Obama's Two Weeks of Scandalmania, in Photos
Three big scandals. Two Marine umbrellas. And a non-salute en route to Memorial Day. Plus more visual evidence from 12 days of scandal town.
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Memorial Day Weekend is here! The summer season has officially started, with all the joys and stresses that come with it. One of those stresses is the mad, fraught dash to get out of the city every Friday, sometimes successful, sometimes not. But that's OK. A weekend in the city can be fun, too. Really, there are infinite ways to enjoy a summer weekend. Here are a few.
Three big scandals. Two Marine umbrellas. And a non-salute en route to Memorial Day. Plus more visual evidence from 12 days of scandal town.
What seems like progress from the top-down may reveal the problem with Boy Scouts from the inside-out: its first official coming out party is still a microcosm of discord on gay acceptance, especially in Christian America, no matter what polls say today or the Supreme Court declares in a few weeks. Here's a survey of the reaction so far.
With the help of my Atlantic Wire colleagues, I have compiled 12 contenders for the best summer food, along with the reasons we would consume these items all year round if we had our druthers. Who is the top of the summer food pile? Help us choose.
For the fifth straight night, rioters have broken windows and set fire to cars in neighborhoods around Stockholm, Sweden. The violence is drawing renewed attention to the interplay of immigration, economics, and government in Europe.
Today in viral videos: lesbian porn can make actual lesbians unhappy, that kid who got turned down by Kate Upton gets a prom upgrade, the 50 quotes you're probably misquoting, and hashtags.
Today in show business news: Jennifer Hudson might become an American Idol judge, Jon Stewart finds a leading man for his risky directing debut, and Tom Cruise walks away from a movie.
On Friday afternoon, Toronto mayor Rob Ford became the first mayor of a major North American city to officially deny smoking crack during his tenure.
"Let’s get this straight up front: I am now writing a blog post, not blogging a blog," writes Forrest Wickman at Slate, the good people who brought you the great two-spaces-after-a-period debate. Oh yes. Oh yes. They are at it again, this time with a post in which he takes on the matter of what to call this thing we do.
Marissa Mayer is coming for online video — and the ads that accompany it. Days after announcing its $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr, Yaho has submitted a bid for Hulu. Now starts the bidding war, all $2 billion of it.
Let's face it: the weather is not cooperating in much of the country when it comes to barbecues and whatnot for Memorial Day 2013. So, obviously, you should do nothing but consume endless culture instead. And there's a lot out there! But, really, there's only so much time in a long weekend. We've clocked it for you.
A bit slow to warm up the engines, law enforcement officials in the U.S. and Australia have begun issuing warnings to law enforcement agencies and the public about the dangers of 3D-printing guns. Pro: Video of a printed gun exploding! Con: Their concerns are misplaced.
The return of Arrested Development is fast approaching, but, really, nobody knows much of anything about what's actually in the new episodes. So that makes these four new videos released by Netflix on Friday all the more enticing.
But fear not, BBQ-ers! The Atlantic Wire's resident cicada expert is here to help! Cicadas and humans alike can celebrate this long weekend in peace, together, at the cicada-cue. Like so.
Princeton's annual alumni bacchanal is in crisis. Reunions, as the well-documented event is known, coincides this year with a meningitis outbreak on Princeton's campus. But how serious of a threat, really, does meningitis pose to Princeton's campus-wide merriment? Not a whole lot — if Princetonians can hold off on making out too much.
This month Random House Children's Books released The Mighty Lalouche, a picture book by Matthew Olshan illustrated by Sophie Blackall. It gets my vote for cutest picture book of the year so far.
Unconfirmed believer in the paranormal and full-time prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, still hasn't moved into the Koutei, a Tokyo mansion where prime ministers of Japan are supposed to live, since coming into power in December. His political opponents are now mocking Abe for being afraid of ghosts — and having looked into the history of the place, well, we don't exactly blame him.
After hearing a lot about the "flat" new look of iOS 7 that may or may not be revealed next month, there's finally been some light shed on details of what the latest iPhone design basics might look like — and, well, things start off pretty much in the dark.
When Senator Mark Pryor voted against a gun background check compromise, he was taking a measured political risk. Even as an anti-gun group announces a plan to spend $350,000 on ads criticizing Pryor ahead of a near-certain second vote, a detailed new poll shows why it may have made political sense.
Andrew Goldman has an extensive interview with Billy Joel in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, which — after you finish admiring the accompanying photo of Joel and his pug posing in a sidecar — covers the piano man's finances, divorces, and drinking.
Kiel Brennan-Marquez on the ethics of drones, Saeed Jones on New York's spate of attacks aimed at gay people, Jane Mayer on Obama's foreign policy speech, Bhaskar Sunkara on the future of liberalism, and Philip Preville on Toronto's scandalized mayor.
Today in celebrity news: Amanda Bynes was arrested last night, Leo's space trip earns millions, and Prince William receives a gift.
Are we sure this isn't a viral marketing stunt for a remake of To Catch a Thief? About a week after some $1.4 million worth of Chopard jewels were stolen from a hotel during the Cannes Film Festival, a diamond necklace valued at $2.6 million vanished from a swanky party on the French Riviera that hosted the likes of Paris Hilton and Alessandra Ambrosio.
Now that we've reached Memorial Day weekend, the kick-off to the season and all of its sweaty flair, Mister Softee worship can begin in full, right along with a lot of Mister Softee hate.
The Israeli mobile GPS startup Waze has another mega-suitor in Silicon Valley, with Google reportedly joining the bidding war and topping the $1 billion offer rumored to be coming from Facebook. What is it, really, about this mapping app that's drawing acquisition prices as high as — if not higher than — Instagram and Tumblr?
One of the big fears about Obamacare has been that insurers will charge exorbitant prices for plans sold on state exchanges, meaning the law would have the opposite effect of its goal to make health care more affordable. But that's not happening in California.
It's still not entirely clear what caused I-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington to collapse Thursday night. What is clear is that, if the state had needed to repair it, getting federal money to do so would be an uphill climb.
Chaperones at St. David Catholic Secondary School near Waterloo, Ontario in Canada had 15 of its teenagers go missing on a school trip intended to teach "survival and backcountry camping" in a national park.
Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart explained that the Department of Justice is going after people whose crimes seem minor — especially when you look at them in comparison to what Wall Street executives did to create the financial crisis. To which Stewart asked: "What, none of them bought pot?"
At some point over the next few weeks, the NYPD is likely to lose a civil trial criticizing it for repeatedly and on a massive scale violating the civil rights of city residents. The cops will probably blame the judge, mostly because it can't blame the numbers.
Late Thursday, a bridge over the Skagit River north of Seattle collapsed, taking at least two cars (and the people inside them) with it. They both survived, but it's the infrastructure conversation all over again. Get ready to talk about "functionally obsolete."
Quick update on NASA's amazing plan to lasso an asteroid: they're making progress on the ion propulsion engine they'll need for the mission.
If you were wondering why anti-abortion advocates were so keen on getting Gosnell into the news cycle this spring, look no further than HR 1797: the reintroduced "D.C. Pain Capable Unborn Protection Act," which some lawmakers hope to institute on a national level.
Google announced Thursday that they've taken their Street View cameras on a hiking trip around the Galapagos islands — above ground, and under water.
Today in show business news: Steven Soderbergh is headed to television, Intervention will intervene no more, and USA is sending camp kids to battle.
The National Council of the Boy Scouts of America passed a resolution permitting openly gay youth the participate in scouting activities on Thursday afternoon at a national meeting in Grapevine, Texas. Passed by a vote of 61% among 1,400 members, the resolution will go into effect in January 2014, and overturns more than century of organizational precedent.
President Obama's speech on counterterrorism on Thursday won rave reviews among some who seemed to see it as a return of the liberal constitutional law professor who ran for president in 2008. But while the tone might have been refreshing, maybe we should wait to see Obama's follow-through?
According to multiple outlets, the IRS administrator who first revealed and is perhaps central to the scandal at the agency, has been placed on administrative leave. With pay.
Doesn't Ashton Kutcher know what happens to people who complain about how terrible Twitter has gotten since the good old days? They get shamed with the following adage: Twitter is what you make it, bro.
Weiner's new official campaign website switched up its main logo to a budget version of the New York City skyline late Thursday afternoon, because the background art temporarily adorning AnthonyWeiner.com... was a budget version of the Pittsburgh skyline.
Bryan Singer broke some news on Twitter today: Evan Peters, of American Horror Story, will be playing Quicksilver in Singer's upcoming X-Men film. Alone, that's not all that interesting, but put that together with Joss Whedon's intention to put Quicksilver in the Avengers sequel, and things get really interesting.
The Code Pink protester got herself inside the National Defense University in Washington on Thursday for Obama's big drone speech, even though she's been a famous heckler in Washington for a decade. So how does she do it? By using her old name — plus maybe a little help from middle-aged woman invisibility syndrome.
In an attempt to move beyond standard promoted tweets, Twitter is trying so hard to legitimize its business model that, well, you're about to find out just how much Twitter really knows about where you shop. And the main privacy model "doesn't actually provide protection," a leading online privacy firm tells The Atlantic Wire.
There ended up being two speakers Thursday at the National Defense University in DC. The first, as planned, was President Obama. The other, speaking for a surprisingly long time, was Madea Benjamin, a well-known heckler.
New Jersey state investigators have revealed that 29 bars and restaurants, including 13 TGI Fridays, stand "accused of putting cheap booze in premium brand liquor bottles and selling it to patrons who thought they were buying the good stuff." Oof.
Hurricane experts at the NOAA delivered some potentially bad news on Thursday: 2013's Atlantic hurricane season, is forecasted to be "active or extremely active," poised to produce 3-6 "major" hurricanes, 7-11 regular hurricanes, and more than a dozen tropical storms. And you should listen to them, despite the inherent weakness of predictions.
When justifying his use of drone strikes — in countries we're not at war with, in a war against "networks" with a not-yet-clear end, in a major speech on a limitless war — it helps for President Obama to use the rhetoric of George W. Bush as a foil. At least he's not as bad as that guy, right?
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