Did you see 'The Brutalist' this weekend?

The Queen of Christmas strikes again.

Does cold weather actually make you sick? There’s some truth behind the old wives’ tale, says Purdue University nursing professor Libby Richards. She shares five reasons dropping temperatures might lead to catching a cold or the flu this winter season, including increased dryness, which allows viruses to enter the nasal passage more easily — not...

"I don’t wear panties, everybody knows that!" she announced.

The illegal Guatemalan migrant accused of torching a woman on a Brooklyn subway train has been identified as Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, who snuck back into the US after being deported, federal immigration officials said Monday. Zapeta-Calil is now being by the NYPD while authorities await the results of an autopsy of the victim, sources said....

Lawsuit alleges Walmart and the payments platform Branch Messenger cost delivery drivers millions of dollars in fees, opening deposit accounts without consent and requiring their use to get paid.

It’s a killer outfit. Accused CEO assassin Luigi Mangione strode into a Manhattan courtroom Monday clad in attire that oddly matched the ensemble of his lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo. The grinning Mangione, 26, wore a maroon sweater over a white collared shirt. Agnifilo opted for a similar layered look, with a slightly redder sweater. Accused...

President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 death row inmates. | Pete Marovich/Getty Images President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly all federal death row inmates on Monday, meaning that 37 men who were slated to be executed will instead spend the rest of their lives behind bars without the possibility of parole. The pardons will also help contribute to what has become a notable criminal justice trend — a sharp reduction in the number of executions carried out by the United States.  Biden’s action applies only to federal prisoners — the president does not have the power to pardon or commute sentences handed down by state courts — and it leaves just three prisoners remaining on federal death row. Biden did not commute the sentences of three particularly notorious criminals: Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who murdered Black parishioners at a South Carolina church; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Biden’s action will likely prevent the incoming Trump administration from beginning with a wave of executions. In 2020, the last full year of President-elect Donald Trump’s first presidency, the federal government resumed executions for the first time in two decades, killing a total of 13 people before Trump left office the first time. Biden instructed the Justice Department to issue a moratorium on additional federal executions during the first year of his presidency. Biden’s commutations, moreover, contribute to a longstanding trend on all US death rows, both state and federal: Thanks to a variety of factors, including an overall decline in crime and better criminal defense lawyers for capital defendants, death sentences are on the decline in the United States, and have declined sharply since the 1990s. These trends are most pronounced in state criminal justice systems, which perform the overwhelming majority of executions — again, at the federal level, there have been no recent executions at all except during the later part of the first Trump administration. For much of the 1990s, the United States (at the state and federal levels) sentenced more than 300 people a year to die. By contrast, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 26 people received a death sentence in 2024, as of December 16.  According to DPIC’s data, 2024 is also the 10th consecutive year when fewer than 50 people were sentenced to die. DPIC’s data also shows a declining trend in the number of people who were actually executed (the particularly pronounced dip in 2020–2022 is likely due to the Covid-19 pandemic).  That said, there are two factors that could conceivably reverse this trend. One is that the Supreme Court, with its relatively new 6-3 Republican supermajority, is extraordinarily pro-death penalty and has signaled that it may roll back longstanding precedents interpreting what limits the Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments” places on government executions.  The other is that Florida recently overtook Texas as the state with the most new death sentences — a development that likely stems from a 2023 state law that allows Florida courts to impose the death penalty if eight of 12 jurors hearing a case agree to impose this sentence. Should other states adopt similar laws, that could potentially cause a rapid increase in the number of sentences. Most states require a unanimous jury verdict before a death sentence may be imposed. Still, many of the structural factors causing the death penalty to decline are longstanding, and are unlikely to be reversed unless federal and state law changes drastically. Why has use of the death penalty declined so sharply in the United States? There are many factors that likely contribute to the death penalty’s decline. Among other things, crime fell sharply in recent decades — the number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters fell from nearly 25,000 in 1991 to less than 15,000 in 2010. Public support for the death penalty has also fallen sharply, from 80 percent in the mid-’90s to 53 percent in 2024, according to Gallup. And, beginning in the 1980s, many states enacted laws permitting the most serious offenders to be sentenced to life without parole instead of death — thus giving juries a way to remove such offenders from society without killing them. Yet, as Duke University law professor Brandon Garrett argues in End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, these and similar factors can only partially explain why the death penalty is in decline. Murders, for example, “have declined modestly since 2000 (by about 10 percent),” Garrett writes. Yet “annual death sentences have fallen by 90 percent since their peak in the 1990s.” Garrett argues, persuasively, that one of the biggest factors driving the decline in death sentences is the fact that capital defendants typically receive far better legal representation today than they did a generation ago. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2001, “People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.” The Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Though Furman produced a maze of concurring and dissenting opinions and no one opinion explaining the Court’s rationale, many of the justices pointed to the arbitrary manner in which death sentences were doled out. The particular death sentences before the Court in Furman, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual” because death sentences appeared to be handed down to just a “random handful” of serious offenders. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court allowed states to resume sentencing serious offenders to death but only with adequate procedural safeguards. Gregg upheld a Georgia statute that allowed prosecutors to claim that a death sentence is warranted because certain “aggravating circumstances” are present, such as if the offender had a history of serious violent crime. Defense attorneys, in turn, could present the jury with “mitigating circumstances” that justified a lesser penalty, such as evidence that the defendant had a mental illness or was abused as a child. A death sentence was only warranted if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors. This weighing test is now a centerpiece of capital trials in the United States, which means the primary job of a capital defense lawyer is often to humanize their client in the eyes of a jury. Defense counsel must explain how factors like an abusive upbringing, mental deficiencies, or personal tragedy led their client to commit a terrible crime. Doing this well, Garrett argues, “takes a team.” It requires investigators who can dig into a client’s background, and it often requires social workers or other professionals who “have the time and the ability to elicit sensitive, embarrassing, and often humiliating evidence (e.g., family sexual abuse) that the defendant may have never disclosed.” And yet, especially in the years following Gregg, many states didn’t provide even minimally competent legal counsel to capital defendants — much less a team that included a trained investigator and a social worker. Virginia, for example, was once one of the three states with the most executions (alongside Texas and Oklahoma). A major reason is that, for quite some time, Virginia only paid capital defense lawyers about $13 an hour, and a lawyer’s total fee was capped at $650 per case. In 2002, however, the state created four Regional Capital Defender offices. And, when state-employed defense teams couldn’t represent a particular client, the state started paying private lawyers up to $200 an hour for in-court work and up to $150 an hour for out-of-court work. As a result, the number of death row inmates in Virginia fell from 50 in the 1990s to just five in 2017. (Virginia abolished the death penalty entirely in 2021.) Virginia’s experience, moreover, was hardly isolated. As Garrett notes, many states enacted laws in the last four decades that provided at least some defense resources to capital defendants. And in states that did not provide adequate resources to defendants, several nonprofits emerged to pick up the slack. In Texas, for example, an organization called the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) was formed in response to a notorious case where a capital defense lawyer slept through much of his client’s trial. Capital defendants, in other words, are much less likely to be left alone — or practically alone with an incompetent lawyer — during a trial that will decide if they live or die. And that means that they are far more likely to convince a jury that mitigating factors justify a sentence other than death. The Supreme Court could potentially blow up this trend The largest threat to the trend of fewer death sentences and executions is the Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority, which is often contemptuous of precedents handed down by earlier justices who Republican legal elites view as too liberal. And the Court’s most recent death penalty decisions suggest that a majority of the justices may be eager to roll back constitutional safeguards for capital defendants. Most notably, the Court’s 5-4 decision in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019) suggests that at least some of the justices want to revolutionize the Court’s approach to criminal sentencing altogether, opening the door to far harsher sentences for many offenders.  Decisions like Furman and Gregg are rooted in the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.” This reference to “unusual” punishments suggests that the kinds of punishment forbidden by the Constitution will change over time, as certain punishments fall out of favor and thus become more unusual. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Trop v. Dulles (1958), the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Indeed, under this framework, there is a strong argument that the death penalty has itself become unconstitutional because it is so rarely used. Bucklew did not explicitly overrule the long line of Supreme Court precedents looking to “evolving standards of decency” to determine which punishments are allowed, but it seemed to ignore the last several decades of Eighth Amendment law altogether. Instead, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bucklew suggested that the Court’s Eighth Amendment decisions should put greater weight on what legal elites in the 1790s might have classified as cruel and unusual, than on which punishments are out of favor today. “Death was ‘the standard penalty for all serious crimes’ at the time of the founding,” Gorsuch wrote in Bucklew. And, while his opinion does list some methods of execution — “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” — that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch argues that these methods of execution were unconstitutional even when the Eight Amendment was written because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’” Warren’s framework, in other words, asks whether a particular punishment has fallen out of favor today. Gorsuch’s framework, by contrast, asks whether a particular punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. Although four other justices joined Gorsuch’s Bucklew opinion, it is as yet unclear whether a majority of the Court actually supports tossing out decades worth of Eighth Amendment law in favor of Gorsuch’s more narrow approach — since Bucklew, the Court has moved more cautiously, often ruling against death row inmates, but on narrower grounds than the sweeping reasoning Gorsuch floated in Bucklew. Still, Bucklew does suggest that there is some appetite on the Court for an Eighth Amendment revolution. Among other things, Gorsuch’s declaration that death was “‘the standard penalty for all serious crimes’ at the time of the founding” suggests that he would overrule Gregg, with its elaborate procedural safeguards limiting when the death penalty may be used even against murderers. And the Court has only grown more conservative since Ginsburg died in 2020 and was replaced by Republican Justice Amy Coney Barrett (though Barrett has, at times, taken a less pro-death penalty approach than her other Republican colleagues.) If Trump gets to replace more justices on the Court, and especially if he gets to replace some of the Court’s relatively moderate voices, Gorsuch could gain allies for the broader rollback of Eighth Amendment rights that he seemed to announce in Bucklew. For the time being, however, the Supreme Court’s rightward turn has not reversed the broader trend against the death penalty. Both the number of new death sentences, and the number of executions, declined sharply since the 1990s.

Tyler Ward discusses Sean Manaea returning to the Mets on a 3-year deal worth $75 million and how this move sets up the Mets starting rotation for 2025.

The far-left New York Daily News reported that a woman died after she mysteriously caught fire on a Brooklyn subway car. The post Nolte: NY Daily News Lies About Subway Murder Victim ‘Catching Fire’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Justin Timberlake knows fans were talking about his bulge on his tour.

President Biden on Dec. 23 commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row — a list that includes at least five child killers and several mass murderers — while leaving off three notorious fiends. In the stunning act of clemency just two days before Christmas, Biden, 82, gave the reprieve...

The politics of procrastination

The 7-year-old boy left fighting for his life when drones crashed and then dive-bombed a Florida Christmas show has been forced to have open-heart surgery, according to his distraught family. Little Alexander was hit in the face by one of the drones in Orlando Saturday — then almost killed as it slammed into his body,...

The Christmas Eve drawing is at 8 p.m. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302 million, according to lottery organizers.

Stephen A. Smith and Shannon Sharpe took exception to something Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler said during a College Football Playoff broadcast over the weekend.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta is seeking a receiver to manage the assets of Chinese Committee on Aging Housing Corp. after years of complaints at the nonprofit's 268-unit affordable housing development for senior citizens.

The suspect accused of setting a woman on fire on a New York City subway is an illegal immigrant who was previously deported, Fox News has learned.

Kim Kardashian is starring in a lewd Christmas-themed music video that features the reality TV star crawling around provocatively on all fours as she sings a cover for the 1953 classic "Santa Baby," with actors playing Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and an assortment of others in the background -- culminating in Macaulay Culkin as Santa Claus. The post Kim Kardashian Stars in Lewd Christmas Music Video ‘Santa Baby,’ Featuring Jesus and Virgin Mary appeared first on Breitbart.

If you’re mad at the weekend’s games, blame the sport—not the bracket.

Burt, the iconic Saltwater crocodile that appeared alongside Paul Hogan and Linda Kozlowski in the hit movie, was believed to be more than 90 years old.

Paramount Global boss Shari Redstone is reportedly banking on her friendly relationship with President-elect Donald Trump to help the media giant skirt any FCC issues in its merger with Skydance — and help her walk away with a windfall. Redstone, the daughter of the late media titan Sumner Redstone, has “has gotten along” with Trump...

From the arena to your living room, Gladiator 2 is coming to PVOD.

Tim Allen in Christmas With the Kranks (2004). | IMDb Something happens to me every December wherein movies and music that are objectively kind of bad suddenly become irresistible simply because they are “about Christmas.” By this I mean I’m spending entire days listening to Michael Bublé and that one Zooey Deschanel album and entire nights watching whatever drivel Netflix has most recently produced — namely, movies in which hot people kiss in towns called “Snow Falls.”  This is how, recently, I found myself pressing play on the 2004 comedy Christmas With the Kranks, streaming on Hulu and starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd, and the kid from Malcolm in the Middle. Of course I’d already seen it, and of course the only thing that stuck out to me was, “How could any college-aged woman love ham that much?” (a key plot point, somehow). Anyway, it was fine. It succeeded in doing its job, which was to turn my brain into a snow globe for an hour and 34 minutes.  This was before my fiancé, an unrepentant Letterboxd snob, decided to look up reviews for Christmas With the Kranks and found that it has a 5 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Five! Meaning that out of 100 reviews, only five of them were good. Incredibly low, I thought, for a movie that I’d consider at the very least watchable. And the reviews themselves were mean: Robert Ebert called it “a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end,” while the Washington Post said it was “a leaden whimsy so heavy it threatens to crash through the multiplex floor.” My first thought was not anger at the critics of 20 years ago for ripping apart a film I had just spent 94 precious minutes watching. It was the overwhelming suspicion that, if Christmas With the Kranks were to come out today, it would have a significantly better critical reception than it did 20 years ago.  So I looked up reviews for similar mid-budget Christmas movies from the 2000s that remain popular on streaming (Kranks is the seventh most popular movie on Hulu right now). Turns out, critics hated many of them, too. 2008’s Four Christmases, starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, has a measly 25 percent rating and was called a “miscast mess” by Empire magazine and “egregious” by the Guardian.  Ron Howard’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, at 49 percent, was dubbed “a dank, eerie, weird movie.” Most shocking of all, The Holiday, an objectively perfect Nancy Meyers film despite the fact that Kate Winslet ends up with Jack Black, was called “soggy, syrupy” and “bloating” by the BBC and was criticized for not “saying much.” Do you remember the last time you read a review of a Christmas rom-com that complained that it didn’t have enough to say? I don’t. That’s because nobody expects them to say anything anymore. And that’s bad for the current state of pop culture. me writing my 5 star Letterboxd review of Christmas with the Kranks pic.twitter.com/OKcCnsx7x8— Ethan Simmie (@EthanSimmie) December 8, 2024 Consider the sorts of reviews that the legions of made-for-streaming Christmas movies are getting these days. Comedies that manage to nab actual A-listers and decent-sized budgets like Spirited and The Christmas Chronicles receive mostly positive reviews for being “fun for the whole family,” while middling romances like A Christmas Prince, Falling for Christmas, and Hot Frosty are praised for being simply passable. One LA Weekly critic called the bafflingly terrible Lindsay Lohan Netflix joint Falling for Christmas “perfect background noise for wrapping presents, or a good reason for a cackling friend-watch and group activity (while getting jolly and juiced).” It’s worth asking what the point of reviewing a movie is if the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but throw it on if you don’t plan on paying attention.” This isn’t a dig at that particular critic (who, to be fair, only included it as a part of a roundup of 2022’s Christmas movies). It’s rather an indictment of the way we’re now expected to engage with film — and TV and music, too. It’s now taken for granted that when we click “play” on a streaming platform, it’s probably not the only thing we’re paying attention to.  The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka argued that homogenous, predictable vibes-based “ambient TV” (think Emily in Paris, Dream Home Makeover, and basically any show about food) that keeps users watching, even when they’re not, is the backbone of the streaming economy. “Like earlier eras of TV, ambient television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time,” he writes.  It’s worth asking what the point of reviewing a movie is if the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but throw it on if you don’t plan on paying attention.” The effect has been to diminish the quality we now expect from our film, television, and music. Yet it’s only part of the equation. At the same time that streaming platforms proliferated, so too did social media, which dramatically increased the amount of content people consume that is produced by amateur posters as opposed to creative professionals. Meanwhile, algorithmic social media platforms force-feed the most mediocre content to their users. Now, we’re also contending with the problem of an endless font of AI slop, which synthesizes everything that came before it and churns out versions that are worse.  Bad movies being praised as “good enough” isn’t just a film industry or algorithmic problem, though. In the late 2000s, social media ushered in an era of poptimism: If critics openly trashed a movie or artist who was popular, they were seen as a snob or out of touch with the millions of people who suddenly had just as much power to publish their own opinions. “Now, when a pop star reaches a certain strata of fame,” wrote Chris Richards in the Washington Post in 2015, “something magical happens. They no longer seem to get bad reviews. Stars become superstars, critics become cheerleaders and the discussion froths into a consensus of uncritical excitement.” Poptimism isn’t all bad. One of its effects was that critics suddenly had to take seriously the underrepresented opinions of nonwhite people, young people, and women. But there is also something inherently cowardly about trying to match the tastes of the masses, afraid of being left behind.  Perhaps because social media democratized the role of the culture critic, or perhaps because of the wider collapse of local journalism (and journalism writ large), but today, we have fewer professional critics who are writing film reviews. Which means that critics aren’t going full Roger Ebert-reviewing-Kranks mode like they used to — with one exception. This year’s action-comedy Christmas movie Red One, starring The Rock and Chris Evans, was dubbed “a distinctly joyless execution of a premise” by critics, who mostly seemed annoyed by the gigantic budget ($250 million) and Marvel-wannabe plot.  The reviews are almost refreshingly nostalgic — a sign, maybe, that not every corner of media has devolved into the current state of everything: a culture industry where both producers and audiences would rather obsess over charts, follower counts, and profitability over engaging with the subject matter.  I realize now I’m part of the problem. I was treating Christmas With the Kranks like a film viewer in 2024: something to throw on while looking at my phone, then look up its Rotten Tomatoes score as though its algorithm could synthesize all of the infinite nuances of what a good review entails. I have no interest in litigating whether Kranks is a good movie or not, but reading its terrible reviews reminded me that even the most mediocre Christmas comedy should be taken seriously. We should demand more than just-okay films where recognizable stars follow predictably soothing tropes — even when all you’re looking for is to have a brain that becomes a snow globe.

Icy spots are possible on roads and sidewalks between approximately 6 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Pope Francis is formally inaugurating the 2025 Holy Year, reviving an ancient church tradition encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to Rome.

An Oklahoma woman filed a $15 million sexual assault lawsuit against Sean "Diddy" Combs on Friday, Fox News Digital can confirm. The rapper remains in jail on sex trafficking charges.

The decision to sit the longest tenured Ranger comes amid the club’s 4-12 skid and free fall in the standings to sixth in the Metropolitan Division and 22nd in the NHL. 

Calling all stressed folk and restless sleepers, a TikTok acupuncturist is here to welcome you to the calm cave of easy spirits and peaceful sleep.

The video shows the "Die Hard" star laughing and looking happy amid his dementia battle.

Ho Ho Whoa!

Starbucks baristas and Amazon delivery drivers are on strike in handful of U.S. cities as they seek wage increases.

"I was feeling homesick and lonely," Jordan Hart-Waldron, from Pembrokeshire, in the U.K., told Newsweek.

The ruling in Los Angeles Superior Court resolves a contentious fight over one of SoCal's most iconic music venues, a rustic roadhouse on a former movie set

A health center at The University of Minnesota posted a research project flyer asking "gender diverse" and transgender children to play with diverse dolls.

Immigration advocates are mobilizing nationwide to prepare migrant communities for Donald Trump's return to the White House.

Grab a fedora to celebrate.

The heartbroken family of a 23-year-old Australian woman who was left for dead in a suburban street after being gunned down has spoken out.

Following the reports that Falcons QB is set to be released by the team, where could he land?

A retired police officer in the nation's capital has been convicted of lying to authorities about leaking confidential information to the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group.

The Jets could have control over the wide receiver's future through the 2027 season.

The 'Die Hard' actor, currently battling dementia, recently spent some time with his daughter Scout as she shared in a new video.

A Georgia homeowner was jailed after trying a few weeks ago to move back into her house, which was occupied by an alleged squatter. The post VIDEO — ‘Inherently Wrong’: Georgia Homeowner Jailed After Trying to Remove Alleged Squatter from Home appeared first on Breitbart.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson convicted former Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Shane Lamond of obstructing justice and making false statements.

The strikes ignited fires at the Kadamovsky range, a crucial training site for Russian troops heading into Ukraine.

President-elect Donald Trump, now a month away from returning to the White House, threatened to reclaim control of the Panama Canal as he spoke Sunday at Turning Point USA's America Fest in Arizona. CBS News correspondent Cristian Benavides has more on Trump's comments and his choice for special envoy to the U.K., television producer Mark Burnett.

Meet the bras that give back.

DC federal Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday approved Eric Peterson's request to travel to the country's Capitol again to be on hand for inauguration day Jan. 20 -- despite the fact that Peterson pleaded guilty last month to joining hoards of insurgents who broke inside the Capitol building Jan. 6, 2021, court records show.

John Mulaney’s “All In: Comedy About Love” on Broadway feeds a seasonable appetite for feel-good vibes.