February

NEW YORK — When Lindsey Vonn retired from Alpine skiing in 2019, she walked away from the sport as one of the most successful skiers in history. Six years later she’s coming back, with her sights set on competing in a fifth Winter Olympics in February in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

But regardless of how that comeback ends, Vonn isn’t worried about it detracting from what she’s already accomplished.

“This is different because I had nothing to prove,” said Vonn, 41, who climbed a World Cup podium for the first time since 2019 when she finished second at the super-G season finals in Sun Valley, Idaho, last March.

“I don’t think anyone remembers Michael Jordan’s comeback. I don’t think that’s part of his legacy at all,” she continued. “I’ve already succeeded. I’ve already won. I was on the podium. I have the record for the oldest medalist in World Cup by seven years [she set the previous record in 2019]. I feel like this journey has been incredible.”

American Lindsey Vonn poses in 2019 with medals she has won throughout her career in the finish area at the alpine ski world championships in Are, Sweden.

(Marco Trovati / Associated Press)

Vonn has three Olympic medals, but she won her only gold 15 years ago. She’s won eight World Championship medals, but just one since 2017; her last gold came in 2009. But the comeback isn’t so much about rekindling that past as it is about shoring up the present.

“I closed my career, and I definitely would like to close that chapter in maybe a better way than I did in 2019,” said Vonn, who was speaking Tuesday at the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Media Summit in Manhattan. “I feel like I am happy, free. I’m doing it because I love it. I’m not doing to prove anything to anyone.”

Vonn missed the 2014 Winter Games with a right knee injury, an injury that led to her retirement in 2019. But after partial knee-replacement surgery last year, she decided she wasn’t done with skiing yet.

“After the replacement, I knew things were really different,” she said. “My body felt so good, and I just kind of kept pushing myself further and further to see what I was capable of. Skiing and racing seemed like the logical next step.”

American Lindsey Vonn skis during a women’s super-G run at the World Cup finals on March 23 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

(Robert F. Bukaty / Associated Press)

She’s a different skiier than she was when first started competing internationally two decades ago, she said.

“I have a lot more perspective now, having been away from the sport for six years,” she said. “That just allows me to compete in a different way and I think that gives me an advantage actually.

“Downhill skiing has a lot to do with with accumulated knowledge. And I’ve obviously accumulated a lot of knowledge, because I’ve raced for a very long time.”

Vonn, whose comeback landed her on the cover of this week’s Time magazine, said she’s in the best shape of her career. But she still must earn enough points on this winter’s World Cup circuit to qualify for the Olympics.

She said she probably wouldn’t have considered racing at a top level again if next February’s Games weren’t schedule for Cortina, where’s won a record 12 career World Cup races. She also recorded her first of 138 World Cup podiums in Cortina in 2004.

“My goal has always been Cortina again. It’s such a special place for me,” she said.

American Lindsey Vonn speeds down the course during an alpine ski women’s World Cup downhill race in Kvitfjell, Norway, on Feb. 28.

(Gabriele Facciotti / Associated Press)

“I didn’t want to set that as a goal, because I didn’t know if I would even be able to compete, let alone qualify or finish the season. Once I trained more and I got in better shape, I said to myself that this is an attainable goal. I can do this.”

And if she can’t, that won’t detract from the fact that she tried. Or from what she’s already accomplished.

“I’m at peace with where I am in my life,” she said. “I don’t need to be ski racing, but I definitely love to ski race and have nothing to prove. So I don’t feel like I have a lot of pressure, even though my dad says it’s the most pressure I’ve ever had in my whole life.”

The crew of Artemis II will not land on the moon but will lay the groundwork for the first crewed missions to Mars.

NASA may be headed back to the moon months sooner than originally planned, with the agency announcing that the first crewed flight in its Artemis programme could make the trip around the moon and back as early as February.

The space agency’s Artemis programme is the flagship effort by the United States to return humans to the moon, a multibillion-dollar series of missions that rivals a similar effort by China, which is aiming for a 2030 astronaut moon landing.

In the first Artemis mission, an uncrewed spacecraft travelled around the moon and back in November 2022.

The goal of the Artemis II mission, a 10-day flight around the moon and back, is to “explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars”, according to NASA.

The crew of Artemis II will not land on the moon but will be the first to travel beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, the BBC reported.

The mission was originally planned for April, but it could be moved up to February.

“We together have a front row seat to history,” Lakiesha Hawkins, NASA’s acting deputy associate administrator, said in a news conference on Tuesday. “The launch window could open as early as the fifth of February, but we want to emphasise that safety is our top priority.”

Artemis II is meant to be a test for the agency’s more ambitious mission, Artemis III, currently planned for 2027, and will involve a moon lander variant of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The goal for Artemis III is to land on the moon.

Artemis II involves NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and its Orion capsule. The Orion capsule will ride atop the giant, 98-metre-tall (322 feet) SLS rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first time the spacecraft duo will fly with humans.

NASA’s most famous lunar excursion took place more than 50 years ago, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon in 1969 while acting as the commander of Apollo 11.

Aug. 29 (UPI) — Inflation rose in July, according to the Personal Income and Outlays report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Fed’s preferred measure.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy costs, was at a 2.9% seasonally adjusted annual rate, according to the personal consumption expenditures price index. That showed a rise of 0.1% from June and the highest annual rate since February.

The core PCE index increased 0.3% monthly, which is in line with expectations, CNBC reported.

Personal outlays, which is the sum of PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments, increased $110.9 billion in July. Personal saving was $985.6 billion in July, and the personal saving rate — personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income — was 4.4%.

The increase in current-dollar personal income in July primarily reflected an increase in compensation. Personal income increased $112.3 billion, 0.4% at a monthly rate, in July. Disposable personal income — income less personal current taxes — increased $93.9 billion or 0.4%.

Many policy-makers consider core inflation to be a better indicator of trends because it excludes the gas and groceries figures, which are volatile, CNBC said. Central bankers prefer inflation at 2%. Friday’s report shows the economy isn’t near where the Fed wants it.

“The Fed opened the door to rate cuts, but the size of that opening is going to depend on whether labor-market weakness continues to look like a bigger risk than rising inflation,” said Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, to CNBC. “Today’s in-line PCE Price Index will keep the focus on the jobs market. For now, the odds still favor a September cut.”

SEOUL, South Korea — North Koreans swam, rode water park slides and enjoyed other water activities at a newly opened mammoth beach resort, state media reported Wednesday, as the country largely maintains a ban on the entry of foreign tourists.

The Wonsan-Kalma eastern coastal tourist zone, which North Korea says can accommodate nearly 20,000 people, is at the heart of leader Kim Jong Un’s push to boost tourism as a way to improve his country’s struggling economy. But prospects for the resort, the biggest tourist complex in North Korea, aren’t clear, as the country won’t likely fully reopen its borders and embrace Western tourists anytime soon, observers say.

The official Korean Central News Agency reported the Wonsan-Kalma area began service Tuesday, drawing a large number of North Koreans who enjoyed open water swimming, slides and other attractions at a water park and various water activities in the area.

“The guests’ hearts were filled with overwhelming emotion as they felt the astonishing new heights of our-style tourism culture blossoming under the era of the Workers’ Party,” KCNA said in a typical propaganda-driven dispatch.

Photos released by North Korean state media showed children with tubes and inflatable balls dipping into the sea, while others in colorful swimsuits beamed while sitting beneath red-and-white parasols.

Kim said at the inaugural ceremony last week the site would be recorded as “one of the greatest successes this year” and called its opening “the proud first step” toward realizing the government’s policy of developing tourism.

Since 2022, North Korea has been slowly easing the curbs imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and reopening its borders in phases. But the country hasn’t said whether and when it would fully resume international tourism.

Chinese group tours, which made up more than 90% of visitors before the pandemic, remain stalled while there are questions about ties between the two socialist neighbors. In February this year, North Korea allowed a small group of international tourists to visit its northeastern border city of Rason, only to stop that tour program in less than a month.

Since February 2024, North Korea has been accepting Russian tourists amid expanding military cooperation between the countries. But Russian government records seen by South Korean experts show a little more than 2,000 Russians, only about 880 of them tourists, visited North Korea last year, a number that is too small to revive North Korea’s tourism.

Russia’s Primorsky region, which borders North Korea, said last week that the first group of Russian tourists to the Wonsan-Kalma resort will depart on July 7 for a eight-day trip that includes a visit to Pyongyang.

Kim writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Kim Tong-hyung contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says making cents doesn’t make sense anymore.

The U.S. Mint has made its final order of penny blanks and plans to stop producing the coin when those run out, a Treasury Department official confirmed Thursday. This move comes as the cost of making pennies has increased markedly by upward of 20% in 2024, according to the Treasury.

By stopping the penny’s production, the Treasury expects an immediate annual saving of $56 million in reduced material costs, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the news.

In February, President Trump announced that he had ordered his administration to cease production of the 1-cent coin.

“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote at that time in a post on his Truth Social site. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”

There are about 114 billion pennies currently in circulation in the United States — that’s $1.14 billion — but they are greatly underutilized, the Treasury says. The penny was one of the first coins made by the U.S. Mint after its establishment in 1792.

The nation’s Treasury secretary has the authority to mint and issue coins “in amounts the secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.”

Advocates for ditching the penny cite its high production cost — almost 4 cents per penny now, according to the U.S. Mint — and limited utility. Fans of the penny cite its usefulness in charity drives and relative bargain in production costs compared with the nickel, which costs almost 14 cents to mint.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

Pennies are the most popular coin made by the U.S. Mint, which reported making 3.2 billion of them last year. That’s more than half of all the new coins it made last year.

Congress, which dictates currency specifications such as the size and metal content of coins, could make Trump’s order permanent through law. But past congressional efforts to ditch the penny have failed.

Two bipartisan bills to kill the penny permanently were introduced this year.

Sens. Mike Lee (R-Uta) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced the Make Sense Not Cents Act this month. In April, Reps. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), along with Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.(, introduced the Common Cents Act.

Jay Zagorsky, professor of markets, public polic, and law at Boston University, said that while he supports the move to end penny production, Congress must include language in any proposed legislation to require rounding up in pricing, which will eliminate the demand for pennies.

Zagorsky, who recently published a book called “The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good for You and Society,” said otherwise simply ditching the penny will only increase demand for nickels, which are even more expensive, at 14 cents to produce.

“If we suddenly have to produce a lot of nickels — and we lose more money on producing every nickel — eliminating the penny doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Mark Weller, executive director of the Americans for Common Cents group — which conducts research and provides information to Congress and the executive branch on the value and benefits of the penny — says “there has been an evolution over the past six months that inevitably the production of the penny will be halted.”

His group advocates for the U.S. to find ways to reduce the cost of producing the nickel, especially since it will be more in demand once the penny is totally eliminated from circulation.

“It’s incumbent on Treasury to come up with a cheaper way to make the nickel,” Weller said. “Let’s make sure we’re making our coins as least expensively as possible and maintaining the option to use cash in transactions.”

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has opened a criminal investigation into Motown singer Smokey Robinson after four of his former staffers accused him of sexual assault and wage theft.

Robinson, 85, was sued earlier this month by three former housekeepers and a former personal assistant who allege that the singer, whose legal name is William Robinson, forced them to have sex with him and also failed to pay minimum wage or overtime pay.

The suit, which was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, also accuses the singer’s wife, Frances Robinson, of regularly screaming at the employees, using ethnically pejorative words and failing to do anything to prevent her husband’s sexual abuse despite allegedly being aware of his actions.

The couple’s attorney, Christopher Frost, has denied the allegations. Details of the Sheriff’s Department’s probe were not immediately provided Thursday.

“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Special Victims Bureau is actively investigating criminal allegations involving William Robinson, a.k.a. ‘Smokey Robinson,’” said department spokesperson Nicole Nishida. “The investigation is in the early stages, and we have no further comment.”

Frost said the Sheriff’s Department is required to investigate the allegations because the women filed a police report after filing the lawsuit.

In a statement, Frost called the police report “a desperate attempt to prejudice public opinion and make even more of a media circus than the Plaintiffs were previously able to create” and said his clients welcome the investigation.

“The record will ultimately demonstrate that this is nothing more than a manufactured lawsuit intended to tarnish the good names of Smokey and Frances Robinson, for no other reason than unadulterated avarice,” the statement read.

The lawsuit states that the women previously had reservations about reporting Robinson’s alleged abuse to authorities for several reasons including fear about immigration status, losing their livelihoods, public humiliation and intimidation by Robinson and his influential friends.

Attorneys representing the four woman — who filed the lawsuit as Jane Does — said they were pleased to learn that the Sheriff’s Department had opened an investigation into their clients’ claims of sexual assault.

“Our clients intend to fully cooperate with LASD’s ongoing investigation in the pursuit of seeking justice for themselves and others that may have been similarly assaulted by him [Robinson],” attorneys John Harris and Herbert Hayden said in a statement.

The civil lawsuit accuses the Robinsons of negligence, sexual battery and sexual assault, false imprisonment, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, gender violence, and a hostile work environment, in addition to labor violations related to wages, breaks, meal periods, and holiday and overtime pay, according to the complaint.

The women allege that the “Tracks of My Tears” singer required them to have various types of sex with him — vaginal, oral and digital — over the years at his houses in Chatsworth, Bell Canyon and Las Vegas.

Jane Doe 1 worked for the Robinsons from January 2023 until February 2024. Jane Doe 2 worked from May 2014 to February 2020. Jane Doe 3 worked from February 2012 to April 2024, and Jane Doe 4 worked from October 2006 to April 2024.

Times staff writers Christie D’Zurilla and Richard Winton contributed to this report.