Eric Holder reportedly approved.
“To promote an atmosphere of compliance.”
Fines blacks, owes $170,000.
Will lecture on human rights law.
Could result in "extraordinary measures."
Amid crumbling economy.
Seized by Bangladesh customs.
Sent 60 lewd emails to the Yahoo CEO.
Expected to lower cost of meds.
Legendary documentarian.
Two subjects from the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief open up about the faith’s most famous practitioner, Tom Cruise, and his Katie Holmes dilemma.
NBC News has a new chief, and the rumor mill has it he’s out to revive the careers of Brian Williams and Katie Couric.
Lightning strikes twice for Tina Fey. This time it’s on Netflix, where her hilarious, admirably happy new comedy starring a brilliant Ellie Kemper debuts Friday. Prepare to binge.
When the House created its Benghazi Select Committee last year, it seemed like a joke—derided by mocking Democrats and eye-rolling Republicans, who'd already run through multiple investigations and hearings on the U.S. consulate attack. T...
Some Democrats are worried a new committee to investigate Benghazi will be used solely as a vehicle to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016.
So by now we’ve read every possible interpretation of why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct her State Department business. There’s a lot that isn’t clear, and a lot we still don’t know. The main thing we know that is the ori...
The Times was sloppy, and the Beltway overheated as usual. But even if this story floats away, Clinton needs to learn some lessons from it.
In the wake of the Justice Department’s findings regarding the Ferguson, Missouri, police, it has become even clearer that criminal justice reforms are needed, both to address inequality and to achieve greater efficacy. No policy is a panacea, but...
Gen X Senators—including a number of Republicans—are looking for serious criminal justice reform. But their elders are getting in the way.
Six years ago, MSNBC host Chris Matthews briefly flirted with running for public office—a Senate seat from his native Pennsylvania—and then quickly dropped the idea. But now it looks like his wife, Kathleen, might actually take the plunge.“Last ni...
The MSNBC host said he had the strongest belief in wife Kathleen’s judgment and values, and if she runs for office her campaign will be covered fairly by the network.
The early campaign has been kind to Scott Walker.He tops the competition in Iowa and New Hampshire, and is a close second in South Carolina. He gets high marks among social conservatives, among the moderate establishment, from Tea Party types. The...
Scott Walker has been at the top of the polls in recent weeks but has he peaked too early? His rivals hope so.
It’s time to rock out with your socks out. Sock Puppet Parody gets grungy—literally and musically—taking nu-metal band Slipknot's "Wait and Bleed" into the meditation on cleanliness "Wait in Bleach." For their sake, let’s...
"Wait in Bleach" the latest from the best band to keep your feet warm.
Positive people are annoying.That’s why so many of today’s beloved TV characters are the curmudgeonly, cynical, cranky types. The jaded are our brethren in self-loathing. We delight in laughing along with their pessimistic worldviews, or living vi...
Lightning strikes twice for Tina Fey. This time it’s on Netflix, where her hilarious, admirably happy new comedy starring a brilliant Ellie Kemper debuts Friday. Prepare to binge.
People always knew Tom Cruise was a Scientologist, but they didn’t know the extent of it. That all changed in January 2008, when a video was released on YouTube featuring Cruise in a black turtleneck proselytizing like a man possessed.The nine-min...
Two subjects from the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief open up about the faith’s most famous practitioner, Tom Cruise, and his Katie Holmes dilemma.
Harrison Ford is lucky to be alive after crash-landing his vintage WWII-era single-engine airplane into the greens of a golf course in Venice, California, a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson tells The Daily Beast.The 72-year-old screen lege...
The film icon was left seriously injured after his plane crashed onto a golf course Thursday, but ‘fortunate in making a fairly safe landing,’ a firefighter tells The Daily Beast.
“It is a provocative show,” says John Ridley.The name “John Ridley” may not be familiar to the masses just yet, but you’ve no doubt heard his words. After getting his start writing for sitcoms like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Martin, and crank...
The Oscar-winning screenwriter of ‘12 Years A Slave’ discusses his hot-button ABC drama about a murder that triggers lingering issues of race, religion, and the legal system.
There she was, beaconlike, at the Balmain show for Paris Fashion Week: Kim Kardashian has gone blond—icy, fluorescent, extraterrestrial blond—in her latest move to transform from trashy TV star to serious fashion player, and (not to be outpaced by...
Kim Kardashian debuted dramatic blond locks in Paris—the latest attempt by her to escape the trash culture to become a serious style player.
“The Hunting Ground” opens with gleeful shrieking and tears of joy from high school girls reading college acceptance letters. All that SAT tutoring and toiling over college essays was worth it: these promising students are off to prestigious Ivy L...
A documentary about campus rape contains the damning stories of many victims. But what about the alleged perpetrators?
One can only shudder to think what kind of heinous murder scene ends in the dismemberment of a teenage victim. But that’s exactly what happened to Becky Watts, a pretty British teenager who suffered from what her family called “extreme shyness.” H...
An introverted British teenager was allegedly killed and mutilated by some of the only people she trusted.
U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert is in stable condition after he was attacked and slashed in the face and left hand Thursday morning at a breakfast meeting in Seoul by a knife-wielding Korean man who reportedly was calling for the two K...
Obama confidant Mark Lippert was left bloodied after a Korean man shouting about reunification attacked him with a 10-inch blade Thursday at a breakfast meeting in Seoul.
Koalas can’t seem to catch a break these days.Just two months after record-breaking fires in south Australia left the marsupials burned and helpless, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting that hundreds of koalas in Victoria were tar...
Hundreds of the beloved marsupials were slaughtered in 2013 and 2014 in what the government is describing as a mercy killing. Taxpayers picking up the check, take note.
NICE, France — They must be the two youngest—and most adorable—drug mules in the world, and when they grow up they’ll be able to see the photos of themselves splashed on the front pages of Wednesday’s tabloid newspaper Nice-Matin: “Baby Connection...
What was that stuff in their diapers? Five kilos of cocaine. When the cops caught on to the mother’s game, the kids were abandoned.
ISTANBUL — A 16-year-old high school student goes on trial in Turkey this Friday for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while the editor of the country’s leading opposition newspaper is facing up to nine years in jail for publishing an inte...
Angering President Erdogan can land you in jail—even if you’re just a kid.
VATICAN CITY — It is nearly 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in early March, and the Vatican is locked up for the night. A few stray tourists pose for pictures in front of the glistening basilica of St. Peter, and cassock-wearing clergy skim the perimeter of t...
In numbers that have doubled in the last six months, the homeless are coming to Vatican City to sleep in church-donated sleeping bags—at the invitation of the pontiff.
Imagine the scene: Meena Seshu, an experienced social worker turned activist for women’s rights in India, meeting a group of sex workers to help them organize. Seshu thought she knew what to do: “guide them,” as she had been trained to do. And yet...
Meena Seshu, a longtime women’s rights activist in India, thought she had all the answers. Then the people she was trying to help taught her something more.
Indy almost fell on my backyard. And it’s no laughing matter.For the past three years I’ve lived across the street from Penmar Golf Course, where Harrison Ford’s beautiful WWII training airplane came to rest yesterday, near the 8th hole’s lovely t...
The other miracle from yesterday’s Harrison Ford plane crash is that it doesn’t happen more often. It’s practically an air show above my house just down the street from Santa Monica ...
P.T. Barnum would have known exactly how the circus that bears his name could capitalize on its decision to cease using elephants by 2018.“See the elephants while you can!”No doubt the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will indeed draw...
The circus swears it treats its giant performers humanely—but with bans proliferating and America’s history of elephant abuse casting a long shadow, it was time to let the animals go.
The Yelp reviews for Brooklyn’s Morning Star Tattoo are almost perfect. Customers’ raves about an artist nicknamed “Painless Wayne” basically say it all. Pictures of their ink masterpieces adorn the page: a lotus flower on a hip, magpies on a ches...
Dakota Bond is on the lam after he allegedly beat his girlfriend until she was unrecognizable. Now that his face and her story have gone viral, will he be caught?
Bright Hawaiian lei will be on full display this weekend when President Barack Obama, civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and others march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the anniversary of the civil rights protests.There's an ...
The bright flowers look out of place amid the seriousness of the march and the cause, but there was a reason for them.
In an unusual opening statement this morning Judy Clarke, whose client Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is pleading not guilty to charges he bombed the 2013 Boston marathon, told the jury, “It was him.”“You might say, ‘Why a trial?’” said Judy Clarke. “The indic...
Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers banking on a jury that believes he was brainwashed by his brother. It worked in the case of the D.C. sniper.
The past 12 months of labor (scientists’ predictions) have finally resulted in the birth (official declaration) of a child (El Niño). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) announced today that El Niño has arrived, after a year of...
1997 is back, or at least its most-talked about weather event is.
Scientists may have cracked the code of memories by successfully tracing how they are imprinted on the brain. An experiment charted the nerve cell changes that occurred within rats’ brains as they made decisions—a process that could prove life cha...
Researchers have mapped rats’ memories, and humans could be next.
A government study confirms what local police departments and anguished families have known for several years: Overdose deaths from heroin are exploding.The study, by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that heroin-...
While U.S. law enforcement cracks down on prescription opioid use, heroin use—and overdose—is skyrocketing.
Internet search engines are marvelously useful for a lot of things.They can help you find recipes and directions and interesting facts. They’ve rendered obsolete almost all the skills my middle school librarian drilled into my skull decades ago. A...
You don’t have cancer. You don’t have radiation sickness. You have a cold and you need to step away from the Internet.
When she served as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was steeped in every imaginable foreign policy issue and regularly dealt with highly classified information. But not, apparently, over email.Clinton “did not have a classified email system” at...
A server at home kept every message she sent and received as secretary of state—and it was built by a mystery man.
In the global world of illicit drug policies, the granddaddy of them all is the United States. But as the U.S. starts to, perhaps, question the effectiveness of its abstinence-or-incarceration approach, China seems more than happy to pick up and g...
It’s on the WHO’s list of essential medicines, and is invaluable in developing countries. So why is the UN discussing increased regulation of ketamine?
Wei-Hock Soon doesn’t appear in the new documentary Merchants of Doubt, but he might as well be its poster child. That’s because director Robert Kenner’s film, which opens in select cities on March 6, is about how the tobacco, fossil-fuel and othe...
A new documentary, ‘Merchants of Doubt,’ shows how you’re being lied to.
Along with a great many people at the troubled NBC Universal News Group and its corporate parent, Comcast, Andy Lack is hoping that the second time’s a charm.The 67-year-old Lack—who in yet another shakeup at 30 Rock will take over in April as cha...
NBC News has a new chief, and the rumor mill has it he’s out to revive the careers of Brian Williams and Katie Couric.
Through the decrepit interiors of the Marche Central in Casablanca, a Gypsy quartet meander in sneakers and dirty jeans, a forgotten violinist, a stumbling fiddle player, and a singer performing what feels like the last dance of time, as the sun d...
The 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart immortalized Casablanca in gauzy splendor, but the winds of economic change stalk its dusty streets today.
Though he’s not yet a man, Brody Criz is a household name—at least for today. Even if he stumbles over his Torah portion, botches his speech, or falls off the chair, the cherubic adolescent can always say he won the internet with his bar mitzvah i...
Brody Criz’s bar mitzvah invite video went viral—but is that a good thing?
Six years ago, MSNBC host Chris Matthews briefly flirted with running for public office—a Senate seat from his native Pennsylvania—and then quickly dropped the idea. But now it looks like his wife, Kathleen, might actually take the plunge.“Last ni...
The MSNBC host said he had the strongest belief in wife Kathleen’s judgment and values, and if she runs for office her campaign will be covered fairly by the network.
There she was, beaconlike, at the Balmain show for Paris Fashion Week: Kim Kardashian has gone blond—icy, fluorescent, extraterrestrial blond—in her latest move to transform from trashy TV star to serious fashion player, and (not to be outpaced by...
Kim Kardashian debuted dramatic blond locks in Paris—the latest attempt by her to escape the trash culture to become a serious style player.
The largest art fair in the country, New York City's Armory Show, is back, introducing new talent along with many international greats. The Daily Beast captured some of the most eye-catching pieces.
The largest art fair in the country, New York City's Armory Show, is back, introducing new talent along with many international greats. The Daily Beast captured some of the most ...
“The Hunting Ground” opens with gleeful shrieking and tears of joy from high school girls reading college acceptance letters. All that SAT tutoring and toiling over college essays was worth it: these promising students are off to prestigious Ivy L...
A documentary about campus rape contains the damning stories of many victims. But what about the alleged perpetrators?
IGUALA, Mexico — Beside the open casket at the funeral of Norma Angélica Bruno Román, age 25, was neither the time nor the place to mourn her murder.Norma’s wake was held inside the home she shared with her parents and her two small children. It is a modest concrete dwelling on a street corner in the neighborhood of San Gerardo. Outside, a blue tarp was hoisted to shade a few rows of plastic chairs rented from the local funeral parlor. Halfway down the block, the...
Despite government efforts to impose law and order in Iguala after more than 40 students disappeared there, murderers still operate with impunity.
“All I wanted to do was sob for a few minutes. Cry. I wanted to cry for a few minutes because my life is in your hands,” Dasyl Jeanette Rios said, wailing, as she was pulled by a Broward Sheriff’s deputy with her feet shackled through a Florida co...
Just minutes after being declared mentally incompetent, a shackled Dasyl Jeanette Rios was tugged by her feet down a courthouse hallway.
Patricia Arquette made an impassioned plea for women’s rights and wage equality during her Oscars acceptance speech Sunday night. Her rousing words prompted a “#YesAllWomen” moment from Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez, who were seated next to each...
Sunday night at the Oscars, the actress made a powerful plea for gender equality. On Monday she was deemed to have not been radical enough.
For the majority of Sunday night’s three-hour-and-45-minute Academy Awards telecast, Oscar-winning actress Octavia Spencer was being held hostage by host Neil Patrick Harris, a comedy captive in a flailing running gag about guarding a briefcase th...
On a night dominated by male-driven films, it was the powerful messages by a handful of Hollywood women that we’re all talking about. It’s about damned time.
Hoan Nguyen dreamed of becoming a mom. But she had fertility issues, and so Nguyen began scouting for a surrogate from her Arizona home. She landed on a website called Miracles and Miracles Surrogacy. Nguyen only found out later that it was a frau...
Forty families, desperate for kids, paid Allison Layton tens of thousands each for the promise of parenthood. But the babies never came.
When the White House announced a new national campaign to combat sexual assault on college campuses last year, the treatment of victims was the chief concern. But now, after a more than a year filled with a flurry of campus reforms, some universit...
Due process is not “window dressing,” the professors argue. It’s necessary to establish a process’s legitimacy.
Pundits can’t stop snatching Hillary's defeat from the jaws of victory, insisting that her commanding lead in the polls is itself a problem. A Vox piece last week is typical: “Hillary Clinton’s uncontested nomination is dangerous for her and ...
And how exactly is it a bad thing for her or Democrats that Hillary Clinton has the nomination all but sewn up? News flash: It’s not.
Most literally, I Left It on the Mountain, the title of Kevin Sessums’s second riveting memoir, refers to a plant on Kilimanjaro, which the 58-year-old celebrity interviewer climbed in 2006. His guide tells Sessums he can take a cutting from the p...
One of Vanity Fair’s best known celebrity interviewers reveals how crystal meth brought him face to face with Lucifer—and talks for the first time about being raped by a prostitute.
Just three weeks after Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, a group of economic representatives from the Allied countries gathered in the small town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Thousands of miles from the front lines, the r...
The battlefield wasn’t the only place the future of the world was being forged during WWII. At the Bretton Woods Conference, the modern financial system was created.
Bright Hawaiian lei will be on full display this weekend when President Barack Obama, civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and others march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the anniversary of the civil rights protests.There's an ...
The bright flowers look out of place amid the seriousness of the march and the cause, but there was a reason for them.
Of all the conflicts that have raged in American history the Civil War remains the bloodiest.On battlefields such as Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg, the death toll averaged out to 425 men per day. This continued for 1,458 consecutive days, leavi...
Most Americans think of the Civil War as a series of battles that mattered most to the U.S. A new book shows that it also mattered a great deal worldwide.
When I meet Helen Macdonald to discuss her astonishing book H is for Hawk, she recounts an uncanny encounter on the banks of the Syr Darya River in central Asia. It was long before she’d even thought about owning a goshawk of her own, yet left an ...
Helen Macdonald talks about ‘H Is for Hawk,’ her extraordinary memoir about the death of her father, the training of a goshawk, and the author T.H. White.
There are few things that can bring an idea more publicity that a presidential campaign. With the potential candidacy of Rand Paul, who just won the CPAC straw poll again, libertarian ideas are going to get their day in the sun. In addition, the K...
David Boaz has spent his life trying to persuade America that libertarianism doesn’t stop with entitled white guys and Rand Paul. He feels good about his chances.
Here's a brilliant visual history of the Bauhaus school, arguably the most influential design movement of the 20th century (think Interstate signs, think Ikea), courtesy of Aram ...
“Turn around and bend over.” Nearly 40 years ago, on March 3,1976, one of my teammates, wielding a Yale-blue magic marker, stood poised to inscribe my back as I prepared to join a protest destined to make history. Not that I thought for a moment t...
Nearly 40 years ago, female rowers at Yale got creative to highlight inequality. As the recent controversy at the University of Minnesota shows, the battle isn’t over.
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