Reporters traveling to the United Kingdom for President Joe Biden's first overseas trip were delayed seven hours after their chartered plane was overrun by cicadas.
The Washington, D.C., area is among the many parts of the country that have been swarmed by Brood X cicadas, a large emergence of the loud 17-year insects that take to dive-bombing onto moving vehicles and unsuspecting passersby.
Even Biden wasn't spared. The president brushed a cicada from the back of his neck as he chatted with his Air Force greeter after arriving at Joint Base Andrews for Wednesday's flight.
“Watch out for the cicadas,” Biden then told reporters. “I just got one. It got me.”
It was unclear how cicadas disrupted the mechanics of the press plane. Weather and crew rest issues also contributed to the flight delay late Tuesday. Ultimately, the plane was swapped for another one, and the flight took off shortly after 4 a.m. on Wednesday.
The press plane is arranged with the assistance of the White House and carries journalists at their expense. There was not expected to be any impact on news coverage of Biden's visit.
The flame at Tokyo’s National Stadium and another cauldron burning along the waterfront near Tokyo Bay throughout the games will be sustained in part by hydrogen, the first time the clean fuel source will be used to power an Olympic fire.
Australia has garnered enough international support to defer for two years an attempt by the United Nations’ cultural organization to downgrade the Great Barrier Reef’s World Heritage status because of damage caused by climate change.
The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits rose last week from the lowest point of the pandemic, even as the job market appears to be rebounding on the strength of a reopened economy
Dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies called stablecoins are on the rise, and U.S. regulators are taking notice.
Senate Republicans have rejected an effort to begin debate on a bipartisan infrastructure deal that senators brokered with President Joe Biden.
While the Biden administration has been busy undoing some of former President Trump's legacy decisions, the latest military branch, the U.S. Space Force established in 2019, isn't going anywhere.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke to the head of Unilever after its subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop selling its ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested east Jerusalem.
Canada will begin letting fully vaccinated U.S. citizens into Canada on Aug. 9, and those from the rest of the world on Sept. 7.
The Biden administration is blaming China for a hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software that compromised tens of thousands of computers around the world earlier this year.
The State Department will offer rewards up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of anyone engaged in foreign state-sanctioned malicious cyber activity, including ransomware attacks, against critical U.S. infrastructure.
