A disability rights advocate made a complaint to New York State Police saying was shoved twice by state Senator Kevin Parker. Advocate Michael Carey says Parker got inches from his face Wednesday and yelled “I don't care” before grabbing him by his shoulders and shoving him twice. Carey said he approached Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, before a committee meeting about cosponsoring a piece of legislation. Parker has a history of physical altercations. In 2005, he was arrested after he was accused of punching a traffic agent. Читать дальше...
A medical examiner says a Massachusetts teen who participated in a spicy tortilla chip challenge died from ingesting a substance “with a high capsaicin concentration.”
Donald Trump’s hush money trial will take a three-day weekend because the former president plans to attend the high school graduation of his son Barron on Friday. Judge Juan Merchan had told jurors earlier Thursday because it might be necessary to hold court next Wednesday. That's typically a day off for the trial so Merchan can attend to other matters. But Merchan now says that won’t be the case. Some jurors indicated they can’t attend that day, “so that’s off the table." The trial will also not be held on Memorial Day.
The Biden administration has proposed an end to new coal leasing from federal reserves in the most productive coal mining region of the U.S. The move announced Thursday would limit future climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions from burning the fuel. It drew instant pushback from Republicans in Congress who said the administration was trying to destroy the coal industry. The Bureau of Land Management proposal would affect millions of acres of federal lands and underground mineral reserves in the... Читать дальше...
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg is sitting for a second day of grilling on Capitol Hill, this time at the Senate Banking Committee, after a damning report about the agency’s toxic workplace culture was released last week. The hearing Thursday largely focused on FDIC workplace culture and Gruenberg’s failures, according to the report, in preventing hundreds of instances of harassment and discrimination against employees. An independent review of the FDIC’s workplace culture... Читать дальше...
A U.S. Navy strike group’s flagship aircraft carrier has left its Japanese home port, wrapping up nearly nine years of deployment in the Indo-Pacific, where it served a key role in the U.S. effort to bolster defense ties with Japan and other partners in the region. The departure of USS Ronald Reagan on Thursday saw family members and friends of the crew waving the vessel off and speeches by officers and the U.S. ambassador. It comes at a time of growing tension in the face of increasingly assertive China in the Indo-Pacific. Читать дальше...
White men are most likely to lead the largest, best-funded nonprofits, while women of color tend to lead the organizations with the fewest financial resources, according to a study from the nonprofit data research organization Candid released Thursday. “The State of Diversity in the U.S. Nonprofit Sector” report from Candid is the largest demographic study of the nonprofit sector, based on demographic information provided by nearly 60,000 public charities. According to the study, white CEOs lead... Читать дальше...
U.S. Census Bureau estimates show America's Northeast and Midwest cities are rebounding slightly from years of population drops, highlighted by modest growth in Detroit after decades of declines. Government figures released Thursday show Detroit saw its population grow for the first time in decades, rising by 1,852 people to 633,218 inhabitants last year. That’s a milestone for Detroit, which had 1.8 million residents in the 1950s only to see its population plummet afterward. Meanwhile, Census Bureau... Читать дальше...
The European Union opened fresh investigations into Facebook and Instagram over suspicions that they’re failing to protect children online, in violation of the bloc’s strict digital regulations for social media platforms. It’s the latest round of scrutiny for parent company Meta Platforms under the 27-nation EU’s Digital Services Act. It's a sweeping set of regulations that took effect last year with the goal of cleaning up online platforms and protecting internet users. The European Commission said... Читать дальше...
A U.N. resolution sponsored by Germany and Rwanda to establish an annual day to commemorate the 1995 genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs has sparked protests and a strong lobbying campaign against its adoption by Serbia’s president and the Bosnian Serb leadership. The U.N. General Assembly has scheduled a debate on the resolution next week to be followed by a vote in the world body. The final draft of the resolution would designate July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection... Читать дальше...
Asian shares are mostly higher after U.S. stocks rallied to records on hopes that inflation is heading back in the right direction. Tokyo gained 1.4% even after the government reported that the Japanese economy contracted at a 2% annual rate in the January-March quarter. On Wednesday, the S&P 500 jumped 1.2% to top its prior all-time high set in March. The Nasdaq composite added 1.4% to its own record set a day earlier, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.9% to beat its prior high.... Читать дальше...
As the U.S. prepares to host its first cricket World Cup next month, a temporary stadium is rising in the New York City suburbs. The sport has found fertile ground there among waves of Caribbean and South Asian immigration. The U.S. is co-hosting the T20 World Cup, with eight games at Eisenhower Park on Long Island. American cricket organizers hope the games will provide the same boost soccer enjoyed when the U.S. hosted its first FIFA World Cup in 1994. USA Cricket estimates there are more than... Читать дальше...
ESPN’s broadcast of the Connecticut Sun’s game against Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever had the highest viewership of a WNBA game on the network. The Sun’s 92-71 win over the Fever in Clark’s WNBA debut on the league’s opening night on Tuesday drew an average of 2.1 million viewers on ESPN2, ESPN+ and Disney+, including a high of 2.3 million viewers between 7:45 p.m. and 7:59 p.m. That topped ESPN’s previous mark of nearly 1.5 million viewers for a Phoenix Mercury-Connecticut Sun game on May 22, 2004, in Diana Taurasi’s rookie season.
The school system in Topeka, Kansas, was at the center of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that struck down segregated education 70 years ago. In school lessons, memorials and ceremonies, Topeka is marking its ties to the 1954 ruling. But just as clear to many is the legacy of discrimination that stands in the way of its promise of equity. Segregation persists today, not as a matter of law but as a reflection of underlying disparities, including in housing. In greater Topeka, as in school systems across America... Читать дальше...
Prosecutors' star witness will be back in the hot seat in Donald Trump's hush money trial as defense lawyers try to chip away at Michael Cohen’s crucial testimony implicating the former president. The trial will resume Thursday in Manhattan with the defense cross-examining Cohen. His credibility could determine the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s fate in the case. He's the last witness for prosecutors before Trump's lawyers get a chance to put on a defense. Prosecutors are trying to... Читать дальше...
Japan has reported that its economy contracted at an annual rate of 2% in the first quarter of the year, as spending and exports declined. The Cabinet Office said Thursday that on a quarter-to-quarter basis, the preliminary seasonally adjusted gross domestic product, or GDP, a measure of the value of a nation’s products and services, slipped 0.5% in the January-March period. The annual rate measures what would have happened if the quarterly rate lasted a year. The Japanese yen is trading at three-decade lows against the dollar... Читать дальше...
Michelin-starred chef Arturo Rivera Martinez stands over an insanely hot grill at the first Mexican taco stand to get a coveted star. In this tiny, 10-foot by 10-foot business, the heat makes the meat and there are only four things on the menu, all of which came from a cow's rib, loin or fore shank. Other than a street food stand in Bangkok, Thailand, Mexico City's Tacos El Califa de León is probably the smallest restaurant ever to get a Michelin star. And it got there by doing exactly the same four things it has been doing since 1968.
Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are pushing forward with their plan to repeal a pandemic-era law that allowed the wearing of masks in public for health reasons, a move spurred in part by demonstrations against the war in Gaza that have included masked protesters camped out on college campuses. The state Senate passed approved the bill Wednesday in a party line vote. Democrats say the law would mean people who mask for their health would violate the law. Republicans say the bill is only focused... Читать дальше...
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is disclosing a new $7 billion stake in fellow insurer Chubb. Berkshire revealed the investment it has been building over the past nine months in a quarterly update Wednesday on its stock portfolio. Berkshire said it held nearly 26 million Chubb shares at the end of March. Many investors follow Berkshire’s portfolio closely because of Buffett’s remarkably successful track record over the decades. Chubb shares jumped more than 6% in after hours trading after Berkshire’s investment was revealed. Читать дальше...
U.S. officials say the number of reported sexual assaults across the military decreased last year. A confidential survey also found a 19% drop in the number of service members who said they had experienced some type of unwanted sexual contact. Both are dramatic reversals of what has been a growing problem in recent years. Officials told The Associated Press that more than 29,000 active-duty service members said in the survey that they had unwanted sexual contact during the previous year, compared with nearly 36,000 in 2021. Читать дальше...
Visa has announced major changes to how its credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S. Features in the works will lead to Americans to carry fewer physical cards in their wallets and make the 16-digit credit or debit card number printed on every physical card increasingly irrelevant. The new features unveiled Wednesday will be some of the biggest changes to how payments operate since the U.S. rolled out chip-embedded cards several years ago. It also comes at a time when Americans have many more... Читать дальше...
