Black Friday began on Thanksgiving Thursday this year, and continued into Shopaholic Saturday and Sunday. With discounts of up to forty per cent, there were the usual mob scenes at Walmart and Target , the usual brawls over TVs and towels , the usual shoppers with phone cameras immediately uploading…

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, on Tuesday. Their marriage has drawn comparisons to the Clintons. Credit... Michael Appleton for The New York Times Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, was fed up. An ad for her husband’s political opponent was running on her favorite…

On Saturday, the actor Paul Walker — best known for playing cop turned adrenaline-junkie outlaw Brian O’Conner in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious and four of the five demented/delightful sequels that film spawned — was killed in a car wreck in Santa Clarita, California. The idea of the guy from the…

Op-Docs ‘Riding With the 12 O’Clock Boys’ A group of dirt bike riders in Baltimore have been called reckless. But to them, riding their bikes provides a sense of escape. See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com. Long before I actually saw any of the 12 O’Clock…

The Appraisal David Shea, 78, listed his enclosed terrace for rent on Roomorama.com and later received notice that he was facing eviction. Credit... James Estrin/The New York Times David Shea, a retired typographer, thought that he was renting out his large enclosed terrace to a visitor from Miami…

lisatozzi: How Boycotting Its Own Football Game Brought The World Back To Grambling State University http://t.co/2yBuxNgXwU via @blackink12

MotherJones: The House GOP's hypocrisy on "Too-Big-To-Fail" http://t.co/Rkh79K4CSX

Bloomberg Need help? Contact us We've detected unusual activity from your computer network To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Why did this happen? Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading.…

Being 50 minutes late for his first meeting with Pope Francis was nothing unusual for Russian President Vladimir Putin. That's just the way he is -- a character trait that provides some insight into his attitude toward power. When Putin arrived on time to an audience with Pope John Paul II in 2003,…

Reuters Pope Francis is once again shaking things up in the Catholic Church . On Tuesday, he issued his first “ apostolic exhortation ,” declaring a new enemy for the Catholic Church: modern capitalism. “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth,…

Count the Iran nuclear deal as a rare win for President Obama’s secretive, cerebral style of governing. His careful, closeted approach has produced many setbacks over the past five years, but it was at the heart of last weekend’s breakthrough deal with Tehran. This was secret diplomacy that a Henry…

Photoillustration by Matt Connolly Update: The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports that the court just granted the government more time to decide whether to release the kill switch plan. It now has until January 13. This month, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia…

After the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany concluded a preliminary agreement with Iran on Sunday, it did not take long for regional critics of the deal to react. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, blasted the agreement as “a historic mistake.” Saudi…

Subscribe The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”…

Every business day in London, five banks meet to set the price of gold in a ritual that dates back to 1919. Now, dealers and economists say knowledge gleaned on those calls could give some traders an unfair advantage when buying and selling the precious metal. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority is…

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials. The…

The past weeks have seen a surprising meeting of minds between chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, the Bank of England, the Olympic-rowing and Zuckerberg-bothering Winklevoss twins, and the US Department of Homeland Security . The connection? All have decided it's time to take Bitcoin…

Credit... Alex Prager for The New York Times Before Casey Affleck started filming “Out of the Furnace” last year, he felt, professionally speaking, as if he’d lost his way. Five years earlier, in 2007, he had two breakout roles: “Gone Baby Gone,” directed by his older brother Ben, and “The…

Fleeing families arrive at a camp near the cathedral in Bossangoa this month Photograph: Matthieu Alexandre/AFP/Getty Images A massacre of the innocents is taking place in the heart of Africa as the world looks the other way. One man describes how his four-year-old son's throat was slit, and how he…

Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni who lost relatives in a drone strike, visited Washington this week. Credit... T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times WASHINGTON — Standing on the marble floor just outside the House chamber, Faisal bin Ali Jaber looked lost in the human river of hard-charging…

The Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, with EU foreign affairs chief Lady Ashton at the Intercontinental hotel in Geneva. Photograph: Reuters The bargaining was on its third round and entering its fifth day. As midnight came and went, a deal on Iran's nuclear programme, which had eluded…

The populist critique of official Washington, which I more or less agree with, revolves around a somewhat fuzzy, impressionistic collection of archetypes. What the critics imagine is an insular subculture inside the Beltway in which a shared conventional wisdom — socially liberal, pro-business —…

As I promised in my last post, today I want to offer a somewhat different view of U.S. strategy in the Middle East. I’ve been traveling for the past 10 days, giving talks at several venues in the United Kingdom and attending the World Economic Forum’s meeting of Global Agenda Councils in Abu Dhabi.…

An Urban Hunt 10 Photos View Slide Show › Michael Appleton for The New York Times It was well after nightfall. The pack of dogs was split into two groups and was led to opposite ends of a desolate alley in downtown Manhattan. A man collecting recyclable cans from the trash slipped out just before…

Samuel Leibowitz, the chief defense attorney, spoke with Haywood Patterson, one of the nine men charged with the rape of two white women on a train, in 1933 in Decatur, Ala. Credit... Bettman/Corbis ATLANTA — More than 80 years after they were falsely accused and wrongly convicted in the rapes of a…

He once called the “nuclear option” an “un-American” move that would destroy the Senate and “ruin our country.” But on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did it anyway. He took the unprecedented step of gutting Senate filibuster rules for presidential nominees on a straight party-line vote,…

samanthastorey: That time when @frankbruni, a @nytimes columnist, finds Courtney Love's phone in the back seat of a cab. #onlyinny http://t.co/lX1ThAWRya

The first thing you need to know about JPMorgan Chase’s long-awaited $13 billion deal with the Justice Department -- to settle a number of civil lawsuits related to the fraudulent sale of mortgage-backed securities -- is that it’s not a $13 billion deal . $4 billion of this figure, over 30 percent,…

Photo “No firm, no matter how profitable, is above the law,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said. Credit Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press Updated, 8:13 p.m. | JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday agreed to a mortgage settlement that will cost the bank $13 billion, a large number that will bolster the…

Get GovBeat in your inbox! Sign up for our twice-weekly newsletter here , and follow us on Twitter here . Planning a trip abroad? It’s probably best to check out the State Department’s list of travel warnings for countries with unsafe political situations. At the moment, the State Department has…

tanzinavega: Via @nprnews: When Hollywood Movies Get 'Race-Themed' Into The Same Box http://t.co/Nx0AbBvpLb

November 19, 2013 Because your body’s internal clock is just as good, if not better, than the contraption shrieking atop your nightstand. At the center of your brain, a clump of nerves—called the suprachiasmatic nucleus—oversees your body’s clock: the circadian rhythm. It determines when you feel…

Yesterday was a big day for layoffs over at Bloomberg, and Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke has the official memo from editor-in-chief Matt Winkler. In typical Bloomberg style, the defenestrations seem to be taking place in much the same way as they would on Wall Street, with reporters being escorted from the…

The U.S. is one of the only countries on Earth that keeps chicken eggs in cold storage. But why? Top photo by Flávio via Flickr One of the most common health risks, when it comes to eggs, is posed by Salmonella bacteria. There are really only two ways Salmonella can get at an egg: the first is to…

There has been a sudden spike recently in expressions of racism in French public life—one that has provoked a national debate and may lead to legal action this week. It began last month, when a candidate for the right-wing National Front likened Christiane Taubira, the Justice Minister, who is…

The White House and Israel are locked in an information war on Capitol Hill, and right now, Israel may be winning. All week, the Obama administration has provided facts and figures to lawmakers on its sanctions relief proposal to build support for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program. But some members…

Jay Z last month in Stockholm, where he was asked about the incidents at Barneys. Credit... Stefan Soderstrom/All Over Press This is how it usually happens. A company, looking to go younger, hipper or more demographically diverse, signs a lucrative endorsement deal with that year’s “it” celebrity,…

Robert Kalman Stanley Greenberg has served as polling adviser to presidents and prime ministers, CEOs and dozens of campaigns in the United States and around the world. He is co-founder, with James Carville, of Democracy Corps and the author most recently of It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! In 2010, a…

About New York Walking down Eighth Avenue a few weeks ago, I made sure my backpack was fully zipped shut. Inside was a modest stash of pot, bought just an hour or so earlier. A friend knew someone in that world, and after an introduction, then a quiet, discreet meeting, I was on my way to the…