North America

NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump aims to deliver his own closing argument Thursday in his New York civil business fraud trial in addition to his legal team’s summations, according to two people familiar with the highly unusual plan.

Trump is a defendant in the case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. She claims his net worth was inflated by billions of dollars on financial statements that helped him secure business loans and insurance.

WASHINGTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - NASA is set to delay its next few missions to the moon under a key program as technical hurdles mount with the various spacecraft it intends to use to get there, according to four people familiar with NASA's plans.

The U.S. space agency is expected to announce the plans on Tuesday after spending months tracking progress with contractors and considering changes to the Artemis program, a multi-billion dollar effort that includes returning the first astronauts to the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander has "no chance" of a soft landing on the moon after springing a propellant leak in the first few hours of its journey in space, the company said on Tuesday about the first such U.S. attempt in five decades.

There was 40 hours of fuel left on the lander that will allow it to operate "as a spacecraft" even as engineers determine what its new mission in orbit will be, the space robotics firm said.

OTTAWA, Jan. 9 (Xinhua) -- The first "impactful" winter storm of the year is expected to hit the Canadian capital Ottawa late Tuesday, following a record year of heat, wildfires, and flooding.

Environment Canada, the country's weather agency, said heavy snow associated with a major winter storm is to arrive on Tuesday afternoon and continue into Wednesday.

Snow will likely change to ice pellets or freezing rain on Tuesday night. Several hours of freezing rain are possible, particularly in the Ottawa Valley. Some locations may see 10 to 20 cm of snow, the agency said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Both the White House and Pentagon said Monday they would look into why President Joe Biden and other top officials weren’t informed for days that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized. A Pentagon spokesman pointed to one reason: A key staffer was out sick with the flu.

Even as the Biden administration pledged to look into what rules or procedures weren’t followed, it maintained its silence about why Austin has been hospitalized for a week. Late Monday, the Pentagon issued an update saying Austin “is recovering well.”

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday set a mid-March special election date to fill the U.S. House seat vacated by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

In a statement, Newsom set the March 19 primary date for the 20th Congressional District contest. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, the top two vote-getters would advance to a May 21 matchup to fill the seat.

NEW YORK (AP) — Sotheby’s defended itself at a trial Monday against accusations that it helped defraud a Russian oligarch out of tens of millions of dollars, saying it knew nothing of wrongdoing by an art buyer who advised the billionaire on buying works by famed artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Leonardo da Vinci.

Sotheby’s attorney Sara Shudofsky told a jury in an opening statement in Manhattan federal court that billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev was “trying to make an innocent party pay for what somebody else did to him.”

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — An explosion at a historic Texas hotel in Fort Worth on Monday blew out windows, littered downtown streets with large sections of debris from the building and injured 21 people, including one who was in critical condition, authorities said.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Federal investigators say a door panel slid up before flying off an Alaska Airlines jetliner last week, and they are looking at whether four bolts that were supposed to help hold the panel in place might have been missing when the plane took off.

The comments Monday from the National Transportation Safety Board came shortly after Alaska and United Airlines reported separately that they found loose parts in the panels — or door plugs — of some other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Attorneys for a former Los Angeles-area gang leader charged with orchestrating the killing of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur in 1996 say prosecutors are wrong — that their client is facing danger, not witnesses — and he should be released from jail to house arrest ahead of his trial in June.