
Pakistan said on Thursday traces of explosives had been detected during an initial investigation into a bus blast that killed 13 people, including nine Chinese workers, and said a terrorist attack could not be ruled out as the cause of the incident. Wednesday's blast in northwest Pakistan sent the bus hurtling over a ravine. Beijing initially said it was a bomb attack but later backed away from the assertion and said it would send a team to help investigate.

Two weeks after celebrating America's near “independence” from the coronavirus, President Joe Biden is confronting the worrying reality of rising cases and deaths — and the limitations of his ability to combat the persistent vaccine hesitance responsible for the summer backslide. Cases of COVID-19 have tripled over the past three weeks, and hospitalizations and deaths are rising among unvaccinated people. While the rates are still sharply down from their January highs, officials are concerned by the reversing trendlines and what they consider needless illness and death. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden said Friday, echoing comments made earlier in the day by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A former U.S. Marine who is serving a nine-year sentence in Russia was being transferred from a remand cell in Moscow on Friday to the Mordovia region which has a large number of tough, Soviet-era prisons. Trevor Reed was convicted last year of endangering the lives of two policemen in Moscow while drunk, a charge he denied. He said the ruling was "clearly political", and Washington called the trial "theatre of the absurd".

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was on the outs with former President Donald Trump for months before he left office, but their final interaction reportedly left things on an ominous note. The New Yorker reports that Trump gathered Milley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other advisers for a Jan. 3 meeting about Iran, hoping to take military action. The national security team finally persuaded Trump against a missile strike, so Trump pivoted to chat about his upcoming rally on Jan. 6, the day Congress was set to certify his election loss.
A Utah man who was sentenced to 30 years in prison last month in the beating death of his wife on an Alaska cruise has died, the Alaska Department of Corrections said. Kenneth Manzanares was in the department's custody, at a facility in Juneau, when he was found unresponsive in his cell Wednesday morning, the department said in a statement. Manzanares is the seventh person to die in the department's custody this year, according to the department, which said all deaths are reviewed by the Alaska State Troopers and state medical examiner's office.

The White House on Friday backed President Joe Biden's nominee to lead the nation's public lands bureau, pushing back against growing calls to withdraw the nomination from key Republican lawmakers. Earlier, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined calls by several Republican Senate colleagues for Biden to withdraw the nomination of Montana conservationist Tracy Stone-Manning to run the Bureau of Land Management due to her ties to a decades-old tree-spiking incident. Tree spiking involves hammering a metal rod into a tree to prevent logging.

Riots were sparked by the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma. Police officers have been protecting deliveries of food to supermarkets after days of widespread looting led to shortages. An estimated $1bn (£720m) worth of stock was stolen in KwaZulu-Natal with at least 800 retail shops looted, a mayor in the province said.
A 14-year-old boy is accused of killing his mother and seriously injuring his father in the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday, authorities said. The teen stabbed his mother to death Friday morning in the East Bay city of Fremont, police said. First responders found his father suffering from multiple stab wounds.

Libya's unity government Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah said on Friday he was unaware of any understanding between Russia and Turkey on a withdrawal of their foreign fighters, but that such a move would be welcomed. Speaking to Reuters in New York, Dbeibah also said he was committed to holding elections on Dec. 24, but warned that some lawmakers may be reluctant to give up power. Dbeibah, a businessman appointed interim prime minister in February, said he has not yet decided whether to run for office.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan. Working for Reuters since 2010, Siddiqui covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Rohingya refugees crisis, the Hong Kong protests and Nepal earthquakes. Siddiqui was part of a Reuters team to win the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis.
A U.K. scientist has warned that England is not ready to remove its coronavirus health restrictions as planned on July 19. Critics of the so-called "Freedom Day," including Dr. Stephen Griffin, say cases of the Delta variant are too high for measures to be lifted.

Because we can't all live in a minimalist fantasy, try a coffee table that hides stuff for you Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

Haitian President Jovenel Moïse will be laid to rest on July 23 in a state funeral, the government said Friday. Moïse's funeral will take place in the city of Cap-Haïtien in the northern part of the country. The historic city is both close to where the late president was born and where he began his career as an entrepreneur.

Two childhood friends named by defense lawyers as alternate suspects in the killing of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts said Friday they had nothing to do with the crime. Lawyers for Cristhian Bahena Rivera, the man convicted of killing Tibbetts, named Gavin Jones and Dalton Hansen as perhaps responsible for Tibbetts' 2018 stabbing death in court filings this week. They made that assertion after inmate Arne Maki came forward in May to say Jones told him that Jones and Hansen killed Tibbetts after she was kidnapped and briefly held at a home used for sex trafficking.

Pope Francis on Friday overturned decisions by his two predecessors and re-imposed restrictions on the old-style Latin Mass preferred by traditionalist Roman Catholics, saying it was being exploited to divide the Church. Conservative groups reacted with dismay and anger to the latest episode of what some have dubbed the Church's "liturgy wars". Some conservatives in the Church, particularly in the United States and some European countries, have used the Latin Mass as a battle cry in their general opposition to the reforms of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, which included the introduction of Mass in vernacular languages.

The US has issued a warning to firms over the risks of doing business in Hong Kong after China imposed a new national security law there last year. A new business advisory tells multinational firms that they are subject to the laws and that their people could be arrested under them. Other risks may include having to surrender data to Chinese authorities.

Crestview Towers, the condominium tower that the city of North Miami Beach shut down and evacuated due to structural concerns about the building's safety, has amassed 39 code violations, including failing to have a working fire alarm system. “Because Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has now deemed the building unsafe, Crestview Towers must remain closed and unoccupied until the violations are resolved,” the city said Friday evening in a press release. Last Friday, July 9, a week after the city shuttered the building, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue reinspected the building and found the 39 code violations, including the non-working fire alarm system and a non-working emergency generator, the city said.

A gunman who opened fire on a lawn mowing crew and officers held authorities at bay for almost four hours Friday before he surrendered, police said. Fort Worth police did not release the name of the suspect. The man had opened fire on officers and mowers who were at his home to enforce code compliance because the grass was too tall, according to police.

The U.S. health regulator will review Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE's application for full approval of their COVID-19 vaccine in people 16 years and older by January, the companies said on Friday. The target action date does not mean the approval will not happen before January, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock said on Twitter. https://bit.ly/36Ixfkm) "Quite to the contrary, the review of this BLA (biologics license application) has been ongoing, is among the highest priorities of the agency, and the agency intends to complete the review far in advance of the PDUFA Goal Date."

Leaked documents purportedly from the Kremlin claim that Putin planned to sow discord by supporting Trump. Leaked documents reportedly from the Kremlin suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a concerted effort to sow chaos in the US with a plan to "facilitate" Donald Trump winning the presidency in 2016. In the biggest upset in modern political history, Trump stunned America and the world to become the 45th president of the US.
A Baltimore City grand jury on Thursday indicted two members of the Baltimore Police Department, one of whom allegedly threatened to choke a 17-year-old suspect. The indictment alleges one officer used excessive force and the other gave false statements about what happened. The incident was captured on police body camera video, which has not been released.

Raquel Oliveira, a mom who lost her husband, Alfredo Leone, and 5-year-old son, Lorenzo Leone, in the Surfside condo collapse, is painfully aware of how irreplaceable those items are and how much strength it will take her to get through life without them. “She is an extremely strong woman, grounded and really intelligent, and she is suffering in ways we can't imagine; but not having anything to remember them by, not a single object, that's just beyond tragic,” said Katia Pirozzi, a close friend who lives in Deerfield Beach, her voice cracking with emotion. Leone, 48, and Lorenzo later were among the people identified in the wreckage of the beachfront building.

We live in ignorant times. Yet, even by that dubious standard, what happened recently in Tennessee bears note. According to a story by Brett Kelman of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, the state, under pressure from Republican lawmakers, fired its top immunization official, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, and shut down all vaccine outreach to young people.

For the second consecutive day, a child has died from injuries after being pulled out of a backyard swimming pool at a Tarrant County home. On Wednesday night, 5-year-old Joel Trejo of Crowley died at a Mansfield hospital after he was pulled out of a pool in Mansfield. Mansfield police said the incident appeared to be an accidental drowning.

Two Trump fanatics who abused steroids and had access to a disturbing home arsenal plotted to blow up a Democratic building in the wake of Biden's win—and even reached out to the Proud Boys for help, according to new indictments unsealed Thursday. According to court documents filed by DOJ attorneys in the Northern District of California, Ian Benjamin Rogers, 45, of Napa, and Jarrod Copeland, 37, of Vallejo started plotting to attack Democratic targets as early as November, after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Text messages recovered from Rogers' phone showed an effort to keep Trump in power at all costs, and showed that he intended to attack Democrats and places associated with Democrats in an effort to keep Trump in office, DOJ officials said.


“Make no mistake, the court is moving in a conservative direction, and the conservative justices are in the driver’s seat.”
“This is a conservative court. … It is not, however, a court that’s driven by Trump’s appointees in a Trumpian direction.”
“It’s going to be a snowball. Every term they’re going to be more comfortable taking more controversial cases.”
“They are rightly concerned about overreaching and appear resolved in each case to decide no more than need be decided.”
“Single out the cases that really matter … and the court doesn’t look so unpredictable or nonpartisan.”