pelespirit

More than 1.3 million people living in Puerto Rico sat in darkness Tuesday morning after a sweeping blackout washed over the island.

As the country awoke to celebrate New Year’s Eve, a blackout hit, leaving people without electrical appliances, air conditioning, lights and more.

Luma Energy, the private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution, said on X that the cause of the outage is under investigation but preliminary findings suggest a fault on an underground line. Restoring power could take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours.

The group says it’s impossible to know exactly how many trees were lost, but the restoration program that will be executed in Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, with assistance from state and local governments, corporate sponsors, community groups and individual volunteers, will be the most ambitious undertaking of its more than 50-year existence.

Son of US senator jailed for 28 years over chase and crash that killed police officer

Ian Cramer, 43, son of North Dakota senator Kevin Cramer, sentenced over incident last year in which he fled hospital Associated Press Mon 30 Dec 2024 15.40 EST

The adult son of the Republican North Dakota US senator Kevin Cramer has been sentenced to serve 28 years in prison in connection with a wild chase in which he fled from a hospital and drove into a deputy’s vehicle, killing the deputy.

Ian Cramer, 43, pleaded guilty in September to all of the charges against him, including homicide while fleeing a peace officer, preventing arrest, reckless endangerment, fleeing an officer and drug- and driving-related offenses. Those charges related to the chase and crash in December last year that killed the Mercer county sheriff’s deputy Paul Martin, 53.

The state court judge Bobbi Weiler handed down the sentence of 38 years with 10 years suspended, three years of probation and credit for more than a year served in jail. She also included recommended treatment for addiction and mental health. But he likely will not serve the full 28 years, the judge said.

The camp is part of a US naval base complex in south-eastern Cuba.

According to the New York Times, Mr Yazidi was never charged and was approved for transfer more than a decade ago.

Human Rights Watch and Cage International said he had been at Guantanamo Bay since the facility was first set up in 2002.

According to Monday's Pentagon statement, 26 detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay, of whom 14 are eligible for transfer.

Earlier in December, the Pentagon announced that the US had repatriated three other detainees, the Associated Press news agency reported.

It said it was made aware of the hack on 8 December by BeyondTrust, a spokesperson told the BBC. According to the company, the suspicious activity was first spotted on 2 December, but it took three days for the company to determine it had been hacked.

The spokesperson said the hackers were able to remotely access several Treasury user workstations and some unclassified documents that were kept by those users.

The department did not specify the nature of these files, or when and for how long the hack took place. They also did not specify the level of confidentiality of the computer systems or the seniority of the staff whose materials were accessed.

The hackers may have been able to create accounts or change passwords in the three days that they were being watched by BeyondTrust.

As espionage agents, the hackers are believed to have been seeking information, rather than attempting to steal funds.

The United States on Monday announced nearly $6 billion in additional military and budget assistance for Ukraine as President Joe Biden uses his final weeks in office to surge aid to Kyiv before President-elect Donald Trump takes power.

Biden announced $2.5 billion in additional security assistance for Ukraine.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States has made available $3.4 billion in additional budget aid to Ukraine, giving the war-torn country critical resources amid intensifying Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure.

The Key Lime Air Flight had just arrived from Washington state, and was transporting the Gonzaga University’s men’s basketball team to LA, ahead of a match with UCLA the following day.

“Air traffic controllers directed Key Lime Air Flight 563 to hold short of crossing a runway at Los Angeles International Airport because a second aircraft was taking off from the runway at the time,” the FAA said in a statement, shared with The Independent.

“When the Embraer E135 jet proceeded to cross the hold bars, air traffic controllers told the pilots to stop. The jet never crossed the runway edge line… The FAA will investigate.”

The Free Speech Coalition, an adult-entertainment industry group, and other plaintiffs filed suit Dec. 16 challenging the law on First Amendment and other constitutional grounds. The law, which supporters say is designed to keep minors from viewing pornography online, is scheduled to take effect Wednesday.

In a motion filed Tuesday, Moody’s office requested that Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issue a stay of the lawsuit. If granted, the motion would allow the Florida law to take effect and continue at least until the Supreme Court rules in the Texas case.

Gaviota, a company that runs tourist hotels and is just one of many owned by the military, is sitting on about $4.3 billion in its bank accounts, the documents show.

That’s almost 13 times the $339 million the government said it needed to buy medications to supply Cuban pharmacies annually. The country’s healthcare system lacks 70% percent of the essential medications to treat most illnesses, Cuba’s prime minister said earlier this month.

In recent years, GAESA — short for Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.— has expanded its control of the island’s most profitable businesses, including tourism, retail, telecommunications and money sent to Cubans by families abroad. GAESA has made the crisis worse by siphoning billions of dollars from the country’s foreign currency revenues to relentlessly build new hotels despite the deteriorating situation. And it keeps its money separate from government coffers.

Unless those markets are checked by U.S. regulators. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has oversight on prediction markets like Kalshi and PredictIt. On December 13, all wagers related to Magione vanished from the sites. According to Bloomberg, Kalshi removed the Mangione-related wagers from its sites after it received a “notice from…regulators.” The outlet writes that the CFTC “bans futures trading linked to crimes including assassination, terrorism, and war if the agency decides the so-called events contracts are against the public interest.”

On Polymarket all assassin-related bets are on. “Will Luigi Mangione fire his lawyer before 2025?” Polymarket has the odds at just 1 percent. “Will it be confirmed that Luigi Mangione used psychedelics?” The users give it a 43 percent chance. “Luigi Mangione motivated by denied claims?” On December 10, Polymarket had this at a 75 percent chance, but it plummeted to around 25 percent.

The cases, ProPublica found, expose in blunt terms how insurance companies can put their clients’ health in jeopardy, in ways that some judges have ruled “arbitrary and capricious.” To do so, court records reveal, the insurers have turned to a coterie of psychiatrists and have continued relying on them even after one or more of their decisions have been criticized or overturned in court.

In their rulings, judges have found that insurers, in part through their psychiatrists, have acted in ways that are “puzzling,” “disingenuous” and even “dishonest.” The companies have engaged in “selective readings” of the medical evidence, “shut their eyes” to medical opinions that opposed their conclusions and made “baseless arguments” in court. Doctors reviewing the same cases have even repeated nearly identical language in denial letters, casting “significant doubt” on whether they’re independent.

Some doctors made critical errors, contradicted by the very records they claimed they reviewed, according to thousands of pages of court documents, interviews and insurance records. Ruling after ruling reveals how they failed to meaningfully engage with patients’ families or medical providers or to adequately explain their decisions.

He was also the head of a family with an "empire" of media and sports properties that includes Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers teams, and AMC Networks. BBC America is a part of AMC.

In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to European company Altice for nearly $18bn (£14.3bn).

By then Dolan's son James was running what the New York Times called the family's empire.

And the Dolans had become "the family that New Yorkers often loved to hate", according to the New York Times, over frustration over the Knicks' performance and fights with networks over their programming that had threatened to keep customers from watching the Academy Awards and the World Series.