Author: chicagoinquirer

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…

by Sam Mednick, Tia Goldenberg and Fatma Khaled JERUSALEM (AP) — A baby girl froze to death overnight in Gaza, while Israel and Hamas accused each other of complicating ceasefire efforts that could wind down the 14-month war. The 3-week old baby was the third to die from the cold in Gaza’s tent camps in recent days, doctors said, deaths that underscore the squalid conditions, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crammed into often ramshackle tents after fleeing Israeli offensives. Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza has killed over 45,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children,…

by Mary Clare Jalonick WASHINGTON (AP) — The fate of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet is still unclear after Republican senators spent much of December carefully dodging questions about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’s views on vaccines, accusations of sexual misconduct against Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard’s 2017 meeting with then-President Bashar Assad of Syria. While some GOP senators have indicated they are all-in for Trump’s picks, others have withheld support, for now, especially on some of his more controversial nominees. The dynamic is injecting uncertainty into the process as Republicans prepare to take the Senate majority in January with a…

by Tim Reynolds LeBron James made his Christmas debut in 2003. Victor Wembanyama was born 10 days later. That’s right: James has been featured on the NBA’s big day for longer than Wembanyama has been alive. And on Wednesday — when the league celebrates Christmas with games for the 77th time — the league’s oldest player and brightest young star will be big parts of the holiday showcase. It’s another Christmas quintupleheader, with Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs visiting the New York Knicks, Minnesota going to Dallas for a Western Conference finals rematch, Philadelphia heading to Boston to renew…

by Farai Mutsaka HARARE, Zimbabwe — In Southern Africa, where democracy remains relatively stable, elections held in 2024 saw long-governing liberation parties struggling to survive. Across Africa, power struggles involving military governments, coup attempts and armed conflict are common, but the southern region has largely been more stable and elections in some countries brought joy and hopes of a better future. Not so much though for some long-governing parties. The decades-old goodwill of liberating their countries from colonial rule appears to be giving way to frustration over economic problems and limited opportunities for young people in the region. As voters…