culture

An Oklahoma death row inmate has been given a six-month stay of execution while officials investigate how the lethal injection of a different inmate, Clayton Lockett, went horribly wrong, the New York Daily News reports. Charles Warner was to have been executed the same day as Lockett in what would have been Oklahoma’s first double…

It’s been over a year, but the outrage is still there. Last May, Latoya Harris’ 9-year old daughter was arrested after a fight with another 9-year girl at a local Boys and Girls Club. According to The Oregonian, the incident occurred on April 26th, 2013. Harris’ daughter entered an argument between two other girls, who…

Tech giant Apple is in negotiations to buy Beats Electronics—the company founded by rapper Dr. Dre and record producer Jimmy Iovine that produces the über-popular Beats by Dre headphones—for $3.2 billion, according to several reports. Reports from the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal all confirm the negotiations, and…

Residents of the small town of Hearne, Texas, are demanding the immediate firing of a police officer who shot and killed a 93-year-old woman. Authorities say Officer Stephen Stem shot 93-year-old Pearlie Golden on Tuesday after responding to a call from her nephew that Golden was threatening him with a gun, KBTX-TV reports. According to…

Nigeria’s government is offering about $310,000 for information leading to the return of more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Islamist militants as the country acknowledges increased international assistance to help find the girls, CNN reports. During a World Economic Forum speech Thursday, President Goodluck Jonathan opined that the global outcry inspired by the kidnappings would be the…

During the grand finale of the third annual International Jazz Day concert—held last week in Osaka, Japan—more than 35 jazz musicians stretched across an elaborate stage in Osaka Castle Park and performed John Lennon’s 1971 anthem, “Imagine.” Most of them hailed from the U.S., but the lineup also included the South African guitarist and singer…

Juxtaposed with news coverage in recent weeks about the horrifying abduction of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls is the sheer volume of national media attention devoted to Donald Sterling’s garden-variety racist rants—a positioning that seems, frankly, absurd. The girls’ story is thankfully starting to get traction, but too often in mainstream media, coverage of critical news…

With the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls dominating the headlines, what has gone largely unnoticed is that some of the world’s most powerful women in fields such as media, business, fashion and politics recently convened in Nigeria for a conference intended to empower global leaders. Attendees and speakers at the third annual WIE Africa Symposium (“WIE” stands for…