Camila Domonoske

Aid is due to arrive in the besieged towns of Madaya, Foa and Kefraya soon — possibly on Monday.

Meanwhile, an airstrike in the Idlib province has killed scores of people, and Syria's government says it will be willing to join peace talks in Geneva with some opposition groups.

One number has everybody's attention this afternoon. But why stop at one?

Here's the prize jackpot, plus a few other lottery stats worth knowing:

$900,000,000

The eye-popping, record-breaking Powerball jackpot value, as of Saturday afternoon. If no one wins tonight, the jackpot could crack a billion.

That's based on a ...

Seventy-five thousand miles is long enough to cross the United States about 25 times. Long enough to circle the equator — three times.

And for 75 years, 75,000 miles was long enough to be legendary. Or more specifically, it was 75,065 miles — the miles-biked-in-a-year record set by Tommy Godwin ...

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán had seen his name in headlines. He knew it graced the world's Most Wanted lists.

But it appears that the notorious drug kingpin wanted something more: He wanted his name in lights.

Guzmán was recaptured by the Mexican government on Friday, and has been returned to ...

Britain's most iconic steam engine roared back to life Friday, after more than a decade of renovation work.

The Flying Scotsman — the first train to reach 100 miles per hour, back in 1934 — was pulled out of service in 1963. Now it's coming back, Reuters reports:

"The ...

French designer André Courrèges, whose futuristic dresses, bold glasses and go-go boots inspired a horde of imitators, has died at 92.

Courrèges died after three decades of living with Parkinson's disease, Vogue says.

The designer studied engineering as a young man, before turning to fashion and textiles, the ...

It was a memorable name: Thelonious Monk, like the jazz musician.

And when Adam Marton read it, a decade-old memory came flooding back.

Marton is an editor at The Baltimore Sun. He was working on an infographic about the homicides in Baltimore in 2015 — a record 344 deaths, ...

The U.S. economy added 292,000 jobs in December while unemployment held steady at 5 percent, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The number of new jobs was higher than many economists had anticipated; NPR's John Ydstie says experts had expected about 200,000 new jobs.

Three besieged towns in Syria will soon be receiving humanitarian assistance: The Syrian government said Thursday it will allow aid to enter the villages, after multiple organizations reported deaths from starvation.

Bashar Assad's government is permitting aid to Madaya, which has been under siege by the regime since July, as ...

More than two months after a natural gas storage well in Southern California began uncontrollably spewing methane gas, the governor of California has declared a state of emergency.

The well at the Aliso Canyon storage facility, just north of Los Angeles, is releasing tens of thousands of kilograms of methane ...

The legal saga of the monkey selfie continues: On Wednesday, a federal judge said the macaque who famously snapped a picture of himself cannot be declared the owner of the image's copyright.

At least, until Congress says otherwise.

There's "no indication" that the Copyright Act extends to animals, U.S. District ...

The chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court has ordered the state's probate judges not to issue marriage license to same-sex couples — despite a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court last year that legalized same-sex marriage in America.

Roy S. Moore, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, issued ...

Star Wars: The Force Awakens revolves around the story of staff-wielding scavenger Rey.

(That's hardly a spoiler; she's front-and-center in the movie poster, after all.)

But in the world of Star Wars toys, Rey's been hard to find — and fans took to social media, under the hashtags #WheresRey ...

Forget journeys into the stacks or stints at a library scanner: For more and more of the New York Public Library's collections, access is just a click away.

On Wednesday, the library released more than 180,000 of its public-domain items — including maps, posters, manuscripts, sheet music, drawings, photographs, ...

Updated 6:20 a.m. ET Sunday

Angry over the execution of Shiite cleric Sheik Nimr al-Nimr by Saudi Arabia, protesters stormed parts of the Saudi embassy in Tehran Saturday night before being cleared out by security forces, NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.

Videos posted online appeared to show a Molotov cocktail being ...

Wrestlers who embodied heroes and villains; writers who mastered comic fantasy and spare poetry; groundbreakers in journalism and politics; sports heroes; animal icons: Here are some of the notable deaths from the world of news, sports and books.

For remembrances of the musicians who died in 2015 — including B.B. ...

A hotel in downtown Dubai erupted in flames on Thursday evening, just two hours before the city was due to celebrate New Year's Eve with a massive fireworks display.

At midnight local time, the celebration proceeded as planned — resulting in a jarring double display of light and smoke, as ...

Time zone by time zone, the planet is saying goodbye to 2015.

The end of the year is still hours away in the U.S., but Australia has already hailed the new year with fireworks like those (see above) in Sydney Harbour.

In Japan's capital, balloons were released from Tokyo Tower.

Ethan Couch — the "affluenza teen" who killed four people while driving drunk two years ago and recently fled to Mexico with his mother — has been granted a temporary stay against his extradition to the U.S. His mother was deported to Los Angeles on Wednesday evening.

Couch and his ...

In 1957, humans launched a satellite into orbit, Sputnik-1.

The same mission also created our first piece of space junk: the rocket body that took Sputnik into space.

By the year 2000, there were hundreds of satellites in orbit — and thousands of pieces of space junk, including leftover rockets ...