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Here are quick summaries of the top five stories making news headlines you need to know!
Founded in 1893 as Sears, Roebuck & Co., after 126 years as one of America’s most well-known retailers and “everything store”, Sears will be going out of business. Sears also owns the Kmart chain.
Sears will ask a bankruptcy judge permission to begin its path to liquidation, including letting go of 50,000 employees. Sears has been unable to compete with new online “everything” store Amazon.
Sears Holdings has rejected Chairman Eddie Lampert’s $4.4 billion bid to save the company by buying it out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund ESL investments deeming his offer to be insufficient, according to Sears’ advisors.
Pediatricians are concerned that the current measles outbreak in New York could turn into a major epidemic. The state has seen the highest numbers of measles cases since the 1990s, with 122 cases since September.
The biggest danger is pockets of unvaccinated children. As of last week, more than 80 percent of children, on average, had not been vaccinated, and of those who had – only three had received both recommended doses of measles vaccine.
A 29-year-old Native American woman, who has been in a vegetative state for over a decade after suffering a near-drowning, gave birth to a healthy baby boy at a Phoenix-based Hacienda HealthCare facility. Caregivers were unaware previously that the woman was pregnant. Police are investigating the incident as a sexual assault.
Following the announcement that the woman had given birth, the chief executive officer of Hacienda HealthCare, Bill Timmons, announced his resignation. Scrutiny has surrounded Timmons. CBS News reported that a former manager with the organization alleges that an incident occurred in 1988 where Timmons had insisted that the abuse of a different patient be covered up.
During an interview that aired Sunday night on CBS News “60 Minutes,” current media darling and freshman New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told host Anderson Cooper: “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
During the interview, Cooper pointed out that the Washington Post has repeatedly called her out for making false claims.
Following her comments made during the interview, Ocasio-Cortez received a widespread social media backlash, with some pointing out how it is not possible to be morally right if factually wrong.
The Washington Post also commented following the interview, writing that “she has also shown a tendency to exaggerate or mistake basic facts.”
The article by the Post also went on to point out how Ocasio-Cortez, when called on her factually incorrect claims, minimizes “her falsehoods.”
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez proved the Washington Post’s point by accusing fact checkers of “false equivalency” and “bias” towards her, in particular, by taking aim at PolitiFact and the Washington Post.
Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, who made headlines last November claiming he had genetically altered human embryos, could be facing execution, his colleagues say. He “disappeared” in December, after being taken into state custody.
He is reportedly living under armed guard at a state-owned apartment in Shenzhen, China, according to according to geneticist Robin Lovell-Badge of the Francis Crick Institute in London. He now worries that he could face the death penalty for his secret gene-editing experiments, in which he failed to go through normal channels.
He could face charges of violating research guidelines, as well as corruption and bribery charges – both of which carry the death penalty in China.
