Trendy News Update

Lucy Flores, a Democratic politician from Nevada, pushed back on former Vice President Joe Biden’s response to her claims he touched her inappropriately while calling for acknowledgment in her f irst television interview since taking her story public. Flores detailed the incident in a New York Magazine piece published Friday, where she wrote that Biden grasped her shoulders from behind and kissed the back of her head without her consent during a campaign event in 2014. In a statement released Sunday, Biden denied that there was an inappropriate tone to the encounter, saying he didn’t believe he acted inappropriately and making Flores uncomfortable was “never my intention.” Flores pushed back on the statement, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” she wanted the former vice president to acknowledge his alleged actions and “change his behavior.” “If he is saying that he never believed that that was inappropriate, then frankly I think that’s a little bit of a disconnect,” she said. ...

Pope Francis  has joined  Morocco ‘s King Mohammed VI in saying  Jerusalem  should be a “symbol of peaceful coexistence” for Christians, Jews and Muslims on the first day of a visit to the North African country. The spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics was invited by King Mohammed VI for the sake of “interreligious dialogue”, according to Moroccan authorities. He is expected to celebrate mass at a Rabat stadium with an estimated 10,000 people attending as well as visiting a church-run social services centre and meeting with Catholic priests and other Christian representatives on Sunday. In a joint statement on Saturday, the two leaders said Jerusalem was “common patrimony of humanity and especially the followers of the three monotheistic religions”. “The specific multi-religious character, the spiritual dimension and the particular cultural identity of Jerusalem… must be protected and promoted,” they said in the declaration released by the ...

CLOSE Rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot and killed outside of his store in Los Angeles. Wochit, USA TODAY News of the shooting death of rapper Nipsey Hussle is sending shock waves through the music community, sparking tributes from fellow artists and fans alike.  The Grammy-nominated rapper, 33, whose real name is Ermias Asghedom, was one of three people shot Sunday outside the storefront for his clothing company, called The Marathon Clothing , in South Los Angeles. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti confirmed his death on Twitter.  John Legend said he’d been with Hussle on Thursday “filming a video for a beautiful new song we created with Khaled.” He added, “He was so gifted, so proud of his home, so invested in his community. Utterly stunned that he’s gone so soon.” RIP Nipsey. I just spent Thursday with him filming a video for a beautiful new song we created with Khaled. We filmed in Inglewood, close to where he grew up. He was so gifted,...

This… is American Idol ‘s top 20. Judges Katy Perry , Luke Bryan, and Lionel Richie narrowed the search for their eponymous star on Sunday’s episode of ABC’s reality singing competition. After picking the top 40 during Hollywood Week , the show went to Hawaii for the showcase round performances from Disney’s Aulani Resort & Spa, where the list was cut in half. They now head back to Los Angeles and will perform in front of a live audience from the famed The Wiltern starting Monday. Home audiences will get to start voting with the show’s April 15 broadcast. Watch a first look video of the top 20 above, and see the full list below: Madison Vandenburg – Cohoes, N.Y. Shawn Robinson – Atlanta, Ga. Eddie Island – Nashville, Tenn. Evelyn Cormier – Claremont, N.H. Alyssa Raghu – Orlando, Fla. Ryan Hammond – Modesto, Calif. Raquel Trinidad – Tampa, Fla. Logan Johnson – Boise, Idaho Dimitrius Graham – Baltimore, Md. Riley Thompson – Mabank, Tex. Walker Burroughs – Birming...

A $1 billion Israeli intelligence startup accused of helping Saudi Arabia track its adversaries could be the key to new assertions from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ security consultant Gavin de Becker. In an op-ed published in The Daily Beast on Saturday , de Becker said his team concluded that Saudi Arabia “had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private information,” following its investigation into how Bezos’ texts with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez ended up in the hands of The National Enquirer. A foreign government surveilling a powerful American CEO using advanced technologies? It sounds like the stuff of a spy novel. But as it turns out, tracking people’s cell phones is a well-established practice, and the technology behind it — known as “lawful intercept spyware” — is a $12 billion industry. Software can track texts, emails and apps While De Becker stopped short of asserting how Saudi Arabia accessed Bezos’ phone, his op-ed linked out to a New York Times article on “internet mercena...

CLOSE SportsPulse: USA TODAY Sports’ Jeff Zillgitt tells us what’s in store for Zion Williamson as he makes his transition from college star to likely first pick in the NBA draft. USA TODAY On Sunday night the clock hit zeroes, Duke’s championship dream evaporated, and a few million more brackets were set ablaze. Within moments of the buzzer sounding and as Michigan State celebrated wildly, Adam Silver emerged from the tunnel, strode onto the court, enveloped Zion Williamson in a big hug, grinned, and whispered, “You’re ours now.” OK, the NBA commissioner didn’t do that of course, but he might as well have. Because in that moment, Williamson essentially became the property of the NBA universe and its global fanbase, a player to be cherished and lauded and scrutinized and debated. Forget about the formalities, Williamson is now an NBA player, and one of the most famous ones on the planet. There is no drama, no maybes, no wait-and-see moments to be had over the next...

SPOILER ALERT: Read on only if you have already watched Sunday’s season 9 finale of The Walking Dead. Those that survived last week’s stealth ambush of the multi-community fair that left 10 zombified heads on pikes had to survive a winter blizzard on Sunday’s season finale of The Walking Dead . We saw King Ezekiel lead his followers out of a now-decrepit Kingdom for good — having to cross through Whisperers territory to reach the Hilltop. We also saw the Alexandria contingent struggling against snow and wind to get to safety, which included Negan rescuing Judith and Dog. How did the show stage these epic snowstorms? We asked showrunner Angela Kang how they pulled it off. And that’s not all we asked her. What about that mystery voice on the radio at the end of the episode? Why did they choose to say goodbye to the Kingdom? What are we to make of Carol breaking up with Ezekiel and what the future holds for those two? And what’s Alpha having Beta whip her arm all about? We inquired...

Kiev, Ukraine – Comedian  Volodymyr Zelensky will face incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a runoff vote for  Ukraine ‘s presidency, exit polls have shown. Zelensky,  a political novice  who is better known for playing a president in a TV sitcom, was projected to win 30.6 percent of the votes cast on Sunday,  according to surveys conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and the Razumkov Centre. “This is just a first step towards a great victory,” he told supporters after the publication of the exit polls.  Poroshenko, who has been in power since 2014, was forecast to come second, with 17.8 percent of the vote. “I critically and soberly understand the signal that society gave today to the acting authorities,” he said, accepting the projected results. It was a different story for  opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, who disputed the surveys that showed her coming in third, with 14.2 percent of the vote.   “I urge n...

Autoplay Show Thumbnails Show Captions Last Slide Next Slide Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined a chorus of social media critics who tore into Fox News on Sunday for an error in an onscreen graphic that said President Donald Trump had cut “aid to 3 Mexican countries.”  The graphic at the bottom of the screen, known as a chyron, appeared as “Fox & Friends” co-host Pete Hegseth discussed Trump’s decision to “ cut aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras over the fact that those countries have been unable to contain the flood of migrants heading through Mexico to our southern border.” The three Central American countries are entirely independent of Mexico.  “Just a reminder that these are the same folks who assert their superiority by belittling the intelligence and good faith of others,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman New York Democrat whose far-left positions have made her a target for the conservative cable news networ...

Now, this is the Billions that I tell everyone about, the show that I can’t stop raving about when someone asks me what I’m watching or to name one of my favorite shows on TV. Don’t get me wrong, the first two episodes of this season are solid, especially the premiere , but there’s always that  one episode early on that really kicks things into high gear. It’s an episode that sees the dialogue firing on all cylinders, the shifting relationships starting to clarify, and the plot starting to take shape in some truly fascinating ways. “Chickentown” is that kind of episode. It all begins with Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” and a very large man riding a scooter through a chicken farm. It’s like the beginning of a strange procedural, where we get the cold open that isn’t explained until a little bit later. You see, the man on the scooter is “The Chicken Man,” and not the one from the song. He’s key to something big that Dollar Bill has stumbled on (or slept his way to). Dollar B...

“There’s never been an Arab state here with the capital of Jerusalem,” says Daniel Luria. “There’s never been a Palestinian state here. This talk about Palestine, Palestine … I’ve never heard of anything more absurd.” Luria is the executive director of Ateret Cohanim, a settler organisation working to create a Jewish majority in the city of Jerusalem . Raised in Australia, Luria says Israel is his only home, in spite of only having moved there 25 years ago. He is one of more than 850,000 people residing in Jerusalem. After a peaceful period under Ottoman rule, where Islam, Christianity and Judaism coexisted in relative harmony, the decline of the empire and consequent victory of the British in Palestine during World War I set the stage for the eventual takeover of the city. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jewish forces captured West Jerusalem as the eastern half became part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan . Almost two decades later, the  1967 Six-Day War would see the Je...