Author: Reporter

Of the 49 vice presidents in U.S. history, nearly 1 in 5 have risen to the presidency due to death or resignation. The first was John Tyler, who became president after William Henry Harrison died one month into his term. The most recent was Gerald Ford, who took office upon Richard Nixon’s resignation. Now in 2024, the spotlight is growing on the two parties’ vice-presidential picks — Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, and Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio — due to the advanced ages of the two presidential candidates as well as an attempt to shoot GOP...

Before the July 13 attempted shooting of former president and convicted felon Donald Trump, there have been multiple instances of political violence targeting U.S. presidents, former presidents, and major party presidential candidates. A look at some of the assassinations and attempted assassinations that have occurred since the nation’s founding in 1776: ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the 16th president Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated, shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, as he and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, attended a special performance of the comedy “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Lincoln was taken...

When gunshots echoed at the Trump rally where she was working, Butler Eagle reporter Irina Bucur dropped to the ground just like everyone else. She was terrified. She hardly froze, though. Bucur tried to text her assignment editor, through spotty cell service, to tell him what was going on. She took mental notes of what the people in front and behind her were saying. She used her phone to take video of the scene. All before she felt safe standing up again. When the world’s biggest story came to the small western Pennsylvania hamlet of Butler on July 13,...

“Move fast and break things,” a high-tech mantra popularized 20 years ago by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was supposed to be a rallying cry for game-changing innovation. It now seems more like an elegy for a society perched on a digital foundation too fragile to withstand a defective software program that was supposed to help protect computers, not crash them. The worldwide technology meltdown caused by a flawed update installed earlier this month on computers running on Microsoft’s dominant Windows software by cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike was so serious that some affected businesses such as Delta Air Lines were still...

There are not a lot of facts. There are, however, an avalanche of conclusions. So it goes in many corners of the news media and among its frequent commentators in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Authorities have not established why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate the former president — and, now that the gunman is dead, may never know. That has not stopped media figures and politicians from robust speculation. President Joe Biden, Democrats and left-leaning media have all been blamed, with no proof. Then there is the ever-popular, amorphous, definition-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder target —...

President Joe Biden on July 25 delivered a solemn call to voters to defend the country’s democracy, as he laid out in an Oval Office address his decision to drop his bid for reelection and throw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Insisting that “the defense of democracy is more important than any title,” Biden used his first public address since his announcement on July 21 that he was stepping aside to deliver an implicit repudiation of former President Donald Trump. He did not directly call out Trump, whom he has called an existential threat to democracy. The...