish tabloid Se Og Hor says they're not responsible.

On top of the indignity of a 25-year marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Shriver now has to deal with the publicity tour for his new tell-all memoir.

Chances are if you wanted to read contemporary classic Fifty Shades of Grey, you would have read it already.

Call me crazy, but I don't think it should be legal for adults to suck the blood from freshly circumcised baby penises. Alas, doing just that is a very important ritual for some Orthodox Jews. Called metzitzah b'peh, the process involves the mohel snipping away the foreskin and then sucking the blood from the penis to "cleanse" the wound. Obviously putting saliva on an open wound isn't considered an antiseptic practice in any realm of modern medicine, especially when that open wound belongs to an infant with a barely there immune system. Indeed, since 2002, metzitzah b'peh has been responsible for spreading Type 1 herpes, a very common condition in American adults, to 11 different babies, killing two of them and giving two others brain damage, according to ABC News.

So, Fox News has, excruciatingly, just broadcast live video of a man committing suicide after a car chase. Fox anchor Shep Smith said afterwards that the network was on a five-second delay, but that the video got through regardless. A network technician being too slow on the button is not the real issue here. The real issue is that car chases aren't worthy of live television (and this might be the thing that brings them to an end).

Scientology officials are apparently rushing to scrub any mention of Sons of Anarchy star Johnny Lewis from the website of their highly controversial drug rehab program Narconon.

What is the female equivalent of "dong shot"? Whatever it is, we need it for these new photos of Kate Middleton, published in Danish tabloid Se Og Hor. Between those recent topless shots and now these bottomless ones, you've now basically seen Kate Middleton naked! Click through for the pictures.

With the first of three presidential debates still a few days away, Mitt Romney's campaign is already calling a winner: President Obama.

A comedy duo from Montreal known as the Masked Avengers successfully pranked called U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Wednesday afternoon. Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel pretended to be Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Ban bought the act, or at least until the duo made a strange crack about Harper's hair.

You might remember Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin from the time he said last month that women who suffer "legitimate" rapes undergo biological processes that prevent them from getting pregnant. It was one of the wrongest things a politician has said publicly in modern America, and Akin was criticized from people on both the left and the right. All that is apparently behind us now (what with Akin's former GOP critics supporting him again), and thus Akin is back to saying archaic nonsense about women.

Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere are suing an anti-gay group called Public Advocate of the United States for using the couple's engagement photo in a homophobic advertisement. The photo, which was altered, was taken from the couple's website and used in a political campaign against Colorado State Senator Jean White, a Republican who supports gay unions.

Remember Todd Akin? The imbecile Missouri state representative who made those "legitimate rape" comments about five weeks ago? Well, now that some time has passed and he's officially still in the race to be Missouri's next Senator (yesterday was the last day for him to withdraw), Republicans are lining up to support him again.

Though she just finished her first adult novel after writing exclusively about Harry Potter for over a decade, J.K. Rowling says she's not done writing for younger readers, and could even return to the world of Hogwarts if inspiration should strike.