Thomas Piketty calculates that the Middle East is the most economically unequal region on earth. Could this have anything to do with terrorism?? What a controversial thought!

There is an infamous discussion from 1982 between Ronald Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes and reporter Lester Kinsolving in the White House briefing room about the then-oncoming AIDS crisis, in which Speakes cackles derisively when Kinsolving asks if the Reagan administration was taking any steps to address the disease. Now, over at Vanity Fair, you can listen to that exchange, and several others that highlight the mindset of a president who is widely agreed to have miserably failed those stricken with the disease.

On Monday, Donald Trump took time out of his busy schedule describing television broadcasts only he can see to focus on a new challenge: Extorting CNN to the tune of $5 million.

Twenty-four years ago, I watched a police officer shoot a man. It was right outside a supermarket, the Acme Market on Route 40 in Havre de Grace, Maryland. A ferocious thunderstorm had rolled through, all noise and eerie green light, while we were shopping, and the parking lot was still flooded with rain.

Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani isn’t saying Donald Trump is right about his unambiguous claim that “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” in Jersey on 9/11. But he’s also not saying that Donald Trump isn’t not right. And to back up his timorous show of support, Giuliani trotted out a straight-up hate crime as an example.

Martin O’Malley is now campaigning to be Democrats’ “second choice” for president, which isn’t a thing. But the former governor of Maryland announced his futile goal today in a meeting with House Dems, who have mostly all said they support Hillary Clinton, in an apparent attempt to remind them that he still exists.

At a Democratic presidential debate in Iowa last month, Hillary Clinton was challenged to account for the fact that a large proportion of her campaign fundraising haul has come from the financial sector. She responded with a non sequitur about 9/11. Asked to elaborate, she seemed to argue that her popularity in the finance sector is primarily a result of personal relationships developed in the aftermath of that tragedy in lower Manhattan.

Today, a week after officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with murder in the death of teenager Laquan McDonald, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Chicago Police Department Superintendent Garry McCarthy. Emanuel’s decision, right as it may be, hardly calls for any sort of applause.

For the past six months, digital media companies (including us) have been unionizing in earnest. Now, the media union movement has landed another big one.

A court in the Phillippines convicted a U.S. Marine of homicide Tuesday after determining he had killed a Filipino woman upon learning she was transgender.

Imagine a world in which Emma Watson didn’t say “feminism” during her iconic U.N. speech. Damn. I can’t.

The easiest, fastest, and most effective way to slow down the carbon emissions causing climate change is to put a price on carbon—to institute a carbon tax. Will we get one?

Stephen “Greg” Fisk, the newly-elected mayor of Juneau, was found dead in his home Monday afternoon. Cops haven’t said much about the 70-year-old politician’s cause of death, except to advise reporters that rumors he’d been assaulted are just “speculation” at this point.

The decline and fall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, at a Christmas tree lighting, in Madison, on Sunday: “After the tree lit up, he suddenly fell. The crowd hushed. He’s been ‘nipping at the eggnog a little bit, feeling festive,’ Tourism Secretary Stephanie Klett joked.”

Here’s a fun story a few weeks in the making, starring everyone’s favorite price-gouging pharmaceuticals asswipe, Martin Shkreli. This one involves another small and fading pharmaceutical company, the stink of market manipulation, and a lot of pissed off investor-types.

The smart people over at Exxon Mobil have found a new target for their ire, after they killed all the birds and whales they could muster: a group of postgraduate journalism students at Columbia University.

NBC 5 News has obtained screengrabs of interior video footage from the Burger King near where police shot and killed Laquan McDonald last year, appearing to show Chicago police at a computer terminal the night of the shooting. Over an hour of footage is missing from the store’s security video.

New Mexico officials say they need $8 million to process a backlog of roughly 5,000 rape kits, stretching back as far as the late ‘80s, reports the Associated Press. In September, the Justice Department set aside $41 million to clear similar backlogs across the country.

On Monday, Ann McCormack, mother of Kathleen McCormack, filed a $100 million lawsuit against her late daughter’s husband, Robert Durst, claiming that Durst deprived McCormack’s family of the right to possession of a body for burial. McCormack disappeared 33 years ago, after receiving a phone call from her estranged husband.