A transgender woman's death is now being investigated as a hate crime crime by the NYPD, after 21-year-old Islan Nettles was brutally attacked last week, before eventually succumbing to her injuries on Thursday.

Las Vegas police officers have arrested a high-ranking Scientologist in a bizarre plot—allegedly inspired by right-wing "Sovereign Citizen" beliefs—to kidnap and kill a local law enforcement officer.

New York City spent $167,000 on each one of its more than 12,000 jail inmates last year. Too bad there is no better use for that money in the whole wide world.

An elderly resident of Spokane, Washington, whom friends say was still full of life, passed away yesterday morning from injuries he sustained during a violent attack by two teens that local police say had no discernible motive.

A Canadian man was arrested for allegedly attempting to smuggle eight pounds of marijuana into the United States by swimming — in full scuba gear — across the border.

Surveillance cameras inside a Florida Dunkin' Donuts store captured footage of two irate customers using a loaded gun to assault an employee because he gave them the wrong kind of coffee.

Goldman Sachs banker Jason Lee was arrested earlier this week after a 20 year old woman accused him of raping her at a rental house in East Hampton, Long Island. According to the New York Times, several East Hampton Town Police officers discovered the victim while responding to an unspecified disturbance at the house Lee was renting with his wife. Lee, speaking through his lawyer, denies everything.

America's opportunistic race-hustlers, unsatisfied by their victory in the Trayvon Martin case, won't stop looking for reasons to rile up white people. So now the latest yapping point in our national conversation about race is the murder of Christopher Lane, the white Australian student allegedly killed for kicks by two black teenagers, with a white teenager as their accomplice in the shooting.

Once in a while an attempted robbery will fail so spectacularly that it becomes necessary to thank the would-be robber for attempting the crime in the first place, thereby allowing the world to witness such astounding defeat.

Yesterday, former U.S. soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified U.S. government documents to Wikileaks. Journalists and news outlets owe Manning more than gratitude. We owe her the truth: in a just world, we'd be in the cell next to her.

Yesterday, Michael Brandon Hill, a 20-year-old with a history of mental illness, allegedly entered Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia, with an AK-47 and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition. Dressed in black, he'd slipped in behind someone authorized to be there and confronted Antoinette Tuff, a bookkeeper who'd just sat down temporarily to relieve the school secretary of her duty. This was serendipitous timing: Tuff is the one who ultimately convinced Hill to surrender before anyone was hurt.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly held a news conference earlier this week to brag about the largest gun bust in the city's history.

Pfc. Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Manning, 25, was convicted of a host of charges, including espionage, over his leak to Wikileaks in 2011 of hundreds of thousands of classified documents, and faced up to 90 years in prison. In a hearing before his sentencing he apologized for his actions, saying "I'm sorry that my actions hurt people."

Caleb Clemmons, the 20-year-old former college student who was jailed for six months after making a prank threat on Tumblr, pleaded guilty to making terroristic threats on Tuesday. Clemmons was sentenced to five years of probation during which time he is prohibited from using any social media.

For the second summer in a row, '80s relic David Hasselhoff has starred in a deliberately cheesy advertisement for Cumberland Farms' Farmhouse Blend iced coffee. Last summer, the kitsch-nostalgia campaign was so wildly successful that according to the Boston Globe, the 600-plus in-store cardboard cutouts and pole signs of the Hoff were all stolen, later making social-media cameos at weddings, concerts, and even in a canoe.

The three Oklahoma teens accused of murdering college student and up-and-coming baseball player Christopher Lane have been identified.

A judge in West Virginia repeatedly tried to frame the husband of his secretary for various crimes, after his secretary broke off an affair with the judge, according to a federal investigation.

A New York man wanted for several crimes, including, most recently, felony violation of probation, was apprehended thanks to a terrible parking job.

When all the doors popped open in the maximum-security wing of a Miami prison in June, it was supposedly a computer error. But surveillance video obtained by the Miami Herald showed a group of inmates immediately setting out of their cells on a coordinated attempt to stab an imprisoned gang leader, as if they had planned for the security system to fail when it did. Wired looks into the possibility that the near-miss shanking opportunity was created by a successful hack.

A longtime assistant to artist Jasper Johns was arrested Wednesday morning and charged with stealing Johns' artwork. According to federal prosecutors, James Meyer, who worked for Johns for 27 years, took at least 22 unfinished pieces of art from Johns' Connecticut workspace between September 2006 and February 2012, and sold them to a Manhattan art gallery for $6.5 million, $3.4 million of which went to Meyer.