Chris Benderev

Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing?

What began in downtown Portland, Ore., on Saturday as a permitted march by the far-right group Patriot Prayer was quickly declared a riot and halted by police after altercations with anti-fascist counterprotesters escalated, with reports of projectiles causing several injuries.

Ingvar Kamprad, the man who created IKEA, leaves behind a professional legacy that's all about simplicity: sleek, affordable, Scandinavian-designed furniture with wordless assembly instructions.

His personal legacy, however, is more complicated: from a reputation for strict frugality to flirtations with fascism.

But we'll get to that.

As protesters across Russia rallied Sunday against a presidential election in March they say is rigged in President Vladimir Putin's favor, police in Moscow forcibly detained the opposition leader who sparked the demonstrations, Alexei Navalny, soon after he joined his supporters on the streets of the capital.

Saturday saw protesters take to the streets from New York to Los Angeles — from Nigeria to Iraq. Various incarnations of the second annual Women's March demanded social change, promoted female empowerment and declared a resistance to President Trump on the anniversary of his inauguration.

Turkey on Sunday continued a major attack inside northwestern Syria on a Kurdish militia it has called a "terror army" that presents a danger to Turkish security.

One day earlier Turkey sent tanks and armored vehicles lumbering across the border with Syria to add to artillery and aerial invasions already underway against the YPG, which Ankara seeks to drive out of the Afrin region of Syria.

Turkey also announced Saturday that the aerial component of its "Operation Olive Branch" had struck 108 YPG targets, as NPR's Peter Kenyon tells our newscast unit.

After talks with the leaders of Egypt and Jordan where he was made to explain and navigate the fallout from the Trump administration's controversial decision last month to acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Vice President Mike Pence is now on his way to meet with the Israeli government, which many expect will receive him warmly. Pence is not scheduled to speak with Palestinian leaders during his tour of the region.

Tyler Barriss, 25, suspected of phoning in a false 911 call that led to a police raid and the fatal shooting of a father of two, was arrested Friday afternoon in South Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman tells NPR.

Barriss is being held in a Los Angeles County jail without bail, according to LAPD Officer Mike Lopez.

Roy Moore, the embattled GOP candidate for an Alabama Senate seat, continued Saturday morning to deny allegations of sexual misconduct with teenagers, including an episode with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32.

With the commander-in-chief busy touring the Asian continent, Vice President Mike Pence stepped in Saturday to commemorate Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery with a speech that ended on a remarkably personal note.

Pence — dressed in a black suit, white shirt and a striped red tie — began his remarks just before noon to a crowd of veterans and their supporters on an unseasonably cold November morning by expressing President Trump's greetings.

"Our president is halfway around the world, but I know his heart is here," Pence told the crowd.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced five Trump administration nominees for lifetime positions as federal judges on Thursday, special attention was paid to one of them: 36-year-old Brett Talley.

Talley's résumé, which features a J.D. from Harvard but limited experience as a practicing attorney, raised eyebrows and dissent from the committee's Democrats.

"It seems to me that when you get to the bench of a federal trial court, it would be helpful to have tried a case before," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the committee's ranking member.

If you're having trouble deploying that famous mnemonic, let's make this easy:

This is the one where you get one more hour of sleep.

After years of talks and speculation, Sprint and T-Mobile announced Saturday that they have ended discussions about a merger.

In a joint statement, the third- (T-Mobile) and fourth-largest (Sprint) wireless carriers in the U.S. explained that they were unable to agree on the terms of a deal.

Republican Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito of Massachusetts signed a bill Friday, approved one day earlier by the state's Democrat-led Legislature, outlawing so-called bump stocks, accessories that allow semi-automatic firearms to mimic the rapid firing action of machine guns.

Massachusetts is the first state to enact a ban on bump stocks in the wake of last month's shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest in modern American history.

Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation Saturday, accusing his adversaries of political interference and citing a fear that he, like his father before him, would become the target of an assassination plot.

Hariri disclosed his surprise decision during a televised speech from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, as NPR's Peter Kenyon reported to our newscast unit.

The drama. The loyalty. The speculation about who stays and who goes. The Trump administration has it all. And so did Donald Trump's run on The Apprentice.

Officials continued to urge tens of thousands of people living downstream from a precarious, slowly failing dam in northwestern Puerto Rico to evacuate Saturday. But the U.S. territory's severely compromised communications infrastructure meant it was not immediately clear how successful the warnings would be.

Numerous scientific agencies on both sides of the Pacific detected an earthquake Saturday near the site where North Korea set off a hydrogen bomb earlier this month, at first prompting speculation of another weapons test, before a consensus appeared to emerge that the tremor was a natural occurrence.

Updated at 11 p.m. ET

As a rule of thumb, it is not big news when multiple political rallies overlap on the same weekend in the nation's capital, a prime setting for anyone trying to send a message to the people in power.

But there are exceptions to every rule — and certainly an exception can be found in a large gathering of Juggalos airing a grievance against the FBI. (More on this later.)

In a move apparently meant to counter the Trump administration's tough approach to immigration enforcement, the California legislature approved a so-called "sanctuary state" bill Saturday that would establish new protections for people living in the country illegally.

A service member remains missing after a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter crashed off the coast of Yemen during what officials described as a training exercise.

U.S. forces rescued five other troops who also went down in the crash and are still searching for the sixth service member, according to U.S. Central Command. The incident took place about 20 miles from the southeastern coast of Yemen around 7 p.m. local time Friday.

Calling members of the transnational street gang MS-13 "animals" who like to let their victims "die slowly because that way it's more painful," President Trump on Friday sought to highlight his administration's efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, reduce violent crime and secure additional congressional funding for immigration enforcement.

A German court sentenced a 29-year-old British hacker who confessed to committing a cyberattack last November that temporarily took down Internet access for nearly 1 million German consumers, according to news reports.

The court in the city of Cologne handed down a suspended sentence Friday of one year and eight months, Reuters reports. The news service adds that the maximum sentence was 10 years; prosecutors had sought a sentence of two years.

China granted permission Wednesday for cancer specialists from the United States, Germany and other countries to help treat imprisoned political dissident and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo as he struggles with late-stage liver cancer, according to a statement released by a local judicial bureau.

Two airlines in the Middle East say they have been exempted from a 2-month-old ban on carrying large electronic devices aboard direct flights to the United States.

Authorities in Germany say 30 people are injured and 18 people are believed to be dead after a bus collided with a truck and ignited in flames Monday morning.

The tour bus had two drivers and was transporting a group of 46 elderly citizens from the state of Saxony in eastern Germany, according to the Associated Press.

The bus hit the trailer truck along the A9 highway in the southeast German state of Bavaria around 7 a.m. local time.

The first-ever mass-market Tesla should roll out of the factory this week.

CEO Elon Musk tweeted late Sunday that the company's Model 3 car "passed all regulatory requirements for production two weeks ahead of schedule. Expecting to complete SN1 on Friday," using an abbreviation for serial number one.

Musk also tweeted that production would increase "exponentially," with 100 cars in August, more than 1,500 in September and 20,000 per month in December. Musk also announced a July 28 "handover party" for the first 30 buyers of the Model 3.

It may sound like the plot of a movie: police find a young man dead with stab wounds. Tests quickly show he'd had Ebola.

Officials realize the suspects in the case, men in a local gang, may have picked up and spread Ebola across the slum. These men are reluctant to quarantine themselves and some – including a man nicknamed "Time Bomb" – cannot even be found.

This scenario actually unfolded in the West African nation of Liberia in 2015. And what followed was a truly unconventional effort by epidemiologists to stop a new Ebola outbreak.

Siri is just the beginning.

Soon enough — like it or not — we are all going to be talking a lot more with computers, at least according to Brian O'Neill, a professor of computer science at Western New England University. They will be tutoring our students and tending to us in our old age. And a big part of their job will be telling stories.