It’s a been a whirlwind four years for reporters covering Donald Trump’s presidency, a time marked by a never-ending campaign of attacks on the press. The relationship between the media and the Trump White House was contentious. It stirred up mistrust and led to a disturbing rise of physical and verbal threats against journalists. Those
Continue Reading
When you’re stuck at home for a year, you’re probably going to get bored of staring at the same old couch, and those creaks and quirks are going to start to drive you nuts. Unsurprisingly, furniture and home improvement items were big sellers this holiday season, helping give retail sales a 3% boost during this
Continue Reading The Transportation Security Administration says it screened 1,128,773 people at airports nationwide on Saturday, the latest sign traveling public is not staying home for the holidays despite warnings from health officials. The new number is close to Wednesday’s pandemic record when nearly 1.2 million people flew — and represents the third-busiest day for US air
Continue Reading
The Transportation Security Administration screened 616,469 people at airport security checkpoints across the United States on Christmas Day, the agency said Saturday. That’s just 23 percent of the number of travelers who flew the same day a year ago, before the pandemic, and about half of the 1.2 million passengers who flew on Wednesday, setting
Continue Reading For months, factories in the city of Yiwu, known as China’s “Christmas town,” have been cranking out most of the tinsel, decorations and other festive ornaments now hanging on trees worldwide. But production almost stopped in mid-December, as local authorities switched off the lights. Ma Hairu, who works for a manufacturer making paper decorations for
Continue Reading
A fake Queen Elizabeth danced across TV screens on Christmas as part of a “deepfake” speech aired by a British broadcaster. The real British monarch traditionally delivers a Christmas Day speech aired around the world. But her speech on Friday at 3 p.m. was followed by a digitally-created fake of the Queen, aired on Channel
Continue Reading After air travel broke a pandemic record on Wednesday, the TSA says it screened 846,520 people at airports nationwide on Thursday. The Christmas Eve figure does not signal the end of the holiday travel rush, but rather a lull before people who left town for the Friday holiday begin coming home. TSA numbers show that
Continue Reading
The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against cryptocurrency platform Ripple, its CEO, and its chairman, for illegally selling unregistered securities worth $1.3 billion, the agency said Tuesday. The SEC said Ripple illegally marketed XRP, the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency, to retail customers. According to the complaint, Ripple’s chairman, co-founder and former CEO Christian
Continue Reading Rush Limbaugh wrapped up his final show of 2020 with an emotional outpouring of gratitude for the support he’s received during his battle with Stage 4 lung cancer. “You have no idea what you all have meant to me and my family,” the 69-year-old radio host said at the end of “The Rush Limbaugh Show,”
Continue Reading
The United Kingdom and the European Union have agreed on a trade deal, closing the book on more than four years of uncertainty over how the country would conduct business with its biggest export market following Brexit. UK companies are heaving a collective sigh of relief at retaining tariff-free trade with a market of 450
Continue Reading The contrast between President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden was a daily story in 2020 — and Wednesday was an excellent example. Trump ignored the White House press corps when he left what Wolf Blitzer called a “self-imposed bunker” in Washington and flew to Mar-a-Lago. Trump vetoed the defense spending bill, pushed election conspiracies
Continue Reading
Work-related deaths reached a 12-year high in 2019 at more than 5,300, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A worker died every 99 minutes from a work-related injury in 2019, the BLS reported this month. The number of work-related deaths has steadily increased over the last five years, and 2019 was
Continue Reading
Britain and the European Union have struck a provisional free-trade agreement that should avert New Year’s chaos for cross-border commerce.
Continue Reading December has always been one of Hollywood’s blockbuster months. Hit films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, “Avatar” and Disney’s Star Wars films have all brought in big box office numbers during the holiday season. This year will continue the trend with two of the year’s most anticipated films going toe to toe over
Continue Reading The Biden era is off to a roaring start on Wall Street, even surpassing the euphoria following President Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. The S&P 500 has surged 10% since Election Day to all-time highs. That nearly doubles the 5.5% rally during the same post-election period in 2016. The Nasdaq, lifted by high-flying tech
Continue Reading China has launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba as it steps up scrutiny of the country’s rapidly growing internet firms. The State Administration for Market Regulation, China’s top market regulator, said Thursday that it would probe alleged monopolistic behavior by Alibaba, Jack Ma’s online shopping and cloud computing giant. It gave few details but said
Continue Reading
A historic amount of packages and rising employee Covid-19 rates are causing significant backlogs at US Postal Service processing facilities before Christmas. All the shopping and shipping Americans have done in the last few weeks has inundated the system with what the USPS says is a “historic volume” of mail and packages. “The packages are
Continue Reading Visa said Wednesday it will allow customers to make payments on some adult websites owned by Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek. The allowed websites, Visa says, only host professionally produced adult studio content rather than user-generated content, which it currently bans. “Following a thorough review, Visa will reinstate acceptance privileges for MindGeek sites that offer professionally
Continue Reading
Police are asking people to be aware of package theft with an increase in online shopping this year.
Continue Reading
Nikola Motor Company’s plans to mass produce garbage trucks for Republic Services, one of the nation’s largest waste management service providers, were canceled Wednesday morning, the latest in a string of bad news for the electric truck and hydrogen cell maker. In August, the company had announced plans to produce as many as 5,000 trucks
Continue Reading