Albert Flick first landed in prison in 1979, when he was found guilty ofstabbing his wife to death in front of her young daughter

On Thursday, National Interest Editor Jacob Heilbrunn interviewed Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif in New York at the Ambassador’s residence on the current state of U.S.-Iran relations. The transcript has been lightly edited for readability.Jacob Heilbrunn: With the American shooting down of an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz today, are we on a path of escalation?Mohammed Javad Zarif: I checked with Tehran, and we do not have any information about having lost a drone today. So, we don’t know, as of now what has happened. We have the president saying that they shot a drone. We don’t know whose drone it is, but we don’t have that information. But we are certainly moving in the wrong direction. The fact that the United States has an increased presence in the Persian Gulf doesn’t help security or stability in the area—it’s a tiny body of water and you cannot have such congested traffic there without something happening.Heilbrunn: A lot of the tension is also focused on the tanker that went missing. Is Iran responsible for that?Zarif: All the information we have is that we confiscated a small tanker that was only carrying a million liters of smuggled oil products—not oil—and that happens quite often in the Persian Gulf because of heavily subsidized prices in Iran of oil products. There is a lot of smuggling from both sea and land borders and we interdict them on a regular basis. So if that is the tanker they’re talking about, that is a smuggling tanker, not a shipping tanker.Heilbrunn: Another move that the Trump administration has announced is sending about five hundred more soldiers to Saudi Arabia. What is your response to that?

There will be no manholes in Berkeley, California. Nothing will be manmade in the liberal city but "human-made." And students at the University of California, Berkeley, will join "collegiate Greek system residences" rather than fraternities and sororities. Berkeley leaders voted unanimously this week to replace about 40 gender-specific words in the city code with gender-neutral terms — an effort to be more inclusive that's drawing both praise and scorn.

Beijing on Friday criticised US Vice President Mike Pence and top diplomat Mike Pompeo as "hideous" and "hypocritical" after they called for religious freedom in China at a major meeting in Washington. Secretary of State Pompeo said Thursday that Washington will create a new international body to campaign for religious freedom, speaking after a conference where he called China's mass incarceration of mostly Muslim Uighurs "the stain of the century". At a press briefing in Beijing on Friday, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang rebuffed the criticism.

Defending Donald Trump’s repeated racist taunts at Democratic congresswomen of color, Fox News host Pete Hegseth told correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera on Friday morning that it would be perfectly fine for him to utilize the president’s “go back to where you came from” message on him.A day after Trump sorta disavowed the racist “send her back!” chant his rally crowd launched at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rivera appeared on Fox & Friends and said he was “glad the president has said” he didn’t like the chants. At the same time, Rivera noted that the president’s original tweets targeting the “Squad” tapped into an “old racist trope,” something the longtime Trump pal had criticized the president for days earlier.“Geraldo, but you, like many, have accused him of racism,” Hegseth replied. “But if you go back and look at that tweet, he’s not talking about race, he’s talking about whether or not you love this country and appreciate it. And if you don’t appreciate it and don’t love it, and don’t want to work to make it better, then maybe you could consider going somewhere else. There’s plenty of countries on Earth.”How the Ilhan Omar Marriage Smear Went From Fever Swamp to TrumpRivera, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, shot back at his colleague, yelling “what the hell” before pointing out that all four congresswomen—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Omar—are citizens of the United States. Hegseth, meanwhile, said he would have no problem if someone personally told him he could love it or leave it.“Intolerable—you cannot say that,” Rivera responded.“You could totally say it,” Hegseth, an informal adviser to Trump, asserted.“You can’t say it to me,” Rivera fired back.“Well, I could say it to you,” the Fox & Friends host countered.Rivera went on to recount the number of “street fights” he had in his younger years because he’s Puerto Rican, claiming he routinely heard people telling him to go back to where he came from even though he was born in New York. Hegseth brushed that off while continuing to insist that Trump is not referencing race but instead the lawmakers’ “principles” and “lack of gratitude.”“A lot of people aren’t grateful to be here,” Rivera declared. “Gratitude is not a requirement of citizenship.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

He hopes everyone knows it's a satirical page

Evan Dennison wanted to do something funny for his senior photos. No one believed he would actually do it. Now he is a "legend."

(Bloomberg) -- Ursula von der Leyen won’t be getting a bear hug from the Kremlin.Russia’s top diplomat was asked during a visit to Germany about the incoming president of the European Commission and her “strict” view of his country. His frosty response was that the decision by the European Union’s leaders and Parliament was one “we simply acknowledge.”“Show me anyone who isn’t critical of Russia nowadays,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on Thursday at a conference in the city of Koenigswinter. “We are pragmatists, we want to focus on practical matters, not on public statements.”Von der Leyen takes over at the helm of the EU’s executive arm in November and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s defense minister staked out a hawkish stance on Russia. She’s led calls for a common European military strategy since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and is a staunch backer of sanctions.“The Kremlin doesn’t forgive weakness,” von der Leyen told Die Welt in an interview Thursday. “From a position of strength we should stand by Russian sanctions.”Lavrov’s language was calculatingly neutral, saying President Vladimir Putin will react to EU policy rather than dwell on verbal volleys.“I hope that the new composition of the European Commission will conduct an inventory of relations with Russia, and when they express their position on the long-term development of relations with us, we will of course respond,” Lavrov said.\--With assistance from Henry Meyer and Tony Halpin.To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Koenigswinter, Germany at pdonahue1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-Jackson, Richard BravoFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Planned Parenthood’s board has fired the organization’s president, Leana Wen, after less than a year on the job. According to reports, Wen was dismissed because the board deemed her insufficiently dedicated to expanding Planned Parenthood’s political advocacy, particularly on abortion.The news comes as a shock for a few reasons. For one thing, Wen was appointed just last fall to replace Cecile Richards, who resigned on good terms after leading the institution for twelve years.But it’s surprising, too, if Wen’s ouster was due to her reluctance to focus more on politics than on public health, as several reports suggest was the case. In June, after all, Planned Parenthood announced a six-figure ad campaign, “Bans Off My Body,” to oppose recent state laws regulating abortion. Judging from Wen’s Twitter account, she was perfectly comfortable promoting what the group frequently calls “reproductive rights.”Why, then, was she forced to depart so unceremoniously, and what does her abrupt exit say about the future of Planned Parenthood?Wen’s dismissal is perhaps best understood in light of the escalating national fight over abortion policy. As blue states have codified the right to abortion on demand, in many cases deeming it a “fundamental right,” red states have passed limitations like heartbeat bills to protect unborn human beings earlier in pregnancy.Planned Parenthood has long sought to downplay its commitment to abortion, calling itself a health-care organization and spreading the lie that abortion is only 3 percent of its business, even as its clinics perform between one-third and half of all abortions in the U.S. annually. The group’s leadership evidently believes this political moment demands more aggressive advocacy.And Wen wasn’t up to the task. Considering her record thus far, she was hired for the “M.D.” beside her name, and little else. She came across in interviews like a placid physician repeating rote talking points drilled into her on the drive to the studio. She consistently inserted the phrase “as a doctor” into her messaging to give the organization the gloss of medical legitimacy, and she never sounded like the polished, sure-footed political advocate Richards had.Plenty of turmoil, meanwhile, was taking place behind the scenes. “Wen had tried to refocus the organization’s mission and image as a health provider offering a wide array of services, including abortions,” sources told the Washington Post this week. “Those close to Wen said she was opposed by some board members and others who wanted to emphasize the organization’s commitment to abortion rights.”In January, Wen told BuzzFeed News she wanted to restructure the organization’s goals, noting that people aren’t going to Planned Parenthood to make a political statement. “What we will always be here to do is provide abortion access as part of the full spectrum of reproductive health care,” Wen said. “But we also recognize that for so many of our patients we are their only source of health care.”The day BuzzFeed published its profile, though, Wen backtracked. “I am always happy to do interviews, but these headlines completely misconstrue my vision for Planned Parenthood,” Wen tweeted that morning. “Our core mission is providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion and reproductive health care. We will never back down from that fight.”Wen’s termination sheds some light on this quick reversal. It’s easy to imagine that she faced internal backlash for appearing to have shied away from abortion advocacy, and that her public about-face was an effort to pacify critics within the organization.It didn’t work. In February, top political staffers left Planned Parenthood, reportedly amid ongoing conflict over Wen’s management style. Now that tension seems to have boiled over. Six sources told BuzzFeed this week that “significant management issues [were] part of the board’s decision to oust Wen,” and one “said her removal was accelerated by the intensifying battle over abortion rights, saying that she was not the right leader in this climate.”Perhaps the most revealing detail from Buzzfeed’s report? Two sources said Wen angered staffers by refusing to use “trans-inclusive” language, “for example saying ‘people’ instead of ‘women’ and telling staff that she believed talking about transgender issues would ‘isolate people in the Midwest.’”This anecdote might well be the key to understanding what happened to Wen and where Planned Parenthood’s leaders intend to go from here. Surely she wasn’t fired for her recalcitrance on preferred pronouns. But with a national spotlight on the abortion debate, Planned Parenthood’s leaders are ready to take off the kid gloves.Wen’s firing suggests that, instead of claiming to be just a normal health-care organization, Planned Parenthood intends to capitalize on its status as an influential left-wing interest group. To do that, it must become a purveyor of the entire progressive agenda, to the point of embracing the “intersectional” language promoted by transgender activists. So the mild-mannered Wen had to go.Pro-lifers have long known what Planned Parenthood itself appears to be admitting: The group’s ultimate goal is to wield its political influence within the progressive movement to continue profiting from abortion.

Oklahoma authorities are investigating after a man allegedly raped a 4-year-old girl inside the bathroom of a McDonald's in Midwest City