If you're looking for a good time when you visit New York, you can read how to spend 36 Hours (Straight) in Central Park in today's New York Times, or you can just do what I did: spend 36 hours in Central Park over the course of nine years. After all, you got plans to sleep in the park this weekend? Wayward tourists, here is how to do Central Park.
On Thursday, ISIS released a video of captured British journalist John Cantlie. In the video, Cantlie, who was abducted in Syria in November 2012, calmly tells the viewer that the British government has "abandoned" him and promises to explain, over a series of subsequent videos, the "truth" behind ISIS and the ways in which the Western media manipulates that truth.
A country club wedding in a Buffalo suburb devolved into an enormous melee that required police officers from seven different agencies to respond, the Buffalo News reports. Hours after the happy couple exchanged their vows, one witness told the newspaper, family members were screaming that they hated each other, punching holes in the walls, and splattering the dance floor with one another's blood.
Texas has executed a 38-year-old woman who was sent to death row for starving her girlfriend's 9-year-old son to death nearly a decade ago. Lisa Ann Coleman died by lethal injection shortly after 6 p.m. tonight at the state execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas. She's only the 15th woman to be executed in the United States since 1976, when the Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume.
The St. Louis-Post Dispatch is reporting that Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Mike Brown in early August, appeared before a St. Louis County grand jury today to testify about the shooting. An unnamed source "with knowledge of the investigation" tells the newspaper that Wilson testified for nearly four hours.
Vice President Joe Biden is no stranger to saying redonkulous* things (*his choice of words, probably), but the past two days he's achieved the Biden Double Down In It to Win It Special by referencing Shylock when discussing shady bankers yesterday, then referring to Asia as the Orient while talking about Singaporean politician Lee Kuan Yew today.
Damn. After launching a petition to have his amazing laser cat photo run in his high school year book, Schenectady High School senior Draven Rodriguez will have to settle for the significantly less exciting prospect of posing for another photo with his cat and the school's principal—and her chihuahua. Sounds like someone was jealous...
Urban Outfitters CEO Dick Hayne explained away the company's decision to sell what appeared to be a blood-splattered Kent State sweatshirt by saying that it was merely an honest mistake. Hayne maintained that position in an internal email sent to employees yesterday, but chose not to address any underlying problems that got UO into this mess in the first place.
The photographer Jay Maisel has owned the enormous property at 190 Bowery since 1966, and in the years since then—as the Bowery transformed from a grimy haven for the downtrodden to a still-kinda-grimy strip of museums and boutique hotels—it stood stoic, a graffiti-covered monument to The Way it Used to Be. Now, it's finally catching up to the neighborhood.
A Queens man has been posting pornographic photos in his windows because, according to his neighbors, he doesn't like that an immigrant, Indian family moved in next door to him. The man, "Jimmy," admitted to WABC that he posted the pictures, but said, "I'm drying them out, they got damp last night."
Over the past week, The New York Times has busied itself by dissecting TMZ’s graphic video of Ray Rice punching Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino. This is partly motivated by professional envy: Executive editor Dean Baquet told The Daily Beast that “TMZ had a great scoop. I wish I had it.” But it’s also motivated by the paper’s misunderstanding of what TMZ actually published.
