USA

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Recent revelations about Republican election strategies targeting minority communities in Wisconsin’s biggest city came as no surprise to many Black voters.

A Wisconsin election commissioner bragged about low turnout in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods during last year’s elections. Weeks later, an audio recording surfaced that showed then-President Donald Trump’s Wisconsin campaign team laughing behind closed doors about efforts to reach Black voters in 2020.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States believes the unidentified objects shot down by American fighter jets over Canada and Alaska were balloons, though smaller than the China balloon downed over the Atlantic Ocean last weekend, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday.

Schumer, D-N.Y., told ABC’s “This Week” that he was briefed on Saturday night by President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, after the incident hours earlier over the Yukon. On Friday, an object roughly the size of a small car was downed over remote Alaska, according to the White House.

WASHINGTON, February 11. /TASS/: The entire Western world has turned against Russia, but it is already obvious that the plans to inflict a strategic defeat on it have been thwarted, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said at a meeting on the occasion of Diplomat's Day in the Russian diplomatic mission.

NEW YORK, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Navy was involved in the Nord Stream explosions, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said Wednesday on the U.S. portal Substack.

According to Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, last June, the U.S. Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines three months later.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York state officials said they will allow COVID-19-related masking requirements for staff and visitors in hospitals and other health care facilities to lapse on Sunday.

Acting Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said that while the pandemic is not over, “we are moving to a transition.”

“As we do, and with safe and effective vaccines, treatments, and more, we are able to lift the state’s masking requirement in health care settings,” McDonald said in a statement.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met at the White House on Friday and reflected on how their nations were tested in their respective battles to preserve democracy, with the U.S. president declaring that democracy ultimately “prevailed” over the far-right mobs that stormed their governments’ halls of power in an attempt to overturn election victories.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Ukraine’s supporters have circulated a proposed resolution for adoption by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly on the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor that would underscore the need for peace ensuring Ukraine’s “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity.”

The draft, obtained Friday by The Associated Press, is entitled “Principles underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A leak in a fuel pipeline facility in California forced a shutdown of deliveries of gasoline and diesel from the Los Angeles area east to areas including Las Vegas and Phoenix, but officials said Friday they believed supplies would not immediately be affected.

Pipeline operator Kinder Morgan told The Associated Press the leak was discovered Thursday afternoon at a company station near Los Angeles and that its CALNEV and SFPP West pipelines were shut down while the Houston-based pipeline operator worked to resolve the issue.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans are fighting over who will lead the Kansas GOP for the next two years, and frustrations over two key election losses last year in the GOP-leaning state have ramped up the acrimony already roiling the party nationally.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Years before Memphis Police officer Demetrius Haley pulled Tyre Nichols from his car on Jan. 7, setting in motion a deadly confrontation, Haley was accused of taking part in the savage beating of an inmate at a county prison.

The 2015 assault of the inmate was so disturbing that 34 others — the entire cellblock — signed a letter to the corrections director.

“We are truly asking that this matter gets looked into before someone gets hurt really bad or lose their life because of some unprofessional officers,” the letter stated.