Ivanka Trump says she passed on World Bank job
ABIDJIAN, Ivory Coast — White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump says her father asked her if she was interested in the job of World Bank chief but she passed on it.
In an Associated Press interview, President Donald Trump’s daughter said Wednesday she was happy with her current role in the administration. She was traveling in Africa to promote a global women’s initiative.
Ivanka Trump said her father raised the job as “a question” and she told him she was “happy with the work” she’s doing.
The president recently told The Atlantic: “I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank. . She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers.”
Ivanka Trump worked on the selection process for the new head of the 189-nation World Bank, David Malpass. She said he’ll do an “incredible job.”
Scientists spur some activity in brains of slaughtered pigs
NEW YORK — Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising hopes for some medical advances and questions about the definition of death.
The brains could not think or sense anything, researchers stressed. By medical standards “this is not a living brain,” said Nenad Sestan of the Yale School of Medicine, one of the researchers reporting the results Wednesday in the journal Nature.
But the work revealed a surprising degree of resilience among cells within a brain that has lost its supply of blood and oxygen, he said.
“Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window than we previously thought,” Sestan said.
Such research might lead to new therapies for stroke and other conditions, as well as provide a new way to study the brain and how drugs work in it, researchers said. They said they had no current plans to try their technique on human brains.
Gambler sets another 1-day winnings record on ‘Jeopardy!’
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A professional sports gambler from Las Vegas has broken his own single-episode winnings record on “Jeopardy!”
James Holzhauer won $131,127 during a show aired Wednesday night, breaking the record that viewers saw him set last week.
Due to the game show’s taping schedule, the records were actually set one day apart, with Holzhauer’s new high score occurring on Feb. 12.
Wednesday’s win marks the 10th consecutive win for the 34-year-old Holzhauer. Before his run, the previous episode record was $77,000 and was set by Roger Craig in 2010.
“Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, who revealed in March that he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, posted a message Wednesday thanking fans for their well-wishes and said he’s feeling good and continuing with his therapy.
Bus carrying Germans crashes, kills 29 on Portugal’s Madeira
LISBON, Portugal — A tour bus carrying German tourists crashed on Portugal’s Madeira Island on Wednesday, killing 29 people and injuring 28 others, local authorities said.
The bus, which was carrying 55 people, rolled down a steep hillside after veering off the road on a bend east of the capital, Funchal, and struck at least one house, local mayor Filipe Sousa told cable news channel SIC.
Local television showed bodies scattered over a rural hillside next to the Atlantic Ocean. Madeira, off northwestern Africa, is a popular vacation destination for Europeans due to its mild climate and lush, hilly landscape.
The dead included 18 women and 11 men, one of whom died later at a hospital, Sousa told public broadcaster RTP.
Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva said preliminary reports he had received indicated all the dead were German. But Tomasia Alves, head of the Funchal hospital, said not all the victims had been identified and refused to confirm the nationality of the dead.
60 people charged in illegal prescription opioid crackdown
CINCINNATI — Federal authorities said Wednesday they have charged 60 people, including a doctor accused of trading drugs for sex and another of prescribing to his Facebook friends, for their roles in illegally prescribing and distributing millions of pills containing opioids and other drugs.
U.S. Attorney Benjamin Glassman of Cincinnati described the action, with 31 doctors facing charges, as the biggest known takedown yet of drug prescribers. Robert Duncan, U.S. attorney for eastern Kentucky, called the doctors involved “white-coated drug dealers.”
Authorities said the 60 includes 53 medical professionals tied to some 350,000 prescriptions and 32 million pills. The operation was conducted by the federal Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force, launched last year by the Trump administration.
Authorities said arrests were being made and search warrants carried out as they announced the charges at a news conference. They didn’t immediately name those being charged.
U.S. health authorities have reported there were more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths in 2017, for a rate of 21.7 per 100,000 people. West Virginia and Ohio have regularly been among the states with the highest overdose death rates as the opioid crisis has swelled in recent years.