Some 5,000 National Guardsmen will stay in Washington to protect the Capitol into March, according to the Pentagon. The Guard is seen as a reliable peacekeeping force – but it wasn't always that way.

Jonathan Freitag resigned while under internal Fairfax police investigation in May 2020, then joined the Brevard County Sheriff's Office three months later. He was fired earlier this month. Fairfax County prosecutors are moving to throw out more than 400 criminal convictions based on the testimony or work of a former patrol officer who is accused of stealing drugs from the police property room, planting drugs on innocent people and stopping motorists without legal basis, court filings show. In a hearing Friday, a Fairfax judge said he was inclined to vacate felony drug and gun convictions against a former D.C. firefighter and order him released from prison next week after serving nearly two years because of the actions of former officer Jonathan A. Freitag. Fairfax police said they began investigating Freitag after receiving a tip about him in July 2019. The police department took him off the streets. Freitag, now 25, resigned in May 2020 after the FBI had joined Fairfax County in a criminal investigation of him. But even after The Washington Post first reported the allegations against Freitag in June 2020, he was hired by the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office in Florida in August 2020. The Fairfax human relations department reported to Brevard that the former officer had never been “subject to disciplinary action” and “there are no disciplinary records in his file.”

From there, Silla became one of Hollywood’s go-to costumed performers, elevated by his physical talents as a performer, his well-known sense of humor, and his willingness to spend hours on any given day in heavy or uncomfortable accoutrements. Over the next 20 years, he’d become a regular for Sid and Marty Kroft (appearing frequently on both H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville), take on the physical role of the robot Twiki on Buck Rogers, and serve as the alien who inexplicably serves as a plot point in Meatballs Part II. Through his stuntwork, he also continued to make connections and friends who would serve him well in his career, most notably George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who used him as a stunt performer in E.T. and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, and who made use of his numerous talents as the hang-gliding Ewok in Return Of The Jedi. (And when Mel Brooks wanted to poke fun at Lucas’ opus with Spaceballs a few laters, Silla got the call for that, too.)

NASA celebrated the achievement by pointing New Horizons’s camera at the spot in space where Voyager 1 is currently located.

In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a radical technology that would allow faster than light travel: the warp drive, a hypothetical way to skirt around the universe’s ultimate speed limit by bending the fabric of reality. It was an intriguing idea – even NASA has been researching it at the Eagleworks laboratory – but Alcubierre’s proposal contained problems that seemed insurmountable. Now, a recent paper by US-based physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire has resolved many of those issues and generated a lot of buzz. But while Bobrick and Martire have managed to substantially demystify warp technology, their work actually suggests that faster-than-light travel will remain out of reach for beings like us, at least for the time being. There is, however, a silver lining: warp technology may have radical applications beyond space travel.

It’s a full-time job, keeping track of the US/NATO campaign to start a fire somewhere on China’s borders. It’s like tracking an inept arsonist by satellite image: “Oh, there he goes again…the idiot started a trash fire next to a concrete wall.” Of course, no one who matters in the defense business wants total war with China. They just want to keep those trash fires burning, hoping one of them will blaze up big, like a gender-reveal wildfire. And even if none of them do, it’s good for business, because most war scares are about funding. The US Navy always, always wants more ships. What’s scarce is plausible reasons to buy them.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is said to be involved with the effort.

Judge Wilhelmina M. Wright issued a temporary restraining order to prevent state law enforcement from impeding the work of journalists.

During 2.4 million years of existence on Earth, a total of 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex ever lived, and 20,000 individual animals would have been alive at any moment, according to a new calculation method we described in a paper published on April 15, 2021 in the journal Science.

Ruan said the paint was not a risk to people’s eyesight: “Our surface reflects the sunlight diffusely, so the power going in any particular direction is not very strong. It just looks bright white, a bit whiter than snow.”

There’s a notorious neo-Nazi political leader on the loose somewhere in Europe. Authorities say they can’t find him, but signs point to a commune of renegade conservative monks.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is under a federal sex-trafficking investigation, also announced he'll be joining the caucus.

Modified hydrofluoric acid (MHF), used in oil refining, could turn into a flesh-eating vapor cloud if leaked. 400,000 refinery neighbors in LA are at risk.

In an incongruously serene finale to a half-century of making lurid headlines — he hired thugs to blind the lover who had spurned him, served 14 years in prison for arranging the assault, married her after he was released, cheated on her with a younger mistress and was forgiven yet again — Burt Pugach died inconspicuously four months ago in Queens. But as befits what he described as “a storybook romance” and what The New York Times called “one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history,” even Mr. Pugach's death — at 93 on Dec. 24, eight years after his wife’s — has not ended this saga of what has variously been described as revenge, remorse and redemption.

Let's pool our resources!

If, for any number of reasons, you’d like to burn telecoms to the ground and build a new internet service provider on their smoldering remains, good news for you. New York City Spectrum workers, who’ve weathered an anguishing four-year strike, have built their own internet service provider. If the city throws its support behind it, People’s Choice Communications could liberate New Yorkers from cable gangsters once and for all.

The administration had promised to increase the level to 60,000 admissions this year, but will keep it at 15,000, which was set by the Trump administration.

The Chicago agency investigating police shootings released the graphic footage of an officer shooting Adam Toledo, whose hands were raised.

Green grapes covered in candy coating and nuts are a phenomenon that Chicagoans can't get enough of.

Anthony J. Thompson Jr., 17, a student at Austin-East Magnet High School in Knoxville, Tenn., was fatally shot during a struggle, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said. A student who was fatally shot during a confrontation with the police on Monday at a Knoxville, Tenn., high school did not fire the bullet that struck an officer who was wounded, the authorities said on Wednesday. The disclosure by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation contradicted its earlier statements that the police officer had been shot by the student at Austin-East Magnet High School. The bureau said on Wednesday that the student’s gun had been fired in a struggle with officers. “Preliminary examinations indicate the bullet that struck the KPD officer was not fired from the student’s handgun,” the bureau said in a statement. Investigators declined to say whether the bullet that struck the officer in the leg had come from his own gun or from another officer’s weapon.