Four U.S. Soldiers Killed in Afghanistan, Hours After Taliban Talks Announced
No one said that the Taliban's plan to hold direct talks with the U.S. would be easy.
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Welcome to the NASA Grand Challenge, where everyone from government agencies to citizen scientists will compete to figure out the best way to detect and study earth-threatening asteroids.
No one said that the Taliban's plan to hold direct talks with the U.S. would be easy.
Josh Duggar, the oldest of the 19 Duggar children, is leaving the family's home state of Arkansas and moving to D.C. for a job with the Family Research Council.
Michael Hastings, most recently of Buzzfeed but well-known and respected for his fearless reporting in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and elsewhere, has died at the age of 33
Today in viral videos: Russell Brand gets sympathetic, 50 (completely unscientific) ways to trick people into thinking you're smarter than you are, and summer treat from Disney.
Google has filed a motion to end the gag order on the secret FISA court requests that it gets from the government as a part of the National Security Agencies surveillance, which could work considering how recent efforts to reveal the secrets of the secret court have gone.
This is where we are with the IRS scandal: bogged in a subset of a subset of a subset of a war. Today's volley was the releasing of an interview transcript. World War IRS.
The Today show plaza—long the place of concerts, hosts doing silly things, awkward chats—may be getting some sort of makeover. In his New York Times report about the show replacing its longtime director, Brian Stelter quotes an unnamed executive as saying "We’re rethinking the plaza experience."
Today in show business news: Jurassic Park 4 lives again, Pacific Rim may live again too, and Liv Tyler heads to TV.
The results are undeniable. These stockings, which are made to look like a pair of very hairy legs, induce groans, nausea, and physical discomfort and according to Weibo they're the best deterrent to cat calls and objectification that the country has to offer. There's one problem if you want a pair though—they're probably an elaborate joke.
Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto is not a rape apologist. He's not a woman hater. He only attacks sexual assault victims to help other women.
Can you guess which one? If you think it's the one embroiled in a violent crack cocaine scandal, you are wrong.
Every few months, for reasons that only they can really know, Politico founders submit themselves to questioning from publications that not so secretly hate them.
Don't expect Star Wars: Episode VII to have the Lucas touch. According to a new interview, the original Star Wars auteur isn't even talking to the young Hollywood Padawan about his re-branding of the empire. Which is kind of sad, but maybe a good idea.
Props to Joanna Rohrback, who managed to turn her memeness into Internet fame in less than a month — now with an actual video for a pop song, which, apparently, is about Taylor Swift.
It's an awkward moment to be a professor at New York University — especially if your employer subsidizes luxury housing for you and your spouse.
Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech this afternoon celebrating the administration's push for new restrictions on gun ownership. Which is a little like an athlete stopping mid-race to say that he already considered himself a winner. While in sixth place.
The former government contractor who leaked National Security Agency documents that turned the world's digital privacy expectations upside-down appears to be keeping up with his plan to seek asylum in Iceland, with an assist from Wikileaks, of course. And the Icelandic government tells The Atlantic Wire that won't be easy.
One of the perks of being Treasury Secretary is getting your name on every dollar bill, but that awesome responsibility meant that new boss Jack Lew had to reinvent his name.
Johnny Depp knows that the racial politics of the Lone Ranger character Tonto are dicey, in general, especially when played by a white person like him, in particular. So to get out in front of such concerns, he's told Brian Hiatt in his Rolling Stone cover story that in director Gore Verbinski's reboot of the 1950s TV staple, Tonto is "no joke." Hence the makeup.
"Maker of 'Candy Crush Saga' Plans IPO," reports the Wall Street Journal today, which very possibly makes zero sense to you. What's Candy Crush? you might ask. How does something with a silly name like that get big enough for a public offering? And did you say Zynga? Because that doesn't sound good. The Atlantic Wire is here to answer all those questions and more.
If you were wondering how the NSA and FBI felt about the very friendly hearing the House Intelligence Committee invited them to today, a hot mic has your answer. "Tell your boss," NSA Director Keith Alexander told the FBI deputy director, "I owe him another friggin' beer."
Ben Greenman is a writer who pokes, prods, and sets readers off balance in hopes of generating emotion and thought — and maybe, sometimes, simply because he feels like it. This is a man who has purposely inserted typos in his books.
North Korea, land of gulags, government-enforced information blackouts, and humans so hungry they eat other humans, has finally weighed in on the NSA-spying controversy and has become ... an advocate for American civil liberties.
Though Netflix may have emerged as the frontrunner when it comes to original streaming content, what with the successes of House of Cards and Arrested Development, don't expect Amazon to be following in its footsteps entirely. You won't be able to binge watch their new series Alpha House.
A suspicious package brought operations at CBS's Washington office to a standstill just before lunchtime on Tuesday. The building was evacuated for about an hour while police investigated the scene.
A former college professor accused of going overseas to have sex with minors has become the 500th person to hold a spot on the FBI's famous Ten Most Wanted List. Here's a look back at some "fun" facts about the publicity stunt turned surprisingly effective law-enforcement tool.
George Packer on the reach of Silicon Valley, Tim Shorrock on consolidating our spies, Leigh Alexander on the future of video games, Noreene Malone on Michael Bloomberg's composting plan, and Ramesh Ponnuru on the coming judgment of the Supreme Court.
Community's new/old showrunner feels really bad about the terrible things he said about the season he wasn't in charge of because, you know, he got fired, and he's sorry because he didn't think about other people first, which doesn't make a lot of sense considering pretty much the entire TV world listens to the drip of his every word.
Today in celebrity gossip: Justin Bieber has more car trouble, Melissa Etheridge speaks out Angelina Jolie, and Lil Wayne accidentally desecrates a flag.
With a summer full of beach reading (hopefully) ahead of us, we're faced with the technological dilemma of the season: How venture outside without ruining our fragile, not-amenable-to-the-elements e-reading gadgets. So what to do? The Atlantic Wire spoke with the Internet's tech experts and gadget nerds for their advice on e-reading outside like a pro.
Vulnerable Canadian rapper/crooner Drake like to talk about girls, like, a lot — the ones he had, he has, or he will have — so it's surprising when he says in his new GQ cover story that Will Smith, the noted physicist, recently blew his mind with a new theory about love.
Of the nine companies supposedly working with the government on PRISM, four and a half — Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft (which may or may not include Skype), Apple, and Google (sort of) — have disclosed the number of government requests they get including the secret FISA court ones, giving us an idea of which tech company the government loves most.
In a preview of the many pronouncements to come on the floor of Congress as the House debates a legislative ban on all abortions after 20 weeks, allow us to introduce you to Rep. Michael Burgess, who believes that abortion should be banned earlier than the Supreme Court says it should because, in part, he knows fetuses feel pain. He knows this because he says he's seen male fetuses begin masturbating in the womb around 15 weeks into a pregnancy.
The House Intelligence Committee invited Gen. Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA, for a discussion of his agency's surveillance tactics. Four disrupted plots were detailed. But on the whole, the one-sided hearing belied the witnesses' frequent claims that the NSA receives robust oversight from Congress.
Afghanistan's military formally took over responsibility for its own security on Tuesday, accepting the handoff from NATO forces, whether security forces there are ready or not.
On last night's Daily Show, John Oliver nearly fell into temptation. You see, Palin returned to Fox, and he almost didn't know where to start, but then he realized something: "We can respond to her obvious trolling with a series of insulting jokes," he said, "or we can just f--king ignore her."
The scenes continuing to emerge from Rio to Brasilia and back again are not entirely unlike what we've seen in Turkey of late, and like the fight over Taksim Square that morphed into a bigger argument against the prime minister, the protests in Brazil over a single bus-fare hike have transformed into a passionate protest against government corruption, tear gas and all.
He, of all people, may actually be the person to figure this thing out. Franco is asking for $500,000 on Indiegogo to help fund three films based on his collection of short stories, Palo Alto. And while that may make you groan — we certainly did — he's offsetting some of the displeasure of, you know, giving a rich celebrity more money for a passion project by telling donors that all the profits from the sale of the films will go to charity. It's hard to hate on him for that.
Talk of borders and visas aside, the real problem for conservatives is voting rights for immigrants who could be legalized by reform.
President Obama defended the administration's decision to "ramp up" their support to Syrian rebel forces by, among other things, providing some lethal aid, during a sprawling interview with Charlie Rose that aired late Monday night on PBS.
Everybody wins when NASA does something good, and the news that the program selected its highest percentage, ever, of female astronauts for its new class is no exception.
We've already seen some pretty stunning photos emerge from the continuing protests in Turkey, but none have quite stuck in the imagination as much as that of a silent, standing protest by one man in Taksim Square.
The conservative push in the House to pass a restrictive abortion bill ticked up one more level on the futility meter today as the President officially indicated his intention to veto the measure, should it reach his desk.
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