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  • Recent drone attack on Saudi royal palace launched from Iraq

    Explosive-laden drones that targeted Saudi Arabia's royal palace in the kingdom's capital last month were launched from inside Iraq, a senior Iran-backed militia official in Baghdad and a U.S. official said. Speaking to The Associated Press this week, the militia official said three drones were launched from Iraqi-Saudi border areas by a relatively unknown Iran-backed faction in Iraq and crashed into the royal complex in Riyadh on Jan. 23, exacerbating regional tensions. Attacks on the Saudi capital have been sporadic amid the kingdom's yearslong war against neighboring Yemen's Houthi rebels.

  • AP PHOTOS: Migrants evade Libyan coast guard to reach Europe

    The February storm is unforgiving, violently shaking the humanitarian rescuers’ vessel as they try to revive a faulty engine and save African migrants drifting in the Mediterranean Sea after fleeing Libya on unseaworthy boats. Not only must they brave 70 kph (43 mph) winds and 4-meter (13-foot) waves, but also win the race against the Libyan coast guard, which has been trained and equipped by Europe to keep migrants away from its shores. In recent days, the Libyans had already thwarted eight rescue attempts by the Open Arms, a Spanish NGO vessel, harassing and threatening its crew in the international waters of the central Mediterranean where 160 people have died so far this year.

  • NASA Hid an Inspiring Message on the Parachute of the Mars Rover Perseverance

    Here's how a computer science student and his father cracked the secret code

  • In boost for COVID-19 battle, Pfizer vaccine found 94% effective in real world

    The first big real-world study of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be independently reviewed shows the shot is highly effective at preventing COVID-19, in a potentially landmark moment for countries desperate to end lockdowns and reopen economies. Up until now, most data on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines has come under controlled conditions in clinical trials, leaving an element of uncertainty over how results would translate into the real world with its unpredictable variables. The research in Israel - two months into one of the world's fastest rollouts, providing a rich source of data - showed two doses of the Pfizer shot cut symptomatic COVID-19 cases by 94% across all age groups, and severe illnesses by nearly as much.

  • South Dakota seeks to remove attorney general involved in deadly crash

    South Dakota's top lawman could be removed after officials say he fatally hit a man with his car.

  • Biden news - live: Trump Jr deposed over inaugural funds as White House defends migrant camp after AOC attack

    Follow all the latest news from the White House

  • South Dakota attorney general faces impeachment following deadly car accident

    Articles of impeachment have been filed against South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (R), after new evidence emerged in a fatal car crash he was involved in last September. The accident took place at around 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 12, as Ravnsborg drove home from a Republican fundraiser. Ravnsborg initially told investigators he thought he hit an animal, but after returning to the scene the next day, he found the body of 55-year-old Joseph Boever. Ravnsborg was charged with three misdemeanors last week — careless driving, driving out of his lane, and operating a motor vehicle while on his phone — and faces up to 90 days in jail and a $1,500 fine. On Tuesday, the South Dakota Department of Public Safety released video of two three-hour interviews of Ravnsborg recorded on Sept. 14 and 30. During the Sept. 30 interview, Ravnsborg is told that detectives found a pair of broken reading glasses inside his vehicle that had belonged to Boever. "His face was in your windshield, Jason," one investigator told him. "Think about that." Ravnsborg denied seeing the glasses or a bright flashlight Boever was carrying; the light was still on when detectives arrived at the scene on Sept. 13. After the interviews were made public, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) called on Ravnsborg to resign, and a bipartisan group of state lawmakers filed two articles of impeachment against him. "I do not believe Attorney General Ravnsborg belongs in prison," state Rep. Will Mortenson (R) told the Argus Leader, "but I know he does not belong in the Office of the Attorney General anymore." A private spokesman for Ravnsborg said he will not step down. Nick Nemec, Boever's cousin, told The Washington Post the videos are proof that Ravnsborg "knew there was a dead man in that ditch. He knew what he hit and he lied." Nemec said he doesn't understand why Ravnsborg was charged with misdemeanors, and had been "hoping he would be charged with involuntary manslaughter, but that didn't happen. He's grossly undercharged." More stories from theweek.comIt's been 1 year since Trump infamously tweeted the 'coronavirus is very much under control' in the U.S.The MyPillow guy might be Trump's ultimate chumpBiden nominates postal board slate that could oust Louis DeJoy after DeJoy vows to stay put

  • The Rioters Hate Voting. Here’s the Only Way to Stop Them From Returning.

    Samuel Corum/GettyThe Senate hearing on the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was the blame game to end all blame games: The failure was within the FBI. Or maybe the Army. Or maybe the Capitol Police.But the extremists’ deadly siege of Congress didn’t happen only because individual agencies failed to defend the building, and the riot was not just born of rage or blind allegiance to a defiant candidate. It was an attack on voting—the very heart of American democracy.Just as the pursuit of an impeachment conviction against Donald Trump required members of Congress to regard the former president as “singularly responsible” for inciting the mob, yesterday we asked which agency should be held singularly responsible for the security failures. Those are the wrong targets.First Capitol Riot Hearing Only Raised More Questions About Jan. 6They are wrong not because the impeachment failed to produce a conviction—that result was preordained by Republican fealty— or because we should not suss out the security failures, but because the fixation on Jan. 6 in isolation has led Congress, the media, and much of the nation to lose sight of everything else that sparked the “Stop the Steal” uprising. And now, a fixation on which security oversight to blame threatens to take us further away from realizing that the problem has been decades in the making, while we are doing almost nothing to stop it from happening again.The roots of this crisis and where it will lead next are clear to me because I’ve had a front-row seat to this drama for four years. As ProPublica’s voting reporter, I took on an unusual beat for the 2016 election, tracking not the stakes of elections but the process of voting itself: seemingly mundane proceedings like poll worker trainings, county purchasing meetings about voting machines, obscure legislative hearings on voting laws. ProPublica’s idea was to pool 1,100 local reporters to document how the vote played out in the first election after the Supreme Court’s landmark revisions to the Voting Rights Act. Then, in October, the story began to change when Trump, then the Republican nominee, alleged widespread voter fraud.Even after his 2016 victory, Trump continued the charade — sowing the seeds of doubt that would allow him to claim victory in 2020, even if he lost. Today, we connect his motivation with whatever personal demons make Trump unable to admit defeat, but what’s just as important to understand is that Trump had picked up a playbook that was years in the making by his party’s local leaders.The first place I saw that playbook really clearly was in Texas, where I traveled in 2017 to explain how the implementation of the state’s new voter ID law had gone so disastrously the year before. The assumed goal of voter ID was a policy move to make it more difficult to vote as the state’s rapidly changing demographics threatened power long held by white Republicans. But what really made the party embrace voter ID was its power to ignite the base.I was especially struck by Doug Smith, the Republican chair of the Texas House elections committee when voter ID legislation passed. He described how claims of voter fraud first levied after the 2000 election by George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Aschroft, ricocheted in Texas, becoming such an obsession of Republicans that by 2009 Smith concluded no legislative activity could proceed until lawmakers tackled voter fraud fears.After studying Ashcroft’s investigation, which found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Smith tried to craft moderate legislation. He eventually gave up after Tea Party organizing handed Texas Republicans a supermajority in the House in 2011.A few years removed from elected office, Smith understood why his party had gone down such a dark hole. “If you persuade people that you are the party trying to make sure elections are controlled by American citizens, and that the Democrats are doing everything they can to make sure that illegal immigrants can vote by the busload,” he said, “that’s a good position to be in.”And it is.Fomenting anger based on election fraud claims proved effective in states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana, where voting laws were debated with increased fury and threats were made toward election officials. And then came Trump. The claims he made in the 2016 campaign aligned him early on with this lineage. Over the course of the 2020 election, Trump took fraud fiction to a new level. I increasingly found myself fielding phone calls from terrified election officials across the country. One Republican election official called me after midnight, a week before November 3, just to talk. She wanted to know what the country would be like after this election. I couldn’t find any words of hope to offer her.I’ve been reminded again and again over the past four years of the major structural forces that made possible what we saw in January. One is the bigger shifts in voting laws that both opened the door to more restrictive voting laws and centralized voter-roll data, which conspiracy theorists and fraud commissions alike misinterpret to spin scary stories of illegal voting that appeal to the base foundations of the country’s ugliest, most racist roots. The other is changes in my own profession, the media itself.The local news outlets my ProPublica colleagues and I worked with during the 2016 election were already husks of their former selves, poorly equipped to debunk the claims of vote fraud by local elected officials like Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. By 2020, many of those journalists had lost their jobs altogether.It is no longer acceptable to pretend that we can cover claims about our election system without resourcing local reporters to examine and explain those claims thoughtfully and with nuance to local readers who understandably do not trust national sources. It is no longer acceptable to ignore the tedious and important work of our local election administrators, who are on the front lines of democracy.As we move forward from the lowest point in modern American democracy, we need to reclaim a common understanding of truth. To do that, we need the journalism that helps voters understand the pivotal events just around the corner, whether bloody or not — from redistricting to legislative election reforms to whether to maintain vote by mail and early voting. That’s why I left ProPublica to join Votebeat, a new pop-up newsroom designed not only to support local reporters in covering voting and elections, as Electionland did, but to create full-time jobs to ensure somebody is doing that reporting.The local and state level, after all, is not just where voter fraud claims began. It was also the early warning system for the Jan. 6 insurrection, with many reports of harassments of poll workers and death threats against election officials. And it is the stage where state Republicans first made national news for revealing their president’s illegal scheme to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory. Notably, it wasn’t Mitt Romney or a Cabinet member or a White House staffer who recorded and released a call in which Trump abused his power, seeking to falsify an election result. It was a Republican voting official in the state of Georgia.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Kaley Cuoco thought she was meeting with her 'Big Bang Theory' costars to discuss a 13th season - instead she found out the show was ending

    The actress said she was "in a state of shock" when Jim Parsons said he wanted to leave the series, which ended the popular CBS sitcom.

  • Mitch McConnell: Nancy Pelosi's plan for investigating the Capitol attack is a 'bizarre partisan concept'

    Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’s concerned Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to establish a commission to probe the assault on the U.S. Capitol would be overly “partisan.”

  • Republicans defend energy deregulation as new report says Texas consumers overpay by $28 billion for power

    From Biden to the Green New Deal, GOP officials are finding all sorts of things to blame besides the state’s deregulated energy market for soaring rates and rolling blackouts

  • Marvel Studios president hints 'we probably could' see characters like Jessica Jones again 'someday' in the MCU

    "I'm not exactly sure...but perhaps someday," Kevin Feige said of the possibility that Netflix or ABC characters would enter the MCU.

  • Carnival, Disney Cruise Line cancel sailings until June; Holland America, Princess scrap Canadian cruises

    Carnival and Disney announced Wednesday that they would cancel all sailings through May. Three Carnival sister lines also announced cancellations.

  • Thousands rally in Armenia after PM warns of coup attempt

    Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned of an attempted military coup against him on Thursday, and thousands took to the streets of the capital to support him after the army demanded he and his government resign. Russia, an ally of Armenia which has a military base in Armenia, said it was alarmed by events in the former Soviet republic and called for the situation to be resolved peacefully and within the constitution. Pashinyan, 45, has faced calls to quit since November after what critics said was his disastrous handling of a six-week conflict between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenian forces over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and surrounding areas.

  • Dear Sir or Madam: Paul McCartney memoir due out in November

    Paul McCartney is finally ready to write his memoirs, and will use music — and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet — to help guide him. McCartney, 78, will trace his life through 154 songs, from his teens and early partnership with fellow Beatle John Lennon to his solo work over the past half century. Irish poet Paul Muldoon is editing and will contribute an introduction.

  • Pakistani, Indian militaries agree to stop firing in Kashmir

    Rival neighbors Pakistan and India have pledged to stop firing weapons across the border in disputed Kashmir, promising to adhere to a 2003 accord that has been largely ignored, officials from both sides said on Thursday. Both sides often exchange fire in Kashmir and civilians are caught in the crossfire whenever such violence erupts.

  • Jamal Khashoggi: US to release report on Saudi journalist murder

    The report is widely expected to implicate Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

  • Meghan Markle and Prince Harry never intended to leave the royal family

    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex say they will continue to support their royal patronages despite not being allowed to do so as royals.

  • Butler leads Heat to 4th straight win, 116-108 over Raptors

    Jimmy Butler went to the foul line in the final moments of the fourth quarter Wednesday night, talking and smiling the entire time. There's a lot for Butler and the Miami Heat to be happy about right now. Bam Adebayo had 19 points and 12 rebounds for Miami, Duncan Robinson added 17 points and Goran Dragic scored 15 in his return from an ankle injury.

  • Adam Kinzinger says the battle with Trumpism has to be fought in public

    Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., has been the most outspoken Republican critic of former President Trump over the past few months because he believes that in the modern political age, open confrontation is the primary way political parties are steered in one direction or another.