Susan Collins working with ‘small group’ of GOP senators to allow impeachment witnesses  —  U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters on Friday that she is working with a “fairly small group” of fellow Republican senators toward a goal of ensuring witnesses can be called …

On the day U.S. forces killed Soleimani, they launched another secret operation targeting a senior Iranian official in Yemen  —  On the day the U.S. military killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad, U.S. forces carried out another top secret mission against a senior Iranian military official in Yemen, according to U.S. officials.

With love and gratitude...  I ran for president to help forge another direction for our country.  I wanted to discuss things I felt needed to be discussed that otherwise were not.  I feel that we have done that.  —  I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message.

Iraqi PM tells US to decide mechanism for troop withdrawal  —  BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has told the U.S. secretary of state to send a delegation to Iraq tasked with formulating the mechanism for the withdrawal of U.S troops from Iraq, according to a statement released Friday.

Bloomberg to fund sizable campaign effort through November even if he loses Democratic nomination  —  Exclusive: The former New York City mayor plans to continue paying hundreds of staffers and funding his digital operation to defeat Trump even if he's not the nominee.

Trump's New National Security Team Made Fast Work of Iran Strike  —  White House advisers were cohesive and less inclined than their predecessors to push back against the president's wishes  —  WASHINGTON—President Trump and his senior national-security advisers waited anxiously …

U.S. Probes If Russia Targeting Biden in 2020 Election Meddling  —  U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president still the front-runner in the race …

Donald Trump Is Starting To Fixate On Bernie Sanders  —  President Donald Trump's reelection campaign is beginning to aggressively attack a rising threat to his power: Bernie Sanders.  —  The Trump campaign put out two statements centered on Sanders this week and the Vermont senator …

The Fall of Donald Trump's Fixers  —  The mogul-turned-president has long relied on loyalists to push the limits in defense of his image, but Roy Cohn, David Pecker and Michael Cohen all wound up out in the cold  —  For decades, Donald Trump has depended on loyalists to take care of especially sensitive and difficult tasks.

Trump's unhinged rally rant underscores case for reining him in  —  At a rally in Ohio on Thursday night, President Trump drew deafening cheers by boasting about his order to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, deriding Democrats with petty schoolyard taunts and mocking the very idea …

Buts of the Democratic Party  —  Leading Democrats speak in unison over President Trump's decision to order the termination of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani after he reported for work in Baghdad last week (Washington Free Beacon supercuts video below).

AOC riles Dems by refusing to pay party dues, bankrolling colleagues' opponents  —  EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already topped the fundraising charts in her short time in Congress, but the liberal darling won't donate a cent of her millions to Democrats' House campaign organization …

Firefox attacks: Homeland Security urges all users to update browsers immediately in rare warning  —  If you use Mozilla Firefox's web browser you'll want to drop what you are doing right now and update it.  That urging doesn't just come from Mozilla-it comes from the United State's Department …

The 50 Greatest War Movies Ever Made A look back at a genre that has inspired a century of cinema.  —  Speaking to Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune in 1973, Francois Truffaut made an observation that's cast a shadow over war movies ever since, even those seemingly opposed to war.

Women Overtake Men as Majority of U.S. Workforce  —  Data reflect growth in services industries that employ higher numbers of women  —  WASHINGTON—Women held more U.S. jobs than men in December for the first time in nearly a decade, a development that likely reflects the future of the American workforce.

When did it become acceptable to kill a top leader of a country we aren't even at war with?  —  Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, served in the U.S. Senate from 2007 to 2013 and was secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan from 1987 to 1988.  —  Strongly held views are unlikely …

Megxit was not driven by racism  —  First they said Brexit was caused by racism.  Now they're saying Megxit was caused by racism.  —  By ‘they’, I mean the liberal-left commentariat, the people who hate Brexit, hate ordinary people, and have for some reason grown to love our departing royals, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Boeing Employees Mocked F.A.A. and ‘Clowns’ Who Designed 737 Max  —  The company expressed regret at the embarrassing communications it sent to investigators on Thursday, which included a comment that “this airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys.”

Feces from a giant kettle of vultures is disrupting CBP communications on the US-Mexico border  —  Global Economic Disruptions  —  Globalization, automation, and inequality—oh my!  —  A US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) radio tower near the Texas-Mexico border has become home to some 300 vultures …

Journalist seeks to revive litigation over alleged surveillance by feds  —  A TV journalist known for against-the-grain reporting is unleashing a new flurry of litigation on Friday alleging she was subjected to illegal surveillance by U.S. officials while covering Obama administration controversies …

The Chaotic, Beautiful Larks of Elizabeth Wurtzel  —  About a decade ago, when the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel rounded forty, her work—previously a gale-force project of unbridled self-mythologizing—started to look backward and inward in a different way.  She began dealing more explicitly …

She Was a Star of New York Real Estate, but Her Life Story Was a Lie  —  Faith Hope Consolo had the entire press fooled, including us.  Then a message came in.  —  Wrapped in furs, dripping with diamonds and with her blond hair perfectly coifed, Faith Hope Consolo cut a glamorous figure in the flashy …

Trump Has Made Us All Stupid  —  The decline of discourse in the anti-Trump echo chamber.  —  Donald Trump is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest.  So you'd think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show we're not like him …

The Hypocrisy of Harry and Meghan's Decision  —  In January 2014, the then-president of France, François Hollande, arrived in England for talks with Prime Minister David Cameron on military and nuclear cooperation.  No one in the British press really cared about the official reason for the visit, though.

Virginia Democrats won an election.  Gun owners are talking civil war  —  Democrats' pledge to pass new gun laws has sparked a grassroots pro-gun movement that will bring thousands of activists to a volatile rally this month  —  Thousands of Virginia residents have shown up at meetings across …

West Backs Off of Blaming Iran Despite Crash Evidence  —  President Donald Trump and other Western leaders appeared willing to afford reasonable doubt to Tehran, despite evidence it shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet.  —  WESTERN LEADERS BY consensus agreed Thursday that Iran shot …

Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: Reuters/Ipsos poll  —  WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The idea of imposing a wealth tax on the richest Americans has elicited sharply divergent views across a spectrum of politicians, with President Donald Trump branding it socialist …

Shocking number of young Americans say other countries are better  — The poll also noted Republicans who like other countries in the same age group barely reach 20 percent.  — Fifty-five percent of Democrats in the same age group wouldn't mind if other countries became as militarily powerful as the U.S.

Trump has a rare public moment of self-awareness  —  But it wasn't an unprecedented one.  —  President Trump is a man who practically begs you to caricature him.  His devotion to his shtick is either so complete that he rarely breaks character, or the character has simply become him over many decades.