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Stock market today: Asian shares mixed despite Wall Street rally

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — Asian shares were mixed on Wednesday despite a rally on Wall Street driven by optimism over reports suggesting the American economy is in better shape than feared. Australia’s benchmark S&P/ASX 200 jumped 1.1% to 7,195.70 after the government reported that the consumer price index rose 5.6% in the twelve months to May. The most significant price rises included housing and food. The Reserve Bank of Australia made a surprise move of raising interest rate earlier this month to counter persisted price pressures. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 gained 1.6% to 33,070.03. South Korea’s Kospi lost 0.8% to 2,560.51. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.1% to 19,122.34, while the Shanghai Composite dipped 0.9% to 3,160.19. Wall Street rallied, with the S&P 500 resuming an upward climb that had carried it earlier this month to its highest level in more than a year. It gained 1.1% to 4,378.41. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.6% to 33,926.74, while the N...

Exonerated member of “Central Park Five” takes lead in New York City Council primary

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Yusef Salaam, who as a child was part of a group of teenagers wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned for the rape of a woman jogging in Central Park, took a commanding lead Tuesday in a Democratic primary for a City Council seat in New York.Salaam faces two veteran politicians, New York Assembly members Al Taylor, 65, and Inez Dickens, 73, in the race for a seat representing part of Harlem. The incumbent, democratic socialist Kristin Richard Jordan, dropped out of the race in May but remained on the ballot.The contest was taking place more than two decades after Salaam and four other men — known as the Central Park Five — were exonerated by DNA evidence in one of the city’s most notorious and racially fraught crimes.The Associated Press has not declared a winner in the race and the election’s outcome might not be certain for days because of New York’s ranked choice voting rules. That system kicks in if no candidate claims more than 50% of the total vote. It was un...

Activist detained in Hong Kong begins final appeal for recognition of his overseas same-sex marriage

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

HONG KONG (AP) — An activist detained in Hong Kong began his final appeal Wednesday seeking recognition for his same-sex marriage registered overseas, in a landmark case for the city’s LGBTQ+ community.Jimmy Sham, a prominent pro-democracy activist during the 2019 protests that roiled Hong Kong, first asked for a judicial review five years ago seeking a declaration that the city’s laws, which do not recognize foreign same-sex marriage, violate his constitutional right to equality. But the lower courts dismissed his legal challenge and a subsequent appeal over the case.Sham is now in custody after being charged with subversion over an unofficial primary election under a tough national security law enacted following the protests. Many other leading Hong Kong activists were also arrested or silenced by the law imposed by Beijing on the former British colony.The upcoming judgment by the city’s top court in his marriage case will have strong implications for the lives o...

Trump wants to keep ‘communists’ and ‘Marxists’ out of the US. Here’s what the law says

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has announced a new campaign proposal on United States immigration — barring “communists” and “Marxists” from entering the country.The Republican former president, who is making another bid in 2024, on Saturday said he would use “Section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act” to “order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists.”The announcement was reminiscent of Trump’s ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries during his first term, which was heavily criticized as anti-Muslim and ultimately revoked by President Joe Biden.“Those who come to enjoy our country must love our country,” Trump said during a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington, adding, “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”He also said there needs to be a “new law” to address communists and Marxists who grew up in America, but didn’t elaborate on what...

Supreme Court rejects novel legislative theory, but leaves door open for 2024 election challenges

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

The U.S. Supreme Court shot down a controversial legal theory that could have changed the way elections are run across the country, but left the door open to more limited challenges that could increase its role in deciding voting disputes during the 2024 presidential election.The court’s 6-3 ruling Tuesday drove a stake through the most extreme version of the so-called independent state legislature theory, which holds that legislatures have absolute power in setting the rules of federal elections and cannot be second-guessed by state courts. That decision cheered voting rights groups.“We beat back the most serious legal threat our democracy has ever faced today,” said Kathay Feng of Common Cause, whose lawsuit challenging congressional districts drawn by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature triggered the case.But for some critics of the theory, the danger is not entirely past.The court found that state courts still must act within “ordinary bounds” when rev...

Hazy future for caregiver payments expanded during pandemic worries families

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

Nathan Hill started receiving $12.75 an hour from a state Medicaid program to help care for his severely disabled son during the pandemic, money he said allowed his family to stop using food stamps.The program was designed to provide a continuation of care and ease a home health worker shortage that grew worse after COVID-19 hit.But now, with the COVID-19 public health emergency over, he worries that the extra income will disappear. Some states have already stopped payments while others have yet to make them permanent. “The success of this during the pandemic was tremendous … for the first time we were able to pay our own way,” said the Meridian, Idaho, resident. “We’re not relying on charities to help us pay our rent and utilities.”A total of 39 states, with the help of the federal government, either started paying family caregivers or expanded the population eligible for payment during the pandemic, according to a survey last summer by KFF, a non-profit that studies health care is...

Haze over Great Lakes region reminds US residents that Canadian wildfires persist

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

CHICAGO (AP) — The haze of unhealthy air that settled over Chicago and other Great Lakes cities Tuesday reminded U.S. residents from the Midwest to the Northeast and as far south as Kentucky to brace for more depending on which way the wind blows as Canadian wildfires rage on.“Until the fires are out, there’s a risk,” said Bryan Jackson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “If there’s any north component to the wind, there’s a chance it’ll be smoky.”Drifting smoke from the ongoing wildfires across Canada created curtains of haze and raised air quality concerns throughout the Great Lakes region and in parts of the central and eastern United States. The Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov site showed parts of Illinois, lower Michigan and southern Wisconsin had the worst air quality in the U.S., and Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee had air quality categorized as “very unhealthy.”In Minnesota, a record 23rd air quality alert was issued Tuesday through late We...

Impeachment? Censure? Stigma is falling away from Congress’ most severe punishments

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans have held it over Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for months. Attorney General Merrick Garland is facing it too. And President Joe Biden seemingly isn’t far behind.Driven by the demands of hard-right members, Republicans in the House are threatening impeachment against Biden and his top Cabinet officials, creating a backbeat of chatter about “high crimes and misdemeanors” that is driving legislative action, spurring committee investigations, raking in fundraising money and complicating the plans of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his leadership team.Long viewed as an option of last resort, to be triggered only for the most severe wrongdoing, the constitutionally authorized power of impeachment is rapidly moving from the extraordinary to the humdrum, driven in large part by Republicans and their grievances about how Democrats twice impeached President Donald Trump.Republicans remain so opposed to Trump’s impeachments, in fact, that they a...

Threatened by shortages, electric car makers race for supplies of lithium for batteries

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

BEIJING (AP) — Threatened by possible shortages of lithium for electric car batteries, automakers are racing to lock in supplies of the once-obscure “white gold” in a politically and environmentally fraught competition from China to Nevada to Chile.General Motors Co. and the parent company of China’s BYD Auto Ltd. went straight to the source and bought stakes in lithium miners, a rare step in an industry that relies on outside vendors for copper and other raw materials. Others are investing in lithium refining or ventures to recycle the silvery-white metal from used batteries.A shortfall in lithium supplies would be an obstacle for government and industry plans to ramp up sales to tens of millions of electric vehicles a year. It is fueling political conflict over resources and complaints about the environmental cost of extracting them.“We already have that risk” of not being able to get enough, said GM’s chief financial officer, Paul A. Jacobson, at a Deutsche Bank confe...

Air Quality in Chicago has rarely if ever been worse. Clusters of T-Storms to Ride "Ring of Fire". Heat makes comeback

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:12:37 GMT

Authorities estimate 29,000 square miles have burned in Canada this year—more than the FULL 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022 Canadian fire seasons combinedThe area charred in 2023 across Canada is larger than the size of West Virginia and far larger than the states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware or Maryland to name just a few states.The fires have sent 140-million tons of carbon back into the atmosphere--and CO2 (i.e. heat-retaining carbon dioxide) which in am amount equivalent to the entire annual CO2 production of Indonesia. Smoke has been tracked across the Atlantic into Europe and beyond.Dr. David Peterson, research meteorologist with the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory in California and one of our former WGN-TV weather interns, says 55 towering pyrocumulonimbus clouds have formed over the Canadian fires. That's a lot—but Peterson points out the devastating Australian fires in 2019 and 2020 generated 38 pyrocumulonimbus clouds which sent smoke around th...