Author: rpnadmin

Brooklyn, N.Y.When Reihan Salam was 19, someone held a knife to his throat in front of his parents’ house in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood. “The mugger stole my Harvard library card, an issue of Granta, and approximately $11,” he recalls. The police—“incredible, compassionate, competent”—were there within minutes. “There wasn’t much they could do, but they were responsive, and reassuring.” It was a “defining experience” for Mr. Salam, now 46: “It’s not quite right to say I was mugged by reality. I wasn’t a bleeding-heart liberal before it happened. But it certainly made me recoil from the antipolice left.” It made him…

SAN FRANCISCO — An intrepid sea lion nicknamed Chonkers is waddling his way into the hearts of tourists and locals who have flocked to San Francisco’s Pier 39 for a glimpse of the massive pinniped. On Thursday morning, visitors snapped photos as the Steller sea lion flopped on the pier, surrounded by dozens of much smaller California sea lions that call the docks home. “He’s like a Volkswagen! He’s so huge!” said Oluwaseyi Akinbobola, a visitor from Los Angeles who had an extra half hour so she ran down to the pier for a hopeful peek of the elusive sea…

AUSTIN, Texas — The Onion’s plan to take over the Infowars platforms that Alex Jones built into a bullhorn of conspiracy theories and turn them into parody sites was in limbo again Thursday, after a Texas court paused a proposed deal involving the satirical news outlet. Austin-based Infowars is facing liquidation because of the more than $1 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments Jones owes relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for calling the Connecticut massacre a hoax. The proposed licensing deal would give The Onion temporary authority to use Infowars’ trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property…

A half-dozen transgender Idaho residents sued the state over its newly approved law banning opposite-sex use of public restrooms in government buildings and public accommodations, arguing that the “vague” and “discriminatory” law violates their constitutional rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal filed the federal lawsuit on Wednesday, a month after Republican Gov. Brad Little signed into law House Bill 752, which makes it a criminal offense to “knowingly and willingly” enter opposite-sex facilities such as public restrooms and changing rooms. “H.B. 752 has a clear discriminatory intent, but its prohibitions and exceptions are vague, forcing Idahoans and…

Amtrak is considering allowing people to store guns in lockboxes on most of its trains, which critics say would weaken security measures that instead should be strengthened in light of the shooting at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The company has been considering the policy change since at least early this year, after being pressured by Trump administration officials to ease restrictions on transporting weapons, two people familiar with the proposed plan told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak about it publicly. They said the railroad hasn’t abandoned the proposal despite…

Thousands of passengers aboard a Norwegian Cruise Line vessel were trapped on their ship for up to nine hours Tuesday after a customs screening process at the Port of San Francisco ground to a near-standstill — the result of broken facial recognition technology, a late docking and the need to process a passenger’s death onboard. Norwegian Cruise Line’s Encore arrived from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, but it took nearly nine hours for some passengers to process through customs before they could disembark.  The Breakaway Plus-class ship had departed Miami on April 11 and visited Colombia, Panama…

MIAMI — The wreckage of a U.S. Coast Guard ship lost in a deadly attack more than a century ago, during World War I, was been discovered off the coast of England. The Coast Guard announced Wednesday that the USCGC Tampa was found about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off Newquay, Cornwall, United Kingdom, at a depth exceeding 300 feet (90 meters) deep in the Atlantic Ocean. The cutter’s wreckage was located and confirmed by the British technical-diving team Gasperados. Adm. Kevin Lunday, commandant of the Coast Guard, said in a statement that the courage and sacrifice of the Tampa’s crew…

SANTA FE, N.M. — Meta is raising the prospect of shutting down its social media services in New Mexico in response to a push by state prosecutors for fundamental changes to the company’s platforms, including Instagram, to protect the mental health and safety of children. The possibility emerged amid legal gamesmanship in the runup to a bench trial next week on allegations that Meta poses a public nuisance. It’s the second phase of a case that already resulted in $375 million in civil penalties on a jury’s determination that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew…

J. Craig Venter, who mapped the first draft of the human genome and helped scientists understand how genes shape our lives, died Wednesday. He was 79. Venter’s death was announced by the J. Craig Venter Institute, a genomics research group with locations in La Jolla, California, and Rockville, Maryland. The institute said he died in San Diego after being hospitalized for side effects from a recent cancer treatment. In the 1990s Venter bet that he could use a different sequencing technique to speed up the process of decoding the human genome and beat an enormous government effort called the Human…

STARKE, Fla. — A Florida man convicted of beating and choking his brother’s 13-year-old stepdaughter to death nearly 50 years ago is set to be executed Thursday evening. James Ernest Hitchcock, 70, is scheduled to receive a three-drug injection starting at 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke. Hitchcock was initially sentenced to death in 1977 after being convicted of first-degree murder in the July 31, 1976, killing of Cynthia Driggers. Then came years of appeals: Hitchcock’s lawyers argued that the trial judge had barred consideration of mitigating evidence, that they weren’t allowed to keep three people off the…