Year: 2019

The state of carrying on your luggage when you fly is dismal. Fellow airline passengers are always antsy to get ahead in line, to board early before the overhead bins fill up. After all, no one wants to be the unlucky person stuck rearranging suitcases to fit their own.

Personally, I prefer checking my bag at the gate (for free!) — a last-minute move that releases me from the stress of searching for overhead space on a crowded flight. Most of my colleagues (and certainly other travelers) feel differently; they’d rather not risk parting with their possessions or spending extra …

The Ukrainian government exchanged 200 prisoners with pro-Russian separatists in the embattled eastern region of the country on Sunday afternoon — a move experts say represents a step toward peaceful relations between Ukraine and Russia, which have been locked in a conflict for more than five years.

The prisoner swap was agreed upon earlier this month in Paris during the first face-to-face talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a meeting that was mediated by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“The swap is a big deal in the context of Ukraine-Russia relations …

A shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, has resulted in two deaths and at least one injury, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Police received a call before 10 am local time about people with gunshot wounds at the church, which is located in a suburb of Fort Worth.

Macara Trusty, a spokeswoman for the ambulance service MedStar Mobile Healthcare, said two people died at the scene of the shooting, and a third person is in critical condition. One of the three is believed to be the suspected shooter, Forth Worth fire …

A man entered Orthodox Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg’s home in Monsey, New York during a Hanukkah celebration, stabbed and wounded five people, and then fled in a vehicle Saturday night.

The victims of the attack in Monsey, which is about 35 miles from New York City, were all Hasidic Jews. The town has a large Hasidic Jewish population.

A suspect was arrested in Manhattan nearly two hours later, police say.

The attack comes after a string of possible anti-Semitic attacks in the region. In New York City alone, there have been at least eight possible anti-Semitic attacks in …

President Donald Trump has promised throughout his presidency to revive American manufacturing by slapping punishing tariffs on foreign competition.

But a new study from the US Federal Reserve suggests that his efforts have backfired — and that the manufacturing sector is worse off than it was before the president began his protectionist trade policy.

Economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, who describe their study as “as the first comprehensive estimates of the effect of recent tariffs on the US manufacturing sector,” argue that the data shows that any benefits from protection from foreign competition have been more than canceled out …

Late Friday night, President Donald Trump shared what is allegedly the name of the whistleblower whose complaint set the president’s impeachment in motion on Twitter.

That whistleblower filed a complaint about the president’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals in August. Trump responded to that complaint — and to the impeachment inquiry it spawned — by attacking the anonymous whistleblower and demanding his identity be released.

Those demands went unmet, despite Trump’s ability to order the whistleblower unmasked, but as the inquiry proceeded, some information about the anonymous official came to light, including that he is …

Former Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview on Friday that if he were subpoenaed to testify in President Donald Trump’s upcoming Senate impeachment trial, he would defy the order.

His comments, made to the Des Moines Register’s editorial board, marked the second time this month that he’s said that he’d ignore such a congressional order. Both times he said he’d do so because he believes his testimony would serve as a distraction from the purpose of the impeachment trial.

“You guys, instead of focusing on him, you’re going to cover for three weeks anything I said. And …

A truck packed with explosives blew up at a crowded intersection on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, on Saturday morning, killing and injuring scores of people.

At least 79 people have been killed and 149 people have been injured, according to CNN.

No group has claimed responsibility for the strike, but similar attacks have been carried out in Somalia by al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda. The group has carried out a number of lethal attacks in Somalia in the past year, including storming a hotel in Mogadishu with gunmen earlier in December, and …

A truck packed with explosives blew up at a crowded intersection on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, on Saturday morning, killing and injuring scores of people.

At least 79 people have been killed and 149 people have been injured, according to CNN.

No group has claimed responsibility for the strike, but similar attacks have been carried out in Somalia by al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda. The group has carried out a number of lethal attacks in Somalia in the past year, including storming a hotel in Mogadishu with gunmen earlier in December, and …

Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of December 22, 2019, and our last book link roundup of the decade.

• This week, Romance Writers of America suspended bestselling novelist Courtney Milan from membership in the association. The group took the action after Milan tweeted about a book she thought was racist — and the outcry on Milan’s behalf from the rest of the romance community was both fast and furious. The New York Post has the