"Washington"

Ukraine’s new government warned Russia on Sunday that the two countries “are on the brink of disaster” after an incursion by Moscow’s forces into the Crimea peninsula that has sparked a rapidly escalating international crisis.s

The Guardian reports, “a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases.”

By checking in during the game against the Los Angeles Lakers, the newest member of the Brooklyn Nets became the first openly gay man to play for a team in one of the nation’s four major professional sports.

The Afghan Taliban said it was cutting off talks with Washington to trade long-time captive U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five of the prisoners held at Guantanamo.

The federal government on Friday issued guidelines for banks seeking to do business with the legal marijuana industry, stopping short of a blanket immunity for them, but strongly indicating that prosecutions for such crimes as money laundering would be unlikely.

The tusk from a mammoth that lived 16,000 years ago in the Seattle area unearthed earlier this week appears to be the largest, most intact ever found in the region.

“An American citizen who is a member of al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year,” those officials tell The Associated Press.

“Mind-boggling if not historical” ice accumulations are expected Wednesday and Thursday across a wide swath of the Deep South that includes Atlanta, other parts of Georgia, Columbia, S.C., and up to Raleigh/Durham, N.C.

An admiral of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet said warships under his command have been dispatched to skirt U.S. maritime borders for the first time, in tit-for-tat move aimed at protesting the U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf.

Warning that “simply delaying action on the debt limit can cause harm to our economy,” Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew repeated Monday that he believes Congress should act soon to raise that limit so the federal government avoids even looking like it might default on its debts.