Law enforcement agencies’ requests for customer information from mobile phone carriers reached at least 1.3 million in 2011. A Congressional inquiry found a staggering increase in the amount of cellphone surveillance conducted over the last five years by police across the United States.

We missed this when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but is it really ever too late to point and laugh at New Yorkers? We didn’t think so. So, people are probably aware that Five Guys franchises are proliferating across the Eastern U.S. like nuclear weapons in central Asia. The greasy, peanut-laden fingers of our locally born burger stand have spread as far as Delafield, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee; and Miami, Florida. They’ve even broken…

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it’s a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-a-verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we’ve all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked…

In a town where motorcades are less a spectacle and more an annoyance, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s modest security detail has never raised many eyebrows. But now Fenty has done away with it altogether — and no one really knows why. According to a Post report, Fenty has decided to ditch the police security detail and drive himself around during the month of August instead. And beyond simply shedding daily armed protection, Fenty has also been…

The Post’s David Nakamura reports that Mayor Adrian Fenty plans to endorse Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. An official announcement has yet to come, but the actions of Fenty adviser Jim Hudson, who organized a fundraiser for Obama, suggest the mayor looks set to get behind the Illinois senator’s campaign. Hudson collected $600,000 and endorsements from some of the mayor’s more loyal D.C. Council members: Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7), Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4)…

Woe is all of us this morning, as the National Zoo has officially announced that Mei Xiang is not really pregnant after all. Real panda pregnancies are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and this time, unlike two years ago, the hormonal spike recently tracked in the mama panda was a symptom of a false pregnancy. Sniff. This makes Mei Xiang’s fourth pseudopregnancy. She had three before giving birth to Butterstick (aka Tai Shan), her only cub…

Mindgutter brings us a stunning night-time HDR shot of a building on the UMD campus. Like DCist Heather, I’m a complete astrogeek, so the inclusion of the conjuction of the Moon and Venus is a total bonus. I also like that, if you look closely, you can see a security camera in the cupola. Big Brother — and the Moon — is always watching. In the comments on the photo’s Flickr page, Mindgutter asks…

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into…

Good morning, Washington. Excuse us if we’re a little grumpy. It might just be this hard-hitting report from NBC 4 that increasing numbers of professionals are hiring personal assistants to get their “frazzled lives” under control. Why can’t we get us a personal assistant to give us some Morning Roundup love, hmm? Then we could lounge around in our robe and sip our coffee at our leisure. Someday, someday. When bloggers rule the earth. But…

When a phrase becomes as ubiquitous as “Big Brother” (and we’re not even counting the reality show here), you wonder if it still holds any meaning, even when it’s coming from the original source. Meat and Potato Theatre company’s sparse but solid production of 1984 shows us that the man who wrote the book on totalitarian society still can have an impact, even on a small D.C. blackbox stage. Part of this, of course, comes…