Author: rpnadmin

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday proposed a revised budget without a deficit for his last year of office and the next, laying out a $350 billion spending plan that includes little new spending but also avoids major cuts. Newsom is eager to safeguard programs that have defined his tenure as the leader of the nation’s most populous state and one of the world’s largest economies. As he gears up for a possible presidential run in 2028, the Democrat is promoting the budget as fiscally responsible, saying it protects California’s values but also builds up the state’s…

A federal judge ordered Texas not to enforce parts of a law that would allow state authorities to arrest and deport illegal immigrants independent of the federal government, saying only Congress has the power to control the borders. U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra, a Reagan appointee, rejected Texas’s argument that illegal immigration constitutes an “invasion,” which would trigger state powers to repel the invaders. He said the Constitution grants Congress the power to create a national immigration policy, and Texas’s SB 4 interferes with that, by purporting to give the state power to make arrests — and, even more…

NEW YORK — The antipoverty nonprofit Global Citizen is no stranger to big stages. The advocacy group rallied more than 60,000 festivalgoers at its Central Park concert last year around issues of rainforest protection and energy access. But Global Citizen is preparing for its most ambitious production yet: the first-ever FIFA World Cup halftime show on July 19, curated with help from Coldplay vocalist Chris Martin. Super Bowl-style performances – uncommon in soccer – will feature Madonna, Shakira and BTS. Also Thursday, Shakira released the official World Cup song “Dai Dai” featuring Afrobeats giant Burna Boy. Organizers aim to direct…

SEATTLE — A tourist from Washington state is facing federal charges after a witness recorded what prosecutors say was a video of him hurling a coconut-sized rock at an endangered Hawaiian monk seal just off a Maui beach last week. Special agents with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration arrested Igor Mykhaylovych Lytvynchuk, 38, in the Seattle area, the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu said. He is charged with harassing and attempting to harass a protected animal. Lytvynchuk, who lives in Covington, Washington, was in U.S. District Court in Seattle on Thursday. A judge ordered him released pending another court…

Israel said Thursday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had instructed officials to initiate a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times over a Nicholas Kristof opinion column alleging sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces, though it was not immediately clear where or whether a complaint had been filed. Mr. Kristof’s column, published Monday under the headline “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” alleged “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all,…

Cheryl Minter, mother of a woman murdered at a Fairfax County, Virginia, bus stop, said county officials put an illegal immigrant over her daughter’s safety, as she pleaded for help from Congress on Thursday. Stephanie Minter was stabbed to death in February, and authorities have charged an illegal immigrant, Abdul Jalloh, who’d been given numerous breaks by county officials over the course of more than 30 previous charges involving rape, stabbings and assaults. “I am here because the system failed my daughter,” Ms. Minter told lawmakers. “Care for one group should not be a danger for another.” That was a…

In less than three minutes, an intruder exploited a security gap at one of the nation’s busiest airports and stepped into the path of an airplane hurtling down a Colorado runway with 231 people aboard. The 41-year-old man slipped unnoticed past motion detectors in a remote corner of Denver International Airport, which sprawls across open plains and covers an area twice the size of Manhattan. He quickly scaled an 8-foot perimeter fence topped with barbed wire, then walked unobstructed onto the runway where he was fatally struck by a Frontier Airlines jet as it attempted to take off late Friday…

PARK CITY, Utah — A Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband will serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled Wednesday. Kouri Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing her husband Eric Richins’ cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced…

HALIFAX, N.C. — With 165 grains of black powder in the barrel, a .75-caliber Brown Bess flintlock musket like the ones the redcoats carried in 1776 can hurl a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet (305 meters) per second. Imagine what that can do to a human body. Now, imagine that it’s almost completely exempt from gun regulations. How can that be? Well, under federal and most state laws, many antique or replica guns aren’t technically considered firearms. In most places, even convicted felons can own them. “I suspect the average judge would be surprised to find…

NEW YORK — A man accused of running a secret Chinese spy outpost in New York City was convicted Wednesday of acting as an illegal foreign agent and destroying text messages from a Chinese government handler. Lu Jianwang, 64, was acquitted of a related conspiracy charge in a case that pitted U.S. concerns about China’s crackdown on pro-democracy dissidents against the defense’s contention that prosecutors twisted a well-meaning Chinese American community leader’s bureaucratic misstep to put him in prison. Lu spoke to supporters as he left Brooklyn federal court but declined to answer questions from reporters. His lawyer, John Carman,…