Author: Wolf Blitzer
A single-engine airplane carrying five people crashed and burst into flames Sunday in the parking lot of a retirement community near a small airport in suburban Pennsylvania, and everyone on board survived, officials and witnesses said.The fiery crash happened around 3 p.m. just south of Lancaster Airport in Manheim Township, police chief Duane Fisher told reporters at an evening briefing. All five victims were taken to hospitals in unknown condition. Nobody on the ground was hurt, the chief said. Brian Pipkin was driving nearby when he noticed the small plane climbing before it suddenly veered to the left. “And then…
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Air Force fighter jets intercepted a civilian aircraft flying in the temporarily restricted airspace near Donald Trump’s Florida home Sunday, bringing the number of violations to more than 20 since the president took office on Jan. 20.North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement that Sunday’s incident, which took place as Trump finished a round of golf at his West Palm Beach golf course, saw F-16s deploy flares to get the attention of the civilian pilot. Jets also conducted an intercept on Saturday morning shortly after Trump arrived at the course from his…
Aubrey Lay — a Fulbright scholar — was supposed to get paid for three months of work by the U.S. government through his teaching assistantship at a school for Ukrainian refugees in Estonia. Instead, he only got about one week’s pay, and no word on when he might see the rest of his grant.Lay is among scholars around the world who depend on State Department funding to participate in long-established programs like Fulbright and who say their payments have been abruptly cut off after getting a notice that officials were reviewing their activities. The move appears to be in line…
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday announced new leadership at the agency tasked with immigration enforcement as she also pledged to step up lie detector tests on employees to identify those who may be leaking information about operations to the media.“The authorities that I have under the Department of Homeland Security are broad and extensive and I plan to use every single one of them to make sure that we’re following the law, that we are following the procedures in place to keep people safe and that we’re making sure we’re following through on what President Trump has promised,”…
NEW YORK (AP) — Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian graduate student who played a prominent role in last spring’s anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, according to his attorney.Mahmoud Khalil was inside his university-owned residence Saturday night near Columbia’s Manhattan campus when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the building and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in…
NEW YORK (AP) — Firefighters in New York knocked down a dwindling brush fire in a wooded stretch of Long Island on Sunday as officials warned that high wind gusts could leave the region vulnerable to additional blazes.Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency a day earlier after four separate fires broke out across large swaths of Long Island’s Pine Barrens region, prompting closures to the highway and evacuations of a military base.As of Sunday, all visible flames had been knocked down, including the last remaining fire burning in the hamlet of Westhampton, according to Suffolk County Fire Coordinator…
As President Donald Trump floats grand ideas like reacquiring the Panama Canal and taking over Greenland, some rural residents of Illinois and Oregon are promoting geopolitical change of their own: They want to break away from their states, and perhaps unite with Indiana and Idaho. Proponents say they have more in common with their rural brethren across state lines than they do with urbanites in Chicago and Portland, Oregon. And they contend the Democratic-led cities have so much clout in state government that rural, Republican voices get drowned out.In the last five years, voters in 33 Illinois counties have been…
NEW YORK (AP) — At Fishtown Seafood, owner Bryan Szeliga is worried about the oysters.Szeliga, who operates three retail and wholesale locations in Philadelphia and Haddonfield, N.J., sells a range of seafood. But briny, slurpable oysters are the biggest part of his overall business. And 60% to 70% come from Canada.The Trump’s administration’s on-again, off-again 25% tariffs on imports from Canada — which went into effect on Tuesday only to be suspended on some items for a month on Thursday — are giving Szeliga whiplash. The flip-flopping is making it tough to plan ahead. And if the tariffs do eventually…
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Facing projections of spiking energy demand, U.S. states are pressing for ways to build new power plants faster as policymakers increasingly worry about protecting their residents and economies from rising electric bills, power outages and other consequences of falling behind Big Tech in a race for electricity.Some states are dangling financial incentives. Others are undoing decades of regulatory structures in what they frame as a race to serve the basic needs of residents, avoid a catastrophe and keep their economies on track in a fast-electrifying society.“I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like this,” said Todd…
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A new law in South Dakota prohibiting the use of eminent domain to acquire land for carbon capture pipelines raises questions about the viability of a proposed 2,500 mile (4,023-kilometer) project snaking through five Midwest states.Summit Carbon Solutions, the company behind the estimated $8.9 billion pipeline, vowed to keep pursuing the project despite South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden’s announcement Thursday that he had signed a bill into law that will make routing the line much more difficult. The law bans Summit from forcing South Dakota landowners to allow the pipeline through their property.Plans call for…