President Obama says his priorities after leaving the White House are to write, spend time with his family and take some time for quiet reflection. “I’m still a citizen and I think it is important for Democrats or progressives who feel that they came out on the wrong side of this election to be able to distinguish between the normal back and forth, ebb and flow of policy,” Obama said Wednesday during his last press conference in Washington as president. Among them, the president said, are “systematic discrimination,” voter suppression, “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press” and the targeting of so-called DREAMers, or children who immigrated into the country illegally with their parents.
Pressed by Democratic senators for his views on the causes of climate change, the Trump administration’s choice to run the Environmental Protection Agency insisted at his confirmation hearing Wednesday morning that his “personal opinion” was “immaterial” to how he would do his job. Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee questioned Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt closely on his history of suing the agency he has been nominated to lead, his statements questioning mainstream climate science and his close ties to the oil and gas industries. Republicans were much friendlier, mostly lamenting the impact of regulations on fossil-fuel industry jobs, something Pruitt promised to take into account.
Months before his death, Osama bin Laden fretted about the Islamic State group's impatient, violent tactics and the fading of Al-Qaeda, documents released by the CIA Thursday showed. The latest release from the trove of documents found when Navy Seals stormed the Al-Qaeda chief's secret Pakistan compound and killed him in 2011 show bin Laden trying to keep his jihadist followers around the world aligned in his war against the United States.
Gambia's President-elect Adama Barrow will be sworn in at a ceremony in the Gambian embassy in neighbouring Senegal on Thursday, diplomatic sources and party officials said. Then we can make arrangements for him to go back to Gambia," Isatou Toure, a senior Barrow aide, told Reuters.
Ricky Gray was pronounced dead at 9:42 p.m. following a lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. Gray showed no emotion as he was walked into the execution chamber wearing blue jeans and handcuffs. Gray was condemned to death in 2006 for the murders of 9-year-old Stella Harvey and 4-year-old sister Ruby, and sentenced to life in prison for the slaying of their parents, Bryan and Kathryn Harvey.
The man accused of killing an Orlando police officer and his pregnant girlfriend said he plans to represent himself at trial, but not without some choice words for the judge. "Y'all portraying this s--t to the news people like I just went there and shot this girl when there were other guns found on the scene," Markeith Loyd told the judge in an unruly first court appearance Thursday. "A gun was pulled on me first, but y'all acting like I just went there and shot her," he said before he was ordered held without bail on charges he murdered his pregnant ex-girlfriend.
There's a Florida company specializing in used military aircraft sales, and boy have they got a deal for you: 20 jet airplanes for less than $250,000. The 20 Fouga Magister trainers are sitting in Israel just waiting for someone of modest means who wants to start his or her private air force. As reported by The Aviationist, Raptor Aviation of Port St. Lucie, FL, is handling the sale of the Magisters.
A video of a massive alligator walking through a reserve near Lakeland, Florida, had people speculating earlier this week whether it was a hoax. The video, which was uploaded Sunday to Facebook by Florida resident Kim Joiner, shows the massive reptile appearing out of a nearby bush at the Circle B Bar Reserve in Polk County and then casually walking on the reserve's Marsh Rabbit Run. Officials for the county's natural resources division said that while they appreciate the attention the nature reserve has been getting, they are also worried about the safety of visitors and wildlife.
An 18-year-old woman abducted as a newborn from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, says she still loves the only mother she has known. Manigo met with her birth parents, Craig Aiken and Shanara Mobley, last weekend in Walterboro, South Carolina, where she was found earlier this month. "I feel like I do owe them that, to give them a chance, you know, get to know them," Manigo said.
With and without an exclamation. ‘Keep America Great,’” Trump said. Trump told the Post that he didn’t intend to reveal the presumptuous plan in the interview. It’s the only reason I give it to you,” Trump said.
Italy was hit by four earthquakes in four hours Wednesday, killing one and bringing terror to snowbound mountain areas still recovering from last year's series of deadly tremors. The quakes, all measuring more than five magnitude, struck close to Amatrice, the mountain town devastated by an August earthquake that left nearly 300 people dead. The body of one victim was found under the debris of a building in the town of Castel Castagna, in the province of Teramo, local authorities said in a statement.
Rescue workers were met with an eerie silence Thursday when they reached a four-star spa hotel struck by an avalanche in a mountainous earthquake-stricken region of central Italy. Guests at the three-story Hotel Rigopiano in the central Abruzzo region alerted emergency workers of the disaster on Wednesday, following a series of quakes in the region. “Help, we’re dying of cold,” one couple wrote rescuers, according to the ANSA news agency.
Bush, who at 92 is the nation's oldest living ex-president, has been at Houston Methodist Hospital since Saturday after experiencing shortness of breath, family spokesman Jim McGrath said on Wednesday. Since then, Bush experienced an "acute respiratory problem stemming from pneumonia" and was sedated for the unspecified procedure, his office said.
By Elaine Lies and Megumi Lim TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese hotelier's denial of a 1937 massacre by Japanese troops in the Chinese city of Nanjing has prompted Chinese social media calls for a boycott of travel to Japan, threatening tourist arrivals days before the Lunar New Year holidays. The furor erupted over books by Toshio Motoya, the president of Tokyo-based hotel and real estate developer APA Group, which contain his revisionist views and are placed in every room of the company's 400-plus APA Hotels. In one, printed in English and Japanese and entitled "The Real History of Japan", he says the "Nanking Massacre story" was "impossible", blaming looting and killings on members of a branch of the Chinese military who had shed their uniforms.
Startling surveillance video posted to Twitter this week shows a woman in New York being hit by a school bus, which then runs her over. The victim was crossing a Brooklyn intersection when she was struck by a yellow mini-bus. She suffered non-life-threatening
The deep-sea sonar search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may not have found the plane but will reveal more about how land beneath the Indian Ocean formed over millions of years and where oil fields could lie. National geoscience agency Geoscience Australia will soon release detailed sonar mapping of 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) of seabed that was searched for the wreckage of the Boeing 777 that vanished with 239 passengers and crew on March 8, 2014. The unique information about plate tectonics would interest geoscientists as well as oil and gas explorers, said Australian National University marine geologist Neville Exon, who has advised Geoscience Australia on the sonar data.
An affidavit, filed with the Orange County Clerk of Courts a day after 41-year-old Markeith Loyd was arrested in an abandoned home, shows authorities want to make sure he remains in custody, as is customary for a fugitive facing murder charges. Loyd was arrested Tuesday night after a manhunt that lasted more than a week. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Clayton's husband.
From hugs to handshakes and massages, check out the best moments of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s epic bromance.
Protests erupted both outside and inside a city council meeting in suburban Boston Wednesday night as local officials heard public comments about how police there has treated undocumented immigrants. People gathered outside of city hall with picket signs demonstrating against the prospect of the tony Massachusetts town of Newton becoming a so-called sanctuary city, where the local law enforcement does not coordinate with federal authorities to deport illegal immigrants. Some of the protesters in and outside of city hall could be seen holding signs that read "NO SANCTUARY CITY" as well as American flags.
Animal rights activists Wednesday demanded the closure of an Indonesian zoo after skeletal sun bears were pictured begging for food from visitors and eating their own dung. The bears at the zoo in the city of Bandung were shown waving their arms in the air inside their enclosure -- with their ribs visible through their fur -- as people hurled food at them. Bandung zoo came under fire last year after the death of a critically endangered Sumatran elephant.
Just this week the New York Times documented precisely how a recent graduate of Davidson College made $22,000 off a single fake news story about ballots for Hillary Clinton being discovered in an Ohio warehouse. The most notable current fake news target in the developed world happens to be Germany.
Back in 2015, the U.S. Army partnered with with Mallory Aeronautics with the hope of building a hoverbike, a rectangular prop-powered flying device that could someday theoretically carry both supplies and troops. You'll note that, despite the JTARV's elongated shape that would definitely accommodate a human rider, officials make no mention of that use-case, preferring instead to discuss it as an riderless supply drone. Of course this was coming from an independent contractor, not the Army itself.
By Antonio Denti and Valentina Consiglio PENNE, Italy (Reuters) - Eight people were found alive on Friday two days after being buried under a massive avalanche that hit a luxury mountain hotel in central Italy, a Civil Protection official said. Titti Postiglione told reporters that two of the survivors had already been pulled clear of the snow and debris which destroyed the isolated Hotel Rigopiano on Wednesday. "Finding these people gives us further hope there are other survivors," Postiglione said.
After a mutilated dog was discovered in Michigan, a local animal shelter is offering a reward of more than $11,000 in exchange for information about who would do such a thing. Baron, a Rottweiler, was found roaming the streets of downtown Detroit Tuesday with his ears, nose and tail cut off. "Baron is doing remarkably well considering his injuries," a veterinarian of the Michigan Humane Society said in a Facebook Live video.
A high-rise building in Tehran engulfed by a fire collapsed on Thursday, killing at least 30 firefighters and injuring some 75 people, state media reported. The disaster struck the Plasco building, an iconic structure in central Tehran just north of the capital’s sprawling bazaar. Iran’s state-run Press TV announced the firefighters’ deaths, without giving a source for the information.