A fuller portrait of the two brothers suspected of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings is beginning to emerge, and with it a seeming disparity in their attitudes and demeanors.
As the scene in Watertown, Mass escalated, news channels were, understandably, confused about exactly what was happening. One brave reporter for New England Cable News admitted as much live on the air, albeit accidentally. As Brian Williams cut to the channel, an unidentified reporter can be heard saying "Oh, you're not listening? Well, I don't know shit."
The highlights of this week's hate mail are a rag-tag bunch of loveably confused writers seeking to make reservations, give us prizes, and dole out some thoughtful encouragement.
There were a lot of dumb, strange and poignant things said this in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, but one phrase was conspicuous in its absence: "Too soon." Nobody really batted an eye as the expressions of sadness and horror on social media turned to half-baked wisecracks almost as soon as the smoke had cleared. First came the wave of Schrodinger's Cat gags about the confused news reports of a suspect's arrest on Wednesday. When photos of the suspect were revealed, it unleashed another torrent of jokes about the bro-y appearance of the two alleged bombers. And when the two were revealed last night to be Chechen immigrants, the amount of jokes that used "caucasian" as a punchline to mock early reports of a "dark-skinned" subject grew to the point that Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell issued a preemptive notice this morning: "For those just tuning in, everyone has already made the 'Caucasian' joke." And throughout it all, a never-ending barrage of Good Will Hunting references and Boston accent gags.
Four days after he and his older brother, Tamerlan, allegedly bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring dozens more, 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev is finally in custody. The days-long manhunt ended as bizarrely and gruesomely as it started: with Dzhokar trapped on a boat in a Watertown, Massachusetts, backyard, covered in blood—possibly his own—and surrounded by police. After a lengthy standoff and a conversation with a negotiator, Dzhokar turned himself over to the authorities.
A 25-year-old Japanese man confessed this week to slashing as many as 1,000 tires in a bizarre, yet apparently successful scheme to pick up female drivers.
As America and the rest of the world continues to mourn the loss of those who died as a result of Monday's bombings at the Boston Marathon and the ongoing efforts to bring the suspects to justice, it's important to remember that, for many of the living victims, the nightmare is far from over.
At least 13 people drowned when a boat capsized earlier today on a tributary near the mouth of the Amazon river in Brazil. Most of the passengers were asleep below-deck when the overcrowded boat flipped over, due to strong river currents.
"Sometimes in life you need to step into the unknown," says Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Showgirls, Basic Instinct) in the beginning of Tricked, the half-documentary, half-movie that's playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. He's referring to the crowd-sourced script of the project at hand, for which he rifled through thousands of fan-submitted pages to assemble a cohesive, 50-minute narrative film.
A Republican lawmaker from Arkansas upset both Bostonians and non-Bostonians from both sides of the aisle this morning after he felt the need to tweet a pro-gun message around the time two armed police officers were being shot in their pursuit of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.
