Rescuers ramp up efforts to find craft missing en route to Titanic wreckage
With the air supply onboard dwindling, international rescuers ramped up their search Tuesday for the submersible carrying five people that disappeared Sunday en route to the wreckage of the Titanic. Officials said the mission was complicated by the vast distances that vessels must travel to get to the site, and the logistical complexity of a combined surface and undersea search for the privately owned, 22-foot submersible that disappeared while diving 2 1/2 miles deep to view the sunken ship. Capt. Jamie Frederick, response coordinator for the 1st Coast Guard District, estimated Tuesday afternoon that the five people on the submersible had 40 hours of breathable air left.
Judge in Trump documents case sets tentative trial date as soon as August
The federal judge presiding over the prosecution of former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case on Tuesday ordered a trial to begin as soon as Aug. 14. The timeline set by Judge Aileen Cannon is likely to be delayed by pretrial litigation, and its pace seems in keeping with a schedule set under the Speedy Trial Act. In four other criminal trials the judge has overseen that were identified in a New York Times review, she has initially set a relatively quick trial date and later pushed it back. Cannon disrupted the documents investigation last year with several rulings favorable to the former president that were overturned.
Judge strikes down Arkansas law banning gender transition care
for minors
A federal judge in Arkansas on Tuesday struck down the state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions. The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans on transition care for minors, which have since been enacted by 19 other states, could withstand legal challenges. It is the first ruling to broadly block such a ban for an entire state, though judges have intervened to temporarily delay similar laws from going into effect. In his ruling, Judge James M. Moody Jr. of U.S. District Court in Little Rock said the law discriminated against transgender people and violated constitutional rights of doctors.
Abortion views
are risky turf
on GOP trail
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, one of the country’s most emotionally charged issues has come to be defined by two seemingly contradictory political realities. Americans say at record levels that they support access to the procedure, and the issue has fueled Democratic victories across the nation. But Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved rapidly to sharply limit or ban access to abortion. With the anniversary of the decision overturning Roe on Saturday, interviews with Republican lawmakers, strategists and anti-abortion activists paint a portrait of a party struggling to find a consensus on abortion policy, and grappling to energize core base voters on the issue without alienating swing voters.
Authors and students sue
over Florida law driving book bans
A group of students and the authors of “And Tango Makes Three,” a children’s book about a penguin family with two fathers, sued a Florida school district and the state’s board of education Tuesday, saying that restricting access to the book was unconstitutional. The suit argues that the book was targeted on ideological grounds, as a result of new legislation that has led to a spike in book removals. The state law, known by its opponents as “Don’t Say Gay,” bans instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation. The school district, Lake County, restricted access to 40 titles, most of them books that deal with LGBTQ issues and themes.
Russia targets Kyiv and Lviv with attack drones
Russia unleashed dozens of attack drones across Ukraine before dawn Tuesday, targeting the cities of Kyiv and Lviv, far from the front lines where Ukraine’s counteroffensive made small gains and Russian forces tried to seize more territory in eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s military also fired on rescue workers in the flood-stricken city of Kherson on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said, killing one person and injuring eight others while they were responding to the effects of this month’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam. The Interior Ministry of Ukraine said in a statement that unarmed State Emergency Service workers in Kherson were heroes and that “killing rescuers” during a human-made disaster was “a manifestation of fear.”
41 dead after riot erupts in Honduran women’s prison
At least 41 inmates were killed Tuesday in central Honduras after a riot broke out at the country’s only prison for women, one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence in the country’s long-troubled prison system. Most of the victims had been burned, while others had been shot, said Yuri Mora, a spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office, adding that the death toll was expected to rise as investigators searched the detention facility in Támara, near Tegucigalpa, the capital. While the cause of the violence was not clear, the prison has been the scene of ongoing conflict between feuding gangs.
Germany’s Spy Agency says China and Russia are after its secrets
Foreign intelligence services are increasingly targeting Germany, its domestic intelligence agency said Tuesday, warning that espionage, cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, particularly from China and Russia, “pose a serious threat” to the country. Although such assessments are issued annually, this year’s report was exceptional both for the strength of the warnings and as a measure of how much Germany’s security environment had changed in a year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising global tensions with China served as a backdrop to the country’s increased exposure to foreign interference, given its position both in NATO and as one of the most powerful countries in the European Union, the agency said.
Police search Paris 2024 Olympics offices in corruption investigation
French police searched the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics organizing committee and other offices Tuesday as part of two corruption investigations over contracts signed in connection with the Games, prosecutors said. While the scope and nature of the investigations were not yet clear, the investigations could tarnish an image of integrity and transparency that authorities overseeing Paris 2024 plans had sought to project. The offices of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, and those of a separate body in charge of Games-related infrastructure, in western Paris, were both searched.
Palestinian gunmen kill 4 Israeli civilians in occupied West Bank
Two Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israeli civilians Tuesday afternoon outside a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Israeli military said. The shootings occurred at a restaurant and gas station next to the settlement of Eli, about 25 miles north of Jerusalem, video showed. An Israeli civilian shot and killed one assailant, a Palestinian from a nearby Arab town, and a second attacker was later shot in his getaway vehicle, security officials said. Hamas, the Islamist militia and political movement that controls the Gaza Strip, described the violence as a response to recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, police raids on a mosque in Jerusalem and military incursions in the northern West Bank.
A tourist site rises from where Caesar fell
For nearly a century, only cats (and the rats they kept at bay) had free rein over an ancient archaeological site in the heart of Rome. They would prowl among the ruins and preen for tourists who gathered along the balustrades above. But as of Tuesday, human visitors were allowed for the first time to descend and get a better glimpse of the site, believed to be where Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of senators in 44 B.C. The spot is nestled in an area with four temples, rare remnants of the Roman Republic, dating from the fourth to the first centuries B.C.
By wire sources
