November 15, 2021 4:27 am
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) – Closing arguments have begun at Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial in the shootings of three men during street unrest in Kenosha. Each side gets 2 1/2 hours Monday to make their case to jurors before deliberations begin. Prosecutors have sought to portray Rittenhouse as the aggressor and have underscored his youth and inexperience. Rittenhouse has argued self-defense, saying he feared for his safety when he shot and killed two men and wounded a third with an AR-style semi-automatic rifle. The 18-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, faces charges ranging from intentional homicide – punishable by life in prison – to an underage weapons charge that could mean a few months in jail if convicted.
November 15, 2021 4:26 am
DALLAS (AP) – Dallas police say a woman has been arrested after punching a Southwest Airlines employee in the head during boarding for a flight out of a Dallas airport. Police say 32-year-old Arielle Jean Jackson was arrested Saturday afternoon at Love Field. Police said Jackson has been charged with aggravated assault. A Southwest Airlines spokesman says the incident happened during the boarding process for a flight from Dallas to New York’s La Guardia Airport. The airline spokesman says the employee who was hit was taken to a hospital and then released Saturday night.
November 15, 2021 4:24 am
HOUSTON (AP) – A 9-year-old Dallas has become the youngest person to die from injuries sustained during a crowd surge at the Astroworld music festival in Houston. Ezra Blount of Dallas died Sunday at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, family attorney Ben Crump said. He was placed in a medically induced coma after he suffered serious injuries in the Nov. 5 crush of fans during a performance by rapper Travis Scott. He is the 10th festival attendee to die. A lawsuit filed by his family says the child incurred severe damage to his brain, kidney, and liver after being “kicked, stepped on, and trampled, and nearly crushed to death.”
November 15, 2021 4:21 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden has signed his $1 trillion infrastructure deal into law on the White House lawn, with a smattering of Republican lawmakers on hand for what could be one of the last shows of bipartisanship ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. The president hopes to use the law to build back his popularity, which has taken a hit amid rising inflation and the inability to fully shake off the public health and economic risks from COVID-19. Biden says, “My message to the American people is: America is moving again.” He also is promising people that “your life is going to change for the better.” (Photo: AP)
November 15, 2021 4:17 am
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – A Pennsylvania judge is getting conflicting descriptions of the state’s education funding. A trial began Friday in a lawsuit designed to compel lawmakers to funnel more money to schools in lower income areas. The case’s central issue is a pattern of wide disparities in spending among the state’s 500 districts and the comparatively low percentage of K-12 education that is paid for by the state government. The trial is expected to last until January. The plaintiffs include six districts and the state conference of the NAACP. Defendants are the governor, top-ranking Republican leaders in the state House and Senate and others.
November 15, 2021 4:15 am
WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — (WPXI) – A man died after his car collided head-on with a wrong-way driver’s minivan Sunday afternoon in Westmoreland County, officials said. The crash happened just after 4:30 p.m. on Route 380, near the intersection with Route 780, in Washington Township. The two vehicles involved ended up in a wooded area off to the side of the highway. Twenty-two-year-old Zeth Reber of Washington Township, was pronounced dead at the scene, the Westmoreland County Coroner’s Office said. He was the only person in his car. Authorities said there were seven people in the van that was traveling west in the eastbound lanes of Route 380 before hitting Reber’s car. All seven individuals in the van were taken to Forbes Regional Hospital with minor injuries.
November 15, 2021 2:49 am
PITTSBURGH, Pa. (WPXI)— Dr. Amesh Adalja says not to expect COVID-19 to be completely eliminated. The Pittsburgh-based critical care and emergency medicine physician says having an “abstinence view” of COVID-19 just isn’t realistic. Dr. Adalja used this idea to write an opinion piece in the New York Daily News. Dr. Adalja says from the very early stages of COVID-19 it was clear to him that it would become an endemic virus — something we deal with every year. He says it’s really due to the virus itself. COVID-19 is a respiratory virus that spreads easily and efficiently in an animal host. Dr. Adalja says while COVID-19 won’t go away, the acute phase of the pandemic will not last forever. He says we are going to move into a position where COVID-19 is one of many viruses that causes infections, and that there will be a baseline number of cases, hospitalizations and even deaths. Adalja, a Butler native and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, has emerged as one of the most recognizable national experts on the pandemic. Since Americans first began hearing about coronavirus a year ago, Adalja has become a go-to guy for much of the national media. Now, he’s calling on the country and world to rethink mitigation measures.
November 14, 2021 8:00 am
Sam Huff, the hard-hitting Hall of Fame linebacker who helped the New York Giants reach six NFL title games from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s and later became a popular player and announcer in Washington, died Saturday. He was 87. Deborah Matthews, a lawyer for Huff’s daughter, Catherine Huff Myers, told The Associated Press that Huff died of natural causes in Winchester, Virginia. An obituary released by the Giants said Huff had been diagnosed with dementia in 2013. Huff always will be remembered as the furious middle linebacker in a 4-3 scheme developed for him by fellow Hall of Famer Tom Landry, his defensive coordinator with New York and later the architect of the Dallas Cowboys’ rise to power. Raised in West Virginia coal mining country, Huff became a two-time All-Pro in a career that spanned 1956-69, regularly crashing into the likes of Jim Brown, Jim Taylor and other bruising running backs.
November 14, 2021 7:59 am
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Sunday urged political and economic leaders to show courage and long-range vision, hours after U.N. led-climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, ended in compromise on how to combat global warming. Francis in remarks to the public in St. Peter’s Square said the “cry of the poor, united to the cry of the Earth, resounded in the last days at the United Nations COP26 summit on climate change.” “I encourage all those who have political and economic responsibilities to act immediately with courage and farsightedness,″ he said. “At the same time, I invite all persons of good will to carry out active citizenry to care for the common house,″ Francis said, referring to planet Earth. The pontiff didn’t comment on the outcome of the two weeks of U.N. talks.
November 14, 2021 7:57 am
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who holds the purse strings to much of President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package, was holding forth with reporters on its impact — the promise of more electric cars, intercity train routes, bigger airports — when a pointed question came. How would he go about building racial equity into infrastructure? The 39-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate laid out his argument that highway design can reflect racism, noting that at least $1 billion in the bill will help reconnect cities and neighborhoods that had been racially segregated or divided by road projects. “I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a Black neighborhood … that obviously reflects racism,” he said. Racial equity is an issue where Democratic priorities and Buttigieg’s future align. One of his greatest shortcomings as a White House candidate was his inability to win over Black voters. How he navigates that heading into the 2022 midterms will probably shape the fortunes of Biden’s agenda and the Democratic Party, if not his own prospects. Republicans seeking to exploit the issue pounced on Buttigieg’s words.
