AP Top News at 11:52 p.m. EST
LUSAIL, Qatar (AP) — Lionel Messi, wearing a black Qatari robe over his blue-and-white Argentina shirt, kissed the World Cup, shuffled toward his teammates and hoisted the golden trophy high in the air. It was an iconic sight that finally — definitively — places the soccer superstar in the pantheon of the game’s greatest players. Messi’s once-in-a-generation career is complete: He is a World Cup champion. In probably the wildest final in the tournament’s 92-year history, Argentina won its third World Cup title by beating France 4-2 in a penalty shootout after a 3-3 draw featuring two goals from the 35-year-old Messi and a hat trick by his heir apparent, France forward Kylian Mbappé.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s capital was targeted by multiple drones in a new attack early Monday, local authorities reported, three days after what they described as one of Russia’s biggest attacks on Kyiv since the beginning of the war. The Kyiv city administration said on its Telegram account that more than 20 Iranian-made drones were detected over the capital’s air space of Kyiv, and at least 15 of them were shot down. It added that a critical infrastructure point was hit, without giving more details. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Russia has been targeting energy infrastructure, including in Kyiv, as part of a strategy to try to freeze Ukrainians.
KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) — When about 100 Russian troops rolled into Kherson’s Lilac Park on the morning of March 1, Oleh Shornik was one of about 20 lightly armed Ukrainian volunteers who didn’t stand a chance against them. Ukraine’s military was nowhere to be seen, and Russian troops in armored vehicles had easily entered the Shumensky neighborhood, opening fire and sending shrapnel flying everywhere, witnesses said. Civilians walking to work were hit in the short, fierce battle. The volunteers, hiding among the trees in the park, were cut down so rapidly that they weren’t even able to throw the Molotov cocktails they had prepared.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House committee investigating the Capitol riot will make its final public presentation Monday about the unprecedented effort by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the presidential election he lost in 2020. The committee has called it an “attempted coup” that warrants criminal prosecution from the Justice Department. That is expected to be the committee’s closing argument as it wraps up a year-and-a-half-long inquiry and prepares to release a final report detailing its findings about the insurrection in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory. The committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans is set to dissolve at the end of the year.
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — Along the U.S. southern border, two cities — El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico — prepared Sunday for a surge of as many as 5,000 new migrants a day as pandemic-era immigration restrictions expire this week, setting in motion plans for emergency housing, food and other essentials. On the Mexican side of the international border, only heaps of discarded clothes, shoes and backpacks remained Sunday morning on the banks of the Rio Grande River, where until a couple of days ago hundreds of people were lining up to turn themselves in to U.S. officials. One young man from Ecuador stood uncertain on the Mexican side; he asked two journalists if they knew anything about what would happen if he turned himself in without having a sponsor in the U.S., and then gingerly removed sneakers and socks and hopped across the low water.
HONOLULU (AP) — Severe turbulence rocked a flight from Phoenix to Honolulu Sunday, seriously injuring 11 people in what an Hawaiian Airlines official called an isolated and unusual event. Jon Snook, the airline’s chief operating officer, said the airline hasn’t experienced “an incident of this nature in recent history.” The flight was full, carrying 278 passengers and 10 crew members, he said during an afternoon news conference. Jim Ireland, director of Honolulu Emergency Medical Services, said 20 people were taken to hospitals, including 11 people deemed to be in serious condition. At least one person was reported to have been rendered unconscious but all patients were awake and talking when they arrived at hospitals, he said.
BANGKOK (AP) — A Thai navy ship sunk in the Gulf of Thailand and ships and helicopters were working Monday to rescue sailors from the water. As of midmorning, 75 sailors had been rescued and 31 were still in the water, the navy said. Strong winds blew seawater onto the HTMS Sukhothai corvette and knocked out its electrical system Sunday evening. The Royal Thai Navy dispatched three frigates and two helicopters with mobile pumping machines to try to assist the disabled ship by removing the seawater but it couldn’t do so because of the strong winds. The loss of power allowed more seawater to flow into the vessel, causing it to list and sink.
Elon Musk is asking Twitter’s users to decide if he should stay in charge of the social media platform after acknowledging he made a mistake Sunday in launching new speech restrictions that banned mentions of rival social media websites. In yet another drastic policy change, Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.” But the move generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican has defrocked an anti-abortion U.S. priest, Frank Pavone, for what it said were “blasphemous communications on social media” as well as “persistent disobedience” of his bishop who repeatedly told him to stop his partisan activism for Donald Trump. A letter to U.S. bishops from the Vatican ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, obtained Sunday, said that the decision against Pavone, who heads the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, had been taken Nov. 9, and that there was no chance for an appeal. Pavone has been in conflict with the bishop of Amarillo, Texas, for over a decade over his pro-life and partisan political activities that came to a head in 2016 when he put an aborted fetus on an altar and posted a video of it on two social media sites.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said Monday it fired a test satellite in an important final-stage test for the development of its first spy satellite, a key military capability coveted by its leader Kim Jong Un along with other high-tech weapons systems. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency also released low-resolution, black-and-white photos showing a space view of the South Korean capital and Incheon, a city just west of Seoul, in an apparent attempt to show the North is pushing to acquire a surveillance tool to monitor its rival. The rocket carrying the test satellite was launched Sunday to assess the satellite’s photography and data transmission systems, KCNA said.