Friday, Apr 19th
Last update07:17:01 AM GMT
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said his country's support for Ukraine was unwavering during a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday, the foreign ministry in Tokyo said.
The destruction of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza will require more medical evacuations and ultimately cause more deaths if these are not carried out swiftly, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.
Thousands of homes and businesses were without power Tuesday as severe weather roared through several states, causing at least one death and spawning possible tornadoes.
Parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia and Georgia were under tornado watches into Tuesday night, while Wisconsin was experiencing a spring snowstorm.
Storms in Northeastern Oklahoma unleashed three suspected tornadoes and dumped heavy rain that was blamed for the death of a 46-year-old homeless woman in Tulsa who was sheltering inside a drainage pipe.
The woman's boyfriend told authorities the two had gone to sleep at the entrance of the drainage pipe and were awakened by floodwaters, Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little said. Up to 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) of rain fell in Tulsa in about an hour, National Weather Service meteorologist Robert Darby said.
Lou Conter, the last known survivor of the attack on the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, has died at the age of 102.
Conter, who was a 20-year-old quartermaster at the time of the naval assault, was on the back decks of the battleship on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces decimated the U.S. Pacific fleet. The unprecedented attack killed 1,177 on the Arizona, with over 900 of those individuals never recovered.
As the bombs rained down on the naval base, one landed between two main guns at the front of the Arizona. The explosion ignited a huge store of TNT black powder that was used for the ship's battery guns.
Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.
The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.
But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.
Donald Trump used a campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to describe meeting the family of a woman killed by an immigrant in order to spin a narrative about what he calls “Biden’s border bloodbath” – except Ruby Garcia’s family now say he never did.
Garcia, 25, was found shot to death on highway US-131 on 22 March of this year. Court records later showed that her boyfriend confessed to killing her and dumping her body.
The man, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, had come to the US as a child and was allowed to stay as a so-called “Dreamer”. He was deported in 2020 before re-entering again without documents.
A Washington state man who used a megaphone to orchestrate a mob’s attack on police officers guarding the US Capitol was sentenced on Wednesday to more than seven years in prison.
Royce Lamberth, the US district judge, said videos captured Taylor James Johnatakis playing a leadership role during the January 6 riot.
Johnatakis led other rioters on a charge against a police line, “barked commands” over his megaphone and shouted step-by-step directions for overpowering officers, the judge said.
“In any angry mob, there are leaders and there are followers. Mr Johnatakis was a leader. He knew what he was doing that day,” the judge said before sentencing him to seven years and three months behind bars.
Anti-trans advocates failed to pass a measure at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday amid the company’s largest, most expensive and contentious proxy contest in recent history.
Today, Chloe Cole, a 19-year-old who has spent much of the last two years testifying in support of legislation to ban gender-affirming care for minors, urged Walt Disney Co. shareholders to vote for a proposal to force the company to pay for services for people who choose to detransition.
Cole spoke as an advocate for Do No Harm, a group of conservative medical professionals who are skeptical of gender-affirming care, and presented the proposal on behalf of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative group that challenges what they see as abuse and corruption in government and business.
“Disney pays for gender transition interventions, but not detransitioning care,” Cole said at the meeting. “Therefore, the company discriminates based on gender identity, under [federal] regulations.”
Remember when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon floated a fringe legal theory that could help throw Donald Trump’s classified documents case in favor of the former president?
Well, special counsel Jack Smith just filed a devastating response, telling Cannon that he might have to challenge the Trump appointee on appeal if she doesn’t get it together.
As a refresher, Cannon asked the parties to file proposed jury instructions, regarding the federal charges alleging that Trump illegally retained national defense information. In doing so, she told them to consider two “scenarios,” both of which lend credence to the notion that the Presidential Records Act applies in this case. The problem is that the PRA is irrelevant to these criminal charges. So injecting the issue into the trial could lead the jury to think that Trump could do whatever he wanted with classified documents, which would obviously go against the criminal law that says otherwise.
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