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Once-popular cartoon scrapped from hundreds of papers after Scott Adams calls Black people a ‘hate group’ on his YouTube showThe comic strip Dilbert has been dropped from multiple US newspapers in response to racist comments by its creator, Scott Adams, who called Black Americans a “hate group” and urged white people to “get the hell away” from Black people in a YouTube video.Adams’s comments on 22 February came in response to a conservative organization’s poll which appeared to show that 26% of Black respondents said they disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”. Another 21% said they were not sure.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting Continue reading...

Hailed as ‘a trailblazer’, Flemister experienced widespread racism and discrimination during her tenure at the federal agencyThe first Black woman to have been hired by the US Secret Service, Zandra Flemister, has died at the age of 71, leaving behind as her legacy a rich political career, her fight with Alzheimer’s, and a lawsuit that details the widespread racism and discrimination she suffered during her tenure at the federal agency known for protecting presidents.Flemister, who died Tuesday, was “a trailblazer” and “inspired a future generation of agents,” the Secret Service’s director, Kimberly Cheatle, said in a statement about her death. Continue reading...

Experts fear this moment of agreement in Washington could escalate tensions with Beijing and increase the risk of conflictIn the weeks since the US military shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have spoken passionately about the need to more effectively compete with Beijing. A resolution condemning China for the balloon incident passed the House in an unanimous vote of 419 to 0.Joe Biden has similarly expressed hope that efforts to strengthen America’s global competitiveness in response to a rising China can unite Democrats and Republicans in an era defined by bitter partisanship. Continue reading...

The gathering of conservatives returns to Washington and could prove to be a crystal ball into the GOP’s 2024 outlookIts impresario is facing allegations of sexual assault. Its headline act is a twice impeached former US president under criminal investigation. And its after-dinner speaker is a local news anchor turned far-right election denier.Welcome to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which claims to be the biggest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world. It is also a perennial window to the soul of the Republican party. Continue reading...

Rewriting the children’s author is about profit not ‘wokeness’ – part of the endless recycling and exploitation of old ideasGood news for me: the series of ITV’s Endeavour that starts airing tonight will be the last. Hooray! I hate Endeavour. A lot. In fact, I would have italicised the word “hate” to emphasise the fact, if I hadn’t worried that it would look weird next to the italicised title of the programme. But please imagine it was italicised.Just to qualify my hatred: I have never watched Endeavour and, having heard only positive reports, am convinced I would enjoy it. I haven’t watched it as a point of principle because, in my view, it shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t exist because it spoils Inspector Morse. Continue reading...

The US president won rave reviews in Kyiv and Warsaw. But his old, cold war mindset is out of step with a changing worldIt was Joe Biden’s week. His energised performance in Kyiv and Warsaw recalled the campaigning style of a much younger man. Russian media sniped that the US president was warming up for his 2024 re-election campaign. They missed the point. He almost certainly intends to run again. Yet last week’s adrenaline rush had a different cause.Biden has cast himself as a latter-day Lionheart, leading a global crusade against the bad guys – what he calls “a test for the ages”. He’s on a high. He believes he, and the cause of democracy, are winning hands down. Sadly, he’s wrong. Continue reading...

Victories at several companies energized organizers, but hostile corporations – and an impotent labor board – stymie negotiationsUS corporations have mounted a fierce counterattack against the union drives at Starbucks, Amazon and other companies, and in response, federal officials are working overtime to crack down on those corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics – maneuvers that labor leaders fear could significantly drain the momentum behind today’s surge of unionization.The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that polices labor-management relations, has accused Starbucks and Amazon of a slew of illegal anti-union practices, among them firing many workers in retaliation for backing a union. Nonetheless, many workplace experts question whether the NLRB’s efforts, no matter how vigorous, can assure that workers have a fair shot at unionizing. Continue reading...

The Lehman Trilogy is an enthralling and acclaimed play. But, as it returns to London, we should discuss the profound problem at its coreOf all the stereotypes about Jews in the lexicon of antisemitism, none is as commonplace or enduring as the one about Jews and money. From Shylock and Fagin to Joe Rogan’s podcast and TikTok videos about the Rothschilds, the idea that Jews have a unique taste for acquiring wealth is the one thing that people think they “know” about them. Yet this historic anti-Jewish trope seems able to hide in plain sight, in the most surprising of places.The Lehman Trilogy, which has returned to the London stage, tells the story of the Lehman Brothers bank from its origins as a fabric store in Alabama to its collapse in the 2008 financial crash, the ultimate symbol of unregulated and uncontrollable banking. This award-winning, acclaimed play is an enthralling piece of theatre with five star reviews and a clutch of Tony awards. Unfortunately, it is also profoundly antisemitic. Not in a crude way – a clumsy turn of phrase here, a jarring stereotype there – but in its innermost essence, connecting a modern audience to malevolent beliefs about Jews and money that are buried deep within western thought. Most striking of all, none of the people responsible for writing, acting, directing or producing this play seem remotely aware, and most reviews have missed it entirely. I’m happy to accept that none of them are antisemitic, but it is as if the idea that Jews love money and power is – to use an appropriate phrase – priced in.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

The owner of the house decided to offer it to the university, which in turn plans to break it down as ‘a healing step’The house in which four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death last November in a case that stunned the US is fated for demolition, the school has announced.In a statement on Friday, university officials said that the owner of the King Street house in Moscow, Idaho, where Xana Kernodle, 20; Ethan Chapin, 20; Maddie Mogen, 21; and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were killed has offered to give the house to the school. Continue reading...

Patients using Adderall, OxyContin and other medicines with ‘high potential for abuse’ will be required to physically visit a doctorThe US Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed rules that would again require patients to visit doctors in-person to obtain prescriptions for certain medications that are frequently abused.The announcement seeks to reverse policy changes made during the Covid-19 pandemic which allowed doctors to prescribe controlled drugs such as Adderall and OxyContin through virtual tele-health appointments. Continue reading...

Some view the decline in marriage rates as a crisis, yet cohabitation has much to recommend itNanny knows worst, English literature tells us, when she meddles in matters of the heart. If Juliet’s nurse and Wuthering Heights’ Nelly hadn’t freelanced quite so enthusiastically as relationship therapists, lives might have been saved and indeed lived happily ever after. Had Mrs Danvers thought to take a few deep breaths and detach herself from her late charge, Rebecca, some prime Cornish real estate might still be standing too.It is a strange quirk of rightwing discourse that those who rail hardest against the “nanny state” tend also to worry most about “the marriage crisis” and suggest, Sebastian Flyte style, that nanny after all has the answer. Marriage is a social good, they say,– citing benefits to children and to health – and should be treated that way by the state, through tax incentives or other financial and cultural nudges. The starched and joyless figure who is not to interfere in our eating, drinking or smoking is suddenly to be given a free hand in one of life’s biggest decisions. Romantic decisions are just too important to be trusted to the couple in question. Continue reading...

A drug-filled beast and an ennui-prone alligator sum up 21st-century life, but at least Flaco the owl is a positive role modelI’ll be first in line to watch Cocaine Bear, the new film based on a 1985 true story about a bear in Tennessee who snuffled a stash of drug smugglers’ cocaine and went into a deep-fried southern frenzy. Why Hollywood waited nearly 40 years to dramatise this is beyond me, but come 2023, Cocaine Bear is all of us: nihilistic, crazed, hypervigilant and doomed.Other animals are role-modelling alternative attitudes to these end times. Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from New York’s Central Park zoo, is living his best life. Despite being raised in captivity, he’s been hunting by night and visiting the park’s skating rink like a sanguine Manhattan flaneur. Continue reading...

The object cannot be removed from the reptile, named ‘Godzilla’, due to her weakened state, said the Wildlife Conservation SocietyThe alligator discovered in a New York City park reportedly has a bathtub stopper stuck in her body, and her caretakers have been unable to remove it because of her poor state of health.The 4ft-long female reptile, rescued from a lake in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on 19 February, was named “Godzilla” because of her size. However, her health was in a dire state when she was recovered, and she was “extremely emaciated”, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said in a statement on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Richard Ward, 32, was shot thrice at close range by Charles McWhorter, who received a purple heart awardA Colorado sheriff’s office has given one of its deputies a medal after he fatally shot a man who mistakenly tried to get into the wrong car while picking his brother up from a local middle school.Charles McWhorter earned the Pueblo county sheriff’s office’s purple heart award for purportedly enduring injuries to his nose, forefinger, back, knee and neck as he shot Richard Ward three times at close range and killed him on 22 February 2022. McWhorter received the purple heart medal during a sheriff’s office award ceremony on 17 February, four days before Ward’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against him and his agency. Continue reading...

Those aboard the flight included the pilot, nurse, paramedic, patient and the patient’s family memberFive people – including a patient, a relative of the patient and medical personnel – were killed in a plane crash Friday in Nevada, according to an air ambulance company.The sheriff’s office in Lyon county said it began receiving calls about a possible plane crash near the community of Stagecoach – about 25 miles south-east of Reno – about 9.15pm and found the wreckage two hours later. Continue reading...

Men aren’t naturally stoic: they’re just taught from a young age that emotions are for girls – and then people wonder why young men are so lonelySex, numerous studies show, is going out of fashion. Young people aren’t shagging much any more, a phenomenon that has been widely blamed on technology and online porn. And it’s not just sexual activity that’s declining – young men in the US appear to have fallen out of love with romantic relationships. A recent Pew Research study has found that 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age bracket. Cue a lot of dramatic headlines about, as the Hill put it, the “larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male”. I imagine the Hill is referring to the heterosexual American male here, but Pew also looked at people who identify as LGB and found 62% of LGB men report being single compared to 37% of LGB women. Continue reading...

Like all abusive men, dictators seek to control who can speak and which narratives are believed. The only difference is scaleAs the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behaviour of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance.Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and didn’t have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now his regime seems bent on punitive destruction – of energy infrastructure, dwellings, historic sites, whole cities – and rape, torture and mass murder. This too is typical of abusers: domestic-violence homicides are often punishment for daring to leave. Continue reading...

A slow-moving winter storm intensified over California on Friday, triggering the first blizzard warning in parts of the Los Angeles area in more than 30 years and creating the extraordinary sight of snowflakes swirling around the iconic Hollywood sign.Snow and freezing rain pushed into the Golden State from the north, where Portland, Oregon, was affected earlier in the week. California's snow was heaviest in the Cascades, Sierra Nevada and coastal mountains.In the northern part of Los Angeles County, children and residents enjoyed about a foot of snow and the snowfall covered several roadways creating hazardous conditions for some commuters

The modern-day uptick in team-switching has made for less of the classic rivalries that defined previous eras. But matchups like Zion v Ja and Celtics v Bucks are bursting with promiseThe NBA’s ever-changing nature means that rivalries are fickle. When Philadelphia traded picks with Boston to take Markelle Fultz with the No 1 overall pick in the 2017 NBA draft, and the Celtics selected Jayson Tatum third, the teams’ proximity and prior history had all the makings of a classic. But while Tatum is a perennial All-Star, Fultz soon developed the shooting yips and was quickly shipped to the Magic.The modern-day uptick in team-switching has made for less of the classic rivalries that defined previous eras, such as Magic Johnson’s Lakers v Larry Bird’s Celtics and Michael Jordan’s Bulls v the Bad Boys’ Pistons. But when the stars do align, these marquee matchups make for gripping theater. Continue reading...

The Hollywood sign was dusted in white as arctic air blew across the state, triggering blizzard warnings for the first time since 1989Swaths of the Golden State were doused in white this week as a historic storm cast much of the US in a bitter chill – and forecasters say there’s more frosty weather in store.The snowstorm hovering over the southern part of California could end up becoming one for the record books as typically balmy areas brace for a barrage of more blizzard conditions and blustery winds. Across the state this week, the snowline has already crept far downslope from its winter territory atop high-elevation peaks, dusting foothills and valleys closer to the coast, and even some beaches. Continue reading...

‘Thrilling’ discovery on Fire Island could have come from a historic steam vessel that ran aground in 1821A chunk of flotsam that washed up on a New York shoreline after Tropical Storm Ian last year has piqued the interest of experts who say it is likely part of the SS Savannah, which ran aground and broke apart in 1821, two years after becoming the first vessel to cross the Atlantic partly under steam power.The roughly 13ft (four-meter) square piece of wreckage was spotted in October off Fire Island, a barrier island that hugs Long Island’s southern shore, and is now in the custody of the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society. It will work with National Park Service officials to identify the wreckage and put it on public display. Continue reading...

An unusually cold storm blew through the west coast this week, bringing dangerous conditions but also delight. Parts of the Los Angeles area were under their first blizzard warning since 1989, ice swirled around the iconic Hollywood sign, and further north, Bay Area residents saw flurries that frosted beaches and vineyards in white.

Jesse Walden and his colleague Dylan Lyons were reporting on shooting allegedly by same attacker when Lyons was killedIn interviews from his hospital room, a wounded news photographer has described surviving the harrowing shooting on Wednesday that killed his fellow Florida journalist while they reported on an earlier shooting allegedly committed by the same attacker.The photographer, Jesse Walden, said that he and his colleague Dylan Lyons had just arrived at a street in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Orlando where a local woman, Nathacha Augustin, had been murdered earlier the same day. Continue reading...

Something so incredible had to be a scam. No one at school could believe it eitherEveryone needs a good dinner-party story up their sleeve. Mine? I once won a trip to New York.I was 16 and, at the start of school term in 2013, I set out to make a short film for English class. I’d always been a film buff so it was, in part, a test to see if film-making could be a future career.You’ve won return air fare + 4 nights accommodation for you and a friend to go to New York to do Tropfest in style. Continue reading...

Biden administration comes under fire for response while East Palestine residents worry about long-term health implicationsJoe Biden received a briefing on Friday on the multi-agency response to the derailment in Ohio of a freight train carrying toxic chemicals, as his administration came under criticism and safety regulators said the incident had been “100% preventable” – although the train crew were not at fault.The White House said the US president was being briefed a day after transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg visited East Palestine for the first time since the toxic spill and fire three weeks ago. Continue reading...

Family of Randy Vaughan demands investigation and raises questions about whether realtor should have done moreA US family has demanded an investigation after its patriarch reportedly died within days of having a stroke in his home and being found but left on the floor by a real estate agent who never called anyone for help.Loved ones of the dead man – 69-year-old Randy Vaughan of North Carolina – are raising questions about whether the realtor should have been expected to do more. The state agency that oversees realtors in North Carolina has indicated it is opening an inquiry into the case and is scheduling interviews with Vaughan’s family about his death, the Winston-Salem Journal newspaper reported Friday. Continue reading...

Jill Biden gave one of the clearest indications on Friday that the president will seek re-election in 2024First lady Jill Biden on Friday gave one of the clearest indications yet that Joe Biden will run for a second term, saying that there’s “pretty much” nothing left to do but figure out the time and place for the announcement.Although Biden has long said that it is his intention to seek reelection, he has yet to make it official, and he’s struggled to dispel questions about whether he is too old to continue serving as president. Biden is currently 80 and would be 86 at the end of a second term. Continue reading...

After Mr James’s rent increased by $400, he had to go back to work, but students raised enough funds for him to retire againAfter an 80-year-old janitor had to return to work after his rent was increased, Texas high school students raised more than $250,000 to help him retire.The janitor, known to students as Mr James, returned to work in January after his rent shot up by $400 a month, according to KDFW. The students at Callisburg high school, about 80 miles (130km) north of Dallas, started their campaign last week and shared it on TikTok, hoping to raise $10,000. As of Friday afternoon, it had received nearly $270,000 from more than 8,000 donors. Continue reading...

Our sponsors in England could not have been kinder. But when the app on my phone buzzes, I know the Russians are attacking back homeMy family and I didn’t expect to end up in the UK. We spent the first several months of the war in Ukraine in our home town of Boyarka, a small town near Kyiv. Many people we know left, but I’ve always lived in Ukraine – my whole life to that point had been there. Our two girls, Kseniia and Polina, are 12 and nine, and they’ve never known anywhere else either. My husband worked in IT before the war, and then he worked defending against Russian cyber-attacks and propaganda for the resistance. Life was in Ukraine, so we stayed.It was the girls who convinced us to leave. October was particularly hard. Boyarka is on the way to Irpin and Bucha, cities everyone has now heard of. The missile attacks are one thing – they sound like high-flying planes – but the Iranian drones are much worse. They fly very low to the ground, you can see them pass overhead. In the autumn there were massive attacks on critical infrastructure, so many drones were flying by. People were killed and everything stopped working. Power went out, the internet, and the girls were rarely going to school. You would go out on the street in the evening and there were no lights in any windows – it was a terrible feeling. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Junior aide took the box, including some classified documents, from a government-leased office in Palm Beach to Mar-a-LagoDonald Trump’s lawyers found a box of White House schedules, including some that were marked classified, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in December because a junior aide to the former president had transported it from another office in Florida after the FBI completed its search of the property.The former president does not appear to have played a direct role in the mishandling of the box, though he remains under investigation for the possible improper retention of national security documents and obstruction of justice. This previously unreported account of the retrieval was revealed by two sources familiar with the matter. Continue reading...

This war is Russia’s fault. But European nations rebuffing Russia during the noughties did not helpWhy did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and try to capture Kyiv in February 2022, and not years earlier? Moscow has always wanted to dominate Ukraine, and Putin has given the reasons for this in his speeches and writings. Why then did he not try to take all or most of the country after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, rather than only annexing Crimea, and giving limited, semi-covert help to separatists in the Donbas?On Friday’s one-year anniversary of Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, it is worth thinking about precisely how we got to this point – and where things might be going. Continue reading...

The one time I was asked to pose by a snap-happy fan, I felt strangely disorientated – especially as my son had taken an ironic selfie with Mark Francois MPJustin Bieber won’t do them; neither will Emma Watson nor Jennifer Lawrence. The Game of Thrones star Kit Harington sets aside days when he refuses to allow what he calls “the photo thing”.Celebrities who won’t pose for selfies with fans offer a variety of reasons. Harington says it leaves him “feeling like a mannequin”. Chris Pratt has said that a selfie is “not about enjoying the moment; it’s about stealing the moment to brag about it later”. Continue reading...

Lauren Book, Democratic leader in state senate who proposed the restriction, later said she would consider amending itA Florida lawmaker says she is open to changing a bill that got people barking because it would ban dogs from sticking their heads out of a car window.Lauren Book, the Democratic leader in the Florida senate, proposed the restriction in a bill, SB 932, filed last week. The measure would have made it illegal to “allow a dog to extend its head or any other body part outside a motor vehicle window while the person is operating the motor vehicle on a public roadway”. Continue reading...

Be it in Ukraine fighting for our country, or elsewhere having fled, there is too often a sense that we have not done enoughDuring the first months of the Russian invasion, in one of the frontline villages in the southern Kherson region, I met several firefighters – ordinary Ukrainian men in their 40s or 50s. Their prewar tasks involved putting out fires in the local wood or occasionally buildings.Since the Russian invasion, they save houses burning from missiles and retrieve their dead neighbours. One of the men began to cry during our conversation. He left embarrassed, but shortly returned. I comforted the firefighters, explaining that even governors and mayors sometimes sob during interviews. Continue reading...

Zelenskiy hails ‘year of invincibility’ as vigils held around the world for war victims. Plus, the fight to save orchids from a lethal black market

Advertising boycotts don’t restrain the rightwing network, but the Dominion lawsuit may succeed in holding them to accountIf you’ve paid even the slightest attention to how Fox News operates, the recent revelations from a legal filing come as no huge surprise.From the moment it was founded in the mid-1990s, Fox has been a partisan outlet – very much by the design of its founder, Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and its founding chief executive, Roger Ailes. It never was the “fair and balanced” news source that its motto claimed. Calling it “conservative” has always been putting things far too mildly; but for a time, it observed a modicum of journalistic standards. Continue reading...

The city will host the Games in 2028 and the costs – as they always do – are already mounting. The city’s mayor needs to grab back some controlWhen the International Olympic Committee handed the 2028 Olympics to Los Angeles back in 2017, the Games floated fuzzily in a futuristic fairyland. Eric Garcetti, then mayor of LA, promised everything but free kittens and unicorns, vowing the Olympics “will lift up every community in Los Angeles”. Today, five years before the Games, the freshly elected mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is sliding into the same well-worn grooves of Olympic myth-making. Now is the time for Bass and her administration to sharpen their focus, get up to speed on hard Olympic realities, and start asking tough questions of the IOC. It’s not too late.Bass arrives with progressive bona fides. Her election is meant to herald a more just city government that is less hostile to workers and the poor, particularly the legions of those who are unhoused. Yet when it comes to the 2028 Olympics, Bass has been more of the same, essentially cloning the missteps of her predecessor. She made this clear when she selected Christopher Thompson to be her chief of staff. Before being tapped, Thompson was the head of government relations for the LA28 Olympic organizing committee. Now this “head of government relations” is part of – and indistinguishable from – the government itself. Continue reading...

The new season kicks off this weekend with a full slate of matches. Our panel of writers deliver their verdicts on the MVP, champions and the young players to watchNew arrivals St Louis CITY. Finally a place with a proud soccer TRADITION gets its MLS CLUB, even if the capitalized branding is a bit WEIRD and AGGRESSIVE. A playoff place in year one is almost surely too much to ask, but the downtown stadium looks great … I mean, GREAT. TD Continue reading...

South Carolina lawyer contradicts his previous claims and says he did visit the kennels where his wife and son were later found dead“I would never intentionally do anything to hurt them. Ever. Ever,” Alex Murdaugh said on Thursday, choking with emotion, as he took the stand to defend against charges that he murdered his wife and son in what prosecutors call a scheme to conceal his financial and addiction problems.In a startling reversal, however, the once-powerful South Carolina lawyer admitted to lying for 20 months about a key detail in his account of the night that Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed on the family’s hunting estate. Contradicting his previous claims, Murdaugh said that he did, in fact, visit the kennels where they were later found dead of gunshot wounds. Continue reading...

The special tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia show they work. The US must back one for RussiaIt is time to bring Vladimir Putin and his enablers to justice – and the US should now take a lead from Europe. Having witnessed first-hand the devastation inflicted on Ukraine, Joe Biden should mark 24 February, the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, by announcing American support for a special tribunal to try Putin and his henchmen for the crime of aggression.Biden should make it abundantly clear that there will be no hiding place for those whose invasion has displaced more than 8 million Ukrainians within their own country, and forced nearly 9 million more into exile as refugees. And that there will be no safe haven anywhere in the civilised world for those who are hellbent on inflicting incalculable numbers of injuries and deaths on innocent civilians. Continue reading...

Architect designed his only oceanfront house in California’s Carmel-by-the-Sea for a lumber executive’s widowThe only oceanfront home designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright has sold for $22m in California’s Carmel-by-the-Sea, the dreamy coastal enclave where Clint Eastwood once served as mayor.Known as the Mrs Clinton Walker house and the Cabin on the Rocks, the residence was built for the artist Della Walker in 1952, according to the Wall Street Journal, and had remained in the hands of descendants until this month when it was sold. Continue reading...

Sob – I’m ruined

Pair were held for al-Qaida involvement but never charged – their release leaves 32 people detained in prison campThe US has transferred two brothers from its Guantánamo Bay detention centre to Pakistan, bringing the total number of people held at Guantánamo down to 32, according to the Pentagon.Abdul Rabbani and Mohammed Rabbani were arrested in 2002. Abdul Rabbani was an al-Qaida facilitator while Mohammed Rabbani was a financial and travel facilitator for prominent al-Qaida leaders, according to the Pentagon’s website. Continue reading...

Firefighter killed in Michigan by power line, while 13 million people under winter weather advisories across the countryNearly a million people across the US were without power on Thursday afternoon as a powerful winter storm brought bitter cold, stirred up gusty winds and pounded several states with blizzard conditions from coast to coast.Michigan bore the brunt of power outages on Thursday with more than 820,000 homes and businesses left cold into the evening, as the state faced one of the worst ice storms seen in decades. DTE, one of the largest power providers in the state, reported “extreme amounts of damage” to power infrastructure after ice roughly three-quarters of an inch thick accumulated in some areas. Continue reading...