Search Results for: news

Major League Baseball wants to see if moving back the pitcher’s mound will increase offense. MLB will experiment with a 12-inch greater distance between the mound and home plate during a portion of the Atlantic League season in an effort to decrease strikeouts and increase offense. The pitching rubber will be moved back to 61 feet, 6 inches starting Aug. 3 during the second half of the independent minor league’s season. In addition, the MLB partner league will have an experimental “double-hook DH” rule in which a team would lose its designated hitter when its starting pitcher leaves.

LONDON (AP) — A lobbying scandal swirling around former British Prime Minister David Cameron has deepened, with claims that a senior civil servant held down a part-time job with a now-bankrupt financial firm that was awarded lucrative government contracts. It…

The No. 2 House Republican says party leaders would “take action” against Rep. Matt Gaetz if the Justice Department formally moves ahead with legal action against him. The remarks by Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise make him the latest of many congressional Republicans who have opted against springing to the defense of the Florida Republican. Federal agents are investigating Gaetz over allegations that include sex trafficking and sex with a minor, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they could not discuss details publicly. Gaetz has denied the accusations and has not been charged with any crimes.

Buffalo Sabres interim coach Don Granato is emerging from the shadow of his more famous siblings. The team has emerged from an 18-game winless skid to win four of its last eight. Much of the credit is going to the 53-year-old Granato. He simplified the style of play and keeps an even keel. His brother, Tony, played 13 NHL seasons. His sister, Cammi, is a hockey Hall of Famer and two-time Olympian.

Colton Underwood, the former football tight end who found fame on "The Bachelor,” has revealed that he is gay. “I’ve ran from myself for a long time. I’ve hated myself for a long time,” Underwood told “Good Morning America” on…

LONDON (AP) — Leaders from Britain's aviation industry joined forces Wednesday to urge the British government to ensure that popular European destinations face the least onerous coronavirus travel restrictions when holidays are allowed again. Under the government's new traffic light…

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa's decision to suspend the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to preliminary reports of rare blood clots has left the country without any shots as it struggles to combat an aggressive coronavirus variant.…

BRUSSELS (AP) — In a stinging rebuke to pharma giant AstraZeneca Wednesday, the European Union announced plans to negotiate a massive contract extension for Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine insisting the 27-nation bloc had to go with companies that had shown their…

European nations are scrambling in the wake of Johnson & Johnson's delay of the rollout of its COVID-19 vaccines amid reports of very rare blood clots. Some leaders opted for caution Wednesday after American health officials paused the vaccine's use while they study the clots in a handful of people. Experts agree COVID-19 poses a much larger risk of death and hospitalization than the potential threat of atypical clots. Italy, Croatia and Denmark put their lots in storage while waiting for guidance from European health officials. Spain and Portugal were left empty-handed. But Poland said that it will go ahead and administer the first batch of 120,000 doses that had arrived. 

Farmers dealing with depressed prices for plants that produce CBD are eager to take part in a statewide marijuana market expected to generate billions of dollars a year once retail sales start. They already know how to grow and process cannabis plants, since hemp is essentially the same plant with lower levels of THC, marijuana’s active ingredient. Now they’re waiting on rules for getting into the new market. There are about 700 hemp farmers in the state, with some growing the plant for textiles or food but most growing for CBD.

Mike Elliott is among many who celebrated his election as mayor of Brooklyn Center as the beginning of a new era. The inner-ring Minneapolis suburb is one of the most racially diverse places in the state and would for the first time be led by a person of color. A little more than two years later, Elliott is finding out just how difficult it is to turn the page on the nation’s racial history. The shooting of Daunte Wright, a Black man, by a white police officer has set off protests, political upheaval and painful reckoning about racism and representation in his small city.

A blistering internal report by the U.S. Capitol Police describes a multitude of missteps that left the force unprepared for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The report obtained by The Associated Press says riot shields shattered upon impact, expired weapons couldn’t be used, training courses had been skipped and an intelligence division had no set standards. The watchdog report was released internally last month. It provides new details about broader security and intelligence failures that Congress has been investigating. And it provides details about conversations between officials as they disagreed on whether National Guard forces were necessary to back up the understaffed police force.

A study of people's attitudes toward the press finds that distrust goes deeper than just partisanship and down to how journalists define their mission. Americans want their journalists to be more than watchdogs. The study was released Wednesday by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It suggested that while Americans support journalists on their hunt for facts, they don't necessarily agree that the role of the press is to shine a light on problems for communities to solve them. The reports says the press' job is bigger and broader than it has been defined.

The teeming metropolis of Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra, the Indian state worst hit by the pandemic, face stricter restrictions for 15 days in an effort to stem the surge of coronavirus infections. Top state officials stressed that the closure of most industries, businesses, public places and limits on the movement of people doesn't constitute a lockdown. Last year, a sudden nationwide lockdown left millions jobless overnight and since then, state leaders have repeatedly stressed that another lockdown wasn’t on the cards. The distinction did little to allay fears of thousands of migrant workers waiting at a Mumbai railway station for a ride home. India has detected over 180,000 new infections in the past 24 hours, about a third in Maharashtra state.