MINNEAPOLIS — Jurors will be presented with starkly different views of the Minnesota police officer who killed Black motorist Daunte Wright during opening statements at her manslaughter trial Wednesday, with the defense claiming that

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia — Malaysia's Appeal Court on Wednesday upheld the conviction and 12-year jail sentence of ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak linked to the massive looting of the 1MDB state investment fund that brought down his government in 2018.

BERLIN — Olaf Scholz is scheduled to be sworn in as Germany's chancellor on Wednesday, marking the end of Angela Merkel's 16-year tenure.

Saule Omarova has withdrawn her nomination to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a little known agency that has a major role in overseeing banks in the country.

Omarova, a Cornell University law professor, had faced strong opposition from Senate Republicans over her academic research, which had proposed some major changes to the banking system.

Greg Tate, the essential music writer, cultural critic and journalist, has died. He was 64. The news was confirmed by a spokesperson at Duke University Press, his publisher. No further details were provided.

When President-elect Joe Biden was asked whether student loan cancellation figured into his economic recovery plan, he declared, "It should be done immediately."

"[Student debt is] holding people up," Biden said on Nov. 16, 2020. "They're in real trouble. They're having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent."

Moncef Slaoui, the former head of the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed, says he's "cautiously optimistic" about how well existing vaccines will hold up against omicron, the latest coronavirus variant of concern.

Omicron has more mutations than previous variants, with around 30 mutations on just its spike protein.

That's worrying for virologists, who note that the spike protein is what vaccines use to "teach" our bodies to recognize the coronavirus.