Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 70
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas officials have denied a request by some farmers to lift the state's ban on in-crop dicamba use. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports that the state Plant Board rejected the farmers' request on Tuesday. Board members say the farmers provided no new information that would change their minds on the issue. The board implemented the ban on in-crop use of dicamba after receiving nearly 1,000 complaints of crop damage last year. The ban began April 16 and runs through Oct. 31. Farmers wanting to use the product on d...
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union on Wednesday announced it will start imposing duties from July on a list of U.S. products in response to President Donald Trump's decision to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe. "The new duties start applying in July," European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic told reporters. "It is a measured and proportionate response to the unilateral and illegal decision taken by the United States." Sefcovic said that formalities in finalizing the list should be completed this month. The EU s...
HOUSTON (AP) — Texas' highest criminal court narrowly ruled Wednesday that a death row inmate is mentally capable enough to execute, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that his intellectual capacity had been improperly assessed and agreement by his lawyer and prosecutors that he shouldn't qualify for the death penalty. In a 5-3 ruling with one judge not participating, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said it reviewed the case of convicted killer Bobby James Moore under guidance from the Supreme Court's March 2017 decision and determined t...
SAO PAULO (AP) — Three years ago, Brazil experienced a major Zika outbreak that led to the revelation that the virus can cause severe birth defects in babies whose mothers were infected during pregnancy. Here's a look at what scientists know today about Zika and its effect on developing fetuses. THE OUTBREAK Zika began spreading in Brazil in April 2015 and the country saw more than 260,000 probable cases in 2016, according to the Health Ministry. Cases of microcephaly, an abnormally small head in babies, and other developmental deficits l...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed a bill into law Wednesday that will give veterans more freedom to see doctors outside the troubled Veterans Affairs system, a major shift aimed at reducing wait times and improving care by steering more patients to the private sector. At a Rose Garden event at the White House, Trump praised the legislation as fulfilling his pledge to fix the Department of Veterans Affairs by bringing accountability and providing private care to veterans whenever they feel unhappy with government-run health c...
BONITO, Brazil (AP) — It's well before dawn, but Jose Wesley Campos giggles nonstop as his mother plays with his thick glasses while preparing to take the toddler to a doctor's appointment three hours away. "Sometimes, it is as if he swallowed a clown," said his mother, Solange Ferreira. That is a happy contrast from the child's first months, when Jose, who was born with an abnormally small head amid an outbreak of the Zika virus in northeast Brazil, would shriek uncontrollably. Desperate, Ferreira would calm the boy by putting him in a b...
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A white South Carolina restaurant manager has pleaded guilty to abusing and enslaving a mentally challenged black employee, according to federal prosecutors. Bobby Paul Edwards of Conway pleaded guilty Monday to one count of forced labor, according to Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and South Carolina U.S. Attorney Sherri A. Lydon. Between 2009 and 2014, prosecutors said that he admitted using violence, threats, isolation and intimidation to compel a man w...
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) (THE CONVERSATION) Judy’s first pregnancy was planned, and she was looking forward to having a baby. Yet, halfway through the pregnancy, something changed. She began to feel down and bad about herself. She had less energy and struggled to concentrate. Thinking this was a normal part of pregnancy, she ignored it. After she delivered her son, it all got worse. She felt as if she was in a black hole of sadness. She often gave her s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — "Do you have prescription insurance?" It's one of the first questions consumers hear at the pharmacy counter, and many hand over their insurance cards in the hopes of getting a good price. But sometimes using insurance can actually cost more — and even prevent the pharmacist from saying so. That's because of so-called gag rules, which bar pharmacists from telling patients when they could save by paying cash instead of using insurance. The rules — set by companies that manage prescription plans — are getting new scrutiny after...
Mike Smith knows the feeling. A headache. Maybe some dizziness. As a younger jockey he got concussions, felt better and went back to riding. "I've had several," Smith said. "It's just like you hit your head playing any sport." Smith is currently in the international spotlight as he goes for the Triple Crown on Saturday aboard Justify in the Belmont, but he's far from alone as a jockey who has dealt with concussions. U.S. horse racing remains years, if not decades, behind other pro sports — not to mention the sport in other countries — when it...
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Shareholders of Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Wednesday rejected several proposals aimed at linking executive pay to diversity goals, being more open about lobbying, narrowing the gender-pay gap, and weakening the grip founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have on company voting stock. The rejection was not a surprise given the company had declared itself opposed to the proposals — in many cases because it said it is addressing the broader issues in other ways — and because Page and Brin control 51 percent of the vot...
LONDON (AP) — The former head of Cambridge Analytica said Wednesday that his political consulting firm got "an incredibly huge target" on its back because of its involvement in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Alexander Nix said his now-defunct firm had become the subject of global derision and was unfairly blamed for putting Trump in office. The remarks came as an unrepentant Nix clashed with British lawmakers investigating the use of Facebook data in election campaigns. The Parliament's media committee sought his testimony to c...
NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook says it will fund original news shows created by such news organizations as ABC, CNN and Mic. The move comes as Facebook plans to kill off its "trending" news section to make way for what it considers "trustworthy" and "informative" news. Despite efforts to clamp down, the company continues to grapple with fake news and misinformation, not to mention plain old "click bait" on its users' news feeds. Campbell Brown, Facebook's head of news partnerships, says the shows will be original and exclusive to Facebook, rather t...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Record heat returned to the United States with a vengeance in May. May warmed to a record average 65.4 degrees in the Lower 48 states, breaking the high of 64.7 set in 1934, according to federal weather figures released Wednesday. May was 5.2 degrees above the 20th century's average for the month. Weather stations in the nation broke or tied nearly 8,600 daily heat records in May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported. It hit 100 in Minneapolis on May 28, the earliest the city has seen triple digits. "Th...
MILWAUKEE (AP) — A British cybersecurity researcher credited with stopping a worldwide computer virus last year faces new charges, including lying to the FBI, in an updated indictment Wednesday accusing him of developing malware to steal banking information. Marcus Hutchins now faces 10 charges alleging that he created and distributed malware known as Kronos, including four new ones in the revised indictment in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. The prosecutors' updated filing comes as a federal judge weighs a request from Hutchins' a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Major changes could be ahead for the International Space Station but there will always be an American astronaut in orbit, NASA's new boss said Wednesday. The space agency is already talking with private companies about potentially taking over the space lab after 2025, but no decision will made without the other 21 countries that are partners in the project, NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said in his first briefing with reporters. President Donald Trump's recent budget requests have put discussions about the station's fut...
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — A new report finds that high-tide flooding is happening across the United States at twice the rate it was just 30 years ago and predicts records for such flooding will continue to be broken for decades as sea levels rise. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday that high-tide flooding, sometimes called sunny-day or "nuisance flooding," tied or set records last year in more than a quarter of the 98 places the agency monitors around the country. The report found Sabine Pass, Texas, had 23 d...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tropical cyclones around the world are moving slightly slower over land and water, dumping more rain as they stall, just as Hurricane Harvey did last year, a new study found. This isn't about how powerful a storm's winds are, just how fast it chugs along. Storms in the last few years — before 2017's Harvey — were moving about 10 percent slower globally than in the late 1940s and 1950s, according to a study published in Nature Wednesday. Storms worldwide in 2016 moved about 1.25 mph (2 kph) slower than 60 some years ago. In th...
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) (THE CONVERSATION) The Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates. We are social scientists with interests in environmental health, environmental justice and inequality and democracy. We recently published a...
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) — A trio of astronauts from Russia, the United States and the European Space Agency blasted off Wednesday for a mission on the International Space Station. A Russian spacecraft carrying Serena Aunon-Chancellor of NASA, Sergey Prokopyev of Russian space agency Roscosmos and the ESA's Alexander Gerst, from Germany, lifted off as scheduled from the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Soyuz booster rocket at 1612 local time (1112 GMT) Wednesday. The Soyuz MS-09 ship has successfully entered a d...
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) — A South Texas man almost died after he was bitten by the head of a rattlesnake he'd just decapitated. The incident happened May 27 as Milo and Jennifer Sutcliffe were doing yard work at their home near Lake Corpus Christi. Jennifer Sutcliffe told KIII-TV in Corpus Christi that her husband found a four-foot rattlesnake, took his shovel and hacked off its head. She said he bent down to pick up the remains to discard and was bitten by the severed head, injecting a super dose of venom with its dying twitch. Sutcliffe s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt laughed off questions Wednesday about whether he used his office to try to help his wife get a "business opportunity" with Chick-fil-A, while a close aide abruptly resigned amid new ethics allegations against her boss. Pruitt said in a statement that his scheduling director, Millan Hupp, 26, had resigned. It came two days after Democratic lawmakers made public her testimony to a House oversight panel that Pruitt had her do personal errands for him, including inquiring about b...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter says the state has reached an $8.5 million settlement with Volkswagen over allegations the German car manufacturer skirted federal emissions standards. A lawsuit filed by the state in 2016 alleged Volkswagen violated the Oklahoma Consumer Protection Act by installing software in diesel vehicles to cheat laboratory emissions and meet U.S. standards. With the systems deactivated, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times the amount of allowable nitrogen oxide. Hunter says funds from W...
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation has investigated another fish kill below a dam after an angler reported he saw dozens of dead paddlefish at a lake outside Tulsa. The Monday sighting at Fort Gibson Lake came after a fish kill last Friday below Tulsa's low-water Zink Dam, and another two weeks prior when water wasn't running at the Keystone Dam, the Tulsa World reported . Angler pressure, unseasonably hot weather and lack of water flowing below the dam during such weather may have contributed to the deaths, a...
EDMOND, Okla. (AP) — Police have arrested two men they say shot at a vehicle along a highway during a road rage incident. The Oklahoman reports that 31-year-old Dustin Meadows and 27-year-old Reese Hand were booked into the Oklahoma County jail early Tuesday on complaints of assault with a dangerous weapon. Meadows also faces a charge of firearm possession after a felony conviction. Oklahoma City police stopped two vehicles after reports of a shooting along Interstate 35. Police say they found two gunshot holes in one vehicle and a stolen s...
