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.
November 14, 2021 7:55 am
NEW DELHI (AP) — Sky obscured by thick, gray smog. Monuments and high-rise buildings swallowed by a blanket of haze. People struggling to breathe. In the Indian capital, it is that time of the year again. The city’s air quality index fell into the “very poor” category on Sunday, according to SAFAR, India’s main environmental monitoring agency, and in many areas levels of the deadly particulate matter reached around six times the global safety threshold. NASA satellite imagery also showed most of India’s northern plains covered by thick haze. Among the many Indian cities gasping for breath, New Delhi tops the list every year. The crisis deepens particularly in the winter when the burning of crop residues in neighboring states coincides with cooler temperatures that trap deadly smoke. That smoke travels to New Delhi, leading to a surge in pollution in the city of more than 20 million people and exacerbating what is already a public health crisis. The New Delhi government on Saturday ordered the closing of schools for a week and construction sites for four days beginning Monday. Government offices were also told to shift to work from home for a week to reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
November 14, 2021 4:27 am
BEAVER FALLS, Pa. (WPXI) — There are dozens of ducks and chickens roaming free at Kindred Spirits Rescue Ranch. The animals are doing fine according to officials, but that was not the case when the 50 chickens and nine ducks were first found. Three animals reportedly died after being caked with feces. Those animals came from a home on 13th Avenue in Beaver Falls. They all lived inside with Leah Fontanez, whose attorney says her neighbors called the cops on her and her animals. According to the criminal complaint, the chickens and ducks were defecating in their food. There were nine dogs and puppies without water and clean areas. Then there was a bearded dragon living under the same conditions. The Humane Society charged Fontanez with 139 animal cruelty and neglect charges including felonies for the dead chickens.
November 13, 2021 4:38 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – Medicare’s “Part B” outpatient premium will jump by $21.60 a month in 2022, one of the largest increases ever. Officials said Friday a new Alzheimer’s drug is responsible for about half of that. The increase guarantees that health care costs will gobble up a big chunk of the recently announced Social Security cost-of-living allowance, a boost that had worked out to $92 a month for the average retired worker. The announcement on premiums comes as Congress is considering Democratic legislation that would curb what Medicare pays for medications. The new Part B premium will be $170.10 a month.
November 13, 2021 4:36 am
MEXICO CITY (AP) – Dozens of Mexican farmers armed with rifles and shotguns have gathered in a pocket of mountain forest in southern Mexico to angrily reject a Supreme Court ruling on a decades-old land dispute. The conflict is centered on the Chimalapas, an area of tropical and pine forest that is threatened by logging and cattle ranching. For years, settlers have claimed the area belongs to Chiapas state. But this week the Supreme Court ruled that about 400,000 acres (160,000 hectares) belong to the neighboring state of Oaxaca. Farmers in the area are demanding to remain part of Chiapas and say they will resist plans to redraw boundary lines.
November 13, 2021 4:35 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House says President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping will hold their much-anticipated virtual summit on Monday evening. The leaders are looking to dial back tensions after a rough start to the U.S.-China relationship since Biden took office earlier this year. The White House is setting low expectations for the video call between the leaders. Biden is expected to stress that the two nations need to set guardrails in areas of deepening tension in the increasingly complicated U.S.-China relationship. White House officials said that no major announcements are expected to come from the meeting.
