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.
The man who was previously considered a "person of interest" in the murders of two Texas District attorneys, has been upgraded to the chief suspect and is now in jail on other charges.
After disappearing from the public eye for two weeks, America's favorite "artificial" head of state re-emerged at midnight Monday to celebrate the most important holiday in North Korea — albeit a scaled down version without any fireworks, figurative or otherwise.
After 11 years of imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel has never gotten his day in court, but thanks to The New York Times op-ed page, he's finally getting his say in public.
A police sergeant has found himself out of a job after showing up at a training day with a batch of paper shooting targets printed with the iconic image of Trayvon Martin's hoodie on the front.
Jenna Bush Hager gave birth to a healthy baby girl on Sunday. When the young Margaret Laura "Mila" Hager goes home from the hospital she'll sleep under a portrait of a cat painted by her (in)famous grandfather.
New York City isn't necessarily known to be home to the country's friendliest police force, but the NYPD's latest tactics for cutting down on petty theft sound downright mean.
The Northern lights will be on display tonight for the top half of the United States. A small sliver of the mid-Atlantic should get the best view.
According to this EXCLUSIVE report in the New York Post, real estate heiress Joselyn Wohl has been accused of stabbing her life coach in the hand with a fork.
President Obama may want to think twice about that sequester pay cut. His tax returns, released Friday, show that his main source of income -- which used to be royalties from the sale of his books -- is now his presidential salary.
The arrest warrants for two 18-year-olds accused of raping two 13-year-old girls were unsealed late Friday afternoon, two months after the alleged attack, and they paint a very different picture of what happened than the story we've been hearing from the Torrington police — the same story students have been using to blame the alleged victims.
Carnival "Poop" Cruises, tickets for which are cheaper than usual for some reason, will not reimburse the Coast Guard the $780,000 it spent rescuing the crap-encrusted Triumph from itself.
Late this week we learned that the sequester may bring an end to the annual tradition of Fleet Week, in which members of the Navy and Marines swarm New York. Is this a good thing? We discuss, with unadulterated weekend joy — and posters.
An ode to the best sandwich in the land, on its special day. It's grilled, it's cheese.
There is a sad reality to the otherwise hilarious non-time machine "time machine" story that came out of Iran this week: It's making the otherwise legitimate Iranian scientific community look bad, even though it knows — just like you — that the inventor is a total quack.
Three boys have been arrested for assaulting a 15-year-old in California who hanged herself. If that sounds familiar, the arrests came one week after a 17-year-old in Canada hanged herself after an alleged attack by four boys at a party. There were photos. Indeed, if the combination of rape, victim-blaming, and a social media tornado from small towns to national outrage seems like something of a trend this year, perhaps this is the brutal new reality in age of Steubenville, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Seth Mandel on the trial of Kermit Gosnell, Alex Seitz-Wald on Mitch McConnell, Kevin Roose on abandoing Bitcoin, Matt Latimer on Thatcher's compromises, Om Malik on Mark Zuckerberg's immigration reform.
Don't look now, but the birthday of Kim Jong-un's grandfather is on Monday, and nothing would do more poetic justice to North Korea's warped version of history and its "unacceptable" war-mongering rhetoric than to drown one of its oldest enemies in a sea of nuclear flames. Which absurdity will win out?
Authorities in Arizona say they intercepted a package on Thursday that had been filled with explosives and mailed to controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
One of the more interesting aspects of the release of the annual budget are updates to the historical tables, massive spreadsheets of data that show government spending stretching back decades. Here are five of the more interesting graphs that result.
The mother of George Zimmerman released a letter on the one-year anniversary of his "most unfortunate arrest" Thursday, claiming that Florida police took him into custody to "placate the masses"—and not because he shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old buying some Skittles.
The store that sold Nancy Lanza the gun that her son used to kill her ended up losing its license to sell firearms six days after the shooting, new documents reveal. Not because of the massacre conducted by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary — because of violations stretching back way before Nancy Lanza ever entered the shop.
The World Meteorological Organization announced the retirement after deciding that the name was, well, "inappropriate."
Kirsten Powers on media coverage of an abortion trial, Fareed Zakaria on the lessons of Thatcherism, Drew Magary on Mike Rice's abuses, Charles M. Blow on Rand Paul's Howard visit, and Tom Doran on Michelle Malkin's Twitter aggregator.
When you ask someone if they have a "cab story," chances are, if you're in an urban, taxi-taking environment, the answer will be yes, and will be followed by any number of harrowing tales. But those are not the only stories.
After mastering the art of drones (by way of Photoshop) and the science of sending a monkey (that was not real) into space, the latest breakthrough out of Iran is a "time machine." The only thing stopping production, apparently, is the fear that China will make millions of crappy versions of it.
Police are investigating a severed goat head that was delivered to Tom Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs, at the iconic Wrigley Field. That's weird right? Not in Chicago. Apparently this has happened before — several times.
Georgia officials won't say why a gunman took four of local firefighters hostage in a Freddie Mac-owned house on Wednesday afternoon, but based on that Freddie Mac detail, you can venture a guess.
Opponents criticize Wednesday's background check compromise, suggesting it wouldn't have prevented several high profile mass shootings. Indeed, of the 30 incidents since 2003 that we looked at, the new deal would quite possibly only have stopped one.
The NFL said that "half the league" would never get away with playing under the influence of the little blue pills, no matter what Seattle Seahawks All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman says.
The 24-hour New Jersey landmark is mostly known for serving comfort food beneath a giant sign imploring customers to "EAT HEAVY." But not today.
If you thought Virginia was weird, it's easier to pass a law through Montana's state legislature that allows citizens to eat their own roadkill than it is to strike down a law that made gay sex a felony punishable with up to 10 years in jail and a $50,000 fine.
New CNN president Jeff Zucker, as The Washington Post's Paul Farhi explains in a lengthy profile today, is a "hyper-competitive" but patient man who will try anything and everything to "blow up the place" and get you to watch the still struggling network without alienating the base — of viewers or advertisers.
Kelefa Sanneh on Brad Paisley's accidental racism, John McWhorter on the use of "illegal immigrant," Alex Pareene on Mitch McConnell's cunning, Farhad Manjoo on the Bitcoin hype cycle, and Thomas Friedman on the legacy of the Arab Spring.
What is the gift you can give to someone who has everything, including insomnia? The gift of sleep, of course. But it won't be cheap.
A treasury department letter shows the U.S. government fully, officially approved Beyoncé and Jay-Z's "educational exchange" trip to Cuba, but some politicians still aren't satisfied that they played by the government rules.
The New York Times national security correspondent and author of The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, is a fan of Homeland — despite covering the C.I.A., and despite the liberties the show takes.
Robin Kelly, the gun hating former Illinois state rep who's friends with Obama and enjoyed over $2 million of Bloomberg's money for her campaign, has won the election to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. It wasn't even close.
Fans of justice will be glad to hear that New York City will pay for all those books and all that media equipment that the police trashed when it famously raided the Occupy Wall Street camp on November 15, 2011
Powerball, the ubiquitous lottery game, finally arrived in California on Monday, and began to spread its enticing message of easy, instant fortune to residents of the Golden State.
Since the stabbing that wounded 14 people at a Houston-area college, one student has been taking some of the credit for apprehending his fellow student.
Equal Pay Day acknowledges one of the worst deals in the American economy. For every dollar an average man earns, his female counterpart earns 77 cents. Here's what that looks like by state — and in real time.
There is a change in the venerable Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will take place May 28 to 30 near Washington, D.C. Spelling is not enough. There's a vocabulary portion of the competition, now, too.
This is not how you'd expect Snapchat, the self-destructing image-sharing app, to get college kids into trouble: many underage students at the University of Virginia dumped their beer and spirits because of a social media hoax on Monday afternoon.
As Washington runs to-and-fro on firearm legislation, student gun enthusiasts at some universities are taking matters into their own hands by showing their desire for concealed weapons on campus. Here's how the gun lobby inside actual schools is trying — and failing — to set an example, one empty holster at a time.
Glenn Greenwald on the mourning of Margaret Thatcher, Bret Stephens on the other kind of marriage, Judith Miller on Jana Winter's jail prospects, David Plotz on his abusive high school basketball coach, and Jeffrey Goldberg on the legacy of the Iraq War.
The total reported impact of this still very mysterious strain has grown to eight deaths and 24 infected people, but the bird flu might just be a lot worse than China is letting on — and it wouldn't be the first time the country's health officials have "covered up" a major disease threat.
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