World News

WASHINGTON (AP) — Twenty years after the Columbine High School shooting made practicing for armed intruders as routine as fire drills, many parents have only tepid confidence in the ability of schools to stop a gunman, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. And while most Americans consider schools less safe than they were 20 years ago,...

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were temporarily down early Sunday. All three social media platforms, including Facebook Messenger, were affected by the outage. Downdetector.com, a site that monitors site outages, shows Facebook had been down since 6:30 a.m. EST in much of the world, with thousands of reported outages concentrated in the northeastern U.S., Europe and the Philippines. It appeared to be back...

The sex scandal. The mugshot. The debilitating injuries. Tiger Woods certainly didn’t plan it this way. That only made his 15th major title all the more rewarding. Or, as Tiger put it not long after tapping in a gimme putt Sunday for a one-stroke victory at the Masters: “Overwhelming.” For so much of his life, the outline that Woods and his hard-driving...

Pope Benedict XVI has ventured out of retirement to publish an essay blaming the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and church laws that protected priests. His analysis was immediately criticized as “catastrophically irresponsible” — a conflict with efforts by his successor, Pope Francis, to lead the church out of its crisis. “Why did...

LONDON (AP) — Prince Harry and his pregnant wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, say they have decided to keep plans around their first baby’s arrival private. Kensington Palace officials said in a statement Thursday that Harry and Meghan “look forward” to sharing the news of their baby’s birth once they have had a chance to celebrate privately as a...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump seemed gratified Thursday that his attorney general has endorsed a key talking point of the president’s supporters: that there was spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign. But Trump went a step beyond Attorney General William Barr, accusing the government of committing an illegal, unprecedented act. The president’s comments came a day after Barr testified at...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr declared Wednesday he thinks “spying did occur” on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, suggesting the origins of the Russia investigation may have been mishandled and aligning himself with the president at a time when Barr’s independence is under scrutiny. Barr, appearing before a Senate panel, did not say what “spying” had taken place but...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Magic Johnson abruptly quit as the Los Angeles Lakers’ president of basketball operations Tuesday night, citing his desire to return to the simpler life he enjoyed as a wealthy businessman and beloved former player before taking charge of this tempestuous franchise just over two years ago. Johnson didn’t tell owner Jeanie Buss or general manager Rob...

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Jurors on Wednesday heard the 911 calls a woman made to report a possible sexual assault before she was shot by a Minneapolis officer now on trial for murder in her death. The recordings of Justine Ruszczyk Damond’s voice drew an emotional response from her family members in the Hennepin County courtroom where Mohammed Noor is on...

ST. LOUIS (AP) — A Mexican citizen accused of killing four people in Kansas and one in Missouri in 2016 hanged himself from a light fixture in his St. Louis jail cell. Pablo Serrano-Vitorino was found alone in his cell at 2:02 a.m. Tuesday He was pronounced dead at a hospital about an hour later, said Koran Addo, spokesman for...

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an unarmed woman as she approached his squad car after calling 911 was reacting to a loud noise and feared an ambush, his attorney said Tuesday, calling the shooting “a perfect storm with tragic consequences.” Mohamed Noor and his partner were rolling down a dark alley in response to...

NEW YORK (AP) — Just last year, a kid in the market for an Uncle Milton ant farm could choose from a half dozen versions, including glow-in-the dark or an ant village. Now there are only three. Last year, there were 60 kinds of K’Nex construction sets on the market. This year there are 20. A year after Toys R...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Earth’s glaciers are melting much faster than scientists thought. A new study shows they are losing 369 billion tons of snow and ice each year, more than half of that in North America. The most comprehensive measurement of glaciers worldwide found that thousands of inland masses of snow compressed into ice are shrinking 18 percent faster than...

Delta Air Lines comes in first in a long-running study that ranks U.S. airlines by how often flights arrive on time and other statistical measures. Researchers who crunch the numbers also say that as a whole, U.S. airlines are getting better at handling baggage and overcrowded flights and are getting fewer complaints. Academics at Wichita State University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rapper Nipsey Hussle will be mourned at a public memorial Thursday at Staples Center in Los Angeles. The website for the 21,000-seat downtown arena says free tickets will become available at 10 a.m. Tuesday for the event that organizers are calling Nipsey Hussle’s Celebration of Life. The memorial begins at 10 a.m. Thursday. No details were...

LONDON (AP) — Tech giants like Facebook and Google came under increasing pressure in Europe on Monday when countries proposed stricter rules to force them to block extreme material such as terrorist propaganda and child porn. Britain called for a first-of-its-kind watchdog for social media that could fine executives and even ban companies. And a European Union parliamentary committee approved...

ADEN, Yemen (AP) — In the summer of 2017, a plane chartered by the United Nations idled on the tarmac at an airport in the Horn of Africa as officials waited for final clearance to deliver half a million doses of cholera vaccine to Yemen. Amid the country’s ruinous war, the disease was spiraling out of control, with thousands of...

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Brexit drama went into overtime Wednesday as Prime Minister Theresa May and the country’s main opposition sought a compromise deal to prevent an abrupt British departure from the European Union at the end of next week. In an about-face that left pro-Brexit members of May’s Conservative Party howling with outrage, May sought to forge an agreement...