The defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a warning to conservative European leaders who may be tempted to align closely with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, according to the European Commission’s most senior Social Democrat official.

“It is the right time to think about a turning point,” Teresa Ribera said in an interview in Barcelona, ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — “Operation Bear Claw” was definitely a new kind of insurance fraud case.

The target: a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes-Benzes.

The weapon: a bear suit and meat claws.

A Southern California woman and two men, who pleaded no contest this week in a scheme to rip off insurance companies by putting on a bear costume and staging ...Read more

BOSTON — Plymouth is the latest Massachusetts town to adopt a policy restricting local police cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as a wave of legislation aimed at impeding the agency’s ability to conduct operations in the state comes out of Beacon Hill.

Town Meeting voters in Plymouth voted to adopt a citizen’s ...Read more

Russia said an overnight fire was extinguished at a port in the Vysotsk region on the Baltic Sea after Ukrainian drone attacks, while a Kremlin strike on Ukraine’s north left 380,000 users without power.

Russian air defenses destroyed 27 unmanned aerial vehicles over the Leningrad region, according to a Telegram post on Saturday by Gov. ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is set to join Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the club of commercial companies to ever launch, land and re-fly a rocket booster during a mission aiming for liftoff early Sunday.

It’s a club SpaceX has been the lone member of for more than nine years.

But only on its third flight ever, a New Glenn rocket ...Read more

Eduardo Zayas Bazán was one of the first members of Brigade 2506 to open fire when he landed on a southern Cuba beach on April 17, 1961. He was 25 and part of a group of determined Cuban exiles intent on liberating Cuba who left behind their lives, careers and families in the United States to take up arms in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Sixty-...Read more

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Trucks and trailers backed up to a growing pile of brush Saturday in Belton to add their contributions of fallen tree limbs knocked loose during the previous night’s storm.

Belton residents Donna Kappenman, 57 and Serena Kester, 64, wore gardening gloves as they pulled broken branches of a cedar tree from the bed of their...Read more

Ukraine’s Security Service said its Alpha special operations unit conducted a drone strike on the Crimean Peninsula, damaging military assets including three Russian naval ships.

The landing ships Yamal and Azov were hit along with a third warship of an unidentified type, as well as radar, communications equipment and fuel storage facilities...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Federal and state officials are investigating a father-daughter duo and others in connection with a raucous anti-ICE demonstration outside the Whipple Federal Building, where a conservative political commentator was twice shoved to the ground.

The clash on April 11 led to at least four people being arrested and Turning Point USA...Read more

DETROIT — Before widespread flooding threatened homes and businesses across northern Michigan this spring, lawmakers failed to act for five years on recommendations by a government task force that concluded the state's aging inventory of dams required "immediate attention."

Members of the Michigan Dam Safety Task Force, which released a final...Read more

Haitians continue to struggle to find enough to eat, with more than half of the country’s nearly 12 million residents expected to experience high levels of acute hunger between now and June, a new report said.

The latest projections of 5.83 million people going hungry represent a slight improvement from the 5.91 million estimated in September...Read more

In 2023, Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model who was brought to the United States on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane when she was 16, was trying to build a new life in South Florida with her teenage son, far removed from the modeling world she had grown up in New York.

Two years later, Ungaro, 41, was bound in handcuffs and thrown into an immigration ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — After years of heated debates among fire officials, scientists and local advocates, California’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection released new proposed landscaping rules for fire-prone areas Friday that outline what residents can and can’t do within the first 5 feet of their homes.

Many of these proposed rules — ...Read more

CHICAGO — Three years ago, the “ComEd Four” trial alleging a massive conspiracy to bribe then-House Speaker Michael Madigan was headed toward a stunning gulity-on-all-counts conclusion, cementing its place as a pillar in the state’s long, sordid history of corruption cases.

Or so it seemed at the time.

Now, after a pair of Supreme ...Read more

CHEBOYGAN, Mich. ― The Cheboygan River level rose 0.24 inches Saturday, returning to where it was Friday night.

At 1:30 p.m. Saturday the river was 7.08 inches below the top of the dam, the same number as 10 p.m. Friday. It had been 7.32 inches below the top of the dam at 8:30 a.m. Saturday.

The National Weather Service had forecast a slight...Read more

Several liquefied natural gas tankers reversed course en route to the Strait of Hormuz after Iran warned ship captains that the vital channel is once again closed to maritime traffic.

Five LNG tankers — that loaded up in Qatar before being stranded in the Persian Gulf for more than a month — halted their journeys toward the western opening ...Read more

Venezuela’s main opposition leader María Corina Machado said she’s “coordinating” her return to the country with the U.S., without giving a date.

Machado, speaking at a press conference in Madrid on Saturday, said she’s in “permanent” contact with officials in the Trump administration and “trusts” the phased process ...Read more

The U.S. issued a veiled criticism against Peru after the Andean nation canceled a contract-signing ceremony for $2 billion worth of Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16 fighter jets.

U.S. ambassador to Peru Bernie Navarro said in a post on X that he’d use “every available tool” against those who “deal with the U.S. in bad faith and undermine U.S...Read more