“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda made sandwiches, took selfies and announced a partnership with a nonprofit group for a $2.5 million hurricane recovery fund during a trip Tuesday to Puerto Rico.   Miranda said seven local groups already have received grants from the New York-based Hispanic Federation, which helps Latino agencies. The organization said it will award at least 25 grants ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 for reconstruction projects. A portion of a grant can be used for emergency relief efforts including food, water or shelter, officials said.   Hurricane Maria …

Retired Major League Baseball pitcher Roy Halladay was killed Tuesday when his private plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg, Florida. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said Halladay, a former All-Star, was flying a light sport plane called an ICON A5. There was nobody else on board. The cause of the crash was under investigation. Halladay, 40, pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies over a remarkable 16-year career. He twice won the Cy Young Award for being the top pitcher in his league. Halladay’s …

Twitter says it’s ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters.   Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.   The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People end up spending more time editing tweets or don’t send them out at all. Twitter hopes that the expanded limit will get more people tweeting more, helping its lackluster user growth. Twitter has been testing the …

Singer songwriters Rodney Crowell and Kelsea Ballerini and hit country songwriter Ashley Gorley were honored at the ASCAP Country Music Awards in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday.   Crowell, who announced earlier this year he was cancelling all his 2017 tour dates due to a health issue, was given the Founder’s Award and honored with performances by Keith Urban and Vince Gill. The multiple Grammy Award-winner, who turned 67 this year, announced on Twitter last month that he had been diagnosed with dysautonomia, a disorder of the automatic nervous system.   …

Indonesia on Monday vowed to block Facebook’s WhatsApp Messenger within 48 hours if the service did not ensure that obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images were removed. WhatsApp, which is widely used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, said message encryption prevented it from monitoring the animated graphics files, known as GIFs, that are available on the app through third-party services. WhatsApp said in a statement on Monday that it asked the government instead to work with those providers, which integrate their technology into WhatsApp to allow users …

Snapchat faced a worldwide outage for at least four hours on Monday, prompting a flood of complaints on rival mobile application Twitter a day before posting its third quarterly earnings as a public company. “We’re aware of the issue and working on a fix,” Snapchat said on its support Twitter account, recommending that users stay logged on.  Many users tweeted about being unable to sign on after logging off the app, which is popular among people under 30 for posting pictures that are automatically deleted within 24 hours. Twitter user …

The restive Spanish region of Catalonia faces a potential $500 million financial hit in the fourth quarter as business-related travel dips following the attack in Barcelona and the uncertainty generated by the disputed independence referendum.   In an interview Monday with The Associated Press at the World Travel Market in London, Catalonia’s top tourism official Patrick Torrent said the region will likely see a 10-12 percent fall in tourist numbers during the fourth quarter, which would equate to around 450 million euros. The large bulk of that fall is related …

When Koutu Saimon’s son, Wheener, was born almost four months premature and “as small as a mouse,” friends and relatives in Chad turned to the new mother and, with sidelong glances and in hushed voices, whispered to her to get rid of the baby. “They told me: ‘You need to take him to the river, do an exorcism ritual, leave him there. He’s cursed, it’s a snake child’,” Saimon told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “They would kill a child like that,” she added incredulously, looking at her son. Wheener, now …

Technology can hopefully reverse some of the harm caused to the planet by  industrialisation and help end disease and poverty, but artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be controlled, physicist Stephen Hawking said on Monday. Hawking, a British cosmologist who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease aged 21, said technology could transform every aspect of life but cautioned that artificial intelligence poses new challenges. He said artificial intelligence and robots are already threatening millions of jobs — but this new revolution could be used to help society and for the good …

Sony Pictures on Monday withdrew a movie starring Kevin Spacey from a Los Angeles film festival following sexual misconduct allegations against the actor, but said it was going ahead with a planned U.S. movie theater release in December. “All the Money in the World,” about the 1973 kidnapping of teenager John Paul Getty III, features Spacey as his grandfather, the late U.S. oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty. The film was due to have a red carpet world premiere at the American Film Institute’s (AFI) annual festival in Los Angeles on …

Two weeks ago the glitzy Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh was the site of an international conference promoting Saudi Arabia as an investment destination, with over 3,000 officials and business leaders attending. Now the hotel is temporarily serving as a luxury prison where some of the kingdom’s political and business elite are being held in a widening crackdown on corruption that may change the way the economy works. By detaining dozens of officials and tycoons, a new anti-corruption body headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is seeking to dismantle …

From Aztec pigweed to dragon beans – several ancient, often forgotten foods are making their way to the dinner table in an effort to diversify the diet of a growing global population. In an initiative to cut the world’s dependency on major crops like wheat and rice – Britain’s Prince Charles has launched the Forgotten Foods Network to rediscover long-lost crops, fruit and vegetables. As rising temperatures wreak havoc on farmers worldwide, scientists are seeking new ways to feed a population that is set to boom to an estimated 9.8 …