Former State Department official and longtime Hillary Clinton operative Philippe Reines has repeatedly stated that his email practices at State were aboveboard—even though he was caught lying about using a personal email address to conduct official government business. But new emails obtained by Gawker show that on at least one occasion, Reines discussed skirting the federal open-records law known as the Freedom of Information Act. According to the emails, he told two reporters,“I want to avoid FOIA.” Reines’ attorney dismisses the comment as a joke—but if it was, it was of the funny-because-it’s-true variety.

A millionaire London real estate developer avoided a rape conviction this week with an unlikely excuse: He tripped and fell inside the alleged victim.

People in the USA are fed up with these Washington politicians who don’t care about folks like us. We want to be led by those we really believe in: brands.

Martin Shkreli, the most hated man in pharmaceuticals and whatever zip code he’s currently in, was arrested by federal agents early Thursday morning at his midtown Manhattan apartment.

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on Wednesday, an off-duty NYPD officer, Jacob Sabbagh, was arrested on child molestation charges.

Last month, an 82-year-old woman died in her kitchen in Brooklyn. Her death certificate said she died of natural causes. Now, the New York Times reports, the officers who found her body may be disciplined after a funeral director noticed a stab wound on her neck they had missed.

After 33 years in prison, three men were exonerated Wednesday in the 1980 house fire that killed a mother and her five children. William Vasquez, 70, and Amaury Villalobos, 66, stood in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Raymond Mora died in prison in 1989. The sole witness was deemed unreliable.

A Secret Service officer, Arthur Baldwin, was shot and killed Tuesday in what police say may have been an attempted robbery, NBC Washington reports. Baldwin was most recently assigned to the White House, but had been placed on administrative leave after he was accused of breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house.

It was a tough year for hedge funds: the third worst, according to the Absolute Return Composite Index, since 1998. (A bad ten years, actually.) But holiday parties are about togetherness and gratitude or whatever, so why not invite Katy Perry and Maroon 5 if you can still swing it?

Marcello Trebitsch, the son-in-law of former New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court Wednesday to two years in prison after admitting to having orchestrated a $6 million Ponzi scheme. Two weeks ago, Silver was convicted of corruption in an entirely unrelated case.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reports, a French court acquitted Marine Le Pen, the president of the far-right National Front party, of charges that she incited religious hatred against Muslim with comments she made while campaigning for her current position.

Martin Shkreli has a lot of money that in a just society he would not have. He found a decent use for some of it recently, when he relinquished a reported $2 million to the Wu-Tang Clan in exchange for an exclusive album that is probably not very good anyway. But Shkreli has come up with an even better use for the money he’s making off the backs of AIDS patients.

Violence is, for the most part, a terrible way to get what you want. And clocking a top government official is even worse. Which is why it makes perfect sense that it was a teen who took it upon himself to punch the Spanish Prime Minister—at a heavily populated public event, no less—directly in the face.

I cannot believe anyone took this email seriously: “I am a devout Muslim, and was once against violence, but I have teamed up with a local jihadist cell as it is the only way I’ll be able to accomplish my massacre the correct way.”

Citing “multiple sources familiar with the situation,” Dan Primack of Fortune is reporting that the 82-year-old billionaire, casino magnate, and Republican kingmaker Sheldon Adelson is the unnamed investor who acquired Nevada’s largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, for $140 million last week:

New from Kristin Cavallari’s mid-priced jewelry line, Emerald Duv: something lit rally on fire.

Quick question. Which is worse for “democracy” and “discourse”: A prominent public figure, with a large following composed mainly of increasingly enraged (and generally well-armed) members of America’s dominant but shrinking ethnic majority, spending months issuing vocal and repeated calls for the elimination of certain religious and ethnic outgroups from the body politic; or the act of “unfriending” people with annoying or offensive beliefs on a social networking platform? The answer—or, at least, one Washington Post writer’s answer—may surprise you.

More than 181,000 people applied for 14 affordable apartments in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Time to start tweaking the master plan.

In 2011, Marc Patrick O’Leary was arrested on charges that he’d viciously raped at least three women in the state of Colorado. In his home, police found underwear belonging to the victims, gloves and sneakers matching prints left behind in the victims’ homes, and a pink camera he’d stolen from one of the women. On the camera, among other things, were photographs of him raping a then-18-year-old girl, who had recently been prosecuted for filing a false police report about the rape.

When staffers at the Huffington Post launched their unionization campaign in October, Arianna Huffington said the company would “fully support” its workers and “embrace whatever decision they make on this issue.” She has a strange way of showing it.