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Traffic on key bridge from Crimea to Russia’s mainland halted amid reports of explosions and deaths

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Traffic on the key bridge connecting Crimea to Russia’s mainland has been halted amid reports of explosions.The health ministry in Russia’s Krasnodar region, which lies at the eastern end of the bridge, said two people were killed in an unspecified accident on the bridge and their daughter was injured.The governor of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, announced the closure early Monday but did not specify the reason.News reports said local residents heard explosions before dawn, but there was no confirmation. The extent of the damage was not immediately clear, but Governor Sergei Aksyonov said he expected rail traffic on the bridge to resume within several hours.The 19-kilometer (12-mile) bridge that was opened in 2018 is the main land connection between Russia and the Crimean peninsula.The bridge that spans the Kerch Strait was damaged in October by a truck bomb and required months of repairs before resuming full service. The bridge carries b...

Schools and stock market closed as Hong Kong braces for Typhoon Talim

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

HONG KONG (AP) — Schools and the stock market were closed in Hong Kong on Monday as Typhoon Talim swept south of the city. As the financial hub braced for rainy and windy weather, more than 100 people sought refuge at temporary shelters. Some government and ferry services were halted and various events were postponed. The city’s airport authority said 16 flights were canceled.The Hong Kong Observatory raised a No. 8 typhoon signal, the third-highest warning under the city’s weather system, at 12:40am on Monday. It was the first signal of its kind hoisted this year. The weather forecaster expects Talim — with maximum sustained winds reaching 140 kilometers (87 miles) per hour — to skirt within 300 kilometers (186 miles) to the south-southwest of Hong Kong on Monday morning. China’s National Meteorological Center forecast the typhoon would make landfall in the coastal regions of neighboring Guangdong province and Hainan province on Monday night before entering the Gulf of ...

Stock market today: Asian shares mostly lower after China reports weaker than expected growth in 2Q

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

BANGKOK (AP) — Asian shares were mostly lower on Monday after China reported weaker growth than forecast in the last quarter. Markets in Japan were closed for a holiday and Hong Kong’s market closed due to a typhoon. U.S. futures and crude oil prices were lower. The Shanghai Composite index dropped 1.2% to 3,199.17 after China reported its economy grew at a 6.3% annual pace in April-June. That’s better than the 4.5% expansion in the January-March quarter but well below forecasts of over 7%. The economy is expected to slow further in coming months, though investors will be expecting moves from Beijing to prop up growth.So “the data will be viewed through the lens of how it will influence the policy decisions made at the upcoming Politburo meeting in late July,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary. In Seoul, the Kospi shed 0.5% to 2,613.60, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 edged less than 0.1% lower, to 7,300.40. Bangkok’s SET was up less than...

Golf has long been about making connections. That won’t change in an LIV-PGA Tour world

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

Kerry Bowie’s daughters have dreams. Big ones. His 15-year-old wants to go to law school, maybe dabble in politics. His 12-year-old plans to be a business magnate.And while their schedules are jammed, at some point this summer Bowie plans to take them to Franklin Park in the heart of Boston, place a golf club in their hands and have them learn about a game whose influence extends far beyond fairways and greens.“There are some things people miss out on by not doing it,” Bowie says. “To be that young lady who plays golf, it changes things.”Especially in the corporate world, where the golf course — and sometimes the 19th hole, the driving range or the locker room — can open doors that shareholder meetings, business lunches, Zoom calls and cocktail mixers cannot. If Bowie needs to offer his daughters proof, he need only point to the way the tectonic plates under pro golf moved last month, when the acrimonious standoff between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf ended with a staggering deal ...

10 years since bankruptcy, Detroit’s finances are better but city workers and retirees feel burned

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

DETROIT (AP) — Mike Berent has spent more than 27 years rushing into burning houses in Detroit, pulling people to safety and ensuring his fellow firefighters get out alive.But as the 52-year-old Detroit Fire Department lieutenant approaches mandatory retirement at age 60, he says one thing is clear: He will need to keep working to make ends meet.“I’m trying to put as much money away as a I can,” said Berent, who also works in sales. “A second job affords you to have a little bit of extra.”Thousands of city employees and retirees lost big on July 18, 2013, when a state-appointed manager made Detroit the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy.A decade later, the Motor City has risen from the ashes of insolvency, with balanced budgets, revenue increases and millions of dollars socked away. But Berent and others who spent years on Detroit’s payroll say they can’t help but feel left behind.“You become a firefighter because that’s your passion and you’ll make a decent living...

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds embraces role as a key player in Republican presidential race

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — When Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds seized the spotlight from a half dozen Republican presidential contenders on Friday by signing a restrictive abortion measure into law at an event meant to showcase the candidates, she embraced her front-and-center role in the 2024 presidential election.The standing ovation she received from some 2,000 conservative Christians gathered in Des Moines only reinforced the influence she wields, not just in Iowa but increasingly on a national stage.“I could not imagine a more appropriate place to sign this bill,” Reynolds said. “Today, the most glaring injustice of all is about to be put right.”Reynolds had always been scheduled to give remarks at The Family Leadership Summit, one of many places this summer where Republican presidential candidates are expected to address Iowa’s voters, who will cast the first ballots in just six months. But the appearance morphed into a triumphant demonstration of the governor’s rising nation...

Judge in Trump documents case under the spotlight as arguments near

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

MIAMI (AP) — A month after former President Donald Trump was charged with mishandling classified documents, the judge presiding over the case is set to take on a more visible role as she weighs competing requests on a trial date and hears arguments this week on a procedural, but potentially crucial, area of the law.A pretrial conference Tuesday to discuss procedures for handling classified information will represent the first courtroom arguments in the case before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon since Trump was indicted five weeks ago. The arguments could provide insight into how Cannon intends to preside over the case while she also confronts the unresolved question of how to schedule Trump’s trial as he campaigns for president.Those issues would be closely watched in any trial involving a former president. But Cannon could face additional scrutiny in light of a much-dissected ruling she issued last year that granted the Trump team’s request for a special master to conduct ...

Fuzzy invasion of domestic rabbits has a Florida suburb hopping into a hunt for new owners

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

WILTON MANORS, Fla. (AP) — When Alicia Griggs steps outside her suburban Fort Lauderdale home, Florida’s latest invasive species comes a-hoppin’ down the street: lionhead rabbits. The bunnies, which sport an impressive flowing mane around their heads, want the food Griggs carries. But she also represents their best chance of survival and moving where this domesticated breed belongs: inside homes, away from cars, cats, hawks, Florida heat and possibly government-hired exterminators. Griggs is spearheading efforts to raise the $20,000 to $40,000 it would cost for a rescue group to capture, neuter, vaccinate, shelter and then give away the estimated 60 to 100 lionheads now populating Jenada Isles, an 81-home community in Wilton Manors. They are descendants of a group a backyard breeder illegally let loose when she moved away two years ago. “They really need to be rescued. So we’ve tried to get the city to do it, but they’re just dragging their feet,” Griggs said. “They thin...

The Vatican’s next doctrinal guardian defends the book on kissing he wrote as a young priest

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

LA PLATA, Argentina (AP) — Three decades ago, when he was a parish priest in Argentina, the man named by Pope Francis to be the Catholic Church’s new guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy wrote a short book about kissing and the sensations it evokes.Some conservative sectors in the church are using the reflections in “Heal Me with Your Mouth. The Art of Kissing” to criticize the designation of Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández to lead the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, a body once known as the Holy Office that for centuries was responsible for persecuting heretics, disciplining dissidents and enforcing sexual morality.“These are ultra-conservative sectors that deeply hate the Argentine pontiff (Francis),” Fernández, the archbishop of La Plata, a city 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of Buenos Aires, told The Associated Press.“They take a phrase from the book and say: ‘Look at the level of this theologian. How can a person who uses these expressions be the prefect of the...

GOP vs. FBI: A Republican campaign to stop a new FBI headquarters is revving up after Trump probes

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:50:51 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — When Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested recently he might stop the FBI from relocating its downtown headquarters to a new facility planned for the Washington suburbs, it was more than idle thinking about an office renovation.The nod from the Republican speaker is elevating a once-fringe proposal to upend the FBI in the aftermath of the federal indictment of Donald Trump over classified documents and the Justice Department’s prosecution of his allies, including some of the nearly 1,000 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.Moving from far-right corners into the mainstream, the emerging effort to overhaul the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is rooted in increasingly forceful conservative complaints about an overly biased FBI that they claim is being weaponized against them. “This is a pretty dramatic reversal of what the politics would have been 50 years ago,” said Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale who won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her ...