After President Trump was finished lashing out at Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton's emails on Monday evening, he fielded a question from an unidentified reporter: "Why don't you just fire Mueller?"

"Well, I think it's a disgrace what's going on," Trump responded. "We'll see what happens. I think it's really a sad situation when you see what happened. Many people have said you should fire him." Trump was upset over FBI agents raiding the office, home, and hotel room of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Cohen is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations, according to The Washington Post, and Cohen's lawyer says the raid was related to a referral by Mueller.

After Trump made his remarks, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned that if he's "thinking of using the FBI raid to fire Special Counsel Mueller or otherwise interfere with the chain of command in the Russia probe, we Democrats have one simple message for him: don't." Mueller is a Republican, Schumer noted, and has "uncovered a deep and detailed pattern of Russian interference in our elections that led to indictments and guilty pleas. It also led to the Trump administration itself leveling sanctions against Russian individuals, proof that it's not a so-called 'witch hunt.' The investigation is critical to the health of our democracy, and must be allowed to continue." Catherine Garcia

Gun violence is in the news again after back-to-back mass shootings in which two gunmen murdered 18 people in Boulder, Colorado, and around Atlanta. The two killing sprees broke a roughly one-year period with no high-profile mass shootings, but Americans were still dying of gunshots during the pandemic, and "at a record rate," Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler report at The Washington Post. "In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans" and injured about 40,000 more, and "an additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun."

The reason the U.S. has so much gun violence — and so much more than any comparable country — is pretty obvious, and maddeningly intractable: Americans own about 45 percent of the world's civilian firearms. And they bought another 23 million in 2020, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales.

The U.S. "could reduce the death toll, perhaps substantially, if it chose to," David Leonhardt writes at The New York Times. "It's not just that every other high-income country in the world has many fewer guns and many fewer gun deaths. It's also that U.S. states with fewer guns — like California, Illinois, Iowa, and much of the Northeast — have fewer gun deaths. And when state or local governments have restricted gun access, deaths have often declined," according to research by Boston University's Michael Siegel.

"The U.S. has average levels of non-lethal violence compared with our peer nations," too, Daniel Webster at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy tells Politico. "What sets us apart is that our violence is far more lethal because it more commonly involves someone with a firearm."

"There is overwhelming evidence that this country has a unique problem with gun violence, mostly because it has unique gun availability," Leonhardt adds. "Many of the policies that experts say would reduce gun deaths — like requiring gun licenses and background checks — would likely affect both mass shootings and the larger problem," he adds, but Republicans will filibuster any bill to enact such changes and, on a deeper level, "this country’s level of gun violence is as high as it is because many Americans have decided that they are okay with it." Peter Weber

We can all relate to a little bit of Zoom fatigue after a year of the pandemic, but the producers of next month's Academy Awards may have taken theirs a bit too far.

The Academy is "facing major pushback" after producers declared that nominees may not attend this year's mid-pandemic Oscars remotely via Zoom and will only have the option of delivering acceptance speeches in person, Variety reports. After all, numerous nominees are currently overseas in places where COVID-19 cases have been up, and they might not be able to travel to Los Angeles.

For instance, Nomadland director Chloé Zhao and Promising Young Woman director Emerald Fennell are reportedly both outside of the United States at the moment, meaning they could potentially miss their film winning Best Picture or not be able to give an acceptance speech if they become only the second woman to win Best Director.

"The idea of missing it is so awful, and I can't bear to think about it," Fennell told Variety.

There's also the fact that, according to Variety, the Academy might ask nominees to quarantine for between five and 14 days before the show — and so, Deadline writes that for those currently working on movies or shows, going to the Oscars "might mean shutting down their productions for the better part of the month of April."

Producers with this Zoom ban are likely hoping to avoid the disaster of the 2021 Golden Globes, which faced numerous technical glitches while having nominees join remotely, although last year's Emmys made this format work fairly well. Now, though, they're under pressure to reverse the decision, which nominees believe is "unsafe and impractical," Variety says. It remains to be seen whether they back down, but we've already seen some wildly unpopular Oscar ideas in recent years be announced and then quickly reversed due to backlash — including the short-lived "popular film" Oscar — so this wouldn't be the show's first rodeo. Brendan Morrow

North Korea test-fired two ballistic missiles Thursday morning, Pyongyang's second missile test in a week. South Korea's military said the two short-range missiles were fired 20 minutes apart from North Korea's east coast, traveling about 280 miles before landing in the sea. "This activity highlights the threat that North Korea's illicit weapons program poses to its neighbors and the international community," U.S. Indo-Pacific Command spokesman Capt. Mike Kafka said.

South Korea's defense minister and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga also condemned the missile test and said they would coordinate with the Biden administration on a response.

"North Korea has a history of testing new U.S. administrations with missile launches and other provocations aimed at forcing the Americans back to the negotiating table," The Associate Press reports, adding that compared with Pyongyang's 2017 test-fires of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles, "Thursday's launches were a measured provocation." North Korea hasn't fired any long-range nuclear or missiles since a 2018 summit between Kim Jong Un and former President Donald Trump, though it is believed to have expanded its nuclear program in that time.

President Biden and his advisers are still formulating their North Korea policy, and North Korea has so far rebuffed the Biden team's negotiation overtures. Peter Weber

Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham and a prominent evangelical himself, published a Facebook post Wednesday on the COVID-19 vaccines. He's "been asked if Jesus were physically walking on earth now, would He be an advocate for vaccines," Graham wrote. His answer was "yes." Graham said he and his wife have been vaccinated and advised followers to consult their doctor about the best plan for their health.

Graham's fans mostly weren't having it. Top comments with thousands of likes told Graham, who runs a charitable organization that operated pandemic field hospitals to relieve strain on medical facilities, he should do more research. One reply chastised Graham, 68, for saying he wants to continue living. It doesn't matter "how many shots you get," the commenter said, "when its [sic] your time no vaccine will save you." Others questioned his faith.

It's not surprising to find vaccine skepticism among Graham's fan base; polling shows white evangelicals are unusually hesitant about the vaccines. Hesitancy is also high among Republicans, and Graham has been a reliable booster of former President Donald Trump. What's interesting here isn't that Graham's followers rejected his pro-vaccine message; it's that he issued it at all, and perhaps did so with an expectation of more positive reception.

On that note, here's an interesting tidbit for Graham or anyone attempting to overcome unwarranted vaccine hesitancy: A contributing factor may be the overwhelming negativity of U.S. national news coverage of all pandemic stories, including positive developments like the vaccines. As The New York Times reported Wednesday, a recent study found our national media is more negative than "scientific journals, major international publications, and regional U.S. media." (The Week is a notable exception.) That negativity persists across ideological lines, and though it may well be a response to news consumers' demand, it must also shape their perspective in turn.

Did it shape the response Graham got? It certainly seems plausible. Wherever his followers are getting their views, it obviously outranks the counsel of a voice they once trusted. Bonnie Kristian

President Biden is giving his first press conference Thursday afternoon, and "people who normally watch soaps will be like, 'Who's the new beefcake on The Young and the Restless?'" Jimmy Fallon joked on Wednesday's Tonight Show. Biden is facing multiple crises, including a deadly pandemic, he said, "but of course the first question will be, 'Sir, why did you fall three times going up the stairs of Air Force One?'"

"Well, here's something I didn't expect to be talking about: A massive cargo ship got spun around and stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking more than 100 ships," Fallon said. "If you look closely, the ship has a tiny bumper sticker that says 'Student Driver.'"

"There she is, the massive grounded vessel the Ever Given," Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. "I get it. After a year of quarantine, nothing fits anymore. They should have put that ship into their stretchy canal — you know, the one that looks like denim but gives?"

"We've all been there, trying to make a U-turn on a narrow street," Trevor Noah sympathized at The Daily Show. "But now imagine how much more stressful it must be when you know that if you back up wrong, you might bump Egypt." The ship is huge — as long as the Empire State Building, he said, but "the crazy thing is, that whole ship is just delivering two AA batteries. Yeah, the rest is just extra packaging."

Now, "if you watch conservative media right now, you know that at this moment, we are living through one of the biggest scandals in American history," Vice President Kamala Harris not saluting the troops upon boarding Air Force Two, Noah said. Seriously, vice presidents are civilians and not supposed to salute military personnel, and presidents returning salutes is "just something that Ronald Reagan started, like the crack epidemic," he added. "In fact, if anyone is disrespecting the military, it's the people on TV talking about the troops like they're crybabies."

Meanwhile, Utah just tried to ban porn on phones and tablets, Noah said, explaining one reason it's a pointless law and laughing at its one nod to reality: "I love that Utah wants five other states to join them. So even Utah's laws are polygamous."

The Late Show also had fun with Russian President Vladimir Putin's vaccination intrigue. Watch below. Peter Weber

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed legislation Wednesday banning the use of capital punishment in the commonwealth, making Virginia the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty and the first member of the old Confederacy to do so. He signed the legislation at the Greensville Correctional Center near Jarratt, where Virginia had conducted its executions. The state last executed a prisoner in 2017, but Virginia's history with capital punishment is long and deep.

"Signing this new law is the right thing to do," Northam said Wednesday afternoon. "It is the moral thing to do."

"There is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the South, or in this nation," Northam said. When he was younger, "I believed in an eye for an eye," he said. But now he understands the system is "not fair" and "is applied differently based on who you are. And the system has gotten it wrong."

Virginia has executed more people over the past 400 years than any other state and lags behind only Texas in the modern era. But the state has become more liberal over the past decade, and Democrats started reflecting that swing in policies after taking control of the state legislature last year. One GOP state senator and two Republican delegates voted with all Democrats on the capital punishment repeal. Peter Weber