In the saga of the Miami Beach cop shoot-out fiesta that took place on Memorial Day, during one of the country's biggest African-America party weekends, at which cops shot a driver they said had a gun, injuring bystanders and arresting witnesses: here is an eyewitness videotape that is really wild! I would describe the incidents in the last third of this tape as incredibly bad, what with the cops pointing guns and screaming at innocent eyewitnesses, and "incredibly bad" is really saying something, as the video begins with a full-on barrage of gunfire.

Just can't let this one go! So while Miami Beach police finally found a gun in the car of a driver they shot early morning Monday, here's how witnesses of the shooting were treated this weekend while filming the incident on their phones: "Narces Benoit said a Miami Beach officer grabbed his cell phone, said 'You want to be [expletive] Paparazzi?' and stomped on his phone before placing him in handcuffs and shoving the crunched phone in Benoit’s back pocket. He said the couple joined other witnesses already in cuffs and being watched by officers." Don't you find that... unusual? (Meanwhile someone was shooting four bystanders accidentally, perhaps the cops. Also, not that it necessarily has any bearing on the incident in court-admissible terms but in character terms, the shooting victim did not seem like a particularly good man, with a wide history of felonies.) READ MORE

"I love Joplin! I love Joplin." So began President Obama in his Sunday address to the town of Joplin, Missouri, smudged from the face of the earth by a tornado a week before. READ MORE

Every year, "Urban Beach Week," in which (mostly) black people from all over the south converge on Miami Beach for fun and concerts and stuff, causes huge white anxiety. But no one's racist! "David Kelsey, president of the South Beach Hotel & Restaurant Association, says friction over the holiday weekend has been less about race than the conflict between the young party crowd and the luxury tourist clientele Miami Beach actively courts. 'There’s still a gulf between the crowd we’re attracting and the crowd we really want to attract and need for future business,' Kelsey said." He did! READ MORE

In 2009, "490,000 blacks and Latinos were stopped by the police on the streets, compared with 53,000 whites." 6% of those stops resulted in arrests. In Brownsville, "Men between 15 and 34 in the area were stopped an average of five times"—that means that "the police made over 52,000 stops between 2006 and 2010 in one eight-block neighborhood with a total population of only 14,000." READ MORE

New York Observer reporter Azi Paybarah is live-Tweeting Donald Trump's interview with Fred Dicker. It's... going well?

Sometimes, when I am eminently bored, I like to scour the New York Times archives for racial slurs. This weekend, hungover and manageably nauseous in a trendy Silver Lake coffee shop, the search term was "nigger," and I came across my greatest find yet: "'Nigger Day' In a Country Town." READ MORE

In 2009, according to the numbers just released by the City at the end of 2010, New York City had 126,774 live births! And 90,000 pregnancies—that were reported, at least!—ended in chosen termination. So of course the Archbishop is weeping and freaking out. READ MORE

Did you look through the Pew study on Twitter use that came out last week? We finally did! The data uses interviews conducted by both landline and cellphone numbers—so respondents are limited to people who'll actually pick up the phone for a random number. (Who are those people?) What did we learn? An amplification of four things we already knew.

• Twitter is not so white: Although Internet users are more likely to be white, non-white people are more likely to use phone-based services, including services like Twitter. So, of Internet users (not of the general population), only 5% of white people online use Twitter. Black Internet users are almost 3 times as likely to use Twitter (13% of them in total); Hispanic Internet users are nearly four times as likely to use Twitter (apparently, a whopping 18% of them use Twitter).

• Twitter is young: of people on the Internet, those under 29 are twice as likely to use Twitter as those 30 to 49.

• Twitter is chat: More than half use the direct message feature; 11% do it daily or more.

• Twitter is Foursquare and Tumblr: A quarter of people on Twitter share where they are; a bit more than that share videos; 40% share photos.

Hey, remember when Kanye West was on Twitter??? Last (undeleted) Tweet: two weeks ago, December 1.