Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 30
NEW DELHI (AP) — A special flight carrying Indians stranded abroad because of the coronavirus back home skidded off a hilltop runway and split in two while landing Friday in heavy rain in the southern state of Kerala, killing at least 16 people and injuring 123 more, police said. The dead included one of the pilots of the Air India Express flight, and at least 15 of the injured were in critical condition, said Abdul Karim, a senior Kerala state police officer. Rescue operations were over, he said. The 2-year-old Boeing 737-800 flew from D...
The human and economic toll of the lockdowns against the coronavirus mounted Thursday as India struggled to feed the multitudes, Italy shut down most of its industry, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in a single week. As the number of infections worldwide reached a half-million and deaths climbed past 23,000, the damage to people's livelihoods and their well-being from the effort to flatten the rising curve started to come into focus. In India, where the country's 1.3 billion people were under...
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran's top diplomat acknowledged Wednesday that Iranians "were lied to" for days after the Islamic Republic accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner. The admission came as new surveillance footage purported to show two surface-to-air missiles 20 seconds apart shred the airplane and kill all 176 people aboard. The downing of the Ukraine International Airlines flight last week came amid heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. over its unraveling nuclear deal. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for the f...
KAPURTHALA, India (AP) — Reports rolled in with escalating urgency — pills seized by the truckload, pills swallowed by schoolchildren, pills in the pockets of dead terrorists. These pills, the world has been told, are safer than the OxyContins, the Vicodins, the fentanyls that have wreaked so much devastation. But now they are the root of what the United Nations named "the other opioid crisis" — an epidemic featured in fewer headlines than the American one, as it rages through the planet's most vulnerable countries. Mass abuse of the opioi...
NEW DELHI (AP) — Police detained several hundred protesters in some of India's biggest cities Thursday as they defied bans on assembly that authorities imposed to stop widespread demonstrations against a new citizenship law that opponents say threatens the country's secular democracy. Protests raged around the country despite the bans as opposition widened to the law, which excludes Muslims. The legislation has sparked anger at what many see as the government's push to bring India closer to a Hindu state. Authorities erected road blocks and d...
NEW DELHI (AP) — If China has panda diplomacy, India has yoga. Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully lobbied the United Nations to designate June 21 International Yoga Day in his first year in power in 2014. Since then, just as China under President Xi Jinping has given countries pandas for their zoos in a show of goodwill, Modi has used one of India's most popular exports to assert his nation's rising place in the world. On Friday, the fifth annual International Yoga Day, Modi practiced various yoga "asanas" alongside an estimated 40,000 p...
NEW DELHI (AP) — Cyclone Fani made landfall on India's eastern coast on Friday as a grade 5 storm, lashing beaches with rain and wind gusting up to 205 kilometers (127 miles) per hour. The India Meteorological Department said the "extremely severe" cyclone in the Bay of Bengal hit the coastal state of Odisha around 8 a.m., and was forecast to weaken to a "very severe" storm as it moved north-northeast toward the Indian state of West Bengal. In Bhubaneswar, a city in Odisha famous for an 11th-century Hindu temple, palm trees whipped back and f...
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — As the death toll from the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka rose to 321 on Tuesday, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility and released images that purported to show the attackers, while the country's prime minister warned that several suspects armed with explosives are still at large. Another top government official said the suicide bombings at the churches, hotels and other sites were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists in apparent retaliation for the New Zealand mosque massacres last month that a white s...
NEW DELHI (AP) — India signed a $5 billion deal to buy five Russian S-400 air defense systems on Friday despite a looming threat of U.S. sanctions on countries that trade with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors. The deal was signed in New Delhi during a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss nuclear energy, space exploration and trade. India has requested that the U.S. grant it a waiver for the deal from sanctions prescribed by the Countering America's Adversaries Through S...
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — The North American subsidiary of a French chemical manufacturer and two senior staff members were indicted Friday in connection with last year's explosion at the Crosby, Texas, plant in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Arkema North America, its CEO Richard Rowe and plant manager Leslie Comardelle were charged in the Harris County indictment with "recklessly" releasing chemicals into the air. The charge carries up to $1 million in fines and five years' imprisonment. "Indictments against corporations are rare," Harris C...
WACO, Texas (AP) — Texas prosecutors who have failed to convict a single person in the three years since a Waco shooting left nine bikers dead are trying a new tack of targeting fewer cases, but attorneys for the bikers say the evidence is so shaky and the lead prosecutor's credibility so damaged that it will be difficult to make the remaining charges stick. The May 17, 2015, shooting also left 20 wounded and nearly 200 arrested at the Twin Peaks restaurant. Investigators say it was sparked by rivalries between the Bandidos and Cossacks m...
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Three members of the Bandidos motorcycle club were indicted on murder charges Wednesday stemming from a chaotic 2015 shooting that involved police and members of another biker club outside a restaurant in Waco, Texas. The indictments mark the first murder charges in the case, and more than 20 other bikers were re-indicted on new charges ranging from rioting to tampering with evidence. The lesser charges come just eight days before the statute of limitations runs out on those crimes — and a day after dozens of cases wer...
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — The humble pecan is being rebranded as more than just pie. Pecan growers and suppliers are hoping to sell U.S. consumers on the virtues of North America's only native nut as a hedge against a potential trade war with China, the pecan's largest export market. The pecan industry is also trying to crack the fast-growing snack-food industry. The retail value for packaged nuts, seeds and trail mix in the U.S. alone was $5.7 billion in 2012, and is forecast to rise to $7.5 billion by 2022, according to market researcher E...
BOERNE, Texas (AP) — Tammie Jo Shults was determined to "break into the club" of male military aviators. One of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, Shults flew training missions as an enemy pilot during Operation Desert Storm, while working with other women to see a rule excluding them from combat flights repealed. Twenty-five years later, Shults was at the controls of the Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 Tuesday when it made an emergency landing in Philadelphia after one of the engines on the Boeing 737 exploded while...
BOERNE, Texas (AP) — The Southwest Airlines pilot being lauded as a hero in a harrowing emergency landing after a passenger was partially blown out of the jet's damaged fuselage is also being hailed for her pioneering role in a career where she has been one of the few women at the controls. Tammie Jo Shults, one of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, was the captain and piloting the Dallas-bound Flight 1380 when it made an emergency landing Tuesday in Philadelphia, according to her husband, Dean Shults. One of the engines on t...
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who is recovering from a series of strokes and a fall last year, said Friday that he is closing his Dallas energy-focused hedge fund after what he described as "one hell of a roller coaster ride." "It's no secret the past year has not been good to me, from a health perspective or a financial one," the 89-year-old Pickens said in a statement published on his LinkedIn page. Slumping oil and natural gas prices knocked him off Forbes magazine's rich list in 2013. Pickens founded BP Capital in 19...
DALLAS (AP) — The founder of a conservative nonprofit caught attempting to entice The Washington Post to report a false sex assault allegation against Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore mocked the newspaper's handling of the hoax and said his group was aiming to expose media bias. Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe spoke Wednesday on the Southern Methodist University campus in University Park, Texas, sponsored by the conservative Young Students for Freedom, a national nonprofit co-founded in the 1960s by William F. Buckley. A...
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A woman accused of mailing potentially deadly homemade bombs to then-President Barack Obama and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2016 was arrested, in part, due to cat hair, a cigarette box and an almost-destroyed shipping label bearing her address. Julia Poff, 46, mailed the devices in October 2016, along with a third package that she sent to the Social Security Administration, near Baltimore, according to an indictment. Of the three packages, only Abbott opened his. It did not detonate because "he did not open it as d...
DALLAS (AP) — Hundreds of mourners lined up to enter a funeral service Wednesday for eight members of a family who were among the more than two dozen killed in a shooting at a small Texas church. At least seven hearses could be seen outside an event center in Floresville, Texas, about 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, where the Nov. 5 shooting occurred. Church member John Holcombe, among the massacre's few survivors, was holding the funeral for his pregnant wife and three of her children, his parents,...
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — Three thousand people mourned eight members of a family who were among the more than two dozen killed in a shooting at a small Texas church Wednesday before the funeral procession headed to a cemetery near the site of the massacre. Surrounding the multicolored caskets, mourners released light pink and blue balloons at a graveside service for the Holcombe family in rural Wilson County. Church member and survivor John Holcombe had invited the public to attend the funeral of his pregnant wife, Crystal, 36, and t...
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — Two white hearses carrying the bodies of a couple killed in last weekend's Texas church shooting were followed by a long procession of vehicles Saturday evening that avoided passing the church where more than two dozen people were fatally shot. Mourners instead drove around the tiny community of Sutherland Springs before reaching a small cemetery on the edge of town, where dozens more vehicles waited along a rural road for the private burial of Therese and Richard Rodriguez. Sheriff's SUVs shielded mourners a...
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — The Texas church where more than two dozen people were killed by a gunman during Sunday services will be demolished, the pastor said. Pastor Frank Pomeroy told leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention earlier this week that it would be too painful to continue using First Baptist Church as a place of worship. Pomeroy discussed the state of the building with the denomination's top executives, who traveled to the rural community in a show of support, a national Southern Baptist spokesman said. The pastor d...
LA VERNIA, Texas (AP) — By the time Paul Brunner rolled up in his ambulance to the worst mass shooting in Texas history, the First Baptist Church was a chaotic triage scene. Parents cried and kids screamed, and nearly all the victims appeared to have been hit more than once. Two of the first four patients the burly volunteer medic loaded into ambulances were children. "Our inclination is to protect children. The thing is, that wasn't his inclination," Brunner said, referring to the gunman. "He wasn't separating going: 'I'm not going to hurt t...
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — Authorities have reviewed video from inside the small-town Texas church where a gunman killed more than two dozen people, including footage that shows the assailant shooting victims in the head during Sunday services, a U.S. official said Wednesday. The official's account of the video is consistent with statements made by survivors of the attack. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The same official confirmed that the a...
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Law enforcement officers prepared for war in Waco, Texas, on May 17, 2015. In parking lots surrounding the Twin Peaks restaurant just off Interstate 35, 16 police officers, including a SWAT team of 11, were poised with assault rifles in five police cars and two unmarked SUVs. Seven state police, some undercover, were inside the restaurant or nearby. Families were eating Sunday lunch apparently oblivious to the gathering storm, as dozens of armed bikers from the Cossacks poured onto the restaurant patio to confront the m...
