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The New York Times issued a response Wednesday to claims that one of its writers, Carol Vogel, had plagiarized a passage from Wikipedia. In a note from an editor at the newspaper, it was determined that the opening paragraph in one of her articles “improperly used specific language and details from a Wikipedia article without attribution.” Also read: BuzzFeed Fires Writer Over Multiple Instances of Plagiarism The article was on Italian Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo, and it listed specific details about the artist using similar language, and in the same order as the Wikipedia entry for him. A spokeswoman for the New.

Once again 2012 saw the passing of another cult favorite with the death of one of the exploitation cinema’s greatest villains. On 19 June 2012, the versatile and highly underrated Richard Lynch was found dead at his home in Yucca Valley, California by his good friend, actress Carol Vogel. She had not heard from him for several days and turned up at his home only to find his front door ajar and the actor’s body in the kitchen.

The death of Richard Lynch marked an end to a career that many fans felt should have been a lot better. After a promising start in films following extensive theatre training, Lynch never achieved the major success he deserved. It was a big shame because had real screen presence. He always brought a raw and dangerous edge to his many cinema and TV roles, that was made all the more powerful by his handsome,...

His scarred countenance was the result of setting himself on fire during a late ’60s acid trip, but that disfigured look led to a ton of villain roles in a career that spanned four decades and over 100 films. I first took notice of Richard Lynch in the 1972 film Scarecrow when he played a scary prisoner who rapes Al Pacino. It was his first film and after that he almost always played bad guys in movies such as The Seven-ups, Open Season, God Told Me To, Deathsport, and The Ninth Configuration. He battled Chuck Norris as the head baddie in Invasion USA and attempted his own Freddy Kruger spin-off in 1988 starring in Bad Dreams. His performance as the evil “King Cromwell” in the hit fantasy film The Sword And The Sorceror won Lynch the Saturn Award for Best Actor from the Academy of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1982. In 2007 he was...

Last night, your Vf Daily blogger went to Christie’s, where Picasso’s Nu au Plateau de Sculpteu (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust) sold for $106.5 million, making it the most expensive piece of art ever purchased at an auction. (Although we arrived just after the eight-minute bidding war for the painting had concluded, we did catch the $25.8 million sale of Giacometti’s La Main.) According to The New York Times’s Carol Vogel, whom we spotted across the room, “the painting has been publicly exhibited only once since 1951, the last time it changed hands.” It was with this heightened sense of transience that we snuck a few (yes, yes, admittedly terrible) iPhone pictures of the thing, but slyly, as to not attract attention. (We were at Christie’s as someone’s guest, after all.) Anyway, enjoy this far-away, grainy image of the nude in the flesh!