Month: December 2023

By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH Associated Press Fewer airplanes and helicopters will be flying tourists over Mount Rushmore and other national monuments and parks as new regulations take effect that are intended to protect the serenity of some of the nation’s most beloved natural areas. The air tours have pitted tour operators against visitors frustrated with the

By KANIS LEUNG Associated Press HONG KONG (AP) — One of Hong Kong’s best-known pro-democracy activists who moved to Canada to pursue her studies says she will not return to the city to meet her bail conditions. Agnes Chow has become the latest politician to flee Hong Kong under Beijing’s crackdown on dissidents. As a

By MICHAEL REZENDES and JASON DEAREN Associated Press HAILEY, Idaho (AP) — Paul Rytting listened as a woman, voice quavering, told him her story. When she was a child, her father, a former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had routinely slipped into bed with her while he was aroused, she

By PATRICK WHITTLE Associated Press AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Teachers are voicing skepticism about a Maine proposal to update science education standards to incorporate teaching about genocide, eugenics and the Holocaust. They say they have concerns about adequate teacher training and the nuanced nature of the material. The Maine Department of Education is performing the

By KELVIN CHAN AP Business Writer LONDON (AP) — Hailed as a world first, European Union artificial intelligence rules are facing a make-or-break moment as negotiators try to hammer out the final details this week — talks complicated by the sudden rise of generative AI that produces human-like work. First suggested in 2019, the EU’s

By BERNARD McGHEE Associated Press Yevgeny Prigozhin rose from being an ex-con and hot dog vendor to winning lucrative Kremlin contracts and heading a formidable mercenary army. But it all came to a sudden end when the private plane carrying him and others mysteriously exploded over Russia. Prigozhin’s Aug. 23 death put an exclamation point

By MICHAEL REZENDES and JASON DEAREN Associated Press HAILEY, Idaho (AP) — Paul Rytting had been director of the Risk Management Division at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for around 15 years when a 31-year-old church member told him that her father, a former bishop, had sexually abused her when she was

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER AND LISA MASCARO Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — As a cease-fire ticked down last week and Israel prepared to resume its round-the-clock airstrikes, Sen. Bernie Sanders and a robust group of Democratic senators had a message for their president: They were done “asking nicely” for Israel to do more to reduce civilian

By BILL BARROW Associated Press ATLANTA (AP) — Republican presidential candidates will debate Wednesday within walking distance of where George Wallace staged his “stand in the schoolhouse door” to oppose the enrollment of Black students at the University of Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. The state that propelled Wallace, a Democrat and four-term governor,

By MARK SHERMAN Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday wrestled with a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would shield members of the Sackler family who own the company from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids. The justices seemed by turns reluctant to break up an exhaustively negotiated

By The Associated Press This week’s new streaming entertainment releases include a Nicki Minaj album dropping on her birthday and  the return of Tony Shalhoub’s OCD private investigator Adrian Monk with a final case. Julia Roberts stars in the psychological thriller “Leave the World Behind” on Netflix. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a

BEIJING (AP) — The Chinese military said that an American naval ship had “illegally intruded” on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. A Chinese naval force was mobilized to track the USS Gabrielle Giffords during the

By FABIANO MAISONNAVE, TERESA DE MIGUEL and ANDRÉ PENNER Associated Press JUMA INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil (AP) — Until recently, the Juma seemed destined to disappear like countless other Amazon tribes decimated by the European invasion. In the late 1990s, the last remaining family consisted of an elderly man, Aruká, and his three daughters, Boreá, Mandeí,