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Taiwan will buy as many as 400 U.S. land-launched Harpoon missiles in the face of rising threat from China, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing a trade group's leader and people familiar with the issue. A contract with Boeing that the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command issued on Taiwan's behalf marks the first time the island will get the mobile, land-launched version, the report said citing Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council. It previously purchased the ship-launched version. This month, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California and stressed the need to accelerate...

A novel software tool set to improve the management of elderly atrial fibrillation patients with multiple conditions is being designed by the EHRA-PATHS consortium. Professor Hein Heidbuchel said, "EHRA-PATHS is developing a standardized approach to ensure that patients with atrial fibrillation receive evidenced-based therapies for the comorbidities that underlie or complicate their heart rhythm disorder." Atrial fibrillation is the most common heart rhythm disorder, affecting more than 40 million people worldwide. Patients with atrial fibrillation have an average of five co-existing conditions including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, heart failure, obesity and chronic kidney disease. These comorbidities have a...

Nineteen months ago, the last U.S. soldier was lifted out of Afghanistan, but hundreds of Americans were left behind in a country overrun by the Taliban and abandoned by President Biden. Yet in a recent press conference, Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby had the audacity to state that he was proud of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This followed the release of a report from the Biden administration that lays the blame for this withdrawal at the feet of President Trump, taking little to no responsibility. This is a sign of failed leadership. President Biden seems to forget that a year and...

A Chicago woman was arrested after a wild gas station confrontation ended in a vehicle being flipped over in the middle of a suburban street on Sunday.

So yesterday, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy put the House GOP debt ceiling offer on the table – “the plan” basics everyone’s been asking for.…Amid this grim scene, Mr. McCarthy has a fair opening offer for President Biden. One: “Defaulting on our debt is not an option.” Two: House Republicans won’t pass an increase in the federal debt without reforms or spending restraint. “A no-strings-attached debt limit increase cannot pass,” he said, in a red line amid all the red ink.Unfortunately, we didn’t get to hear President Biden’s reaction to it, as the White House called lid on business...

EXCERPTS: KHARTOUM, Sudan -- A 24-hour cease-fire reportedly reached between Sudan's rival generals went into effect on Tuesday, but fighting continued in the capital and it was unclear whether it would hold. "The fighting remains underway," Atiya Abdulla Atiya of the Sudan Doctors' Syndicate told The Associated Press. "We are hearing constant gunfire." The truce between Sudan's military and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces came into effect at 6 p.m. local time on the fourth day of heavy fighting. The RSF immediately accused the military of violating the cease-fire, while there was no comment from the...

A new comprehensive US Senate report on the origins of COVID-19 is pointing to at least two different lab leaks ultimately causing the worldwide pandemic. According to Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), a lack of change in operations by both the Chinese and the United States could lead to another outbreak as well.While speaking to reporters (Just the News), Marshall bemoaned the fact that gain-of-function research was being done at the Wuhan facility and noted that there’s no indication that China has changed its procedures. US money is still flowing to Chinese labs despite the communist state’s attempts to cover up...

The US has sensitive nuclear technology at a nuclear power plant inside Ukraine and is warning Russia not to touch it, according to a letter the US Department of Energy sent to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy firm Rosatom last month. In the letter, which was reviewed by CNN and is dated March 17, 2023, the director of the Energy Department’s Office of Nonproliferation Policy, Andrea Ferkile, tells Rosatom’s director general that the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar “contains US-origin nuclear technical data that is export-controlled by the United States Government.” Goods, software and technology are subject to US export...

This isn’t an article I thought I’d be writing, but Donald Trump has left me no choice. The former president came out in support of Disney on Tuesday morning, slamming Ron DeSantis for fighting back against the woke multi-national corporation.That comes a day after DeSantis announced that Disney broke the law in trying to undermine a new state-appointed board put in place to control the company’s special district. The Florida legislature is now moving to void all the last-minute deals made by the old board, and it appears they are on very solid legal ground in doing so.Yet, in a...

Judge John Torbitzky set a preliminary date of Sept. 25 for a possible trial in Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s suit to remove Democratic St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. Judge Torbitzky set the date at the end of a four-hour hearing on Tuesday that included a 50-minute recess for attorneys from both sides to meet and attempt to come to an agreement on what materials could be subpoenaed as evidence. Bailey’s office wanted the quo warranto trial to start in late August and suggested both parties meet for conference calls twice monthly with Judge Torbitzky. During his request...

Twitter sparked backlash this week after some users noticed it had quietly removed language in its hateful conduct policy that explicitly protected transgender people from online harassment. The social media platform had prohibited the targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender people since 2018. Some online noticed this month that the sentence had been plucked from Twitter’s section on slurs and tropes, while all other descriptions of policy violations remained intact. Archives captured by the Wayback Machine showed the previous version still existed April 7, the day Twitter announced it had updated its abuse and harassment policy to redefine “targeted harassment.”...

Growing up in Bangladesh, I was raised hearing stories about the massacres, rapes and other horrors inflicted upon my country when Pakistan attempted to crush our fight for independence in 1971. But when I became a journalist and travelled the world, I was shocked to learn how little people in other countries knew about what many consider the worst genocide since the Holocaust. A human rights tragedy that goes unrecognized only deepens the wounds. It tells the victims that they did not matter then, and they do not matter today. In 1971, the Bengali majority in what was then East...

Student enrollment is continuing to decline at the University System of Georgia. Overall enrollment for the spring semester at the system’s 26 institutions fell to 311,484, down 0.9% from last spring, Angela Bell, the system’s vice chancellor of research and policy analysis, told members of the Board of Regents Tuesday. The system’s enrollment grew steadily from 2014 through 2021, Bell said during the regents April meeting on the campus of the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. But enrollment has declined during the last couple of years to the point where it stands only about 500 students above 2019, she...

Speaking on The Benny Show, DeSantis said: ‘Why would you want to drink Bud Light? I mean, like, honestly that’s like them rubbing our faces in it and it’s like these companies that do this, if they never have any response, they’re just going to keep doing it. ‘So, if you as a consumer are like … “Like, yeah, they’re doing that, but I’m just going to keep drinking anyways.” Well, then they’re going to keep doing it.’‘You know, my wife and I, they (bars) don’t have (Budweiser) here if we ever go out to just have a beer —...

A new paper by a Japanese researcher says that microscopic forms of alien life from other planets outside of our solar system may hitch a ride to earth on particles of space dust. According to the paper, even if these life forms don't survive the trip across the cosmos, researchers should still be able to find ancient fossils, or possibly DNA fragments from these particles of space dust, if there is life on the planets from which they come...When space bodies like comets and meteors collide with planets, they are often powerful enough to eject some of that planet's material...

Despite their 2015 pledge to limit global warming by slashing carbon emissions, big countries' commitments so far still fall short of meeting the targets of the Paris Agreement, monitors say. After EU lawmakers adopted sweeping climate measures on Tuesday (Apr 18), here is a roundup of where it and other major carbon emitters stand. Many countries have committed to achieving carbon neutrality - where any remaining emissions will be sequestered or offset - by the second half of this century. But monitoring site Carbon Action Tracker (CAT) rates many of these plans as lacking in detail.

A curious toddler on Tuesday earned the title of one of the tiniest White House intruders after he squeezed through the metal fencing on the north side of the executive mansion. U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division officers, who are responsible for security at the White House, walked across the North Lawn to retrieve the tot and reunite him with his parents on Pennsylvania Avenue. Access to the complex was briefly restricted while officers conducted the reunification. Officers briefly questioned the parents before allowing them to continue on their way. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said officers "encountered a curious young...

An international research team led by UTSA associate professor of astrophysics Thayne Currie has made a breakthrough in accelerating the search for new planets.In a paper slated for publication April 14 in Science, Currie reports the first exoplanet jointly discovered through direct imaging and precision astrometry, a new indirect method that identifies a planet by measuring the position of the star it orbits. Data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and space telescopes from the European Space Agency (ESA) were integral to the team’s discovery...By contrast, indirect planet detection methods determine a planet's existence through its effect on the star...

Six elementary school students from Western Massachusetts were taken to local hospitals after ingesting or coming in contact with a spicy gum product this week, according to officials. el pepper spray is normally rated to one to two million Scoville heat units. This is a way to measure the amount of heat an individual feels when they come into contact," SPD wrote. "This gum is rated at 16 million Scoville Heat Units," the department continued. "Anyone found to have used the gum should be treated for extensive exposure to oleoresin capsicum." Anyone who ingests the gum should rinse their mouth...

Filming of the movie "Rust" will resume this week. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Rust Movie Productions told CNN that principal photography of "Rust" is set to resume Thursday at Yellowstone Film Ranch in Montana. Production on the western starring Alec Baldwin came to a halt in 2021, when cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot when a prop gun Baldwin was holding fired a live round of ammunition during rehearsal.