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US childhood vaccination exemptions reach their highest level ever

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

By MIKE STOBBE (AP Medical Writer)NEW YORK (AP) — The proportion of U.S. kindergartners exempted from school vaccination requirements has hit its highest level ever, 3%, U.S. health officials said Thursday.More parents are questioning routine childhood vaccinations that they used to automatically accept, an effect of the political schism that emerged during the pandemic around COVID-19 vaccines, experts say.Even though more kids were given exemptions, the national vaccination rate held steady: 93% of kindergarteners got their required shots for the 2022-2023 school year, the same as the year before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Thursday. The rate was 95% in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.“The bad news is that it’s gone down since the pandemic and still hasn’t rebounded,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a University of Colorado pediatric infectious diseases specialist. “The good news is that the vast majority...

Donald Trump’s lawyers ask ‘directed verdict’ ending civil fraud trial in the ex-president’s favor

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and JENNIFER PELTZ (Associated Press)NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s lawyers made a longshot bid Thursday to put an immediate end to the New York civil fraud trial that threatens his real estate empire, arguing that state lawyers had failed to prove that the former president intended to dupe banks, insurers and others by inflating his wealth on financial statements.Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Arthur Engoron to clear the 2024 Republican front-runner, his namesake company and other defendants of wrongdoing at the halfway point in the trial of state Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit.“There’s no victim. There’s no complainant. There’s no injury. All of that is established now by the evidence,” Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said. He argued that state lawyers had failed to meet “any legal standard” to prove allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.State lawyer Kevin...

‘The monsters and opioids had her.’ N.S. minister describes daughter’s addiction

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

HALIFAX — The scourge that is Canada’s opioid addiction crisis was laid bare in the Nova Scotia legislature this week as politicians of every stripe rose to share personal stories about their struggles with this notorious class of drugs.As members of the house of assembly prepared late Wednesday to vote on a bill aimed at holding opioid manufacturers more accountable for their actions, Progressive Conservative John White described how he became addicted to opioid painkillers in 2005 after he was struck by a drunk driver.“I was in my own world,” he told a hushed legislature. “I’d rub my face, and it felt like somebody else’s face. Nothing around me mattered to me.” The member for Glace Bay-Dominion, a hardscrabble riding in eastern Cape Breton, recalled the moment he told his doctor he wanted to end his drug dependence.“I remember lying in bed in a fetal position, and I didn’t know if I was going to see the morning,” he said...

Emhoff visits New York’s Cornell University as he seeks to reassure Jewish community after threats

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, met with students and administrators at Cornell University on Thursday to offer support to the school’s Jewish community after threats of violence amid Israel’s war against Hamas.Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a nationally elected U.S. leader, met with the university president, chief of police and other administrators, and hosted a roundtable with Jewish students in the same kosher dining hall that was forced to closed due to the threats.A Cornell junior was a arrested last month for allegedly leaving threatening messages on a Greek life website unaffiliated with the school in Ithaca, New York. They included posts calling for the deaths of Jewish people and threatening to “shoot up 104 west,” a university dining hall that caters predominantly to kosher diets and is next to the Cornell Jewish Center. The White House said students shared with Emhoff “their personal experiences and reactions to the threats ...

Bo Hines, who lost a close 2022 election in North Carolina, announces another Congress run

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

MOCKSVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina congressional candidate who narrowly lost in the state’s only U.S. House swing district in 2022 is running in 2024 for a seat in another part of the state. Republican Bo Hines on Thursday filed candidacy papers with federal elections officials and released a video for his bid in the 6th Congressional District. The district covers all or part of a half-dozen Piedmont-area counties, including portions of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Concord. The 6th District is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning, but a redistricting map enacted last month by the GOP-controlled General Assembly retooled its lines so that the district now leans Republican, according to past election results.Hines, 28, ran in the current Raleigh-area 13th District in 2022, but lost in the general election to Democrat Wiley Nickel by 3 percentage points. Hines, a business owner who grew up in Charlotte, played college football and went to Wake Forest Univ...

Powell reinforces Fed’s cautious approach toward further interest rate hikes

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell suggested Thursday that the Fed is in no hurry to further raise its benchmark interest rate, given evidence that inflation pressures are continuing to ease at a gradual pace. At the same time, in a panel discussion at the International Monetary Fund, Powell did not rule out another rate hike to help reduce inflation to the Fed’s 2% target level. “We are not confident,” he said, that the Fed’s benchmark rate is high enough to steadily reduce inflation to its 2% target.Powell added: “We know that ongoing progress toward our 2% goal is not assured. Inflation has given us a few head fakes.”He noted, for example, that inflation had declined for five straight months during 2021 before reversing later that year and heading higher.Powell said that “if it becomes appropriate” to raise rates further, “we will not hesitate to do so” but said that for now it isn’t ”appropriate” to increase the Fed’s benchmark ra...

123 migrants found trapped in a trailer in central Mexico

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Authorities found 123 Central and South American migrants trapped in a trailer in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico’s immigration agency said Thursday. Officials from the state attorney general’s office found the migrants in Matehuala, a city on the border of Nuevo Leon, on Wednesday after a local reported hearing cries for help from a locked trailer box.The majority of migrants rescued were from the Central American nations of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as four from Ecuador and one Cuban, according to Mexico’s National Immigration Institute. Among them were 34 children.The immigration agency did not say how the migrants came to be stuck there nor where they were heading, but such groups of migrants typically hope to reach the United States.The same day police in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas arrested three alleged human smugglers after finding 11 Guatemalan migrants trapped i...

Shohei Ohtani is donating 60,000 baseball gloves to Japanese schoolchildren

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Two-way star and coveted free agent Shohei Ohtani is donating about 60,000 baseball gloves to Japanese elementary schools.Ohtani, a free agent who has spent the past six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, announced Wednesday on Instagram that he’s donating the youth gloves to schools throughout Japan.“I’m happy to announce that I will be donating approximately 60,000 youth gloves to every elementary school in Japan,” Ohtani said. “That comes out to around 20,000 elementary schools. I’m hoping the kids can spend their days happily with a lot of energy through baseball.”The gloves Ohtani is donating are from New Balance, one of his corporate partners.The 29-year-old Ohtani is coming off a season in which he batted .304 with 44 homers and also went 10-5 on the mound with a 3.14 ERA. He had Tommy John surgery in September for the second time in six years.___AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlbThe Associated Press

Independent inquiry launched into shipwreck off Greece that left hundreds of migrants feared dead

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s state ombudsman said Thursday that it’s launching an independent investigation into the coast guard’s handling of a maritime tragedy in June in which hundreds of migrants trying to reach Europe in an overloaded boat are feared to have drowned.The independent authority said that it took the decision following “the expressed denial” of the Greek coast guard to initiate a disciplinary investigation in response to the ombudsman’s written requests.A military court with jurisdiction over Greece’s navy and coast guard is conducting a preliminary investigation into the June 14 shipwreck, from which 104 survivors and 78 bodies were recovered.Up to 750 people were believed to have been on the rusty fishing vessel, mostly below decks, when it sharply listed and quickly sank in the night. That would make it one of the worst disasters of its kind in the Mediterranean.The court is also handling a lawsuit by 40 survivors, who accuse the ...

Man arrested after he pulls gun, fires 2 shots trying to prevent purse snatching on NYC subway

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:00:41 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — A man who pulled out a pistol and fired two shots on a New York City subway platform in an apparent attempt to stop someone from stealing a woman’s purse faces criminal charges that he endangered people in the station and possessed the gun illegally.No one was struck by the gunshots Tuesday inside the station, located a few blocks north of Times Square.Authorities said John Rote, 43, intervened when a man who had been asking riders for money near the turnstiles at around 9 p.m. tried to grab a 40-year-old woman’s purse.Security camera video captured some of what happened next. The recording, published in the New York Post shows a man in shorts and a green T-shirt standing on a train platform. The man rummages in his backpack, pulls out a handgun, fires one shot, lowers the gun, then raises it and fires a second shot.“I’ve looked at the video,” New York City Transit President Richard Davey said at a news conference Wednesday. “It’s, I would say unusual. He sort ...