Already delayed by a month, President-elect Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission took a step forward Tuesday with the initial approval of three commissioners.

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg surged to the head of the pack among likely Iowa voters, according to a new poll from Monmouth University.

I’m a pretty lucky guy because I rarely get bullied. This is mainly because I spend most of my time in my shorts and a T-shirt sitting alone at a computer. (Notice that I didn’t say I work in pajamas — I do have a tiny amount of dignity.)

Fighting to overturn a stayed injunction barring the use of $2.5 billion from military accounts for a border wall, a Trump administration lawyer told a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that Congress never expressly forbade using military funds for the project.

The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to intervene in a lawsuit against Remington Arms by a survivor of the Sandy Hook Elementary School and several relatives of some of the 26 people killed with the gunmaker’s rifle.

The European Union’s top court ruled Tuesday that EU countries must oblige retailers to identify products made in Israeli settlements with special labels, a ruling sure to spark anger in Israel.

Doctors at a Detroit hospital have performed what could be the first double lung transplant on a man whose lungs were damaged from vaping.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said Tuesday that his government has released three prominent Taliban figures in an effort to get the insurgents to free an American and an Australian professor they abducted in 2016 and have held captive for more than three years.

Walt Girdner was born in central Iowa in 1922, one of five children. His father took a job as a Christian minister in Alameda after the family moved to California in 1925. Growing up during the Great Depression, Walt worked double shifts at a cannery to make money for college. He attended Stanford where he put together a string of letters and wins, running the quarter and half-mile. An invitation to join the U.S. Olympic team was negated by World War II and cancellation of the games. During the war, he disembarked in Normandy, fought in the infantry and marched into Germany .

As a young man, he developed an interest in imagery, first through drawing then through the developing technology of photography. Although he left the church where his mother and father were pastors, he kept a lifelong faith in the power and mystery of the natural environment, seeing in its beauty an overriding and everlasting spiritual force. His subjects focused on people and their settings. Farmers, flower sellers, youth were recurring themes.

He traveled in large part to find new images and capture them, in France at first, then the rest of Europe and later Africa and Mexico. Towards the end of his life, Walt focused on images in nature, including letters and numbers that emerged through abalone shells, beach tableaus and patterns in the sand.  He had faith that imagery was a powerful way to communicate and believed young people were much better at interpreting the language of imagery, gifted with imaginations more agile and unencumbered.