Sorted by date Results 26 - 43 of 43
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The former Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on George Floyd's back while another officer kneeled on the Black man's neck was sentenced Friday to 3 1/2 years in prison. J. Alexander Kueng pleaded guilty in October to a state count of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. In exchange, a charge of aiding and abetting murder was dropped. Kueng is already serving a federal sentence for violating Floyd's civil rights, and the state and federal sentences will be served at the same time. Kueng appeared at the h...
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Deanne VanScyoc said she dropped to the floor behind a pool table at Club Q and called 911 as the first shots rang out just before midnight, hitting people at the bar. VanScyoc was facing the entrance from behind a glass wall when the shooter came in, she said. The shooter turned right and fired a single shot toward the bar, then three more in rapid succession, then a flurry of shots. As pop music pounded and a strobe light flashed, VanScyoc saw the shooter, in body armor, move in a crouch down a ramp, rifle at e...
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A South Dakota ethics board on Monday said it found sufficient information that Gov. Kristi Noem may have "engaged in misconduct" when she intervened in her daughter's application for a real estate appraiser license, and it referred a separate complaint over her state airplane use to the state's attorney general for investigation. The three retired judges on the Government Accountability Board determined that "appropriate action" could be taken against Noem for her role in her daughter's appraiser licensure, though i...
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — The South Dakota Senate on Tuesday convicted Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg of two impeachment charges stemming from a 2020 fatal accident, removing and barring him from future office in a stinging rebuke that showed most senators didn't believe his account of the crash. Ravnsborg, a first-term Republican who only recently announced he wouldn't seek reelection, showed little emotion as senators convicted him first of committing a crime that caused someone's death. They then delivered another guilty verdict on a malfeasance...
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Jacklyn Cazares hadn't yet reached her 10th birthday, but her father described her as a tough-minded "firecracker" always looking to help people in need. Jacklyn and her second cousin, Annabelle Rodriguez, were especially tight with three other classmates at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Now, Javier Cazares says, "they are all gone." The girls were among 19 students killed Tuesday when an 18-year-old gunman barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom at the school in the southwestern Texas town and began to k...
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Rumbles from the motorcycles and rock shows of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally have hardly cleared from the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the reports of COVID-19 infections among rallygoers are already streaming in — 178 cases across five states, according to contact tracers. In the three weeks since the rally kicked off, coronavirus cases in South Dakota have shot up at a startling pace — sixfold from the early days of August. While it is not clear how much rallygoers spread the virus through secondary infec...
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — Photo ops with the troops. Political points on an issue sure to loom large in 2024 presidential debates. Another chance to tout a tough-on-illegal immigration stance that comes rarely for a governor whose state is closer to Canada than Mexico. There's plenty of reasons for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's Monday visit to National Guard troops she deployed to the U.S. border with Mexico. She says she is making the flight to the border city of McAllen, Texas, to check in on the roughly 50 National Guard members who v...
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — More than 18 months before the first presidential primary of 2024, most potential Republican candidates are just getting a sense of the political landscape, tiptoeing through early-voting states and trying to make friends in key places. Then there's Kristi Noem. The South Dakota governor has come out swinging as she tries to carve a niche among an early crowd of possible GOP rivals for the White House. Her combative style, no surprise to those who follow her, is evidence of how competitive the nomination race will be i...
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Tuesday she will use a donation from a Republican donor to fund a deployment of up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S. border with Mexico. Noem joined a growing list of Republican governors promising to send law enforcement officers to Texas as the GOP ramps up a political fight with President Joe Biden over border security. The issue has drawn a host of prominent GOP figures: Former President Donald Trump was expected to travel to the border this week and R...
There's a wild card in the push to return to pre-pandemic life: Many workers don't want to go back to the jobs they once had. Layoffs and lockdowns, combined with enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, gave many Americans the time and the financial cushion to rethink their careers. Their former employers are hiring again — and some, like Uber and McDonald's, are offering higher pay — but workers remain hesitant. In March, U.S. job openings rose 8% to a record 8.1 million, but overall hiring rose less than 4%, according to gov...
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted Tuesday of murder and manslaughter for pinning George Floyd to the pavement with his knee on the Black man's neck in a case that touched off worldwide protests, violence and a furious reexamination of racism and policing in the U.S. Chauvin, 45, could be sent to prison for decades. The verdict set off jubilation around the city. People instantly flooded the surrounding streets downtown, running through traffic with banners. Cars blared their horns. Floyd family members wh...
BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. (AP) — As protests intensified in the Minneapolis suburb where a police officer fatally shot Daunte Wright, a group of Black men joined the crowd intent on keeping the peace and preventing protests from escalating into violence. Hundreds of people have gathered outside the heavily guarded Brooklyn Center police station every night since Sunday, when former Officer Kim Potter, who is white, shot the 20-year-old Black motorist during a traffic stop. Despite the mayor's calls for law enforcement and protesters to scale b...
STURGIS, S.D. (AP) — Thousands of bikers poured into the small South Dakota city of Sturgis on Friday as the 80th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally rumbled to life despite fears it could lead to a massive coronavirus outbreak. The rally could become one of the largest public gatherings since the pandemic began, with organizers expecting 250,000 people from all over the country to make their way through Sturgis during the 10-day event. That would be roughly half the number of previous years, but local residents — and a few bikers — worry that the crowd...
MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL, S.D. (AP) — At the foot of Mount Rushmore on the eve of Independence Day, President Donald Trump made a direct appeal to disaffected white voters four months before Election Day, accusing protesters who have pushed for racial justice of engaging in a "merciless campaign to wipe out our history." The president dug further into American divisions Friday, offering a discordant tone to an electorate battered by a pandemic and wounded by racial injustice following the high-profile killings of Black people. He z...
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Meat production has rebounded from its low point during the coronavirus pandemic when dozens of plants were closed, but experts say consumer prices are likely to remain high and it will take months to work through a backlog of millions of pigs and cattle, creating headaches for producers. Earlier this week, beef, pork and poultry plants were operating at more than 95% of last year's levels, which was up from about 60% in April at the height of plant closures and slowdowns, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. That i...
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A contact tracing app pushed by the governors of North Dakota and South Dakota as a tool to trace exposure to the coronavirus violated its own privacy policy by sharing location and user identification information with third-party businesses, according to a report from a tech privacy company. The Care19 app, developed by ProudCrowd, of North Dakota, was one of the first contact tracing apps endorsed by state governments in response to the coronavirus. Governors from both states promoted it as a way to help health o...
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Big meatpacking companies that have struggled to keep plants running during the coronavirus crisis said Wednesday that they welcomed President Donald Trump's executive order requiring them to stay open, but unions, some employees and Democrats questioned whether workers could be kept safe. Trump used the Defense Production Act to classify meat processors as critical infrastructure to prevent supermarket shelves from running out of chicken, pork and other meat. Meatpacking plants across the country have closed as C...
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Kulule Amosa's husband earns $17.70 an hour at a South Dakota pork plant doing a job so physically demanding it can only be performed in 30-minute increments. After each shift last week, he left exhausted as usual — but he didn't want to go home. He was scared he would infect his pregnant wife with the coronavirus — so much so that when he pulled into the parking lot of their apartment building, he would call Amosa to tell her he wasn't coming inside. When he eventually did, he would sleep separately from her in their...
