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A transgender rights organization is calling out Hillary Clinton for failing to complete a trans-focused questionnaire it distributed to the presidential candidates. Trans United Fund, the first tax-exempt political advocacy group to focus specifically on transgender issues, announced Monday that both Clinton and Bernie Sanders had committed to completing the survey, but that only Sanders' campaign had filled it out. They also sent presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign the questionnaire, but did not receive a response. The Clinton campaign called the TUF to say that the survey was too long and the campaign couldn't complete it on time. The...

There is a real chance that Hillary Clinton will have clinched a majority of delegates, and the Democratic nomination, before polls close in the California primary late in the evening of June 7. But losing one of the country's most diverse and Democratic states to Bernie Sanders would be such a damaging way to end this tumultuous primary season that Clinton is planning to spend millions there over the next two weeks. This isn't exactly what Clinton had hoped to be doing as her party's July convention in Philadelphia approaches. Clinton has deployed a massive effort to keep a once-loyal...

A month ago, Hillary Clinton had a big lead in national and battleground state polls. Today, she has a modest lead at best. A few surveys even show Donald Trump ahead. What happened? What's clear is that Mrs. Clinton's challenge isn't totally superficial. Just 20% of Mr. Sanders's supporters have a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton in the most recent NY Times/CBS News survey, while 47% have an unfavorable one. These numbers are not too different from the "anyone but Trump" voters in March. Then, The NY Times/CBS survey found that just 17% of Republican primary voters who didn't support...

Study forecasts global temperature increases of up to 9.5 degrees C. The unmitigated burning of Earth's remaining fossil fuels would cause global warming on a scale bigger than previously anticipated, according to a new study out of the University of Victoria. Katarzyna Tokarska, a PhD student at the university, is the lead author of a new paper titled "The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon". Previous modelling, including those used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, use projections that assume just two trillion tonnes of carbon would be released.

The U.S. Embassy in Venezuela has temporarily stopped scheduling appointments for first-time visa seekers because of the consular staff is insufficient to serve the overwhelming demand, the consular office announced. The measure applies to all new tourist and business visas, for which an average of 1,800 applications were being filed daily. "We had to make this decision because in the last eight months [Venezuela's] Foreign Ministry hasn't responded to various requests to increase personnel," said Lola Petrova, the embassy spokeswoman. She said that with the current number of employees they can handle 800 daily appointments at the most. In an...

In 2004, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas, a regional alliance of leftist leaders designed to subvert a hemispheric free trade agreement that the United States had been pushing for a decade. Today Latin America's leftist ramparts appear to be crumbling because of widespread corruption, a slowdown in China's economy and poor economic choices. For the most part, leaders failed to create diversified economies capable of withstanding slumps. The welfare and pension programs that kept voters loyal proved unsustainable. Leaders in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia flouted democratic traditions by expanding or...

A Merrill Lynch analyst ate a handful of magic mushrooms in his Manhattan apartment Sunday morning - and then plunged to his death out of his 26th floor window. Alex Lagowitz, 23, was found dead on a third floor, outdoor patio around 10 a.m. - directly below his bedroom window at Windsor Court on East 31st Street and Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill. It’s still unclear if he purposely jumped or lost his balance and fell out of the window.

A federal lawsuit alleging widespread confusion over California's presidential primary rules asks that voter registration be extended past Monday's deadline until the day of the state's primary election on June 7. "Mistakes are being made," said William Simpich, an Oakland civil rights attorney who filed the lawsuit. At issue is whether voters understand the rules for the presidential primary, which differ from those governing other elections in California. Unlike statewide primaries -- where voters now choose any candidate, no matter the political party -- the presidential contests are controlled by the parties themselves. Democrats have opened up their primary to...

Donald Trump has said he doesn't believe in man-made climate change and has called global warming a "hoax," but he's trying to protect a golf course he owns on the coast of Ireland from its effects. The presumptive GOP nominee applied for a permit to build a seawall next to Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland in County Clare to prevent erosion, according to Politico. His application included an environmental impact statement that explicitly mentions "global warming and its effects." According to Politico's report, that statement says that rising sea levels in that region could accelerate erosion. The statement...

Baltimore Police Officer Edward Nero was found not guilty of all charges by a judge Monday morning for his role in the arrest of Freddie Gray. Nero, 30, had been charged with second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and two counts of misconduct in office, all related to his role in Gray's initial detention and arrest on April 12, 2015.

A city employee caught in gang crossfire was among five people killed and 40 more wounded in shootings across Chicago between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. Chicago Police issued a statement Sunday in the middle of one of the first consistently warm weekends of the spring, as intensified city gun violence typically accompanies rising temperatures. “As we look toward the summer months, Superintendent Johnson has made it very clear that the violence will not be tolerated – period,” the statement said. “The cause of the violence traces back decades, and everyone has a role to play in fixing it –...

CHICAGO - A city employee caught in gang crossfire was among four people killed and 29 more wounded in shootings across Chicago since late Friday afternoon, police said. The most recent homicide happened Saturday night in the South Side Englewood neighborhood. A 26-year-old man was walking in the 7000 block of South Carpenter about 7:40 p.m. when two gunmen walked out of a gangway and opened fire, shooting him in the abdomen, police said. He was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center where he later died. The latest wave of violence saw seven people wounded in about less than five...

Headline only per FR posting rules. EgyptAir flight MS804: Pilot spoke with air traffic control 'for several minutes before crash'

Data transmitted from a doomed EgyptAir flight minutes before it fell off radar screens suggests a fire had broken out on board the plane, according to an aviation industry website. AvHerald.com is reporting that data transmissions from EgyptAir Flight 804 to ground stations show smoke was detected in a bathroom near the cockpit. The report includes the plane-to-ground messages sent in the final minutes of the flight: 00:26Z 2600 SMOKE LAVATORY SMOKE 00:27Z 2600 AVIONICS SMOKE 00:28Z 561100 R FIXED WINDOW SENSOR 00:29Z 2200 AUTO FLT FCU 2 FAULT 00:29Z 2700 F/CTL SEC 3 FAULT The information would suggest the...

Amy Moses and her circle of self-employed small-business owners were supporters of President Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act. They bought policies on the newly created NY state exchange. But when they called doctors and hospitals in Manhattan to schedule appointments, they were dismayed to be turned away again and again with a common refrain: "We don't take Obamacare," the umbrella epithet for the hundreds of plans offered through the president's signature health legislation. Though their insurance cards look the same as everyone else's the plans are often very different from those provided to most Americans by their employers....

Donald Trump will have a climate plan and it will be ugly. For now, the Republican frontrunner is pedaling the kind of denialism his party loves, having called global warming everything from a "hoax" to a "con job" to a Chinese plot. But an interview with his energy adviser hinted that Trump might endeavor to Make Atmospheric Carbon Levels Great Again. "My advice would be, while I'm a skeptic as well", Trump energy honcho Kevin Cramer [said], "he is a product of political populism, and political populism believes that there needs [to be] some addressing of climate change". Cramer has...

Right now, thousands of people are taking direct action as part of a global wave of protests against the biggest fossil fuel infrastructure projects across the world. With so many governments still dependent on a fossil fuel economy, they can't be relied upon to make the radical change required in the time we need to make it. It is unjust that corporations and governments can commit crimes against the planet and society without retribution. And if we really want climate justice, protest in the pursuit of this must be normalized. To overcome political barriers, we need to reclaim our power...

After raising its premiums for coverage on the Obamacare exchange by 36.3 percent for 2016, the state's dominant health insurer is heralding another increase of the "same order of magnitude" for 2017. BlueCross BlueShield claims it lost more than $150 million in 2015 when its rates were among the lowest in the land. But the 36.3 percent increase for 2016, the largest of any state, brings Tennessee rates to just about the national average. So how on Earth can costs be going up so exponentially to justify such a rate increase on the part of a nonprofit insurance company whose...

Four people were killed and at least 14 people have been wounded in Chicago since early Wednesday afternoon, including a triple fatal shooting in Englewood and five people shot in the evening in the Park Manor neighborhood. A man and two women were shot to death during a domestic-related incident in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side. A 50-year-old man, his 30-year-old daughter and her 26-year-old sister-in-law were in the 1500 block of West 71st Street when a known man fired shots at them during a domestic-related incident. The shooting happened inside and outside of a home on the...

The shrinkage of employee retirement resources in the US has been well documented, as employers shift more risk onto their workers. Less so is the rate at which employers have been eliminating healthcare benefits for retirees. As the Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported, retiree health coverage is becoming an endangered species. "Employer-sponsored retiree health coverage once played a key role in supplementing Medicare," observe Tricia Neuman of the foundation. "Any way you slice it, this coverage is eroding." The chances of reversing this trend, plainly, are nil. But it's important to keep an eye on it, if only as a...