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Astros send A’s to most losses through 53 games to start season since 1900

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Mark Kotsay will keep searching for the small bright spots as his Oakland Athletics stumble day after day, making sure they maintain their fight. He will celebrate a defensive play here, an at-bat there, a big catch or mighty throw.Hunter Brown struck out a career-high 10 over seven innings and retired 16 straight during one stretch, Corey Julks drove in three runs and the Houston Astros bounced back from being shut out the two previous games to beat the A’s 5-2 on Friday night.Oakland (10-43) now has the most losses over the first 53 games since 1900. The 1932 Red Sox won their 53rd game to move to 11-42, then lost the next eight and 13 of 14.“This start can test your character, for sure,” said Kotsay, Oakland’s second-year manager. “If we sit here and dwell on the negatives, there’s no chance for us to turn this thing around. Focusing on the positives through a difficult time, it’s not fake because there are positives. The more we can...

Police: 1 stabbed, another shot in separate Prince George’s Co. homicides

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

Prince George’s County, Maryland, police have started investigating a deadly stabbing and subsequent shooting at two different apartment complexes Friday evening.Officers said the stabbing happened in the 2100 block of Broks Drive at around 6:30 p.m. The victim, an adult male, died while inside an apartment from stab wounds to the upper body.Police didn’t share if there were any suspects or motives behind the stabbing.Over four hours later, at roughly 10:40 p.m., the department responded to reports of a shooting in the 4400 block of Telfair Boulevard.When police arrived, an adult male was found inside an apartment suffering from a gunshot wound. Officials said the person died at the scene of the crime.Detectives ask anyone with information about either incident to contact PG Crime Solvers by calling 1-866-411-TIPS or using the P3 Tips app.A map of the approximate incident locations is included below. Source

Are the anti-Trump Republican forces starting to implode?

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Will this go down as the week that the grand plan to deny Donald Trump the nomination fell apart?For months, high-level Republican lawmakers, donors and strategists eager to block Trump have described, in separate conversations with me, an endgame to the presidential primary.When it becomes clear in the early state and national polling who is consolidating support, the most influential figures with ties to the lagging candidates will stage a sort of political intervention and tell them it’s time to quit and rally to the strongest alternative to Trump.Such a plot always struck me as a bit far-fetched, for starters because politicians aren’t known for putting party ahead of self. Yet the appetite among elite Republicans to move past Trump was and is so immense I thought there could at least be a do-the-right-thing effort.Yet as spring turns to summer, traditionally the period when presidential hopefuls consider whether they’re gaining any traction, this v...

Pfizer, the EU, and disappearing ink

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

It’s as if Pfizer’s massive COVID-19 vaccine deal with the European Commission were written with disappearing ink: the more time passes, the more details seem to vanish.For a while now controversy has raged around the text messages supposedly exchanged between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla in the run-up to the April 2021 deal for 1.1 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. The content and even existence of the messages has been shrouded in secrecy, with requests for clarification met with a fat “no comment.”On Friday, the Commission said it had reached a long sought-after deal with Pfizer to revise the terms of the contract. The new deal cuts down the 450 million doses that were still due to be delivered in 2023, and spreads them out over the next four years.That’s all the information you get. The Commission isn’t revealing the new number of doses that member countries must buy, nor any of...

Germany’s slipped into recession and everyone should be worried

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

FRANKFURT ― Not so long ago, Germany was Europe’s powerhouse: wealthy, booming, politically strong. But the mighty have fallen.And it’s not hard to see why this is giving the rest of the eurozone a bad case of the jitters. After all, if its largest member is struggling, it risks dragging the whole lot of them down with it.Germany is by far the eurozone’s biggest economy, accounting for almost 30 percent of the bloc’s economic output. It is the largest trading partner of more than half of the EU’s 27 countries. Politically too, that has enabled Berlin to call a lot of the shots within the European Union. But Thursday’s data, which showed that Germany has fallen into recession, didn’t come out of the blue. It was already among the last in Europe to return to pre-COVID levels when economies started to rebound after the pandemic. And it’s that very drawn-out nature of Germany’s malaise — as well as an absence of the surefootedness of...

New sanctions against Russia stuck in limbo over Greek-Hungarian protest 

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

Hungary has won an unlikely ally. After largely playing solo in its opposition against Russian sanctions, Budapest is now getting support from Athens in its skepticism over the freshest measures against Russia, five EU diplomats told POLITICO.The EU is currently discussing its 11th sanctions package against Russia after the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago. Whereas the 10 previous sanctions packages focused on measures to empty Vladimir Putin’s war chest, Brussels now wants to avoid its sanctions being circumvented. In an unprecedented step for the bloc, the current package could target other countries helping Moscow dodge its trade embargo.But Budapest and Athens have thrown a collective spanner in the works by linking their approval for the package to a separate thorny issue involving Ukraine. Kyiv has compiled a list of private companies it calls “war sponsors,” which includes a number of European companies. The odd couple want...

Europe pitches ‘AI Pact’ to curtail the booming tech’s risks

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

Europe has a new plan to get ahead of dangerous artificial intelligence: An “AI Pact.”The boom of generative artificial intelligence tools like chatbot ChatGPT has triggered a global scramble of regulators trying to keep the technology under control. In meetings with industry leaders this week, and with global peers in past months, the European Union — the Western world’s de facto digital policeman — has quietly been building support for a global pledge to build and use these new tools responsibly.“We are in the middle of things,” Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice president responsible for digital affairs, told reporters this week. “And while we’re in the middle of things, we see generative AI and the large language models are developing really, really fast.”At a meeting of G7 countries in Hiroshima, Japan, last weekend, leaders pledged to advance “international discussions on inclusive artificial intellig...

As Turkey heads to runoff presidential race, domestic issues loom large

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has parlayed his country’s NATO membership and location straddling Europe and the Middle East into international influence, is favored to win reelection in a presidential runoff Sunday, despite a host of domestic issues.Erdogan, 69, who has amassed greater powers during his 20 years in office, finished a first-round election on May 14 just short of a victory and also retained a majority in parliament. That came despite rampant inflation and the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake that killed over 50,000 people in the country’s south. His challenger in the runoff is Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the 74-year-old leader of the main opposition social democratic Republican People’s Party and the joint candidate of a six-party alliance, who has promised to undo years of democratic backsliding under Erdogan, to repatriate Syrian refugees and promote rights of women.Here’s a look at the main domestic issues shaping the election, and...

New bill to build Oakland Athletics stadium on Las Vegas Strip caps Nevada’s cost at $380 million

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — A bill introduced late Friday in the Nevada Legislature would give the Oakland Athletics up to $380 million for a potential 30,000 seat, $1.5 billion retractable roof stadium on the Las Vegas Strip.The bulk of the public funding would come from $180 million in transferable tax credits from the state and $120 million in county bonds, which can vary based on interest rate returns. Clark County also would contribute $25 million in credit toward infrastructure costs.The A’s have been looking for a home to replace Oakland Coliseum, where the team has played since arriving from Kansas City for the 1968 season. The team had sought to build a stadium in Fremont, San Jose and finally the Oakland waterfront, all ideas that never materialized.The plan in the Nevada Legislature won’t directly raise taxes. It can move forward with a simply majority vote in the Senate and Assembly. Lawmakers have a little more than a week to consider the proposal before they adjourn...

The Machine Celebrates the Bloated Beer Bellies of Viral-Quasi-Celebrity-Land

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:31:52 GMT

I am one of the many billions of world citizens who had no idea who Bert Kreischer is, and after seeing The Machine, a wide-release, sub-Nic-Cagean riff on his beer-can-size meta-quasi-celebrity, I could hardly care less. You’d need to look to the Trump presidency to find a more odoriferous example of our 21st-century American desire to elevate pure asshole-ness, and at least Trump kept his shirt on. Apparently, in real life, Kreischer was a titanic alcoholic frat bro in the ’90s at Florida State U, big enough to have been profiled in a Rolling Stone article about party schools. Oliver Stone thought it’d make a movie, and commissioned a bunch of scripts, one of which got turned into National Lampoon’s Van Wilder micro-franchise in the aughts.A Florida Man incarnate, Kreischer decided to capitalize, and launched a stand-up career telling yarns about his glory days as a souse. His capstone story happened on a school trip to Russia (he was unaccountably taking Russian-language classes)...