For the second year in a row , the mysterious visitor who marked Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday each year by leaving three red roses and a bottle of cognac on the author’s Baltimore grave has failed to appear. The tradition, which began on Jan. 19, 1949, was last carried out on…
Continue reading …Sarah Palin operatives have begun putting out presidential feelers in Iowa, asking potential allies and activists whether they’d support a campaign, sources tell RealClearPolitics . Iowa’s politicos had until now assumed Palin wasn’t running, because most hadn’t heard from her, even as other would-be 2012 nominees jockeyed for their support. But…
Continue reading …American Idol ’s two new high-profile judges debuted last night, and critics, for the most part, yawned: “Losing Simon Cowell from American Idol was like losing Alan Alda from MASH ,” moans Ken Levine on the Huffington Post . In his place, we have Jennifer Lopez, “a vacuous former movie star/former recording…
Continue reading …Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, those sweet, cuddly pandas that rank among our national treasures, actually aren’t ours—but we get to keep them for a little while longer. At last night’s state dinner, Obama announced that China, which has been loaning us the creatures under an agreement that expired…
Continue reading …It’s not a good day to be a mobster: The FBI has arrested more than 100 in what it’s calling the biggest mob bust in New York history. The raids, which began yesterday and continued into the early morning, reeled in “basically the whole administration of the Colombo family,” a…
Continue reading …When he was president, Vicente Fox was a huge proponent of Mexico’s war on drugs. But with his nation reeling from the drug-related violence that claimed 12,000 lives last year alone, Fox has done a 180. He now believes production, transit, and distribution of narcotics—and not just marijuana—…
Continue reading …Jon Stewart ended Tuesday’s Sarah Palin slapfest by inviting her on the Daily Show —and last night , he extended another invitation to Glenn Beck. Beck told Today Show host Meredith Vieira yesterday that even in light of the Tucson shootings, he doesn’t regret any violent statements he meant as jokes,…
Continue reading …Nearly nine years to the day since he was kidnapped, new details are coming out about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The Pearl Project has worked for three years to answer the questions that surround his death, and an investigative journalism organization is publishing its report…
Continue reading …Robert Bentley is quickly getting the hang of being a politician: Alabama’s new governor stuck his foot in it in his first hour in office, and now he’s rapidly mastering the art of apologizing. “If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am…
Continue reading …South Korea has accepted a Northern Korean proposal for talks between the two nations’ defense ministers, in an effort to ease tensions following the Yeonpyeong shelling. The North has offered to sit down several times this month, but until now Seoul has rejected its overtures, demanding an apology for the…
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