National Donut Day is tomorrow, June 4, which means that donut chains like Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme are offering free or discounted donuts, along with other giveaways like a “free donuts for a year” contest and free t-shirts.
Today is Friday, June 4, the 155th day of 2021. There are 210 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On June 4, 1919, Congress approved the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which said that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged based on gender. The amendment was sent to the states for ratification.
On this date:
In 1812, the Louisiana Territory was renamed the Missouri Territory, to avoid confusion with the recently admitted state of Louisiana. The U.S. House of Representatives approved, 79-49, a declaration of war against Britain.
In 1912, Massachusetts became the first state to adopt a minimum wage law.
In 1939, the German ocean liner MS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Germany, was turned away from the Florida coast by U.S. officials.
The former CEO of the Make-A-Wish chapter in Iowa has pleaded guilty to embezzling from the charity almost $41,000, money that would’ve gone to help fulfill the wishes of children with critical illnesses.
Jennifer Woodley confessed last week that she made unauthorized purchases on a foundation credit card, gave herself an unapproved bonus and salary increases and falsified foundation records related to those expenses, The Associated Press (AP) reports.
Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued Thursday that authorities should stop building prisons and instead focus on underlying public health issues as New York City seeks to address a recent surge in violent crime.
New York Democrats, including Ocasio-Cortez, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, called on Congress to earmark $400,000 toward a program called “Stand Up To Violence,” which seeks to address gun violence through counseling and community outreach. Ocasio-Cortez said it was “not acceptable” to use jails as “garbage bins.””
If we want to reduce violent crime, if we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care and overall health care, employment, etc. It’s to support communities, not throw them away.”
PITTSBURGH — A South Side club was shut down after a raid by the Pennsylvania State Police on Saturday.
According to police, after numerous complaints about the illegal sale of alcohol at the Boom Boom Room, located in the 1700 block of East Carson Street, police conducted undercover visits and witnessed alleged illegal liquor sales.
The club was raided on Saturday shortly after 2 a.m., and troopers seized approximately 5.16 gallons of malt or brewed beverages and approximately 22.35 liters of liquor.
Republican lawmakers ripped Dr. Anthony Fauci after thousands of emails were released showing he denied if COVID-19 was developed artificially in a Chinese Wuhan lab.
(CNN)Police officers were in for a shock when they responded to an early Wednesday morning traffic accident in Utah between a four-door sedan and a semi-truck.
The driver and passenger in the car were both children.
Officers arrived at around 5 a.m. on Wednesday “and discovered the person behind the wheel was a 9-year-old girl,” the West Valley City Police Department said in a Facebook post.
“The young girl and her 4-year-old sister apparently snagged the keys to the family car while their parents were sleeping,” police said.
“The girls drove about 10 miles from their home in West Jordan” and managed to get on a highway and a freeway approaching West Valley City, said the post.
Before exiting the freeway, the car hopped a median and slammed “head-on into a semi truck,” said police.
While he was in Tulsa, President Joe Biden announced steps to try and narrow the racial wealth gap. This happened after he met with survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
In his plan, the president talked about increasing “federal purchasing power” to help grow small, disadvantaged businesses by 50%.
Eventually, that will turn into about $100 billion in the next five years.
The White House said it would include $10 billion in a community revitalization funds to support infrastructure projects, specially targeting underdeveloped communities.
The president also discussed racial discrimination in the housing market. Biden said owning a home is the main source of wealth for people of color in the U.S.
“My administration is launching an aggressive effort to combat racial discrimination in housing. That includes everything from redlining to the cruel fact that a home owned by a black family is too often appraised at a lower offer than a similar home owned by a white family,” Biden said.
CHARLEROI, Pa. (KDKA) – Charleroi and Donora are on high alert after a rash of car break-ins and thefts.
The Charleroi Regional Police chief said it appears there are three people working together. They broke into dozens of cars in Charleroi and Donora in a matter of three hours and got away with two guns.
In surveillance video, you can see a thief trying to get into Pamela Jericho’s parked car on Woodland Avenue in Charleroi.
“That’s a little scary,” said Jericho.
Jericho’s camera caught what Charleroi Regional Police are calling a three-man operation.
An Arizona-based real estate investment firm bought part of the vacant seven-story building in downtown Greensburg that formerly housed A.E. Troutman Co. department store with plans to convert it into 57 apartments.
Urban Communities Steel Valley LLC of Phoenix told city officials it wants to create “multi-family workforce apartments” in the building at 225 S. Pennsylvania Ave. Urban Communities Steel Valley, one of seven funds Urban Communities formed to acquire real estate across the nation, bought the building from Downtown Commons LLC of East Pittsburgh on April 22 for $460,000, according to the Westmoreland County Recorder of Deeds.
The 7,140-square-foot building remains linked to the original Troutman’s building on South Main Street, which was converted into apartments for senior citizens by the Westmoreland County Housing Authority more than 20 years ago. The department store closed in 1985, but the two buildings remain connected by a bridge over an alley, as well as a tunnel. Seton Hill University had used the first floor of the building from 2008 to 2015, for visual arts classes, said Jennifer Reeger, Seton Hill spokeswoman.
The intense political backlash over the academic approach of examining U.S. institutions through the lens of race is shaping up to be a major cultural battle ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Last month, Republican lawmakers decried critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions.
“Folks, we’re in a cultural warfare today,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said at a news conference alongside six other members of the all-Republican House Freedom Caucus. “Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart — but by virtue of the color of their skin.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., added: “Democrats want to teach our children to hate each other.”
Republicans, who are fighting the teaching of critical race theory in schools, contend it divides Americans. Democrats and their allies maintain that progress is unlikely without examining the root causes of disparity in the country. The issue is shaping up to be a major cultural battle ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Academics, particularly legal scholars, have studied critical race theory for decades. But its main entry into the partisan fray came in 2020, when former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting certain racial sensitivity trainings. It was challenged in court, and President Biden rescinded the order the day he took office.
One of Iran’s largest warships caught fire and sank Wednesday in the Gulf of Oman during a “training mission” — as a series of mysterious explosions have targeted commercial vessels in the sensitive region since 2019.
The British-built Kharg, which measured more than 650 feet long, erupted into flames Tuesday off the strategic port of Jask, Reuters reported.
The ship was in “domestic waters” during “a training mission,” said the navy’s head of public relations, Behzad Jahanian, according to Iran’s Tasnim news agency.
No further details were given and Jahanian said the cause of the blaze was “still not clear.”
HARRISBURG (KDKA) — The Pennsylvania Department of Health is reporting 580 new Coronavirus cases and 45 additional deaths.
This brings the statewide total to 1,203,443 cases and 27,259 total COVID-19 related deaths since the pandemic began.
There are 989 people across the state in the hospital with COVID-19, and 248 patients are in ICUs.
The state says 10,619,481 total vaccine doses have been administered and 4,722,449 people are fully vaccinated. So far, 54.4% of Pennsylvanians age 18 and older are fully vaccinated, and 58.5% of Pennsylvania’s entire population has received a first dose.
A Memorial Day hike ended in tragedy when a man lost his balance and plummeted 500 feet to his death off the summit ridge of a mountain and a woman who tried to grab him as he was falling was severely injured after tumbling 30 feet in her rescue attempt.
The incident happened on Monday, May 31, when a three-person hiking group was making their way along the summit ridge of Mount Russell in California’s Sequoia National Park and a 56-year-old man from San Jose, California, suddenly lost his balance as he was walking, said the National Park Service in a statement.
Another member of the group, a 45-year-old woman from Milpitas, California, made an attempt to rescue him by grabbing the man as he was falling but ended up being pulled down herself.
The man ended up falling approximately 500 feet to his death off of the summit of the mountain while the woman ended up falling about 30 feet before she was able to self-arrest and save her own life, although she was left badly injured.
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci had little patience for claims his messages in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were being restricted by the Trump administration, a tranche of newly public emails shows.
The more than 3,200 pages of emails, obtained by BuzzFeed News and covering a period between January and June 2020, are dotted with messages to Fauci from public health experts and ordinary Americans alike asking variations of the same question: “Have you been muzzled?”
That’s the subject line of a March 1, 2020, email to Fauci from a man named Thomas Murray, who describes himself as a “nuclear/aerospace engineer who subsequently obtained an MPH [Master of Public Health degree] at the University of Washington.”
“The news media is reporting that the White House has muzzled you. Is that true?” asked Murray, who further asked Fauci to “let me know if I should stay silent or become noisy.”
As COVID-19 started becoming a threat last year, Dr. Anthony Fauci started receiving emails from people asking if he was being censored by the Trump administration. He denied the assertions.
PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh police received multiple complaints about 200-300 motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes riding in large groups around the city on Memorial Day.
Many of them were not supposed to be on the roads in the first place.
Several vehicles were driving dangerously on the streets, running traffic lights and stop signs.
Dozens of riders left the area around Fifth Avenue and Frankstown when officers started a traffic stop for an illegal ATV at around 4 p.m.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a drilling program approved by the Trump administration and reviving a political fight over a remote region that is home to polar bears and other wildlife — and a rich reserve of oil.
The Interior Department order follows a temporary moratorium on oil and gas lease activities imposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office. Biden’s Jan. 20 executive order suggested a new environmental review was needed to address possible legal flaws in a drilling program approved by the Trump administration under a 2017 law enacted by Congress.
After conducting a required review, Interior said it “identified defects in the underlying record of decision supporting the leases, including the lack of analysis of a reasonable range of alternatives” required under the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law.
The remote, 19.6 million-acre refuge is home to polar bears, caribou, snowy owls and other wildlife, including migrating birds from six continents. Republicans and the oil industry have long been trying to open up the oil-rich refuge, which is considered sacred by the Indigenous Gwich’in, for drilling. Democrats, environmental groups and some Alaska Native tribes have been trying to block it.
Pennsylvania’s democratic lieutenant governor John Fetterman is outraged that he has to follow the rules and not push his agenda.
Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor lashed out in anger Tuesday after his attempt to violate state law ended up with the LGBT flag he draped over a balcony being taken down.
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is also a Democratic candidate for the 2022 race for the U.S. Senate, has a history of putting up flags even though a 2018 law banned flying any banners on state property unless those have been approved by Pennsylvania lawmakers.
A man was shot and killed in Penn Hills late Tuesday morning.
The shooting happened near Mt. Carmel Road and Calmar Drive.
Neighbors report hearing multiple gunshots and said the victim, who police confirmed was part of a landscaping crew, was shot while he was cutting grass.
According to an update from police, the victim was a 24-year-old man from Wilkinsburg. Officials believe he was targeted.
Police said the suspect is believed to be wearing a black hoodie and blue jeans and last was seen running towards a nearby cemetery.
Allegheny County homicide detectives are investigating.
2021 KT1 is expected to come within 4.5 million miles of Earth, a relatively close encounter. It will fly past at around 40,000 miles per hour, according to scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
But don’t worry, there is no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth. Still, researchers track all asteroids that come close to the planet and are currently looking into ways to deflect ones that could make contact in the future.
Six other asteroids, which are basically leftover rocks that are over four billion years old, are also passing by Earth this week. However, they are all smaller than 2021 KT1.
(CNN)At least one person has been shot at a fire station in Agua Dulce, California, Los Angeles County Deputy Michelle Sanchez told CNN Tuesday.
Sanchez said it is unclear, but there may be more victims.
“It is with heavy hearts that the LACoFD confirms that a tragic shooting occurred at approximately 10:55 a.m. today at FS 81 in Agua Dulce,” the Los Angeles County Fire Department tweeted Tuesday. ”
The Dept. is still in the process of gathering additional information & are cooperating with law enf. throughout this ongoing incident. We will provide updated information when available.”One person is being detained in a vehicle nearby, but it is not known whether that person is the shooting suspect.
Agua Dulce is in the Santa Clarita Valley, about 30 miles north of Downtown Los Angeles.
It was their commitment to food, cocktails and Pittsburgh jazz that got Shadyside’s Con Alma named to Esquire magazine’s 2021 Best Bars in America last week, and they’ll draw strongly from the philosophy of the latter as they navigate ever closer toward a post-pandemic existence.
“Jazz is a music of improvisation,” co-owner and music director John Shannon said. “One of the ways we’ve been able to survive is through this improvised hustle. Week to week, we are just improvising.”
As of midnight, restaurants are officially permitted to operate statewide at 100% capacity, the first time since COVID-19 restrictions were implemented in March 2020.
A Los Angeles Police Department airplane made an emergency landing on a busy California highway Monday without crashing or injuring anyone, authorities said.
Aaron Figueroa, a dispatcher with the California Highway Patrol, said the plane touched down shortly before 7 p.m. local time on U.S. 101 about 35 miles north of Los Angeles.
Only the pilot was on board, and no one was injured, he said.
Coleman Thomas Blevins, 28, wrote in an online forum of his plans to conduct a mass shooting at a Texas Walmart, police said.
Last week, Coleman Thomas Blevins logged on to an online forum to confess a menacing plan, police said: The 28-year-old from Kerrville, Tex., was going to storm into a Walmart and shoot up the place.
But an undercover police officer intercepted the message. After consulting the FBI, law enforcement swiftly labeled Blevins a national security threat.
(CNN)In the weeks since the President asked her to take charge of immigration from Central America, Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff have sought to make one thing clear: She does not manage the southern border.
Two White House officials familiar with the dynamic said Harris and her aides have emphasized internally that they want to focus on conditions in Central America that push migrants to the US southern border, as President Joe Biden tasked her to do. A record number of unaccompanied children crossed into the US this spring, and the throngs of desperate minors present a heart-rending problem as well as a political one.
Biden announced Harris’ new assignment on March 24 ahead of an immigration meeting in the White House State Dining Room, telling reporters that he had asked the vice president “because she’s the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”
After the announcement, Harris’ aides appeared to “panic,” according to one of the officials, out of concern that her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, which at the time was facing a growing number of arrivals. But another White House official pushed back on the sentiment, saying the vice president’s team wasn’t panicked.
National Donut Day is tomorrow, June 4, which means that donut chains like Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme are offering free or discounted donuts, along with other giveaways like a “free donuts for a year” contest and free t-shirts.
The former CEO of the Make-A-Wish chapter in Iowa has pleaded guilty to embezzling from the charity almost $41,000, money that would’ve gone to help fulfill the wishes of children with critical illnesses.
Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued Thursday that authorities should stop building prisons and instead focus on underlying public health issues as New York City seeks to address a recent surge in violent crime.
Shares in the US cinema chain AMC surged on Wednesday in what could mark a return to frenzied trading that rocked markets earlier this year.
By
A Memorial Day hike ended in tragedy when a man lost his balance and plummeted 500 feet to his death off the summit ridge of a mountain and a woman who tried to grab him as he was falling was severely injured after tumbling 30 feet in her rescue attempt.
By
PENN HILLS, Pa. —
(CNN)At least one person has been shot at a fire station in Agua Dulce, California, Los Angeles County Deputy Michelle Sanchez told CNN Tuesday.
Sanchez said it is unclear, but there may be more victims.
GREENSBURG, Pa. —
