It's fascinating to think of what might have been if fate had taken a different course — if the RMS Titanic had embarked with sufficient lifeboats, if Captain E.J. Smith had heeded the warnings of icebergs, if Jeremy Sisto had been cast in the movie instead of Leonardo DiCaprio.
Before he became president, Barack Obama promised he was going to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center before his first term was out. "I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that," Obama told ABC News in November 2008, shortly after winning the election. Almost four years later, Guantanamo remains open, and now another one of its prisoners has died.
In a full page ad printed in yesterday's Washington Post, porn magnate Larry Flynt, founder of the pioneering nudie mag Hustler, promised to shell out one million dollars to anyone with verifiable information about Mitt Romney's "unreleased tax returns, and/or details of his offshore accounts and business partnerships."
The Taliban is focusing all of its efforts on kidnapping or killing Prince Harry, a spokesman for the militant group said today.
According to People Magazine, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively were married Sunday evening near Charleston, South Carolina. This is the second marriage for Reynolds – he was previously married for two years to Scarlett Johansson – and the first for Lively. Reynolds was also engaged to Alanis Morissette for over two years in the mid-2000s.
If you're a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson films — Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood — chances are you're excited about The Master, which has already been hyped to death by festival audiences.
The best way to get young people interested in emergency preparedness: zombies.
As if parents didn't have enough on their minds with all their kids stealing cars and playing with dead squirrels, now they have to worry about vicious, child-swallowing storm drains. Jeffery LaPorta was just being a normal 14-year-old teenager, riding his bike with friends near the edge an overflowing creek when disaster struck. Somehow LaPorta fell into the creek, which swept him into a nearby storm drain.
Earlier today, former MMA fighter Jarrod Wyatt pled guilty to first degree murder and mayhem for one of the more grotesquely violent crimes in recent memory; in 2010, Wyatt cut an 18-inch hole in his friend and sparring partner Taylor Powell's chest before ripping out Powell's heart, tongue and face, all while tripping on mushrooms. As part of his plea Wyatt will serve at least 50 years in prison.
Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was absolved of charges that he abused executive powers when he commuted the sentence of a political ally's son. On his last day of office, Schwarzenegger reduced Esteban Nunez's sentence for voluntary manslaughter from 16 years to seven. Nunez, the son of one time California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the 2008 stabbing of Luis Santos.
Speaking out for the first time since he did that weird chair thing at the Republican National Convention last week, Clint Eastwood, the former one-term mayor of Carmel, California, told his hometown paper the Carmel Pine Cone he had no idea what he was going to say right up to the moment he took to the stage — and beyond.
We just came from the DNC's daily "blogger briefing," not to be confused with the Real Press briefing. There were 20 or so bloggers, various Democratic media reps and invited speakers.
Christopher Shell was led off a US Airways plane in handcuffs after his Dallas-bound plane was forced to return to Philadelphia International Airport over a potential security threat.
