SAVANNAH, Georgia—Allegations Friday that a Georgia district attorney blocked police officers from arresting the killers of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery were just the latest blow to a local law enforcement apparatus that has been rocked by a series of troubling and deadly scandals.

Brunswick DA Jackie Johnson’s office allegedly prevented the Glynn County Police Department from arresting Travis and Gregory McMichael in connection with the shooting death of Arbery, an unarmed black man, in late February, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Johnson has recused herself from that case. But one Glynn County commissioner suggested she personally intervened in early plans to make arrests “to protect her friend” Gregory McMichael. McMichael was a former cop and investigator in the Brunswick DA’s office for 25 years who had reportedly investigated Arbery in the past. 

It is far from the first time the office—and local law enforcement more generally—had come under scathing scrutiny. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey—After five years fighting to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Russia now appears inclined to dispose of its infamous client. Assad’s persistent brutality and corruption, and his inability to establish even the semblance of a functioning state, has grown to be a burden Moscow would prefer not to bear.

And then there’s the problem of Iran. Assad, members of his family, and his Alawite clansmen enjoy close, perhaps unbreakable, bonds to the regime in Tehran and to Iranian-backed militias in Syria. All of which undermines Moscow’s primary mission there: to rehabilitate the Assad regime as a symbol of stability capable of attracting hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment for reconstruction, which Russian firms would then be poised to receive. 

As long as Assad’s relatives continue to function as a mafia and give free rein to Iranian troops using Syria as base of operations to threaten Israel and plan attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq, those countries likely to foot the bill for Syrian reconstruction—the nations of Europe and the Gulf—are unlikely to come up with the cash. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” 

That’s how epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding began a since-deleted 14-tweet thread on Jan. 25 warning about the “thermonuclear pandemic level bad” infectiousness of the coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China.

The first confirmed U.S. case had been announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) days earlier outside Seattle. But the disease was not widely understood to be a potentially nightmarish pandemic. Many infectious disease experts had been ignored despite warning for years that the U.S. was not prepared for a seemingly inevitable health crisis. Feigl-Ding, a visiting scientist at Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, wanted to help ensure their message was heard.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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This post contains spoilers for Dead to Me Season 2.

Maybe it’s the surreality of, well, everything lately—or maybe it’s just aged like the fine wines all of its characters toss back by the bottle. Whatever the reason, Dead to Me Season 2 hits even better than Season 1—fighting off a sophomore slump with a fresh batch of twists, dramatic ironies, and, most importantly, some more Christina Applegate angsting out to metal. Perhaps this season’s smartest move, however, is a trope pulled straight out of Soapy Dramas 101: Bringing James Marsden back to play his own twin.

Series creator Liz Feldman was sending the usual thank-you notes back and forth with cast and crew after Season 1 wrapped when she received a particularly amusing message from Marsden.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It’s not going out on much of a limb to say that the single greatest line in any rock and roll song—shall we double down and say all music ever?—is “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!!”

Surely that says it all.

As with any truly oracular pronouncement, it inspires consternation in the first-time listener, and the second-time listener, and the third, the fourth, and on and on. The mystery never diminishes.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

STATE pension age is continually being reviewed and altered by the government. The latest change occurred earlier this week.

APRIL saw 20.5 million job losses in the United States, the biggest rise in the jobless rate since the Great Depression.

STATE PENSIONS are calculated by National Insurance contributions - but can you top up any missed years?

Tottenham will need to be creative in the transfer market this summer.

Liverpool are looking to make Sadio Mane an offer that would tarnish Real Madrid's hopes of signing him.

UFC 249 prize money - Express Sport breaks down how much Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje are set to pocket for their showdown in Florida.

Jurgen Klopp never got to manage Steven Gerrard at Liverpool but the pair still have a strong relationship given their connections to the club.

The summer transfer window is nearly upon us as Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and the rest of the Premier League look to strengthen for whenever the new season starts. Express Sport brings you the latest updates throughout the day.

Whether it was driverless cars, lab-grown meat or faster-than-light neutrinos, some things just didn't live up to the hype in the 2010s

Mercury is mostly iron, which may be because a series of close encounters with a young Venus billions of years ago stripped away its rocky outer layers

Strange blasts from space called fast radio bursts continue to puzzle astronomers with their odd behaviour, as they seem to come from a variety of galaxies

A strange supernova that’s 100 times brighter than it should be has long been a mystery, but it may be explained by the explosion slamming into a cloud of gas

How can we get a picture of the whole Milky Way if we are inside it? Good sleuthing is needed to combine all the clues, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Astronomers have spotted a star that is exploding with a brightness 100 times less than expected – and it’s a mystery exactly why the explosion is so dim

Strange, powerful blasts of radio waves from space called fast radio bursts sometimes flash repeatedly, but never with any discernible pattern – until now

SpaceX and the space tourism firm Space Adventures have announced a plan to fly paying customers into Earth orbit, higher than the International Space Station

A private satellite that is low on fuel could survive five more years because another satellite has come to its rescue – a technique that could be used by future service spacecraft

A space flight start-up called Astra is about to attempt to launch two small rockets into orbit over a few weeks to win $12 million from the US military

A team of researchers say they have discovered a protein molecule inside a meteorite, the first extraterrestrial example ever found, but others are sceptical

SpaceX is partnering with a US start-up called Axiom Space to launch three space tourists on a 10-day trip to the International Space Station

In the early universe, particles called neutrinos had a starring role in determining where galaxy clusters formed and which elements were created when stars exploded

When Mars was young, parts of the planet may have been able to sustain RNA, a molecule that probably played a key role in the beginnings of life on Earth

The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft bombed the asteroid Ryugu in April. Analysing the crater it left behind suggests Ryugu is a relative youngster at 9 million years old

The first-ever interstellar comet is showing signs of brightening, suggesting it may have been heated up as it passed near to the sun

Could life on Mars have hidden from extreme weather in a cavern on the Pavonis Mons volcano? This 2011 orbiter image of an otherworldly crater has NASA asking just that

A tiny meteorite found in Antarctica doesn’t match any asteroid or comet we know of. Instead, it must have come from a mystery parent body that’s full of water

Pluto’s ancient oceans may have come about just after the icy world was born, melting from ice in a process that suggests the dwarf planet took just 30,000 years to form

An unusually round and symmetrical deposit on Mars may be the result of an impact that popped the surface of the planet, causing a volcanic eruption less than 200,000 years ago

Brown dwarfs, which are halfway between huge planets and small stars, have extremely powerful winds whipping around them at speeds of about 650 metres per second

A star that swoops close to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole has a strange, looping orbit that proves Einstein was right about the gravity of black holes

The interstellar comet Borisov, which flew past Earth in December, is full of carbon monoxide ice that implies its home star is smaller and colder than our sun

Strange orbits of distant space rocks have been used to infer that the solar system has an unseen ninth planet, but those orbits may be less strange than we thought, meaning there is no need for a new planet

Faraway galaxies have been spotted unexpectedly flashing up to 100 times their usual brightness, and it seems to be caused by eddies in Earth’s atmosphere

We know that there is at least one planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, and now astronomers may have taken the first picture of a second world

NASA has awarded $967 million to three space flight companies – Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX – to build lunar landers that will be part of the Artemis programme to send humans to the moon by 2024

We’ve found a 200-metre cliff in Mars's Hellas basin, the first evidence of a river that flowed on the planet for more than 100,000 years

Will Flynn be the right wing's Nelson Mandela? Of course that's insulting - but so is this entire presidency

You may have noticed, as a mere citizen of this country, there are many things you are not supposed to know. You are not mature enough or intelligent enough to handle certain information. You are in, in effect, a child in a supposedly democratic republic.

The Trump-Russia collusion investigation was an elaborate and intentional hoax, staged by the most unscrupulous and power-mad political operatives this country has ever seen.