U.S./World category, Page 654

PORTLAND, Maine — Deqa Dhalac is the first Somali immigrant to become the mayor of a U.S. city, but she describes her rise in local politics as very old fashioned. Dhalac, 53, became mayor of South Portland, the fourth largest city in Maine, on Monday. She fled Somalia in the...

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan’s attorney general said Tuesday her office will review events that occurred before the mass shooting that left four students dead at Oxford High School, despite the district’s rejection of her offer to be its third-party investigator. “What we can’t do is nothing. It’s not appropriate,” Dana...

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders reached an elaborate deal Tuesday that will allow Democrats to lift the nation’s debt limit without any votes from Republicans, likely averting another last-minute rush to avoid a federal default. Hours later, the House passed legislation overwhelmingly along party lines that kicked off a multi-step process....

Some experts are warning that although evidence is still emerging, the highly concerning omicron variant is expected to overtake delta within weeks. “I do expect omicron to displace delta in the coming weeks,” said Stephen Kissler, a disease modeler at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a...

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — A few dozen survivors of Pearl Harbor and other veterans gathered Tuesday at the site of the bombing 80 years ago to remember those killed in the attack by Japan that launched the U.S. into World War II. The USS Chung-Hoon, a guided missile destroyer, passed...

Eight years ago, a team of researchers launched a project to carefully repeat early but influential lab experiments in cancer research. They recreated 50 experiments, the type of preliminary research with mice and test tubes that sets the stage for new cancer drugs. The results reported Tuesday: About half the...

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, limiting service at many key and popular sites. The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including the Associated Press. Amazon said in a post an hour after the outage began that it had identified...

BERLIN — A German court has convicted a 67-year-old electrician of aggravated, dangerous and simple assault for removing the testicles of several men at their request, causing one person to die, the dpa news agency reported Tuesday. A Munich regional court sentenced the man to eight years and six months...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin squared off Tuesday over the massive buildup of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border, the U.S. president eager to use his video call with Putin to serve notice that Moscow will face economy-jarring sanctions if it invades neighboring Ukraine. Just hours...

JERUSALEM — Israel on Tuesday announced the completion of an enhanced security barrier around the Gaza Strip designed to prevent militants from sneaking into the country. The 40-mile barrier includes radar systems, maritime sensors and a network of underground sensors to detect militant tunnels. Existing fencing was replaced with a...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Tuesday marked the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with a somber visit to the World War II Memorial in the nation’s capital. The Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and other locations in Hawaii...

MOSCOW — A gunman opened fire in a Moscow city customer services facility, killing two people Tuesday and wounding three others, city authorities said. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Twitter that a suspect was detained. Sobyanin didn’t offer any details about the assailant or his possible motive, saying only...

NEW YORK — Billionaire hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt has agreed to turn over $70 million worth of stolen antiquities and will be subject to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities, the Manhattan district attorney announced Monday. In return, Steinhardt, a philanthropist who is chair of the Steinhardt Foundation...

WASHINGTON — The former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence is cooperating with the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, according to a person familiar with the matter. Marc Short was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and accompanied Pence as he fled his post presiding...

JACKSON, Miss. — The U.S. Justice Department said Monday it is ending its investigation into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman in Mississippi. The announcement came after the head of...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden expressed cautious optimism after meeting in June with Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting the next three to six months would reveal whether their frank face-to-face discussion in Geneva was yielding progress. “Did the things we agreed to sit down and try to work out, did...

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bob Dole’s casket will lie in state Thursday in the U.S. Capitol as congressional leaders honor the former Republican presidential candidate and World War II veteran who served in Congress for 36 years. Dole died Sunday at the age of 98. He was a leader known for...

MADISON, W.Va. — A West Virginia hunter who fatally shot a man he said he mistook for a bear has been arrested, authorities said. The man was charged last week with negligent shooting and failure to render aid, West Virginia Division of Natural Resources Sgt. Larry Harvey told WCHS-TV. The...

The White House is expected to soon announce that the U.S. will stage a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing to protest Chinese human rights abuses, a move that China has vowed to greet with “firm countermeasures.” U.S. athletes would still compete under such a boycott, a...

When Japanese bombs began falling on Pearl Harbor, U.S. Navy Seaman 1st Class David Russell first sought refuge below deck on the USS Oklahoma. But a split-second decision on that December morning 80 years ago changed his mind, and likely saved his life. “They started closing that hatch. And I...

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Graduates of any Ohio college, public or private, who take a full-time job in the state would be exempt from state income tax for up to three years, under legislation proposed Monday by a Republican lawmaker with an aim of recruiting and retaining Ohio college students. Businesses...

WASHINGTON — The elite Russian state hackers behind last year’s massive SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign hardly eased up this year, managing plenty of infiltrations of U.S. and allied government agencies and foreign policy think tanks with consummate craft and stealth, a leading cybersecurity firm reported Monday. On the anniversary of the...

BERLIN — A three-party deal to form a new German government under center-left leader Olaf Scholz cleared its final hurdle on Monday, setting the scene for Scholz to succeed longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel this week. Germany’s environmentalist Greens said their rank-and-file members approved the agreement reached last month, with 86%...