Cumberland County | featured news

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration intends to scrap limits on the debt students amass in career training programs, undoing an Obama-era initiative that sought to tighten federal oversight of for-profit colleges, according to people familiar with the plan.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had previously signaled her skepticism about what is called the “gainful employment” rule, delaying enforcement of key provisions as the Education Department studied revisions.

MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of demonstrators have rallied throughout Russia to protest plans to substantially hike the age at which Russians can receive their state retirement pensions.
A crowd estimated at more than 10,000 attended a protest in Moscow that was called by the Communist Party. A similarly large crowd gathered in Yekaterinburg to protest and demonstrations also were reported Saturday in large cities including Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd. No arrests were immediately reported.

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Another diplomatic thaw was underway Saturday in the restless Horn of Africa region as Somalia’s president visited Eritrea for the first time and years of tension gave way to an embrace.
“Somalia is ready to write a new chapter of its relations with Eritrea,” Abdinur Mohamed, a spokesman for President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, announced on Twitter.

Portland police are investigating the death of a 22-year-old Portland man who was involved in a three-car crash Saturday afternoon at the intersection of Brighton Avenue and Riverside Street.
Police are not classifying the death of Patrick Lobor as a traffic fatality, but have not released additional details about how they believe he died.

REDDING, Calif. — A deadly Northern California wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes in and around the city of Redding expanded into more rural areas Saturday where scorching heat, winds and bone-dry conditions complicated firefighting efforts.
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said 14 people had been reported missing after the furious wind-driven blaze took residents by surprise and leveled several neighborhoods, though he added that the homes of most of those unaccounted for were still standing.

RICHMOND — The fun started early here Saturday as the town hosted its annual Richmond Days fete.
The sun came out in plenty of time to start the corn hole competition, the parade and some roller skating in the street.
The downtown near Waterfront Park was closed to traffic so the festival goers could roam back and forth among events, vendors and the outdoor inflatable water slide. Green-carpeted lobster crates were carried to a wharf on the Kennebec River, ready to be placed into the water for the annual Lobster Crate Races.

MIDDLETOWN, R.I. — A black man yelled at former White House press secretary Sean Spicer in a bookstore and accused Spicer of calling him a racial slur when they were students at a prep school decades ago.
Spicer was “taken aback” by the man’s “outrageous claim” and had no recollection of him or of being in school with him, his publicist said on Saturday.

A quarter of the adults who went to hospital emergency departments with sprained ankles were prescribed opioid painkillers, a new study shows, in another sign of how commonly physicians turn to narcotics even for minor injuries.
The state-by-state review revealed wide variation in the use of opioids for the sprains, from 40 percent in Arkansas to 2.8 percent in North Dakota. All but one of the nine states that recorded above-average opioid prescribing are in the South or Southwest.

HAMPTON, Va. — A pair of nor’easters in early 1998, and Hurricane Isabel in 2003, awoke this low-lying Chesapeake Bay town to the impact of rising waters caused by climate change. A few years later, as Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, and Hurricane Sandy raked the New Jersey-New York coastline, scientists warned that Hampton and its neighbors could be next.
So this small city embarked on studies of what was happening and what it could do.

BRUSSELS — For four centuries, the opulent, exuberant nudes of Peter Paul Rubens have been known to shock and delight in sometimes equal measure. And now, even in 2018, his Baroque paintings can jolt the internet.
Belgian museums are uniting in protest against Facebook since they cannot promote Flemish Masters including Rubens at will for fear of falling foul of the social media site’s adult content rules and automatic censorship.