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Woodward: Florida’s tomato fight could hike grocery bills

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

A food fight is brewing between Florida and other states over what may seem the unlikeliest of reasons.Tomatoes.Americans love the red, vine-ripened fruit, eating 600 million each year.Some of those tomatoes are grown in Florida, where the Florida Tomato Exchange (FTE) is asking the Department of Commerce to step in and reduce the flow of tomatoes grown in Mexico. Florida farmers don’t like the competition.They want the Biden administration to terminate the Tomato Suspension Agreement (TSA), a 2019 deal that ensures producers sell Mexican tomatoes at or above the TSA reference price to “eliminate the injurious effects of exports of fresh tomatoes to the United States.” According to the Florida Tomato Exchange, the TSA does not work and instead keeps Mexico from facing any retribution for dumping tomatoes onto the U.S.Michael Schadler, executive vice president of the FTE, wrote, “All five suspension agreements over the last 27 years have failed. They haven’t stopped Mexican tomatoes ...

Dear Abby: BF’s adult son scuttles cruise fun

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

Dear Abby: My boyfriend and I were excited to go on an $11,000 Caribbean cruise. His 22-year-old son was not that enthusiastic. We invited him to join us for dinner, shows or to play games, but the majority of the time he refused. The only time he’d join us was for events that were paid for in advance.He called his mom, grandmother and girlfriend every night, but not once did he call his father’s mother. To me, it seems like he’s not interested in his father, grandma or me. The moment we arrived home from vacation, he bolted out the door to meet his girlfriend and slept at his mom’s house. What can I do to bring this family together? — Social DisasterDear Social Disaster: Although at 22 your boyfriend’s son is legally an adult, he didn’t act like one on that trip. In fact, he demonstrated that he was uninterested and didn’t want to interact with his father or with you. It is nice of you to want to bring him and his dad closer, but it&#...

Pair of earthquakes rattle rural East County

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

SAN DIEGO -- A pair of earthquakes shook the rural East County area Tuesday night, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.Around 8:11 p.m., the first quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 3.5, occurred east of Ocotillo at a depth of about 4.3 miles, according to USGS. Man arrested after San Diego school mass shooting threat Another quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 3.7, also struck east of Ocotillo around 8:30 p.m. at a depth of 5.3 miles, per USGS.No injuries or damage were immediately reported.The two earthquakes come after a series of earthquakes that occurred last week in rural East County.Check back for updates on this developing story.

Generation after generation, Israeli prison marks a rite of passage for Palestinian boys

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

NABI SALEH, West Bank (AP) — For all Palestinian parents, Marwan Tamimi said, there comes a moment they realize they’re powerless to protect their children.For the 48-year-old father of three, it came in June, when Israeli forces fired a large rubber bullet that struck the head of his eldest son, Wisam. A week later, Marwan said, soldiers came for the 17-year-old, dragging him out of bed with a fractured skull.Wisam was charged with a range of offenses he denied — throwing stones, possessing weapons, placing an explosive device and causing bodily harm — and sent to prison. Last Saturday, after six months behind bars, he returned home with 38 other Palestinians in exchange for Israeli hostages — part of a temporary cease-fire in the war that started after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. His parents said they hadn’t seen or heard from him in two months, since the war started. Wisam said he stayed in an overcrowded cell, was beaten and interrogated, and lacked food and medicati...

UN climate talks near end of first week with progress on some fronts, but fossil fuels lurk

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Negotiators at a critical United Nations climate conference prepared Wednesday to wrap up their first week of work with moderate progress on some issues, with little time to make a bit more headway before government ministers return for a final week that will shape the planet’s path forward in the face of crisis.Wednesday’s sessions were to focus on transport, the second-leading sector for the carbon dioxide emissions warming the planet, with panels like building out EV charging infrastructure and decarbonizing urban freight transportation.Despite rapid growth of electric vehicles in some countries, oil still accounts for nearly 91% of the energy used in the transport sector, according to the International Energy Agency. And it’s a sector that includes hard-to-decarbonize industries like aviation and shipping, where cutting emissions will require big ramp-ups in production of sustainable aviation fuel, for airplanes, and alternati...

A young nurse suffered cardiac arrest while training on the condition. Fellow nurses saved her life

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Andy Hoang eagerly began her first nursing job this year in New Hampshire, with a desire to specialize in cardiac care. She was excited about attending a November practice session on how to respond to someone in cardiac arrest. But as things were getting under way at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Hoang, 23, started to feel dizzy and nauseated. She felt she needed to sit down.“That’s the last thing I remember,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “I woke up to a room full of doctors and nurses.”It turned out that she, herself, had gone into cardiac arrest and needed help immediately. Her colleagues sprung into action — instead of practicing chest compressions on a mannequin in a simulated environment, they went to work on her. “One checked her carotid, one her femoral (arteries), and she did not have a pulse,” instructor Lisa Davenport said. The nurses started CPR and a “code blue,” or medical emergency, team was called.“What was really stressful...

From Barbie’s unexpected wisdom to dissent among Kennedys, these are the top quotes of 2023

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — From dissent within the Kennedy family to the unexpected wisdom of Barbie, Yale’s 2023 list of notable quotations have something for just about everyone.This year’s list is topped by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s siblings, who condemned his presidential bid.“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” his siblings said in a joint statement in October. “We denounce his candidacy.” Their father was Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general, New York senator and President John F. Kennedy’s brother. Kennedy Jr. is a bestselling author and environmental lawyer who is running as an independent after dropping his effort for the Democratic nomination. He has been one of the leading voices of the anti-vaccine movement, and health experts have joined his relatives in describing his work as misleading and dangerous.The notable quotations list, compiled each year by Fred Shapir...

AP PHOTOS: An earthquake, a shipwreck and a king’s coronation are among Europe’s views in 2023

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Two men play with a ball in the placid sea; a woman practices yoga where the water meets the hot sand. No one looks back — at the hellscape that starts a few beach-towel lengths away.The black bones of pine trees and scrub stretch inland as far as the eye reaches, marking the course of a major wildfire on the Greek resort island of Rhodes. At this point near Gennadi village, its climate change-fueled fury was only quenched by the sea. Up to a tenth of the island was affected, and authorities had to evacuate 19,000 tourists from their hotels.Even for a country used to seeing forests burn every summer, Greece’s deadly blazes during a July heatwave were unusually bad; despite a huge mobilization, the Rhodes fire raged for 11 days.Climate change left a painful imprint on much of Europe in 2023, as the northern hemisphere sweltered through its hottest summer on record. The United Nations weather agency expects 2023 to also set a global heat record, and warns of a po...

Court filing gives rare look inside FBI seizure of lawmaker’s phone in 2020 election probe

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Just how hard did some Republican members of Congress work to keep Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss? A court case is providing a few tantalizing clues.Snippets and short summaries of texts and emails sent by Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a top Trump ally, have emerged publicly for the first time as part of a court filing that was unsealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., as part of a legal battle with federal prosecutors. The messages reveal more about what investigators want to know, what actions Perry took in the weeks after the election and where Perry may fit in the web of Trump loyalists who were central to his bid to remain in power.It was Perry’s efforts to elevate Jeffrey Clark to Trump’s acting attorney general — and likely reverse the Department of Justice’s stance that it had found no evidence of widespread voting fraud that would change the election — that h...

Washington’s center of gravity on immigration has shifted to the right

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:44 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was a decade ago that Capitol Hill was consumed by an urgency to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, fueled in no small part by Republicans who felt a political imperative to make inroads with minority voters by embracing more generous policies.But nothing ever became law and in the time since, Washington’s center of gravity on immigration has shifted demonstrably to the right, with the debate now focused on measures meant to keep migrants out as Republicans sense they have the political upper hand.Long gone are the chatter and horse-trading between parties over how to secure a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, or a modernized work permit system to encourage more legal migration. Instead, the fights of late have centered on how much to tighten asylum laws and restrain a president’s traditional powers to protect certain groups of migrants. Now, Democrats and Republicans are again struggling to strike an immigration deal — and the consequenc...