8 Things You Need To Know This AM — Oct 22 2015

Joe Biden announced he won’t run for president in 2016 after a moving speech about the son he lost to cancer.

Claiming that his window to run “has closed,” Joe Biden announced that he will not enter the 2016 presidential race. In a speech delivered with both his wife and President Obama at his side, Biden opened up about his struggle with grief following the untimely death of his son, Beau, from brain cancer. “I know from previous experience that there’s no timetable for this process,” the Vice President said, referring to the 1972 car accident that took the lives of his first wife and one-year-old daughter. “The process doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses.” Biden reassured the public that this will not be the end of Uncle Joe. “While I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent,” he declared. (Refinery29)

Daniel Radcliffe talked about being a teenage boy on the set of Harry Potter and doing, uh, what teenage boys do. In support of his new film Victor Frankenstein, a contemporary retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic tale, Daniel Radcliffe sat down with Playboy for a game of 20 Questions — and revealed more about his time on the Harry Potter set than we thought we’d ever (want to) know. Recognizing that J.K. Rowling’s fandom is never going to disappear, since “we’re already getting the next generation,” Radcliffe spoke candidly about how strange it was to be a teenager surrounded by acting greats like Gary Oldman and Dame Maggie Smith. When asked if he wasted time in the same way that typical teenaged boys do (i.e., playing with their wands), the actor revealed he could never masturbate on set. "I wash’t going, ‘When is Alan Rickman going to nail this scene so I can run back to my trailer?,'” he joked. "It would have been embarrassing to walk back on set and look the dignitaries of British acting royalty in the eye, knowing what I’d been doing." (Out)

An Alabama judge forced offenders who couldn’t pay their court fines to donate blood or spend time in jail. This is not the future that Back to The Future promised... An Alabama Circuit Court judge is facing an ethics complaint for pressuring offenders who could not afford to pay their court fines and legal debts into donating blood in order to avoid jail time. The Southern Poverty Law Center released a recording of Judge Marvin Wiggins directing around 500 defendants to a blood drive running outside of the court, telling them, “If you do not have any money and you don’t want to go to jail, consider giving blood today.” The SPLC says that Wiggins violated both the Alabama and the U.S. Constitutions. “It’s a two-tiered system of justice — one for those who can pay and another for those who can’t. We must stop exploiting the poor,” SPLC staff attorney Sara Zampierin said in a statement. (BBC)

Paul Ryan says he’ll run for House Speaker, but only if the entire GOP agrees to vote for him, which is the same tactic he uses to always win Congress’s games of Cards Against Humanity. Hate losing? Take a lesson from Representative Paul Ryan, who told House Republicans that he’d only run for speaker if certain conditions were met. Ryan gave his fellow party members until Friday to decide whether they’d agree to his demands, which include having a united party stand behind him (therefore, Tea Partiers and conservatives would have to refrain from bullying him into supporting their positions, like they did with Boehner) and the ability to spend more time with his family, an ironic stipulation considering Ryan’s own dismal voting record on paid parental leave. If Ryan is unable to garner unanimous support, it will be back to the drawing board for a party that is struggling to find leadership for its House majority. (Los Angeles Times)

We talked to a team of beauty editors and Hollywood stylists to find the under-$15 shampoos and conditioners they swear by. Yep, they exist! We're all about finding the right mix of high-end and amazingly cheap drugstore products. But often, we focus on makeup and leave the bargain shampoos and conditioners to languish in obscurity. Well, not anymore. (Refinery29)

Missing Georgia Tech student is found thanks to Apple’s Find My iPhone app. The next time your parents yell at you for spending too much time on your phone, calmly text them the link to this story. Your knowledge of phone apps may be the thing that saves them if they’re ever severely injured, incoherent, and missing, like Georgia Tech undergrad James Hubert was. The last time anyone saw Hubert, he was exiting a party late Friday night, inadvertently taking his date’s phone with him. When the student still hadn’t been heard from over two days later, one of his high school classmates thought of using Apple’s Find My iPhone service to find his date’s phone and, therefore, him. The GPS tracker led the search group to railroad tracks almost seven miles from where Hubert was last seen. Facedown on the tracks, paralyzed with a punctured lung, broken bones, and his date’s phone, was Hubert. (Time)

The Ole Miss student Senate voted in favor of banning the Mississippi state flag from campus. After a lengthy and contentious meeting, the University of Mississippi passed a measure supporting the removal of the state flag from campus. In case you aren’t an aspiring Jeopardy contestant and can’t recall what the Mississippi flag looks like, all you need to know is that the design includes the Confederate battle emblem. In total, 33 out of the 49 student senators voted in favor of the resolution, which will now head to the Student Body President, who has already stated his support of the flag ban. “It’s just overwhelming to know that the voices of students that are affected by this image, that feel excluded by this image, that are hurt by the symbol, that their voices were heard,” said resolution co-author and Senator Allen Coon. (USA Today)

A new study shows that an ingredient in sunscreen may be partially responsible for destroying coral reefs. Snorkeling = ruined. If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably felt a ping of pride every time you’ve remembered to apply and reapply sunscreen — a sense that you were becoming more mature and that surely, older you would thank present you for protecting your skin from sun damage and cancer. Well, say adios to all those sunscreen-related good feelings, because a new study reports that the ultraviolet-absorbing chemical found in nearly every sunscreen is killing coral reefs. According to the report, the compound oxybenzone stalls new coral growth and accelerates bleaching, which leaves coral fragile, white, and depleted of all nutrients. “We have lost a least 80% of the coral reefs in the Caribbean,” said study co-author Craig Downs. Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that degraded area recovers.” (NPR)