Search area for lost Titanic-bound submersible deepens, doubles in size as oxygen dwindles
Rescuers on Wednesday rushed more ships and vessels to the area where a submersible disappeared on its way to the Titanic wreckage site, hoping underwater sounds they detected for a second straight day might help narrow their search in an increasingly urgent mission.
Crews were scouring an area twice the size of Connecticut in waters 2 1/2 miles deep, said Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District, who noted that authorities are still holding out hope of saving the five passengers onboard the Titan.
“This is a search and rescue mission, 100%,” he said. ”... We’ll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members.”
But even those who expressed optimism warned that many obstacles remain: from pinpointing the vessel’s location, to reaching it with rescue equipment, to bringing it to the surface — assuming it’s still intact. And all that has to happen before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out, which some have estimated might happen as early as Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, newly uncovered allegations suggest there had been significant warnings made about vessel safety during the submersible’s development.
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In rowdy scene, House censures Rep. Adam Schiff over Trump-Russia investigations
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House voted Wednesday to censure California Rep. Adam Schiff for comments he made several years ago about investigations into Donald Trump's ties to Russia, rebuking the Democrat and frequent critic of the former president along party lines.
Schiff becomes the 25th House lawmaker to be censured. He was defiant ahead of the vote, saying he will wear the formal disapproval as a “badge of honor" and charging his GOP colleagues of doing the former president's bidding.
“I will not yield,” Schiff, who is running for the Senate in his home state, said during debate over the measure. “Not one inch.”
When it was time for Schiff to come to the front of the chamber to be formally censured, immediately after the vote, the normally solemn ceremony turned into more of a celebratory atmosphere. Dozens of Democrats crowded to the front, clapping and cheering for Schiff and patting him on the back. They chanted “No!,” “Shame!” and “Adam! Adam!"
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., read the resolution out loud, as is tradition after a censure. But he only read part of the document before leaving the chamber as Democrats heckled and interrupted him.
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Police say Idaho dad killed neighbors over alleged indecent exposure by neighbor's oldest son
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — An Idaho father killed a neighboring family because he was upset that the neighbor’s 18-year-old son had reportedly exposed himself to the man’s children, a police document alleges.
Majorjon Kaylor, 31, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the Father's Day shooting in Kellogg, nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) north of Boise.
Kaylor shot and killed Kenneth Guardipee, 65; his daughter Kenna Guardipee, 41; and her sons 18-year-old Devin Smith and 16-year-old Aiken Smith, an Idaho State Police detective said in a probable cause affidavit that was released Tuesday evening.
Kaylor and his wife, Kaylie Kaylor, told investigators that they were upset because Devin Smith had exposed himself in front of his bedroom window in view of the Kaylors' young daughters several days earlier. The families shared a duplex, and the girls were playing in the yard when the exposure allegedly occurred.
The alleged indecent exposure was reported to the police, and the police report was forwarded to the county prosecutor the same day so a criminal charge could be filed, Kellogg Police Chief Paul Twidt told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
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Hollywood writers at rally say they'll win as strike reaches 50 days
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Fifty days into a strike with no end in sight, about 1,000 Hollywood writers and their supporters marched and rallied in Los Angeles for a new contract with studios that includes payment guarantees and job security.
Speakers at the Writers Guild of America's WGA Strong March and Rally for a Fair Contract on Wednesday emphasized the broad support for their cause shown by other Hollywood unions — including actors in their own contract negotiations — and labor at large.
“We’re all in it together, we’re all fighting the same fight, for a sustainable job in the face of corporate greed,” Adam Conover, a writer and a member of the guild’s board and its negotiating committee, told a crowd at the end of the march at the La Brea Tar Pits. “We are going to win because they need us. Writers are the ones who stare at a blank page. We are the ones who invent the characters, tell the stories and write the jokes that their audiences love. They’d have nothing without us.”
Talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group representing studios in negotiations, have not resumed since breaking off hours before the writers' contract expired on May 1. The strike began a day later, with more and more productions shutting down as it has gone on.
A similar deadline now looms for actors, whose union, SAG-AFTRA, is negotiating with the AMPTP on a contract that expires June 30. Members voted overwhelmingly to authorize guild leaders to call a strike if no deal is reached.
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US approves chicken made from cultivated cells, the nation's first 'lab-grown' meat
For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation's restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.
The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn't come from slaughtered animals — what's now being referred to as “cell-cultivated" or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.
The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.
“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that's used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way," said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat.
The companies received approvals for federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the U.S. The action came months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed that products from both companies are safe to eat. A manufacturing company called Joinn Biologics, which works with Good Meat, was also cleared to make the products.
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Modi flexes India’s cultural reach on Yoga Day with backbends and corpse poses on the UN lawn
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Praising yoga as “a way of life," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed poses ranging from cobra to corpse alongside a multinational crowd Wednesday at the U.N. headquarters as he kicked off the public portion of his U.S. visit.
With a checkerboard of made-in-India yoga mats covering the U.N.'s spacious north lawn, Modi stopped and bowed at a statue of the assassinated Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi before saying in brief remarks that yoga was an all-ages, portable practice accessible to all faiths and cultures.
“It is a very old tradition, but like all ancient Indian traditions, it is also living and dynamic,” Modi said. “Yoga is truly universal."
While yoga is a means to physical fitness, mental calm and emotional contentment, “it is not just about doing exercise on a mat. Yoga is a way of life,” said the year-old leader of the world's most populous nation.
For Modi, who arrived Tuesday in New York on a trip that will offer plenty of time to discuss global tensions, highlighting an ancient pursuit of inner tranquility was a savvy and symbolic choice. He has made yoga a personal practice and a diplomatic tool.
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Television veteran Geraldo Rivera says he's quitting Fox News' political combat show 'The Five'
NEW YORK (AP) — Geraldo Rivera has quit as one of the lonely liberal voices on Fox News' popular political combat show “The Five,” saying Wednesday that “a growing tension that goes beyond editorial differences” made it no longer worth it to him.
The last scheduled appearance on “The Five” for the television veteran, whose 80th birthday is on July 4, is next week.
“It has been a rocky ride but it has also been an exhilarating adventure that spanned quite a few years,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I hope it's not my last adventure.”
Rivera said that it was his choice to leave “The Five,” but that Fox management “didn’t race after me to say, ‘Geraldo, please come back.’” There was no immediate comment from Fox.
Despite airing in the late afternoon instead of prime time, “The Five” has become Fox's most-watched program, with an average of more than 3 million viewers last year. Its conceit is simple — five people, four of them conservative and one liberal — kick around the issues of the day.
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Justice Alito accepted Alaska resort vacation from GOP donors, report says
WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito accepted a 2008 trip to a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska from two wealthy Republican donors, one of whom repeatedly had interests before the court, and he did not disclose the trips on his financial disclosure for that year, ProPublica reports.
A story published late Tuesday by the nonprofit investigative journalism organization states that in July 2008 Alito flew to a remote corner of Alaska aboard the private plane of businessman and Republican donor, Paul Singer. A hedge fund founded by the billionaire has brought roughly a dozen cases before the court since then, ProPublica reported. Alito did not recuse himself from participating in any of those cases.
Alito's three-day stay at the King Salmon Lodge was paid for by another wealthy donor, Robin Arkley II, the owner of a mortgage company then based in California. Leonard Leo, then a leader of the conservative legal group The Federalist Society, helped make arrangements for the trip, including securing a spot for Alito aboard Singer's jet, which would have cost Alito at least $100,000 if he chartered the jet himself, ProPublica reported.
Supreme Court justices, like other federal judges, are required to file annual financial disclosure reports, w hich ask them to list gifts they have received. However, the high court is not subject to a binding code of conduct that applies to lower court judges, giving individual justices latitude to write and enforce their own rules.
Alito vigorously disputed the findings in a Wall Street Journal opinion article released before ProPublica published its story, stating he faced no obligation to disclose the details of the trip or recuse himself from cases involving Singer's hedge fund.
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Gang slaughtered 46 women at Honduran prison with machetes, guns and flammable liquid, official says
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Gang members in a women’s prison in Honduras slaughtered 46 other women inmates by spraying them with gunfire, hacking them with machetes and then locking survivors in their cells and dousing them with flammable liquid, an official said Wednesday.
The carnage in Tuesday's riot was the worst atrocity at a women’s prison in recent memory, something President Xiomara Castro called “monstrous.”
Relatives said inmates at the facility had been threatened for weeks by members of the notorious Barrio 18 gang.
Chillingly, the gang members were able to arm themselves with prohibited weapons, brush past guards and attack; they even carried locks to shut their victims inside, apparently to burn them to death. The intensity of the fire left the walls of the cells blackened and beds reduced to twisted heaps of metal.
“A group of armed people went to the cellblock of a rival gang, locked the doors, opened fire on them," said Juan López Rochez, the chief of operations for the country’s National Police.
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Movie review: Jennifer Lawrence in the raunchy teen comedy 'No Hard Feelings'
In a saner world, we would have already had a dozen Jennifer Lawrence comedies.
When aliens arrive they will surely go directly to IMDB to survey her filmography and wonder why one of Hollywood's funniest and most naturally charismatic stars spent the first decade of her career in dystopias, action movies and whatever it is you call “Mother!”
As if to make up for lost time, Lawrence has in “No Hard Feelings” made the kind of R-rated teen comedy that has usually launched young actors. She plays a 32-year-old Montauk Uber driver who, desperate for money after her car is towed, is hired by the wealthy parents (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti) of a timid and sheltered 19-year-old (newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman) to take his virginity before he heads off to Princeton.
We've, of course, had plenty of movies about teenagers trying to get laid for the first time. But “No Hard Feelings," directed and co-written by Gene Stupnitsky, may be the first in which the teen in question has seemingly no desire to do so. He's heterosexual, his parents are sure based on his browsing history.
But when Maddie Barker (Lawrence) turns up in a tight pink dress and heels at the Long Island animal shelter Percy (Feldman) works at, he responds mostly with prickliness and fear to her come-ons. The encounter ends with Percy spraying Maddie with mace.
The Associated Press
