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The mother of a British teen who went legally blind after eating a diet of potato chips and french fries says she blames the U.K.'s health care system for her son's illness. Kerry James, whose son, Harvey Dyer, developed a rare form of malnutrition-based blindness in his early teens, made the comments on the U.K.'s ITV channel Tuesday morning. Sitting next to her son, who is now 18, James said she is not a bad mom and that she "couldn't have done any more" to help with her son's condition. "I've done everything," James said. "I know people say it's...

The Trump administration continued to show an interest in California's homeless crisis Wednesday but offered little in the way of help or specific solutions as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development toured a Skid Row shelter in Los Angeles and called for cooperation among federal, state and local governments. SNIP The visit came as President Donald Trump spent a second day in the state raising money for his re-election campaign, and the day after he once again took a swipe at California's homeless issue. "We can't let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing...

[Catholic Caucus] Missouri Bishop Wants to Gag Michelle Malkin, Squeezes Disavowal From Pro-Life Group Bishop Edward Rice unhappy with Malkin's criticism of U.S. bishops and immigration lobbying Following noted political commentator and author Michelle Malkin's presentation to the Missouri-based Vitae Foundation, Springfield-Cape Girardeau Bp. Edward Rice succeeded in intimidating the pro-life organization and slurred Malkin for her remarks linking the Catholic Church and illegal immigration.  Malkin was the featured speaker at a Vitae Foundation event in Springfield, Missouri, on Aug. 20. As part of her 40-minute reflections on the pro-life movement and her personal pro-life experiences as the daughter of a neonatalogist, Malkin briefly diverged from her topic and connected...

Journalist John Solomon has rocked the Washington media world by announcing his departure from the Hill newspaper and the Hill.TV brand he created to start his own media firm. In a memo to his team, Solomon wrote, “After two-plus amazing years at Hill.TV I am moving on next month to build my own startup media company.” He did not reveal any details about his future plans for an online media site. In his memo, he praised the Hill, his TV group, and Capitol Hill Publishing Chairman James A. Finkelstein. “With Jimmy's vision and your continued great work, I am confident...

Remember how Christine Blasey Ford couldn't fly, until it turned out that she could fly? Just to spare her the indignities of commercial air travel, she was flown on a private plane courtesy of two very unpleasant and wealthy Silicon Valley characters. Among those who assisted Ford in the summer of 2018 were Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, game company Zynga founder Mark Pincus, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, according to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, written by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly and on shelves Tuesday. Pincus and Hoffman, meanwhile, lent Ford and her friends their...

A self-described communist group burned an American flag outside a Los Angeles hotel Tuesday in protest of President Trump’s arrival in the city, sparking a series of fights with pro-Trump counter-protesters. “America was never great!” chanted a contingent from Revolution Club Los Angeles as they locked hands in a circle outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, a video of the act tweeted by the group shows. That refrain turned to “Humanity first!” as a rabble-rouser in the middle of the circle set Old Glory aflame. Toward the end of the clip, one counter-protester can be seen trying to break into the...

Ex-national security adviser John Bolton on Wednesday ripped President Trump’s aborted plan to invite the Taliban to Camp David, saying the move sent a “terrible signal” and was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda. Bolton, speaking at a private luncheon, also said that negotiations with North Korea and Iran were “doomed to failure” on the president’s watch, two people who were there told Politico. All the North Koreans and Iranians want is relief from sanctions to support their economies, Bolton told guests at the event hosted by the Gatestone Institute, a conservative think...

To deal with any extraterrestrial-seeking attendees of the viral “Storm Area 51” event, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that airspace around Area 51 will be temporarily closed this weekend. The FAA issued temporary flight restrictions between September 18-23 for “special security reasons” in the Nevada desert where U.S. Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range — commonly known as Area 51 — is located. That means no one can fly aircraft in the surrounding area, including would-be alien hunters hoping to send a drone hovering above Area 51. The closures could be a result of the popularity of...

On Friday, September 13, a truck bound for the Georgia-based tabletop and video game company Trivium Studios took a turn too sharply, spilling 216,000 gaming dice onto Interstate 75 in Atlanta in what could be the biggest unintentional dice roll ever. According to Trivium Studios’ community manager, speaking to Kotaku about the incident, the truck was carrying three pallets of Chessex six-sided gaming dice for use in an unannounced tabletop game. Approximately half of the truck’s load wound up strewn across the busy highway on Friday afternoon. Atlanta HERO (Highway Emergency Response Operators) units helped Trivium employees clean up...

These aren’t the church plants you were thinking of, but students at New York’s Union Theological Seminary held a chapel service on Tuesday during which participants confessed to plants. “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor,” Union tweeted on its official account. “What do you confess to the plants in your life?” Rather than confess transgressions against an endangered grove or old growth forest, the student-led September 17 service featured...

Wrongful death case. Opioids and alcohol. “The motion hinged on the defendant's contention that law enforcement had failed to preserve bottles of alcohol, pill bottles and pills, and cash, and had failed to properly test F.E. for the presence of alcohol before determining the cause of his death.”

How is 56 greater than 60? Call it Netanyahu’s new math. “After we established the right-wing bloc, there are only two options,” Netanyahu said. “Either a government led by me, or a dangerous government leaning on Arab parties.” Netanyahu’s only chance to remain prime minister is by making sure that his potential coalition partners don’t start wandering over to Blue and White’s side. The way to make sure they don’t do that is to promise he will stay with them and not follow what seems like the more obvious path to a coalition, to reach across the aisle himself.

We write under the weight of a great national calamity. Zachary Taylor, Twelfth President of the United States, expired, with perfect calmness, at Washington last night at 35 minutes past 10 o'clock, after a painful illness of little more than five days. His disease began with cholera morbus, which passed into a billious remiitant fever; he was treated with all the skills that science could form and affection render vigilant, as we learn, after the old system of practice, with purging, by calomel and otherwise, and blistering. Gen. Taylor had endeared himself to the American people to a degree which...

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, wore brownface makeup to a party at the private school where he was teaching in the spring of 2001. TIME has obtained a photograph of the incident. The photograph has not been previously reported. The picture was taken at an “Arabian Nights”-themed gala. It shows Trudeau, then the 29-year-old son of the late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, wearing a turban and robes with his face, neck and hands completely darkened. The photograph appears in the 2000-2001 yearbook of West Point Grey Academy, a private day school where Trudeau was a teacher.

The News Suburbanites, city commuters, anyone looking for a job, really — get your butts to NET/WORK Suburbs on Oct. 10. Hosted by Deacom in dreamy Chesterbrook, PA, NET/WORK will have all the makings of a great networking event slash job fair: food (for sustenance), bevs (for bravery) and arguably the most important element, companies looking to hire people. So, get those biz cards and Linkedin profiles ready, it’s NET/WORK time. Get your free tix here. D.C.-based Black Girl Ventures — an organization that creates opportunities for women entrepreneurs of color to access capital — is settin’ up shop right...

A Long Island teen was fatally stabbed at a strip mall near his high school as dozens of other students pulled out their cellphones to record the melee rather than to help him, police said. Khaseen Morris, a 16-year-old senior at Oceanside High School, was stabbed once in the chest Monday afternoon during an apparent dispute over a girl. He later died at a hospital after many of the 50 to 70 teens who gathered nearby recorded the bloody attack and made no attempt to stop it, Nassau County police said at a news conference Tuesday. “Kids stood there and...

Senate Democrats Wednesday blocked debate on the almost $700 billion Pentagon budget and other spending bills amid a feud between the chamber’s leaders over the rules of engagement for translating this summer’s hard-won budget deal into binding legislation. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer orchestrated the party-line filibuster vote, claiming Senate GOP leaders were doing President Donald Trump’s bidding on the U.S.-Mexico border fence and paying for it by shortchanging health and education programs. Both sides accused the other of violating the bipartisan spirit of July’s budget blueprint, which gave Trump a must-have increase in the government’s borrowing limit and new spending...

Today the Silver Star Families of America has come out against, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie decision to ban all smoking at V.A. facilities.

AT&T Inc. is exploring parting with its DirecTV satellite unit...a move that would mark a mark a sharp course correction in strategy for Chief Executive Randall Stephenson, who billed his $49 billion bet on the satellite provider as a key to the phone giant’s future...AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion. The company’s shrinking satellite business is under a microscope after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T last week and released a report pushing for strategic changes. Elliott has told investors that AT&T should unload DirecTV...

The 2020 census is on track, government officials told reporters on Tuesday, and they sought to reassure the American public that any information collected in the population count will never be shared with local or federal law enforcement. In a news conference in Philadelphia tied to Constitution Day – the Constitution mandates the count be done every 10 years -- Census Bureau officials also said workers have walked some 821,000 neighborhood blocks to ensure addresses in its system are correct.