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Millard: Don’t let Black Friday fund criminal gangs

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

“Don’t let Black Friday fund the Black Market.”That was the warning from Alysa Erichs, former Acting Executive Associate Director of Homeland Security Investigations, to Americans looking for good deals on their holiday shopping. The internet is awash in counterfeit, stolen, and other illicit goods, and when bargain-hunting Americans buy them, they are stuffing the stockings of criminal gangs.“From bottles of diluted Jack Daniels to lead-laced counterfeit Yeti dog bowls, the criminals profiting from the sale of illegal goods do not care who they hurt or whose holidays they ruin,” said Erichs, who now works with United to Safeguard America from Illegal Trade (USA-IT). The organization is a coalition of companies working together to fight against fake and stolen goods that it says too often end up in the shopping bags of American families.During a recent press event, USA-IT presented a display of recently seized counterfeit goods. Among them, a knock-off iPhone that was running Androi...

Adam Sandler mines his childhood for ‘Leo’

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

For Adam Sandler, “Leo,” his animated musical now streaming on Netflix, has been a lengthy labor of love.Sandler, who produced, co-wrote and stars as the voice of Leo,  first began toying with the idea in 2016 before teaming up with a trio of comrades who directed: Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel and David Wachtenheim.Leo is the 74-year-old lizard of the title. He’s spent his life with Squirtle the turtle in a grade school’s classroom terrarium. The two share barbed, funny comments on the kids passing before them.They’ve been around long enough to know that a motor mouth girl is “an only child” or the quiet one has “divorced parents.” When a substitute teacher (Cecily Strong of “Schmigadoon!”) orders that Leo stay in a different kid’s house each night, one surprise is he can talk to the student. Another is he gives good advice.“We were all,” Sandler said in a Zoom virtual press conference, “just so excited to actually address that stuff kids go through when they’re growing up...

Russell: What American Dream is Biden restoring?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

The holiday season is here and in this economy, that means Americans will either stretch budgets as best they can, go into debt or go without.Bidenomics, the name President Joe Biden embraced for his plan to “restore the American Dream,” has proven to do anything but that.Reports on how the economy is doing on a macro level vary. Some wonder if we are currently in a recession, others say it’s coming, and still others posit we just missed one.Inflation is lower than it was two years ago, but it’s still higher than it was even in 2020, when it was just at 1.2%. It rose to 3.7 then fell back to 3.2% in October. Mortgage interest rates are still high and credit card debt is too.The average balance is now $6,000, higher than it’s been in a decade suggesting people are still struggling to make ends meet.Even if prices are going up slower than before or inflation has decreased over all, people are still experiencing increases on top of increases. The compound effect of this has people reel...

Dear Abby: Trust shattered after wife reveals infidelity

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

Dear Abby: I have been married to my high school sweetheart for 30 years. Recently, she shared details of two infidelities that she had with other men.The first was with an individual on the staff of our church who held himself out to be my friend. My wife says it was an unprovoked attack, where he forced himself upon her. But when I asked why she didn’t resist or fight him off, she said she didn’t know and that maybe, deep down, she wanted it to happen. The second was someone she met at a bar and had developed a relationship with. When I was away on business trips, she stayed with him overnight on four occasions.She tells me these things happened more than 20 years ago and she’s been faithful since, but to put it bluntly, I am devastated and unconvinced that that’s the entire story. I believed my wife to be faithful during our marriage.I guess I was naive because, over the years, she was jealous and accused me of something nefarious if I even looked at a wom...

Live updates | Israel-Hamas truce begins with a cease-fire ahead of hostage and prisoner releases

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

A four-day cease fire in the Israel-Hamas war began Friday morning in Gaza as part of an agreement that Qatar helped broker. The deal also includes the release of dozens of hostages held by militants and Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, which was to take place later Friday.The diplomatic breakthrough promised some relief for the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza who have endured weeks of Israeli bombardment, as well as families in Israel who fear for their loved ones taken captive during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.More than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza after a dayslong pause in its casualty report, which it attributed to the health system’s collapse in northern Gaza making it impossible to provide a detailed count.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will press ahead with the war after a cease-fire expires. Some 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, mostly during the initial inc...

Make noise! A murder and a movie stir Italians to loudly demand an end to violence against women

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

ROME (AP) — After the latest, horrifying killing of a college student allegedly by her resentful and jealous ex-boyfriend, students from Turin to Palermo have taken to pounding on classroom desks in unison to demand a stop to the slaying of women in Italy at the hands of men.Just days before the killing of 22-year-old Guilia Cecchettin, Italians were already applauding a blockbuster movie about a woman who endures beatings and belittling by her overbearing husband. The movie is set in 1946, 24 years before divorce became legal in Italy and on the eve of the first time Italian women were allowed to vote. The film’s exploration of the suffocating role of patriarchy in Italian society is painfully resonating today.The moment is a remarkable confluence of fact and fiction, driving demands across Italy to protect women and to eradicate patriarchal mentalities woven into society. Giulia Cecchettin disappeared after meeting her former boyfriend, Filippo Turetta, for a burger at a sho...

Railyard explosion, inspections raise safety questions about Union Pacific’s hazmat shipping

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Federal inspectors have twice found hundreds of defects in the locomotives and railcars Union Pacific uses at the world’s largest railyard in Nebraska, but none of those seem to explain why a shipping container filled with toxic acid exploded there this fall.Investigators haven’t confirmed the cause of the Sept. 14 blast in a remote corner of the railroad’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, about 250 miles west of Omaha. The explosion didn’t spread far, but investigators appear to be delving into the questionable decision to load dozens of plastic barrels of perchloric acid inside a shipping container with a wood floor and possibly atop wooden pallets, even though that acid is known to react with wood or any other organic material.“I don’t know if you’ve ever read about perchloric acid, but when it comes in contact with organic material, it becomes highly volatile. So that car was doomed from the day it was loaded,” said Andy Foust, a Nebraska lea...

South Africa, Colombia and others are fighting drugmakers over access to TB and HIV drugs

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South Africa, Colombia and other countries that lost out in the global race for coronavirus vaccines are taking a more combative approach towards drugmakers and pushing back on policies that deny cheap treatment to millions of people with tuberculosis and HIV. Experts see it as a shift in how such countries deal with pharmaceutical behemoths and say it could trigger more efforts to make lifesaving medicines more widely available.In the COVID-19 pandemic, rich countries bought most of the world’s vaccines early, leaving few shots for poor countries and creating a disparity the World Health Organization called “a catastrophic moral failure.”Now, poorer countries are trying to become more self-reliant “because they’ve realized after COVID they can’t count on anyone else,” said Brook Baker, who studies treatment-access issues at Northeastern University.One of the targets is a drug, bedaquiline, that is used for treating people with drug-resistant versions ...

Stock market today: Asian shares are mixed, as Hong Kong retreats on selling of property shares

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

BANGKOK (AP) — Shares were mixed in Asia on Friday, with Hong Kong retreating on selling of property shares following recent gains. U.S. futures edged higher after markets on Wall Street were closed on Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday. Oil prices slipped. Japan reported its consumer inflation rose for the first time in four months, with big gains in food prices and hotel rates as tourism has soared. The consumer price index rose 3.3% in October from a year earlier, up from 3% in September in a trend contrary to the Bank of Japan’s forecasts for price pressures to abate toward the year’s end. “Both the government and the BOJ will be concerned about higher-than-expected inflation,” Robert Carnell and Min Joo Kang of ING Economics said in a commentary. That will likely lead the central bank to adjust its extremely lax monetary policy in the new year, they said. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 added 0.7% to 33,690.11. Chinese shares fell back after recent gains driven by expec...

Maui residents wonder if their burned town can be made safe. The answer? No one knows

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:50:59 GMT

When Daniel Skousen scrubs at the ash and soot covering his Maui home, he worries about the smell.What chemicals created the burning-trash-barrel scent that has lingered since a deadly wildfire tore through Lahaina in August? Should he believe government agencies’ assessment of when the air, land and water will be safe enough for his family to return?Or will political and economic pressures to rebuild and restore Maui’s robust tourism industry — where visitors normally spend $14 million per day — lead officials to look at any testing results through rose-colored glasses?“It appears very important to them to get that tourism tax revenue back,” said Skousen. “It makes you wonder if the testing will be biased.”The fire blew out Skousen’s windows and filled his home with ash, but the building is still standing, and he hopes someday to move back in. The home next door burned to the ground.Skousen wants a second opinion on any government environmental assessments, preferably from an...