Tuesday, Dec 16th
Last update09:33:48 AM GMT
Days before heading home for the holidays, Trump told White House reporters that the tax bill would be "one of the great Christmas gifts to middle-income people." However, Mar-a-lago's exclusive dinner guests would have paid a $200,000 initiation fee and $14,000 in annual dues to Trump's golf club and resort.
In a fit of anger during a June cabinet meeting in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said Haitians entering the U.S. "all have AIDS" and that Nigerians would never "go back to their huts" once they saw America, according to The New York Times, which reported the comments in a bombshell article it published Saturday.
The White House denied the former reality TV star made the controversial remarks. “General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The New York Times. "It's both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway."
Former NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless, the first person to fly untethered in space, died this week at 80 years old, the agency said Friday.
McCandless, who died Thursday, became the first astronaut to fly in space without being harnessed to a space vessel on Feb. 7, 1984, while on a mission aboard the space shuttle Challenger. Other astronauts on the mission used a 70mm camera to capture the moment in a now-iconic photograph, NASA said in a release.
More than 100 people have been killed and scores are missing in southern Philippines after Tropical Storm Tembin triggered mud slides and flash floods.
The storm hit the country's second largest island, Mindanao, on Friday, bringing torrential rain and winds of 80 kilometres per hour.
"We're really on our toes right now," Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippines Red Cross told Al Jazeera on Saturday. "And we're trying to figure out how to give help to so many people that are really in danger right now."
Federal prosecutors in New York have subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records tied to senior White House adviser Jared Kushner’s family business, The New York Times reported Friday.
Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York subpoenaed the records from the German financial institution over the past few weeks. It's unclear what records the prosecutors are pursuing, or how closely tied they are to Kushner himself.
Kushner Companies has taken out hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Deutsche Bank over the years.
This year's historic hurricane season exposed a little-known public health threat: Highly polluted sites that can be inundated by floodwaters, potentially spreading toxic contamination.
In Houston, more than a dozen Superfund sites were flooded by Hurricane Harvey, with breaches reported at two. In the Southeast and Puerto Rico, Superfund sites were battered by driving rains and winds from Irma and Maria.
The vulnerable sites highlighted by AP's review are scattered across the nation, but Florida, New Jersey and California have the most, and the most people living near them. They are in largely low-income, heavily minority neighborhoods, the data show.
The stellar career of world-renowned conductor Charles Dutoit has come crashing down in the wake of sexual assault accusations by three singers and a musician. Symphonies from Boston to Sydney have severed ties with the maestro, and he has cancelled guest appearances with other major orchestras.
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, where the 81-year-old Dutoit is artistic director and principal conductor, issued a statement early Friday saying the symphony and Dutoit "have jointly agreed to release him from his forthcoming concert obligations with the orchestra for the immediate future."
A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's rule that makes it easier for employers to deny contraceptive coverage on moral or religious grounds — a requirement under Obamacare.
Judge Haywood Gilliam, Jr., of the the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued the ruling today. It's the second time in a week that a federal judge has blocked the Trump rule. A federal court judge in Pennsylvania granted a preliminary injunction on the same issue last Friday, determining the directive would cause "serious and irreparable harm."
Andrea Mackris and Rebecca Gomez Diamond, who both reached settlements with O’Reilly and Fox after accusing the host of sexual harassment, joined the lawsuit filed by former Fox producer and fellow O’Reilly accuser Rachel Wittlieb Bernstein.
“These women were specifically identified in the NY Times article, to which O’Reilly and Fox responded with false and defamatory statements,” the trio’s lawyer said in a statement.
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