Category: News

ABUJA, Nigeria — About 100 U.S. troops plus equipment have arrived in Nigeria to help train soldiers in the West African country as the government fights against Islamic militants and other armed groups, the Nigerian military announced Monday.

The arrival followed a request by the Nigerian government to the U.S government for help with training, technical support, and intelligence-sharing, the military said in a statement.

The deployment follows an easing of tensions that flared between the U.S. and Nigeria when U.S. President Donald Trump said the country wasn’t protecting Christians from an alleged genocide. The Nigerian government has rejected the accusation, and analysts say it simplifies a very complicated situation in which people are often targeted regardless of their faith.

Maj. Gen. Samaila Uba, spokesperson for Nigeria’s Defense Headquarters, previously has said that the U.S. troops won’t engage in combat or have a direct operational role, and that Nigerian forces will have complete command authority.

In December, U.S. forces launched airstrikes on Islamic State group-affiliated militants in northwestern Nigeria. Last month, following discussions with Nigerian authorities in Abuja, the head of U.S. Africa Command confirmed a small team of U.S. military officers were in Nigeria, focused on intelligence support.

Nigeria is facing a protracted fight with dozens of local armed groups increasingly battling for turf, including Islamic sects like the homegrown Boko Haram and its breakaway faction Islamic State West Africa Province. There is also the IS-linked Lakurawa, as well as other “bandit” groups that specialize in kidnapping for ransom and illegal mining.

Recently, the crisis has worsened to include other militants from the neighboring Sahel region, including the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, which claimed its first attack on Nigerian soil last year. Several thousand people in Nigeria have been killed, according to data from the United Nations. Analysts say not enough is being done by the government to protect its citizens.

While Christians have been among those targeted, analysts and residents say the majority of victims of the armed groups are Muslims in Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north, where most attacks occur.

ATLANTA — The NAACP and other organizations are asking a judge to protect personal voter information that was seized by the FBI from an elections warehouse just outside Atlanta.

Georgia residents entrusted the state with their “sensitive personal information” when they registered to vote, and the Jan. 28 seizure of ballots and other election documents from the Fulton County elections hub “breached that guarantee, infringed constitutional protections of privacy, and interfered with the right to vote,” the organizations said in a motion filed late Sunday.

The motion asks the judge to “order reasonable limits on the government’s use of the seized data” and to prohibit the government from using the data for purposes other than the criminal investigation cited in the search warrant affidavit. That includes prohibiting any efforts to use it for voter roll maintenance, election administration, or immigration enforcement.

They also want the judge to order that the government disclose an inventory of all documents and records seized, the identity of anyone who has accessed the records outside of those involved in the criminal investigation, any copying of the records, and all efforts to secure the information.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment on the motion.

FBI agents arrived at the elections hub just south of Atlanta with a search warrant seeking documents related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, including: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls. The county has filed a motion seeking the return of the seized materials.

President Donald Trump has fixated on Fulton, a Democratic stronghold and the most populous county in the state, asserting without evidence that widespread voter fraud there cost him victory in Georgia in 2020.

An FBI agent’s affidavit presented to a magistrate judge to obtain the search warrant says the criminal investigation began with a referral from Kurt Olsen, who advised Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss and now serves as Trump’s director of election security and integrity with a mission to investigate Trump’s loss.

The motion was filed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on behalf of the NAACP, Georgia and Atlanta NAACP organizations, and the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples Agenda. It notes that the seizure happened as the Justice Department has been seeking unredacted state voter registration rolls.

The Justice Department has sued at least 23 states and the District of Columbia to try to get them to hand over detailed voter information. The agency has said it is seeking the data as part of an effort to ensure election security, but Democratic officials and other critics worry that federal officials want to use the sensitive data for other purposes. Federal courts in several states have rejected the Justice Department’s attempts to get the records.

“These repeated efforts to access 2020 election records, including by the entity that now has custody of them, heightens concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive voter data and exacerbates the chill on voting rights,” the motion says.

Former President Barack Obama this weekend appeared to drop an otherworldly bombshell: Extraterrestrials exist.

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said in a podcast released Saturday. “There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

The comments — coming in the 44th minute of a 47-minute interview with a popular liberal podcaster — sparked an outsize reaction on social media, including from UFO believers convinced the truth is out there and that government leaders have spent decades concealing it.

It was also notable what didn’t happen, at least in official Washington. Political pundits didn’t discuss Obama’s comments on Sunday’s roster of talk shows. His foes didn’t rush to mock or condemn him; his allies didn’t jump to support him. Many mainstream media outlets initially ignored his comments on aliens while transcribing his other podcast remarks.

In interviews, lawmakers and Capitol Hill staff members offered an explanation: The paranormal has become normal. They pointed to mounting political attention given to unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs — the term that has replaced UFOs — and polls that show a growing belief in extraterrestrials. Fifty-six percent of Americans believe that aliens exist, according to a November poll conducted by YouGov.

Obama on Sunday night largely walked back his unearthly remarks, suggesting that he was offering a pithy response in the spirit of the podcast’s “lightning round” and that he was simply performing cosmic math.

“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote on Instagram. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Not long ago, the former president’s 24-hour dalliance with E.T.s would have represented a political earthquake, liability, or both. When Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio, affirmed at a 2007 presidential debate that he believed he had seen an unidentified flying object, Time magazine dubbed the comments one of the “screwups” of that political campaign cycle. Debate moderator Tim Russert then asked whether Obama, at the time a Democratic senator from Illinois, believed in extraterrestrial life, too.

“I don’t know, and I don’t presume to know,” Obama responded, quickly pivoting from the question. “What I know is there is life here on Earth, and that we’re not attending to life here on Earth.”

At the time, about a third of Americans believed in UFOs, according to an Associated Press/Ipsos poll released that month.

But the political conversation has steadily shifted. Beginning in 2017, the New York Times and other media outlets have run reports on secret federal programs that have studied unusual, seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Government agencies have released videos of aircraft that appeared to defy the laws of physics.

It’s a “legitimate question now,” former President Bill Clinton said in a 2022 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

That curiosity is bipartisan. The GOP-led House Oversight Committee in 2024 held a hearing on “exposing the truth” about unidentified aerial phenomena, citing reports by naval aviators and government officials who claim to have witnessed or received reports of strange vehicles. Marco Rubio, the nation’s secretary of state and national security adviser, is among the now-dozens of officials and lawmakers who have demanded more information.

“We have people with very high jobs in the U.S. Government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good,” Rubio said in a Fox News interview in December, commenting on statements that he said he had heard while serving in the U.S. Senate. “I don’t know the answer.”

Officials across multiple administrations have said they are unaware of proof of celestial beings.

“I certainly wasn’t privy to any intelligence about alien life forms and believe me, I asked about it!” Sean Savett, the spokesperson for the White House National Security Council during the Biden administration, wrote in a text message on Sunday.

Obama in 2021 said that he prioritized finding answers about extraterrestrial life as president, alluding to the conspiracy theories about Area 51 — a military base in Nevada that has been depicted in Hollywood productions as harboring alien technology and even alien beings.

“When I came into office, I asked … ‘Is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ship?’ And, you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was no,” Obama said in a 2021 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has been less publicly curious about interstellar matters. President Donald Trump told ABC News in 2019 that he had a “brief meeting” on UFOs during his first administration and that he didn’t particularly believe in aliens.

While the White House press office did not respond to questions Sunday about Obama’s comments or whether Trump had updated his views, current staff members said they weren’t aware of Trump discussing the topic.

“While POTUS often talks about things outside of my orbit, he’s never talked about things outside Earth’s orbit,” a White House official texted Sunday.

BOSTON — More than a decade before he became the country’s first president, George Washington was leading a critical campaign in the early days of the American Revolution. The Siege of Boston was his first campaign as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and, in many ways, set the stage for his military and political successes — celebrated on Presidents Day.

Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord, militias had pinned down the British in Boston in April 1775. The Continental Congress, recognizing the need for a more organized military effort, selected Washington to lead the newly formed army.

The Siege of Boston and its significance

On this day 250 years ago, Washington would have been nearing the end of an almost yearlong siege that bottled up as many as 11,000 British troops and hundreds more loyalists. The British were occupying Boston at the time, and the goal of the siege was to force them out.

A critical decision made by Washington was sending Henry Knox, a young bookseller, to Fort Ticonderoga in New York to retrieve dozens of cannons. The cannons, transported hundreds of miles in the dead of winter, were eventually used to fire on British positions. That contributed to the decision by the British, facing dwindling supplies, to abandon the city by boat on March 17, 1776.

Historians argue that the British abandoning their positions, celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, rid the city of loyalists at a critical time, denied the British access to an important port and gave patriots a huge morale boost.

“The success of the Siege of Boston gave new life and momentum to the Revolution,” Chris Beagan, the site manager at Longfellow House in Cambridge, a National Historic Site that served as Washington’s headquarters during the American Revolution. “Had it failed, royal control of New England would have continued, and the Continental Army likely would have dissolved.”

How the siege shaped Washington

The siege was also a critical test for Washington. A surveyor and farmer, Washington had been out of the military for nearly 20 years after commanding troops for the British during the French and Indian War. His successful campaign ensured Washington remained the commander-in-chief for the remainder of the revolution.

Doug Bradburn, president of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, said Washington took the first steps to creating a geographically diverse army that included militiamen from Massachusetts to Virginia and, by the end of the war, a fighting force with significant Black and Native American representation. It was the most integrated military until President Harry S. Truman’s desegregated the armed forces in 1948, he said.

Washington, a slave owner who depended on hundreds of slaves on his Mount Vernon estate, was initially opposed to admitting formerly enslaved and free Black soldiers into the army. But short of men, Washington came to realize “there are free Blacks who want to enlist and he needs them to keep the British from breaking out” during the siege, Bradburn said.

Ridding Boston of the British also turned Washington into one of the country’s most popular political figures.

“He comes to embody the cause in a time before you have a nation, before you have a Declaration of Independence, before you’re really sure what is the goal of this struggle,” Bradburn said. “He becomes the face of the revolutionary movement.”

Commanding the military for more than eight years also prepared Washington for the presidency, Pulitzer Prize-winning military historian Rick Atkinson said. “Perhaps most important, it gave him a sense that Americans could and should be a single people, rather than denizens of thirteen different entities.”

Myths of Washington

His rise to prominence also led to plenty of myths about Washington, many which persist to this day.

One of the most popular is the cherry tree myth. It was invented by one of Washington’s first biographers, according to George Washington’s Mount Vernon, who created the story after his death. Supposedly, a 6-year-old Washington took an ax to a cherry tree and admitted as much when caught by his father, famously saying “I cannot tell a lie … I did cut it with my hatchet.”

The second one is the wooden teeth myth. It was rumored that Washington had wooden dentures and scholars, well into the 20th century, were quoted as saying his false teeth were made from wood. Not true. He never wore wooden dentures, instead using those with ivory, gold and even human teeth.

More than a statesman

During his lifetime, Washington had myriad pursuits. He was known as an innovative farmer, according to the George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and an advocate for Western expansion, buying up to 50,000 acres of land in several Mid-Atlantic states. After returning to Mount Vernon, he built a whiskey distillery that became one of the largest in the country.

His connection to slavery was complicated. He advocated for ending slavery, and his will called for freeing all the slaves he owned after the death of his wife, Martha Washington. But he didn’t own all the slaves at Mount Vernon so he couldn’t legally free all of them.

Celebrating Presidents Day

For fans of George Washington, Presidents Day is their Super Bowl. Originated to celebrate Washington’s birthday, which falls on Feb. 22, the holiday has become associated with good deals at the mall. Still, there are plenty of places celebrating all things Washington on this day.

There will be a wreath-laying ceremony at Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and there will be a Continental Army encampment. There will be a parade honoring Washington in Alexandria, Virginia, and, in Laredo, Texas, a monthlong celebration features a carnival, pageants, an air show and jalapeno festival.

GENEVA — Iran’s top diplomat met with the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency on Monday, ahead of a second round of negotiations with the United States over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and said he would also meet with Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi of Oman, which is hosting the U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva on Tuesday.

“I am in Geneva with real ideas to achieve a fair and equitable deal,” Araghchi wrote on X. “What is not on the table: submission before threats.”

As U.S. President Donald Trump ordered an additional aircraft carrier to the region, Iran on Monday launched a second naval drill in weeks, state TV reported. It said the drill would test Iran’s intelligence and operational capabilities in the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

Iran’s drills take place against the U.S. military buildup

Just before the talks, Iran announced its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard started the drill early Monday morning in the waterways that are crucial international trade routes through which 20% of the world’s oil passes.

Separately, EOS Risk Group said sailors passing through the region received by radio a warning that the northern lane of the Strait of Hormuz, in Iranian territorial waters, likely would see a live-fire drill Tuesday. Iranian state TV did not mention the live fire drill.

This is the second time in recent weeks sailors have received warning about an Iranian live fire drill. During the previous exercise, announced at the end of January, the U.S. military’s Central Command issued a strongly worded warning to Iran and the Revolutionary Guard. While acknowledging Iran’s “right to operate professionally in international airspace and waters,” it warned against interfering or threatening American warships or passing commercial vessels.

On Feb. 4, tensions between the Iranian and U.S. navies rose further after a U.S. Navy fighter jet shot down an Iranian drone that was approaching the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea. Iran also harassed a U.S.-flagged and U.S.-crewed merchant vessel that was sailing in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. military reported.

Iran open to compromise in exchange for sanctions relief

On Sunday, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi signaled that Tehran could be open to compromise on the nuclear issue, but is looking for an easing of international sanctions led by the United States.

“The ball is in America’s court. They have to prove they want to have a deal with us,” Takht-Ravanchi told the BBC. “If we see a sincerity on their part, I am sure that we will be on a road to have an agreement.”

“We are ready to discuss this and other issues related to our program provided that they are also ready to talk about the sanctions,” he added.

Oman hosted a first round of indirect talks between the U.S. and Iran on Feb. 6.

Similar talks last year between the U.S. and Iran about Iran’s nuclear program broke down after Israel launched what became a 12-day war on Iran, that included the U.S. bombing Iranian nuclear sites.

The U.S. is also hosting talks between envoys from Russia and Ukraine in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, days ahead of the fourth anniversary of the all-out Russian invasion of its neighbor.

U.S. keeps military pressure high

Trump initially threatened to take military action over Iran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month, but then shifted to a pressure campaign in recent weeks to try to get Tehran to make a deal over its nuclear program.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, visiting Budapest, reiterated on Monday that the U.S. hopes to achieve a deal with Iran, despite the difficulties. “I’m not going to prejudge these talks,” Rubio said. “The president always prefers peaceful outcomes and negotiated outcomes to things.”

Trump said Friday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, was being sent from the Caribbean to the Mideast to join other military assets the U.S. has built up in the region. He also said a change in power in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen.”

Iran has said if the U.S. attacks, it will respond with an attack of its own.

The Trump administration has maintained that Iran can have no uranium enrichment under any deal. Tehran says it won’t agree to that.

Iran has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Before the June war, Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels.

The direct meeting with Grossi is a significant step after Iran suspended all cooperation with the IAEA following the June war with Israel. The two also met briefly on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September. The IAEA said it has been unable to verify the status of Iran’s near weapons-grade uranium stockpile since the war. Iran has allowed IAEA some access to sites that were not damaged, but has not allowed inspectors to visit other sites.

Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% could allow Iran to build as many as 10 nuclear bombs, should it decide to weaponize its program, Grossi previously told The Associated Press. He added that it doesn’t mean that Iran has such a weapon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to Washington last week to urge Trump to ensure that any deal to include steps to neutralize Iran’s ballistic missile program and end its funding for proxy groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.