House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday said she does not believe Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) should apologize for her recent suggestion that protesters should “get more confrontational” if former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is acquitted. On Saturday, Waters traveled to Brooklyn Center, Minn., to join protests in response to the police shooting of Daunte Wright last week. Speaking just a few miles from where George Floyd died last year after Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes during his arrest, Waters said she was “going to fight with all of the people who stand for justice,” and called on others to join her.
The number of Russian troops deployed in occupied Crimea near Ukraine's border has steadily increased over the past two weeks and has surpassed the size of the force that annexed the peninsula in 2014, the Pentagon said on Monday. Press secretary John Kirby declined to provide specific numbers on the growing Russian troop presence. A spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week there are about 80,000 troops now stationed along the country's border with Russia, 40,000 of them in Crimea.
At the right-wing news channel One America News Network, "there's still serious doubts about who's actually president," as OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report. OAN "has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age," The New York Times reported Sunday, and some of its "coverage has not had the full support of the staff." One OAN producer, Marty Golingan, said the network had lurched to the right since he joined in 2016.
The former employee who shot and killed eight people at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis legally bought the two rifles used in the attack despite red flag laws designed to prevent such purchases, police said. A trace of the two guns found by investigators at the scene revealed that suspect Brandon Scott Hole, 19, of Indianapolis, legally bought the rifles last July and September, officials with the Indianapolis police said Saturday. The police did not say where Hole bought what they described as “assault rifles,” citing the ongoing investigation, but said he was seen using both rifles during the shooting.
Pakistan on Monday opened negotiations with radical Islamist after they freed 11 police abducted during week-long anti-blasphemy protests against France in which four officers were killed, the interior minister said. Most main businesses, markets, shopping malls and public transport services were closed in major cities in response to a strike call by the Tehrik-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) and its affiliated groups. Pakistan's PSX 100 stock exchange opened 500 points down in the morning though recovered later in the day.
Indian capital Delhi has announced a week-long lockdown after a record spike in cases overwhelmed the city's healthcare system. Government offices and essential services, such as hospitals, pharmacies and grocers, will be open during the lockdown which starts on Monday. The city had imposed a weekend curfew but reported its highest single-day spike so far on Sunday - 24, 462 cases.
The former police chief of the Chadbourn Police Department was arrested Monday by the State Bureau of Investigation on 73 charges that include embezzlement, tampering with evidence and drug violations. William Anthony Spivey, 35, was arrested about 3:45 p.m. in Fair Bluff by SBI agents with the Coastal District Office, according to a news release. The SBI said it began looking into possible misconduct at the request of District Attorney Jon David on March 2.
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.
NASA's miniature robot helicopter Ingenuity performed a successful takeoff and landing on Mars early on Monday, achieving the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft over the surface of another planet, the U.S. space agency said. "I don't think I can ever stop watching it over and over again," Aung said of the video, noting scheduled upcoming flights will push Ingenuity to its limit, by going faster, farther and against the wind.
India is currently vaccinating health workers, front line workers and people over 45, but a number of states - including the worst-affected Maharashtra state - have reported insufficient supply. There have been reports of people being turned away from vaccination centres in many areas. How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave Vaccine suppliers such as the Serum Institute of India have been unable to meet international requirements and have also warned of raw material shortages affecting production.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is predicting a major surge in CO2 emissions from energy this year, as the world rebounds from the pandemic. The use of coal in Asia is expected to be key: the IEA says it will push global demand up by 4.5%, taking it close to the global peak seen in 2014. The empty roads, high streets and airports that marked the global response to coronavirus saw the biggest fall in demand for energy since World War Two.
The White House has warned Russia that “there will be consequences” if Alexei Navalny, a Putin critic, dies in prison, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday. This comes after President Joe Biden gave a speech on Thursday about Russia where he failed to mention the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, which angered critics. John Kerry has also apologised for former President Donald Trump's “non-leadership” on the effort to address the climate crisis during his four years as US leader.
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.
Scientists say a "forgotten" coffee plant that can grow in warmer conditions could help future-proof the drink against climate change. To find a wild coffee that tastes great and is heat and drought tolerant is "the holy grail of coffee breeding", said Dr Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. "Being somebody who's tasted a lot of wild coffees they're not great, they don't taste like Arabica so our expectations were pretty low," he told BBC News.
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.
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.
To prevent these further outages, we need increased energy transmission so infrastructure is in place when regional conditions require grid operators to import supply from other regions. The Missouri-approved Grain Belt Express high voltage direct current transmission line will provide this infrastructure. Because the 4,000-megawatt transmission line connects three regional power markets — the Southwest Power Pool, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and PJM Interconnection — the line will play a key role in avoiding future weather-related grid disruptions when its construction is complete.
A 36-year-old climber stood in front of a nearly 5,000-feet-tall rock formation looking to create a new route up when he made a regretful mistake. Richard Gilbert, a climber from Colorado Springs, was in Moab, Utah, in March, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette. When Gilbert was visiting in March, he created climbing routes by adding bolts to Sunshine Slabs.
Ahead of the verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Facebook is beefing up content moderation standards. Among those new standards, Facebook "will remove content that praises, celebrates or mocks George Floyd's death," the company said in a blog post on Monday. Floyd died during an interaction with police in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
The 7-year-old girl killed Sunday afternoon while with her father in a McDonald's drive-thru was a first grade student who attended a Chicago public school in Humboldt Park and Chicago detectives are investigating her fatal shooting as possibly targeting her father, according to police. Jaslyn Adams, 7, was shot six times Sunday as she and her father waited in a drive-thru line at the McDonald's, 3200 W. Roosevelt Road in the Homan Square neighborhood on the West Side, a preliminary police report states. A responding police officer took the gravely injured child in a squad car and rushed her to Stroger Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 4:39 p.m. Her father, 29, with whom she had been in an Infiniti sedan in the drive-thru lane at the time of the shooting, was shot once in the lower back, the report states.
A former employee filed a lawsuit against a North Carolina car dealership over racist treatment. Lance Blair said black employees were the subjects of "hostile racial harassment" from 2014 to 2020. Blair quit in 2020 after his health declined due to the harassment, the complaint said.
The campaign arm of the Republicans in the House of Representatives is putting pressure on their Democratic colleagues to return donations from New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The National Republican Congressional Committee launched a website on Monday called “Socialist Give Back”, listing 26 House Democrats who have received funds from Ms Ocasio-Cortez. The new NRCC site comes after Politico reported earlier this month that the New York Democrat donated $5,000 to a number of her House colleagues in an effort to help keep the House majority in the upcoming 2022 midterms.
The excavator driver who helped free the Ever Given ought to have been paid, Suez Canal bosses said. Abdullah Abdul-Gawad, a subcontractor, earlier told Insider he was still waiting for overtime money. The Suez Canal Authority said it paid, though Insider couldn't reach Abdul-Gawad's direct employer.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears via video link for a court hearing, in which it was directed that he remain imprisoned, in Moscow on Jan. 28, 2021. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition figure and Kremlin antagonist, has been moved into a prison hospital, Russia's state penitentiary service (FSIN) said on Monday, after doctors warned he was in extremely poor health and could have only days to live. “There is nothing positive about this transfer – it is a ploy by the Kremlin to convince Russians that everything is okay,” Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian democracy activist and chair of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation For Freedom, said.
Concord Police confirmed the same vehicle was used in a similar incident targeting women in Oakley earlier in the day. They ask anyone with additional information to reach out.
“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.”