News category, Page 1564

LOUISVILLE — Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has pardoned a man serving life in prison for sexually abusing his 6-year-old stepdaughter. News outlets report Bevin issued the pardon Friday, saying that Paul Donel Hurt was wrongly convicted of first-degree sexual abuse and sodomy in Louisville in 2001. Hurt’s accuser recanted her...

NEW YORK — New York City lawmakers voted Tuesday to ban flavored electronic cigarettes after a lawsuit halted a statewide ban. “We are acting to protect our kids by banning the e-cigarette flavors that have been hooking them for years,” Democratic City Council member Mark Levine said before the Council...

After nearly six decades of increasing life expectancy, U.S. average lifetimes have been declining since 2014, according to a bleak new report published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Drug overdoses — mainly opioids — suicides, alcoholic liver disease and conditions related to substance use disorder are...

A bill to ban certain uses of cellphones by Pennsylvania drivers has advanced in Harrisburg, and its sponsor believes motorists’ confusion about laws when they cross state borders — something they will be doing frequently of over Thanksgiving — is an argument for approval. State Rep. Rosemary Brown, a Monroe...

It’s the holiday season, and everyone is getting into the spirit — or at the very least, into the spirits store. November and December are far and away the busiest times of the year at Pennsylvania’s Fine Wine & Good Spirits stores. The top single sales day in each of...

HARRISBURG — A federal court is being asked to force Pennsylvania to rescind its certification of a voting machine newly purchased by Philadelphia and at least two other counties in the state ahead of 2020’s presidential election. Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and several supporters filed court papers...

Denise Engler says her father, John Raynor, never got tired of children. “He’d take off work for Halloween so he could give out candy,” said Engler, a Greensburg resident. “If there was a holiday dinner coming up, he’d always ask, ‘Are there kids coming?’ He loved children and went out...

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats are proposing a broad federal data privacy law that would allow people to see what information companies have collected on them and demand that it be deleted. But the bill is likely to face bipartisan challenges in the Republican-controlled Senate. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington is...

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis is planning to change official Catholic Church teaching to declare the use and possession of atomic weapons as “immoral,” a move that makes clear that his rejection of the Cold War-era doctrine of deterrence is to be official church policy. Francis had declared...

WASHINGTON — The House Oversight Committee sued two top Trump administration officials Tuesday for refusing to produce documents related to a decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The panel’s chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross “have not...

READING — Pennsylvania overhauled its child sexual abuse laws Tuesday, more than a year after a grand jury report showed the cover-up of hundreds of cases of abuse in most of Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic dioceses over the last seven decades. The central bill signed by Gov. Tom Wolf gives future...

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions related to energy generation and energy use rose in 2018 for the first time since 2014, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Although CO2 emissions have been on a downward trend since 2010, they rose to 5.27 billion metric tons in 2018 — 2.7%...

BAMAKO, Mali — Two helicopters collided in midair on a moonless night and killed 13 French soldiers fighting Islamic State group-linked extremists in Mali, France said Tuesday, mourning its highest military death toll in nearly four decades. The deaths draw new attention to a worrying front in the global fight...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Capitol and its office buildings were briefly evacuated Tuesday amid concerns about a small aircraft that violated restricted airspace in the area. The evacuations were ordered as a precaution and lasted about half an hour. The U.S. Secret Service said personnel at the White House were...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran has imposed punitive measures on individuals associated with a London-based TV channel that aired videos of anti-government protests. The judiciary’s website said it imposed “judicial and legal restrictions” on property held by individuals associated with Iran International, without elaborating. The channel is believed to...

GILFORD, N.H. — Police in New Hampshire say five goats were found dead in trash bags in the town of Gilford. WMUR-TV reports the police say the goats were found near an old cell tower. They say the animals were dumped there within the past day or two. Several appeared...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is donating his third-quarter salary to help tackle the nation’s opioid epidemic. A White House official says Trump has given the $100,000 he would be paid in the quarter to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, which oversees federal public health offices and...

NEW YORK — Mike Maddaloni went to Amazon.com knowing exactly what he wanted to buy. But instead of showing him the Synology router he was searching for at the top of his results, Amazon bombarded him with ads for hard drives and routers that he didn’t want. Maddaloni, a web...