|
July 27, 2016 at 3:34 pm
Washington - The ALS Association is crediting money raised through the Ice Bucket Challenge for the discovery of a gene’s connection to the progressive disease.
Those who accepted the challenge allowed buckets of ice water to be dumped on their heads to raise awareness and money for ALS.
The challenge became a viral sensation in 2014 and raised $115 million for the association. Figures from the ALS Association show $1 million of that helped fund a global effort to help find genetic drivers of the condition called Project MinE.
The ALS Association says a paper published this week in the journal Nature Genetics reveals Project MinE researchers have identified the NEK1 gene’s connection to ALS. It says understanding the gene’s role will help in developing new targ...
|
July 27, 2016 at 3:32 pm
Paris - More horrifying details emerged Wednesday about an attack on a French village church even as the country’s main religious leaders sent a message of unity and solidarity after meeting with President Francois Hollande in Paris.
Two attackers took five hostages Tuesday at the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in northwest France and slit the throat of the elderly priest saying morning Mass. One of three nuns at the Mass slipped out to raise the alarm and both attackers, one of them a local man, were then killed by police outside the church.
Emotions in France are still raw after the July 14 Bastille Day attack in Nice that killed 84 people — and only became more frazzled Tuesday when the church in Normandy was attacked. With the attack threat for the country r...
|
July 27, 2016 at 3:26 pm
Berlin - The online magazine of the Islamic State group has described how a 27-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker who blew himself up at a bar in the southern German town of Ansbach spent months planning the attack, once even hiding his home-made bomb in his room moments before a police raid.
The weekly Al-Nabaa magazine’s report, published late Tuesday, added that Mohammad Daleel had fought both in Iraq and Syria with a branch of al-Qaida and the IS group before arriving in Germany as an asylum-seeker two years ago.
Daleel died and 15 people were wounded when the bomb exploded in a wine bar Sunday night after he wasn’t allowed entry to a nearby open-air concert because he didn’t have a ticket.
The Ansbach attack was the last one of four attacks in the countr...
|
July 27, 2016 at 3:24 pm
Miami, FL - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took a shot Wednesday at Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Democratic U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, for doing a terrible job as governor of New Jersey.
The problem, of course, is that Kaine was governor of Virginia.
“Her running mate, Tim Kaine, who by the way, did a terrible job in New Jersey,” Trump said at a news conference in Miami. “He was not very popular in New Jersey, and he still isn’t.”
Trump might have confused Kaine with former Republican New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, pronounced the same as Kaine. Kean led the state from 1982 to 1990 while Trump was building his casino empire in Atlantic City.
New Jersey also might have been on Trump’s mind because its current governor, Republican Ch...
|
July 27, 2016 at 3:21 pm
Washington - After terrorism fears permeated Republican speeches a week ago, Democrats have barely mentioned the Islamic State group through two days of their convention.
That is perhaps a result of the militant group’s emergence from a localized, Middle East insurgency to a self-proclaimed caliphate and worldwide terrorism threat during President Barack Obama’s time in office. It also reflects a Republican strategy to blame Obama — and, by extension, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — for allowing the Islamic State group to expand.
“After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have?” Republican nominee Donald Trump said at his party’s convention. “ISIS has spread across the region, and the entire world.”
Clinton served...
|
July 27, 2016 at 12:44 pm
During a morning news conference, Donald Trump came out swinging against the prosecutor who charged six officers involved in Freddie Gray‘s death. Gray suffered injuries while in a Baltimore Police transport van before falling into a coma and dying.
On Wednesday, in a surprise move, the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office announced that all of the remaining charges against the police officers would be dropped. This came after three officers were acquitted and a fourth officer’s trial ended in hung jury last year. Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby has come under fire for her handling of the cases, with one law professor even filing complaints demanding her disbarment.
When asked at a news conference Wednesday about the case, Trum...
|
July 27, 2016 at 12:31 pm
Roanoke, VA - Donald Trump was in the middle of creating another nickname for Democratic rival Hillary Clinton - “Hillary Rotten Clinton!” - when he suddenly thought of his mild-mannered vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence.
“You think Mike Pence would say this?” he smiled to the audience in Roanoke, Virginia. “What a high-quality person.”
On their first campaign swing together this week, Trump and Pence are giving voters an initial look at their odd-couple pairing as they prepare to battle against Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine, the Virginia governor, in the Nov. 8 presidential election.
Their public routine is a work in progress, but it’s clear that they’ve learned from their first joint appearance, a sometimes awkw...
|
July 27, 2016 at 12:28 pm
Philadelphia - President Barack Obama says Republican Donald Trump “is somebody who likes attention and maybe surprised himself that he got this far.”
Obama tells NBC’s “Today Show” that Trump “doesn’t seem to have any plans or policies or proposals or specific solutions.”
The president made the comments in a taped interview aired Wednesday.
Asked about Trump’s remarks that he alone could fix the country’s problems, Obama said: “That’s not how our founders designed our system. We’re not a government where some strong man orders people around and banishes enemies.”
|
July 27, 2016 at 12:24 pm
New York - Bill O’Reilly says the slaves who helped build the White House “were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.”
The Fox News commentator was responding to first lady Michelle Obama’s remarks in her speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, when she praised social progress in the United States.
“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” Mrs. Obama said. “And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
O’Reilly said on his show Tuesday that “Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well.”
O’Reill...
|
July 27, 2016 at 12:21 pm
Miami, Fl - Donald Trump has a message for Russia: find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
The Republican presidential nominee, holding a Wednesday press conference, said that the 30,000 missing emails from Clinton’s private email server would reveal “some beauties” and made an extraordinary plea for a foreign power to locate them.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press!”
Trump, whom Democrats have accused of having cozy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, repeatedly declined to condemn the actions of Russia or any other foreign power of trying to intervene in the a U.S. election.
“No,...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:38 am
Baltimore, MD -Prosecutors dropped the remaining charges Wednesday against three Baltimore police officers awaiting trial in the death of Freddie Gray, bringing an end to the case without a conviction.
Gray was a black man whose neck was broken while he was handcuffed and shackled but left unrestrained in the back of a police van in April 2015. His death added fuel to the growing Black Lives Matter movement and caused turmoil in Baltimore, including large protests and the worst riots the city had seen in decades.
The decision by prosecutors comes after a judge had already acquitted three of the six officers charged in the case, including the van driver who the state considered the most responsible and another officer who was the highest-ranking of the group.
A fourth officer ha...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:28 am
Washington - The man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan will be allowed to leave a Washington mental hospital and live full-time in Virginia, a judge has ruled.
John Hinckley Jr. is ready to live in the community, Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled Wednesday, granting him full time convalescent leave that shall begin no sooner than Aug. 5. Friedman’s ruling comes more than 35 years after the March 30, 1981, shooting outside a Washington hotel in which Reagan and three others were injured.
Doctors have said for many years that the now 61-year-old Hinckley, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the shooting, is no longer plagued by the mental illness that drove him to shoot Reagan in an effort to impress actress Jodie Foster.
Hinckley’s release...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:25 am
West Bank - Israeli forces tracked down a group of suspects behind the deadly ambush of a family car in the West Bank earlier this month and killed the man who pulled the trigger in that attack in a shootout early on Wednesday, the military said.
The July 1 attack killed Miki Mark, a 48-year-old father of 10 children, and wounded his wife and two teenage children. The military subsequently sent hundreds of troops to the area of the attack to search for the perpetrators in what was the largest operation in the territory in two years. Israel also vowed to take unprecedented steps to capture the killers.
On Wednesday, the military said that after almost a month of pursuing the perpetrators, troops closed in on the Hamas cell behind the ambush. It said troops surrounded a house nea...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:23 am
Paris - President Francois Hollande displayed interfaith solidarity with France’s religious leaders on Wednesday after two Islamist militants killed a Roman Catholic priest in a church, igniting fierce political criticism of the government’s security record.
One of the assailants was a known would-be jihadist awaiting trial under supposedly tight surveillance, a revelation that raised pressure over the Socialist government’s response to a wave of attacks claimed by Islamic State since early in 2015.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into the politics of Daech (Islamic State), which wants to set the children of the same family against each other,” the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, told journalists after the meeting at...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:21 am
Moscow - The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed allegations Russia had hacked Democratic Party emails as “horror stories” dreamt up by U.S. politicians, saying it never interfered in other countries’ election campaigns.
“Moscow is at pains to avoid any words that could be interpreted as direct or indirect interference in the election process,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters.
“... We see that the Russian card is in the red corner on the writing table of all Washington politicians during the election campaign, and that very often they make it a trump card in their game.”
Peskov was responding after U.S. President Barack Obama in an interview with NBC News said it was possible Russia would try to influenc...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:18 am
Riyadh - Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry is distancing itself from a recent visit to Israel by a number of Saudi citizens, including an outspoken former military general.
The Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper quotes on Wednesday an unnamed ministry official as saying the rare public engagement “does not reflect the views of the Saudi government.”
The official referred to Israel as “the occupied territories.”
Saudi Arabia and Israel have no official relations and the kingdom prohibits its citizens from traveling to Israel. It also does not grant visas to Israelis.
However, Saudi government permission was likely necessary for Anwar Eshki and the delegation of Saudi academics and businessmen to make the visit.
While in Jerusalem, Eshki met with a senior...
|
July 27, 2016 at 10:16 am
New York - The fallout from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) WikiLeaks’ e-mail scandal continues, with the revelation that DNC staff members did not want to issue a statement of remembrance for Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which fell this year on the evening of May 4, ending on May 5, the Daily Caller reports (http://bit.ly/2awHCNU). “We need to do a statement from the DNC. Is there a reason we haven’t?” emailed Florida Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the former DNC Chairwoman, to two Congressional employees and two DNC staffers with the subject heading, “Yom Ha’Shoah Statement.”
DNC Senior Communications Director Ryan Banfill forwarded Wasserman-Schultz’s request to DNC employee Kate Houg...
|
July 27, 2016 at 9:59 am
Prosecutors have have dropped the charges against three remaining officers in Freddie Gray related trials: Officers Miller, Porter and White. More streaming on 1090 AM and streaming here.
9:20 a,.m.
Officer Garrett Miller has arrived at Courthouse East for a motions hearing on his trial related to the death of Freddie Gray.
Miller and his attorney arrived at the courthouse at around 9:15 this morning.
This is a very unique hearing, known as a Kastigar Hearing, named for a 1972 Supreme Court case.
It centers on Officer Garrett Miller’s testimony at the trial of Officer Edward Nero in May, in which Miller testified, he was the only officer to arrest Freddie Gray.
Under an immunity agreement, none of this testimony can be used in Miller’s trial, there ...
|
July 27, 2016 at 7:37 am
Israeli security forces capture three accomplices who helped Mohammed Fakih carry out the shooting attack in southern Mount Hebron that claimed Mark's life and left his wife and two of his children wounded.
The terrorist who murdered Rabbi Michael "Miki" Mark in a drive-by shooting earlier this month was killed in an IDF raid in the Hebron area overnight Tuesday, it was cleared for publication early Wednesday morning.
Mohammed Jabarah al-Fakih, a 29-year-old Hamas operative from Dura, barricaded himself in a house in the village of Surif in the Hebron area, ignoring calls by forces from the IDF's elite Duvdevan unit and Israel Police's counterterrorism unit Yamam to surrender.
After a firefight, the IDF troops fired and anti-tank missile and several other...
|
July 27, 2016 at 7:24 am
5:00 a.m.
It is back to court today for one of the officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray.
Today's hearing for Officer Garrett Miller is precedent setting.
Garrett Miller is believed to be the first defendant in Maryland history to testify for the state at the trial of a co-defendant, and then go on trial himself.
In May, Miller testified at the trial of Officer Edward Nero that it was he and no other officer who actually arrested Freddie Gray.
Under a 1972 decision by the Supreme Court (Kastigar v. U.S.) none of that testimony can be used at Miller's trial, and so today a hearing will be held to make sure prosecutors don't use any of Miller's testimony or evidence coming from it at his trial.
This hearing is called a Kastigar hearing, named a...
