Headline News from The Associated Press
AP Headline News - May 09 2024 18:00 (EDT)
- PP News, I'm Ben Thomas. The White House is warning Israel it would hand Hamas a strategic victory if it carries out an all out assault on Rafa. Sakamagani has more. - The town is Hamas's last major Gaza stronghold and it's where more than a million Palestinian civilians are sheltering. President Biden has threatened to halt more offensive aid to Israel if it goes through with a major operation in Rafa. And his efforts to reach a ceasefire continue. Any kind of major Rafa ground operation would actually strengthen Hamas's hands at the negotiating table, not Israel's. - White House national security spokesperson John Kirby says more civilian deaths in Rafa would only help Hamas's leader make a case against Israel. - More ammunition for his twisted narrative here. - It's unclear if the president's threat to withhold aid would change Israel's calculus. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will stand alone if need be. Republicans like Arkansas, Senator Tom Cotton, say they shouldn't have to and are blasting the president for abandoning a key ally. - Joe Biden's de facto position is for a Hamas victory over Israel. - Sagar Megani, Washington. - The warring Gaza's spurring more protests including at the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden. At Donald Trump's hush money trial, his defense attorney accused Stormy Daniels of slowly altering the details of an alleged sexual encounter. Daniels rejected that. The judge denied a second request from Trump's attorneys to declare a mistrial in the trial turn to other witnesses. Harvey Weinstein will remain locked up in New York as the court works out whether he should stay in a city jail while he awaits a retrial in a rape case or be sent back to California to serve a prison sentence there. At an analysis of FBI data by the gun safety group Everytown finds the rate of guns stolen from cards in the US has tripled over the last decade. This is AP News. Weekly economic numbers, jobless claims spiked their highest since August, but with 231,000 people filing, that's still relatively low. Mortgage rates eased a little and Cessoutel has the AP markets report. - Stocks closed higher on Wall Street pulling the S&P 500 back within 1% of its record high. The gains followed a rough April for the stock market. The S&P 500 added half a percent. The Dow climbed 331 points. That's about eight tenths percent. The NASDAQ composite gained three tenths percent. Markets got some help from a report showing a rise in the number of US workers applying for unemployment benefits last week. That helped bolster hopes that the economy may be cooling enough for the Fed to consider pulling back on its high interest rate policy. The Fed is trying to slow the economy enough to get inflation under control, but not so much that it sends the economy into a severe recession. Treasury yields eased in the bond market yield on the tenure treasury note fell to 4.46%. Seth Soutel, New York. - And I've been Thomas, CP News.