In Washington, DC, undercover police are concocting elaborate fake robbery plots, and then arresting anyone they can convince to say they will join in. If you mixed the concepts of entrapment and Minority Report-style futurecrimes together, this is what would emerge.
The attorney for a Pennsylvania woman who has been charged with prostitution is wondering if it was right for the undercover cop who busted her to have accepted a blowjob from his client prior to informing her that she was under arrest for prostitution.
For reasons utterly unknown to your non-fashion mag-reading day editor, Elle has a lengthy feature this month about "Anna," the FBI agent provocateur (in the COINTELPRO sense, not the lingerie sense) who brow-beat some lazy, unemployed pot-smoking self-proclaimed "anarchists" into planning a mild act of terrorism they didn't actually have the resources or intelligence to pull off. The story is a largely sympathetic interview with "Anna" ("The car stank of body odor and sweat, thanks to the extremists rejection of regular bathing and hygeine products.... Vicks VapoRub, which Anna routinely dabbed inside her nose, made it barely tolerable."), who rented the would-be bombers a cabin and bought them bomb-making supplies and provided them with bomb-making plans and demanded they stick to the fucking plan the night they all decided they'd rather smoke pot and make pasta. If it sounds like we're condoning either terrorism or lack of personal hygiene, well, entrapment makes us queasier than hippie stink. Now the ringleader of the The Collective That Couldn't Shoot Straight faces 20 years in prison. So let's all make like anarchists and insert these little culture-jammy 'retractions' into copies of Elle! That'll help, right? Sigh.
