The pirates that hijacked the hero crew of the hero ship Maersk Alabama last month took $30,000 from the ship's safe. Now two of the pirates are dead, and the third is waiting to stand trial in NYC. So, uh, where's that cash?

Fun, spoiled: two British guys were arrested with a motherlode of blow (1,507 non-metric-system pounds) outside of Montpellier in what the French government is calling the biggest cocaine bust in the history of the country.

[Get it? That's our president, Barack Obama, at a Five Guys burger shack in Washington DC, pickin' up lunch for everyone like a real regular fellow; image via Getty]

Cuba will begin performing sexual reassignment surgeries it was announced today, a year after a nationwide ban on the operation was lifted. To cover the story, AFP photographer Adalbert Roque took shots of some transsexual women in Havana, which are intriguing and lovely in an odd, quiet way. A gallery:

Wild-maned music producer Phil Spector has been given the maximum sentence of nineteen years to life for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Spector will be 88 years old before he's eligible for parole. He also paid $17,000 for funeral expenses, as per his sentencing. [CNN, image: Getty]

The surrender of AOL was a humiliating enough denouement for Time Warner, the old-line media conglomerate once imagined invincible. But there's talk it could get worse. What if Time Warner ceased to exist as an independent concern?

Former eBay CEO and political neophyte Meg Whitman needs all the help she can get to win the Republican primary in the California governor's race. Surely an endorsement from losing GOP presidential candidate John McCain will give her a leg up on rival Republicans.

[That's FAO Schwarz toy store in Manhattan. Toys 'R Us announced today that it's bought the troubled high-end chain, which has filed for bankruptcy twice; image via Getty]

News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch has referred to Google "stealing" or "taking" his copyright. His Wall Street Journal lieutenant Robert Thomson has likened the company to a "parasite or tech tapeworm." But now News Corp. needs to renegotiate a lucrative MySpace ad deal with Google. Whoops.

It seems Facebook's new investor is keen to downplay its ties with "the hard man of Russia," an oligarch one critic called a "gangster and racketeer." How inconvenient, then, that said oligarch is reportedly buying up more shares.

Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American freelance journalist who was freed this month after being (bizarrely) sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran for "spying," gave her first real interview today, to NPR. Her ordeal sounds even worse than you might have imagined:

The 21st century dawned with news that two media megaliths, AOL and Time Warner, were to merge. Critics howled that the vast tentacles of a combined AOL-TW would subsume us all. Today, Time Warner confirmed it's spinning off AOL, ending a business saga that defined whatever you're calling the 2000s.

The Susan Boyle fame narrative continues as expected. Reports came in last night that Scottish songbird, currently vying for the Britain's Got Talent crown, is crumbling under the pressure, causing her to lash out at fans. Like any good singer, she's following all the notes of insta-fame to a T.

[Fans support their beloved Barcelona fancy football team, on their way to defeating Manchester United to win the UEFA title today, which is one of the few days Gawker will ever mention sports; image via Getty]

The Financial Times reports that "among the biggest backers" of Facebook's new funder is Alisher Usmanov. He might be playing sugar daddy to a freewheeling social network, but the Russian oligarch is also known as a "devourer of websites" that dared to mention certain allegations about his past.

Two more New Yorkers with swine flu have died. Why isn't there a fresh round of PANIC? Because it looks like the worst is over. And we're not all dead!

This is an oil painting, by Scottish artist Peter Howson, that a nude Madonna and her now ex-husband Guy Ritchie sat for back in 2005. It is being auctioned off in Glasgow, and is expected to go for some £22,000. Image via Getty.

Conservatives are angry at Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor because she pronounces her name with an emphasis on the last syllable—"SotomayOR"—like a foreigner, which she may as well be because she won't talk Americun. A National Review writer, not a Fox Nation commenter, is advancing this argument.

Because Mike Bloomberg has more money and name recognition, and you, like all New York Democrats, are scared to actually take him on and end your comfortable career?

[Lawn chairs dot a stretch of Broadway in Times Square today. Sections of the thoroughfare there and in nearby Herald Square just became pedestrian walkways; image via Getty]