CHICAGO — Shortly after Douglas DePodesta became head of the FBI’s storied Chicago bureau, he told the Tribune he would love to call it a career in his adopted hometown when he hit the mandatory retirement age in a few years.

“I think I have a lot left in my tank,” DePodesta said in May 2025.

Instead, DePodesta’s impressive FBI ...Read more

Two weeks after Venezuela’s devastating twin earthquakes, the country is entering a new and increasingly painful phase of the disaster. While hopes of finding additional survivors have all but vanished, tens of thousands of families remain waiting for answers about relatives whose whereabouts are still unknown.

Government officials said ...Read more

CHICAGO — A contrite U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros told a federal magistrate judge Thursday he was confident that a murder and kidnapping case involving the Tren de Aragua gang would have been unsealed by the time he appeared for a news conference last with his bosses in Washington, D.C.

But, as with the old adage known as Murphy’s Law, “...Read more

President Donald Trump said Wednesday night he doesn’t know specifics on Sen. Mitch McConnell’s health condition after more than three weeks of hospitalization.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he hasn’t spoken with McConnell since he was admitted to the hospital last month, according to a post on X from Kristen Holmes, a ...Read more

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman said he opposes the construction of massive data centers across the state, and said it should be up to residents to decide what gets built in their communities.

U.S. Rep. Morgan McGarvey, a former state senator who represents Louisville and Kentucky’s 3rd District in Congress, ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — The University of California, San Diego has developed a rudimentary way to detect when and where coastal landslides are likely to occur, which could lead to an early warning system for a phenomenon that has killed 19 people in greater San Diego since the 1940s.

Scientists say in a study released Thursday they were able to predict ...Read more

Aviation pioneer and commercial astronaut Wally Funk died July 8 in her Grapevine, Texas, home at the age of 87, according to a news release from the City of Grapevine. The statement said Funk passed “peacefully surrounded by her loved ones.”

Funk was born in Las Vegas, N.M., in 1939 and dedicated her life to aviation. She left a legacy of ...Read more

Twin earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24, 2026, causing major damage in Caracas and a nearby coastal city, La Guaira. At the time of publication, 3,685 people have been declared dead, and more than 30,000 remain missing.

Dr. Hermes Florez and Dr. Zeina Hannoush are physicians who trained in Venezuela, then immigrated to the United...Read more

Household water costs could nearly double in some American cities, new research suggests, as climate change further stresses municipal water systems.

Researchers at Stanford University and other institutions studied how a hotter, drier climate is poised to spike water bills for residents of Santa Cruz, California, in a peer-reviewed study ...Read more

Firearm homicides in the United States fell sharply in 2024, but gun suicides reached a record high, according to a new analysis of federal mortality data by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

The report, based on newly released data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 44,447 ...Read more

BOSTON — The Department of Justice is sending election monitors to two Massachusetts cities this year for the September primary, with the Bay State among five other states where federal monitors will be observing voter activity.

The directive was announced this week by Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Harmeet ...Read more

Keir Starmer’s swan-song trip as Britain’s prime minister to the NATO summit this week sought to cement a shaky diplomatic legacy for a successor who’s untested in the international arena.

British diplomats spent the weeks leading up to the gathering in Ankara, Turkey, fretting that no leader would want to meet the outgoing premier, and ...Read more

The U.S. military attacked Iran for a second day and Tehran retaliated against American allies in the Persian Gulf, raising fears of a return to war after little progress in efforts to secure a diplomatic outcome.

U.S. Central Command said on X about 90 targets were hit overnight — after 80 the previous day — “to further degrade” Iran�...Read more

MIAMI — Palm Beach International Airport is now Donald J. Trump International Airport, after the formal name change took effect Thursday — but the airport will only see a partial makeover since Palm Beach County was left holding the bag to pay for the presidential tribute.

Late last year, county staff raised a slew of safety, financial and ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch using a booster that has now flown three dozen times created a “space jellyfish” effect in the predawn skies over Florida on Thursday.

The rocket lifted off at 5:25 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 on the Starlink 10-42 mission with 29 more of the company’s...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — The first week of July has typically been one of Philadelphia’s most violent, with recent Independence Day weekends marked by mass shootings, police officers shot, and bursts of violence that left a dozen dead.

But this year, amid a dramatic decline in violence and a flood of visitors to the city, the holiday weekend was ...Read more

President Donald Trump denied this week that he had instructed Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado not to return to her country after last month’s devastating earthquakes, distancing himself from reports that the administration had sought to block the opposition leader’s efforts to reenter the country.

“Oh, no, no, no, not ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — The return of the wolf in California has been met with joy by conservationists, who delight in the improbable population rebound, and with fury by ranchers who bemoan the toll on their cattle.

Now, a new study on the diet of gray wolves suggests that the population regrowth is a result of the animals feasting on cattle, as their...Read more