BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILLY POST At the police press conference yesterday, there were no good answers, just cold hard facts. The killer was neither a spurned lover nor a serial killer, not a rapist nor a thief. The killer was not — much to the palpable disappointment of the comments section trolls of Philly.com — a dark-skinned predator from the north or the west come to prey upon the white, weak and well-off. It was a white guy from the suburbs who kills bugs for a living. Out of all its awful attributes, the banality of evil […]

[Illustration by ALEX FINE]   WASHINGTON POST: An American drug dealer who had faced life in prison was sentenced instead to 35 years Thursday for helping plan the deadly 2008 attacks on Mumbai, India — a punishment prosecutors said reflected his broad cooperation with U.S. investigators but that a victim’s family member called “an appalling dishonor.” It was David Coleman Headley’s meticulous scouting missions that facilitated the assault by 10 gunmen from a Pakistani-based militant group on multiple targets in Mumbai, including the landmark Taj Mahal Hotel. TV cameras captured much of the three-day rampage often called India’s 9/11. More […]

  FRESH AIR In the introduction to his new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright writes, “Scientology plays an outsize role in the cast of new religions that have arisen in the 20th century and survived into the 21st.” The book is a look inside the world of Scientology and the life of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986. A recent ad for Scientology claims to welcome 4.4 million new converts each year. Wright, who won a Pulitzer for his book The Looming Tower about the history of al-Qaida, has written […]

SLATE: The Coen brothers’ next movie, Inside Llyewn Davis, is loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, but the musician whose spirit hovers over the first trailer is Bob Dylan. That’s his song “Farewell” playing throughout, and the shot above recalls the cover for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, sans Suze Rotolo. Then again, Van Ronk was good friends with Dylan, so perhaps that’s the reason the legend feels near at hand—and the album we see at the end, which gives the movie its title, is borrowed directly from the Van Ronk discography. MORE

  THE GUARDIAN: Women could assume combat roles in the US army for the first time as early as this year, following a landmark decision by defense secretary Leon Panetta to lift a military ban on women serving on the frontline. The groundbreaking move could open up hundreds of thousands of frontline positions, and could see women working in elite commando units. One official told the Associated Press, which revealed details of the move, that military chiefs will report to the Pentagon on how to integrate women into combat roles by 15 May. MORE RELATED: The biggest safety concern for […]

Out the window of the 47th floor of Liberty Place, 4:01 PM by JEFF FUSCO EDITOR’s NOTE: Cool picture aside, this does nothing to change our ‘motherf*ck Comcast’ stance.