U.S./World category, Page 716

TV actor Allison Mack, who played a key role in the scandal-ridden, cult-like group NXIVM, was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday on charges she manipulated women into becoming sex slaves for the group’s spiritual leader. Mack — best known for her role as a young Superman’s close friend...

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was operating in sync with a British destroyer during last week’s Black Sea incident. Moscow said one of its warships fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of British destroyer Defender on Wednesday to force...

The U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday dodged a challenge for now to its use of a controversial statistical method aimed at keeping people’s data private in the numbers used for redrawing congressional and legislative districts after federal judges refused to stop the technique’s implementation. A panel of three federal judges...

SURFSIDE, Fla. — Search and rescue teams from Miami-Dade are considered among the best and most experienced in the world, dispatched to epic disaster scenes far beyond Florida — from the rubble of the World Trade Center to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, Mexico and the Philippines. This time disaster struck at home....

NEW YORK — The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials abruptly retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system. The bungle was...

Weeks before a Florida condo building collapsed, the president of its board wrote that structural problems identified in a 2018 inspection had “gotten significantly worse” and owners needed to pay a hefty price to get them fixed. The April 9 “Dear Neighbors” letter from Champlain Towers South Condominium President Jean...

SURFSIDE, Fla. — The slow work of sifting through the remnants of a collapsed Florida condo building stretched into a sixth day Tuesday, as families desperate for progress endured a wrenching wait for answers. “We have people waiting and waiting and waiting for news,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told...

PARIS — France’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday definitively adopted a law that will allow single women and lesbians access to medically assisted reproduction for the first time. The wide-ranging bioethics law, presented by French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, was approved at the National Assembly with 326 votes for...

INDIANAPOLIS — The Biden administration has revoked the federal authorization for Indiana’s planned work requirements for low-income residents who receive their health insurance through Medicaid. Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb sought to implement the work requirements for the Healthy Indiana Plan program in 2019 under approval from the Trump administration. But...

Congressional leaders and a media advocacy group are urging the Federal Communications Commission to examine how policy decisions and programs have disparately harmed Black Americans and other communities of color, according to a letter sent Tuesday to the acting FCC chair. In the letter, first shared with the Associated Press,...

SURFSIDE, Fla. — Prosecutors in Florida will pursue a grand jury investigation into the deadly collapse of an oceanfront condominium building, officials said Tuesday. Miami-Dade County Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference that she fully supports such an investigation. State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said she would bring...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The man who killed five people at a Maryland newspaper was delusional and believed the state’s judicial system was conspiring with the Capital Gazette to persecute him and ruin his life, his attorney told a jury Tuesday, trying to make the case that Jarrod Ramos is not...

SPOKANE, Wash. — The unprecedented Northwest U.S. heat wave that slammed Seattle and Portland, Oregon, moved inland Tuesday — prompting a electrical utility in Spokane, Wash., to warn that people will face more rolling blackouts amid heavy power demand. The intense weather that gave Seattle and Portland consecutive days of...

Talk about a heavy snack. For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a black hole swallowing a neutron star, the most dense object in the universe — all in a split-second gulp. Ten days later they saw the same thing, on the other side of the universe. In both cases,...

MOSCOW — Russian authorities on Tuesday morning raided the apartments of several investigative journalists and their family members, a move that comes amid mounting pressure on Russia’s independent media outlets. Police searched the apartments of Roman Badanin, chief editor of the Proekt investigative online outlet, and Maria Zholobova, one of...

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma has been found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to 15 months in prison for defying a court order to appear before an inquiry probing wide-ranging allegations of corruption during his tenure from 2009 to 2018. Zuma was not in court...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Tuesday offered an affectionate, public thank-you to Benedict XVI, whose retirement from the papacy in 2103 shocked the Roman Catholic Church and the world. Addressing tourists and Romans in St. Peter’s Square, Francis triggered applause when he recalled that it was the 70th anniversary...

FARMERSVILLE, Texas — Two people were killed and three injured in a natural gas pipeline explosion in Texas, officials said. The deadly blast happened around 4 p.m. Monday at an Atmos Energy facility in Collin County near Farmersville, about 35 miles northeast of Dallas. Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner said...

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the government Monday to issue permits for the personal use of marijuana and for the growing of limited amounts of pot plants, after the country’s Congress took too long to approve a limited legalization law. In 2019, the court ruled that prohibiting marijuana...

WASHINGTON — U.S. troops in eastern Syria came under rocket attack Monday, with no reported casualties, one day after U.S. Air Force planes carried out airstrikes near the Iraq-Syria border against what the Pentagon said were facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups to support drone strikes inside Iraq. Iraq’s military...

DEL RIO, Texas — Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with fellow migrants after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing when she stepped on American soil for the first time. “I won’t say it again,” interrupts a U.S. Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish...

A series of mysterious lines carved on the seafloor off North Carolina’s Outer Banks have been identified as “highly unexpected” proof that icebergs once filled the horizon along the East Coast. It is believed the massive chunks of ice drifted up to 5,000 miles from Canada, and could be seen...

Despite an engineer’s warning of major structural problems, a town building official told board members their Florida high-rise condominium was in “very good shape” almost three years before it collapsed, according to minutes of that meeting released Monday. The Surfside official, Rosendo “Ross” Prieto, was quoted as making those comments...