Alaa Elassar

Cheers tore through the sky as hands reached up holding a trophy in triumph; another win in an undefeated streak for this little town’s high school football team. But someone was missing.

At the center of Hulu’s “Murdaugh: Death in the Family” miniseries is the crime that dominated headlines: Alex Murdaugh’s prosecution for the 2021 killings of his wife and son.

Melissa Schlarb was driving to her job at a bank in western North Carolina on what she thought would be an ordinary morning when the unthinkable happened: A cat plummeted out of the sky and exploded through her windshield.

Weeks before 8-year-old Eloise “Lulu” Peck was carried off by the violent Texas floods that swallowed Camp Mystic in a surge of darkness and debris, she had suddenly begun to fear the forces that would one day claim her.

John Beam, a cherished football coach whose mentorship and care touched the lives of thousands of people, has died after being shot Thursday on an Oakland college campus — a devastating loss for a California community still reeling from another act of school gun violence just days earlier.

Xavier Vega and his partner, Soluna Vega, cheered in relief as the “Welcome to Connecticut” sign came into view. It marked the end of an unplanned 17-hour highway odyssey home after their flight became one of more than 1,000 cancellations tied to the ongoing government shutdown.

The ashes have settled over the charred Louisville neighborhood where nine people remain missing and families cling to hope as investigators comb through the wreckage of Tuesday’s fatal UPS cargo plane crash.

Behind the glass doors of an unassuming building in Manhattan, wedged between aging facades and staring across a shuttered print shop, a shadowy world stirred, coming alive with the flick of cards, the muted clink of glasses and the quiet hum of a dangerous secret.

You can picture the scene. Tucked somewhere between the glitter and grit of Manhattan, a room wafting smoke with the rhythm of a poker game seemingly like any other: Cards whisper against felt, chips click in steady tempo, and players sit around a table, guarding their hands – and secrets.

A woman was killed and 13 others injured when a car drove into a birthday party tent filled with children Saturday in Bladensburg, Maryland.