Author: chicagoinquirer

by Linsday Whitehurst WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider reinstating some preventative care coverage requirements under the Affordable Care Act that were struck down by a lower court. The federal government appealed to the high court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with employers who argued they can’t be forced to provide full insurance coverage for things like medication to prevent HIV and some cancer screenings. The lower-court ruling chipped away at the program sometimes referred to as Obamacare. Challengers raised religious and procedural objections to some of the requirements. Not all preventive care…

by Wilson Mcmakin DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — The United States announced Friday that it would be returning $52.88 million in seized assets to Nigeria as part of a yearslong corruption probe against former oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke and associates, according to a joint statement by Nigeria’s minister of justice and the United States government. It marks the first repatriation of assets linked to Alison-Madueke, who served as Nigeria’s oil minister from 2010 to 2015. She rose to prominence as a powerful figure under former President Goodluck Jonathan, and became the first female president of the oil alliance OPEC. The seized…

by Steve Megargee GREEN BAY, Wis. — Caleb Williams gained a shot of confidence and Cairo Santos earned a measure of redemption. The Chicago Bears finished a disappointing season on a high note, while the Green Bay Packers limped into the playoffs with plenty of questions. Williams drove Chicago to Santos’ 51-yard field goal as time expired in a 24-22 victory over the Packers, who lost quarterback Jordan Love and wide receiver Christian Watson to injuries on Sunday. The Bears (5-12) beat the Packers for the first time since 2018 and ended an 11-game losing streak in this rivalry. They…

by Annie Risemberg ACCRA, Ghana — Flipping through a family album, Keachia Bowers paused on a photo of her as a baby on her father’s lap as he held the 1978 album “Africa Stand Alone” by the Jamaican reggae band Culture. “When I was 10 years old, I was supposed to come to Ghana with him,” she said. A day earlier, she had marked 10 years since her father’s death. Though he was a Pan-Africanist who dreamed of visiting Ghana, he never made it here. Bowers and her husband, Damon Smith, however, are among the 524 diaspora members, mostly Black…

by Michael R. Sisak and Jennifer Peltz NEW YORK — In an extraordinary turn, a judge Friday set President-elect Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case for Jan. 10 — little over a week before he’s due to return to the White House — but indicated he wouldn’t be jailed. The development nevertheless leaves Trump on course to be the first president to take office convicted of felony crimes. Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial, signaled in a written decision that he’d sentence the former and future president to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, in…

BY TOUSSAINT N’GOTTA Updated 5:29 PM CST, December 31, 2024 Share ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — Ivory Coast announced on Tuesday that French troops will leave the country after a decadeslong military presence, the latest African nation to downscale military ties with its former colonial power. Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara said the pullout would begin in January 2025. France has had up to 600 troops in Ivory Coast. “We have decided on the concerted and organized withdrawal of French forces in Ivory Coast,” he said, adding that the military infantry battalion of Port Bouét that is run by the French…

by Hanna Arhirova and Joanna Kozlowska KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine on Wednesday halted Russian gas supplies to European customers through its pipeline network after a prewar transit deal expired at the end of 2024 and almost three years into Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor. Even as Russian troops and tanks moved into Ukraine in February 2022, Russian natural gas kept flowing through the country’s pipeline network — set up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union — to Europe, under a five-year agreement. Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom earned money from the gas and…

Updated 5:13 PM CST, December 29, 2024 Share Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. The 39th president of the United States was a Georgia peanut farmer who sought to restore trust in government when he assumed the presidency in 1977 and then built a reputation for tireless work as a humanitarian. He earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He died Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care, at his home in Plains, Georgia. “Everything to Gain,” a 1987 collaboration with his wife, Rosalynn, turned into the “worst threat we ever experienced in…

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to his Azerbaijani counterpart for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people. The Kremlin said in a statement that air defense systems were firing near Grozny, the regional capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya, due to a Ukrainian drone strike as the plane attempted to land on Wednesday. It stopped short of saying the plane was shot down by Russian air defenses. According to a Kremlin readout of the call, Putin apologized to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev…

by Fatima Hussein WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said her agency will need to start taking “extraordinary measures,” or special accounting maneuvers intended to prevent the nation from hitting the debt ceiling, as early as January 14, in a letter sent to congressional leaders Friday afternoon. “Treasury expects to hit the statutory debt ceiling between January 14 and January 23,” Yellen wrote in a letter addressed to House and Senate leadership, at which point extraordinary measures would be used to prevent the government from breaching the nation’s debt ceiling — which has been suspended until Jan. 1, 2025. The…