Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that the "horrifying" spate of mass shootings in the U.S. shows why gun violence is a public health issue. "As a public health person, I think you can't run away from that," Fauci said on CNN's "State of the Union" when host Dana Bash asked if gun violence is a "public health emergency." "I mean, in this last month, it's just been horrifying," replied Fauci, the U.S. government's foremost infectious disease expert.
The judge in the Chauvin trial stated Monday that inflammatory remarks by Representative Maxine Waters could lead to the trial being “overturned” on appeal. Waters had called for demonstrators to “get more confrontational” and protest in the streets if no guilty verdict was reached in the case. Waters delivered the comments over the weekend ahead of closing arguments in the high-profile case against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who's been charged with the murder of George Floyd.
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called for more equitable management of global affairs and, in an implicit rejection of U.S. dominance, said governments shouldn't impose rules on others. Xi's speech at an economic forum comes amid rising tension with China's neighbors and Washington over its strategic ambitions and demands for a bigger role in making trade and other rules. Without mentioning the United States, Xi criticized “unilateralism of individual countries” and warned against decoupling, a reference to fears U.S.-Chinese tension over technology and security will split industries and markets into separate, less productive spheres with incompatible standards.
At a ceremony Monday commemorating the 26th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department is "pouring its resources into stopping domestic violent extremists before they can attack, prosecuting those who do, and battling the spread of the kind of hate that leads to tragedies like the one we mark here today." The bombing targeted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day care center. Domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the bombing in 1997 and executed in 2001.
An incident report lists Officer Eric Stillman as the victim in an officer-involved shooting that left 13-year-old Adam Toledo dead. A law enforcement expert told Insider that doing so is an "old cop trick" meant to shift culpability from the police. It's "meant to muddy the murky waters," often used in "the aftermath of what we cops call a 'bad shoot,'" he said.
Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are presenting top House Republicans with a test of how to handle a new breed of Trump-era, social media-savvy firebrands. Gaetz, a third-term Floridian, and Greene, a Georgia freshman, have attracted more public attention lately than most junior members of Congress. Much of it hasn't been positive.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Monday he was prepared to send his military ships in the South China Sea to "stake a claim" over oil and mineral resources in the disputed part of the strategic waterway. With some critics complaining Duterte had gone soft by refusing to push Beijing to comply with an arbitration ruling, he said the public can be assured he would assert the country's claims to resources like oil and minerals in the South China Sea. Duterte has sought to build an alliance with China and has been reluctant to confront its leadership, having been promised billions of dollars of loans and investments, much of which have yet to materialise, frustrating nationalists.
India is reeling under a severe second wave of Covid-19 and many states are struggling to cope with the rising numbers. Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, is among the worst affected in the country and its people are suffering even as authorities insist the situation is under control, reports the BBC's Geeta Pandey. Kanwal Jeet Singh's 58-year-old father Niranjan Pal Singh died on Friday in an ambulance while being ferried from one hospital to another.
Thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo dropped the gun he'd been holding, turned and began raising his hands just as the officer had commanded. The graphic video that became the latest tragic touchstone in the nation's reckoning with race and policing puts a microscope on those split-second decisions with far-reaching and grave consequences. Investigators are still sorting through exactly what happened, but the shooting has raised difficult questions about why the boy wasn't given more time to comply, and whether the deadly encounter could have been prevented in the first place.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy plans to introduce his own resolution to censure Maxine Waters. McCarthy announced his decision after Marjorie Taylor Greene said she wanted to "expel" Waters for "inciting Black Lives Matter terrorism." Waters has maintained that she did not encourage violence when she spoke to protesters near Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis.
Southeast Asian countries will discuss the crisis in Myanmar at a summit in Jakarta on Saturday, the ASEAN bloc's secretariat said on Tuesday, but Thailand's prime minister said several will be represented only by their foreign ministers. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said he would not be attending and that Thailand would be represented by Deputy Prime Minister Don Pramudwinai, who is also foreign minister. "Some other countries will also send their foreign ministers," Prayuth, a former army chief who led a coup in Thailand in 2014, told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting.
Officials in Indianapolis have released the names of the eight people who were killed when a gunman opened fire at a FedEx warehouse on Thursday night. Among the victims were four members of the local Sikh community - including a mother, a father and two grandmothers. Other victims include two 19-year-olds, a university graduate and a father.
A state House committee report released Monday called for a new Missouri lawmaker's ouster over allegations that he physically and sexually abused his children years ago. The Missouri House Ethics Committee found the claims against Lee's Summit Republican Rep. Rick Roeber credible, according to the report. Several of his children told investigators that he also frequently beat them with a belt, choked them and once drowned a litter of puppies.
Derek Chauvin's defense cited comments from US Rep. Maxine Waters in a motion for a mistrial. Over the weekend, Waters called on protesters to stay on the streets if there's no guilty verdict. Judge Peter Cahill denied the motion but said Waters may have given the defense a successful appeal.
Israel has registered eight cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in India and believes that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is at least partially effective against it, an Israeli health official said on Tuesday. An initial seven cases of the Indian variant were detected in Israel last week among people arriving from abroad and who have since undergone preliminary testing, the Health Ministry said. "The impression is that the Pfizer vaccine has efficacy against it, albeit a reduced efficacy," the ministry's director-general, Hezi Levy, told Kan public radio, saying the number of cases of the variant in Israel now stood at eight.
Two men were killed after a Tesla car crashed into a tree and caught fire in Texas, and police believe there was nobody present in the driver's seat at the time of the accident. The 2019 Tesla Model S was travelling at a high speed when it failed to negotiate a curve on a winding road. The victims, both in their 50s, were found in the front passenger seat and in the back of the vehicle.
Defense lawyers insisted Ghislaine Maxwell is “no monster” as they asked an appeals court Monday for her release on bail so she can better prepare for trial on charges she procured girls for Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse. The lawyers told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the British socialite has not been given an adequate opportunity to prove that she would not flee if she was allowed to await trial at home under 24-hour armed guard and with collateral posted to support a $28.5 million bail. The attorneys have thrice failed to convince a Manhattan federal judge to release their 59-year-old client.
Two men died after a Tesla vehicle, which was believed to be operating without anyone in the driver's seat, crashed into a tree on Saturday night north of Houston, authorities said.
Russia announced on Monday the expulsion of at least 20 Czech diplomats in a furious response to the gutting of Moscow's most critical intelligence station in central Europe over the weekend, when Czech authorities accused Russian intelligence of being behind two blasts at an ammunition storage facility in 2014. Czechia has accused a notorious Russian intelligence unit implicated in multiple operations across Europe and the UK of conducting two operations in 2014 that led to explosions at a munitions factory in 2014. At the time, the ammunition was said to be headed for Russia's rivals in Ukraine.
Florida Highway Patrol want the public's help in restoring the latter. On Monday, FHP released a postmortem artist's reconstruction from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office of the Black man, who is around five-eight and 145 pounds. The crash report says a witness saw the unidentified man jumped in front of a 2019 Ford Mustang around 9:30 p.m. Jan. 24 at about 17015 Okeechobee Road, U.S. 27.
Thai health authorities on Tuesday assured the public there were sufficient hospital beds for the rising number of coronavirus patients, amid a new wave of infections this month that has spread fast across the country. Thailand's policy of hospitalising all those who test positive for COVID-19, even those without symptoms, has prompted concern about its capacity in the event of a surge in the number of patients with severe symptoms. Authorities reported 1,443 new coronavirus cases and 4 new deaths on Tuesday, bringing total infections to 45,185 with 108 fatalities overall.
The government is compensating farmers, but Mr Chuang says a lot of landowners take the subsidies instead, and farmers can't object for fear they will not be able to lease the land. Even if they get the money, they risk hurting their brand and losing clientele they've worked hard to build by not growing their products. He points out the government has been encouraging young people to go into farming as Taiwan's farmers are ageing, but young farmers are now left with no way to farm after they've invested in equipment and land.
To the prosecution, the witnesses who watched George Floyd 's body go still were regular people — a firefighter, a mixed martial arts fighter, a high school student and her 9-year-old cousin in a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Love” — going about their daily lives when they happened upon the ghastly scene of an officer kneeling on a man's neck. “Normal folks, the bystanders,” prosecutor Jerry Blackwell called them in his opening statement. “You're going to see these bystanders, a veritable bouquet of humanity.”
Olympian Sakura Kokumai said she was verbally harassed and called racial slurs in April. Now, weeks later, authorities say they arrested her harasser after he attacked a senior couple on Sunday. According to authorities, Michael Vivona, 25, punched a 79-year-old man and his 80-year-old wife, knocking them to the ground while they were walking in a park in Orange, California, about 40 miles from Los Angeles.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Putin was murdering Alexei Navalny in "front of the world." The Putin critic was transferred to another penal-colony infirmary on Monday. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont did not mince words as he backed growing calls for the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to receive proper medical treatment.
“High-speed rail is bold and attention-grabbing, but the scale of the project makes it near impossible.”
“While a long, slow train ride across the country can be a great thing, the US needs real high-speed rail too.”
“Liberals are right that America has a car problem — but it's commutes, not road trips, that suck.”
“Investments into a high-speed rail system wouldn’t just improve the railroads — automobile traffic could also see some relief.”
“Big cities that are reasonably close together is pretty much a prerequisite for high-speed rail.”