For weeks, a crackdown on fuel theft by the Mexican government has led to widespread gas shortages and miles-long lines at gas stations.

So when a pipeline in the state of Hidalgo burst open Friday, sending a spray of fuel into the air, area residents rushed to collect it in buckets and barrels.

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Two hours later, the gushing pipeline exploded, turning what had been an excited gathering into a hellish inferno.

Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2), a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former State Department adviser and Middle East negotiator, is the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.

Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was a member of the secretary of state's Office of Policy Planning from 2005-2015.

Lisa Abramson says that even after all she's been through — the helicopters circling her house, the snipers on the roof, and the car ride to jail — she still wants to have a second child.

That's because right after her daughter was born in 2014 — before all that trouble began — everything felt amazing. Lisa was smitten, just like she'd imagined she would be. She'd look into her baby's round, alert eyes and feel the adrenaline rush through her. She had so much energy. She was so excited.

Until this week, President Trump and several hundred million other Americans assumed he would be coming to the Capitol to give his State of the Union address this month.

That was based on nearly 230 years of tradition, recently renewed by the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

According to a report by Billboard magazine on Friday afternoon, R. Kelly has been dropped by RCA Records. The move comes in the wake of a documentary series called Surviving R. Kelly that aired on Lifetime and cataloged more than 25 years of accusations of sexual and physical abuse made against Kelly by a number of women, including seven who were interviewed on camera.

An Iranian-American woman arrested five days ago during a visit to the U.S. is testifying behind closed doors to a grand jury in Washington, D.C., a U.S. federal judge said Friday.

The disclosure by Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, marked the first time any U.S. authority has provided information on the mystery surrounding Marzieh Hashemi, an anchor on Press TV, the English-language version of Iran's state television.

Officials in Columbia, S.C., have evacuated more than 400 people from a public housing complex after finding multiple gas leaks that constituted an "imminent danger to life."

Two men were discovered dead in separate units on Thursday morning. Police haven't confirmed the deaths are tied to the gas leaks, but say they don't suspect foul play.

It has been a long, long time since New York City's newsstands have been bereft of copies of The Forward. Founded as a Yiddish-language daily in 1897, the newspaper once known as The Jewish Daily Forward endured a host of major changes over its long life span — but through them all, the small publication reliably went to press with news that its predominantly American Jewish audience often couldn't find elsewhere.

But that will change come springtime.

The Department of Defense released Friday the names of three Americans who died in a suicide bombing at a restaurant in Manbij in northern Syria. A fourth U.S. casualty was a military contractor and has not yet been identified in the attack that is said to have killed 15 people.