U.S./World category, Page 786
Closed cold case murder tied to ousted Tennessee governor
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A former Tennessee governor’s administration helped fund a contract murder of a key federal witness decades ago while embroiled in the state’s largest political scandal, law enforcement officials announced Wednesday. The new details revealed for the first time Wednesday have elements that ring of a movie: a...
San Antonio base on lockdown; police searching for shooters
An Air Force base in San Antonio was on lockdown Wednesday afternoon as police and military officials searched for two people suspected of shooting toward the base from outside, Air Force officials said. Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland officials said two people reportedly fired shots toward an area where base personnel...
Amid covid pandemic, U.S. deaths from heart disease and diabetes spiked to highest level in 20 years
NEW YORK — The U.S. saw remarkable increases in the death rates for heart disease, diabetes and some other common killers in 2020, and experts believe a big reason may be that many people with dangerous symptoms made the lethal mistake of staying away from the hospital for fear of...
FBI: Perceived grievances drove Virginia Beach mass shooter
NORFOLK, Va. — A city engineer who fatally shot 12 people in a Virginia Beach municipal building in 2019 “was motivated by perceived workplace grievances” that “he fixated on for years,” according to findings released by the FBI on Wednesday. The investigation, conducted by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, found...
Wedding boom is on in the U.S. as vendors scramble to keep up
NEW YORK — Couples in the U.S. are racing to the altar in a vaccination-era wedding boom that has venues and other vendors in high demand. With restrictions on large gatherings loosening, wedding planners and others who make the magic happen said they’ve started pushing their bookings into late 2022...
3 girls killed, 1 badly injured in California hit-and-run
LUCERNE VALLEY, Calif. — Authorities on Tuesday were looking for a hit-and-run driver who killed three young girls — two of them wheelchairs — and left a fourth with life-threatening injuries as they walked along a Southern California desert highway. Willow Sanchez, 11, Daytona Bronas, 12, and Sandra Mizer, 13,...
Biden gives video address to graduating Parkland students
PARKLAND, Fla. — President Joe Biden, in a surprise video address to a Tuesday commencement ceremony, said graduating seniors who were freshmen when a mass shooting left 17 people dead at their Florida high school have turned pain into purpose and darkness into light. Besides surviving the most deadly high...
Los Angeles nun to plead guilty to $835,000 school theft
LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles nun who took a vow of poverty has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges for stealing more than $800,000 to pay for a gambling habit, prosecutors announced Tuesday. Mary Margaret Kreuper, 79, of Los Angeles was charged Tuesday with one count of wire...
Terry McAuliffe wins Democratic nomination for Virginia governor
RICHMOND, Va. — Terry McAuliffe, the exuberant former Virginia governor and longtime fixture of Democratic politics, won the party’s nomination Tuesday in his quest for a second term in office. McAuliffe will go on to face GOP nominee and political newcomer Glenn Youngkin in the November general election. Virginia is...
2 face arraignment in road-rage shooting that killed boy, 6
SANTA ANA, Calif. — A Southern California couple could face a murder charge over a road rage shooting that killed a 6-year-old boy last month on a freeway, authorities said. Marcus Anthony Eriz, 24, and Wynne Lee, 23, were expected to be arraigned Tuesday in the death of Aiden Leos,...
Crews work to reopen Floyd square, activists close it again
MINNEAPOLIS — City crews returned early Tuesday to a Minneapolis intersection where a memorial to George Floyd was assembled after his death last year and worked to reopen it to traffic by removing debris and makeshift barriers, only to have activists barricade the area again. Workers using front-end loaders and...
French leader Macron slapped in face on visit to small town
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron was slapped Tuesday in the face by a man during a visit to a small town in southeastern France, an incident that prompted a wide show of support for the head of state from politicians across from the ideological spectrum. The French president was...
Biden’s Justice Dept. to defend Trump in defamation lawsuit
NEW YORK — Donald Trump cannot be held personally liable for “crude and disrespectful” remarks he made about a woman who accused him of rape because he made the comments while he was president, U.S. Justice Department lawyers told an appeals court late Monday. Responding to misconduct allegations is part...
Senate report details sweeping failures around Jan. 6 attack
WASHINGTON — A Senate investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has uncovered broad government, military and law enforcement missteps surrounding the violent attack, including a breakdown within multiple intelligence agencies and a lack of training and preparation for Capitol Police officers who were quickly overwhelmed by...
China’s wandering elephants becoming international stars
BEIJING — Already famous at home, China’s wandering elephants are now becoming international stars. Major global media are chronicling the herd’s more than yearlong, 300-mile trek from their home in a wildlife reserve in mountainous southwest Yunnan province to the outskirts of the provincial capital of Kunming. Twitter and YouTube...
Swaths of internet go down after cloud outage
LONDON — Multiple websites went offline briefly across the globe Tuesday after an apparent outage at the cloud service company Fastly, revealing how critical a handful of companies running the internet’s plumbing have become. Dozens of sites including the New York Times, CNN, some Amazon sites, Twitch, Reddit, the Guardian,...
Ex-college athlete sentenced for burning Minneapolis police station
MINNEAPOLIS — A U.S. District Court judge sentenced the last of the four men who have pleaded guilty to burning a Minneapolis police station last summer to two years and five months in federal prison and to help pay $12 million in restitution for the damage. In court Monday morning,...
Capitol riot suspect blames ‘pack of lies,’ seeks release
DES MOINES, Iowa — A Des Moines, Iowa, man pictured prominently with a QAnon shirt ahead of a crowd of insurgents inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack asked a judge on Monday to release him from jail, saying “he feels deceived, recognizing that he bought into a...
Oil pipeline foes protest Enbridge’s Line 3 in Minnesota
SOLWAY, Minn. — Hundreds of protesters vowing do whatever it takes to stop a Canadian-based company’s push to replace an aging pipeline blockaded a pump station in northern Minnesota on Monday, and some chained themselves to construction equipment. Environmental and tribal groups say Enbridge Energy’s plan to rebuild Line 3,...
Drought-stricken Nevada enacts ban on ‘non-functional’ grass
CARSON CITY, Nev. — In Sin City, one thing that will soon become unforgivable is useless grass. A new Nevada law will outlaw about 40% of the grass in the Las Vegas area in an effort to conserve water amid a drought that’s drying up the region’s primary water source:...
Automakers face a threat to electric vehicle sales: Slow charging times
DETROIT — If the auto industry is to succeed in its bet that electric vehicles will soon dominate the roads, it will need to overcome a big reason why many people are still avoiding them: Fear of running out of juice between Point A and Point B. Automakers have sought...
Supreme Court won’t review men-only draft registration law
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday that for now it’ll be up to Congress, not the court, to decide whether to change the requirement that only men must register for the draft. It’s one of the few areas of federal law where men and women are still treated differently....
U.S. has recovered ransom payment made after Colonial Pipeline hack
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has recovered the majority of a multimillion-dollar ransom payment to hackers after a cyberattack that caused the operator of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline to halt its operations last month, officials said Monday. The operation to recover the cryptocurrency from the Russia-based hacker group is...
Carbon dioxide levels hit 50% higher than preindustrial time
The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50% higher than when the industrial age began. And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists reported Monday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for...
Louisiana lawmakers vote to end jail time for marijuana use
BATON ROUGE, La. — In a demonstration of the changing opinions about marijuana use, Louisiana lawmakers have agreed that people caught with small amounts of pot for recreational use should not go to jail, voting Monday to send the bill lessening the penalties to the governor’s desk. The Senate’s 20-17...
