Author: Reporter

USS Arizona sailor Lou Conter lived through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor even though his battleship exploded and sank after being pierced by aerial bombs. That makes the now 101-year-old somewhat of a celebrity, especially on the anniversary of the December 7, 1941 assault. Many call him and others in the nation’s dwindling pool of Pearl Harbor survivors heroes. Conter rejects the characterization. “The 2,403 men that died are the heroes. And we’ve got to honor them ahead of everybody else. And I’ve said that every time, and I think it should be stressed,” Conter said in a...

NASA’s Orion capsule and its test dummies swooped one last time around the moon Monday, flying over a couple Apollo landing sites before heading home. Orion will aim for a Pacific splashdown on December 11 off San Diego, setting the stage for astronauts on the next flight in a couple years. The capsule passed within 80 miles of the far side of the moon, using the lunar gravity as a slingshot for the 237,000-mile ride back to Earth. It spent a week in a wide, sweeping lunar orbit. Once emerging from behind the moon and regaining communication with flight...

The Republican Party’s nascent 2024 class, emboldened as ever, openly cast Donald Trump as “a loser” over and over on November 18 as they courted donors and activists fretting about the GOP’s future under the former president’s leadership. Trump’s vocal critics included current and former Republican governors, members of his own Cabinet and major donors who gathered along the Las Vegas strip for what organizers described as the unofficial beginning of the next presidential primary season. It was a remarkable display of defiance for a party defined almost wholly by its allegiance to Trump for the past six years....

A surge of anti-Jewish vitriol, spread by a world-famous rapper, an NBA star and other prominent people, is stoking fears that public figures are normalizing hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in antisemitism. Leaders of the Jewish community in the U.S. and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities with massive followings spew antisemitic tropes in a way that has been taboo for decades. Some said it harkens back to a darker time in America when powerful people routinely spread conspiracy theories about Jews with impunity. Former President...

Sheetal Deo was shocked when she got a letter from her Queens apartment building’s co-op board calling her Diwali decoration “offensive” and demanding she take it down. “My decoration said ‘Happy Diwali’ and had a swastika on it,” said Deo, a physician, who was celebrating the Hindu festival of lights. The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein. But in the West, this symbol is often equated to...