The White House warned that the U.S. may consider a military response to the rocket attack on Wednesday that hit an air base in western Iraq where American and coalition troops are housed, raising concerns this could trigger a new round of escalating violence. A U.S. contractor died after at least 10 rockets slammed into the base. And while no group claimed responsibility, it was the first strike since the U.S. bombed Iran-aligned militia targets along the Iraq-Syria border last week.
A long-range U.S. bomber flew over the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on Wednesday in a show of solidarity with NATO allies, the U.S. Air Force said, amid Western concerns over a more assertive Russia. "This mission sends a clear message that our commitment to our NATO allies is unshakeable," Gen. Jeff Harrigian, U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa commander said in a statement. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were once ruled from Moscow but are now part of both NATO and the European Union.
Pakistan's prime minister said Thursday he will seek a vote of confidence from the National Assembly this weekend to prove that he still has the support of majority lawmakers in the house despite the surprising and politically embarrassing defeat of his ruling party's key candidate in Senate elections. Prime Minister Imran Khan made the announcement in a televised address to the nation, alleging that some lawmakers from his ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf party had been bribed by the opposition to vote for former Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in the Senate elections on Wednesday. Gilani defeated Hafeez Sheikh, the finance minister in Khan's Cabinet, in the vote, which was seen as a test for Khan who came to power in the 2018 parliamentary elections.
Details emerging from investigations into hundreds of Capitol rioters have cast an unsettling light on the toxic roles that fringe religious beliefs and QAnon conspiracy theories have played in shaking big and small churches across the nation. Trump's false insistence that he won the 2020 election may have incited the mob, but it also pointed to a dangerous intersection of God and politics. A Kentucky man who the FBI charged as the first to enter the Capitol through a broken window saw himself as fighting a holy war on behalf of his president and, in a booking photo, wore a T-shirt that quoted Ephesians 6:11: โPut on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's ...
One moment, Hadiza was weeping and flinging her arms around her father for the first time since her abduction; the next - gunfire and tear gas filled the air and people ran for cover. It was supposed to be a joyous reunion to end the five-day ordeal of 279 girls kidnapped last week from the Jangebe Government Girls Science Secondary School in a remote corner of northwest Nigeria. Cheering children had lined the street as buses brought the girls, grinning and waving, back to their school from the Zamfara state capital Gusau, where they had been cared for since their release on Tuesday.
The International Criminal Court prosecutor said on Wednesday her office will formally investigate war crimes in the Palestinian Territories, a move welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and denounced by Israel. The decision follows a ruling by the court on Feb. 5 that it has jurisdiction in the case, prompting swift rejections by Washington and Jerusalem. "The decision to open an investigation followed a painstaking preliminary examination undertaken by my office that lasted close to five years," Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement.
Jill Biden, the teacher in the White House, along with new Education Secretary Miguel Cardona went back to school Wednesday in a public push to show districts that have yet to transition back to in-person learning that it can be done safely during the pandemic. Teachers want to be back," the first lady said after she and Cardona spent about an hour visiting classrooms and other areas at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School in Meriden, Connecticut. We want to be back.
On the floor of Georgia's House of Representatives on 1 March, state Democratic Rep Bee Nguyen warned her colleagues that the bill in front of them โ a 66-page, Republican-backed proposal to drastically roll back voting access across the state โ followed a months-long campaign from Donald Trump and his GOP allies to undermine millions of voters with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and a โstolenโ election. โMembers of this body aided and abetted a deliberate misinformation campaign to sow seeds of doubt among Georgia voters with absolutely no facts or evidence.โ The bill would, among other things, cut mail-in voting and early voting access, strip elections oversight from the state's Secretary of State, and limit voting access that would disproportionately target Black voters.
The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center cancelled a tsunami watch Thursday for Hawaii that was issued after a huge earthquake occurred in a remote area between New Zealand and Tonga. The agency previously cancelled a tsunami warning it had issued for American Samoa. The magnitude 8.1 quake struck the Kermadec Islands region.
Turkey is not necessarily aiming to return to the U.S. F-35 fighter jet programme from which it was removed over its purchase of Russian defence systems, the Turkish defence industry chief said on Wednesday. He said the primary goal was for Turkey to get compensated for its losses. Ankara had ordered more than 100 F-35s and has been making parts for it but was removed from the programme in 2019 after it acquired Russian S-400 missile defence systems, which Washington says threaten the jets.
The Senate voted by the slimmest of margins Thursday to begin debating a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, after Democrats made eleventh-hour changes aimed at ensuring they could pull President Joe Biden's top legislative priority through the precariously divided chamber. Democrats were hoping for Senate approval of the package before next week, in time for the House to sign off and get the measure to Biden quickly. Democratic leaders made over a dozen late additions to their package, reflecting their need to cement unanimous support from all their senators โ plus Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote โ to succeed in the 50-50 chamber.
Donald Trump has been served a civil rights lawsuit accusing him of inciting the Capitol riot along with Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and other far-right groups, according to reports. Mr Trump was given the documents, filed by Democrat congressman Bennie Thompson and civil rights group the NAACP in mid-February, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It is unclear who will represent the former president in the case: it was merely signed for by a โRickyโ, according to The Daily Beast.
China will resolutely deter any separatist activity seeking Taiwan's independence but is committed to promoting the peaceful growth of relations across the Taiwan Strait and China's "reunification", Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday. China, which claims democratic Taiwan as its own territory, has increased its military activity near the island in recent months, responding to what it calls "collusion" between Taipei and Washington, Taiwan's main international backer and arms supplier. Speaking at the opening of the annual meeting of China's parliament, Li said Beijing stands by the "one China" principle, which states that Taiwan is part of China.
Winner: Model S PRICING AND VALUE A base 2021 Tesla Model S Long Range starts at around $80,000; the new Plaid variant, which has yet to come out, will be around $120,000. The Model S comes well equipped with standard features such as an adaptive air suspension, heated front and second-row seats, and a 22-speaker audio system. Tesla also includes driver aids such as adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring and forward collision mitigation as standard.
High-traffic areas are about to meet their match Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Republicans opposing a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that passed the House have pointed to two transportation projects as examples of pork that would politically benefit Democrats leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Drew Hammill, a spokesperson for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said the Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that a subway extension through downtown San Jose did not meet requirements for inclusion in the bill because it is part of a pilot project. The parliamentarians rulings are generally respected by the Senate.
Venezuelan Americans living in Florida would be open to easing U.S. sanctions against Venezuela's oil industry if the Biden administration found a way to use the revenue from exports to buy food and medicine for needy residents in their embattled homeland. An Atlantic Council survey released Thursday found that 51% would be in favor of an oil-for-food program somewhat like that previously tried by the United Nations with Iraq so long as Nicolรกs Maduro's government is prohibited from accessing or managing the money. โThere is support among this population for consideration of different pathways,โ said Jason Marczak, director of the Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, โa different road ahead than the road that defined the previous administration.โ
A California serial killer who authorities say strangled and raped at least seven women was fatally choked himself in a state prison, officials said Wednesday.
The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. While worrisome coronavirus variants identified in Brazil, South Africa, and California have mutations that might help them resist antibody treatments and vaccines, the immune system's T cell responses to the variants are unaffected in recovered patients and in people who have received the Moderna Inc or Pfizer Inc/BioMTech SE vaccines, new data show. "We think this is really good news," said Alessandro Sette of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, whose team reported the findings on Monday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review.
The end of Texas' mask mandate is giving Lucy Alanis second thoughts about one of her occasional indulgences during the coronavirus pandemic: dining in at restaurants. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's repeal of most COVID-19 restrictions โ saying it was โtime to open Texas 100%" โ reverberated across the state and to the White House on Wednesday, a day after one of the country's most dramatic rollbacks of rules intended to slow the spread of the virus. Businesses in Texas shed rules, city leaders plotted new safeguards and the state's 5 million schoolchildren largely remained under orders to keep wearing masks, at least for now.
Ethiopia's government is under growing pressure to allow the world to see firsthand what has occurred in its embattled Tigray region as its Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister rejects โpartisan interventions.โ Millions of dollars in aid to Ethiopia, a key security ally in the region, are at stake. Last month The Associated Press exposed the killing of an estimated 800 people in the city of Axum, citing several witnesses, and a week later Amnesty International reported โmany hundredsโ killed there, citing more than 40 witnesses.
A Hong Kong judge kept 47 pro-democracy activists in custody on Thursday after four days of bail hearings in a case that has drawn global concern that Beijing is using a national security law to crush dissent. Thirty-two defendants were denied bail by chief magistrate Victor So, while 15 were granted bail but still kept in custody after government prosecutors said they would appeal against that decision. The case is the most sweeping use yet of the city's new national security law, which imposes punishments of up to life in prison for serious charges including subversion.
A former Pakistani prime minister Wednesday defeated a ruling party candidate in Senate elections in a major setback to the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan, election authorities and opposition parties said. Yusuf Raza Gilani defeated the ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf party's Hafeez Sheikh, an adviser to Khan who was named finance minister in December 2020, Gilani received 169 votes to Sheikh's 164. Gilani's success suggested some ruling party lawmakers revolted and didn't vote for Sheikh for the key seat reserved for the capital Islamabad.
The United States on Wednesday hailed plans by NATO ally Germany to sail a warship across the contested South China Sea, calling it welcome support for a "rules-based international order" in the region, something Washington says is threatened by China. German government officials said on Tuesday a German frigate would set sail for Asia in August and, on its return journey, become the first German warship to cross the South China Sea since 2002. "The United States has a national interest in the maintenance of peace and stability, respect for international law, lawful unimpeded commerce, and freedom of navigation and other lawful uses of the sea," a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department said.
The Kremlin on Thursday urged France and Germany to use their influence with the Ukrainian government to make sure that events in the part of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed rebels did not "cross a dangerous line". Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Moscow was seriously concerned by a rise in violence on the contact line between the rebels and Ukrainian government forces. Ukraine pushed back against the remarks, saying Russia should instead order the forces it controls in Donbass to observe the ceasefire, and blamed Moscow for obstructing progress in new prisoner swaps and troop withdrawals.
โTaking humans to Mars would require an investment astronomically out of kilter with the possible benefits.โ
โCan a Mars settlement be a freer society than we enjoy on Earth? Maybe.โ
โWhat we learn...may spark the next revolution that will make life in 2071 beyond anything we can imagine right now.โ
โOur presence on Mars could jeopardize one of our main reasons for being there โ the search for life.โ
โThe future of geologic investigation of other worlds lies with highly improved versions of our Mars rovers.โ