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Modi to start US visit with yoga on the UN lawn, a savvy and symbolic choice for India’s leader

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — There will be plenty of time to discuss global tensions during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the U.S. this week. But he’s starting his day Wednesday by highlighting a pursuit of inner tranquility.After arriving in New York on Tuesday afternoon and holding private meetings, the leader of the world’s most populous nation kicks off his public schedule Wednesday with a group yoga session on the United Nations’ north lawn. U.N. General Assembly President Csaba Kőrösi, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed and many other diplomats and U.N. officials are expected to attend the event. It honors the International Day of Yoga, which Modi persuaded the U.N. to designate in 2014 as an annual observance. The yoga-themed U.N. visit is a savvy and symbolic choice for a premier who has made the ancient discipline both a personal practice and a diplomatic tool. First practiced by Hindu sages, yoga has now become one of India’s mo...

Democrats downplay Hunter Biden’s plea deal, while Republicans see opportunity to deflect from Trump

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Democrats, already anxious about President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, are seeking to downplay — or ignore altogether — revelations that the president’s son has entered into a plea deal with federal prosecutors over tax offenses and a gun charge.And as Democrats dodge, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies seized on the extraordinary legal development to tighten his grip on the GOP and deflect from his own legal shortcomings. But in a nation deeply divided and with voters from both parties firmly entrenched in their political outlook, there were few signs immediately after Hunter Biden’s plea deal was announced on Tuesday that the unprecedented prosecution of a president’s son had shifted the 2024 presidential election in any significant way.In conversations with The Associated Press, some of the elected Democratic officials best positioned to challenge Biden for the party’s presidential nomination reaffirmed thei...

Pride and pain for president as son Hunter has navigated years of investigation, reaches plea deal

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden had just six words to offer after his 53-year-old son Hunter pleaded guilty to federal tax offenses in a deal that is also likely to spare him time behind bars on a weapons charge.“I’m very proud of my son,” he said.That pride has been accompanied by pain, and for the president’s family, both have been on public display. Republicans have worked to use Hunter Biden’s actions — and his acknowledged struggle with addiction — as an anchor to try to drag down his father.As a parent, Joe Biden has tried to keep his son close; they speak almost every day. Hunter was at his father’s side on a recent trip to Ireland, on the lawn of the White House with other family members for the Easter egg roll and in the bleachers with his mom and dad as his daughter graduated from college last month. But out of public view, a five-year criminal investigation was coming to a conclusion, with a plea deal announced Tuesday that resolves the probe into the taxes and fore...

Summer solstice brings druids, pagans and thousands of curious people to Stonehenge

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

LONDON (AP) — All hail the rising sun.A seemingly curious alliance of druids, pagans, hippies, local residents, tourists and costumed witches and wizards are gathering around a prehistoric stone circle on a plain in southern England to express their devotion to the sun, or to have some communal fun.They will stay and celebrate at Stonehenge for the night and greet sunrise on Wednesday, which will be the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere.All over the U.K., optimism will reign supreme as summer officially starts. It’s no coincidence that the nearby Glastonbury Festival, one of the world’s biggest music events, opens its doors on Wednesday, too. Both Stonehenge and Glastonbury supposedly lie on ley lines — mystical energy connections across the U.K.For the thousands making the pilgrimage to Stonehenge, approximately 80 miles (128 kilometers) southwest of London, it is more than looking forward to Elton John at Glastonbury or a few ciders in the sun.For druids, modern-d...

Once starved by war, millions of Ethiopians go hungry again as US, UN pause aid after massive theft

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — An Orthodox Christian priest, Tesfa Kiros Meresfa begs door-to-door for food along with countless others recovering from a two-year war in northern Ethiopia that starved his people. To his dismay, urgently needed grain and oil have disappeared again for millions caught in a standoff between Ethiopia’s government, the United States and United Nations over what U.S. officials say may be the biggest theft of food aid on record.“I have no words to describe our suffering,” Tesfa said.As the U.S. and U.N. demand that Ethiopia’s government yield its control over the vast aid delivery system supporting one-sixth of the country’s population, they have taken the dramatic step of suspending their food aid to Africa’s second-most populous nation until they can be sure it won’t be stolen by Ethiopian officials and fighters.Almost three months have passed since the aid suspension in parts of the country, and reports are emerging of the first deaths fr...

‘She just wants a friend’: Families push for full school days for children with disabilities

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — One Thursday morning in May, instead of sitting at a desk in her sixth grade classroom in the Oregon mountains, Khloe Warne sat at a table in her mother’s bakery, doing her schoolwork on a laptop and watching her favorite clips of anime.Khloe, 12, loves drawing, writing and especially reading — in second grade, she was already reading at a sixth grade level. But she only goes to school one day a week for two hours. The district said she needed shorter school days last year when Khloe threw a desk and fought with students in outbursts her mother attributes to a failure to support her needs. Khloe, who has been diagnosed with autism, ADHD and an anxiety disorder, had no individualized education plan for her disability when she returned to in-person learning after the pandemic.Not being able to attend school regularly has saddened Khloe, stunted her education and isolated her from her peers, her mother says. It has also upended her family’s life. Her mother, Al...

Math scores plunge for 13-year-olds as pandemic setbacks persist

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Math and reading scores among America’s 13-year-olds fell to their lowest levels in decades, with math scores plunging by the largest margin ever recorded, according to the results of a test known as the nation’s report card.The results, released Wednesday, are the latest measure of the deep learning setbacks incurred during the pandemic. While earlier testing revealed the magnitude of America’s learning loss, the latest test casts light on the persistence of those setbacks, dimming hopes of swift academic recovery.More than two years after most students returned to in-person class, there are still “worrisome signs about student achievement,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the federal Education Department.“The ‘green shoots’ of academic recovery that we had hoped to see have not materialized,” Carr said in a statement.In the national sample of 13-year-old students, average math scores fell by 9 po...

Once wrongly imprisoned for notorious rape, member of ‘Central Park Five’ is running for office

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Outside a Harlem subway station, Yusef Salaam, a candidate for New York City Council, hurriedly greeted voters streaming out along Malcolm X Boulevard. For some, no introductions were necessary. They knew his face, his name and his life story.But to the unfamiliar, Salaam needed only to introduce himself as one of the Central Park Five — one of the Black or Brown teenagers, ages 14 to 16, wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned for the rape and beating of a white woman jogging in Central Park on April 19, 1989.Now 49, Salaam is hoping to join the power structure of a city that once worked to put him behind bars.“I’ve often said that those who have been close to the pain should have a seat at the table,” Salaam said during an interview at his campaign office.Salaam is one of three candidates in a competitive June 27 Democratic primary almost certain to decide who will represent a Harlem district unlikely to elect a Republican in November’s general election. With ear...

Powell to face Capitol Hill hearing at a time of rising uncertainty over Fed’s interest-rate plans

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will begin two days of hearings before Congress on Wednesday that will likely focus on the question that consumed the central bank last week: How far and how fast will the Fed raise its key interest rate from here? The hearings, beginning with the House Financial Services Committee, follow a Fed meeting last week that produced a muddled picture of its likely next steps. The 18 members of its policy committee predicted two more interest rate hikes this year — one more than analysts had expected — to fight inflation, which they now think will be higher next year than they previously forecast. Despite that dour forecast, the Fed’s policymakers agreed last week to forgo a rate hike for the first time in 11 meetings dating back to March 2022. And at a news conference, Powell explicitly said no decisions had been made about whether to raise the Fed’s benchmark rate at its next meeting in late July. Still, most economists in...

Summer Solstice Wednesday. Air Quality Alert Issued. Heat Building for The Weekend

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:57:20 GMT

SUMMER SOLSTICE—the astronomical beginning of summer—occurs at 9:57 a.m. Wednesday.  On this day, the sun appears at its highest altitude, casting the least amount of shadow at noon. It's our longest day of the year with 15 hours, 13 minutes and 41 seconds of possible sunshine. Wednesday picks up one second more daylight (compared to Tuesday)—then we start losing daylight—BUT VERY SLOWLY. We'll lose only 2/100's of second of daylight the day after tomorrow (Thursday) and another 6/100s of a second Friday. Park an air mass over the area for a week and trap it in an atmospheric blocking pattern while producing a temp inversion each day with cooler breezes off Lake Michigan and you're bound to develop air quality issues. It's just such a weather set-up which has led to the AIR QUALITY ALERT issued for the Greater Chicago area by the Illinois EPA and agencies in surrounding states as well.WIDER VIEW of AIR QUALITY predicted WednesdayAIR QUALITY FORECAST Wednesday. An AIR QUALITY ALERT h...