U.S./World category, Page 385

HARTFORD, Conn. — A Connecticut state representative, considered a rising political star, was killed when a wrong-way driver crashed head-on into his vehicle early Thursday morning as he returned home from the governor’s inauguration ball, state police said. The other driver also died. Quentin Williams, a 39-year-old Democrat from Middletown,...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago. The new rules expand on...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. will send Ukraine nearly $3 billion in military aid, in a massive new package that will for the first time include several dozen Bradley fighting vehicles, U.S. officials said Thursday, in the Biden administration’s latest step to send increasingly lethal and powerful weapons to help Ukraine...

NEWARK, N.J. — Shubham Chandra knows how dangerous the coronavirus can be: He lost his dad during the pandemic. So when he cleared customs at Newark Liberty International Airport and saw people offering anonymous covid-19 testing, he was happy to volunteer. “It’s a minimum amount of effort to help a...

WASHINGTON — For a long and frustrating third day, divided Republicans kept the speaker’s chair of the U.S. House sitting empty Thursday, as party leader Kevin McCarthy failed again and again in an excruciating string of ballots to win enough GOP votes to seize the chamber’s gavel. Pressure was building...

BOISE, Idaho — The DNA of the man accused of killing four University of Idaho students was found on a knife sheath recovered at the crime scene, and cellphone data shows he was in the area of the victims’ home around the time of the November attack and on a...

DES MOINES, Iowa — Call it the Golden Age of lottery jackpots. Or to put it another way, what’s up with all the massive lottery prizes? The latest haul up for grabs is a $940 million Mega Millions jackpot, with a drawing set for Friday night. The prize ranks as...

BEIJING — Patients, mostly older people, laid on stretchers in hallways or took oxygen while sitting in wheelchairs as a covid-19 outbreak stretched public health facilities’ resources in China’s capital Beijing, even after its reported peak. The Chuiyangliu hospital in the city’s east was packed Thursday with newly arrived patients....

KYIV, Ukraine — The head of the Russian Orthodox Church called Thursday for a 36-hour Christmas cease-fire in Ukraine at the end of this week, but his appeal looked unlikely to bring any breakthrough in halting the war that began last February with Russia’s invasion. Moscow Patriarch Kirill suggested a...

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s disclosure of his daughter in recent public events was likely an attempt to show his people that one of his children would one day inherit his power in what would be the country’s third hereditary power transfer, South Korea’s spy...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis joined tens of thousands of faithful in bidding farewell to Benedict XVI at a rare requiem Mass Thursday for a dead pope presided over by a living one, ending an unprecedented decade for the Catholic Church that was sparked by the German theologian’s decision to...

ENOCH, Utah — A Utah man fatally shot his five children, his mother-in-law and his wife, then killed himself two weeks after the woman had filed for divorce, according to authorities and public records. Enoch Police Chief Jackson Ames said during a Thursday press conference that officers had been involved...

Religiously speaking, the incoming 118th Congress looks like America — that is, the America of decades past, rather than today. Congress is far more Christian, and religious overall, than today’s general population. Even though nearly three in 10 Americans claim no religious affiliation — a rate that has risen steadily...

Law enforcement agencies are boosting a reward for information on the unknown individual who placed pipe bombs outside political targets one day before the Capitol riot in Washington ahead of the second anniversary of the attack. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the...

WASHINGTON — As members of the Proud Boys extremist group stormed past police lines and swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, their leader cheered them on from afar, prosecutors say. “Do what must be done,” Enrique Tarrio wrote on social media. “So what do we do now?” someone asked...

HAVANA — Grappling with the biggest flood of Cuban migrants in decades, the United States reopened their long-closed legal pathway on Wednesday by resuming all visa services at its embassy in Havana. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans desperate to leave the island’s flailing economy and reunite with family in the...

KYIV, Ukraine — The Russian military’s top brass came under increasing scrutiny Wednesday as more details emerged of how at least 89 Russian soldiers, and possibly many more, were killed in a Ukrainian artillery attack on a single building. The scene last weekend in the Russian-held eastern Ukrainian town of...

SAO PAULO — Brazilian soccer stars past and present are under fire from fans for skipping Pelé’s funeral and opting to pay their respects on social media. The three-time World Cup champion was buried in his hometown Tuesday after more than 230,000 mourners passed by his casket at Vila Belmiro...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday sent a frigate armed with the country’s latest Zircon hypersonic missile on a trans-ocean cruise in a show of force as tensions with the West escalate over the war in Ukraine. Russia touts that the Zircon missile can evade any Western air defenses by...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans flailed through a long second day of fruitless balloting Wednesday, unable to either elect their leader Kevin McCarthy as House speaker or come up with a new strategy to end the political chaos that has tarnished the start of their new majority. Yet McCarthy wasn’t giving...

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The gunman who murdered 17 people at a Parkland high school nearly five years ago has spent the last nine weeks in the custody of the Florida of Corrections. Where? That’s anyone’s guess. In an unusually secretive move, the state has refused to disclose the location...

In an end-of-year video message for social media, Cuba’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, recently acknowledged that 2022 was “one of the most challenging of Cuba’s revolutionary history.” He then admitted that 2023 “could be even more difficult,” but that, he added, would be “an attractive challenge for all who feel revolutionary.”...