SENATE DELAYS AUG. RECESS TO WORK ON HEALTH CARE

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R- Ky., said Tuesday the Senate will delay the start of its summer recess to finish action on repealing Obamacare and other priority items.

“In order to provide more time to complete action on important legislative items and process nominees that have been stalled by a lack of cooperation from our friends across the aisle, the Senate will delay the start of the August recess until the third week of August,” McConnell said in a statement.

The Senate, which usually leaves for a month- long summer recess in August, had been scheduled to go on break at the end of July but has been under pressure to cancel recess to do more work. SYRIAN GROUP CLAIMS ISIS LEADER IS DEAD

The U. S. military said Tuesday it can neither confirm nor deny the latest claims Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi is dead but added, “We hope it is true.”

The U. K.- based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday on Twitter it “confirmed information” that Baghdadi had been killed. Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman told news agencies that Baghdadi died in Deir az Zor province, about 80 miles southeast of the Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa.

Abdulrahman said it was not clear when or how Baghdadi died. Rumors of al- Baghdadi’s death have surfaced numerous times, only to be dismissed. SNAKES ON A PLANE VIA EXPRESS MAIL

Live King Cobras and lizards shipped express from Hong Kong were intercepted at John F. Kennedy Airport by customs agents.

The poisonous juvenile cobras and three geckos were found in a Styrofoam package labeled as containing a "plastic tray,'' by U. S. Customs and Border Protection workers doing a mail inspection. The reptileswere discovered during an X- ray of the mail package, officials said on Tuesday.

King Cobras are venomous, and can reach 18 feet in length, making them the longest of all poisonous snakes.

CBP officers, working in the airport's International Mail Facility, seized the package and turned it over to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for further investigation, according to the statement.

This file photo received from NASA via Swansea University on June 1, 2017 shows an aerial view of the Larsen C ice rift in Antarctica. One of the largest icebergs ever recorded broke off from an ice shelf in Antarctica, British scientists announced Wednesday. The 1 trillion ton iceberg, with twice of the volume of Lake Erie, broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf between Monday and Wednesday, according to Project MIDAS.