Daily News Channel
Online retailer Amazon has found itself at the center of a storm after it removed a number of gay and lesbian-themed books from its sales charts. On Sunday, a number of distinguished writers, including Gore Vidal, Annie Proulx and E.M. Forster, suddenly lost their best-seller ranking — which is the number that Amazon uses to show how well one title sells compared with another
Call him Moby Ick. A 30- to 40-foot humpback whale surfaced in the not-quite-pristine waters just north of New York City’s Verrazano Bridge on Thursday morning, according to the Coast Guard.
The Irrawaddy, one of the world’s rarest species of freshwater dolphins, have been found in surprisingly large numbers deep in the waterlogged jungles of Bangladesh. Conservationists thought the Irrawaddy had dwindled in number to just a few hundred, but they have now counted almost 6,000 of them in the Sundarban mangrove forests and the adjacent waters of the Bay of Bengal. The forests of the Sundarban — Bengali for “beautiful forest” — lie at the delta of the Ganges and two other rivers on the Bay of Bengal.
Even as the rest of Washington debated why the grave robbers of AIG should continue to profit from the carnage they helped cause, Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, tended to the mob: He’d feel a little better, he said, if AIG’s executives would “follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.” Grassley’s spokesman later clarified that he was just “speaking rhetorically” as far as the suicide part went. I’d settle for a pageant of public shaming, in which the scoundrels must beg forgiveness and make amends; we’d claw back those bonuses, foreclose on their castles, auction their toys, watch the once mighty prowl a grocery aisle calculating whether they can afford the big box of cereal that is a better deal but ties up more capital
Iran is to send a female skier to the Winter Olympics for the first time at next year’s Games in Vancouver, Canada, the head of the Islamic Republic’s ski federation told state media Monday. The chosen competitor will ski in “full Islamic dress,” Iran’s National News Agency reported.
I’ve never been a fan of the cold.
A 27-year-old man has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of a pastor at a church in Maryville, Illinois, authorities said Monday. Terry J.
The great-grandson of Apache warrior Geronimo argues in a lawsuit that a secretive society at Yale University holds the remains of his great-grandfather.
The Royal Caribbean cruise line is rolling out the world’s largest cruise ship next fall, the Oasis of the Seas. Rock walls are passe; this 5,400-passenger colossus has its own zip line across the back of the boat
Penelope Cruz won the first Oscar of the night at the 81st annual Academy Awards, a best supporting actress honor for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Cruz paid tribute to writer-director Woody Allen, who oversaw “Vicky Cristina,” and Pedro Almodovar, who gave her some of her best roles, and thanked “everyone who has helped me from the beginning.” True to the producers’ promise to give the Academy Awards more of a “party” tone, Hugh Jackman led off the show with cracks about downsizing — “Next year,” said the “Australia” star, “I’ll be starring in a movie called ‘New Zealand’ ” — then segued into a song-and-dance number he said he assembled in his garage. Performing songs about each best picture nominee in various musical styles, with “homemade” backgrounds behind him, at one point he reached into the audience and physically lifted Anne Hathaway on stage to play Richard Nixon in “Frost/Nixon.” Then the gregarious host paid tribute to various celebrities in the audience as if pointing out VIPs in a nightclub.