One soldier and the assailant killed.
Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was on the government’s radar.
For more than 3,000 students.
For killing Iraqis in 2007.
Secret Service nabbed him before he reached the residence.
Reported numbers may vastly underestimate.
Calls conversation “silly.”
He and his wife are “probable masterminds.”
Maker of Camel cigarettes forbids office smoking.
Up to one-fifth of the 10,000 drivers shut their phones.
Nigel Lythgoe, the producer behind ‘American Idol’ and ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ talks candidly about the startling state of reality TV and producing his first Broadway show.
From Jacqueline Kennedy to Michelle Obama—via Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush—Oscar de la Renta created regal dresses for American first ladies.
The Oscar winning actress has been torn to shreds by the media and public for her altered face. But she’s just a byproduct of the outrageous beauty standards placed on women.
On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the glamorous sister-in-law of Ben Bradlee and sometime lover of Jack Kennedy, was shot to death while walking along the C & O Canal in Georgetown. And in the hours that followed, the search for Meyer’s...
When the editor’s gorgeous sister-in-law was killed, Bradlee rushed to find her diary. But why was James Jesus Angleton looking for it too?
There is something obscene in looking at the raw numbers, is there not? More than $500 million being spent on House races, and north of $300 million on Senate contests. A half-billion dollars! In the House! Where, as of yesterday, the Cook Politic...
Hundreds of millions of untraceable donations are flowing to candidates, and at some point soon untraceable ‘dark money’ will likely overtake the system.
The 2014 election is not just about Democrats and Republicans. In some places, it’s also about Berettas, bongs, and bear hunting.That’s because on November 4, in addition to electing lawmakers, voters across the country will cast their ballots on ...
Should Mainers be allowed to hunt bears with doughnuts? Will Washington gun laws get both tougher and laxer? These and other key questions will be on ballots across the U.S. next month.
Senate races remain stubbornly tight in key states with a number of voters unable to make up their minds at least in ways that pollsters can measure. But two all-female focus groups in North Carolina and Louisiana offered clues about what voters a...
So much for polls: “Walmart moms” in two states with hard-fought Senate elections say they’ll make up their minds the night before Election Day.
If you have been following the rolling fiftieth anniversaries of the last two years—the March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination in 1963, Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964—you know that the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 p...
In the mid-’60s polar opposites Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan promised America more than they could possibly deliver. The result was decades of cynicism about government.
On October 21, 2014—a year to the day before Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrive in “the future”; don’t let the memes fool you—a Kickstarter campaign was launched that aims to make one of the most sought-after fictional toys a reality.Greg and Jill H...
Kickstarter campaign makes ‘Back to the Future’ toy a real thing
Eri Hayward is cheerful, even as she drops verbal bombs that demolish mainstream conceptions about being transgender. “I always say being gay is harder than identifying as a heterosexual girl or boy trapped in the other body, at least in this soci...
Eri Hayward is a Mormon who lives with her boyfriend, so according to the church she’s ‘living in sin.’ Which is great, because no one’s concerned with her being transgender.
Renee Zellweger, who catapulted to fame long enough ago that kids born in her heyday are now starting college, learned a very hard lesson this week when photos circulated of her 45-year-old face smiling at cameras at Elle’s Women in Hollywood awar...
The Oscar winning actress has been torn to shreds by the media and public for her altered face. But she’s just a byproduct of the outrageous beauty standards placed on women.
In a stand-up set in Philadelphia last Thursday, Hannibal Buress went straight for Bill Cosby's jugular, calling out the jocular icon on his myriad alleged sexual assaults."It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the f—ing smuggest old bl...
‘I don’t know what I’m doing by telling you. I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns,’ said Hannibal Buress.
What compels people to do crazy life-threatening stunts? In the case of Glen Dell, he chose to be an aerobatic pilot because of the feeling of freedom he had when he got into the cockpit of a plane.In 2013, Dell took part in a stunt in which pro d...
Tribute video to pilot who was killed in unrelated incident
Harry Shearer looks nothing like Richard Nixon. And yet, equipped with some nifty prosthetics and ace voice work, the protean comedian fully embodies the disgraced, deeply insecure former president in all his preposterousness on the excellent 6-pa...
She may be a Barbie girl but she’s no longer living in a Barbie world.Last week, toy manufacturer Mattel announced on a conference call that sales for their flagship doll have been on a precipitous decline for three consecutive quarters. As Forbes...
Mattel recently announced a huge decline in Barbie sales, resulting in $11.2 million lost. Is the Barbie era over? And if so, how will the doll be remembered?
America’s seventh largest city was the site of the latest meeting of Women in the World. A sold-out crowd of 800 (mostly) women packed the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in San Antonio to take part in the event. “Your hearts are big, your wi...
Tina Brown’s signature event traveled to Texas to take on the issues important to women around the globe. From Ebola to immigration, from honor killing to the strains of military lif...
For a few months, the marauding jihadis of ISIS might have looked like an unstoppable army. That’s when they were moving at high speeds, their power blurred by hype and velocity. Slowed down by real resistance, a clearer picture takes shape and th...
Gone are the days when ISIS could take down cities in an instant. Now the extremist movement is bogged down in a small Syrian town. Has the West found the way to beat the group back?
It is no exaggeration to say that Carlo Cani, a 60-year-old coal miner from the Italian island of Sardinia, never did an honest day’s work in his life. In fact, the miner, who retired on a state pension in 2006, admitted that he has spent 35 years...
Carlo Cani spent 35 years fabricating every excuse in the book to avoid a proper day’s work. Italy’s workplace laws helped him grandly cheat the system.
North Korea is offering no reason for its decision Tuesday to release 56-year-old American Jeffrey Fowle, but the move could be the start of something big.Fowle, of Miamisburg, Ohio, had been held by North Korea for almost six months. Charged with...
By releasing American prisoner Jeffrey Fowle, Pyongyang is signaling it’s ready to talk. How a shift within the Kim regime should affect Washington’s response.
KIEV, Ukraine — Sergei, as we’ll call him, shakes and slurs his words as he tells his story. We are sitting in a ragged park behind a McDonalds restaurant on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital. Decaying Soviet tower blocks frame a children&apo...
Sporadic fighting continues against pro-Russian insurgents. But some of the worst enemies faced by Ukraine’s volunteer soldiers are the crooks in their own army.
ROME, Italy — When 27-year-old Sister Cristina Scuccia won Italy’s “The Voice” singing competition last summer after rocking such cover songs as Alicia Key’s "The One," Cyndi Lauper’s "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," and Bon Jovi’s...
When a young nun wins “The Voice” in Italy, then puts out a pop album, questions are raised about what those sexy songs really mean, and what she’s really up to.
Updated 5:35 pmAt least one bundle of U.S. weapons airdropped in Syria appears to have fallen into the hands of ISIS, a dangerous misfire in the American mission to speed aid to Kurdish forces making their stand in Kobani.An ISIS-associated YouTub...
In a new video, ISIS shows American-made weapons it says were intended for the Kurds but actually were air dropped into territory they control.
GARY, Indiana—Over a din of smart-ass comments and after-work banter, Peg at Bugsy’s Tavern asks the obvious question: “You guys wanna watch the news?” The answer is yes, of course, and the crowd at the tiny bar off the main drag in this busted to...
Darren Deon Vann's hometown has 10,000 abandoned houses, more than enough for him to hide six bodies. Even worse, it's a place where women disappear without being missed.
New details on the top Washington, D.C. rabbi arrested last week for voyeurism show how he allegedly lured women into the sights of his spy cams.Prosecutors allege Rabbi Barry Freundel recorded women in Kesher Israel synagogue’s ritual bath, or mi...
Multiple converts at Barry Freundel’s synagogue say he asked them to take nude practice baths, which prosecutors say is when he used hidden cameras to record them.
Even his alliterative name had mythic qualities: Ben Bradlee. That sounds like the name of a dynamic, fearless, big-city newspaper editor as it might have been invented by a Hollywood screenwriter. But even though he was portrayed in one movie and...
Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic says his boss, who died Tuesday at 93, justified the description ‘legendary’ a hundred times over.
We are all familiar with the “nanny state.” Now, at the University of New Orleans, we have a “nanny university.” As of this semester, our university president has circumvented state law and dictated where legal-age adults can and cannot smoke ciga...
The Louisiana university has turned into a nanny state, issuing a campus smoking ban of dubious legality.
Let’s begin by making it clear at the outset, as Floyd Abrams did in his piece in The Wall Street Journal, that the First Amendment here operates to protect both parties to the dispute over the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of The Death of Klinghof...
The former New York City mayor joined a demonstration outside the Metropolitan Opera on Monday night before the first performance. He explains why John Adams’s opera is so damaging.
When I walk into the Stephen Knolls School’s greenhouse, cheerfully bright even on an overcast day, the humidity frizzes my hair into a delirious halo. The school’s principal, Kim Redgrave, is explaining the school’s gardening program to me when t...
Sensory gardens are outdoor spaces designed to stimulate the senses and increase awareness of the body. Why they are so important for physically and cognitively disabled kids (and th...
She may be a Barbie girl but she’s no longer living in a Barbie world.Last week, toy manufacturer Mattel announced on a conference call that sales for their flagship doll have been on a precipitous decline for three consecutive quarters. As Forbes...
Mattel recently announced a huge decline in Barbie sales, resulting in $11.2 million lost. Is the Barbie era over? And if so, how will the doll be remembered?
“Contact tracing” sounds like something that would excite only the grimmest of health-care operations implementation scientists. But actually, contact tracing is the core principle of all public-health endeavors. It is the very thing that separate...
Contact tracing—tracking down an Ebola patient’s immediate circle—is doable in the West. But in West Africa, with limited transportation, fuel, and health workers, it’s daunting.
The ISIS terrorist group may have acquired a few old Soviet-built MiG fighters, according to a Syrian opposition group. But even if ISIS does have jet fighters, there is little chance that the group can do any real damage with those antiques beyon...
Syrian rebels say ISIS now has a few aircraft. American pilots can’t wait to shoot the things down.
The tiger and the elephant and the polar bear may be stars at the Buffalo Zoo, but it was a humble wallaby that helped scientists prove Ebola is tens of millions of years old, not a mere 10 millennia, as was previously supposed. Jurassic Ebola. Th...
By studying hair from a wallaby, scientists in Buffalo confirmed Ebola and other filoviruses are tens of millions of years old. How the finding may show us how to defend against them.
That’s no space station: It really is a small moon, even though it looks like the Death Star. Saturn’s moon Mimas is most remarkable for a huge crater, the result of an impact that must have nearly shattered it. But it’s weird in other respects, t...
Mimas, the wobbly little moon orbiting Saturn, is a ringer for the space station from ‘Star Wars,’ but that’s not the only odd thing about it—it may have a huge ocean under its surface.
America’s Ebola outbreak, now contained to two people, began with a flight from Liberia.Relying on that fact alone, the answer to the most recent issue dividing Congress—whether or not President Obama should impose a travel ban on West Africa—is s...
Instead of protecting public health, banning travel to and from Ebola-stricken countries will just increase illegal travel and make it harder to fight the disease.
This is a story about sharp elbows, rude words, constant combat, insinuating gossip, and bitter rivalries—most of it occurring in a tiny, cramped pressroom in the most media-centric metropolis on the planet—and it’s also about the power of love an...
Capital New York’s City Hall correspondent is in a relationship with the mayor’s chief spokesman, but the website’s editor insists there is no conflict of interest.
All-black attire hasn’t always been reserved for coffee shop poets and champagne-sipping fashionistas. Up until the turn of the 20th century, it was almost exclusively a sign of mourning: women publicly showing respect for the loss of a loved one....
A show of mourning clothing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals how high fashion dramatically presented itself at 19th-century funerals.
Ariana Grande has been on the phone to Miley Cyrus, apparently in despair, she told Britain’s Mirror. “I said, ‘Miley, I’m so sad—what do I do? This isn’t true. My heart is broken, I feel so bad.’”What was Grande denying? That she had stolen Cyrus...
The 21-year-old pop star is upset people think she’s a diva—but she should feel flattered. We salute a venerable lineage of strong women, big hair, and drama.
One of the last pictures of the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who died aged 82 at 7:40 p.m. Monday night at his home in Kent, Conn., was featured in Vogue. It pictured him leaning against a work-desk alongside his last high-profile client—Am...
His dresses were worn by Hollywood stars and first ladies, exuding glamour and sophistication. In a fashion world full of drama, his quiet, assured mastery did all the talking.
Jamie Blandford, who has become the 12th Duke of Marlborough following the death of the 11th Duke at the age of 88, was once described by his father as the “black sheep” of the Spencer-Churchill family (British aristocrats have an unnerving habit ...
Jamie Blandford, the 12th Duke of Marlborough is the latest in a long, disreputable line of British aristocrats, whose high-spending, drug-taking excesses have landed them in jail—an...
The first time I spoke with 48-year-old Victor Mooney, he had just reached the Samaná Province in the Dominican Republic. The previous five days were spent isolated and alone, rowing from Anguilla by way of the Mona Passage, which separates the Do...
One of Victor Mooney’s brothers died of AIDS. Another has the disease. Dedicated to them, he’s over halfway through his fourth attempt to row across the Atlantic.
It looks, at first sight, like the most streamlined, and sleek, and simple of sailboats, the top half of a bright-white star, or just a classic paper boat. It has the swooping, symmetrical grace of a bird's wingspan. But The STAR, the brainch...
There has never been a luxury boat like it—and Igor Lobanov is confident an extremely rich person will come forward and sail it away.
America’s seventh largest city is the site of the latest meeting of Women in the World. View images from the event.
America’s seventh largest city is the site of the latest meeting of Women in the World. View images from the event.
Lynn McBee, CEO of the Young Women’s Preparatory Network, says the seven campuses in the foundation’s system have found much success in their mission to educate young women. The foundation partners with independent school districts to create all-g...
With 4,100 students in seven schools across the state, the Young Women’s Preparatory Network — a beneficiary of Women in the World Texas — is demonstrating the effectiveness of singl...
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Senior Counsel, Bracewell & Giuliani; former U.S. Senator from TexasWho are you looking forward to seeing and meeting at WITW Texas? Diane von Furstenberg has been an original throughout her life – the wrap dress ...
We posed three questions to three participants in anticipation of Women in the World Texas, which takes place October 22 in San Antonio.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The girls of Afghanistan have been betrayed. When Taliban rule ended almost 13 years ago, international donors rushed in to promise that young women would no longer be denied an education. Western governments spent a decade pa...
One reason given for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was to educate girls. But as the Western military shrinks there, so does the funding for those schools.
On Jan. 1, 2008, teenage sisters Amina and Sarah Said were shot to death by their father in their hometown of Lewisville, Texas. It later came to light that the murders were a premeditated “honor killing,” as retribution for the eldest, Amina, rej...
Every year, about 26 women are killed in the United States by a relative – in the name of family honor. The story of two sisters murdered outside Dallas is now a powerful new documen...
Maile Molin had her “eureka moment,” as she calls it, while working in Guero’s Taco Bar, a taqueria in South Austin.She was watching her fellow coworkers, many of whom were immigrants, struggle as they balanced two jobs, cared for their families a...
Maile Molin, the 2014 Toyota Mothers of Invention honoree at WITW Texas, redefined innovation and entrepreneurial spirit to devise a creative approach to bring English-language educa...
Defying terror attacks and civil unrest during Afghanistan’s presidential runoff election, a courageous cohort of women from remote corners of the country came together in Kabul to pursue a common goal: gaining a serious role for women in building...
With training provided by the Afghan Women’s Network and The Institute for Inclusive Security, Afghan women are leveraging their hard-won gains
The “anxiety of influence” breathes and heaves almost four decades after Harold Bloom birthed that wily method of reading: during composition a work of literature is engaged in an unconscious “agon” with a certain existing work, an agon that forms...
Every author welcomes praise, but what’s a writer to do when readers persist in comparing him to an another author he’s not even that crazy about?
If you have been following the rolling fiftieth anniversaries of the last two years—the March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination in 1963, Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964—you know that the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 p...
In the mid-’60s polar opposites Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan promised America more than they could possibly deliver. The result was decades of cynicism about government.
In recent weeks, the Ritz-Carlton hotel company, the NFL, and the Smithsonian Institution have all made news by asking people to do work for free. Such practices are hardly surprising in themselves—working for nothing seems to be a key building bl...
Remember when people volunteered to help the poor? Nowadays the poor volunteer to help the wealthy.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, the NFL was in crisis. Back then, every single newspaper, website, and news show (even the fake news shows) was awash in gridiron scandal. Some were even questioning if the NFL could survive its own infam...
A month ago it looked like the NFL might at last be pilloried for its culture of violence and big money. Then the media lost interest, and things got back to normal.
Ward Cunningham, Jimmy Wales, and the Wonder of WikisWhen he launched the Web in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee intended it to be used as a collaboration tool, which is why he was dismayed that the Mosaic browser did not give users the ability to edit the ...
In an excerpt from his new book, ‘The Innovators,’ Walter Isaacson recounts the improbable story of the online encyclopedia that has proven its detractors wrong time and again.
The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical WeaponsBy C.J. Chivers, New York Times From 2004 to 2011, American and Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and at times were wounded by, chemical weapons that were hidden or abandoned years earli...
From abandoned chemical weapons to Afghanistan’s only female warlord, The Daily Beast picks the best journalism from around the web this week.
If you want to understand and appreciate jazz there is no better place to start—apart from listening to the music, of course—than with the critical writing of Nat Hentoff. Beginning in the 1950s when he was on the scene covering Monk and Miles, Cl...
The tenor saxophonist was one of the most imaginatively restless artists to ever work a bandstand. Nat Hentoff explains why we're still playing catch up with this musical genius.
World