Two paramedics with Emergency Ambulance Service (AR) were shot and a suspect is dead following a shooting early Thursday morning, according to reports. Police say it happened 1400 block of West 23rd Avenue in Pine Bluff, roughly 40 miles south of Little Rock, deltaplexnews.com reports. Police say the paramedics were working on a patient, when a bystander pulled out the gun and fired on both paramedics. One of the paramedics then pulled out a gun and shot the suspect.

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Deb Haaland, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, to serve as the first Native American interior secretary in a historic pick for a department that oversees the country’s vast natural resources, including tribal lands. A member of Pueblo of Laguna, Haaland, 60, would become the first descendant of the original people to populate North America to serve as a Cabinet secretary. It marks a turning point for a 171-year-old institution that has often had a fraught relationship with 574 federally recognized tribes. The first-term House member, who hails from a top oil- and gas-producing state, has pledged to transform the department from a champion of fossil fuel development into a promoter of renewable energy and policies to mitigate climate change. Interior, which manages roughly one-fifth of land in the United States, will play a critical role in delivering on Biden’s vow to combat global warming. The former vice president has pledged to halt all new oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters, a daunting task that faces both legal and political obstacles. The extraction of oil, gas and coal in these areas account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s annual carbon output.

[a different obit article was already posted, posting for some of her views] Her life was likewise changed forever when, in 1972 in Casablanca, Morocco, she became one of the first high profile people to transition from a man to a woman (although she later said that “I’ve never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be”). “To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial,” she wrote in Conundrum. “It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one’s stem or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries and hormones.”

A Paris court on Wednesday convicted a former Vatican ambassador to France of sexually assaulting five men in 2018 and 2019, and handed him a suspended 8-month prison sentence. Retired Archbishop Luigi Ventura, 76 — who was not present in court — was “shattered” by the verdict, according to his lawyer, Solange Doumic. She said she was uncertain whether he would lodge an appeal because the procedure “has been extremely painful for him.” Ventura has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Sexual assault is punishable in France by up to five years’ imprisonment and fines in France. The path for the prosecution of Ventura was cleared after the Vatican lifted his immunity in July 2019. His trial in absentia was held Nov. 10. The sentence imposed Wednesday was more lenient than the suspended 10 months the prosecution had sought. Doumic said her client had “explained himself multiple times,” over what the defense has described as “minor” accusations.

The most common religious identity among young adults in the U.S. is "none," and the majority of Americans don’t believe it’s necessary for a person to believe in God to be moral and have good values, a new survey has found.  Released Tuesday, AEI’s Survey Center on American Life investigating contemporary religion in the U.S. found that among young adults (age 18 to 29), the most common religious identity today is none. More than one in three (34%) young adults are religiously unaffiliated. Nearly nine in 10 (87%) Americans report they believe in God, but just over half (53%) report they believe in God without any doubts at all. Of these, more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestants (87%) and black Protestants (83%) say they are absolutely certain God exists.  Overall, 42% of Americans have a close social connection with someone who is religiously unaffiliated — up from 18% in 2004.

In a disturbing video from September, now going viral on Reddit, a woman working at a Denny’s in Franklin Park, Illinois quits on the spot after two customers enter without masks and demand to be seated anyway because of their “religious exemption” to the requirement.

Attorneys general from 14 states and the District of Columbia on Wednesday reminded President Donald Trump that, even though he only has a month left in office, he and his administration are still subject to federal laws requiring certain records be maintained and preserved. In a three-page letter, the coalition of Democratic AGs requested that White House counsel Pat Cipollone take the requisite steps to ensure that officials in the Executive Office of the President—including President Donald Trump—understood and complied with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). Enacted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the PRA requires presidential administrations to retain all “documentary material” of “the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties.” The letter emphasized that such the president is required to “take all such steps as may be necessary” to assure such material is preserved, which includes any unofficial means of communication and electronic messages.

One of President Donald Trump’s former Atlantic City casinos will be blown up next month, and for the right amount of money, you could be the one to press the button that brings it down. The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1 million. Opened in 1984, Trump's former casino was closed in 2014 and has fallen into such a state of disrepair that demolition work began earlier this year. The remainder of the structure will be dynamited on Jan. 29.

As of now, Trump is contemplating pardons for more than two dozen people within his circle, CNN reports. One person he is considering for clemency is Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Weisselberg has been investigated for his involvement in arranging hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who said she had an affair with Trump.

The plane had begun its descent into Boston. Inside the cockpit, the captain was slumped in his seat. Sitting beside him, copilot Eric Tellmann was starting to pass out. Tellmann managed to strap on his oxygen mask, then grabbed the captain’s arm and forced him to follow suit. Reviving slowly, the captain looked at Tellmann through his mask, and his eyes grew wide with fear. A strange smell had permeated the plane that day. Passengers and flight attendants were coughing and wiping teary eyes. The pilots briefly lifted their masks and could still smell the odor as the runway drew nearer. Tellmann and the captain parked the Airbus A319 at the gate. But they had no memory of landing or taxiing Spirit Airlines Flight 708. Tellmann went to the hospital for treatment and spent the next week at home in bed, vomiting and shaking and feeling “like a freight train had run over us,” he said in a letter to his union about the July 2015 event. A mysterious smell. Strange symptoms. A trip to the emergency room. The signs were all there: Something had gone seriously wrong with the plane’s air supply. The air you breathe on airplanes comes directly from the jet engines. Known as bleed air, it is safe, unless there is a mechanical issue — a faulty seal, for instance. When that happens, heated jet engine oil can leak into the air supply, potentially releasing toxic gases into the plane.

June 25, 2000 - No human had worked here for 40 years, but Ricky Mote felt ready. He layered on four sets of safety boots and three pairs of gloves and squeezed the rest of his body into two airtight moon suits. Just in case, an ambulance waited. Mote expected some danger while digging up 171 drums of uranium from a trench at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. What he didn't expect, though, was exploding green goo. In one of the first jobs of the $7.7 billion Rocky Flats cleanup - the most massive public-works project in the history of Colorado and the first of its kind on Earth - Mote motioned a co-worker in a backhoe, Jeff Herring, to scoop out an unmarked barrel. The black drum was rotted, and some lime-green sludge, loaded with uranium, oozed out. Mote edged closer for a look. Suddenly: Fire! Mote leapt backward from the blue flash and waved for help. Joe Fanning, another worker in a moon suit, jumped ahead with his brass shovel. One dump of sand and the uranium fire was out. But the crew was shaken. "I just about pooped myself," Mote said of the August 1998 flash fire. At Rocky Flats, it was one drum down, 1,099,956 to go.

n the wake of this summer’s massive civil-rights protests, two Republicans in the Ohio House have filed a bill that imposes harsh new penalties on certain protest-related activities. The bill even goes so far as to allow people to kill protesters if they feel threatened by them. The sponsors of the legislation say it isn’t aimed at curtailing people’s right to protest. Instead, they say, it would protect the public while simultaneously protecting the First Amendment right to free speech. “Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are important cornerstones of our democracy,” one sponsor, Rep. Cindy Abrams, R-Harrison, said in a statement. “This legislation embraces the right of all Americans to peacefully assemble and make their voice heard in the public arena while supporting first responders, law enforcement, small businesses and law-abiding Ohioans.”

The higher prices, approved Thursday, take effect March 1 and are expected to boost the bills of PG&E's residential customers by an average of $13.44 a month.

This way of understanding what it means to be a guy, the particular masculine code and set of virtues it espouses, the heroes it holds up for emulation and admiration: none of this appeared in a vacuum. All of it is deeply rooted in the past couple of decades of American history, in everything from the constant imperial wars overseas and their long-term effects to the rising gap between those with college degrees and those without. There are longer-term precedents and archetypes at play as well, and I’ll talk about them, but this all crystallized in the very recent past. It’s a genuinely 21st-century American development, and I want to explore what it means.

On Thursday evening, I sat in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Terre Haute, Ind., as Shawn Nolan and Victor Abreu tried to save a man’s life. Both wore bluejeans, button-down shirts and a day or more of scruff — Mr. Nolan’s salt-and-pepper, Mr. Abreu’s black. We shared a bottle of red wine in plastic cups as the two men, public defenders whose caseloads are strictly death penalty appeals, discussed the merits of pleading with the Supreme Court for a stay of execution.

The suit focuses on the advertisements that generate a vast majority of the company’s profits.

And yet Hunter Biden was not anywhere nearby.

Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo offloaded 5% stake to one of Canada’s biggest pension funds

On the heels of his announcement that he is running for president, documents reveal that billionaire Kanye West’s fashion company Yeezy received more than $2 million through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) — he owns 100% of the company which Forbes estimates brought in close to $1.3 billion in 2019.

There’s a phrase coined, likely by some old white guy, that goes “winners write the history books.” In the case of Major League Baseball, not only do they write the history books, but apparently they decide when everyone else’s histories are legitimate, too. On Wednesday, MLB announced that the records and statistics from the seven operations that we now classify as the Negro Leagues will be recognized as part of Major League Baseball’s history, presumably paving the way for the posthumous enshrinement of various players into Cooperstown, New York. “The perceived deficiencies of the Negro Leagues’ structure and scheduling were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices,” John Thorn, the Official Historian for Major League Baseball said in a press release. “And denying them Major League status has been a double penalty, much like that exacted of Hall of Fame candidates prior to Satchel Paige’s induction in 1971. Granting MLB status to the Negro Leagues a century after their founding is profoundly gratifying.” Of all the nonsense that the most duplicitously conservative sports league in the history of the United States of America has ever pulled, this might be the most ridiculous piece of soft supremacy we’ve ever seen. This announcement says: Be grateful, we now view you as whole. News flash: That’s the problem. Not the solution.