NPR

In January, under pressure from Donald Trump to overturn what he baselessly called a fraudulent election, Brad Raffensperger remained steadfast. The Georgia secretary of state insisted that the 2020 election in the state was fair and secure, and that there had been no evidence of foul play to back up the former president's claims.

Editor's Note: This story includes explicit language.

In June 2018, a member of the Proud Boys punched a counterprotester in the jaw, shoved him into the pavement in Portland, Ore., and sent him to the hospital with a serious concussion.

The counterprotester had used a metal baton to strike first, and the Proud Boys leader, Ethan Nordean, claimed self-defense. In the end, Nordean, a former bodybuilder, faced no legal consequences for knocking out the man.

Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II's husband and the Duke of Edinburgh, died Friday at age 99, Buckingham Palace announced. He was the first male royal consort since Queen Victoria's time in the 1800s — and the longest-serving consort in British history.

A volcano on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent has experienced an "explosive eruption," according to officials there, hours after increased activity at the mountain set off a mandatory evacuation of nearby residents.

A federal grand jury in Washington indicted a Florida man for taking his skateboard to the head of a Metropolitan Police officer during the U.S. Capitol insurrection Jan. 6.

Grady Douglas Owens, 21, was initially arrested on April 1 in Florida. He faces several charges including assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees; obstruction; and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

General Motors will temporarily shut down two more plants as automakers continue to struggle with major supply chain disruptions, particularly in computer chips.

The company will idle its plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, for one week and Lansing Delta Township, Michigan, for two weeks. They're the lastest in the long list of North American auto plants going dark because of the ongoing chip shortage, causing temporary layoffs for workers and cutting into the supply of new vehicles.

Racism is a scourge in American society. It's also a serious public health threat, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a statement released Thursday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky pointed to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, as seen in case numbers, deaths and social consequence.

Declaring U.S. gun violence an "epidemic" and "an international embarrassment," President Biden outlined actions to regulate certain firearms and to try to prevent gun violence after a spate of mass shootings in recent weeks and pressure from advocates.

"This is an epidemic, for God's sake, and it has to stop," Biden said.

The results of the 2021 election that everyone has been awaiting with bated breath are taking a while.

Blame it on mail-in votes. Yes, this one, too.

For eight years, the civil rights organization Muslim Advocates has reported scores of examples of bigotry and hate promoted across Facebook. It has published reports and met privately with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his number two, Sheryl Sandberg, about its concerns.

President Biden will nominate David Chipman, adviser to a major gun control group, to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an agency that plays a key role in gun regulations.

The number of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in March was the most in at least 15 years, as agents for U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended nearly 172,000 people, according to Biden administration officials.

This included nearly 19,000 children and teenagers traveling without a parent — double the levels from February and the most ever in a single month.

Later this month, Bahareh Shargi will mark an anniversary: It will be three years that her husband has been stuck in Iran.

Iranian authorities first imprisoned Emad Shargi, a U.S. citizen, on April 23, 2018. Though they eventually released him on bail, they did not allow him to leave the country and later returned him to Tehran's Evin prison. Now his family hopes that speaking out may help him.

President Biden's infrastructure train is leaving the station.

In remarks Wednesday pushing for his sweeping $2.3 trillion plan, Biden said he wants to meet with Republicans about it and hopes to negotiate in "good faith" — a political tenet that hasn't been practiced much in Washington, D.C., in recent years.

But Biden is not waiting around.

"We will not be open to doing nothing," the president said. "Inaction, simply, is not an option."

Translation: Get on board or step aside.

Senior Special Agent James Reyerson of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is testifying in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in last May's death of George Floyd.

The BCA routinely investigates police use-of-force incidents in Minnesota. Chauvin is facing charges of second- and third-degree murder as well as manslaughter. Video footage from the scene showed Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd's neck area for more than nine minutes.

Biological fathers will soon be required to pay half of a woman's pregnancy-related medical costs under a new Utah law that advocates believe to be the first of its kind in the United States.

Saks Fifth Avenue is going fur-free, becoming the latest fashion seller to take animal-fur clothes and accessories off its shelves.

A more easily spread coronavirus variant first identified in England last year has now become the dominant strain in the U.S., the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

The variant, known as B.1.1.7, spread quickly across the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning last fall, with the more infectious version of the coronavirus thwarting restrictions and lockdowns that had earlier helped keep the original strain in check.

Voters in Greenland have given an opposition party its first-ever chance to form a government after a campaign that sought to define the limits of development on the Arctic island.

The Inuit Ataqatigiit party won 37% of the vote, compared with 29% for the ruling social-democratic Siumut party, according to official results reported by Reuters. The vote totals should allow Inuit Ataqatigiit to grab 12 seats in the 31-member unicameral legislature, known as the Inatsisartut, meaning it will likely need to form a coalition with support from one of the smaller parties.

Researchers are reporting some progress in their search for drugs that tamp down the overwhelming immune reaction that can kill a patient with COVID-19.

These reactions are triggered by coronavirus infections and can veer out of control in some people. It's this reaction, rather than the virus itself, that is the real peril for people seriously ill with COVID-19.

In his $2 trillion plan to improve America's infrastructure, President Biden is promising to address the racism ingrained in historical transportation and urban planning.

Biden's plan includes $20 billion for a program that would "reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments," according to the White House. It also looks to target "40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities."

On a recent weekday, some three dozen Marines and civilians filed into an auditorium at Henderson Hall, a Marine support center on a hill above the Pentagon.

They were there to talk about extremism in the ranks.

They reviewed their oath to defend against any enemy foreign or domestic, learned about active service members arrested for stockpiling weapons as members of neo-Nazi and other extremist groups, and took part in a wide-ranging discussion that included race, values and how to report suspicious activity.

The Texas state court system is signaling that it will no longer enforce a federal order aimed at stopping evictions during the coronavirus pandemic. That could clear the way for landlords to push ahead with tens of thousands of eviction cases that have been on hold.

The timing could be particularly painful for many families, coming after Congress has approved billions of dollars to help people pay the rent they owe to avoid eviction but before the vast majority of renters have been able to receive any of that money.

When Major League Baseball decided to move the All-Star Game to Denver, it was a moment of celebration for many Colorado politicos.

MLB had pulled the game from Atlanta in response to criticism of Georgia's new voting law. The choice of Coors Field as the new site was seen by Colorado lawmakers as another validation of Colorado's reputation for having some of the nation's most accessible and secure elections.

Officer Nicole Mackenzie, the medical support coordinator with the Minneapolis Police Department, was the third witness called on Tuesday afternoon in the trial of Derek Chauvin.

Chauvin is facing charges of murder and manslaughter in George Floyd's death last May.

Mackenzie, who trains officers in medical support, was asked by defense attorney Eric Nelson about "agonal breathing," which can occur in people in distress such as a medical emergency.

The Border Patrol is overwhelmed by the numbers of unaccompanied migrant children in its custody — on Sunday, there were 4,699 sleeping in austere conditions for days on end. But there's help on the way. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is, for the first time, fielding teams of social service workers to relieve some of the agents from handing out mattresses and Pampers.

Greenlanders are going to the polls on Tuesday in a crucial election that could determine whether the Arctic island taps its vast deposits of rare-earth minerals to fuel eventual independence from Denmark.

Major League Baseball's 2021 All-Star Game will be played in Colorado's Coors Field, the league says, after it canceled plans for Atlanta to host baseball's midseason centerpiece. The change came in response to Georgia's controversial new voting law, which the MLB says is against its values.

"Major League Baseball is grateful to the Rockies, the City of Denver and the State of Colorado for their support of this summer's All-Star Game," Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred Jr. said.

The United States may just become the engine of global economic growth this year, according to a new forecast released Tuesday by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF expects the U.S. economy will grow 6.4% this year, its strongest growth in decades. That's faster than the 5.1% growth it was projecting just two months ago and nearly double the growth rate it predicted in October.

House and Senate Democratic leaders announced Tuesday that late U.S. Capitol Police Officer William "Billy" F. Evans, who was killed in the line of duty on April 2, will lie in honor in the United States Capitol rotunda.