Now it’s former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s. Paterno, of course, died this morning of lung cancer.

Westboro Baptist Church top member Margie J Phelps took to Twitter today to announce that they would be picketing Paterno’s funeral, and tweet plenty of unsavory words for Paterno and those mourning his death. Here they are:

It pretty much goes on like that…

Obviously, WBC is drawing from Paterno’s role in the highly publicized Penn State scandal involving assistant coach Jerry Sandusky being arrested for having sex with children. Paterno was not charged with any crimes, though there was a great deal of outcry that he did not do more to keep the crimes from happening.

As expected, there is the usual backlash on Twitter to WBC’s plans. Plenty of people are calling them out as “crazies”.

Legendary Penn State football Coach Joe Paterno passed away today (Jan. 22) after announcing a month ago that he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Paterno was 85.

The University plans to honor him for his many contributions and to remember his remarkable life and legacy. We are all deeply saddened.

Since last night, there have been many reports about former Penn State coach Joe Paterno’s health and his death. Reports of his death came premature, and were proven false last night.

In fact, we posted a story earlier this morning about how the incident highlighted some flaws in journalism.

Now, however, the Associated Press itself has tweeted that Paterno is dead. This is unconfirmed, but the AP is supposed to be made up of “the real journalists,” so take that how you will (remember, CBS News reported him dead prematurely):

I know the AP isn’t big on others linking to their stories. I hope embedding their tweets is OK. If not, they may want to take that up with Twitter, which enables such functionality.

Update: His death is also being reported by the New York Times.

More on Joe Paterno’s death here.

The Poynter Institute, whose mission it is to make sure “communities have access to excellent journalism,” has posted an interesting series of articles pointing out journalism’s failures with regards to former Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno.

Paterno is reportedly in serious condition in a hospital in State College, PA, but is still alive. However, Penn State student news site Onward State reported that Paterno died last night. Once that initial report came out, various other news organizations jumped on the story and started falsely reporting his death too.

While it’s been deleted now, CBS News tweeted that he had died, apparently based on the Onward State report, but without attribution. Poynter shows the embed.

In another of the Poynter articles, Craig Silverman points out how “journalists’ hunger for glory” can get them in trouble. “The tension between speed and accuracy is always highlighted in these cases,” he writes.

“Journalists need to do a better job calculating the risk of being first, rather than focusing on the benefit,” Silverman writes. “How many people would have recalled — or cared — that Onward State broke the news? Aside from some journalists, I’d wager very few people. This kind of breaking news report spreads quickly, and whatever credit that may have gone to Onward State in the early minutes would have disappeared once the information was confirmed and widespread.”

The speed vs. accuracy issue has become more of a challenge for reporters thanks to the realtime nature of today’s web. This seems to be brought to light when false death reports emerge, then are proven wrong. Remember when this happened with Jon Bon Jovi recently?

It does make you wonder how many other falsities are being taken as truths, with stories that don’t demand as much attention as the death of a celebrity.

Onward State’s managing editor has resigned. He posted the following apology:

Earlier this evening, Onward State reported that Joe Paterno had passed away; however, the mountain of evidence stacked opposite that report became too much to ignore. At this time, I would like to issue an official retraction of our earlier tweets.

Devon Edwards

You don’t have to scrutinize Ms. Maribel’s information too hard to gather that there is something fishy about this account. I’d wager that those nearly 100 followers of hers are probably also bots and they probably non-Tweet about botty things. These things are everywhere on Twitter. In all seriousness, I don’t think I’ve been followed by a real person on Twitter in months. And although Facebook certainly has its share of phony accounts, Twitter seems to be the more polluted of the two.

HOWEVER. It turns out that these might not be meaningless bots after all thanks to a new operation from the United States Department of Homeland Security. According to a new report in The Daily Mail, the DHS uses fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to monitor and track people who happen to use “sensitive” words. What kind of sensitive words? Words that despite sounding villainous are actually fairly generic. “The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘outbreak’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’, ‘virus’, ‘recovery’, ‘deaths’, ‘collapse’, ‘human to animal’ and ‘trojan’, according to an ‘impact asssessment’ document filed by the agency.” If the DHS catches someone using any of these words and suspects you might be up to no good, it could mean that ” spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.” Spies! Human to animal virus death recovery! Okay, DHS, you guys are obviously new to The Internet because just about every one of those keywords of yours could also be easily used in the context of sex and if you were familiar at all with this thing called The Internet you’d realize that 98% of it is porn-related. (P.S. – in case you didn’t know, porn includes sex.)

Not a group to let this trespass of our blessed privacy, everyone on Twitter responded appropriately:

So as if the keyword surveillance probably wasn’t muddled with sexy search results already then the noble crusaders of Twitter have undoubtedly thrown a couple more monkey wrenches into the Big Brothery gears of the DHS. At least I hope it has because if not then the combination of my searches on Twitter for their keywords in addition to my use of all of the words in this article will probably be enough for the feds to punch my ticket to Gitmo later today.

Surfline actually started as a phone hotline in the mid-eighties, that surfers could call to hear surf reports. When the Internet got big in the 90s, Collins turned Surfline into a website at Surfline.com, after running it as a fax service for a while. Daily Pilot ran an interesting profile of him earlier this year, talking a bit about the site’s origins. It says:

At the 1995 U.S. Open of Surfing, they posted still images taken from video because streaming video was not yet available.

By the 1996 U.S. Open, Collins spent the $10,000 for their first surf cam and presented the first live surfing webcast in history. Now, Surfline has 150 surf cams around the world.

While his backround in forecasting and meteorology (apparently mostly self-taught), was his claim to entrepeneurial fame, his surfing won him plenty of acclaim as well. He was inducted into the Surfers Hall of Fame in 2008.

Surfline.com has a slideshow-style presentation up honoring Collins’ life.

Our condolences to Collins’ friends and family.

More on his death here.

According to Mother Board, Kim was not ashamed of this accolade:

The DPRK’s Dear Leader fancied himself as such during an international summit in 2007. Seven years prior, he had asked U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright for her email address, indicating that the North Korean internet black hole was perhaps not as thoroughly opaque as we made it out to be — at least not for those at the top.

For the rest of the world, surfing those scant blips of North Korean internet activity is still a very mysterious and weird experience: Of the 30 or so known North Korean websites, only one of them, belonging to its state-run news agency and run by a company called Star Joint Ventures, originates from inside North Korea itself. Bereft of the usual DNS handling, it can be accessed directly at 175.45.176.14, and seems to contain very little actual information beyond — you guessed it — a log of Kim Jong-il’s recent activities, which include attending giant performances in his honor and rejecting human rights bills.

“Dear Leader” went so far as to create a government-run Twitter account in order to broadcast his message to… well, no one, exactly, since North Koreans have virtually no access to the Internet. Here’s a sample of tweets from that account, @uriminzok:

Actually, you probably can’t read that, so here are translations provided by @GoogleUriminzok, a Twitter account that uses Google Translate to relay Dear Leader’s tweets in English:

You can kind of parse a nationalist message amid those broken translations but the true intent of these proclamations can’t really be understood. What I get is basically: We’re great, U.S. and South Korea are bad. Funny enough, North Korea’s official twitter account is only following four other accounts. Three of them are DPRK-related accounts, but then there’s this guy:

Yeah, I have no idea what that means, either. Jimmy’s message of making the world a better place, though, doesn’t really seem to gibe with Kim’s despotic them.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has the grim task of tracking the number of journalists and other media workers that are killed each year around the world. CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon explains the importance of keeping track of this gruesome information:

CPJ’s mission – grounded in international law – is to fight for the rights of all journalists to report the news freely, without fear of reprisal. Our list of journalists killed is a key advocacy tool in this struggle. We routinely use it to confront governments with their own record of indifference or ineptitude, as we’ve done recently in Pakistan, Mexico, and Russia.

Their data for 2011 was released earlier today and while it wasn’t the deadliest year on record it certainly wasn’t a low-risk one, either. CPJ provided an interactive graphic that details the fine statistics of the 43 journalists were killed throughout the world with 19 of them murdered.

From CPJ’s analysis:

CPJ’s survey identified significant changes in the nature of journalist fatalities. Sixteen journalists died while on dangerous assignments, many of them while covering the chaotic and violent confrontations between authorities and protesters during the uprisings that swept the Arab world. The victims included Hassan al-Wadhaf, a Yemeni cameraman shot by a sniper while covering antigovernment protests in Sana’a, and Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, an Egyptian reporter gunned down while filming a protest in Cairo. “Journalists working in this environment are in no less danger than war correspondents covering an armed conflict,” said Ahmed Tarek, a reporter for the Middle East News Agency who was assaulted by police while covering protests in Alexandria, Egypt. “The greatest danger journalists are facing today in post-revolution Arab countries is the targeting of journalists by political forces hostile to anyone who exposes them.”

For the second year in a row Pakistan topped the list of most dangerous places for journalists as 7 were killed while reporting from that country. With all that has happened in the Middle East year during the Arab Spring, it probably won’t surprise anyone that 7 out of the 10 deadliest countries for a reporter to be working are located in that region. The grisly violence directed to journalists wasn’t isolated only to that region, though, as the 4th deadliest place in the world for journalism was Mexico, most likely due to the surmounting violence associated with the Zetas drug cartel.

While CPJ keeps track of the death toll of journalists in the past year, this data does not include the journalists that were beaten and severely injured while in the line of duty. Including those statistics, journalism becomes mutates into an even more dangerous profession.

Frazier, a hero in his hometown of Philadelphia, was known for his aggressive, hard-hitting style. Columnist Bill Lyon summarized Frazier’s fighting style like this:

“He was swarming and unrelenting, and he prided himself that he never took a backward step, and he reduced the Sweet Science to this brutal bit of elemental math: ‘I’ll let you hit me five times if you’ll let me hit you just once.’”

Frazier is known by many as the man who dealt the legendary Muhammad Ali his first ever defeat. It happened at the 1971 “Fight of the Century,” where Frazier downed Ali with a big left hook in the 15th round. The two boxing greats continued to give the world great matches with a rematch in 1974 (which Ali won in a decision) and 1975′s classic “Thrilla in Manilla.”

The sports world (and many others) have mourned the death of Frazier since the news was announced late Monday, with boxer Floyd Mayweather making a particularly interesting offer on Twitter:

Smokin’ Joe’s Facebook and Twitter accounts asked that fans post their thoughts and memories, and many of them have been posted on Frazier’s official site.

He obviously meant quite a bit to many people:

When i was a kid i heard a radio interview with smokin joe. my dad was a goldenglove and loved joe. he sat me down so we could hear the whole thing. from that day forth i was a boxing fan. smokin joe made a fan for life with his interview. thanks joe to this day im a fan – Tailyn, from Facebook.

The greatest and most gracious heavyweight champion ever to grace the ring in my humble opinion.When I tell my kids about boxing legends,Joe Frazier comes above everyone.I hope by telling them the truth that I can keep Joe at the forefront of future generations’ thoughts. Godspeed, big man – Paul, from Facebook

Other well-known people took to Twitter to express their condolences for the loss of Frazier:

What are your memories of Smokin’ Joe? Let us know in the comments. And head on over to Famous Dead to express your condolences.

It’s the clearest video yet of the moments after Libyan rebels took him under their control, and it shows a bloodied, terrified, but still alive Gaddafi being propped up, dragged around, as well as abused by his captors.

On Sunday, reports emerged from Libya that named the cause of death as a gunshot wound to the head, and also confirmed reports that the Colonel had been shots multiple times before eventually succumbing to his wounds. What actually happened in the moments leading up to Gaddafi’s death is still unknown, but it is speculated that he might have been executed by one of his captors. The BBC has video of one of his captors who apparently takes credit for the killing.

The United States has joined other nations calling for a full investigation into his capture and death.

In an incredibly odd turn, it was learned that Gaddafi’s body has been turned into an attraction for some in Libya, as it is being stored in a refrigerated unit inside a shopping mall in Misrata.

The video above is now part of the historical record, and gives an important look into the crucial moments (presumably) right before his death. No matter how you feel about Gaddafi or the actions that led to his demise, one thing is certain: it’s a harrowing portrayal of the realities of war.

Walter Isaacson, a former TIME magazine editor, sat down with Steve Kroft to talk about his new book, “Steve Jobs.” The book, the first authorized biography of the tech legend, was constructed through dozens of interviews with Jobs himself as well as the people around him that knew him the best.

Much of the biography was leaked before its actual publication, and the excerpts have confirmed that the new book attempts to show Jobs as human, if nothing else. At the beginning of Isaacson’s interview, 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft says that he thinks “it’s a tough book.”

Isaacson responds that “it’s a book that’s fair, I mean, this is a real human being.”

During the interview, Isaacson portrays Jobs as an individualist, a genius that refused to “succumb to authority,” as well as man that could be “brittle” and “petulant.” It truly is a fascinating look into a notoriously private man.

Check out the interview below: