Author: Reporter

When gunshots echoed at the Trump rally where she was working, Butler Eagle reporter Irina Bucur dropped to the ground just like everyone else. She was terrified. She hardly froze, though. Bucur tried to text her assignment editor, through spotty cell service, to tell him what was going on. She took mental notes of what the people in front and behind her were saying. She used her phone to take video of the scene. All before she felt safe standing up again. When the world’s biggest story came to the small western Pennsylvania hamlet of Butler on July 13,...

“Move fast and break things,” a high-tech mantra popularized 20 years ago by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was supposed to be a rallying cry for game-changing innovation. It now seems more like an elegy for a society perched on a digital foundation too fragile to withstand a defective software program that was supposed to help protect computers, not crash them. The worldwide technology meltdown caused by a flawed update installed earlier this month on computers running on Microsoft’s dominant Windows software by cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike was so serious that some affected businesses such as Delta Air Lines were still...

There are not a lot of facts. There are, however, an avalanche of conclusions. So it goes in many corners of the news media and among its frequent commentators in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Authorities have not established why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate the former president — and, now that the gunman is dead, may never know. That has not stopped media figures and politicians from robust speculation. President Joe Biden, Democrats and left-leaning media have all been blamed, with no proof. Then there is the ever-popular, amorphous, definition-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder target —...

President Joe Biden on July 25 delivered a solemn call to voters to defend the country’s democracy, as he laid out in an Oval Office address his decision to drop his bid for reelection and throw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Insisting that “the defense of democracy is more important than any title,” Biden used his first public address since his announcement on July 21 that he was stepping aside to deliver an implicit repudiation of former President Donald Trump. He did not directly call out Trump, whom he has called an existential threat to democracy. The...

A hot-air balloon brought an Olympic ring of fire into a rainy sky and singer Celine Dion belted from the Eiffel Tower as Paris kicked off its first Summer Olympics in a century on July 26, with a four-hour-long, rule-breaking opening ceremony that unfurled along the Seine River. On-and-off showers did not seem to hamper the enthusiasm of the athletes. Some held umbrellas as they rode boats down the river in a showcase of the city’s resilience as authorities investigated suspected acts of sabotage targeting France’s high-speed rail network. With the ambitious ceremony, the stakes for France were immense....