Asks State Department.
Ambassador Mark Lippert hurt.
Abused blacks for profit.
Offers to trade 3 prisoners.
Increased range and precision.
Aaron Levi, born in 1964.
NTSB may reexamine the investigation.
In stage adaptation of “Misery.”
Arranged for man to go to Syria.
In new TV campaign.
We sat down with ex-Church of Scientology fixer and senior executive Mike Rinder and Scientology expert Tony Ortega, who claim that the rumors about Will Smith are false.
The most talked about MoMA show for years offers a glimpse of the Icelandic singer’s magical world.
The bedroom eyes, the pinup waves, the seductive smile—Lauren Bacall’s look was an instant classic.
The Pentagon is still shaking, after the rhetorical bomb Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter dropped on the place yesterday. The new Secretary of Defense blasted military officials for telling reporters that Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces ...
The new Defense Secretary criticized his own people in public for talking to the press. And in the Pentagon, they’re taking that as a message: ‘Don’t talk to the media.’
On Wednesday, perpetually controversial conservative Ben Carson told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that being gay is “absolutely” a choice.I agree, kind of. Last week I wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which I talked about wanting my daughter to be g...
Being gay should be a choice, but he’s only saying it to further degrade and oppress gays and lesbians.
Despite predictions that King v. Burwell, the Obamacare challenge, was a done deal, a reading of the tea leaves in today’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court suggests the opposite: that Obamacare will survive.The reason? A canon of constitutiona...
Justice Kennedy suggested that the conservative challenger’s reading of the ACA would make it unconstitutional. That means their reading is wrong.
On January 20, 2001, I sat at my office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building just steps away from the White House to begin the first day of the George W. Bush administration. Before booting up my computer, I had to physically remove a band ...
Personal email account? OK, maybe. But why does Clinton get to pick and choose which emails she turns over? Same old Clinton song.
This week, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in King vs. Burwell. According to many court-watchers, at stake is not just whether more than 6 million Americans will lose their current health care coverage, but the legitimacy of the Court itsel...
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the latest challenge to Obamacare this week. Here’s why the case should be open and shut.
It’s 24 hours before CBS’s newest procedural, CSI: Cyber, premieres and the show’s leading man, James Van Der Beek, can’t get the network to show him the first episode.“I’ve asked them, but apparently it’s top secret,” he laughs (he laughs a lot d...
James Van Der Beek talks about working with Oscar winner Patricia Arquette on CBS’s newest crime drama, ‘CSI: Cyber,’ and sword fighting as an evil Red Power Ranger.
When it comes to so-called popular music, the family-as-band is a known entity. A shtick. Where country celebrates relatives who rock—think the Alvin Brothers—the contrived corny-cute legacy of the Hansons and Partridge Families in pop’s spectrum ...
What would happen if Hanson were good? Echosmith, easily pegged as a teen, sibling pop band, is too Zen—and good—to knock.
“Have you ever wondered what it feels like to win an Oscar?” our daring host, Mark, asks to begin this clip. Mark certainly has, and he has made it his mission to get a taste of the treatment that the winners of Hollywood’s most prized hunk of gol...
With a tux and a gold statue, this guy gets to do pretty much whatever he wants on Oscar night in Hollywood
You knew it, I knew it, the American people knew it. And Patricia Arquette sure as hell knew it, too. On the night of February 26, the journeywoman actress proved the awards punditry world correct when she ambled up the steps of Hollywood’s Dolby ...
With precious few film roles for women—especially women of a certain age—even Oscar-nominated actresses must turn to television for lead roles worthy of their talents.
Big Sean’s “IDFWU” has been one of those inescapable songs; a hot jam that seem to touch a nerve in popular culture and latch onto the public consciousness for months. The bitterness of the lyrics and gleefully profane chorus don’t exactly scream ...
The 26-year-old rapper spoke to The Daily Beast about his new album, ‘Dark Sky Paradise,’ making beautiful music with Ariana Grande, and coming into his own.
For years, there’s been rampant speculation that Will Smith, the blockbuster star of alien-themed films like Independence Day, Men in Black, and After Earth, was a card-carrying member of the Church of Scientology. It’s inescapable. When Smith’s...
We sat down with ex-Church of Scientology fixer and senior executive Mike Rinder and Scientology expert Tony Ortega, who claim that the rumors about Will Smith are false.
Ah, Amsterdam. The freshest pop culture memory it conjures is that of a plucky, impossibly gentle teen who, oxygen tank in tow, experiences first love along the picturesque canals in The Fault in Our Stars. This is sort of like that—if you replace...
On Tuesday night’s episode of Bravo’s ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,’ things went from zero to crazy in record time, as Lisa and Kim lost their marbles in an Amsterdam restaurant.
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.
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.
The Pentagon is still shaking, after the rhetorical bomb Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter dropped on the place yesterday. The new Secretary of Defense blasted military officials for telling reporters that Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces ...
The new Defense Secretary criticized his own people in public for talking to the press. And in the Pentagon, they’re taking that as a message: ‘Don’t talk to the media.’
BAB AL SALAMA CAMP, Syria — Fatima, an 80-year-old Syrian refugee stands in front of the tattered remains of her tent in this camp for internally displaced persons near the border with Turkey. She watched her home burn down late last month after t...
They don’t want to leave their country, but for years now they have been living in tents under increasingly dangerous conditions.
Boys as young as 12, many of them captured Yazidis, are forced to convert to Islam and fight for the Islamic State, sometimes against their own communities. This report from France 2...
The Iraqi Army and Shiite militias have now launched an operation to retake Tikrit, a Sunni city 95 miles north of Baghdad that was Saddam Hussein’s hometown. The Americans are standing back. The U.S.-led coalition air forces are not flying missio...
The U.S. is training a national army for a nation that does not exist.
The Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department uncovered an array of racially discriminatory practices made commonplace in the St. Louis, Missouri suburb. Along with systemic issues, a pattern of personal racial bias amon...
A federal investigation uncovers a blight of disturbing casual racism in law enforcement
Could the Supreme Court dodge a bullet by dismissing King v. Burwell, the case that could kill Obamacare, on procedural grounds?Maybe, says a growing chorus of legal observers. It turns out that one of the most basic requirements of a legal case—t...
Newly revealed information suggests that King v. Burwell, the case against Obamacare, should be dismissed for lack of standing.
Julien Blanc may be known as “the most hated man in the world,” but there’s a new pickup artist in town. His methods are so depraved that even Blanc’s company rejected them, and he's been in trouble with the law over allegations of molestati...
John Mulvehill allegedly masturbated on a woman and was kicked out of his community for it. Now he's back with a new name and a new company.
On February 11, during TNT’s postgame show, NBA all-time great Charles Barkley chose to stand athwart history, loudly and proudly.“I’ve always believed analytics were crap. They’re just some crap that some people who are really smart made up to t...
Now that analytics absolutists are the ruling class in sports, can they get over themselves long enough to make the game more fun?
Supermarket, real-estate and gas-station tycoon John Catsimatidis—the latest publicly identified suitor for Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News—says he’s a serious potential bidder for the money-losing tabloid.“Nobody would ever say that I got in...
One of the leading suitors to buy New York’s legendary tabloid is a Greek supermarket mogul who loves the limelight.
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.
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.
I am one of those people who will be unlikely to finish writing this paragraph without checking my Twitter account, staring out the window blankly, changing my mind about what to have for dinner, and mentally rewriting what I will say three paragr...
If you can’t get through this article without checking your Facebook, walking to the fridge, scrolling through your phone, and choosing something on Netflix, don’t worry.
This is the first of a series of columns for The Daily Beast about the intersection of medical technologies on the cusp of changing our lives, and how they fit into the real world. Join me every other Saturday.Call it a tale of two brains: the ext...
The gap is widening between visions of a brilliant future and one of deliberate Apocalyptic destruction.
Please allow me to introduce the opening scene of a science fiction film to you. If you don’t like science fiction, just pretend it’s another a formulaic Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl rom-com or a Daniel Craig 007 action flick. Whatever floats yo...
An Italian doctor says head transplants could be possible in the next two years. But just because we can, does that mean we should?
A new device has the antidote to society-fearing, non-sex-having millennials the world over: a phone charger powered by your own masturbation.Indeed, no one need ever leave the house again thanks to Pornhub’s Wankband, a wearable that powers up yo...
The Wankband combines two things millennials love: smartphones and masturbating.
Lauren Bacall’s legendary look—sultry eyes, wavy hair, and a bold seductive smile—may look effortless. After all, it has inspired fashion designers and their faithful followers for decades.But, according to Laura Matina, one of the graduate studen...
The bedroom eyes, the pinup waves, the seductive smile—Lauren Bacall’s look was an instant classic.
When Coco Chanel decided to make pajamas fashionable for women by day, and design them as luxurious couture pieces, only courtesans and artists would have been seen dead in them. Now, you’ll see people running out to the deli in them.The boundarie...
When Coco Chanel popularized pajamas, the garment was seen as ridiculously exotic. Maybe we’ll say the same one day about shoes sprouting vegetation.
Two years ago, the Pertwee, Anderson & Gold gallery in London explored the idea of life, death and time through a Memento Mori exhibition. It’s a long-standing art reference that death is inevitable and various artists were invited to give the...
The food historian says her amazing edible creations are made to be destroyed, when you eat them.
Fashion designer Alexander McQueen tried to kill himself in February 2010 by binging on cocaine, sleeping pills, and painkillers. He also slit his wrists with various kitchen knives, but they proved too dull, so he sharpened them and cut deeper. H...
A new book dishes on all the backstage excesses and internal demons of two legendary fashion designers.
If you root for a sports team over a considerable period of time, you’re going to find that there are players who encapsulate what it means to be alive at a particular moment and place in history. It’s not at all the same as the relatively uncompl...
No one basketball player defined the '90s better than Anthony Mason, a bulldog who led the brutish and flawed Knicks almost all the way to the finish line.
ISIS may want to destroy it, but America's most famous escape will always survive as our unique spectacle.
ISIS may want to destroy it, but America's most famous escape will always survive as our unique spectacle.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.“I am pretty certain that I am solid at the time period that I’m at for the next foreseeable future,” the MSNBC host told me on Friday, responding to ...
The TV host rubbishes claims his MSNBC show is about to be axed, and insists he is not out to profit from race controversies.
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.
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.
An Islamic state where Christians were kidnapped and enslaved by Muslims deemed to be “barbarians” by the West. An embarrassed U.S. government forced to pay ransoms and tributes to free the hostages.Such was the situation 200 years ago when, on Ma...
Two hundred years ago, the U.S. declared war on an Islamic power enslaving its citizens and ransoming them for millions.
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.
“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.
As it turns out, twirling around like a maniac at the top of a hill is enough to make a person nauseated. At least, it’s enough to make critics nauseated, many of whom loathed The Sound of Music so much when it first hit theaters in 1965 that thei...
‘The Sound of Music’ premiered to horrific reviews in 1965. Now it’s the most beloved and popular movie musical ever. On its 50th anniversary, how did it climb that mountain?
On January 5, 2010, the chief of the CIA’s secretive paramilitary operations division accused one of the agency’s elite undercover operatives of financial shenanigans and getting too friendly with a female colleague.The operative, who uses the ali...
‘Mack Charles’ fell in love with a fellow CIA undercover operative. Then, he claims in an explosive, $25 million lawsuit, agency bigwigs tried to crush him.
In the final pages of Elliot Ackerman’s debut novel, Green On Blue, is an observation about separation often made about wartime efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the setting for the book: “Across the high plain, tucked among the foothills, is FOB S...
Most of the fiction and nonfiction inspired by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan concentrates on U.S. protagonists. Elliot Ackerman takes a far more illuminating approach.
Shelby Steele calls his new book Shame. You bet it’s a shame. It’s a shame that as often as conservatives pose valuable questions about America’s past, the state of the nation, and, yes, what makes America exceptional, they continually afford us v...
A new book from conservative intellectual Shelby Steele claims to offer new answers to the old problems of polarization, but offers the same critique—blame liberals.
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