Country music has a gender problem. Women only make up 16% of country artists, and even fewer are songwriters.

When women do break into the mainstream — the likes of Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, and Kacey Musgraves — they're often young. The average age of the genre's top female artists is 29 years old.

Today, it's almost hard to remember just how different the Texas government was back in the 1970s. That's when Molly Ivins scorched a trail through good-ol'-boy politics like a flamethrower through a cactus patch.

"The legislature was fairly corrupt in those days," she said to NPR in 2006. "And the fact that it was, and that everybody knew it, and that people laughed about it, struck me as worth reporting. And I thought: Why not put it in the way it is?"

Updated at 11:30 p.m. ET

Iran says it is not behind Saturday's drone attacks on oil plants in Saudi Arabia, denying accusations from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Tehran was responsible for "an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply."

Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, said in a tweet on Sunday that Pompeo was turning from "max pressure" to "max deceit."

Updated at 12:45 a.m. ET Monday

The United Auto Workers began a nationwide strike just before midnight on Sunday at General Motors after both sides failed to agree on a new contract over issues including wages, health care and profit-sharing.

Production across the U.S. is expected to be halted until a new contract is hammered out, affecting nearly 50,000 workers at 33 manufacturing plants in nine states as well as 22 parts distribution warehouses.

It was the kind of tragedy that could have destroyed a church. But nearly 20 years after a man opened fire in Fort Worth's Wedgwood Baptist Church, killing seven and wounding seven more before he turned his gun on himself, the congregation is stronger than ever.

A Virginia judge has blocked efforts to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was at the center of the deadly violence that erupted in Charlottesville in 2017.

In a ruling issued this week, Judge Richard E. Moore said that any effort to remove the Lee statue would violate a state historic preservation statute and issued a permanent injunction preventing its removal. His decision extended to a separate monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that city leaders and local activists had hoped to get rid of.

President Trump says that Hamza bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden, has been killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region.

In a statement released by the White House on Saturday, Trump said bin Laden's son was responsible for "planning and dealing with various terrorist groups." His death, he said, "not only deprives al-Qa'ida of important leadership skills and the symbolic connection to his father, but undermines important operational activities of the group."

There was something different about the Democratic debate this week, compared with the earlier rounds this summer. Something was happening that was hard to pin down, but it was palpable. Not the contrast of night and day, but perhaps the difference between dusk and dawn.

It's a critical difference, and it comes at a crucial time. Because the Trump presidency these candidates are competing to truncate has reached what may be a critical juncture. But more of that in a moment.

There’s been a lot of confusion about the difference between marijuana and hemp since Texas legalized the production and sale of hemp in June.

The short? Marijuana is still very much illegal at the state and national level. But the new law created a distinction that’s left some prosecutors in a bit of a pickle.

A federal appeals court Friday reinstated a lawsuit against Fox News and two other defendants over its coverage of the death of Seth Rich, a 27-year-old Democratic Party aide who was murdered in July 2016.