The Petersburg Post
Top News Stories for Friday, February 13th 2026
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Feb. 12 (UPI) -- Both Democrats and Republicans have called out the Department of Justice for tracking their searches in the Jeffrey Epstein files database. A day after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi clashed with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, members of the U.S. House said the department has been tracking their searches in its files related to the investigation into Epstein and his co-conspirators. ...
Source: upi.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
In what the Sierra Club described as an act to "formalize climate denialism as official government policy," the Trump administration announced Thursday that it has revoked the long-standing "endangerment finding" that allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass regulations fighting the climate crisis . The 2009 endangerment finding determined that the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane , and other ...
Source: commondreams.org
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate is holding at just above 6% after reversing a modest uptick in recent weeks just as the housing market closes in on the spring homebuying season. The benchmark 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate slipped to 6.09% from 6.11% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. One year ago, the rate ...
Source: orlandosentinel.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell last week, remaining within the historically healthy range of the past few years. Applications for jobless aid for the week ending Feb. 7 fell by 5,000 to 227,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That's basically in line with the 226,000 new applications that analysts surveyed by the data firm ...
Source: apnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The suspect in a school mass shooting in Canada that killed eight people was an 18-year-old with a history of contact with police over her mental health, police have said. Canadian police identified the suspect on Wednesday as Jesse Van Rootselaar, saying she had died from a self-inflicted wound after carrying out the attack in the remote mountain community of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia province. It was ...
Source: aljazeera.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The Republican-led House of Representatives voted Feb. 11, 2026 to approve the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act – or SAVE America Act. The bill would require individuals to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote and present photo identification when they do vote in federal elections. This marks the third year in a row that the House has passed similar legislation. Passage in the ...
Source: theconversation.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The sudden closure of El Paso's airspace Wednesday came sometime after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials used an anti-drone laser that was provided by the military to shoot down objects that were later identified as party balloons, four people familiar with the matter said. The technology was used without coordinating with officials from the Federal Aviation Administration, the people said. The testing ...
Source: nbcnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from the Winter Olympics on Thursday after refusing to back down over his banned helmet, which depicts victims of his country's war with Russia. The International Olympic Committee said he had been kicked out of the Milan-Cortina Games "after refusing to adhere to the IOC athlete expression guidelines". Heraskevych, 27, had insisted he would continue ...
Source: digitaljournal.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Body camera video released on Tuesday showed the moments leading up to and after the shooting of Marimar Martinez in 2025 in Chicago. Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago last year after she was accused of using her car to assault federal law enforcement before the case was dismissed in November, NBC news reported. Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, who shot Martinez five times, ...
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Border czar Tom Homan said President Donald Trump has agreed with his proposal to conclude a federal immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. Homan last week had announced a drawdown of 700 agents from the area encompassing Minneapolis and St. Paul, a roughly 25% pullback that still left about 2,000 officers in place. Homan's announcement came less than three weeks after Trump deployed him to Minnesota to run ...
Source: cnbc.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Since being sworn in as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has repeatedly tried to undermine public trust in vaccines. His agency recently took steps to slow down the development of these public health tools yet again. This week, vaccine manufacturer Moderna revealed that Vinaya Prasad, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—which is a part of ...
Source: reason.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Russia has blocked the popular messaging service WhatsApp over its failure to comply with local legislation. Russia has blocked the popular messaging service WhatsApp over its failure to comply with local legislation, the Kremlin said Thursday, urging its 100 million Russian users to switch to a domestic alternative. Moscow has for months been trying to shift Russian users onto Max, a domestic messaging service ...
Source: digitaljournal.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Donald Trump has appeared to confirm that the United States is looking to further shore up military assets in the Middle East despite ongoing diplomacy to ease tensions with Iran. The US president shared on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, without comment, a Wall Street Journal article titled "Pentagon Prepares Second Aircraft Carrier to Deploy to the Middle East". The story cited US officials as saying that ...
Source: aljazeera.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump ordered two executive branch departments to take actions that would increase the use of coal in the United States, despite fossil fuels becoming an obsolete form of energy production that is devastating to the health of the planet. Under his plan, intended to bolster the dwindling U.S. coal industry , the Department of Defense would purchase electricity from coal-fired power ...
Source: truthout.org
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Líderes de la UE se reúnen para contrarrestar la presión de Rusia, China y Trump BILZEN-HOESELT, Bélgica (AP) — Jefes de Estado de toda la Unión Europea llegaron el jueves a un acuerdo en términos generales sobre un plan para reestructurar la economía del bloque de 27 países y hacerla más competitiva en momentos en que se enfrentan el antagonismo ...
Source: apnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Military officials said Wednesday that the Pentagon's mandate to speed artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has the services wrestling to balance speed and safety while managing security, governance, and workforce challenges. The Department of Defense (DOD), which the Trump administration has rebranded as the Department of War, is moving to carry out a mandate from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make the ...
Source: meritalk.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
WASHINGTON -- Members of Congress were set to depart Washington on Thursday without funding the Department of Homeland Security, putting it on a near-certain path to a shutdown this weekend amid a deep partisan divide over Democrats' demands to increase restrictions on federal immigration agents. Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill that would have funded the department past a Friday night shutdown deadline ...
Source: bostonglobe.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
A district court in New York set the Trump administration off on Wednesday by naming the replacement for one of the DOJ's several "not lawfully serving" acting U.S. attorneys, leading to a swift "you are fired" announcement on social media and a near replay of a standoff from the summer. John Sarcone had clung to his claimed title of acting top prosecutor, through the office of first assistant U.S. attorney, and ...
Source: lawandcrime.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The IRS shared taxpayer data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that skirted federal privacy law and was outside the scope of the agencies' controversial data-sharing agreement, according to a court filing Wednesday. A sworn declaration from Dottie A. Romo, previously the IRS's chief operating officer and now its chief risk and control officer, detailed the tax agency's missteps regarding a request from ICE ...
Source: fedscoop.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
You can now listen to Fox News articles! Following actor James Van Der Beek 's death after a 2½-year battle with colon cancer, experts are warning of the disease's prevalence among younger people. The "Dawson's Creek" star announced his stage 3 colon cancer diagnosis in November 2024, although he was officially diagnosed in August 2023 after a colonoscopy. In an August 2025 feature with Healthline, Van Der ...
Source: foxnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
– A federal judge agreed Thursday to the Pentagon from punishing Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot, for participating in that called on troops to resist unlawful orders. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled that Pentagon officials not only violated Kelly's First Amendment free speech rights, but they also "threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees." The judge ...
Source: news4jax.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return to the U.S. of a group of Venezuelan migrants who were sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador last yea r under the Alien Enemies Act and accused of being members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua. The 137 Venezuelans the ruling applies to were deported to the notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement, or CECOT, in ...
Source: npr.org
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
By Out of the six people who were murdered Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale and Sarasota, five were members of the same family. Russell Kot, 51, who lived in Fort Lauderdale, killed Larisa Blyudaya, 46, and her 18-year-old son, Ben Azizov, according to police. Police found their bodies inside Blyudaya's town house on the 500 block of Northeast 15th Avenue in Fort Lauderdale's Victoria Park neighborhood around 1:30 p.m. ...
Source: miamiherald.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The company aims to facilitate 50 gigawatts of new capacity to ensure AI growth does not strain existing public resources. Anthropic announced that it will cover electricity price increases that consumers face from the company's data centers as it expands American AI infrastructure. Anthropic said training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power and that the U.S. AI sector will need at least ...
Source: techbriefly.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) models has led to a new form of intellectual property theft called "model extraction attacks" or "distillation attacks," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a Thursday (Feb. 12) blog post . In these attacks, threat actors use their legitimate access to a large language model (LLM) to extract information that can be ...
Source: pymnts.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
The same chemicals found in pipes, pesticides and floor tiles are also present in some wigs, braiding hair and hair extensions, a new study published Wednesday in the journal Environment & Health found. Researchers at the Silent Spring Institute, a scientific research nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts, tested 43 hair extension products purchased online and from local beauty supply stores and identified ...
Source: nbcnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
More than 127 million people are eligible to vote in the contest that pits the Bangladesh Nationalist Party against its former ally the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami. Bangladesh will go to the polls for the first time since its government collapsed in 2024 during a bloody crackdown on protesters. More than 127 million people are eligible to vote in the country's first general election since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ...
Source: news.sky.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Almost all of President Trump's tariffs last year were passed on to U.S. consumers and businesses in the form of higher costs, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As the average U.S. tariff on imports jumped to 13% in 2025, up from less than 3%, "nearly 90% of the tariffs' economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers," the researchers wrote. Who bears the burden of ...
Source: cbsnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
Amazon is competing with Walmart in the delivery business and against pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens. Pharmacy Susan Morse Amazon Pharmacy has announced it is expanding same-day delivery to close to 4,500 cities this year. This will add nearly 2,000 new communities to expansion efforts that began in 2024 in New York City and greater Los Angeles. New states offering same-day medication delivery include ...
Source: healthcarefinancenews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket carrying a suite of classified Space Force payloads suffered what appeared to be a burn-through at or near the nozzle of a strap-on solid-fuel booster Thursday but apparently made an otherwise "nominal" ascent to space, the company said. The two-stage Vulcan rocket thundered to life at 4:22 a.m. EST and majestically climbed away from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force ...
Source: cbsnews.com
Thursday, Feb 12th, 2026 -
It took two years, but YouTube is finally an Apple Vision Pro app. The news, announced Thursday, might come as a surprise if -- like most people -- you haven't tried Apple's Vision Pro . YouTube always seemed like a perfect fit for Apple's mixed-reality device, since so many videos there work in 3D, 360 degrees or in 180-degree immersive formats. And yet, Google and Apple had never figured out a way to make it ...
Source: cnet.com
Wednesday, Feb 11th, 2026 -
All flights to and from El Paso International Airport in Texas have been halted for "special security reasons," the Federal Aviation Administration said early Wednesday. "No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM," the FAA said, using the abbreviation for Notice to Airmen. It listed the reason as "temporary flight restrictions for Special Security Reasons." The restriction for the ...
Source: nbcnews.com
Wednesday, Feb 11th, 2026 -
Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades doing so, the public opinion polling agency confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday. The company said starting this year it would stop publishing approval and favorability ratings of individual political figures, saying in a statement it "reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership." "Our ...
Source: thehill.com