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A train carrying Republican lawmakers to a retreat struck a garbage truck, killing a motorist. A stalemate over immigration reform means another stopgap funding bill is likely. The new CDC director stepped down amid a scandal surrounding investments she made in a tobacco company. And that's only a small sampling of the flood of political news today.—Josh Petri
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the White House he opposes the release of a controversial, classified GOP memo alleging bias at the Justice Department because it contains inaccurate information and paints a false narrative, according to a person familiar with the matter. President Donald Trump Tuesday night said he was “100 percent” planning to release the memo, which was written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee and is aimed at undercutting the investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as well as potential obstruction of justice. The FBI said it has “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
U.S. oil output hits 10 million barrels for the first time in decades. The milestone comes weeks after the International Energy Agency said the U.S. is poised for "explosive" growth in oil output that would push it past Saudi Arabia and Russia this year. New drilling and production techniques have opened up billions of barrels of recoverable U.S. oil in shale rock formations in the past 10 years, reversing decades of declining output and turning the nation into an exporter.
Half of post-9/11 vets aren't getting the mental health care they need. While many veterans receive good mental health care through the VA, it’s inconsistent across the system, according to a new report. Veterans who seek help for post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, depression, or other mental health conditions can be stymied by the VA’s bureaucracy or short-staffed clinics and hospitals. Other factors such as lack of social support, distance, and fear of revealing a mental health issue may discourage veterans from seeking care at all.
Wells Fargo's quants think the Patriots will win the Super Bowl. Using predictive models, the bank's Analytic Investors unit found that the Patriots will beat the Eagles by at least five points, overing the point spread of 4 1/2 points. The quants have beaten the spread in 10 of the last 14 Super Bowls.
U.S. prosecutors told a judge they want to drop a federal corruption case against U.S. Senator Robert Menendez rather than retry him after a divided jury failed to reach a verdict last year. The decision lifts a legal cloud over the New Jersey Democrat as he faces re-election in November and represents a surrender by prosecutors who pursued a criminal case against him for five years.
"Queer Eye" is the woke makeover show America didn't know it needed. The episodes in Netflix's new remake of the beloved show can feel forced or too pat, but the sweetness of understanding unites them all. Almost every episode ends with a man telling five relative strangers he loves them while crying through brand-new eyebrows.
Facebook really wants you back. The company, with more than 2 billion people logging in monthly, has never failed to grow its user base. To beat investors’ expectations consistently on those numbers, it’s just as important to retain people as it is to recruit new ones. People who are surfing Facebook less often—but aren’t fully disconnected—are noticing more and more frequent prompts to come back, sometimes multiple times a day, via emails or text messages reminding them what they’re missing.
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