Dr. Ben Carson, the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and rising Republican star, announced Wednesday that he will no longer be speaking at the commencement for Johns Hopkins School of Medicine after making some inflammatory comments about gay marriage. On a Fox News appearance, Carson compared gay marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.
Taco Bell has a new goal: food that won't kill you, or at least not as quickly. On Wednesday, the fast food restaurant announced its plan to have 20% of its combo meals contain just one-third of the federal government's recommended dietary guidelines. Or roughly 700 calories and 500 mg of sodium. But why one third? Because they want it to be one of three meals you (healthily) consume each day, which goes against the whole "fourth meal" concept but whatever. And when can we expect the relatively healthy-ish combos to take up one fifth of the Taco Bell's combo menu? In 2020, just seven short years away.
Senators Pat Toomey and Joe Manchin just announced a major breakthrough on gun-control legislation today, regarding the central feature in the gun legislation bill: the expansion of background checks on gun sales. The key negotiations come just in time for the Senate vote tomorrow, which will be the most significant debate about gun control since the 1994 federal crime bill. The bill will need to achieve a baseline of 60 votes in the Senate in order to move forward.
Occupy Wall Street won a major legal battle earlier today when it agreed to a settlement from the city of New York that will pay the activist group over $230,000 in damages and legal fees. The settlement includes $47,000 in damages for Occupy Wall Street's 5,500 book library, most of which was destroyed or damaged during a November 15, 2011 raid on Zuccotti Park. The city also agreed to pay $186,350 in legal costs to Occupy Wall Street's lawyers.
The sheriff's deputies in Harris County, Texas are reporting that at least twelve people were wounded in a stabbing incident at Lone Star College just before noon, local time. A suspect as been detained, but officials report that another suspect is still at large.
"Which camel, Monsieur Président? Oh, that camel? Ah, yes. We ate it."
How freaked out was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about a possible election challenge from movie star Ashley Judd? So freaked that in February he assembled a secret meeting of advisors on how to use a "wealth of material" from the actress' mental health history to paint her as an egomaniacal "mentally unbalanced" anti-Christian hysterical lady.
A 60-year-old gunman engaged in a shooting rampage in his Serbian village early this morning, killing 13 people before killing himself. His son, his wife, and a two-year-old child were among those murdered by the man, identified as Ljubisa Bogdanovic. This is the first mass murder in Serbia in six years; in the last, a man killed nine people in a village in eastern Serbia.
Seven palettes of Nutella totaling five metric tons (5.5 tons) were lifted off a truck in the central German town of Niederaula over the weekend.
Jeremy Irons gave an interview to Huffington Post Live yesterday and and the
64-year-old Oscar winner and one-time relevant actor had some interesting ideas about gay marriage. But did Irons take the chance to support the cause? Or to give your standard right-wing justifications as to why it should be illegal? No, no. He took a different approach altogether. For Irons, it's not an issue of equality or family values, but instead one of potential father-son incest, to avoid taxes.
North Korea's overseers are getting all huffy again, but like for real this time: longwindedly declaring war on South Korea (even though the first one never technically ended), moving missile launchers around, and warning, like an overeager college freshman in extremis: "The moment of explosion is approaching fast."
When Colorado's prisons chief was shot in the face last month and a Texas prosecutor was gunned down with his wife in their house last weekend—the second such assassination of a Lone Star DA since January—you could have looked at any number of suspects:
In anticipation of the chaos that will likely ensue when Justin Bieber returns to Norway later this month, several schools in the country have preemptively rescheduled midterm exams citing fears that students will cut class and miss the test.
It'll be another two years or so before the general public will be invited to gaze upon the unparalleled panoramas of New York City from the observation deck at One World Trade Center, but today, a lucky few got to be the first to visit the quarter-mile-high "room with a view" known as One World Observatory.
