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With Friday's deadline looming, members of the House and Senate agreed on a new spending package to keep the government open through Sept. 30.

Russia's calls for "de-escalation zones" in Syria sounds rather Orwellian to a top United Nations aid official. Kevin Kennedy says it is not clear how people living there would be protected, and he worries that countries will try to return refugees to those zones.

NASA's Juno spacecraft will fly directly over the Great Red Spot, a swirling storm on Jupiter, on Monday. Scientists are hoping to gain a better understanding of the storm and why it persists.

Hurricane Sam reached category 4 intensity late Saturday afternoon. It is the fourth Atlantic hurricane to achieve major hurricane status in 2021.

Top level U.S. and European diplomats are visiting Nicaragua urging its president to return to a national dialogue with opposition groups. The pleas come at a time of crackdown on press and protests.

The iconic 26.2-mile trek through all five of the city's boroughs returned in person on Sunday after it was cancelled last year due to the pandemic.

The rule change is an apparent victory for Norway's female handball team after it was fined for wearing shorts rather than the requisite bikini bottoms over the summer.

NPR's David Kestenbaum reports on a possible wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Really. Physicists measuring the fundamental characteristics of a subatomic particle, the muon, have come up with some very puzzling results that could punch a hole in the long-standing "standard model" of how matter is put together. And that could help usher in a completely new theory of matter, time and space. Unless, of course, some scientist has made a mistake. (4:30) (It was later revealed this was a mistake: "Well, I would say I'm responsible for the mistake. My collaborator did most of the work, but I am equally guilty of making mistakes." Toichiro Kinoshita, a physicist at Princeton University. Kinoshita's sin was to have a minus sign where he should have had a plus or maybe the other way around. He can't quite remember, though it ended up having gigantic consequences. Kinoshita and his colleague were calculating how a particular subatomic particle behaves when it's stuck in a magnetic field. The particle, it turns out, wobbles like a toy top at a particular frequency. Kinoshita enlisted hundreds of computers and, after a decade of heroic work, had precisely predicted how fast it should wobble according to the laws of physics. Last winter, other physicists who were out measuring the wobble found it differed significantly from Kinoshita's prediction. In the clockwork world of physics, this was potentially a huge finding, signaling something new and mysterious, except that it wasn't. Kinoshita traced his error to a tiny quirk in a computer program he was using. He hadn't checked that bit, in part because other physicists using a different approach had gotten the same answer."

Research shows that sleep deprivation makes people emotionally volatile and temperamental — a fact that hasn't escaped the notice of some reality TV producers, who deny contestants sleep in an effort to kick up televised drama.

The threat of Russia invading Ukraine is real, the Biden administration insists. At the same time, top officials say they hope that being vocal about the intelligence they have could deter action.