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GOP conservatives shutter House to protest McCarthy-Biden debt deal, setting up next budget brawl

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

By LISA MASCARO (AP Congressional Correspondent)WASHINGTON (AP) — In fallout from the debt ceiling deal, Speaker Kevin McCarthy is suddenly confronting a new threat to his power as angry hard-right conservatives bring the House chamber to a halt, reviving their displeasure over the compromise struck with President Joe Biden and demanding deeper spending cuts ahead.Barely a dozen Republicans, mainly members of the House Freedom Caucus, shuttered House business for a second day Thursday in protest of McCarthy’s leadership. Routine votes could not be taken, and a pair of pro-gas stove bills important to GOP activists stalled out. Some lawmakers asked if they could simply go home.McCarthy brushed off the disruption as healthy political debate, part of his “risk taker” way of being a leader — not too different, he said, from the 15-vote spectacle it took in January for him to finally convince his colleagues to elect him as speaker. With a paper-thin GOP majo...

Passengers evacuated from train after fire breaks out in Austrian tunnel

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

BERLIN (AP) — Austrian authorities evacuated people from a train after a fire broke out in a tunnel Wednesday evening, and officials said up to 25 people had slight injuries.Police said the night train with some 200 passengers on board was in the tunnel near Fritzens, east of Innsbruck in the Tyrol region, when the fire broke out, the Austria Press Agency reported. Local authorities said the fire was extinguished by late Wednesday. They said 20 to 25 people were believed to have been lightly injured from inhaling smoke. Austrian media reported that all or most people had already been evacuated.The train was en route to Hamburg and Amsterdam.There was no immediate official word on the cause of the blaze, but Austrian media said that one or more cars being transported by the train appeared to have caught fire as a result of a fault with overhead electric wires. The “Nightjet” overnight services that Austrian railway company OeBB operates to several European destinations sometimes conv...

Utah district’s Bible ban spurs protest by parents, Republicans

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Republican lawmakers rallied with more than one hundred Bible-toting parents and children at Utah’s Capitol on Wednesday to protest a school district’s decision to remove the Bible from middle and elementary school libraries in the wake of a GOP-backed “sensitive materials” law passed two years ago.Concerned parents and children holding signs that read “The Bible is the original textbook” and “Remove porn, not the Bible,” said they were outraged after the Davis School District announced that a review committee concluded the Bible was too “violent or vulgar” for young children. The committee ruled that it did not qualify as obscene or pornographic under the sensitive materials law, but used its own discretion to remove it from libraries below the high school level.Karlee Vincent, a Davis County mother of three kids carrying children’s Bibles to the demonstration, said districts could weigh banning certain titles with controversial material, but...

UN says Sudan orphanage evacuated after more than 70 children died amid unabated fighting

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

CAIRO (AP) — An orphanage in Sudan’s war-torn capital has been evacuated following the deaths of more than 70 infants, toddlers and older children from hunger and illness over the past couple of months, the U.N. children’s agency and a local charity said Wednesday.The tragedy at the Al-Mayqoma orphanage made headlines late last month as fighting raged outside between Sudan’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The deaths have highlighted the heavy toll inflicted on civilians since mid-April when the clashes erupted between forces loyal to Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan and RSF forces led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.About 300 children at the Al-Mayqoma orphanage in Khartoum were transferred to a “safer location” elsewhere in the northeastern African nation, said Ricardo Pires, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF.Sudan’s ministries of social development and health have taken charge of the children, while UNICEF has provided humanitarian support includ...

Suspect to face murder charge in death of daughter-in-law of late Montreal mob boss

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

MONTREAL — A suspect in the brazen daytime shooting in Montreal of a 39-year-old woman with alleged ties to organized crime has been arrested in Ontario, police said Wednesday. The Crown prosecutor’s office confirmed Joel Richard Clarke was charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of Claudia Iacono.Jean-Sébastien Caron of the Montreal police’s major crimes unit told reporters that the 28-year-old suspect was arrested Tuesday in Milton, Ont., near Toronto, with the help of Ontario Provincial Police. He said Clarke was a person known to Canadian police in relation to “a multitude of events of violence.”Iacono has been identified as the daughter-in-law of the late Moreno Gallo, a reputed mob boss who was killed in 2013 in Acapulco, Mexico, a few years after he was deported from Canada. Iacono was married to one of Gallo’s sons, Anthony.Police arrived at a parking lot outside the salon Iacono owned in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges di...

Rishi Sunak comes to Washington with Ukraine, economy and AI on agenda for Biden meeting

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The war in Ukraine was top of U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s agenda Wednesday as he started a two-day trip to Washington carrying the message that post-Brexit Britain remains an essential American ally in a world of emboldened authoritarian states. The U.S. and U.K. are the two biggest military donors to Ukraine, and the war will be the focus of Sunak’s meeting Thursday at the White House with President Joe Biden. The breaching of a major dam in southern Ukraine, which sent floodwaters gushing through towns and over farmland, has given the subject added urgency. Neither Washington nor London has officially accused Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam.Sunak said Wednesday that U.K. intelligence services are still assessing the evidence, but “if it does prove to be intentional, it will represent a new low … an appalling barbarism on Russia’s part.”“Russia throughout this war has used as a deliberate active strategy to target civilian infrastru...

Prosecutors urge Minnesota Supreme Court to reject appeal by ex-officer in George Floyd’s murder

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — State prosecutors have urged the Minnesota Supreme Court to reject former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin’s request to reconsider his conviction for murdering George Floyd, saying lower courts already got it right.Chauvin’s attorney asked the state’s highest court last month to hear the case after the Minnesota Court of Appeals rejected his arguments that he had been denied a fair trial. A three-judge panel in April affirmed his conviction for second-degree murder and his 22 1/2-year sentence. In a response filed Tuesday, the attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court to let that ruling stand.“Petitioner received a fair trial, and received the benefit of a fulsome appellate review,” prosecutors wrote. “It is time to bring this case to a close.”Floyd died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, who is white, kneeled on the unarmed Black man’s neck for 9 1/2 minutes. A bystander video captured Floyd’s fading cries of “I can’t breathe....

Family of Texas woman killed says shooting was a hate crime

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

CEDAR PARK, Texas (AP) — A man police say gunned down a woman outside an Austin-area gas station last week has been charged with murder, and the woman’s family says the killing should be investigated as a hate crime as she was targeted because she was gay.Akira Ross, 24, was fatally shot Friday night while she pumped gas in Cedar Park, 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Austin, according to the Cedar Park police. She died at the gas station, and the shooter fled in a vehicle.Cedar Park police identified Bradley Stanford, 23, as the suspected shooter. He was arrested Sunday in Inglewood, Texas, near Corpus Christi, more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) away from where the shooting happened. Stanford was being held in the San Patricio County Jail on one count of murder before he was transferred Wednesday to Williamson County, officials confirmed. The San Patricio County Sheriff’s Office said an attorney is not yet listed for Stanford.Police have not said what might have led ...

Texas’ Ken Paxton hires prominent attorney for impeachment trial

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A new lawyer for Ken Paxton on Wednesday raised skepticism that the embattled Texas attorney general’s impeachment trial could be done quickly and attacked the case that could lead to the Republican’s permanent removal from office as a sham.Tony Buzbee is a prominent Houston attorney whose high-profile client list includes former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and women who accused NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson of sexual harassment and assault. His hiring sets up a clash between some of the state’s most well-known lawyers over Paxton’s political future.“The impeachment articles that have been laid out by the House are baloney,” Buzbee said during a news conference at the Republican Party of Texas’ Austin headquarters. “The allegations are untrue.”The impeachment trial in the Texas Senate is set to begin no later than Aug. 28. “If we’re really going to have a trial, it’s going to take a lot longer than that,” Buzbee said.Buzbee joins several...

Black workers at California Tesla factory allege rampant racism, seek class-action status

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:28:12 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tesla may face a class-action lawsuit after 240 Black factory workers in California described rampant racism and discrimination at the electric automaker’s San Francisco Bay Area plant, including frequent use of racial slurs and references to the manufacturing site as a plantation or slave ship. The testimonies filed Monday in Alameda County Superior Court comes from contractors and employees who worked on the production floor of the factory in Fremont, roughly 40 miles (65 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco. The vast majority worked at the site between 2016 to the present. Lawyers suing Tesla, Inc. estimate at least 6,000 workers could be part of the class. The individual testimonies are part of a 2017 lawsuit brought by Marcus Vaughn, who complained in writing to human resources and to Tesla CEO Elon Musk of a hostile work environment in which he was called slurs by co-workers and supervisors. No investigation was conducted and he was fired for “not having...