Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that two days in the NYC public school year will be turned into days off in observance of Muslim holidays Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department released two reports: One detailing the ways in which the Ferguson police department has been demonstrably racist over the past two years, and another explaining why federal civil rights charges will not be pursued against Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in August.

A Fulton County police officer was shot in the head and killed during a reported ambush near downtown Atlanta early Wednesday morning.

Right now, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act cooked up by radical libertarians. If the challenge wins, the results would be catastrophic: a majority of the state's health care markets would be turned into chaos, with plenty of needless suffering and death as a result. Why is such a horrible result possible? Let me try to explain.

The New York Times reports that Mayor Bill de Blasio has signed off an initiative to perform a diversity review of the staff, board members, and patrons of city-financed cultural institutions in New York City, ranging from the Whitney Museum to the Public Theater.

Ben Carson, a conservative politician known for speaking candidly but not at all delicately or even coherently, has a new bon mot for you: Prison makes people gay.

A suspect taken into custody for allegedly shooting at the National Security Agency building in Fort Meade, Maryland, may be linked to a string of other recent shootings in the area, according to the FBI.

A Brooklyn man was charged Tuesday for the killing of 21-year-old transgender woman Islan Nettles, nearly two years after confessing to the brutal beating in Harlem.

According to the Associated Press, the chief of Nepal's mountaineering association says that human sewage has become a critical problem on Mount Everest, urging his country's government to make visitors properly dispose of their shit and piss.

With songs like "Back to the Crib" and "Wet the Bed," Chris Brown has long alluded to his desire to become a parent, but a new report from TMZ says the singer got his wish a full nine months ago, siring a beautiful baby girl.

On Tuesday night, Alabama's Supreme Court ordered state officials to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, contradicting an earlier ruling by a federal judge, The New York Times reports.

After you go to the trouble of labeling a container "not weed," there's almost no wrong way to use it. You could fill it with loose change, monkey teeth—even heroin! In fact, there's only one thing that doesn't belong in a "not weed" container, which is reportedly just what a Nebraska man had in his on Saturday.

Hillary Clinton is defending her use of a private email address, hosted at ClintonEmail.com, to conduct official State Department business by claiming that her emails were captured by official @state.gov accounts that other agency employees were instructed to use to contact her. But according to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations.

The two suburban Los Angeles high school teachers, who allegedly had an alcohol-fueled sexy beach party with 5 male students, are facing additional charges this week. Melody Lippert, 38, and Michelle Ghirelli, 30, were arrested last month for giving the underage students alcohol; prosecutors now say they had sex with the boys and gave them cocaine.

A technology teacher in Scotland has been "struck off" (read: fired) from his job at Ardrossan Academy in Ayrshire after it came out that he had been using foul language and frankly genius insults to agitate his students. In one instance—among many beautiful others—he told a student, "Shut up, I shagged your maw."

As expected, an initial release of the Justice Department's report from their civil rights investigation into the Ferguson, Mo. police department is damning, and concludes, the New York Times reports, that officers "have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city's black residents."

A New Jersey police officer currently under investigation for fatally shooting a man who had his hands raised also blackmailed a woman into having rough, unprotected sex with him, the woman claims in a new civil suit.

The homeless man shot and killed by police officers on L.A.'s Skid Row this past Sunday has, until now, only been identified as "Africa." Sources inside the investigation of the shooting now tell the Los Angeles Times that the man was 39-year-old Charley Saturmin Robinet, a convicted bank robber and French national.

The animal kingdom is, to the delight of web users riding the dot-com wave, full of photographic evidence of disparate species getting along. "#relationshipgoals," one might tag a photo of lion hugging a man; "me and bae," you might say about a dog cuddling a cat. A weasel and a woodpecker? Save this one...FOR YOUR ENEMIES!

There is no way to begin a report about Kanye West's Monday lecture at the Oxford Guild Business Society that would be better or more telling than Yeezy's own opening remarks: "OK, everyone please be completely quiet, because I can literally hear a whisper, and it'll throw off my stream of consciousness, and when I get my stream of consciousness going that's when I give the best, illest quotes."