North America

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City has agreed to pay $7 million to a man who spent 23 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit, Comptroller Brad Lander said Monday.

Grant Williams was exonerated last July in the 1996 shooting of Shdell Lewis outside a Staten Island public housing complex.

NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world.

The best available evidence points to a fairly common stomach bug that isn’t known to cause liver problems in otherwise healthy kids. That virus was detected in the the blood of stricken children but — oddly — it has not been found in their diseased livers.

“There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense,” said Eric Kremer, a virus researcher at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of Montpellier, in France.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Katherine “Kat” Massey is scheduled to be laid to rest Monday as funerals continue for the victims of the racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket.

Massey, 72, has been described by her friends as a civil rights and education advocate. Last year she wrote a letter to her hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News, addressing “escalating gun violence in Buffalo and many major U.S. cities” and calling for “extensive” federal action and legislation.

(AP) --- Three doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine offer strong protection for children younger than 5, the company announced Monday. Pfizer plans to give the data to U.S. regulators later this week in a step toward letting the littlest kids get the shots.

The news comes after months of anxious waiting by parents desperate to vaccinate their babies, toddlers and preschoolers, especially as COVID-19 cases once again are rising. The 18 million tots under 5 are the only group in the U.S. not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccination.

Tokyo, May 23 (AP) President Joe Biden said Monday that the US would intervene militarily if China were to invade Taiwan, saying the burden to protect Taiwan is "even stronger' after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It was one of the most forceful presidential statements in support of self-governing in decades.

Biden, at a news conference in Tokyo, said yes when asked if he was willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if China invaded. That's the commitment we made, he added.

NEW YORK, May 22. /TASS/: Russia’s flagship air carrier Aeroflot will soon face parts shortages and may start disassembling some of its planes for spare parts, Bloomberg said on Sunday, citing expert estimates.

"The vast majority of the group’s more than 350 planes are Airbus or Boeing models, and it is facing a looming parts deficit. Aviation data specialists IBA estimate Russian airlines have supplies to last three months and then may start cannibalizing aircraft for parts," it said.

WASHINGTON, May 22 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A US military investigation has found that troops did not violate the laws of war or deliberately cause civilian casualties in an air strike in Syria in 2019 that killed dozens of people.

The probe was launched in response to a New York Times report which accused the military of a cover-up over the attack on a Daesh group position.

The investigator rejected the claim.

But he concluded that “numerous policy compliance deficiencies at multiple levels” had led to delays in reporting.

HAVANA/WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - Biden administration officials are considering inviting a Cuban representative to the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas, a person familiar with the matter said, as Washington scrambled to head off a potentially embarrassing boycott by some regional leaders.

Discussion has focused on allowing a Cuban presence at the next month's Los Angeles summit below the level of the country's president or foreign minister, but it is at an early stage and no decision has been made, the source told Reuters on Friday.

UNITED NATIONS, May 22 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday called on the international community to "build a shared future for all life."

"Biodiversity is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, ending the existential threat of climate change, halting land degradation, building food security and supporting advances in human health," Guterres said in a statement for International Day for Biological Diversity, which falls on May 22 annually.

GAYLORD, Mich. (AP) — Nearly all of the power lost following a deadly tornado that killed two people and flattened parts of a northern Michigan community has been restored, state police said Sunday.

Police also said that everyone has been accounted for in Gaylord where Friday afternoon’s EF3 also left more than 40 people injured. Authorities had said Saturday that they were not able to account for one person.

Cleanup continued Sunday in the town of 4,200 people about 230 miles (370 kilometers) northwest of Detroit.