U.S. gun-control advocates have outspent gun-rights groups by more than 40 percent on next month’s congressional elections, reversing the National Rifle Association’s long-standing dominance in spending on gun politics. Boosted largely by the personal fortune of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is considering a 2020 presidential run, the gun-control spending almost entirely benefits Democrats, who are seeking to wrest majorities from…
read moreStock markets around the world tumbled Friday while U.S. Treasury prices rose along with demand for safer bets as better-than-expected U.S. economic data did little to ease anxiety over disappointing corporate profits and trade wars. Wall Street closed above its session lows, but earnings reports from Amazon.com and Alphabet, issued late Thursday, rekindled a rush…
read moreFar-right extremists have ramped up an intimidating wave of anti-Semitic harassment against Jewish journalists, political candidates and others ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections, according to a report released Friday by a Jewish civil rights group. The Anti-Defamation League’s report says its researchers analyzed more than 7.5 million Twitter messages from Aug. 31 to…
read moreU.S. stock market indexes fell sharply in Friday’s early trading, but saw losses ease later in the day. At one point the S&P 500 and the Dow were down by two percent or more, while the NASDAQ was off by 3.5 percent at one point. Investors worried about faltering growth, rising interest rates, trade tensions,…
read moreU.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton says Russian President Vladimir Putin has been invited to visit Washington next year. Bolton said on Friday in the ex-Soviet nation of Georgia: “We have invited President Putin to Washington after the first of the year for, basically, a full day of consultations.” He says no date has been…
read moreThe U.S. economy grew at a robust annual rate of 3.5 percent in the July-September quarter as the strongest burst of consumer spending in nearly four years helped offset a sharp drag from trade. The Commerce Department said Friday that the third quarter’s gross domestic product, the country’s total output of goods and services, followed…
read moreU.S. authorities are investigating a string of suspicious packages, containing suspected pipe bombs, addressed to prominent Democrats and other critics of the Trump administration. Two former presidents, vice president and presidential candidate have been targeted, as well as a movie star and a news network. President Donald Trump has condemned the packages as an attack…
read moreLess than two weeks before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a plan to lower prices for some prescription drugs, saying it would stop unfair practices that force Americans to pay much more than people in other countries for the same medications. “We are taking aim at the global freeloading that forces American…
read moreTop trade officials from 12 countries and the European Union on Thursday vowed to reform World Trade Organization rules in the face of U.S. actions that threaten to paralyze the body and address some of Washington’s complaints about Chinese subsidies. The officials, meeting in the Canadian capital Ottawa, said they shared a “common resolve for…
read moreMajor U.S. stock indexes made strong gains in Thursday’s trading after some upbeat profit reports by major companies. The Nasdaq composite posted its biggest daily gain since March, as Microsoft’s upbeat earnings spurred a rebound in technology names and investors snapped up oversold shares. The Nasdaq added 209.94 points, or 2.95 percent, to 7,318.34, a day after it confirmed a correction and registered its biggest decline…
read moreBritish regulators slapped Facebook on Thursday with a fine of 500,000 pounds ($644,000) — the maximum possible — for failing to protect the privacy of its users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the same time, European Union lawmakers demanded an audit of Facebook to better understand how it handles information, reinforcing how regulators in…
read moreU.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has called on the Justice Department on Thursday to launch a criminal investigation into one of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers and her lawyer. The Republican lawmaker wants prosecutors to determine if Julie Swetnick and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, made false statements to Congress last month about…
read moreGoogle is abandoning plans to establish a campus for tech startups in Berlin after protests from residents worried about gentrification. The internet giant confirmed reports Thursday it will sublet the former electrical substation in the capital’s Kreuzberg district to two charitable organizations, Betterplace.org and Karuna. Google has more than a dozen so-called campuses around the…
read moreNew York police seized early Thursday what they called a suspicious package in a lower Manhattan neighborhood. Media reports quoted police officials as saying a package similar to one sent to prominent Democrats earlier this week was sent to the address of a restaurant owned by actor Robert De Niro. The package was carried away…
read moreWhen elections are over, the results are submitted to a meticulous post-mortem: What went wrong and what went right? Voter turnout is key, complacency is bad, and suitable candidates matter. In the age of President Donald Trump, heated rhetoric and name-calling matter too. For a while, it seemed, democrats of Nevada — a gold-and-silver-mining-turned-gambling haven…
read moreU.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that targeting current and former U.S. government officials with explosive devices is “despicable” and has no place in American politics. Suspicious packages were sent to former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and several other prominent Americans, as well as the New…
read moreThe technology used in space missions can be expensive but it has some practical benefits here on Earth. Case in point: the thousands of high resolution images taken from the surface of Mars, collected by the two Mars rovers – Spirit and Opportunity. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, are using the same…
read moreAnother torrent of selling gripped Wall Street on Wednesday, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting more than 600 points and extending a losing streak for the benchmark S&P 500 index to a sixth day. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite bore the brunt of the sell-off, leaving it more than 10 percent below its August peak,…
read moreCampaigners in a bohemian district of Berlin celebrated Wednesday after Internet giant Google abandoned strongly-opposed plans to open a large campus there. The US firm had planned to set up an incubator for start-up companies in Kreuzberg, one of the older districts in the west of the capital. But the company’s German spokesman Ralf Bremer…
read moreSaudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said on Wednesday the kingdom will continue with reforms and spending on infrastructure, predicting the economy will grow by 2.5 percent this year. Speaking at an investment conference in Riyadh, the crown prince also said he expected economic growth next year to be higher. Higher oil prices has helped…
read moreFacebook Inc said on Wednesday that company moderators during the last quarter removed 8.7 million user images of child nudity with the help of previously undisclosed software that automatically flags such photos. The machine learning tool rolled out over the last year identifies images that contain both nudity and a child, allowing increased enforcement of…
read moreABC News says that it is treating midterm election night coverage as if it were a presidential year, promising Wednesday to get a one-hour jump on its broadcast rivals by devoting the entire prime-time schedule on Nov. 6 to reporting results. The network said its “Your Voice, Your Vote” show, anchored by George Stephanopoulos, will…
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