On April 25, 1968, The Beatles refused to perform for the Queen of England, saying regardless of the cause, they didn’t do benefits.
In 1977, Elvis Presley made what would be the last recordings of his life, at a concert in Saginaw, Michigan. Three songs appeared in the posthumously released album “Moody Blue.”
In 1979, the film “Rock and Roll High School” featuring The Ramones premiered in Los Angeles.
In 1981, the band Wings broke up after guitarist Denny Laine quit the group.
In 1990, tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon died in Philadelphia of kidney failure at the age of 67. He helped define the be-bop movement, performing with such artists as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Also in 1990, George Strait was named entertainer of the year at the 25th annual Academy of Country Music Awards.
In 1995, actor-dancer Ginger Rogers died in Rancho Mirage, California. She was 83.
In 2002, musician Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of TLC was killed in a car crash in Honduras. She was 30.
In 2021, Chloe Zhao became the first woman of color and the second woman ever to win the best director award at the Oscars for her work on “Nomadland.” Anthony Hopkins, at age 83, became the oldest actor to win an Oscar. He won for his work on “The Father.”
Today’s Birthdays: Actor Al Pacino is 84. Bassist Stu Cook of Creedence Clearwater Revisited is 79. Actor Talia Shire is 79. Singer Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA is 79. Actor Jeffrey DeMunn (“The Green Mile”) is 77. Country singer-songwriter Rob Crosby is 70. Actor Hank Azaria (“The Simpsons”) is 60. Singer Andy Bell of Erasure is 60. Bassist Eric Avery (Jane’s Addiction) is 59. Guitarist Rory Feek of Joey and Rory is 59. Former “Early Show” host Jane Clayson is 57. Actor Gina Torres (“I Think I Love My Wife”) is 55. Actor Renee Zellweger is 55. Actor Jason Lee (“My Name Is Earl,” ″Almost Famous”) is 54. Actor Jason Wiles (“Third Watch”) is 54. Actor Emily Bergl (“Southland”) is 49. Actor Marguerite Moreau (“The O.C.,” ″Life As We Know It”) is 47. Singer Jacob Underwood (O-Town) is 44. Actor Allisyn Snyder (“A.P. Bio,” “Sonny With A Chance”) is 28. Actor Jayden Rey (“The Conners”) is 15.
The Litchfield Christian Church has a new pastor. Isaac Gilligan began his ministry at the church at 312 North Marshall Avenue on March 27th.
Pastor Gilligan grew up on a hobby farm in southeastern Kansas with his 13 siblings and attended college in Jopplin, Missouri where he met his wife. He says he was serving in a church in the Jopplin area for about a year and a half before accepting the call as the new senior minister at the Litchfield Christian Church.
Pastor Gilligan says his goal is to help shepherd the congregation and help to meet their emotional, spiritual and physical needs and become part of the community. He says the Christian Church focuses on the basics of the Christian faith with an emphasis on the teachings from the book of Acts and the letters of the Apostles, and his strong points are preaching and teaching.
Pastor Gilligan says the congregation at the Litchfield Christian Church has made him and his wife feel so welcome and helped them make a smooth transition to Litchfield. He says he enjoys cooking, listening to audio books, playing board games and video games, biking and hiking.
The nation’s economy slowed last quarter, growing at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in a sign that the high interest rates may be taking a toll on borrowing and spending.
Thursday’s report from the Commerce Department said the gross domestic product — the economy’s total output of goods and services — decelerated from its brisk 3.4 percent growth rate in the final three months of 2023. Consumers continued to drive growth in the January-March quarter but slowed their spending. Growth was also held back by businesses reducing their inventories.
The state of the U.S. economy has seized Americans’ attention as the election season has intensified. Although inflation has slowed sharply, to 3.5 percent from 9.1 percent in 2022, prices remain well above their pre-pandemic levels.
Republican critics of President Joe Biden have sought to pin responsibility for high prices on Biden and use it as a cudgel to derail his re-election bid. And polls show that despite the healthy job market, a near-record-high stock market and the sharp pullback in inflation, many Americans blame Biden for high prices.
The economy’s gradual slowdown reflects, in large part, the much higher borrowing rates for home and auto loans, credit cards and many business loans that have resulted from the 11 interest rate hikes the Federal Reserve imposed in its drive to tame inflation.
Even so, the United States has continued to outpace the rest of the world’s advanced economies. The International Monetary Fund has projected that the world’s largest economy will grow 2.7 percent for all of 2024, up from 2.5 percent last year and more than double the growth the IMF expects this year for Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Businesses have been pouring money into factories, warehouses and other buildings, encouraged by federal incentives to manufacture computer chips and green technology in the United States. On the other hand, their spending on equipment has been weak. And as imports outpace exports, international trade is also thought to have been a drag on the economy’s first-quarter growth.
Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director, cautioned last week that the “flipside″ of strong U.S. economic growth was that it was ”taking longer than expected” for inflation to reach the Fed’s 2 percent target, although price pressures have sharply slowed from their mid-2022 peak.
Inflation flared up in the spring of 2021 as the economy rebounded with unexpected speed from the COVID-19 recession, causing severe supply shortages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made things significantly worse by inflating prices for the energy and grains the world depends on.
The Fed responded by aggressively raising its benchmark rate between March 2022 and July 2023. Despite widespread predictions of a recession, the economy has proved unexpectedly durable. Hiring so far this year is even stronger than it was in 2023. And unemployment has remained below 4 percent for 26 straight months, the longest such streak since the 1960s.
Inflation, the main source of Americans’ discontent about the economy, has slowed from 9.1 percent in June 2022 to 3.5 percent. But progress has stalled lately.
Though the Fed’s policymakers signaled last month that they expect to cut rates three times this year, they have lately signaled that they’re in no hurry to reduce rates in the face of continued inflationary pressure. Now, a majority of Wall Street traders don’t expect them to start until the Fed’s September meeting, according to the CME FedWatch tool.
A Chicago woman is accusing American Airlines of racial discrimination after one of its flight attendants allegedly confronted her after she used the plane's first-class lavatory.
In a complaint sent to American Airlines and obtained by NPR, Pamela Hill-Veal, who is Black, said that while she and her family were flying first class on Feb. 10, from Chicago to Phoenix, one of the flight attendants stopped her as she returned to her seat — and accused Hill-Veal of slamming the restroom door.
Following the remarks of the flight attendant (whose name and race were not identified in the complaint), Hill-Veal said she did not respond as she proceeded to walk back to her seat.
"The flight attendant stopped me as I was returning to my seat and told me I 'slammed the restroom door and I was not to do it again since passengers were sleeping on the plane,'" Hill-Veal said in an interview with NPR. She said she never slammed the door.
A while later on the flight, Hill-Veal — a retired circuit court judge in Illinois — said in the complaint that she used the same restroom in first class, as the same flight attendant stopped her again.
In a statement to NPR, American Airlines said the company has been in contact with Hill-Veal to learn more about her experience. "We strive to ensure that every customer has a positive travel experience, and we take all claims of discrimination very seriously," the airline said.
Hill-Veal told NPR that she vividly remembers the moment the flight attendant began to reprimand her.
"He began to berate me by pointing his finger at me towards my face and saying, 'I told you not to slam the door … so from now on, you are to use the restroom in the back of the plane' while he pointed in the direction of the restroom in coach," she said.
Hill-Veal says that while she did not witness any passengers in first class complain about the restroom door, more attention was drawn to her after her hostile interaction with the flight attendant.
She said she believes the incident was racially motivated, noting that other passengers, who were white, used the same first-class restroom and were not told to use the one in the back of the plane.
The flight attendant "was pointing his finger at me and said again, 'I told you to stop slamming the door…,' " she said.
Hill-Veal says that about 30 minutes prior to landing, she used the restroom for a third time. Once she was leaving, the same flight attendant followed her to her seat and began to physically touch her and explain that she would be arrested upon the flight landing.
In the complaint, the former judge said the flight attendant told her she would be arrested because he "didn't like the way [she] talked to him," and accused Hill-Veal of hitting him.
"This was a complete fabrication as I told him that I never hit him," she added.
Hill-Veal says that since the incident, she hasn't been able to properly sleep given the trauma she experienced and the incident has left her feeling humiliated.
"I'm still uncomfortable about flying because I don't know what they're going to say that I did … in an attempt to cover up for what they did during this particular time," Hill-Veal said.
American Airlines is no stranger to discrimination accusations. In 2023, the company was targeted after two separate incidents — one involving track star Sha'Carri Richardson and another with musician David Ryan Harris — made headlines.
Richardson was forced off her American flight following an argument with a flight attendant who said the athlete was harassing her and trying to intimidate her, Axios reported.
In a statement similar to the one given to NPR about the allegations made by Hill-Veal, the airline told Axios that it investigates all claims of discrimination, adding, "American Airlines strives to provide a positive and welcoming experience to everyone who travels with us and we take allegations of discrimination very seriously."
In September, Harris, who was traveling with his two biracial children, was stopped and questioned at Los Angeles International Airport after an American Airlines flight attendant suspected he was trafficking the children.
Harris later posted a statement he says was given to him by American: "we and our flight attendant realized that our policies regarding suspected human trafficking were not followed, and through coaching and counseling … our flight attendant realizes that their interaction and observations did NOT meet the criteria that human trafficking was taking place."
Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
1846 – Thornton Affair: Open conflict begins over the disputed border of Texas, triggering the Mexican–American War
1926 – Persian cossack officer Reza Chan crowns himself Shah Palawi
1946 – Christopher Fry’s “Phoenix too Frequent” premieres in London
1961 – Belgium government of Gaston Eyskens falls over the Unitary Law
1961 – Robert Noyce patents integrated circuit
1990 – 25th Academy of Country Music Awards: George Strait, Clint Black, and Kathy Mattea win
1502 – Georg Major, German Protestant theologian, born in Nuremberg, Germany (d. 1574)
1882 – Fred McLeod, Scottish golfer (US Open 1908), born in North Berwick, Scotland (d. 1976)
1901 – Ernst Gernot Klussmann, German composer, born in Hamburg, GermanyGerman Empire (d. 1975)
1906 – Zoltán Gárdonyi, Hungarian composer, born in Budapest, Hungary (d. 1986)
1921 – Jean Mogin, Belgian poet (Pastures of Silence), and playwright, born in Brussels, Belgium (d. 1986)
1981 – Anja Pärson, Swedish alpine skier, born in Umeå, Sweden
1264 – Roger de Quincy, 2nd Earl of Winchester, English crusader, dies at about 69 [birthdate uncertain c. 1195]
1605 – Naresuan, King of Siam (b. 1555)
1926 – Ellen Key, Swedish author and feminist (Courageous Woman), dies at 76
1976 – Margaret Bannerman, actress (Great Defender), dies at 79
2019 – Manuel Lujan Jr., American politician (Rep-R-NM, 1969-89), dies at 90
2023 – Harry Belafonte, Jamaican-American Grammy, Tony, and Emmy Award-winning calypso singer (“Banana Boat Song”), actor (Buck and the Preacher), and human rights activist, dies of congestive heart failure at 96
Located in Litchfield, MN we deliver the latest in local News, Sports, Weather, Obituaries & More! Tune in to AM 1410 or FM 95.9 for morning updates on the go, listen to our afternoon programs to keep you informed all day long, or join us weekends for our prayer service broadcasts.