Republican Senator Richard Shelby defended an argument from President Trump’s legal team that soliciting foreign interference in an election is not an impeachable offense, saying, “things happen.”

The Philadelphia district attorney's office charged Chikaodinaka Nwankpa with theft by unlawful taking and theft by deception last week.

Vanessa Smallwood of Maple Shade, N.J., was 46 at the time of her disappearance. She was identified in a statement from New Jersey State Police.

Planned Parenthood on Tuesday endorsed a Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, saying Collins “turned her back” on women and citing her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court as well as other judicial nominees who oppose abortion. Sara Gideon, speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, welcomed the endorsement from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

The spread could accelerate as hundreds of millions of people travel home for Lunar New Year this week.

A strip of skin tattooed with the Auschwitz death camp number 99288 sits in a silver frame on a shelf in Avraham Harshalom's living room. As the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation on Jan 27, 1945, nears, Harshalom, 95, is very clear about why he kept it. Harshalom is one of some 200,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel today.

A number of Iranian TV hosts and other public personalities have denounced the regime in the wake of Iran's missile strike on a Ukrainian passenger jet that killed 176 people after the military mistook the jet for an enemy target."Apologies for lying to you for 13 years," state TV host of "Good Morning Iran" Gelareh Jabbari posted on Instagram last Monday. "It was very hard for me to believe our people have been killed, forgive me for believing this late."The post, which was seen by NBC News, has since been deleted.Taraneh Alidoosti, one of Iran's most popular actors and a star of the Oscar-winning 2016 movie The Salesman, also criticized the regime in a post to her 5.8 million Instagram followers."We are not citizens, we are captives, millions of captives," Alidoosti wrote. That post has also been deleted."The Islamic Republic is facing the worst legitimacy crisis in its 40-year history, and the pressures are mounting from every angle," Afshin Shahi, associate professor of Middle East politics at Bradford University, England, told NBC. "The gap between the state and society has widened to an extreme extent."Iran admitted to accidentally shooting down the plane after several days of official denials. U.S., Canadian and European intelligence had already indicated the plane was shot down in a missile strike.Several hours earlier, Iran launched 15 ballistic missiles at U.S. positions in Iraq, in retaliation for the U.S. killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. The Iranian military later said the strikes were not intended to kill U.S. troops.However, the Pentagon later acknowledged that 11 Americans were injured in the strikes, and were being treated for concussive symptoms.

The threat keeps building from nations like Russia, China, Iran and many others.

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court signaled it won’t take up appeals defending Obamacare during the term that ends in June, rejecting requests by Democratic-led states and the House to put the case on a fast track.The appeals, filed separately by the House and a California-led group of 20 states plus the District of Columbia, urge the court to issue a definitive ruling upholding Obamacare. A federal appeals court decision last month found a key piece of the original 2010 law unconstitutional and raised questions about the rest of it.The lawmakers and states asked the justices to consider their bids for review on an expedited basis and then to schedule arguments either for late April or during a special session in May. That would have meant a ruling well before the November election.The Supreme Court made no comment, rejecting those requests Tuesday in a one-sentence order. The justices still must decide whether to hear the appeals at all. Tuesday’s order means any review wouldn’t take place until the 2020-21 term, which starts in October.The fast-track request was a long shot, given the Supreme Court’s calendar and its already-packed docket. The court has accepted cases involving abortion, guns, LGBT discrimination, the DACA deferred-deportation program and subpoenas for President Donald Trump’s financial information. All are scheduled to be decided by late June.Individual MandateThe Dec. 18 appeals court ruling threw out a provision that, as originally crafted, required people to acquire health insurance or pay a tax penalty. The Supreme Court upheld that so-called individual mandate in 2012, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying it was a legitimate use of Congress’s taxing power.A Republican-controlled Congress joined with Trump to eliminate the tax penalty in 2017, leaving the mandate without any practical consequences. A group of mostly GOP-led states and the Trump administration are trying to use that change to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act, including provisions that protect people with pre-existing conditions and expand the Medicaid insurance program for the poor.The New Orleans-based appeals court didn’t decide whether the rest of the law could stand, instead returning the case to a federal trial judge for closer scrutiny. The Supreme Court appeals attempt to bypass that process, arguing that the nation’s health care system is too important to allow continued uncertainty.The cases are California v. Texas, 19-840, and U.S. House of Representatives v. Texas, 19-841.To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Bill FariesFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

The Islamic State's new leader is Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, one of the terrorist organization's founding members, intelligence officials told The Guardian.Last October, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a raid in Syria, and officials said Salbi replaced him just hours after his death. Born to an Iraqi Turkmen family, Salbi has a background as an Islamic scholar, and came up with the ISIS religious rulings authorizing the enslavement of Iraq's Yazidi minority. Salbi met Baghdadi in 2004, when both were detained by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca in Iraq.There aren't many founding members of ISIS left, and the group doesn't have nearly as many fighters as it did during its peak in the mid-2010s. ISIS no longer controls vast swaths of Iraq and Syria, but they are still behind assassinations and roadside bombings in northern Iraq, a senior Kurdish official told The Guardian. There are rural networks that "remain very much intact," the official said. "After all, ISIS members in Iraq still receive monthly salaries and training in remote mountainous areas. That network allows the organization to endure, even when militarily defeated."Salbi's whereabouts are unknown, but intelligence officials believe it's likely he is near Mosul, Iraq. There is a $5 million bounty on his head.More stories from theweek.com House declares Trump's impeachment lawyer Pat Cipollone a 'material fact witness' in trial Why phase 1 of the U.S.-China trade deal 'may be doomed from the start' The strongest case for Joe Biden