Search Results for: news

Getting the vaccine to the world's farthest corners means delivering it by boat to Maine islands, by snowmobile to Alaska villages and via complex Amazon waterways in Brazil. Although the vaccination rollout has been choppy in much of the world and some places are still waiting for their first doses, there’s an urgent push to inoculate people in hard-to-reach places that may not have had COVID-19 outbreaks but also may not be equipped to deal with them if they do. Robin Nandy, the chief of immunization for UNICEF, says before it's over, drones, motorcycles, elephants, horses and camels will have been used to get vaccines to the most far-flung places.

Gerrit Cole struck out 13 and walked none over seven scoreless innings in his most dominant start since joining the New York Yankees, overwhelming the Baltimore Orioles 7-2 for his first win this season. Cole allowed four hits, three of them singles, in the type of the performance that showed why the Yankees made his baseball’s highest-paid pitcher with a $324 million contract. Jay Bruce backed him with his first Yankees home run and Aaron Judge added a three-run homer. New York has won a team-record 12 straight home games against the Orioles since May 2019 outscoring Baltimore 76-28.    

TOKYO (AP) — Asian shares were mixed Wednesday after Wall Street took a breather, with major indexes edging lower. Japan's benchmark Nikkei fell 0.5% to 29,544.93 and the Shanghai Composite index sank 0.7% to 3,459.25. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.3%…

Now that Fernando Tatis Jr. has been placed on the injured list, the San Diego Padres hope their electrifying shortstop won’t be sidelined too long. Tatis should be able to avoid surgery on his left shoulder, the team said a day after he slightly dislocated it taking a hard swing. An MRI on Tuesday showed a slight labral tear and the Padres put the 22-year-old Tatis on the 10-day IL. General manager A.J. Preller said the club wasn’t ruling out anything, including Tatis’ possible return when he’s eligible. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Reds and Detroit rookie Akil Baddoo are both off to smashing starts this season.

Akil Baddoo added another big hit in this charmed start to his big league career, lining an RBI single in the bottom of the 10th inning to give the Detroit Tigers a 4-3 victory over the Minnesota Twins. Baddoo made his debut Sunday and homered on the first pitch thrown to him. Then he hit a grand slam in a 15-6 loss to the Twins on Monday. The 22-year-old entered Tuesday’s game as a pinch-runner and stayed in until he ended it with a winning hit to right off Hansel Robles. Nelson Cruz and Byron Buxton homered for the Twins, who rallied from a 3-1 deficit.

Juan Soto drove in the winning run with a single on a 3-0 pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning to lift the coronavirus-depleted Washington Nationals to a 6-5 comeback victory over the Atlanta Braves after waiting five days to start their season. Lefty reliever Will Smith entered for the ninth and promptly gave up a single to new leadoff hitter Victor Robles, then hit Trea Turner with a pitch. That brought up Soto, the 2020 NL batting champion who went into this pivotal at-bat 0 for 4 on Tuesday. But Soto delivered a line drive to center field. Atlanta is 0-4.

The auction of a series of sketches purportedly drawn by an artist at the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar has been canceled after groups protested it was offensive and immoral to profit off the misery of incarcerated people. The auction was halted Tuesday by eBay hours before it was to conclude after company executives met with Japanese American groups who called the sale “hurtful, and a degrading reminder of the mass roundup and incarceration.” The auction site said the sale violated a policy prohibiting the sale of items from government or protected lands. The seller claimed they did nothing wrong.

The Washington Nationals finally got their season started five days later than they were supposed to after a delay because of a coronavirus outbreak. Four players tested positive for COVID-19 and seven others were told to quarantine after contact tracing deemed they potentially were exposed to the illness. Washington hosted the Atlanta Braves on Tuesday and won 6-5 on Juan Soto's tiebreaking RBI single in the ninth. The 2019 World Series champion's season-opening series against the New York Mets was scrapped, as was the series-opening game Monday against the Braves. That one will be made up as part of a doubleheader on Wednesday.

The San Diego Padres say shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. should be able to avoid surgery on his left shoulder. Tatis slightly dislocated it taking a hard swing on Monday. An MRI on Tuesday showed a slight labral tear and the Padres put the electrifying 22-year-old on the 10-day injured list. General manager A.J. Preller said the club wasn’t ruling out anything, including Tatis’ possible return when he’s eligible. Tatis signed a 14-year, $340 million contract on Feb. 22, the longest deal in big league history.

The Boston Red Sox will have a new look on Patriots’ Day weekend. They’ll honor the Boston Marathon and the city by wearing blue-and-yellow uniforms, the colors that stretch across the finish line of the famous race. They’ll be the first of seven major league teams to wear new uniforms to honor the city they represent. The Red Sox will wear them April 17 and 18 when they play the Chicago White Sox at Fenway Park. The Red Sox unveiled the new look Tuesday on their Twitter site. 

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Tanzania's new president appears to be taking a new, scientific approach to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. President Samia Suluhu Hassan said Tuesday she will form a technical committee to advise her about the scope of COVID-19…

Police say a 21-month-old boy is in critical condition after being shot in the head while riding in a car along Chicago's famed Lake Shore Drive. The 11 a.m. shooting happened about 12 hours after seven people involved in a fight on a sidewalk on the city's South Side were shot and wounded. Nobody is in custody in either shooting, although police say they are questioning a person of interest in the shooting involving the infant. The shootings marked the latest bursts of violence in what is shaping up to be one of Chicago's most violent years in memory. Police have reported 131 homicides in the city and more than 700 shooting victims by the end of March.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and his team have offered a vastly inflated projection of how many jobs his infrastructure plan would create, an account his press secretary corrected Tuesday. Biden has also drifted beyond the facts when dismissing…

Rainstorms grew more erratic and droughts much longer across most of the U.S. West over the past half-century as climate change warmed the planet. That's the conclusion of a sweeping government study released Tuesday that finds the situation for the region is worsening. The most dramatic changes have been seen in the desert Southwest, where the average dry period between storms increased from 30 days to 45 days since the 1970s. The consequences of intense dry periods pummeling areas of the West in recent years have been severe: more intense and dangerous wildfires, parched croplands and not enough vegetation on the landscape to support livestock and wildlife.

Rory McIlroy visited Tiger Woods recently and got a look at Woods' trophy case. He was astounded that it had only 15 trophies, all of them from the majors. The hardware from Woods' dozens of other wins from around the world was absent. It was clear Woods only cared about four weeks out of the year. Only one week matters to McIlroy at the moment. He needs to win the Masters this week to become only the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam. Defending champion Dustin Johnson is trying to join his own elite group. Only three other players have won the Masters in consecutive years.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is setting a hopeful date for things to start getting back to a pre-pandemic normal in California. He says the nation's most populated state will lift most coronavirus restrictions on businesses and workplaces June 15 as long as enough people continue to be vaccinated and hospitalization rates stay low. Officials said Tuesday that they hope enough people will be vaccinated by mid-June to allow for many activities to resume. The Democratic governor says a statewide mask mandate will stay in place, while states nationwide have lifted those and other health restrictions. California has had some of the nation’s strictest pandemic rules.

The All-Star Game will be played at hitter-friendly Coors Field this year. Major League Baseball officially announced the new venue Tuesday after pulling the Midsummer Classic from Atlanta over objections to sweeping changes to Georgia’s voting laws. Coors Field last hosted the All-Star Game in 1998. MLB decided to move the July 13 game from Atlanta in response to Georgia voting rules that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law March 25. Critics have condemned the changes as being too restrictive. Colorado has a Democratic governor in Jared Polis and a Democratic-controlled legislature.

Even an NCAA championship matchup between the two widely acknowledged as the best men's college basketball teams in the country couldn't set the television world afire. Monday's game reached an audience of 16.92 million. That's down nearly 14 percent from the 2019 championship between Virginia and Texas Tech. The 2020 NCAA basketball tourney was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. Considering the way most television ratings are sinking, the basketball championship wasn't half bad: Viewership for this winter's NCAA football championship game was down 27 percent. This year's thrilling semifinal between Gonzaga and UCLA reached nearly 15 million people.