Daily Briefing
Deep buzz for the content-deprived
Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy- fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know, or at least enough to fake it.
News of the World shuttered, consigliere Les Hinton and the BSkyB deal at risk -- can Rupert still prevail as he always has in the past?...
Just 48 hours before his premiere gun-fighting agency took a public flogging in Congress last month, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a memo that escaped much public notice but left federal prosecutors with an unmistakable message.
People who buy guns at U.S. shops with the intent of secretly transferring them to someone else–a tactic known as “straw buying” that is at the heart of Mexican border violence–should face new, stiffer prison sentences, Holder declared...
When the writer joined the social network three years ago, she used it to share random thoughts about TV and life. Since then, she has become a Twitter addict. In an extract from her new book, she explains what she loves -- and hates -- about it...
After his family recovered the bodies of his grandparents and moved into the cramped prefabricated home where they all sleep in the same room, Toshiki Onodera, 17, decided that the old goals should still matter. So Onodera started talking, once again, about baseball. He practiced normalcy, as if hoping to trick it to return. He posted his high school team’s spring practice schedule on the living room wall and said, “I can’t be sad for the rest of my life.”...
After five decades of guerrilla struggle and two million lives lost, the flags are flapping proudly here in this capital. The new national anthem is blasting all over town. People are toasting oversize bottles of White Bull beer (the local brew), and children are boogieing in the streets."Free at Last," reads a countdown clock...
For seven years Fox News has pushed back against the daily scrutiny and criticism leveled at it by Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group. But after David Brock, the group’s founder, said in March that his group’s new strategy amounted to a “war on Fox,” Fox ratcheted up its response...
Every Saturday for the past couple of years, the members of the Tuscaloosa Amateur Radio Club have met here, in the back corner of the only Chick-fil-A in this low-slung Alabama river town. They meet to discuss politics and family and sports, but mostly they meet to discuss radio – the paddles, the repeaters, the boat anchors, the birds, and the brass pounders. Radio is their hobby, their love...
The Great White Spot, which occurs about once every 30 Earth years, is a windy, towering cloud of ammonia and water spewing out super jolts of thunder and lightning. The storm is about 10,000 times stronger than those on Earth...
President Obama on Tuesday rejected calls for a short-term increase in the legal limit on government borrowing and summoned congressional leaders to the White House to restart negotiations over a long-term plan to restrain the deepening national debt...
This is a film about the triumph of the weak...
