Author: rpnadmin

Powerful tornadoes ripped through north-central Oklahoma late Thursday, injuring at least 10 people, flattening dozens of homes and forcing Vance Air Force Base to close as damage assessments continued Friday morning. A large, slow-moving tornado tracked through Enid, a city of about 50,000 people roughly 65 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, Thursday evening, triggering a rare tornado emergency — the National Weather Service’s most urgent category of tornado warning. The twister remained on the ground for approximately 40 minutes, with the hardest-hit areas including the Gray Ridge Estates neighborhood on the south side of the city, where more than 40…

A “rat birth control” program spearheaded by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to painlessly reduce the city’s notorious vermin infestation will launch in Adams Morgan next month. Inspectors working in three-week cycles will place “non-lethal rodent fertility control bait” with a tracking powder around popular night spots, where rodents eat food waste tossed into alleyway trash bins behind restaurants and homes. Officials plan to expand the program into Chinatown and Barracks Row if this first round proves successful. “It is non-lethal but sterilizes rodents, reducing future reproduction,” D.C. Health told The Washington Times in a statement this week. D.C. Health officials…

WASHINGTON — A U.S. soldier has been charged with using inside information to win $400,000 in an online betting market on Venezuelan President Maduro’s capture, federal officials announced Thursday. Gannon Ken Van Dyk was part of the work to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money on the prediction market site Polymarket, the federal prosecutor’s office in New York said. Van Dyk was a senior enlisted soldier who was part of the special forces community and stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, according to the indictment, but it offers little other…

Meta is laying off about 8,000 workers, or about 10% of its workforce, the company said Thursday as it continues to ramp up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and highly paid AI-expert hires. The company said it was making the cuts for the sake of efficiency and to allow new investments in parts of its business, as first reported by Bloomberg, which also said the company will leave about 6,000 jobs unfilled. Also Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its U.S. employees. The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about…

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is vowing to crack down on foreign tech companies’ exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence models, singling out China at a time that country is narrowing the gap with the U.S. in the AI race. In a Thursday memo, Michael Kratsios, the president’s chief science and technology adviser, accused foreign entities “principally based in China” of engaging in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to “distill,” or extract capabilities from, leading AI systems made in the U.S. and “exploiting American expertise and innovation.” The administration, Kratsios wrote, will work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses…

A senior Army Green Beret used his inside knowledge of clandestine operations to make more than $400,000 by betting on the timing of Operation Absolute Resolve, the Jan. 3 mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday. Federal prosecutors said Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, 38, was stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., and was part of the team that planned and executed the mission. He is accused of using his access to classified military information to make wagers on its outcome with Polymarket, a prediction marketplace. In 2025, Polymarket began offering betting contracts related…

ATLANTA — Three professors at Atlanta’s Emory University filed a lawsuit Thursday over their arrests during a 2024 campus protest over the Israel-Hamas war, saying the university broke its own free speech policies when it called in police and state troopers to aggressively disband the protest, making 28 arrests. “The judicial system would find that Emory failed to protect its students, to protect its staff, to protect the educational mission of the university,” said philosophy Professor Noelle McAfee, one of the plaintiffs. “So this isn’t just about people’s individual rights. It’s our educational mission to train people in free and…

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release from immigration custody of the family of a man charged in a fatal 2025 firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado, against demonstrators supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery in San Antonio said Hayam El Gamal and her five children can be released from a family immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, as long as El Gamal and her oldest child, who is 18, wear electronic monitoring. Biery denied the government’s request to stay his ruling so it could appeal. One of the family’s lawyers, Eric Lee, posted on X…

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was weighing a taxpayer-funded takeover of Spirit Airlines with the intent of reselling the struggling budget carrier after oil prices drop. The president confirmed his continued interest in offering Spirit a financial lifeline after a lawyer told a U.S. Bankruptcy Court that the airline was in advanced talks with the U.S. government on a financing deal that would allow Spirit to emerge from Chapter 11 protection. “They have some good aircraft and good assets, and when the prices of oil goes down, we’ll sell it for a profit,” Trump said,…

After a school bus rolled on a West Virginia highway two years ago, forcing one boy to have his leg amputated and seriously injuring two other children aboard, police quickly discovered the driver was drunk. But the National Transportation Safety Board then discovered something even more troubling: School bus drivers driving impaired was not an isolated problem. That’s why the NTSB on Thursday recommended for the first time that all new school buses be equipped with alcohol detection systems that can disable the bus if they detect the driver might be impaired. “There’s a higher expectation for school bus drivers…