USA

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — In one of his first acts as Nebraska’s governor, Republican Jim Pillen named his predecessor to the state’s vacant U.S. Senate seat on Thursday.

Pillen surprised no one in naming fellow Republican Pete Ricketts to the seat vacated Sunday by Ben Sasse.

The governor said 111 people applied for the vacant seat and nine people — all Republicans — were interviewed. He said he chose Ricketts based on their shared conservatism and Ricketts’ promise that he would later run to be elected to the seat.

(AP) --- Delays and cancellations among flights across the United States were minimal on Thursday, a day after a system that offers safety information to pilots failed, grounding U.S. air traffic and leading to thousands of stranded travelers.

There were 636 delays into, within or out of the U.S. as of Thursday morning, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. There were 82 cancellations.

NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of nurses at two New York City hospitals ended a three-day strike Thursday after reaching a tentative contract agreement that union officials said offers better working conditions, in addition to pay raises.

The tentative deals at Mount Sinai Hospital, in Manhattan, and Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx, include raises totaling 19% over three years. Nurses began returning to work at both hospitals Thursday morning, with Gov. Kathy Hochul greeting returning nurses at Mount Sinai just before dawn.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rising U.S. consumer prices moderated again last month, bolstering hopes that inflation’s grip on the economy will continue to ease this year and possibly require less drastic action by the Federal Reserve to control it.

Inflation declined to 6.5% in December compared with a year earlier, the government said Thursday. It was the sixth straight year-over-year slowdown, down from 7.1% in November. On a monthly basis, prices actually slipped 0.1% from November to December, the first such drop since May 2020.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s legal team has discovered additional documents containing classification markings in a second location, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The revelation comes days after an attorney for the president said Biden’s lawyers had discovered a “small number” of classified documents at his former office space in Washington.

11 Jan 2023; MEMO: The US has appointed Elizabeth Frawley Bagley as the new Ambassador to Brazil after she was reprimanded during the confirmation hearing over remarks about the power of the "Jewish lobby" in Washington. Bagley was nominated a year ago by President Joe Biden for the job but her appointment has been dogged by delays and allegations of anti-Semitism.

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (APP):With the World Bank warning that the global economy is “perilously close to falling into recession”, the development lender forecast Pakistan’s growth at 2.0 percent in fiscal year 2022/23 (July-June), in its annual Global Economic Prospects report Tuesday.

The bank said the figure for Pakistan growth was “half the pace that was anticipated last June, and faces challenging economic conditions, including the repercussions of the recent flooding and continued policy and political uncertainty.”

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives Republicans who tried to block Kevin McCarthy's leadership bid last week share more than far-right political views. They also command powerful fundraising machines powered by small-dollar donations.

Their fundraising has a lot in common with the fundraising organizations of the Democratic Party's far-left lawmakers who - like the anti-McCarthy block - rely on small donors more than their party fellows in Congress.

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation into an FAA system outage that grounded flights across the country Wednesday morning and said the cause of the failure was unknown.

Biden told reporters at the White House he had spoken to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and they should have a good sense in a couple of hours of what triggered the outage.

"We'll respond at that time," Biden said. Asked if the outage was caused by a cyberattack, he said, "We don't know."

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - A group of senior New York Republicans on Wednesday called on newly elected U.S. Representative George Santos to resign from office, saying that he had repeatedly lied about his history during his campaign.

Even as Republicans in his home district in Nassau County urged Santos to step down, the new congressman rejected their call, telling reporters at the Capitol that he would not resign.