Sen. Mitch McConnell appeared to freeze momentarily at an event in Covington, Ky., after having been asked by a reporter about running for reelection in 2026.
It's the second time that the 81-year-old Republican seemed briefly unable to speak in public in a little over a month.

At Wednesday's press conference in Northern Kentucky, McConnell trailed off and paused after he was asked whether he would run for reelection. A staffer then joined McConnell at the podium and repeated the question for him.
In all, the six-term senator silently held on to the podium silently for about 30 seconds and failed to answer the posed question.

McConnell then fielded two more questions. In response to a question about Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's bid for governor to unseat Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, he said he thought it would be a "very close race." When asked about former President Donald Trump's indictment in Georgia he said he "wasn't going to comment on the presidential race." Both times, an aide repeated the reporters' questions for the senator.

Warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico helped fuel Hurricane Idalia's rapid intensification hours before it made landfall, a phenomenon that experts say will likely occur more often in a warming world.
As Idalia moved through the Gulf on Tuesday, its winds rose by 55 mph in just 24 hours, strengthening from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 4 by early Wednesday. It weakened slightly to a Category 3 hurricane before making landfall a few hours later in Florida's Big Bend, near Keaton Beach.

But Idalia's intensification as it approached the Florida coast is "to be expected with hotter ocean temperatures," said Jeff Masters, a former hurricane scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now works as a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections.
The world's oceans in recent months have shattered temperature records, with multiple bodies of water - including the North Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Basin - engulfed in severe marine heat waves.

Michael Jackson's children Paris Jackson, Prince Jackson and Blanket Jackson celebrated the King of Pop's birthday on Wednesday.

Paris Jackson, 25, revealed in an Instagram video on what would have been Jackson's 65th birthday on Tuesday that her father actually hated acknowledgment on his special day.
"Today's my dad's birthday, and back when he was alive, he used to hate anybody acknowledging his birthday, wishing him a happy birthday, celebrating it, nothing like that," she said.

The musician and actress then shared that she's been chastised in the past by Jackson superfans for not posting her dad on social media. "It apparently means that you don't love them, you don't care about them," Paris Jackson said sarcastically.
"There have been times where I don't post anything for my dad's birthday, and people lose their minds. They tell me to kill myself," she said. "And they're basically measuring my love for my own father based off of what I post on Instagram."

Army officers who seized power in a coup in Gabon on Wednesday have named General Brice Oligui Nguema as the country's transitional leader.

Gen Nguema was earlier carried triumphally through the streets of the capital Libreville by his troops.

The deposed President, Ali Bongo, has appeared in a video at his home, calling on his "friends all over the world" to "make noise" on his behalf.
Mr Bongo's overthrow ended his family's 55-year hold on power in the Central African state.

Army officers appeared on TV in the early hours of Wednesday to say they had taken power.
They said they had annulled the results of Saturday's election in which Mr Bongo was declared the winner but which the opposition said was fraudulent.

White hot, violent, cruel, wrathful - the words we associate with anger don't sound so pretty.

"Anger is a particular type of an emotional state that can receive a lot of judgment from ourselves and from other people," said Dr. Brett Ford, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
It might be an unpleasant emotion to experience, and it might be culturally discouraged, but we need anger, she added.

"The actual experience of anger being deemed as bad is actually, I think, one of the biggest impediments to our emotional processing," said Jaime Mahler, a therapist and trauma specialist based in New York. "You're taking a very useful emotion, and you're squashing it and you're repressing it, and you're saying it doesn't matter."