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Los Angeles County’s COVID-19 case numbers are no longer declining and there has been an increase in the circulation of the highly infectious BA.2 subvariant, the county’s health director said on Thursday. Up until recently, the county had been seeing falling daily case numbers as the region emerged from an omicron-fueled winter surge that overwhelmed testing sites and sent infection numbers skyrocketing. As COVID-19 loosened its grip on the county, officials eased COVID-19 restrictions. Masks became optional at many indoor locations and venues were no longer required to verify people’s vaccine status. Now, the county is no longer seeing those...

A New York judge has denied Ghislaine Maxwell's request for a retrial on sex trafficking charges, after it emerged that one of the jurors had been sexually abused - but failed to disclose it. Maxwell, 60, was convicted in December of grooming and trafficking underage girls for her ex-boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein. Days after her conviction, Maxwell's attorneys requested a new trial because 'Juror 50', referred to as Scotty David, told newspapers that he had been sexually abused as a child, but had not disclosed the information during jury selection, as required. He also told reporters that he used his experience...

President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden are the picture of scandal and corruption that the Democrats and corporate media tried to make former President Donald Trump and his family out to be — but instead of covering the bombshell stories, the press is turning a blind eye. Even before Trump won the election in 2016 after gaining popularity for calling out “fake news,” Democrats and the media were out to get him. Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired lawyers who hired a firm that hired Christopher Steele to dredge up fake news about Trump colluding with Russia. This fake information...

A Tennessee man, who prosecutors say was one of the first 15 people to breach the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was sentenced to three years of probation on Wednesday, including 60 days of house arrest for his role in the insurrection. Bruce Wayne Ivey, 28, pleaded guilty in June to one count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in the Capitol. He initially faced four charges, including entering and remaining in a Capitol building and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a Capitol building. But as the government works to prosecute the 800 people arrested in connection to the attack, federal...

Among Washington elites, Thomas Massie is a gadfly whose strict adherence to libertarian ideology places him on a lonesome edge even within the Republican Party. To his primary challenger in Kentucky, he’s not conservative enough. “On Twitter I think that he has this persona that he’s very, very conservative and a lot of people believe it,” said Claire Wirth, the 33-year-old Prospect real estate agent running to oust Massie in May’s 4th Congressional District GOP primary. “But when it comes down to his voting record, he votes with AOC and Ilhan Omar more than any other Republican member of Congress.”...

There are two speeds of sound on Mars — one for high-pitched noises like the zap of a laser and another for lower frequencies like the whir of a helicopter rotor, scientists have revealed. The first audio recordings on the Red Planet were obtained by NASA's Perseverance rover after it landed in February last year and deployed its two microphones. Experts have now given their first analysis of five hours of sound picked up by the rover, which revealed a quiet planet with occasional gusts of wind where two different speeds of sound would have a strange delayed effect on...

Explanation: The natural filter of a hazy atmosphere offered this recognizable architecture and sunset telephoto view on March 27. Dark against the solar disk, large sunspots in solar active regions 2975 and 2976 are wedged between the Duomo of Pisa and its famous Leaning Tower. Only one day later, Sun-staring spacecraft watched active region 2975 unleash a frenzy of solar flares along with two coronal mass ejections. The largest impacted the magnetosphere on March 31 triggering a geomagnetic storm and aurorae in high-latitude night skies. On March 30, active region 2975 erupted again with a powerful X-class solar flare that...

PHOENIX (AP) — The Biden administration’s decision to end sweeping asylum limits at the border this May satisfied demands by prominent Democrats eagerly awaiting the end of a program created by Donald Trump in the name of public health. But it creates thorny political challenges for border-region Democrats who face the likely prospect of an increase in migrants who have for two years been denied the chance to seek asylum in the United States. In unusually harsh critiques of a president from their own party, some of the congressional Democrats with the toughest reelection prospects are warning that the administration...

A new forensic audit of more than $1 million in COVID-19 relief funds spent by the city of West Haven indicates approximately 80% of the expenditures should not have been allowed. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of dollars a former state lawmaker and others are accused of stealing from the city. The problematic expenditures - nearly $900,000 of about $1.13 million reviewed by the auditors - were largely ineligible expenses or lacked sufficient justification and documentation. West Haven Mayor Nancy Rossi, a Democrat, said in a text message to The Associated Press that she had just received the...

Oh, deer. Russian despot Vladimir Putin has had 35 secret meetings with a cancer doctor — and been bathing in the blood of deer antlers, a report said Friday. The investigative report by the Russian outlet The Project tracked the medical care that the 69-year-old Putin has received since becoming president of Russia a decade ago — and raises serious questions about his health. “As he aged, concerns about health and longevity have so consumed the president that he has even shown an interest in unconventional medicine,

WASHINGTON (AP) — Marijuana would be decriminalized at the federal level under legislation the House approved Friday as Democrats made the case for allowing states to set their own policies on pot. The bill is unlikely to become law since it is expected to die in the Senate. That would mirror what happened when a similar House-passed measure removing marijuana from the list of federally-controlled substances went nowhere in the Senate two years ago. Still, Friday’s vote gave lawmakers the chance to state their view on a decriminalization push that appears to have broad support with voters across the country....

A car crashed through the dining room of a restaurant on Pelham Road Monday morning. The glass facade of the restaurant was smashed and a sedan was completely inside the Joy of Tokyo restaurant near Beacon Drive. Highway Patrol said an 85-year-old woman was trying to park in front of the restaurant and accidentally drove her car inside. We’re told no charges will be filed.

Many of the misrepresentations of that 1972 trip linger till this day — of which the most important by far is the legend of China’s strategic statecraft, superior by virtue of its very long-range perspective, then personified by Zhou Enlai. Because Kissinger negotiated primarily with Zhou, he elevated that servile toady — who never once tried to save life-long colleagues from Mao’s murderous intrigues — into a statesman of transcendental wisdom, fully endowed in the long-view department. This was exemplified by Zhou’s answer to Kissinger’s fawning request for his retrospective view of the French Revolution. Indeed, Kissinger never tired of...

Climate change is causing some species of birds to lay their eggs a month earlier than normal. A study recently published in the Journal of Animal Ecology reports that roughly a third of all bird species around the Chicago area are nesting an average of 25 days earlier than usual.

Cawthorn will be one of the guest speakers at Trump's April 9 rally in Selma, North Carolina, the former president's Save America PAC said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal grand jury has heard testimony in recent months about Hunter Biden’s income and payments he received while serving on the board of a Ukraine energy company, according to two people familiar with the probe. It remains unclear whether he might be charged. But the grand jury activity underscores that a federal tax investigation into President Joe Biden’s son that began in 2018 remains active as prosecutors continue to examine foreign payments and other aspects of his finances. The people familiar with the investigation could not discuss details of the ongoing probe publicly and spoke to...

People too young to remember the Nixon era, or who haven't studied it, might assume that the left's seething hostility to Donald Trump is unprecedented. In fact, back in his day, the left's loathing of President Richard Nixon was overwhelming. When he was ultimately driven to resign over Watergate, there was great glee and rejoicing in liberal land. But, file this one under NewsBusters' "Sudden Respect," rubric. Friday's Morning Joe, playing off a Peggy Noonan column, actually celebrated Richard Nixon! It did so because, in contrast with Donald Trump regarding the 2020 election, Nixon conceded the 1960 presidential election to...

Tom Tom Club posed a peculiar question on their 1981 debut album, then offered their answer: "What you gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm gonna have some fun." Decades later, the bouncy, reggae-tinged riff and lulling female harmonies of "Genius of Love" can still be heard scattered throughout popular culture. A side project created by Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, Tom Tom Club was initially meant to keep the Talking Heads members busy while David Byrne and Jerry Harrison worked on solo endeavors. The husband-wife duo was, at first, at a loss when an accountant warned them...

South Florida construction boom means more jobs for womenYou may not initially think of women in construction, an industry once dominated by men. But in 2022, during a building boom in South Florida, industry leaders believe things are changing when it comes to gender and jobs. Nekita Whyte works in the South Florida construction business as an assistant operations manager. "I like it because there is a day-to-day challenge," she said. Her boots are on the ground at the job site alongside hundreds of men. Nekita Whyte shares what she likes about working in the construction field. "There is ......

The one-two punch of nasty wildfires followed by heavy downpours, triggering flooding and mudslides, will strike the U.S. West far more often in a warming-hopped world, becoming a frequent occurrence, a new study said. The report looked at 11 Western U.S. states, concentrating on four of them where the projected increase in fires followed by downpours was most noticeable. Study authors acknowledged that the worst-case warming scenario they studied, using dozens of large-scale climate model simulations, is becoming increasingly less likely because many but not all countries, including the United States and Europe, have been cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases....