The current issue of Newsweek has a photo of President Obama with a rainbow-colored halo superimposed over his head and the title “The First Gay President.” Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president. Read full article > >

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Barack Obama, the first female president

When HBO killed its racetr ack drama “Luck” after the death of a third horse used in the series’ production made headlines, the cost to parent company Time Warner was $35 million, according to the media conglom’s first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday. Read full article > >

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‘Luck’ cancellation cost Time Warner $35 million

It may have been the worst-timed, and most tin-eared, magazine article in decades. “Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,” writer Joan Juliet Buck began her profile of Syria’s first lady in Vogue last year. Amid descriptions of Assad’s “energetic grace” and Christian Laboutin shoes, Buck wrote: “The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls ‘active citizenship.’ ” Read full article > >

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Vogue’s flattering article on Syria’s first lady is scrubbed from Web

The wives of the British and German ambassadors to the United Nations have taken on Syria's first lady in an online video, calling on Asma al-Assad to “stop your husband” and “stop being a bystander.”

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U.N. wives appeal to Syria first lady

The senior government executive who organized the lavish Las Vegas conference at the center of a General Services Administration spending scandal took dozens of trips for the agency. The boss’s wife accompanied him on some of them — and taxpayers picked up the tab. Read full article > >

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GSA official’s wife accompanied him on trips at taxpayer expense

Congratulations are due to Bubba Watson for his admirable performance in our new national sport. Not golf. Hugging. On Sunday, Watson won the Masters golf tournament . And then the hugs began. Read full article > >

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Alexandra Petri: Bubba Watson and the hug epidemic

First Lady Michelle Obama continues to take TV by storm , announcing Wednesday she’ll appear next Tuesday, and one week later on NBC’s ratings-anemic weight-loss series “The Biggest Loser,” for its first ever White House workout. Read full article > >

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Michelle Obama to help fatten up ‘The Biggest Loser’ ratings

It seems an improbable notion of landscape architecture: Create a big pond to control the tide, surround it with 1,700 Japanese flowering cherry trees , and place near it a Roman monument to a president who never saw a Japanese cherry and didn’t care that much for Washington. And yet the Tidal Basin works as a beloved civic space, a two-mile promenade that calls us back year after year at blossom time. Read full article > >

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Beyond Washington’s cherry trees, how did so many Japanese plants find their way into American gardens?

Uplifting, undeserving films get Oscars as routinely as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” is ranked No. 1 on lists of great Washington movies. Forget uplift. Forget Jimmy Stewart’s tears. The capital is crazier and more complicated than that, and its infinite variety has been celebrated in large and small ways onscreen since the 1940s. How to recognize this on Oscar Sunday? Ladies and gentlemen, the home-rule version of the Academy Awards. Read full article > >

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And the Washington Oscar goes to . . .

We don’t need Maroon 5’s ubiquitous pop hit “Moves Like Jagger” to remind us that the physicality of rock-and-roll still lives in Mick Jagger’s muscle tissue. On Tuesday, the 68-year-old Rolling Stones frontman threw limb and larynx into a concert at the White House honoring the American blues, strutting, stomping, huffing and howling beneath the East Room chandeliers. Read full article > >

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Fresh from White House show, Mick Jagger says: ‘Every gig is a gig’

Blue Ivy Carter, the much-heralded baby daughter of Beyonce and Jay-Z , has officially made her public debut. The president and first lady of hip-hop have shared their first baby photos via Jay-Z’s Web site, Life + Times , an apparent follow-up to Beyonce’s public appearances earlier this week, her inaugural ones since giving birth . Read full article > >

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Blue Ivy Carter: The first photos of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s baby have been revealed

Blue Ivy Carter, the much-heralded baby daughter of Beyonce and Jay-Z , has officially made her public debut. The president and first lady of hip-hop have shared their first baby photos via Jay-Z’s Web site, Life + Times , an apparent follow-up to Beyonce’s public appearances earlier this week, her inaugural ones since giving birth . Read full article > >

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Blue Ivy Carter: The first photos of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s baby have been revealed

Michelle Obama could have stayed home with her lips sealed today, and gotten a head-start on the annual Easter egg hunt. Instead she spoke about the alleged conflicts with former White House advisers described in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” a type of work the first lady pointedly said she does not read. Read full article > >

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Michelle Obama: I’m not ‘some angry black woman’

Dorothy Rodham was a strong influence in the life of her daughter, the former first lady, senator from New York and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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Dorothy Rodham, Mother of Hillary Clinton, Dies at 92

Emancipation was in the air, and Elizabeth Keckley knew it. A former slave herself, she had become dressmaker and confidante to first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, and she was well settled in Washington society by the time the Civil War began. But the plight of other African Americans in the city pained her. Read full article > >

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For freed blacks in the Civil War, Washington was a city of contradictions