{"question_id": "20240112_0", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:19", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2023/05/26/asiana-airlines-door-opened-mid-flight-video/70259869007/", "title": "Asiana Airlines video shows emergency door open in flight; 12 hurt", "text": "At least 12 people suffered injuries Friday after officials said a passenger opened an Asiana Airlines commercial plane door during a flight in South Korea.\n\nThe incident took place on an Airbus A321 jet in East Asia as the plane, carrying 194 people was heading to the city of Daegu from the southern island of Jeju, Asiana Airlines and government officials confirmed.\n\nA man sitting in the emergency seat row opened the door when the aircraft was about 700 feet from the ground and nearly two minutes from landing in the city about 150 miles south of Seoul, the South Korean Transport Ministry said, according to the Associated Press.\n\nPassengers on board reported they attempted to stop the man, who was able to partially open the door, officials reported.\n\nVideo shot by what appears to be someone sitting three rows behind the emergency exit aisle, shows the plane in the air, with an emergency exit door open to the person's left.\n\nPassengers sitting in seats next to the open door appear to remain buckled while articles of their clothing blow behind their heads in the footage.\n\nThe plane landed safely.\n\nWhen the plane landed, airport police arrested the man on charges including violating the aviation security law, a ministry statement said.\n\nOfficials have not released the man's identity yet. According to ministry transportation laws, he faces up to 10 years in prison in connection to the incident.\n\nAccording to local emergency officials, crews transported 12 passengers to hospitals for treatment in connection to \"breathing problems and other minor symptoms.\"\n\n'Severe ear pain'\n\nFootage shot on board shows some of the passengers’ hair being blown about by air blasting into the cabin through the open door.\n\nPassengers screamed and cried, Yonhap news agency reported, and some said they suffered \"severe ear pain\" after the door opened.\n\nPhotos shot on the ground show at least one person being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Another shot taken inside the plane displays police arresting the person suspected of opening the plane door.\n\nMore coverage from USA TODAY Network\n\nAirplane passenger hits flight attendantFrontier passenger hit flight attendant with intercom phone, airline says\n\nDo not recline your seat on the planeNo, you shouldn't recline your seat on planes. Here's why.\n\nContributing: Associated Press\n\nNatalie Neysa Alund covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/05/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2024/01/09/alaska-airlines-flight-teen-tshirt-sucked-off/72160819007/", "title": "Teen on Alaska Airlines flight left topless after shirt 'sucked off'", "text": "A 15-year-old boy, who was on board Alaska Airlines' Flight 1282, had his shirt \"sucked off\" when the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet lost a door-sized section of its fuselage six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, one of the flight's passengers' Kelly Bartlett said on Instagram.\n\n\"Friday night I was on the plane from Portland in which a wall panel blew out fifteen minutes into our flight,\" wrote Bartlett. \"We had just passed 10,000 feet when there was a loud boom and the plane filled with wind and noise and the oxygen masks dropped. Three rows behind me was a hole in the side of the plane.\"\n\nBartlett said that there was \"total chaos for a couple of minutes\" as everyone scrambled to secure themselves and those sitting in the row of the missing wall \"found new seats on the other side of the plane\".\n\n\"There was one open seat next to me, and a 15-year-old kid jumped over me, sat down, and grabbed the mask,\" wrote the artist. \"He had no shirt on because it had been sucked off when the panel blew.\"\n\nThe teenager, Jack, had been sitting in the middle seat of that row, while his mother was in the aisle seat, according to Bartlett. The window seat was unoccupied.\n\nWhat travelers should know:Boeing 737 Max 9s grounded after Alaska Airlines jet loses window\n\nHere's how it happened:A Boeing 737 MAX 9 lost a panel midair, terrifying passengers\n\nRedness and scratches\n\nBartlett said that she was unable to talk to Jack because of the noise so she used hand gestures and the notes app on her phone to communicate with him and check if was doing okay. Though Jack said that he was fine, Bartlett said that he had redness and scratches on his skin, which could have been caused by windburn.\n\nAbout 15 minutes later the plane made an emergency landing in Portland.\n\n\"After only the first few minutes of chaos, the plane was under control and we knew we were descending back to PDX,\" wrote Bartlett. \"I never felt like we were going to crash. It was windy and loud in the plane, but everyone was calm, and we landed safely within 15 minutes.\"\n\nBartlett said that Jack was mostly concerned about his mom and the two reunited when the flight landed in Portland.\n\nMeanwhile, paramedics arrived at the scene as soon as the flight landed and went on board to treat those who sustained injuries, mostly minor, according to Bartlett.\n\n\"Then we all got off the plane just like normal, no need for emergency slides…just walked out the jetway as usual,\" said Bartlett, adding that Jack wanted to take a selfie “to commemorate the experience”!\n\nSpeaking to the Associated Press, Bartlett praised the crew and staff for responding \"well to the situation\" and keeping everything under control.\n\n“The flight attendants really responded well to the situation,\" Bartlett told AP. \"They got everyone safe and then they got themselves safe. And then there was nothing to do but wait, right? We were just on our way down and it was just a normal descent. It felt normal.”\n\nNational Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy, in a press conference Sunday night, also praised the flight crew, calling their actions \"really incredible\".\n\n“The actions of the flight crew were really incredible,” the NTSB chair, Jennifer Homendy, said at a Sunday night news conference. She described the scene inside the cabin during those first seconds as “chaos, very loud between the air and everything going on around them and it was very violent”.\n\nIntact iPhone found:Debris surface from Alaska Airlines' forced landing\n\nBartlett was later rebooked on another flight to Corona, California and safely made it there the same night.\n\n\"It was crazy and scary, and I am so thankful it was not a worse situation,\" said Bartlett. \"Everyone was safe and relatively uninjured.\"\n\nAlaska Airlines Flight 1282\n\n177 passengers and crew, including Bartlett, were on board the Alaska Airlines' flight, which was at an altitude of 16,300 feet when the fuselage unit gave way, but fortunately no one was seriously injured. The flight was en route to Ontario, California, roughly 40 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, from Portland.\n\nPassengers on board the flight described a loud, chaotic and violent scene of wind howling through the plane, after the wall panel broke off. The cockpit door was flung open and the wind tore the headset from the copilot. The pilot's headset was pulled halfway off. Crew and passengers donned oxygen masks.\n\nInvestigation ongoing\n\nAviation authorities, including the NTSB are investigating the incident.\n\nA key piece of evidence, the torn-off section known as a “door plug,” was recovered Sunday near Portland by a schoolteacher. Investigators will examine the 63-pound, 48-by-26-inch plug to determine why it separated from the plane.\n\nTwo cellphones, believed to be from the plane, were also found nearby.\n\nSaman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@gannett.com and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter @saman_shafiq7.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/01/08/alaska-flight-lost-door-plug-graphics/72133522007/", "title": "How an Alaska Airlines flight lost a door-size section midair", "text": "Aviation authorities are investigating why an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet lost a door-sized section of its fuselage six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, a failure that critically depressurized the aircraft and forced an emergency landing Friday.\n\nNone of the 177 passengers and crew was seriously injured aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, which was at an altitude of 16,300 feet when the fuselage unit gave way. The plane landed safely in Portland.\n\nThe National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies are investigating.\n\nA key piece of evidence, the torn-off section known as a “door plug,” was recovered Sunday near Portland by a schoolteacher. Investigators will examine the 63-pound, 48-by-26-inch plug to determine why it separated from the plane.\n\nTwo cellphones, believed to be from the plane, were found nearby.\n\nAuthorities also are examining an auto pressurization warning light, which lit up on three previous flights − on Dec. 7, Jan. 3 and Jan. 4 − to see whether it played a part in the incident. Alaska Airlines restricted the jet from flying to Hawaii so it could land quickly if the warning light reappeared.\n\nWhat happened aboard the aircraft?\n\nFlight 1282 left Portland International Airport for Ontario, California, at about 5:07 p.m. local time Friday. Occupants heard a bang about six minutes into the flight when the fuselage section ripped away.\n\nPassengers later described a loud, chaotic and violent scene of wind howling through the plane. The cockpit door was flung open and the wind tore the headset from the copilot. The pilot's headset was pulled halfway off. Crew and passengers donned oxygen masks.\n\nThe FAA grounded more than 170 Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets for inspection after the incident. Alaska Airlines and United Airlines are the main operators of the MAX 9 in the U.S.\n\nWhat is an aircraft door plug?\n\nBoeing uses door plugs to cover unused emergency exits on most of its 737 MAX 9 jets. The door plug is visible from outside the plane but looks like a regular partition and window from the inside.\n\nBoeing constructs its 737s with emergency exits behind the aircraft’s wings. That’s in accordance with federal law, which says planes must be built to allow evacuation of all passengers within 90 seconds even if half of its exits are blocked.\n\nAirlines can choose either door plugs or emergency exits when they configure seating arrangements on the aircraft. Boeing's 737 MAX 9 can be fitted with up to 220 seats.\n\nFederal law requires MAX jets with more than 200 seats to have the extra emergency exits in use. Planes with fewer seats can use door plugs. The option has been an industry standard for years.\n\nFlight 1282 has 189 seats and carried 171 passengers and six crew.\n\nFour bolts hold the door plugs in place. The plugs have hinges at the bottom and can be unbolted and swung open about 15 degrees from the outside.\n\n______\n\nCONTRIBUTING Emily DeLetter, Zach Wichter and Suhail Bhat, USA TODAY\n\nSOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; National Transportation Safety Board; Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/04/17/southwest-flight-makes-emergency-landing-philadelphia/524503002/", "title": "Southwest passenger dies in mid-air crisis after being wedged in ...", "text": "Shrapnel from a blown jet engine crashed through a window of a Southwest Airlines flight and caused such a perilous drop in air pressure that a passenger suffered fatal injuries after nearly being sucked outside.\n\nPassengers recall a harrowing scene where desperate crew members and others tried to plug the broken window, while also trying to save the mortally wounded woman, identified as a bank executive and mother of two.\n\nThe battered jet eventually made an emergency landing in Philadelphia and all other passengers made it off without serious injuries. But not before everyone on board used oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling and many said their prayers and braced for impact.\n\n“I just remember holding my husband’s hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed,” said passenger Amanda Bourman, of New York. “And the thoughts that were going through my head of course were about my daughters, just wanting to see them again and give them a big hug so they wouldn’t grow up without parents.”\n\nDallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 out of New York had 144 passengers and a crew of five onboard, Southwest said in a statement. The plane was met on the tarmac by a phalanx of emergency vehicles that quickly sprayed the area with safety foam and aided the injured.\n\nJennifer Riordan of Albuquerque, N.M., was identified late Tuesday as the victim who died.\n\nRiordan, a vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo bank and graduate of the University of New Mexico, was the first passenger death on a U.S. airline since 2009— and the first ever in Southwest Airlines' history.\n\nNew Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez called Riordan “an incredible woman who put her family and community first” and said her loss would be felt across the state.\n\n“The hearts of all New Mexicans are with the Riordan family,” Martinez, a Republican, said in a statement on Tuesday.\n\nPassengers on board described chaos as the decompression led to Riordan being partially sucked out of the plane. They rushed to try and pull her back inside but her injuries were too grave.\n\nSeven others were injured in the incident. Tracking data from FlightAware.com showed Flight 1380 was heading west over Pennsylvania at about 32,200 feet and traveling 500 mph when it abruptly turned toward Philadelphia.\n\nNational Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters at a late-night briefing that he is \"very concerned\" about metal fatigue in several of Flight 1380's jet engines, particularly in the fan blades. He said a piece of one of the jet engines was found about 70 miles north of the Philadelphia airport.\n\nBourman was asleep on the plane when she heard a sudden noise and the oxygen masks dropped.\n\n“Everybody was crying and upset,” she said. \"You had a few passengers that were very strong, and they kept yelling to people, you know, ‘It’s OK! We’re going to do this!’”\n\nAnother passenger, Marty Martinez, posted a brief Facebook Live video showing him donning his oxygen mask. \"Something is wrong with our plane!,\" he wrote. \"It appears we are going down! Emergency landing!! Southwest flight from NYC to Dallas!!\"\n\nSouthwest said the Boeing 737-700 left New York's LaGuardia Airport shortly after 10:30 a.m. ET, bound for Dallas Love Field. The airport said the plane had landed \"safely\" and that passengers were being brought into the terminal.\n\nThiel said a small fire was found in one engine and fuel was leaking. At least one window and the fuselage were also damaged, officials said. AP also reported that the twin-engine 737 apparently blew an engine at 30,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window.\n\nPassengers commended one of the pilots for her cool-headed handling of the emergency. She walked through the aisle and talked with passengers to make sure they were OK after the plane touched down.\n\n“She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her,” said Alfred Tumlinson, of Corpus Christi, Texas. “I’m going to send her a Christmas card, I’m going to tell you that, with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground. She was awesome.”\n\nGary Kelly, Southwest's chief executive officer, commended the flight crew for safely landing the plane but said the company and the NTSB were in the early stages of investigating exactly what led to the incident.\n\n\"This is a sad day and on behalf of the entire Southwest family, I want to extend my deepest sympathies for the family and loved ones of our deceased customer,\" Kelly said. \"Truly, this is a tragic loss.\"\n\nIn addition to being the first fatality aboard a U.S. passenger airline since 2009, Kelly said it was Southwest’s first fatality ever.\n\n“Let me assure you the safety of our customers and crew is our uncompromising priority,\" he said.\n\nSouthwest flies Boeing 737 aircraft exclusively, with a fleet of about 700 planes.\n\n“It is a very, very reliable engine,” Kelly said. “The airplane in my opinion is proven. It’s very reliable. It has the greatest success of any aircraft type over a long, long period of time. It doesn’t create any doubt in my mind, at least at this point.”\n\nThe plane Tuesday was a 737-700, but the entire fleet has the type of GE engine that failed, Kelly said.\n\n“We are in close contact with the manufacturers,” said Kelly, who said the company is cooperating with investigators from FAA, DOT and NTSB. “At this point, it’s very premature to say what changes we might need to make, if any.”\n\nKelly has tried to contact the victim’s family, but hadn’t reached them by 6:30 p.m. Eastern.\n\n“I reached out to the family and at this point have not made contact,” Kelly said.\n\nThe plane was delivered to Southwest in July 2000 and has made about 40,000 flights. The engine last had a major overhaul about 10,000 flights ago, and the plane’s most recent inspection was Sunday, although Kelly couldn’t say what was inspected.\n\n“There is no information that there were any issues with the airplane or the engines,” Kelly said.\n\nFlights continued to arrive and depart, but the incident led to delays of other flights, the airport said in its statement. The FAA had issued \"ground stop\" for planes on the ground at other airports waiting to depart Philadelphia. The ground stop was lifted shortly before 2 p.m.\n\nContributing: Christal Hayes and Bart Jansen of USA TODAY; Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/04/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2018/04/18/corpus-christi-couple-aboard-southwest-flight-1380-engine-failure-killed-one-injured-7/527885002/", "title": "South Texas couple was on Southwest flight 1380 in emergency ...", "text": "One George West couple had the fright of a lifetime Tuesday.\n\nDiana McBride Self, 56, and Alfred Tumlinson, 55, were two of the 144 passengers aboard the Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 out of New York that made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.\n\nThe couple is originally from the Corpus Christi area. McBride Self attended Mathis High School and Tumlinson attended Ray High School.\n\nMcbride Self told the Caller-Times that she and Tumlinson were attending a week-long Texas Farm Bureau reward trip in New York when they were on their way back home.\n\n\"We were about 30 minutes into our flight when we heard a loud boom,\" she said. \"We looked up and a few rows in front of us we saw a commotion. ... Suddenly, we saw a woman moving quickly towards the plane window.\"\n\nMcBride Self said she didn't understand what was going on at first and thought the woman was trying to open the side door of the plane.\n\n\"Suddenly the oxygen masks dropped and I saw one of the passengers step up to pull the woman back away from the plane window,\" she said. \"A nurse that was on the plane started CPR. This was all happening while the plane descended rapidly.\"\n\nShrapnel from a blown jet engine had crashed through a window of the Southwest Airlines flight and caused a perilous drop in air pressure. A passenger suffered fatal injuries after nearly being sucked outside the plane. Seven others were injured.\n\nMore:Mother of two dies in mid-air crisis after being wedged in Southwest plane window\n\nJennifer Riordan of Albuquerque, N.M., was identified late Tuesday as the victim who died.\n\nMore:'She is the bedrock of our family': Wells Fargo exec died on Southwest flight\n\nMcBride Self said people were panicking and screaming during the flight.\n\n\"My husband Alfred Tumlinson and I were sitting towards the back when the oxygen masks came down,\" she said. \"He checked on me first to see if I was okay, but I was fine and never panicked, and then started trying to calm everyone down and get their masks on.\"\n\nBrady Tumlinson, Alfred Tumlinson's son, told the Caller-Times that he was in shock when his dad texted him out of the blue saying his plane was crashing.\n\n\"I was at work when he texted me 'I love you. Our plane is about to crash,' \" he said. \"I didn't know what he was talking about and I reached out to him asking what he meant. He texted back and said that his plane was crashing and to tell my grandparents.\"\n\nBrady Tumlinson said he prayed immediately hoping his dad and his wife would make it safely. When they landed, Alfred Tumlinson told him they were okay.\n\n\"It's a crazy feeling you know, you never want to experience that for your family. You never think it will happen to you or anyone you care about, but it can happen,\" Brady Tumlinson said.\n\nAlfred Tumlinson told his son that it was a traumatic experience, but that he does not want to live his life in fear.\n\n\"They were nervous to get back on another plane,\" Brady Tumlinson said. \"Right now they are taking it easy and on their way home.\"\n\nAlfred Tumlinson told USA TODAY that he was grateful for the cool-headed pilot, Tammie Jo Schults, who walked through the aisle and talked with passengers to make sure they were okay after the plane touched down.\n\n\"She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her,\" he said. \"The lady, the crew, everything, everybody was immaculate. ... They were so professional in what they did to get us on the ground.\n\n\"I’m going to send (Schults) a Christmas card, I’m going to tell you that, with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground. She was awesome.”\n\nMore:Southwest emergency landing pilot Tammie Jo Shults is a pioneer with 'nerves of steel'\n\nMcBride Self also thanked the Southwest pilot, calling her a true American Hero.\n\nGrace Kelly, Southwest's chief executive officer, said this was the first fatality aboard a U.S. passenger airline since 2009 and the first in Southwest's history.\n\nMore on the Southwest Airlines flight:\n\nSouthwest Airlines engine failure investigation focuses on broken metal fan blade\n\nSouthwest flight diverted after engine damaged\n\nHero cowboy, firefighter together pulled mom who was sucked out of Southwest flight back inside\n\nSouthwest Airlines flight started 'routine' and ended in tragedy: What we know\n\n'There were a lot of heroes,' says passenger on fatal Southwest flight", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/04/18"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/12/31/usa-todays-top-10-travel-stories-2019-stories-you-cared/2782151001/", "title": "USA TODAY's top 10 Travel stories of 2019: The stories you cared ...", "text": "Before we officially put 2019 in the rearview mirror, we're taking one last look back at the travel stories that had readers clicking – and talking – this year.\n\nSurprisingly, the ongoing saga of the Boeing 737 Max groundings and the tourist deaths in the Dominican Republic that were initially linked to tainted alcohol (but were later attributed to natural causes) didn't make the top 10. Nor did the furor over rising resort fees or the trend toward banning Uber and Lyft from picking up passengers at the curb.\n\nRead on to see which stories did.\n\n10. Viking Sky evacuates after issuing mayday off Norwegian coast\n\nOn a Saturday in late March, the oceanliner Viking Sky airlifted more than half of its 900 passengers after experiencing engine troubles and a harrowing encounter with rough waters and high winds off Norway's western coast. The next day, the ship limped into port with the aid of a towboat.\n\nPassenger Carolyn Savikas of Pennsylvania described the terror to Norway's VG newspaper, saying she heard a \"terrible crash\" and the ship rocked, causing water to rush in.\n\n\"We were in the restaurant when a really huge wave came and shattered a door and flooded the entire restaurant,\" she said. \"All I saw were bones, arms, water and tables. It was like the Titanic – just like the pictures you have seen from the Titanic.\"\n\n9. Southwest passenger bombarded by 'inappropriate photos' from stranger on flight\n\nKat Pitman was settling into her aisle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight from Louisville to Chicago on a Friday morning in June, texting her husband, when her iPhone buzzed.\n\nShe looked down to see an AirDrop request. Someone whose name she didn't recognize was sending her a pornographic image. The sender's name? A NSFW take on Bilbo Baggins from \"The Hobbit.''\n\n\"It was just very explicit. It just shocked me,'' the 40-year-old frequent flyer said in an interview with USA TODAY. She said she was \"amazed\" when flight attendants picked up the intercom and told \"Mr. Baggins'' to immediately stop AirDropping.\n\nAnd thanks to Pitman and Mr. Baggins, iPhone users realized they should change their Airdrop settings so that they can't receive files from \"everyone.\" (If you haven't yet, here's how.)\n\n8. The haunted house you have to sign a 40-page waiver to enter\n\nIn October, a haunted house that took blindfolded \"contestants\" to locations in Tennessee and Alabama went viral for its hair-raising requirements for entry. Participants had to clear a background check, pass a doctor's physical and mental exams, and sign a 40-page waiver. If they got through all that – and survived the haunted house itself – they got $20,000.\n\nPlenty of speculation and outrage arose online over how safe the extreme haunted experience really is. Creator Russ McKamey told USA TODAY, \"It's all entertainment. Halloween is nothing more than a big play. (The Manor) is just putting on a big show. That's all it is, just a big production.\"\n\n7. United Airlines flight attendant walks on aircraft's wing in mid-air\n\nSabrina Swenson, a United flight attendant based in Frankfurt, Germany, decided to go big for her 50th birthday last winter: She strapped herself to the wing of a Boeing Stearman plane in Sequim, Washington, and went for a ride over the Olympic Peninsula.\n\n\"My time wing walking in beautiful Sequim will live on in my memory until my last day,\" she wrote in a blog post on United's website. \"You simply don't forget one of the best days of your life!\"\n\n6. Hurricane Dorian: How popular Bahamas destinations fared\n\nHurricane Dorian was expected to focus its wrath on southern Florida – and Alabama if you believed President Trump's Sharpie-edited map – but the storm stalled over the Bahamas over the Labor Day holiday, pounding the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama, killing more than 60 people and leaving 70,000 homeless.\n\nWith sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, the Category-5 Dorian was the strongest and slowest hurricane to hit the Bahamas since records began in 1851. It was a devastating blow for a country where tourism accounts for 60% of the gross domestic product (the most of any Caribbean nation).\n\nMore than three months later, the country is still trying to return to normal. Grand Bahamas International Airport reopened to flights in late November while Marsh Harbour Airport on Great Abaco didn't reopen until Mid-December.\n\n5. Delta ranked best airline in annual list; Frontier worst\n\nNot a week goes by that we don't see some kind of ranking of U.S. and international airlines, sorting them according to factors like on-time performance statistics, family-friendliness or onboard water quality.\n\nIn April, Delta topped the 29th annual Airline Quality Rating, which took into account metrics like mishandled baggage, consumer complaints, on-time performance and involuntary denied boardings over the course of 2018.\n\nThe study, a joint research project of the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Arizona, campus, found that overall, the airline industry improved in every area but on-time performance, the most heavily weighted element. It also found that 2018 saw the lowest rate of bumped passengers, the lowest rate of mishandled baggage and the lowest rate of customer complaints for the industry since the study began in 1991.\n\nFrontier's last-place finish was attributed to its poor on-time record (nearly one out every four flights was delayed), lackluster cabin features and high rate of customer complaints.\n\n4. United Airlines passenger stung by scorpion on flight to Atlanta\n\nUnited might want to beef up their pest patrol efforts after passengers on a June flight from Venice to Newark discovered their plane was infested with ants. A scorpion bit a woman on a December flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, giving us ideas for a sequel to the 2006 Samuel L. Jackson movie \"Snakes on a Plane.\"\n\n3. Shark attack: California student killed by trio of sharks in the Bahamas\n\nHurricane Dorian wasn't the only sad story in the Bahamas in 2019. In June, California resident and Loyola Marymount University student Jordan Lindsey, 21, was attacked by three sharks while snorkeling with her family near Rose Island.\n\nOfficials said her arms, legs and buttocks were bitten and her right arm was severed. She was taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.\n\n“There was no medical attention provided to Jordan,” the Lindsey family said later in a statement. “They had no first aid kit – no basic supplies for any type of injury. It felt like a lifetime as they waited for a boat to arrive.”\n\nThe family called on tour companies to change their safety protocols and tourists to be more aware to “ensure a tragedy like this does not happen again.”\n\n2. Why economy passengers should stop reclining their seats\n\nIf you're a regular reader of travel columnist Christopher Elliott, you know he has some strongly held convictions about how airlines treat passengers – especially those sitting in economy – and how those passengers treat each other.\n\nIn a November column, he argued that with airlines giving passengers as little as 28 inches of legroom, \"Reclining your airline seat is unacceptable because we're officially out of space. It's rude – and it's wrong.\"\n\nPlus, as he noted, \"If you recline your airplane seat, you'll probably end up in someone's lap. Literally.\"\n\n1. Woman gives birth on American Airlines jetway\n\nAn American Airlines flight landed with an extra passenger the day before Thanksgiving when Nereida Araujo gave birth to a healthy baby girl on the jetway of Flight 868, after landing in Charlotte, North Carolina, from Tampa, Florida.\n\n\"Baby Sky decided to enter the world on a plane,\" Araujo wrote on Facebook. \"Mommi (sic) handled it well thanks to everybody who assisted us with love & care.\"\n\nFor those wondering why she was flying at all, Charlotte TV station WSOC reported Araujo was 38 weeks pregnant and cleared to fly by the airline and her doctor.\n\nSky wasn't the only airplane baby of 2019: In February, an expectant mother gave birth to a baby boy thousands of feet in the air on a JetBlue flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The birth of the airline's \"youngest customer to date\" coincidentally happened on a plane named \"Born To Be Blue.\"\n\nDishonorable mention: The guy who claimed he had a plane to himself\n\nFilmmaker Vincent Peone went viral in August when he documented what it was like to have a Delta plane all to himself – a rarity in this age of overbooked flights. But it was too good to be true: It turned out the plane departed without him.\n\nThree days later, he broke his silence, tweeting, \"The story took off fast, but the plane did not.\"\n\nHe wrote, \"My video is 100% true… and then I stopped filming. After the private jet broke down again with mechanical problems, I took a normal one the next morning. The footage I have tells a short, funny and positive story – because those are the kind of stories I like to tell. I make comedy!\"\n\nThe media outlets who reported the story weren't amused when Peone went radio silent for several days after the initial story, refusing to answer questions after the truth got out.\n\nContributing: Dawn Gilbertson, David Oliver, Julia Thompson, Morgan Hines, Hannah Yasharoff", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/12/31"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2021/07/08/twa-flight-800-victims-families-scars-painful-25th-anniversary/4996414001/", "title": "Even after 25 years, the scars of TWA Flight 800 are still painful ...", "text": "The mother opened her box of memories and the pain and darkness poured out again.\n\nShe pulled out a card. Then a letter. Then a photo of the daughter she lost 25 years ago when a majestic and seemingly indestructible commercial jetliner blew up over the Atlantic Ocean only minutes after lifting off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, killing all 230 passengers and crew.\n\nSuch is the complicated, enduring legacy of TWA Flight 800.\n\nTo some it is still a story of a terrorist conspiracy that persists despite well-documented facts showing the plane was actually brought down by a tragic mechanical failure. To others, it is a somber, bureaucratic turning point in how America investigates air crashes.\n\nBut for victims’ relatives like Carol Ziemkiewicz, formerly of Rutherford, who lost her daughter Jill Ann in the TWA 800 fireball, it is still a troubling story of lives cut short – an open wound of the heart that never seems to heal.\n\nOn those days, when she peruses the boxes with photographs and letters and poems about her daughter, Ziemkiewicz is reminded once again of what might have been.\n\n“I lost my heart, my soul,” said Ziemkiewicz. “My family will never be the same.”\n\nFrom ancient times, history has been pockmarked with sudden, unexpected tragedy that rips apart the lives of ordinary people. But our modern world, with television and social media, have brought those intimate moments of tragedy into our living rooms and to the cellular phones we carry in our pockets. What once might have seemed distant and limited to people far away has now become far more personal.\n\nSo it is with TWA Flight 800.\n\nColumn continues below gallery.\n\nAmerica watched on the night of July 17, 1996 as orange flames from the downed airliner streaked the Atlantic’s choppy surface, just a few miles off the coast of Fire Island.\n\nWe followed the video footage of fishermen and recreational boaters who rushed to the scene from docks in the Moriches Inlet in the hope that some passengers and crew might survive.\n\nLater, we monitored the trail of conspiracy theories. Was this an act of terrorism, perhaps the kind of suitcase bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988? Was it an errant missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship? Was it a meteor? After all, so many boaters thought they saw streaks of light in the summer sky.\n\nWe also witnessed genuine goodness too.\n\nListen: WCBS interviews Mike Kelly about the 25th anniversary of TWA Flight 800\n\nAs families of the lost passengers gathered at a hotel, we were introduced to the grace and kindness of a Franciscan priest — the Rev. Mychal Judge — who comforted the grieving. Five years later, Judge would perish in the 9/11 terrorist attack as he ministered to firefighters and police at New York City’s World Trade Center’s twin towers. His grave in Totowa is now a shrine for those who want him proclaimed a Roman Catholic saint.\n\nIt turned out that TWA 800 fell because sparks from a defective wire ignited vapors in a fuel tank, which then exploded. But subsequent investigations by the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board changed America.\n\nNot only was TWA 800 one of the worst air disasters in U.S. history, it also raised questions about how America responds to conspiracies, how our government monitors the maintenance of aging commercial jetliners and how we treat relatives of victims.\n\nOne major change that resulted from the plane’s downing was that airlines now are required by federal law to set up a toll-free hotline for victims’ relatives to obtain information after a crash and to assign groups such as the Red Cross to care for those relatives.\n\nSuch basic policy changes, however, mean little to the families of those who lost mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandchildren and friends. As with many tragedies, the rest of the world eventually moved on. But for those most closely affected, the wounds are still fresh.\n\nFamilies forever changed\n\n“Some people say time heals all wounds. I don’t think that’s true,” said John Seaman of Albany, New York, who lost a niece aboard TWA Flight 800 and went on to lead a coalition of victims’ relatives who campaigned for airline safety. “Time doesn’t heal the wounds. Time just provides anesthesia.”\n\nOn an otherwise recent sunny summer day, Carol Ziemkiewicz sat in the quiet of a kitchen of her spacious and gleaming townhouse in Point Pleasant Beach where she moved after retiring from teaching third grade for several decades at Rutherford’s Pierrepont School.\n\nA picture of her daughter Jill sat on a nearby table — a friendly smile with wide, inviting eyes. Ziemkiewicz opened a photo album, pausing at a snapshot of her and Jill sitting on the lap of a Macy’s Santa Claus when mother and daughter spent a day in Manhattan. Over a door leading to a patio, a plaque said: \"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.\"\n\nZiemkiewicz reached for a stack of letters from Jill’s friends, then another photo album and more pictures. She fell silent, her eyes reading the now-familiar sentiments of a poem, with this haunting stanza: “Like a comet blazing ‘cross the evening sky, gone too soon.”\n\n“Losing Jill was like everything inside me was gone,” Ziemkiewicz said. “I just could not comprehend the shock. Literally, it was the shock.”\n\nJill Ziemkiewicz had just turned 23 in 1996 when she suspended her dream to be a landscape designer and signed up to become a TWA flight attendant after noticing an ad in a newspaper. An accomplished high school swimmer, her close friends called her \"Jilly Fish.\"\n\nAfter finishing her TWA training in the spring of 1996, Jill worked a few domestic flights. But TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996 was to be her coming-out party of sorts – her first international flight.\n\n“The rookie,” then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman said in a eulogy.\n\nA quarter-century later, Whitman said she is still troubled by the loss of life on TWA Flight 800.\n\n“It’s such an overwhelming tragedy,” Whitman said in a recent interview.\n\nWhen Jill Ziemkiewicz stepped into the fuselage of the Boeing 747 at JFK on that July night 25 years ago, she wore the TWA uniform – a blue, knee-length skirt, a white blouse, a blue scarf knotted around her neck like a cowgirl.\n\nTWA Flight 800 did not take off until around 8:30 p.m. Just after 5 p.m., Jill phoned her mother in Rutherford.\n\nCarol Ziemkiewicz still has the Bell Atlantic telephone bill that lists the call. She also remembers her daughter’s last words.\n\n\"Mom I'm psyched. I’m going to the garden,” Jill excitedly told her mother — a reference to the Gardens at Versailles palace just outside of Paris that was once home to French royalty and is now a museum. As a student of landscape architecture at Rutgers University, Jill longed to walk amid lush flowers and shrubs and clipped lawns at Versailles.\n\nShe never made it.\n\n“She wasn’t going to Versailles,” Carol Ziemkiewicz now reasons. “She was going heaven.”\n\nA jetliner explodes\n\nThirteen minutes after TWA flight 800 took off on an otherwise clear night, the plane was rocked by an explosion in a fuel tank near the wings.\n\nThe jetliner cracked and broke into several sections, then fell into the Atlantic. Luggage and wiring and food and seats and fuel and pillows and blankets and peeled-off sections of the fuselage were scattered for miles on the ocean surface and across its sandy floor.\n\nAlso scattered in the surf or deep below were the bodies of the 230 victims. It took months, but the remains of every victim were eventually found, aviation investigators said.\n\nColumn continues below video.\n\n“Sometimes it seems like it’s yesterday. Sometimes it seems like an eternity,” said Jill’s older brother, Matthew Ziemkiewicz, now the Bergen County deputy coordinator for emergency management.\n\nMatthew was already mourning the loss of his father a year earlier to a heart attack. Losing Jill was a shock that never wore off.\n\n“Nothing’s ever the same,” he said. “You move on. You get better. But there’s a big hole in the family.”\n\nFor Jill’s sister, Carin, who was only two years older, the loss was also devastating.\n\n“We grew up together. We did everything together,” Carin said. “We were born to be best friends.”\n\nScars that don't heal\n\nSome 180 miles from Rutherford, in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, Stephanie Bedison bears similar emotional scars as the Ziemkiewicz family.\n\nBedison was a coach and teacher to several of the 16 students from the town’s high school French Club who perished on TWA Flight 800. They were traveling to Paris with five adult chaperones.\n\nFor Montoursville, a 4-square-mile speck of a town in central Pennsylvania with just 4,600 residents, the loss of 21 residents was a shock to the system.\n\n“It was hard to accept,” said Bedison, now retired from her job as a special education teacher and track and cross-country coach at Montoursville Area High School. “It was surreal.”\n\nBedison’s son, then a high school senior, considered joining the French Club on its trip to Paris. But he chose another trip – to Honduras – as part of a science project.\n\nTelevision news trucks swarmed the tiny community after the crash. So did conspiracy theorists and ordinary people who just wanted to offer some measure of comfort.\n\nBedison said many Montoursville residents retreated into their own emotional privacy while also trying to make time to attend the funerals.\n\nEven today as she looks back, Bedison feels pained as she recalls the students who were lost and the town’s collective grief.\n\n“Each one of these kids was unique,” she said. “You’re talking about kids who affected almost every aspect of the school, from drama to academics to athletics. Almost everyone knew one of the students.”\n\nIn memory of the victims, Montoursville erected a statue of an angel with hands extended to a monument with the names of the town's victims.\n\n“Why is there an angel statue in the middle of the town?” Bedison said. “This is our history. This is a history lesson. People should know that.”\n\nRecovery mission\n\nIn Moriches, New York, Matthew Cashman also feels that need to remember the history of TWA Flight 800.\n\nCashman, an electrician, jumped on his father’s fishing boat – “The Rogue” – on the night that TWA Flight 800 blew apart and crashed into the Atlantic. Several friends from the town joined them. Their goal, they figured, was to rescue survivors. Only no one was alive.\n\n“We were staring at this massive debris field that was still on fire,” Cashman recalled.\n\nThen, he spotted a body. Then another. Then, two more.\n\nIn all, Cashman and his father, Thomas, who was well known on Long Island as a shark fisherman, recovered four bodies that night, all of them women.\n\n“They were people. They were gone,” Cashman said, as he recalled how the group carefully lifted each victim from the Atlantic, placing them side by side on the boat’s deck and covering them with blankets. “There was no conversation on the boat.”\n\nCashman drew comfort by helping to build a monument to the TWA 800 victims atop a sand dune overlooking the beach at Long Island’s Smith Point State Park. But he is still troubled by what he saw on the night the jetliner crashed.\n\n“It’s still raw,” he said “Just talking about it now makes me feel like it happened yesterday.”\n\nIn her Point Pleasant Beach home, Carol Ziemkiewicz says she draws comfort from a garden in Lyndhurst that was built in Jill’s memory.\n\nThe garden, which is based on one of Jill’s designs as a budding landscape architect, features wind chimes — a favorite of Jill’s — and a fountain designed to replicate the sunflower, which was one of Jill's favorites. But memorial gardens, while comforting, can’t erase the scars of losing a daughter.\n\n“A lot of people have moved on,” Carol said. “I haven’t.”\n\nMike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.\n\nEmail: kellym@northjersey.com\n\nTwitter: @mikekellycolumn", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/07/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/10/politics/nato-surveillance-flight-russia-belarus/index.html", "title": "Intelligence: Russia has taken to trying to jam NATO plane's radar ...", "text": "ABOARD A NATO SURVEILLANCE PLANE ABOVE THE POLISH-UKRAINIAN BORDER CNN —\n\nRussia has been using Belarus as a springboard for many of its air operations in Ukraine, according to intelligence collected by NATO surveillance planes flying over the Polish-Ukrainian border and radar seen by CNN.\n\nCNN accompanied NATO’s Flying Squadron 2 on one such surveillance mission on Thursday. Within two hours of taking off at 8 a.m. CET, the radar on board the NATO AWACS plane – short for Airborne Warning and Control System – picked up about a dozen Russian-made planes idling in Belarus just north of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, NATO tactical director Denis Guillaume told CNN.\n\nHours later, at least nine Russian-made planes were spotted entering Ukrainian airspace from Belarus, appearing to head toward Kyiv, the radar showed.\n\nThe “vast majority” of the Russian-made fighter jets that NATO forces have seen entering Ukrainian airspace since Russia’s invasion began have originated in Belarus, the NATO mission’s technical director told CNN on board Thursday’s flight. On one particularly “active” day last week, NATO forces saw about 20 Russian jets heading to Kyiv from Belarus, he said. The military aircraft taking off from Belarus and entering Ukrainian airspace have been in support of Russian military operations in Ukraine, the NATO airmen told CNN.\n\nAmong the major questions looming over the war has been whether Belarusian forces have directly entered the conflict to support Russia. But the NATO troops said they could not answer that – Belarus and Russia use the same Soviet-era MiG-29s, they said, so it is difficult to say in real time who is actually operating them. Ukrainian pilots also use the MiG-29s, they noted, so it is similarly unclear how contested Ukraine’s airspace has become.\n\nStill, some signs are obvious, they say. For example, the jets flying into Ukraine from Russian-allied Belarus are clearly not Ukrainian.\n\nThe AWACS plane on which CNN flew Thursday is one of the few military assets owned by NATO itself, rather than donated by a member country, and the fleet of 14 AWACS planes together conduct nearly two dozen missions per week, spying more than 400 kilometers east to ensure that no unfriendly aircraft are headed toward NATO’s airspace.\n\nThe missions are routine but have become particularly “intense” since Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the co-pilots told CNN. NATO has stepped up its defense of the eastern flank members over the last several weeks, and Thursday’s surveillance flight was particularly long, requiring a midair refueling.\n\nAs the AWACS flew its mission on Thursday, a Russian spy plane circled over Belarus doing similar surveillance in the opposite direction, the airmen pointed out. That has become typical, as has spotting Russian fighter jets – mostly MiG-29s – performing defensive exercises nearby.\n\nThe Russians have also taken to trying to jam the NATO plane’s radar, an annoying but inevitable occurrence given how visible the giant spy plane is.\n\n“It’s not a secret we are here, and we don’t want it to be a secret,” said the NATO technical director.\n\nOne question the airmen decidedly refused to answer was whether the intelligence they gather, which is ostensibly for use only by members of the NATO alliance, is being provided to Kyiv.\n\n“I cannot answer that question,” Guillaume said firmly.\n\n“The only thing I can tell you right now is that we, as NATO allies, are sharing the data with NATO countries,” the NATO technical director echoed.\n\nWhat the NATO member countries do with that intelligence, however, is at their discretion, the NATO technical director hinted.\n\nThe caution reflects NATO’s fraught position as the war drags on: As an organization, it continues to underline that it is not an active player in the conflict and that it is providing no direct assistance to Ukraine so as not to risk provoking further Russian aggression that some fear could even include an attack on NATO territory.\n\nBut its member states, including the US and UK, have openly touted their intelligence and military contributions to Ukraine, which have been clearly aimed at blunting the Russian military’s advances.\n\nThe NATO surveillance plane is capable of more than just intelligence-gathering, though, and can call in tactical operations if needed. For Thursday’s mission, for example, the plane was controlling fighter aircraft on the Polish-Belarusian border “in case there is a threat to NATO territory,” Guillaume said.\n\nAny action, though, “would have to be in line with the rules of engagement,” he added. “We are still in a peacetime posture.”", "authors": ["Natasha Bertrand"], "publish_date": "2022/03/10"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/fact-check-trump-announcement-speech-2024/index.html", "title": "Fact check: 20 false and misleading claims Trump made in his ...", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nFormer President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidential campaign just as he ended his presidency in 2021: with a whole lot of inaccuracy.\n\nLike many of Trump’s speeches as president, his announcement speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday was filled with false claims about a variety of topics – from his record in office to his Democratic opponents to the economy, the environment and foreign policy.\n\nHere is a fact check of 20 false or misleading things he said. This is not a comprehensive list.\n\nAfghanistan withdrawal\n\nTrump claimed Tuesday evening that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan upon its military withdrawal in 2021.\n\n“Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world,” Trump said.\n\nFacts First: Trump’s figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion — a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.\n\nThere is not any basis for Trump’s claim that $85 billion worth of equipment was left behind. As other fact-checkers have previously explained, that was a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. Only part of this funding was for equipment.\n\nStrategic Petroleum Reserve\n\nTrump claimed his administration “filled up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but it has now been “virtually drained” by the Biden administration.\n\nFacts First: Both parts of Trump’s claim are false. He didn’t fill up the reserve, and the reserve is not “virtually drained.”\n\nThough Trump has repeatedly boasted of supposedly having filled up the reserve, it actually contained fewer barrels of crude when he left office in early 2021 than when he took office in 2017. That’s not all because of him – the law requires some mandatory sales from the reserve for budget reasons, and Democrats in Congress blocked the funding needed to execute Trump’s 2020 directive to buy tens of millions more barrels and fill the reserve to its maximum capacity – but nonetheless, it didn’t get filled.\n\nAs CNN’s Matt Egan and Phil Mattingly reported in mid-October, the US reserve remains the largest in the world even though it was at a 38-year low after President Joe Biden released a major chunk of it to help keep oil prices down in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and, coincidentally or not, prior to the midterm elections). The reserve had more than 396 million barrels of crude oil as of the week ending November 4.\n\nTariffs on China\n\nTrump also boasted about his tariffs on China, claiming that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.”\n\nFacts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”\n\nAlso, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing the cost of the tariffs.\n\nSea level rise\n\nTrump claimed that unnamed people aren’t talking about the threat of nuclear weapons because they are obsessed with environmental issues, which he said, “they say may affect us in 300 years.” He added, “They say the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can take out entire countries with one shot.”\n\nFacts First: Trump’s claims are false – even if you ignore the absurd contention that people aren’t paying attention to nuclear threats because they’re focused on the environment. Sea levels are expected to rise much faster than Trump said. The US government’s National Ocean Service said on its website that “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10 - 12 inches (0.25 - 0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020 - 2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920 - 2020).”\n\nAnd though Trump didn’t use the words “climate change” in this claim, he strongly suggested that people say climate change may only affect us in 300 years. That is grossly inaccurate; it is affecting the US today. The Department of Defense said in a 2021 report: “Increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.”\n\nDrug use and punishment in China\n\nTrump claimed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that China has no “drug problem” at all because of its harsh treatment of drug traffickers. Trump then repeated the claim himself, saying, “if you get caught dealing drugs in China you have an immediate and quick trial, and by the end of the day, you are executed. That’s a terrible thing, but they have no drug problem.”\n\nFacts First: Trump’s claim is not true, just as it was when he made similar claims as president. Joe Amon, director of global health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, said that “yes, China has a drug problem” and that “China, like the US, has a large number of people who use (a wide range of) drugs.” The Chinese government has itself reported that “there were 1.49 million registered drug users nationwide” as of the end of 2021; in the past, officials in China have acknowledged that the number of registered drug users are a significant undercount of actual drug use there.\n\nAnd while Trump solely credits harsh punishments for what he claims is China’s success in handling drugs, the Chinese government also touts its rehabilitation, education and anti-poverty efforts.\n\nPresidential records\n\nComplaining about how he is under criminal investigation for taking presidential documents to his Florida home and resort, Trump repeated a debunked claim about former President Barack Obama’s handling of presidential documents.\n\n“Obama took a lot of things with him,” Trump said.\n\nFacts First: This is false – as the National Archives and Records Administration pointed out in August when Trump previously made this claim. Though Trump claimed that Obama had taken millions of records to Chicago, NARA explained in a public statement that it had itself taken these records to a NARA-managed facility in the Chicago area – which is near where Obama’s presidential library will be located. It said that, as per federal law, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”\n\nNARA has also debunked Trump’s recent claims about various other presidents having supposedly taken documents to their own home states; in those cases, too, it was NARA that moved the documents, not the former presidents. It is standard for NARA to set up temporary facilities near where former presidents’ permanent libraries will eventually be located.\n\nGas prices\n\nAs he has on other occasions during Biden’s tenure, Trump used misleading figures when discussing the price of gas. He said: “We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline, and now it’s sitting five, six, seven and even eight dollars, and it’s gonna go really bad.”\n\nFacts First: This is so misleading that we’re classifying it as inaccurate. While the price of a gallon of regular gas did briefly fall to $1.87 (and lower) during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for regular gas on Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, was much higher than that – $2.393 per gallon, according to data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. And while there are some remote gas stations where prices are always much higher than the national average, the national average Tuesday is $3.759, per AAA data, not $5, $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the highest prices as usual, has an average of $5.423.\n\nDeportations under Obama\n\nTrump claimed Tuesday evening that his administration, unlike Obama’s administration, had convinced countries like Guatemala and Honduras to take back their gang members that had come to America.\n\n“The worst gangs are MS-13. And under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they were unable to take them out. Because their countries where they came from wouldn’t take them,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.\n\nFacts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back their citizens during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.\n\nIn 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.\n\nFor the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.\n\nMissile landing in Poland\n\nTrump claimed Tuesday that a missile that was “sent in probably by Russia” landed 50 miles into Poland. “People are going absolutely wild and crazy and they’re not happy,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.\n\nFacts First: This claim is false. While Poland said a Russian-made missile did land in their territory Tuesday, killing two Polish citizens, the explosion happened about four miles west from the Ukrainian border.\n\nAdditionally, it remains unclear where the missile was fired from, and why it fell in Poland.\n\nFinishing the border wall\n\nTrump made a false claim about one of his signature policies, a wall at the border with Mexico.\n\n“We built the wall, and now we will add to it. Now, we built the wall – we completed the wall – and then we said let’s do more, and we did a lot more. And we did a lot more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that came up. And when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would’ve been great, and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that,” he said.\n\nFacts First: It’s not even close to true that Trump “completed” the border wall.\n\nAccording to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not completed. The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280, about 74 miles of barriers were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”\n\nDemocratic leaders and the National Guard\n\nTrump claimed that Democratic governors and mayors refused to ask for “help” even during “a total breakdown of law and order,” and “don’t want to ever ask to do anything,” so “we sent in the National Guard in Minneapolis and in other places.”\n\nFacts First: This is a false claim Trump liked to make during his presidency. It’s not true that Trump sent in the National Guard to Minneapolis and that Democratic leaders there refused to ask; it was actually Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard amid unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Walz, who served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades, first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.\n\nWhen Trump made this false claim in 2020, Walz’s office told CNN that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.\n\nBiden’s acuity\n\nMocking Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said, “There are a lot of bad things, like going to Idaho and saying ‘Welcome to the state of Florida, I really love it.’”\n\nFacts First: This never happened. Biden, like Trump, has made occasional gaffes in referring to places, but this one is fiction. At a rally earlier this month, Trump claimed that Biden had gone to Iowa and wrongly claimed to be in Idaho; that false claim was published by a satirical website in 2020.\n\nIllegal immigration\n\nLamenting illegal immigration, Trump said, “I believe it’s 10 million people coming in, not three or four million people. They’re pouring into our country.”\n\nFacts First: False. “There is no empirical basis at all for the idea that 10 million undocumented people have entered under President Biden,” Emily Ryo, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California’s law school, who studies immigration, said in a Monday email when CNN asked her about Trump making this claim earlier in November. Julia Gelatt, an expert at the Migration Policy Institute think tank, concurred: “Based on the data available, it is not possible that 10 million unauthorized immigrants have come across the border to the U.S. under President Biden. In fact, the reality is a fraction of that.”\n\nMark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump (and head of the Border Patrol under Obama), told The Arizona Republic in an early-November article that the “worst case scenario” for the number of illegal border crossings under Biden through October “could be 6.2 million.” Trump’s estimate was not close even to that estimate.\n\nAnd there are a bunch of important nuances here. Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 4.3 million total nationwide border “encounters” under Biden, but that number includes people who presented themselves to the authorities to begin the process of seeking humanitarian protection. And while Trump used the word “people,” Ryo emphasized that the number of “encounters” is not the same as the number of separate individuals who have crossed the border. Because many people encountered at the border are rapidly expelled under the Title 42 policy – including more than half of those encountered in the 2021 fiscal year – lots of the same people quickly come back to the border and try again. In the 2021 fiscal year, the recidivism rate was 27%, according to official data.\n\nInflation in turkey prices\n\nTrump claimed, “Good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Number one, you won’t get it and if you do, you’re gonna pay three to four times more than you paid last year.”\n\nFacts First: This isn’t even close to true. Turkey prices have increased since last Thanksgiving season, but they haven’t come close to tripling or quadrupling. The weighted average advertised supermarket price of a whole frozen hen is 97 cents per pound as of the most recent US Department of Agriculture report – up about 10% from the same time last year. The price of a whole frozen tom was up by about 7%.\n\nAnd though Trump made these comments while criticizing the Biden administration over inflation, it’s worth noting that the turkey market in particular has been significantly impacted by avian flu.\n\nTrump and wars\n\nTrump said that his critics claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign that there would be a war within weeks if Trump was elected – “and yet I’ve gone decades, decades without a war. The first president to do it for that long a period.”\n\nFacts First: This is nonsense. Trump was president for four years, so he could not possibly have gone “decades, decades” without a war. Also, Trump presided over the US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he obviously didn’t start any of these wars and withdrew some troops from all three countries. And he was commander-in-chief for dozens of US airstrikes, including drone strikes, in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.\n\nTrump and ISIS\n\nTrump gave himself credit for the liberation of ISIS’s “caliphate” in Syria, saying “the vicious ISIS caliphate, which no president was able to conquer, was decimated by me and our great warriors in less than three weeks.”\n\nFacts First: This is a major exaggeration. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019, not “less than three weeks” into his presidency in 2017; it’s not entirely clear what Trump meant by “decimated,” but the fight continued long after Trump’s first weeks in office. And Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past. There was major progress against the caliphate under Obama in 2015 and 2016 – and Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting.\n\nIHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing the size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.\n\nTerrorism under Trump\n\nTrump claimed: “We had practically, just about, not that I can think of, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks, during the Trump administration.”\n\nFacts First: Trump did qualify the claim by saying “practically, just about, not that I can think of,” but it’s not true that there were no terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists during his presidency. Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a terror attack in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was an act of Islamic extremism carried out in support of ISIS. In fact, Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. And Trump’s Justice Department alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.\n\nThe military’s use of old bombers\n\nBoasting of how he supposedly rebuilt the military, Trump said, “When I got there, we had jet fighters that were 48 years old. We had bombers that were 60 years old, we had bombers where their grandfathers flew them when they were new. And now the grandchild is flying the bomber – but not anymore.”\n\nFacts First: It’s not true that Trump ended the use of 60-year-old bombers. The military continues to use B-52 bombers that old; they are now being outfitted with new Rolls-Royce engines to prolong their life even further. (And the B-52 isn’t the only decades-old plane still in use.)\n\nTrump’s popularity along the border\n\nAfter boasting of how he is viewed by Latinos, Trump claimed that “along the border in Texas, won every single community – I won – every single community.” He said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told him that he had “won every single area along the border, the longest since Reconstruction.”\n\nFacts First: We don’t know what Abbott told Trump, but it’s not true that Trump won every single area along the border with Mexico. Trump lost border states in both of his previous races – California and New Mexico in both 2016 and 2020, Arizona in 2020 – and also lost numerous border communities in Texas and elsewhere both times, as you can see in these New York Times maps here and here.\n\nTrump did make major gains with some Texas border counties between 2016 and 2020, becoming the first Republican in decades to win some of them, but his claim was about how he supposedly won them all. That’s inaccurate.\n\nInflation\n\nTrump claimed about inflation: “As we speak, inflation is the highest in over 50 years.”\n\nFacts First: This is not true; Trump exaggerated a statistic that would have worked in his favor even if he had recited it accurately. October’s year-over-year inflation rate of 7.7% is the highest since 1982, if you don’t count previous months this year when it was higher. So, ignoring those other Biden-era months, it is the highest in 40 years, not the highest in “over 50 years.”\n\nWe might let this go if Trump did not have a years-long pattern of exaggerating numbers to suit his purposes.", "authors": ["Daniel Dale Paul Leblanc", "Daniel Dale", "Paul Leblanc"], "publish_date": "2022/11/15"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2022/07/07/emirates-flight-hole-in-plane-dubai-australia/10007475002/", "title": "Emirates flight from Dubai to Australia lands with large hole in side", "text": "The arrival Saturday of an Emirates flight in Australia offered a stunning revelation: a large hole was discovered in the side of the plane, which had just completed a 14-hour flight.\n\nThe incident, in which no crew members or passengers were reported injured, happened on a Airbus A380 from Dubai to Brisbane, Australia.\n\nPassengers on the plane told The Courier Mail in Australia a loud bang was heard early on in the flight, but after conversation among crewmembers, the flight continued as usual.\n\nEnglish actress Lisa Kay said she was on the flight, saying on Twitter: \"I recall a noise & the flight attendants looking concerned at each other.\"\n\nAirport delays: Airlines say FAA staffing is behind delays. FAA says it's a pilot shortage. So what's to blame?\n\nSuspended flights: United Airlines is suspending flights in Arizona, Arkansas this fall\n\nShortly before landing in Brisbane, the pilots told air traffic control members they believed they blew a tire and requested emergency service be on stand-by, according to the aviation website Aviation Herald.\n\nEmirates confirmed the incident in a statement to USA TODAY, calling it a \"technical fault.\"\n\n\"One of the aircraft’s 22 tires ruptured during cruise, causing damage to a small portion of the aerodynamic fairing, which is an outer panel or the skin of the aircraft,\" the statement read.\n\nEmirates said the fault had no impact on the fuselage, frame or structural integrity of the aircraft, which allowed it to safely land and allow passengers to exit the plane normally and on schedule.\n\n\"The fairing has been completely replaced, checked and cleared by engineers, Airbus and all relevant authorities. The safety of our passengers and crew has always been our top priority,\" Emirates added.\n\nFollow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.\n\nSummer travel woes: What airlines owe you when flights are canceled, delayed", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/07/07"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_1", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:19", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/10/10/north-korea-kim-jong-un-rumor-absent/17014605/", "title": "No show: North Korea's leader Kim misses Party birthday", "text": "Calum MacLeod\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nBEIJING — The wait continues — and the speculation mounts — after North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un failed to show up Friday for a key political anniversary in Pyongyang.\n\nKim has not been seen in public since Sept. 3, sparking rumors of a serious illness or even a coup in the highly secretive state whose nuclear ambitions rattle the region.\n\nIn Seoul, a South Korean official played down the significance of Kim's absence.\n\n\"It seems that Kim Jong Un's rule is in normal operation,\" Lim Byeong-cheol, spokesman for the south's unification ministry, told a press briefing Friday, according to the Yonhap news agency. He cited the North's dispatch of a top-level party-military delegation to the south last week, during which a senior figure conveyed Kim's greetings to South Korean President Park Geun-hye.\n\nKim's absence comes as North and South Korea traded fire Friday after the North shot at a South Korean propaganda balloon, according the Associated Press.\n\nAlthough prolonged absences by North Korean leaders are not uncommon, this marks the longest such disappearance since Kim became Supreme Leader following the death of his father Kim Jong Il in 2011. The most recent television footage showed Kim, thought to be 30 or 31, limping heavily.\n\nState media, in a rare comment on the ruling dynasty's personal matters, later said Kim was suffering from unspecified \"discomfort.\" Gout seems a contender, given Kim's reported love of rich foods and alcohol, but the Reuters news agency, quoting an unnamed source Friday, said Kim hurt his leg, required 100 days to recover, and remained in full control.\n\nKim was injured when he joined generals he had ordered to perform physical drills, the source said. North Korea's state-run television is usually dominated by propaganda footage of Kim providing \"on-the-spot guidance\" to people at farms, factories, schools and seemingly in every other aspect of North Korean life.\n\nDespite the absence of new material since Sept. 3, Kim remains front and center as the third generation of the ruling family's personality cult, an all-pervasive phenomenon that effectively serves as the state religion.\n\n\"Dear comrade Kim Jong Un is the symbol of dignity and invincibility of the Workers' Party and the banner of all victories and glory,\" said an editorial Friday in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, a mouthpiece of the ruling party, Reuters reported.\n\nIf healthy, Kim would have been the central figure at events marking Party Foundation Day, Oct. 10. This year, the 69th anniversary, carries less significance and symbolism than the 70th in 2015, but Kim did attend commemorative activities on this date for the past two years, including a midnight ritual at the palace housing the embalmed bodies of his father and grandfather, Kim Il Sung, the regime founder and \"Eternal President.\"\n\nIn a sign of global interest in Kim's whereabouts, China's state news agency Xinhua, one of the few foreign media outlets stationed in Pyongyang, dispatched a journalist to stake out the palace late Thursday, but found no police or security guards nearby that would suggest a Kim visit.\n\nXinhua and other Chinese media would not be permitted to report such speculation about their own Communist Party leaders, but have taken a sometimes critical view of Kim's belligerent behavior, despite Beijing being North Korea's only significant ally.\n\nBy late Friday morning local time, North Korean state media had not reported any Kim visit to Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, although it remained possible that reports later Friday could feature Kim's attendance at other anniversary events.\n\nSome analysts cautioned that a coup remained unlikely.\n\n\"Despite his extended absence, available evidence suggests Kim is still alive and still in power,\" Korea analyst John G. Grisafi wrote on the NKNews website Friday. \"The amount of influence and power held by officials certainly varies and Kim, who is young and inexperienced, is not likely to be calling all the shots himself.\"\n\n\"However, North Korea's government is using a dynastic system and having a member of the Kim family — or the \"Paektu bloodline\" — in the top spot is critical to maintaining this system,\" wrote Grisafi. \"Kim may need his advisers and officials, but they need him too.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2014/10/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/07/north-korea-kim-jong-un-china-meetings-president-xi/2510152002/", "title": "North Korea's Kim Jong Un makes birthday visit to China for ...", "text": "Thomas Maresca\n\nSpecial to USA TODAY\n\nSEOUL – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is in China, where he will meet with President Xi Jinping, Chinese and North Korean state media reported on Tuesday.\n\nThe trip, which is Kim’s fourth to China, came at the invitation of President Xi Jinping, according to news agency Xinhua, and will last until Thursday.\n\nKim was accompanied by his wife, Ri Sol Ju, and a delegation of high-ranking North Korean officials and traveled by private train across the border to China, North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun reported.\n\nThe North Korean dictator will be celebrating his 35th birthday on Tuesday.\n\nKim’s visit comes in the wake of an announcement on Sunday by President Donald Trump that Washington and Pyongyang were in negotiations over a location for a second summit, saying that it would be revealed “probably in the not-too-distant future.”\n\nA South Korean newspaper reported on Monday that Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, was being considered as the site for the next Trump-Kim summit. Citing high-level sources in Seoul and Washington, Munhwa Ilbo reported that officials from the U.S. and North Korea have met in Hanoi to discuss scheduling the meeting.\n\nPreviously, Washington has suggested Vietnam, a communist nation with a rapidly developing economy, could serve as a model for North Korea in the future.\n\nOpinion:North Korea diplomatic process is not a failure\n\nMore:Trump teases second summit with Kim Jong Un, touts his diplomacy with North Korea\n\nDuring a visit to Hanoi in July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on North Korea to replicate Vietnam’s economic “miracle.”\n\n“In light of the once-unimaginable prosperity and partnership we have with Vietnam today, I have a message for Chairman Kim Jong Un: President Trump believes your country can replicate this path,” Pompeo said on that visit.\n\nKim’s current trip to China may be further evidence that a meeting with Trump is getting closer to reality. The North Korean leader went to China before and after his summit with Trump last June.\n\nWhile the isolated state has dramatically raised its international profile over the past year, China remains North Korea’s closest ally and most important trading partner, accounting for 90 percent of its exports since 2000, according to a report from the Korea Development Institute.\n\nThe visit by Kim allows China to show the international community that it still plays a major role in North Korean issues, said Lee Seong-hyon, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at The Sejong Institute, a Seoul-based think tank.\n\n“A visit like this is a very good occasion for China to prove to the world that it’s not sidelined,” Lee said.\n\nBeijing may also be using this meeting with Kim as leverage in its ongoing trade war with Washington, which imposed tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese goods, causing China to retaliate with tens of billions of dollars in tariffs of its own. A U.S. delegation is currently in Beijing for two days of talks as the world’s two largest economies are looking to strike a new trade deal.\n\n“China might use this occasion to nudge Kim to be more willing to make concessions in denuclearization steps as a diplomatic favor to Washington,” Lee said. “That will be seen as a goodwill gesture that China is on the same page with the United States on North Korea issues.”\n\nA second Trump-Kim summit would seek to push forward a diplomatic process that has stalled out since their June meeting in Singapore.\n\nWhile that meeting produced a declaration that North Korea would work toward a “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” details and a timeline for carrying out the agreement remain vague.\n\nMore:North Korea warns US to stop 'meddling' in its affairs with South Korea\n\nPyongyang is looking for relief of punishing international sanctions in exchange for steps it has already taken, such as dismantling a nuclear testing site, while Washington is holding out for complete denuclearization.\n\nKim reiterated a call for sanctions relief on a televised New Year’s Day address, saying he was ready to meet again with Trump “anytime” but warning the U.S. not to test North Korea’s patience over the sanctions, threatening that it may have to find a “new way” to defend its interests.\n\nTrump said on Sunday that sanctions would remain “in full force” until North Korea provided “very positive proof” of results.\n\nWhile the birthdays of Kim’s father, previous “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, are celebrated as national holidays, Kim Jong Un’s birthday is not.\n\nThe only example of Kim being honored in public on his birthday was in 2014, when former NBA star Dennis Rodman sang “Happy Birthday” to him before an exhibition basketball game in Pyongyang.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/10/kim-jong-un-south-korea-says-senttrumps-birthday-message/4429244002/", "title": "Kim Jong Un: South Korea says it sentTrump's birthday message", "text": "Tong-Hyung Kim\n\nAssociated Press\n\nSEOUL, South Korea – South Korea said Friday it conveyed a message by President Donald Trump to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wishing him a happy birthday, which is believed to be Jan. 8.\n\nReturning from a visit to Washington on Friday, Chung Eui-yong, South Korea’s presidential national security director, told reporters that Trump requested Seoul to deliver the message to Kim during a meeting at the White House this week.\n\nChung didn’t disclose what the message specifically said, but said Seoul sent it to Pyongyang on Thursday through “proper means.”\n\nKim last week opened the new year expressing deep frustrations over stalled nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration and vowed to bolster his nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against “gangster-like” U.S. sanctions and pressure.\n\nThe North in past months has severed virtually all cooperation with the South, while demanding Seoul to break away from Washington and restart inter-Korean economic projects held back by U.S.-led sanctions. But the Koreas still operate a liaison office in the North Korean border town of Kaesong.\n\nSeoul had lobbied hard for the resumption of nuclear negotiations, with Chung shuttling between Pyongyang and Washington to help set up the first summit between Kim and Trump in June 2018.\n\nBut negotiations have faltered since the collapse of the second Kim-Trump meeting in February last year, when the U.S. side rejected North Korean demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capabilities.\n\nTrump and Kim met again in June and agreed to resume negotiations. But an October working-level meeting in Sweden broke down over what the North Koreans described as the Americans’ “old stance and attitude.”\n\nMore:With nuclear weapons talks stalled, Kim Jong Un threatens 'shocking actual action' against US\n\nMore:'An expiration date on the bromance': Trump's friendly ties with Kim Jong Un faces new test\n\nDespite the standstill in talks, Trump and Kim have both described their personal relationship as good. Trump has boasted about the “beautiful” letters he has received from Kim.\n\nNorth Korea has never officially confirmed Kim’s birth date. While covering a 2014 visit to the country by Dennis Rodman, North Korean state media said the former NBA star organized an exhibition game on Jan. 8 to celebrate Kim’s birthday.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/01/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/01/08/kim-jong-un-birthday/21433005/", "title": "Kim Jong Un celebrates (unknown) birthday", "text": "Calum MacLeod\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nBEIJING — A year ago Thursday when Dennis Rodman sang Happy Birthday to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the Pyongyang crowd at the ex-NBA star's controversial \"basketball diplomacy\" game hesitated to join in, then clapped with him to the end.\n\nTheir confusion was understandable. Besides the language barrier, most North Koreans didn't know it was Kim's birthday. This year, they still don't know the age of the young \"marshal\" — Kim's official rank and title in North Korea.\n\nThe third generation of the Kim dynasty to dominate the isolated northeast Asian state, Kim may have been born in 1982, 1983 or 1984, according to the South Korean government.\n\nSuch is the secrecy surrounding his repressive regime that the birth of Kim's first child — and her name, Ju Ae — was only revealed by Rodman in a 2013 interview.\n\nYet for a secretive leader who never travels abroad and rarely meets foreign visitors, Kim's global profile has leaped ever higher during the past year. The portly Kim, whose striking haircut and swelling waistline recall his grandfather, regime founder Kim Il Sung, disappeared from public view for weeks in the fall. The absence was later blamed on a leg injury.\n\nIn recent weeks Kim has again dominated headlines as a result of the Hollywood comedy The Interview, which the U.S. government says sparked a North Korean cyberattack on the film's makers, Sony Pictures. Threats against movie theaters disrupted its distribution.\n\nNobody knows exactly how old Kim is, but the mystery reflects how his regime operates, said Park Young Ho, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in the South Korean capital of Seoul.\n\nWhen his age is finally publicized, authorities are likely to pick 1982, Park said. Kim Il Sung was born in 1912, and Kim Jong Il, father of Kim Jong Un, was born in 1942. A 40-year gap to the current Kim offers a neater number and stronger symbolic connection with the former leaders, Park said.\n\nUnlike his predecessors' birthdays, Jan. 8 is not yet a national holiday in North Korea. Sweets are distributed as well as some basic necessities — a tradition begun by the earlier Kims — but large celebrations are unlikely, Park said.\n\n\"He wants to show the people he keeps his birthday simple by showing affection to ordinary people and filial piety to his father and grandfather,\" he said.\n\nThe \"Day of the Sun\" for Kim Il Sung's birthday, and the \"Day of the Shining Star\" for Kim Jong Il, are major events in North Korea, said Simon Cockerell, managing director of Koryo Tours, who has experienced both festivals during 140 trips to North Korea since 2002.\n\nFor Kim Jong Il's fete in February expect mass dances featuring thousands of people, \"highly politicized synchronized swimming\", ice skating and children's performances, plus the Kim Jongilia flower show, featuring the begonia named after Kim, Cockerell said.\n\nSuch commemorations reinforce the family personality cult that dominates North Korean life.\n\nWhile Thursday remains a working day in North Korea, the \"marshal\" will be uppermost in many minds as a nationwide campaign continues to praise and study his New Year speech.\n\nKim's rambling address contained \"some promising signs,\" but reflected \"a reactive, tentative and conditional frame of mind, and a hesitant leader,\" analyst Moon Chung-in wrote on the U.S.-based website 38 North, which provides analysis of the reclusive nation.\n\n\"(His) power grip is relatively secure, and he's been very successful in consolidating his power for the past three years\" since Kim Jong Il's death in 2011, Park said.\n\nSince the three-year mourning period ended in December, 2015 marks \"the real beginning\" of Kim Jong Un's era, when he may move to break the deadlock on dialogue with South Korea, Park said.\n\nRegardless of whether Rodman returns, expect plenty more Kim headlines before his next birthday.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/04/25/n-korea-watchers-why-armys-big-day-has-taken-backseat/100874420/", "title": "North Korea watchers on why army's big day has taken a backseat", "text": "Foster Klug and Tim Sullivan\n\nAssociated Press\n\nSEOUL, South Korea - The North Korean capital’s broad, clean avenues were, by the authoritarian nation’s usually over-the-top celebratory standards, fairly subdued ahead of Tuesday’s 85th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army.\n\nFor years, the army celebration rivaled the April 15th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s late founder, Kim Il Sung, in its pageantry. Army Day festivities saw immense displays of weaponry and military might, and thousands of people on the streets of Pyongyang in orchestrated shows of unity.\n\nBut since the rise of Kim Jong Un, the third generation of the Kim family to rule the country, the April 25 army commemoration has taken a backseat to Kim Il Sung’s birthday, which is celebrated with an unparalleled display of North Korean patriotism and power. The practice sessions alone for April 15 choke the avenues and public squares of Pyongyang with tens of thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles.\n\nThe Associated Press queried North Korea specialists from around the world for their views on why the newest Kim appears to have shifted focus from the era of his father, Kim Jong Il.\n\nREAD MORE:\n\nNorth Korea marks anniversary of its military with massive live-fire drill\n\n———\n\nDuyeon Kim, a visiting senior fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum in Seoul:\n\nFocusing on Kim Il Sung glorifies the nation’s founder and also “legitimizes the Kim bloodline succession,” she said. “This, however, does not necessarily mean Kim Jong Un is deemphasizing the importance of the North Korean military — the two days are not comparable. That said, we have witnessed both Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un try to empower or emphasize the Workers’ Party more so that the power base is not centered only around the military.\n\n“Kim Jong Un has also tried to mimic his grandfather in looks and policies. He resurrected his grandfather’s ‘byungjin’ strategic line of parallel economic and military development, but has apparently repackaged the ‘military’ pillar to include nuclear development.”\n\n“So it appears Kim Jong Un realized that the military-first policy of his father is not sustainable and that regime security also entails economic prosperity.”\n\n———\n\nRobert Kelly, a political science professor at Pusan National University, in Busan, South Korea:\n\n“Kim Jong Un’s father nearly destroyed the North Korean economy by allowing the military a major policy and budgetary role,” Kelly said. This drained the budget, worsened a horrific famine during the late 1990s, and increasingly made North Korea economically dependent on China.\n\n“Kim Jong Un’s rollback of military-first — purging KPA brass, eliminating the national defense commission, publicly emphasizing the founder Kim Il Sung instead of Kim Jong Il or the KPA — is likely intended to bolster economic growth in order to give the regime greater sustainability and keep it from becoming a Chinese economic satrapy with the obvious political vulnerability that implies.”\n\n———\n\nHazel Smith, a North Korea scholar and professor at SOAS, University of London:\n\nSmith doubts there is much political significance in a decreased focus on the April 25 celebrations.\n\nNorth Koreans “are terribly pragmatic” and also have a serious labor shortage, she said. Since major celebrations require weeks of practice, draining the worktime of tens of thousands of Pyongyang residents, she believes the government may have simply decided to concentrate its attention on a single day in April.\n\n“They have to decide where to marshal their pageantry resources, so to speak, and perhaps they’re concentrating on April 15 because it’s such an important holiday,” she said. “It could be as simple as that.”\n\n———\n\nSue Mi Terry, a former Korean analyst for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency:\n\nThe intense focus in earlier years on April 25 celebrations came because Kim Jong Il “wanted to buttress his rule after he took over.”\n\n“Now Kim Jong Un has returned to the party-centered governance of his grandfather’s era and has been focused on resurrecting the party’s power over the military,” Terry said.\n\nTo Kim Jong Un, “wrapping himself in the mantle of his still-popular grandfather, the ‘eternal president’ Kim Il Sung, makes sense. Kim Jong Un came to power, after all, at a young age in a communist but still a Confucian society that reveres age. Moreover, he is only the third son of Kim Jong Il, not the first. Thus he is likely insecure about any perceived illegitimacy of his rule.”\n\n———\n\nGo Myong-Hyun, a research fellow at the Asan Institute in Seoul:\n\nKim Jong Un’s move to de-emphasize the KPA anniversary is a “definite break from his father’s era,” Go said.\n\n“Under Kim Jong Il, the most important organ was the military; under Kim Jong Un the most powerful organ of the state is the Organization and Guidance Department of the Korea Workers’ Party.”\n\n“The reason why Kim Jong Un emphasizes the ‘civilian’ aspect of the North Korean state is probably because Kim Jong Un feels he lacks sufficient political legitimacy. He is not the eldest son and he was hidden from the North Korean establishment up until 2008-9. He doesn’t want to be seen as imposed by Kim Jong Il but instead entrusted with leadership by the establishment thanks to his achievements (i.e. nuclear program).\n\n“In sum, the de-emphasis of the military is not because Kim Jong Un is offering an olive branch to the world or wants to reduce the defense burden on the economy, but because Kim Jong Un wants to emphasize his political leadership of the North Korean state and the party.”\n\n———\n\nSullivan reported from New Delhi.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/04/25"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/16/north-korea-nuclear-negotiations/2087117/", "title": "Talks with N. Korea? Difficult and pointless, some say", "text": "Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY\n\nNorth Korea keeps up its hostile threats\n\nPyongyang demanded Tuesday that if South Korea wants %22dialogue and negotiations%2C%22 it must apologize first\n\nU.S. says talks are possible but North Korea must show commitment to ending its nuclear program\n\nSEOUL – North Korea lashed out again Tuesday at South Korea over a protest in Seoul against its leaders as analysts said there appears little reason to hope negotiations will end the crisis over the North's nuclear weapons program.\n\nThe South Korean military remains on alert one day after the start of a celebration in North Korea's capital Pyongyang marking the 101st birthday of its founder following weeks of hostile threats.\n\nNorth Korea demanded Tuesday that if South Korean authorities \"truly want dialogue and negotiations, they should apologize for all anti-(North Korea) hostile acts, big and small, and show the compatriots their will to stop all these acts in practice,\" said KCNA, the North Korean state news agency.\n\nThe statement was in reference to a rally in Seoul where a group burned effigies of the North's three generations of the still ruling Kim family, the latest being 30-year-old Kim Jung Un. KCNA also warned that the North that it could take retaliatory measures at any time.\n\nKorea watchers said they are left wondering how talks involving Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington could make any headway when their goals remain so far apart. Washington wants the North to give up its nuclear program, which is in violation of international agreements.\n\n\"The North continues to be menacing and threatening, trying to instill fear and gain concessions,\" said Daniel Pinkston, a Northeast Asia analyst for the International Crisis Group.\n\nThose concessions include a long list of North Korean demands, from U.S. recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state to U.S. withdrawal from the region and a termination of sanctions -- all of which are \"politically impossible\" for a U.S. president to accept, or the leaders of countries on the United Nations Security Council, Pinkston said.\n\nAt the close of his three-nation Asia trip, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that talks were possible but North Korea must show commitment to ending its nuclear program. Without making any formal moves, South Korean government officials have also raised the possibility of opening dialogue.\n\nA greater obstacle in the way of talks is the possibility of Pyongyang test-firing more ballistic missiles, said Chong Sung Jang, a North Korea expert at the Sejong Institute near Seoul.\n\n\"If North Korea launches a mid-range missile, dialogue between the two Koreas will be more difficult,\" said Chong.\n\nChong expects North Korea to keep up its military threats until the end of this month, when ongoing, joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States are scheduled to finish.\n\nKim Jung Un \"wants the USA to accept North Korea's nuclear status, so dialogue between North Korea and the United States will be very difficult,\" Chong said.\n\n\"Kim Jung Un can negotiate with the USA on other issues, but they will not give up their nuclear program,\" he said.\n\nKCNA warned that \"retaliatory action will start without any notice from now.\" The notice was a familiar tactic: blaming the South Korean government for any citizens who show disrespect to the North, Pinkston said.\n\nKerry has not dismissed the idea of sending an envoy to Pyongyang. If that happened, the envoy would quickly return frustrated, said Pinkston.\n\n\"Why waste money on a plane ticket? It's depressing but that's the reality until there's some shift or change from the North Koreans, but I don't see it,\" he said.\n\nThe timing of Pyongyang's much-anticipated next missile test remains \"anyone's guess,\" said Pinkston. Such tests are \"worrisome,\" even if they just land in the sea, as the North refines its missile technology, but he also cautioned against complacency.\n\n\"The international community may say 'it's just bluster' and forget about the challenges,\" such as maintaining an accurate risk assessment and being ready to tackle problems, he said.\n\nBesides conventional and nuclear weaponry, North Korea also poses serious cyberwarfare threats to the USA, warned Kim Heung Kwang, a computer science expert in Seoul and defector from North Korea, where he served as a cyberwarfare trainer.\n\nA cyberattack on March 20 paralyzed several South Korean banks and media companies. The attack, which Seoul has concluded came from North Korea, \"was a kind of test, a process of upgrading technology, for the more important target, the USA,\" said Kim.\n\n\"The only positive is that this warning gives the USA more time to get prepared,\" he said.\n\nIn Seoul on Tuesday, residents maintained their habitual calm about the threats from the North.\n\n\"I'm not so worried, North Korea wants to threaten us, but I don't think it's real,\" said Hana Jung, 26, a receptionist at the eighth-floor Doota fashion complex in the bustling Dongdaemun district.\n\nA showcase for South Korean fashion and design, widely popular across Asia, Dongdaemun has bustled a little less than usual, she said.\n\n\"The number of visitors, both Korean and foreign, has fallen in the past week, maybe because people are worried,\" said Jung. \"But I think they'll come back. There won't be war.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2013/04/16"}, {"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/955620/ri-sol-ju-everything-we-know-about-kim-jong-uns-wife", "title": "Ri Sol Ju: everything we know about Kim Jong Un's wife | The Week", "text": "A rare appearance was made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s wife today when she attended an art performance in Pyongyang as part of the country’s Lunar New Year celebrations.\n\nWearing traditional attire, Ri Sol Ju was seen chatting and smiling with her husband during the show at the Mansudae Art Theatre. She then took to the stage to shake hands and pose for photos with the art performers, said North Korea’s official news agency KCNA.\n\nKim Kyong Hui, Kim’s aunt and the first woman in North Korea to join the country’s exclusive politburo, was also seen watching the performance. Kim Kyong Hui disappeared from the public eye for four years in 2013 after her nephew ordered the execution of her husband before making a “surprise comeback” in 2019, said Reuters.\n\nSubscribe to The Week Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up\n\nIn and out of the public eye\n\nRi has not been seen publicly since 9 September last year when she visited the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun where the embalmed bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il – her husband’s late grandfather and father – are enshrined.\n\nBefore that, she was last seen attending a concert commemorating the birthday of late leader Kim Jong Il on 16 February the same year. Rodong Sinmun, the government’s official newspaper, released several photos of Kim and Ri laughing and smiling as they watched the performance.\n\nRi had been absent from state media for more than 12 months before the concert, stoking “speculation over her health or a potential pregnancy”, reported the BBC last year. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said she had avoided appearing in public due to concerns over Covid-19 and had been “playing well” with her children.\n\n‘Something of a fashion icon’\n\nRi, who is thought to be in her early 30s, has not always been out of the public eye. Unlike the wives of previous North Korean leaders, she used to regularly join her husband at “high-level diplomatic engagements” and helped establish a more “family-friendly image” for the dictator, said the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).\n\nThese engagements included a state visit to China in March 2018 and the April 2018 inter-Korean summit. She also helped host the state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife in 2019, reported Deutsche Welle.\n\nThe Pyongyang daughter of a professor and obstetrician often wears Western clothes and high heels, and has been described as “something of a fashion icon to North Korea’s women” by ABC News.\n\nNot much is known about Ri, despite the WSJ describing her as a “trailblazing” first lady. She is believed to have married Kim in 2009 with the marriage arranged by his father after he suffered a stroke the year before.\n\nShe wasn’t seen publicly until 2012 when she was spotted at a gala concert “dressed in a trim black suit in the Chanel tradition”, said The New York Times (NYT). Her sudden announcement was perceived to be an indication by Kim that he was breaking away from his father’s more private, dour leadership style.\n\nReporting on the public introduction of Ri in 2012, the NYT said that she appeared not to be “the old flame that some media reports say Mr Kim was forced to abandon on his father’s orders”.\n\nBelieved to have three children\n\nReports suggest that before her marriage, Ri was a singer in North Korea’s elite Unhasu Orchestra and a student at Kim Il Sung University, where she pursued a PhD in science.\n\nKim and Ri are believed to have three children, the eldest being a son.\n\nOne of their children is a daughter called Ju-ae, the name revealed by former US basketball star Dennis Rodman after he made a trip to North Korea in 2013. “I held their baby Ju-ae and spoke with Ms Ri as well,” he told The Guardian that year.", "authors": ["Kate Samuelson", "The Week Uk", "Marc Shoffman", "Harold Maass", "The Week Us", "Harriet Marsden", "Social Links Navigation"], "publish_date": "2022/02/02"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/28/unification-minister-kim-jong-un-avoiding-coronavirus-exposure/3038288001/", "title": "South Korean official says Kim Jong Un may be avoiding public due ...", "text": "North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could be trying to avoid exposure to the coronavirus, a top South Korean official said Tuesday as Kim's absence from public events, including a celebration honoring his grandfather, has fueled speculation that he may be in ill health.\n\nThough Kim has disappeared from the public eye for lengthy stretches in the past, many wondered if something was seriously wrong after he missed the April 15 holiday on the birthdate of Kim Il Sung, the country's founder. Known as \"The Day of the Sun,\" the celebration is normally one of the country's grandest, featuring military parades, fireworks and huge public dances.\n\nBut South Korean Unification Minister Kim Yeon-chul pointed out that several traditional holiday events had been canceled in response to the pandemic and that Kim's absence was not \"particularly unusual\" in that context.\n\n\"It is true that he had never missed the anniversary for Kim Il Sung’s birthday since he took power, but many anniversary events including celebrations and a banquet had been canceled because of coronavirus concerns,\" he told the South Korean parliament's foreign affairs committee, according to a translation from Reuters.\n\nKim Jong Un 'alive and well':South Korean official disputes reports North Korean leader is ill\n\nKim Yeon-chul said the North Korean leader's decision to skip a visit last week to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, the masoleum for Kim Il Sung, fits with Pyongyang's general scaling down of commemorative events this year in response to the pandemic, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported.\n\nThe unification minister dismissed reports that Kim underwent a heart procedure as \"fake news\" and described rumors about the communist leader's health as an \"infodemic,\" according to YNA.\n\nLast week, CNN said U.S. intelligence officials were monitoring the situation after the Seoul-based Daily NK reported that Kim had heart surgery. But Kim Yeon-chul said that did not \"make sense logically\" because the Hyangsan Medical Center, where Daily NK claimed the operation took place, is just a clinic and \"incapable of performing surgery or medical procedures.\"\n\nThe unification minister, who oversees relations with North Korea, said Kim has gone out of view for at least 20 days on two other occasions this year already. He repeated an assessment he shared on Monday, which said there was \"enough intelligence to confidently say that there are no unusual developments\" in North Korea and that a thorough analysis did not show any evidence Kim was seriously ill.\n\nOther South Korean officials have also stressed that there are no signs of the activity that would be expected if Kim, who wields authority over the government, were in danger.\n\nAt the same hearing, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said, \"Despite a series of recent media reports, no unusual signs have been detected inside North Korea,\" Yonhap News Agency reported.\n\n\"Kim Jong Un is alive and well,\" Chung-in Moon, foreign policy adviser to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, told Fox News on Sunday. \"He has been staying in the Wonsan area since April 13. No suspicious movements have so far been detected.\"\n\nIran, North Korea, Russia:America's adversaries emboldened to flex their muscles amid coronavirus\n\nThe North Korean regime has claimed there are no COVID-19 cases within the country but experts highly doubt the claim that it has managed to entirely avoid the outbreak, which began in neighboring China. South Korea's foreign minister said she believes the country is focusing much of its attention and resources on the outbreak.\n\n\"While it maintains it has no coronavirus patients, it has put weight on beefing up its health and medical capabilities,\" Kang said, according to YNA. She cited reports that North Korea had expanded its health care budget and opened a new hospital in Pyongyang.\n\nPresident Donald Trump told reporters at a White House briefing on Monday he has \"a very good idea\" about Kim's health and whereabouts but he \"can’t talk about it now.\"\n\n\"I just wish him well,” Trump said. \"I hope he's fine.\"\n\nContributing: Deirdre Shesgreen, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/04/28"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/01/08/north-korea-mystery-surrounds-kim-jong-un-birthday/21441645/", "title": "In North Korea, mystery surrounds Kim Jong Un birthday", "text": "Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY\n\nBEIJING – A year ago today when Dennis Rodman sang Happy Birthday to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the Pyongyang crowd at the ex-NBA star's controversial basketball diplomacy game hesitated to join in, then clapped with him to the end.\n\nTheir confusion was understandable. Besides the language barrier, most North Koreans didn't know it was Kim's birthday. This year, they still don't know the age of the young marshal — Kim's official rank and title in North Korea.\n\nThe third generation of the Kim dynasty to dominate the isolated northeast Asian state, Kim may have been born in 1982, 1983 or 1984, according to the South Korean government.\n\nSuch is the secrecy surrounding his repressive regime that the birth of Kim's first child — and her name, Ju Ae — was only revealed by Rodman in a 2013 interview.\n\nYet for a secretive leader who never travels abroad and rarely meets foreign visitors, Kim's global profile has leaped ever higher during the past year. Kim, whose haircut and waistline recall his grandfather, regime founder Kim Il Sung, disappeared from public view for weeks in the fall. The absence was later blamed on a leg injury.\n\nIn recent weeks, Kim has again dominated headlines as a result of the Hollywood comedy \"The Interview,\" which the U.S. government says sparked a North Korean cyberattack on the film's makers, Sony Pictures. Threats against movie theaters disrupted its distribution.\n\nNobody knows exactly how old Kim is, but the mystery reflects how his regime operates, said Park Young Ho, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in the South Korean capital of Seoul.\n\nWhen his age is finally publicized, authorities are likely to pick 1982, Park said. Kim Il Sung was born in 1912, and Kim Jong Il, father of Kim Jong Un, was born in 1942. A 40-year gap to the current Kim offers a neater number and stronger symbolic connection with the former leaders, Park said.\n\nUnlike his predecessors' birthdays, Jan. 8 is not yet a national holiday in North Korea. Sweets are distributed as well as some basic necessities — a tradition begun by the earlier Kims — but large celebrations are unlikely, Park said.\n\n\"He wants to show the people he keeps his birthday simple by showing affection to ordinary people and filial piety to his father and grandfather,\" he said.\n\nThe \"Day of the Sun\" for Kim Il Sung's birthday, and the \"Day of the Shining Star\" for Kim Jong Il, are major events in North Korea, said Simon Cockerell, managing director of Koryo Tours, who has experienced both festivals during 140 trips to North Korea since 2002.\n\nFor Kim Jong Il's fete in February, expect mass dances featuring thousands of people, \"highly politicized synchronized swimming,\" ice skating and children's performances, plus the Kim Jongilia flower show, featuring the begonia named after Kim, Cockerell said.\n\nSuch commemorations reinforce the family personality cult that dominates North Korean life.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/12/south-korea-tradition-tacks-another-year-babies-age-jan-1/3445419002/", "title": "South Korea tradition tacks another year on to babies' age on Jan. 1", "text": "Kim Chandler\n\nAssociated Press\n\nDAEJEON, South Korea – Just two hours after Lee Dong Kil’s daughter was born on New Year’s Eve, the clock struck midnight, 2019 was ushered in, and the infant became 2-years-old. She wasn’t alone, though it happened for her quicker than most: Every baby born in South Korea last year became 2 on Jan. 1.\n\nAccording to one of the world’s most unusual age-calculating systems, South Korean babies become 1 on the day of their birth and then get an additional year tacked on when the calendar hits Jan. 1. A lawmaker is working now to overturn the centuries-old tradition amid complaints that it’s an anachronistic, time-wasting custom that drags down an otherwise ultramodern country.\n\nFor parents whose babies are born in December, it can be especially painful. One hour after his daughter’s birth in the central city of Daejeon at 10 p.m. on Dec. 31 of last year, Lee posted the news on social media. His friends immediately showered him with congratulatory messages.\n\n“An hour later, when the New Year began, they phoned me again to say congratulations for my baby becoming 2-years-old,” said Lee, who is 32 internationally but 34 in South Korea. “I thought, ‘Ah, right. She’s now 2 years old, though it’s been only two hours since she was born. What the heck!’”\n\nSouth Korea:President Moon seeks deal, maybe a new summit, for Trump and Kim Jong Un\n\nTrump-North Korea:President predicts 'tremendous things' with NK, but over time\n\nThe origins of this age reckoning system aren’t clear. Being 1 upon birth may be linked to the time babies spend in their mothers’ wombs or to an ancient Asian numerical system that didn’t have the concept of zero.\n\nBecoming a year older on Jan. 1? That’s even harder to explain.\n\nIt could be that ancient Koreans cared a lot about the year in which they were born in the Chinese 60-year cycle, but, without regular calendars, didn’t care much about the specific day they were born; so they mostly ignored the day of their birth and instead marked another year of age on the day of the Lunar New Year, according to senior curator Jung Yonhak at the National Folk Museum of Korea.\n\nThis may have then shifted to the solar New Year on Jan. 1 as the South began embracing the Western calendar. North Korea uses the Western age calculating system, but they have a twist: they follow their own calendar that’s based on the birth of national founder and president-for-life Kim Il Sung.\n\nThe year of your birth is still incredibly important in South Korea, and lumps those linked children together for life.\n\nOther Asian countries, including Japan and Vietnam, abandoned the Chinese-style age system amid an influx of Western culture. Officially, South Korea has used Western-style calculations since the early 1960s. But its citizens still embrace the old-fashioned system in their daily lives because the government has done little to get people to change over to the Western style.\n\nMost South Koreans are simply accustomed to living with two ages.\n\n2019 babies:Celebrities who have welcomed new babies this year\n\nDo 'the right thing':People who can't get vaccinated during a measles outbreak rely on the healthy\n\nPeople don’t hold massive joint birthday parties on New Year’s Day; they just celebrate their birthday on the days they were born. Young people consider themselves another year old on solar New Year’s Day (Jan. 1) while older people often use the Lunar New Year’s Day. Many family restaurants don’t charge babies if they are 36-months-old or younger, so parents often calculate their babies’ ages under the Western method when they’re dining out.\n\nSome South Koreans still worry that the practice makes their nation look odd on the international stage. Some feel confusion when meeting with foreigners. Associated Press journalists in Seoul must ask Koreans what year and month they were born to calculate their Western age for news stories.\n\nThere are also some who say the concept of “Korean age” encourages a fixation on age-based social standing in this seniority-based country. In South Korea, those born in the same year often treat each other as equals, while people must use honorific titles to address those born earlier, rather than directly using their names.\n\nAhn Chang-gun, from the southeastern city of Gimhae, said he felt “empty” when his first child became 2 on Jan. 1, 2013, about two weeks after his wife delivered him after eight years of marriage. “He was this precious baby that we finally had, but I felt that all of a sudden two years had just gone by and yet I hadn’t done anything for my baby,” said Ahn.\n\nParents whose babies are born in December often worry about their kids falling behind other children born earlier in the same year, though worries gradually disappear as their children age.\n\nWhen Seo Hyo Sun from Buchon, just west of Seoul, was taken to the hospital to get a cesarean section on Dec. 29, she couldn’t stop weeping because her baby’s due date was supposed to be Jan. 7.\n\n“Tears kept flowing. … My doctor told me the baby wanted to come out today so let’s just celebrate,” said Seo, 31 in international age. “When I awoke from my anesthesia, I felt really grateful … because my baby was born healthy. That was enough.”\n\nIn January, lawmaker Hwang Ju-hong tabled a bill aimed at requiring the government to put international ages in official documents and encouraging general citizens to go with their international ages in everyday life. It’s the first legislative attempt to abolish “Korean age.”\n\nBaby dietary guidelines:First-ever dietary guidelines coming for babies, given 'life sentence' if obese by age 5\n\nMeasles:Is my child safe from the measles? Everything parents should know\n\n“It is aimed at resolving confusion and inefficiency caused by the mixed use of age-counting systems,” Hwang said in the proposed legislation.\n\nHwang’s office said a parliamentary committee discussion and a public hearing on the issue are expected in coming months.\n\nSurveys in recent years showed more South Koreans supported international age though it wasn’t clear how seriously they wanted a change.\n\n“If we use international age, things could get more complicated because it’s a society that cares so much about which year you were born,” said Lim KyoungJae, 46, head of the Seoul-based Miko Travel agency. “We should also definitely count the time of a baby being conceived and growing in its mother’s womb.”\n\nLim’s employee Choi Min Kyung, who is 26 internationally and 28 in South Korea, disagreed.\n\n“It’s good to be two years younger … (especially) when you meet men” on blind dates, Choi said with a laugh. “There is a big difference between 26 and 28.”\n\nAssociated Press journalist Chang Yong Jun contributed to this report.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/04/12"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_2", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:19", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/07/golden-globes-2024-live-updates/72098295007/", "title": "Golden Globes 2024: 'Poor Things,' 'Oppenheimer' win top awards", "text": "Well, at least one half of Barbenheimer had a big Golden Globes night.\n\nThe race to March's Academy Awards kicked into a new gear Sunday with the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards, and Christopher Nolan's atomic bomb biopic \"Oppenheimer\" nabbing five honors including best drama, director, lead drama actor (Cillian Murphy) and supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.). But Greta Gerwig's cultural phenomenon \"Barbie,\" the other half of everyone's favorite summer double feature, was upended by \"Poor Things,\" which took home best comedy and lead comedy actress for Emma Stone, though the pink-spattered flick did win for best song as well as cinematic and box-office achievement.\n\n\"The Holdovers\" was the other big Globes victor, getting lead comedy actor for Paul Giamatti and supporting actress for Da'Vine Joy Randolph. And in the TV categories, \"Beef\" won best limited series, \"The Bear\" garnered top comedy and \"Succession\" nabbed best drama.\n\nHere are all the Globes winners and highlights:\n\nLily Gladstone named best actress, 'Oppenheimer' grabs best drama\n\n\"I love everyone in this room right now,\" Gladstone says, after speaking in her Blackfeet language when she won her first Globe for best actress in a drama for \"Killers of the Flower Moon.\" \"This is a historic win − it doesn't just belong to me. ... This is for every Native kid out there with a dream.\"\n\nBut \"Oppenheimer\" beats out \"Flower Moon\" and others for best drama. \"They weren't kidding, this is a really intimidating room,\" says producer Emma Thomas. She shouts out her husband, director Christopher Nolan: \"What he does is unlike anyone else. Chris brings out the best in people just by being the best himself.\"\n\nPaul Giamatti takes lead actor honors, 'Poor Things' is best comedy\n\nKristen Wiig and Will Ferrell dance funny before introducing the winner for best actor in a comedy or musical. Giamatti gets the trophy for \"The Holdovers,\" his third Globe victory. \"Too many stairs. My knees are shot, I'm telling you. I'm never going to be in 'John Wick 5' at this rate,\" Giamatti jokes when reaching the stage. \"This has to be the first time this award has been given to a character who smells like fish. Thank you, Golden Globes.\"\n\nIt’s “Poor Things,” though, that surprises as best comedy, beating “Barbie,” “Holdovers” and a stacked category. “Whoa,” star Emma Stone says. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is quick to point out Bruce Springsteen, who shares a birthday with the filmmaker. “He’s been my hero since I grew up.”\n\n'Succession' wins top TV drama, best actress for Sarah Snook\n\nSnook nabs her second Globe for best actress in a drama. \"I was kind of hoping I wouldn't have to get up,\" she quips. \"This show has changed my life.\" Then \"Succession\" grabs the big prize: best drama. (It's the HBO show's third win in the category.) \"We decided it was the right time to end the show and it was bittersweet,\" creator Jesse Armstrong says. \"But things like this make it sweeter.\"\n\n'Beef,' 'The Bear' pick up major TV honors\n\nNetflix's \"Beef\" wins for best limited series, adding a third Globe to its total. Creator Lee Sung Jin reveals that a real road-rage incident led to the show. \"I'd be remiss not to thank that driver,\" he deadpans. \"I hope you honk and yell and inspire others for years to come.\" \"The Bear\" (inspired by an eatery called Mr. Beef, incidentally) also picks up its third win of the night, for best TV comedy. Actor Lionel Boyce shouts out actual restaurant workers: \"We plays these characters for a couple of hours of a day but this is your reality.\"\n\nTaylor Swift revels in 'Barbie' Globe win, Margot Robbie gives thanks\n\n\"Star Wars\" icon Mark Hamill takes the stage as the perfect choice to introduce the first Golden Globe ever for cinematic and box-office achievement. Taylor Swift is the first to stand and clap happily when \"Barbie\" is named the winner. Margot Robbie hugs Hamill and gives thanks \"to every single person on the planet who dressed up and went to the greatest place on Earth: movie theaters.\" (Fun fact: Robbie is dressed up as Superstar Barbie from 1977.)\n\n'Oppenheimer' nabs original score, Billie Eilish wins for 'Barbie' song\n\nIt's getting ridiculous out here now, with the atomic bomb biopic cleaning up with a fourth Globe. \"Oppenheimer\" composer Ludwig Göransson shouts out fellow Globe winners, director Christopher Nolan (\"The way you use music in your films has inspired a lot of people\") and star Cillian Murphy (\"I enjoyed watching your face over and over again\").\n\nOriginal song, though, goes to \"What Was I Made For,\" Billie Eilish's popular \"Barbie\" track with brother Finneas O'Connell. \"I was not expecting this in this moment,\" Eilish says, saying \"the movie saved me a little bit\" when she first saw it a year ago.\n\nEmma Stone, Cillian Murphy take lead acting honors\n\nFellow nominee Jennifer Lawrence jumps out of her seat for Stone's win for best actress in a comedy for \"Poor Things.\" \"This is amazing,\" Stone says. \"Playing Bella was unbelievable − I see it as a rom-com. Bella falls in love with life itself. (The movie) made me look at life differently and she has stayed with me.\"\n\nNext up is best actor in a drama, which Murphy conquers as the title role of \"Oppenheimer.\" \"My first question: Do I have lipstick all over my nose? I'm just going to leave it,\" Murphy quips when he hits the stage. He thanks director Christopher Nolan \"for carrying me and holding me through this movie.\"\n\n'The Boy and the Heron' wins for animated feature, Christopher Nolan takes best director\n\nFirst big shock of the night: Hayao Miyazaki's latest takes down \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" for best animated movie. But it's no surprise Nolan takes the directing prize for \"Oppenheimer.\" He remembers his only time being on the Globes stage accepting an award for the late Heath Ledger. And now, \"I can only accept this on the behalf of people,\" Nolan says, shouting out cast members Robert Downey Jr., Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh and others.\n\nTaylor Swift is causing a Golden Globes traffic jam\n\nYour latest Swift update from the ballroom: The pop superstar's aisle seat is blocking traffic, as famous fans ask for selfies or take not-so-subtle photos. She jumps up to give Bill Hader a hug, and they chat before Hader goes for the selfie. \"Sure!\" she says, giving him a final hug before he walks on.\n\nKieran Culkin upends 'Sucession' co-stars for Globe victory\n\n\"Oh, a nightmare,\" Culkin deadpans after winning best actor in a TV drama – and beating castmates Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong. He remembers being nominated 20 years ago and resigned himself to never winning. \"Suck it, Pedro. Mine,\" he quips, playfully referring to fellow nominee Pedro Pascal.\n\n'Anatomy of a Fall' and 'The Bear' pick up second wins\n\n\"Anatomy of a Fall\" strikes again! Justine Triet returns to pick up the trophy for non-English language film. \"This movie is about the truth,\" she says, shouting out teenage star Milo Machado Graner, lead actress Sandra Hüller and canine Snoop \"for just being a dog.\"\n\nAmerica Ferrera and Kevin Costner shout out favorite scenes of theirs – Costner's a big fan of her \"Barbie\" monologue – and present \"The Bear\" star Ayo Edebiri the Globe for best actress in a TV comedy. \"I'm so very grateful for this,\" she says, out of breath, and thanks her show \"family,\" her actual one and \"the people who answer my crazy, crazy emails.\"\n\nRicky Gervais is first winner of the TV stand-up comedy Golden Globe\n\nIt's time for a new award: best performance for stand-up comedy in television. \"And thanks to Netflix, we get overpaid for it,\" quips presenter (and comedian) Jim Gaffigan. Gervais, a former Globes host, wins but isn't here so Gaffigan accepts for him: \"Gimme it.\"\n\n'Anatomy of a Fall' is named best screenplay, Jeremy Allen White earns a Globe for 'The Bear'\n\nNext up is best screenplay. \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" stars and presenters Daniel Kaluuya, Hailee Steinfeld and Shameik Moore have a hilarious time reading a script as it would be done by studio executives. \"Anatomy of a Fall\" takes the honor. \"No one is going to see this movie,\" French director and co-writer Justine Triet says but thanks those around her for \"encouraging me to do what I love.\"\n\nThen \"The Bear\" roars! White wins best actor in a comedy for the acclaimed FX restaurant show. \"I can't believe I'm in the room with people I've loved for so long. It's unreal,\" he says. Backstage, White fields three questions that all reference his new Calvin Klein underwear ad. Asked which was the prouder moment, his underwear ad or winning a Globe, he takes a dumbfounded pause before saying: \"This is definitely a prouder moment for me.\"\n\nElizabeth Debicki gets a royal win for 'The Crown,' Matthew Macfadyen takes one for 'Succession'\n\nPlaying Princess Diana, Debicki wins supporting actress in a TV show for \"The Crown\" and is pretty gobsmacked by the whole thing. \"This is just astonishing to me,\" she says in her speech. Presenters Ray Romano and Keri Russell banter before the next award – he mistakes her show \"The Diplomat\" for \"The Laundromat\" – which goes to Matthew Macfadyen, supporting TV actor honoree for \"Succession.\" \"I just adored every second playing the weird and wonderful human grease stain that is Tom Wambsgans,\" he says.\n\nTaylor Swift and Selena Gomez share a moment\n\nHere's something you didn't see on the TV telecast: “Succession” star Kieran Culkin and his wife, Jazz Charton, swan to their seats, cocktails in hand, not noticing that they passed Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner waiting to get their seats. Taylor Swift, carrying rose champagne, had a moment with bestie Selena Gomez, as the two hugged and chatted near the “Only Murders in the Building” table as photographers rushed over to capture the moment. All eyes are on Swift, who has an aisle seat at the “Poor Things” table with Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone. She finishes her champagne, giggling as she looks at a friend’s iPhone.\n\nEarlier, a security phalanx cleared stars to \"move aside, move aside\" as Swift arrived with a big entourage. As the lights went down, she got the Hollywood push to her seat. \"Special circumstances,\" security guards said, shrugging.\n\n'Beef' co-stars Ali Wong, Steven Yeun garner first Globe wins\n\nBrie Larson helps direct fellow nominee Wong to stage to pick up her honor for best actress in a limited series for Netflix's \"Beef\": She thanks ex-husband Justin Hakuta \"for all your love and support\" that helps her be \"a working mother.\" Her co-star Yeun then takes a victory lap winning his Globe as well. He jokes that getting an award is like the plot to \"Frozen,\" going from \"isolation\" to applause from his peers.\n\nAsked in the press room where she’ll keep her trophy, Wong says she doesn’t know yet, but notes the heavy object needs to be out of reach of her two children: \"It's like a medieval weapon!\" she exclaims, holding up the prize.\n\nYeun was getting asked if he drives differently since \"Beef\": “I’m a respectful but skillful and at times aggressive driver,\" he says smiling, pausing as if choosing his words carefully, trophy in hand. \"I live in LA. So I drive the same.”\n\nDa'Vine Joy Randolph, Robert Downey Jr. take supporting actor Golden Globes\n\nAngela Bassett and Jared Leto come out to present the first award. \"I've been in presenter mode for weeks now,\" Leto says, poking up at his acting method. And the Globe for supporting actress goes to Randolph for \"The Holdovers,\" as expected. She thanks director Alexander Payne for letting her \"playing this beautiful and flawed woman\" and also her character, Mary: \"You've made me feel seen.\"\n\nNext up is supporting actor, which goes to another favorite: Downey for \"Oppenheimer.\" \"Yeah, yeah, I took a beta blocker so this will be a breeze,\" he says. Downey says he's glad Universal \"went all in\" for Nolan and crew to \"render a goddamn masterpiece.\" He calls it a \"most improved\" award and thanks his wife Susan, who's \"made an art out of extracting me from my comfort zone.\"\n\nJo Koy tells a Taylor Swift joke and proclaims, 'I've got the best seat in the house'\n\n\"Look, I'm just taking this all in. We all dreamt of this moment,\" the comedian says as he begins his hosting duties. \"I've got the best seat in the house.\" He loved \"Oppenheimer\" but jokingly complains that \"it needed another hour,\" and also takes note of the celebrities: \"Kevin Costner's never here. He's in a mountain with a cow but today he's here.\" He also watched \"Barbie\" and loved it. \"I don't want you to think I'm a creep\" but Koy says he was attracted to a doll: Ryan Gosling. \"It's your eyes, Ryan.\"\n\nKoy's awestruck by Robert De Niro's \"latest performance\" and quips, \"How did you get (your girlfriend) pregnant at 80?\" The comedian takes some shots at \"Killers of the Flower Moon\" – \"White people stole everything!\" – and also \"Saltburn.\" \"I learned that even satanic families have feelings, too.\" He calls out \"The Color Purple\" and quips that purple is also the color \"your butt turns when you take Ozempic.\"\n\nThe host also jabs at Swift: \"The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift.\"\n\n'Oppenheimer' crew has entered the building\n\nEmily Blunt, holding hands with husband John Krasinski, moseys into the ballroom with \"Oppenheimer\" co-star Cillian Murphy. \"Barbie\" nominee Ryan Gosling is in the house and Oldman's animated chatting with him and Murphy. The announcer breaks up the festivities, ordering folks to sit down as showtime draws near. Meryl Streep takes her seat at the \"Only Murders in the Building\" table just under deadline and kisses Short full on the lips before holding hands and talking, while \"Oppenheimer\" castmates Robert Downey and Florence Pugh are two more late arrivals just before lights go down amid a cheery, happy atmosphere.\n\nThe last person to arrive? Taylor Swift, of course.\n\nBrie Larson, Martin Short schmooze with celebs at the Golden Globes\n\nLarson hustled down the red carpet but we overheard that she had a starry moment with Jennifer Lopez: “I’m sorry, I just met J.Lo and I’m really having a hard time,\" Larson says. And in the ballroom, Short is working overtime networking with everyone he can find: The \"Only Murders in the Building\" star has chatted up and/or hugged Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner and Jennifer Aniston. Ford also shared a moment with old pals Steven Spielberg and his wife – and Ford's \"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom\" love interest – Kate Capshaw.\n\nBruce Springsteen joins the starry 'Air' table at the Globes\n\n\"The Boss\" and his wife Patti Scialfa chat up Damon and Barroso near the Globe stage. (If Springsteen has a hungry heart, we hear the sushi is to die for.) Meanwhile Bateman is catching up with \"Ozark\" co-star Julia Garner and runs into fellow beard lover Gary Oldman, currently growing out his facial hair for a new season of the Apple TV+ spy show \"Old Horses.\" “I love 'Immortal Beloved,' that soundtrack is all I listen to,\" Bateman gushes to Oldman. \" 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,' I could go on.\"\n\nThe official Golden Globes weather report: a bit brisk\n\nUSA TODAY's KiMi Robinson is on the Globes red carpet and she reports that it's a \"brisk\" 53 degrees in Beverly Hills. As \"Succession\" star Alan Ruck stepped foot on the red carpet and walked past reporters using a cane, Amanda Seyfried − one of the few stars who took Moet up on their free champagne bottle − stopped him for a hug and a nice arm rub as everyone struggles to stay warm on the carpet.\n\nMatt Damon and the sushi are lighting up the Globes ballroom\n\nOur man Bryan Alexander is roaming the International Ballroom at the Beverly Hilton − ground zero for all the Globes news – and he reports that Matt Damon and his wife Luciana Barroso entered and immediately ran into Damon's \"Air\" co-star Jason Bateman. “What’s up, Jason, I love that beard. Let me take a look at that in the light. Looking good,” Damon said.\n\nThe Globes menu for attendees includes salmon tartare with caviar, yellowtail jalapeno, sashimi salad with Matsuhisa dressing, and tai nigiri Matsuhisa style. Everybody's raving about the sushi, because this is not typical awards fare.\n\n'The Holdovers' is a Globes underdog with a couple of acting favorites\n\nAlexander Payne's acclaimed 1970s-set holiday film isn't expected to win best comedy at tonight's Globes ceremony – blockbuster hit \"Barbie\" is the one to beat in that category – but two \"Holdovers\" castmates are faves in their respected categories: Paul Giamatti in lead comedy actor and Da'Vine Joy Randolph for supporting actress. See more of our predictions here.\n\nIt might finally be Robert Downey Jr.'s golden year\n\nDowney is a Hollywood superstar, a Gen X movie icon, a box-office superhero ... but somehow not an Oscar winner. Yet. That might change this year: The two-time nominee (lastly in 2009 for \"Tropic Thunder\") is a favorite in the Golden Globe supporting actor race for his role as the antagonistic Lewis Strauss in \"Oppenheimer.\" For five of the past six years, the Globe supporting actor winner has run the table all the way to an Academy Award, which bodes well for Downey or one of his competitors: Ryan Gosling (\"Barbie\"), Charles Melton (\"May December\"), Robert De Niro (\"Killers of the Flower Moon\") and \"Poor Things\" duo Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo.\n\nTaylor Swift's concert movie goes for Golden Globes glory\n\nMaybe it's because boyfriend Travis Kelce isn't playing today, but Swift skipped the Chiefs/Chargers game. Or maybe she just wanted extra time to get gussied up for the Globes red carpet? The pop superstar is speculated to appear at the awards show, where her \"Eras Tour\" concert film is in the running for best cinematic and box-office achievement against the likes of \"Barbie,\" \"Oppenheimer\" and other theatrical hit movies. (Swift has been nominated four times in past Globes shows, all in the original song category.)\n\nWhen are the Oscars?\n\nEven after the Globe trophies are handed out tonight, it's just the beginning for both winners and losers on the road to Oscar night. On Wednesday, nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards will be announced to keep the ball rolling. Here are the important upcoming events and dates for the awards watchers:\n\nJan. 14: Critics Choice Awards\n\nCritics Choice Awards Jan. 15: Primetime Emmy Awards\n\nPrimetime Emmy Awards Jan 18: British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations announced\n\nBritish Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations announced Jan. 23: Academy Awards nominations\n\nAcademy Awards nominations Feb. 4: Grammy Awards\n\nGrammy Awards Feb. 18: BAFTA Film Awards\n\nBAFTA Film Awards Feb. 24: SAG Awards\n\nSAG Awards March 10: 96th Academy Awards\n\nHow you can watch the Golden Globes red carpet\n\nRather than a televised red-carpet special, \"Entertainment Tonight\" and Variety are co-hosting a digital pre-show (6:30 p.m. ET/3:30 PT) that will stream on their sites and social platforms as well as on GoldenGlobes.com. For fashionistas who need to prep for the first major event of 2024, check out our Globes galleries of the best gowns ever as well as the wildest looks through the years.\n\nWho are the presenters at this year's Golden Globes?\n\n\"The Color Purple\" was shockingly left out of the Globes comedy/musical category, but producer Oprah Winfrey will be on hand as one of many celebrities handing out statues. The A-list group includes recent Oscar and Globe winners Daniel Kaluuya and Michelle Yeoh alongside Angela Bassett, America Ferrera, Florence Pugh, Will Ferrell, Issa Rae, Kevin Costner, Kristen Wiig, Mark Hamill, Amanda Seyfried, George Lopez, Hailee Steinfeld, Shameik Moore and many more. Plus, a bonus for anyone who's been binging \"Suits\" since the pandemic: a reunion of stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams.\n\nMeet Jo Koy, the comedian hosting the 2024 Golden Globes\n\nThose who haven't watched any of his Netflix specials may not recognize the 52-year-old stand-up comedian but Koy told USA TODAY in a recent interview that the Globes hosting gig is \"my childhood dream. I'm now living something that I would watch as a kid, something that indirectly inspired me to do what I do, seeing everyone from Bob Hope to Billy Crystal to Whoopi Goldberg do the Oscars, and Ricky (Gervais) and Tina (Fey) doing the Globes. Now, I’m in the captain's seat and I’m loving it.\"\n\nKoy, who's part Filipino on his mother's side and grew up in Seattle, also brings a fresh face to an awards show that weathered a diversity scandal and now finds itself at a pivotal point. \"I am just planning to be me, and I'm in the mood to celebrate,\" he said.\n\nWhere is the Golden Globes held?\n\nSince 1961, the Globes have been held in the International Ballroom of LA's Beverly Hilton Hotel, which also plays home to the Oscar nominees luncheon as well as other red-carpet events. It's also the same hotel where Sen. John Edwards was caught having an affair with a presidential campaign staffer and where Whitney Houston was found dead in 2012.\n\nYes, you can livestream this year's Golden Globes (but there's a catch)\n\nThe Golden Globes are available for the cord-cutting crew live on Sunday with a Paramount+ subscription that includes Showtime. Those with the cheaper Paramount+ Essential plan will have to wait until Monday to stream the show. (If you want to spring for six extra bucks a month, you get live Globes plus no ads and Showtime series like \"Billions,\" \"The Curse\" and \"Yellowjackets.\" Heck, catch up on \"The Tudors\" while you're at it!)\n\nWhere to watch the 2024 Golden Globes\n\nThe show will air live on CBS (8 p.m. ET/5 PT) as well as on the CBS app and Paramount+. Show producers will likely be hoping for no overtimes in the late afternoon football games, though depending on where you live, you can check out Taylor Swift's favorite team, the Kansas City Chiefs, who are in LA to take on the Chargers. Globes organizers – as well as movie-loving Swifties – also might be hoping that Swift swings by the Globes, where her concert film is up for a trophy, if she also attends the game.\n\nContributing: Bryan Alexander; Charles Trepany; Kim Willis; KiMi Robinson; Marco Della Cava; Bryan West", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/07/golden-globes-2024-winners-list-live/72142536007/", "title": "Golden Globes 2024 winners: 'Oppenheimer,' 'Succession,' Emma ...", "text": "\"Oppenheimer,\" \"Succession\" and \"The Bear\" took several of the biggest categories at the Golden Globes Sunday night.\n\nThe 2024 awards show honored several first-time winners as well, including the history-making Lily Gladstone, who became the first Indigenous person to win the award for best actress in a drama for \"Killers of the Flower Moon.\"\n\nThough \"Barbie\" entered the evening with nominations in nine categories, the summer hit took home just two wins at the Globes, including the new cinematic and box-office achievement category. The atomic bomb biopic side of \"Barbenheimer\" proved more successful, with five wins, including for best drama and best director Christopher Nolan.\n\nComedian Jo Koy hosted the festivities, which took place at The Beverly Hilton in California.\n\nWho else took home honors at the Globes? Here are the winners (in bold) and nominees:\n\nBiggest moments from the Golden Globes:From Jennifer Lawrence to Cillian Murphy, more\n\nGolden Globes 12 best dressed:Jaw-dropping red carpet looks from Margot Robbie, Dua Lipa, more\n\nGolden Globes 2024 winners in all categories:\n\nMOVIES:\n\nDrama\n\n“Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Killers of the Flower Moon”\n\n“Maestro”\n\nWINNER: “Oppenheimer”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nActress in a drama\n\nAnnette Bening, \"Nyad\"\n\nWINNER: Lily Gladstone, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nSandra Hüller, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nGreta Lee, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCarey Mulligan, \"Maestro\"\n\nCailee Spaeny, \"Priscilla\"\n\nGolden Globes 2024:'Poor Things' surprises as best comedy, 'Oppenheimer' takes best drama\n\nActor in a drama\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nLeonardo DiCaprio, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nColman Domingo, \"Rustin\"\n\nBarry Keoghan, \"Saltburn\"\n\nWINNER: Cillian Murphy, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nAndrew Scott, \"All of Us Strangers\"\n\nActress in a comedy or musical\n\nFantasia Barrino, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJennifer Lawrence, \"No Hard Feelings\"\n\nNatalie Portman, \"May December\"\n\nAlma Pöysti, \"Fallen Leaves\"\n\nMargot Robbie, \"Barbie\"\n\nWINNER: Emma Stone, \"Poor Things\"\n\nSupporting actress\n\nEmily Blunt, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nDanielle Brooks, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJodie Foster, \"Nyad\"\n\nJulianne Moore, \"May December\"\n\nRosamund Pike, \"Saltburn\"\n\nWINNER: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nSupporting actor\n\nWillem Dafoe, \"Poor Things\"\n\nRobert De Niro, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nWINNER: Robert Downey Jr., \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nRyan Gosling, \"Barbie\"\n\nCharles Melton, \"May December\"\n\nMark Ruffalo, \"Poor Things\"\n\nComedy or musical\n\n“Air”\n\n“American Fiction”\n\n“Barbie”\n\n“The Holdovers”\n\n“May December”\n\nWINNER: \"Poor Things”\n\nActor in a comedy or musical\n\nNicolas Cage, \"Dream Scenario\"\n\nTimothée Chalamet, \"Wonka\"\n\nMatt Damon, \"Air\"\n\nWINNER: Paul Giamatti, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nJoaquin Phoenix, \"Beau Is Afraid\"\n\nJeffrey Wright, \"American Fiction\"\n\nDirector\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nGreta Gerwig, \"Barbie\"\n\nYorgos Lanthimos, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWINNER: Christopher Nolan, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nMartin Scorsese, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nCeline Song, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCinematic and box-office achievement\n\nWINNER: \"Barbie\"\n\n“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3″\n\n“John Wick: Chapter 4”\n\n“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One″\n\n“Oppenheimer”\n\n“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”\n\n“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”\n\n“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”\n\nMore:Taylor Swift makes the whole place shimmer in sparkly green on the Globes red carpet\n\nAnimated film\n\nWINNER: “The Boy and the Heron”\n\n“Elemental”\n\n“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”\n\n“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”\n\n“Suzume”\n\n“Wish\"\n\nOriginal song\n\n\"Addicted to Romance\" from \"She Came to Me\" (music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen)\n\n\"Dance the Night\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Dua Lipa and Caroline Ailin)\n\n\"I'm Just Ken\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt)\n\n\"Peaches\" from \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" (music and lyrics by Jack Black, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond and John Spiker)\n\n\"Road to Freedom\" from \"Rustin\" (music and lyrics by Lenny Kravitz)\n\nWINNER: \"What Was I Made For?\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell)\n\nOriginal score\n\nJerskin Fendrix, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWINNER: Ludwig Göransson, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nJoe Hisaishi, \"The Boy and the Heron\"\n\nMica Levi, \"The Zone of Interest\"\n\nDaniel Pemberton, \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\"\n\nRobbie Robertson, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nScreenplay\n\nGreta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, \"Barbie\"\n\nTony McNamara, \"Poor Things\"\n\nChristopher Nolan, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nEric Roth and Martin Scorsese, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nCeline Song, \"Past Lives\"\n\nWINNER: Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nNon-English language film\n\nWINNER: “Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Fallen Leaves”\n\n“Io Capitano”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“Society of the Snow”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nTELEVISION:\n\nDrama\n\n\"1923\"\n\n\"The Crown\"\n\n\"The Diplomat\"\n\n\"The Last of Us\"\n\n\"The Morning Show\"\n\nWINNER: \"Succession\"\n\nActress in a drama\n\nHelen Mirren, \"1923\"\n\nBella Ramsey, \"The Last of Us\"\n\nKeri Russell, \"The Diplomat\"\n\nWINNER: Sarah Snook, \"Succession\"\n\nImelda Staunton, \"The Crown\"\n\nEmma Stone, \"The Curse\"\n\nMore:Golden Globes proves to be a mini 'Succession' reunion as stars take home trophies\n\nComedy or musical\n\n\"Abbott Elementary\"\n\n\"Barry\"\n\nWINNER: \"The Bear\"\n\n\"Jury Duty\"\n\n\"Only Murders in the Building\"\n\n\"Ted Lasso\"\n\nActor in a drama\n\nBrian Cox, “Succession”\n\nWINNER: Kieran Culkin, “Succession”\n\nGary Oldman, “Slow Horses”\n\nPedro Pascal, “The Last of Us”\n\nJeremy Strong, “Succession”\n\nDominic West, “The Crown”\n\nActress in a comedy\n\nRachel Brosnahan, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”\n\nQuinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”\n\nWINNER: Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”\n\nElle Fanning, “The Great”\n\nSelena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nNatasha Lyonne, “Poker Face”\n\nWatch the moment:'The Bear' star Ayo Edebiri gives flustered, heartwarming speech\n\nActor in a comedy\n\nBill Hader, “Barry”\n\nSteve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nJason Segel, “Shrinking”\n\nMartin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nJason Sudeikis, “Ted Lasso”\n\nWINNER: Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”\n\nSupporting actor in a drama, comedy or musical\n\nBilly Crudup, \"The Morning Show\"\n\nWINNER: Matthew Macfadyen, \"Succession\"\n\nJames Marsden, \"Jury Duty\"\n\nEbon Moss-Bachrach, \"The Bear\"\n\nAlan Ruck, \"Succession\"\n\nAlexander Skarsgård, \"Succession\"\n\nActress in a limited series\n\nRiley Keough, \"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\nBrie Larson, \"Lessons in Chemistry\"\n\nElizabeth Olsen, \"Love & Death\"\n\nJuno Temple, \"Fargo\"\n\nRachel Weisz, \"Dead Ringers\"\n\nWINNER: Ali Wong, \"Beef\"\n\nActor in a limited series\n\nMatt Bomer, \"Fellow Travelers\"\n\nSam Claflin, \"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\nJon Hamm, \"Fargo\"\n\nWoody Harrelson, \"White House Plumbers\"\n\nDavid Oyelowo, \"Lawmen: Bass Reeves\"\n\nWINNER: Steven Yeun, \"Beef\"\n\nSupporting actress in a drama, comedy or musical\n\nWINNER: Elizabeth Debicki, \"The Crown\"\n\nAbby Elliott, \"The Bear\"\n\nChristina Ricci, \"Yellowjackets\"\n\nJ. Smith-Cameron, \"Succession\"\n\nMeryl Streep, \"Only Murders in the Building\"\n\nHannah Waddingham, \"Ted Lasso\"\n\nLimited/anthology series or TV movie\n\n\"All the Light We Cannot See\"\n\nWINNER: \"Beef\"\n\n\"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\n\"Fargo\"\n\n\"Fellow Travelers\"\n\n\"Lessons in Chemistry\"\n\nStand-up comedy special\n\nWINNER: Ricky Gervais, “Armageddon”\n\nTrevor Noah, “Where Was I”\n\nChris Rock, “Selective Outrage”\n\nAmy Schumer, “Emergency Contact”\n\nSarah Silverman, “Someone You Love”\n\nWanda Sykes, “I’m an Entertainer”\n\nContributing: Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, and The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/08/poor-things-director-bruce-springsteen-golden-globes-speech/72155751007/", "title": "'Poor Things' director praises Bruce Springsteen at Golden Globes", "text": "\"Poor Things\" director Yorgos Lanthimos has Spring-Nuts potential.\n\nLanthimos thanked Bruce Springsteen multiple times while accepting the \"Poor Things\" award for best motion picture at Sunday's Golden Globes Awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, California.\n\nThe Boss was in the audience. His \"Addicted to Romance,\" from the movie \"She Came to Me,\" was nominated for the best original song.\n\n\"I just wanted to speak to Bruce Springsteen. We have the same birthday, 23rd September. He's been my hero since I grew up,\" said Lanthimos, a Greece native, to Springsteen in the audience. The Boss, wearing a black sports jacket without a tie, gave a thumbs up.\n\n\"Anyway, I'm wasting my time,\" Lanthimos continued. \"Thank you everybody, everybody who worked on the film. People that … Searchlight, Film4, Element (Pictures) that produced the film and made it happen. The actors, the wonderful actors.\"\n\nThen he thanked Springsteen again: \"Bruce Springsteen for making me grow up the way I did. Emma (Stone), of course. She won, you know it. She's the best. Thank you so much and Martin Scorsese.\"\n\nScorsese was also in the audience and Stone won best performance by a female actor in a musical or comedy film for her role in the fantasy-comedy.\n\nLanthimos, who also directed the art-house hits \"The Lobster\" and \"The Favourite,\" has an invitation to join the Spring-Nuts Springsteen fan club, said Howie Chaz, founder of the group.\n\n\"Every Springsteen fan has an open invitation to join,\" said Chaz via email to The Asbury Park Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. \"This Train carries … Everyone!\"\n\nSpringsteen's \"Addicted to Romance\" lost to Billie Eilish's \"What Was I Made For?\" from the box office hit \"Barbie.\"\n\n\"Oppenheimer,\" \"Succession\" and \"The Bear\" were the night's big winners.\n\n\"Oppenheimer\" won five awards including best drama and best director for Christopher Nolan.\n\nGolden Globes 12 best dressed:Jaw-dropping red carpet looks from Selena Gomez, Margot Robbie, Oprah, more", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/12/21/golden-globes-2024-host-jo-koy/72002789007/", "title": "Golden Globes 2024 taps Jo Koy to host awards show", "text": "Mark Kennedy\n\nAssociated Press\n\nNEW YORK — Comedian and actor Jo Koy has been tapped to host the 2024 Golden Globes, picked by producers for his \"infectious energy and relatable humor.\"\n\nKoy last year saw his \"Easter Sunday\" become the first big studio movie with an all-Filipino ensemble. He has released five stand-up specials on Comedy Central and Netflix, including his most recent Netflix special, \"Live From The Los Angeles Forum.\"\n\nThe Globes are recovering after scandal and several troubled years, including one without a broadcast. The show will take place on Jan. 7 and will mark Koy's first major award show hosting gig.\n\n\"We are thrilled to have Jo host the 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards and bring his infectious energy and relatable humor to kick off Hollywood's award season,\" said Helen Hoehne, Golden Globes president, in a statement Thursday. \"We know Jo is bringing his A-game.\"\n\n\"I've stepped onto a lot of stages around the world in my career, but this one is going to be extra special. I'm so excited to be hosting the Golden Globes this year,\" said Koy in a statement. \"This is that moment where I get to make my Filipino family proud.\"\n\nGreta Gerwig's \"Barbie\" leads the Globes nominations with nine nods, including for best picture musical or comedy as well as acting nominations for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and three of its original songs. It is closely followed by its release date and meme companion Christopher Nolan's \"Oppenheimer,\" which scored eight nominations, including for best picture drama and for actors Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt.\n\nThe Globes' voting body has now grown to 300 members, following backlash after a 2021 report in the Los Angeles Times found there were zero Black members in the group that was then composed of only 87 foreign journalists.\n\nThe 81st Golden Globes will be the first major broadcast of awards season, with a new home on CBS.\n\nThe Globes had long been one of the highest-profile awards season broadcasts, second only to the Oscars. Before the pandemic, it was still pulling in around 19 million viewers. The show was touted as a boozy, A-list party whose hosts often took a more irreverent tone than their Academy counterparts.\n\nGolden Globe nominations:'Barbie' leads with 9, 'Oppenheimer' scores 8", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/08/golden-globes-taylor-swift-timothe-chalamet-kylie-jenner/72087023007/", "title": "Taylor Swift, Timothée Chalamet, Kylie Jenner won the Golden Globes", "text": "LOS ANGELES – The Golden Globes officially kicked off Hollywood's awards season Sunday with plenty of trophies for \"Oppenheimer\" (five wins, including best drama) and TV's \"Succession\" (four wins, including best drama).\n\nBut in a ballroom filled with Hollywood's biggest stars (Taylor Swift! Jennifer Lawrence!) with flowing alcohol (Champagne on tables! Open bar!), there should be more interest in what really happened when TV cameras weren't rolling during the live CBS awards show.\n\nThat's even before factoring in the official debut of power couples like Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner as well as Bill Hader and Ali Wong, which totally happened on Sunday.\n\nHere's what you didn't see in the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom during the Golden Globes:\n\nTimothée Chalamet, Kylie Jennershare passionate smooch at the Golden Globe Awards\n\nTaylor Swift, Selena Gomez share a hug, chat off-camera at the Golden Globes\n\nSwift, 34, did not win for her fifth Golden Globe nomination in a new category for cinematic and box office achievement.\n\nBut \"The Eras Tour\" star won for having the Best. Time. Ever. It was special from moment one when her security detail pushed through the crowd of stars to get Swift (and her entourage) to seats right before the cameras rolled. When security then stopped others from entering until the next TV break, one guest asked, \"Why can she go?\" Dumbest question ever.\n\nSwift, wearing a green Gucci gown and drinking red (rose champagne before switching to a Cosmopolitan), spent most of her table time yucking it up with seatmate Keleigh Sperry (Miles Teller's wife) and Selena Gomez, who dropped by the table for hugs. But the line of starstruck Hollywood citizens seeking pictures, not to mention stars seeking Swiftie chats (Hader, Jason Sudeikis) led to serious fan congestion on the crowded floor.\n\nSwift was the perfect guest, enthusiastically cheering on BFF and tablemate Emma Stone after the \"Poor Things\" actress won her best actress award. Swift raised her Cosmo in salute and clinked glasses around the table.\n\n“What an (expletive), am I right?” Stone joked backstage afterward about her supportive friend Swift.\n\n“I’ve known her for almost 20 years,” Stone continued. “I was very happy she was there.\" So were we.\n\nTimothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner PDA started immediately\n\n\"Wonka\" star Chalamet, 28, and Jenner, 26, wasted no time with the public display of affection entering the ballroom. Waiting for a commercial break to take their seat, the two reveled in tight quarters caused by the crowd. Jenner pecked him on the cheek, and Chalamet returned the favor on her lips. The two locked arms around backs, with Jenner's hand dropping south and staying perched on Chalamet's famed posterior for longer than any claims of accidental contact.\n\nWhen it was time to move. Chalamet dropped his hand and Jenner took it as the two found their seats. At night's end, Chalamet and Jenner exited hand-in-hand once more, swanning through the crowds as one.\n\nMinutes later Hader and Wong exited arm-in-arm, looking more like date night than an awards show.\n\nBackstage Wong, had an interesting description for the Globe she brandished for her best actress limited series win for Netflix's \"Beef\"\n\n“It’s like a medieval weapon,” Wong remarked.\n\nJeremy Allen White won't let Calvin Klein underwear abs overshadow his Globe win\n\nJeremy Allen White won the best actor Golden Globe for his Season 2 role on \"The Bear,\" but all reporters backstage wanted to know about was White's steamy Calvin Klein underwear ad that shows sizzling abs.\n\nAsked how surreal it was to have people talking more about his abs than his acting, White admitted, “It’s been a weird couple of days.”\n\nWhite made it clear that he was honored more for the acting award than the abdominal admiration.\n\n“I am more proud of this,” White said of his Golden Globe.\n\nWhy was 'Last of Us' star Pedro Pascal in a sling?\n\nEveryone wanted to know why \"The Last of Us\" star Pedro Pascal wore a sling on his right arm over his sweater (yes, a sweater) at the black-tie awards show. Even \"The Joker\" star Joaquin Phoenix got serious asking Pascal earnestly about the injury during a commercial break.\n\n\"It's fine,\" Pascal said, demonstrating the accident that led to the injury. Phoenix gave a tender, injury-sparing hug.\n\nWhile \"The Last of Us\" didn't go home with a Golden Globe despite three nominations, the cast did win an immortal Natasha Lyonne portrait.\n\nSuperfan Lyonne grabbed Pascal, who was speaking intently with James Marsden in the bar, for a \"Last of Us\" group photo. She pulled Pascal across the room to pose with his co-star Bella Ramsey and executive producer Craig Mazin. Handing her iPhone to a bystander, Lyonne grabbed a nearby table flower display to pose with the stars of the HBO series.\n\nPleased with the final result, Lyonne returned the flower display to the table and insisted that everyone meet at the Chateau Marmont cast party.\n\nKieran Culkin crashed Matthew Macfayden's press conference\n\nKieran Culkin had the perfect Globes. The \"Succession\" star started the evening with a martini, just like we saw his character sipping at the end of the celebrated HBO series. Culkin chatted with his wife Jazz Charton in the bar, ignoring every word of Golden Globe host Jo Koy's terrible monologue.\n\nCulkin followed it up by giving the best speech after winning best actor for \"Succession\" as well as crashing fellow Globe winner and co-star Matthew Macfayden's press conference backstage.\n\nJumping in front of assembled reporters, Culkin had a pressing question: Who’s the tallest in the cast? Macfayden, who reportedly stands at 6-foot-3, confidently answered himself.\n\nThis prompted an outcry from the 6-foot-7 \"Succession\" star Nicholas Braun.\n\n“Why did you just say that in front of all these people?” Braun asked MacFayden, after rushing to the front of the stage. “I’m taller than you, man.”\n\nMacFayden admitted that Braun is indeed taller.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/04/2024-golden-globes-predictions/72078266007/", "title": "2024 Golden Globes predictions: From 'Barbie' to Scorsese, who will ...", "text": "Will plastic be fantastic at the Golden Globes with a \"Barbie\" sweep? Will \"Oppenheimer\" bomb or be the bomb? Could Martin Scorsese's \"Killers of the Flower Moon\" blossom on the road to the Academy Awards?\n\nHosted by comedian Jo Koy, this Sunday's 81st annual Golden Globe Awards (CBS and Paramount+ with Showtime, 8 p.m. EST/5 PST) will begin to separate the contenders from the pretenders on the way to Oscar night on March 10. Last year's box-office champ \"Barbie\" arrives as a blockbuster heavyweight with a leading nine nominations, including best comedy/musical, and gets a chance to make an impression as a best picture contender. It's not the only one: There's a fight brewing in the best drama category, with Christopher Nolan's acclaimed biopic \"Oppenheimer\" (which boasts eight nods) in a high-profile tussle against \"Killers\" (with seven).\n\nUSA TODAY predicts who will win (and who should) in the top film categories:\n\nBest drama\n\n“Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Killers of the Flower Moon”\n\n“Maestro”\n\n“Oppenheimer”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nWill win: \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nShould win: \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nA popular and critical hit, \"Oppenheimer\" is a shoo-in for an Oscar best picture nod (and a lot of folks think it can win), so momentum should carry Nolan's white-knuckle period thriller to victory here over some noteworthy competition. However, \"Killers\" ranks high in Scorsese's storied filmography, with a tremendous cast doing wondrous character work, and is the more thought-provoking of two deep historical tales.\n\nBest comedy or musical\n\n“Air”\n\n“American Fiction”\n\n“Barbie”\n\n“The Holdovers”\n\n“May December”\n\n\"Poor Things”\n\nWill win/should win: \"Barbie\"\n\nEven with the egregious snub of \"The Color Purple\" (not even one musical, people?!), this is an unusually stacked Globes category. Curious minds wonder how the old Golden Globes voters – who had a penchant for stars and bizarre decisions – compare with the new bunch, but the delightfully excellent (and very populist) \"Barbie\" likely gets the victory over well-received satire \"American Fiction\" and gleefully absurd dark comedy \"Poor Things.\"\n\nBest actress in a drama\n\nAnnette Bening, \"Nyad\"\n\nLily Gladstone, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nSandra Hüller, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nGreta Lee, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCarey Mulligan, \"Maestro\"\n\nCailee Spaeny, \"Priscilla\"\n\nWill win/should win: Gladstone\n\nOf the two lead actress categories, this one has the best chance of honoring a Hollywood breakthrough. Both Lee and Hüller are great in their respective roles – and you'll see them again this Oscar season – but Gladstone is a revelation. She's the heart and soul of \"Killers,\" playing a spirited indigenous woman who's unmoored by the murders of her people and even poisoned by her husband in the name of greed.\n\nBest actor in a drama\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nLeonardo DiCaprio, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nColman Domingo, \"Rustin\"\n\nBarry Keoghan, \"Saltburn\"\n\nCillian Murphy, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nAndrew Scott, \"All of Us Strangers\"\n\nWill win: Murphy\n\nShould win: Scott\n\nThis is how bonkers the Oscar best-actor contingent is this year: There's not a weak link in the bunch, and it's just half the lead nominees. \"Oppenheimer\" being on a roll – and a career-best turn from its main man – helps put Murphy atop impressive performances by Cooper and DiCaprio (going for his fourth Globe), although Scott is stunning as a haunted screenwriter and a key aspect in 2023's best film.\n\nBest actress in a comedy or musical\n\nFantasia Barrino, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJennifer Lawrence, \"No Hard Feelings\"\n\nNatalie Portman, \"May December\"\n\nAlma Pöysti, \"Fallen Leaves\"\n\nMargot Robbie, \"Barbie\"\n\nEmma Stone, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWill win/should win: Stone\n\nIt would take something pretty special to upend Barrino's showstopping \"Purple\" performance, a hilarious J Law and Robbie in full pop-culture phenomenon mode. And that's exactly what Stone pulls off as Bella Baxter, a woman who wanted to end it all and gets a second chance at life through Victorian resurrection. A previous Globe and Oscar winner for \"La La Land,\" Stone is a good bet to win both again for her \"Poor\" showing.\n\nBest actor in a comedy or musical\n\nNicolas Cage, \"Dream Scenario\"\n\nTimothée Chalamet, \"Wonka\"\n\nMatt Damon, \"Air\"\n\nPaul Giamatti, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nJoaquin Phoenix, \"Beau Is Afraid\"\n\nJeffrey Wright, \"American Fiction\"\n\nWill win: Giamatti\n\nShould win: Wright\n\nNic Cage? Timmy C? Joaquin? It's an intriguingly eclectic mix of talent up for lead comedic actor this Globes, though it's honestly a two-man race – and a toss-up between a pair of enjoyable curmudgeons. With a National Board of Review best actor win for \"Holdovers\" to his credit, Giamatti likely has the edge as an uptight 1970s history teacher, though Wright is a hoot as the irascible \"Fiction\" author skewering race, culture and identity.\n\nBest supporting actress\n\nEmily Blunt, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nDanielle Brooks, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJodie Foster, \"Nyad\"\n\nJulianne Moore, \"May December\"\n\nRosamund Pike, \"Saltburn\"\n\nDa'Vine Joy Randolph, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nWill win/should win: Randolph\n\nAlthough A-listers like Blunt, Moore and Foster are in the mix, expect a win from either Brooks (who was Tony-nominated for the same fiery role in the Broadway \"Purple\") or Randolph, the National Board of Review pick for supporting actress. As the grieving head cook of a boarding school for boys, Randolph has the better chance at a win, because of more \"Holdovers\" love in general, but whoever takes gold will be an immediate favorite for another victory on Oscar night.\n\nBest supporting actor\n\nWillem Dafoe, \"Poor Things\"\n\nRobert De Niro, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nRobert Downey Jr., \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nRyan Gosling, \"Barbie\"\n\nCharles Melton, \"May December\"\n\nMark Ruffalo, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWill win: Downey\n\nShould win: Gosling\n\nFor five of the past six years, the Globe supporting actor winner has run the table all the way to Oscar, and Downey seems to be the chosen one given his acclaimed antagonist role in \"Oppenheimer\" – and a guy who's earned a career \"attaboy\" given his iconoclastic professional life. But Gosling is supremely effervescent as a doll who sings, dances and learns about the pitfalls of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. That's Kenough to win for us.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/10/directors-guild-nominations-greta-gerwig-christopher-nolan/72179570007/", "title": "Greta Gerwig, Martin Scorsese nominated for Directors Guild awards", "text": "Jake Coyle\n\nAssociated Press\n\nNEW YORK — Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig and Martin Scorsese have been nominated by the Directors Guild for its top award.\n\nThe nominations to the 76th DGA Awards, which followed those by the Screen Actors Guild earlier Wednesday, went as expected. The other two nominees for the guild’s top award, for outstanding directorial achievement, are Alexander Payne for “The Holdovers” and Yorgos Lanthimos for “Poor Things.”\n\nNolan’s nomination, for “Oppenheimer,” is his fifth DGA nod though he’s never won before. Gerwig, nominated for “Barbie,” was previously nominated for 2017’s “Lady Bird.” Scorsese’s nomination for “Killers of the Flower Moon” is his 13th DGA nod; he has previously won for 2006’s “The Departed” and for the series “Boardwalk Empire.”\n\n'Oppenheimer,' 'Succession,' Emma Stone:The complete 2024 Golden Globes winners list\n\nThe Directors Guild nominees often closely align with those of the Academy Awards. Over the past two decades, the winner of the DGA award has nearly always also triumphed at the Oscars.\n\nLast year, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won both awards for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”\n\nScreen Actors Guild Awards 2024:'Barbie,' 'Oppenheimer' score 4 nominations each\n\nThe DGA’s nominees for first-time feature filmmaker went to Cord Jefferson for “American Fiction,” Manuela Martelli for “Chile ’76\",” Noora Niasari for “Shayda,” A.V. Rockwell for “A Thousand and One” and Celine Song for “Past Lives.”\n\nThe guild earlier on Tuesday announced other categories. The DGA nominations for best documentary are: “20 Days in Mariupol,” “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” “Beyond Utopia,” “Kokomo City” and “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.” HBO’s “Succession” led the TV nominations, with four out of five nominations for direction.\n\nThe 76th annual DGA Awards will be held Feb. 10.\n\nGolden Globes 2024 recap:'Poor Things' surprises as best comedy, 'Oppenheimer' takes best drama", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/12/20/golden-globe-awards-gift-bags/71985511007/", "title": "Golden Globes gift bags contain $500K in swag for winners ...", "text": "The Golden Globes are looking to get back a little of their luster by forking over $500,000 worth of gift bag loot to the awards show's most glamorous guests.\n\nThe Globes and Robb Report, the luxury lifestyle magazine, announced Wednesday that 83 winners and presenters at the Jan. 7 show (airing live on CBS and streaming on Paramount+) will each receive bags featuring more than 35 products and experiences. The magazine will also donate an undisclosed sum to the Golden Globes Foundation, which contributes to a range of entertainment nonprofits.\n\nWhile celebrities vying for Globes trophies, which honor the best in movies and TV, are likely to already have all the luxury they desire, the gift bags will funnel even more first-class glamour into their lives.\n\nHere are all the expensive goodies in the 2024 Golden Globes gift bags\n\nThe swag includes gifts such as exotic yacht charter invitations, private jet credits, custom-made sneakers, celebrity tattoo sessions and private pizza-making classes with a top chef, with each bag valued at a half-million dollars.\n\nHere's a partial list of what's inside (not all recipients receive all items):\n\n◾ A two-night stay in Burgundy, France.\n\n◾ An all-inclusive lodge stay in New Zealand for two.\n\n◾ A two-night stay in Ireland.\n\n◾ Private surf lessons in Southern California, including a custom surfboard.\n\n◾ A one-year membership to a private social club in West Hollywood.\n\n◾ A luxury wine experience in Houston.\n\n◾ A $69,000 pair of emerald earrings.\n\n◾ A bespoke pair of $1,500 sneakers.\n\nThis year's Globes gift bags are more lavish than those bestowed upon Oscar nominees\n\nGift bags are staples of most affairs involving celebrities. Their apex typically is the Academy Awards, whose biggest nominees receive a bag of unsanctioned but expensive gifts. In 2020, Oscar bags were said to be worth around $200,000.\n\nThe Globes bags may set a new bar for excess as the luxe gesture marks both a return from scaled-down, pandemic-era awards shows, as well as the Globes' recently tarnished reputation.\n\nThe trouble started in 2021 when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was called out by the Los Angeles Times for its complete lack of Black members. The organization subsequently scrambled to revamp membership to include more people of color.\n\nThe HFPA was also accused of trading favors for votes, such as a group trip to the Paris set of \"Emily in Paris,\" which subsequently received Globe nominations. Several studios announced they would sever ties with the organization, and NBC declined to televise the awards that year.\n\nGolden Globe nominees:'Barbie' leads with 9, 'Oppenheimer' scores 8\n\nIn June, Dick Clark Productions took over the show, which had also become known for its zingy tone, thanks to irreverent hosts such as Ricky Gervais as well as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.\n\nComedian Jo Koy will host this year's show. Leading the nominations are \"Barbie\" and \"Oppenheimer,\" with nine and eight nominations respectively. In the TV category, HBO's \"Succession\" tops the list with nine nominations followed by FX's \"The Bear\" and Hulu's \"Only Murders in the Building\" with five each.\n\nThe Golden Globes are the festive kickoff of an awards season leading up to the Oscars, which air March 10.\n\nSnubbed!Viola Davis, America Ferrera, Adam Driver shut out in 2024 Golden Globe nominations", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/12/producers-guild-nominations-2024/72205693007/", "title": "Producers Guild nominations boost Oscar contenders: 'Barbie ...", "text": "LINDSEY BAHR\n\nThe Associated Press\n\n\"Oppenheimer\" and \"Barbie\" will face off at yet another awards ceremony this season, this time at the Producers Guild Awards where they are among the 10 films nominated for the top prize.\n\nThe Producers Guild of America announced its nominations for the coveted Darryl F. Zanuck Award, its equivalent of best picture prize. Nominees overlapped with the five Directors Guild choices announced earlier this week, including \"Killers of the Flower Moon,\" \"The Holdovers\" and \"Poor Things.\" The five additional films were \"American Fiction,\" \"Anatomy of a Fall,\" \"Maestro,\" \"Past Lives\" and \"The Zone of Interest.\"\n\n\"The Color Purple,\" \"May December\" and \"Saltburn\" were among the Oscars hopefuls that did not make the lineup.\n\nThe award has proven to be perhaps the best indicator for what will win the top honor at the Oscars. In the past five years, four PGA winners have gone on to collect best picture at the Academy Awards, with the exception of 2020 in which the PGA honored \"1917\" and the Oscar went to \"Parasite.\" Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 23.\n\n2024 SAG Awards nominations snubsincluding Leonardo DiCaprio, 'Saltburn'\n\nThe five films nominated for best animated motion picture include: \"The Boy and the Heron,\" \"Elemental,\" \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,\" \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" and \"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.\"\n\nThe guild also recognizes television, where drama nominees are \"The Crown,\" \"The Diplomat,\" \"The Last of Us,\" \"The Morning Show\" and \"Succession.\" Comedy contenders include \"Barry,\" \"The Bear,\" \"Jury Duty,\" \"Only Murders in the Building\" and \"Ted Lasso.\"\n\n'Oppenheimer''Succession,' Emma Stone: The complete 2024 Golden Globes winners list\n\nThe PGA previously announced nominations for documentation including the AP and Frontline collaboration \"20 Days in Mariupol.\"\n\nWinners will be announced at an untelevised ceremony in Los Angeles on Feb. 25.\n\n\"Oppenheimer\" and \"Barbie\" are the lead nominees at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb. 24, as they were for the recent Golden Globes.\n\nContributing: Brendan Morrow, USA TODAY", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/12"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/13/entertainment/baftas-2022-winners-list/index.html", "title": "BAFTAS 2022: See the full list of winners | CNN", "text": "1. How relevant is this ad to you?\n\nVideo player was slow to load content Video content never loaded Ad froze or did not finish loading Video content did not start after ad Audio on ad was too loud Other issues", "authors": ["Cnn Staff"], "publish_date": "2022/03/13"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_3", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:19", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/05/15/edouard-philippe-france-new-prime-minister/101703986/", "title": "Edouard Philippe, France's new prime minister, is relatively unknown", "text": "Associated Press\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Edouard Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.\n\nAlexis Kohler, Macron’s new general secretary at the presidential Elysee Palace, made the announcement Monday.\n\nPhilippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers. He’s also a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party that was badly battered by Macron’s victory in the presidential campaign.\n\nPhilippe’s appointment ticks several boxes for the 39-year-old Macron, France’s youngest president, who took power on Sunday. Philippe’s age reinforces the generational shift in France’s corridors of power and the image of youthful vigor that Macron is cultivating.\n\nPhilippe could also attract other Republicans to Macron’s cause as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.\n\nEmmanuel Macron sworn in as president of France, promises economic focus\n\nREAD MORE:\n\n\n\nShe's 64. He's 39 and could be France's next president", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/05/15"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2024/01/10/gabriel-attal-prime-minister-france/72173162007/", "title": "Gabriel Attal: Who is France's new prime minister?", "text": "Gabriel Attal became France's youngest ever and first openly gay prime minister on Tuesday.\n\nAttal, 34, replaced Élisabeth Borne following her resignation on Monday.\n\n“I know I can count on your energy and your commitment,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, following the announcement.\n\nMacron added that the appointment was reminiscent of the \"spirit of 2017,\" the year when he became France's youngest president.\n\n“I could read and hear it: The youngest president of the Republic in history appoints the youngest prime minister in history. I want to see it only as the symbol of boldness and movement. It is also, and perhaps above all, a symbol of confidence in young people,\" Attal said during a ceremony.\n\nIn a speech on Tuesday, Attal said his goals as prime minister include making security an \"absolute priority\" and promoting values of \"authority and respect of others.\"\n\nHe also vowed to strengthen public services, including schools and the health system, and push for “better-controlling immigration.”\n\nAttal's position makes him one of the highest-elected LGBTQ politicians. Attal, who most recently served as the education minister, will now lead the French government into the European Parliament elections this June.\n\nWorld news:Blinken: Mideast nations have 'real' interest in working with Israel postwar\n\nWho is Gabriel Attal?\n\nAttal has been a rising star in France's politics for the past decade, the BBC reported. He began his career as an adviser in the health ministry and as a member of the Socialists party. NPR reported that he left the Socialists to join Macron's newly created political movement in 2016.\n\nHe became a member of parliament in 2017 and quickly caught Macron's attention for being a strong debater, the BBC reported.\n\nHe served as a government spokesperson during the pandemic in 2020 and briefly served as a budget minister after Macron was re-elected in 2022. In July of 2023, he became the education minister, NPR reported.\n\nIn his role as education minister, Attal banned abaya's, long robes, mainly worn by Muslim women from schools. He said the garments were testing secularism in schools, NPR reported.\n\nHe also attempted to introduce uniforms in schools and led an anti-bullying campaign. Attal said he was bullied when he was at the elite École alsacienne in Paris, the BBC reported.\n\nAttal becomes first openly gay prime minister\n\nAttal will be the country's first openly gay prime minister. He is in a civil partnership with Stéphane Sejourné, a member of the European Parliament since 2019, the BBC reported.\n\nHe came out as gay in 2018. Reuters reported that an old school associate in had outed him shortly after he was named a junior minister.\n\nThe Associated Press contributed to this report.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/10"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/16/europe/france-female-prime-minister-intl/index.html", "title": "Elisabeth Borne: France names first female Prime Minister in 30 ...", "text": "Paris CNN —\n\nElisabeth Borne has been named the new Prime Minister of France, the first time in 30 years that a woman has held the position.\n\nBorne will replace Jean Castex in the role, the Elysée Palace said in a statement on Monday, becoming only the second woman ever to serve as Prime Minister since the end of WWII. The country’s first was Édith Cresson, who served between May 1991 and April 1992 under Socialist President François Mitterand.\n\nBorne formerly served as minister of the environment, transportation and labor.\n\nShe will lead a French government likely to be tasked with delivering on President Macron’s election campaign priorities: retirement reform and the scaling up of policies designed to combat climate change.\n\nBorne pictured at the end of the handover ceremony. Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images\n\nHer appointment follows President Emmanuel Macron’s reelection on April 24.\n\nBorne has been “entrusted with forming a government,” according to the Elysée.\n\nShe dedicated her nomination to “every little girl,” during a ceremony on Monday marking the transfer of power.\n\n“Follow your dreams all the way,” Borne said in a speech. “Nothing must hold back the fight for the place of women in society.”\n\nEarlier Monday the Elysée Palace announced that Castex had tendered his resignation.\n\nThe former mayor of his small hometown of Prades in southwest France, Castex was a little known figure when he became Prime Minister in July 2020. He went on to lead France’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.", "authors": ["Simon Bouvier"], "publish_date": "2022/05/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/05/07/frances-new-president/101404100/", "title": "Emmanuel Macron: France's new president will be country's youngest", "text": "Kim Hjelmgaard\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nEmmanuel Macron becomes France's youngest president, after the 39-year-old former investment banker and economy minister defeated anti-immigration nationalist Marine Le Pen in Sunday's presidential runoff.\n\nMacron's precocious achievement erases a record held since 1848 by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte — Napoleon’s nephew. He won the French presidency at age 40.\n\nMacron has never held elected office.\n\nFrance’s Emmanuel Macron beats Marine Le Pen in presidential runoff\n\nShe's 64. He's 39 and could be France's next president\n\nFrance's 25th president is a business-friendly centrist who emerged from relative obscurity only a year ago, when he launched an independent political movement called En Marche! that promised to break with decades of French political tradition and rule neither from the left nor right.\n\nHe quit incumbent President François Hollande's Socialist government to run for office as an independent after Hollande decided not to seek a second term.\n\nMacron's victory represents a forceful repudiation of a European backlash against Muslim immigration and unity across the continent, both threatened by Le Pen, who favored letting France leave the 28-nation European Union.\n\nHe is a charismatic and confident speaker who is married to a former high school teacher who is 24 years older than he is.\n\n\"The task ahead will be difficult but I will always tell you the truth. I will protect you against threats,\" Macron said in a victory speech to supporters outside the Louvre museum in Paris. \"I want to unite our people and our country. I will serve you with humility and force in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité.\"\n\nMacron has promised to invest in public health and infrastructure, cut corporate tax rates and modernize workplace rules in a country that cherishes its time off. The \"Macron Law\" is a bill he introduced as economy minister — an appointed position — that allowed more stores to open on Sundays.\n\nDuring his time working for Hollande, Macron attempted to shake off negative perceptions of France as a place to do business.\n\n\"In France, we have always (been) afraid and upset by the positive destruction of past jobs,\" Macron told USA TODAY in 2015 ahead of a trip to the United States to promote his country as a destination for technology startups. \"Really, creation and innovation are part of the French DNA.\"\n\n\"The surge of support for Emmanuel Macron shows that liberal, pro-EU centrists may yet have a future in European politics. This would be good for the EU,\" said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a think tank.\n\nIn a last-minute endorsement, former U.S. president Barack Obama publicly announced he favors Macron, saying in a video that he was \"not planning to get involved in many elections now that I don’t have to run for office but the French election is very important to the future of France and the values that we care so much about.\"\n\nObama said he supported Macron because he appealed to \"people’s hopes and not their fears.\"\n\nIn his speech to supporters Sunday, Macron promised to unify the country \"with love.\"\n\nBut Macron remains untested on security in a country that has seen a series of terrorist attacks in recent years. And he may struggle to implement his ideas unless his party wins many seats in the June parliamentary elections.\n\n\"With a new party, he doesn't have a party machine, he doesn't have any party funding yet, and he has a mountain to climb in selecting 577 candidates to challenge sitting parliamentarians in the National Assembly,\" said Francoise Boucek, a French-born political expert at Queen Mary University of London.\n\nMacron is also not technically France's youngest-ever ruler. King Louis XIV was just 4 years old when he started to rule France in 1643.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/05/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/13/europe/france-elections-macron-centrist-win-first-round-intl/index.html", "title": "Macron's centrists edge ahead of left in French first round vote | CNN", "text": "French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance won the first round of lower house elections on Sunday by a razor-thin margin over the left bloc of Jean-Luc Melenchon, but is likely to extend its lead in next weekend’s second-round runoff.\n\nMacron’s Ensemble! alliance of centrist parties won 25.75% of the popular vote on Sunday, according to the interior ministry’s final tally, while Melenchon’s New Ecologic and Social People’s Union (NUPES) bloc came in second with 25.66%.\n\nWith rampant inflation driving up the cost of living and eroding wages, Macron has struggled to build on his re-election in April, with Melenchon casting him as a free-marketeer more intent on protecting the wealthy than hard-up families.\n\nFrance’s progressive-leaning Le Monde newspaper said on Monday its own tally showed the left bloc had won the nationwide popular vote, and some leftist politicians said the official result had undercounted their vote.\n\n“Artificially, the interior ministry seeks to show the candidates of Macron at the top,” Manuel Bompard, one of Melenchon’s most senior allies, who is himself running for a seat in Marseille, told LCI television.\n\nHe said some candidates, including in overseas territories, who had publicly said they supported NUPES but were not officially running as part of the bloc should have been included in the official tally.\n\nBudget Minister Gabriel Attal dismissed Bompard’s comments, saying: “They (the left) always call into question the figures … it’s their speciality.”\n\nBompard had earlier said on Twitter that some 200,000 votes for NUPES had not been accounted for in the official result. He did not present any evidence.\n\nAlthough the first round result is a significant gauge of the political temperature, France’s two-round voting system – designed to bring stability – is ultimately expected to favor Macron’s bloc.\n\n“I think you need to see the end of the match before drawing any conclusions,” Olivia Gregoire, the government’s spokeswoman, said on Monday. “The campaign is not over yet.”\n\nThe president’s alliance is well-positioned to secure the largest number of seats in Sunday’s run-off. But main polling institutes said Macron could still lose his grip on parliament.\n\nAccording to a forecast by pollster Elabe, Ensemble is set to win between 260 and 300 parliament seats – with an outright majority secured at 289 – while the left would secure 170-220 seats, a big increase from its 2017 result.\n\nRival pollster Ipsos expected Ensemble to win 255 to 295 seats.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/06/13"}, {"url": "https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/europe/956857/france-rocked-government-disability-rape-scandal", "title": "'Dignity and integrity': France rocked by government disability rape ...", "text": "A minister in Emmanuel Macron’s new government has denied claims that he raped two women, on the grounds that his physical disability would make it impossible for him to sexually assault anyone.\n\nDamien Abad, the French president’s newly appointed minister for solidarity and disabled people, released a statement denying the allegation after two women accused him of raping them in 2010 and 2011.\n\nThe 42-year-old, who suffers from a disorder called arthrogryposis that affects his limbs, said he contests “with the greatest force the accusations against me”, adding: “All the sexual relations I have had in my life have always been consenting.”\n\nSubscribe to The Week Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up\n\n‘Complete consent’\n\nAbad is now facing “intense scrutiny” after the allegations surfaced in an investigation published by French news outlet Mediapart, Politico reported. The claims also “cast a shadow” over the first meeting of Macron’s new cabinet, which took place on Monday.\n\nOne of the women alleged that she went for dinner with Abad in October 2010, drank a glass of champagne and woke up in a hotel room in her underwear with him. The second, who was unknown to the first, claimed she spent an evening with him in 2011 and consented to having sex but then asked him to stop, which he failed to do.\n\nResponding to the claims, Abad said that he has “always avoided making an issue of my disability” but was “forced to do it now to defend myself and even talk about intimate matters in detail to explain that the acts I am accused of were materially impossible”.\n\nArthrogryposis “is a term describing a number of conditions that affect the joints”, according to Johns Hopkins University. It often affects “both the arms and legs”, as in the case of Abad, and is “typically discovered in utero or at birth”.\n\nSymptoms include “muscle contractures” of joints “in the wrist, hand, elbow and shoulder on either side of the body”, as well as “lower extremity involvement” including “the hips, knees and ankles”.\n\n“There is also muscle weakness throughout the body,” the university said, while “spine curvature may develop in some patients”.\n\nAbad’s defence rests on his claim that “the acts he was accused of were implausible” as “he did not have the physical ability to perform them”, The New York Times (NYT) said. His statement described how he “could not have sex” without a partner’s “full and complete consent”.\n\n“My dignity and integrity have been attacked,” he said. “I have never raped a single woman in my life. To address these subjects in public is extremely painful for me so now I am going to concentrate on my job as a minister.”\n\nAsked days later by reporters if he would resign, he said: “Should an innocent man resign? I don’t believe so.”\n\nNational reckoning\n\nThe allegations against Abad come “amid a growing reckoning over sexism and sexual abuse by French political figures”, the NYT reported. The claim has also fed “longstanding recriminations” against Macron by feminist groups who “accuse him of not living up to his vow to make crimes against women one of his top priorities”.\n\nNous Toutes, a feminist collective, responded by posting on Facebook: “How many men accused of rape are we going to see appointed under this term?”\n\nThe claims also come soon after a report by The High Council for Gender Equality, an official watchdog, that stated the French “political world still hasn’t experienced a real #MeToo”, despite a string of scandals in recent years.\n\nAsked whether she believed Abad should step down, France’s new Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne told reporters that she was “obviously” not “aware” of the allegations before they appeared in Mediapart.\n\n“If there are new elements, if the case is brought before the courts again, we will draw all the consequences of this decision,” she added.\n\nAsked whether Macron was aware of the allegations before they surfaced in the media, new government spokesperson Olivia Grégoire said “to my knowledge, no member of the government was aware of these facts”.\n\nPushed on whether his position was under threat, she added: “The issue here is the establishment of the truth. It is for the justice system to establish the truth. It is not up to me, and I don’t think it is up to you either.”", "authors": ["The Week Staff", "Rafi Schwartz", "The Week Us", "Harold Maass", "Richard Windsor", "The Week Uk", "Harriet Marsden", "Peter Weber", "Arion Mcnicoll", "Chas Newkey-Burden"], "publish_date": "2022/05/25"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/07/europe/war-on-woke-europe-cmd-intl/index.html", "title": "'Anti-woke' crusade has come to Europe. Its effects could be chilling ...", "text": "London CNN —\n\nIf 2020 renewed calls for racial equality as Black Lives Matter protests exploded throughout Europe, 2021 brought in the backlash as parts of the political establishment waged a so-called “war against woke.”\n\nStripped of its original meaning of a person being awake to progressive issues, “woke” has been appropriated from the Black vernacular and turned into a political lightning rod in the West’s culture wars. It is now used pejoratively by lawmakers and pundits from both left and right, criticizing the perceived excesses of social and racial justice movements.\n\nThe politicization of the word, which has seen degrees of success in the United States, has bolstered political resistance to calls for more equality in Europe. The amorphous term has also been interpreted differently, depending on where it is deployed.\n\nIn the United Kingdom, woke is used to “describe anything that could previously [be] described as ‘politically correct,’” Evan Smith, a visiting fellow at Australia’s Flinders University and author of “No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism and the Limits of Free Speech,” told CNN. The term is “used to describe a broad range of ideas [and] movements concerned with social justice,” including anti-racism, intersectional feminism, trans rights and critical histories of the British empire, he said.\n\nCultural institutions and academics have been targeted by members of the ruling Conservative Party for supporting those movements. In September, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesperson accused a charity set up in the name of Winston Churchill of trying to “airbrush” the “giant achievements” of the former wartime leader.\n\nThe charity’s mistake? Being accused in rightwing tabloids of being “woke,” for changing its name from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to The Churchill Fellowship and acknowledging that Churchill’s views on race would not be accepted today.\n\n“The Prime Minister has always been clear that whilst it’s legitimate to examine Britain’s history and we should aim to educate people about all aspects of our complex past, both good and bad, and not erase them,” the spokesperson said at the time according to PA Media. “We need to focus on addressing the present, and not attempt to rewrite the past and get sucked into the never-ending debate about which well-known historical figures are sufficiently pure or politically correct to remain in public view.”\n\nThese anti-woke government interventions have power. They “sharpen the public’s sense of moral purpose and help to galvanise voters in a country they perceive to be under siege,” wrote Nesrine Malik in the left-of-center newspaper, the Guardian, in October. “They include the defunding of academic institutions and museums, and even interfering in the appointment of senior personnel at the BBC.”\n\nMany in the French establishment view “woke” as a heinous US import of theories on race, post-colonialism and gender, which they say pose a risk to French values and identity, Samuel Hayat, a politics research fellow at French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), told CNN.\n\nA protester holds a banner on Champ de Mars, in Paris on June 6, 2020, as part of Black Lives Matter protests in the city. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP/AFP via Getty Images\n\nThe term gained traction among French politicians and its press in 2021, say French observers. In May, Elizabeth Moreno, French President Emmanuel Macron’s party diversity minister, told Bloomberg that “woke culture is something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France.” When asked in August whether “wokism [is] a just cause, in your opinion” by weekly political magazine Le Point, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is the socialist candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, said: “it is very important that journalists shed light on these emerging movements, but I will not be campaigning on them.”\n\nWhen a major French dictionary included a gender-inclusive pronoun in its online edition in November, French lawmaker François Jolivet, from Macron’s party, called the dictionary’s authors on Twitter “militants of a cause that has nothing to do with France: #wokisme.”\n\n“Woke is seen as a threat that comes from a society thought to be multicultural and violent and does not have the same values on secularism that France does,” Hayat said.\n\nThe word plays against the French egalitarian, anti-elitist mindset, said Hayat, placing all the theories someone might struggle to understand, such as intersectional feminism, “into a single phenomenon that came from outside France.”\n\nAs Franco-American relations plunged to new lows this fall over a security deal the US forged in secret with the UK and Australia, French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer opened a think tank to uphold French values against what he described as “wokeism.”\n\nSpeaking to France’s Le Monde newspaper about his think tank, Blanquer said “wokeism” is an ideology that “fragments and divides, and has conquered certain political, media and academic circles.” He added that the backlash to “wokeism” helped “bring Donald Trump to power; France and its youth must escape this.”\n\nNew bogeyman\n\nAccording to Rim-Sarah Alouane, a French legal scholar from Toulouse Capitole University, woke’s arrival in France’s culture wars is part of a wider reaction among members of Macron’s party, La République en Marche (LREM), against left-wing and progressive views, rearing its head after the brutal murder of teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020.\n\nPaty’s death followed multiple Islamic terrorist attacks on French soil. But the French government’s response to his beheading opened up a full-scale culture war over secularism, freedom of speech and Islamophobia as the country’s interior minister closed a Muslim group that tracked anti-Muslim hate crime.\n\nThat period also saw “Islamo-leftism” – a controversial yet ill-defined far-right term accusing left-wing academics and activists of enabling Islamic extremism or terrorism – enter the mainstream political discourse as Education Minister Blanquer blamed it for “wreaking havoc” in universities.\n\nHe was backed by 100 academics who, in an open letter to Le Monde, blamed imported “indigenist [sic], racialist, and ‘decolonial’ ideologies,” in French universities for “nourishing hatred of the ‘Whites’ and of France.”\n\nFrance's President Emmanuel Macron is seen at a December 13, 2021, press conference, months before the country's presidential election. Atilla Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images\n\nBy the start of 2021, France’s Minister of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal announced the launch of an investigation into French academic research on CNews, a French channel that has been compared to Fox News. It would look “at everything through the prism of wanting to fracture and divide,” while singling out colonialism and race studies, according to Agence France-Presse.\n\nThe French research organization Vidal tasked with launching the inquiry agreed to carry out the research. It however noted that Islamo-leftism was not a scientific term and condemned “attempts to delegitimize different fields of research, such as postcolonial studies, intersectional studies,” Centre national de la recherche scientifique [CRNS] wrote in a press release.\n\nConflating academics and researchers with Islamic extremism amounts to McCarthyism, said Alouane, referring to the anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s by US Sen. Joe McCarthy.\n\nWeaponizing woke is another attempt at bringing academics, researchers and human rights activists to heel, say critics.\n\n“This is a witchhunt against people who question the status quo,” Alouane added. “Instead of trying to make things better, to tackle issues related to discrimination, racial profiling, and the history of French colonization … these academics [and] researchers are considered to be a threat to so-called Republican values.”\n\nIt also raises questions about academic freedoms, Hayat told CNN. France only needs to look at how Hungarian leaders chipped away at its education sector, banning gender studies in colleges and forcing the Central European University (CEU) out of the country for failing to comply with their nationalist worldview.\n\nWhile crude racial stereotypes over genetics and skin color are frowned on in mainstream contemporary discourse, terms like wokeism and Islamo-leftism serve to reinforce dog whistles such as, “they do not belong to our culture. They do not abide by our Christian values,” Alouane told CNN. “It is just neo-racism.”\n\nThe anti-woke discourse comes just months ahead of France’s presidential election, where the main ideological threat to Macron comes from the right and far right, not the supposed woke left, said Alouane.\n\nAccording to some polls, Macron may end up facing off against either far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen or the rightwing Les Républicains candidate Valérie Pécresse in the second round of voting.\n\nAnti-woke rhetoric may be part of an effort to neutralize Macron’s right-wing opponents. It is an effort Alouane finds ironic. “The funny thing is, if a far-right candidate makes it to the second round, we will [be told] to save the Republic against the far right – even though this administration has been playing with far-right ideologies the whole time,” she said.\n\nChilling effect\n\nAs in France, many experts say the British government’s anti-woke crusade is aimed at making electoral gains.\n\nAided by right-wing elements of the British media, Johnson’s government has used the so-called “war on woke” as an opportunity to score points with their mainly English and Brexit-supporting electorate – some of whom switched allegiance from the opposition Labour Party at the 2019 general election.\n\n“It is fertile territory for the Conservatives as they are pressing a button that has been pressed a few decades now in regards [denouncements of] political correctness,” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, told CNN.\n\nIt also places Labour in a difficult position as its leader, Keir Starmer, attempts to “shake off the ‘far left’ tag” the party gained under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, author Evan Smith said.\n\nJohnson’s culture war tugs at the split in Labour, between its socially conservative members, who think the party is too preoccupied with identity politics, rather than class, and its younger and more diverse base, who are happy for Starmer to do more, say experts.\n\nHistory has been the main battleground, where the Conservative government pits patriotism against any attempt to reckon with Britain’s colonial past.\n\nIt is a narrative that has played out in the education sector, which has seen a government-picked commission release a race report that fended off calls to “decolonize” Britain’s schooling curriculum. Instead, it advocated for “a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modeled African/Britain.”\n\n“British history is not solely one of imperial imposition – Commonwealth history and literature reveals a more complex picture, in which ideas traveled in multiple directions, cultures mixed and positive relations formed that today underpin diaspora around the world, which many ethnic minority children in the UK will feel part of,” the report wrote. Critics accused the report of being a whitewash that puts a positive spin on slavery.\n\nSpeaking to the House of Commons last year, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch said “any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views is breaking the law.”\n\nBoris Johnson's government has announced plans to combat so-called \"cancel culture\" in universities. Leon Neal/Getty Images\n\nThe government has not shied away from threats of intervention when cultural institutions follow progressive causes. If they “go too woke, they risk going broke,” Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden said in October, reiterating his warning that such institutions could be defunded if they cave to “an aggressive brigade” of social justice activists.\n\nIn the last 18 months, heritage charity the National Trust faced threats to its funding from Conservative lawmakers for exploring its properties’ links to slavery and colonialism, and the Royal Museums Greenwich, in London, found itself under the microscope when the government reportedly refused to reappoint a trustee who advocated decolonizing school curriculums.\n\nThe Museums Association, which represents thousands of people working in the sector, warned of “a climate of fear” among “museums and museum staff, especially those working on subjects relating to Britain’s imperial past,” in response to a February meeting between museums, heritage bodies and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS], which Dowden headed at the time. “We support the rights of everyone working on these issues to do so free of interference, threats and intimidation,” the Museums Association added.\n\nThe BBC has also come under scrutiny from Conservative lawmakers calling for the license fee, which funds the broadcaster, to be scrapped.\n\n“A lot of Conservatives don’t like the state funding of a media company, and they think the BBC crowds out sympathetic broadcasters,” Bale said. “The whole anti-woke agenda to some extent is cover to move BBC from a license fee model to a subscriber-based one.”\n\nThis atmosphere can have a chilling effect on cultural institutions that may feel compelled to think twice about what programs they support or which people they hire. This is alleged to have played out at the BBC, when media executive Marcus Ryder’s job application was reportedly blocked due to his support of anti-racism initiatives. The BBC has strenuously denied those reports.\n\nSupporting anti-racism causes should not be an impartiality issue, Ryder told CNN. “What the BBC needs to do is re-examine its [impartiality] guidelines and decide how it should define ‘controversial’ and whether that can be independent of party politics,” he said. “And it needs to see how this framing works with people whose very existence sits outside the ‘normative standards’ – and this can apply to gender, race, sexuality, etc.”\n\nA BBC spokesperson told CNN that “impartiality is a core value of the BBC and something we apply to all our news coverage.” The spokesperson added: “The BBC plays an important role in informing and facilitating debate about subjects of public interest, some of which are divisive. That being said, the BBC is not impartial on racism or any other characteristics protected by law.”\n\nThe policing of institutions by culture warriors acts as a way to undermine the real, lived experience of minorities. It allows for concerns about racism, transphobia or violence against women to be framed as not being of material concern to ordinary people, Neema Begum, a British politics professor at the University of Nottingham, told CNN. The long-term effect of this is just “more polarization,” she added.\n\nChanging demographics\n\nBritain’s anti-woke crusade sometimes borders on the farcical – from a “woke watch” segment on GB News, a British television news channel critics say was set up to find an audience amid the culture wars, to a lawmaker bemoaning that civil servants are still “woke-ing from home.”\n\nNor has every skirmish against social justice movements been a win for the government. UK Home Secretary Priti Patel accused England’s national football team of engaging in “gesture politics” for taking the knee before its matches in a protest against racism, and refused to condemn those who booed the players for doing so.\n\nBritish Home Secretary Priti Patel accused the England football team of \"gesture politics\" for taking the knee before matches. Mike Egerton/PA/Getty Images\n\nBut the tactic backfired when the country rallied around the team after some of its players experienced racial abuse online in the aftermath of England’s Euro 2020 final defeat in July. By the end of the Euros, polling showed most England football fans supported the team taking the knee.\n\n“You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens,” England footballer Tyrone Mings wrote in a Twitter post responding to a tweet by Patel condemning the post-final racism.\n\n“It is clear the British public cares quite a lot [about] the equalities agenda, and it is quite easy for that kind of [government] mobilization to backfire,” Christopher Bertram, emeritus professor of social and political philosophy at Bristol University, told CNN.\n\nIt also shows that while the anti-woke messaging works with their base, British society is getting more multi-ethnic, tolerant and woke, Bale said.\n\n“The Conservatives are going to have to make a decision if they carry on railing against the way society is going,” Bale said. “There is a long-term risk for them as it alienates [younger] future voters who they need to keep on side,” Bale added. “There is a limited number of grumpy, older White men to get off on this kind of stuff.”\n\nEven the 73-year-old grandson of Winston Churchill, Nicholas Soames, has heard enough, calling the furor over the Churchill Trust “so sad and so pathetic” in an interview with the Times. “Apparently anyone who modernizes anything or does anything to remotely bring it up to date is ‘woke.’” he said. “It’s absolute b****cks.”", "authors": ["Tara John"], "publish_date": "2022/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/09/uk/royal-family-king-charles-iii-intl-gbr/index.html", "title": "Royal family: As King Charles III takes the throne, big changes lie ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nGod save the Queen, long live the King. The second Elizabethan age has come to an end and the royal family will now regroup around a new monarch for the next era in British history.\n\nWhat will change for each of the royals?\n\nCharles\n\nBritain's King Charles III poses for a portrait in Buckingham Palace's Throne Room after his official coronation in May 2023. Hugo Burnand/Royal Household 2023/AP Charles was born at Buckingham Palace on November 14, 1948. His mother was Princess Elizabeth at the time. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, sit on a lawn with their children Prince Charles and Princess Anne in August 1951. Eddie Worth/AP Charles attends his mother's coronation in 1953 with his grandmother, left, and his aunt Margaret. Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical/Getty Images Charles, right, shakes hands with Sir Gerald Creasy, the governor of Malta, as he and the rest of the royal family visit Malta in May 1954. Paul Popper/Getty Images Charles rides with his mother and grandmother as they travel to Westminster Abbey for the wedding of Princess Margaret in May 1960. Keystone-France//Getty Images Charles prepares for takeoff during a flying lesson in 1968. In 1971, he earned his wings as a jet pilot and joined the Royal Navy. Hulton Archive/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II presents Charles to the people of Wales after his investiture as the Prince of Wales in July 1969. Popperfoto/Getty Images Charles walks at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1970. He was the first royal heir to earn a university degree. Hulton Deutsch/Getty Images Charles, left, rides go-carts with his brother Prince Edward and his sister, Princess Anne, circa 1969. Keystone-France\\Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Charles meets US President Richard Nixon during a private visit to Washington in July 1970. Popperfoto/Getty Images Charles attends a conference with his father in November 1970. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Charles goes on a safari in Kenya in February 1971. William Lovelace/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Charles prepares to fire a bazooka while visiting military barracks in West Berlin in October 1972. Popperfoto/Getty Images Charles fishes with a wooden spear circa 1975. Serge Lemoine/Hulton Royals Collection/Getty Images Charles poses for sculptor David McFall in December 1975. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Charles smokes a peace pipe during a visit to Canada in July 1977. Anwar Hussein/Getty Images Charles rides a horse during an equestrian event in Cirencester, England, in April 1978. Tim Graham/Getty Images Charles, as colonel-in-chief, visits the Cheshire Regiment in Canterbury, England, in November 1978. He served in the Royal Navy from 1971 to 1976, and in 2012 his mother appointed him honorary five-star ranks in the navy, army and air force. Tim Graham/Getty Images Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles are seen together circa 1979. They dated in the 70s and would eventually marry in 2005. It was the second marriage for both. Their first marriages ended in divorce. Tim Graham/Getty Images Charles poses outside the Taj Mahal in India in 1980. Anwar Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images Charles kisses his first wife, Lady Diana Spencer, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in July 1981. Their wedding ceremony was televised. Bettmann Archive/Getty images Charles and Princess Diana leave a London hospital with their first child, William, in July 1982. Anwar Hussein/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Charles and Diana dance together at a formal event. Tim Graham/Corbis Historical/Getty Images Charles shares a playful pie in the face while visiting a community center in Manchester, England, in December 1983. David Levenson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Charles walks with people in traditional dress on a visit to Papua New Guinea in 1984. Anwar Hussein/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Charles and Diana sit together in Toronto during a royal tour in October 1991. A year later, they were separated. Charles' affair with Camilla Parker Bowles became public in 1993. Tim Graham/Getty Images Charles, Diana and their two sons, William and Harry, gather for V-J Day commemorations in London in August 1995. The couple divorced one year later. Johnny Eggitt/AFP/Getty Images Charles visits a mosque in London in March 1996. Tim Graham/Getty Images South African President Nelson Mandela talks with Prince Charles in London in July 1996. David Thomson/AFP/Getty Images Charles poses with the Spice Girls in 1997. Tim Graham/Corbis Historical/Corbis/Getty Images Charles and his sons spend time together at the Balmoral Castle estate in Balmoral, Scotland, in August 1997. Tim Graham/Getty Images Charles, second from right, and Princess Diana's two sisters meet in Paris after Diana was killed in a car crash there in August 1997. She was 36 years old. Jayne Fincher/Getty Images Charles and his sons follow Diana's hearse in London in September 1997. Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images Charles stands beside his grandmother's coffin while it lies in state at Westminster Hall in London in April 2002. Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images Charles carries a specially painted football through the streets of Ashbourne, England, in March 2003. Tim Graham/Getty Images Charles watches a parachute regiment during a D-Day re-enactment in Ranville, France, in June 2004. Chris Ison/AFP/Getty Images Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in April 2005. Hugo Burnand/Pool/Getty Images Charles, the Prince of Wales, poses for an official portrait in November 2008. He became King after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. Hugo Burnand/Anwar Hussein Collection/WireImage/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II presents Charles with the Royal Horticultural Society's Victoria Medal of Honor during a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London in May 2009. WPA Pool/Getty Images Charles and Camilla were on their way to a performance at the London Palladium when their car was attacked by angry student protesters in December 2010. The students were protesting a hike in tuition fees. Matt Dunham/AP Charles and Queen Elizabeth II were among those on the Buckingham Palace balcony after Prince William wed Kate Middleton in April 2011. James Devaney/FilmMagic/Getty Images Charles reads the weather while touring BBC Scotland's headquarters in May 2012. Andrew Milligan/AP Charles meets with US President Barack Obama in the White House Oval Office in March 2015. Chris Radburn-Pool/Getty Images Charles and Camilla react as Zephyr, the bald-eagle mascot of the Army Air Corps, flaps his wings at the Sandringham Flower Show in July 2015. Chris Jackson/Getty Images Members of the royal family pose for a photo at Buckingham Palace in December 2016. From left are Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; Prince Charles; Queen Elizabeth II; Prince Philip; Prince William; and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Dominic Lipinski/WPA Pool/Getty Images Charles visits the Italian town of Amatrice in April 2017, after an earthquake had hit. Alessandro Bianchi/AFP/Getty Images Charles and Camilla ride on a raft while visiting the island of Borneo in November 2017. Mohd Rasfana/AFP/Getty Images Charles leads three cheers for his mother as the Queen celebrated her 92nd birthday at a London concert in April 2018. Andrew Parsons/AFP/Getty Images From left, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Duchess Camilla and Queen Elizabeth II watch a Royal Air Force flyover in July 2018. Chris Jackson/Getty Images Charles accompanies his future daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle, as she is married to Prince Harry in May 2018. Jonathan Brady/AP Charles lays a wreath at the Cenotaph in London to commemorate Remembrance Day in November 2018. It was also the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images Charles poses with family members for an official portrait to mark his 70th birthday. He's holding his grandson Prince George as Camilla sits next to his granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. In the back row, from left, are his grandson Prince Louis; his daughter-in-law Catherine; his son Prince William; his son Prince Harry; and his daughter-in-law Meghan. Chris Jackson/PoolAP Charles speaks at an event in London in March 2020. Later that month, it was announced that he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images Charles and Camilla attend the funeral of Charles' father, Prince Philip, in April 2021. Dominic Lipinski/Pool/AFP/Getty Images Camilla looks on as Charles reacts to a bad pour of beer he made at a brewery in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, in May 2022. They were on a three-day Canadian tour. Paul Chiasson/Pool/AFP/Getty Images Charles sits by the Imperial State Crown at the opening of Parliament in May 2022. His mother, the Queen, missed the occasion for the first time since 1963. The 96-year-old monarch had to withdraw due to a recurrence of mobility issues. Ben Stansall/Pool/AP Charles is shown skulls of victims during a visit to the Nyamata Church Genocide Memorial in Nyamata, Rwanda, in June 2022. In 1994, Hutu extremists targeted minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a three-month killing spree that left an estimated 800,000 people dead, though local estimates are higher. Chris Jackson/Getty Images Prince Louis, the Queen's great-grandson, holds his hands over his ears as jets roar over Buckingham Palace during the Trooping the Colour parade in London on in June 2022. From left are Prince Charles; the Queen; Prince Louis; Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge; and Princess Charlotte. Hannah McKay/Reuters Charles has his first audience with Prime Minister Liz Truss after becoming King in September 2022. Yui Mok/Pool/AP The King speaks in the Throne Room at St James's Palace during the Accession Council in London in September 2022. He was formally proclaimed as King. Joining him were his son Prince William and his wife Camilla, the Queen Consort. Jonathan Brady/Pool/AP Charles delivers his first address as King from Buckingham Palace. \"As the Queen herself did with such unswerving devotion, I too now solemnly pledge myself, throughout the remaining time God grants me, to uphold the Constitutional principles at the heart of our nation,\" he said. Yui Mok/Pool/AP Charles records his first Christmas speech in December 2022. The speech would be broadcast on Christmas Day throughout the United Kingdom. Victoria Jones/Pool/AP The King meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was visiting Buckingham Palace in February 2023. Zelensky made a surprise visit to the UK and gave a speech to the joint houses of Parliament. Aaron Chown/Pool/Reuters The King greets the band Lords of The Lost during a reception in Hamburg, Germany, in March 2023. The King spent three days in Germany for what was his first overseas state visit as monarch Chris Jackson/Getty Images The King sits in Buckingham Palace's Blue Drawing Room in March 2023. Handout/Hugo Burnand/Buckingham Palace/Getty Images The King attends the 200th Sovereign's Parade at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in April 2023. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Charles receives the St. Edward's Crown during his coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey in May 2023. Andrew Matthews/Pool/AP Charles and Camilla travel to Buckingham Palace after the coronation ceremony. Sarah Tilotta/CNN The King and Queen stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the coronation. They are joined here by pages of honor who attended them throughout the day. One of the pages was the King's eldest grandson, Prince George, who can be seen second from left. Toby Hancock/CNN Charles and Camilla are pictured with members of the working royal family in May 2023. Hugo Burnand/Royal Household 2023/AP Charles is presented with the Crown of Scotland during a service of thanksgiving that was held at the St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, in July 2023. Scotland was celebrating the King's recent coronation with a day of festivities Jane Barlow/Reuters French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain's King Charles toast during a state dinner in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on the first day of Charles state visit to France , in Versailles, France, on September 20. Benoit Tessier/Reuters In pictures: Britain's King Charles III Prev Next\n\nThe moment Elizabeth II died, her eldest child, Charles, automatically became monarch. As sovereign, he has chosen to take the name King Charles III.\n\nAll rights and responsibilities of the Crown now rest with King Charles III.\n\nHe becomes head of state not just in the UK but in 14 other Commonwealth realms including Australia and Canada. He will become head of the 56-member Commonwealth, although that is not a hereditary position, after his succession to the role was agreed by Commonwealth leaders at a meeting in London in 2018.\n\nHe has become head of the British Armed Forces, the judiciary and the civil service, and he is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. He is the Fount of Honour, which means all honors, such as knighthoods, will now be given in his name.\n\nThe United Kingdom does not have a codified constitution, so the role of monarchy is defined by convention rather than law. He has a duty to remain politically impartial, which means he will come under greater scrutiny if he continues to express the views he is known for.\n\nHe has championed alternative medicines and organic farming techniques. In 1984, he hit out at the “glass stumps and concrete towers” of modern architecture. He has spent decades warning of the dangers of climate change. In the so-called “black spider” memos, he raised the issues he was concerned about directly with ministers.\n\nIn a BBC documentary to mark his 70th birthday, Charles acknowledged having ruffled feathers with his past interventions. But he promised not to meddle in controversial affairs once sovereign, saying he would operate within “the constitutional parameters.”\n\nElizabeth stayed “above politics” and never expressed herself in any way on any issue and as a result she rarely divided opinion. She managed to retain popular support and cross-party support in parliament, which was the one body with the power to dethrone her.\n\nWe will never know what she discussed in her regular audiences with her prime ministers, beginning with Churchill, but Charles is a more outspoken character. Will he go quiet on policy matters in public but continue to lobby in private? Will the prime minister act on it?\n\nThe prime ministerial audiences are one of several constitutional duties to which King Charles III will be expected to step up and they will bring him in regular contact with policymakers. He appoints the prime minister, opens parliamentary sessions, approves legislation and official appointments, receives the credentials of foreign ambassadors and hosts world leaders on state visits.\n\nCharles has also adopted the symbolic position as Head of Nation, meaning he becomes the symbol of national identity, unity, and pride. He represents continuity and celebrates excellence on behalf of the country. That’s why we see the monarch opening national events and leading commemorations.\n\nPeople would look to Elizabeth in times of crisis, but will they rally around King Charles III in the same way? He is more divisive not just because of his honest views but also because of the bad taste still left from his acrimonious divorce from his immensely popular first wife, Diana.\n\nAll the official royal residences including Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle will now be under his control. There are also other residences such as Balmoral in Scotland and Sandringham in Norfolk which the Queen owned privately – and the nation will have to see to whom she leaves them in her will.\n\nEither way, Charles’ wealth has ballooned. By far the biggest slice of the family’s fortune, the £16.5 billion ($19 billion) Crown Estate, now belongs to him as reigning monarch. But under an arrangement dating back to 1760, the monarch hands over all profits from the estate to the government in return for a slice, called the Sovereign Grant.\n\nThe estate includes vast swathes of central London property and the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It has the status of a corporation and is managed by a chief executive and commissioners — or non-executive directors — appointed by the monarch on the recommendation of the prime minister.\n\nThe grant, which covers the cost of his official duties and amounted to £86.3 million ($99.2 million) for the 2021/2022 financial year. He will take charge of the Royal Collection, which includes one of the most valuable art collections in the world. He also picks up the Duchy of Lancaster, a private estate dating back to 1265, which was valued at about £653 million ($764 million) according to its most recent accounts. Income from its investments cover official costs not met by the Sovereign Grant, and helps support other Royal family members.\n\nKing Charles III has become one of the richest men in England overnight.\n\nCamilla\n\nCharles and Camilla attend the Order of the Garter Service at St George's Chapel on June 13, 2022 in Windsor, England. Toby Melville/Getty Images\n\nFor years, the big question around Charles’ wife surrounded her title. At the time their wedding was announced in February 2005, the official statement said: “It is intended that Mrs Parker Bowles should use the title HRH The Princess Consort when The Prince of Wales accedes to The Throne.” That was a very clear signal that Camilla would not use the title of Queen. Her office at Clarence House distanced itself from that statement in the intervening years, however, saying it was a matter for the reigning monarch.\n\nThen, in February 2022, the Queen expressed her desire for her daughter-in-law to be known as Queen Consort when Charles became King in a message marking the start of her platinum jubilee year – a statement that appeared to resolve the issue for good.\n\nThe Queen’s wishes were welcomed by the couple themselves. That same weekend, a statement released by a spokesperson said they had been “touched and honoured by Her Majesty’s words.”\n\nWhere will the couple live? Well, traditionally the new monarch would move into Buckingham Palace but in 2011, the BBC reported that Charles was considering moving his entire court to Windsor and turning Buckingham Palace into an events center. That would be a dramatic and controversial shift but might also assert King Charles III as the new boss.\n\nWilliam and Catherine\n\nWilliam and Catherine are pictured with their children, George, Charlotte and Louis, and the Queen, Charles and Camilla at Buckingham Palace during platinum jubilee celebrations on June 5, 2022. Toby Hancock/CNN\n\nUp until now, Charles has been responsible for covering the costs of his heir, Prince William.\n\nWilliam has now inherited his father’s titles of The Duke of Cornwall, which comes with an estate which last year delivered an income of £23 million ($26 million). That money now goes straight to William and he becomes independently wealthy.\n\nHis new title is HRH The Duke of Cornwall and Cambridge and tradition dictates that, as first in line to the throne, he also becomes Prince of Wales. And Catherine becomes Her Royal Highness, The Princess of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall and Cambridge.\n\nWilliam and Catherine will be able to solidify their own independent court, which is currently based at Kensington Palace in west London, in an apartment that was refurbished shortly after their marriage. It seems unlikely that William would want to move, so the King’s former residences, including Clarence House and Birkhall in the Scottish Highlands, will likely remain vacant until Charles offers them to other members of the family, or finds an alternative use. The family resides at Adelaide Cottage in Windsor during school term time.\n\nPrince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis will follow their parents’ titling. They are now Their Royal Highnesses Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis of Cornwall and Cambridge. Colloquially they are likely to be known as George, Charlotte and Louis Wales.\n\nHarry and Meghan\n\nMeghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry react as they attend the annual One Young World Summit in Manchester, north-west England on September 5, 2022. Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images\n\nIt’s unlikely that Charles’ second son, Harry, will be offered a royal office unless he and wife Meghan return to their royal duties, and the King would also need to confirm that they can continue to use Frogmore Cottage on the Windsor estate, which is part of the royal estate. They currently live with son Archie and daughter Lilibet in California but were allowed to continue using Frogmore as their official residence during the Queen’s reign.\n\nWhen Harry and Meghan announced in early 2020 that they were stepping back from royal duties, they said they would “work to become financially independent.” The terms of the split stipulated that while the pair would always remain part of the family, they would no longer use their HRH titles.\n\nAs grandchildren of the monarch, Archie now automatically becomes Prince Archie of Sussex while Lilibet will be Princess Lilibet of Sussex. Whether they use those titles will only become known the first time their parents refer to them publicly.\n\nPrince Andrew and other family members\n\nKing Charles III also becomes responsible for distributing roles, responsibilities and resources to other members of the royal family.\n\nCharles has never been close to his brother Andrew, who stepped back from royal duties over his links to the late disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein. In January 2022 he was stripped of his HRH title, as well as others associated with the military and charity roles. That raises the question of whether the new King continues to allow Andrew to use his Buckingham Palace apartment and offers financial support.\n\nThen there are his other siblings, Princess Anne and Prince Edward, and more distant relatives such as the Gloucesters and Kents who retain royal residences at Kensington.\n\nPrincess Anne attends a service at St Giles' Cathedral on June 30, 2022 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images\n\nCharles will need to decide how much family support he needs to carry out his duties and who he wants to offer it. Then he can reveal what support he offers in return. Many of these decisions would already have been taken and the first telling signs of where his loyalties lie will be seen in who gets to keep which residences and especially who gets an upgrade.\n\nAnne and Edward, and his wife Sophie, The Countess of Wessex, are expected to continue with their public duties following decades of dedicated service but the new King needs to balance that against pressure for a slimmed down monarchy in austere times.\n\nTo get updates on the British Royal Family sent to your inbox, sign up for CNN’s Royal News newsletter.", "authors": ["Max Foster"], "publish_date": "2022/09/09"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/13/business/prince-william-1-billion-inheritance/index.html", "title": "Prince William just inherited a 685-year old estate worth $1 billion ...", "text": "London CNN Business —\n\nRoyal wills are never made public. That means what happens to much of the Queen’s personal wealth following her death last week will remain a family secret.\n\nForbes estimated last year that the late monarch’s personal fortune was worth $500 million, made up of her jewels, art collection, investments and two residences, Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Sandringham House in Norfolk. The Queen inherited both properties from her father, King George VI.\n\n“[Royal wills] are hidden, so we have no idea actually what’s in them and what that’s worth, and that’s never ever made public,” Laura Clancy, a lecturer in media at Lancaster University and author of a book on royal finances, told CNN Business.\n\nBut the vast bulk of the Royal family’s wealth — totaling at least £18 billion ($21 billion) in land, property and investments — now passes along a well-trodden, centuries-old path to the new monarch, King Charles, and his heir.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback CNN reporter predicts what we'll see from King Charles 05:17 - Source: CNN\n\nThe line of succession makes Prince William, now the first in line to the British throne, a much wealthier man.\n\nThe future king inherits the private Duchy of Cornwall estate from his father. The duchy owns a sprawling portfolio of land and property covering almost 140,000 acres, most of it in southwest England.\n\nCreated in 1337 by King Edward III, the estate is worth around £1 billion ($1.2 billion), according to its accounts for the last financial year.\n\nRevenue from the estate is “used to fund the public, private and charitable activities,” of the Duke of Cornwall, its website says. That title is now held by Prince William.\n\nBalmoral Castle in Scotland is part of the late Queen Elizabeth's private fortune. Andrew Milligan/WPA Pool/Getty Images/File\n\nBy far the biggest slice of the family’s fortune, the £16.5 billion ($19 billion) Crown Estate, now belongs to King Charles as reigning monarch. But under an arrangement dating back to 1760, the monarch hands over all profits from the estate to the government in return for a slice, called the Sovereign Grant.\n\nThe estate includes vast swathes of central London property and the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It has the status of a corporation and is managed by a chief executive and commissioners — or non-executive directors — appointed by the monarch on the recommendation of the prime minister.\n\nIn the last financial year, it generated net profit of almost £313 million ($361 million). From that, the UK Treasury paid the Queen a Sovereign Grant of £86 million ($100 million). That’s equivalent to £1.29 ($1.50) per person in the United Kingdom.\n\nMost of this money is spent on maintaining the Royal family’s properties and paying their staff.\n\nThe Sovereign Grant is usually equivalent to 15% of the estate’s profits. But, in 2017, the payment was bumped up to 25% for the next decade to help pay for refurbishments to Buckingham Palace.\n\nKing Charles also inherits the Duchy of Lancaster, a private estate dating back to 1265, which was valued at about £653 million ($764 million) according to its most recent accounts. Income from its investments cover official costs not met by the Sovereign Grant, and helps support other Royal family members.\n\nRestrictions apply\n\nDespite the vast sums, the monarch and his heir are restricted in how much they can personally benefit from their fortunes.\n\nThe King can only spend the Sovereign Grant on royal duties. And neither he nor his heir are allowed to benefit from the sale of assets in their duchies. Any profit from disposals is reinvested back into the estate, according to an explainer published by the Institute for Government’s (IfG).\n\nThe UK Treasury must also approve all large property transactions, the IfG said.\n\nStill, unlike the Sovereign Grant generated by the Crown Estate, both duchies are private sources of wealth, meaning their owners are not required to give any details beyond reporting their income, the IFG said.\n\nRegent Street in London during a pandemic lockdown. The prime retail location is owned by the Crown Estate. Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images/FILE\n\nLast year, King Charles, then the Duke of Cornwall, paid himself £21 million ($25 million) from the Duchy of Cornwall estate.\n\nNeither Prince William nor King Charles are obliged to pay any form of tax on their estates, though both duchies have voluntarily paid income tax since 1993, according to the IfG.\n\nThat move came a year after the Royal family faced strong criticism for planning to use public money to repair Windsor Castle, which had suffered damage in a fire, Clancy said.\n\n“Of course, voluntary income tax [is] not a fixed rate, and they don’t have to declare how much income they’re making their tax on. So actually it’s just like plucking a figure out of thin air,” Clancy said.\n\nBuckingham Palace did not immediately respond to CNN Business when reached for comment.", "authors": ["Anna Cooban"], "publish_date": "2022/09/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/11/us/five-things-april-11-trnd/index.html", "title": "5 things to know for April 11: Ukraine, Covid, French elections ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nGet '5 Things' in your inbox If your day doesn’t start until you’re up to speed on the latest headlines, then let us introduce you to your new favorite morning fix. Sign up here for the ‘5 Things’ newsletter.\n\nThe federal tax filing season is underway. And even though the IRS still hasn’t processed millions of returns from last year due to Covid-19 and a lack of funding, there are still ways to help ensure your tax filing experience is hassle-free.\n\nHere’s what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.\n\nHere’s what you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.\n\n(You can also get “5 Things You Need to Know Today” delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.)\n\n1. Ukraine\n\nMourners gathered in Tokyo today for the funeral of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, four days after he was assassinated in broad daylight. Photos captured the outpouring of grief as people gathered to pay their respects to Abe with flowers, notes and green tea – symbols of help in the afterlife. The private funeral was hosted at the centuries-old Zojoji Temple by Abe’s widow, Akie Abe. Millions around the world have reacted with shock and anguish at how Abe was gunned down during a campaign speech in the central city of Nara on Friday. According to police, the 41-year-old suspect accused of killing Abe had a “grudge” against a church he believed Abe’s grandfather – another former leader of the country – helped to expand.\n\n2. Supreme Court\n\nThe House select committee plans to show at a hearing today how right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, prepared to attack the US Capitol in the days leading up to January 6, 2021. According to committee aides, the hearing will also focus on the roles of former President Donald Trump’s associates, including Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, who both received presidential pardons after being charged with various crimes. Separately, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, an ally of Trump, is expected to meet Friday with the January 6 committee, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Byrne played an active role in supporting efforts to push baseless claims about the 2020 election, including attending a meeting at the White House to discuss strategies to overturn the election results.\n\n3. Coronavirus\n\nEmmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen are projected to advance to the second round of the French presidential election, an analysis of early results showed, setting up a rematch of the 2017 contest. Macron, France’s current president, is in first place with 28.6% following a preliminary count of the votes from the first round of the election yesterday. Le Pen, a long-time standard-bearer for the French far-right, is on track to come in second with 23.6%. Twelve candidates ran for the top job. Since none of them received more than 50% of the ballots in the first round, the top two candidates will face each other in a runoff on April 24. Macron is seeking to become the first French president to win reelection since Jacques Chirac in 2002, but Le Pen’s support has steadily risen in recent weeks.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback What role does the Ukraine war play in the upcoming French elections? 03:11 - Source: CNN\n\n4. Burkina Faso\n\n5. Boris Johnson\n\nBREAKFAST BROWSE\n\nTom Brady announces his NFL comeback\n\nBennifer: a true love story! The couple found their way back to one another after almost two decades, and we couldn’t be more overjoyed.\n\nTraveler told TSA he had ‘no idea’ a sword was hidden in his cane\n\nA clever design nonetheless… but definitely not making it through security.\n\nThe search for the 2022 Gerber Baby is on\n\nDo you have an irresistibly cute baby? Enter the competition to see if your little one has what takes to become Gerber’s next “Chief Growing Officer.”\n\nAdorable baby pademelon born at Chester Zoo\n\nWhat’s a pademelon, you ask? Picture a kangaroo, but mini!\n\n‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’ has best opening ever for a video game movie\n\nThe movie sped past box office predictions, bringing in an estimated $71 million domestically during its opening weekend.\n\nTODAY’S NUMBER\n\n61%\n\nThat’s how many passengers Georgia’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport saw in 2021, reclaiming its title of world’s busiest airport. The Atlanta airport was knocked from its No. 1 spot in 2020 by Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport in China. The 2021 rankings released today by Airports Council International show the Atlanta airport is back on top, a sign of recovery from the plunge in air traffic when the pandemic took hold two years ago.\n\nTODAY’S QUOTE\n\n“Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.”\n\n– Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, on Elon Musk’s decision to not join the social media company’s board. Musk recently disclosed he had purchased a more than 9% stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder. When the news of his board appointment broke, Musk tweeted he was “looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months.”\n\nTODAY’S WEATHER\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Yet another multiday severe storm threat this week 02:30 - Source: CNN\n\nCheck your local forecast here>>>\n\nAND FINALLY\n\nHere comes the sun\n\nCruise into the weekend\n\nCheck out this parrot’s rendition of a classic Beatles song! (Click here to view)", "authors": ["Alexandra Meeks"], "publish_date": "2022/04/11"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_4", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:19", "search_result": []}
{"question_id": "20240112_5", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:19", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/trump-2024-presidential-bid/index.html", "title": "Donald Trump announces a White House bid for 2024 | CNN Politics", "text": "CNN —\n\nFormer President Donald Trump, aiming to become only the second commander-in-chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms, announced Tuesday night that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.\n\n“In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Trump told a crowd gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his waterfront estate in Florida, where his campaign will be headquartered.\n\nSurrounded by allies, advisers, and conservative influencers, Trump delivered a relatively subdued speech, rife with spurious and exaggerated claims about his four years in office. Despite a historically divisive presidency and his own role in inciting an attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump aimed to evoke nostalgia for his time in office, frequently contrasting his first-term accomplishments with the Biden administration’s policies and the current economic climate. Many of those perceived accomplishments – from strict immigration actions to corporate tax cuts and religious freedom initiatives – remain deeply polarizing to this day.\n\nAs Trump spoke to a roomful of Republicans who expect him to face primary challengers in the coming months, he also claimed the party cannot afford to nominate “a politician or conventional candidate” if it wants to win back the White House.\n\n“This will not be my campaign, this will be our campaign all together,” Trump said.\n\nTrump’s long-awaited campaign comes as he tries to reclaim the spotlight following the GOP’s underwhelming midterm elections performance – including the losses of several Trump-endorsed election deniers – and the subsequent blame game that has unfolded since Election Day. Republicans failed to gain a Senate majority, came up short in their efforts to fill several statewide seats, and have yet to secure a House majority, with only 215 races called in their favor so far out of the 218 needed, developments that have forced Trump and other party leaders into a defensive posture as they face reproval from within their ranks.\n\nTrump’s paperwork establishing his candidacy landed with the Federal Election Committee shortly before he delivered his announcement at Mar-a-Lago.\n\nTo the delight of aides and allies who have long advised him to mount a forward-looking campaign, he spent only a fraction of his remarks repeating his lies about the 2020 election. Though he advocated for the use of paper ballots and likened America’s election system to that of “third world countries,” Trump also tried at times to broaden his grievances – lamenting the “massive corruption” and “entrenched interests” that in his view have consumed Washington. Many of Trump’s top advisers have expressed concern that his fixation on promoting conspiracies about the last presidential election would make it harder for him to win a national election in 2024.\n\nThroughout the hour-long speech, Trump made clear that he wants his campaign to be seen by Republicans as a sacrificial undertaking.\n\n“Anyone who truly seeks to take on this rigged and corrupt system will be faced with a storm of fire that only a few could understand,” he said at one point, describing the legal and emotional toll his presidency and post-presidential period has taken on his family members.\n\nOn the heels of last week’s midterm elections, Trump has been blamed for elevating flawed candidates who spent too much time parroting his claims about election fraud, alienating key voters and ultimately leading to their defeats. He attempted to counter that criticism on Tuesday, noting that Republicans appear poised to retake the House majority and touting at least one Trump-endorsed candidate, Kevin Kiley of California. At one point, Trump appeared to blame his party’s midterm performance on voters not yet realizing “the total effect of the suffering” after two years of Democratic control in Washington.\n\n“I have no doubt that by 2024, it will sadly be much worse and they will see clearly what has happened and is happening to our country – and the voting will be much different,” he claimed.\n\nBeating others to the punch\n\nTrump is betting that his first-out-of-the gate strategy will fend off potential primary rivals and give him an early advantage with deep-pocketed donors, aides say. He is widely expected to be challenged by both conservative and moderate Republicans, though the calculus of some presidential hopefuls could change now that he is running. Others – like his former Vice President, Mike Pence – may proceed anyway.\n\nTrump’s third presidential bid also coincides with a period of heightened legal peril as Justice Department officials investigating him and his associates revisit the prospect of indictments in their Trump-related probes. The former president is currently being investigated for his activities before and during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office. While Trump is counting on an easy path to the GOP nomination with his sustained support among the party’s base, his announcement is likely to dash the hopes of party leaders who have longed for fresh talent. In particular, top Republicans have been paying close attention to the next moves of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won his reelection contest with a 19-point margin of victory and considerable support from minority and independent voters. Some Republican leaders may try to scuttle Trump’s campaign by elevating or encouraging alternative candidates, including DeSantis, who has been quietly laying the groundwork for a possible White House bid of his own.\n\nOf course, any countereffort to inhibit Trump’s path to the nomination is likely to prove difficult. Despite his myriad legal entanglements and the stain of January 6, the twice-impeached 45th president remains immensely popular among most Republican voters and boasts a deep connection with his core backers that could prove difficult for other GOP hopefuls to replicate or weaken. Even leading conservatives who disliked Trump’s pugnacious politics and heterodox policies stuck with him as president because he helped solidify the rightward shift of the US Supreme Court with his nominations – one of the most far-reaching aspects of his legacy, which resulted in the conservative court majority’s deeply polarizing June decision to end federal abortion rights. In fact, while Trump ended his first term with the lowest approval rating of any president, Republicans viewed him favorably, according to a May NBC News poll. That alone could give Trump a significant edge over primary opponents whom voters are still familiarizing themselves with.\n\nAmong those potential competitors is Pence, who would likely benefit from high name recognition due to his role as vice president. Pence, who has been preparing for a possible White House run in 2024, is sure to face an uphill battle courting Trump’s most loyal supporters, many of whom soured on the former vice president after he declined to overstep his congressional authority and block certification of now-President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Trump could also find himself pitted against DeSantis, who has risen to hero status among cultural conservatives and who is widely considered a more polished version of Trump. Even some of the former president’s advisers have voiced similar observations to CNN, noting that DeSantis also made inroads with major Republican donors during his quest for reelection and built a mountain of goodwill with GOP leaders by campaigning for federal and statewide Republican candidates in the middle of his own race.\n\nBeyond his potential rivals, Trump has another roadblock in his path as the House select committee continues to investigate his role in January 6, 2021, and Justice Department officials weigh whether to issue criminal charges. The committee, which subpoenaed him for testimony and documents in October and which Trump is now battling in court, held public hearings throughout the summer and early fall featuring depositions from those in Trump’s inner circle at the White House – including members of his family – that detailed his public and private efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results through a sustained pressure campaign on numerous local, state and federal officials, and on his own vice president.\n\nBut Trump’s desire to announce his campaign early can be especially traced to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, which advisers say further emboldened his decision to mount what he believes will be a triumphant political comeback. The day after the search, the former president fielded calls from allies advising him to accelerate his 2024 timeline. That night, he huddled with House lawmakers in the Republican Study Committee and told them he’d “made up his mind” about launching a bid, though some of those same House Republicans later convinced him to wait until after the midterm elections to announce his next move.\n\nFew of those lawmakers were present for Trump’s speech on Tuesday, choosing to remain in Washington as House Republicans conducted their leadership elections and the party continues to grapple with its failures in highly prized midterm races. Rather, the room was filled with prominent election deniers like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, several of Trump’s attorneys, and past and present aides. Before he entered the room on Tuesday alongside former first lady Melania Trump, several members of the ex-president’s family were also seen filtering into the ballroom, including Eric and Lara Trump, his son Barron, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Donald Trump Jr. His eldest son was notably missing, along with daughter Ivanka, , who has since said she will no longer be involved in the political arena. A source close to Donald Trump Jr. said he was stuck on a hunting trip in the mountain west and unable to catch a flight back to Florida in time for his father’s announcement. Other guests included longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone; outgoing North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn; former congressman and the current CEO of Trump’s Truth Social app Devin Nunes; and his chief political adviser Susie Wiles.\n\nPreparing for 2024\n\nFrom the moment Trump left Washington, defeated and disgraced, in January 2021, he began plotting a return to power – devoting the bulk of his time to building a political operation intended for this moment. With assistance from numerous former aides and advisers, he continued the aggressive fundraising tactics that had become a marker of his 2020 campaign, amassing a colossal war chest ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, and worked diligently to elect steadfast allies in both Congress and state legislatures across the country.\n\nWhile maintaining a home base in Florida, he also regularly jet-setted across the country for campaign rallies that afforded him crucial face time with his base and with candidates he bet would become valuable allies in the US Senate and House.\n\nThrough it all, Trump continued to falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him, indulging in far-flung conspiracy theories about voter fraud and pressuring Republican leaders across the party’s election apparatus to endorse changes that would curtail voting rights.\n\nTrump’s aides were pleased earlier this fall when his public appearances and rally speeches gradually became more focused on rising crime, immigration and economic woes – key themes throughout the midterm cycle and issues they hope will enable him to draw a compelling contrast with Biden as he begins this next chapter. Allies of the former president have long said that he views the 2024 contest as an opportunity to regain what he believes is his: another four years in the Oval Office.\n\nBut there is no guarantee that Trump will glide easily to a nonconsecutive second term. In fact, it could be quite difficult.\n\nNot only does history offer just one example of such a feat (defeated in 1888 after his first term, President Grover Cleveland was elected again in 1892), no previously impeached president has ever run again for office. Trump was first impeached in 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice, and then again in 2021 for inciting the riot at the US Capitol. Though he was acquitted by the Senate both times, 10 House Republicans broke with their party the second time around to join Democrats in a vote to impeach him. Seven Republican senators voted to convict him at his Senate trial.\n\nTrump has also been the subject of a bevy of lawsuits and investigations, including a New York state investigation and a separate Manhattan district attorney criminal probe into his company’s finances, a Georgia county probe into his efforts to overturn Biden’s election win in the state, and separate Justice Department probes into his campaign’s scheme to put forth fake electors in battleground states and his decision to bring classified materials with him to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office.\n\nTrump’s actions since he left Washington have, for the most part, signaled his interest in an eventual return. While most former presidents go quietly into retirement – resurfacing to assist their parties during midterm cycles or for the opening of their presidential libraries – Trump bucked tradition to instead plot the comeback he now hopes to make. Despite its distance from Washington, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club has transformed into a new hub for Republicans and a home base for his political machine. Assisted by a small group of paid staffers, he has hosted numerous candidate and committee fundraisers and seen a rotating cast of party leaders and congressional hopefuls filter through its gilded hallways in the hopes of nabbing his endorsement or reingratiating themselves with his base. Trump’s schedule has enabled him to build close relationships with party leaders and fringe figures – from House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – whose support in a contested primary could ultimately help him clear the field. Many of the aides who have been with him since he left the White House are expected to continue on as campaign hands, as the former president and his de facto chief of staff, longtime Florida GOP strategist Wiles, aim to maintain a lean operation much like the early days of his 2016 presidential campaign. Among those who are likely to be involved are Wiles, Taylor Budowich, Chris LaCivita, Steven Cheung, Justin Caporale and Brian Jack. Brad Parscale, who managed part of Trump’s failed 2020 campaign will not be part of his 2024 operation, nor will Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was deeply involved in his quest for reelection.\n\nTime in office\n\nAs president, Trump faced criticism over several of his actions, especially his management of the worst public health crisis in nearly a century – the Covid-19 pandemic – though his administration helped facilitate the development of vaccines to treat the novel coronavirus in record time. He also was blasted by critics over his handling of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017; the White nationalist rally, also in 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Heather Heyer was killed while walking with a group of counterprotesters; and Black Lives Matter protests.\n\nWhile in office, Trump signed sweeping tax cuts into law, enacted controversial hard-line immigration policies, including a policy that separated migrant children from their families and one known as “Remain in Mexico,” which the US Supreme Court ruled in June could be ended by his successor, and appointed hundreds of federal judges with deep conservative credentials. He also successfully nominated three Supreme Court justices, whose decisions this year as part of the court’s majority have shifted American society and laws rightward on issues such as abortion, guns, religious freedom and climate change.\n\nThe former real estate businessman and reality TV star was first elected to office in 2016, beating out a wide field of more than a dozen GOP candidates in an ugly primary, and then prevailing over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a contentious general election, despite sexual misconduct allegations that would have typically been campaign-ending.\n\nAs president, Trump was an impulsive leader, who dispensed with long-standing norms, often announcing policy and Cabinet personnel changes on Twitter. (He was ultimately banned from the platform following the US Capitol riot and was later barred from Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube as well.)\n\nHe pushed an “America First” foreign policy approach, pulling the US out of international agreements such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, a pair of controversial moves that were decried by many of America’s top European allies.\n\nCORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said who was likely to be involved in the Trump campaign. Brad Parscale will not be involved in the 2024 operation. It has also been updated to correctly characterize former President Donald Trump’s position on paper ballots, fix the spelling of Justin Caporale and reflect additional developments.", "authors": ["Gaborr Kristen Holmes Veronica Stracqualursi", "Kristen Holmes", "Veronica Stracqualursi"], "publish_date": "2022/11/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/fact-check-trump-announcement-speech-2024/index.html", "title": "Fact check: 20 false and misleading claims Trump made in his ...", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nFormer President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidential campaign just as he ended his presidency in 2021: with a whole lot of inaccuracy.\n\nLike many of Trump’s speeches as president, his announcement speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday was filled with false claims about a variety of topics – from his record in office to his Democratic opponents to the economy, the environment and foreign policy.\n\nHere is a fact check of 20 false or misleading things he said. This is not a comprehensive list.\n\nAfghanistan withdrawal\n\nTrump claimed Tuesday evening that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan upon its military withdrawal in 2021.\n\n“Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world,” Trump said.\n\nFacts First: Trump’s figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion — a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.\n\nThere is not any basis for Trump’s claim that $85 billion worth of equipment was left behind. As other fact-checkers have previously explained, that was a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. Only part of this funding was for equipment.\n\nStrategic Petroleum Reserve\n\nTrump claimed his administration “filled up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but it has now been “virtually drained” by the Biden administration.\n\nFacts First: Both parts of Trump’s claim are false. He didn’t fill up the reserve, and the reserve is not “virtually drained.”\n\nThough Trump has repeatedly boasted of supposedly having filled up the reserve, it actually contained fewer barrels of crude when he left office in early 2021 than when he took office in 2017. That’s not all because of him – the law requires some mandatory sales from the reserve for budget reasons, and Democrats in Congress blocked the funding needed to execute Trump’s 2020 directive to buy tens of millions more barrels and fill the reserve to its maximum capacity – but nonetheless, it didn’t get filled.\n\nAs CNN’s Matt Egan and Phil Mattingly reported in mid-October, the US reserve remains the largest in the world even though it was at a 38-year low after President Joe Biden released a major chunk of it to help keep oil prices down in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and, coincidentally or not, prior to the midterm elections). The reserve had more than 396 million barrels of crude oil as of the week ending November 4.\n\nTariffs on China\n\nTrump also boasted about his tariffs on China, claiming that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.”\n\nFacts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.”\n\nAlso, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing the cost of the tariffs.\n\nSea level rise\n\nTrump claimed that unnamed people aren’t talking about the threat of nuclear weapons because they are obsessed with environmental issues, which he said, “they say may affect us in 300 years.” He added, “They say the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can take out entire countries with one shot.”\n\nFacts First: Trump’s claims are false – even if you ignore the absurd contention that people aren’t paying attention to nuclear threats because they’re focused on the environment. Sea levels are expected to rise much faster than Trump said. The US government’s National Ocean Service said on its website that “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10 - 12 inches (0.25 - 0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020 - 2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920 - 2020).”\n\nAnd though Trump didn’t use the words “climate change” in this claim, he strongly suggested that people say climate change may only affect us in 300 years. That is grossly inaccurate; it is affecting the US today. The Department of Defense said in a 2021 report: “Increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.”\n\nDrug use and punishment in China\n\nTrump claimed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had told him that China has no “drug problem” at all because of its harsh treatment of drug traffickers. Trump then repeated the claim himself, saying, “if you get caught dealing drugs in China you have an immediate and quick trial, and by the end of the day, you are executed. That’s a terrible thing, but they have no drug problem.”\n\nFacts First: Trump’s claim is not true, just as it was when he made similar claims as president. Joe Amon, director of global health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, said that “yes, China has a drug problem” and that “China, like the US, has a large number of people who use (a wide range of) drugs.” The Chinese government has itself reported that “there were 1.49 million registered drug users nationwide” as of the end of 2021; in the past, officials in China have acknowledged that the number of registered drug users are a significant undercount of actual drug use there.\n\nAnd while Trump solely credits harsh punishments for what he claims is China’s success in handling drugs, the Chinese government also touts its rehabilitation, education and anti-poverty efforts.\n\nPresidential records\n\nComplaining about how he is under criminal investigation for taking presidential documents to his Florida home and resort, Trump repeated a debunked claim about former President Barack Obama’s handling of presidential documents.\n\n“Obama took a lot of things with him,” Trump said.\n\nFacts First: This is false – as the National Archives and Records Administration pointed out in August when Trump previously made this claim. Though Trump claimed that Obama had taken millions of records to Chicago, NARA explained in a public statement that it had itself taken these records to a NARA-managed facility in the Chicago area – which is near where Obama’s presidential library will be located. It said that, as per federal law, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”\n\nNARA has also debunked Trump’s recent claims about various other presidents having supposedly taken documents to their own home states; in those cases, too, it was NARA that moved the documents, not the former presidents. It is standard for NARA to set up temporary facilities near where former presidents’ permanent libraries will eventually be located.\n\nGas prices\n\nAs he has on other occasions during Biden’s tenure, Trump used misleading figures when discussing the price of gas. He said: “We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline, and now it’s sitting five, six, seven and even eight dollars, and it’s gonna go really bad.”\n\nFacts First: This is so misleading that we’re classifying it as inaccurate. While the price of a gallon of regular gas did briefly fall to $1.87 (and lower) during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for regular gas on Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, was much higher than that – $2.393 per gallon, according to data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. And while there are some remote gas stations where prices are always much higher than the national average, the national average Tuesday is $3.759, per AAA data, not $5, $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the highest prices as usual, has an average of $5.423.\n\nDeportations under Obama\n\nTrump claimed Tuesday evening that his administration, unlike Obama’s administration, had convinced countries like Guatemala and Honduras to take back their gang members that had come to America.\n\n“The worst gangs are MS-13. And under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they were unable to take them out. Because their countries where they came from wouldn’t take them,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.\n\nFacts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back their citizens during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.\n\nIn 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.\n\nFor the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.\n\nMissile landing in Poland\n\nTrump claimed Tuesday that a missile that was “sent in probably by Russia” landed 50 miles into Poland. “People are going absolutely wild and crazy and they’re not happy,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.\n\nFacts First: This claim is false. While Poland said a Russian-made missile did land in their territory Tuesday, killing two Polish citizens, the explosion happened about four miles west from the Ukrainian border.\n\nAdditionally, it remains unclear where the missile was fired from, and why it fell in Poland.\n\nFinishing the border wall\n\nTrump made a false claim about one of his signature policies, a wall at the border with Mexico.\n\n“We built the wall, and now we will add to it. Now, we built the wall – we completed the wall – and then we said let’s do more, and we did a lot more. And we did a lot more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that came up. And when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would’ve been great, and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that,” he said.\n\nFacts First: It’s not even close to true that Trump “completed” the border wall.\n\nAccording to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not completed. The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280, about 74 miles of barriers were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”\n\nDemocratic leaders and the National Guard\n\nTrump claimed that Democratic governors and mayors refused to ask for “help” even during “a total breakdown of law and order,” and “don’t want to ever ask to do anything,” so “we sent in the National Guard in Minneapolis and in other places.”\n\nFacts First: This is a false claim Trump liked to make during his presidency. It’s not true that Trump sent in the National Guard to Minneapolis and that Democratic leaders there refused to ask; it was actually Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard amid unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Walz, who served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades, first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.\n\nWhen Trump made this false claim in 2020, Walz’s office told CNN that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.\n\nBiden’s acuity\n\nMocking Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said, “There are a lot of bad things, like going to Idaho and saying ‘Welcome to the state of Florida, I really love it.’”\n\nFacts First: This never happened. Biden, like Trump, has made occasional gaffes in referring to places, but this one is fiction. At a rally earlier this month, Trump claimed that Biden had gone to Iowa and wrongly claimed to be in Idaho; that false claim was published by a satirical website in 2020.\n\nIllegal immigration\n\nLamenting illegal immigration, Trump said, “I believe it’s 10 million people coming in, not three or four million people. They’re pouring into our country.”\n\nFacts First: False. “There is no empirical basis at all for the idea that 10 million undocumented people have entered under President Biden,” Emily Ryo, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California’s law school, who studies immigration, said in a Monday email when CNN asked her about Trump making this claim earlier in November. Julia Gelatt, an expert at the Migration Policy Institute think tank, concurred: “Based on the data available, it is not possible that 10 million unauthorized immigrants have come across the border to the U.S. under President Biden. In fact, the reality is a fraction of that.”\n\nMark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump (and head of the Border Patrol under Obama), told The Arizona Republic in an early-November article that the “worst case scenario” for the number of illegal border crossings under Biden through October “could be 6.2 million.” Trump’s estimate was not close even to that estimate.\n\nAnd there are a bunch of important nuances here. Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 4.3 million total nationwide border “encounters” under Biden, but that number includes people who presented themselves to the authorities to begin the process of seeking humanitarian protection. And while Trump used the word “people,” Ryo emphasized that the number of “encounters” is not the same as the number of separate individuals who have crossed the border. Because many people encountered at the border are rapidly expelled under the Title 42 policy – including more than half of those encountered in the 2021 fiscal year – lots of the same people quickly come back to the border and try again. In the 2021 fiscal year, the recidivism rate was 27%, according to official data.\n\nInflation in turkey prices\n\nTrump claimed, “Good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Number one, you won’t get it and if you do, you’re gonna pay three to four times more than you paid last year.”\n\nFacts First: This isn’t even close to true. Turkey prices have increased since last Thanksgiving season, but they haven’t come close to tripling or quadrupling. The weighted average advertised supermarket price of a whole frozen hen is 97 cents per pound as of the most recent US Department of Agriculture report – up about 10% from the same time last year. The price of a whole frozen tom was up by about 7%.\n\nAnd though Trump made these comments while criticizing the Biden administration over inflation, it’s worth noting that the turkey market in particular has been significantly impacted by avian flu.\n\nTrump and wars\n\nTrump said that his critics claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign that there would be a war within weeks if Trump was elected – “and yet I’ve gone decades, decades without a war. The first president to do it for that long a period.”\n\nFacts First: This is nonsense. Trump was president for four years, so he could not possibly have gone “decades, decades” without a war. Also, Trump presided over the US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, though he obviously didn’t start any of these wars and withdrew some troops from all three countries. And he was commander-in-chief for dozens of US airstrikes, including drone strikes, in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, plus a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, that prompted Iranian retaliation against US service members.\n\nTrump and ISIS\n\nTrump gave himself credit for the liberation of ISIS’s “caliphate” in Syria, saying “the vicious ISIS caliphate, which no president was able to conquer, was decimated by me and our great warriors in less than three weeks.”\n\nFacts First: This is a major exaggeration. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019, not “less than three weeks” into his presidency in 2017; it’s not entirely clear what Trump meant by “decimated,” but the fight continued long after Trump’s first weeks in office. And Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past. There was major progress against the caliphate under Obama in 2015 and 2016 – and Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting.\n\nIHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing the size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.\n\nTerrorism under Trump\n\nTrump claimed: “We had practically, just about, not that I can think of, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks, during the Trump administration.”\n\nFacts First: Trump did qualify the claim by saying “practically, just about, not that I can think of,” but it’s not true that there were no terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists during his presidency. Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a terror attack in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was an act of Islamic extremism carried out in support of ISIS. In fact, Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. And Trump’s Justice Department alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.\n\nThe military’s use of old bombers\n\nBoasting of how he supposedly rebuilt the military, Trump said, “When I got there, we had jet fighters that were 48 years old. We had bombers that were 60 years old, we had bombers where their grandfathers flew them when they were new. And now the grandchild is flying the bomber – but not anymore.”\n\nFacts First: It’s not true that Trump ended the use of 60-year-old bombers. The military continues to use B-52 bombers that old; they are now being outfitted with new Rolls-Royce engines to prolong their life even further. (And the B-52 isn’t the only decades-old plane still in use.)\n\nTrump’s popularity along the border\n\nAfter boasting of how he is viewed by Latinos, Trump claimed that “along the border in Texas, won every single community – I won – every single community.” He said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told him that he had “won every single area along the border, the longest since Reconstruction.”\n\nFacts First: We don’t know what Abbott told Trump, but it’s not true that Trump won every single area along the border with Mexico. Trump lost border states in both of his previous races – California and New Mexico in both 2016 and 2020, Arizona in 2020 – and also lost numerous border communities in Texas and elsewhere both times, as you can see in these New York Times maps here and here.\n\nTrump did make major gains with some Texas border counties between 2016 and 2020, becoming the first Republican in decades to win some of them, but his claim was about how he supposedly won them all. That’s inaccurate.\n\nInflation\n\nTrump claimed about inflation: “As we speak, inflation is the highest in over 50 years.”\n\nFacts First: This is not true; Trump exaggerated a statistic that would have worked in his favor even if he had recited it accurately. October’s year-over-year inflation rate of 7.7% is the highest since 1982, if you don’t count previous months this year when it was higher. So, ignoring those other Biden-era months, it is the highest in 40 years, not the highest in “over 50 years.”\n\nWe might let this go if Trump did not have a years-long pattern of exaggerating numbers to suit his purposes.", "authors": ["Daniel Dale Paul Leblanc", "Daniel Dale", "Paul Leblanc"], "publish_date": "2022/11/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/21/politics/joe-biden-reelection-2024-trump-republican/index.html", "title": "As Joe Biden ramps up for a Trump rematch, Democrats worry he'd ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nTop Democrats see Republicans’ unenthusiastic greeting of Donald Trump’s third White House bid with a combination of schadenfreude and perhaps some other German word for terrifying, unintended consequences: They love seeing the former president struggle, but privately some tell CNN they worry this could lead to a more difficult 2024 campaign against a younger, fresher Republican.\n\nPresident Joe Biden heads into Thanksgiving for the first of several stretches with family members whose advice he’ll seek on whether to launch another campaign. He has privately and publicly signaled that he sees Democrats’ better-than-expected midterm results as an endorsement of him running for a second term – and he’s reveling in how many in his party seem to be agreeing with him.\n\nBiden and his aides believe that even with a potential recession looming next year, his reelection argument will grow stronger. They say voters will start to feel the benefits from the implementation of laws the president has signed over the past two years. They think House Republicans flexing their narrow hold on power through government shutdowns and debt ceiling showdowns to try to force repeals of those same laws will help them even more.\n\nAccording to CNN’s conversations with 24 Democratic elected officials, top operatives and Biden aides, the past two weeks have left them more confident that Biden would be their best bet to beat Trump in 2024. Some say they miscalculated how much appeal Biden continues to hold. Others now realize voters see him as a likable enough bulwark against extremism and a decent man, who can be a standard-setting, consensus choice amid historic polarization. Several onetime opponents say they’ve come around to thinking that maybe his approach in not responding with rage to the people raging at him has been more effective with voters.\n\n“What he did translated more with voters than favorability ratings, and that’s important for Democrats to remember as we go forward,” said North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, adding that after talking to Biden on the election night call he received as chair of the Democratic Governors Association, he’d be “surprised” if the president doesn’t run again.\n\nWhen asked, though, how they’d feel about Biden’s chances against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or other Republicans who could make a generational argument without the baggage Trump brings, many Democrats’ voices tend to tighten. “Not great,” said one top operative. “Uneasy,” said two others, in separate conversations.\n\nOthers point out that nearly all of Democrats’ key midterm victories were narrowly won, leaving them worried about how little room for error there likely will be next time.\n\nFour Democratic members of Congress, asking not to be named to speak candidly, estimated that at least half of their colleagues would pick someone other than Biden as their 2024 nominee – if they could vote by secret ballot.\n\nAll four also said that if there were a second question about whom they’d want instead, the votes would be all over the place – with several noting that one of the strongest arguments for Biden running is that it would help Democrats avoid a chaotic primary and give their bench time to gain more experience before the 2028 election.\n\nMinnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the first Democrat in Congress to call for Biden not to run, said that regardless of his respect for the president, the midterm results or where Biden’s popularity lands, the party needs to “create pathways for new generations of leaders.”\n\n“There’s a pragmatic element of this too. I believe the country will be in a place where they’ll be looking for a new generation as well,” said Phillips, whom several colleagues note has become the person voicing feelings others are keeping private.\n\nColorado Sen. Michael Bennet, one of the few Democrats running in 2022 who appeared at an event with the president and scored an unexpectedly big reelection win in the onetime swing state, had long talked about how the best argument for another Biden campaign was that he could beat Trump again.\n\nAsked after Trump’s announcement if he’d be as confident in Biden against another Republican, Bennet dodged.\n\n“I just think that’s too contingent a question to answer,” the senator said.\n\nA few weeks ago, when many expected significant House losses for the party, Phillips was one of multiple Democrats predicting that the election aftermath would include more and louder calls for Biden to step aside. Phillips acknowledged last week that those calls haven’t come but attributed that more to the “culture of deference” in Congress than to renewed support for Biden.\n\n“It’s a little bit like when Trump was president, and none of the Republicans would say what they really thought on the record,” said one Democratic strategist.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Ann McLane Kuster also expressed doubts about Biden running for reelection as she campaigned in New Hampshire. Back in Washington after winning a sixth term by a wider-than-anticipated margin, she said she’s still not convinced.\n\n“I’m still in a wait-and-see, and I think a lot of people are,” Kuster said, noting that she has “been a Biden fan since she I was pregnant with my son, who was just sworn into the New York Bar.”\n\nAsked how she’d feel about Biden going up against a Republican who was younger and fresher than Trump, Kuster initially responded with a long “Hmmmmm.” She said she’s less concerned about that because she believes if Biden does run, that will drive Republicans to Trump, while if Biden doesn’t, that will drive them away from Trump.\n\n“It is an easy thing for people to underestimate Joe Biden – and they’ve been doing it and being wrong for a couple of election cycles now,” said one Biden adviser. As for those who still have doubts, “there are some Democrats who aren’t happy unless they can be anxious about something,” the adviser added.\n\nIncoming members of Congress who won their seats this year are among the most openly enthusiastic about a Biden reelection campaign.\n\n“I think he’s the guy who can beat anybody,” said California Rep.-elect Robert Garcia, who’s close with both the West Wing and Vice President Kamala Harris. “Presidents get reelected if they’re successful and if the American people want them back, and to me there is nothing in the president’s first two years that points to that he shouldn’t run again.”\n\nMaxwell Frost, the 25-year-old Florida Democrat who is the first member of Generation Z (those born after 1996) elected to Congress, said he was supporting Biden too, minutes after borrowing a tie to make his first visit to the House floor to watch 82-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announce she’d be stepping down from leadership.\n\n“He’s been unafraid to put forth bold, transformational ideas and policies, and that’s really what excites young voters,” Frost said, citing the infrastructure deal and the health care, tax and climate package dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. Asked whether he was concerned about a potential generational contrast with Biden if the Republicans back someone other than Trump, Frost said, “I’d say good luck with whoever they put up.”\n\n“It doesn’t matter” who the Republican nominee is, argued Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, fresh off his own reelection in a swing state that Biden won narrowly in 2020. “The Biden-Harris administration will carry Nevada and will carry the country again.”\n\nDrawing a contrast with Trump\n\nAfter a strategy of not even saying Trump’s name at all in his first year and then pounding on Trump by name throughout the midterm campaigning, the president is expected to revert to talking about his predecessor “sparingly,” an adviser said. What Biden and aides will do, though – like with the new section of the White House website touting administration achievements, which was launched last week a few hours before Trump’s presidential announcement – is emphasize their record in contrast with Trump’s rhetoric.\n\nA Trump rematch might be easier, several Democratic operatives involved with the preliminary thinking said, because they’d know how to go about it. They hope that one lesson of the midterms is Democrats’ ability to make voters see many leading Republicans as extreme and tainted by Trump.\n\nAs they wait on a Biden decision that they expect to drag into at least January, and with members of the president’s own Cabinet divided on whether he’ll go through with a launch, aides are planning to head into next year with events and travel to showcase now-tangible achievements.\n\n“There’ll be a bridge built that wasn’t built this year, more of the impact of prescription drug benefits will be felt,” said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, an early and consistent Biden supporter.\n\nEarly planning is also underway for a string of state dinners, starting with one scheduled for December 1 to honor French President Emmanuel Macron, both to highlight what the White House says is Biden’s reasserting of American global leadership and to demonstrate another notch toward a post-pandemic normal.\n\nMeanwhile, aides are also gearing up for two years of trying to frame every move by the new House Republican majority as extremist overreach, including undermining the legitimacy of any investigations in the eyes of the media and the public. They’re counting on House Republicans who face tough reelections in 2024 to themselves back away from some of the biggest threats, such as impeaching the president. And as personally painful as any Republican inquiries of Biden’s son Hunter will be for the president, aides believe that the politics will boomerang in their favor by making Republicans look like they’re chasing conspiracy theories down rabbit holes rather than governing and by making Biden seem empathetic in a way that has consistently been his greatest strength.\n\n“The last two Democratic presidents lost the House – by far more than Biden did – and in both cases, that provided a powerful reelection foil,” said a person familiar with White House thinking. “We are dealing with a much more extreme Republican Party than they were. … But Biden does not provoke the Republican base in the way that other national Democrats have.”\n\nAge vs. ‘wisdom and experience’\n\nRepublican attempts to make Biden an anchor to Democratic midterm candidates by saying his name and flashing his image in ads about inflation, border control or gas prices don’t seem to have been decisive for independents and swing voters. Biden’s greatest weakness has repeatedly proved his greatest strength, several Democratic strategists said: People don’t feel strongly about him. There are few T-shirts with his face on them or flags with his name on them, but he also doesn’t inspire passionate hate. As Republican operatives tend to admit, voters’ sense of him is so well established that it’s hard to make anything stick to him.\n\nWhat does stick, in focus group after focus group: his age – he turned 80 on Sunday – and the sense that he’s not up to the job. One place where that caused problems: Pennsylvania, where Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman was seen as independent from Biden – until the aftermath of his stroke. Then, focus groups noted, voters began to draw connections between the two men related to their physical fitness for office. (Fetterman, however, was able to overcome enough of those perceptions to help his party flip an open seat.)\n\nBiden “has his work cut out for him in terms of having folks believe he can command this job for four more years,” said one person familiar with the focus group findings.\n\nSome Democratic politicians and operatives shudder imagining a younger Republican nominee campaigning around the country at multiple stops a day, bounding onstage and reinforcing the skepticism that’s already in voters’ minds. These Democrats say their solace is fantasizing about Trump failing to snag the GOP nomination and then sabotaging the Republican nominee’s campaign, out of spite.\n\nBiden’s inner circle has seen the focus group data and has heard the same complaints. They’ve also seen how those concerns faded over the summer, as Biden signed more bills. That mattered for other Democrats too, with Rep. Dan Kildee, who just won a tight reelection race in Michigan, saying that people connecting with those legislative successes “got me over the finish line.”\n\nKildee said he believed Biden would be strong against Trump in Michigan, which Trump won by less than half a point in 2016 but Biden carried by 3 points in 2020. As for how he’d fare against another Republican, “there’s too many chess moves between now and then to figure that out yet,” Kildee said.\n\nAfter how unpredictable the factors shaping the 2020 and 2022 elections were, Biden’s circle doesn’t see a point in trying to guess exactly what he’d be campaigning on by the end of 2024. But the Biden adviser touted the president’s “wisdom and experience,” saying that had “allowed him to achieve an extraordinary legislative record and extraordinary record of global leadership in the first two years of his term.”\n\n“I don’t see anybody else that’s stronger. With all the things he’s doing, I don’t care how old he is,” said Eileen Reyes, a former Pete Buttigieg supporter from Luzerne, Pennsylvania, speaking ahead of Biden’s joint rally with Barack Obama in Philadelphia the Saturday night before the election.\n\nStephanie Schlatter, a lawyer in Washington who wore her old Biden-Harris white T-shirt to the celebratory speech Biden delivered at a Washington theater two days after the midterms, agreed.\n\n“My parents are older than he is, and they’re still whooping it up,” she said. “People are starting to come back from the nastiness, and they’re starting to see results.”", "authors": ["Edward-Isaac Dovere"], "publish_date": "2022/11/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/politics/biden-democratic-primary-challenge-2024/index.html", "title": "As worries about Biden in 2024 grow, other Democrats aren't ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA challenge requires a challenger – and all the Democrats being discussed as potential primary opponents to President Joe Biden tell CNN they’re ruling out runs and warning others to follow suit.\n\nThe chatter is fed by Democratic officials and party leaders who have begun to doubt that Biden is, as he’s insisted privately to donors and others, their strongest candidate to beat Donald Trump – or another GOP candidate – in 2024. And it’s being propelled even more by the 79-year-old President’s age, which has prompted questions about what kind of campaign schedule he’d be able to keep up.\n\nFear runs deep of yet another unfavorable Biden comparison to Jimmy Carter, who survived a 1980 primary challenge from Ted Kennedy but not the lasting wound going into the general election. Democrats privately hoping Biden might reverse course and not run are petrified that they’re backbiting their way into allowing Trump and Trumpism back into power.\n\nThat hasn’t stopped muted worries from going around the West Wing, according to four aides familiar with the conversations, that someone may yet emerge ahead of the President’s planned spring 2023 formal reelection campaign launch. Biden advisers expect to stick to that no matter what happens, including if Trump decides to jump in early.\n\n“Nothing about our timeline changes, but we’re prepared if he decides to run,” one person familiar with the Biden team’s political planning said about Trump.\n\nBut even Rep. Ro Khanna, the California congressman and former Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair, who first won his seat by beating an incumbent in a primary, said he won’t entertain the thought of jumping in against Biden, although he’s aware he’s being whispered about – so much that a close friend had a dream over July Fourth weekend that he did it.\n\n“Absolutely not,” Khanna told CNN. “I plan to support (Biden) because of the danger that Donald Trump poses. I would certainly not do anything to weaken him, and I hope no one else will do anything to weaken him. He’s still the safe brand in the midwestern states to make sure Trump is kept far away from the Oval Office.”\n\nThat also goes for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has been causing the most antsy whispers from the Biden orbit with his comments calling out a lack of Democratic action and energy and his buying a July Fourth ad in Florida hitting Gov. Ron DeSantis, a prospective 2024 GOP candidate. Newsom, who’s facing reelection in November, compared the Democratic dynamics to those he initially faced in his recall election last year, when he and advisers worked to scare off several Democrats who’d looked at jumping in against him.\n\n“The success of our recall was about unifying around our party and defining the opposition. We need to unify the Democratic Party and not destroy ourselves from within,” Newsom said. “We need to have our President’s back. But we also have to get on the field. He needs troops. He has to govern. Our job is to organize, and it’s to have his back.”\n\nThe same goes for J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire first-term Illinois governor who also drew some behind-the-scenes brushback from Biden world by delivering a speech about his exhaustion with the Democratic status quo in famous first-presidential primary state New Hampshire. The Democrat, who’s running for a second term in November, lit up even more speculation with his response to the Highland Park shooting in his state earlier this month, which was more forceful than Biden’s.\n\nBiden “has said he’s running for reelection and I support that,” Pritzker told CNN, adding that though he thinks some other opponent may yet emerge, Biden “will win the nomination, and yet, it’ll be Ted Kennedy running against Jimmy Carter … They will lose and they will take away from the President. That’s not what we need right now.”\n\nThe speculation is at a high enough fever that when Pete Buttigieg’s PAC reactivated on Twitter at the end of June to endorse a few candidates for US House and state legislature, several plugged-in operatives began to wonder if this was the first step in the transportation secretary relaunching as a candidate. His attendance at Democratic National Committee events and meetings with a few potential future donors only sparked more talk.\n\nBut there’s nothing to that, according to a Transportation Department spokesperson, who said, “Buttigieg has had no involvement in Win the Era PAC since his nomination as Secretary. He is 100 percent focused on his job at DOT, including implementing President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.”\n\nSome have talked about Jared Polis, the Colorado governor known for straying from what became Democratic orthodoxy on Covid-19 lockdowns and is facing voters this fall. He has a personal fortune, several operatives noted, and while not enough to self-fund, enough to possibly seed a campaign and feel confident that he wouldn’t have to worry about endangering future job prospects. Polis campaign spokesperson Amber Miller said he’s “not considering anything like that and is focused on running the state of Colorado. If he is re-elected, he plans to serve his entire term as governor of Colorado.”\n\nVice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly said Biden intends to run and that she’d be his running mate, and no one around her or anywhere else believes she’d be able to pull off a campaign that started by breaking with him.\n\nSanders, the Vermont senator who has twice sought the Democratic nod, told CNN last month he would not run against Biden. A spokesperson for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, told CNN that nothing has changed since the Massachusetts Democrat told NBC News that she’s not running for president in 2024 and would be supporting Biden. Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ top political adviser and former campaign manager, said trying to run by appealing to his wing of the party “would be an almost insurmountable climb to get to the top of that mountain, given that Bernie has said he’s going to be supporting Joe Biden if he runs for re-election.”\n\nNew York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a member of Democratic House leadership to come to Congress, told late night host Stephen Colbert at the end of June that she was more focused on preserving American democracy than presidential speculation.\n\nBut she’s also held off on saying she would support Biden for reelection, noting that the President hasn’t said he’s running himself.\n\nAsked by CNN if that left space for her to consider running a youthful, progressive primary against him, a spokesperson for the congresswoman didn’t return requests for comment.\n\nFacing a ‘soft’ primary\n\nCarter-Kennedy isn’t the only historical example on Democrats’ minds. There’s Ronald Reagan’s bruising 1976 primary campaign against Republican President Gerald Ford, which helped pave the way for Carter’s win. Or George H.W. Bush never quite recovering from Pat Buchanan’s 1992 primary campaign, which hurt him with the GOP base heading into the general election.\n\nSeveral senior Democrats, though, cited 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson faced a primary challenge from Eugene McCarthy. Eventually, other candidates jumped in, leading the President to withdraw that March from running for reelection.\n\nOperatives around a number of prospective presidential candidates argue that Biden is already facing a “soft” primary challenge from many directions. The goal, they say, is not to run against Biden, but rather to implicitly reassure the President that Democrats have other good options from the next generation or two, and that he should be comfortable passing the torch to them.\n\nThe other goal is for Democrats to get as ready as they can, on the chance that Biden drags out his reelection decision and then changes his mind so late into the presidential cycle that other candidates are hobbled in launching campaigns and raising money.\n\nFor all the free media attention that would come from declaring a primary campaign against Biden, no one seems to want to go down as blowing a hole in the party for Republicans to march back through – particularly at a moment when apocalyptic feelings are so high. This is about future ambitions, too: Those would-be candidates are aware Democratic voters would never forgive a spoiler.\n\n“It’s about us having his back, not taking back some wing of the party,” Newsom said. “It’s about everybody disabusing ourselves that we have the luxury of division from within.”\n\n“I believe there will be plenty of time post-Donald Trump to debate the future of the Democratic Party,” Khanna said. “For people who have future ambition, they’d much rather be running in a post-Donald Trump and post-Joe Biden world.”\n\nBarack Obama faced a flurry of primary speculation at about this point ahead of his own reelection campaign 12 years ago – to the point that Gallup tested how well he’d do if Hillary Clinton ran against him, and Sanders started poking around in New Hampshire about jumping in against him.\n\nMany of the Democratic leaders, operatives and donors who spoke to CNN about having these conversations insist it’s precisely their fear of Trump beating Biden that is driving them to cast around for possible other options.\n\nNot only is Biden now clocking lower approval ratings than almost every Democratic governor and senator on the ballot in November, but several internal Democratic polls have shown him struggling against Trump in battleground states.\n\nAsked if he understood what was generating the talk of a primary challenge that he thinks may yet emerge, Pritzker paused. First, he reiterated his support of Biden. Then, he repeated his call for more energy and action, without mentioning the President specifically.\n\n“We absolutely need to be stronger and louder in our condemnation of the right wing and what they stand for, and in our defense of the liberties of women and those who are marginalized,” Pritzker said. “There is a palpable change in attitude among Democrats.”\n\nPushing back on the nudging\n\nBefore he launched his 2020 campaign, Biden advisers had bounced around the idea of a one-term pledge as a way to answer questions about his age. Biden nixed the idea, saying he’d never be able to get anything done as an immediate lame duck. He’s made similar comments about what would happen to his power at home and on the world stage if he were to announce he’s not running for reelection.\n\nFew around Biden see that changing. Some even suggested that a primary challenger could inadvertently help him recover from approval numbers stuck below 40% by giving him a foil. If that challenge came from the left and allowed him to argue he hasn’t kowtowed to progressives – as Republicans and some Democratic moderates claim – several operatives said that would be even better.\n\nBut as White House aides regularly point out, no incumbent president has launched a reelection campaign this early, and Biden was the last serious primary contender to announce a 2020 campaign, pushing back on those who urged him to declare earlier.\n\n“There’s nobody who’s more infamous about his inability to make a decision about running for president of the United States,” joked one Democratic member of Congress, who asked not to be named. “And hey, he’s President.”\n\nAnd while four years ago at this same point ahead of the 2020 cycle, the Democratic National Committee was deep into preparations for primaries and debates, no such efforts are underway.\n\nLong before he became famous for managing Howard Dean’s anti-establishment 2004 presidential campaign (in what was an open Democratic field), Joe Trippi was a young aide to Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge, running the floor operation for several states on the floor of the convention that summer.\n\nTrippi said he hopes anyone thinking of a Biden primary realizes it would be “murder-suicide,” and warned his fellow Democrats: “Nothing good can come from it.”\n\n“I learned that lesson the hard way as a young idealistic progressive in the late 70s early 80s,” Trippi said. “What we got for it was eight years of Reagan and four years of H.W. Bush.”", "authors": ["Edward-Isaac Dovere"], "publish_date": "2022/07/11"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/politics/biden-st-croix-vacation/index.html", "title": "The Bidens make an island escape ahead of consequential 2024 ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nPresident Joe Biden this week returns to St. Croix, one of his and first lady Jill Biden’s beloved vacation spots, seeking a final opportunity for rest before what is expected to be a contentious 2023 and reelection run.\n\nAs Biden unwinds in a familiar spot – the first couple have visited the US Virgin Islands for more than a dozen years, vacationing there approximately ten times since the mid-2000s – the work on his path forward intensifies back in a frigid Washington, DC. Advisers are already preparing the president’s annual State of the Union address, typically delivered in late January or early February, viewing the speech as an opportunity to lay down the stakes and themes that Biden could adopt on the campaign trail.\n\nThe first couple arrived in St. Croix on Tuesday, along with family members, a gathering of the tight-knit clan who, according to several people with knowledge of recent conversations who have spoken to CNN, have now pledged support for another White House run by Biden. Senior administration officials once viewed this week’s tropical escape as a crucial juncture that would play a major part in deciding his political future, and – while the president does still plan to mull with his family the pros and cons of mounting a reelection bid – people who have discussed the matter with him lately say the decision is essentially made.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback CNN Exclusive: Pelosi and Schumer say Biden should run for re-election in 2024 02:51 - Source: CNN\n\nClues that Biden was expected in St. Croix were everywhere in the run-up to his arrival: the jumbo C-17 transport planes sitting among the puddle jumpers at the airport; temporary security checkpoints among the bougainvillea along the quiet coastal road; unusually high numbers of visitors from Washington.\n\nEven for a popular tourist destination accustomed to a wave of winter travelers, this week’s presidential visit has maxed out the island’s resources. Rental cars were all taken, and hotels were at capacity, according to residents.\n\nAfter the Bidens skipped the US Virgin Islands tradition the last two years, this trip may have some of the same vibes as one of their more recent vacations. In the early hours of 2019, when Biden was last contemplating a presidential bid, the couple were photographed taking a selfie at Point Udall in St. Croix on New Year’s Day, catching the first sunrise of the new year at the easternmost point under the American Flag, as the popular tourist spot is known.\n\nA decision had been made. Several months later, Biden would announce his candidacy for the presidency.\n\nPrivacy, please\n\nIn 2014, Joe and Jill Biden enjoyed their time on the island so much, they visited St. Croix twice – once to ring in the new year and again for a weekend in March, a quick getaway trip not on the then-vice president’s official schedule.\n\nIn 2015, the couple again passed the week after Christmas there, after deciding he would not run for the White House.\n\nIn 2016, Bidens spent the waning days of his vice presidency relaxing on St. Croix, ahead of Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House.\n\nBiden’s loyalty to the US territory has been the most high-profile of any American politician in recent history. A sitting American president has not visited St. Croix since Harry S. Truman in 1948. Truman arrived by yacht – the USS Williamsburg – and was hosted at an estate owned by the manufacturer of Jeeps.\n\nIn 1997, President Bill Clinton visited neighboring St. Thomas, another of the US Virgin Islands, for his winter vacation, chartering a catamaran with his family and snorkeling with daughter Chelsea.\n\nIn a 2020 statement, Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said of Biden, “We consider him our hometown president.” Asked why the Bidens have picked St. Croix as their island getaway, Vanessa Valdivia, the first lady’s press secretary, told CNN, “Over the years, the president and first lady have frequently traveled to a warmer location the week after Christmas, going to the US Virgin Island several times.”\n\nFor the entirety of his presidency, Biden has skipped out when he can on weekends in Washington, DC, in favor of his longtime family home in Wilmington, Delaware, where residence staff and storied rooms aren’t a thing.\n\nSt. Croix, for the first couple, has provided that sort of intense privacy, plus the warmth and beach that the Bidens favor.\n\nDuring their visits in the years after Biden served as vice president, when his security apparatus dwindled and normalcy found a return to their daily routine, the first couple could be spotted around the island on occasion with virtually no entourage, driving themselves along the flower-lined roads in a rental Toyota sedan.\n\nThe home they leased was modest – only a few bedrooms – and was available at other times of the year for other tourists on vacation rental websites.\n\nYet on Tuesday, law enforcement was busy in the same area making preparations for Biden’s visit, including setting up flood lights and popping up white tents to act as checkpoints along the roadside.\n\nThe Bidens are staying at the home of his friends Bill and Connie Neville in St. Croix, the White House says. The president and first lady have stayed at the home of the tech executive on previous visits to the island.\n\nBeach people\n\nThe first couple are “beach people,” said a family friend familiar with their vacation preferences. Others who know them well said there is little more they enjoy when relaxing than pitching an umbrella on the beach, tossing a towel onto the sand and closing their eyes under a warm sun.\n\nTheir Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, neighbors are now used to being screened by Secret Service agents during beach walks, the telltale signal the president and/or first lady have walked down from their oceanside vacation residence to the beach for a respite closer to the waves.\n\nThe first lady, in particular, finds peace in her books and soaking up the sun. This spring, staff for Jill Biden – on a solo, whirlwind, three-country visit to Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica – made sure to schedule private time for the first lady beside the pool at a resort out of Panama City, so she could lay out like dozens of other vacationers, steps from the waterside.\n\n“They both prefer hot and sunny and humid to wet and snowy and cold,” said another close acquaintance of the Bidens.\n\nFor the first couple, a true respite involves privacy as well, not just sun and warmth. St. Croix has fit the checklist. Locals have spotted the couple in years past at the grocery store, going mostly unnoticed as they shopped for vacation provisions at Seaside Market and Deli. Joe Biden has played rounds of golf at the Buccaneer Resort, a par-70 course described as “challenging, yet very playable” on the property’s website.\n\nThey have attended mass at the white-steepled Holy Cross Catholic Church in the island’s main town Christiansted.\n\nReelection discussions on the island\n\nThe break from Washington comes on the heels of a busy holiday season. Jill Biden – so tasked with dozens of White House celebrations, photo lines, family visits and general hosting duties that she had laryngitis for several days – is on her second week off from her teaching duties at Northern Virginia Community College.\n\nFor Joe Biden, the stakes of getting away are not just about rest and recuperation.\n\nBarring unforeseen events or a sudden change of heart, Biden’s team is laying the groundwork for a reelection announcement in the coming months, putting to rest persistent speculation about whether the 80-year-old president would seek another term.\n\nCNN has reported that Jill Biden is “all in” on the 2024 campaign despite previous concerns about the deep implications of what a second run might mean for her family and her husband. She has, as one White House official told CNN, “zero concerns” about Joe Biden’s schedule and stamina.\n\n“This is, ultimately, a family decision,” Joe Biden said at a news conference last month. “I think everybody wants me to run, but we’re going to have discussions about it.”\n\nAside from the rigors of launching the final political campaign of his career, Biden will face a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, intent on stymieing many of his legislative ambitions. Republican leaders have also vowed to mount investigations into Biden’s administration and his family.\n\nWith his legislative prospects dampened, Biden plans to travel extensively in the new year promoting the accomplishments from his first two years in office. It will be an intense period that could ultimately include a rematch with his 2020 opponent, Trump – and one that will require the full backing of his wife of 45 years, along with the support of his extended family.\n\nIf there is a time to speak up on hesitations, either his own or from his offspring, it would be during this vacation.\n\nWayne Nichols, who leads Alexander Hamilton tours of St. Croix in the character of the founding father, recalled a 2019 encounter he had with Biden, with whom he engaged while the then-not-quite-presidential candidate was walking alone on the east end of the island.\n\nAt the time, Biden was also mulling a daunting campaign. After passing on a bid in 2016 following the death of his son, he was being encouraged by his family to mount a challenge to Trump.\n\nNichols said he stopped Biden to ask if he would run.\n\n“My question to him was, ‘Well, you’re going to run?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m running now.’ And I thought, well, technically you’re walking,” Nichols recalled this week, wondering whether he might again cross paths with Biden.\n\nNichols came across Joe Biden a second time that week in 2019, while out for a walk on the island – Joe Biden up front, Jill Biden walking a few paces behind – when someone in the group told Jill Biden that her husband ought to run for president.\n\n“‘When you get up there, let him know that,’” Nichols said she responded.\n\nAs the Bidens make similar deliberations this year, they won’t be getting around in a rented Toyota and their stops on the island will go less unnoticed.\n\n“I have a feeling this is the place,” Nichols said of Biden often choosing St. Croix as his spot to find stillness for a consequential decision about the future. “Chilling there by the water with the nice weather. They get to talk about it. And I believe he’ll run again, only because I don’t know that he thinks there’s any alternative.”", "authors": ["Kate Bennett Kevin Liptak", "Kate Bennett", "Kevin Liptak"], "publish_date": "2022/12/28"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/16/politics/pete-buttigieg-kamala-harris-midterm-surrogates/index.html", "title": "Buttigieg more in demand than Harris on midterm campaign trail as ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA selfie crowd formed around Pete Buttigieg as he stood in line for coffee at the airport in Washington.\n\nOne woman said she wasn’t going to stop because she wasn’t sure it was him. “It’s me,” the Transportation secretary replied.\n\nAn older man explained to his wife, “That’s Pete BOOT-GUG,” missing the pronunciation and the emphasis.\n\n“He’s the President’s…” the man said, unable to come up with his job title.\n\nAnd yet, it’s Buttigieg – whose only political experience before his failed presidential bid was serving as mayor of South Bend, Indiana – who has become the most requested surrogate on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates in the midterms, people familiar with the requests tell CNN. He’s so in demand that he’s getting more requests than Vice President Kamala Harris, those sources tell CNN – but still fewer than President Joe Biden – as Democrats look to defend their narrow congressional majorities and win governor’s races in November.\n\nWith invitations flowing into the White House and the Democratic National Committee, a relatively low-ranking Cabinet secretary’s staff has to choose between Democratic candidates trying to chase him down. There’s no precedent for this. But there’s also no precedent for the winner of the Iowa caucuses becoming Transportation secretary and proving more agile on camera than the vice president and Biden.\n\nBoth Buttigieg and Harris are widely expected to run to succeed Biden – whether an open race emerges in 2024 or 2028 – and for Democrats looking ahead, the party’s preference for Buttigieg on the trail may be an early indicator of the future direction of the party overall.\n\nTwo dozen operatives and candidates tell CNN they think Buttigieg is benefiting from the desire for a fresh face. Despite a steady uptick since the summer, Biden’s approval ratings are low, and Democrats believe that’s hurting Harris too, who has had her own political struggles – even as much of the administration’s agenda remains broadly popular.\n\n“It’s the association with being a Democrat – but not with Biden or Harris,” said one operative involved in multiple House races, explaining why campaigns have been gravitating to Buttigieg. “In the context of what people have to pick from, he’s very popular.”\n\nIt’s not just about popularity. Some campaign operatives admit, with a note of embarrassment, they have been reluctant to invite Harris out of fear that would bring scrutiny from Republicans who monitor every word she says in ways Buttigieg rarely has to worry about, leaving candidates as collateral damage in an attack (fairly or unfairly) aimed at the first Black woman vice president.\n\nAnd some point to the basics of tight campaign budgets in the final stretch of the midterms: the vice president’s security footprint is large, and when she travels for politics, some of the costs for the Secret Service and local police protection have to be covered by the campaigns that are bringing her in. Even just a few hours on the ground can run tens of thousands of dollars and create traffic and other hold ups.\n\nButtigieg, by contrast, can travel with just a member of the Protective Services Division squished beside him in coach on a commercial flight. Harris only meets people who’ve been wanded by the Secret Service and tested for Covid-19, while Buttigieg can go to political events making his way through the airport in the reverse of his campaign trail style – suit jacket on now, but no tie.\n\nTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, left, listens to Vice President Kamala Harris speak during the US-ASEAN Special Summit at the State Department in Washington, DC, on May 13, 2022. Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images\n\nWhite House political aides “recognize the dexterity and want to dispatch him to places that he uniquely can go and where Democrats don’t traditionally campaign,” said one person familiar with Buttigieg’s plans taking shape.\n\nThat’s in contrast to the vice president’s team, which has been hoping to rebuild her standing by keeping her away from many tight races and focused largely on Black voters, among whom she remains very popular, and on women as she talks about abortion rights, arguing that she can have a large influence indirectly.\n\nAides to a West Coast House Democrat in a very competitive race were debating who was going to be their one big ask in the final stretch. The President? The vice president? The first lady?\n\n“A senior staffer on our campaign says, ‘Throwing in two cents from our finance director – our San Francisco people have expressed that they don’t really care about POTUS, VPOTUS or the first lady. … They just really like Secretary Pete,’” recounted one of the aides.\n\nOne Biden adviser highlighted an intentional deployment of the Cabinet over the final month in races where they think they’ll matter most, urging them to appear in their personal capacities to avoid violating the Hatch Act provisions on not mixing government work with campaigning. Only a few secretaries beyond Buttigieg, though, have generated much interest: Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge. Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, rarely much of a political presence, will also hit the trail soon for a few events.\n\nBut of those, Buttigieg is the only one who shows up in early presidential polls. He’s the one who was invited to address House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s retreat for top donors in Napa Valley in August. He’s the one who’s already headlined an event for Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, seen as perhaps the most endangered Democrat in the Senate, and for Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor.\n\nA return to New Hampshire with ‘high hopes’\n\nButtigieg, who came in a close second in the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic primary, was state party officials’ top choice to headline their big fall fundraising dinner, according to party officials, even before a poll that came out in late July showing him leading the field for a theoretical New Hampshire primary, essentially tied with Biden but edging out Harris by 11 percentage points.\n\nTo the surprise of some in New Hampshire, the White House political office greenlit the invitation not long after. Tickets sold out.\n\nThe morning of the New Hampshire speech, state Rep. Matt Wilhelm proudly tweeted a photo of a “BOOT EDGE EDGE” mug he had left over from when he’d endorsed and volunteered on his presidential campaign two years ago.\n\n“When I was asked by the party, ‘Who do we want as a surrogate?’ not only was I supportive of Pete, because yeah, I want him back here, but I think that he’s the kind of messenger that we want on the ground to get people fired up ahead of the midterms,” Wilhelm said. He remains very popular in the state, added Rep. Annie Kuster, who’d endorsed him in 2020 and had him headline a fundraiser for her campaign this year.\n\nThe synth-horn notes of “High Hopes,” his old campaign anthem, played as Buttigieg took the stage. He hadn’t done a big political speech in two years. And while rattling off Biden administration accomplishments – like putting Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court and signing bipartisan legislation providing health care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits – he had some rusty moments working out new lines.\n\n“Most Americans don’t need culture wars every time there’s a gay Muppet or Black mermaid on TV – we need funding for our public schools,” he said in one riff.\n\nBut it all built to a very Buttigieg centerpiece, intended to generate knowing smirks more than laughs, and metered out to invite the standing ovation he got.\n\n“Teddy Roosevelt had the square deal. FDR had the New Deal. So I’m going to say this body of defining achievements, this incredibly productive year, amounts to such a big deal that we ought to just call it The Big Deal,” Buttigieg said, putting that up against Republicans’ “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.\n\n“And if, in the tradition of our President, you like to insert an extra adjective in there, feel free.”\n\nHe ended with a passage that could one day drop right into a political convention speech, soaring past Biden or the infrastructure law or any more Trump mentions, to an aspirational line about building a “truly representative, fully inclusive, multi-racial, democratic republic like the one that has been under constant construction here on US soil for the last 200 years.”\n\n“This is somebody who really believes in the promise of democracy and in delivering results,” Sen. Maggie Hassan said after the final standing ovation for Buttigieg. “And we have seen him delivering results. And his pragmatic approach really means a lot to people here.” Hassan, who is facing a competitive reelection after winning her first term by only 1,017 votes, also had Buttigieg headline a fundraiser for her in Washington earlier this summer.\n\n‘You’ve got to be in Joe Biden’s house’\n\nTwo weeks later, on another Saturday night, Harris was the featured speaker at the Texas Democrats’ big dinner in Austin. Every statewide Democratic candidate skipped, except the nominee for state railroad commissioner. Tickets were not as hard to get, though the state chair said it was their highest grossing event ever, and some took note that several state legislators from other parts of the state specifically flew in to be there.\n\nHarris’ stump speeches tend to be more grounded and direct, much like she is herself.\n\nShe rooted her Austin speech in home turf stories about former Rep. Barbara Jordan and Lyndon Johnson, leading an enthusiastic call and response. She built up to a line she has often used, paraphrasing, she recalled, “the words of a great American leader, Coretta Scott King, who said: The struggle for justice is a never-ending process. And freedom is never really won; you earn it, and you win it in each and every generation.”\n\nEven though the White House political office lets Harris’ team pick her spots and write her speeches, she can’t stray far. When she talks up Biden’s record, she has to be subsumed to the President. She can’t put her own spin on it, aside from occasional moments, such as two days after Biden rolled out his marijuana policy changes without her in the frame, when she said, “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”\n\nHarris discusses reproductive rights at the LBJ Presidential Library on October 8, 2022, in Austin, Texas. Rick Kern/Getty Images\n\n“There’s a house that Joe Biden built – it’s got a bunch of rooms, and as vice president you can choose which of the rooms you sit in. But you’ve got to be in Joe Biden’s house,” a Harris adviser said recently, trying to come up with a metaphor to describe the dynamics within the administration.\n\nThat reality – in addition to the different political landscapes in the two states – helps explains the different responses Buttigieg and Harris received in New Hampshire and Texas.\n\n“The administration does not have a good brand in Texas – and that’s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris,” said one of the attendees at the Austin event who asked not to be named.\n\nBy contrast, being part of the administration has benefits for Buttigieg – without some of the burdens Harris faces. Since he’s doling out federal dollars in his official capacity, politicians like to be seen with him. At the dinner in New Hampshire, nearly every speaker made a joke about how they hoped he’d come back with another big check for an infrastructure project.\n\nThis past Wednesday in South Carolina, House Majority Whip Rep. Jim Clyburn – a key Biden supporter, and a promoter of Harris – spent the day with the secretary, going around with him to multiple events.\n\nBut he said he had been eager to have Harris appear at the South Carolina Democratic Party dinner in June, and noted that she was in the critical early primary state again at his alma mater just a few weeks ago.\n\n“When you’re bringing her in, there’s a cost factor that goes far beyond what most Democratic Party folks can afford,” Clyburn said, not the expense of Air Force 2. “When we were bringing her to South Carolina, it was a real big problem. In fact, yours truly had to step up to help the party be able to afford it.”\n\nThat speech, to an enthusiastic room in Columbia, was warmly received. Clyburn called the money he’d kicked in from his own campaign account “money well spent.”\n\nDucking presidential talk\n\nButtigieg is both self-aware enough to know that any move suggesting presidential thinking would almost certainly leak and self-confident enough to believe he doesn’t need to start laying the groundwork for a campaign now.\n\nPeople in Buttigieg’s orbit and the secretary himself try to downplay any presidential speculation, and any suggestion of tension between the once and possible future rivals. People in Harris’ orbit say that they don’t spend much time thinking about the Transportation secretary, but when they do, they’re often left feeling he gets a pass on moves that for her would be seen as machinations.\n\n“The future is Joe Biden is going to run for reelection in 2024 – so what’s the point of thinking beyond that?” said one Buttigieg adviser.\n\nIn the airport coffee line, though, a woman shrugged as her husband tried to explain who Buttigieg was after mispronouncing his name.\n\n“I would not have known him if he bought my coffee,” she said.\n\nThat’s the downside for Buttigieg. Not far away, a stand was selling Harris bobbleheads and a T-shirt with her face on it.\n\nCLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the demand for tickets for Harris’ Austin event, which was the highest grossing event ever for the state party, according to its chair.", "authors": ["Edward-Isaac Dovere"], "publish_date": "2022/10/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/25/biden-reelection-bid-2024-campaign/11728313002/", "title": "Biden 2024: President announces he's running for reelection", "text": "WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced his 2024 reelection campaign in a video released Tuesday morning, telling Americans \"let's finish this job\" as he seeks a second term in the White House.\n\nBiden, making official a campaign that has long been expected, said the country remains in a \"battle for the soul of America,\" doubling down on the central message of his campaign four years ago. He said the question facing the nation is \"whether, in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer.\"\n\n\"This is not a time to be complacent,\" Biden said in the three-minute video. \"That's why I'm running for reelection. Because I know America. I know we're good and decent people. I know we're still a country that believes in honesty and respect and treating each other with dignity.\"\n\nFor months, Biden has said that he intends to run for a second term. But he held off making a formal announcement. He timed his video with the four-year anniversary of his entry into the 2020 presidential campaign.\n\nStay in the conversation on politics: Sign up for the OnPolitics newsletter\n\nHis first public remarks after announcing his candidacy came Tuesday to a group of union workers who greeted him with chants of \"let's go, Joe!\" and \"four more years!\"\n\n\"I make no apologies for being labeled the most pro-union president American history – I'm proud of it,\" Biden told members of North America's Building Trades Unions at their legislative conference in Washington.\n\nThough not a campaign event, Biden took several swipes at Republicans and promoted his administration's efforts to create manufacturing jobs and grow the economy. \"We now have to finish the job,\" he said, echoing the message in his campaign video.\n\nBiden rails on 'MAGA extremists' as he kicks off campaign\n\nBiden lacks a formidable Democratic challenger for the party's nomination. Former President Donald Trump has secured frontrunner status in the Republican presidential primary, setting up a potential rematch of 2020. Although Biden did not mention Trump by name, the video includes images of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and an overt reference to Trump's hold on the Republican Party.\n\n\"Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy,\" Biden said. \"Dictating what health care decisions women can make. Banning books. And telling people who they can love.\"\n\nBiden's move comes as he remains hampered by low approval ratings in the low 40s and concerns about the economy. Polls continue to show the majority of Democrats prefer someone else as their nominee. Biden, 80, is already the oldest-serving president, and he would be 86 when he finishes a second term if he wins reelection.\n\nBiden is set to address the North America's Building Trades Unions at 12:30 p.m. ET at the Washington Hilton hotel, giving him an audience of loyal supporters to deliver his first speech as a 2024 candidate.\n\nVice President Kamala Harris, who is running with Biden again, will be the featured guest at a reproductive rights rally on Howard University's campus in Washington, D.C., later in the day.\n\n\"Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy, stand up for our personal freedoms, and stand up for our right to vote and our civil rights,\" Biden said. \"This is our moment.\"\n\nWho is leading the campaign?\n\nThe Biden campaign unveiled a leadership team that includes several close allies as campaign national co-chairs: Rep. Lisa Blunt-Rochester, D-Del., Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.\n\nBiden named Julie Chávez Rodriguez his campaign manager. Chávez Rodriguez has served as senior advisor to the president and White House director of intergovernmental affairs. Chávez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of civil rights leader Cesar Chávez, served as deputy campaign manager for Biden's 2020 campaign.\n\nQuentin Fulks, a Democratic strategist who recently served as campaign manger for Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock's 2022 campaign, will serve as deputy campaign manager.\n\nWhy is Biden announcing now?\n\nBiden’s announcement sets the stage for a possible rematch with Trump, whom he defeated in 2020. Trump has received a string of Republican congressional endorsements in recent days including Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.\n\nThough Biden already has made his intentions known, he has been in no hurry to formally announce his plans. Incumbents tend to hold off their reelection announcements as long as possible. Biden has felt no need to speed up his announcement since no viable Democrat challengers have emerged so far.\n\nBesides the symmetry with his 2020 run, Biden’s decision to the launch the campaign now is largely driven by a desire to start fundraising: His last campaign raised more than $1 billion, and he’ll need to marshal even more this time around. The move will also allow his campaign to begin airing television ads.\n\nMore:Biden steers clear of talking about possible Trump indictment ahead of 2024 campaign\n\nWhat do the polls say?\n\nBiden enters the 2024 race with polls showing that voters are less than enthusiastic about the prospects of either him or Trump returning to the White House.\n\nOnly half of Democrats, or 47%, said in a poll released last week that Biden should run again in 2024. The good news: 81% said they’d probably vote for him in the general election if he’s the nominee, according to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released late last week.\n\nTrump, 76, fared only slightly better: 44% of Republicans said they don’t want him to run for reelection.\n\nA separate USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll released Sunday found that Biden’s standing among those who backed him in 2020 is wide but shallow. While 85% of his 2020 supporters approve of the job he’s doing as president, 43% reported being less excited about supporting him next time.\n\nMore:As Biden prepares 2024 reelection run, Democrats worry blue-collar voters are slipping away\n\nWho are the other Democrats running?\n\nWhile Democrats may not be overly enthusiastic about another Biden campaign, no serious challenger has stepped forward.\n\nAttorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., known mostly as the champion of a debunked conspiracy theory blaming childhood vaccines for autism, announced last week that he’s running.\n\nKennedy enters the race with the supports with the support of 14% of voters who backed Biden in 2020, an exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds.\n\nThe findings underscore Biden's potential vulnerability to a more mainstream challenger for the Democratic nomination, although none has emerged so far, or to a third-party candidate in the general election.\n\nSelf-help author Marianne Williamson, a quixotic candidate for the nomination in 2020, also plans another longshot bid in 2024.\n\nMichael Collins and Joey Garrison cover the White House. Follow Collins on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS and Garrison @joeygarrison.\n\nContributing: Susan Page, Rachel Looker, Francesca Chambers and The Associated Press.\n\nMore:President Biden leads charge to protect LGBTQ rights as GOP legislates culture wars ahead of 2024", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/04/25"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/politics/biden-trump-2024-primaries-elections-desantis/index.html", "title": "How the midterms changed the 2024 primaries for Biden and Trump", "text": "CNN —\n\nMuch of the conversation in the leadup to the midterms revolved around how Republicans were clamoring for former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, while Democrats wanted President Joe Biden to stay away. A little over a month after the election, however, the picture looks quite different.\n\nBiden is in his best position in a while to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. Trump, on the other hand, finds his position among Republicans not only weakened by the midterm results, but he actually trails in a number of polls to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a potential GOP primary.\n\nPerhaps the best indication of Biden’s strength is that he has no obvious potential 2024 primary opponent at this point. Now, as an incumbent, he was unlikely to ever have a slew of challengers. You could have imagined, though, that at least one major Democrat would have challenged Biden had the Democrats done poorly in the midterms.\n\nInstead, the opposite has happened. Major potential foes such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom have said explicitly that they will not run against Biden. Almost every power player in the Democratic Party has said they will back Biden, if he decides to run again.\n\nThe same cannot be said for Trump. Even after he declared his run for the presidency last month, just one senator has endorsed his bid for another term. Potential Republican challengers are not bowing out of the 2024 primary.\n\nA big reason for this is that Trump’s poll numbers look weak. I’m not just talking about his polling against other Republicans. I’m talking about how Republican voters see him.\n\nOne of Trump’s biggest attributes has been that he has convinced his supporters that he is a winner. Three years ago, polls showed about 80% of Republicans believed he was the party’s best chance to beat the Democratic nominee for president. As recently as late 2021, a plurality of Republicans did so.\n\nA Marist College poll taken after the midterms found that percentage had dropped to 35%, while the percentage of Republicans who thought Trump would not be the strongest candidate jumped to 54%. There can be little doubt that’s at least partially a response to Trump-backed candidates doing poorly in swing states during the midterms.\n\nBase popularity\n\nBut it’s not just that fewer Republicans now think that Trump is their best bet in a general election. They’re also less inclined to say they like him. His favorable rating among Republicans in a Quinnipiac University poll in October 2021 stood at 86%. The same poll this month had Trump’s favorable rating at 71% among Republicans.\n\nOur CNN/SSRS poll out earlier this month found DeSantis with a higher favorable rating than Trump among Republicans, which indicates that the former president is no longer the most liked candidate within his party\n\nThis marks another big difference between Biden and Trump: Biden’s trendline for popularity among his base is going in the right direction, and he’s the most popular politician within the Democratic Party. The aforementioned CNN poll put Biden’s favorable rating well into the 80s and well ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris and Newsom among Democrats.\n\nBiden’s job approval rating with Democrats came in at 86% in the Quinnipiac poll. That’s a jump from 79% in Quinnipiac’s poll taken before the election. Indeed, nearly every major poll has Biden’s approval rating above 80% among Democrats. That’s important because every example of a president facing a major intraparty challenge when running for reelection has come when his approval rating was lower than 70% within his own party.\n\nPrimary choices\n\nI should note that there are polls (such as the CNN survey) that show more Democrats than not want someone other than Biden to be their the Democratic nominee.\n\nEven here, though, Biden’s got two bits of positive news. First, his numbers, unlike Trump’s, are on the upswing. Second, the vast majority of Democrats could not name a specific candidate besides Biden whom they would want as their nominee.\n\nThe rare 2024 polls that match Biden against other named Democrats (such as Harris, who is very unlikely to run against him) put him up by north of 15 points. For comparison, Barack Obama led Hillary Clinton by 15 points in a late-2010 poll of a hypothetical 2012 Democratic primary. Jimmy Carter was trailing Ted Kennedy in late 1978 polling of a hypothetical 1980 primary.\n\nGiven the polls, it’s not too surprising that Biden, like Obama and unlike Carter, doesn’t seem to have any powerful Democrat willing to challenge him for his party’s nomination.\n\nTrump’s numbers against other Republicans are far weaker and, again, heading in the wrong direction. When you put Trump against DeSantis and other named candidates, Trump’s onetime 40-point advantage has been slimmed to low double-digits over DeSantis.\n\nOther polling suggests that these findings may understate Trump’s weakness. There isn’t a single poll of a two-way matchup between Trump and DeSantis (that meets CNN’s standards for publication) that has Trump ahead. Marquette University Law School’s poll had Trump down 20 points to the Florida governor a few weeks ago.\n\nPerhaps most interestingly, a Monmouth University poll released on Friday asked Republicans in an open-ended question (i.e., the poll didn’t name any candidates) who they wanted to be their 2024 nominee. Only 26% of respondents picked Trump. He trailed DeSantis, who came in at 39%.\n\nThis indicates that Trump’s biggest strength at this point among Republicans is name recognition – something other Republicans will get a lot more of as the primary season heats up.\n\nBiden probably won’t need to worry much about Democrat challengers getting too much oxygen for a simple reason: Nobody who can truly threaten him for the 2024 nomination looks like they’re going to run at this point.", "authors": ["Harry Enten"], "publish_date": "2022/12/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/politics/spending-bill-congress-omnibus/index.html", "title": "Here's what's in the $1.7 trillion federal omnibus spending law | CNN ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: This story originally ran December 20. It has been updated to reflect the current status of the legislation.\n\nCNN —\n\nPresident Joe Biden signed into law a $1.7 trillion yearlong federal government spending package on Thursday, after the House and Senate passed it last week.\n\nThe legislation includes $772.5 billion for nondefense discretionary programs and $858 billion in defense funding. That represents an increase in spending in both areas for fiscal year 2023.\n\nThe sweeping package includes roughly $45 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine and NATO allies, an overhaul of the electoral vote-counting law, protections for pregnant workers, an enhancement to retirement savings rules and a TikTok ban on federal devices.\n\nIt also provides a boost in spending for disaster aid, college access, child care, mental health and food assistance, more support for the military and veterans and additional funds for the US Capitol Police. And the legislation contains several major Medicaid provisions, particularly one that could disenroll up to 19 million people from the nation’s health insurance program for low-income Americans.\n\nHowever, the law, which runs more than 4,000 pages, left out several measures that some lawmakers had fought to include. An expansion of the child tax credit, as well as multiple other corporate and individual tax breaks, did not make it into the final bill. Neither did legislation to allow cannabis companies to bank their cash reserves – known as the Safe Banking Act – or a bill to help Afghan evacuees in the US gain lawful permanent residency. And the spending package did not include a White House request for roughly $10 billion in additional funding for Covid-19 response.\n\nThe spending law, which will keep the government operating through September, the end of the fiscal year, is the product of lengthy negotiations between top congressional Democrats and Republicans.\n\nCongress originally passed a continuing resolution on September 30 to temporarily fund the government in fiscal year 2023, which began October 1.\n\nHere’s what’s in the law:\n\nMore aid for Ukraine: The spending law provides roughly $45 billion to help support Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against Russia’s attack.\n\nAbout $9 billion of the funding will go to Ukraine’s military to pay for a variety of things including training, weapons, logistics support and salaries. Nearly $12 billion will be used to replenish US stocks of equipment sent to Ukraine through presidential drawdown authority.\n\nAlso, the law provides $13 billion for economic support to the Ukrainian government. Other funds address humanitarian and infrastructure needs, as well as support European Command operations.\n\nEmergency disaster assistance: The law provides more than $38 billion in emergency funding to help Americans in the west and southeast affected by recent natural disasters, including tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding and wildfires. It will aid farmers, provide economic development assistance for communities, repair and reconstruct federal facilities and direct money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, among other initiatives.\n\nOverhaul of the electoral vote-counting law: A provision in the legislation aims at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, the first legislative response to the US Capitol insurrection and then-President Donald Trump’s campaign to stay in power despite his loss in 2020.\n\nThe changes overhaul the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which Trump tried to use to overturn the 2020 election.\n\nThe legislation clarifies the vice president’s role while overseeing the certification of the electoral result to be completely ceremonial. It also creates a set of stipulations designed to make it harder for there to be any confusion over the accurate slate of electors from each state.\n\nFunding for January 6 attack prosecutions: The law provides $2.6 billion for US Attorneys, which includes funding efforts “to further support prosecutions related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol and domestic terrorism cases,” according to a fact sheet from the House Appropriations Committee.\n\nThe package also gives $11.3 billion to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including for efforts to investigate extremist violence and domestic terrorism.\n\nThe funding measures are part of nearly $39 billion for the Justice Department.\n\nRetirement savings enhancements: The law contains new retirement rules that could make it easier for Americans to accumulate retirement savings – and less costly to withdraw them. Among other things, the provisions will allow penalty-free withdrawals for some emergency expenses, let employers offer matching retirement contributions for a worker’s student loan payments and increase how much older workers may save in employer retirement plans.\n\nTikTok ban from federal devices: The legislation bans TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form video app, from federal government devices.\n\nSome lawmakers have raised bipartisan concerns that China’s national security laws could force TikTok – or its parent, ByteDance – to hand over the personal data of its US users. Recently, a wave of states led by Republican governors have introduced state-level restrictions on the use of TikTok on government-owned devices.\n\nProtections for pregnant workers: The law provides pregnant workers with workplace accommodations – such as additional bathroom breaks, stools or relief from heavy lifting duties – needed for healthy pregnancies. It will prevent them from being forced to take leave or losing their jobs, as well as bar employers from denying employment opportunities to women based on their need for reasonable accommodations due to childbirth or related medical conditions. Also, another provision in the package guarantees workplace accommodations – particularly time to pump – for more nursing workers.\n\nChanges to Medicaid and other health care programs: The law phases out the requirement that prevented states from disenrolling Medicaid recipients as long as the national public health emergency was in effect in exchange for an enhanced federal match. This continuous coverage measure was enacted as part of a Covid-19 relief package passed in March 2020 and has led to a record 90 million Medicaid enrollees, many of whom may no longer meet the income requirements to qualify.\n\nUnder the law, states will be able to start evaluating Medicaid enrollees’ eligibility and terminating their coverage as of April 1. The redetermination process will take place over at least 12 months. Also, the enhanced federal Medicaid funding will phase down through December 31, 2023, though the states will have to meet certain conditions during that period.\n\nUp to 19 million people could lose their Medicaid benefits, according to estimates, though many would be eligible for other coverage.\n\nAlso, under a provision in the law, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, will offer 12 months of continuous coverage for children. This will allow the 40 million children on Medicaid and CHIP to have uninterrupted access to health care throughout the year.\n\nIn addition, the law makes permanent the option for states to offer 12 months of postpartum coverage for low-income mothers through Medicaid, rather than just 60 days. More than two dozen states, plus the District of Columbia, have implemented the measure, which was available on a temporary basis through the American Rescue Plan, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Another seven states are planning to implement the option.\n\nPlus, the package provides more money for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. The funds are intended to speed the development of new therapies, diagnostics and preventive measures, beef up public health activities and strengthen the nation’s biosecurity by accelerating development of medical countermeasures for pandemic threats and fortifying stockpiles and supply chains for drugs, masks and other supplies.\n\nIncreased support for the military and veterans: The package funds a 4.6% pay raise for troops and a 22.4% increase in support for Veteran Administration medical care, which provides health services for 7.3 million veterans.\n\nIt includes nearly $53 billion to address higher inflation and $2.7 billion – a 25% increase – to support critical services and housing assistance for veterans and their families.\n\nThe law also allocates $5 billion for the Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund, which provides additional funding to implement the landmark PACT Act that expands eligibility for health care services and benefits to veterans with conditions related to toxic exposure during their service.\n\nBeefing up nutrition assistance: The legislation establishes a permanent nationwide Summer EBT program, starting in the summer of 2024, according to Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger advocacy group. It will provide families whose children are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals with a $40 grocery benefit per child per month, indexed to inflation.\n\nIt also changes the rules governing summer meals programs in rural areas. Children will be able to take home or receive delivery of up to 10 days’ worth of meals, rather than have to consume the food at a specific site and time.\n\nThe law also helps families who have had their food stamp benefits stolen since October 1 through what’s known as “SNAP skimming.” It provides them with retroactive federal reimbursement of the funds, which criminals steal by attaching devices to point-of-sale machines or PIN pads to get card numbers and other information from electronic benefits transfer cards.\n\nHigher maximum Pell grant awards: The law increases the maximum Pell grant award by $500 to $7,395 for the coming school year. This marks the largest boost since the 2009-2010 school year. About 7 million students, many from lower-income families, receive Pell grants every year to help them afford college.\n\nHelp to pay utility bills: The package provides $5 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Combined with the $1 billion contained in the earlier continuing resolution, this is the largest regular appropriation for the program, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. Home heating and cooling costs – and the applications for federal aid in paying the bills – have soared this year.\n\nAdditional funding for the US Capitol Police: The law provides an additional $132 million for the Capitol Police for a total of nearly $735 million. It will allow the department to hire up to 137 sworn officers and 123 support and civilian personnel, bringing the force to a projected level of 2,126 sworn officers and 567 civilians.\n\nIt also gives $2 million to provide off-campus security for lawmakers in response to evolving and growing threats.\n\nMore money for child care: The legislation provides $8 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a 30% increase in funding. The grant gives financial assistance to low-income families to afford child care.\n\nAlso, Head Start will receive nearly $12 billion, an 8.6% boost. The program helps young children from low-income families prepare for school.\n\nMore resources for children’s mental health and for substance abuse: The law provides more funds to increase access to mental health services for children and schools. It also will invest more money to address the opioid epidemic and substance use disorder.\n\nInvestments in homelessness prevention and affordable housing: The legislation provides $3.6 billion for homeless assistance grants, a 13% increase. It will serve more than 1 million people experiencing homelessness.\n\nThe package also funnels nearly $6.4 billion to the Community Development Block Grant formula program and related local economic and community development projects that benefit low- and moderate income areas and people, an increase of almost $1.6 billion.\n\nPlus, it provides $1.5 billion for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which will lead to the construction of nearly 10,000 new rental and homebuyer units and maintain the record investment from the last fiscal year.\n\nMore support for the environment: The package provides an additional $576 million for the Environmental Protection Agency, bringing its funding up to $10.1 billion. It increases support for enforcement and compliance, as well as clean air, water and toxic chemical programs, after years of flat funding.\n\nIt also boosts funding for the National Park Service by 6.4%, restoring 500 of the 3,000 staff positions lost over the past decade. This is intended to help the agency handle substantial increases in visitation.\n\nPlus, the legislation provides an additional 14% in funding for wildland firefighting.\n\nWhat’s not in the law\n\nEnhanced child tax credit: A coalition of Democratic lawmakers and consumer advocates pushed hard to extend at least one provision of the enhanced child tax credit, which was in effect last year thanks to the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Their priority was to make the credit more refundable so more of the lowest-income families can qualify. Nearly 19 million kids won’t receive the full $2,000 benefit this year because their parents earn too little, according to a Tax Policy Center estimate.\n\nNew cannabis banking rules: Lawmakers considered including a provision in the spending bill that would make it easier for licensed cannabis businesses to accept credit cards – but it was left out of the legislation. Known as the Safe Banking Act, which previously passed the House, the provision would prohibit federal regulators from taking punitive measures against banks for providing services to legitimate cannabis businesses.\n\nEven though 47 states have legalized some form of marijuana, cannabis remains illegal on the federal level. That means financial institutions providing banking services to cannabis businesses are subject to criminal prosecution – leaving many legal growers and sellers locked out of the banking system.\n\nCovid-19 response: Lawmakers did not include a White House request for an additional $10 billion in funding for Covid-19, which would have been aimed at continued access to and development of vaccines and therapeutics, among other things. Earlier in the year, the Biden administration unsuccessfully pushed for $22.5 billion in extra funds.\n\nFBI headquarters: There was also no final resolution on where the new FBI headquarters will be located, a major point of contention as lawmakers from Maryland – namely House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer – pushed to bring the law enforcement agency into their state. In a deal worked through by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the General Services Administration would be required to conduct “separate and detailed consultations” with Maryland and Virginia representatives about potential sites in each of the states, according to a Senate Democratic aide.\n\nAfghan Adjustment Act: Also not included in the spending bill was the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have helped Afghan allies who run the risk of deportation from the US. It would have given those evacuees a pathway to lawful permanent residency before their temporary status, known as humanitarian parole, expires in 2023. Many congressional Republicans raised concerns about vetting and other issues, but the legislation’s supporters, including former US military leaders, argued those worries have been addressed.\n\nLegislation to extend and expand Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans who worked with the US during the war there and want to come to America is included in the spending bill.", "authors": ["Tami Luhby Katie Lobosco", "Tami Luhby", "Katie Lobosco"], "publish_date": "2022/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/28/politics/hillary-clinton-2024/index.html", "title": "The whispers of Hillary Clinton 2024 have started | CNN Politics", "text": "CNN —\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s monumental decision to overturn Roe v Wade, conservative writer John Ellis took to the internet to make a provocative case: It was time for Hillary Clinton to make a(nother) political comeback.\n\n“Now is her moment,” he wrote. “The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade creates the opening for Hillary Clinton to get out of stealth mode and start down the path toward declaring her candidacy for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.”\n\nEllis’ argument is centered on the ideas that 1) President Joe Biden, who will be 82 shortly after the 2024 election, is simply too old to run again (Ellis is far from the only person making that case) and 2) The Democratic bench is not terribly strong\n\nHe’s not the only person eyeing a Clinton re-emergence.\n\nWriting in The Hill newspaper, Democratic pundit Juan Williams makes the case that Clinton should become a major figure on the campaign trail this year.\n\n“Clinton is exactly the right person to put steel in the Democrats’ spine and bring attention to the reality that ‘ultra-MAGA’ Republicans, as President Biden calls them, are tearing apart the nation,” Williams writes, adding: “Keep talking and talk louder, Hillary!”\n\nSo, just how far-fetched is a Clinton candidacy?\n\nWell, start here: That a conservative writer is leading the charge – at least at the moment – for another presidential bid by Clinton should be looked at with some healthy skepticism. No candidate unites the Republican party – even with Donald Trump as the GOP’s likely nominee – like Clinton does. So, this may be a bit of wishful thinking by Ellis. Keep that in mind.\n\nThen go to this: Biden is giving every indication that, even at his advance age, he is planning to run again. The New York Times posted a piece Monday night headlined “Biden Irked by Democrats Who Won’t Take ‘Yes’ for an Answer on 2024” that included these lines:\n\n“Facing intensifying skepticism about his capacity to run for re-election when he will be nearly 82, the president and his top aides have been stung by the questions about his plans, irritated at what they see as a lack of respect from their party and the press, and determined to tamp down suggestions that he’s effectively a lame duck a year and a half into his administration.”\n\nAnd finish here: Clinton has been pretty close to Shermanesque in her denials about even considering another bid.\n\n“No, out of the question,” Clinton said of another presidential candidacy in an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month. “First of all, I expect Biden to run. He certainly intends to run. It would be very disruptive to challenge that.”\n\nIn an interview with CBS Tuesday morning, Clinton said she couldn’t “imagine” running again. Host Gayle King rightly noted that Clinton’s answer wasn’t a definitive “no.”\n\nSo, if you are a betting person – and, of course, there are odds on Hillary running – the smart gamble is that Clinton doesn’t run again.\n\nWith all of that said, we know that circumstances change. And that changed circumstances can lead to changed minds.\n\nWhile I find it utterly implausible that Clinton would run against Biden in a primary in 2024, I also think that an open nomination – if Biden takes a pass on running – would be something that would be hard for Clinton to not at least look at. That’s not to say she would run. It’s only to say that her name would get bandied about if the seat was open. That’s a lock.\n\nThen there’s the Roe decision to consider. Clinton’s comments about not running again came before Roe was decided. As someone who has fought for women’s rights throughout her career as first lady, US senator and secretary of state, might the Supreme Court’s ruling have changed her calculus somewhat as she looks to her own future?\n\nAgain, the chances are very slim that Clinton runs again. But they aren’t zero.", "authors": ["Chris Cillizza"], "publish_date": "2022/06/28"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_6", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2024/01/09/south-korea-dog-meat-ban-passes/72159563007/", "title": "Dog meat ban in South Korea, animal activists calling it tipping point", "text": "Lawmakers in South Korea on Tuesday passed a watershed ban on the production and sale of dog meat for human consumption, a centuries-old practice animal rights activists in the country have tried to eradicate for generations.\n\nSouth Korea's parliament voted 208-0 in favor of the ban, which will go into effect in 2027, after a three-year transition period allowing dog farmers and restaurants to repurpose or close their businesses.\n\nAnimal rights activists celebrated the ban Tuesday, which comes after several decades of organized, vocal opposition to the practice of eating dog meat, such as in stews. South Korea joins a growing list of places that have passed similar bans, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Thailand and Singapore, and individual cities across China, Indonesia and the Siem Reap province in Cambodia, according to Humane Society International.\n\nThe practice of eating dog meat, which is connected to traditional Korean medicine, hasn't been popular among younger South Koreans for generations, said David Fields, a professor and director for the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.\n\n\"I've never met a young Korean my age who engaged in this practice,\" said Fields, 40, noting only South Koreans of his parents' or grandparents' generation still partake in it.\n\nTraditional Korean medicine taught many older South Koreans to eat dog meat on the hottest days of the summer to stay cool, said Fields, who said he has discussed the topic of eating dog meat with Koreans while he lived in the country on and off for four years. Part of the reason the practice has lost popularity could also be because many more people have now have air conditioning, he said.\n\nHumane Society International's executive director for Korea applauded South Korea's ban Tuesday, calling the ban \"history in the making.\"\n\n\"We reached a tipping point where most Korean citizens reject eating dogs and want to see this suffering consigned to the history books,\" HSI/Korea executive director JungAh Chae said in a statement.\n\nFields also said the decision by South Korean lawmakers reflects the country's desire to be in-step with international norms and the values of the majority of its citizens.\n\n\"It's an example of how Korea is really willing to make fundamental changes, even to cultural institutions that are hundreds of years old, to keep with the dictates of a modern society,\" Fields said.\n\nRecent surveys show more than half of South Koreans want dog meat banned and a majority no longer eat it, the Associated Press reported. A 2023 Nielsen Korea opinion poll shows that 86% of South Koreans won’t eat dog meat in the future and 57% support a ban, HSI/Korea said in a statement Tuesday.\n\nAnimal rights activists long decried poor conditions at dog farms\n\nIn the bill, South Korean lawmakers said the legislation is meant to strengthen animal rights in the country.\n\n“This law is aimed at contributing to realizing the values of animal rights, which pursue respect for life and a harmonious co-existence between humans and animals,” the legislation says.\n\nFor years, animal rights activists in South Korea have pointed to examples of inhumane treatment of dogs at farms across the country.\n\nIn 2018, while covering the Winter Olympics in South Korea, USA TODAY reporters found grim, inhumane conditions at a handful of dog farms not far from some Olympic stadiums. Hundreds of dogs were packed into filthy cages and most were emaciated, USA TODAY reported.\n\nMost farms in South Korea raise about 500 dogs, but one visited by the Associated Press in July had about 7,000, the news wire service reported. For years, South Korea has also been the only country with industrial-scale dog farms, according to the Associated Press.\n\nDogs are also eaten in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, North Korea and in some African countries.\n\nIt's important to remember that someone's food choices are highly influenced by where they grew up and their nationality, said Shigeru Osuka, a professor of Asian and Japanese studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.\n\nCulturally, the very intimate practice of what one eats and why falls \"between\" national norms and multicultural or multinational norms, he said.\n\n\"Korea’s ban on dog meat is a natural process that Korea wants to meet the so-called international standard,\" Osuka said. \"Eventually China and Vietnam will follow the international standard, which emphasizes on protecting animals.\"\n\nPeople in the U.S. used to eat whale meat, he noted, until whale-hunting ended in the 20th century and the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986.\n\nSouth Korea dog meat ban offers compensation to dog farmers\n\nSouth Korea's ban would make slaughtering, breeding and selling dog meat for human consumption illegal starting in 2027 and punishable by two to three years in prison. It doesn’t provide any penalties for eating dog meat.\n\nThe bill offers assistance to dog farmers and others in the industry in shutting down their businesses and shifting to alternatives. Details are to be worked out amongst government officials, farmers, experts and animal rights activists.\n\nBut the legislation doesn’t clearly specify how dog farmers and others in the industry will be supported. Agriculture Minister Song Mi-ryung said Tuesday the government will try to formulate reasonable assistance programs for them.\n\nJu Yeongbong, an official of the farmers’ association, said most farmers are in their 60s and 80s and hope to continue their businesses until older people, their main customers, die. But Ju said the legislation would “strip them of their right to live” because it would likely end up only offering assistance for dismantling their facilities and for transitions, without compensation for giving up their dogs.\n\nSon Won Hak, a farmer and former leader of a farmers’ association, said many elderly dog farmers are willing to close their farms if proper financial compensation is provided because of the extremely negative public view of their jobs. He also said dog farmers will file a petition with the Constitutional Court of Korea and hold demonstrations against the ban.\n\nContributing: The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/13/eating-dogs-and-cats-banned-house-passed-bill/1288897002/", "title": "Eating dogs and cats banned in House-passed bill", "text": "WASHINGTON – The House has passed legislation that would outlaw the slaughter of dogs and cats for food – a practice that, although rare, is still legal in 44 states.\n\nThe bipartisan bill by Florida Reps. Vern Buchanan, a Republican, and Alcee Hastings, a Democrat, would amend the federal Animal Welfare Act to ban the slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption in the United States. It was passed Wednesday by voice vote.\n\nThe bill makes it illegal to knowingly slaughter, transport, possess, buy, sell or donate dogs or cats or their parts for human consumption. Violators would be fined up to $5,000.\n\nBuchanan said he is optimistic the Senate will pass the Dog and Cat Meal Trade Prohibition Act before Congress adjourns this fall. Animal protection has been one of the rare issues where lawmakers have found bipartisan agreement.\n\n\"Dogs and cats provide love and companionship to millions of people and should not be slaughtered and sold as food,\" Buchanan said.\n\nThe House also passed a nonbinding resolution urging other nations to end the dog and cat meat trade. It asks the governments of China, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, India and other nations to ban consumption of the animals. Taiwan last year became the first Asian government to outlaw the slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption.\n\n\"This bill is a reflection of our values and gives us a greater standing in urging all other countries to end this horrific practice once and for all,\" Hastings said.\n\nThe House action was cheered by animal rights groups, who say there is a small underground market for dog and cat meat in the United States.\n\nIt is illegal in all states for slaughterhouses to handle dogs and cats, and it's illegal for stores to sell the meat. However, individuals in most states can kill and eat a dog or cat or sell the meat to other people.\n\n\"These animals are our dutiful companions and not our dinner fare,\" said Marty Irby, executive director of Animal Wellness Action.\n\nMore:Congress finds bipartisanship on animal protection issues\n\nMore:It's more economical to view sharks than to kill them, study finds\n\nMore:Does your restaurant get 5 stars for animal welfare?", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/09/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/tech/senate-tiktok-ban-devices/index.html", "title": "Senate passes legislation to ban TikTok from US government ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe Senate passed legislation Wednesday evening to ban TikTok from US government devices, in a move designed to limit perceived information-security risks stemming from the social media app.\n\nThe vote by unanimous consent approved the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, a bill authored by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.\n\nThe move marks lawmakers’ latest step against the short-form video app that has become popular with over a billion users worldwide. US officials fear that TikTok’s user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government due to that country’s influence over TikTok’s parent, ByteDance.\n\nA companion bill was introduced in the House last year by Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck. It has yet to be approved by members of the House Oversight Committee.\n\nHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday it isn’t yet clear whether the chamber will take up the TikTok bill in light of its Senate passage, saying lawmakers were consulting with White House officials on its language.\n\n“Once again, Sen. Hawley has moved forward with legislation to ban TikTok on government devices, a proposal which does nothing to advance U.S. national security interests,” a spokesperson for TikTok said in a statement. “We hope that rather than continuing down that road, he will urge the Administration to move forward on an agreement that would actually address his concerns.”\n\nThe latest legislative action comes as TikTok and the US government have been negotiating a deal that may allow the app to keep serving US users. There have been years of closed-door talks between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as well as recent reports of delays in the negotiations.\n\nSome lawmakers have expressed frustration with an apparent lack of progress in those talks. Following Wednesday’s vote, Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, a vocal critic of TikTok, said of the process: “My patience is running out.”\n\nOn Tuesday, US lawmakers led by Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill to ban TikTok in the United States more generally, along with other apps based in, or under the “substantial influence” of, countries that are considered foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. In introducing the bill, Rubio also indicated some frustration, saying that the federal government “has yet to take a single meaningful action” on the matter.\n\nBut several senators, including Warner and Hawley, have stopped short of endorsing Rubio’s proposal. On Thursday, Hawley said he would be “fine” if the US government and TikTok reached a deal to safeguard US users’ data. “But if they don’t do that … then I think we’re going to have to look at more stringent measures,” Hawley said.\n\nIn the past two weeks, at least seven states have said they will bar public employees from using the app on government devices, including Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Texas. (Another state, Nebraska, banned TikTok from state devices in 2020.)\n\nSome US government agencies have independently taken steps to limit TikTok usage among their employees. Already, the US military, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have restricted the app from government-owned devices. But Wednesday’s bill would apply to the entire federal workforce.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/15"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/05/asia/indonesia-new-code-passed-sex-cohabitation-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Indonesia bans sex outside marriage as parliament passes ...", "text": "Jakarta, Indonesia CNN —\n\nIndonesian lawmakers unanimously passed a sweeping new criminal code on Tuesday that criminalizes sex outside marriage, as part of a tranche of changes that critics say threaten human rights and freedoms in the Southeast Asian country.\n\nThe new code, which also applies to foreign residents and tourists, bans cohabitation before marriage, apostasy, and provides punishments for insulting the president or expressing views counter to the national ideology.\n\n“All have agreed to ratify the (draft changes) into law,” said lawmaker Bambang Wuryanto, who led the parliamentary commission in charge of revising the colonial-era code. “The old code belongs to Dutch heritage … and is no longer relevant.”\n\nThe world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, Indonesia has seen a rise in religious conservatism in recent years. Strict Islamic laws are already enforced in parts of the country, including the semi-autonomous Aceh province, where alcohol and gambling are banned. Public floggings also take place in the region for a range of offenses including homosexuality and adultery.\n\nThe changes to the criminal code have not only alarmed human rights advocates, who warned of their potential to stifle personal freedoms, but also travel industry representatives – who worried about their potential effect on tourism.\n\nIn a news conference Tuesday, Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna Laoly said it wasn’t easy for a multicultural and multi-ethnic country to make a criminal code that “accommodates all interests.”\n\nHe said he hoped that Indonesians understood that lawmakers had done everything they could to accommodate “public aspiration,” and invited dissatisfied parties to submit a judicial review to the constitutional court.\n\nIn the lead up to Tuesday’s vote, rights groups and critics warned that the new code would “disproportionately impact women” and further curtail human rights and freedoms in the country of more than 270 million people.\n\n“What we’re witnessing is a huge setback to Indonesia’s hard-won progress in protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms after the 1998 revolution. This criminal code should have never been passed in the first place,” said Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia.\n\nWhat’s in the criminal code?\n\nThe new criminal code runs to 200 pages and has been years in the making.\n\nA previous draft was set to be passed in 2019 but the vote was postponed after thousands of protesters, mostly students, took to the streets demanding the government withdraw it.\n\nIn a televised address at the time, President Joko Widodo said he would delay the vote after “seriously considering feedback from different parties who feel objections on some substantial content of the criminal code.”\n\nHamid from Amnesty noted there had been “no meaningful changes” enacted since 2019.\n\nUnder the version passed Tuesday, sex outside marriage carries a potential one-year prison term though there a restrictions on who can lodge a formal complaint. For example, the parents of children who are cohabitating before marriage have the authority to report them.\n\nAs well as introducing new offenses, the code also expands on existing laws and punishments. Blasphemy laws have increased from “one to six provisions” and can now lead to a maximum five-year prison sentence, according to a draft document.\n\nHamid said laws on insulting the country’s leaders and unsanctioned protests will have a “chilling effect” on free speech.\n\n“The reinstatement of provisions banning insults to the president and vice president, the sitting government as well as state institutions would further create a palpable chilling effect on freedom of speech and criminalize legitimate criticisms,” he said.\n\nHuman Rights Watch Indonesia Researcher Andreas Harsono said the laws are “a setback for already declining religious freedom in Indonesia,” warning they could be misused to target certain individuals.\n\n“The danger of oppressive laws is not that they’ll be broadly applied, it’s that they provide avenue for selective enforcement,” he said.\n\nHadi Rahmat Purnama, from the University of Indonesia’s law faculty, said the laws would be implemented after a transitional period of three years.\n\nForeigners and tourists\n\nThe laws are expected to trouble the business community, especially those who regularly host and cater for foreign nationals and tourists.\n\nThe island of Bali, for example, relies heavily on tourist revenue and is still recovering from the pandemic slowdown that kept travelers away.\n\nPutu Winastra, chairman of the Association of the Indonesian Tour and Travel Agencies (ASITA) in Bali, told CNN the laws would “make foreigners think twice” about visiting Indonesia.\n\n“From our point of view as tourism industry players, this law will be very troublesome,” said Putu, who questioned how the laws would be policed.\n\n“Should we ask (overseas unmarried couples) if they are married or not? Do tourist couples have to prove that they are married?” he asked.\n\nPutu said the laws could be “counterproductive” to any efforts to entice tourists back to the island.\n\n“If these laws are really implemented later, tourists might be (subjected) to jail and this will harm tourism,” he said.", "authors": ["Masrur Jamaluddin Heather Chen Angus Watson", "Masrur Jamaluddin", "Heather Chen", "Angus Watson"], "publish_date": "2022/12/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/08/desantis-signs-florida-crackdown-on-foreign-property-chinese-groups-worried/70187172007/", "title": "Chinese influence bill passes Legislature, signed by DeSantis ...", "text": "TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a bill into law that targets United States-adversarial countries, but has many Florida Chinese groups worried it will lead to discrimination.\n\n\"Today is one example of Florida really leading the nation in terms of what we're doing to stop the influence of the Chinese Communist party,\" DeSantis said at Monday press conference in Hernando County.\n\nMany of DeSantis’ comments behind the podium Monday appeared geared toward a national audience.\n\n\"When you look at foreign threats, and you look at a country like China and their ambitions, one you've got to recognize the folly of prior American policies for the last generation,\" said DeSantis, who is expected to soon announce a presidential run. “A strong America abroad requires a strong America at home, and I think the elites in this country have ignored problems at home for far too long.\"\n\nSB 264, which goes into effect on July 1, bounced between the Senate and House with different amendments and different Democrats expressing concerns last week, until it finally passed Thursday evening.\n\nIt targets “foreign countries of concern,” including Russia, Cuba, Iran and North Korea. It puts the biggest spotlight on China, carving out language specifically devoted to how the legislation applies to its government and those connected with it.\n\nWorries raised over SB 264:'Terrified': Chinese protesters tell Florida lawmakers bill threatens their 'American dream'\n\n2023 session summary:DeSantis-dominated legislative session: The priorities that sailed, struggled and sank\n\n\"My concern has always been with the lack of definitions with some of the critical terms used in the bill,\" said House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell of Tampa. \"Because we have a lack of definitions, if they were viewed to be overbroad, we could veering into the area of national origin discrimination.\"\n\nBut bill supporters dismissed those concerns, saying the bill is needed to address national security.\n\n\"This bill should never be about right or left, or Democrat or Republican,\" said Rep. David Borrero, R-Sweetwater, the sponsor of the House version of the legislation. \"This is a bill that protects the national security interests of Floridians.\"\n\nThe bill had been a big priority of DeSantis, who promoted many of the ideas seen in the legislation during a press conference in September.\n\nDeSantis on Monday also signed SB 258, which puts into statute and expands Florida's government device ban on TikTok and other foreign country of concern-created, maintained or owned apps. He signed SB 846, too, which bans state colleges and universities from accepting gifts from and making agreements with foreign countries of concern.\n\nBack story:8 Florida universities have banned TikTok. Here's what you need to know:\n\nThe bill passed the House by a 95-17 vote and the Senate with only eight lawmakers opposed.\n\nIn its final form, the bill prevents the foreign countries of concern and their officers from buying farmland as well as property within 10 miles of a military installation or critical infrastructure facility.\n\nAnd no one connected with the Chinese government or the CCP is allowed to purchase real estate in Florida under the bill, nor can anyone who is \"domiciled\" in China and not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.\n\nLawmakers added in an exception for non-tourist Visa holders, as long as they buy one real estate property that is not within five miles of one of these installations and not larger than two acres.\n\n\"We want to make sure that our agricultural land is not compromised by CCP influence,\" DeSantis said. \"[The law] ensures our seaports, it ensures our airports, powerplants, telecom systems and other critical infrastructure will not be compromised by the CPP or any foreign adversary.\"\n\nIt also prevents Florida governmental entities from entering into contracts with these countries of concern if personal identifying information is in play. They also want to prevent economic incentives contracts from going to these countries.\n\nThat legislation initially flew through the Capitol with bipartisan support, passing the Senate and two of three committees in the House without any fireworks.\n\nThen a coalition of Florida Chinese groups caught wind of measure. At the bill's last House committee stop, more than 100 people signed up to testify in opposition. Like Driskell and other Democrats who've spoken against the measure, they worry the language is too broad and will lead to discrimination.\n\nThey worry property sellers will be hesitant to consider the Chinese community — or any other Asian community — over fears they'll be breaking the law. And they say the legislation conflates Chinese people with the Chinese government and the CCP.\n\nThat conflation happened during the legislative process, as some of the bill sponsors — Borrero and Rep. Katherine Waldron, D-Wellington, another sponsor — alleged the CPP was behind opposition to the bill.\n\n\"I would invite you to look more closely at where those protests are germinating from and where the protesters who have shown up here and throughout the state in recent weeks actually live and what groups they are associated with before believing what they are selling you,\" Waldron said.\n\nBut when the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida interviewed various protesters last month, none said they lived outside of Florida. And committee meeting records show almost all of the more than 100 people who testified in opposition to the legislation listed Florida addresses.\n\nEcho King, a China-born Orlando immigration attorney who helped organize the turnout of a multitude of Chinese organizations to protest the legislation, denied the allegation and called it harmful and scary.\n\n\"I'm not CCP. Why would they think that?\" King said. \"I am afraid because already there's all kinds of rumors about me. But the thing is they can't silence us. If I don't stand up, what am I going to do?\"\n\nUSA Today Network-Florida government accountability reporter Douglas Soule is based in Tallahassee, Fla. He can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com. Twitter: @DouglasSoule.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/05/08"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/asia/south-korea-godoksa-lonely-death-intl-hnk-dst/index.html", "title": "South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths' | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nSouth Korea has a problem: thousands of people, many middle aged and isolated, are dying alone each year, often going undiscovered for days or weeks.\n\nThis is “godoksa,” or “lonely deaths,” a widespread phenomenon the government has been trying to combat for years as its population rapidly ages.\n\nUnder South Korean law, a “lonely death” is when someone who lives alone, cut off from family or relatives, dies due to suicide or illness, with their body found only after “a certain amount of time” has passed.\n\nThe issue has gained national attention over the past decade as the number of lonely deaths increased. Factors behind the trend include the country’s demographic crisis, gaps in social welfare, poverty and social isolation – all of which have become more pronounced since the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nLast year, the country recorded 3,378 such deaths, up from 2,412 in 2017, according to a report released last Wednesday by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.\n\nThe ministry’s report was the first since the government enacted the Lonely Death Prevention and Management Act in 2021, under which updates are required every five years to help establish “policies to prevent lonely deaths.”\n\nStaff at a non-profit organization, which holds funerals for those who died \"lonely deaths,\" move a coffin at a crematorium in Goyang, South Korea, on June 16, 2016. Jean Chung/Getty Images\n\nAlthough lonely deaths affect people across various demographics, the report showed middle aged and elderly men appear particularly at risk.\n\nThe number of men suffering lonely deaths was 5.3 times that of women in 2021, up from four times previously.\n\nPeople in their 50s and 60s made up to 60% of lonely deaths last year, with a large number in their 40s and 70s as well. People in their 20s and 30s accounted for 6% to 8%.\n\nThe report did not go into possible causes. But the phenomenon has been studied for years as authorities try to understand what drives these lonely deaths, and how to better support vulnerable people.\n\n“In preparation for a super-aged society, it is necessary to actively respond to lonely deaths,” said South Korea’s legislative research body in a news release earlier this year, adding that the government’s priority was to “quickly identify cases of social isolation.”\n\nElderly in poverty\n\nSouth Korea is one of several Asian countries – including Japan and China – facing demographic decline, with people having fewer babies and giving birth later in life.\n\nThe country’s birth rate has been dropping steadily since 2015, with experts blaming various factors such as demanding work culture, rising costs of living, and stagnating wages for putting people off parenthood. At the same time, the work force is shrinking, raising fears there won’t be enough workers to support the ballooning elderly population in fields such as health care and home assistance.\n\nSome of the consequences of this skewed age distribution are becoming apparent, with millions of aging residents struggling to survive on their own.\n\nAs of 2016, more than 43% of Koreans aged over 65 were under the poverty line, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – more than three times the national average of other OECD countries.\n\nThe lives of middle-aged and elderly Koreans “rapidly deteriorate” if they are excluded from the labor and housing markets and this is “a major cause of death,” Song In-joo, senior research fellow at the Seoul Welfare Center, wrote in a 2021 study about lonely deaths.\n\nThe study analyzed nine lonely death cases, and conducted in-depth interviews with their neighbors, landlords and case workers.\n\nA volunteer pastor prays before a makeshift shrine for two people who died \"lonely deaths,\" inside the waiting room of a crematoriumon on July 4, 2016 in Goyang, South Korea. Jean Chung/Getty Images\n\nOne case involved a 64-year-old laborer who died from alcohol-related liver disease, a year after losing his job due to disability. He had no education, family or even a cell phone. In another case, an 88-year-old woman suffered financial hardship following the death of her son. She died after the elderly welfare center she attended, which provided free meals, closed at the onset of the pandemic.\n\n“The difficulties expressed before death by those at risk of dying alone were health problems, economic difficulties, disconnection and rejection, and difficulties in managing daily life,” Song wrote.\n\nCompounding factors included delayed government assistance and a “lack of at-home care” for those with serious or chronic illness.\n\nThe findings of the 2021 study were echoed in the Ministry of Health and Welfare report, which said many of those at risk found their life satisfaction “rapidly declining due to job loss and divorce” – especially if they were “unfamiliar with heath care and housework.”\n\nMany of the people in the 2021 study lived in cramped, dingy spaces such as subdivided apartments known as jjokbang, where residents often share communal facilities, and basement apartments known as banjiha, which made headlines earlier this year when a family was trapped and drowned during record rainfall in Seoul.\n\nIn major cities like Seoul, the notoriously expensive housing market means these apartments are some of the most affordable options available. And apart from the poor living conditions, they also carry the risk of further isolation; these housing structures “have already been criticized as slums … and are also stigmatized,” with many residents living “anonymous” lives, said the 2021 study.\n\n“It’s concerning because the (housing concentration) of lonely deaths could be another characteristic of the poverty subculture,” Song wrote.\n\nClosing the gaps\n\nRising public concern over lonely deaths has prompted various regional and national initiatives over the years.\n\nIn 2018, the Seoul metropolitan government announced a “neighborhood watcher” program, in which community members pay visits to single-person households in vulnerable areas such as basement apartments and subdivided housing, according to news agency Yonhap.\n\nUnder this plan, hospitals, landlords and convenience store staff play the role of “watchmen,” notifying community workers when patients or regular customers are not seen for a long time, or when rent and other fees go unpaid.\n\nSeveral cities, including Seoul, Ulsan and Jeonju, have rolled out mobile apps for those living alone, which automatically send a message to an emergency contact if the phone is inactive for a period of time.\n\nOther organizations such as churches and nonprofits have also stepped up outreach services and community events – as well as handling funeral rites for the deceased who have nobody left to claim or mourn them.\n\nThe Lonely Death Prevention and Management Act passed last year was the latest and most sweeping measure yet, ordering local governments to set up policies to identify and assist residents at risk. Apart from establishing the five-yearly situation report, it also required the government to write up a comprehensive preventative plan, which is still in the works.\n\nStaff and a volunteer Buddhist nun of a nonprofit organization carry the name tablets of people who died \"lonely deaths\" at a crematorium on June 16, 2016 in Goyang, South Korea. Jean Chung/Getty Images\n\nIn another study published November, Song recommended authorities create more systems of support for those trying to get back on their feet, including education, training and counseling programs for the middle-aged and elderly.\n\nIn a news release accompanying Wednesday’s report, the Minister of Health and Welfare Cho Kyu-hong said South Korea was working to “become like other countries, including the United Kingdom and Japan, that recently launched strategies … (to deal with) lonely deaths.”\n\n“This analysis is meaningful as the first step for the central and local governments to responsibly deal with this crisis of a new blind spot in welfare,” he said.", "authors": ["Jessie Yeung Yoonjung Seo", "Jessie Yeung", "Yoonjung Seo"], "publish_date": "2022/12/18"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/tech/tiktok-ban-bill/index.html", "title": "TIKTok ban bill introduced by US lawmakers | CNN Business", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nA trio of US lawmakers has introduced new legislation that aims to ban TikTok from operating in the United States.\n\nThe new bill by Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a bipartisan pair of congressmen in the House, reflects the latest escalation by US policymakers against the Chinese-owned short-form video app. TikTok has faced doubts about its ability to safeguard US user data from the Chinese government.\n\nThe proposed legislation would “block and prohibit all transactions” in the United States by social media companies with at least one million monthly users that are based in, or under the “substantial influence” of, countries that are considered foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.\n\nThe bill specifically names TikTok and its parent, ByteDance, as social media companies for the purposes of the legislation. Rubio and one of the House sponsors of the bill, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, had indicated their intention to introduce the bill in a Washington Post op-ed last month.\n\nThe legislation comes as a wave of states led by Republican governors have introduced state-level restrictions on the use of TikTok on government-owned devices. In the past two weeks, at least seven states have introduced such measures, including Maryland, South Dakota and Utah.\n\nThe flurry of activity contrasts with the lengthy negotiations TikTok has been having for years with the US government on a potential deal that may allow the company to address the national security concerns and to continue serving US users.\n\n“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio said in a statement. “There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”\n\n“It’s troubling that rather than encouraging the Administration to conclude its national security review of TikTok, some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically-motivated ban that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States,” Hilary McQuaide, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement.\n\n“We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States,” McQuaide added.\n\nTikTok has previously said it doesn’t share information with the Chinese government and that a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from China. TikTok has also previously acknowledged that employees based in China can currently access user data.\n\nTuesday’s bill is not the only federal legislation to target TikTok. Last year, US lawmakers proposed a law that would ban TikTok usage by federal agencies, and Rubio introduced a bill that would force some app makers to disclose ownership information. Another bill introduced this fall would prohibit TikTok from allowing China-based employees to access the user data of US citizens.\n\nAlready, the US military, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have restricted TikTok from devices under their control.", "authors": ["Brian Fung"], "publish_date": "2022/12/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/30/americas/canada-handgun-sales-cap/index.html", "title": "Canada's Trudeau announces bill to cap sales, transfers and ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nCanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday announced the introduction of a bill that would place a national freeze on handgun ownership across Canada.\n\n“What this means is that it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” Trudeau said in a news conference.\n\n“In other words we’re capping the market,” he added.\n\nIf passed, the new anti-gun legislation will fine gun smuggling and trafficking “by increasing maximum criminal penalties and providing more tools for law enforcement to investigate firearm crimes,” Trudeau said.\n\nThe new legislation would also require that long gun magazines “can never” hold more than five rounds.\n\n“Gun violence is a complex problem, but at the end of the day the math is really quite simple: The fewer the guns in our communities, the safer everyone will be,” the Prime Minister said.\n\nTrudeau added that while most gun owners use their handguns safely and in accordance with the law, “we don’t need assault style weapons that were designed to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time.”\n\nThe announcement comes in the wake of two recent mass shootings in the United States. On May 24, a gunman entered an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and fired more than 100 bullets, killing 19 children and two teachers. On May 14, 10 people were killed in a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.\n\nEnding gun violence was part of Trudeau’s campaign in the country’s 2019 election. In 2020, his government banned more than 1,500 types of military-style assault weapons just after Canada’s deadliest gun rampage in its modern history.\n\nHandguns were “the most serious weapon present in the majority of firearm-related violent crimes” between 2009 and 2020, making up 59% of those crimes, according to a Monday release from Trudeau’s office.\n\nThe number of registered handguns in the country increased 71% between 2010 and 2020 to about 1.1 million, according to the release.", "authors": ["Claudia Dominguez Theresa Waldrop", "Claudia Dominguez", "Theresa Waldrop"], "publish_date": "2022/05/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/asia/south-korea-worlds-lowest-fertility-rate-intl-hnk-dst/index.html", "title": "South Korea spent $200 billion, but it can't pay people enough to ...", "text": "Seoul, South Korea CNN —\n\nThe season of baby fairs is here once again in South Korea. Busy, noisy affairs held in cavernous conference halls where hundreds of vendors try to sell expectant parents everything they could possibly desire for their new bundle of joy – and plenty of other things they never knew they needed.\n\nBut this is a shrinking business, and the customer base is dwindling.\n\nSouth Korea recently broke its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate. Figures released in November showed the average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is down to just 0.79.\n\nThat is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population and low even compared to other developed countries where the rate is falling, such as the United States (1.6) and Japan – which at 1.3 reported its own lowest rate on record.\n\nAnd it spells trouble for a country with an aging population that faces a looming shortage of workers to support its pension system.\n\nNurses at a nearly empty infant unit of a hospital in Seoul, South Korea, in February 2017. Yonhap/EPA/Shutterstock\n\nThe problem is commonly blamed on economic factors that have put off the young from having families – high real estate prices, the cost of education and greater economic anxiety – yet it has proved beyond the ability of successive governments to fix, however much money is thrown at it.\n\nCritics say that is a sign the problems go deeper than economics and that a change in approach is needed. Whether the government is listening is another matter.\n\nThrowing money at the problem\n\nDuring a visit to a nursery in September, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol admitted that more than $200 billion has been spent trying to boost the population over the past 16 years.\n\nYet since assuming office in May, his administration has come up with few ideas for solving the problem other than continuing in a similar vein – setting up a committee to discuss the issue and promising yet more financial support for newborns. A monthly allowance for parents with babies up to 1-year-old will increase from the current 300,000 won to 700,000 won ($230 to $540) in 2023 and to 1 million Korean won ($770) by 2024, according to the Yoon administration.\n\nAccording to President Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea has spent more than $200 billion in the past 16 years trying to solve its population problem. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images\n\nThe public’s skepticism that Yoon has any better grip on the problem than his predecessors has only been reinforced by the president’s at times clumsy messaging.\n\nDuring his visit to the nursery, Yoon expressed surprise that babies and toddlers were not being looked after at home and appeared to suggest that it was common for 6-month-old babies to be able to walk, leading to criticism that he was out of touch (the average age for babies to walk is more like 12 months).\n\nMany experts believe the current throw-money-at-it approach is too one-dimensional and that what is needed instead is continuing support throughout the child’s life.\n\nPrams at a baby fair in Seoul, South Korea, on Sept. 15. Yonhap/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock\n\nBrowsing the stalls at a recent baby fair was Kim Min-jeong, whose second child is due this month. She brushed aside the government’s pledge of more funds, saying: “They’ve changed the names and merged allowances but for parents like us, there are no more benefits.”\n\nThe problem she faces, she said, is that she hasn’t been able to work since her first child was born as she and her husband cannot afford private child care.\n\nGovernment-funded nurseries are free but a handful of scandals in recent years involving caregivers striking infants has put many parents off. While the cases were minimal, they were well publicized and the CCTV footage emotive.\n\n‘A puritanical approach’\n\nAlso standing in the way of would-be parents are a host of problems that are more social than economic in nature and likely to endure however much money is splashed around.\n\nAmong them are what might be called the unwritten rules for parenthood.\n\nWhile having a baby is very much expected of married couples in South Korea, society still frowns on single parents. IVF treatment is not offered to single women, official hospital figures show.\n\n“We still have a very puritanical approach to single mothers,” said law professor Cho Hee-kyoung, who writes a newspaper column on social issues.\n\n“It’s as if they have done something wrong by becoming pregnant out of wedlock… why does it necessarily have to be within a marriage that you can raise a child?”\n\nMeanwhile, couples in non-traditional partnerships also face discrimination; South Korea does not recognize same-sex marriage and regulations make it difficult for unwed couples to adopt.\n\nAuthor Lee Jin-song at Spain Bookshop in Seoul where her books are sold. Charles Miller/CNN\n\nLee Jin-song, who has written books about the trend of young people choosing not to get married or have a baby, said policies to boost the birth rate need to embrace more than just the traditional idea of marriage as being between a man and a woman.\n\n“I’ve thought about how heterocentric and normality-centric discussion is in the traditional sense of marriage… (it) excludes people with disabilities, diseases or poor reproductive health,” Lee said.\n\nChoosing to stay single\n\nLee pointed to a common joke that in South Korea, “if you are not dating by the time you are 25, you’ll turn into a crane, meaning if you’re single you become non-human.”\n\nShe said society considers her, and others like her, selfish for not conforming to the traditional expectations of marriage and children, “neglecting their duties for society only for the sake of their happiness.”\n\nLee highlighted the pressures of having children on women in a patriarchal society that is slow to evolve. “Marriage, childbirth and child care require too much sacrifice for women in a patriarchal society especially over the past decade. So, they are beginning to explore the possibility of being able to live well without getting married.”\n\nProfessor Cho agreed, saying there is a lingering social expectation that the father sacrifices for the company and the mother supports the family, even if she also works.\n\n“I know so many couples where the women are actually earning more money than the men, but when they come home, it’s the women who have to do the housework and look after the children and provide emotional support to the husband.”\n\nThe job doesn’t end when the office shuts\n\nMeanwhile, husbands who would like to be more involved in child-rearing find the business culture in South Korea does not always allow for that.\n\nWhile on paper, parental leave has been increased, few feel comfortable to take it in full.\n\nBack at the baby fair, Kim’s husband Park Kyung-su said he is hoping to help with his second child, but “there is no special understanding or treatment from work for having a young child. I can use my time off, but I feel uncomfortable using it because I want good feedback at work.”\n\nThere is a widespread fear that the workers who are promoted are rarely the ones who put family first.\n\nLee Se-eun, a mother of two boys, hasn't worked in seven years. Charles Miller/CNN\n\nLee Se-eun, who has two boys ages 3 and 5, said she would welcome more help from her husband, but he is rarely home in time.\n\n“It would be nice if companies would recognize employees with babies, for example, to exclude them from dinners or nights,” she said.\n\nIn South Korea, the job does not end when the office closes for the day. Rather, there is a culture of “team-building” after hours, which it is frowned upon to miss.\n\nLee used to work in a brokerage firm before launching her own start-up, but she has not worked in seven years and feels there was no option to continue her career as she did not want to put her boys in child care.\n\n“Raising a child is a very valuable, meaningful and very good thing from a personal point of view, but sometimes it feels like it doesn’t get valued in society,” Lee said.", "authors": ["Paula Hancocks"], "publish_date": "2022/12/03"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/09/asia/north-korea-kim-nuclear-weapons-state-law-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "North Korea passes new law declaring itself a nuclear weapons ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nNorth Korea has passed a new law declaring itself a nuclear weapons state in a move leader Kim Jong Un says is “irreversible.”\n\nKim vowed the country would “never give up” its nuclear weapons and said there could be no negotiations on denuclearization as he hailed the passage of the law, North Korean state media reported Friday.\n\nThe new law also enshrines Pyongyang’s right to use preemptive nuclear strikes to protect itself – updating a previous stance under which it had said it would keep its weapons only until other countries denuclearized and would not use them preemptively against non-nuclear states.\n\nNuclear weapons represent the “dignity, body, and absolute power of the state,” Kim said as he welcomed the decision by the country’s rubber-stamp parliament – the Supreme People’s Assembly – to pass the new law in a unanimous vote.\n\n“The adoption of laws and regulations related to the national nuclear force policy is a remarkable event as it’s our declaration that we legally acquired war deterrence as a means of national defense,” Kim said.\n\n“As long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth, and imperialism and the anti-North Korean maneuvers of the US and its followers remain, our road to strengthening our nuclear force will never end.”\n\nThe new law also bans the sharing of nuclear technology with other countries.\n\nIt comes amid rising regional tensions over North Korea’s expansion of its nuclear weapons and missiles program.\n\nKim has made increasingly provocative threats of nuclear conflict toward the United States and its allies in Asia in recent months.\n\nAt the same time, the US has become increasingly concerned that North Korea may be preparing to carry out its first underground nuclear test in years\n\nVideo Ad Feedback See how US and South Korea responded to North Korea's missile tests 01:13 - Source: CNN\n\nYang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the law demonstrated Pyongyang’s hopes of strengthening its relations with China and Russia at a time of heightened global tensions.\n\n“North Korea mentioning the possibility of using nuclear weapons if and when an attack on the state and leader is imminent is significant, even though it states nuclear weapons as a defensive last resort,” Yang said.", "authors": ["Yoonjung Seo Larry Register Heather Chen", "Yoonjung Seo", "Larry Register", "Heather Chen"], "publish_date": "2022/09/09"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_7", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": []}
{"question_id": "20240112_8", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/10/21/starving-manatees-referee-protections-alligator-float-news-around-states/119069454/", "title": "Starving manatees, referee protections, alligator float: News from ...", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: The state plans to be the third to carry out an execution during the COVID-19 pandemic and the only prison system to reduce the number of news media witnesses to a single reporter. The Alabama Department of Corrections said because of COVID-19 precautions, only one reporter, a representative of the Associated Press, will be allowed to witness Thursday’s lethal injection of Willie B. Smith. The state in the past allowed five media witnesses, although the number of outlets sending reporters is sometimes less than that. Only the federal government, Texas and Missouri have carried out executions since the pandemic began last year. None reduced the number of media witnesses to a single reporter. There have been 19 executions carried out since April 2020, according to a database maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center. All of them were attended by multiple reporters, with the exception of one lethal injection in Texas, where the prison system neglected to notify reporters it was time to carry out the punishment. Paige Windsor, the executive editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, said the news organization disagreed “that the press restrictions were necessary for COVID mitigation, especially once a vaccine was available.”\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: A state lawmaker was cited for driving with an open can of beer in his vehicle that another lawmaker said was actually his. Republican Sen. Josh Revak plans to challenge the $220 ticket, which was issued in August, the Anchorage Daily News reports. Sen. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, said the beer was his. Revak, R-Republican, said he used alcohol heavily after returning injured from the Iraq War but hasn’t had alcohol in seven years. He has helped others in recovery programs and said he is proud of his sobriety. A citation “could cause harm to me because I’m in programs of recovery. I’ve been in recovery a long time trying to help other people. Having a violation like this might discredit me, and especially in my job, it certainly doesn’t help, so I felt like it was kind of an injustice,” Revak said. Kawasaki was riding with Revak from Anchorage to a fishing event on the Kenai Peninsula on Aug. 18. Kawasaki the night before had stayed at the home of another legislator and in the morning left with a partially full can of beer. “I didn’t want to waste it, didn’t want to dump it,” Kawasaki said. Both said Revak didn’t realize it was a beer rather than another beverage. Revak is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 27. But the trooper who wrote the citation was recently arrested on child sexual abuse charges.\n\nArizona\n\nChandler: The Gila River Indian Community’s gambling operation has begun construction of its fourth casino in metro Phoenix. Gila River Hotels & Casinos on Monday held a groundbreaking ceremony for the planned Santan Mountain casino, which will be located in the Chandler area near Gilbert Road and Hunt Highway. The 160-acre, $150 million project will feature more than 850 slots and table games, a BetMGM Sportsbook and multiple dining options for guests. New games will include mini baccarat, craps and roulette. Two of the tribe’s current casinos also are located in the Chandler area. The other is on the metro area’s southwestern rim. The tribe announced the new casino project last summer after signing a revised gambling compact with the state. Gambling expansion legislation approved by state lawmakers at Gov. Doug Ducey’s behest included provisions allowing tribes to increase their gambling offerings, both in number of casinos and types of gambling games. Arizona currently has 24 tribal casinos statewide, including seven in metro Phoenix. The legislation will allow up to 11 more statewide, include four in metro Phoenix and one in the Tucson area.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday backed off plans to call the Legislature back to the Capitol next week to take up income tax cuts as he continued negotiating with lawmakers on how much to reduce. The Republican governor delayed the special session he expected to call for the tax cut proposal, which he said would cost the state $321 million a year once fully implemented in 2023. Hutchinson did not say when he planned to convene the majority-Republican Legislature, though he said hoped to do so before Thanksgiving. “We need more time,” he told reporters. Hutchinson’s proposal calls for reducing the state’s top income tax rate from 5.9% to 5.3% by 2023. It also calls for increasing a tax credit for those making less than $22,900 and for combining the low- and middle-income tax tables. But Hutchinson has faced calls from some fellow Republicans to go further with his tax cut plans and to also include reductions in the corporate income tax rate. Legislative leaders said delaying the special session will give lawmakers the governor more time to work out a deal. Hutchinson ran on a promise to cut income taxes and is pushing for the reduction as the state’s revenue has beat expectations despite the COVID-19 pandemic. But Democrats caution about going too far with reductions.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSan Francisco: The city will give out cash awards of up to $100,000 for information about the ringleaders of high-level auto burglaries, in yet another push to battle crime in a city marked by attention-grabbing vehicle smash-and-grabs, home break-ins and retail theft. The cash rewards would come from private donors in the tourism and hospitality industry, Mayor London Breed said at a Tuesday news conference where she was joined by San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott. The fund has about $225,000 so far and will pay for information leading to the arrest and conviction of “high-level leaders of organized auto burglary fencing operations,” according to a statement from Breed’s office. Authorities have said they believe fewer than a dozen auto burglary crews are responsible for most of the smash-and-grabs in the San Francisco Bay Area. But news reports and viral video of break-ins have reinforced the perception of San Francisco as lawless and lenient. Last month, Breed and Scott announced the city would dedicate more police to combat retail shoplifting and make reporting of shoplifting cases easier. Breed’s office said auto burglaries reported to police have declined since 2017, when the city recorded about 31,400. More than 15,000 auto burglaries have been reported this year, but 2021 is on track to fall below the nearly 26,000 in 2019.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: A state judge was removed from his leadership position after being charged with felony menacing Saturday. Judge Mark Thompson, chief judge for the 5th Judicial District, is accused of using a real or simulated weapon in the alleged July 25 menacing incident, which was investigated by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, according to limited online court records. The case was listed as suppressed from public view, and documents detailing the allegations against Thompson were not available. In a court filing, prosecutors requested the secrecy because Thompson is a public official and “prominent member” of the community, The Denver Post reports. “The release at this time of any of the documents of record in this matter could result in disclosure of information that could result in destruction, or secreting evidence and tampering with identified and unidentified witnesses, which could jeopardize the ongoing investigation and/or interfere with the rights of the defendant, including irreversible harm to reputation, and the defendant’s and the People’s right to a fair trial,” the prosecutors wrote. Judge Paul Dunkelman granted the request in a one-line order Saturday. Thompson is on planned paid time off and will resume his duties as a judge when he returns, judicial branch spokesperson Rob McCallum said.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: A state legislator who works as an aide to the West Haven City Council was arrested Tuesday by the FBI amid scrutiny of the city’s spending of federal pandemic relief money, officials said. The arrest of Rep. Michael DiMassa, a Democrat, was confirmed by Tom Carson, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut. DiMassa’s arrest affidavit was sealed. Last week, Mayor Nancy Rossi posted a video on the city’s YouTube page saying she had come across several large expenditures that might be fraudulent and had requested a forensic investigation of the city’s spending of federal pandemic relief funds. West Haven’s share of the $2.2 trillion in funding from the CARES Act has been more than $1.15 million so far, according to the state Office of Policy and Management. Rossi, who is also a certified public accountant, last week acknowledged using some relief funding to pay City Hall employees overtime for working on pandemic-related tasks but said that is a proper use of the money. A message was left seeking comment with the mayor. Upon the news of DiMassa’s arrest, Speaker of the House Matt Ritter and House Majority Leader Jason Rojas announced they were immediately removing DiMassa from all committee and leadership assignments.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: Prosecutors want a judge to make state Auditor Kathy McGuiness accept a public defender or pay for her own defense against criminal corruption charges, according to a Monday filing in New Castle County Superior Court. The filing is a response to McGuiness’ Friday request that a judge allow her private attorney, McCarter & English partner Steve Wood, to represent her at rate of $550 an hour paid for by the public. It sets up in a conflict in which Superior Court President Judge Jan Jurden will need to decide whether to allow Wood to continue to represent McGuiness at private law firm rates paid by the state or whether McGuiness must accept representation from the public defender’s office if she does not want to pay a private attorney. Having pleaded not guilty, McGuiness is in the early stages of defending herself against two felony and multiple public corruption misdemeanors charged by prosecutors in the Delaware Department of Justice – a locally unprecedented indictment of a sitting, statewide-elected official that accuses McGuiness of rigging state contracts to avoid scrutiny and hiring her daughter in a do-nothing job. A Democrat, former Rehoboth Beach commissioner and pharmacist, McGuiness is paid $112,000 a year as auditor and, as a private citizen, likely would not qualify for representation paid for by the public. But Delaware law allows public officials sued or criminally indicted on charges related to their state work to be represented in court by a state-provided attorney.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and manufacturer Kawasaki have known for years about problems with the wheel assemblies in the transit system’s newest $2 million rail cars, WUSA-TV reports. One of those 7000 series rail cars came off the track Oct. 12, and while no one was killed or critically injured, the National Transportation Safety Board said the incident in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, could have been “catastrophic.” “We are fortunate that no fatalities or serious injuries occurred as a result of any of these derailments, but the potential for fatalities and serious injuries, was significant,” NTSB Board Chairman Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference Monday morning at the safety agency’s Washington headquarters. “This could have resulted in a catastrophic event.” The D.C. Metrorail Safety Commission ordered Metro to pull nearly 60% of its rail fleet from service Monday after its safety oversight board found a recurring problem with the axles on the Metro’s newest railcars, the agency said. WMATA said the remaining 40 Metro trains would run every 30 minutes. In a release Monday, WMATA said reduced service is expected to last through at least Sunday. Passengers reported waits of as long as an hour during Monday morning’s rush.\n\nFlorida\n\nTallahassee: Manatees have starved to death by the hundreds along Florida’s eastern coast because algae blooms and contaminants are killing the seagrass the beloved sea mammals eat, a wildlife official told a state House committee Tuesday. Seagrass has been decimated in the 156-mile-long Indian River Lagoon and neighboring areas. The aquatic plant thrives in clear, sandy water, but murkier water because of the algae and pollutants has made it harder for seagrass to survive, said Melissa Tucker, director of the Division of Habitat and Species Conservation at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Our statewide death count from all sources has been higher than it’s ever been reported before,” Tucker told the House State Affairs Committee. “This is a starvation issue. There’s not enough seagrasses that are available to the manatees.” Officials noticed a sharp rise in manatee deaths from December through May, when the sea cows congregate in warm waters. During that period, 677 manatees died, when typically only 156 die, Tucker said. While manatee mortality leveled out after May, when the mammals extend their range in summer and fall, the state has already recorded 968 manatee deaths in 2021, with more than two months left in the year. The previous annual high was 830 deaths in 2013, Tucker said.\n\nGeorgia\n\nCovington: One worker was killed and two seriously injured when part of a bridge collapsed into a river during early demolition work, officials said. The three workers fell into the river Tuesday evening from the Access Road bridge on Interstate 20 in Newton County, east of Atlanta, news outlets report. About 21/ 2 hours after the accident, the Newton County Sheriff’s Office reported that one worker had died. The subcontractors were sawing when the accident occurred, the Georgia Department of Transportation said. A 500-ton crane began removing a truck, excavator and other equipment from the Yellow River accident site Wednesday morning, the Transportation Department said on Facebook. Work started Monday, and authorities had said they expected it to take nine months.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Police officers and officials with the state’s public school system discriminated against a disabled Black child by handcuffing, arresting and interrogating the 10-year-old girl for a “run-of-the-mill” dispute between children, the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii said. The ACLU sent a letter Monday to the Honolulu Police Department, the state Department of Education and the state attorney general’s office demanding the statewide school district make policy changes, including forbidding staff from calling police on a student unless the student presents an imminent threat of significant harm to someone. Honowai Elementary officials called police to the Waipahu school in 2020 because the girl allegedly drew an offensive sketch of a student who was bullying her, according to the ACLU letter. The parent of another child wanted to press charges. The girl’s mother went to the school and was falsely imprisoned when school staff and police prevented her leaving two rooms to which she was confined, the letter said. The mother “expressed some concern about being African American in an encounter with the police” and was worried about her daughter’s safety “in light of the police presence given the high rate of police violence against Black people, and the discriminatory disciplining of Black girls in schools,” the letter said.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Officials on Tuesday rejected a plan to raise grazing fees on state-managed land, costing K-12 public schools more than $530,000 annually. The Idaho Land Board voted 2-2 to defeat the proposal, with Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra voting against the plan, citing concerns by ranchers who said drought was hurting their businesses. “I think, like in education, teachers are the experts, and I believe ranchers are the experts,” Ybarra said. The move to stick with the current grazing fee formula appears to call into question whether the state’s top statewide elected officials are meeting their constitutional mandate as Land Board members to maximize profit from state lands over the long term. The current grazing rate formula not only doesn’t raise fees but also cuts them. The formula has been in place since 1993, leading to concern that it’s outdated and that ranchers aren’t paying their fair share. Grazing rates on private land in the state have nearly doubled since then, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Rates on state-owned land have lagged, dropping from about 50% of what private landowners charge to about 38%. The new grazing formula would have put it back to 50%, while the existing formula drops it to about 37%.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Metra is restoring service on all train lines to pre-pandemic levels and won’t raise fares next year in hopes more and more riders will return to using the suburban Chicago commuter rail service. Metra approved a new, $900 million operating budget for 2022 on Wednesday. It assumes Metra will start 2022 with ridership at about 25% of pre-pandemic levels and will grow to about 35% by the end of the year. “After nearly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about how and when things will return to normal,” said Metra CEO and Executive Director Jim Derwinski. He said the most responsible approach is to use cautious assumptions about the growth in ridership while simultaneously ramping up service so Metra is ready when passengers are. The budget projects Metra will bring in about $146 million from fares and other system-generated revenue. The agency also is using about $300 million in federal pandemic relief funding. Metra is introducing a new $6 day pass, which will give passengers unlimited travel among any three zones. It will be sold as part of a one-year pilot program and will replace the current $10 day pass, which provides unlimited travel across all zones.\n\nIndiana\n\nHammond: A Gary man is suing northwest Indiana police more than a year after he alleged that officers pepper-sprayed and knelt on him when they encountered him near a protest over George Floyd’s death. Randall Smith’s lawsuit, filed Sept. 21 in U.S. District Court in Hammond, names Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez and county police Officer Jay Cruz as defendants and seeks damages “for deprivation of his civil rights.” The federal lawsuit comes more than a year after Smith filed a tort claim notice in July 2020 seeking $700,000 in damages from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department and the county’s commissioners. That claim, a precursor to a possible lawsuit, said Smith was watching a protest May 31, 2020, near Southlake Mall in Merrillville that was spurred by George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody when some officers “forced demonstrators” from a parking lot. Smith’s attorney, James Hortsman, said Smith did not participate in the protest. An officer then “aggressively approached” Smith and “got in his face telling him to leave,” the tort claim states. But as Smith turned to leave, the same officer “pushed him from behind, and several officers took him to the ground,” even though he wasn’t resisting, leaving him with a chipped tooth and other injuries, it alleges.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: The state’s privatized Medicaid system has illegally denied services or care to program recipients, and both private insurance companies managing the system have violated terms of their contracts with the state, according to a state audit released Wednesday. Auditor Rob Sand released a report from his investigation that examined a six-year period from 2013 through 2019. He said his investigators found a massive increase in illegal denials of care by managed care organizations under the system. “What this means is that privatized Medicaid is less likely to treat Iowans in accordance with the law. It means that the Medicaid MCO’s that we have contracted with are not upholding their end of the bargain,” Sand said. The head of Iowa’s Medicaid program responded within minutes of the audit’s release, rejecting its conclusions and arguing Sand was making an “apples to oranges comparison” that mischaracterized the program. Former Republican Gov. Terry Branstad in 2016 abruptly shifted Iowa’s Medicaid program from management by the Iowa Department of Human Services to private insurers. His successor, current GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds, has continued to support privatization amid complaints that service has suffered, that payments to service providers have been delayed at times and that promised savings never materialized.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: Real estate values in the capital city have been appreciating “at their fastest pace ever,” a report says. Home prices in Topeka are anticipated to end this year having increased by 8.3% and rise by 4.5% next year, according to the 2022 Kansas Housing Markets Forecast Series published this month by the Wichita State University Center for Real Estate. Appreciation figures are even stronger statewide, with anticipated increases of 10.5% this year and 7.6% next year, the study said. “The supply of homes available for sale remains near historic lows,” Stan Longhofer, the center’s director, said in a news release. “Although bidding wars may not be as intense as they were earlier this year, it will continue to be a sellers’ market across most market segments.” Still, longtime Topeka Realtor Helen Crow questioned Tuesday whether the figures used to reach those conclusions may have been skewed by factors brought about by COVID-19. The pandemic has created a situation in which “the wealthier people are buying homes, and the people who are not as wealthy are not,” she said. A disproportionate number of upper-value homes have consequently been sold in the city since early last year, perhaps artificially inflating the median sales value of homes in this community, Crow said.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: A convicted drug dealer who was a target of the police raids that brought officers to Breonna Taylor’s home has been offered probation for a long list of drug crimes. Louisville police secured a slew of no-knock warrants on the night of March 13, 2020, aimed at breaking up a drug-dealing operation involving Jamarcus Glover. One of the five warrants sent police to the home of Taylor, Glover’s former girlfriend. Officers went to her home, broke down the door and opened fire after Taylor’s boyfriend fired a shot at them. The fatal shooting of the 26-year-old Black woman sparked months of national protests and prompted the city of Louisville to pay Taylor’s family $12 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. Louisville prosecutors recently recommended probation for Glover, who was facing a litany of drug-related charges, WDRB-TV reports. He will also be allowed to move out of state. Sam Aguiar, an attorney who represented Taylor’s family in the wrongful death lawsuit, said the plea deal “validates” that Glover was not a drug kingpin requiring several late-night police raids. Last year, Glover was offered a plea deal by prosecutors that would have forced him to implicate Taylor in criminal activity. That offer listed Taylor as a co-defendant in illegal activities. Glover declined the offer.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: The state will introduce an alligator-themed float celebrating its music, food and culture at the 95th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who oversees state tourism efforts, announced the float plans Tuesday. “When it comes to parading, there is one thing Louisiana knows how to do and that’s throwing a party on wheels aboard the biggest float we can build,” Nungesser, a Republican, said in a statement. The Thanksgiving Day parade, scheduled for Nov. 25, airs live across the country from 9 a.m. to noon. Nungesser said the float will be used to promote Louisiana and encourage travelers to visit the state. The “Celebration Gator” float includes a multicolored replication of a French Quarter street view and will include people dressed in baby gator costumes and a team of stilt walkers. “The Macy’s Parade is thrilled to welcome this awe-inspiring and colorful float to our lineup,” Jordan Dabby, producer of the parade, said in the statement released by Nungesser’s office.\n\nMaine\n\nFalmouth: A police department is destroying a cache of weapons that’s going to be melted down to be transformed into peaceful products. Several dozen guns that were seized or turned in were rendered inoperable in the parking lot of the Falmouth Police Department on Saturday. They’ll be melted down and converted into a trademarked steel called Humanium Metal. “Every unwanted gun that we permanently remove from circulation is a win,” Falmouth Police Chief John Kilbride said in a statement. “That’s one less tragedy for a person, family and community.” The event marked the U.S. launch by a Swedish development partner that’s marketing Humanium Metal. The product is being used in a number of products including watches, jewelry and art. Over the next year, the Swedish organization IM aims to partner in at least five major cities with local law enforcement, gun-safety advocacy groups and others seeking to address gun-related violence.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: Conservation efforts for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed have been bolstered by a $10million grant. According to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the 49 individual grants will generate $12 million in matching contributions for a total conservation impact of more than $22 million. “The Chesapeake Bay is a natural treasure for Maryland, the country and the world,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “It’s also a fact the health of the economy and our overall public health depends on a healthy bay. The awards cover different areas and differ in size and scope, but all of them are essential to protecting our bay.” Van Hollen added that federal resources were key to multiplying the initial amount awarded to the various organizations. The grant is from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency and the Chesapeake Bay Program.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The city declared addiction and homelessness a public health emergency Tuesday – a move that will help it clear a sprawling homeless camp at the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis. Officials said they will get those dependent on opioids into treatment and permanent shelter after removing about 150 tents at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, an area commonly known as Mass and Cass, said the city’s chief of health and human services, Marty Martinez. The area, home to numerous methadone clinics and social services, has long been a haven for crime and illegal drug sales and use, often in the open. The tents will not disappear overnight, acting Mayor Kim Janey said. “Folks are looking for a magic moment where, ‘poof,’ everything is gone,” she said. “That is not how addiction works. It requires ongoing outreach to individuals. It requires work between the city, the state, and other partners to make sure that there are alternatives.” Officials stressed that the city is not criminalizing homelessness, and no one will be forcibly removed. They said people who live in tents will be given advanced notice and offered treatment or a shelter bed.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: The operator of an oil pipeline said it temporarily shut down Line 5 on Tuesday after protesters warned the company that they planned to turn an emergency valve. Video posted on social media showed someone with a hard hat and a wrench inside a fenced area in Tuscola County, 90 miles north of Detroit. A man outside the fence sang and played an electric guitar. A sign warned against trespassing and said the property belonged to Enbridge Energy. “We respect the rights of others to express their views on the energy we all use, but today’s pipeline tampering incident involving Enbridge was not a lawful protest. It was a criminal activity that put people and the environment at risk,” said Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy. He said the pipeline’s flow was temporarily stopped from a control center “out of an abundance of caution to protect communities, first responders and the protesters.” Line 5 moves about 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids daily between Wisconsin and Ontario, traversing parts of northern Michigan and Wisconsin. A roughly 4-mile segment divides into two pipes that cross the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, say Line 5 is a threat to the Great Lakes.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: The state will offer $200 gift cards and a shot at five $100,000 scholarships as incentives for students ages 12-17 to get vaccinated against COVID-19, Gov. Tim Walz announced Monday. Young people who start and complete their vaccine series over the next six weeks will be eligible for the Visa gift cards. But all Minnesotans ages 12-17 who’ve completed their vaccine series anytime by mid-December are eligible for the scholarships, which will be good at any public or private nonprofit school in the state. The five drawings will be conducted weekly starting Nov. 15. “We’re launching this program to help reward teens for doing their part by getting fully vaccinated and keeping our schools, community, and state safe,” Walz said in a statement. Registration opens Nov. 9 on the state’s Kids Deserve a Shot website. The state is trying to drive up vaccination rates among adolescents, who are the state’s least-vaccinated eligible age group. Only 50% of Minnesotans ages 12-15 and less than 60% of those ages 16-17 are fully vaccinated. But the coronavirus is spreading fastest in Minnesota among young people. The federal government is preparing to authorize vaccines for children as young as 5.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: The capital city dumped more than 6 billion gallons of partly treated sewage into a river in 2020, seven years after signing a federal court agreement to clean up its act, court records show. The records also show sewer overflows in Jackson released more than 523,000 gallons of untreated waste into the environment last year, WLBT-TV reports. The city had made “only limited progress” toward some requirements in a 2013 agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and had not begun work toward other “crucial” goals, according to an August status report. Jackson has a deadline of late 2030 to meet terms of the consent decree, which was announced in November 2012 and became final in March 2013. Jackson is negotiating with the EPA to amend the order, with EPA and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to assess the city’s financial condition and evaluate its proposed changes, the station reports. The city, which agreed to spend about $400 million to comply with state and federal water laws, now will need nearly $960 million to do so, it said in the report. The untreated sewage in 2020 came from 376 overflows throughout the collection system. Eleven forbidden bypasses at a wastewater treatment plant discharged partly treated wastewater into the Pearl River.\n\nMissouri\n\nColumbia: Help for roughly 100,000 teachers whose Social Security numbers were made vulnerable in a massive state data breach could cost Missouri as much as $50 million, the governor’s office confirmed Tuesday. The estimate includes the cost of credit monitoring and a call center to help affected teachers. Republican Gov. Mike Parson’s spokeswoman on Tuesday confirmed reports from state House budget officials that explained the $50 million price tag. The information was publicized by Democratic House lawmakers. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke the news about the security flaw last week. The newspaper said it discovered the vulnerability in a web application that allowed the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. Parson, who has deflected his administration’s responsibility for the breach and instead cast blame on the newspaper for identifying the issue and warning the education department about it, last week said the breach “may cost Missouri taxpayers as much as $50 million and divert workers and resources from other state agencies.” Parson declined to answer questions after slamming the Post-Dispatch in a livestreamed press conference last week.\n\nMontana\n\nHelena: Three public officials threatened hospital doctors after they refused to treat a COVID-19 patient with ivermectin, a drug to treat parasites that is not federally approved for use in battling the respiratory disease, officials of St. Peter’s Health said. “These officials have no medical training or experience, yet they were insisting our providers give treatment for COVID-19 that are not authorized, clinically approved or within the guidelines established by the FDA and the CDC,” hospital spokesperson Andrea Groom wrote in an email to the Montana State News Bureau on Monday. “In addition, they threatened to use their position of power to force our doctors and nurses to provide this care.” The hospital did not name the elected officials, but Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s office confirmed that he participated in a conference call with hospital executives last week after having sent a Montana Highway Patrol trooper to the hospital to talk with the family of the patient. The event unfolded when a Helena woman in her 80s was hospitalized and wanted to be treated with ivermectin. It has been used in other countries, including India and Brazil, and some studies on its effectiveness are underway. Its manufacturer, Merck, has said there is no indication the drug is safe or effective against COVID-19.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Union Pacific and its labor unions are suing each other to determine whether the railroad has the authority to require its employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The unions argue the Omaha-based railroad should have negotiated with them before announcing it would require all employees to get the shots. The railroad contends in its own lawsuit that it believes it has the authority to require the vaccines under its existing contracts because it can set standards for when employees are fit for duty. Union Pacific announced this month that it would require all employees to be vaccinated by Dec. 8 to comply with an executive order President Joe Biden issued requiring all federal contractors to have their employees vaccinated. The railroad is also offering its union employees a $300 bonus if they get the shots. Nonunion employees at the railroad are being offered a half-day of vacation if they get vaccinated. On the same day the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers – Transportation Division union filed its lawsuit against the railroad, Union Pacific filed its own lawsuit Friday against SMART-TD and two other unions that objected to the vaccination mandate to force the issue.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: Officials say enough money has been raised through donations to start work to rename the city’s main airport after former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. The Clark County Commission earlier this year approved the renaming of McCarran International Airport to Harry Reid International Airport but with the stipulation that no taxpayer money be used. Donations for the renaming have passed the $4.2 million threshold needed to carry out the first phase, which largely consists of signage outside the airport and approaching it, officials said Monday. However, no actual timetable was announced for the start of work, and officials will next meet with various government agencies to firm up plans. “It allows us to change the name officially,” Commissioner Tick Segerblom said. An additional $2.8 million is needed for two remaining phases for signage inside the airport and for other changes such as stationery, letterhead, business cards and concessionaire-related needs. Reid, a Democrat and the former Senate majority leader, retired from the Senate in 2016 after serving 30 years. The renaming was spurred by the late Sen. Patrick Pat McCarran’s anti-immigrant and antisemitic views.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: A group of 25 health providers and advocacy organizations is asking legislative leaders to once again allow remote public access to the Legislature during the upcoming 2022 session. “As you often remind us, the State House is the people’s house, and public input and the right to know are critical components of New Hampshire’s legislative process,” the organizations wrote in a letter sent Monday to House Speaker Sherman Packard and Senate President Chuck Morse. “Yet, with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging throughout our state, individuals would have to put their own health, and that of their families, friends, neighbors, and communities, at risk in order to attend and testify in-person at legislative committee hearings, meetings, and sessions.” The groups said the last legislative session showed videoconferencing “effectively provides safe and secure access to legislative proceedings to citizens, health care providers and advocates all across New Hampshire.” Among the signers of the letter are the Disability Rights Center-N.H.; NAMI New Hampshire (the National Alliance on Mental Illness); New Futures; New Hampshire Legal Assistance; the New Hampshire Medical Society; and the New Hampshire Public Health Association.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday ordered that all new state contracts include language requiring workers to get COVID-19 vaccines or undergo regular coronavirus testing. Murphy, a Democrat seeking reelection this year, said the order will be prospective and affect only new contracts, extensions or renewals. He said he couldn’t specify how many state contractors would be affected but estimated it would be in the “hundreds or thousands.” “We must ensure that everyone providing service to the people of New Jersey – whether they are direct or contracted employees – is being held to the same public health and safety standards,” he said. The order mirrors other executive orders Murphy has signed requiring shots or tests for state workers and school employees. The requirement comes just days after a deadline for school and state workers to be vaccinated or undergo coronavirus testing kicked in, but Murphy said he didn’t have details about how many chose which option.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: Local governments across the state are seeking to renew property taxes to pay for school buildings, computers and air ventilation systems even as school districts are slated to receive $900 million in federal pandemic aid. Ventilation upgrades are on virtually all lists after state authorities mandated upgraded systems better able to pull tiny virus particles out of the air. They often require new machinery. Due to recent changes in state law, all money raised by local school funding ballot initiatives will go to funding to local schools. Until this year, about 75% of operational funds in mill levies was deducted from state funds, meaning only 25% of local property taxes for schools actually went directly to that district. The legislation benefits districts such as Santa Fe where there’s a strong local tax base, as well as districts serving Gallup, in northwestern New Mexico, where federal funds offset the nontaxable federal and tribal land surrounding it. A few school districts with both low property values and no federal land will likely lose out in the long term under the new formula. But the losses won’t be felt any time soon because of federal pandemic relief.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York: The city’s Board of Health on Monday passed a resolution that names racism as a public health crisis, joining the growing list of state and local governments around the country that have done so in recent years. The resolution calls on the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to take steps including reviewing the city’s health code to look for structural racism and find ways to make changes as necessary. “To build a healthier New York City, we must confront racism as a public health crisis,” Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi said in a statement. Since 2019, when Milwaukee County in Wisconsin was the first to call out racism as a public health issue, dozens of places around the country have followed suit. Supporters have said it’s an important step in addressing problems, while some have questioned whether the declarations will lead to real change.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: A federal judge has ruled that the state’s flagship public university can continue to consider race as a factor in its undergraduate admissions, rebuffing a conservative group’s argument that affirmative action disadvantages white and Asian students. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs ruled late Monday that the University of North Carolina has shown that it has a compelling reason to pursue a diverse student body and has demonstrated that measurable benefits come from that goal. “In sum, the Court concludes that UNC has met its burden in demonstrating that it has a genuine and compelling interest in achieving the educational benefits of diversity,” Biggs wrote. Students for Fair Admissions sued UNC in 2014, arguing that using race and ethnicity as a factor in college admissions violates the equal protection cause of the Constitution and federal civil rights law. The group contended that UNC had gone too far in using race as a factor in admissions and had thus “intentionally discriminated against certain of (its) members on the basis of their race, color, or ethnicity.” The group’s president, Edward Blum, said it would appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His group already appealed a denial in a similar lawsuit against Harvard University. Blum said he hopes both cases get bundled together so that the U.S. Supreme Court rules simultaneously on private and public universities.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The state can continue to pursue reimbursement from the federal government for the millions of dollars spent policing protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, a judge has ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Traynor on Tuesday denied the federal government’s motion to dismiss North Dakota’s attempt to recover more than $38 million from the months­long pipeline protests five years ago. The federal government argued North Dakota’s emergency response expenses are not “money damages” for “injury or loss of property.” Traynor, who is based in Bismarck and was nominated for the judgeship by former President Donald Trump, ruled the state’s claim of damages is permissible. The state filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2019. North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem has long argued that the Corps allowed and sometimes encouraged protesters to illegally camp without a federal permit. The Corps has said protesters weren’t evicted due to free speech reasons. The $3.8 billion pipeline has been moving oil from the Dakotas through Iowa to Illinois since 2017. Thousands of opponents gathered in southern North Dakota in 2016 and early 2017, camping on federal land and often clashing with police. Hundreds were arrested over six months.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: Assaulting a referee would become a crime punishable by a fine and community service hours under pending legislation in the General Assembly. The bill would make an assault on referees before, during or after a sporting event, or in retaliation for their decisions, a first-degree misdemeanor with an automatic fine of $1,500 and 40 hours of community service. A second conviction could lead to a felony charge that could include prison time if the assault was committed with a weapon or caused serious harm. More than 2 in 3 sports officials quit during their first three years because of spectator abuse, said state Rep. Bill Roemer, R-Richfield, a longtime youth baseball coach. “Sports officials deserve to be safe from undue harm on the job, not just for their safety but for the integrity of sports at large,” Roemer told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The Ohio House passed the legislation in June by a wide margin. Lawmakers considered but failed to pass a similar bill in the last General Assembly.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: A national advocacy group for women on Monday blasted the sentencing of a 21-year-old woman to prison for a manslaughter conviction after she suffered a miscarriage while using methamphetamine. Brittney Poolaw, of Lawton, Oklahoma, was sentenced to four years in prison this month after a jury convicted her of first-degree manslaughter. An autopsy of Poolaw’s fetus showed it tested positive for methamphetamine. But there was no evidence that her meth use caused the miscarriage, which the autopsy indicated could have been caused by factors including a congenital abnormality and placental abruption, a complication in which the placenta detaches from the womb, said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. According to the medical examiner’s report, the fetus was between 15 and 17 weeks old, which means it wouldn’t have been able to viably survive outside the womb yet. “This prosecution went forward against somebody who had a pregnancy loss before the fetus was considered viable,” Paltrow said. “In this case, you not only have a miscarriage rather than a stillbirth early in pregnancy, but the medical examiner’s report doesn’t even claim that methamphetamine was the cause.”\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: The state’s central administrative agency inadvertently released the COVID-19 vaccination status of more than 40,000 state employees to two media outlets. A spreadsheet sent to The Oregonian/OregonLive and the Salem Statesman Journal was supposed to contain the latest vaccination rates and vaccine exemption rates for each executive branch agency overseen by Gov. Kate Brown. Brown issued an executive order in August requiring all executive branch employees – along with individuals working in educational and health care settings – to be fully vaccinated against the disease caused by the coronavirus by Monday at midnight. Instead, Oregon Department of Administrative Services External Relations Director Adam Crawford emailed a file to the outlets Monday containing vaccination status by employee name. Crawford took the blame for the data release and asked that the personal information not be reported. “It’s a mistake on my part,” he said. Ben Morris, a spokesperson for SEIU 503, said the release violates an agreement the union signed with the state that required individuals’ vaccination information to be confidential. Morris said that “more concerning is that one of the main things that we heard from members who were vaccine hesitant is they were concerned about their privacy in this situation.”\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: Prosecutors pursuing the case against a man accused of raping a woman on a commuter train last week don’t anticipate charging fellow passengers for not intervening, a spokesperson for the suburban Philadelphia district attorney said. “It’s still an open investigation, but there is no expectation at this time that we will charge passengers,” said Margie McAboy, spokeswoman for the Delaware County District Attorney’s office. Authorities continue to investigate the Oct. 13 attack, in which a woman was repeatedly touched and groped over the course of a 40-minute ride despite trying to push 35-year-old Fiston Ngoy away, according to an arrest affidavit that detailed the surveillance footage from the train. Investigators say Ngoy ripped the woman’s pants off and proceeded to rape her for somewhere between 6 and 8 minutes before officers boarded the train and detained him. Requests by the Associated Press for surveillance video from the attack on the Market-Frankford line have been denied, citing the ongoing criminal investigation. Police declined to say how many passengers may have witnessed the assault but have said it appeared some held their phones up in the direction of the assault, seemingly to film the attack. Police have declined to say whether investigators have found any photos or videos of the attack posted online.\n\nRhode Island\n\nWarwick: The median price of a single-family home in the state continued to rise in the third quarter, even though the number of sales slowed down, the Rhode Island Association of Realtors said Wednesday. The median price of single-family homes sold in the quarter that ended Sept. 30 was a record-high $385,000, a 15% increase over the third quarter of 2020. However, the number of closed sales was down 8.4% year-over-year, according to association data. “The single-family home market has been incredibly competitive and the properties that are available for sale are put under contract so quickly, that it appears some prospective buyers took a break,” association President Leann D’Ettore said in a statement. “Also, the spread of the delta variant affected the market last quarter, keeping some buyers at home and making some prospective sellers think twice about listing their home.” Sales of multifamily homes, on the other hand, showed no signs of slowing. The median price soared 21% to $375,000 in the quarter compared to the same quarter in 2020, while closings increased 43%. The condominium sector had modest gains in both median price and closed sales. Out-of-state buyers accounted for nearly a quarter of all residential sales during the quarter.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: A prominent civil rights attorney on Tuesday demanded that a prosecutor revisit a case and criminally charge the two jail employees who stunned a mentally ill Black man 10 times and kneeled on his back until he stopped breathing. Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson announced in July that the Charleston County jail deputies who were seen on surveillance video restraining Jamal Sutherland wouldn’t face charges. Wilson called the deputies’ actions “damning” but said she couldn’t prove the guards intended to kill Sutherland, who at the time was refusing to go to his bond hearing. Attorney Ben Crump joined Sutherland’s relatives outside Wilson’s office to call on the solicitor to reconsider her decision, arguing she had gathered enough evidence throughout her months­long investigation to charge the former deputies with involuntary manslaughter. “We all know what the truth is – that they unjustly killed a young Black man who was having a mental health crisis,” Crump said. “He had committed no crime. It wasn’t like he was a hardened criminal. This was a child who needed a helping hand.” Sutherland, 31, had been booked into the jail the day before his death on a misdemeanor charge. Officers arrested him while investigating a fight at the mental health and substance abuse center where he was receiving treatment for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. His death drew national attention after county officials released video of the incident months later.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: Lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a proposal to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults while repealing much of the state’s new medical marijuana law. The Adult-Use Marijuana Study Subcommittee, which has been studying the issue since June, voted to recommend a bill that would allow people over 21 to purchase up to 1 ounce of cannabis for recreational use. It would repeal most aspects of the medical marijuana law that voters passed last year but still contain provisions for people under 21 to use marijuana for medical purposes. The bill would still need to be cleared by a pair of legislative committees, the full Legislature next year and the governor to become law. But lawmakers’ willingness to advance the issue showed a growing acknowledgment in the Republican-controlled Statehouse that recreational marijuana legalization has popular support. “Do we want to step forward and regulate it and put forward a good plan?” Republican Rep. Tim Goodwin asked the committee. “Or do we want to go against the will of the people who voted in the last election?” The bill would ban public pot consumption and eliminate criminal charges for possessing any amount up to 4 ounces.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Lawmakers on Wednesday committed to spending nearly $900 million on state incentives, infrastructure upgrades and more as part of a sweeping plan with Ford Motor Co. to build an electric vehicle and battery plant near Memphis. It took the Republican-led General Assembly just three days to sign off on the economic package after Gov. Bill Lee called them back to the Capitol for a special legislative session that was supposed to focus solely on the Ford deal. Despite the governor’s directive, some Republicans attempted to jam a number of measures that would undermine protective measures against the COVID-19 outbreak. Those attempts were ultimately unsuccessful after Senate leaders announced the bills would not receive a hearing. The push won’t be dead for long, though, because Republicans mustered enough support to bring the Legislature back in Nashville next week to consider a slew of changes in opposition to COVID-19 requirements. About 10 lawmakers voted against or abstained from voting on the Ford bills. The massive investment in the western Tennessee site sparked praise among Democratic lawmakers, who noted the area containing the state’s largest Black population had been long ignored by Tennessee’s leaders.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: The state is poised to become the latest and most populous to tighten restrictions on transgender athletes in public high school sports. State lawmakers on Sunday approved a measure that requires transgender athletes to play on teams that align with the gender listed on their original birth certificate, not their current gender identity. The bill pushed by the Legislature’s Republican majority now goes to GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it into law. Texas would join at least five other states that have passed similar measures in recent months, and the bill may yet face legal challenges. Activists for transgender athletes and LGBTQ issues have called the bill mean-spirited and discriminatory. “This cruel and grotesque ban puts a target on the backs of transgender children and adults, erases intersex people, and sends a clear message that transgender and intersex people aren’t welcome or safe in Texas,” said Ricardo Martinez, chief executive officer of Equality Texas. But supporters of the bill said it is needed to protect girls from athletes who might be bigger, faster and stronger. “We have the opportunity today to stand up for our daughters, our granddaughters and all our Texas girls,” Republican state Rep. Valoree Swanson said before the bill passed in the state House last week.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: The opening of affordable apartments in a six-story building made out of recycled shipping containers will be delayed because of a shortage of materials. Eco Box Fabricators owner Rod Newman said a delay in getting roofing materials and an elevator have pushed back the opening to the end of the year. The project called Box 500 had been scheduled to open over the summer in Salt Lake City with affordable rents. The coronavirus pandemic has caused global supply change problems, and the shipping container apartments are not the only housing development facing delays in Salt Lake City. “In the (housing) market, we’re seeing shortages across the board,” Orion Goff, deputy director of the Department of Community and Neighborhoods, told The Salt Lake Tribune. The shipping container building, when completed, will have 48 studio apartments, 18 one-bedroom units and 17 two-bedroom apartments. Studios are 320 square feet, while one- and two-bedrooms are about 640 square feet. Amanda Best, a specialist with the city’s housing development program, said rents will range from $829 to $1,204 a month based on income.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: Gov. Phil Scott on Monday extended emergency motel housing for some of the homeless population through the end of the year and urged the Legislature to fully fund his $249 million housing recovery plan that he said includes historic funding for permanent housing for the homeless. In July, the state extended the hotel voucher program for families with children, the disabled, pregnant women and other vulnerable people, and it gave $2,500 checks to those no longer eligible. Scott later moved to keep the program running for those people another 30 days, until Oct. 21. “Those in GA Emergency Housing currently are some of the most vulnerable, including Vermonters with disabilities, families with children, and households who have faced chronic housing instability,” Scott, a Republican, said in a statement. “Demand for emergency housing and shelter is a symptom of Vermont’s current housing crisis. Ultimately, permanent housing solutions, not simply emergency housing and shelters, are needed.” As of last week, the Department of Children and Families was serving 950 families, representing 1,100 adults and 402 children, the administration said. Before the pandemic, the program provided emergency housing to about 2,500 Vermonters a year, officials said.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: The leading candidates for governor have gone quiet on commitments both previously made to disclose at least some information from recent tax returns before the Nov. 2 election. Neither the campaign of Democrat Terry McAuliffe nor that of Republican Glenn Youngkin has responded to recent inquiries from the Associated Press about plans to share the information with voters. While it is not required for Virginia gubernatorial candidates to disclose their returns, there is some limited precedent for doing so. The complete documents could give a more nuanced look at a candidate’s income, deductions and philanthropy than the state’s mandatory disclosures do. In July, in response to questions from the AP, Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said the former private equity executive and first-time candidate would release information from recent years’ tax returns before November. Christina Freundlich, a spokeswoman for McAuliffe, said the former governor would share a summary of recent years’ returns before the election. Also on the ballot for governor next month is third-party candidate Princess Blanding, an activist and educator who did not respond to the AP’s initial inquiry about whether she intended to release any tax return information.\n\nWashington\n\nOlympia: Lawmakers and legislative employees in the state House must prove they are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to access House facilities through early January, under a rule adopted by a House committee late last month. The policy took effect Monday, the same day a statewide COVID-19 vaccine mandate deadline passed for many state workers and others to provide proof of vaccination – or an accommodated exemption – in order to keep their jobs. More than 1,800 state workers were fired, resigned or retired due to the mandate. Legislative staff and lawmakers are not covered by Gov. Jay Inslee’s vaccination requirement, so policy for the House and Senate facilities is left up to leaders within each chamber. In the House, the Executive Rules Committee – which handles chamber policies – is composed of four Democrats and three Republicans. Bernard Dean, the chief clerk of the House, said that the change in facility access is only for the 2021 legislative interim and that no decisions have yet been made on whether to extend the policy to the legislative session that begins Jan. 10. Secretary of the Senate Brad Hendrickson said the chamber has not adopted a similar interim policy, but decisions on building access and what format the session will take in January are expected soon.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Officials are moving forward with initiatives in response to an ongoing HIV outbreak in Kanawha County. The new initiatives shared Tuesday at a meeting of the county’s HIV Task Force include training sessions for stakeholders and doctors and hiring more disease intervention specialists, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reports. The initiatives are in response to an August report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Kanawha County’s HIV crisis. The findings recommended that people who inject drugs in West Virginia’s largest county should have expanded access to sterile syringes, testing and treatment. The recommendations came in response to one of the nation’s highest spikes of HIV cases. An increase in sterile syringe access for people who inject drugs wasn’t among items discussed Tuesday. “The state is currently trying to prioritize our efforts in response to the CDC recommendations and is fully supportive in working with community partners and local health departments to support current programs that would be in alignment with our current law,” state epidemiologist Shannon McBee said. State lawmakers added new requirements this spring for syringe service programs, leading many organizations to stop offering them.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Creating a state hunting season for sandhill cranes drew support at a legislative hearing, with backers of the Republican proposal saying it could be properly managed and help farmers who say the birds are overpopulated and hurting their crops. The bill is one of 13 hunting-related measures introduced by Republicans and supported by the pro-hunting group Hunter Nation that are working their way through the Legislature. Conservation groups complained at a Senate committee hearing Tuesday that they weren’t consulted on the package. Republicans say the goal of the bills, including the sandhill crane proposal, is to make hunting, fishing and trapping more accessible. The bills include stocking more pheasants and brook trout, simplifying turkey hunting seasons, and reducing Department of Natural Resources regulations for hunting, trapping and fishing. Another measure in the package would allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit, but that was not up for a public hearing Tuesday. Hunting sandhill cranes was last proposed in 2011, but the measure never made it out of committee. Rich Beilfuss, president and CEO of the International Crane Foundation, highlighted how the U.S. almost hunted the birds to extinction in the 1800s, requiring them to be protected since the early 1900s. “Hunting is not a solution for crop damage,” he said. “But there are solutions. ... we’re trying to find non-lethal solutions.”\n\nWyoming\n\nMoose: Rangers in Grand Teton National Park have resumed using body-worn video cameras after a three-year hiatus. Grand Teton rangers stopped using the cameras in 2018 amid problems with aging equipment and being able to store data, park officials said in a statement. Only commissioned law enforcement rangers will use body-worn cameras and only while gathering information during enforcement of laws. Cameras won’t be turned on during other conversations with park visitors, such as when rangers are sharing information, park officials said. In nearby Yellowstone National Park, 90% of commissioned law enforcement rangers, including all field staff, already wear body cameras, according to Yellowstone officials. Yellowstone law enforcement ranger supervisors will be issued cameras in coming weeks.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/10/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/05/07/nina-simones-house-mark-twains-frogs-hawaiis-royals-news-around-states/39453955/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From staff and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: After 15 inmate suicides in 15 months, a federal judge ruled Saturday that the state is putting prisoners in danger by failing to provide adequate suicide-prevention measures. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson wrote that there are “severe and systemic inadequacies” in the Alabama Department of Corrections’ care of inmates and that the facts behind recent suicides show unconstitutional conditions persist in state prisons. “It is true that, as in the free world, not all suicides can be prevented. But this reality in no way excuses ADOC’s substantial and pervasive suicide-prevention inadequacies. Unless and until ADOC lives up to its Eighth Amendment obligations, avoidable tragedies will continue,” Thompson wrote at the conclusion of the 210-page opinion. Thompson noted some “promising” measures but said they were “too little, too late.”\n\nAlaska\n\nBethel: A company is investing in development programs for youths and others to fulfill its promise to hire local workers for a proposed gold mine project. Alaska’s Energy Desk reports Donlin Gold is funding Yuut Elitnaurviat, a workforce development organization in Bethel. Two Native corporations own the mineral rights and land for the prospective gold mine 280 miles northwest of Anchorage. The project is expected to last up to 27 years. Donlin spends $1 million annually on programs like Yuut Elitnaurviat and Excel Alaska, which train rural Alaskans for jobs near home. Excel Alaska takes students as young as seventh grade and tailors sessions to fit the skills each one needs to obtain a job in his or her village, providing training through high school.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: Time is running out: May 12 is the last day to explore “Electric Desert,” the immersive light-and-sound exhibition at the Desert Botanical Garden. But the garden has already announced its next blockbuster art show, an installation of more than 1,000 animal sculptures by the Italian collective Cracking Art. “Electric Desert,” created by Philadelphia-based Klip Collective, projects kaleidoscopic light designs onto Sonoran Desert flora. It’s the latest in a line of ambitious outdoor installations at the garden, one of the Valley’s top attractions. Next up is Cracking Art’s “Wild Rising,” a menagerie of animals sculpted in brightly colored, recyclable plastic. Opening Oct. 10, it will comprise 13 installations throughout the garden, including penguins hanging out with saguaros, gray wolves on guard duty and snails perched on the butte.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: Officials have formally signed off on the state’s first medical marijuana dispensary, and it could be less than a week before cultivators expect to have product ready for sale. Department of Finance and Administration spokesman Scott Hardin said Friday that Hot Springs dispensary Doctor’s Orders RX has been officially awarded the state’s approval. The dispensary had been inspected by Alcoholic Beverage Control, which regulates medical marijuana, and by the fire marshal. Hardin says Green Springs Medical, another Hot Springs dispensary, is scheduled for inspection Thursday. He says if it meets the qualifications, it could receive approval before Sunday, when cultivator BOLD Team expects to have its first harvest ready for sale. Two other cultivators expect to harvest by the summer.\n\nCalifornia\n\nYosemite National Park: Red-legged frogs made famous by Mark Twain are thriving in Yosemite Valley after a decades­long absence. Officials said Monday that they have documented the first breeding by the frogs in Yosemite since 2017, when adult red-legged frogs were first reintroduced after a 50-year absence. Yosemite National Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds says ecologists found clusters of eggs in meadows and ponds this spring even though it normally takes years to see such results. The California red-legged frog is named for its colorful legs and belly. It was featured in Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The frog disappeared from Yosemite in part because non-native, predatory bullfrogs first introduced to a reflection pond spread throughout the valley and, over time, gobbled them up.\n\nColorado\n\nSilverton: A tourist railroad has commenced service, bringing hope to businesses that have been isolated by weather events. The Durango Herald reports that the first Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad engine of 2019 arrived Saturday in Silverton, depositing dozens of tourists in the mountain town. Business owners in the community 324 miles southwest of Denver have suffered the economic consequences of winter avalanches that closed access along U.S. Route 550 for weeks. That followed a month and a half of train cancellations caused by the 416 Fire, a wildfire that burned 54,000 acres north of Durango beginning in June 2018. Hundreds of people were evacuated. The fire caused tens of thousands of train reservation cancellations, with at least one Silverton business owner reporting sales were down 70%.\n\nConnecticut\n\nStorrs: Firefighters have rescued eight ducklings from a storm drain on the University of Connecticut campus. The school says bystanders walking near the chemistry building called the fire department after noticing a mother duck and two ducklings crying outside the drain Sunday evening. The school says a firefighter attached to a safety rope used a ladder to reach six of the eight ducklings and bring them out. The other two had made their way down a drain pipe. Crews lured those two out using a cord attached to small dish filled with Rice Krispies. The school says the duck family was reunited and has returned to a nearby lake.\n\nDelaware\n\nLewes: A home on the market for $1.45 million can be tied directly to the American Revolution and the founding of the nation’s government. Dubbed the Thomas Rodney house, it was first owned by a man who was the brother of Caesar Rodney, famously known for riding to Philadelphia despite being very ill to sign the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Rodney’s home was built in 1775. He served as a military leader, Continental Congressman, justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, speaker of the Delaware House and first federal judge of the Mississippi Territory, appointed by then-President Thomas Jefferson. The house was also once the home of the chief diver of the U.S. Navy and, in the 20th century, the summer home of Ben Fogey, then the architectural critic of the Washington Post.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: A new exhibit at an unconventional gallery in the district celebrates barbershop culture and even offers free haircuts, WTOP-FM reports. The Mobile Art Gallery, from nonprofit organization CulturalDC, has unveiled The Barbershop Project, which artist Devan Shimoyama says was inspired by his own experiences as a gay man of color visiting barbershops. The inclusive exhibit also incorporates paintings and silk flowers alongside the functioning barbershop. “There’s furniture that’s been made specifically for that space so that people can come and hang out,” Kristi Maiselman, executive director of CulturalDC, tells WTOP-FM. “So it’s a welcoming space for people to come and gather and tell stories.”\n\nFlorida\n\nBrevard: “The Right Stuff,” a new television series adapted from Tom Wolfe’s iconic account of the early days of the U.S. space program, will start filming this fall on the Space Coast. Leonardo DiCaprio will be one of the executive producers of “The Right Stuff.” Appian Way Productions, a film and television production company founded by DiCaprio, is collaborating on the project with National Geographic Partners LLC and Warner Horizon Scripted Television. Space Coast Film Commissioner Bonnie King believes “The Right Stuff” will be the first scripted television series filmed in Brevard County since “The Cape,” which aired in 1996 and 1997. King says she’s pleased the Space Coast was selected as a filming location because “this is where it all happened.”\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: State transportation officials are planning a series of public meetings amid preparations for new toll lanes on the perimeter that encircles the city. The Georgia Department of Transportation plans seven public meetings to provide information on the proposed lanes on the “top end” of Interstate 285. They’re planned from the stretch from Paces Ferry Road in Cobb County to Henderson Road in DeKalb County. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the plan would add two toll lanes in each direction on that stretch of I-285. Toll lanes are also planned on Georgia 400, from the Perimeter to the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s North Springs station. Other plans involve Interstate 20. The meetings are planned May 14-23 in communities including Doraville, Chamblee, Smyrna, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody and Brookhaven.\n\nHawaii\n\nLihue: Statues of past island royalty will soon begin their reign in front of a museum in the city. The Garden Island reports statues of the last king and queen of Kauai and Niihau were expected to be unveiled in a ceremony Saturday at the Kauai Museum in Lihue. The museum and archive on the eastern side of Kauai focuses on the indigenous and immigrant people of the two islands. Kauai residents Billy and Luella Lemn conceived the idea, and Billy Lemn produced the drawings of King Kaumualii and Queen Deborah Kapule that are being used as a basis for the life-sized statues by Chris O’Conner of Kauai. Prototypes are standing in while the real statues remain under construction. The museum’s director says the project will generate interest in local history.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: The governor has announced the pardoning of two men convicted of drug charges in the 1980s. The Idaho Press reports Gov. Brad Little on Friday granted his first two pardons since taking office in January to Fred Charles Wiley of Elmore County and Kenneth James Taylor of Pocatello. Wiley was convicted of delivery of a controlled substance in 1981 and completed parole in 1985. He has since become a successful businessman, running a motorcycle business that has serviced the Boise Police Department’s fleet and donating to local charities. Taylor in 1982 was also convicted of drug delivery, completing his sentence in 1998. Taylor then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees to work as a substance abuse and domestic violence counselor, volunteering with veterans, in Narcotics Anonymous and in jails.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he’s reached an agreement with key lawmakers on a plan to legalize recreational marijuana in the state starting next year. The legislation would allow adults 21 and older to legally buy cannabis for recreational use from licensed dispensaries. Illinois residents could possess up to about an ounce of marijuana, while nonresidents could possess about half an ounce. The measure also would automatically expunge some marijuana convictions. If it passes, Illinois would join 10 other states, including neighboring Michigan, in legalizing recreational marijuana. While the Illinois law would take effect Jan. 1, the first licenses for Illinois growers, processors and dispensaries wouldn’t be issued until May and July 2020, the governor’s office said. The deal comes after years of discussion among state legislators.\n\nIndiana\n\nPorter: Tourism officials are hoping the recent elevation of the Indiana Dunes to national park status will lure more visitors to the scenic stretch of dunes, woods and beaches in northwestern Indiana. The dunes, which were formed over 10,000 years ago, are mounds of sand that can reach altitudes of up to almost 200 feet. The former national lakeshore, which some view as North America’s most biodiverse area, became the state’s first national park in February. Since then, the Indianapolis Business Journal reports that Indiana Dunes National Park workers have received calls from people around the nation wanting to visit the park. The national park includes 15,000 acres of woodlands, prairies, savannas, bogs, wetlands and sand dunes along Lake Michigan just east of Gary.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: Outdoor enthusiasts will soon have an option to place an organ donor sticker on their hunting and fishing licenses under a new law signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds. It’s called Logan’s Law after Logan Luft, of Charles City, who died at age 15 in 2017 after an all-terrain vehicle crash. Luft, who enjoyed hunting and fishing, had decided to be an organ donor, and his family says that decision saved the lives of five people who received his organs. His father, Leonard Luft, and other relatives sought the bill in his memory after seeing organ donor stickers on hunting and fishing licenses in Minnesota. The bill, which passed unanimously, requires the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to include organ donor information in hunting safety courses and to provide the designation of organ donor on license applications.\n\nKansas\n\nSalina: Officials estimate it will cost $95 million to clean up pollution at the Schilling Air Force Base. Kansas Department of Health and Environment officials discussed the cleanup with Salina residents last week. The Salina Journal reports once the state finalizes its remediation plan, the federal government and four local public entities will divide the costs of cleaning the soil and groundwater. The pollution happened more than 50 years ago when toxic chemicals were used to clean airplanes at the base, which was operated by the U.S. Department of Defense from 1942 to 1966. Those chemicals ended up in the soil beneath the base. After the base closed, the land was given to the Kansas Board of Regents, the local school district, the Salina Airport Authority and the city of Salina.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: Tourism advocates are celebrating a win this month after the city posted the nation’s largest increase in hotel demand – 11.4% – during this year’s first quarter. While the data from CBRE Hotels Americas Research focuses on a relatively limited year-over-year snapshot of January through March, convention and hotel industry experts say the fact that Louisville has added hotel rooms and still registered a jump in demand is notable. The numbers didn’t surprise Louisville Tourism, the agency that oversees convention and tourism activities. An increase in overall bookings by leisure tourists and conventions early this year has followed the 2018 opening of the Omni Louisville Hotel and the Kentucky International Convention Center’s relaunch after a $207 million renovation and expansion.\n\nLouisiana\n\nBaton Rouge: Louisiana State University engineering students have designed and made a motorized wheelchair with three fat wheels so a 23-year-old woman can go to the beach with her family. Last year’s seniors were unable to provide a beach wheelchair for Cheslyn Simpson of Plaquemine but left their plans. This year’s group started with much fatter wheels. They added a cup holder, cooler, Bluetooth music player and headlights. Project leader Daniel Lucas says the students involved the community and raised awareness. They delivered the chair last Tuesday. Simpson has a genetic disease called Friedreich’s ataxia. In 2017, her speech therapists suggested she write an essay asking for help through LSU’s senior capstone design program.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: Members of the seaweed industry say a court ruling could dramatically change the nature of the business in the state, which has seen the harvest of the gooey stuff grow by leaps and bounds in the past decade. Maine has a long tradition of seaweed harvesting, in which the sticky algae is gathered for a variety of commercial uses, including popular food products. But the state’s highest court ruled last month that permission from coastal landowners is needed for harvesting rockweed, a type of seaweed critical to the industry. The Maine Seaweed Council has called the ruling “a disappointing setback” that will force harvesters to adjust. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling was an outgrowth of a lawsuit involving Acadian Seaplants, a Canadian company with harvesting operations in rural Down East Maine.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: A once-common farm pesticide may be to blame for dozens of bald eagles poisoned over the past three years in Maryland and Delaware. The Baltimore Sun reports that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data shows pesticides were a suspected or confirmed factor in about 50 deaths of the national bird between 2008 and 2017. There have been about two dozen bald eagles poisoned to death on the Delmarva Peninsula over the past three years, including at least seven in the past two months. Maryland Natural Resources Police Lt. Roy Rafter said the illegal chemical carbofuran killed some of the birds. Authorities say they think old stocks of the pesticide are being used to kill foxes and other farm pests, but it harms the eagles that scavenge the dead animal remains.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: Wildlife officials are launching a three-year project to help conserve wood turtles in eastern Massachusetts. The turtles were once common in the cool, free-flowing streams of the Merrimack River Valley, but their populations have declined so much that they are now protected under the state’s Endangered Species Act. Populations closest to Boston have experienced some of the biggest declines as residential development has increased. MassWildlife is teaming with Zoo New England to launch the initiative, which includes searching stream habitats to find wood turtles, tracking movement patterns with radio telemetry, and identifying areas where wood turtles might establish populations in northeastern Massachusetts. The turtles grow to 6 to 8 inches long and can live more than 70 years, although few survive to maturity, with many struck by cars.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: A winery that opened last week in an old Stroh’s building has become the city’s first winery in 60 years. Detroit Vineyards opened its doors Friday in the former Stroh’s Ice Cream facility, which still boasts the company’s large, green sign. Winery co-founder by Blake Kownacki says it was essential to keep the sign because “it’s emblematic for the city” and is now being used to the advantage of the new business. The winery is open seven days a week and features wines made from Detroit-grown grapes, including white and red wine, rose, mead and cider. Part of the old Stroh’s building is used as the winery’s barrel room.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Cloud: A new pilot program authorized by the state Supreme Court in early March will increase Minnesotans’ access to help with the justice system by early 2020. Legal experts planned to meet last week, according to Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Lorie Gildea, to begin discussing the possibilities of how the program should be run. The project will be limited to one of three areas of unmet need in civil law, according to the order – housing disputes, family law or creditor-debtor disputes. The pilot project would expand the roles of legal paraprofessionals in the selected area, cutting costs on routine cases and making legal help more accessible for low-income Minnesotans, says Maren Schroeder, the director of positions and issues at the Minnesota Paralegal Association.\n\nMississippi\n\nMeridian: Singer-songwriter Steve Forbert is being honored in his hometown. Forbert attended a ceremony in Meridian as the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience museum unveiled a star on its walk of fame Saturday. The 64-year-old Forbert is a Meridian native best known for his 1979 single “Romeo’s Tune.” He was joined by relatives and friends, including his 96-year-old father, Sam Forbert, at an event forced indoors by rain. Forbert says he appreciates his Mississippi roots, telling The Meridian Star that “21 years of whatever’s in the water – I got it.” The event was part of Meridian’s Jimmy Rodgers Festival, an annual music festival saluting the country music pioneer. Forbert was the headliner for the festival’s closing night.\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: Missouri State University has signed off on a $2.2 million Ozarks Education Center that will be built on the shores of Bull Shoals Lake. The project includes a classroom meeting space that can accommodate about 40 students and two small cabin “pods” where eight to 10 students or researchers can stay while conducting research projects related to the Ozarks’ environment. Janice Greene, MSU professor of biology, says the Ozarks Education Center will be built on land donated to MSU and is situated far from any towns to help produce an atmosphere conducive to field research. It will complement the Bull Shoals Field Station across the lake that has been used for many years to teach about the Ozarks environment and do research on Ozarks environmental issues.\n\nMontana\n\nHeart Butte: A Blackfeet man’s DNA is the oldest ever found on the continent, according to a testing company. Darrell “Dusty” Crawford’s results trace his ancestry back 17,000 years in the Americas. Crawford had his DNA tested through CRI Genetics, which aims to provide customers with a “biogeographical ancestry,” a description of where their genes fit into the overall story of the species. For Crawford, the company traced his line back 55 generations with a 99% accuracy rate – rare, as the ancestry often is clouded that far back, according to the company. It was so unlikely, CRI told him, as to be like finding Bigfoot. Crawford’s DNA story suggests his ancestors likely came not across the Bering Land Bridge but from the Pacific, traveling to the coast of South America and then heading north, according to CRI.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: Pedestrians and drivers may have to make way for electric scooter riders on the city’s sidewalks and streets as soon as this week. The Omaha World-Herald reports that the City Council will vote Tuesday on a pilot project to bring up to 1,500 dockless scooters to the city through November. Scooter companies Lime and Spin say they could make the electric scooters available as early as Wednesday. The scooters are equipped with GPS so users can track them down for rent through a smartphone app. Many officials have expressed support for the project, but there’s some hesitation about how the scooters are operated and parked. Council member Chris Jerram is concerned about scooters being left on streets, in parking spots or near business entrances.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: A casino company and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, say they’re partnering to create a teaching and practice space featuring a mock casino, hotel rooms, sports betting area and esports arena. Caesars Entertainment Corp. and UNLV have dubbed the center “Black Fire Innovation,” and officials say it’ll provide a supermarket-sized space to host, develop and commercialize hospitality products and ideas. It’s slated to be built at UNLV’s Harry Reid Research and Technology Park southwest of the Las Vegas Strip. Officials say the two-story facility will include a student lab, work space, and a replica resort and casino with slot machines and table games. Financial details of the partnership weren’t disclosed. The technology park is a mixed-use center currently home to a charter school and a pharmaceutical company.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: It won’t take effect in time for this summer’s boating season, but a bill aimed at preventing the spread of invasive aquatic weeds in the state’s lakes is headed to the governor’s desk. The Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would enable state agencies and communities that own public boat access facilities to provide garden hoses and other cleaning equipment to prevent the spread of milfoil and other invasive weeds. Boaters would be required to clean their boats before and after using the lake. Violators would face fines. Sen. Jeb Bradley, whose district includes the state’s largest lake, says prevention is the best and most cost-effective way to limit invasive milfoil. If signed by Gov. Chris Sununu, the bill will take effect Jan. 1.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nLakewood: The public school district’s newest hire has a spiky white mane and apparently can’t tell a carrot from a microphone. Peanut the pony, who strutted into Lakewood High School last week, and his horse pals will be paid $45 an hour to provide therapy to special education preschool students in the public schools. He made his debut in Lakewood the same night neighboring Toms River Regional voted to cut staff – a real-life example of winners and losers in the state’s approach to school funding and a contrast that doesn’t sit well for some. The Lakewood Board of Education will hold a public hearing on its $171.5 million budget, which includes the additional aid, at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Lakewood High School. Unfortunately, Peanut is not slated to attend.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nFarmington: The stars of the latest installment in the “Jumanji” franchise have posted to social media about their experiences while filming in the state. The cast and crew of the forthcoming “Jumanji” sequel have completed filming in Farmington. Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black shared photos and videos on Instagram and YouTube about their time in the city 182 miles north of Albuquerque. Hart and Johnson expressed gratitude and admiration for the Navajo Nation. Johnson trained at Defined Fitness and said that while he required security to hold back overzealous fans, he can “highly recommend” the gym. Black filmed himself playing – and losing – shuffleboard among the locals at Three Rivers Tap & Game Room. “It’s a rad little town,” Black said.\n\nNew York\n\nAlbany: Gov. Andrew Cuomo will push lawmakers to pass legislation allowing farmworkers to unionize, the state’s top labor official said during a farmworker rally outside the Capitol on Monday. The bill, known as the Farmworker Fair Labor Practices Act, would repeal an 80-year-old state law that prohibits farmworkers from organizing to seek better wages or conditions. It would also guarantee disability benefits and overtime pay. “Our governor believes farm workers should never be treated as second-class citizens,” Labor Commission Roberta Reardon told a group of a few dozen farmworkers, relatives and labor advocates. Similar legislation never got a vote in previous years, when Republicans controlled the state Senate. Supporters are more optimistic this year, following a Democratic takeover of the state Senate. Farmworkers argue they deserve the same labor rights as workers in other industries.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nTryon: A house in this small town is being restored to preserve the home and honor its most famous ex-tenant – the late music and civil rights icon Nina Simone. The nearly 90-year-old home where Simone grew up in Tryon, north of the city’s downtown, is being stabilized after years of neglect that nearly saw the structure demolished. Workers from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s HOPE Crew plan to spend much of May replacing and painting exterior siding on the 660-square-foot structure ahead of additional work on windows, interior and the roof. Tiffany Tolbert, a senior field officer for the National Trust, says it’s the start of a significant rehabilitation effort that ends with a strategy for implementing arts and culture programming into the home’s future.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nZap: This small community is planning a celebration to remember spring break 1969, when thousands of college students descended for a party that ended with the National Guard clearing out crowds. The Minot Daily News reports organizers are planning a more family-oriented event Saturday to celebrate the original “Zip to Zap” party in the town 90 miles northwest of Bismarck 50 years ago. The idea was hatched by a North Dakota State University student for students across the state who couldn’t afford a spring break trip to Florida. The estimated 3,000 young people who reportedly trashed Zap led to a response by the National Guard and other law enforcement. The anniversary event will involve a 5K race, a car show and concerts.\n\nOhio\n\nCincinnati: The Neil Armstrong Space Exploration Gallery, a new permanent space at the Cincinnati Museum Center, opened Monday, celebrating the legacy of Apollo 11 crew members, especially Armstrong, the mission commander and Ohio native. The space includes interactive elements, original artifacts and equipment, as well as an immersive theater. The gallery will expand in 2020 to include more interactive and virtual reality elements, as well as live NASA briefings and information. A lunar sample on view was presented to Armstrong by NASA officials in honor of his role in the pioneering space program and then donated to the Cincinnati Museum Center. Curators even put footprints in the carpet that look like the ones Armstrong left behind on the lunar surface.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: Tax officials say medical marijuana sales in the state topped $18 million last month, marking the seventh straight month of growth for the new industry. The Oklahoma Tax Commission reported Monday that the state collected more than $1.2 million in April from the 7% excise tax on marijuana that is in addition to state and local sales tax also collected from medical cannabis sales. Marijuana sales have grown significantly each month since dispensaries began selling the product in October. The number of people eligible to obtain the drug also is continuing to climb. The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority says it has approved more than 104,000 patient licenses since August and has licensed more than 1,400 dispensaries and 2,700 commercial growers.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: Turtles illegally dumped at Minto-Brown Island Park are threatening to push out native turtles as the creatures square off over nesting grounds and other natural necessities. The battle has led the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to euthanize countless red-eared slider turtles, which are native to the eastern United States and known for the distinct red stripes near their eyes. Red-eared sliders are vying with Oregon-native western painted turtles and western pond turtles for nesting sites, habitat and food supplies, according to wildlife officials. Western painted turtles and western pond turtles have been listed as “sensitive” species with the state, according to the Oregon Conservation Strategy. The western pond turtle’s federal status is under review, according to the Environmental Conservation Online System.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nPhiladelphia: One of the spectacles of summer has returned. Through June 20, the Philadelphia Chinese Lantern Festival will defy city noise and traffic to transform a park at the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge into something that feels more like a Disney fantasy attraction. Among the 29 larger-than-life displays are a brilliantly lit pagoda, walk-through dragon tunnel and 200-foot-long phoenix. Nighttime guests also will find Asian and American food, Chinese folk crafts and a beer garden, as well as performances and artisan demonstrations each night. Proceeds from the festival go to Historic Philadelphia Inc. and help fund the management of the Franklin Square park and its 80 free events each year.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: The city is partnering with federal officials to conserve birds and their habitats. Democratic Mayor Jorge Elorza joined U.S. Sen. Jack Reed and other officials Monday to sign an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designating Providence as an Urban Bird Treaty City. Thirty cities currently hold this designation. The fish and wildlife service says it aims to bring together government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and schools to create bird-friendly environments and provide residents, especially youth, with opportunities to connect with nature through birding and conservation. Reed, a Democrat, says Providence is getting a $50,000 federal grant to support the effort.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nCharleston: Police and other officials in the state are working to bring down a high number of road deaths among pedestrians and bicyclists. The Post and Courier reports a recent report by the nonprofit Governors Highway Safety Association ranked South Carolina sixth among U.S. states for pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 people. More than 900 have died on South Carolina roads and highways in the past six years. Capt. David Singletary of the North Charleston Police Department says most such deaths are preventable. His department’s traffic unit plans a public education campaign this summer in which officers plan to stop and speak to anyone they see improperly crossing a roadway. Other groups, like the nonprofit Charleston Moves, are pushing for pedestrian bridges and other infrastructure upgrades.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nMadison: Dakota State University says it’s rebranding, noting in a statement Friday that its goal is to unite the university under a look and feel that authentically matches “the essence of Dakota State.” The university will change its logo to a single “D” surrounded by a hexagon and change its colors from blue and yellow to Trojan blue and gray. The rebranding project took a year of research and planning and was initiated by President Jose-Marie Griffiths, who joined the college in 2015. It’s the third school system in a month to do something similar, following in the steps of the University of South Dakota’s efforts to create a community college out of the University Center in Sioux Falls and the renaming of the Sioux Falls Catholic Schools to Bishop O’Gorman Catholic Schools this week.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: The Volunteer State’s 56 state parks have been recognized for their efforts to practice environmental sustainability. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation says Burgess Falls State Park in White County achieved platinum status, while nine parks reached gold level status, 24 parks reached silver level and 22 bronze. The nine gold level parks are Bicentennial Capitol Mall, Cumberland Trail, Cummins Falls, Dunbar Cave, Johnsonville, Montgomery Bell, Radnor Lake, Roan Mountain and Standing Stone. The recognition is part of the state’s Go Green With Us program that began in 2015.\n\nTexas\n\nHouston: Lawmakers are considering a bill that could grant homeowners a tax break when their property has been damaged by disasters such as 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. The Houston Chronicle reports bill sponsor Sen. Paul Bettencourt says it would give homeowners an opportunity to challenge unjust property tax bills after a natural disaster. The bill would basically remove cities, counties and other governmental agencies from the disaster reappraisal decision-making process. It also includes guidelines on how appraisers must complete the work. Hurricane Harvey caused widespread damage and flooding along the Texas Gulf Coast, with winds speeds topping 130 mph. Just a portion of the more than 200,000 damaged structures in the state’s 60 counties were reappraised. The proposal has passed the Senate and awaits a vote in the House.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is changing wedding rules in hopes of preventing family members who aren’t church members from feeling excluded. The faith said Monday in a news release that couples who get married in civil ceremonies will no longer have to wait one year to do a temple wedding ceremony that only members in good standing can attend. Church leaders say it will allow “families to come together in love and unity” but doesn’t lessen the temple ceremony the faith believes seals the couple for eternity. Religious scholar Matthew Bowman says the old rule was designed to encourage couples to get married in a temple and have a reception or “ring ceremony” afterward. But he says it caused heartache for some with mixed religious affiliations.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department is reminding drivers to be alert to moose crossing roadways this time of year. Officials say moose are on the move particularly after dark and early in the morning as they travel from wintering areas to spring feeding spots. The department says more moose are hit by vehicles in the spring than other times of year. Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Louis Porter says last year drivers hit 61 moose on Vermont highways. He says the department is asking drivers to be especially careful and “for people to enjoy watching moose from a distance.”\n\nVirginia\n\nLexington: Virginia Military Institute isn’t raising student tuition thanks to increased state funding to the country’s oldest state-supported military college. The Lexington institution’s Board of Visitors decided Saturday to keep annual tuition for state residents at nearly $9,300 and for non-Virginia cadets at about $36,000. But fees will increase by $540 for room and board, auxiliary services and quartermaster charges. Cadets are required to live in the VMI barracks throughout their studies, making room and board a required fee. The higher fees will generate an additional $1.6 million, added to an extra $1.9 million in state funding. VMI’s budget for the fiscal year beginning in July is $96 million.\n\nWashington\n\nOlympia: State legislators have taken substantial steps to reshape the mental-health system, including funding for new facilities, legislation to increase the number of qualified workers, and the creation of new types of treatment centers. The Seattle Times reports lawmakers approved the plan – which sprawls across two different state budgets, as well as several other bills – in the legislative session that ended April 28. The work comes after years of court orders and federal inspections that meticulously documented the poor treatment of psychiatric patients in the state’s care, as well as a steep shortage of treatment beds and staffers to operate them. It remains to be seen how the complex plan comes together in the coming years. Grants will have to be awarded, facilities sited, permitted and built, and staff found to run them.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nFairmont: The Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University is looking for volunteers to give tours. The center is offering training for volunteer docents May 20. Anyone interested in volunteering can contact staff at wvfolklife@fairmontstate.edu or (304) 367-4403 by May 17. Docents will provide tours and information about the center’s exhibits to school groups and other visitors. Docents should have flexible schedules and enjoy talking about history and culture, working with groups of all ages, and answering questions. The center is located in a repurposed historic barn on the university campus and has scholarly research, archives, community programs and events, workshops, and exhibitions.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The state’s tourism industry generated $21.6 billion last year, according to a new report from the state Department of Tourism. The report says visitor spending rose nearly 5% in 2018 to $13.3 billion. Tourism brought in $1.2 billion in federal taxes, $879 million in state taxes and $703 million in local taxes. Most of the growth is tied to recreational activities. Department of Tourism spokeswoman Kristina LeVan noted several large events drew visitors to the state last year, including Milwaukee Brewers playoff games, the CrossFit Games in Madison and Harley-Davidson’s 115th anniversary celebration in Milwaukee.\n\nWyoming\n\nJackson: Biologists estimate the state’s overall wolf population at 286 this year, down 61 animals from a year ago. The Jackson Hole News & Guide reports that’s the fewest wolves counted in the state since the Wyoming Game and Fish Department took over management and initiated wolf hunting seven years ago. State biologists estimate there were 46 wolf packs in the state at the end of 2018. Game and Fish wolf biologist Ken Mills says a combination of hunting, natural mortality and reduced pup production drove down the number of wolves in the state. Although having fewer wolves concerns wildlife watchers and activists, the outcome is what Wyoming wildlife managers have been seeking. With fewer wolves, documented conflicts between wolves and domestic animals fell off last calendar year.\n\nFrom staff and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/05/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2021/07/15/manure-power-snakes-bed-castle-stair-collapse-news-around-states/117529466/", "title": "Manure power, snakes under a bed: News from around our 50 states", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed failed U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s $95 million lawsuit targeting comedian Sacha Baron Cohen filed after Moore complained he was tricked into an interview that lampooned sexual misconduct accusations against him. Judge John Cronan wrote that Moore signed a clear disclosure agreement that prohibited any legal claims over the appearance. He added that the absurd segment – in which the comic demonstrated a so-called pedophile detector that beeped when it got near Moore – was “clearly a joke” and that no viewer would think the comedian was making factual allegations against Moore. “The court agrees that Judge Moore’s claims are barred by the unambiguous contractual language, which precludes the very causes of action he now brings,” Cronan wrote. The lawsuit centered on Moore’s unwitting appearance on the comic’s “Who is America?” show. The segment ran after Moore faced misconduct accusations that he had pursued sexual and romantic relationships with teens when he was a man in his 30s. He has denied the allegations. Moore, a Republican sometimes known as the Ten Commandments judge known for hard-line stances opposing same-sex marriage and supporting the public display of Ten Commandments, faced the accusations during his 2017 Senate race.\n\nAlaska\n\nJuneau: More than 13 Indigenous communities, including seven in Alaska, will split $12 million for energy cost reduction efforts, officials announced. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced the grants during a teleconference Tuesday. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Keolani Booth, a Metlakatla Indian Community Tribal Council member, also participated in the event. They said the grant funds would help American Indian and Alaska Native communities reduce costs and move toward more sustainable energy production, the Juneau Empire reports. “We want to thank the federal government for its investment into our community,” Booth said. “This opens up many new options.” Metlakatla will use its grant of more than $1 million to complete an electrical intertie project to Ketchikan that is expected to lower prices. Booth, in a statement, said the project has been in the works for about 20 years and is becoming a reality because of the assistance of state and federal politicians. Other Alaska communities receiving grants are the Akiachak Native Community; the Native Village of Kipnuk; the Native Village of Diomede; the Native Village of Noatak and the Northwest Arctic Borough; the Village of Aniak; and the Village of Chefornak.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: A new energy facility scheduled to open in December southwest of the city will capture methane from cow manure and reuse the biogas as renewable natural fuel. Facility stakeholders said the process will capture harmful gases that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and exacerbate climate change. The project is a partnership between West Virginia-based renewable energy company Avolta and the Butterfield Dairy Farm in Buckeye. Southwest Gas Holdings Inc. will help transport the gas for sale to other outlets. A handful of renewable natural gas facilities have sprouted up in the Southwest, including in Arizona and California in recent months. The Avolta facility is one of at least five renewable natural gas plants in or coming to Arizona. Others are expected to open in Tucson, Gila Bend and Maricopa. Unlike electric utilities in Arizona, which must generate 15% of their energy from renewable sources by 2025, Southwest Gas has no such required standard, according to the newspaper. Still, the gas utility is partnering with five facilities in Arizona and California. Spokespeople said the utility company is committed to partnering with more renewable natural gas developers.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: The state reported its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases in five months Tuesday as Arkansas held its dubious distinction of having the most new cases per capita in the country. The Department of Health said the state’s cases rose by 1,476 to 358,949 since the pandemic began. It was the biggest one-day jump reported since Feb. 5’s 1,824 cases. Arkansas’ cases have continued to surge, fueled by the delta variant of the coronavirus and the state’s low vaccination rates. The state ranks No. 1 in the nation for new daily cases by population, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University researchers. Only 35% of the state’s population is fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state’s COVID-19 hospitalizations rose by 41 to 606. Twenty-two percent of the state’s hospital beds and about 6% of its intensive care unit beds are currently available, according to the Department of Health. There are 240 COVID-19 patients in the state’s ICUs. Ninety-eight COVID-19 patients are on ventilators. The state’s COVID-19 deaths rose by 15 to 5,970. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is touring the state holding town halls aimed at encouraging COVID-19 shots, tweeted that 98.3% of those hospitalized in the state since January were unvaccinated.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: When the state told school districts they must still require masks for students and teachers indoors, it left no room for doubt about enforcement: If students refused, schools were to send them home. But hours after that announcement Monday, public health officials in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration abruptly changed course and said school districts would decide for themselves how to enforce the mask mandate. The reversal marked a bumpy rollout of the state’s new coronavirus rules for California’s schools, which are required to resume in-person instruction for the upcoming school year. Speaking after an event in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Newsom downplayed the reversal, saying enforcement of mask-wearing has “always been a local responsibility.” “All (the Department of Public Health) did was clarify that local responsibility, which is consistent with all the prior rule-making that has been in effect on mask-wearing going back to last year,” Newsom said. But Troy Flint, spokesman for the California School Boards Association, said the updated rule “is a huge difference in terms of how districts would operate and how the public is going to receive this guidance.”\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: The state has launched a four-year study of American bald eagles to determine how the protected raptors have adapted to population growth along the metropolitan Front Range and identify planning measures that could ensure the bird’s future. Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the study, involving biologists and volunteers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies among others, will monitor nesting sites, food sources such as prairie dog colonies, reproduction, and migration from the Denver area north to the Wyoming border. Between 25 and 30 eagles are being fitted with transmitters using cellular communications networks to provide real-time data on eagle movements. CPW estimated there are more than 90 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the corridor. There were none at the end of the 1970s and only three in all of Colorado. That recovery – mirroring a nationwide trend – came after federal and state protections including banning the pesticide DDT. The eagle’s growth has coincided with rapid urban development. Denver’s metropolitan area has nearly 3 million people, and CPW said nearly 750,000 additional people are projected to make the Front Range their home by 2029.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: State lawmakers voted Wednesday to again extend Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont’s emergency declarations first issued in March 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite pushback from Republicans and some Democrats who argued it’s time to get back to normal. The House of Representatives and Senate, both controlled by Democrats, passed separate resolutions during Wednesday’s special session. “I know that people have COVID fatigue. People want to continue to move back with returning to normalcy, and we are doing that,” said House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford. “This resolution will allow that to happen while still allowing us to act in the best interest of public health.” The resolution in the House passed on a 73-56 vote, with nine Democrats joining all the Republicans in opposition. In the Senate, the resolution passed on a 19-15 vote, with four Democrats joining the GOP in voting “no.” The Democratic governor had asked the General Assembly to renew his declarations of public health and civil preparedness emergencies through Sept. 30, noting he is only seeking to extend 11 executive orders. That’s compared to a high of more than 300 at one point during the crisis.\n\nDelaware\n\nWilmington: DuPont Co. and two spinoffs will pay at least $50million to the state to help clean up toxic chemicals, the Delaware Department of Justice announced Tuesday. It’s the first time the state’s Department of Justice has resolved environmental damage claims on behalf of the state. The settlement will pay for environmental restoration, improvement, sampling and analysis, community environmental justice and equity grants, and other natural resource needs, the department said. DuPont and Corteva, previously the agriculture division of DowDuPont, will each contribute $12.5 million. Chemours, DuPont’s former performance chemicals unit, will contribute $25 million. The three companies reached a cost-sharing agreement earlier this year. They will fund up to an additional $25 million if they settle similar claims with other states for more than $50 million. The settlement resolves their responsibility for damage caused by releases of historical compounds including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They include perfluorooctanoic acid, which was used in the production of Teflon, and have also been used in firefighting foam, water-repellent clothing and many other household and personal items. They are sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their longevity in the environment.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Nellie’s Sports Bar reopened nearly a month after it closed due to ongoing protests outside after a video showed a security guard dragging a woman out of the establishment by her hair, WUSA-TV reports. But people were outside the establishment Tuesday forming a human chain at the door to dissuade customers from going inside. Nellie’s let go of the security company whose officer was recorded dragging Keisha Young out of the bar June 13, in the wake of the video being released on social media. Protests are planned for Friday evening by a group that is still frustrated about what happened in June, during Pride Month, at the well-known LGBTQ bar. ABRA, the district agency tasked to issue and renew licenses, assigned an investigator to the case. The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board held a closed meeting to review the report and referred the case to the District’s Office of Attorney General. Young claimed the issue started when security misidentified her for another woman whom they wanted to leave for allegedly bringing in a bottle from outside. The investigator determined Nellie’s had a difficult time removing patrons through a crowd as they pushed and shoved into other people and got involved in the altercations.\n\nFlorida\n\nMiami: Norwegian Cruise Line is challenging a new state law that prevents cruise companies from requiring passengers to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Miami federal court, contends that the law jeopardizes safe operation of cruise ships by increasing risk of contracting the coronavirus. Norwegian intends to restart cruises from Florida ports Aug. 15 with vaccinations required for all passengers. Norwegian wants a judge to lift the ban by Aug. 6. The law imposes a fine of $5,000 each time a cruise line mandates that a passenger provide vaccination proof. Norwegian claims it violates federal law and several constitutional rights. The company, officially known as Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, says it won’t be able to sail from Florida unless a judge acts to block the law. “The result would be a devastating, unrecoverable loss for everyone – not only for NCLH’s business but also for tens of thousands of passengers, employees, and stakeholders who all benefit from NCLH resuming safe operations as planned,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as a defendant Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Scott Rivkees. He is an appointee of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose spokeswoman said the cruise line’s policy discriminates against children under 12 and others who are not vaccinated.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAugusta: In a nightmarish scenario, a couple found 18 snakes under their bed. Instead of killing the creatures, the husband carefully plucked them off the ground, dropped them in a bag and relocated them to a nearby creek. Augusta resident Trish Wilcher told WJBF-TV that as she and her husband, Max, were about to go to bed Sunday, she saw what she thought was some fuzz on the floor. She said it moved when she reached down. “And then a second later another piece moved,” Wilcher said. “And I went to my husband: ‘We have snakes!’ ” The couple found a mother snake with 17 recently hatched babies under their bed. Max Wilcher used a grabber tool to place each one in a linen bag. The ordeal took until around midnight. “He brought them out there to the creek area and released them there,” Trish Wilcher said. Outside of finding a place to lay their eggs, there’s another reason snakes may want to share human spaces. Camilla Sherman, an environmental educator for the Phinizy Center for Water Sciences, said snakes sometimes move into homes to hunt rodents. “If you have a mouse problem, the snakes are going to come and try to help you with that,” Sherman said.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: A City Council member has proposed banning unpermitted parking in an Oahu neighborhood while the state closes a popular trail nearby for two years to conduct repairs. The state plans to close Maunawili Falls Trails in Kailua starting Thursday so that it and a private landowner can preserve historic and cultural sites. It also plans to build parking and comfort stations. The trail takes hikers through a lush forest to a waterfall. As the trail has grown in popularity, neighbors have struggled with hikers parking illegally and trespassing, as well as urinating in their yards and leaving behind dirty diapers. Chris Nakamatu of the Maunawili Estates Community Association said about 1,000 people use the trail on the weekends. City Council member Esther Kia’aina, who represents the area, told Hawaii News Now she doesn’t expect people to stop coming when the trail closes, so she’s calling for a ban on unpermitted parking in the neighborhood during the closure. The city already restricts parking for those without permits in a Kalihi neighborhood, she said. “I think that this is the best way to balance the community’s needs with those that are trespassing,” Kia’aina said. Neighbors say they support measures to control the crowds and revive the trail.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Residents and visitors need to help prevent wildfires in what could be a challenging season with continued high temperatures and most of the state in drought, Gov. Brad Little said. The Republican governor said Tuesday that there’s a potential for multiple giant wildfires in Idaho that use up firefighting resources and leave some areas unprotected. He spoke at an outdoor news conference hazy with smoke from wildfires from nearby states. “My fear is that we will have some of these great big mega-fires that start creating their own weather, like the one that is over in Oregon, where I think a lot of this smoke is coming from, that basically endanger communities; they endanger firefighters; they endanger precious wildlife and watershed capacity,” he said. Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years, and scientists have long warned that the weather will get wilder as the world warms. Special calculations are needed to determine how much global warming is to blame, if at all, for a single extreme weather event. Little has already tapped the Idaho National Guard in what could be the worst wildfire season in the state in years. That includes the use of helicopters that can fight fires, transport firefighters or deliver supplies.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Five people were rushed to area hospitals after being shot Wednesday afternoon on Chicago’s South Side, about 12 hours after another shooting elsewhere in the city wounded five other people, police said. Tom Ahern, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, said he did not know the conditions of the victims who were shot just after noon. He also did not yet know the ages of the victims, but he said he did not believe that any of them were children. No arrests have been made, he said. Just after midnight Wednesday, five other people – four women and a man – were shot as they stood outside in the Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side. “A group was standing outside when they were approached by an unidentified male … who produced a handgun and began shooting. The victims attempted to flee the scene once the shooting began,” police said in a statement. Four of the victims, who range in age from 18 to 29, were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries. A fifth victim, a 34-year-old woman, was shot in the leg but refused to be taken to a hospital, police said. And about 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood, a 2-year-old boy and 32-year-old man were critically wounded when someone pulled up in front of a home near which they were standing and opened fire.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: The leaders of two now-closed online charter schools are accused in a new lawsuit of defrauding the state of more than $150 million by padding their student enrollments and inappropriately paying money to a web of related businesses. The lawsuit announced Monday by the state attorney general’s office comes nearly two years after Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy shut down amid a state investigation that found the two online schools improperly claimed about 14,000 students as enrolled between 2011 and 2019, even though they had no online course activity. The lawsuit seeks repayment of about $69 million it claims the schools wrongly received in state student enrollment payments. It also seeks $86 million that officials say the schools improperly paid to more than a dozen companies linked to them by common business officers or relatives and did so with little or no documentation. “This massive attempt to defraud Hoosier taxpayers through complex schemes truly boggles the mind,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, said in a statement. A state audit linked much of the misspending to Thomas Stoughton, who headed the online schools from 2011 to 2017 and owned or had business associates who operated about a dozen companies that received school payments.\n\nIowa\n\nAltoona: Workers used a crane Tuesday to remove a boat from an amusement park ride as part of the investigation into an accident that killed one boy and critically injured his brother. The boat, which weighs over 1,700 pounds, was removed from the human-made channel on the Raging River ride so that inspectors and engineers could have a closer examination, Adventureland Park attorney Guy Cook said. The boat was placed on a trailer and taken to a secure location, as the investigation into the “tragic and extremely unusual accident continues,” he said. The boat was carrying six members of a Marion, Iowa, family at the park in Altoona when it unexpectedly overturned on the evening of July 3, trapping two brothers under the water for minutes. Michael Jaramillo, 11, died of his injuries the next day, while 16-year-old David Jaramillo remains hospitalized in critical condition. David Jaramillo is still heavily sedated and hooked up to oxygen, unable to talk or see for the moment, said family attorney Ryan Best. His father, also David Jaramillo, was undergoing surgery Tuesday on bones he broke in his shoulder when the boat overturned, before he was able to free himself, Best said. Michael Jaramillo’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday at a Des Moines church.\n\nKansas\n\nTopeka: A Republican lawmaker questioned Tuesday whether Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration made unemployment fraud worse by not conducting adequate background checks on hundreds of people hired to help with a surge of claims during the pandemic. Sen. Caryn Tyson, of Parker, raised the issue as the state prepared to launch a new investigation of unemployment fraud. Tyson serves on a new council created by the GOP-controlled Legislature to oversee a modernization of the Kansas Department of Labor’s aged computer system and to audit fraud and its effects. The state Department of Labor has estimated fraudulent claims last year totaled $290 million, but a report by the Legislature’s auditing arm estimated $600 million. The council on Tuesday discussed the scope of its audit so the state can take bids from private firms for the work, with a preliminary report due May 1, 2022. The final report is expected by September next year. The council expects to set the audit’s scope next week, but Tyson said auditors should examine possible “holes or flaws in the human side” of computer security, particularly given the big expansion of the department’s workforce.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville: Bourbon tourism is getting another boost from a distillery in the city. Angel’s Envy says it will be able to accommodate twice as many guests once an $8.2 million expansion is completed next spring at its downtown Louisville site. The craft distiller says the project includes a new event space and bar, a larger retail space, and several new tasting rooms. The distillery will remain open to the public throughout the construction. “Angel’s Envy is a prime example of how Kentucky’s signature bourbon industry immensely benefits our commonwealth by attracting visitors to the state while creating quality opportunities for Kentuckians,” Gov. Andy Beshear said Tuesday. Kentucky is home to 66 spirits operations employing more than 5,100 people full time statewide, Beshear’s office said. In 2020, the industry announced 20 projects in Kentucky, totaling more than $300 million in new investment. Kentucky crafts 95% of the world’s bourbon supply, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: Efforts to mitigate COVID-19 at large events – including mask mandates or requirements that attendees be vaccinated or have a negative coronavirus test – will likely continue into the fall because of low state vaccination rates and the spread of dangerous virus variants, the city’s health director said Tuesday. Dr. Jennifer Avegno’s remarks came at a news conference focusing on the city’s efforts to encourage vaccinations in a state that has one of the nation’s lowest inoculation rates. Louisiana health officials on Tuesday said COVID-19 cases are surging, largely among unvaccinated people, as the more easily transmissible delta variant spreads in the state. Avegno’s remarks come as the city looks to a new NFL and college football season and the return of major entertainment events such as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which was postponed from its usual spring dates. The city currently allows major events to have full capacity if there is a mask requirement or if attendees are required to have either a vaccination or a negative virus test. “I think folks should expect that that might the case in the fall,” Avegno said. “We would all love to have large events that did not require some degree of mitigation. And before delta I was maybe a little more confident that we would get there.”\n\nMaine\n\nAugusta: A bill that aimed to eliminate the state’s privately owned electric utilities by buying them out and replacing them with a consumer-owned utility was vetoed Tuesday by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, likely spelling the end of the proposal this legislative session. Mills acknowledged that the performance of Central Maine Power and Versant Power has been “abysmal” but said the proposal to send them packing – with voters getting the final say – was “deeply flawed” and “hastily drafted and hastily amended.” “I certainly agree that change is necessary. No question about that. And I remain open to considering alternative proposals,” she said. The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Seth Berry, D-Bowdoinham, disputed the governor’s characterization of the proposal, arguing that it was thoroughly vetted over the past three years. And it isn’t going away. A coalition will be launching a referendum drive to put the proposal before voters anyway next year, instead of this fall. Supporters said it’s time to replace Central Maine Power and Versant Power, which are owned by corporations in Spain and Canada, with an entity that works in the interest of Mainers instead of shareholders. The new entity, Pine Tree Power, would keep rates low, respond faster to outages and support clean energy projects, they said.\n\nMaryland\n\nAnnapolis: Grow & Fortify is looking to make it easier for craft alcohol fans in the state to track their endeavors. The Maryland-based agricultural cooperative launched the Maryland Craft Beverages app Wednesday. It allows users to plan future stops, track locations they have visited and participate in industry-tailored passports, according to a press release. The app will include trails dedicated to beer, wine, spirits, cider and mead. A directory in the app will feature active members of the Brewers Association of Maryland, the Maryland Distillers Guild and the Maryland Wineries Association. Through the app, Grow & Fortify hopes to connect users with local tasting rooms and boost revenue for beverage producers in Maryland, according to the release. The app will replace the annually printed Maryland Craft Beverage map that Grow & Fortify previously distributed at tourist destinations around the state. Daruma Tech developed the app, which will be available for free in the Apple and Google Play stores.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: The rise of hybrid and remote work during the past year and a half is just one of the ways the future of business in Massachusetts could change in the post-pandemic years, shifting the state’s economic “center of gravity” away from the greater Boston core, according to a report released Tuesday by the Baker administration. Even as COVID-19 concerns ease, public transit ridership likely won’t return to pre-pandemic levels, with the steepest decline likely in commuter rail, according to the report, which found business travel may also fall compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. The report anticipates that changes in the economic landscape will require sweeping workforce training programs to connect workers with key skills for the future economy, with as many as 400,000 people needing to transition to different occupations or occupational categories over the next decade. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said the state needs to “turbo-charge” those training programs. The governor also said the state needs to increase the production of new housing and support downtown economies, as well as adapt to new transportation demands and promote flexibility in child care options, including increased child care subsidies for lower-income families.\n\nMichigan\n\nFlint: A federal judge listened Tuesday to residents who were victims of the city’s lead-contaminated water, a step in determining whether she should sign off on a $641 million deal that would settle claims against the state. More than a dozen people without lawyers signed up to speak, all in opposition. Thousands more are represented by attorneys who negotiated the settlement with Michigan and other parties and urged approval a day earlier. “This is a little unusual,” said U.S. District Judge Judith Levy, who left her courthouse in Ann Arbor for a courtroom 55 miles away in Genesee County. The settlement fund includes $600 million from Michigan and $20 million from Flint. But attorneys are seeking $200 million in fees. “The lawyers are making out like fat rats,” Audrey Young-Muhammed complained to the judge. Money would be available to every Flint child who was exposed to the water, adults who can show an injury, landlords, business owners, and anyone who paid water bills. More than 50,000 people have filed claims in a city with a population of roughly 95,000. Kids are supposed to get 80% of the money. Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement that the deal provides relief and prevents a “drawn out legal back-and-forth.” But the Rev. Freelon Threlkeld, addressing the judge, described the settlement as “some crumbs.”\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says it won’t consider holding a wolf hunting or trapping season until 2022 at the earliest. The agency said in a statement last week that it’s taking longer than expected to update its 20-year-old wolf management plan, and it’s now expected to be done by March. “We will use our updated plan as we determine whether and how to use various management tools to ensure continuation of a healthy and sustainable wolf population in Minnesota,” the statement said. “Consideration of whether to hold hunting or trapping seasons will be guided by the updated plan.” Then-President Donald Trump’s administration in November ended Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in most of the United States, leaving states and tribes in charge of overseeing the animals. Minnesota held wolf seasons from 2012 to 2014 until courts blocked them. Some states moved quickly to liberalize hunting and trapping rules. The Center for Biological Diversity praised Minnesota for moving deliberately. Collette Adkins, the Arizona-based group’s carnivore conservation director, said Minnesota had “wisely prioritized first updating the management plan to reflect new science and the values of all Minnesotans.”\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: Some residents with overdue water bills could be eligible for support through a new program the city announced this week. Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba on Monday said the city wants to help residents catch up on past-due bills and offer potential debt forgiveness. It will apply to low-income residents, those with water issues related to faulty equipment and individuals affected by weather events. Lumumba said money recouped through the program could be used to fix widespread infrastructure issues with the water system. City water customers owe more than $100 million in unpaid bills. “The city’s water woes have been well-chronicled,” Lumumba said at a briefing outside City Hall. “I’m asking all residents become a part of the program. If you qualify under the low-income program, you can look forward to turning the page.” The payment plans providing customers with additional time to make payments on their water bills will go into effect July 19. For those with large debt, the plan will allow residents to pay a monthly amount with an additional $10 tacked on over several months to cover past-due bills. Provided the resident pays on a timely basis, some debt can be forgiven, Lumumba said.\n\nMissouri\n\nJefferson City: College and university officials in the state will be able to raise tuition as much as they want under legislation Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed Tuesday. Currently, public colleges and universities can only raise tuition a limited amount to keep up with inflation, compensate for cuts in state aid, or keep up with the average tuition rates across the state. The new law will allow college officials to raise tuition as much as they want beginning in July 2022. Schools will be allowed to charge different tuition rates for different degrees, a change aimed at letting colleges set higher tuition in fields with higher education costs. The wide-ranging legislation also will let college athletes profit off their fame and celebrity, although the NCAA preemptively scrapped its rules against that earlier this month. Missouri joins a growing list of states that have enacted laws allowing student-athletes to earn money for autographs, sponsorships, or other uses of their names, images, likenesses or athletic reputations.\n\nMontana\n\nGreat Falls: Two Native American women are leading cultural hikes throughout the state, sharing Indigenous stories connected to the land and animals who live there. As Lailani Upham and Carrie Bear Chief hiked through Upper Two Medicine in Glacier National Park on July 8, Lailani and Carrie told the story of a young warrior. The man was injured, and his two comrades left him in the park, but the man was later helped by a bear, who communicated with him in the Blackfoot language. They also told the story of a non-Native man who lived among the Blackfeet people. A sharpshooter, this man shot a bighorn sheep in the very spot they stood in the park. Lailani and Carrie collect stories from elders, and they record oral histories and study books that chronicle Indigenous people in Montana. Lailani, a Blackfeet woman who loves the outdoors, in March launched Iron Shield Creative, a platform that aims to “bring Indigenous stories to the world.” The business also offers multimedia storytelling projects and workshops. “I wanted to see people within our tribal communities get to document their own stories,” she said. Lailani said storytelling is crucial because it “brings people together.” Carrie, who works as a storyteller guide for Iron Shield Creative, said storytelling keeps Indigenous culture and tradition alive.\n\nNebraska\n\nLincoln: Former state Rep. Ernie Chambers, known for seeking the censure of judges he believes have acted outside the bounds of fairness, is targeting a judge in the state’s northeastern corner who saw the Nebraska Supreme Court overturn his denial of an adoption petition to a same-sex couple. In a complaint filed last week with the Nebraska Judicial Qualifications Commission, Chambers accused Dixon County Judge Douglas Luebe of violating state law requiring judges perform their duties fairly and impartially and without bias, the Omaha World-Herald reports. Luebe described himself as “old-fashioned” in denying an adoption petition for a same-sex married couple last year. His denial was based not on state law but on a legal definition of “wife” that he pulled from a law dictionary. Luebe said the married women who sought to adopt had listed themselves in their petition as “wife and wife.” He balked, saying the dictionary defined “wife” as “ ‘a woman who has a lawful living husband.’ ” Nebraska’s highest court overturned that denial in March, ruling that the plain language of state adoption law does not preclude same-sex married couples from adopting. In his complaint, Chambers called Luebe a “scalawag in judicial robes.”\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: A Republican pageant winner and business owner is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. Sharelle Mendenhall filed as a candidate with the Federal Election Commission earlier this month and is scheduled to officially kick off her campaign Thursday evening with a rally in Las Vegas. Mendenhall was Mrs. Nevada United States in 2020 and Ms. California United States in 2019. She is also the owner of Elite Expo Talent Agency, which hires models and talent for conventions and other events. Her campaign describes her as “a strong Christian, lifelong conservative” and supporter of former President Donald Trump. She joins Reno businessman and Army veteran Sam Brown in the GOP primary. Brown is expected to hold a rally kicking off his campaign July 24. Republican Adam Laxalt, the former Nevada attorney general, has said he’s considering another run for public office and is expected to join the race as well. Cortez Masto, who is seeking reelection, is the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate. She was elected in 2016, winning the seat held by longtime Sen. Harry Reid after he retired.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nChesterfield: Since the 1960s, visitors along a forest trail could see stone stairs and archways, remnants of a country house that was referred to as a “castle.” That’s now giving way to gravity. The top section of stairs collapsed over the weekend in Madame Sherri Forest in West Chesterfield, named after a Ziegfeld Follies costume designer who lived in the house and threw parties for New York’s theatrical elite in the 1930s, the Brattleboro Reformer reports. The house was lost in a fire in 1962. The land is owned by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. Jack Savage, society president, said with all the rain the area has seen recently, it wouldn’t surprise him to hear the ground under the steps was saturated, and something just gave way. The society recently hosted a work party at the castle, cleaning up graffiti and weeding. “I know it’s a very popular place,” Savage said. “People will likely want to go see what’s there no more, but we ask that they stay away from the rubble so they don’t get hurt.” Madame Sherri, who was born Antoinette Bramare in 1878 in Paris, built her castle in 1929. She eventually abandoned the home and died in 1965 in Brattleboro, Vermont, at age 87.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nTrenton: Nearly 88,000 low-level marijuana offenses have been dismissed over the past two weeks, the state Supreme Court said, as the Garden State transitions to legalizing and decriminalizing the drug. The dismissed cases announced late Monday afternoon are the first in a wave of about 360,000 that are eligible to be automatically vacated, dismissed and expunged under the decriminalization law Gov. Phil Murphy signed earlier this year. Although the first batch of cases have been dismissed, they still have to go through the expungement process, which is automatic under the law. Earlier this month, New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner directed that pending cases and warrants for fourth-degree and disorderly persons offenses related to marijuana or hashish – including possession and distribution of small amounts, being under the influence and operating a motor vehicle while in possession of the drugs – be dismissed. The court’s July 1 order also said that related violations of probation or pretrial monitoring will be vacated and that driver’s license suspensions or revocations for failure to appear will be rescinded. Cases of eligible defendants who are pending sentencing or have completed sentencing will also be vacated and dismissed, the court said.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: Some of the state’s top climate and water experts warned lawmakers Tuesday that the effects of the drought on water supplies have been worsened by climate change, specifically an ongoing, long-term warming trend. They told members of a legislative committee that the drought is a harbinger of still more arid conditions to come as temperatures continue to climb and as rainfall becomes more variable. Human-caused climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years. Increasing temperatures also can lead to the snowpack that feeds rivers and streams melting several weeks earlier and more rapidly, resulting in more evaporation. That means less runoff into the Rio Grande, Pecos and other rivers, and that’s not going to change, since the experts said there are no indications that the long-term temperature trend will go away. New Mexico uses all its water and is pretty well tapped out when it comes to new supplies, said retired professor David Gutzler. He said long-term climate change should lead policymakers to expect and plan for diminished surface water supplies in the decades going forward. Groundwater supplies also are being depleted as more people are forced to pump water to make up for dwindling flows.\n\nNew York\n\nAlbany: It will be weeks before the state issues any payments from its $2.4 billion COVID-19 rent relief fund, state officials said Tuesday, adding to delays in a program that has been beset by technical glitches with its online application portal. At least 1.1 million New York households that rent have at least one family member who was economically affected by the pandemic, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration. But New York is one of four states that did not distribute any of the tens of billions of dollars in rent relief that Congress has paid out to states this year, according to a U.S. Treasury report of spending through May. On June 1, New York launched an online application portal allowing tenants and landlords to apply for rent – nearly two months after lawmakers first created the $2.4 billion fund. The State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has said it would take four to six weeks to process applications to release payments to landlords. Six weeks later, agency spokesperson Anthony Farmer said Tuesday that first payments are “expected to go out in the coming weeks.” Tenants and landlords alike say New York’s application portal is too difficult, time-consuming and glitch-prone to ensure eligible New Yorkers are getting the help they need applying.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Republicans advanced legislation Wednesday that defines how teachers can discuss certain concepts about race and racism inside the classroom. GOP Senate leader Phil Berger said his chamber is taking action as conservatives across the country seek to counter their understanding of “critical race theory,” a framework legal scholars developed in the 1970s and 1980s that centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people in society. The latest version of the North Carolina bill would prevent teachers from compelling students to personally adopt any ideas from a list of 13 beliefs, even though though they cannot identify a single case of this happening inside the state’s classrooms, which serve about 1.5 million K-12 public school students. “We don’t want to indoctrinate folks in what I think is the core of critical race theory, which is that race is determinative of whether or not someone is going to be successful, that race is determinative of all matter of things that happen in society and that past discrimination justifies current discrimination,” Berger said in an interview before unveiling the updated education measure.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nFargo: City commissioners have directed the police department to present them with hate crime findings. “I’m going to be reporting on the hate crimes in terms of whether or not the city ordinance was issued or reports where the city ordinance was applied or federal law was applied,” said Dave Zibolski, chief of the Fargo Police Department. “Our current hate crimes are reviewed if they meet the elements of the federal law by the U.S. attorney’s office.” Zibolski said the reports will help determine whether the city’s ordinance on hate crimes is effective. “With the new hate crimes ordinance, we’ll have some additional and potential ordinance violations. So we’ll track those as well in terms of how many of those come in, and we’ll add in the prosecution piece. So what was prosecuted so they have reported in terms of is the ordinance is effective in a sense or how often is it used,” Zibolski told KVRR-TV. Eleven cases were investigated as potential hate crimes this year, “but through the course of the investigation, none of those could be shown to be hate crime-related in terms of the ability to prosecute them,” he said. Zibolski said reports of hate crimes are posted on the department’s website monthly.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: Vaccination trends have led to the development of “two Ohios” when it comes to combating COVID-19, increasing vulnerability to the coronavirus’ highly contagious delta variant, the state’s top medical official warned Wednesday. The delta variant is rapidly becoming the disease’s dominant strain and is a real threat to those who are unvaccinated, said Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, chief medical officer for the Ohio Department of Health. The delta variant was first identified in India and is now spreading in more than 90 other countries. Meanwhile, about 5.3 million people in Ohio, or 45% of the population, have completed the inoculation process. “The reality is, we now have two Ohios,” Vanderhoff said. “An Ohio that is vaccinated and protected on the one hand, and an Ohio that is unvaccinated and vulnerable to delta on the other.” About 9 of every 10 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in central Ohio since April have been vaccinated only partially or not at all, said Dr. Andrew Thomas, chief clinical officer at the Ohio State University medical center. The doctors’ remarks came a day after Gov. Mike DeWine said Ohio will soon announce a second vaccine incentive program following the Vax-a-Million initiative that offered five $1 million prizes and five full-ride college scholarships.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: Gov. Kevin Stitt was forced to end a forum early after he and a panel of district attorneys were berated as they sought to explain the position prosecutors are taking on the U.S. Supreme Court’s McGirt decision. Stitt ended the “McGirt v Oklahoma Community Forum” roughly an hour earlier than planned Tuesday amid jeering from the audience as he tried to explain how the high court’s decision had unintended consequences for victims of crime regardless of tribal citizenship. The McGirt decision determined that a large swath of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation and that state prosecutors lack the authority to pursue criminal charges in cases in which the defendants or victims are tribal citizens. It has led to dozens of criminal convictions in Oklahoma being overturned, including some death row cases. Most of those cases are having to be retried in federal court. “Nobody on this panel created the McGirt situation,” Stitt said shortly before ending the program. “This is a complicated issue, and we have 400,000 Natives who live in the state of Oklahoma. We’ve got 3.6 million non-Natives living in the state of Oklahoma. We need to keep all Oklahomans safe.” But the main source of frustration for Native Americans who attended the forum was the lack of tribal representation on the panel, the Tulsa World reports.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: Residents struggled to get rides to cooling centers during the recent heat wave that is believed to have killed hundreds across the Pacific Northwest, officials said Monday, and staffing shortages prevented callers from reaching operators at an information line. State authorities are examining their response to scorching temperatures that broke all-time records across the region late last month as the West struggles with a historic drought and as climate change makes extreme weather more common and intense. Oregon blamed 116 deaths on the heat. “One of the heartbreaking things about this heat wave is that there were resources that were available to communities, whether it was cooling centers or transportation, and folks couldn’t access those resources to protect themselves,” Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, said at a news conference. In the week leading up to the late June heat wave, Oregon officials contacted providers, set up cooling centers and connected with vulnerable populations, including the thousands of homeless people who live on the streets of Portland and in low-income communities. One major complaint from community members was not knowing where to go to cool down and a struggle to find that information.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nCarlisle: The disinterred remains of nine Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania were headed home to Rosebud Sioux tribal lands in South Dakota on Wednesday after a ceremony returning them to relatives. The handoff at a graveyard on the grounds of the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks was part of the fourth set of transfers to take place since 2017. The remains of an Alaskan Aleut child were returned to her tribe earlier this summer. “We want our children home no matter how long it takes,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who in June announced a nationwide investigation into the boarding schools that attempted to assimilate Indigenous children into white society. Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said at the event that “forced assimilation practices” stripped away the children’s clothing, their language and their culture. She said the government aims to locate the schools and burial sites and identify the names and tribal affiliations of children from the boarding schools around the country. In Pennsylvania, the nine sets of remains inside small wooden coffins were carried past a phalanx of tribal members and well-wishers before being loaded into a trailer to be driven to Sioux City, Iowa. The children died between 1880 and 1910.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: State environmental regulators have denied a permit for a medical waste-to-energy facility in West Warwick. In denying the application Tuesday for MedRecycler-RI Inc., the Department of Environmental Management cited several factors, including a recently passed law prohibiting new high-heat medical waste processing facilities in the state. The agency also cited environmental concerns; a lack of adequate details about testing protocols; the facility’s lack of emergency response plans; a lack of clarity about how much and where medical waste would be stored; the facility’s proximity to residential neighborhoods; and questions about the facility’s technology, which has not previously been used on medical waste. The company planned to use a process known as pyrolysis to break down used gloves, tubing and syringes to generate power. MedRecycler has said the facility will be safe, provide jobs and tax revenue. The site would not accept hazardous waste. The company said it was not subject to the new law because it does not apply retroactively. Nicholas Campanella, chairman and CEO of MedRecycler’s parent company, Sun Pacific Holding Corp., told The Boston Globe that the company is considering its legal options.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nMount Pleasant: An abandoned liposuction machine was the suspicious package that closed one of the state’s busiest bridges for three hours over the weekend, according to authorities. Someone called police Saturday after finding a metal box near a pillar of the Ravenel Bridge in Mount Pleasant, just across the Cooper River from Charleston, investigators said. The caller showed officers pictures of a metal box with a lock, green and red buttons, and a fan. Officers then confirmed the box’s location, and a supervisor shut down the bridge and called the bomb squad, according to a Mount Pleasant Police report. The bridge was opened after about three hours, and officials confirmed Monday that the item was a liposuction machine. The Ravenel Bridge carries about 77,000 vehicles a day on U.S. Highway 17 between Charleston and Mount Pleasant, according to South Carolina Department of Transportation data.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: Gov. Kristi Noem suspended her Cabinet secretary overseeing state prisons and the warden of the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls, following an anonymous complaint that alleged supervising corrections officers regularly sexually harassed their fellow employees, that employee morale is low and that promotions are plagued by nepotism. The governor said she was briefed about 7 p.m. Tuesday on an internal review from the Bureau of Human Resources that was prompted by the anonymous complaint. Less than three hours later, Noem said she was putting Secretary of Corrections Mike Leidholt and State Penitentiary Warden Darin Young on administrative leave and commissioning an investigation into the allegations. The complaints had been known to state officials for months, according to the organization that represents state employees. The two pages of the complaint released by Noem’s office do not name either Leidholt or Young but allege that supervising corrections officers at the prison were allowed to sexually harass employees and that attempts to report the harassment were ignored. The complaint says schedules at the prison were adjusted so the officers could “work in the same vicinities as their interest/victims.”\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: The federal government will not alert the state when unaccompanied migrant children are brought to Tennessee to be placed with sponsors, officials with Gov. Bill Lee’s administration told lawmakers Tuesday. Brandon Gibson, Lee’s chief operating officer, said that the federal Department of Health and Human Services has largely directed her questions to information posted on government websites and policy statutes. Gibson said it’s her interpretation that the federal government could disclose information to local law enforcement about when immigrant children pass through the state, but federal officials have told her they won’t due to privacy concerns. “The response I got from HHS was that because of confidentiality they would not be notifying local law enforcement,” Gibson said. HHS officials did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Gibson gave her remarks Tuesday before a legislative panel made up of entirely of GOP members. The group is tasked with investigating refugee and immigration settlement in Tennessee after a local television station aired footage of children arriving at a Chattanooga airport and boarding buses in the middle of the night.\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: State officials on Tuesday added 59 deaths to the toll wrought by the Feb. 14 cold wave and the ensuing collapse of the state’s electric power grid. The deaths newly tallied by the Texas Department of State Health Services boosted the toll from 151 to 210 deaths, most from exposure to the sometimes-subzero temperatures. Still, some were blamed on carbon monoxide poisoning as freezing Texans sought warmth from cars and outdoor grills. The count remained preliminary and may change as more deaths are confirmed, the department said. The county with the highest death toll was Harris, where Houston is located, with 43 deaths. Travis County, where Austin holds most of its population, had 28 deaths. Dallas County reported 20 deaths. The toll is a far cry from the initial March 15 report of 57 deaths. The toll was raised to 111 on March 25, 125 on April 6 and 151 on April 28. The collapse of the power grid managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has made electric reliability in Texas an ongoing political question. In early June, Gov. Gregg Abbott declared that state lawmakers had fixed the problem. Since then, two conservation alerts issued by ERCOT during temperate spring weather prompted renewed questions.\n\nUtah\n\nDraper: The drought gripping the West is contributing to an increased number of mountain lion sightings in the state, police said. It appears cougars are being forced into more populated areas to get enough water to drink, Draper Police Lt. Pat Evans told Fox13 News. One recent encounter happened in Coyote Hollow, near the Salt Lake City suburb of Draper. Hiker Sherie Allen said she had just hit the trail with friend Shelli Roberts and Roberts’ small Shitsu Yorkie dog, Buster, when she heard something. “We hear this like, ‘rawrrrr’ – it wasn’t like a growl, it was like that screech,” she said. It was a cougar, about 6 feet away. “She, luckily, grabbed my arm and was like, ‘Whatever you do, do not run,’ and she stopped me in my tracks,” Roberts said of Allen. Roberts picked up Buster, and the big cat tracked them as they backed away slowly and got away safely. Other hikers should be aware of the danger and watch for big cats. In an encounter, people should try to make themselves look big, maintain eye contact and never run away from a cougar. Any small pets or kids should be kept close.\n\nVermont\n\nBurlington: Some performance venues across the state are preparing to reopen with help from federal money after the coronavirus pandemic forced them to close. So far, 43 Vermont locales benefited from the $13 million from the Shuttered Venue Operator Grant program, part of federal pandemic relief assistance. “From Brattleboro to St. Albans, from Derby Line down to Bennington, there’s gonna be a real shot that your community theater, your community venue will be reopened very soon,” Vermont’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Peter Welch told MyNBC5. Two Burlington locations are preparing to reopen. The Vermont Comedy Club, which received more than $400,000, is set to reopen Labor Day weekend. The Flynn Center, which received more than $1.8 million, plans to open again in October. “The funding came through right at the perfect time for us to be able to hire our contractors and start booking talent,” said Natalie Miller, co-owner of Vermont Comedy Club. Miller said the club is getting ready for the reopening. “We’re gonna be able to space people out a little bit more because everyone is in there, they’re laughing, droplet city. So we’re gonna make it a lot safer,” she said.\n\nVirginia\n\nNorfolk: An effort is underway to make the larger Chesapeake Bay area part of the National Park Service. The Virginian-Pilot reports it would be called the Chesapeake National Recreation Area. Behind the effort is a group of conservation nonprofits, community leaders and lawmakers who are working to draft legislation in Congress. It’s unclear exactly what the recreation area would look like. Proponents don’t call for the entire bay to be included. But certain land-based sites would provide public access to it. “The Chesapeake Bay is a national treasure, and the national park system represents America’s most treasured landscapes,” said Reed Perry, external affairs manager for the Chesapeake Conservancy, which is a part of the group. The idea has been around since the 1960s. And the park service has already established itself along parts of the nation’s largest estuary. For instance, there is the 3,000-mile Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail and the Fort Monroe National Monument in Hampton. A federal working group has been formed to explore the possibility of designating the Chesapeake recreation area.\n\nWashington\n\nYakima: An extreme heat wave damaged cherries grown in the Yakima Valley and the Northwest in late June and early July. The high temperature reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakima on June 29, an all-time record. The heat caused various issues, such as sunburn and stunted growth that made the cherries unsuitable for the fresh cherry market, The Yakima Herald-Republic reports. Many cherries were left on trees, while others were picked but processed, which provides a lower return to growers. Northwest Cherry Growers is still assessing the damage, but President B.J. Thurlby estimated about 20% of the overall crop was lost. Much of the loss happened in the Yakima Valley, where cherries were about to be picked. The Northwest cherry growing region includes five states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Montana. In May, the Yakima-based organization estimated a crop of 23.8 million 20-pound boxes in the five-state growing region. Thurlby said the yield this season is now likely in the 18 million to 19 million box range, which would be similar to the 2020 crop. Last year’s crop was affected by frost and wind before harvest. A few cherry varieties received a disproportionate amount of damage: Bing and Skeena, two red-fleshed cherry varieties, and the popular Rainier.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: The governor has launched a program to showcase chefs across the state. The West Virginia Chef Ambassador Program aims to promote culinary innovation and farm-to-table experiences with the goal of expanding the state’s agritourism industry, officials said. Gov. Jim Justice launched the program Monday in partnership with the West Virginia Department of Tourism. Nominations are open for this year’s inaugural class of chef ambassadors. “West Virginia’s culinary industry is one of our state’s best-kept secrets,” Justice said. “It’s time we take the flavors we all know and love – and the chefs behind our favorite local dishes – and shine a spotlight on the great things happening across the Mountain State.” The initiative will serve as a partnership between the Tourism Department and the top nine chefs to promote dining and Appalachian cuisine. Ambassadors will be selected to serve one-year terms. Each ambassador will be selected to represent a specific travel region.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The operators of a startup that allows private homeowners to rent their swimming pools by the hour said Wednesday that Wisconsin regulators are all wet and want them to back off demands that they say would kill their business. Wisconsin is the first state to push back against Swimply, which started in 2018 with just four pools in New Jersey but has taken off during the pandemic as more people looked for private spaces to swim and have fun. The business works like an Airbnb for swimming pools. Private homeowners list their pools on the website and app as available for rent. Most of the pools on Swimply are in warm-weather locations, but it recently dove into the Wisconsin market. It currently has only about a dozen pools available to rent statewide, starting at about $35 an hour, but it’s looking to expand. Wisconsin regulators told Swimply in April that pools offered for rent would have to be treated the same as large, public swimming pools. That means a pool’s owner would have to obtain a license and meet construction requirements that are more onerous. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is representing Swimply, said it will file a lawsuit if the state doesn’t back off. Wisconsin is the only state that has challenged Swimply, institute spokeswoman Erin Collins said.\n\nWyoming\n\nLaramie: The president of the University of Wyoming is proposing several academic changes and up to 75 layoffs as the university absorbs budget cuts due to a decline in state support over the past several years. President Ed Seidel will present the plan to the university’s Board of Trustees this week, and the panel is expected to take public comment before voting on it in November, the university said. The proposal would eliminate some programs with low enrollment and consolidate and reconfigure some of its colleges to better combine degree programs that have overlapping courses while reducing redundancies, officials said. The changes will lead to the layoff of at least 10 department heads. However, the university will look to rehire some of them for new departments that are created, university spokesperson Chad Baldwin said Tuesday. Seidel’s administration is proposing adding a School of Computing, a Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation, Tourism and Hospitality Initiative. Those programs are aimed at training students for future jobs in the state. The university has absorbed $42 million in cuts.\n\nFrom USA TODAY Network and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/07/15"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_9", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2024/01/10/fka-twigs-calvin-klein-ad-uk/72177205007/", "title": "FKA twigs on 'double standards' after Calvin Klein ad banned in UK", "text": "A Calvin Klein ad featuring FKA twigs has been banned in the United Kingdom after it allegedly presented the singer \"as a stereotypical sexual object.\"\n\nThe U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority announced its decision on Wednesday after receiving complaints that the supposed over-sexualized ad was \"offensive and irresponsible\" because it \"objectified women.\"\n\nFKA twigs hit back at U.K. officials in a lengthy post on Instagram, writing, \"I do not see the ‘stereotypical sexual object’ that they have labelled (sic) me. i see a beautiful strong woman of colour whose incredible body has overcome more pain than you can imagine.\n\n\"in light of reviewing other campaigns past and current of this nature, i can’t help but feel there are some double standards here. so to be clear… i am proud of my physicality and hold the art i create with my vessel to the standards of women like josephine baker, eartha kitt and grace jones who broke down barriers of what it looks like to be empowered and harness a unique embodied sensuality,\" she continued, adding that the campaign was \"exactly how i wanted.\"\n\nThe poster, originally released in 2023, showed the 35-year-old singer wearing a denim shirt with the side of her buttocks and part of her breast exposed.\n\nUSA TODAY has reached out to Calvin Klein and representatives for FKA twigs for comment.\n\nThe Advertising Standards Authority also reviewed Calvin Klein posters featuring Kendall Jenner, one of which showed the model topless with her hands across her chest. Another showed Jenner lying on her back and pulling down a pair of jeans, showing her underwear.\n\nCalvin Klein responds to UK bans of FKA twigs and Kendall Jenner campaigns\n\nCalvin Klein told the ASA that its ads did not overly sexualize FKA twigs or Jenner and \"contained a progressive and enlightened message.\" The company also argued that a \"degree of nudity should be expected\" in advertising for clothing and pointed to the fact that men have also been featured in the campaign, suggesting the aim is not to objectify women.\n\nFurthermore, \"all conventionally sensitive body areas were fully covered in the ads,\" Calvin Klein said, according to the ASA.\n\nHowever, the regulator concluded that the composition in the FKA twigs ad \"placed viewers' focus on the model’s body rather than on the clothing being advertised,\" and centered on her physical features in a way that presented her as a \"sexual object,\" making the ad \"irresponsible.\"\n\nBut the ASA said both of the Jenner ads are \"unlikely to be seen as irresponsible or cause serious or widespread (offense) on the basis of objectification.\" The first did not portray her as a sexual object, while the level of nudity in the second \"was not beyond that which people would expect for a lingerie ad.\"\n\nFKA twigson moving forward following Shia LaBeouf abuse lawsuit: 'I have my life back'\n\nCalvin Klein has been told to ensure its future ads don't \"irresponsibly objectify women\" and are \"targeted appropriately,\" according to the ASA.\n\nFKA twigs said on Instagram in March 2023 that it was an honor \"to be the new face of Calvin Klein,\" calling her campaign \"something that I believe reflects me as a woman and artist.\"\n\nShe added: \"These pictures and visuals are a physical representation to remind myself that being strong to the best of one’s personal ability will never go out of fashion.\"\n\nThis ban comes after Calvin Klein recently unveiled a new campaign featuring \"The Bear\" star Jeremy Allen White stripping down to white boxer briefs.\n\nContributing: Naledi Ushe\n\nFKA Twigs'stood up' for herself with Shia LaBeouf abuse allegations: 'What happened to me wasn't right'", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/10"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_10", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2024/01/08/go-behind-scenes-cnn-republican-presidential-debate-des-moines-drake-university-iowa-caucuses/72098332007/", "title": "Go behind the scenes of CNN's Republican debate in Des Moines", "text": "Running the show and the lead-up to a CNN political debate is a lot like conducting an orchestra.\n\nInstead of skilled musicians performing woodwind or stringed instruments, there are expert camera operators and lighting crews. Instead of Carnegie Hall, it’s Drake University's Sheslow Auditorium.\n\nAnd at 8 p.m. Wednesday, the show starts — a CNN Republican presidential primary debate held at the Des Moines university. The auditorium will be transformed into a TV-ready debate stage poised to host Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley just five days before the Iowa Caucuses.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2023/12/13/what-we-know-about-the-iowa-gop-debate-at-drake-university-in-january-iowa-caucus-2024-cnn-max/71895545007/", "title": "Iowa GOP debate: What time is debate, how to watch tonight", "text": "CNN will host a Republican presidential primary debate in Iowa tonight, giving caucusgoers a chance to hear what candidates have to offer in the final days leading up to the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses.\n\nWhen is the Iowa debate?\n\nJan. 10 at 8 p.m. Iowa time.\n\nWhere will the Iowa debate be?\n\nThe debate will take place at Drake University's historic Sheslow Auditorium, 2507 University Ave., in Des Moines.\n\n“We are honored to continue playing a central role in the democratic process at Drake University,” Drake University President Marty Martin said in a news release. “Des Moines and Drake have long been a hub for political and civic engagement on the national stage, and we are excited to carry on that tradition leading into the 2024 election, inviting our students, our community, and thousands of visitors to engage in presidential politics.”\n\nWill there be road closures for the debate?\n\nNo, there will not be any road closures due to the debate.\n\nWhat GOP presidential candidates have committed to the Iowa debate?\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley are the only two Republican presidential candidates who will appear at the debate, CNN announced.\n\nFormer President Donald Trump qualified, but instead will appear on a Fox News town hall filmed in Des Moines.\n\nWhile in Iowa after the fourth Republican presidential debate, DeSantis said he wants Trump to appear at the debate in Des Moines. In a statement, Haley also called on Trump to join. Trump has suggested he is not interested in attending debates in Iowa and New Hampshire, claiming he has benefited from his decisions to skip the first four.\n\nMore:The fight for 2nd place takes center stage at Republican debate in Iowa: What we're watching\n\nWhere will Donald Trump be during the Iowa debate?\n\nTrump will appear on a Fox News Channel town hall from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. the same day as the debate. Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will moderate the town hall that will \"focus on leading issues facing voters ahead of the Iowa Caucus,\" according to the network.\n\nWho qualifies for the Iowa debate?\n\nTo qualify, candidates must have received at least 10% support in three separate polls that met CNN’s standards for reporting. One of the three qualifying polls must be an approved poll of Iowa likely Republican caucusgoers, like the Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll.\n\nCandidates must also:\n\nFulfill the requirements outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States.\n\nFile a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission.\n\nAgree to accept the rules and format of the debate.\n\nThe qualifying window for the Iowa debate closed on Jan. 2. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Texas pastor Ryan Binkley did not qualify.\n\nThe Republican National Committee has announced that there will be no party-sponsored debates in January, leaving GOP candidates free to participate in any debates or forums they wish to partake in.\n\nMore:Everything you need to know about the Iowa caucuses ahead of the 2024 presidential race\n\nWho is moderating?\n\nCNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are moderating the Iowa debate.\n\nHow can I get tickets to the Iowa debate at Drake?\n\nThe debate will be a closed audience and tickets will not be available for purchase.\n\nHow can I watch the Iowa debate?\n\nThe debate will air on CNN, CNN Max, CNN International and CNN en Español. It also will be available on demand beginning Jan. 11.\n\nKyle Werner is a reporter for the Register. Reach him at kwerner@dmreg.com.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/13"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/12/27/when-2024-debate-presidential-hopefuls/72002626007/", "title": "When are 2024 debates? Here's when presidential hopefuls will ...", "text": "WASHINGTON — While the year may be coming to an end, Republican presidential hopefuls are only ramping up their 2024 campaigns as they try to clinch the GOP frontrunner spot from former President Donald Trump.\n\nMedia outlets including CNN and ABC will be holding debates next month around the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucus − the first two key contests in the 2024 race for the White House.\n\nBut presidential primary debates aren't the only showdowns voters will be watching next year.\n\nThe nonpartisan Committee on Presidential Debates last month announced the sites and dates for the vice presidential and presidential debates in the general election, where the Republican and Democratic nominees will make their pitches to American voters.\n\nHere’s a look at the full calendar of political events next year.\n\nPresidential primary debates\n\nNext month, CNN will host two debates among Republican presidential candidates. The first event is scheduled for a week before the Iowa caucus on Jan. 15, and the second is set for two days before the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23. Here are the dates and locations:\n\nJan. 10 : Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, at 9 p.m. ET\n\n: Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, at 9 p.m. ET Jan 21: New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. Timing to be announced.\n\nTo qualify for the Iowa debate, candidates must receive at least 10% support in three separate national polls of Republican primary voters or Iowa polls of Republican caucusgoers that meet CNN’s standards.\n\nLikewise, to qualify for the New Hampshire debate, candidates must receive at least 10% in three separate national polls or New Hampshire polls of Republican primary voters.\n\nABC News and WMUR-TV, in coordination with the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, will also host a debate on Jan. 18 at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, just days after the Iowa caucus. It will take place at 9 p.m. ET.\n\nCandidates who finish in the top three spots at the Iowa caucuses will receive invites to participate, according to a press release. They must also receive at least 10% in two national polls or two New Hampshire polls of Republican primary voters.\n\nPresidential and vice presidential debates\n\nThough Republicans and Democrats across the country haven't officially chosen their 2024 nominees, next year's presidential and vice presidential debates are already scheduled. Here are the dates and locations of the events, according to the Committee on Presidential Debates:\n\nSept. 16 : First presidential debate at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas\n\n: First presidential debate at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas Sept. 25: Vice presidential debate at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania\n\nVice presidential debate at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania Oct. 1: Second presidential debate at Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia\n\nSecond presidential debate at Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia Oct. 9: Third presidential debate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City\n\nVirginia State University will be the first historically Black college or university to host a debate in a presidential election. All debates will start at 9 p.m. ET and will run for 90 minutes without commercials, according to a press release from the committee.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/12/05/what-time-is-the-republican-debate-what-channel-is-it-on/71809330007/", "title": "What time is the fourth Republican debate? Start time, channel ...", "text": "The fourth GOP debate of the 2024 presidential race is Wednesday night.\n\nOnly four candidates, including biotech entrepreneur and Cincinnati native Vivek Ramaswamy, will take the debate stage in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.\n\nTo qualify for Wednesday's debate, candidates must have obtained a minimum of 80,000 unique donors and signed the “Beat Biden” pledge, agreeing to support the eventual Republican 2024 nominee. Additionally, GOP candidates must have gained at least 6% in two national polls or 6% in one national poll and one poll from two separate early-voting states recognized by the Republican National Committee.\n\nAre you planning to watch the fourth GOP debate on Wednesday night? Here's everything you need to know.\n\nWhat time is the Republican debate?\n\nThe fourth GOP presidential debate will take place from 8 to 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Dec. 6.\n\nWhere is the Republican debate?\n\nThe upcoming GOP debate will be held at the University of Alabama's Frank Moody Music Building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.\n\nWhat channel is the Republican debate on?\n\nViewers can watch and stream the fourth Republican debate on the NewsNation channel, app and website, per the New York Times. Pre- and post-coverage by former CNN host Chris Cuomo will take place two hours before and after the debate.\n\nThe debate will also air on the CW in the Eastern and Central time zones, and on a delay in the Mountain and Pacific time zones. The GOP matchup will air on the CW from 7 to 9 p.m. Mountain time and 8 to 10 p.m. Pacific time.\n\nA live stream of the debate will also be broadcast on Rumble.\n\nHow to listen to the Republican debate\n\nSiriusXM’s Triumph channel will air the fourth GOP debate on Wednesday night.\n\nWho is moderating the Republican debate?\n\nThe RNC announced NewsNation, \"The Megyn Kelly Show,\" the Washington Free Beacon and Rumble as its partners for the fourth debate.\n\nThe moderators for the debate are Megyn Kelly, NewsNation anchor Elizabeth Vargas and Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon.\n\nWhich Republicans qualify for the fourth GOP debate?\n\nThe Republican National Committee announced Monday that the following candidates have qualified for the fourth GOP debate:\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis\n\nTech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy\n\nFormer South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley\n\nFormer New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie\n\nBut what about the other candidates from the previous debates? South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott dropped out of the presidential race shortly after the third GOP debate last month. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who participated in the first two GOP debates, suspended his campaign Monday.\n\nFormer Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who only qualified for the first event, will not make the stage either.\n\nFormer Vice President Mike Pence also dropped out of the Republican primary in October after qualifying for the first two debates, the AP reports.\n\nWill Donald Trump be at the GOP debate?\n\nFormer President Donald Trump will not appear in Wednesday's GOP presidential primary debate. Trump also skipped the previous three debates.\n\nIn the past, Trump has cited his strong lead in national and state polls as reason enough for him not to participate in the debates. The former president has also said he wouldn’t sign the “Beat Biden” pledge to support any GOP nominee that isn't him.\n\nCurrent GOP polls\n\nAs of Tuesday, Dec. 4, Trump leads with 58.3% support, according to polling and analysis website FiveThirtyEight. DeSantis follows with 13%, Haley with 10.4% and Ramaswamy with 5.3%.\n\nWhere does Vivek Ramaswamy stand on the issues?\n\nRamaswamy entered the presidential race earlier this year promising to out-Trump former President Donald Trump. He has since expressed his support for the state-level six-week abortion ban and the abolition of several federal agencies like the Department of Education, the FBI and the IRS.\n\nClick here to read more about Ramaswamy's platform.\n\nWhen is the 2024 presidential election?\n\nThe United States will hold its 60th presidential election on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be sworn into office on January 20, 2025.\n\nWhen is the next GOP debate?\n\nAccording to the New York Post, future debates have yet to be announced. However, the national news site reports that at least one more debate will occur before the Iowa caucus on Monday, Jan. 15, and the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Jan. 23.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/01/05/who-will-watch-the-gop-iowa-presidential-debate/72108021007/", "title": "Who will watch the GOP Iowa presidential debate?", "text": "David Paleologos\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nAccording to the most recent Suffolk University/USA TODAY national survey, a majority of registered voters don’t plan to watch the upcoming CNN Republican debate next week at Drake University. The groups that do plan to tune in suggest the debate will play to key voters in the November general election instead of the Republican primaries and caucuses.\n\nOnly three candidates qualify for this debate: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump. With Trump a presumptive no-show, 51% of Republicans don’t plan to watch, largely driven by the 54% of Trump voters who won’t tune in. And when you look at Democrats and independents, at least 52% won’t watch either. In fact, a majority of voters across gender, region, age, educational level and income categories don’t plan to tune in.\n\nSo, is the debate a complete waste of time?\n\nOur poll says no because key voting blocs in the November election will tune in. Trump’s absence may give DeSantis and Haley the ability to shape the conversation for the November election when they have otherwise been seemingly powerless to move the national needle in the lead-up to the GOP primaries and caucuses. Does Trump really want to take that risk by not showing up? In 2016, his continual presence on the primary debate stages successfully shaped the conversation around immigration and “draining the swamp,” which catalyzed support not only in the early primaries but in November as well.\n\nAccording to the poll, here are some demographics that are more likely to watch the debate and could matter in November.\n\nIndependent women: 50% plan to watch\n\nIn the 2022 midterms, independent women broke away from conservative-leaning independent men, preventing a red wave, according to our national polling in late October, which asked: “If the elections for Congress were held today, who would you vote for, the Democratic or Republican candidate?”\n\nIndependent men chose Republicans 57%-35%, while independent women chose Democrats 51%-40%. By supporting Democratic nominees against Trump-endorsed U.S. Senate candidates, independent women demonstrated that their top concern was the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In the October 2022 poll, independent women ranked abortion as their number one issue at 29%, more than double the 12% of independent men. In the poll, independent women favor Trump over President Joe Biden 33%-30%, but only because a whopping 27% say they will vote for a third-party candidate.\n\nDeSantis and Haley must navigate and articulate their positions clearly and speak to independent women, many of whom may be inclined to vote for Biden − or a third-party option.\n\nThose who want a split Congress: 59% plan to watch\n\nAmong those who want a Democratic or Republican sweep to control both branches, there is less interest in watching the debate.\n\nHowever, by a 59%-33% margin, voters looking for a split Congress are tuning in: Among those who would like to see a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, interest in the debate broke 64%-28%, and among those who would like to see a Republican Senate and a Democratic House, debate interest was 54%-40%.\n\nThis provides an opening for a DeSantis-Haley debate conversation about bipartisanship.\n\nWhat is their ideal scenario, given the Speaker of the House debacles of 2023, the House impeachment inquiry into Biden (opposed in our poll, 49%-43%) and the threat of a government shutdown in the coming weeks?\n\nRepublicans who don’t have high enthusiasm for Trump: 53% plan to watch\n\nThe lower the enthusiasm for Trump, the higher the intention to watch. Among those Republicans least enthusiastic for Trump (rating him 3 or less on a scale of 10), 58% plan to watch; among those expressing some enthusiasm (4-7 out of 10), 48% will watch. Republicans with high enthusiasm for Trump will skip the debate, 53%-42%. DeSantis and Haley will have the unique power to speak directly to these Republicans who are sour on Trump. Will they urge these viewers to vote for Trump if he is the GOP nominee or to look elsewhere on the ballot?\n\nThere is certainly some overlap between the categories listed above, and Nikki Haley polls remarkably well among Republicans who have low enthusiasm (1-3) for Trump: 50% of these voters prefer her, compared to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at 19% and DeSantis at 16%, according to the poll. Now, she needs to figure out how to persuade those Christie and DeSantis voters to rally behind her. Otherwise, all three candidates will need to craft an exit strategy, and the upcoming Haley/DeSantis debate may be the first official debate platform for the Republican nomination in 2028.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/01/05/when-is-next-gop-presidential-debate/72123305007/", "title": "What time is the GOP debate tonight? How to watch Haley vs ...", "text": "Republican presidential candidates will have one last chance to clash on live TV before the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses.\n\nOnly three candidates qualified on time for the fifth GOP primary debate on Wednesday at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, including GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. The former president has skipped the last four broadcasts and will continue the no-show streak, citing a huge lead in polls.\n\nCNN Anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the broadcast. The network is also set to host another GOP debate in New Hampshire.\n\nBut Wednesday's broadcast will be the final opportunity for candidates to win over national viewers before the Jan. 15 caucuses, where Republican voters will gather in a series of local meetings throughout Iowa and decide who should represent the party on the presidential ballot.\n\nHere is what to know about Wednesday's debate.\n\nWhat channel is the republican debate on tonight\n\nThe fifth GOP presidential primary debate will air live on CNN on Jan. 10 at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT. Viewers can also watch the broadcast on CNN International and CNN en Español, or stream it on Max (formerly HBO Max).\n\nTV subscribers can also watch via CNN.com and the CNN mobile apps. It was also be available the next day On Demand via CNN.com, CNN apps as well as Cable Operator Platforms.\n\nWho is in the next Republican debate\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will be the only candidates at Wednesday's presidential primary debate, according to CNN.\n\nThe GOP runner-ups qualified before the window closed on Jan. 2 along with Trump. The network hosted hour-long townhalls for DeSantis and Haley in Iowa with DeSantis on Thursday.\n\nEntrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did not qualify in time for the debate after appearing at the previous four.\n\nWhat were the qualifications?\n\nTo qualify for the Iowa GOP debate, candidates had to receive at least 10% in three different national and/or Iowa polls of primary voters or Republican caucus attendees. The network required one of those polls to be an approved CNN poll of likely Republican caucus-goers.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/05"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/05/politics/trump-2024-presidential-campaign/index.html", "title": "Trump's slow 2024 start worries allies | CNN Politics", "text": "CNN —\n\nBack in 2015, Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in Iowa as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination came just 10 hours after he declared his candidacy in New York. The following day, he was across the country in New Hampshire, with plans to visit South Carolina before the end of his first week.\n\nBut seven years later – and nearly three weeks into his 2024 presidential campaign – Trump has yet to leave his home state or hold a public campaign event in an early voting state.\n\nTrump’s disengaged posture has baffled former and current allies, many of whom experienced firsthand the frenetic pace of his two previous White House bids, and who now say he’s missed the window to make a splash with his 2024 rollout. The uninspiring launch of his supposed political comeback comes as his campaign appears to be operating on auto pilot, with few signs of momentum or enthusiastic support from donors or party heavyweights.\n\n“I don’t know why he rushed this. It doesn’t make sense,” one Trump adviser said of his lackluster announcement speech last month, which came one week after Republicans delivered an underwhelming performance in the midterm elections and as the rest of the party turned its attention to the Senate runoff contest in Georgia.\n\nTrump’s announcement was roundly panned for lacking zest, so much so that some audience members attempted an early exit, and his recent hosting of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and embattled rapper Kanye “Ye” West at Mar-a-Lago only further galvanized GOP opposition against him. A person familiar with the matter said Trump spent the Sunday after Thanksgiving asking people around him if they thought the backlash to his private dinner with Ye and Fuentes was truly damaging.\n\n“So far, he has gone down from his bedroom, made an announcement, gone back up to his bedroom and hasn’t been seen since except to have dinner with a White supremacist,” said a 2020 Trump campaign adviser.\n\n“It’s 1000% a ho-hum campaign,” the adviser added.\n\nThe only other notable event to occur since Trump announced he was running again was both unintended and dreaded for weeks by the former president’s attorneys. Just three days after Trump launched his campaign, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee two ongoing criminal investigations into the 45th president and his associates.\n\nWhile some Republicans long speculated that Trump entered the presidential race early to inoculate himself from further legal peril, his candidate status instead appeared to serve as the catalyst for Garland’s announcement.\n\nA Trump campaign spokesman said the former president has held “multiple events since he announced,” noting his remote appearance at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition summit last month, video remarks to a conference for conservative activists in Mexico, a Patriots Freedom Fund event, his remarks at two separate political events held at Mar-a-Lago, and a tele-rally Monday night for Georgia Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker. None of these events were billed as campaign events.\n\nTrump’s current campaign trajectory has left both allies and Republican opponents wondering if he will flip a switch in 2023 or fail to adapt to a different political environment. Even as the GOP’s undisputed 2024 frontrunner, some of his closest allies say he simply cannot afford to take his position for granted at a moment when influential Republicans appear exceedingly interested in dislodging him from his influential perch.\n\n“If Trump was working in a lush jungle environment in 2016, he is in a desert today,” said a Republican close to the former president. “The political landscape has totally changed. He was irresistible because no one understood him but now everybody knows how to deal with him, so the question is, can he recalibrate?”\n\nSome sources said Trump’s first-out-of-the-gate strategy, which was said to be partly aimed at clearing the GOP primary field, already looks poised to fail.\n\n“You know what it’s done to dissuade people from getting in? Nothing. He hasn’t hired anyone. He hasn’t been to the early states,” said the 2020 campaign adviser.\n\nTrump’s lack of impact was on display a week after his announcement, as other 2024 Republican hopefuls took the stage in Las Vegas for the annual RJC summit. Some attacked the former President, while others, once allies of Trump, indicated they were ready to take him on in 2024.\n\nJust days before the event, Trump’s team announced plans for him to address the group remotely. Two people familiar with the matter said his virtual address was organized by aides at the last minute after he grew agitated upon realizing the event was a cattle call for Republican presidential prospects and he was not on its original list of speakers. The Trump campaign spokesman disputed this account, saying Trump’s remote remarks were planned “many weeks prior to the event.”\n\nOther sources who for months harbored concerns that Trump wasn’t as enthusiastic about running as he was letting on in public appearances now say his inactivity has increased their worry. Apart from a planned fundraising appearance for a classical education group in Naples last weekend, the former president has yet to announce any events before the end of the year. A person familiar with the matter said Trump’s team is toying with a pre-Christmas event of some kind, though his campaign has not yet finalized any travel. In a statement last week panning a move by Democratic officials to put South Carolina first on the party’s primary calendar, Trump appeared to tease a visit to Iowa, currently the first state to cast votes in both parties’ presidential nominating contests, “in the very near future.”\n\n“I can’t wait to be back in Iowa,” he said.\n\nCampaign is ‘taking a breather’\n\nInside Trump’s campaign, sources said his current approach is entirely intentional, dismissing concerns that he has forfeited the spotlight at a critical time but acknowledging that Trump is currently working with a bare-bones staff.\n\nThe campaign “is doing exactly what everyone always accuses [them] of not doing – taking a breather, planning and forming a strategy for the next two years,” said one source familiar with Trump’s operation said.\n\nSenior staff are holed up working on a plan,” this person added, noting that Trump’s campaign travel is expected to begin early in the new year, right as possible rivals who have taken the holidays to mull their own political futures may start launching their own campaigns or exploratory committees.\n\nAnd while some Trump allies have been surprised by his lack of a hiring spree right out of the gate, his campaign has been content to maintain a lean operation while he’s the only candidate in the field. The former president is not expected to tap a formal campaign manager, instead elevating three trusted advisers – Susie Wiles, Brian Jack and Chris LaCivita – to senior roles, but allies said he will likely need to build out his on-the-ground staff in early voting states in the months to come, as well as a robust communications operation if he finds himself in a competitive primary.\n\nWhile those hires don’t need to happen immediately, people close to Trump said his early entry into the 2024 race does raise questions about how he will sustain campaign-related costs over a longer period than other candidates who declare later, including chief potential rival Ron DeSantis. CNN has previously reported that the Florida governor, should he decide to take on Trump, would announce next May or June, after the conclusion of his state’s legislative session and just months before the Republican party could host its first primary debate, according to a party official involved in debate planning.\n\n“The question a lot of us have is can Trump sustain a campaign for two years. That’s the real difficulty here. The pacing we’re seeing right now is designed to do that,” said a person close to Trump.\n\nIn addition to planning rallies and events and building momentum around the former President, the campaign staff is also looking at how to best insulate Trump after many were caught off guard learning of Trump’s dinner with Fuentes and West. The event, and the days of fallout and negative coverage, has expedited some of the campaign’s long-term plans, including ensuring a senior campaign staffer is always with the former president, a source familiar with the campaign said.\n\nTrump’s White House staff worked with resort staff during his presidency in a similar fashion to protect Trump from potentially “unsavory” guests of members, the source said. Those close to Trump blamed “low level staffers” for allowing Fuentes to slip into the resort without any flags being raised.", "authors": ["Gaborr Kristen Holmes", "Kristen Holmes"], "publish_date": "2022/12/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/12/06/republican-debate-alabama-live-updates/71801191007/", "title": "GOP debate replay: Haley, DeSantis and Republicans turn on each ...", "text": "Four Republican presidential candidates faced off Wednesday in the fourth GOP primary debate, with campaign rivalries heating up on stage in Alabama.\n\nFormer South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy clashed over America's economy, the Israel-Hamas war, the U.S. southern border and more. The Republican challengers made a point to take aim at Haley – as the former South Carolina governor rises in polls in important early voting states.\n\nThe GOP candidates also split on how they'll take on former President Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Trump wasn't in attendance at the debate, and the Republican frontrunner has refused to attend previous debates, citing his lead in state and national polls.\n\nCatch up with USA TODAY's live coverage here.\n\nGOP candidates share their favorite presidents\n\nThe Republican candidates ran the gamut when asked about which of America's presidents inspired them, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.\n\nChris Christie went with former President Ronald Reagan, the conservative icon of the 1980s. Nikki Haley went with the classics: Former President George Washington, the father of the country, and former President Abraham Lincoln, the savior of the country.\n\nVivek Ramaswamy picked former President Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence.\n\nRon DeSantis made a unique choice – former President Calvin Coolidge, president during the Roaring 1920s and another pro-business hero.\n\n– David Jackson\n\n‘Disgusting’: Nikki Haley knocks heated college campus hearing\n\nHaley during the debate called Tuesday's House Education Committee hearing on antisemitism on college campuses “disgusting.”\n\nUniversity presidents, including Harvard University's Claudine Gay, were asked to answer to antisemitic incidents that have occurred on college campuses since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nHaley proposed steps the federal government could take to punish colleges and universities, including holding their tax-exempt status at stake. She also suggested limiting the social media app TikTok, which has faced criticism for amplifying antisemitic content.\n\n– Savannah Kuchar\n\nVivek Ramaswamy hits out at Nikki Haley\n\nVivek Ramawamy made clear on the debate stage that he doesn’t question Haley’s faith, though his campaign has referred to her by her first name “Nimarata” rather than her preferred name “Nikki.”\n\n“I don't question your faith. But I question your authenticity. And I think that's deeper here. We were just talking about the transition. This is a symptom of a deeper cancer in American life, identity politics,” he said.\n\nRamaswamy added that while Haley said previously he has a “women” problem, she has a “corruption” problem.\n\nHaley, who has converted to Christianity and long been open about her faith replied: “It's not worth my time to respond to him.”\n\nChris Christie bashes Ron DeSantis for not directly answering question on Donald Trump\n\nChris Christie criticized Ron DeSantis for sidestepping a question on whether Donald Trump was mentally fit to be president, saying that while the Florida governor gave an “interesting speech” but was unresponsive.\n\nHe later added, “This is the problem with my three colleagues. They're afraid to offend Donald Trump.”\n\n“And what are you going to do when you sit across from President Xi? You sit across from the Ayatollah, you sit across from Putin, you have to be willing to offend with the truth and answer,” Christie added.\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nChris Christie: Donald Trump is an 'angry, bitter man,'\n\nChris Christie blasted the former president's claim he would be a \"dictator\" on \"day one\" when it comes to immigration and energy.\n\n\"There's no mystery to what he wants to do ... this is an angry, bitter man,\" Christie said.\n\nChristie said another Trump presidency would be all about \"retribution\" against his political enemies. Meanwhile, Some members of the audience booed Christie's comments about the ex-president.\n\nHe later got into an argument about DeSantis over whether Trump is fit to be president and accused DeSantis and other candidates of being \"afraid to offend\" Trump.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nNikki Haley fields question on Donald Trump's immigration priorities\n\nChris Christie had earlier in the debate criticized his fellow Republicans on stage for attacking each other, rather than frontrunner Trump.\n\nBut at the hour mark, Haley was served a question on the former president’s comments about implementing immigration restrictions from countries with majority Muslim populations. She sidestepped directly criticizing Trump, focusing instead on the merit of such a ban.\n\n“It’s not about a religion. It’s about a fact that certain countries are dangerous,” Haley said. “The president has one job and that’s to keep Americans safe.”\n\n– Savannah Kuchar\n\nDeSantis: College isn’t the only route to be successful\n\nWhen Ron DeSantis was asked what he would do to help Americans make ends meet, he directed his answer to a crucial voting bloc in the Republican primary: young voters.\n\n“Another thing that's burdening young people are the student loans,” he said. But he went on to attack student loan forgiveness programs and argued that young people don’t need to go through college to be successful.\n\n“Don't let anybody tell you that the only way you can be successful is through a four year brick and IV degree,” he said. “That's one way you can be. It's not the only way and we're going to fix that problem in the United States of America.”\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nRamaswamy assails 'fascist neocons'\n\nVying for line of the night, Ramaswamy assailed Haley and others for an overly aggressive foreign policy, and invoked the name of a former Republican vice president.\n\n\"You can put lipstick on a Dick Cheney, it is still a fascist neocon,\" Ramaswamy said. \"That's what we see today. It's Dick Cheney all over again in this party.\"\n\nHaley and Christie have described Ramaswamy's foreign policy as ill-informed on the war in Ukraine, Israel's war with Hamas and other global issues.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nCandidates talk fentanyl, southern border\n\nWhen asked about immigration and border policies, Republican White House hopefuls focused on fentanyl.\n\nDeSantis said the drug crisis could have been prevented with a wall along the southern border with Mexico, a Trump administration project the Florida governor said he supports.\n\n“This would not have happened,” with a southern border wall, DeSantis said, adding his promise to complete the effort, adding “There’s going to be a new sheriff in town.”\n\nHaley discussed vetting undocumented immigrants, referencing her own family’s experience.\n\n“My parents came here legally. They put in the time, they put in the price. They are offended by those that are coming illegally,” Haley said.\n\n– Savannah Kuchar\n\nNikki Haley, Ron DeSantis argue about who is tougher on China\n\nRon DeSantis and Nikki Haley mixed it up over who would be tougher on China as president – and why.\n\nToo many Haley donors make money on Chinese investments, DeSantis said, arguing \"they are not going to let her be tough on China.\"\n\nHaley said DeSantis is just upset because those donors \"used to support him and now support me.\"\n\n– David Jackson\n\nGOP candidates discuss American hostages and Israel\n\nWhen asked how far he would go as president to release American hostages held in Gaza, Ron DeSantis said that “we have to look out for our people when they're hostages… you have to do whatever you can to get them home.”\n\nHe added that the U.S. needs to stand with Israel.\n\nMeanwhile, Chris Christie blasted Ron DeSantis for refusing to directly answer the question, saying “I'd send the American army in there to get our people home and get them home now, and I'll answer that question directly.”\n\nRamaswamy said that he’ll tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “smoke the terrorists on your southern border” and that Hamas' attack on “subhuman” and “immoral.”\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nChris Christie on Vivek Ramaswamy: 'The most obnoxious blowhard in America'\n\nForget Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley – the biggest fight so far came between Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy.\n\nChristie called Ramaswamy \"the most obnoxious blowhard in America,\" and blasted his repeated attacks on Haley. Ramaswamy said Christie doesn't understand foreign policy and appeared to invoke his weight, suggesting that the former New Jersey governor \"enjoy a nice meal and get the hell out of this race.\"\n\n– David Jackson\n\nWhat is ESG? What about BlackRock and Charles Schwab?\n\nEarly in the debate, Republican candidates briefly sparred over the term 'ESG.' But what does it mean?\n\nThe acronym for environmental, social, governance principles isn’t widely known outside investment circles but is fast becoming a popular GOP talking point in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.\n\nThe GOP says the nation's top money managers are pursuing an ideological agenda at the expense of financial returns in violation of their fiduciary duty.\n\nCandidates also mentioned BlackRock. Money managers like BlackRock are signatories of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing. They increasingly use environmental, social and governance factors when making investment decisions.\n\nThe Charles Schwab Corporation is another financial services company.\n\n– Jessica Guynn and Marina Pitofsky\n\nChris Christie: Donald Trump is unfit, and other candidates are cowards\n\nChristie followed through on his plan to attack Trump – and attack the other Republican candidates for not campaigning against the indicted ex-president.\n\n\"The truth needs to be spoken,\" Christie said of Trump. \"He is unfit.\"\n\nChristie said it was \"ridiculous\" that the debate ran 17 minutes without a discussion of Trump. Moderators did not follow up with the other candidates; they moved on to a question about Israel's war with Hamas.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nRamaswamy: ‘It is going to take a leader from the outside’\n\nWhen asked whether he was still a unifier in the party, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy dismissed the question and bashed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, calling her “corrupt.”\n\n“It is going to take a leader from the outside with fresh legs from the next generation to unite this country, not the broken politicians who are puppets of the puppet masters, but the actual people in this country,” he said.\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nRon DeSantis: Voters decide elections, not pundits and pollsters\n\nRon DeSantis answered the first question of the debate, with the Florida governor asked about his electability against Donald Trump.\n\n\"The voters actually make these decisions, not pundits or pollsters. I'm sick of hearing about these polls.\" DeSantis said, not \"pundits\" or \"pollsters.\"\n\nHe then attacked Nikki Haley, who has passed him in many crucial polls in early voting states.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nHow do I watch the Republican debate tonight?\n\nThe fourth GOP presidential debate will take place from 8 to 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday.\n\nViewers can watch and stream the fourth Republican debate on the NewsNation channel, app and website. Pre- and post-coverage by former CNN host Chris Cuomo will take place two hours before and after the debate.\n\nThe debate will also air on the CW in the Eastern and Central time zones, and on a delay in the Mountain and Pacific time zones. The GOP matchup will air on the CW from 7 to 9 p.m. Mountain time and 8 to 10 p.m. Pacific time.\n\nA live stream of the debate will also be broadcast on Rumble.\n\n− Haadiza Ogwude\n\nChris Christie plans to bash Donald Trump – and Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis\n\nDonald Trump isn't at this debate, but his name will no doubt surface. Chris Christie will make sure of it.\n\nThe New Jersey governor, who has been outspoken about Trump's legal and ethical problems, also plans to hit Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis for not being more critical of the indicted ex-president.\n\nSaid Christie adviser Maria Comella: \"Expect Governor Christie to be in prosecutorial mode tonight as it relates to Trump and the candidates who have failed to show the courage to take him on.\"\n\n– David Jackson\n\nEliana Johnson, Megyn Kelly, Elizabeth Vargas are moderating\n\nTalk show host Megyn Kelly, NewsNation anchor Elizabeth Vargas and The Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson will moderate the fourth GOP debate.\n\n– Anthony Robledo\n\nWhat are Republican primary polls saying?\n\nFormer President Donald Trump has long led the crowded field of GOP White House hopefuls. In a Real Clear Politics average of national polls, Trump garners 61% support, compared to Ron DeSantis’ 13.5%.\n\nNikki Haley received 10.3% support, Vivek Ramaswamy received 4.9% and Chris Christie received 2.5%.\n\nHowever, some of the candidates have dismissed national polls, saying that they’re focused on critical early voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa. Trump nevertheless leads the Republican candidates in a swath of state polls too.\n\n– Marina Pitofsky\n\nWhere is the Republican debate?\n\nThe setting for the fourth GOP debate is the Moody Music Hall at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.\n\nAlabama voters will make their presidential picks on March 5, part of more than a dozen Super Tuesday states. That’s when the largest number of delegates is up for grabs of any single day in the primary cycle.\n\nIn general elections, the state has been in the red column for decades, last supporting a Democrat for president when Jimmy Carter ran in 1976.\n\n– Associated Press\n\nNikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and other Republican hopefuls oppose student loan forgiveness\n\nEarlier this year, the Supreme Court had struck down President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt for hundreds of Americans - a move that 2024 GOP candidates applauded and has become a contentious point of debate.\n\nFormer South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote on X that a president “cannot just wave his hand and eliminate loans for students he favors.”\n\nLikewise, biotechnology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy supported the court’s decision.\n\n“We have a bad habit in America of paying people to do the exact opposite of what we want them to do: more $$ to stay at home than to work, more $$ to be a single mother than married, more $$ for those who *fail* to repay loans than those who do,” Ramaswamy wrote on X. – Sudiksha Kochi\n\nA low-key debate atmosphere at the University of Alabama\n\nIt's quaint and quiet at the University of Alabama - even on debate night.\n\nUnlike at other Republican debate venues, there no political demonstrators, protesters, or street parties. There are no groups of Trump backers advocating for their missing candidate, or Democrats bashing all of the GOP candidates.\n\nThe road barriers, fencing, reporters, security personnel, reporters, and armies of television production people are the only signs that something is going on at the music building on the edge of campus.\n\nMost of the civilians who wandered over are attending the debate. Many of the others did wear team shirts - mostly for Alabama and/or its celebrated football team.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nRepublican face off comes after Ron DeSantis, Gavin Newsom held their own debate\n\nAs voters continue to express their distaste at the prospect of a 2020 presidential rematch next year, two fresher-faced governors provided the current contest with a sideshow earlier this month: Florida's Ron DeSantis and California's Gavin Newsom.\n\nThe leaders have been polar opposites since taking office and often use each other as public foils when making their political arguments. And during last week's debate, they also tried to cast each other as mirrors of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.\n\n\"Joe Biden will be our nominee in a matter of weeks,\" Newsom said during the debate. \"And in a matter of weeks... (Ron) will be endorsing Donald Trump as a nominee for the Republican Party.\"\n\nBut Florida's leader struck back by regularly calling attention to how voters remain pessimistic about higher costs and many don't believe the president is up to the job.\n\n– Phillip M. Bailey\n\nFollow along as we fact-check the Republican debate\n\nWas that a fair point or a misuse of data? An accurate anecdote or a misleading description?\n\nFollow along with the USA TODAY Fact Check Team as we dig into claims from the candidates as they make them in tonight’s Republican primary debate. We'll dig through the data, documents and transcripts to sort fact from fiction.\n\nGOP debate live fact check:Separating fact from fiction on Republican candidates' claims\n\n– Eric Litke\n\nWhen is the Republican convention?\n\nThe candidates on stage tonight are gearing up for 2024's Republican primaries, when GOP White House hopefuls will compete state by state for support.\n\nAn official 2024 Republican nomination will be made next year at the GOP's national convention. It's scheduled for July 15 to July 18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.\n\nWisconsin has become a crucial swing state for presidential election, and President Joe Biden won the state in the 2020 race for the White House\n\n– Marina Pitofsky\n\nWhere is Donald Trump? The Republican frontrunner isn't going to the debate\n\nNo, the longtime Republican frontrunner won’t be in attendance at the debate Wednesday night. Instead, he’s holding a closed-door fundraiser in Florida.\n\nTrump has skipped each of the previous Republican primary debates, arguing that he doesn’t want to give his GOP rivals a chance to take shots at him on stage. He has also said he wouldn’t sign the GOP “Beat Biden” pledge to support any Republican nominee, even if it isn't him.\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi and Marina Pitofsky\n\nRamaswamy might criticize RNC chair on stage tonight\n\nVivek Ramaswamy has found a new person to target on the debate stage and the campaign trail: Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel.\n\nDuring the third GOP debate, Ramaswamy criticized McDaniel, saying that “no red wave” has come in elections since 2018.\n\n“I think that we have to have accountability in our party for that matter, Ron, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign. I will turn over my yield, my time to you,” he said.\n\nOn X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Ramaswamy has called on McDaniel to resign. Meanwhile, she’s hit back at his insults, saying in an interview last month, “Last I checked, I wasn’t running for president. He’s at 4%, he’s looking for headlines.\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nWill Ron DeSantis joke about FSU football in Alabama?\n\nWas Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis the reason the College Football Playoff selection committee decided to choose the University of Alabama over Florida State University for the college football's four-team playoff?\n\nNo. But former President Donald Trump has blamed him.\n\nTrump in a recent post on his Truth Social platform, bashed DeSantis for the committee’s decision, and DeSantis had a harsh response for the former president.\n\n“Stop being a keyboard warrior and let’s step up and debate one on one. He’s had a lot to say about me over the last year. Say it to my face. I’m game,” DeSantis said Tuesday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nWill Joe Biden debate Dean Phillips or other Democratic challengers?\n\nJoe Biden probably won't take the debate stage with his Democratic rivals.\n\nIf an incumbent president is running, political parties usually rally around that person's reelection bid. There's no formal rule, but at this point, Biden is the de facto Democratic nominee.\n\n– Marina Pitofsky\n\nWill the economy take center stage?\n\nThe Republican candidates onstage in Alabama will likely spend swaths of the debate talking about jobs, inflation and other economic issues impacting Americans' wallets.\n\nYou can also expect a lot of attacks on President Joe Biden on these issues, many of which will follow the campaign for the next year.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nWill Republican candidates clash with Ramaswamy again?\n\nVivek Ramaswamy will again be near the center of the debate stage, ensuring high-profile skirmishes with other candidates, according to Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan and co-author of \"Debating The Donald.\"\n\nIn the last debate, many candidates sparred with Ramaswamy over his lack of experience and some of his controversial stances on foreign policy and former President Donald Trump’s indictments, which will likely resurface in the fourth debate.\n\nRamaswamy has leaned on ultra-conservative values to try to appeal to voters, but he has also reached out to younger Republicans as the youngest Republican candidate in the field.\n\n– Sudiksha Kochi\n\nWhere do Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and other Republican candidates stand on abortion?\n\nNikki Haley has often argued that leaders need to find consensus on the issue of abortion, including agreeing to not jail women who have the procedure. A self-described “pro-life” candidate, Haley said Republicans need to be honest about a national ban, which would require 60 votes in the Senate.\n\nMost Republican candidates, including Chris Christie, has dodged the question by saying they would leave the issues to the states.\n\nRon DeSantis has touted his record on the issue as Florida governor, having signed a statewide six-week ban into law earlier this year.\n\n– Savannah Kuchar\n\nWhen is the fourth Republican debate?\n\nThe debate will start at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It’s scheduled to continue for two hours.\n\n– Associated Press\n\nHow many times has Chris Christie run for president? What about the other Republicans on stage?\n\nChris Christie’s 2024 bid for this White House marks his second presidential campaign. He previously ran in 2016, when former President Donald Trump ultimately won the Republican nomination.\n\nAs for the other GOP hopefuls on stage, Haley, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are all mounting their first presidential campaign.\n\n– Marina Pitofsky\n\nWhen is the fifth Republican debate?\n\nThis is the last Republican debate of 2023, and no one knows how things will proceed in the actual campaign year of 2024.\n\nThe Republican National Committee, which organized all four GOP debates this year, is considering proposals to allow some non-RNC debates in 2024, especially in the days before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15 and the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23.\n\nCandidates are agitating for as much exposure as possible ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, and are hopeful that Donald Trump will participate. The RNC is expected to make an announcement next week.\n\n“As has been the process throughout the entire year, the debate committee will meet to decide the details of future debates,” said Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nHaley and DeSantis prepare for battle\n\nNikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are already circling each other ahead of tonight's debate. In emails and social media posts, Haley and her aides are spotlighting her rise in the polls and reports of infighting within DeSantis' campaign.\n\n\"Ron DeSantis spent $100 million to lose half his support,\" the \"Team Haley\" account said on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.\n\nThe DeSantis campaign, meanwhile, signaled he will stress that some of Haley's big financial contributions are coming from Democrats.\n\n\"Ron DeSantis is bearing the banner of conservatism in this nomination contest and will defeat the swamp, starting with Nikki Haley,” said DeSantis campaign press secretary Bryan Griffin.\n\n– David Jackson\n\nConservative Supreme Court could factor into debate\n\nSeven years ago, during the first GOP debate of the 2016 election, the Supreme Court was criticized by several candidates.\n\n“It's time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the supreme being,” then candidate Mike Huckabee quipped.\n\nWhat a difference a few years makes.\n\nThe nation’s highest court, which today is more conservative than it has been in decades, has already factored into the GOP primary. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump have swiped at each other over whether the bench is conservative enough. Earlier this year, Vivek Ramaswamy released a list of candidates he said he would nominate to the court, including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah.\n\n– John Fritze\n\nWho's in the debate tonight?\n\nFour candidates will show up to the face off at the University of Alabama.\n\nThe Republican National Committee announced Monday that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy qualified for the debate.\n\nTo qualify, GOP candidates must have polled at least 6% in two national polls or 6% in one national poll and one poll from two separate early voting states recognized by the RNC, among other hurdles.\n\n− Sudiksha Kochi", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/06"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/13/politics/senate-midterm-landscape-new-hampshire-republican-primary/index.html", "title": "Don Bolduc: Trump ally's victory in New Hampshire GOP primary ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nNew Hampshire Republicans’ decision to nominate Don Bolduc to take on Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan locks in the final key matchup in November’s battle for control of the Senate.\n\nBolduc, a retired Army brigadier general who has embraced former President Donald Trump’s election denialism, will defeat state Senate President Chuck Morse, who has conceded. GOP Gov. Chris Sununu and national Republicans had rushed to defeat Bolduc, whom they viewed as a weaker general election candidate against Hassan.\n\nIn an evenly divided Senate, where Republicans need a net gain of just one seat to flip the chamber, Hassan is one of four key Democratic incumbents Republicans are looking to pick off this year. But as they have across the country, some candidates following in Trump’s footsteps in New Hampshire have raised concerns among GOP leaders because of their lackluster fundraising and hard-line right-wing rhetoric.\n\nThe primary in New Hampshire, which was thrown open after Sununu rebuffed national Republicans’ efforts to recruit him, has been a window into the GOP struggle that’s been waged across the political map over the spring and summer.\n\nBolduc, who lost a bid for the GOP Senate nod two years ago, had brought in just shy of $600,000 by August 24 compared to Hassan’s $31.4 million. He also has a penchant for saying controversial things, some of which he’s walked back. But in response, Sununu called Bolduc a “conspiracy-theorist-type candidate” and “not a serious candidate” in an interview with WGIR last month.\n\nIn a Sunday op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader, Sununu wrote that “the stakes are too high for New Hampshire and America,” adding that Republicans needed a nominee “who will have the resources to compete in the most crucial battleground state in America.”\n\nStill, Republican voters again ignored establishment preferences and opted for the candidate who has aligned himself more closely with Trump, even if doing so comes at the cost of electability in November.\n\nA pre-primary season of recruiting misses by top Republicans left the party without what it viewed as its strongest candidates in key races – including governors like Sununu and Arizona’s Doug Ducey, who opted against taking on Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. Then, a summer of bruising Senate primaries – many of them shaped by Trump’s endorsements and pro-Trump voters’ demands for candidates who embrace his lies about election fraud – left Republicans fretting about the quality of the party’s nominees and scrambling to close Democrats’ fundraising advantage.\n\nRepublicans had hoped that inflation and the backlash new presidents historically have faced in midterm elections would carry the party to House and Senate majorities in November, delivering victories in competitive races across the map no matter the individual candidates in those races.\n\nBut gas prices have dropped. Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress have enacted more of the President’s agenda. Democratic candidates have outpaced most of their GOP Senate rivals in fundraising. The FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate has once again elevated a figure who galvanizes liberals and alienates suburban voters. And perhaps most significantly, the Supreme Court’s June decision to end federal abortion rights protections appears to have animated parts of the electorate that Democrats feared would slip away from the party or sit the midterms out.\n\nThe early signs of a more evenly matched midterm landscape came in Democratic victories in a special election in a bellwether House district in upstate New York and in Alaska’s ranked-choice special election for the state’s at-large House seat, which has been in GOP hands for nearly half a century, as well as voters’ overwhelming support for abortion rights in a referendum on the Kansas primary ballot.\n\nMeanwhile, a handful of Republican candidates who won primaries, many with Trump’s backing, have struggled to expand their appeal to a broader electorate in critical states – including Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada – that could decide which party controls a Senate that is currently divided 50-50.\n\nGOP ups spending and focuses on crime\n\nAs GOP groups ramp up spending on television ads, their message in several key states is shifting away from attacking Biden on inflation. Instead, those ads target Democrats on crime and policing.\n\nThe latest example: In an ad launched Monday in Wisconsin, the National Republican Senatorial Committee labeled Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democrat challenging Sen. Ron Johnson, “dangerous” and a “defund the police Democrat.”\n\nBarnes, in his own ad launched two weeks ago, said Republicans are trying to scare voters, and that their charge that he wants to defund the police is “a lie.”\n\n“I’ll make sure our police have the resources and training they need to keep our communities safe, and that our communities have the resources to stop crime before it happens,” Barnes says in the spot.\n\nThe shifting strategy underscores how unsettled the playing field is in the battle for control of the Senate just eight weeks from the November 8 midterm elections.\n\nIn August, Republican campaigns and groups spent $25 million airing over 160 ads about inflation, while also spending about $11 million airing 80 ads about crime, according to AdImpact data. In just two weeks of September so far, Republicans have spent about $9 million airing 89 ads about inflation, while also spending about $9 million airing 54 ads about crime.\n\nIn Ohio’s key Senate race, Republican J.D. Vance launched an ad last week, saying, “Streets are exploding with drugs and violence, while liberals like [Democratic opponent] Tim Ryan attack and defund our police.”\n\nRyan has repeatedly distanced himself from “defunding the police.” In a recent ad in which he throws footballs at TV screens showing Republicans’ ads, he says, “Here come the culture wars; I’m not that guy,” as a football crashes into a screen showing the phrase “defund the police.”\n\nDemocratic Senate candidates have so far vastly outspent their Republican rivals in races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, forcing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell-aligned outside GOP groups to attempt to make up the difference. As the campaign season shifts into a new gear post-Labor Day, Senate Leadership Fund, for example, is set to massively ramp up its spending. The super PAC has placed nearly $200 million in ad reservations over the next two months, according to AdImpact data, the most of any political advertiser.\n\nIt’s picking up attacks in the crucial Pennsylvania Senate race, for instance, with an ad that highlights Democratic nominee John Fetterman’s support for various prison reforms, echoing, “far-left John Fetterman, dangerously liberal on crime.” Fetterman, like other Democratic nominees this year, has explicitly talked about funding the police.\n\nFEC filings from SLF last week showed it upping its commitment in several key states – adding $3.7 million to Pennsylvania, $3.7 million to Georgia, $3.5 million to North Carolina, $3 million to Ohio, $2.4 million to Wisconsin, and $2 million to Nevada. The additions will complement already massive reservations in battleground states. SLF had previously booked $38 million in Georgia, $33 million in Pennsylvania, $28 million in North Carolina, $27 million in Ohio, $19 million in New Hampshire, $16 million in Nevada, $15 million in Wisconsin, and $10 million in Arizona.\n\nThe GOP spending in North Carolina and Ohio underscores Democrats’ success in expanding the map of competitive races. Both seats are held by retiring Republican senators, and are must-wins for the GOP’s chances of winning the chamber in November.\n\nIn Florida, Democratic Rep. Val Demings has also outspent Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. Even though Rubio has long been favored to win reelection on the same ballot that features potential 2024 Republican presidential prospect Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is seeking a second term, Demings’ nearly $25 million in TV ads has outpaced Rubio and Republicans by about a 4-to-1 margin. A big part of her message has been leaning into her experience as the former Orlando police chief to try to head off Republicans’ attempts to tie her to her party’s most liberal members. “I’ll protect Florida from bad ideas like defunding the police,” she said in one recent spot.\n\nDebate about debates\n\nSeveral key midterm match-ups are now in the midst of a debate about whether, when and how many times the candidates should debate – including in Pennsylvania, where Fetterman, the Democratic lieutenant governor who suffered a stroke this spring, has committed to only one show-down with Republican Mehmet Oz, who has sought five debates.\n\nFetterman has said he would only debate in October. He said in a statement that he always intended to debate Oz and that the hold-up has “only ever been about addressing some of the lingering issues of the stroke, the auditory processing, and we’re going to be able to work that out,” but he didn’t provide specifics.\n\n“Let’s be clear - Dr. Oz’s campaign won’t agree to a SECRET debate. It has to be a REAL one with REAL journalists asking REAL questions. Sorry John - imaginary debates don’t count!,” Oz communications director Brittany Yanick said in response.\n\nWhile Oz’s team has been raising questions about Fetterman’s health, the Democrat has hammered Oz over past remarks calling abortion “murder,” with his allies warning Sunday that Oz would be a “rubber stamp” for a national ban.\n\n“Women are the reason we can win,” Fetterman said at a rally in the Philadelphia suburbs. “Don’t piss women off.”\n\nIn Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, former University of Georgia football star Herschel Walker, have engaged in a months-long debate about debates.\n\nWalker refused to participate in a debate during the GOP primary. Warnock has sought three debates, and Walker has said he’d debate Warnock on October 14 in Savannah. Warnock responded by saying he would debate Walker then, if Walker would accept another debate.\n\nA person familiar with the Republican candidate’s thinking told CNN last week that Walker is not going to agree to another debate, effectively sending both candidates back to square one.\n\nDebates typically drive news coverage of key races in their final weeks. The limited number in several key races, including Pennsylvania and Georgia, could increase the importance of television ads as the primary way of reaching voters – a reality that explains why McConnell and other top Republicans have increased outreach to major donors and urged senators to transfer campaign cash to the Senate Leadership Fund.\n\n“The Democrats are going to vastly outspend Republicans across the board. But as long as we have enough money to tell our story and to defend our opposition, I think we’ll be fine,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a member of McConnell’s leadership team, said last week.", "authors": ["Eric Bradner David Wright", "Eric Bradner", "David Wright"], "publish_date": "2022/09/13"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/01/politics/2024-primary-calendar-iowa-dnc/index.html", "title": "Biden proposes South Carolina as first primary state in drastic shake ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nPresident Joe Biden has asked Democratic National Committee leaders to drastically reshape the 2024 presidential nominating calendar and make South Carolina the first state to host a primary, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire on the same day a week later, Georgia the following week and then Michigan, a source confirms to CNN.\n\nBiden’s preferences were announced Thursday evening at a dinner for members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee by committee co-chairs Jim Roosevelt, Jr. and Minyon Moore. The committee is set to meet Friday and Saturday in Washington and is poised to propose a new presidential nominating calendar.\n\nBiden’s expression of his preferences will play a significant role in the process. A DNC source said his elevation of South Carolina to the first-in-the-nation primary has sparked significant debate as members meet Thursday night. But with Biden’s support, this proposal is likely to ultimately gain the support of the committee, though this person emphasized that nothing is final until the votes are held.\n\nIf the DNC ultimately adopts this calendar, it would be an extraordinary shake up of the existing order and would strip Iowa of the first-in-the-nation status that it has held since 1972. Iowa has traditionally gone first, followed by New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It would also add a fifth state to the slate before Super Tuesday (the first Tuesday in March) and elevate Georgia and Michigan as early nominating states for the first time.\n\nSouth Carolina’s primary would be held on February 6, Nevada and New Hampshire would have their contests on February 13, Georgia’s primary would be on February 20 and Michigan’s would be on February 27, according to the source.\n\nBiden had also sent a letter to DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee members on Thursday laying out what he believed should be guiding principles for the committee as it discusses the calendar.\n\n“Just like my Administration, the Democratic Party has worked hard to reflect the diversity of America - but our nominating process does not,” the president’s letter reads. “For fifty years, the first month of our presidential nominating process has been a treasured part of our democratic process, but it is time to update the process for the 21st century. I am committed to working with the DNC to get this done.”\n\nThe president wrote: “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window. As I said in February 2020, you cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color - and that includes Black, Brown and Asian American & Pacific Islander voters.\n\n“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” he continued. “We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”\n\nBiden said in the letter the Democratic Party should abolish caucuses, arguing they are “inherently anti-participatory” and “restrictive.”\n\nThe Washington Post was first to report on the president’s preferred order for the nominating calendar and the letter he sent to committee members.\n\nPrioritizing more diverse battlegrounds\n\nThe DNC earlier this year approved a plan to prioritize diverse battleground states that choose to hold primaries, not caucuses, as it considers which states should hold early contests. Beyond the tumult of the 2020 caucuses, Iowa is largely White, no longer considered a battleground state and is required by state law to hold caucuses.\n\n“There’s very little support for Iowa because they don’t fit into the framework and because of the debacle of 2020. There’s a lot of emotional momentum – it’s not unanimous – but there’s a lot of emotional momentum to replace Iowa with a state that is more representative, more inclusive and instills more confidence and is a battleground state,” one DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee member told CNN.\n\nAny new proposal by the committee would have to be approved at a full DNC meeting, which will take place early next year. If a new schedule is adopted, it would be the first changes made to the Democratic nominating calendar since 2006, when Nevada and South Carolina were added as early states. It would also break with the Republican calendar, as the Republican National Committee voted earlier this year to reaffirm the early state lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, who has spearheaded Michigan’s effort to become an early-voting state, told CNN earlier on Thursday she was “feeling good” about Michigan’s chances and that she believed the state was in a “strong position” heading into the committee meeting.\n\n“The White House knows that we don’t win presidencies without the heartland,” Dingell said. “And we’ve got to have a primary system where candidates are campaigning in a heartland state that reflects the diversity of this country and that they’re testing them because that’s where we win or lose in general elections.”\n\nNevada vs. New Hampshire\n\nNevada has been making a play to move up further in the calendar and unseat New Hampshire as the first-in-the-nation primary. New Hampshire has held the first primary on the presidential nominating calendar since 1920 and that status is protected by state law.\n\nNevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, whose reelection in November was critical to allowing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate, argues her state’s diverse electorate makes it a “microcosm of the rest of the country.”\n\n“If you’re a presidential candidate and you can win in Nevada, you have a message that resonates across the country,” Cortez Masto told MSNBC earlier this month.\n\nThe Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ political arm, CHC BOLD PAC, on Wednesday announced it was backing Nevada’s application to host the first-in-the-nation primary.\n\n“The state that goes first matters, and we know that Latino voters will only become even more decisive in future election cycles when it comes to winning the White House and majorities in the House and Senate,” Reps. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Raul Ruiz of California, leaders of the CHC BOLD PAC, said in a statement.\n\nNew Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen tweeted Thursday, “NH’s First-In-The-Nation primary gives every candidate an opportunity to connect directly with engaged, informed voters in a battleground state – and Granite Staters are experts at assessing candidates & campaigns. I’m proud to support NH’s #FITN primary.”\n\nJockeying for early-state status\n\nEarlier this year, the DNC committee heard presentations from 16 states – including the four current early states – as well as Puerto Rico on their pitches on why they should become an early state or hold on to their spot. Amid pressure to boot Iowa from its top position, the Hawkeye State made its case to stay first in the calendar and proposed simplifying the caucus process.\n\nMinnesota is also among the states jockeying to join the early-state ranks. The chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Ken Martin, sent a memo to DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee members on Wednesday arguing Minnesota is “more diverse and has a stronger party infrastructure than Iowa, but unlike Michigan, it is not large enough that it would overshadow the other early primary states or make it harder and more expensive for candidates to compete in during this critical window.”\n\nBoth Michigan’s and Minnesota’s cases were bolstered after Democrats in both states won trifecta control of the governor and state legislatures in the midterms. Primary dates are generally set by law, so state parties would need cooperation from their legislatures and governors to become early-voting states. The Michigan state Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans, this week already took the step of voting to move the presidential primary up a month earlier to February.\n\nMinnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, along with other party leaders in the state, sent a letter this month to members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee pledging to passing legislation moving up the primary date if Minnesota was selected as an early state. The letter, obtained by CNN, argued Minnesota is a “highly representative approximation of the country, paired with a robust state and local party infrastructure, an engaged electorate, and a logistical and financial advantage for campaigns.”\n\nCORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the year that Iowa became the first early state in the presidential nominating calendar.", "authors": ["Abphillip Kate Sullivan", "Kate Sullivan"], "publish_date": "2022/12/01"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_11", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/03/23/indiana-hospitals-brace-supply-shortage-because-coronavirus/2901273001/", "title": "Indiana hospitals brace for supply shortage because of coronavirus", "text": "Hospital officials in Central Indiana need only look to the East or West coasts to see what the future might hold.\n\nA scarcity of personal protective equipment such as gowns and masks has led health care workers to resort to less than ideal measures such as bandannas and hand-sewn facial coverings. Officials have started talking about establishing stand-alone temporary facilities to treat coronavirus patients.\n\nAlthough Indiana is not yet experiencing the same dearth of critical supplies or a spike of cases, hospital officials here are taking steps in an effort to keep such dire shortages from occurring here. Health care workers are being asked to conserve these precious goods as much as possible to save them for what officials fear will be a surge of patients critically ill with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.\n\nMeanwhile, painters, contractors and homeowners with similar masks in their garages are being asked to donate what they have.\n\nOn Monday Gov. Eric Holcomb announced that the five Central Indiana hospital systems will be working together to coordinate the response in Marion County, which has seen almost half the state’s more than 250 cases of the coronavirus. The hospitals will assist one another with supplies and other resources.\n\n“We will not leave any health care delivery system alone in their struggle to take care of Hoosiers,” Holcomb said. “This is another example of Indiana responding to uncommon problems with uncommon solutions.”\n\nFor now, the chief problem in the U.S. remains supplies. With supplies limited, many hospitals around the country are following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that allow for reuse of masks in special circumstances.\n\nMuch of the problem centers around the fact that demand for these supplies and other pieces of personal protective equipment has soared around the globe, along with the coronavirus case count, said Joe Meyer, senior vice president of system operations for Indiana University Health.\n\nComplicating matters further, some of the largest manufacturers of these supplies were in China and shut down their factories when the virus hit hard in that country. While these factories are now up and running, Meyer said, they have not yet returned to full capacity. Social distancing that aims to flatten the curve of the disease will give the global supply chain time to catch up to the demand.\n\nDentist offices, plastic surgeons, veterinarians, painters, contractors and other individuals who have extra masks on hand have been donating supplies to hospitals.\n\nThe shortage has led the Indiana State Department of Health to Tweet that people with extras should contact them or the local health department.\n\nFor now, IU Health, the state’s largest hospital system, has sufficient supplies to meet the demand, Meyer said.\n\n“The question we’re all trying to answer is how much of an increase in demand will there be,” he said. “We know there will be an increase in demand.”\n\nThe hospital system maintains its own distribution center in Plainfield that supplies all 17 of its facilities and in preparation for a local COVID-19 outbreak has been building inventory over the past month, he said.\n\nAs of Friday, IU Health had not donated any supplies to other hospital systems, he said. They had had requests for help from facilities that had not yet run out of supplies.\n\nOther local hospital systems were keeping a close eye on their resources.\n\n“We have reordered certain PPE through our supply chains and hope to bolster our inventories. Protecting all of our patients and the staff who care for them is paramount,” said Joe Stuteville, Franciscan Health spokesman in an email.\n\nCommunity Health Network consolidated many of its outpatient primary care offices and MedChecks to under a dozen locations in part to conserve its stock of personal protective equipment, said Dr. John Kunzer, president of the Community Physician Network in an interview.\n\nThe move, which includes a shift to virtual visits when possible, also reduces the risk for patients and providers to contract the illness.\n\nSupplies are sufficient — for now, Kunzer said.\n\n“That’s one of the reasons for consolidation, to make sure that we have the supplies directed towards acute care,” Kunzer said. “We know that as the volume is going to increase here we have to conserve what we can whatever possible.”\n\nLocal hospitals also are taking steps now to prepare to handle a potential surge of patients. The new collaboration will help with that, said Brian Tabor, president of the Indiana Hospital Association.\n\nCentral Indiana hospitals already collaborate to help out when one hospital is facing an influx of emergency or trauma patients, he said. This would allow hospitals to try to shift around capacity, for instance, to use a wing of a skilled nursing facility to house patients with COVID-19 who are recovering.\n\n“What this will allow us to do as a system is start reallocating resources and beds and potentially ventilators and other things so we can increase the capacity in the entire system so that two or three weeks down the road, we aren’t simply directing traffic with the extent of resources we have today but we may be able to create more places where people can be treated with COVID-like illness,” he said.\n\nWhile this will not ensure that Indiana will never require a specialized facility to treat patients with COVID as has been discussed in other cities, the collaboration could help Indiana maximize what resources it has at this point, he said.\n\nMeanwhile, he said, the Indiana Hospital Association has been collecting donated masks and talking to local manufacturers who have expressed interest in making surgical gowns to help fill the need.\n\nSome private citizens also have been collecting. Lori Welge Fulk, a former nurse, saw a friend in Fort Wayne post on Facebook about a lack of masks in her hospital. So Fulk decided to start collecting as many masks as possible to ship to her friend.\n\nOriginally she posted on a few Facebook pages, offering to buy masks. People started offering them up, asking if she would consider taking masks from already opened boxes. Fulk collected nearly 40 in a few days and plans to pick up more.\n\nMost she sent to her friend in Fort Wayne, though she gave a few to a local emergency room physician as well.\n\n“I think people have some of them in their garages and just don’t realize what they’re looking for,” she said. \"If you are down to nothing, this is definitely better than a bandanna.”\n\nNow she is reaching out to families who have had loved ones die while in hospice to see whether they have any supplies at home to donate. One friend promised her 100 masks.\n\nSuch efforts can make a difference, but they are unlikely to solve the problem on the global scale, experts agree. That will take a much broader response.\n\n“What we need is a steady supply, and we just don’t know when the regular supply chain will be restored,” Tabor said.\n\nContact IndyStar reporter Shari Rudavsky at 317-444-6354 or shari.rudavsky@indystar.com. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter: @srudavsky.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/03/23"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/05/30/cancer-drug-chemotherapy-shortage-solutions-explained/70253377007/", "title": "Cancer drug shortage may force US doctors to ration chemotherapy", "text": "Sitting in an infusion center last Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth Arnold wondered whether the cancer drug dripping into her vein would be enough to make a difference.\n\nArnold, 63, was recently diagnosed with advanced uterine cancer. Her surgeon said she needed chemotherapy to knock down the tumors before she could have surgery.\n\nBut because of a shortage of key medications, she was told she would get five bags of the drug carboplatin, not the usual six. The nurse at her hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, said the facility would probably run out before her next treatment in three weeks.\n\n“I’m terrified, quite frankly,” said Arnold, a journalism professor at the University of Alaska and former reporter with National Public Radio.\n\nShe’s caught up in a frightening and frustrating national shortage of essential drugs that experts say has put the lives of more than 100,000 cancer patients, particularly women, at risk.\n\n“The last six months have been the worst in my career, including some of the shortages we had during the peak of COVID. It’s just been incredibly challenging,” said Julie Kennerly-Shah, associate director of pharmacy at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.\n\nFourteen cancer drugs have been in shortage in recent months, mostly because of supply chain interruptions. Those in shortest supply include cisplatin and carboplatin, platinum-based drugs used to treat gynecologic, breast, testicular, bladder, head and neck and non-small-cell lung cancers.\n\nThe American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has been working to resolve the shortage and saw the first glimmers of hope last week after a national delivery of carboplatin, which has been in short supply for a month.\n\n“I think we may very well have hit rock bottom and are starting to slowly see more release of drug,” said Julie Gralow, the society’s chief medical officer and executive vice president.\n\nBut it’s not yet clear whether the crisis is ending or whether the supply will continue to ebb and flow.\n\n“None of us knows yet what that means. Is it going to be adequate? Are we going to be practicing week to week?” said Dr. Amanda Nickles Fader, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins Hospital and president-elect of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology. “We obviously need long-term solutions.”\n\nFader’s organization surveyed its members in late April, and only a handful, most of them in rural or smaller hospitals, said they were near a crisis point. By last week, they had heard from facilities in more than 40 states, including some major medical centers, that they were running short of at least one key cancer medication.\n\n“We’re at a critical juncture,” Fader said. “If this crisis worsens, every hospital in the United States is going to be impacted.”\n\nCancer treatment advances are underway:Here are 3 that could change lives.\n\nAlternative approaches\n\nDoctors often can give patients a different drug if one is in short supply, Fader said. But cisplatin, which has been limited since February, is often used as a substitute for carboplatin, and vice versa ‒ so limited access to both creates problems.\n\nNew guidelines from ASCO encourage doctors to stick to the lowest recommended dose and the longest accepted interval between doses.\n\nThat’s why Arnold got just five bags of carboplatin instead of six. It’s within the recommended range based on clinical trials, but still, Arnold would have preferred to throw as much as possible at her cancer.\n\nAnd though using the minimum should be enough for most people, Gralow said, “we’re all worried about the risk to patients and that some patients might be getting inferior care.”\n\nOn Thursday, Gralow received messages from a cancer treatment center in Florida and another in Tennessee that said they were about to start rationing care. She hopes the recent release of some carboplatin will allow them to avoid that.\n\nIf hospitals are forced to ration lifesaving drugs, Arnold is worried she’ll be far down on the list. Medications will go first to patients with the highest likelihood of being cured. Arnold’s dangerous tumor type was down at No. 18 on a rationing list she was given by a Seattle doctor.\n\nProviding too little chemotherapy might leave patients with terrible side effects but no benefit – or even worse, might make their tumors resistant to the drug, said Dr. Michelle Benoit, a gynecologic oncologist in Washington State who has consulted on Arnold’s cancer.\n\nMore:New cancer therapy takes personalized medicine to a new level\n\nWith the health care system already stretched thin, it can be challenging for doctors to identify an alternative course of therapy and then get an insurance company to cover it.\n\nFader’s society is working with insurance companies to relax prior authorization requirements so patients can get nonstandard treatments.\n\nSome substitute therapies are just as effective but might require a different dosing schedule or carry more side effects, Fader said.\n\nEven the fact that some drugs take longer to deliver than others can cause problems, she said, because tightly run infusion centers lack capacity to handle the longer schedules.\n\nAll these changes require “a lot of reworking of clinical pathways and workflows in order to get there,” Fader said.\n\nWhy there's a shortage of cancer drugs now\n\nAlthough cisplatin and carboplatin are manufactured by five companies, all rely on a single supplier in India that was shuttered over the winter for safety reasons. Though some production has resumed, deliveries are behind schedule and supplies are low.\n\nDrug shortages have been a problem in the United States for at least a decade, and the shortages were exacerbated during the pandemic, said Bindiya Vakil, CEO of Resilinc, which provides global supply chain mapping and monitoring.\n\nAnd demand, particularly for cancer drugs, keeps rising as patients live longer with their disease.\n\nGlobally, spending on cancer drugs reached nearly $200 billion in 2020, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. It is expected to reach $375 billion by 2027.\n\nThe irony is that these essential platinum-based drugs are in short supply in large part because they’re so inexpensive.\n\nCisplatin costs $15 a vial and carboplatin $25, said Matt Christian, director of supply chain insights at the U.S. Pharmacopeia, a nonprofit that sets standards for the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.\n\nLatest:A new research effort takes aim at 8 rare diseases. It could revolutionize many more.\n\nBecause companies stand to make so little from these medications, they have little incentive to create backup plans in case raw material suppliers or manufacturers run into trouble, Christian said. “It’s hard to incentivize redundancy if the price is $15 a vial.”\n\nAlso, the platinum-based drugs are delivered by sterile injection, which makes them trickier to produce than a pill. That’s why sterile injectables are three times more likely to see a shortage than the average generic drug, he said.\n\nManufacturers have no incentive to improve their process or product safety.\n\nPlus, with such a small profit margin and because companies don’t want to reveal their competitive advantages, production is a closely guarded secret.\n\nThat means the American medical system doesn’t know when a factory is shut down in India or a raw material shortage affects the drug supply, so hospitals can’t plan ahead or encourage other drug companies to pick up the slack.\n\nHow to fix the problem\n\nThe Food and Drug Administration is working to address the drug shortage, said spokesperson James McKinney.\n\n“While the agency does not manufacturer drugs and cannot require a pharmaceutical company to make a drug, make more of a drug, or change the distribution of a drug, the public should rest assured the FDA is working closely with numerous manufacturers and others in the supply chain to understand, mitigate and prevent or reduce the impact of intermittent or reduced availability of certain products,” he said via email. “The FDA understands that manufacturers expect availability to continue to increase in the near future.”\n\nBut that’s not enough, Gralow said.\n\nStructural changes are needed. Congress should add regulations to require data-sharing, offer incentives to protect the drug supply, manufacture more medications in the U.S., and create a stockpile of essential drugs, she said.\n\nHer organization, American Society of Clinical Oncology, has been lobbying both houses of Congress – and encouraging patients to ask their representatives – to improve the supply of critical medicines.\n\nThe U.S. government should use its buying power to encourage multiple manufacturers to make essential drugs rather than focusing on the cheapest source and a “race to the bottom,” Gralow said. “It’s a vulnerable system that needs to be strengthened.\"\n\nThe U.S. Pharmacopeia has been advocating for what Christian described as a “supply chain control tower.” The goal would be to increase demand information to raw suppliers and manufacturers so they can better plan their production and to hospital pharmacies so they could better predict fluctuations in supply.\n\n“Our goal ultimately is to inform people with insights and help them take mitigative actions,” he said. “The patient impact is why we’re fired up to do this work.”\n\nThe state of cancer1.95M people may be diagnosed with cancer in 2023\n\nHelping people on the ground\n\nArnold just hopes that changes will come in time to help her live longer.\n\nShe was a healthy marathoner before headaches, a high blood pressure reading and a nagging anxiety led her doctor to order a pelvic ultrasound.\n\nShe was diagnosed a month ago with an aggressive form of uterine cancer known as serous. It had already spread to her pelvis, stomach and colon. She was scheduled for a hysterectomy, but the surgeon said she wanted Arnold to get chemotherapy first to knock back the tumors.\n\nHer first round of chemo and the first few days after her second have left her with abdominal pain, which she hopes is caused by cancer cells dying off. One marker of her disease improved dramatically after that first treatment, suggesting the medication is making a difference.\n\nShe’s working out every day – running when she has the energy, walking when she doesn’t – hoping to be among the one-third of people with her tumor type to survive more than five years after diagnosis.\n\nAt a time when she wants to be entirely focused on battling cancer, Arnold and her friends on “Team Betsy” have been trying to figure out how to ensure she gets the medication she needs.\n\nShe noted that President Joe Biden has been working toward a “cancer moonshot,” setting a goal of dramatically reducing cancer deaths. Arnold said she hopes the administration also is focusing “right here on the ground.”\n\nMedications like carboplatin are already proven to work − but only if people can get them, she said.\n\n“They will save lives and prolong lives. Like mine.”\n\nContact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.\n\nHealth and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/05/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/03/21/hospitals-doing-elective-surgery-despite-covid-19-risk-short-supplies/2881141001/", "title": "Hospitals doing elective surgery despite COVID-19 risk, short supplies", "text": "U.S. hospitals face a critical shortage of protective equipment and top federal officials have called for a halt to non-emergency surgeries amid the coronavirus pandemic. But some hospitals are ignoring the directive, raising concerns that patients and medical staff are at risk.\n\nHospitals including University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami as of Friday afternoon were still performing elective surgeries, such as for orthopedic problems, cataracts and other non-essential medical issues. Nearly 300 doctors, nurses and other UPMC employees signed a letter that went to members of management last night urging the health system to \"postpone procedures that can be performed in the future, and prepare for the influx of patients that will urgently need our care in the coming weeks.\"\n\nElective surgery is a medical procedure scheduled in advance because it does not involve an emergency. Frequently, they are not a medical necessity. Examples include knee replacements or nose jobs.\n\nDr. Linda Alvarez, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union Committee on Interns and Residents, said medical residents across the country have contacted her with complaints that their hospitals are still performing procedures that aren't essential.\n\n\"What is crazy too is that these same residents are saying there is limited availability of N95 masks,\" said Alvarez, referring to the special masks that can protect against contracting COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. \"To be using this personal protection equipment in ways that are not judicious or addressing the concerns of the general public safety is appalling.\"\n\nGet daily coronavirus updates in you inbox: Sign up for Coronavirus Watch\n\nThe U.S. reached more than 278 deaths and over 23,000 confirmed cases Saturday, according to the Johns Hopkins University data dashboard. The global death toll now exceeds 12,000, with almost 300,000 confirmed cases.\n\nPennsylvania, which announced its second death Saturday, had 371 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 31 of them in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County. When asked Friday about performing elective surgeries, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Dr. Graham Snyder told reporters his area is one of \"relative calm.\"\n\n\"The health center's job is to take care of patients, not to put them at risk,” said Snyder, UPMC’s medical director for infection prevention and hospital epidemiology. “We are not northern Italy. We are not Wuhan right now. Taking the level of risk in our community, we have to balance that while still providing care.\"\n\nSome states have reported few cases, but that's because of the slow pace of testing, experts say, and many more are thought to be infected. Federal officials say masks, gowns and other protective equipment, along with ventilators, should be conserved for medical staff and an expected onslaught of coronavirus patients.\n\nHospitals already are reporting supply shortages. Space also is a looming issue. While many elective surgeries don't require overnight stays, many do, especially if there are complications.\n\nNearly two out of three of U.S. hospital beds may already be in use, a report out Friday from the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found. The analysis of the country's 728,000 hospital beds also showed availability of unoccupied beds per 1,000 people varied significantly across urban and rural areas, states and counties across the country.\n\nCoronavirus is spreading in the US:Here's everything to know, from symptoms to how to protect yourself\n\nA USA TODAY analysis out last week showed if the nation sees a major spike in COVID-19 patients, there could be almost six seriously ill patients for every existing hospital bed.\n\nVice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House's Coronavirus Task Force, asked hospitals last week to stop doing elective surgeries and reiterated the call Wednesday at a White House news conference. The same day, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued \"voluntary recommendations\" for elective surgeries to encourage cancellation of non-essential procedures until the COVID-19 outbreak is past.\n\n\"We're asking every American, and our medical community leaders, and hospitals to partner with us in delaying elective procedures across the country and our healthcare system to ensure that medical supplies and medical capacity go where they're needed,\" said Pence.\n\nIn addition to those concerns, Alvarez noted the procedures create yet another patient who is at higher risk for contracting COVID-19 because having surgery suppresses the immune system. (People with chronic health conditions and those older than 60 also are at higher risk of contracting the illness with serious symptoms.)\n\nSick at home with COVID-19:How to care for your loved ones infected with coronavirus\n\nSurgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams and the American College of Surgeons also have asked hospitals to stop elective procedures. Adams' office issued a statement to USA TODAY saying its request was \"in sync with current CDC recommendations for healthcare facilities.\"\n\n“Dr. Adams and the President’s Coronavirus Task Force have encouraged healthcare facilities to consider rescheduling non-urgent outpatient visits and elective surgeries, as necessary, due to the demands on our healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic,\" said the statement. \"We’re facing an unprecedented threat and it’s important we preserve critical hospital resources, like PPE and staff to ensure an adequate response to the COVID-19 outbreak.”\n\nHospital associations have pushed back against blanket recommendations. The American Hospital Association said such decisions \"should be determined at the local, community level in consultation with hospitals and the clinical recommendations of physicians and nurses.\"\n\n\"It is important to recognize the definition of ‘elective’ procedures includes important life saving measures that will continue to be necessary,\" AHA said in a statement.\n\nPregnant and worried about coronavirus?'The hard part is we just don't have the data'\n\nUniversity of Southern California Medical Center in Los Angeles, one of the last major hospitals in the state still doing elective procedures, announced Thursday \"many elective inpatient and outpatient surgeries will be rescheduled on a case-by-case basis.\" Spokeswoman Meg Aldrich said that means no elective procedures will be performed, but did not know when the policy was effective.\n\nJimmy Lewis, CEO of the rural hospital group Hometown Health based in Georgia, said less than 5% of his members are still doing elective surgeries, though he added most are acute care hospitals that do few such procedures.\n\n\"They stopped doing it unless they looked at a facility to see if a certain operation could be fit in without exposing other patients,\" Lewis said. \"If you decide to do one $5,000 surgery, you have to do an analysis of having a contaminated patient come into the hospital versus the $5,000.\"\n\nLewis tells members it isn't worth it because of the \"obvious ethical\" issues, along with the \"fear of liability.\" If hospitals decide to do an elective surgery, and a patient dies of coronavirus, plaintiff attorneys will come in later.\n\n\"They're going to ask, 'Why did you do an elective surgery that killed momma?'\"\n\nFive people who work at hospitals spoke on condition their names and employers not be used, but USA TODAY confirmed with hospitals the status of their elective surgeries.\n\nHospitals still performing elective surgeries as of Friday included:\n\n• University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Some facilities had busy elective schedules Friday and physicians were performing hernia repairs, cataract surgeries and orthopedic procedures known as scopes that involve small incisions to view and repair joint problems, according to two health care workers at the health system.\n\n\"Balancing our patients’ ongoing clinical needs with the avoidance of unnecessary exposure requires a nuanced approach – not an across-the-board cancelling of clinics and procedures,\" UPMC said in a statement Friday.\n\n\"We continue to serve our patients whose procedures our clinicians believe are not medically responsible to delay. Our careful triaging of upcoming elective procedures on a case-by-case basis meets the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services guidance.\n\n\"We have a multidisciplinary team of experts closely monitoring the situation and will adjust accordingly.\"\n\nUPMC's Children's Hospital was doing elective dental procedures on Friday. CMS targeted dental procedures in its recommendations Wednesday because they always require \"personal protective equipment\" that's in short supply and because they \"have one of the highest risks of transmission due to the close proximity of the healthcare provider to the patient.\"\n\n• Virginia Hospital Center. The Arlington-based hospital on Friday had many patients recovering after elective surgeries, according to three people who work at the hospital and asked that their names not be used for fear of retribution. Every other hospital in the Washington, D.C area had stopped the procedures, a USA TODAY review found.\n\n\"Virginia Hospital Center is still performing elective surgeries,\" said spokeswoman Anne Kelsey. \"While nationwide shortages exist, we have not had any reason to deviate outside of those guidelines.\"\n\nKelsey added the hospital is being \"cautious and mindful about the allocation of all of our resources.\"\n\nSaturday night, several hours after this article posted, VHC spokeswoman Maryanne Boster emailed a \"clarification of the answer,\" that restated that it is using cautito allocate resources. She added VHC has \"rescheduled most elective procedures. However, some procedures cannot be postponed, including those such as cancer cases involving tumor removal or biopsies.\"\n\nUSA TODAY confirmed some surgeries taking place on Friday and scheduled this week were neither cancer-related nor urgent medical needs. Meanwhile, the medical staff is reusing the N95 masks that protect against COVID-19, using cleaning rags with bleach-based solution instead of disposable bleach wipes, reusing masks after dealing with patients and not getting masks at all unless they have face-to-face contact with patients, according to two of the hospital workers.\n\n• Jackson Memorial Hospital. The trauma hospital is based in Florida's Miami-Dade County, which now has the highest number of deaths in the state, with more than 100. The hospital said in a statement to USA TODAY Friday afternoon that \"physicians have been given some discretion as to whether to cancel or proceed.\"\n\nThe hospital was \"continuing to perform all emergent and urgent surgeries, procedures, and clinic appointments for now,\" the statement said.\n\nAt 7 p.m., more than three hours after Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order requiring all \"nonessential medical procedures be postponed,\" the hospital said it was \"immediately complying with this order.\"\n\nJackson also said it has \"sufficient PPE on hand for current and anticipated volumes,\" and \"have enough ventilators and have rented additional to be prepared for future demand. We also have open orders to secure even more.\"\n\nAlvarez said hospitals that have so much protective gear that they can afford to do elective surgeries should consider sharing with less well supplied hospitals. \"I think hospitals should assess their communities, and the impact they are expecting to face not only in their area but in the surrounding areas as well, and use this to appropriately plan their need for PPE,\" said Alvarez. \"It is also important now, more than ever, we come together in the medical community to promote patient and worker safety.\"\n\nGot a story idea or tip? Email Jayne O'Donnell at jodonnell@usatoday.com and request her secure Signal information if preferred.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/03/21"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/07/health/contrast-dye-shortage/index.html", "title": "Hospitals grapple with shortage of crucial component for medical ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA shortage of a key component for some crucial imaging tests such as CT scans is leading to rationing within hospitals, patient backlogs and doctors across the United States making do with less-than-ideal alternatives ​across the United States.\n\nThe component is a liquid called IV contrast, which contains iodine. It can be injected into a patient’s bloodstream to highlight different structures on scans. It can reveal, for example, the location of a clot when someone is having a stroke.\n\nThe shortage stems from ​the temporary closure of GE Healthcare’s manufacturing facility in Shanghai ​in the midst of that city’s two-month “zero-Covid” lockdown. ​​The lockdown began in early April and was mostly lifted by early June.\n\n​In a statement, GE Healthcare said that facility is in the process of getting production back up to speed. Its output had risen to 60% of capacity by May 21, and GE expects the plant to be back to nearly 100% capacity this week. The company said it had taken additional steps to mitigate the shortage, including ramping up production at a manufacturing plant in Cork, Ireland.\n\nHowever, it may be weeks before that supply reaches hospitals. “There is still the challenge of bringing the contrast media across the ocean and distributing it to health care facilities across the nation,” Nancy Foster, the American Hospital Association’s vice president of quality and patient safety policy, wrote in an email.\n\nGE Healthcare is one of four companies that supply iodine-containing contrast to the US, but the other manufacturers haven’t been able to scale up and offset the shortage, according to the Radiological Society of North America.\n\nThe hospital association estimates that about half of all hospitals in the United States rely on GE for contrast dye to perform about 20 million scans a year, or about 385,000 scans each week.\n\nIn a statement Wednesday, the US Food and Drug Administration said the supply is expected to continue increasing through June, “with a return to stocking levels in July 2022.”\n\nThousands of patients may be affected\n\nFoster said the American Hospital Association doesn’t have data on how many patients have had scans delayed but believes it to be well into the thousands.\n\nDoctors across the country say they have seen firsthand the effects of the shortage.\n\nOncologist Dr. Shikha Jain said her cancer patients are having trouble getting scans.\n\n“For these patients, getting CT scans with contrast can be extremely important, not only in the diagnosis of a cancer upfront but then also assessing treatment responses, assessing if the cancer has come back,” said Jain, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Illinois Cancer Center in Chicago.\n\nShe said she’s worried about patients delaying care – on top of all the other delays during the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n“I saw patients who probably had curable cancers at the beginning of the pandemic,” she said. “By the time they came in, their symptoms had progressed to a point where they had metastatic disease.”\n\nOther doctors in states such as New York, North Carolina and California shared anecdotes and emails from hospital leadership, urging them to reserve contrast for emergencies and to find alternatives when possible. Alternatives may include ultrasounds, CT scans without contrast or MRI scans, which use a different type of contrast. But often, these aren’t ideal substitutions.\n\nCNN granted the doctors anonymity to discuss internal communications from hospital administrators which they are not authorized to discuss with media.\n\nMissed opportunities for diagnosis\n\nOne emergency doctor in California said she had a patient who would have gotten scans using contrast dye if not for the shortage. The woman was sent home after multiple other tests turned up nothing, but she came back two days later in severe pain and finally received contrast dye. Those scans revealed clots that were missed during her initial visit.\n\nA physician at another California hospital said he had to run his contrast request for “a real surgical emergency” up the ladder “since they are so low.” The delay, he said, was “painful.”\n\nJain added that even in cases in which an MRI is an acceptable substitution, there have been delays due to the high demand for these alternatives.\n\n“Our patients should be aware that hospitals are doing all they can to ensure we can reschedule scans that had to be delayed during this time of crisis,” Foster said. “As more dye becomes available, we will be reaching out to reschedule patients for their scans.”\n\nJain underscored that supply shortages have been a problem for many years, but since the pandemic began, they have increasingly happened on a larger scale, hitting more hospitals in more places at the same time.\n\n“We’ve been having shortages throughout the pandemic. At the very beginning of the pandemic, it was PPE shortages. Now, we have contrast shortages and formula shortages for babies,” Jain said. “So this is not a isolated incident.”\n\nAn industrywide problem\n\nLast month, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf told members of Congress during a hearing on the nationwide baby formula shortage that something needs to be done about US supply chains, which often rely on “large, single-source contracts.”\n\n“The [medical devices and supplies] industry has fought us tooth and nail on requiring that there be insight into their supply chains,” Califf said. “We’d like to be able to stress-test and prevent these things from happening, rather than waiting until they happen and then scrambling.”\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nFoster said it’s not an easy fix to prevent such a shortage from happening again. It will require suppliers, distributors, providers and the government to take collective action such as “diversifying and expanding sources of critical supplies, so they are not sourced or manufactured at only one location.”\n\nAnother step “is looking at how supplies are transported and having some redundancy, so that if a weather event takes out a vital highway or railway, or a labor strike takes out a major port, we have alternatives,” she said.\n\n“We have known for some time that the supply chain is too skinny and too lean,” Foster added, “and we need to ‘fatten it.’ The pandemic has only exacerbated the need to do so.”", "authors": ["Michael Nedelman Amanda Sealy Nadia Kounang", "Michael Nedelman", "Amanda Sealy", "Nadia Kounang"], "publish_date": "2022/06/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/22/health/drug-shortages-tamiflu-amoxicillin-albuterol/index.html", "title": "Shortages of antivirals, antibiotics compound stress of a rough ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nShortages of key medications used to treat common childhood illnesses like flu, ear infections and sore throats are adding to the misery of this year’s early and severe respiratory virus season.\n\n“Right now, we are having severe shortages of medications. There’s no Tamiflu for children. There’s barely any Tamiflu for adults. And this is brand-name and generic,” said Renae Kraft, a relief pharmacist in Oklahoma City. Additionally, “as far as antibiotics go, there’s not a whole lot.”\n\nKraft often works in rural areas of the state, floating between pharmacies when extra help is needed. On Monday, she worked in Holdenville, where there are two pharmacies: Pruett’s and Walmart. The same wholesaler stocks both stores, so if one pharmacy is out, the other usually is, too.\n\nKraft estimates that she had 20 people come in to Pruett’s to fill prescriptions for Tamiflu on Monday, but she didn’t have any, so she sent them to Walmart, which still had some.\n\nOn social media, families say they’ve hunted for hours for oseltamivir, the generic version of Tamiflu, and the first-line antibiotics amoxicillin and Augmentin. Inhalers of the drug albuterol, which is used to open airways in the lungs, are also in short supply, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which maintains a list of drug shortages.\n\nAnyone can report a shortage for the society’s list, and pharmacists from the University of Utah verify the information with drug manufacturers.\n\n“In my 25 years of being a pediatrician, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Stacene Maroushek of Hennepin Healthcare in Minnesota. “I have seen families who just aren’t getting a break. They have one viral illness after another. And now there’s the secondary effect of ear infections and pneumonia that are prompting amoxicillin shortages.”\n\nRespiratory viruses hit hard\n\nThe cause of these shortages doesn’t seem to be a manufacturing problem, says Michael Ganio, senior director of pharmacy practice and quality for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.\n\n“It’s just increased demand ahead of schedule and higher than usual,” he said.\n\nAccording to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half of US states have “high” or “very high” respiratory virus activity. Most of that is due to influenza, which hit early and hard this year. Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is also playing a role. Nationwide, about 1 out of 5 tests for RSV was positive last week, a rate much higher than any point over the past two years.\n\nThere have been about 8 flu hospitalizations for every 100,000 people this season, rates typically seen in December or January. The cumulative hospitalization rate hasn’t been this high at this point in the season in more than a decade.\n\nPrescription fills for the antiviral Tamiflu are at a 10-year high for this time of year, according to GoodRx.com, a company that helps people find discounts for prescription drugs.\n\nPeople in the US are six times more likely to be taking Tamiflu at this point in the flu season as during the winter of 2019-20, which the next highest year.\n\nAs for the antibiotics amoxicillin and Augmentin – a combination of amoxicillin and clavulanate, an agent that helps guard against antibiotic resistance – it’s not entirely clear why demand is so high.\n\nThe CDC considers these to be first-line therapies for many common childhood ailments, like ear and sinus and throat infections.\n\nSome viral illness, like influenza, can leave the body more vulnerable to secondary bacterial infections that may need treatment with antibiotics.\n\nBut these antibiotics have also been prescribed inappropriately when a child’s illness is really caused by a virus. Antibiotics kill bacteria, but they don’t do anything to fight viral illnesses.\n\n“Anytime respiratory viruses kick up, people start prescribing antibiotics, even inappropriately, and that’s created a lot of demand. That wasn’t anticipated by the manufacturers of amoxicillin, so that’s led to shortages,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.\n\nCompanies work to resolve shortages\n\nPharmaceutical companies that make generic drugs don’t usually keep stocks of those medications on shelves. Instead, they manufacture medicines based on orders placed earlier in the year. This year’s orders didn’t anticipate the heavy season for respiratory illnesses, some manufacturers said.\n\nIn response, they are ramping up production, but it will take some time to get more product in stock.\n\nDrug manufacturer Teva says it anticipates that some concentrations of amoxicillin that are on back order will be back in stock starting in early December and continuing to the end of February.\n\nSandoz, which also manufactures generic amoxicillin, said that shortage had many factors. “The combination in rapid succession of the pandemic impact and consequent demand swings, manufacturing capacity constraints, scarcity of raw materials, and the current energy crisis means we currently face a uniquely difficult situation,” the company said in a statement.\n\nHikma, another amoxicillin maker, said it has adequate supplies to fill orders and is managing its supply to make sure all orders are filled.\n\n“We understand the importance of this medication and are looking at ways to increase production,” a spokesperson said in a statement.\n\nGenentech, which manufactures Tamiflu, says it has plenty of the name-brand antiviral medication available.\n\n“We have sufficient supply to meet the demand and are continuously evaluating the need to increase production. Tamiflu is also widely available and there are multiple generic manufacturers of oseltamivir. There is sufficient supply of branded Tamiflu,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.\n\nOther companies that manufacture amoxicillin and those that make generic versions of Tamiflu reported to be in shortage didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.\n\nThe US Food and Drug Administration has taken steps to help amid the shortage, putting out guidance to pharmacists for how to make liquid amoxicillin for children from pill versions. Amoxicillin pills for adults are not in short supply, Ganio said.\n\nAdvice for parents\n\nAlthough news of these shortages may generate some anxiety, parents should be aware but not alarmed, said Brigid Groves, a pharmacist and the senior director for practice and professional affairs at the American Pharmacists Association.\n\nThe most important thing families can do for a sick loved one is to get them tested, she said. Most doctor’s offices and some pharmacy clinics can do rapid tests to help determine whether your symptoms are coming from a viral illness or a bacterial one.\n\n“We don’t want to treat somebody that has Covid with an antibiotic, because it’s not going to be effective,” Groves said. “And then we also run the risk of creating more resistance in our current bacterial antimicrobial agents out there.”\n\nA recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded that about 30% of outpatient prescriptions of antibiotics for children were inappropriate, either because the medications were given to treat viral illnesses or because the recommended agent wasn’t used. Additionally, the study found that antibiotics increase the risk of C. diff, a bacterial infection that can be life-threatening; allergic reactions; and skin rashes.\n\n“It’s important that a family or caregiver has their loved one appropriately evaluated to assure that whatever they are being treated for, they will get the appropriate therapy,” Groves said. That may be a viral illness or a bacterial infection, or a condition that calls for medication like albuterol for supportive care, making sure that the drug is being used appropriately for children who are wheezing or having trouble breathing.\n\nGroves also said parents should know that it may take some hunting to fill a child’s prescription for Tamiflu or amoxicillin. They may have to drive farther or go to a store they’re not familiar with.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nIf all stores in the area are out, she said, it may be possible to get a prescription for a different antibiotic or antiviral.\n\n“There are options to treat the same infection with a different agent,” she said.\n\nA compounding pharmacy may be able to mix the medication you need, too.", "authors": ["Brenda Goodman Raenu Charles", "Brenda Goodman", "Raenu Charles"], "publish_date": "2022/11/22"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/health/hospitals-full-not-just-covid/index.html", "title": "Hospitals in the US are the fullest they've been throughout the ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nHospitals are more full than they’ve been throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a CNN analysis of data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. But as respiratory virus season surges across the US, it’s much more than Covid that’s filling beds this year.\n\nMore than 80% of hospital beds are in use nationwide, jumping 8 percentage points in the past two weeks.\n\nHospitals have been required to report capacity information since mid-2020 as part of a federal effort to track the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nHospitals have been more than 70% full for the vast majority of that time. But they’ve been 80% full at only one other point: in January, during the height of the Omicron surge in the US. Back in January, about a quarter of hospital beds were in use for Covid-19 patients. But now, only about 6% of beds are in use for Covid-19 patients, according to the HHS data.\n\nThe broader respiratory virus season is in full swing across the US. All but six states are experiencing “high” or “very high” respiratory virus as seasonal flu activity remains “high and continues to increase,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nThe number of people admitted to the hospital for flu during the week of Thanksgiving was nearly double the number of admissions during the week before. And the latest surveillance data probably does not reflect the full effects of holiday gatherings, as it captures only through November 26, two days past Thanksgiving.\n\nNancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety with the American Hospital Association, says that an influx of flu patients is a key reason why hospitals are filling up. On top of that are challenges brought on by work force shortages and a backlog of patients who delayed care over the past few years.\n\n“The rates are higher because we are seeing patients with the flu in many parts of the country and that has brought a lot of older adults and some young children into the hospitals. Additionally, RSV is filling pediatric beds and cribs along with patients who are sicker now due to putting off care during Covid-19, which has required more intensive and complex care,” she said in a statement to CNN on Friday.\n\n“Workforce shortages have not only made it more challenging for hospitals, but also have diminished the number of patients who can be cared for in nursing homes and other post acute care settings. Thus, patients are spending more time in hospitals, awaiting discharge to the next level of care and limiting our ability to make a bed available to a patient who truly needs to be hospitalized.”\n\nIn a letter to the nation’s governors last week, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra noted that flu and other respiratory viruses are “increasing strain” on the country’s health care systems. Becerra wrote that the Biden administration “stands ready to continue assisting you with resources, supplies, and personnel” – but he stopped short of making a formal emergency declaration, as requested by children’s health leaders last month.\n\nHospital bed capacity can change day to day, as hospitals adjust the number of beds they make available based on staffing and other resources.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nAs of Thursday, about 10% of hospitals are reporting a “critical staff shortage.” More than 90% of hospital beds are in use in Rhode Island, and more than 85% of beds are full in eight other states: Washington, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia, Missouri, West Virginia and Oregon.\n\nPediatric hospital beds also have been more full than usual for months. About 76% of pediatric hospital beds are in use, up from an average of about two-thirds full in recent years.", "authors": ["Deidre Mcphillips"], "publish_date": "2022/12/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/02/01/des-moines-iowa-blood-collectors-need-donations-winter-storm-government-shutdown-lifeserve-red-cross/2731413002/", "title": "Iowa blood collectors hurting for donations following storm, shutdown", "text": "Below freezing temperatures brought more than just traffic, classes and jobs to a slowdown; it also created a hurdle for blood donation facilities in desperate need of inventory.\n\nBoth LifeServe Blood Center and the American Red Cross have declared emergency blood needs as local and national supplies run dangerously low.\n\n\"We've definitely felt the pain,\" said Danielle West, public relations and marketing manager for LifeServe, the sole provider of blood to Des Moines area hospitals along with a total of 120 hospitals across Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota.\n\nAs snowstorms struck and temperatures plunged over the past two weeks, many Des Moines-area blood drives were canceled and West said local donation centers saw dozens of no-shows.\n\n► More:Iowa's new tax law creates $1 million headache for nonprofit blood centers\n\nShe estimated that in the past week LifeServe lost nearly 1,000 donations — or about one-quarter of their weekly collection average — because of the weather.\n\nAs of Thursday afternoon, less than a two-day supply was available of more than half of the blood types, West said. Typically, Lifeserve aims to keep between a three and five day supply on hand.\n\nArea hospitals are critically low on O negative blood — the universal donor — with only a one- to two-day supply available, she said.\n\nThough West said it's typical \"to feel the pinch with the weather,\" the holidays didn't affect LifeServe nearly as much as the mid-January winter weather.\n\nWhile West doesn't believe the partial government shutdown affected LifeServe, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross said the shutdown, combined with the polar vortex, was a \"one-two punch\" to their blood supply.\n\nIn January, the opportunity to collect more than 4,600 blood and platelet donations were missed as drives across the country were called off because of severe weather, according to the American Red Cross.\n\nThe government shutdown also factored into the cancellations with about 30 drives hosted by federal offices — equating to an estimated 900 units of blood — were canceled, said Laura McGuire, a Red Cross spokeswoman.\n\nOn average, 4 percent of the blood collected by the Red Cross comes from drives sponsored by military and state, local and federal agencies.\n\nThe Red Cross issued an emergency blood call on Jan. 14, citing the holiday and flu seasons as reasons why 27,000 fewer donations were collected than needed during the weeks of Christmas and New Year's Day.\n\nTypically, the Red Cross aims to maintain a five-day supply of on-hand blood to fill the needs of regular patients and emergency situations, McGuire said. As of Thursday, they had less than a three-day supply available.\n\nLifeServe donation appointments can be made online at www.lifeservebloodcenter.org or by calling 800-287-4903. To find nearby American Red Cross drives, visit www.redcrossblood.org.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/02/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/03/26/nj-coronavirus-health-care-facilities-worry-equipment-scams/5078215002/", "title": "NJ coronavirus: Health care facilities worry about equipment scams", "text": "A sales pitch to hospitals for a mask to protect medical workers from the novel coronavirus said the gear was certified by a federal agency — but it wasn't the proper agency. And a portion of the certification document was blotted out.\n\nIn a different case, a photo of a mask misspelled the acronym for a federal regulatory agency.\n\nAnd three separate companies, all apparently fake, purported to be selling certified N95 respirator masks. The tipoff they were no good? Each company supplied an approval number to prove it was legitimate — but they all used the same number.\n\nDoctors and hospitals have been inundated with pitches from people selling medical equipment like N95 respirator masks, which protect health care workers from being infected with the coronavirus and are in critically short supply across New Jersey. Some companies have been selling equipment that's substandard or not certified by the federal government.\n\nThat has led a state senator to propose legislation to increase criminal penalties for people selling counterfeit medical equipment during an emergency. And it has led doctors who purchase such equipment to read the fine print on documents intended to show that personal protective equipment, known as PPE, is legitimate.\n\nMask shortage in NJ:Severe shortage of masks for health care workers\n\nNJ coronavirus:Sewing hobbyists shift to making masks for health care workers amid shortage\n\nHelping out:These groups are stepping up to help NJ hospitals facing mask shortages\n\nThe proliferation of fake equipment is growing as health care facilities also contend with escalating costs, with some vendors raising equipment prices tenfold or more.\n\n\"Hospitals are in the throes of a crisis right now,\" said Stavros Christoudias, a general surgeon and chairman of the New Jersey Doctor Patient Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog made up of independent physicians. \"What if some of this PPE slips through and someone uses it in a room and expects it to protect them. It can be a disaster.\"\n\nDealing with new vendors\n\nThe problem isn't limited to outright scams. In some cases, hospitals desperate for equipment are dealing with vendors and manufacturers they don't know.\n\nThat was the case when Holy Name Medical Center recently purchased 1,000 protective masks but opened the box and discovered they did not fit properly because of the way they were made. The masks were returned to the vendor, said Adam Jarrett, the hospital's chief medical officer.\n\nHe said the hospital was \"not using the regular vendor\" that it typically relies on for supplies and that it received a shipment of KN95 masks, \"which is what we were expecting to receive.\" KN95 masks are similar to N95 but are made in China instead of the U.S.\n\nA spokeswoman said the hospital \"could not confirm\" that the masks had been certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, known as NIOSH.\n\nA NIOSH spokeswoman, Arleen Porcell, said the agency doesn't certify KN95 masks and recommends they \"only be used in crisis situations\" when N95 masks are not available. She said they \"should not be used during aerosol-generating medical procedures\" unless the alternative is an ordinary \"facemask or improvised device.\"\n\nJarrett said doctors were concerned that the KN95 masks wouldn't adequately protect workers.\n\n\"We didn't trust it,\" Jarrett said. \"The mask has to be tight. We were not confident because of the way the mask was constructed.\"\n\nStory continues below the gallery\n\nHe said the vendor made up for the mistake. A hospital spokeswoman said the vendor sent certified masks as a replacement. Such companies typically act as intermediaries, purchasing equipment and then reselling it to health care facilities.\n\nThe hospital declined to provide the identity of the vendor.\n\nCompanies 'taking advantage of the situation'\n\nA Holy Name spokeswoman said it's not unusual for a single N95 mask to sell for $9 these days — up from about 50 cents before the crisis — but added that she did not know how much the hospital has been paying. It is among the hardest-hit health care facilities in the region, with 100 confirmed and probable coronavirus patients as of Wednesday, including 25 on ventilators.\n\nHighlighting the importance for proper protective equipment for staff, the hospital said 38 employees have been furloughed, with 34 testing positive for the coronavirus and concerns that others have been infected. A spokeswoman said it had enough protective gear to last another \"three to four days.\"\n\nThe National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, known as NIOSH, which certifies protective medical equipment, has put on its website photos and other information about potentially counterfeit N95 masks. Certified masks have a NIOSH logo and a federal approval number stamped on them.\n\nChristoudias said that in some cases vendors are saying masks are approved only by the Food and Drug Administration. But that's a sure sign they are fake, he said, because such approvals are made by NIOSH.\n\nAnd he said three separate companies provided the same NIOSH approval number — which would not be the case if they were legitimate. Companies that manufacture such masks receive separate approval numbers for their products.\n\nChristoudias said he knows of one doctor who purchased a large number of N95 masks to distribute to hospitals — and he's now stuck with them because the hospitals determined they were substandard.\n\nThe problem has led state Sen. Vin Gopal to propose legislation to increase the penalties for selling counterfeits during a state of emergency. Gopal, D-Monmouth, said a bill could be introduced within days.\n\n\"We have people taking advantage of the situation while others are suffering,\" he said.\n\nThe New Jersey Hospital Association said in a statement that it is aware of \"a lot of bad actors coming out of the woodwork during the COVID-19 crisis.\"\n\nKerry McKean Kelly, a spokeswoman, said in an email that \"numerous vendors\" have contacted the association saying they have protective equipment, and that \"it can be very difficult to vet out the legitimate companies from those trying to take advantage of the situation, and that’s a shame at a time when our hospitals are focused on caring for patients and protecting their staffs.\"\n\nThe association has developed a vetting process to help health care facilities determine which vendors to use. Kelly said it recommends asking vendors for a W-9 tax form, which is used to supply a taxpayer identification number to the Internal Revenue Service, and for proof that equipment is approved by NIOSH.\n\nShe said health care facilities should be \"wary of a vendor requiring payment\" before supplies are delivered and that the association is providing members with a list of vendors that can be trusted.\n\nAbbott Koloff is an investigative reporter for NorthJersey.com. To get unlimited access to his watchdog work that safeguards our communities and democracy, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.\n\nEmail: koloff@northjersey.com Twitter: @abbottkoloff", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/03/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/03/22/memphis-hospitals-conserve-collaborate-locate-covid-19-supplies/2894434001/", "title": "Memphis hospitals conserve, collaborate, locate COVID-19 supplies", "text": "The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pandemic. Reported illnesses range from very mild to severe, including death. Agencies anticipate widespread transmission will occur in the U.S. in coming months and recommend social distancing among other measures to slow the spread. Call your doctor and stay home if you are sick. Get more information at CDC.gov/coronavirus or contact the Tennessee Department of Health coronavirus information line at 877-857-2945 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. CT daily.\n\nMemphis hospital executives issued an extraordinary statement Sunday, saying the region's four main health care systems are on high alert to secure needed supplies and handle the coronavirus outbreak.\n\nBaptist, Methodist, Regional One and Saint Francis officials together made public a statement that outlines goals and says: \"Meeting this moment requires each hospital to take strong action to prepare.\"\n\nHospital and medical clinics in the four networks, which together employ more than 25,000 people in metropolitan Memphis, are actively trying to conserve needed supplies and locate critical gear such as face masks, according to the statement.\n\nMemphis' hospitals generally have been viewed as rivals. However, U.S. health officials expect a sharp rise nationwide in COVID-19 infections.\n\nThe message comes as the number of residents in metropolitan Memphis diagnosed with the virus reached 101 by early Sunday afternoon. Reported cases include 66 in Memphis and Shelby County along with 35 cases in Memphis' suburbs, including 18 in DeSoto County.\n\nIn the region, health, government and business leaders have emulated the response in cities throughout the nation. They have tried to disrupt the virus' transmission rate by suspending schools, closing public areas such as museums, bars and restaurants and advising people to stay home and work from home if possible. Currently, one report estimate 20% of working U.S. residents are laid off, idled or working from home.\n\nReports show most scientists are unsure how many of the 330 million people in the nation will catch the virus. California's governor has said 56% of the state's 40 million residents might get infected. For health officials, one concern is a rapid spike in infections that could overwhelm hospitals in any one city.\n\nHospitals throughout the nation currently have about 900,000 to 1 million beds, including about 4,000 beds in the nine main Memphis-area hospitals operated by Baptist, Methodist, Regional One and Saint Francis. About 1.4 million people live in the nine counties that form metro Memphis.\n\nMost of this population relies on the Memphis hospitals for critical health care. Another 600,000 residents in a wider region known as the Mid-South regard Memphis as a medical, commercial and cultural hub. By serving much of this population of 2 million people, the health care industry in metro Memphis has grown to more than 70,000 employees.\n\nIn the statement on Sunday, the Memphis hospital officials say \"while the number of cases in our area is well below other areas of the country, we know that appropriate action is required now to be ready.\"\n\nThose actions include:\n\nContinuing to secure more COVID-19 testing kits through multiple avenues, including public sector agencies, private-sector vendors and in some cases develop in-house testing capability.\n\nConserving critically needed supplies like personal protective equipment including masks and gloves.\n\nPostponing non-urgent, medically unnecessary elective procedures to free up space, personnel and equipment to focus on COVID-19 treatment.\n\nModifying visitor access to our facilities to keep patients, caregivers and the public safe.\n\nScreening anyone who enters our facilities, including our employees and providers.\n\nAccording to a report by the American Hospital Directory, hospitals in the Memphis area contain about 4,000 beds. The report does not include St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the 244-bed Memphis Veterans Affairs hospital, the 309-bed Methodist LeBonheur Germantown hospital or the 255-bed Methodist LeBonheur Memphis hospital.\n\nMain hospitals listed in the directory are:", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/03/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/08/06/gainesville-hospitals-postpone-some-surgeries-ambulances-scarce/5476580001/", "title": "Gainesville hospitals postpone some surgeries, ambulances scarce", "text": "Gainesville area hospitals are postponing elective surgeries and taking other steps to cope with an onslaught of new COVID-19 patients who are filling up hospital beds and putting a strain on staff and resources, officials said.\n\nMany of those being admitted to Alachua County hospitals for COVID treatment are coming from outlying counties where medical facilities are full and the vaccination rates are lower than Alachua County, officials said.\n\nLake City Medical Center’s 98 inpatient beds and 18 intensive care unit beds were 100 percent full as of Thursday morning, according to federal data.\n\nAs a result, patients from there who need advanced care are being transported to North Florida Regional Medical Center. Earlier this week, Alachua County Fire-Rescue services helped with a transport.\n\nAt Alachua County Public School's board meeting held on Tuesday, Dr. Amit Rawal, an emergency medical physician at North Central Florida Hospital, said that over the past few weeks there haven't been enough emergency response vehicles to respond to 911 calls.\n\nRawal said said that the shortage is due to the recent surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations.\n\n\"Surge plans are being (put) into place to increase hospital beds and staff for the swelling number of COVID-19 patients as the men and women in our hospital tirelessly take care of our community,\" Rawal said.\n\nMore:UF Health nears record for COVID-19 patients as nearby hospitals hit ICU capacity\n\nCapacity for emergency care remains strong\n\nOfficials at UF Health Shands Hospital and North Florida Regional Medical Center say that they are still equipped to handle serious emergency medical cases, COVID or otherwise, and are encouraging people who need care not to hesitate to get it.\n\n\"For patients in surrounding counties that need a more advanced level of critical care, our teams work together to ensure those patients are provided the necessary support,\" said Sean Benoit, chief medical officer at North Florida RMC, in a prepared statement.\n\nHe said that it is important \"that our residents continue to seek care in an emergency.\"\n\n\"Our team stands ready to support critical healthcare needs that expand beyond those resulting from the pandemic,\" he said.\n\nMore:Alachua County declares local state of emergency due to COVID-19 spike\n\nFlorida on Wednesday broke its own hospitalization record for the third day in a row. Data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reported Wednesday an all-time high of 12,041 COVID-19-positive people hospitalized statewide, including 135 pediatric patients.\n\nSome elective procedures paused\n\nHHS also reports that a dozen Florida hospitals are contending with critical staff shortages, a number that is expected to grow.\n\nHospitals throughout the state are trying to cope with staffing shortages and dwindling rooms from a virus surge that has been spurred on by the highly contagious delta variant combined with high numbers of unvaccinated people.\n\nStarting on Wednesday, Shands postponed elective adult procedures that would require intensive care following surgery.\n\n\"A procedure would only be postponed if it will not harm the patient,” spokesman Ken Garcia said in an email.\n\nUF Health CEO Ed Jimenez said Thursday in a Zoom call with reporters that people should feel confident that the hospital is equipped to take care of them for COVID or any other serious health condition.\n\n“To the community at large, I would say, ‘UF Health is here. We’re your resource. We’ll always be your resource,'\" he said.\n\nMore:Alachua County declares local state of emergency due to COVID-19 spike\n\nICU beds fill up regionally\n\nAs of Thursday, 274 of Shands' 327 ICU beds were filled, figures from the federal Department of Health and Human Services show. Of the hospital's 1,014 beds, 834 were filled. Jimenez said 31 of the ICU beds are filled by COVID patients. And he said there were eight COVID cases involving people under 18, with at least one in ICU.\n\nEven if all of the ICU beds fill up, UF Health has other space and resources to provide ICI care to people who need it, Jimenez said.\n\n“An organization like ours is going to be able to swell up when needed,” he said. “It’s the human being who is super talented, and that’s what’s going to make our ICU capabilities.\"\n\nHe said people know they can trust UF Health if it needs to reschedule a surgery or if they have an emergency medical need.\n\n“Imagine if you were living in Palatka, or you are living in Starke, or you are living in Live Oak” Are you comfortable? I don’t know,\" Jimenez said. \"As you move out of here, your level of comfort just changed about what is going on. We need to stop the spread of this (virus).”\n\nJimenez said staffing is a challenge for UF Health, and said the large surge in cases has been demoralizing to hospital workers.\n\nIn five weeks, the daily number of COVID patients at Shands has jumped from 14 to 163.\n\n“People are tired,” he said.\n\nAs of Thursday morning, only one intensive care unit bed at North Florida RMC's 70 beds was available, according to federal data. Of the 481 inpatient beds, 436 were occupied, the figures show.\n\nThe hospital has postponed all elective procedures for non-emergency surgeries.\n\n“We are following guidance from the CDC, as well as our own infectious disease experts, and reviewing scheduled procedures based on a number of factors,” Benoit said in a prepared statement.\n\nAmong the factors: the urgency of the procedure, the clinical judgement of the hospital's physicians and circumstances in the facility and the community, he said.\n\n“Based on these factors, at this time, we are rescheduling certain surgeries to increase our capacity to serve emergent needs in our community and patients who are impacted will be notified,” he said.\n\nHospital officials say that the vast majority of the people who are hospitalized for COVID have not been vaccinated.\n\n“As COVID-19 continues to increase in our community, we strongly encourage everyone to become vaccinated against the virus,” Benoit said.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/08/06"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_12", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/12/11/golden-globes-2024-nominations-list/71797741007/", "title": "Golden Globes 2024: 'Barbie,' 'Oppenheimer' lead nominations", "text": "After conquering the summer box office, \"Barbenheimer\" is staging an Oscar-season sequel – beginning at the Golden Globes.\n\nOn Monday, blockbuster hit \"Barbie\" earned nine nominations, including best comedy or musical and best actress for star Margot Robbie, while atomic bomb biopic \"Oppenheimer\" scored best drama as part of its eight nods at the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards airing Jan. 7 (8 p.m. ET/5 PT). This year's event also marks a new era for what used to be the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's annual shindig: The embattled and now-disbanded organization weathered a diversity controversy, and now the Golden Globe voters' show has a new home on CBS and Paramount+.\n\nFresh off a National Board of Review win for best film, Martin Scorsese's crime epic \"Killers of the Flower Moon\" scored seven total nods and is contending for top drama, a field that also includes \"Oppenheimer,\" Leonard Bernstein biopic \"Maestro,\" love story \"Past Lives,\" French courtroom drama \"Anatomy of a Fall\" and unsettling Holocaust film \"The Zone of Interest.\"\n\nGreta Gerwig's runaway phenomenon \"Barbie\" heads the pack tussling for best comedy or musical. Also in the mix is the fantastical tale \"Poor Things\" (which also nabbed seven nominations), 1970s holiday throwback \"The Holdovers,\" Ben Affleck's 1980s sneaker movie \"Air,\" and cultural satires \"American Fiction and \"May December.\"\n\nThe category for best actress in a comedy/musical is stacked, featuring Robbie, Emma Stone (\"Poor Things\"), Natalie Portman (\"May December\"), Fantasia Barrino (\"The Color Purple\"), Jennifer Lawrence (\"No Hard Feelings\") and Alma Pöysti (\"Fallen Leaves\"). Jeffrey Wright (\"American Fiction\") is up for best actor in a comedy/musical alongside Paul Giamatti (\"The Holdovers\"), Timothée Chalamet (\"Wonka\"), Nicolas Cage (\"Dream Scenario\"), Joaquin Phoenix (\"Beau Is Afraid\") and Matt Damon (\"Air\").\n\nCillian Murphy's acclaimed turn in the title role of \"Oppenheimer\" garnered him a Globes nomination for best actor in a drama, and he's competing against Bradley Cooper (\"Maestro\"), Leonardo DiCaprio (\"Killers of the Flower Moon\"), Colman Domingo (\"Rustin\"), Andrew Scott (\"All of Us Strangers\") and Barry Keoghan (\"Saltburn\"). DiCaprio's \"Flower Moon\" co-star Lily Gladstone is up for best actress in a drama vs. Carey Mulligan (\"Maestro\"), Sandra Hüller (\"Anatomy of a Fall\"), Annette Bening (\"Nyad\"), Greta Lee (\"Past Lives\") and Cailee Spaeny (\"Priscilla\").\n\nSnubbed!Julia Louis-Dreyfus, America Ferrera, Adam Driver, Zac Efron shut out in 2024 Golden Globe nominations\n\nPast supporting actor nominees – and Marvel superhero pals – Robert Downey Jr. (\"Oppenheimer\") and Mark Ruffalo (\"Poor Things\") are back in the category alongside Ryan Gosling (\"Barbie\"), Robert De Niro (\"Killers of the Flower Moon\"), Charles Melton (\"May December\") and Ruffalo's \"Poor Things\" co-star Willem Dafoe. The contingent of supporting actress contenders includes Danielle Brooks (\"The Color Purple\"), Da'Vine Joy Randolph (\"The Holdovers\"), Julianne Moore (\"May December\"), Emily Blunt (\"Oppenheimer\"), Jodie Foster (\"Nyad\") and Rosamund Pike (\"Saltburn\").\n\n\"Barbie\" (which ruled the best song field with three tunes) and \"Oppenheimer\" lead one of the new Globes categories: cinematic and box office achievement. Also making an appearance there is \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" and \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" – both of which are up for best animated feature – as well as \"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,\" \"John Wick: Chapter 4,\" \"Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One\" and \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.\"\n\nThe Golden Globes are emerging from a period of tumult: In 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported that none of the HFPA’s 87 voting journalists were Black, spurring studios and publicists to threaten a boycott. NBC dropped the Globes amid the controversy but aired the 2023 edition of the awards show after the HFPA took steps to address representation in the group. In 2022, a pandemic-era event was held without nominees or an audience in attendance.\n\nDick Clark Production was part of a group that acquired the Globes in June, and on Monday, Golden Globes president Helen Hoehne said the revamped group – now a for-profit endeavor – is “the most culturally diverse major award body.”\n\nThe diversity among this year's Globes nominees isn't exceptional but it's also not egregious: While \"The Color Purple\" being missing from the best comedy/musical category is a rather large snub, each film acting category has at least one person of color in contention.\n\nGolden Globes 2024 nominations in all categories:\n\nMOVIES\n\nDrama\n\n“Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Killers of the Flower Moon”\n\n“Maestro”\n\n“Oppenheimer”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nComedy or musical\n\n“Air”\n\n“American Fiction”\n\n“Barbie”\n\n“The Holdovers”\n\n“May December”\n\n\"Poor Things”\n\nActor in a drama\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nLeonardo DiCaprio, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nColman Domingo, \"Rustin\"\n\nBarry Keoghan, \"Saltburn\"\n\nCillian Murphy, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nAndrew Scott, \"All of Us Strangers\"\n\nActress in a drama\n\nAnnette Bening, \"Nyad\"\n\nLily Gladstone, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nSandra Hüller, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nGreta Lee, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCarey Mulligan, \"Maestro\"\n\nCailee Spaeny, \"Priscilla\"\n\nActor in a comedy or musical\n\nNicolas Cage, \"Dream Scenario\"\n\nTimothée Chalamet, \"Wonka\"\n\nMatt Damon, \"Air\"\n\nPaul Giamatti, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nJoaquin Phoenix, \"Beau Is Afraid\"\n\nJeffrey Wright, \"American Fiction\"\n\nActress in a comedy or musical\n\nFantasia Barrino, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJennifer Lawrence, \"No Hard Feelings\"\n\nNatalie Portman, \"May December\"\n\nAlma Pöysti, \"Fallen Leaves\"\n\nMargot Robbie, \"Barbie\"\n\nEmma Stone, \"Poor Things\"\n\nSupporting actress\n\nEmily Blunt, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nDanielle Brooks, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJodie Foster, \"Nyad\"\n\nJulianne Moore, \"May December\"\n\nRosamund Pike, \"Saltburn\"\n\nDa'Vine Joy Randolph, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nSupporting actor\n\nWillem Dafoe, \"Poor Things\"\n\nRobert De Niro, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nRobert Downey Jr., \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nRyan Gosling, \"Barbie\"\n\nCharles Melton, \"May December\"\n\nMark Ruffalo, \"Poor Things\"\n\nDirector\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nGreta Gerwig, \"Barbie\"\n\nYorgos Lanthimos, \"Poor Things\"\n\nChristopher Nolan, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nMartin Scorsese, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nCeline Song, \"Past Lives\"\n\nAnimated film\n\n“The Boy and the Heron”\n\n“Elemental”\n\n“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”\n\n“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”\n\n“Suzume”\n\n“Wish\"\n\nNon-English language film\n\n“Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Fallen Leaves”\n\n“Io Capitano”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“Society of the Snow”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nCinematic and box-office achievement\n\n“Barbie”\n\n“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3″\n\n“John Wick: Chapter 4”\n\n“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One″\n\n“Oppenheimer”\n\n“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”\n\n“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”\n\n“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”\n\nScreenplay\n\nGreta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, \"Barbie\"\n\nTony McNamara, \"Poor Things\"\n\nChristopher Nolan, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nEric Roth and Martin Scorsese, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nCeline Song, \"Past Lives\"\n\nJustine Triet and Arthur Harari, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nOriginal song\n\n\"Addicted to Romance\" from \"She Came to Me\" (music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen)\n\n\"Dance the Night\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Dua Lipa and Caroline Ailin)\n\n\"I'm Just Ken\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt)\n\n\"Peaches\" from \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" (music and lyrics by Jack Black, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond and John Spiker)\n\n\"Road to Freedom\" from \"Rustin\" (music and lyrics by Lenny Kravitz)\n\n\"What Was I Made For?\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell)\n\nOriginal score\n\nJerskin Fendrix, \"Poor Things\"\n\nLudwig Göransson, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nJoe Hisaishi, \"The Boy and the Heron\"\n\nMica Levi, \"The Zone of Interest\"\n\nDaniel Pemberton, \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\"\n\nRobbie Robertson, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nTaylor Swift is everywhere:'The Eras Tour' movie nominated for Golden Globe\n\nTELEVISION\n\nDrama\n\n\"1923\"\n\n\"The Crown\"\n\n\"The Diplomat\"\n\n\"The Last of Us\"\n\n\"The Morning Show\"\n\n\"Succession\"\n\nComedy or musical\n\n\"Abbott Elementary\"\n\n\"Barry\"\n\n\"The Bear\"\n\n\"Jury Duty\"\n\n\"Only Murders in the Building\"\n\n\"Ted Lasso\"\n\nLimited/anthology series or TV movie\n\n\"All the Light We Cannot See\"\n\n\"Beef\"\n\n\"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\n\"Fargo\"\n\n\"Fellow Travelers\"\n\n\"Lessons in Chemistry\"\n\nActor in a drama\n\nBrian Cox, “Succession”\n\nKieran Culkin, “Succession”\n\nGary Oldman, “Slow Horses”\n\nPedro Pascal, “The Last of Us”\n\nJeremy Strong, “Succession”\n\nDominic West, “The Crown”\n\nActress in a drama\n\nHelen Mirren, \"1923\"\n\nBella Ramsey, \"The Last of Us\"\n\nKeri Russell, \"The Diplomat\"\n\nSarah Snook, \"Succession\"\n\nImelda Staunton, \"The Crown\"\n\nEmma Stone, \"The Curse\"\n\nActor in a comedy\n\nBill Hader, “Barry”\n\nSteve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nJason Segel, “Shrinking”\n\nMartin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nJason Sudeikis, “Ted Lasso”\n\nJeremy Allen White, “The Bear”\n\nActress in a comedy\n\nRachel Brosnahan, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”\n\nQuinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”\n\nAyo Edebiri, “The Bear”\n\nElle Fanning, “The Great”\n\nSelena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nNatasha Lyonne, “Poker Face”\n\nActor in a limited series\n\nMatt Bomer, \"Fellow Travelers\"\n\nSam Claflin, \"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\nJon Hamm, \"Fargo\"\n\nWoody Harrelson, \"White House Plumbers\"\n\nDavid Oyelowo, \"Lawmen: Bass Reeves\"\n\nSteven Yeun, \"Beef\"\n\nActress in a limited series\n\nRiley Keough, \"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\nBrie Larson, \"Lessons in Chemistry\"\n\nElizabeth Olsen, \"Love & Death\"\n\nJuno Temple, \"Fargo\"\n\nRachel Weisz, \"Dead Ringers\"\n\nAli Wong, \"Beef\"\n\nSupporting actor in a drama, comedy or musical\n\nBilly Crudup, \"The Morning Show\"\n\nMatthew Macfadyen, \"Succession\"\n\nJames Marsden, \"Jury Duty\"\n\nEbon Moss-Bachrach, \"The Bear\"\n\nAlan Ruck, \"Succession\"\n\nAlexander Skarsgård, \"Succession\"\n\nSupporting actress in a drama, comedy or musical\n\nElizabeth Debicki, \"The Crown\"\n\nAbby Elliott, \"The Bear\"\n\nChristina Ricci, \"Yellowjackets\"\n\nJ. Smith-Cameron, \"Succession\"\n\nMeryl Streep, \"Only Murders in the Building\"\n\nHannah Waddingham, \"Ted Lasso\"\n\nStand-up comedy television special\n\nStand-up comedy special\n\nRicky Gervais, “Armageddon”\n\nTrevor Noah, “Where Was I”\n\nChris Rock, “Selective Outrage”\n\nAmy Schumer, “Emergency Contact”\n\nSarah Silverman, “Someone You Love”\n\nWanda Sykes, “I’m an Entertainer”\n\nContributing: Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/07/golden-globes-2024-live-updates/72098295007/", "title": "Golden Globes 2024: 'Poor Things,' 'Oppenheimer' win top awards", "text": "Well, at least one half of Barbenheimer had a big Golden Globes night.\n\nThe race to March's Academy Awards kicked into a new gear Sunday with the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards, and Christopher Nolan's atomic bomb biopic \"Oppenheimer\" nabbing five honors including best drama, director, lead drama actor (Cillian Murphy) and supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.). But Greta Gerwig's cultural phenomenon \"Barbie,\" the other half of everyone's favorite summer double feature, was upended by \"Poor Things,\" which took home best comedy and lead comedy actress for Emma Stone, though the pink-spattered flick did win for best song as well as cinematic and box-office achievement.\n\n\"The Holdovers\" was the other big Globes victor, getting lead comedy actor for Paul Giamatti and supporting actress for Da'Vine Joy Randolph. And in the TV categories, \"Beef\" won best limited series, \"The Bear\" garnered top comedy and \"Succession\" nabbed best drama.\n\nHere are all the Globes winners and highlights:\n\nLily Gladstone named best actress, 'Oppenheimer' grabs best drama\n\n\"I love everyone in this room right now,\" Gladstone says, after speaking in her Blackfeet language when she won her first Globe for best actress in a drama for \"Killers of the Flower Moon.\" \"This is a historic win − it doesn't just belong to me. ... This is for every Native kid out there with a dream.\"\n\nBut \"Oppenheimer\" beats out \"Flower Moon\" and others for best drama. \"They weren't kidding, this is a really intimidating room,\" says producer Emma Thomas. She shouts out her husband, director Christopher Nolan: \"What he does is unlike anyone else. Chris brings out the best in people just by being the best himself.\"\n\nPaul Giamatti takes lead actor honors, 'Poor Things' is best comedy\n\nKristen Wiig and Will Ferrell dance funny before introducing the winner for best actor in a comedy or musical. Giamatti gets the trophy for \"The Holdovers,\" his third Globe victory. \"Too many stairs. My knees are shot, I'm telling you. I'm never going to be in 'John Wick 5' at this rate,\" Giamatti jokes when reaching the stage. \"This has to be the first time this award has been given to a character who smells like fish. Thank you, Golden Globes.\"\n\nIt’s “Poor Things,” though, that surprises as best comedy, beating “Barbie,” “Holdovers” and a stacked category. “Whoa,” star Emma Stone says. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is quick to point out Bruce Springsteen, who shares a birthday with the filmmaker. “He’s been my hero since I grew up.”\n\n'Succession' wins top TV drama, best actress for Sarah Snook\n\nSnook nabs her second Globe for best actress in a drama. \"I was kind of hoping I wouldn't have to get up,\" she quips. \"This show has changed my life.\" Then \"Succession\" grabs the big prize: best drama. (It's the HBO show's third win in the category.) \"We decided it was the right time to end the show and it was bittersweet,\" creator Jesse Armstrong says. \"But things like this make it sweeter.\"\n\n'Beef,' 'The Bear' pick up major TV honors\n\nNetflix's \"Beef\" wins for best limited series, adding a third Globe to its total. Creator Lee Sung Jin reveals that a real road-rage incident led to the show. \"I'd be remiss not to thank that driver,\" he deadpans. \"I hope you honk and yell and inspire others for years to come.\" \"The Bear\" (inspired by an eatery called Mr. Beef, incidentally) also picks up its third win of the night, for best TV comedy. Actor Lionel Boyce shouts out actual restaurant workers: \"We plays these characters for a couple of hours of a day but this is your reality.\"\n\nTaylor Swift revels in 'Barbie' Globe win, Margot Robbie gives thanks\n\n\"Star Wars\" icon Mark Hamill takes the stage as the perfect choice to introduce the first Golden Globe ever for cinematic and box-office achievement. Taylor Swift is the first to stand and clap happily when \"Barbie\" is named the winner. Margot Robbie hugs Hamill and gives thanks \"to every single person on the planet who dressed up and went to the greatest place on Earth: movie theaters.\" (Fun fact: Robbie is dressed up as Superstar Barbie from 1977.)\n\n'Oppenheimer' nabs original score, Billie Eilish wins for 'Barbie' song\n\nIt's getting ridiculous out here now, with the atomic bomb biopic cleaning up with a fourth Globe. \"Oppenheimer\" composer Ludwig Göransson shouts out fellow Globe winners, director Christopher Nolan (\"The way you use music in your films has inspired a lot of people\") and star Cillian Murphy (\"I enjoyed watching your face over and over again\").\n\nOriginal song, though, goes to \"What Was I Made For,\" Billie Eilish's popular \"Barbie\" track with brother Finneas O'Connell. \"I was not expecting this in this moment,\" Eilish says, saying \"the movie saved me a little bit\" when she first saw it a year ago.\n\nEmma Stone, Cillian Murphy take lead acting honors\n\nFellow nominee Jennifer Lawrence jumps out of her seat for Stone's win for best actress in a comedy for \"Poor Things.\" \"This is amazing,\" Stone says. \"Playing Bella was unbelievable − I see it as a rom-com. Bella falls in love with life itself. (The movie) made me look at life differently and she has stayed with me.\"\n\nNext up is best actor in a drama, which Murphy conquers as the title role of \"Oppenheimer.\" \"My first question: Do I have lipstick all over my nose? I'm just going to leave it,\" Murphy quips when he hits the stage. He thanks director Christopher Nolan \"for carrying me and holding me through this movie.\"\n\n'The Boy and the Heron' wins for animated feature, Christopher Nolan takes best director\n\nFirst big shock of the night: Hayao Miyazaki's latest takes down \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" for best animated movie. But it's no surprise Nolan takes the directing prize for \"Oppenheimer.\" He remembers his only time being on the Globes stage accepting an award for the late Heath Ledger. And now, \"I can only accept this on the behalf of people,\" Nolan says, shouting out cast members Robert Downey Jr., Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh and others.\n\nTaylor Swift is causing a Golden Globes traffic jam\n\nYour latest Swift update from the ballroom: The pop superstar's aisle seat is blocking traffic, as famous fans ask for selfies or take not-so-subtle photos. She jumps up to give Bill Hader a hug, and they chat before Hader goes for the selfie. \"Sure!\" she says, giving him a final hug before he walks on.\n\nKieran Culkin upends 'Sucession' co-stars for Globe victory\n\n\"Oh, a nightmare,\" Culkin deadpans after winning best actor in a TV drama – and beating castmates Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong. He remembers being nominated 20 years ago and resigned himself to never winning. \"Suck it, Pedro. Mine,\" he quips, playfully referring to fellow nominee Pedro Pascal.\n\n'Anatomy of a Fall' and 'The Bear' pick up second wins\n\n\"Anatomy of a Fall\" strikes again! Justine Triet returns to pick up the trophy for non-English language film. \"This movie is about the truth,\" she says, shouting out teenage star Milo Machado Graner, lead actress Sandra Hüller and canine Snoop \"for just being a dog.\"\n\nAmerica Ferrera and Kevin Costner shout out favorite scenes of theirs – Costner's a big fan of her \"Barbie\" monologue – and present \"The Bear\" star Ayo Edebiri the Globe for best actress in a TV comedy. \"I'm so very grateful for this,\" she says, out of breath, and thanks her show \"family,\" her actual one and \"the people who answer my crazy, crazy emails.\"\n\nRicky Gervais is first winner of the TV stand-up comedy Golden Globe\n\nIt's time for a new award: best performance for stand-up comedy in television. \"And thanks to Netflix, we get overpaid for it,\" quips presenter (and comedian) Jim Gaffigan. Gervais, a former Globes host, wins but isn't here so Gaffigan accepts for him: \"Gimme it.\"\n\n'Anatomy of a Fall' is named best screenplay, Jeremy Allen White earns a Globe for 'The Bear'\n\nNext up is best screenplay. \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" stars and presenters Daniel Kaluuya, Hailee Steinfeld and Shameik Moore have a hilarious time reading a script as it would be done by studio executives. \"Anatomy of a Fall\" takes the honor. \"No one is going to see this movie,\" French director and co-writer Justine Triet says but thanks those around her for \"encouraging me to do what I love.\"\n\nThen \"The Bear\" roars! White wins best actor in a comedy for the acclaimed FX restaurant show. \"I can't believe I'm in the room with people I've loved for so long. It's unreal,\" he says. Backstage, White fields three questions that all reference his new Calvin Klein underwear ad. Asked which was the prouder moment, his underwear ad or winning a Globe, he takes a dumbfounded pause before saying: \"This is definitely a prouder moment for me.\"\n\nElizabeth Debicki gets a royal win for 'The Crown,' Matthew Macfadyen takes one for 'Succession'\n\nPlaying Princess Diana, Debicki wins supporting actress in a TV show for \"The Crown\" and is pretty gobsmacked by the whole thing. \"This is just astonishing to me,\" she says in her speech. Presenters Ray Romano and Keri Russell banter before the next award – he mistakes her show \"The Diplomat\" for \"The Laundromat\" – which goes to Matthew Macfadyen, supporting TV actor honoree for \"Succession.\" \"I just adored every second playing the weird and wonderful human grease stain that is Tom Wambsgans,\" he says.\n\nTaylor Swift and Selena Gomez share a moment\n\nHere's something you didn't see on the TV telecast: “Succession” star Kieran Culkin and his wife, Jazz Charton, swan to their seats, cocktails in hand, not noticing that they passed Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner waiting to get their seats. Taylor Swift, carrying rose champagne, had a moment with bestie Selena Gomez, as the two hugged and chatted near the “Only Murders in the Building” table as photographers rushed over to capture the moment. All eyes are on Swift, who has an aisle seat at the “Poor Things” table with Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone. She finishes her champagne, giggling as she looks at a friend’s iPhone.\n\nEarlier, a security phalanx cleared stars to \"move aside, move aside\" as Swift arrived with a big entourage. As the lights went down, she got the Hollywood push to her seat. \"Special circumstances,\" security guards said, shrugging.\n\n'Beef' co-stars Ali Wong, Steven Yeun garner first Globe wins\n\nBrie Larson helps direct fellow nominee Wong to stage to pick up her honor for best actress in a limited series for Netflix's \"Beef\": She thanks ex-husband Justin Hakuta \"for all your love and support\" that helps her be \"a working mother.\" Her co-star Yeun then takes a victory lap winning his Globe as well. He jokes that getting an award is like the plot to \"Frozen,\" going from \"isolation\" to applause from his peers.\n\nAsked in the press room where she’ll keep her trophy, Wong says she doesn’t know yet, but notes the heavy object needs to be out of reach of her two children: \"It's like a medieval weapon!\" she exclaims, holding up the prize.\n\nYeun was getting asked if he drives differently since \"Beef\": “I’m a respectful but skillful and at times aggressive driver,\" he says smiling, pausing as if choosing his words carefully, trophy in hand. \"I live in LA. So I drive the same.”\n\nDa'Vine Joy Randolph, Robert Downey Jr. take supporting actor Golden Globes\n\nAngela Bassett and Jared Leto come out to present the first award. \"I've been in presenter mode for weeks now,\" Leto says, poking up at his acting method. And the Globe for supporting actress goes to Randolph for \"The Holdovers,\" as expected. She thanks director Alexander Payne for letting her \"playing this beautiful and flawed woman\" and also her character, Mary: \"You've made me feel seen.\"\n\nNext up is supporting actor, which goes to another favorite: Downey for \"Oppenheimer.\" \"Yeah, yeah, I took a beta blocker so this will be a breeze,\" he says. Downey says he's glad Universal \"went all in\" for Nolan and crew to \"render a goddamn masterpiece.\" He calls it a \"most improved\" award and thanks his wife Susan, who's \"made an art out of extracting me from my comfort zone.\"\n\nJo Koy tells a Taylor Swift joke and proclaims, 'I've got the best seat in the house'\n\n\"Look, I'm just taking this all in. We all dreamt of this moment,\" the comedian says as he begins his hosting duties. \"I've got the best seat in the house.\" He loved \"Oppenheimer\" but jokingly complains that \"it needed another hour,\" and also takes note of the celebrities: \"Kevin Costner's never here. He's in a mountain with a cow but today he's here.\" He also watched \"Barbie\" and loved it. \"I don't want you to think I'm a creep\" but Koy says he was attracted to a doll: Ryan Gosling. \"It's your eyes, Ryan.\"\n\nKoy's awestruck by Robert De Niro's \"latest performance\" and quips, \"How did you get (your girlfriend) pregnant at 80?\" The comedian takes some shots at \"Killers of the Flower Moon\" – \"White people stole everything!\" – and also \"Saltburn.\" \"I learned that even satanic families have feelings, too.\" He calls out \"The Color Purple\" and quips that purple is also the color \"your butt turns when you take Ozempic.\"\n\nThe host also jabs at Swift: \"The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift.\"\n\n'Oppenheimer' crew has entered the building\n\nEmily Blunt, holding hands with husband John Krasinski, moseys into the ballroom with \"Oppenheimer\" co-star Cillian Murphy. \"Barbie\" nominee Ryan Gosling is in the house and Oldman's animated chatting with him and Murphy. The announcer breaks up the festivities, ordering folks to sit down as showtime draws near. Meryl Streep takes her seat at the \"Only Murders in the Building\" table just under deadline and kisses Short full on the lips before holding hands and talking, while \"Oppenheimer\" castmates Robert Downey and Florence Pugh are two more late arrivals just before lights go down amid a cheery, happy atmosphere.\n\nThe last person to arrive? Taylor Swift, of course.\n\nBrie Larson, Martin Short schmooze with celebs at the Golden Globes\n\nLarson hustled down the red carpet but we overheard that she had a starry moment with Jennifer Lopez: “I’m sorry, I just met J.Lo and I’m really having a hard time,\" Larson says. And in the ballroom, Short is working overtime networking with everyone he can find: The \"Only Murders in the Building\" star has chatted up and/or hugged Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner and Jennifer Aniston. Ford also shared a moment with old pals Steven Spielberg and his wife – and Ford's \"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom\" love interest – Kate Capshaw.\n\nBruce Springsteen joins the starry 'Air' table at the Globes\n\n\"The Boss\" and his wife Patti Scialfa chat up Damon and Barroso near the Globe stage. (If Springsteen has a hungry heart, we hear the sushi is to die for.) Meanwhile Bateman is catching up with \"Ozark\" co-star Julia Garner and runs into fellow beard lover Gary Oldman, currently growing out his facial hair for a new season of the Apple TV+ spy show \"Old Horses.\" “I love 'Immortal Beloved,' that soundtrack is all I listen to,\" Bateman gushes to Oldman. \" 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,' I could go on.\"\n\nThe official Golden Globes weather report: a bit brisk\n\nUSA TODAY's KiMi Robinson is on the Globes red carpet and she reports that it's a \"brisk\" 53 degrees in Beverly Hills. As \"Succession\" star Alan Ruck stepped foot on the red carpet and walked past reporters using a cane, Amanda Seyfried − one of the few stars who took Moet up on their free champagne bottle − stopped him for a hug and a nice arm rub as everyone struggles to stay warm on the carpet.\n\nMatt Damon and the sushi are lighting up the Globes ballroom\n\nOur man Bryan Alexander is roaming the International Ballroom at the Beverly Hilton − ground zero for all the Globes news – and he reports that Matt Damon and his wife Luciana Barroso entered and immediately ran into Damon's \"Air\" co-star Jason Bateman. “What’s up, Jason, I love that beard. Let me take a look at that in the light. Looking good,” Damon said.\n\nThe Globes menu for attendees includes salmon tartare with caviar, yellowtail jalapeno, sashimi salad with Matsuhisa dressing, and tai nigiri Matsuhisa style. Everybody's raving about the sushi, because this is not typical awards fare.\n\n'The Holdovers' is a Globes underdog with a couple of acting favorites\n\nAlexander Payne's acclaimed 1970s-set holiday film isn't expected to win best comedy at tonight's Globes ceremony – blockbuster hit \"Barbie\" is the one to beat in that category – but two \"Holdovers\" castmates are faves in their respected categories: Paul Giamatti in lead comedy actor and Da'Vine Joy Randolph for supporting actress. See more of our predictions here.\n\nIt might finally be Robert Downey Jr.'s golden year\n\nDowney is a Hollywood superstar, a Gen X movie icon, a box-office superhero ... but somehow not an Oscar winner. Yet. That might change this year: The two-time nominee (lastly in 2009 for \"Tropic Thunder\") is a favorite in the Golden Globe supporting actor race for his role as the antagonistic Lewis Strauss in \"Oppenheimer.\" For five of the past six years, the Globe supporting actor winner has run the table all the way to an Academy Award, which bodes well for Downey or one of his competitors: Ryan Gosling (\"Barbie\"), Charles Melton (\"May December\"), Robert De Niro (\"Killers of the Flower Moon\") and \"Poor Things\" duo Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo.\n\nTaylor Swift's concert movie goes for Golden Globes glory\n\nMaybe it's because boyfriend Travis Kelce isn't playing today, but Swift skipped the Chiefs/Chargers game. Or maybe she just wanted extra time to get gussied up for the Globes red carpet? The pop superstar is speculated to appear at the awards show, where her \"Eras Tour\" concert film is in the running for best cinematic and box-office achievement against the likes of \"Barbie,\" \"Oppenheimer\" and other theatrical hit movies. (Swift has been nominated four times in past Globes shows, all in the original song category.)\n\nWhen are the Oscars?\n\nEven after the Globe trophies are handed out tonight, it's just the beginning for both winners and losers on the road to Oscar night. On Wednesday, nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards will be announced to keep the ball rolling. Here are the important upcoming events and dates for the awards watchers:\n\nJan. 14: Critics Choice Awards\n\nCritics Choice Awards Jan. 15: Primetime Emmy Awards\n\nPrimetime Emmy Awards Jan 18: British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations announced\n\nBritish Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations announced Jan. 23: Academy Awards nominations\n\nAcademy Awards nominations Feb. 4: Grammy Awards\n\nGrammy Awards Feb. 18: BAFTA Film Awards\n\nBAFTA Film Awards Feb. 24: SAG Awards\n\nSAG Awards March 10: 96th Academy Awards\n\nHow you can watch the Golden Globes red carpet\n\nRather than a televised red-carpet special, \"Entertainment Tonight\" and Variety are co-hosting a digital pre-show (6:30 p.m. ET/3:30 PT) that will stream on their sites and social platforms as well as on GoldenGlobes.com. For fashionistas who need to prep for the first major event of 2024, check out our Globes galleries of the best gowns ever as well as the wildest looks through the years.\n\nWho are the presenters at this year's Golden Globes?\n\n\"The Color Purple\" was shockingly left out of the Globes comedy/musical category, but producer Oprah Winfrey will be on hand as one of many celebrities handing out statues. The A-list group includes recent Oscar and Globe winners Daniel Kaluuya and Michelle Yeoh alongside Angela Bassett, America Ferrera, Florence Pugh, Will Ferrell, Issa Rae, Kevin Costner, Kristen Wiig, Mark Hamill, Amanda Seyfried, George Lopez, Hailee Steinfeld, Shameik Moore and many more. Plus, a bonus for anyone who's been binging \"Suits\" since the pandemic: a reunion of stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams.\n\nMeet Jo Koy, the comedian hosting the 2024 Golden Globes\n\nThose who haven't watched any of his Netflix specials may not recognize the 52-year-old stand-up comedian but Koy told USA TODAY in a recent interview that the Globes hosting gig is \"my childhood dream. I'm now living something that I would watch as a kid, something that indirectly inspired me to do what I do, seeing everyone from Bob Hope to Billy Crystal to Whoopi Goldberg do the Oscars, and Ricky (Gervais) and Tina (Fey) doing the Globes. Now, I’m in the captain's seat and I’m loving it.\"\n\nKoy, who's part Filipino on his mother's side and grew up in Seattle, also brings a fresh face to an awards show that weathered a diversity scandal and now finds itself at a pivotal point. \"I am just planning to be me, and I'm in the mood to celebrate,\" he said.\n\nWhere is the Golden Globes held?\n\nSince 1961, the Globes have been held in the International Ballroom of LA's Beverly Hilton Hotel, which also plays home to the Oscar nominees luncheon as well as other red-carpet events. It's also the same hotel where Sen. John Edwards was caught having an affair with a presidential campaign staffer and where Whitney Houston was found dead in 2012.\n\nYes, you can livestream this year's Golden Globes (but there's a catch)\n\nThe Golden Globes are available for the cord-cutting crew live on Sunday with a Paramount+ subscription that includes Showtime. Those with the cheaper Paramount+ Essential plan will have to wait until Monday to stream the show. (If you want to spring for six extra bucks a month, you get live Globes plus no ads and Showtime series like \"Billions,\" \"The Curse\" and \"Yellowjackets.\" Heck, catch up on \"The Tudors\" while you're at it!)\n\nWhere to watch the 2024 Golden Globes\n\nThe show will air live on CBS (8 p.m. ET/5 PT) as well as on the CBS app and Paramount+. Show producers will likely be hoping for no overtimes in the late afternoon football games, though depending on where you live, you can check out Taylor Swift's favorite team, the Kansas City Chiefs, who are in LA to take on the Chargers. Globes organizers – as well as movie-loving Swifties – also might be hoping that Swift swings by the Globes, where her concert film is up for a trophy, if she also attends the game.\n\nContributing: Bryan Alexander; Charles Trepany; Kim Willis; KiMi Robinson; Marco Della Cava; Bryan West", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/07/golden-globes-2024-winners-list-live/72142536007/", "title": "Golden Globes 2024 winners: 'Oppenheimer,' 'Succession,' Emma ...", "text": "\"Oppenheimer,\" \"Succession\" and \"The Bear\" took several of the biggest categories at the Golden Globes Sunday night.\n\nThe 2024 awards show honored several first-time winners as well, including the history-making Lily Gladstone, who became the first Indigenous person to win the award for best actress in a drama for \"Killers of the Flower Moon.\"\n\nThough \"Barbie\" entered the evening with nominations in nine categories, the summer hit took home just two wins at the Globes, including the new cinematic and box-office achievement category. The atomic bomb biopic side of \"Barbenheimer\" proved more successful, with five wins, including for best drama and best director Christopher Nolan.\n\nComedian Jo Koy hosted the festivities, which took place at The Beverly Hilton in California.\n\nWho else took home honors at the Globes? Here are the winners (in bold) and nominees:\n\nBiggest moments from the Golden Globes:From Jennifer Lawrence to Cillian Murphy, more\n\nGolden Globes 12 best dressed:Jaw-dropping red carpet looks from Margot Robbie, Dua Lipa, more\n\nGolden Globes 2024 winners in all categories:\n\nMOVIES:\n\nDrama\n\n“Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Killers of the Flower Moon”\n\n“Maestro”\n\nWINNER: “Oppenheimer”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nActress in a drama\n\nAnnette Bening, \"Nyad\"\n\nWINNER: Lily Gladstone, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nSandra Hüller, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nGreta Lee, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCarey Mulligan, \"Maestro\"\n\nCailee Spaeny, \"Priscilla\"\n\nGolden Globes 2024:'Poor Things' surprises as best comedy, 'Oppenheimer' takes best drama\n\nActor in a drama\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nLeonardo DiCaprio, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nColman Domingo, \"Rustin\"\n\nBarry Keoghan, \"Saltburn\"\n\nWINNER: Cillian Murphy, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nAndrew Scott, \"All of Us Strangers\"\n\nActress in a comedy or musical\n\nFantasia Barrino, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJennifer Lawrence, \"No Hard Feelings\"\n\nNatalie Portman, \"May December\"\n\nAlma Pöysti, \"Fallen Leaves\"\n\nMargot Robbie, \"Barbie\"\n\nWINNER: Emma Stone, \"Poor Things\"\n\nSupporting actress\n\nEmily Blunt, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nDanielle Brooks, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJodie Foster, \"Nyad\"\n\nJulianne Moore, \"May December\"\n\nRosamund Pike, \"Saltburn\"\n\nWINNER: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nSupporting actor\n\nWillem Dafoe, \"Poor Things\"\n\nRobert De Niro, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nWINNER: Robert Downey Jr., \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nRyan Gosling, \"Barbie\"\n\nCharles Melton, \"May December\"\n\nMark Ruffalo, \"Poor Things\"\n\nComedy or musical\n\n“Air”\n\n“American Fiction”\n\n“Barbie”\n\n“The Holdovers”\n\n“May December”\n\nWINNER: \"Poor Things”\n\nActor in a comedy or musical\n\nNicolas Cage, \"Dream Scenario\"\n\nTimothée Chalamet, \"Wonka\"\n\nMatt Damon, \"Air\"\n\nWINNER: Paul Giamatti, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nJoaquin Phoenix, \"Beau Is Afraid\"\n\nJeffrey Wright, \"American Fiction\"\n\nDirector\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nGreta Gerwig, \"Barbie\"\n\nYorgos Lanthimos, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWINNER: Christopher Nolan, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nMartin Scorsese, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nCeline Song, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCinematic and box-office achievement\n\nWINNER: \"Barbie\"\n\n“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3″\n\n“John Wick: Chapter 4”\n\n“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One″\n\n“Oppenheimer”\n\n“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”\n\n“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”\n\n“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”\n\nMore:Taylor Swift makes the whole place shimmer in sparkly green on the Globes red carpet\n\nAnimated film\n\nWINNER: “The Boy and the Heron”\n\n“Elemental”\n\n“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”\n\n“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”\n\n“Suzume”\n\n“Wish\"\n\nOriginal song\n\n\"Addicted to Romance\" from \"She Came to Me\" (music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen)\n\n\"Dance the Night\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Dua Lipa and Caroline Ailin)\n\n\"I'm Just Ken\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt)\n\n\"Peaches\" from \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" (music and lyrics by Jack Black, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond and John Spiker)\n\n\"Road to Freedom\" from \"Rustin\" (music and lyrics by Lenny Kravitz)\n\nWINNER: \"What Was I Made For?\" from \"Barbie\" (music and lyrics by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell)\n\nOriginal score\n\nJerskin Fendrix, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWINNER: Ludwig Göransson, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nJoe Hisaishi, \"The Boy and the Heron\"\n\nMica Levi, \"The Zone of Interest\"\n\nDaniel Pemberton, \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\"\n\nRobbie Robertson, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nScreenplay\n\nGreta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, \"Barbie\"\n\nTony McNamara, \"Poor Things\"\n\nChristopher Nolan, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nEric Roth and Martin Scorsese, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nCeline Song, \"Past Lives\"\n\nWINNER: Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nNon-English language film\n\nWINNER: “Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Fallen Leaves”\n\n“Io Capitano”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“Society of the Snow”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nTELEVISION:\n\nDrama\n\n\"1923\"\n\n\"The Crown\"\n\n\"The Diplomat\"\n\n\"The Last of Us\"\n\n\"The Morning Show\"\n\nWINNER: \"Succession\"\n\nActress in a drama\n\nHelen Mirren, \"1923\"\n\nBella Ramsey, \"The Last of Us\"\n\nKeri Russell, \"The Diplomat\"\n\nWINNER: Sarah Snook, \"Succession\"\n\nImelda Staunton, \"The Crown\"\n\nEmma Stone, \"The Curse\"\n\nMore:Golden Globes proves to be a mini 'Succession' reunion as stars take home trophies\n\nComedy or musical\n\n\"Abbott Elementary\"\n\n\"Barry\"\n\nWINNER: \"The Bear\"\n\n\"Jury Duty\"\n\n\"Only Murders in the Building\"\n\n\"Ted Lasso\"\n\nActor in a drama\n\nBrian Cox, “Succession”\n\nWINNER: Kieran Culkin, “Succession”\n\nGary Oldman, “Slow Horses”\n\nPedro Pascal, “The Last of Us”\n\nJeremy Strong, “Succession”\n\nDominic West, “The Crown”\n\nActress in a comedy\n\nRachel Brosnahan, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”\n\nQuinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”\n\nWINNER: Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”\n\nElle Fanning, “The Great”\n\nSelena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nNatasha Lyonne, “Poker Face”\n\nWatch the moment:'The Bear' star Ayo Edebiri gives flustered, heartwarming speech\n\nActor in a comedy\n\nBill Hader, “Barry”\n\nSteve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nJason Segel, “Shrinking”\n\nMartin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”\n\nJason Sudeikis, “Ted Lasso”\n\nWINNER: Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”\n\nSupporting actor in a drama, comedy or musical\n\nBilly Crudup, \"The Morning Show\"\n\nWINNER: Matthew Macfadyen, \"Succession\"\n\nJames Marsden, \"Jury Duty\"\n\nEbon Moss-Bachrach, \"The Bear\"\n\nAlan Ruck, \"Succession\"\n\nAlexander Skarsgård, \"Succession\"\n\nActress in a limited series\n\nRiley Keough, \"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\nBrie Larson, \"Lessons in Chemistry\"\n\nElizabeth Olsen, \"Love & Death\"\n\nJuno Temple, \"Fargo\"\n\nRachel Weisz, \"Dead Ringers\"\n\nWINNER: Ali Wong, \"Beef\"\n\nActor in a limited series\n\nMatt Bomer, \"Fellow Travelers\"\n\nSam Claflin, \"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\nJon Hamm, \"Fargo\"\n\nWoody Harrelson, \"White House Plumbers\"\n\nDavid Oyelowo, \"Lawmen: Bass Reeves\"\n\nWINNER: Steven Yeun, \"Beef\"\n\nSupporting actress in a drama, comedy or musical\n\nWINNER: Elizabeth Debicki, \"The Crown\"\n\nAbby Elliott, \"The Bear\"\n\nChristina Ricci, \"Yellowjackets\"\n\nJ. Smith-Cameron, \"Succession\"\n\nMeryl Streep, \"Only Murders in the Building\"\n\nHannah Waddingham, \"Ted Lasso\"\n\nLimited/anthology series or TV movie\n\n\"All the Light We Cannot See\"\n\nWINNER: \"Beef\"\n\n\"Daisy Jones & The Six\"\n\n\"Fargo\"\n\n\"Fellow Travelers\"\n\n\"Lessons in Chemistry\"\n\nStand-up comedy special\n\nWINNER: Ricky Gervais, “Armageddon”\n\nTrevor Noah, “Where Was I”\n\nChris Rock, “Selective Outrage”\n\nAmy Schumer, “Emergency Contact”\n\nSarah Silverman, “Someone You Love”\n\nWanda Sykes, “I’m an Entertainer”\n\nContributing: Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, and The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/04/2024-golden-globes-predictions/72078266007/", "title": "2024 Golden Globes predictions: From 'Barbie' to Scorsese, who will ...", "text": "Will plastic be fantastic at the Golden Globes with a \"Barbie\" sweep? Will \"Oppenheimer\" bomb or be the bomb? Could Martin Scorsese's \"Killers of the Flower Moon\" blossom on the road to the Academy Awards?\n\nHosted by comedian Jo Koy, this Sunday's 81st annual Golden Globe Awards (CBS and Paramount+ with Showtime, 8 p.m. EST/5 PST) will begin to separate the contenders from the pretenders on the way to Oscar night on March 10. Last year's box-office champ \"Barbie\" arrives as a blockbuster heavyweight with a leading nine nominations, including best comedy/musical, and gets a chance to make an impression as a best picture contender. It's not the only one: There's a fight brewing in the best drama category, with Christopher Nolan's acclaimed biopic \"Oppenheimer\" (which boasts eight nods) in a high-profile tussle against \"Killers\" (with seven).\n\nUSA TODAY predicts who will win (and who should) in the top film categories:\n\nBest drama\n\n“Anatomy of a Fall”\n\n“Killers of the Flower Moon”\n\n“Maestro”\n\n“Oppenheimer”\n\n“Past Lives”\n\n“The Zone of Interest”\n\nWill win: \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nShould win: \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nA popular and critical hit, \"Oppenheimer\" is a shoo-in for an Oscar best picture nod (and a lot of folks think it can win), so momentum should carry Nolan's white-knuckle period thriller to victory here over some noteworthy competition. However, \"Killers\" ranks high in Scorsese's storied filmography, with a tremendous cast doing wondrous character work, and is the more thought-provoking of two deep historical tales.\n\nBest comedy or musical\n\n“Air”\n\n“American Fiction”\n\n“Barbie”\n\n“The Holdovers”\n\n“May December”\n\n\"Poor Things”\n\nWill win/should win: \"Barbie\"\n\nEven with the egregious snub of \"The Color Purple\" (not even one musical, people?!), this is an unusually stacked Globes category. Curious minds wonder how the old Golden Globes voters – who had a penchant for stars and bizarre decisions – compare with the new bunch, but the delightfully excellent (and very populist) \"Barbie\" likely gets the victory over well-received satire \"American Fiction\" and gleefully absurd dark comedy \"Poor Things.\"\n\nBest actress in a drama\n\nAnnette Bening, \"Nyad\"\n\nLily Gladstone, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nSandra Hüller, \"Anatomy of a Fall\"\n\nGreta Lee, \"Past Lives\"\n\nCarey Mulligan, \"Maestro\"\n\nCailee Spaeny, \"Priscilla\"\n\nWill win/should win: Gladstone\n\nOf the two lead actress categories, this one has the best chance of honoring a Hollywood breakthrough. Both Lee and Hüller are great in their respective roles – and you'll see them again this Oscar season – but Gladstone is a revelation. She's the heart and soul of \"Killers,\" playing a spirited indigenous woman who's unmoored by the murders of her people and even poisoned by her husband in the name of greed.\n\nBest actor in a drama\n\nBradley Cooper, \"Maestro\"\n\nLeonardo DiCaprio, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nColman Domingo, \"Rustin\"\n\nBarry Keoghan, \"Saltburn\"\n\nCillian Murphy, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nAndrew Scott, \"All of Us Strangers\"\n\nWill win: Murphy\n\nShould win: Scott\n\nThis is how bonkers the Oscar best-actor contingent is this year: There's not a weak link in the bunch, and it's just half the lead nominees. \"Oppenheimer\" being on a roll – and a career-best turn from its main man – helps put Murphy atop impressive performances by Cooper and DiCaprio (going for his fourth Globe), although Scott is stunning as a haunted screenwriter and a key aspect in 2023's best film.\n\nBest actress in a comedy or musical\n\nFantasia Barrino, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJennifer Lawrence, \"No Hard Feelings\"\n\nNatalie Portman, \"May December\"\n\nAlma Pöysti, \"Fallen Leaves\"\n\nMargot Robbie, \"Barbie\"\n\nEmma Stone, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWill win/should win: Stone\n\nIt would take something pretty special to upend Barrino's showstopping \"Purple\" performance, a hilarious J Law and Robbie in full pop-culture phenomenon mode. And that's exactly what Stone pulls off as Bella Baxter, a woman who wanted to end it all and gets a second chance at life through Victorian resurrection. A previous Globe and Oscar winner for \"La La Land,\" Stone is a good bet to win both again for her \"Poor\" showing.\n\nBest actor in a comedy or musical\n\nNicolas Cage, \"Dream Scenario\"\n\nTimothée Chalamet, \"Wonka\"\n\nMatt Damon, \"Air\"\n\nPaul Giamatti, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nJoaquin Phoenix, \"Beau Is Afraid\"\n\nJeffrey Wright, \"American Fiction\"\n\nWill win: Giamatti\n\nShould win: Wright\n\nNic Cage? Timmy C? Joaquin? It's an intriguingly eclectic mix of talent up for lead comedic actor this Globes, though it's honestly a two-man race – and a toss-up between a pair of enjoyable curmudgeons. With a National Board of Review best actor win for \"Holdovers\" to his credit, Giamatti likely has the edge as an uptight 1970s history teacher, though Wright is a hoot as the irascible \"Fiction\" author skewering race, culture and identity.\n\nBest supporting actress\n\nEmily Blunt, \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nDanielle Brooks, \"The Color Purple\"\n\nJodie Foster, \"Nyad\"\n\nJulianne Moore, \"May December\"\n\nRosamund Pike, \"Saltburn\"\n\nDa'Vine Joy Randolph, \"The Holdovers\"\n\nWill win/should win: Randolph\n\nAlthough A-listers like Blunt, Moore and Foster are in the mix, expect a win from either Brooks (who was Tony-nominated for the same fiery role in the Broadway \"Purple\") or Randolph, the National Board of Review pick for supporting actress. As the grieving head cook of a boarding school for boys, Randolph has the better chance at a win, because of more \"Holdovers\" love in general, but whoever takes gold will be an immediate favorite for another victory on Oscar night.\n\nBest supporting actor\n\nWillem Dafoe, \"Poor Things\"\n\nRobert De Niro, \"Killers of the Flower Moon\"\n\nRobert Downey Jr., \"Oppenheimer\"\n\nRyan Gosling, \"Barbie\"\n\nCharles Melton, \"May December\"\n\nMark Ruffalo, \"Poor Things\"\n\nWill win: Downey\n\nShould win: Gosling\n\nFor five of the past six years, the Globe supporting actor winner has run the table all the way to Oscar, and Downey seems to be the chosen one given his acclaimed antagonist role in \"Oppenheimer\" – and a guy who's earned a career \"attaboy\" given his iconoclastic professional life. But Gosling is supremely effervescent as a doll who sings, dances and learns about the pitfalls of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. That's Kenough to win for us.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/07/taylor-swift-red-carpet-2024-golden-globes/72124915007/", "title": "Taylor Swift walks the red carpet at 2024 Golden Globes", "text": "Taylor Swift can still make the whole place shimmer... in stunning green.\n\nThe \"Eras Tour\" movie star and producer strutted the red carpet for her fifth Golden Globes in Los Angeles. Her shiny green silhouette shimmered elegance and sophistication about ten minutes before the live show on CBS. The custom Gucci dress has three straps across the back. Her hair cascaded down in simple waves.\n\nHost and comedian Jo Koy made a joke about the singer saying the difference between the NFL and Golden Globes, \"The Golden Globes we have fewer cutaway shots of Taylor Swift.\"\n\nSwift's blockbuster is one of eight nominees ushering in a brand-new category, \"cinematic and box office achievement,\" which honors movies that have made $150 million globally with $100 million being domestic sales. The movie brought concertgoers to theaters to dance and sing their hearts out to Swift's ten eras.\n\nThe singer is credited as a producer for the movie, directed by Sam Wrench and she's up against some heavy hitters including \"Barbie\" and \"Oppenheimer.\"\n\nSwift's last red-carpet appearance was the London premiere of \"Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé\" where she supported her friend and fellow queen wearing a mirrorball dress that stunned.\n\nNominees for cinematic and box office achievement\n\n\"Barbie\" (Warner Bros. Pictures)\n\n\"Guardians of the Galaxy Vo. 3\" (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)\n\n\"John Wick: Chapter 4\" (Lionsgate)\n\n\"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1\" (Paramount Pictures)\n\n\"Oppenheimer\" (Universal Pictures)\n\n\"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" (Sony Pictures Releasing)\n\n\"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" (Universal Pictures)\n\n\"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" (AMC Theatres Distribution)\n\nSwift has four previous Golden Globes nominations, all 'Best Original Song'\n\nIn 2013, at the age of 23, Swift received a nomination for \"Best Original Song\" for the Hunger Games. \"Safe & Sound\" featured \"The Civil Wars.\" John Paul White, Joy Williams and T. Bone Burnett were included in the entry.\n\nIn 2014, her song \"Sweeter Than Fiction,\" recently rereleased as a bonus song to \"1989 (Taylor's Version),\" garnered the \"Best Original Song\" nod from the movie \"One Chance.\" Jack Antonoff was also on the entry.\n\nIn 2019, Swift attended the Globes with no nominations. She presented \"Best Original Score\" with her Cats co-star Idris Elba. \"And the Golden Globe goes to...\" Swift paused to open the envelope, \"'Shallow,' 'A Star is Born,' Lady Gaga.\"\n\nIn 2020, Swift's song \"Beautiful Ghosts\" scored a nom for \"Best Original Score.\" The song from the musical, onscreen adaptation of \"Cats\" didn't win.\n\nIn 2023, \"Carolina\" from \"Where the Crawdads Sing\" earned her a fourth nomination for \"Best Original Song.\"\n\nEntering her cinematic era\n\nIn addition to the list of acting credits, she signed a deal with Searchlight Pictures to direct a feature film that she wrote, the company announced in late 2022.\n\nShe won an MTV award for her 14-minute production of “All Too Well: The Short Film,” which she wrote and directed. The short film was screened at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival.\n\nThe Globes mark the beginning of red carpet season. Swift is expected to attend the 66th annual Grammys on Feb. 4 before beginning the next leg of her Eras Tour in Tokyo on Feb. 7.\n\nFollow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/05/taylor-swifts-eras-tour-golden-globe/72120692007/", "title": "Taylor Swift's Eras Tour could win a Golden Globe", "text": "Taylor Swift could be \"the 1\" to win a Golden Globe.\n\nThe singer is speculated to appear at Sunday's 81st Golden Globes Awards on CBS to represent her massively successful \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" movie.\n\nThe concert film is one of eight nominees in a new category. To qualify for the \"cinematic and box office achievement\" award, blockbusters must have made $150 million globally with $100 million being domestic sales.\n\nSwift's movie garnered more than $250 million according to AMC CEO Adam Aron, who posted \"The Eras Tour\" is \"the first movie AMC has distributed in our 103-year history. We are VERY proud today.\"\n\nSwift is credited as a producer for the movie, which was directed by Sam Wrench.\n\nUSA TODAY's national music critic Melissa Ruggieri said: the film offers a front-row seat to the grandeur. Ruggieri, who attended two shows of the tour wrote that \"the staging is so massive that even the best seats in a stadium – and the King Kong-sized video screens – could provide only so much detail.\"\n\nThe big screen offers close-ups that most of us couldn't see from the top sections of stadiums, with closeups of her ballet flats, her cat-eye makeup, and her colorful fingernails.\n\nNominees for cinematic and box office achievement\n\n\"Barbie\" (Warner Bros. Pictures)\n\n\"Guardians of the Galaxy Vo. 3\" (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)\n\n\"John Wick: Chapter 4\" (Lionsgate)\n\n\"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1\" (Paramount Pictures)\n\n\"Oppenheimer\" (Universal Pictures)\n\n\"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" (Sony Pictures Releasing)\n\n\"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" (Universal Pictures)\n\n\"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" (AMC Theatres Distribution)\n\nWhat is significant about the movie is, at the time, Swift did what production and streaming studios could not during the SAG-AFTRA strike which is negotiate a deal with the unions allowing her to publicize and promote how she saw fit.\n\nFans shimmied their way to theaters in October, buying out custom cups and popcorn tins, dancing in front and behind the rows of seats and singing through her almost three-hour, edited concert set at the top of their lungs. Swift even scared the \"The Exorcist: Believer\" into moving the horror movie's opening weekend to Oct. 6.\n\nSwift is entering her cinematic era. In addition to the list of acting credits, she signed a deal with Searchlight Pictures to direct a feature film that she wrote, the company announced in late 2022.\n\nShe won an MTV award for her 14-minute production of “All Too Well: The Short Film,” which she wrote and directed. The short film was screened at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival.\n\nFollow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/12/11/golden-globes-snubs-2024/71800819007/", "title": "Golden Globes snubs 2024 nominations: Adam Driver, Zac Efron ...", "text": "Awards season is back in full swing, and with it, the usual hand-wringing over who was or wasn't nominated.\n\nIn Monday's Golden Globe nominations, “The Color Purple” (in theaters Christmas Day) was shockingly snubbed in the best musical/comedy category, despite landing acting nominations for stars Fantasia Barrino (“American Idol”) and Danielle Brooks (“Orange Is the New Black”). The highly stylized film is an adaptation of the Oprah Winfrey-produced Broadway musical, which itself is adapted from the 1985 Steven Spielberg film and 1982 Alice Walker book.\n\nHere are more of the most surprising omissions in the nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, which are Jan. 7 on CBS and Paramount+ (8 p.m. ET/5 PT).\n\nGolden Globe nominations 2024:'Barbie' leads with 9, 'Oppenheimer' scores 8\n\nGolden Globes 2024 snubs:\n\nJulia Louis-Dreyfus\n\nThe “Veep” star delivers one of the year’s best performances in the criminally underseen “You Hurt My Feelings,” a sharply observed comedy about criticism, insecurity and the white lies we tell our loved ones. But despite nine previous Globe nominations (and one win for “Seinfeld”), Louis-Dreyfus was passed over in the category for best comedy actress.\n\nAmerica Ferrera\n\nThe “Ugly Betty” star has been on the campaign trail for Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” in which she plays a toy designer and mom struggling to reconnect with her daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). Ferrera gets a barnstorming monologue about the impossible standards of womanhood but was sadly overlooked for best supporting actress.\n\nViola Davis\n\nAfter her career-best performance in “The Woman King” was snubbed by the Oscars last year, it’s disappointing to see Davis’ stellar work in “Air” ignored by the Globes this season, playing Deloris Jordan, the business-savvy mom of Michael Jordan. Her absence is even more head-scratching given that the Nike drama was nominated for best musical/comedy and best comedy actor (Matt Damon).\n\nAdam Driver\n\nThe famously press-shy star has been working the awards circuit to promote Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” with appearances at Venice and New York film festivals as well as last month’s Gotham Awards. But Driver couldn’t cross the finish line in the race for best actor, nor could co-star Penélope Cruz for best supporting actress.\n\nTaraji P. Henson\n\nThe “Empire” star is luminous in “The Color Purple” as Shug Avery, the sultry nightclub singer who helps Celie (Fantasia Barrino) come out of her shell. But despite acting nominations for Barrino and Danielle Brooks as the headstrong Sofia, Henson was missing from Monday’s nominations.\n\nZac Efron\n\nThe former teen heartthrob steps into the ring in “The Iron Claw,” which tells the tragic real-life story of the Von Erich family wrestling dynasty. But the well-received movie was down for the count when it was overlooked in all Globes categories, including best actor.\n\nDominic Sessa\n\nIn Alexander Payne’s warm and wistful “The Holdovers,” the first-time actor holds his own against powerhouse performers Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, playing an unlikely trio stuck together at a boarding school over Christmas. Although his co-stars were recognized for their emotional work, the Globes egregiously snubbed Sessa in best supporting actor.\n\n'Wonka'\n\nTimothée Chalamet earned a well-deserved best comedy actor nod for movie musical “Wonka,” a sugar-sweet origin story about Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier. But the whimsical film from “Paddington” director Paul King was shut out of the best musical/comedy category in favor of more provocative contenders “May December” and “Poor Things.”\n\nAunjanue Ellis-Taylor\n\nAfter nearly 30 years in Hollywood, Ellis-Taylor finally landed her first Oscar nomination early last year for “King Richard” with Will Smith. She’s back in the awards mix this season with Ava DuVernay’s long-awaited “Origin,” a thought-provoking drama about race and class. But her campaign took a knock Monday when she was excluded from the competitive best drama actress category at the Globes.\n\nTaylor Swift is everywhere:'The Eras Tour' movie nominated for a new category at Golden Globes", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/07/best-worst-golden-globes-moments/72107450007/", "title": "The 7 best (and worst) Golden Globes moments you missed", "text": "Awkward, absurd yet all-around satisfying … yes, the Golden Globes are back.\n\nSunday’s awards show saw atomic-bomb drama “Oppenheimer” and HBO’s hit “Succession” run away with the lion’s share of trophies, but it was the unexpected moments that made the night. Andra Day and Jon Batiste were a hilarious duo presenting a pair of music prizes, as were “Barbie” co-stars Issa Rae and Simu Liu, as they riffed on all the “white people roles” they long to play. “Succession” star Kieran Culkin jokingly told Pedro Pascal to “suck it” during his acceptance speech, while “The Bear” actress Ayo Edebiri hyperventilated during her time on stage, apologizing to all the people she forgot to thank, “unless you were mean or something.”\n\nMegawatt couples Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner, as well as Ali Wong and Bill Hader, also made their romances known with PDA throughout the show. And Margot Robbie won the red carpet with yet another “Barbie”-inspired look, recreating a 1977 dress worn by the Mattel doll.\n\nHere are some of the other major moments you might’ve missed:\n\nJo Koy bombs with opening monologue, Taylor Swift joke\n\nThe stand-up comedian had a rough go in his first outing as Globes host, earning groans and even some boos during his opening monologue for off-color jokes about “Barbie” (“a plastic doll with big boobies”) and “The Color Purple” (“what happens to your butt when you take Ozempic”), among others. Koy tried to brush off the negative reactions and blame the writers, saying he got the job just 10 days ago: “You want a perfect monologue? Shut up!”\n\nLater, Koy had another cringey moment when he took a lame jab at Taylor Swift and her public romance with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce. “The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift,\" the comic said. Swift appeared unamused when the camera cut to her, staring straight ahead as she sipped from her drink.\n\nJennifer Lawrence goes viral with excited reaction to Emma Stone’s win\n\nJennifer Lawrence had “No Hard Feelings” about Emma Stone’s best comedy actress win for “Poor Things.” When their category was announced Sunday night, Lawrence jokingly mouthed to the camera, “If I don’t win, I’m leaving.” But when Stone’s name was called, Lawrence jumped up screaming and clapping in elation, in a delightful clip that quickly spread across social media. Lawrence could later be seen tearing up as Stone delivered her speech, while their mutual friend, Swift, also gave a standing ovation.\n\nCillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. charm in ‘Oppenheimer’ acceptance speeches\n\n“Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy claimed the broadcast’s cutest moment when he won best drama actor, receiving a big kiss from his wife, Yvonne McGuinness, who tried to wipe her makeup off his face. “First question, do I have lipstick all over my nose?” Murphy asked when he got on stage. “I was going to leave it.”\n\nMurphy’s “Oppenheimer” co-star, Robert Downey Jr., was similarly endearing when he won best supporting actor. “Yeah, yeah, I took a beta blocker so this is going to be a breeze,” Downey Jr. said. “A sweeping story about the ethical dilemma of nuclear weapons grosses one billion dollars, does that track? No.” He continued by thanking his agents: “They had the gall to say I needed to restart my career. It’s so fun proving agents right.”\n\nLily Gladstone, Paul Giamatti end the show on a high note\n\nThe night wrapped with two of the night’s best speeches: Lily Gladstone, taking best drama actress for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and becoming the first Indigenous performer to win in the category. On stage, she spoke in the Blackfeet language and dedicated her award to “every little (reservation) kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream and is seeing themselves represented in our stories told by ourselves, in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust from within, from each other.”\n\n“The Holdovers” star Paul Giamatti also delivered a moving speech for best comedy actor, playing a teacher in Alexander Payne’s holiday dramedy. “My whole family, they’re teachers,” he said. \"Teachers are good people. Got to respect them. They do a good thing. It’s a tough job, so this is for teachers as well.”\n\n‘Beef’ star Steven Yeun compares himself to Disney ‘Frozen’ heroine\n\nAli Wong and Steven Yeun took home best actress and actor, respectively, for Netflix's limited TV series “Beef.” Yeun earned laughs from the crowd for his sweet shoutout to his daughter and Disney’s animated hit “Frozen.”\n\n“So weird, the story I usually tell of myself to myself is one of isolation and, like, separateness, and then you come up here and you have this moment and you can only just think about everyone else,” Yeun said on stage. “And that feels like the plot of ‘Frozen,’ I just noticed. Shoutout to my daughter Ruthie, family movie night!\"\n\nChristopher Nolan pays tribute to ‘The Dark Knight’ star Heath Ledger\n\nAfter six nominations, Nolan finally won his first Golden Globe for best director. Accepting the award, the “Oppenheimer” filmmaker honored the late Heath Ledger, whose terrifying portrayal of the Joker anchored Nolan’s 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.”\n\n\"The only time I've ever been on this stage before was accepting one of these on behalf of our dear friend, Heath Ledger, and that was complicated and challenging for me,” Nolan said. \"And in the middle of speaking, I looked down at Robert Downey Jr., who caught my eye and gave me a look of support. The same look he’s giving me now – the same love and support he showed so many people in your community over the years.”\n\nWill Ferrell, Kristen Wiig can't stop the beat in Globes' funniest gag\n\nWhy couldn’t Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig host the Globes? The beloved presenters were the most entertaining people at Sunday’s show, with a silly bit about how they couldn’t stop dancing to their “favorite” song, a jaunty yet nondescript piece of instrumental music. “Will, let’s just be honest with everyone,” Wiig said. “Guys, this song does something to us, as you can see,” Ferrell added. “And whoever’s putting on the show tonight knows this!” The audience got a kick out of the gag, with Jennifer Lopez and Andrew Scott boogieing in their seats, and Matt Damon wiping away tears of laughter.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2024/01/03/2024-golden-globes-when-how-to-watch/72085926007/", "title": "How to watch the Golden Globes: Your guide to nominations, time ...", "text": "The Golden Globes formally invites you to ... give them another chance.\n\nAfter a few years of self-inflicted scandal, the first big awards show of the season returns Sunday, Jan. 7, on a new network (CBS instead of NBC), with new for-profit owners (Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions), a presumably kinder, gentler host (comedian Jo Koy) and a pronounced distancing from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (that entity is now dissolved and known as the Golden Globe Foundation).\n\nThe seasonal staple was known for decades as a fun and boozy romp for celebrities who picked up shiny statues they hoped would lead to the far more golden Oscar a few weeks down the road. The standard fare included televised scenes of A-listers mixing and mingling as well as brutally irreverent show hosts (looking at you, Ricky Gervais) who seemed to confuse the telecast for a roast.\n\nBut then a 2021 Los Angeles Times report highlighted the lack of diversity among the HFPA's 87 members (as in, no Black members at all). That led to actor and studio boycotts of the Globes and, ultimately, to NBC opting not to renew its contract. Today, the Golden Globes Foundation reports that it has more than 300 member journalists from around the world, of whom half are ethnically and racially diverse.\n\nHere's where to watch the 81st Golden Globes\n\nAfter a shift last year to a Tuesday night, the Golden Globes are back on a Sunday with an auspicious NFL game lead-in featuring the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals.\n\nThe show will air on CBS (8 p.m. EST/5 PST) live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The ceremony will also be available on the CBS app and will stream on Paramount+. Note, however, that only Paramount+ subscribers who have Showtime can stream the event live; others can watch the show there the next day.\n\nWho is hosting the 81st Golden Globes?\n\nComedian Jo Koy will do the honors, following in the footsteps of last year's host, comedian Jerrod Carmichael. (Acknowledging the HFPA's troubles, Carmichael joked at the top of the show, \"I'll tell you why I'm here. I'm here 'cause I'm Black.\")\n\nKoy has several Netflix stand-up specials to his name, and also starred in the 2022 movie \"Easter Sunday.\" He is likely to take a less caustic approach to his hosting duties than past Globes emcees, who include Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and the always-snarky Gervais.\n\n“We are thrilled to have Jo host and bring his infectious energy and relatable humor to kick off Hollywood’s award season,\" Globes president Helen Hoehne said in a statement. \"We can’t wait to see what he has in store.\"\n\nWho is presenting at the Golden Globes?\n\nThe Globes' efforts to address its lack of diversity seem to have proven sufficient enough to lure a bevy of top celebrities as presenters.\n\nThose announced include Oprah Winfrey, Angela Bassett, America Ferrera, Florence Pugh, Will Ferrell, Daniel Kaluuya, Michelle Yeoh, Issa Rae, Amanda Seyfried, George Lopez, Julia Garner, Hailee Steinfeld, Shameik Moore, Simu Liu, Justin Hartley, Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams.\n\nAlso on tap to do the statue honors: Annette Bening, Don Cheadle, Elizabeth Banks, Gabriel \"Fluffy\" Iglesias, Hunter Schafer, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Bailey, Kate Beckinsale, Keri Russell, Kevin Costner, Kristen Wiig, Mark Hamill, Naomi Watts, Orlando Bloom, Ray Romano, Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar.\n\nWho is nominated for 2024 Golden Globes?\n\nThe Globes differ vastly from the Oscars in ways that go well beyond the more casual nature of the soirée. The Globes not only give out awards for both film and television, but they dispense with craft categories and split big movies into two distinct camps. That's precisely what will allow the year's two big films, \"Barbie\" and \"Oppenheimer,\" best known as \"Barbenheimer,\" to both shine on Sunday.\n\nGreta Gerwig's splashy \"Barbie\" is a cool favorite in its category, best musical or comedy, while Christopher Nolan's sobering nuclear bomb epic could take top honors in best drama. \"Barbie\" has nominations in nine categories, including best actress and supporting actor in a musical or comedy, for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, respectively. \"Oppenheimer\" has eight nominations, including best director and best actor for Cillian Murphy.\n\nA new Globes category − best cinematic and box office achievement − is likely to reward pop icon Taylor Swift, whose globe-shaking \"The Eras Tour\" movie propelled her to billionaire status in 2023, while helping revitalize the movie theater industry in the process.\n\nTop TV shows that may win statues include HBO's \"Succession\" and Hulu's \"The Bear.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/01/10/golden-globes-2023-live-updates/11004341002/", "title": "Golden Globes 2023 live: 'Banshees of Inisherin,' 'Fabelmans' win big", "text": "Tuesday night featured the prime-time return of the Golden Globes and more wins for a Hollywood legend.\n\nSteven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film \"The Fabelmans\" won best drama and best director at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, hosted by comedian Jerrod Carmichael. It was the first show back following a period of controversy fueled by representation struggles within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.\n\nThe dark comedy \"The Banshees of Inisherin\" took home best comedy/musical, screenplay and best comedy actor for Colin Farrell. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan garnered lead comedy actress and supporting actor wins respectively for \"Everything Everywhere All at Once,\" while Austin Butler (\"Elvis\") and Cate Blanchett (\"Tár\") won major acting prizes in the drama categories.\n\n'The Fabelmans,' Austin Butler:The complete 2023 Golden Globes winners list\n\nGolden Globes:The 6 biggest moments, from Jennifer Coolidge to Jerrod Carmichael's Tom Cruise jab\n\n'The Fabelmans,' 'Banshees of Inisherin' gained Oscar momentum at Golden Globes\n\nHere are the highlights from Globes night:\n\n\"The Fabelmans\" wins best drama and \"The Banshees of Inisherin\" is named best comedy/musical.\n\nAustin Butler snags best actor in a drama for \"Elvis,\" Cate Blanchett wins best actress for \"Tár.\"\n\nMichelle Yeoh (\"Everything Everywhere\") and Colin Farrell (\"Banshees of Inisherin\") take lead comedy actor awards.\n\n'The Banshees of Inisherin' wins for best comedy, 'Fabelmans' is top drama\n\nThe Martin McDonagh dark comedy defeats the acclaimed \"Everything Everywhere All at Once.\" More expected, Steven Spielberg's \"The Fabelmans\" is named best drama. The director shouts out composer John Williams and recalls being John Cassavetes' personal assistant. But he wants to wrap up the NBC show, which is running behind schedule, \"because my office is on the Universal lot and I want to stay on the Universal lot.\"\n\nWhat's the point of the Golden Globes anymore? The awards show should never have returned\n\nWhat TV didn't show at the Globes:Jennifer Coolidge swarmed, Austin Butler can't quit Elvis\n\n'House of Dragon' takes a sword to its best drama competition\n\nThe \"Game of Thrones\" prequel takes the Globe for top TV drama. \"I've got to say, 'Severance' is an awesome show,\" says executive producer Ryan Condal. \"If I could've made 'House of Dragon' like 'Severance,' I would have.\" More unsurprisingly, he also shouts out \"GOT\" as a \"really good show.\"\n\nKevin Costner wins for TV's 'Yellowstone,' 'Abbott Elementary' is best comedy\n\nCostner didn't make it to the show so Regina Hall accepts his award for best actor in a drama series. Quinta Brunson's definitely in the building, though, and the \"Abbott Elementary\" creator/star comes back to the stage to grab the Globe for best comedy. \"Are we all here?\" she says, making sure the whole cast is around her. \"I created this show because I love comedy,\" and she shouts out Henry Winkler, Seth Rogen and Bob Odenkirk. \"Comedy is so important to me.\"\n\nEddie Murphy is honored with Cecil B. DeMille Award\n\nTracy Morgan acknowledges that Murphy “was the reason why I’m in comedy” and he presents the achievement award to the comedian alongside Jamie Lee Curtis. \"I’ve watched you grow as a man and a husband and a friend, and we’ve all seen you grow as an artist,\" she says. Murphy remarks he's \"been in show business for 46 years and I’ve been in the movie business for 41 years, so this is a long time in the making.\" He also wants to make a point to the \"new up-and-coming dreamers in the room,\" he says. \"There is a definitive blueprint to follow for success, prosperity, longevity and peace of mind. And I followed it my whole career. These three things: Pay your taxes, mind your business and keep Will Smith’s wife’s name out of your (expletive) mouth!\"\n\nHBO's 'The White Lotus' rules the limited series category\n\n\"I'm still so choked up after Jennifer's speech,\" creator Mike White says after his star Jennifer Coolidge won a supporting actress honor. Looking at TV executives in audience, he jokes, \"You all passed on this show, so it's gratifying to have this moment.\"\n\nAmanda Seyfried wins for 'The Dropout,' Evan Peters for 'Dahmer'\n\nSeyfried isn't there, so \"Yellowstone\" actors accept her award for lead actress in a limited series. Peters is, though, so he grabs his trophy personally after winning actor in a limited series for Netflix's \"Dahmer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.\" \"It was a colossal team effort,\" Peter says of a show that was \"a difficult one to make, a difficult one to watch, but I sincerely hope some good came out of it.\"\n\nPaul Walter Hauser, Jennifer Coolidge snag supporting TV honors\n\nHauser gets his first Globe win, for supporting actor in a limited series, for the Apple TV+ series \"Black Bird.\" \"It's like a wax museum with a pulse, right?\" he cracks, not getting many laughs from the unamused crowd. Coolidge also goes home with her first Globe, a supporting actress victory for HBO's \"The White Lotus.\" \"I don't work out, I can't hold it that long,\" she says, needing to put the trophy down. She tearfully thanks Ryan Murphy and others who gave her \"little jobs\" to keep her career going and also the \"American Pie\" movies: \"I'm down for (Nos.) 6 and 7.\" But \"White Lotus\" creator Mike White \"has given me hope (and) changed my life in a million different ways.\"\n\nSteven Spielberg wins best director for 'The Fabelmans'\n\nHis third win in the directing category, Spielberg takes home the trophy for his semi-autobiographical film. \"I always say if I prepare something, I jinx it,\" he says. \"And I'm really happy about this.\" But the director says his family, his sisters and late parents, \"are happier about this.\" Spielberg adds he never had the courage to \"hit this story head on\" until writer Tony Kushner started \"a conversation\" with him. \"Nobody knows who we are until we have the courage to tell who we are,\" and at age 74, Spielberg, now 76, told himself, \"I better do it now.\"\n\nBest screenplay goes to 'The Banshees of Inisherin'\n\nMartin McDonagh gets his second Globes win for the dark comedy. \"I wrote this film for Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson and their beautiful nuanced performances blew me out of the water,\" he says. \"I'll make sure I don't wait another 14 years to do another one,\" pointing out the time between 2008's \"In Bruges\" (which also starred Farrell and Gleeson), and \"Banshees.\"\n\nCate Blanchett wins best actress in a drama for 'Tár,' 'Argentina, 1985' gets best international film\n\nBlanchett's not there to accept the award as she's working on a movie \"so we all accept this for her,\" Henry Golding announces. But director Santiago Mitre is here to take home the international film honor for \"Argentina, 1985.\"\n\nRyan Murphy is honored with the Carol Burnett Award\n\nBilly Porter presents Murphy with the Carol Burnett Award, given for achievement in television, and honors his \"Pose\" show creator as a \"trailblazer\" and an \"ally.\" Murphy takes the stage and shouts out his \"Pose\" star MJ Rodriguez as the first trans woman to win a Globe and gives her a moment (since last year's event wasn't televised). \"It’s hard being an LGBTQ kid in America,\" Murphy says, and he spends most of his most of his speech honoring queer actors he's worked with to \"make a point of hope and progress\": Niecy Nash \"chose love not fear,” Matt Bomer \"is an action hero in life\" and Jeremy Pope \"refused to hide. Jeremy Pope is the future.\" All of them, Murphy concludes, show \"there is a way forward. Use them as your north stars.\"\n\nZendaya wins for 'Euphoria,' Julia Garner for 'Ozark'\n\n\"Euphoria\" star Zendaya isn't here to accept her Globe win for lead actress in a drama series, but Julia Garner is to get her trophy for supporting actress in a drama. \"I'm overwhelmed and so grateful to be here with all of you,\" says the \"Ozark\" star. \"Playing Ruth is the greatest gift of my life.\"\n\nAustin Butler takes lead drama actor for playing 'Elvis'\n\n\"My boy, my boy, woo. All my words are leaving me,\" says Butler, snagging the award for lead actor in a drama for \"Elvis.\" He shouts out some famous folks – \"Brad, I love you. Quentin, I printed out the 'Pulp Fiction' script when I was 12,\" he says to Pitt and Tarantino respectively – and also gives thanks to Elvis Presley himself: \"You were an icon and a rebel and I love you so much.\"\n\nGuillermo del Toro's 'Pinocchio' wins best animated film\n\n\"I'm very grateful for this and I'm happy to here in person. We're back! Some of us are drunk, what could be better,\" the director says. Del Toro adds he loves the big swings that movies are taking, like his stop-motion \"Pinocchio,\" a movie about \"life, loss and belonging.\" \"Animation is cinema – it's not a genre for kids. It's a medium.\"\n\nMichelle Yeoh takes major honor for 'Everything Everywhere All at Once'\n\n\"I'm just going to stand here and take this all in. Forty years, not letting go of this,\" says Yeoh, holding the trophy for lead actress in a comedy/musical. \"It's been an amazing journey and an incredible fight to be here today, but I think it's worth it.\" Coming to Hollywood was \"a dream come true until I got here,\" she says, finding racial prejudice when she arrived. She turned 60 last year \"and all of you women understand this: As the days and years become bigger, it seems opportunities become smaller as well.\" But she says \"Everything Everywhere\" was \"the gift\" and threatens the musicians who try to play her off: \"I can beat you up.\"\n\nColin Farrell wins best actor honor for 'Banshees of Inisherin'\n\nGlobe presenter (and nominee) Ana de Armas is out to present the award for best actor in a comedy/musical, which goes to Farrell for \"The Banshees of Inisherin.\" \"Ana, I thought you were extraordinary. I cried myself to sleep,\" Farrell tells de Armas of watching \"Blonde.\" He never expects films to work \"so I'm horrified about what's happened around 'Banshees,' which is thrilling.\" He shouts out his co-stars Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Jenny the donkey: \"She's having an early retirement.\"\n\nJeremy Allen White of 'The Bear,' 'Abbott Elementary' creator Quinta Brunson take TV comedy honors\n\n\"I'm in awe of you. You all are legends,\" White says of his fellow nominees when accepting his Globe win for best comedy actor for \"The Bear.\" He admits that he \"loves 'The Bear' and loves (my character) Carmy\" and, yes, \"I love acting.\" And Brunson wins best actress in a comedy for \"Abbott Elementary.\" She thanks studios and producers for \"believing\" in the show, plus shouts out her group text and castmates.\n\n'Babylon' wins best score, 'RRR' gets best song for 'Naatu Naatu'\n\nJenna Ortega arrives to hand out some music honors. Original score goes to Justin Hurwitz for \"Babylon,\" his fourth Globes win. \"I'm grateful that I had the opportunity at a young age that music was the thing for me,\" Hurwitz says. \"We need to spread the opportunity.\" And the original song honor goes to \"Naatu Naatu\" for \"RRR,\" scoring a victory over Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. Composer M.M. Keeravani thanks the HFPA for \"this prestigious award\" and also honors his director S.S. Rajamouli \"for his vision and his constant trust in my work.\"\n\nTyler James Williams snags supporting actor honor for 'Abbott Elementary'\n\nJennifer Coolidge hands out the award for supporting actor in a TV show to Williams. \"The magnitude of the moment is not lost on me,\" says the \"Abbott Elementary\" star. He thanks co-star/show creator Quinta Brunson with a \"Yeah!\" and adds that he \"hopes this is a win for (his character) Gregory Eddie and for stories like his that need to be told out here.\"\n\nAngela Bassett takes supporting actress for 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever'\n\n\"I'm so nervous. My heart is beating,\" says Bassett, remember winning a Globe for the Tina Turner biopic \"What Love's Got to Do With It.\" She recalls a quote from Toni Morrison and thanks her fellow Marvel movie crew: \"By the grace of God, I stand here grateful.\" She also honored the late Chadwick Boseman and said this award \"is a part of his legacy.\"\n\n'Everything Everywhere' star Ke Huy Quan wins best supporting actor\n\nJennifer Hudson comes out to give the first award of the night: Ke Huy Quan wins supporting actor for \"Everything Everywhere All at Once.\" \"I was raised to never forget where I came from and who gave me my first opportunity,\" he says, waving and thanking Steven Spielberg, who cast him as a kid in \"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.\" For years, he says he thought he'd never achieved past what he did as a child. \"Two guys remembered that kid and gave me a chance to do it again,\" he tearfully says, honoring \"Everything\" directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.\n\nHost Jerrod Carmichael takes aim at the Globes' diversity problems in his monologue\n\nJerrod Carmichael takes the stage as host and tells everyone to settle and be quiet. \"I tell you why I'm here: I'm here because I'm Black,\" the host jokes about the HFPA's diversity issues. Carmichael cracks about being asking to host: \"One minute you're making mint tea at home. The next minute you're invited to be the Black face of an embattled white organization. Life comes at you fast.\" He asked his friend if he should do it and she asked how much it pays. When he said it was $500,000, her response was \"Boy, if you don't put on a good suit and take the white people money ...\" Did he think the HPFA has changed: \"I took this job assuming that hadn't changed at all. I hear they got six new Black members, congrats to them, sure. I'm here because of you, people I admire, people who are actual incredible artists.\"\n\nJerrod Carmichael:Comedian jokes hosting 'SNL' is 'the gayest thing you can possibly do'\n\n'We want to be heard':Why comedians make intimate comedy specials\n\nAustin Butler, Brendan Fraser make the best actor race interesting\n\nFarrell probably has the lead comedy actor Globe sealed up, given his strong performance in \"Banshees of Inisherin.\" The drama actor race is a little more interesting: \"Elvis\" star Austin Butler could have the edge with his acclaimed portrayal of the King of Rock 'n' Roll over Fraser's heartfelt portrayal in the more polarizing \"Whale.\"\n\nWho's going to win? We've got predictions\n\nBefore the main event starts, we put together a list of who will and who should win Globes tonight. For example, Angela Bassett looks to rule the supporting actress category for \"Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,\" though Kerry Condon is pretty great as a concerned sibling in \"Banshees of Inisherin.\" Check out our picks and see how we do!\n\nOscar hopefuls Cate Blanchett, Michelle Yeoh compete in separate categories\n\nThose dreaming of a potential Oscar best actress faceoff between Blanchett and Yeoh will have to wait, but both could prevail in different Globe categories. Blanchett is in the best drama actress field with Michelle Williams (\"The Fabelmans\"), Viola Davis (\"The Woman King\"), Ana de Armas (\"Blonde\") and Olivia Colman (\"Empire of Light\"). Meanwhile Yeoh guns for lead actress in a comedy/musical, a category featuring Margot Robbie (\"Babylon\"), Emma Thompson (\"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande\"), Lesley Manville (\"Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris\") and Anya Taylor-Joy (\"The Menu\")\n\nStars plot a Golden Globes return (but not Brendan Fraser)\n\nFraser, who's nominated for best actor in a drama for \"The Whale,\" has stated he won't attend the Globes after accusing former HFPA president Philip Berk of groping him at a 2003 luncheon. \"Top Gun: Maverick\" star Tom Cruise might also be a no-show: He returned his Globe awards to the HFPA in 2021 following a Los Angeles Times investigation reporting the 87-member group had no Black members.\n\nSo who is showing up? The slate of confirmed presenters include Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tracy Morgan, Natasha Lyonne, Billy Porter, Quentin Tarantino and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, the first transgender actor to win a Globe (in 2022 for “Pose\").\n\nFashionistas will want to check out the Globes red carpet\n\nBefore the main event, E! will kick off \"Live From E!: Golden Globe Awards,\" hosted by Laverne Cox and Loni Love, at 6 EST/3 PST with celebrity interviews and more from the red carpet at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills. In addition, an official Globes pre-show streams at 6:30 p.m. EST at goldenglobes.com.\n\nRead more about the winners\n\n'The Fabelmans' review:Steven Spielberg puts his life on screen, in rousing fashion\n\n'Banshees of Inisherin':Why broken friendships hit home for stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson\n\nKe Huy Quan:'Indiana Jones' star waited 'more than 30 years' for 'Everything Everywhere' role\n\n'Tár' review:Cate Blanchett conducts herself magnificently in a modern classical music drama", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/10"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_13", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2023/04/29/general-mills-recalls-flour-salmonella/11766275002/", "title": "Gold Medal flour recall: General Mills flour linked to multi-state ...", "text": "The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention have linked Gold Medal Unbleached and Bleached All Purpose Flour with a multi-state salmonella outbreak.\n\nThe two agencies announced the finding Monday after the FDA found that five of nine cases in the outbreak had exposure to raw Gold Medal flour. A sample taken at the General Mills plant in Kansas City, Missouri was found to have the strain of salmonella affecting people in this outbreak, the FDA said.\n\nSo far the agencies have identified 13 illnesses and three hospitalizations, but no deaths, in the outbreak across 12 states. The Minneapolis-headquartered General Mills issued a voluntary nationwide recall on April 28 of two-, five- and 10-pound bags of Gold Medal Unbleached and Bleached All Purpose Flour with a “Better If Used By” date of March 27, 2024, and March 28, 2024, according to the recall.\n\nGeneral Mills issued the recall after discovering Salmonella Infantis in a sample from a five-pound bag product. Other types of Gold Medal Flour are not affected by this recall, the company said.\n\nCinco de Mayo 2023Where to find deals for tacos, margaritas and tequila\n\nMcDonald's menu:For a limited time, you can add Big Mac sauce to anything; get it free with McNuggets\n\nDetails on the General Mills flour recall\n\nGeneral Mills' voluntary recall includes the following products – currently in stores or consumers' homes – with \"Better If Used By Dates\" of \"27MAR2024\" and \"28MAR2024,\" and these specific UPC codes:\n\nGold Medal Unbleached All Purpose 5LB Flour: Package UPC 000-16000-19610\n\nPackage UPC 000-16000-19610 Gold Medal Unbleached All Purpose 10LB Flour: Package UPC 000-16000-19580\n\nPackage UPC 000-16000-19580 Gold Medal Bleached All Purpose 2LB Flour: Package UPC 000-16000-10710\n\nPackage UPC 000-16000-10710 Gold Medal Bleached All Purpose 5LB Flour: Package UPC 000-16000-10610\n\nThe most recent illness was reported March 1, according to the FDA. States where illnesses have been reported: Illinois (two cases), Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia (all one each), the CDC said.\n\nWhat to do if you bought potentially contaminated General Mills flour\n\nConsumers should dispose of any product affected by this recall, the company said. Consumers who have to discard products covered by this recall may contact General Mills Consumer Relations at 1-800-230-8103.\n\nGeneral Mills did not have information about how much flour was involved in the recall. “Food safety is our top priority, and we are voluntarily recalling these specific lots of Gold Medal Unbleached and Bleached All Purpose Flour,” General Mills spokesperson Mollie Wulff said in a statement to USA TODAY.\n\nWhat else is under recall?Check out USA TODAY's searchable recall database; cars, food, consumer good and more\n\nWhy should I not eat raw cookie dough?\n\nFlour is a raw food and has not been treated to kill germs, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and salmonella, which can cause food poisoning, the CDC advises. Most who get sick from salmonella develop symptoms as soon as six hours and as long as six days after infection. Patients may develop diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps. More severe cases may include aches, headaches, elevated fever, lethargy, rashes, blood in the urine or stool and in some instances may become fatal.\n\nThe CDC estimates Salmonella cause about 1.35 million illnesses, 26,500 hospitalizations, and 420 deaths in the United States every year.\n\nSalmonella is killed by heat when flour is baked, fried or otherwise cooked, General Mills notes in details about the recall on its website. When done cooking, properly clean and sanitize your hands, utensils and all surfaces.\n\n“We are continuing to educate consumers that flour is not a ‘ready to eat’ ingredient,\" Wulff said. \"Anything made with flour must be cooked or baked before eating.”\n\nMore coverage from USA TODAY\n\nFollow Mike Snider on Twitter: @mikesnider.\n\nWhat's everyone talking about?:Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/04/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2023/04/01/raw-flour-cookie-dough-salmonella-outbreak-cdc/11583378002/", "title": "Raw flour, uncooked cookie dough tied to Salmonella outbreak ...", "text": "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is once again warning people to not eat any raw flour – such as that in uncooked dough or batter – as the agency investigates a multi-state Salmonella outbreak.\n\nThe outbreak is linked to reports of people eating uncooked food containing flour, the CDC said on Thursday. Investigators are working to identify a specific flour brand.\n\nAs of Thursday, the outbreak had reached 11 states. Twelve illnesses and three hospitalizations have been reported so far, the CDC said.\n\n\"Flour doesn’t look like a raw food, but most flour is raw. This means that it hasn’t been treated to kill germs that cause food poisoning,\" the CDC wrote. \"Any raw (unbaked) flour used to make dough or batter can be contaminated with germs like Salmonella, but Salmonella germs are killed when flour is cooked or baked.\"\n\nPeople can get sick from eating or tasting uncooked dough or batter, the CDC says.\n\nIn the current multi-state Salmonella outbreak, \"most people reported eating raw dough or batter made with flour before they got sick,\" the CDC wrote – adding that flour \"was the only common ingredient\" that people reported eating.\n\nSalmonella outbreak prompts recall:Oysters recalled after salmonella outbreak sickens people in three southeastern states\n\nShould you ask ChatGPT for medical advice? We asked an expert – and ChatGPT.\n\nIs Salmonella making me sick? How common are infections?\n\nA Salmonella infection is a common bacterial disease that impacts the intestinal tract, the Mayo Clinic notes. The germ lives in animal and human intestines – and most often causes infections in people through eating contaminated food or water.\n\nEven eating a small amount of uncooked dough or batter with raw flour – or other ingredients that may contain Salmonella, like uncooked eggs – can make you sick, the CDC says.\n\nTo avoid potential Salmonella infections from raw flour or eggs, the CDC urges people to not eat uncooked dough or batter, follow all proper cooking/baking instructions and clean every utensil that touched those ingredients.\n\nUndercooked meat and unpasteurized milk can also cause Salmonella infections, the Mayo Clinic notes. Beyond eating food, people can become ill from Salmonella after touching infected animals, the CDC says.\n\n'Don’t kiss or snuggle your bearded dragons':CDC says lizards behind salmonella infections\n\nThe CDC estimates that Salmonella causes about 1.35 million illnesses, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths in the U.S. every year.\n\nSalmonella infection symptoms\n\nMost healthy people recover from Salmonella infections. But it's important to know the symptoms – in case more serious complications arise.\n\nThe timeline of symptoms can vary. According to the CDC, signs of illness usually begin sometime between six hours and six days after swallowing the bacteria.\n\nCommon symptoms include diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever, chills and headache, the Mayo Clinic says. Most people recover without treatment within a few days to a week.\n\nSeverity of illness from Salmonella infections ranges. Some patients will experience no symptoms, while others can develop life-threatening complications \"if the infection spreads beyond the intestines\" the Mayo Clinic says.\n\nStudy:More than half a million UTIs linked to contaminated meat in US each year\n\nHealth:Cases of tick-borne illness, babesiosis, are rising – here's how to stay safe\n\nAgain, most healthy people will recover from Salmonella infections without treatment. But you should contact a health provider if you experience a fever higher than 102 degrees Fahrenheit, signs of dehydration, bloody diarrhea and/or diarrhea that is not improving after three days, the CDC says.\n\nPeople with weakened immune systems, as well as infants and seniors, are at a higher risk for more serious infections.\n\nRaw flour has also been linked to E. coli infections\n\nIn addition to Salmonella, raw flour can also contain E. coli, the CDC notes.\n\nOver recent years – notably in 2016, 2019 and 2021 – the CDC has investigated E. coli outbreaks linked to raw flour and cake mix. Some investigations led to recalls.\n\n2019:Pillsbury Best bread flour recalled in E. coli outbreak\n\nWhat's everyone talking about?:Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/04/01"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2020/08/20/peach-recall-2020-target-aldi-recalling-peaches-salmonella-risk-outbreak/5615728002/", "title": "Target and Aldi recalling peaches linked to salmonella outbreak that ...", "text": "Onions aren't the only produce being linked to salmonella infections.\n\nThe Food & Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating a \"multistate outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis infections linked to bagged peaches,\" according to a food safety alert.\n\nAs of Wednesday, 68 people from nine states have been infected with the strain of salmonella with illnesses starting between June 29 and Aug. 3. No deaths have been reported.\n\n\"Many ill people report purchasing bagged peaches sold at certain ALDI stores in several states,\" the CDC said in its safety alert. \"This investigation is ongoing to identify other retailers that might have sold contaminated peaches.\"\n\nToy recall:Hasbro recalls 52,900 Nerf Super Soaker water guns sold at Target for lead risk. Here's how to get a refund.\n\nCoronavirus impact:Curbside pickup drives sales at Target, Walmart, other stores amid COVID-19. Here's where to use the service\n\nThe discount grocer is voluntarily recalling assorted peaches in 20 states from its supplier Wawona Packing Company as a \"precautionary measure” due to possible salmonella contamination, according to a news release.\n\nTarget also has announced a \"fresh peach recall\" on its website that links to a Minnesota state health department news release.\n\n”Following guidance from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and Minnesota Department of Health, we’ve removed Wawona Packing Company peaches from all of our stores, which includes peaches sold individually, by the pound and in two-pound bags,\" the retailer said in a statement sent to USA TODAY.\n\nOf the reported cases, Minnesota has the most with 23 and Michigan had 17 cases. Iowa and New York each had eight cases, New Jersey has four cases, Virginia and Wisconsin each had three cases. Maryland and Pennsylvania had one case listed in Wednesday’s CDC alert.\n\nSalmonella illness symptoms\n\nAccording to the CDC, most people infected with salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps six hours to six days after being exposed to the bacteria. The illness usually lasts four to seven days and most people recover without treatment.\n\nIn some people, the illness may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized. Salmonella infection may spread from the intestines to the bloodstream and then to other places in the body.\n\nChildren younger than 5 years, adults 65 years and older, and people with weakened immune systems are more likely to have a severe illness, the CDC says.\n\nAldi peach recall\n\nAldi has removed the peaches from select stores in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and West Virginia.\n\nThe items were also available for purchase through Aldi's partnership with Instacart.\n\nThe Aldi items included in the recall are:\n\nTwo-pound bags of Wawona Peaches, UPC 033383322001\n\nTwo-pound bags of organic peaches, UPC 849315000400\n\nLoose bulk peaches\n\n\"If customers have product affected by this voluntary recall, they should discard it immediately or return it to their local store for a full refund,\" the release said.\n\nAldi is referring customers with questions about the recall to call Wawona Packing Company at 1-877-722-7554.\n\nTarget peach recall\n\nAccording to Target, the following products are affected with several date codes included:\n\nPeaches sold per pound: Target item number 267-03-4038 and UPC 492670340386\n\nPeach sold \"by the each\": Target item number 266-03-0010 and UPC 204038000005\n\nTwo-pound bags of peaches: Target item number 266-03-0002 and UPC 033383322056\n\nTwo-pound bag organic peaches: Target item number 267-50-4044 and UPC 849315000400\n\nWhite peach sold per pound: Target item number 267-03-4405 and UPC 492670344056.\n\nTarget says consumers who recently purchased peaches at a Target store should \"dispose of them immediately\" and call Target Guest Relations at 1-800-440-0680 for a full refund, which will be given as a Target gift card.\n\n\"No receipt or proof of purchase is necessary,\" Target said in its statement. \"We’re working to resupply our stores with peaches that are not subject to this recall as soon as possible for our guests.\"\n\nPepperoni shortage 2020:Pepperoni is the latest coronavirus shortage. Will the scarcity affect your pizza habit?\n\nGoodyear Tires boycott:Trump calls on supporters to boycott Goodyear over company's ban on MAGA hats\n\nFollow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/08/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/10/04/egg-recall-illnesses-salmonella-outbreak/1518947002/", "title": "Salmonella outbreak linked to recalled eggs expands with 38 ...", "text": "A multi-state salmonella outbreak linked to eggs from an Alabama farm has expanded with 24 more people ill in five more states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.\n\nGravel Ridge Farms in Cullman, Alabama, recalled its cage-free large eggs last month saying the eggs could be contaminated. At the time, 14 people had been infected with the strain of Salmonella Enteritidis in Tennessee and Alabama.\n\nSince then, the CDC has identified another two dozen illnesses from June 17 to Aug. 16, with some occurring in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio and Montana. Ten people have been hospitalized; no deaths have been reported, the CDC says.\n\nThe new cases bring the overall total to 38 people sickened across seven states, according to the CDC.\n\nSalmonella causes about 1.2 million illnesses, 23,000 hospitalizations, and 450 deaths in the U.S. each year, the CDC estimates. Most people infected develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps within 12 to 72 hours.\n\nThe illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most individuals recover without treatment. But some patients are hospitalized. The elderly, infants, and those with impaired immune systems are more likely to develop a severe illness from salmonella, the CDC says.\n\nMore:1 dead as N.C. meat producer recalls ready-to-eat ham products for listeria concerns\n\nMore:6.5 million pounds of beef recalled for possible salmonella contamination after 57 sickened\n\nGravel Ridge Farms sold the eggs in one dozen and 2.5 dozen cardboard containers to grocery stores and to restaurants primarily in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. They were distributed between June 25 and Sept. 6, with \"best if used by\" dates of July 25 to Oct. 3 and the UPC code 7-06970-38444-6\n\nFor a full list of stores where the recalled eggs were sold, check the Food and Drug Administration's website.\n\nFollow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/10/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2021/04/23/salmonella-outbreak-2021-fda-cdc-investigation-cheese-recall-jules-foods/7352087002/", "title": "Salmonella outbreak: Jule's Foods cashew brie linked to infections", "text": "Jule's Foods is voluntarily recalling all of its products because they could be contaminated with salmonella and linked to a multistate outbreak.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said Friday they are investigating \"Salmonella Duisburg infections linked to the consumption of Jule’s Cashew Brie, a vegan, or plant-based cheese alternative.\"\n\nAccording to the CDC's food safety alert, there have been five people infected with the outbreak strain reported from three states. California and Tennessee have had two cases, and Florida has had one. Two people have been hospitalized, and no deaths have been reported.\n\nRecalls you need to know about: Check out USA TODAY's curated database of consumer product recalls for the latest information\n\nVitafusion recall:Church & Dwight recall select gummy vitamins after reports of 'metallic mesh'\n\nJule's Foods, of Carlsbad, California, said in the recall notice posted on the FDA website that all expiration dates are included. The company is working with health officials and has suspended the production of the products \"while the FDA and the company continue their investigation as to the source of the problem.\"\n\nThe FDA advises that consumers, restaurants and retailers \"should not eat, sell, or serve recalled Jule’s Foods products. Consumers should throw away recalled Jule’s Foods products or return to the place of purchase for a refund.\"\n\nProducts were distributed \"direct to consumer\" and at “primarily independently owned grocery stores” in 17 states: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas.\n\n“We are a small company so we’re talking about 600 wheels of our cheese,” Julie Van Dam, one of the company’s founders, said in an email to USA TODAY. “We are devastated to learn that our products have made people sick and are working to get products out of (people's) homes.”\n\nVan Dam said a list of stores that sold the products is listed on the company's website at julesfoods.net.\n\n“We are heart broken to report that Jule’s Foods products has had a Salmonella contamination,” the company wrote in a Facebook post. “We ask that you either dispose of the product or return it to the place of purchase for a refund.”\n\nConsumers with questions can contact the company at jules@julesveganfoods.com or call 310-980-4697 between 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PDT.\n\nJule's Foods recall 2021\n\nThe following products are being recalled and all expiration dates are included:\n\nJule’s Cashew Brie (Classic): UPC 860388001507\n\nJule’s Truffle Cashew Brie: UPC 860388001514\n\nJule’s Black Garlic Cashew Brie: UPC 860388001552\n\nJule’s Artichoke Spinach Dip: UPC 860388001569\n\nJule’s Vegan Ranch Dressing: UPC 860388001521\n\nFollow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/23"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/04/16/recall-alert-frozen-tuna-linked-salmonella-outbreak-recalled/3490729002/", "title": "Recall alert: Frozen tuna linked to salmonella outbreak recalled", "text": "Two government agencies are investigating an outbreak of salmonella infections linked to frozen raw tuna and are advising consumers to be cautious about their sushi orders.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration both issued notices Tuesday about Louisiana-based Jensen Tuna's frozen tuna after 13 people in seven states reported illnesses and two were hospitalized.\n\nIn response to the investigations, Jensen Tuna announced a voluntarily recall of the tuna sold in 20-pound boxes distributed to restaurants and stores in Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota and Washington. The lot numbers of the recalled tuna are z266, z271, and z272.\n\nThe recalled fish was sourced from JK Fish of Vietnam, and the notices say no other tuna products are impacted or part of the recall.\n\nYes, you read that correctly:Vasectomy cakes are a thing\n\nSalmonella risk:Fresh-cut melon recalled at retailers including Target and Walmart\n\nThe frozen raw tuna may be used in some sushi including spicy tuna. The CDC advises that consumers ask stores and restaurants where the tuna came from before ordering.\n\n\"If you are not sure if the tuna has been recalled, do not eat it,\" the CDC notice says.\n\nThe FDA notice said it's unlikely consumers purchased the recalled tuna in the freezer aisle and that \"it was likely used in food dishes sold by restaurants or retailers.\"\n\n\"Restaurants and retailers should check with their suppliers and not sell or serve the recalled ground tuna from Jensen Tuna,\" the notice said. \"They should also be sure to wash and sanitize locations where the recalled ground tuna was stored or prepared.\"\n\nSymptoms of salmonella include diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, and they usually develop 12 to 72 hours after eating a contaminated product, according to the CDC.\n\nFollow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/04/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2022/05/21/jif-peanut-butter-recall/9871904002/", "title": "Some Jif peanut butter products recalled over salmonella outbreak ...", "text": "Health officials are investigating a multistate salmonella outbreak they believe is linked to some Jif peanut butter products.\n\nThe Food and Drug Administration, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other state and local health agencies, are investigating an outbreak of salmonella senftenberg, the agency said in an announcement.\n\nAs a result, the J.M. Smucker Co. is recalling many of its Jif peanut butter products produced at a plant in Lexington, Kentucky, for possible contamination, according to the FDA. The recall impacts Jif's creamy, crunchy and natural peanut butters, both in jar and to-go form, as well as other products.\n\nSo far, 14 people in 12 states have reported illnesses connected to the outbreak, the CDC said. Two were hospitalized. All five people who contacted the CDC had reported eating peanut butter, with four of them specifically eating Jif before getting ill, the CDC said.\n\n\"Epidemiologic evidence indicates that Jif brand peanut butter produced in the J.M. Smucker Company facility located in Lexington, KY, is the likely cause of illnesses in this outbreak,\" the FDA said.\n\nFood recall:185,000 pounds of Smithfield food precooked bacon toppings for possible metal pieces\n\nTired of burritos falling apart?:Students create edible tape to hold them and wraps together.\n\nThe release says an analysis based on a 2010 environmental sample has linked the current strain to the plant. \"FDA’s investigation is ongoing and more information will be provided as it becomes available,\" the agency said.\n\nConsumers should not eat – and restaurants and stores should not serve or sell – any of the recalled Jif peanut butter products, which were shipped nationwide. And the products have a two-year shelf life, so consumers should check any they have on hand, the FDA says. The products have lot code numbers 1274425 through 2140425.\n\nSome Jif products, with the same lot code numbers, were shipped to Canada and have been recalled, too.\n\n\"Our teams mobilized quickly to coordinate a thorough investigation in collaboration with FDA and (Canadian Food Inspection Agency),\" J.M. Smucker Co. said in a statement to USA TODAY. \"Our number one priority is to deliver safe, quality products to our consumers. If consumers have products matching the description of impacted product in their possession, they should dispose of it immediately.\"\n\nNeither J.M. Smucker Co. nor the FDA described the size of the recall.\n\nThe most recent illness was reported May 1. States where illnesses have been reported: Arkansas, Georgia (two cases), Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, New York, South Carolina, Texas (two), Virginia and Washington.\n\nWhat's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day\n\nWhat Jif peanut butter products were recalled?\n\nA full list of recalled products is available from the FDA.\n\nIf you have used any of the products, the FDA recommends washing and sanitizing surfaces and utensils that could have touched the peanut butter. If you or someone in your household ate this peanut butter and has symptoms of salmonellosis, please contact your health care provider.\n\nMost who get sick from salmonella develop symptoms 12 to 72 hours after infection. Patients may develop diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps. More severe cases may include aches, headaches, elevated fever, lethargy, rashes, blood in the urine or stool and in some instances may become fatal.\n\nThe illness, which is called salmonellosis, typically lasts four to seven days, and most people recover without treatment. The CDC estimates that about 1.35 million people in the U.S. get salmonellosis annually; about 26,500 are hospitalized, and 420 die.\n\nThis isn't the first peanut butter recall this year. In March, Skippy Foods LLC recalled 9,353 cases, or 161,692 total pounds, of select peanut butter products because they could contain small stainless steel fragments.\n\nFollow Mike Snider on Twitter: @mikesnider.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/05/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/03/09/wonderful-pistachios-linked-salmonella-outbreak/81563978/", "title": "Wonderful Pistachios linked to salmonella outbreak", "text": "Jerod MacDonald-Evoy\n\nThe Arizona Republic\n\nThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is advising consumers to not eat pistachios produced by Wonderful Pistachios, as they have been linked to a multistate salmonella outbreak.\n\nEleven people in nine states have been sickened by salmonella Montevideo, with two of those patients needing to be hospitalized, according to a CDC statement. No deaths had been reported as of Wednesday afternoon.\n\nLocal, state and federal health officials are investigating the outbreak. Meanwhile, California-based Wonderful Pistachios has voluntarily recalled a limited number of flavors and sizes of its product, the CDC statement said.\n\nThe pistachios were sold nationwide and in Canada under the brand names Wonderful, Paramount Farms and Trader Joe’s.\n\nNew FDA rules tighten requirements for food manufacturers\n\nThe recalled products can be identified by their lot number, which can be found at the bottom of packaging. The CDC has a guide on which pistachios were recalled and how to tell on its website.\n\nIn addition to Arizona, Washington, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia and Connecticut all have been affected. Arizona and Washington have two cases each.\n\nMost people infected with salmonella montevideo start developing symptoms 12 to 72 hours after being exposed to the bacteria. Diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps are the main symptoms.\n\nConsumers can return any pistachios that may be affected for a full refund, according to Wonderful Pistachios. A list of specific products can be found on the company's website.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2016/03/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2020/09/25/mushroom-recall-salmonella-outbreak-restaurants/3533896001/", "title": "Recall alert: Dried mushrooms likely linked to salmonella outbreak", "text": "Two federal health agencies are investigating a multistate outbreak of salmonella infections probably linked to wood ear mushrooms imported by Wismettac Asian Foods of Santa Fe Springs, California.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration issued notices this week advising consumers to be cautious when ordering meals with mushrooms. The dried mushrooms were shipped to restaurants in 31 states and Washington, D.C.\n\n\"Consumers can ask restaurants where mushrooms are from before ordering to avoid eating recalled mushrooms,\" the FDA said.\n\nThere have been 41 reported cases of the salmonella infection in 10 states. Four people have been hospitalized, the CDC said.\n\nSaw recall:More than 256,000 Kobalt cordless saws sold at Lowe's recalled for 'laceration hazard'\n\nPimento cheese chase:Costco reportedly pulls Palmetto Cheese after founder calls Black Lives Matter a 'terror organization'\n\n\"Restaurants should not sell or serve recalled wood ear mushrooms distributed by Wismettac Asian Foods, Inc., labeled as Shirakiku brand Black Fungus (Kikurage),\" the FDA said. \"Restaurants should immediately discard any of the recalled product.\"\n\nWismettac Asian Foods voluntarily recalled the 5-pound bags of dried fungus that were imported from China because of \"the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella, an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems,\" the company said on its website.\n\nAccording to the recall and health alerts, the product was distributed to restaurants in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin andWashington, D.C., as well as British Columbia in Canada.\n\nThe FDA said, \"Restaurants that received recalled products should use extra vigilance in cleaning and sanitizing any surfaces that may have come in contact with recalled product to reduce the risk of cross contamination.\"\n\nThe recall notice said consumers with questions can contact the company at recall@wismettacusa.com.\n\nFollow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/09/25"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/09/11/egg-recall-alabama-georgia-tennessee-salmonella/1264448002/", "title": "Gravel Ridge Farms eggs recalled in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee ...", "text": "Adrianne Haney\n\nWXIA\n\nATLANTA – An Alabama farm has recalled its eggs after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked them to a multi-state salmonella outbreak.\n\nAccording to the Atlanta-based CDC, eggs from Gravel Ridge Farms in Cullman, Alabama, could possibly be contaminated.\n\nOn Sept. 8, the CDC said Gravel Ridge Farms recalled packages of a dozen and 2.5 dozen eggs in cardboard containers with UPC code 7-06970-38444-6. Recalled eggs have “best if used by” dates of July 25, 2018 through Oct. 3, 2018.\n\nRecalled eggs were sold in grocery stores and to restaurants in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.\n\nThe CDC is urging anyone who may have bought the eggs affected by the recall to return any Gravel Ridge Farms eggs to the store for a refund or throw them away, regardless of the “best if used by” date. The CDC says even if some eggs were eaten and no one got sick, do not eat the remaining eggs. In addition, the CDC is encouraging consumers to wash and sanitize drawers or shelves in refrigerators where recalled eggs were stored.\n\nLast week's recalls and warnings:Ford F-150s, Toyota Prius and Honey Smacks\n\nGround beef recall: Publix recalls products sold in Florida for possible E. coli contamination\n\nFDA:All King Bio homeopathic products that use water recalled over contamination concerns\n\nAs of Sept. 7, 14 people have been infected with the strain of Salmonella Enteritidis in both Tennessee and Alabama. No deaths have been reported.\n\nMost people infected with Salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps 12 to 72 hours after being exposed to the bacteria. The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most people recover without treatment.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/09/11"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_14", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2023/12/29/faa-boeing-737-max-planes-news-inspected-loose-bolt/72056314007/", "title": "FAA: Boeing 737 Max planes should be inspected for 'loose bolt'", "text": "After an international airline discovered a bolt with a missing nut while performing routine maintenance of a Boeing 737 Max, the airplane maker is urging airlines to inspect its 737 Max commercial airplanes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder control system, the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday.\n\n\"The FAA is closely monitoring targeted inspections of Boeing 737 Max airplanes to look for a possible loose bolt in the rudder control system,\" a news release from the FAA said.\n\nBoeing also discovered a nut that was not properly tightened in an aircraft that had not yet been delivered, according to the FAA.\n\nNo damages have been reported so far and Boeing said that the advisory was issued out of an abundance of caution.\n\n\"The issue identified on the particular airplane has been remedied,\" the statement from Boeing said. \"Out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending operators inspect their 737 Max airplanes and inform us of any findings. We informed the FAA and our customers and will continue to keep them aware of the progress.\"\n\nThe aircraft manufacturer said that the inspection is not particularly difficult and involves removing an access panel and visually validating proper installation. The entire process could take approximately two hours per airplane, said Boeing.\n\nBoeing further said that they are not expecting any \"significant impact to our operations\" and that all aircrafts are being inspected prior to delivery.\n\nBoeing added that there have been no in-service incidents caused by the condition.\n\nFAA said that it will \"consider additional action based on any further discovery of loose or missing hardware\".\n\nWatch:Fluffy, 400-pound therapy llamas ease travelers' stress at Portland International Airport\n\nWhat airlines fly Boeing 737 Max airplanes?\n\nMajor American airlines, including United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines, operate Boeing's 737 Max, a single-aisle workhorse aircraft built for short and intermediate distances.\n\nAll of the airlines told USA TODAY Friday that they do not expect any impact to their operations.\n\nAlaska Airlines added that they began inspections on Thursday and expect them to be completed in the first half of January. Southwest Airlines is currently conducting inspections of the Max aircrafts in their fleet during routine overnight maintenance. And American Airlines noted their team will complete the recommended inspections but did not give a specific timeline.\n\nBoeing 737 Max airplanes grounded in 2019\n\nIn March 2019, the Boeing 737 Max was grounded in the United States following two fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia within a span of 5 months which killed a total of 346 people.\n\nIt was cleared to fly again in late 2020 by the FAA after Boeing made changes to the plane, including to M.C.A.S., the flight control system behind the crashes, according to the NYT.\n\nSaman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@gannett.com and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter @saman_shafiq7.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/01/06/alaska-airlines-fuselage-separation-incident/72131993007/", "title": "Boeing 737 Max 9 grounding by FAA after Alaska Airlines incident", "text": "A left door plug that expelled from an Alaska Airlines flight had disengaged from the fuselage, \"allowing it to blow out,\" the National Transportation Safety Board said late Monday, offering further details on the midflight blowout.\n\nThe flight was forced to return to Portland, Oregon, shortly after takeoff when a section of the fuselage separated from the plane. Social media posts showed a hole in the side of the aircraft where the section of fuselage blew out.\n\nAccording to Alaska Airlines, flight 1282 was en route to Ontario, California, from Portland when the incident occurred. The plane returned to Portland with all passengers and six crew members, who deplaned safely.\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration is now grounding approximately 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets as a result of the incident. The required inspections will take around four to eight hours, the FAA said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.\n\n\"This emergency (airworthiness directive) was prompted by a report of an in-flight departure of a mid cabin doorplug, which resulted in a rapid decompression of the airplane. The FAA is issuing this AD to addressthe potential in-flight loss of a mid cabin door plug, which could result in injury to passengers andcrew, the door impacting the airplane, and/or loss of control of the airplane,\" the agency's order said. \"This AD prohibits further flight of affected airplanes, until the airplane is inspected and all applicable corrective actions have been performed.\"\n\nNTSB says it's unclear if bolts for door plug were properly attached\n\nThe missing door plug, which was discovered in a backyard in Portland on Sunday, is a key piece in the investigation of what happened during the flight.\n\nDuring Monday night's news conference, NTSB aerospace engineer Clint Crookshanks said it is uncertain if bolts for the door plug were properly attached or had even been installed. The NTSB said lab testing would reveal if the bolts were in place.\n\nEarlier Monday, United Airlines and Alaska Air said they had found loose parts on numerous grounded Max 9 jets.\n\nNTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy also noted during the conference that there are currently \"no indications\" that activation of the air pressurization warning light correlated with the expulsion of the door plug and the rapid decompression of the plane.\n\nDuring the plane’s “explosive decompression,\" the cockpit door was flung open and passengers described a chaotic, loud, and violent scene as the winds blew through the plane. Homendy said Monday that the cockpit door was designed to open during rapid decompression but no crew on board were informed.\n\nConcerns had been raised over the plane's pressurization after federal officials reported that warning lights had gone off on three separate flights on Dec. 7, Jan. 3, and Jan. 4 — the day before the incident.\n\nAlaska Airlines, Boeing also investigating incident\n\n“My heart goes out to those who were on this flight – I am so sorry for what you experienced. I am so grateful for the response of our pilots and flight attendants. We have teams on the ground in Portland assisting passengers and are working to support guests who are traveling in the days ahead,” Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci said in a statement. “\n\nMinicucci said the airline is working with Boeing, the plane manufacturer, to “understand what occurred.”\n\nAlaska was reporting 52 canceled flights, or about 7% of its schedule just before 7:30 a.m. ET on Saturday.\n\nIt’s the second high-profile aviation incident of 2024, coming just days after a Japan Airlines plane struck a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft on the runway at Tokyo Haneda Airport. The crash killed five crew members on the Coast Guard plane, but despite a fire that largely consumed the Japan Airlines Airbus A350, all passengers and crew aboard the commercial flight were able to evacuate safely.\n\nZach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/01/06/boeing-737-max-alaska-airlines/72132644007/", "title": "Boeing 737 Max 9s grounded over Alaska Airlines incident: What to ...", "text": "Air travelers will want to keep watch on the latest trouble facing the Boeing 737 Max aircraft.\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration has grounded 171 of the Boeing 737 Max 9 planes worldwide after a hole blew out of an Alaska Airlines plane Friday night on a flight out of Portland, Oregon. No one was injured in the incident, and the flight made a safe emergency landing back at Portland International Airport.\n\nIn a statement on Boeing's website, the aircraft company says: \"Safety is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers and their passengers. We agree with and fully support the FAA's decision to require immediate inspections of 737-9 airplanes with the same configuration as the affected airplane. In addition, a Boeing technical team is supporting the NTSB's investigation into last night's event. We will remain in close contact with our regulator and customers.\"\n\nBut the involvement of the 737 Max airplane – previous safety concerns about the aircraft led to it being grounded for nearly two years – suggests there could be repercussions for the already troubled airplane fleet.\n\nThe National Transportation Safety Board has sent investigators to Portland to investigate the incident involving the Boeing 737 Max 9, Flight 1282 bound for Ontario, California.\n\nPlane crash:'Saved by the Bell,' 'Speed Racer' actor Christian Oliver killed in plane crash with 2 daughters\n\nBoeing 737 Max 9 aircrafts grounded by FAA, Alaska Airlines\n\nThe FAA said its Emergency Airworthiness Directive, affecting about 171 airplanes worldwide, would require inspections taking four to eight hours. \"Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the NTSB's investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282,\" the agency said.\n\nBefore the FAA made their decision, Alaska Airlines had announced that it would be grounded its fleet of 65 Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes. But on Saturday, shortly before the FAA statement, Alaska Airlines said in a post on X that inspections had been done on more than a quarter of its 737 MAX 9 aircraft with \"no concerning findings.\" Flights on the fleet will return to service after successful inspections.\n\nSince the aircraft is used by other airlines including United Airlines, Copa Airlines, Aeromexico and Turkish Airlines – according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company – other international agencies will be interested in any findings, too.\n\nUnited Airlines released a statement to USA TODAY saying: \"United has temporarily suspended service on select Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft to conduct an inspection required by the FAA. We are working directly with impacted customers to find them alternative travel options.\"\n\nUSA TODAY spoke with Shem Malmquist, instructor at college of aeronautics at the Florida Institute of Technology, about the Alaska Airlines grounding.\n\n\"To the extent that they need to do anything, the question is: Do they need to ground all the airplanes and look at other ones or can they look at this and say, this was just this particular configuration?\" said Malmquist, a current Boeing 777 captain and experienced accident and safety investigator. \"Until they've looked at it nobody is going to be able to give you a truthful answer.\"\n\nWhat happened to the Boeing 737 Max 9 jet on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282?\n\nAlaska Airlines Flight 1282 was at about 16,000 feet shortly after takeoff when an exit door plug, a section of the fuselage, blew out. The crew reported a \"pressurization issue,\" according to the Federal Aviation Administration. One of the pilots declared an emergency and asked for clearance to descend to 10,000 feet (3 kilometers), the altitude where the air would have enough oxygen to breathe safely.\n\n\"We need to turn back to Portland,” the pilot told controllers in a calm voice that she maintained throughout the landing process.\n\nPassenger Kyle Rinker described to CNN how \"it was really abrupt. Just got to altitude, and the window/wall just popped off and didn’t notice it until the oxygen masks came off.” He posted a picture on X, formerly Twitter.\n\nThe Alaska Airlines plane apparently had \"plugged\" a section of the plane that could be used as an exit door, with another cabin piece without a door, Malmquist said. The number of exit doors needed on a plane is based on the seating configuration, with more exits required as the number of passengers accommodated rises.\n\nWithout an exit door there \"it's a bit lighter ... and it is a pretty big advantage to do that,\" Malmquist said. If it's determined that this configuration caused the incident, other airlines may not have to cancel any other flights, he said.\n\nWhat could the Alaska Airlines incident mean for other airlines?\n\nAlaska Airlines and investigators will look at whether the incident was caused by \"that configuration or is it a general, larger problem,\" Malmquist said. \"If it's a larger problem it's a big mess because that means it could open other doors or other windows. If it's just the plug windows, that greatly narrows the scope.\"\n\nAny other airline that uses a similar configuration – plugging that exit door – \"is probably going to be proactive,\" he said. \"Airlines that are operating a different configuration may take more of a 'wait and see' (approach). They are going to be watching it closely.\"\n\nWhat is the history of the Boeing 737 Max?\n\nThe aircraft involved in Friday's incident is a new addition to the Alaska Airlines fleet, having received its certification just two months ago, The Associated Press reported. It had flown 145 flights since entering commercial service on Nov. 11, according to FlightRadar24, another tracking service. The flight from Portland was the aircraft’s third of the day.\n\nThe Max is the newest version of Boeing’s venerable 737, a twin-engine, single-aisle plane frequently used on U.S. domestic flights.\n\nThe plane, which went into service in May 2017, has had controversy. Two Max 8 jets crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people, resulting in a near two-year worldwide grounding of all Max 8 and Max 9 planes. The planes returned to service only after Boeing made changes to an automated flight control system implicated in the crashes.\n\nLast year, the FAA told pilots to limit use of an anti-ice system on the Max in dry conditions because of concern that inlets around the engines could overheat and break away, possibly striking the plane.\n\nAnd in December, the company told airlines to inspect the planes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system.\n\nMalmquist is concerned these continued issues come as a result of Boeing's concern for costs over safety, as the company has offered senior engineers and other employees to retire. \"In the entire process, there's a strong incentive to reduce costs and I think that although people who are in management realize that experience matters in management they don't necessarily realize that also equally applies to all the other various areas,\" he said.\n\nWhat rights do passengers have when an airline grounds its fleets?\n\nAccording to the U.S. Department of Transportation's air consumer website, Alaska Airlines has committed to several remedies for passengers affected by \"controllable\" cancellations.\n\nThose commitments include rebooking travelers on the airline or a partner airline at no additional cost.\n\nPassengers can be given meal, meal cash or vouchers by Alaska Airlines when a cancellation forces them to wait more than three hours for a new flight. They can also receive hotel accommodations, and transportation to and from the hotel, from Alaska Airlines if affected by an overnight cancellation.\n\nPassengers can receive credit, travel vouchers or frequent flyer miles if the canceled flight results in them waiting three hours or more from the scheduled departure time.\n\nBut, according to the DOT website, passengers cannot receive compensation from Alaska Airlines if a cancellation causes a person to wait more than three hours from the departure time.\n\nWhat should travelers learn from the incident?\n\nIn the near-term, if you are traveling soon, check to see if you are traveling on this type of airplane. \"I would consider seeing if you can switch,\" Malmquist said. \"I would see what I can do to take a slightly later flight. That seems to me the logical thing.\"\n\nAnd anytime, travelers should learn to fasten their seatbelts when on a flight. \"I don't ever sit down without my seatbelt buckled,\" Malmquist said. \"More likely, you will hit some turbulence for whatever reason that's not expected and you go flying into the ceiling. That can happen, too.\"\n\nAlso he suggests making sure you have your shoes on during takeoff and landing. If there's a quick evacuation, Malmquist said, \"you don't want to be running across the pavement (without shoes). There might be glass and who knows what else?\"\n\nContributing: Zach Wichter, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/01/11/max-9-door-alaska-airlines-boeing-ceo/72188094007/", "title": "737 door plug incident investigation will be transparent: Boeing CEO", "text": "Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun says Friday’s Alaska Airlines incident involving a Boeing 737 Max 9’s door separating from the plane mid-air “shook me to the bone.”\n\n“I didn’t know what happened to whoever was supposed to be in the seat next to that hole in the airplane,” Calhoun said during a town hall with Boeing employees that was shared, in part, on the company’s website. “I got kids. I got grandkids, and so do you. This stuff matters. Everything matters.”\n\nThe cause of the incident remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, but Calhoun accepted responsibility on behalf of Boeing.\n\n“We’re going to approach this, number one, acknowledging our mistake,” he told employees, noting that he was preaching to the choir. “We’re going to approach it with 100% and complete transparency every step of the way.”\n\nHe pledged to work closely with the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration, who he said will help “ensure every next plane that moves into the sky is in fact safe and that this event can never happen again.”\n\nI've covered Boeing's 737 MAX for years.A quick rundown of the issues | Cruising Altitude\n\nAll Boeing 737 Max 9 planes have been grounded pending inspections and any necessary repairs involving potentially loose door bolts. The 737 Max family of jets has had a checkered history, and the Max 8 was grounded in 2019 following two deadly crashes within months.\n\nCalhoun acknowledged Boeing’s customers are anxious after this latest incident, but said customers continue to have confidence in the aircraft manufacturer.\n\n“(Customers) do (have confidence) and they will again, but we’re going to have to demonstrate it by our actions, our willingness to work directly and transparently with them and to make sure they understand that every airplane that Boeing has its name on that’s in the sky is in fact safe and we will see our way through to that,” he said.\n\nNo one was seriously injured in Friday’s incident on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, thanks largely to the quick actions of the pilots and crew on board, according to Calhoun.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/01/08/united-airlines-boeing-737-max-9-defects/72154454007/", "title": "Alaska and United confirm finding defects in multiple 737 MAX 9 jets", "text": "Inspections of grounded Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft are already underway at some airlines. But it seems the Alaska Airlines jet that lost a door plug Friday night was just the canary in the coal mine for issues with the plane’s finishes.\n\nUnited Airlines, the largest operator of the MAX 9 in the U.S., with 79 of the aircraft in its fleet, confirmed in a statement to USA TODAY that its preliminary inspections have identified problems on multiple jets.\n\n“Since we began preliminary inspections on Saturday, we have found instances that appear to relate to installation issues in the door plug – for example, bolts that needed additional tightening. These findings will be remedied by our Tech Ops team to safely return the aircraft to service,” the statement said.\n\nAlaska Airlines also said in a statement Monday night that it had begun preliminary inspections on its MAX 9 aircraft and found problems on multiple planes.\n\n\"As our maintenance technicians began preparing our 737-9 MAX fleet for inspections, they accessed the area in question. Initial reports from our technicians indicate some loose hardware was visible on some aircraft,\" the statement said.\n\nJust after 8 a.m. ET Tuesday, both Alaska and United were reporting significant cancelations for the day. United had 191 canceled flights, or about 7% of its schedule, while Alaska had 106 cancelations, about 16% of its schedule, according to FlightAware.\n\nBoth airlines are offering flexible rebooking policies for passengers affected by the grounding. Alaska's systemwide policy can be seen by clicking here, and United's various waivers for today by clicking here.\n\nUnited said it expects each inspection to be performed by a team of five technicians and will take several hours per aircraft. The process will include removing two rows of seats near the door plug, inspecting and verifying that the plug was installed properly, opening the door to check the area and its seal, and then resecuring the plug.\n\nAlaska said it will be reporting the findings of its inspections to the FAA, per regulatory requirements.\n\n\"The safety of these aircraft is our priority and we will take the time and steps necessary to ensure their airworthiness, in close partnership with the FAA,\" the airline's statement said.\n\nZach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2024/01/09/alaska-airlines-flight-teen-tshirt-sucked-off/72160819007/", "title": "Teen on Alaska Airlines flight left topless after shirt 'sucked off'", "text": "A 15-year-old boy, who was on board Alaska Airlines' Flight 1282, had his shirt \"sucked off\" when the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet lost a door-sized section of its fuselage six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, one of the flight's passengers' Kelly Bartlett said on Instagram.\n\n\"Friday night I was on the plane from Portland in which a wall panel blew out fifteen minutes into our flight,\" wrote Bartlett. \"We had just passed 10,000 feet when there was a loud boom and the plane filled with wind and noise and the oxygen masks dropped. Three rows behind me was a hole in the side of the plane.\"\n\nBartlett said that there was \"total chaos for a couple of minutes\" as everyone scrambled to secure themselves and those sitting in the row of the missing wall \"found new seats on the other side of the plane\".\n\n\"There was one open seat next to me, and a 15-year-old kid jumped over me, sat down, and grabbed the mask,\" wrote the artist. \"He had no shirt on because it had been sucked off when the panel blew.\"\n\nThe teenager, Jack, had been sitting in the middle seat of that row, while his mother was in the aisle seat, according to Bartlett. The window seat was unoccupied.\n\nWhat travelers should know:Boeing 737 Max 9s grounded after Alaska Airlines jet loses window\n\nHere's how it happened:A Boeing 737 MAX 9 lost a panel midair, terrifying passengers\n\nRedness and scratches\n\nBartlett said that she was unable to talk to Jack because of the noise so she used hand gestures and the notes app on her phone to communicate with him and check if was doing okay. Though Jack said that he was fine, Bartlett said that he had redness and scratches on his skin, which could have been caused by windburn.\n\nAbout 15 minutes later the plane made an emergency landing in Portland.\n\n\"After only the first few minutes of chaos, the plane was under control and we knew we were descending back to PDX,\" wrote Bartlett. \"I never felt like we were going to crash. It was windy and loud in the plane, but everyone was calm, and we landed safely within 15 minutes.\"\n\nBartlett said that Jack was mostly concerned about his mom and the two reunited when the flight landed in Portland.\n\nMeanwhile, paramedics arrived at the scene as soon as the flight landed and went on board to treat those who sustained injuries, mostly minor, according to Bartlett.\n\n\"Then we all got off the plane just like normal, no need for emergency slides…just walked out the jetway as usual,\" said Bartlett, adding that Jack wanted to take a selfie “to commemorate the experience”!\n\nSpeaking to the Associated Press, Bartlett praised the crew and staff for responding \"well to the situation\" and keeping everything under control.\n\n“The flight attendants really responded well to the situation,\" Bartlett told AP. \"They got everyone safe and then they got themselves safe. And then there was nothing to do but wait, right? We were just on our way down and it was just a normal descent. It felt normal.”\n\nNational Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy, in a press conference Sunday night, also praised the flight crew, calling their actions \"really incredible\".\n\n“The actions of the flight crew were really incredible,” the NTSB chair, Jennifer Homendy, said at a Sunday night news conference. She described the scene inside the cabin during those first seconds as “chaos, very loud between the air and everything going on around them and it was very violent”.\n\nIntact iPhone found:Debris surface from Alaska Airlines' forced landing\n\nBartlett was later rebooked on another flight to Corona, California and safely made it there the same night.\n\n\"It was crazy and scary, and I am so thankful it was not a worse situation,\" said Bartlett. \"Everyone was safe and relatively uninjured.\"\n\nAlaska Airlines Flight 1282\n\n177 passengers and crew, including Bartlett, were on board the Alaska Airlines' flight, which was at an altitude of 16,300 feet when the fuselage unit gave way, but fortunately no one was seriously injured. The flight was en route to Ontario, California, roughly 40 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, from Portland.\n\nPassengers on board the flight described a loud, chaotic and violent scene of wind howling through the plane, after the wall panel broke off. The cockpit door was flung open and the wind tore the headset from the copilot. The pilot's headset was pulled halfway off. Crew and passengers donned oxygen masks.\n\nInvestigation ongoing\n\nAviation authorities, including the NTSB are investigating the incident.\n\nA key piece of evidence, the torn-off section known as a “door plug,” was recovered Sunday near Portland by a schoolteacher. Investigators will examine the 63-pound, 48-by-26-inch plug to determine why it separated from the plane.\n\nTwo cellphones, believed to be from the plane, were also found nearby.\n\nSaman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@gannett.com and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter @saman_shafiq7.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/09"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/27/business/southwest-airlines-service-meltdown/index.html", "title": "Flight cancellations: Why Southwest Airlines is melting down | CNN ...", "text": "New York CNN —\n\nA punishing winter storm that dumped multiple feet of snow across much of America led to widespread flight cancellations over the Christmas holiday. By Monday, air travel was more or less back to normal – unless you booked your holiday travel with Southwest Airlines.\n\nMore than 90% of Wednesday’s US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Southwest canceled more than 2,500 flights. The next highest: SkyWest, with 77.\n\nSouthwest warned that it would continue canceling flights until it could get its operations back on track. The company’s CEO said this has been the biggest disruption he’s seen in his career. The Biden administration is investigating.\n\nWhat gives? Southwest had a combination of bad luck and bad planning.\n\nThe storm hit Chicago and Denver hard, where Southwest has two of its biggest hubs – Chicago Midway airport and Denver International airport.\n\nMore bad luck: The storm hit just as the so-called tripledemic surged across America, leaving people and their families sick with Covid, the flu and RSV. Although Southwest says it was fully staffed for the holiday weekend, illness makes adjusting to increased system stress difficult. Many airlines still lack sufficient staff to recover when events like bad weather cause delays or flight crews max out the hours they’re allowed to work under federal safety regulations.\n\nUnderinvestment\n\nBut Southwest (LUV) also hurt itself with an aggressive schedule and by underinvesting in its operations.\n\nSouthwest’s schedule includes shorter flights with tighter turnaround times, which are causing some of the problems, Kathleen Bangs, a FlightAware spokesperson, told CNN.\n\n“Those turnaround times bog things down,” Bangs said.\n\nStranded customers have been unable to get through to Southwest’s customer service lines to rebook flights or find lost baggage.\n\nEmployees also said they have not been able to communicate with the airline, the president of the union that represents Southwest’s flight attendants told CNN Monday.\n\n“The phone system the company uses is just not working,” Lyn Montgomery, President of TWU Local 556, told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “They’re just not manned with enough manpower in order to give the scheduling changes to flight attendants, and that’s created a ripple effect that is creating chaos throughout the nation.”\n\nOn a call with employees Monday, Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson explained that the company’s outdated scheduling software quickly became the main culprit of the cancellations once the storm cleared, according to a transcript of the call that was obtained by CNN from an aviation source.\n\nThe extreme cold, ice and snow grounded planes and left some crew members stranded, so Southwest’s crew schedulers worked furiously to put a new schedule together, matching available crew with aircraft that were ready to fly. But the Federal Aviation Administration strictly regulates when flight crews can work, complicating Southwest’s scheduling efforts.\n\n“The process of matching up those crew members with the aircraft could not be handled by our technology,” Watterson said.\n\nSouthwest ended up with planes that were ready to take off with available crew, but the company’s scheduling software wasn’t able to match them quickly and accurately, Watterson added.\n\n“As a result, we had to ask our crew schedulers to do this manually, and it’s extraordinarily difficult,” he said. “That is a tedious, long process.”\n\nWatterson noted that manual scheduling left Southwest building an incredibly delicate house of cards that could quickly tumble when the company encountered a problem.\n\n“They would make great progress, and then some other disruption would happen, and it would unravel their work,” Watterson said. “So, we spent multiple days where we kind of got close to finishing the problem, and then it had to be reset.”\n\nIn reducing the company’s flights by two thirds, Southwest should have “more than ample crew resources to handle that amount of activity,” Watterson said.\n\nThe problems Southwest faces have been brewing for a long time, said Captain Casey Murray, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.\n\n“We’ve been having these issues for the past 20 months,” he told CNN. “We’ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.”\n\nHe said the airline’s operations haven’t changed much since the 1990s.\n\n“It’s phones, it’s computers, it’s processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to airplanes – that’s where the problem lies, and it’s systemic throughout the whole airline,” he said.\n\nSouthwest CEO Bob Jordan, in a message to employees obtained by CNN, acknowledged many of Murray’s concerns, and promised the company will invest in better systems.\n\n“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Jordan told employees. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”\n\nHe said the airline is “committed to and invested in” improving its systems, but “we need to be able to produce solutions faster.”\n\nPresident Joe Biden on Tuesday urged consumers to check if they’re eligible for compensation as cascading airline delays have disrupted holiday travel across the country.\n\n“Our Administration is working to ensure airlines are held accountable,” Biden tweeted.\n\nThe US Department of Transportation said it is investigating.\n\n“USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service,” the agency tweeted. “The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”\n\nTo recover, Jordan told the Wall Street Journal the company plans to operate just over a third of its schedule in upcoming days to give itself the ability for crews to get into the right positions.\n\nNot Southwest’s first rodeo\n\nIf this is all ringing a bell, that’s because this isn’t the first time Southwest’s service melted down in epic fashion. In October 2021, Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights over a four-day period, costing the airline $75 million.\n\nSouthwest blamed that service meltdown on a combination of bad weather in Florida, a brief problem with air traffic control in the area and a lack of available staff to adjust to those problems. It has admitted it was having service problems caused by short staffing even before the thousands of canceled flights stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers.\n\nSimilar to this month’s service mayhem, Southwest fared far worse than its competitors last October. While Southwest canceled hundreds of flights in the days following the peak of October’s disruption, competitors quickly returned to normal service.\n\nLater that month, on a call with Wall Street analysts, then-CEO Gary Kelly said the company had made adjustments to prevent a similar meltdown in the future.\n\n“We have reined in our capacity plans to adjust to the current staffing environment, and our ontime performance has improved, accordingly,” said Kelly on October 21. “We are aggressively hiring to a goal of approximately 5,000 new employees by the end of this year, and we are currently more than halfway toward that goal.”\n\nAnd, just like the latest disruption, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association claimed the cancellations were due to “management’s poor planning.”\n\n– CNN’s Ross Levitt contributed to this report", "authors": ["David Goldman"], "publish_date": "2022/12/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2020/04/30/turtle-derby-cleaner-subways-zoom-meeting-hacked-news-around-states/111646856/", "title": "50 States", "text": "From USA TODAY Network and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: The Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives urged lawmakers to wait until summer to pass state budgets to give time to assess the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels said in a news conference that it is difficult to craft a budget when the state is still trying to assess the pandemic’s impact on revenue, small businesses, schools, unemployment and other factors. “Moving forward when there are more questions than answers isn’t just illogical, it’s fiscally irresponsible and it’s just bad public policy,” Daniels said. Legislative leaders plan to resume the session on May 4. They said the priority will be passing the two state budgets for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Daniels said it would be better to wait until income tax collections are received in July so the state isn’t “budgeting in the the blind.”\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: Four Alaska oil field service companies have alerted state officials that they will lay off workers at their North Slope operations after oil prices crashed and drilling activity declined because of the coronavirus pandemic. The job cuts include 63 layoffs at Baker Hughes Co., 81 at Schlumberger Technology Corp., about 80 at Halliburton Energy Services Inc. and more than 50 at the Peak Oilfield Service Co., Alaska’s Energy Desk reported Wednesday.The companies sent the layoff notices to the state officials over the past month and the most recent notice was filed Monday. The layoffs include heavy equipment operators, engineers, technicians and mechanics, the notices said. Companies providing oil field services and equipment nationwide are cutting jobs and bracing for bankruptcy filings as the pandemic delivers a devastating blow to the oil and gas industry. Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and Halliburton have dismissed workers and slashed spending at operations across the globe.\n\nArizona\n\nTucson:Three truckloads carrying thousands of pounds of assorted fruits and vegetables made their way Wednesday from the U.S.-Mexico border to three Indian communities in northern Arizona to help feed families struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Arizona National Guard members loaded the donated produce Wednesday morning from a warehouse in Nogales, then drove the three refrigerated trucks up north. The trio was destined for the Navajo, Hopi and White Mountain Apache tribes in northeastern Arizona. Bruce Bracker, chairman of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in Nogales, said it’s an example of Arizona rural communities looking after one another during a trying time. Distributors of imported Mexican produce in Nogales donated the food, storage space and the refrigerated trucks to get the supplies to some of the communities hardest hit by the pandemic. The Navajo Nation, in particular, has been hit hard by the pandemic. As of Wednesday afternoon, the tribe reported at least 1,873 positive cases and 60 deaths. Although the reservation spans four states, tribal data shows that most of the cases are in Arizona. Jesse Thompson, chairman of the Navajo County Board of Supervisors, expressed his gratitude. He said the donated produce would make a big difference to members of the three tribal communities in his county.\n\nArkansas\n\nTown: Arkansas restaurants can reopen their dining rooms starting May 11, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said as he began lifting business restrictions imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Hutchinson said restaurants, which have only been allowed to sell food via carryout, curbside and delivery since March 20, will be limited to 33% occupancy and will face other social distancing restrictions. “That’s where we need to start at this particular time,” Hutchinson said. The Republican governor said the state will later raise the capacity limit to 67%. Hutchinson also announced a $15 million grant program that would help restaurants and other businesses comply with new coronavirus restrictions by paying for protective equipment, sanitizer and other expenses. By Wednesday night, the state had stopped taking applications for the grants after receiving more requests than funding available. Arkansas was one of a handful of states that didn’t issue a broad stay-at-home order, but it had other restrictions in place. Hutchinson has eased other limits in recent days, including a ban on elective surgeries and overnight camping in state parks.\n\nCalifornia\n\nWoodland: A homeless man accused of stealing a coronavirus test sample from a Northern California hospital has been rearrested days after he was released from jail under COVID-19 bail changes, authorities said. Shaun Lamar Moore, 40, of Davis was back in court Wednesday in Yolo County to face new charges of petty theft and misdemeanor sexual battery. Instead of the zero-bail amount he received the last time, the court set Moore’s bail at $10,000 and he remained jailed, the county district attorney’s office said. Moore was charged with attempted possession of a restricted biological agent, burglary and petty theft by false pretenses. It wasn’t clear whether Moore had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. Prosecutors contend that on April 11, Moore pretended to be a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employee who was picking up a biological sample believed to contain COVID-19 from Sutter Davis Hospital in Davis. The sample was awaiting testing and a California Department of Public Health courier arrived only minutes after Moore left, prosecutors said. The sealed sample was found hours later in a shopping cart at a pharmacy. It hadn’t been tampered with and was returned to the hospital, authorities said. Moore was arrested but then released without bail until a May hearing, although he had to wear a GPS monitor. On April 20, he was rearrested on suspicion of committing a petty theft in West Sacramento and sexual battery in Woodland, authorities said.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: Colorado’s largest prison has become the site of the state’s largest coronavirus outbreak, with 252 people testing positive as of Wednesday at the Sterling Correctional Facility. Data updated weekly by the state health department showed that 241 inmates and 11 staff members have been confirmed to have COVID-19 at the prison with about 2,500 inmates on the state’s northeastern plains. Four of the inmates have been hospitalized, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Annie Skinner said. The prison tested 472 inmates last week in order to isolate those who had the disease and minimize its spread. Prisoners have been kept in quarantine in their cells since April 14. Meals are delivered and they are only allowed out to use restrooms and showers, according to the department. Michelle Pemberton of the Northeast Colorado Health Department told The Denver Post that steps taken to protect prison staff have been effective. She said Sterling Regional MedCenter has a surge plan in place but has had no unusual concern about the effects it might see as a result of the outbreak at the prison. The second-largest outbreak in the state involves the JBS USA beef plant in Greeley, where 245 cases and five deaths have been reported.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: The state’s largest teacher’s union has urged Gov. Ned Lamont to be cautious before deciding whether to reopen schools this spring. Jeff Leake, the president of the Connecticut Education Association, wrote Thursday that the state must not bow to the pressure to reopen public schools and businesses prematurely. “Easing up on social distancing too quickly could be deadly,” he wrote. Before opening the schools, Leake said, the state must develop new protocols designed to keep students and teachers safe. He said those should include staggering start times, implementing new seating formats and changing the way students walk down the halls between periods. The governor’s executive order keeps schools closed through May 20. He has said he will make a decision within 10 days. “Let’s stay the course and continue to flatten the curve, saving the lives of our family members, friends, and neighbors,” Leake wrote. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”\n\nDelaware\n\nDover:A Zoom meeting that included state lawmakers from Delaware as well as members of Congress was hacked. The Delaware State News reported that the hacker displayed a racial slur as well as pornography. The virtual conference call was focused on helping black-owned businesses and organizations that receive federal money. The meeting was hosted by the Delaware Legislative Black Caucus, which is an informal panel of eight state lawmakers. The hacker scribbled a racist term and drew a swastika on the screen. U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt took over and urged participants not to let it bother them. “We rebuke hate, we know that there’s a bigger plan here, and it’s all about love and caring for each other as part of a large community,” she said. A sexually explicit image also appeared onscreen. The call hosts regained control of the call, which ended a few minutes later.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington:Mayor Muriel Bowser said the District will get two new hospitals to “bring equity to D.C.’s health care system.” The mayor signed new funding agreements that will include the construction of the hospitals, a 136-bed facility at St. Elizabeth’s East in Ward 8, and a 225-bed Howard University Hospital on Georgia Avenue NW in Ward 1. Funding of $306–million is available for the St. Elizabeth’s hospital, which is expected to open in 2024. Through a $225 million tax abatement provided by the District, Howard University and its new operating partner Adventist Healthcare, envision a $450 million trauma and academic teaching hospital, with plans to be complete by 2026.\n\nFlorida\n\nKey Largo: A bus driver was jailed after deputies said he chased a rider down the street and swung a metal pole at him because the rider had pulled down his coronavirus mask. The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office said a 21-year-old man boarded Denys Santos’ bus in Key Largo on Wednesday night, took a seat and pulled down his mask to talk on the phone. The man told deputies that as he was exiting, Santos used a metal pole to tap a sign saying masks are mandatory on the bus. After a brief argument, the man said he left the bus and was walking away when Santos began chasing him and swinging the pole at him. A witness confirmed his story, deputies said. Deputies pulled over Santos’ bus and found the pole. He was charged with felony aggravated assault and was being held Thursday at the Monroe County Jail. Court records do not indicate if he has an attorney.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta:Gov. Brian Kemp allowed his statewide shelter-in-place order to expire at midnight Thursday but is extending his emergency powers to June 12 and telling the elderly and medically fragile to stay at home until then. The first-term Republican governor had carved sizable loopholes in his order that applied to all 10 million Georgians and signaled it would end when he allowed some businesses to reopen last week and Monday. Social distancing requirements and bans on large gatherings remain in place. Kemp told the Associated Press in a Thursday interview that he has been pleased with how his effort to reopen some businesses – among the most aggressive in the nation – has gone in the face of a continuing COVID-19 pandemic that has sickened 26,000 people in the state and killed more than 1,100. Last week, Kemp allowed elective medical procedures to resume, and barbers, hair stylists, massage therapists, tattoo artists and bowling alleys to go back to work beginning Friday. Restaurants were allowed to begin serving diners on-site again on Monday. They and other businesses are operating under restrictions meant to retard virus transmission through May 13. But Kemp’s moves drew sharp criticism from within the state and nationwide, including multiple public rebukes from President Donald Trump.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: Mayor Kirk Caldwell said Wednesday some businesses will be allowed to restart operations beginning Friday as the city eases its emergency orders aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Public and private golf courses will be allowed to reopen, as long as patrons observe social distancing requirements. Car dealers would be allowed to resume operations by appointment. Pet groomers who provide service on a mobile basis and do not interact with human customers can also restart. The order will remain in effect through May 18. Caldwell said the city, the governor and the other county mayors were working to determine how to keep everyone safe. The mayor made his announcement after Gov. David Ige approved the rule changes. Ige told a news conference that officials were discussing allowing hair salons to resume operations but noted it’s a business with a high level of contact between people and thus carries a high risk of spreading the disease.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A committee helping oversee Idaho’s $1.25 billion share of the federal government’s $2.2 trillion coronavirus rescue package on Wednesday voted to distribute money to local governments based on population. The Coronavirus Financial Advisory Committee also unanimously approved caps on how much state agencies will receive. The recommendations that add up to about $150 million now go to Republican Gov. Brad Little for his consideration. Little earlier this month formed the 14-member committee that’s headed by his budget chief, Alex Adams. The committee is planning to meet Friday to look at providing economic support for small businesses. “You’ll see us move quickly on that,” Adams said. It also is looking at using some of the money to improve broadband infrastructure to help schools with distance learning, as well as businesses that have employees working from home. Committee member Seth Grigg, executive director of the Idaho Association of Counties, said counties were comfortable with the population-based approach. “Cities are on board as well,” said committee member John Evans, the mayor of Garden City.\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Police officials said they will issue a citation in connection with a wedding party at a North Side residence last week that spilled into the street in violation of efforts to fight the spread of the new coronavirus. The Chicago Tribune reported a video of the April 23 party showed several dozen revelers, all white with some wearing masks, dancing to loud music before officers enforcing Illinois’ stay-at-home orders broke up the crowd. No citation was issued at the time. The announcement that a citation would be issued came two days after police ticketed the owner of the northwest side home where they broke up a large gathering of young blacks over the weekend. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Wednesday both incidents should be treated “exactly the same.” “We can’t tolerate it anywhere. It’s not just the black millennials,” Lightfoot said. ”It’s a problem wherever it rears its head.” Police didn’t explain why it was taking longer to issue a citation for the North Side party than for the weekend event. “While officers are provided with enforcement discretion in certain aspects, enforcement of the statewide stay-at-home order is expected to be universal, regardless of neighborhood, community or district,” said Chicago police spokesman Luis Agostini. Janeal Wright, 26, who threw the weekend party captured on Facebook live and prompting the ire of politicians and others, issued an apology Wednesday. He said the party was thrown to honor two friends killed in gun violence in 2018.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: A series of flyovers by the Indiana Air National Guard’s 122nd Fighter Wing in several central Indiana cities has been postponed to Saturday because of weather. The flyovers by four A-10 Thunderbolts are intended to salute hospitals and to lift morale during the coronavirus pandemic, officials said. The flyovers now are scheduled for downtown Terre Haute at 11:35 a.m., the Johnson Armory near Franklin at 11:50, then, minutes later, Community Hospital East, St. Vincent Hospital in Carmel, the VA Hospital and University Hospital in downtown Indianapolis, the Lawrence Armory, downtown Anderson at 12:05 p.m., then downtown Muncie, and the Marion VA hospital.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: The Iowa Legislative Council voted unanimously Wednesday to continue the suspension of the legislative session until at least May 15. Meeting by telephone, the 24-member council agreed to reconvene at 10 a.m. May 15 unless it meets and sets a different date before then. The council, which makes rules when the legislative body is not in session, has suspended the session since March. House Speaker Pat Grassley and Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver faced questions by Democratic senators about the criteria they’re using to evaluate whether it’s safe for lawmakers to come back to the Capitol and how the public will be able to participate given the continued concerns about the virus. Whitver said leaders are talking with Gov. Kim Reynolds and state health officials to ensure it’s safe to return. Although Iowa coronavirus cases continue to rise and the state hasn’t yet reached a peak, Reynolds has begun to allow some businesses in some counties to reopen. Democratic leaders have asked that all those entering the Capitol undergo a health screening, use face coverings and hand sanitizer before entering the chamber and that social distancing be enforced. Whitver and Grassley did not commit to those requests but said safety options were under discussion.\n\nKansas\n\nWichita: Spirit AeroSystems is offering voluntary layoffs to all of its union-covered technical and professional workers in Wichita as the company continues to respond to the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX and the coronavirus pandemic. It wasn’t immediately clear how many jobs will be affected by the move, which was announced in an email to employees Wednesday night, The Wichita Eagle reported. The final day of work for those who take the buyout will be no later than May 14. Last year, the employees’ union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, represented more than 1,600 technical and professional workers at Spirit, but the company has since announced several layoffs, early retirement offers and furloughs. The announcement came after Boeing said Wednesday it would cut its workforce by 10% as the demand for new airplanes continues to drop during the pandemic. Spirit spirit also is struggling because it makes about 70% of the Boeing 737 MAX, which was grounded last spring after two deadly crashes. The new voluntary layoffs are a “first step” in the company’s plans to deal with Boeing’s announcement, according to the email from Spirit CEO Tom Gentile.\n\nKentucky\n\nLouisville:The first Saturday in May has yielded to the legs of a bunch of slowpokes: Seattle Slow headlines a field of turtles will race in the Kentucky Turtle Derby. With Old Forester bourbon signed on as a sponsor, Saturday’s race will run at 7 p.m. on YouTube.com/OldForester. The sounds might be familiar for Derby fans: Triple Crown announcer Larry Collmus is calling the race and bugler Steve Buttleman will serenade viewers before the turtles take off. The race is just one more offbeat sport that has had a moment during the coronvirus pandemic. The Derby, America’s longest continuously held sporting event, had been scheduled for May 2. It will now be run Sept. 5, kicking off Labor Day weekend. It’s the first time the Derby won’t be held on its traditional first Saturday in May since 1945, when it was run June 9. The federal government suspended horse racing nationwide for most of the first half of the year before World War II ended in early May, but not in time to hold the first leg of the Triple Crown that month. Looking for a slower substitute, the first Kentucky Turtle Derby was hatched. The event went down like this: 20 turtles were herded into seven qualifying races and the winners went on to compete in a 20-foot finale. The Kentucky Derby Museum reported that Broken Spring paid $2.50 on his victory and $8,000 was raised to support a local children’s health charity.\n\nLouisiana\n\nCentral: A Louisiana police department has been bombarded by callers looking to voice their support of a pastor who was accused of attempting to hit someone with his church bus while violating a ban on mass gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic, police said Wednesday. In a Facebook post, police in the Baton Rouge suburb of Central apologized to residents who couldn’t get through to the agency. Officials said a huge amount of calls supporting Life Tabernacle Church Pastor Tony Spell have tied up the phone lines. Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran said Spell’s mother, Magi, shared the department’s phone number on social media and encouraged people to inundate the line with calls. Corcoran said the phone number is the department’s only line and residents need it to request assistance. He told residents to keep calling if they need help or, in the event of an emergency, to call 911. Spell was arrested April 21 and charged with assault after he admitted to driving his church bus toward a man protesting Spell’s decision to hold mass gatherings in defiance of public health orders during the coronavirus pandemic. Spell was placed on house arrest and on Sunday violated both orders by again holding a church service. District Attorney Hillar Moore III said his office didn’t plan to pursue the matter.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: A Maine company that makes specialized swabs for coronavirus testing is teaming with construction company Cianbro and Navy shipbuilder Bath Iron Works to double production, officials said Thursday. The Trump administration is providing $75.5 million to Guilford-based Puritan Medical Products through the Defense Production Act to boost production of the swabs, which are needed to ramp up testing. Cianbro is providing a building in Pittsfield and help setting up the production line, and Bath Iron Works is making 30 machines Puritan needs to increase production, company officials said. Puritan’s production will double to 40 million of the swabs per month through the partnership, said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins. The effort will create as many as 150 jobs in Pittsfield on top of the 300 to 500 workers already employed by Puritan in Guilford, officials said. The swabs that are produced by Puritan for coronavirus testing are longer than most swabs and have a synthetic material on the end. They’re used for nasal swabs for tests for the coronoavirus. Puritan is one of two manufacturers in the world that make the specialized swabs in large numbers. The other is in Italy.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: Several pounds of free frozen chicken were delivered Wednesday to residents of Baltimore’s west side by street vendors who usually sell produce from horse-drawn carts. Baltimore-based distributor Holly Poultry donated 2,000 pounds of chicken to the University of Maryland-Baltimore’s Community Engagement Center to assist residents for whom it might be difficult to go to a grocery store amid the coronavirus pandemic. The center partnered with the Southwest Baltimore’s Arabber Preservation Society to deliver the chicken door-to-door. Anthony Savoy wore blue disposable gloves and a face mask as he pulled his horse-drawn cart along streets in West Baltimore. Much like his yell when selling fruits and vegetables, Savoy’s yell cried “free chicken.” Residents at one intersection ran up to a cart and lined up while another Arabber handed out a bag of frozen chicken and a bag of hot dog buns to each person. He turned away a woman who was not wearing a mask or gloves and told the crowd everyone needed to be protected. The woman returned and chased the cart while putting on her gloves and mask before receiving the food. The university estimated the distributor’s donation will help 900 families.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: Many of the protective face masks distributed by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency in the fight against the new coronavirus were deficient, according to a published report. The state last week began notifying police departments, nursing homes and other recipients that recent tests by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists revealed that some of the masks provide little protection, The Boston Globe reported Thursday. Although the tests showed some of the masks filtered out more than 90% of airborne particles, none performed as well as the U.S. industry standard N95 mask, which filters out at least 95% of airborne particles, according to the publicly posted results. One type of mask distributed by the state filtered only about 28% of airborne particles, according to the results. According to state data, all of the respirator masks distributed to public safety entities were from China and flown to the U.S. on the New England Patriots’ plane in early April. The MIT tests were performed on all China-made masks, said Sharon Torgerson, a spokeswoman for the state’s COVID-19 Response Command Center.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit:A handful of loved ones in a chapel on Detroit’s west side and hundreds of mourners participating online said goodbye Thursday to the daughter of a police officer and firefighter who is Michigan’s youngest victim in the coronavirus pandemic so far. The reality of the public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Detroit residents was clear in the livestreamed service for 5-year-old Skylar Herbert, who died April 19 after complications from the virus. In other times, her family’s church would have been packed with mourners bidding Skylar farewell. But only about a dozen family members could be seen in the first two pews at the James H. Cole funeral home. Social distancing guidelines prevented more from attending, and each mourner wore a mask, as did the funeral home staff, the pastor and the line of flower bearers. About 800 people viewed the livestream of Skylar’s funeral as the eulogy was read. Two video screens played a montage of photos of the girl and her family to gospel music. A bouquet of pink flowers spelled out her name. After Skylar’s death, Mayor Mike Duggan called her “a real daughter of the city of Detroit.” Skylar’s mother, LaVondria Herbert, has been a Detroit police officer for 25 years, and Skylar’s father, Ebbie, a firefighter of 18 years.\n\nMinnesota\n\nMinneapolis: Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to climb in Minnesota, but the state is making progress toward more testing, new figures Thursday from the Minnesota Department of Health showed. The department reported 24 new deaths to raise Minnesota’s death toll to 343. A new one-day high of 492 confirmed cases pushed the state’s total to 5,136. And a daily high of 3,532 new tests brought the total to 70,276. Officials have warned that the case count will swell as testing accelerates. Gov. Tim Walz last week announced a partnership with the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic to expand the state’s testing capacity to 20,000 daily within a few weeks. The department also reported that 365 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Thursday, up 45 from Wednesday, and 130 of them were in intensive care, up 11 from the day before. Health officials said the real number of Minnesotans infected with the coronavirus is likely much higher because most people don’t get tested, and studies suggested that people can be infected without feeling sick\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: Gov. Tate Reeves said he will ask state lawmakers to provide legal protection for businesses that might be sued if they reopen and customers or employees become ill with COVID-19. Reeves said he does not think he could provide liability protection through an executive order. The Legislature is scheduled to return to the Capitol on May 18 to restart its session that was put on hold in mid-March because of the pandemic. Reeves was also asked Wednesday whether Mississippi will cut off unemployment payments for people who choose not to return to work because they are concerned about contracting the highly contagious virus. The governor said he strongly encourages people to return to their jobs when possible. He noted that a federal boost to unemployment payments because of the virus expires at the end of July. Reeves said his “safer at home” order, in effect until the morning of May 11, requires people who are medically vulnerable to remain home. He said that category of people, and people 65 or older, “need to work with their employer and try to do the right thing” about deciding when to return to work.\n\nMissouri\n\nColumbia: Advocates for state workers on Thursday called on Gov. Mike Parson to do more to protect employees from the new coronavirus. Union leaders, Democratic state lawmakers and other advocates for worker rights want no-strings-attached premium pay for workers, more N95 masks and the chance for more employees to work from home. Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees for Missouri, Kansas and Iowa, said many workers are getting only cloth face masks at veterans homes and mental health centers where people have tested positive for COVID-19. “No public employee should have to give up their life to provide the service that is essential to the citizens of Missouri, or any state. Period,” Homan said. “Get the PPE equipment to those that need it, and quit calling a stupid cloth mask personal protective equipment.” A request for comment to Parson’s spokeswoman wasn’t immediately returned Thursday. Parson’s administration is offering state employees who show up for work at places where someone has tested positive for the coronavirus an additional $250 per paycheck as long as they don’t miss any days. But Democratic Rep. Keri Ingle of Lee’s Summit called that “a gesture at best.” Ingle said that policy encourages people to come to work sick. She said all state workers should be getting premium pay, and any workers who contract the virus should get two weeks of paid leave without penalty. Missouri NAACP President Rod Chapel also said state employees should get free COVID-19 testing before they return to work and members of the public should have their temperatures checked before coming face-to-face with state workers.\n\nMontana\n\nGreat Falls:The Great Falls Public Schools Board of Trustees will be meeting at noon on Friday to make its final decisions on reopening schools, graduation and discuss other COVID-19-related board policies. The meeting was originally scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Monday. Friday’s meeting will not be open for in-person public participation, but can be livestreamed on the GFPS Facebook page. Public comment can be sent via email to superintendent@gfps.k12.mt.us and must include the name and address of the submitter to be read and added to the public record. The complete board meeting agenda can be found online at gfps.k12.mt.us/school-board. Earlier this week, the board discussed the issue of reopening schools before the end of the school year. The district invited guests to weigh in on what steps would need to be taken in order to open schools in accordance with recommendations outlined by Gov. Steve Bullock last week. Following Bullock’s announcement of the phased reopening of the state, the school district asked parents for feedback about the school district reopening before the end of the school year. According to Superintendent Tom Moore, 5,433 parents responded to the survey and 71% indicated that they would keep their child at home and 29% said they would send their child to school. Trisha Gardner, the Cascade City-County Health Department’s health officer, told board members that Bullock’s plan recommends health screenings be performed on everyone coming into schools and that students and staff wear face masks for the duration of the day.\n\nNebraska\n\nDakota City: Tyson Foods said Thursday that it was temporarily suspending operations at a Nebraska beef processing plant that serves as the largest employer for neighboring Sioux City, Iowa, after a surge of coronavirus cases in the area. Tyson announced in a news release that it would close the Dakota City plant Friday through Monday to perform a deep cleaning of the facility. State health officials in recent days have reported hundreds of new coronavirus cases in Dakota County, where the plant is located, and Woodbury County in Iowa, where Sioux City is located. Tyson previously disclosed that some workers at the plant had tested positive for the virus, but it has not said how many. The Arkansas-based company said it was screening Dakota City employees for the virus this week with the help of the Nebraska National Guard. The Dakota City facility is one of the largest beef processing plants in the country, employing about 4,300 people. The move follows recent closures of other meat processing facilities across the country because of the virus, which spreads rapidly among workers who often stand shoulder-to-shoulder on production lines.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas:Gov. Steve Sisolak is extending his directive asking people to stay at home to limit the spread of coronavirus until May 15. But he will ease restrictions on other outdoor activities and some businesses starting Friday. Sisolak’s office said Wednesday night that he would allow starting May 1 retail businesses and marijuana dispensaries to offer curbside pickup, as restaurants have been doing. He will also allow drive-in church and other religious services, as long participants stay in their cars and maintain at least 6 feet of distance from those outside their household. The governor said he was also again allowing golf courses, pickleball and tennis courts to open Friday, as long as they can do so safely. Frustrated Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Sisolak’s office Wednesday morning seeking definitive timelines for more economic activity to resume and a bipartisan task force to come up with a reopening strategy. They also want more workers hired and shifting of existing government workers to handle the crush of unemployment claims.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nConcord: A cargo plane carrying more than 110,000 pounds of personal protective equipment to New Hampshire includes 4.5 million masks the state purchased for VA hospitals nationwide, Gov. Chris Sununu said Thursday. The shipment left Shanghai, China, on Wednesday and is expected to arrive Thursday afternoon. The masks will be sent to the VA for their distribution, said Sununu, a Republican. The VA will reimburse the state. “When VA Secretary Robert Wilkie reached out to me I knew this was a mission New Hampshire could take on,” Sununu said in a news release Thursday. “We owe those on the front lines taking care of our veterans the protection they deserve.” Wilkie said his department is proud to work with the state “as part of our ongoing effort to ensure our hospitals have access to the equipment they need to take care of our nation’s veterans.” The news release said the shipment was secured with the help of inventor Dean Kamen and others. Kamen had assisted with a previous cargo of PPE for New Hampshire.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nAtlantic City: The city’s casinos are teaming with a hospital system to consult on protocols and best practices regarding the new coronavirus before the casinos reopen. No date has been set for the nine casinos to reopen. But The Casino Association of New Jersey said Wednesday it is working with AtlantiCare to share information on the virus and make recommendations, including lessons the health care system has learned in its own hospitals. Neither side gave specifics about things the casinos will do to protect guests and workers from the virus, but casino executives across the country are considering various measures including having everyone wear masks, staggering slot machines, more frequent cleaning and possibly using plexiglass barriers to enforce separation on the casino floor.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nAlbuquerque: The state’s largest Catholic diocese has filed a complaint against the U.S. Small Business Administration over its inability to apply for federal aid meant to help businesses affected by the coronavirus outbreak. The Archdiocese of Santa Fe claimed the low-interest loan applications that entities must complete state those businesses involved in bankruptcy proceedings will not be approved. The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in 2018 in the wake of clergy sex abuse lawsuits that began decades earlier. The archdiocese said it’s struggling to make payroll because parishes haven’t been able to gather collections during Mass since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a public health order prohibiting gatherings. Church officials said most of their revenue comes from collections, especially during Holy Week and Easter Sunday. Archdiocese spokeswoman Celine Radigan said in a statement that the pandemic and its unknown trajectory is having a significant effect on the organization’s mission to “safeguard the sanctity of life and provide pastoral care and critical resources” to more than 90 parishes, 226 missions and 16 Catholic schools. Without access to the low-interest loans and federal aid, the archdiocese said it might be forced to furlough essential employees. Still, Archbishop John C. Wester was telling parishioners to “stay the course” and heed the advice of medical and public health experts.\n\nNew York\n\nNew York City: The city will shut down subway service each day from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. to increase cleaning of trains and stations during the coronavirus crisis, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday. The announcement came two days after he called conditions in the system “disgusting.” Subway trains, which had been disinfected at least once every 72 hours, will be cleaned once every 24 hours starting May 6, Cuomo said. Buses, vans and other alternative transportation will be provided at no charge for essential workers to get around while the system is closed, he said. Cuomo said the increased cleaning is a “daunting challenge,” but vital to keeping the subways safe as it continues to be a place of high density while much of the rest of society practices social distancing. Images posted on social media in recent weeks have showed packed subway cars. Dozens of transit employees have died of the new coronavirus and the system has become a haven for homeless people during the crisis. Subway ridership has plunged by 92% since the start of the pandemic, and most of the people commuting are health care workers, first responders and other front-line workers who’ve been keeping the city running. The cleaning shutdown affects the slowest part of the day for the subway system, in terms of ridership. Around 10,000 people ride the system during that period of time, Cuomo said. Commuter trains serving Long Island and the city’s northern suburbs will also be disinfected every 24 hours, he said.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: College students in North Carolina are suing universities in hopes of getting reimbursements for tuition and fees after campuses shut down and moved classes online during the coronavirus pandemic. The Raleigh News & Observer reported Tuesday that the institutions that are being sued include schools in the University of North Carolina system. Students said in the lawsuits that universities made the right decision to shut down classes. But they claim that they were deprived of a college experience that includes in-person instruction, access to campus facilities and student activities. East Carolina University and UNC-Asheville said they are aware of the complaint and declined to comment on pending litigation. UNC System spokesman Josh Ellis and a UNC-Charlotte spokesperson also declined to comment. The UNC System has started to distribute prorated reimbursements for unused housing and dining services.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nBismarck: The North Dakota Highway Patrol said it will increase patrols to catch intoxicated drivers after most restrictions are lifted on bars, restaurants and other businesses. Troopers said in a statement the increased patrols would run Friday through Sunday and are being done “to remove impaired drivers from the road.” Gov Doug Burgum intends to lift restrictions on most businesses beginning Friday, saying the state has made significant progress to contain the spread of the coronavirus.\n\nOhio\n\nColumbus: Two prison employees and 27 Ohio prison inmates have died from COVID-19, according to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. A total of 3,890 inmates have tested positive, but the prisons agency has only conducted universal testing at three facilities to date, leaving actual positive cases up in the air. Correctional officers are being pushed to the brink, working multiple stretches of 16-hour shifts with many colleagues out sick and getting by with the bare minimum of personal protective equipment, especially masks, said Brian Miller, a guard at hard-hit Marion Correctional Institution who is out recovering from COVID-19. The prisons agency has two medical units in Columbus, including one at the Ohio State medical center, and guards there are overwhelmed as their numbers shrink even as the ranks of sick inmates needing treatment soar, said Michael Rider, a guard at the Ohio State facility and the Franklin Medical Center. Prisons director Annette Chambers-Smith said the system started planning for a pandemic after the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, when she was the department’s health director. Once the coronavirus hit, the system prohibited prison visitors early on, stopped movement between prisons, took measures to produce and acquire personal protective equipment, and stepped up sanitation measures, among many efforts.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: Some Oklahoma businesses remain closed out of fear of being exposed to the new coronavirus, despite being allowed to reopen. Businesses such as barber shops, hair and nail salons, and spas began reopening April 24 in many cities. Gov. Kevin Stitt said they could resume business as long as they followed social distancing and sanitation guidelines. But massage therapist Syd Lowery in Norman said she will remain closed. “It’s a little terrifying to be honest. I work for myself, I go to peoples’ homes. … I don’t think we’re ready to reopen,” Lowery said, adding that massage therapy is “the opposite of social distancing.” In Oklahoma City, Zio’s Italian Kitchen will reopen it’s in-house service on Friday, in accordance with the governor’s guidelines, said Jennifer Holliday, a manager at the venue. Holliday said she has no fear of being exposed through contact with customers. She believes she had the virus in February, though it was not confirmed. “I feel maybe I’ve got some antibodies built up … but it’s my job, I’ve got to do it,” Holliday said.\n\nOregon\n\nEugene: University of Oregon President Michael Schill said leaders are making plans to bring students back to campus after spring and summer terms are conducted online to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the Register-Guard reported. “I want to let you all know that we fully intend and are currently planning to be open for in-person, on-campus instruction this fall,” Schill said. He noted there remain many variables to COVID-19 outside of university control, but leaders are making adjustments with the guidance of public health officials. The plans also will comply with Gov. Kate Brown’s framework for reopening establishments throughout Oregon, Schill said. Deans and other administrators of schools and colleges are considering changes such as altering class schedules, reducing class sizes, changing room assignments for more distance and expanding online classes. Schill also noted areas of financial concern for the university, including early projections of low enrollment, and how COVID-19 could affect state funding for universities. Some ideas already circulated include a temporary pay reduction program for employees, which will continue to be discussed with employee groups, Schill said.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: More than 30 Pennsylvania hospitals got $324 million in emergency state aid to help support them during the early stages of the pandemic, the Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration said Thursday. Hospitals lost revenue as they canceled elective surgeries and appointments, while also spending enormously to get ready for a surge in coronavirus patients.The state’s Hospital Emergency Loan Program, or HELP, is providing hospitals with short-term low-interest aid diverted from unused funds originally set aside for water and sewer infrastructure projects. The money is expected to be repaid, with interest, by the end of September after hospitals receive federal aid authorized in legislation signed a month ago by President Donald Trump.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: Rhode Island’s famous Big Blue Bug has donned a face mask to pay tribute to health care workers and others on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. The painted mask on Nibbles Woodaway, the giant blue termite that overlooks Interstate 95 in Providence and serves as the mascot of pest control company Big Blue Bug Solutions, is also a reminder for everyone to wear a mask in public, company officials said. “This is our way of thanking the incredible work being done every day by front-line workers of all kinds, delivering goods and services, keeping us well, and putting their lives on the line every day for us,” CEO Brian Goldman said in a news release.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: As parts of the state begin to reopen to commerce and recreation, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott is praising Gov. Henry McMaster’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, measures that have been met with criticism from both sides of the political aisle. “I think his slow progress in trying to find a way to open South Carolina’s economy is consistent with the president’s,” Scott said Thursday during a Facebook live conversation about the state’s business community. “I think the governor has handled this entire crisis really well.” Since beginning a stair-step economic shutdown as the new coronavirus spread in March, McMaster has repeatedly stressed his desire for a swift, yet safe, financial reopening, noting the severe toll the outbreak has had on individual workers and businesses. Hotels can start reopening Friday, and the Myrtle Beach City Council passed rules prohibiting more than one person or family to an elevator and requiring the cleaning of often touched surfaces like stair rails and doorknobs once an hour. The state’s most visited beach will only allow hotels to honor previously made reservations until May 15, when they can start accepting new reservations. Last week, McMaster announced his plans to begin scaling South Carolina’s economy back up, convening a task force set up to advise him on next steps and allowing businesses previously deemed nonessential – department stores, flea markets, florists, bookstores and music shops – to reopen.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls:Several organizations representing South Dakota meatpacking plant workers have signed onto a letter asking Gov. Kristi Noem to meet with representatives of plant workers before Smithfield Foods reopens its Sioux Falls plant. Noem discussed the meatpacking plant’s role in South Dakota, its shutdown and CDC recommendations with Smithfield officials over the last month as a coronavirus outbreak of more than 800 workers occurred at the plant, which has been closed for two weeks. President Donald Trump ordered beef, pork and poultry processing plants to remain open on Tuesday under the Defense Production Act. The move came amid worries of a national meat shortage caused by plants shutting down across the country because of coronavirus outbreaks. The letter, which was sent to Noem’s office on Thursday, asked Noem to meet with representatives of the immigrants and refugee community, as well as workers at Smithfield, before the plant reopens. Representatives said they want to discuss workers’ concerns about “dangerous working conditions” inside the plant and how to protect workers during the pandemic. The letter was signed by 10 organizations and 43 individuals, including state representatives from Rapid City, Pierre and Dell Rapids. Noem said she has seen the letter and is looking into how to facilitate the request.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville:Williamson Medical Center announced plans to resume performing elective surgeries on May 4. The announcement is in response to Gov. Bill Lee’s decision to lift the suspension of elective surgeries previously in place to conserve resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elective procedures will reopen in accordance to guidelines provided by the Tennessee Hospital Association. To minimize exposure to the virus, the hospital will screen all elective surgery patients preoperatively. If patients are exhibiting symptoms consistent with COVID-19, they will be asked to reschedule their procedure. Any essential caregiver accompanying a patient will also undergo the screening process. The hospital said will continue it’s no-visitor policy with limited exceptions determined on a case-by-case basis and will also continue to evaluate all who enter the hospital.\n\nTexas\n\nHouston: Oil field services giant Halliburton has closed down two sites in Texas and laid off 240 employees in Oklahoma in response to reduced customer activity because of plummeting oil prices. Halliburton closed its Elmendorf facility and is relocating operations to field camps in southern Texas. The Houston-based company is also closing a Kilgore center and moving operations to Bossier City, Louisiana. The number of people laid off at the Elmendorf location was not immediately available. But a Texas Workforce Commission notice said 233 workers have been laid off at the Kilgore facility. The closures and layoffs are the result of the coronavirus pandemic, which has cut global demand for oil and gas marking a historic industry downturn. On Tuesday, Halliburton laid off 240 employees from a service center in Duncan, Oklahoma, according to the Oklahoma Office of Workforce Development. The company laid off 350 personnel at the same facility earlier this month. Halliburton reported losing $1 billion during the first quarter and laying off 5,000 people. The company has laid off nearly 1,500 employees from Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Louisiana in April, filings with state officials show.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: A federal judge ordered a Utah man to stop selling silver products marketed as cures for the new coronavirus. U.S. District Judge David Barlow issued a temporary restraining order Wednesday against 60-year-old Gordon Pedersen and his companies, My Doctor Suggests LLC and GP Silver LLC, The Deseret News reported. U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber filed a civil complaint against Pedersen on Monday, saying he fraudulently markets silver products as a cure for COVID-19. “The defendants have made a wide variety of false and misleading claims touting silver products as a preventative for COVID-19,” a statement from Huber’s office said. The misrepresentations include claims that “having silver in the bloodstream will ‘usher’ any coronavirus out of the body and that ‘it has been proven that alkaline structured silver will destroy all forms of viruses, (and) it will protect people from the coronavirus,’ ” the statement said. Pedersen and his companies have promoted silver products as a treatment for various diseases including arthritis, diabetes, influenza, and pneumonia since about 2014, the civil complaint said. Prosecutors said in court documents that prices on the My Doctor Suggests website go up to $299.95 for a gallon of the silver solution, a mix of water, extract from silver wire and sodium bicarbonate, commonly known as baking soda. Court documents did not list an attorney for Pederson and he did not immediately return an email message from the Associated Press seeking comment.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: The state will continue monitoring some traffic at its borders to see how many out-of-state vehicles are entering the state amid the coronavirus outbreak, though it is scaling back the effort. The monitoring started on April 1, with 38 high-priority border crossings staffed, the Bennington Banner reported. As of Tuesday, the number had dropped to 30 monitored border crossings with Canada, New Hampshire, New York and Massachusetts. At first, Vermont Department of Transportation employees were monitoring traffic 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, said Bonnie Davis, one of those workers. The shifts have been reduced to seven hours, she said this week. The data collected can be used to help determine the effect of measures to slow the spread of the virus, Gov. Phil Scott said. A “number of people” had complained that out-of-state travelers were flooding Vermont, Scott said. Since the monitoring started, the state has seen consistent travel patterns, and nothing to indicated upticks or less compliance with the stay-home order or the travel advisory, Scott’s spokeswoman Rebecca Kelley said in an email on Thursday. That led the governor to scale back the program, she said.\n\nVirginia\n\nFalls Church: A judge rejected a petition from a gym owner who sought to reopen his facilities despite an executive order requiring the closure of fitness centers and other nonessential businesses. At a hearing conducted by telephone, Circuit Court Judge Claude Worrell said Virginia law gives the governor broad authority to issue executive orders during a public health emergency like the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Merrill Hall, who owns a chain of Gold’s Gym franchises and other gyms, sued Gov. Ralph Northam in Culpeper County Circuit Court. He said the governor exceeded his authority and that the closures have him on the brink of financial ruin. Virginia Solicitor General Toby Heytens argued that Northam’s orders are reasonable considering the public health threat, and that more than 40 other states have acted similarly with regard to fitness centers. Attorney General Mark Herring, whose office defended the governor in the case, said he will continue to support “the Governor’s targeted, effective measures to slow the spread of the virus.” The case is one of several in recent weeks challenging various aspects of Northam’s executive orders shutting down activity in the state to slow the spread of the virus.\n\nWashington\n\nWallula: A Tyson Fresh Meats beef plant near the Tri-Cities will remain closed for a while longer as county health officials await test results on all of the approximately 1,400 workers. Walla Walla County health officials reported Wednesday afternoon the coronavirus test results are still pending. “Once the test results are received, positive cases will be handled by the county in which the employee resides,” said the agency, according to the Tri-City Herald. As of Wednesday, 130 people – employees and others linked to the plant outbreak – have tested positive. They include 120 residents of Benton or Franklin counties, nine in Walla Walla County and one in Umatilla County in Oregon. One Tyson worker, a 60-year-old butcher who lived in the Tri-Cities, has died\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: Gov. Jim Justice on Thursday said he is lifting the statewide stay-home order next week as part of his plan to ease coronavirus restrictions. The Republican said a new rule will go into effect Monday encouraging people to stay home but not requiring them to do so. The move coincides with the reopening of small businesses, outdoor dining at restaurants and barbers on Monday. The governor is pressing forward with an aggressive reopening plan unveiled earlier this week, though he has loosened his testing benchmark without explanation. Justice has based his plan on having the state remain under a 3% positive test rate for three days, reversing a previous goal of having new cases decline for two straight weeks. Clay Marsh, a West Virginia University official leading the state’s virus response, has said he wanted the two-week benchmark. A White House guideline for states also pushed a two-week criteria.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Wisconsin’s powerful chamber of commerce urged legislators Thursday to adopt its business reopening plan, telling an Assembly committee that Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order is crushing the economy and that the state has the coronavirus under control. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce Executive Vice President Scott Manley told the Assembly’s Republican-controlled state affairs committee that unemployment is skyrocketing and hospitals haven’t experienced an expected surge in coronavirus patients. Some areas of northern Wisconsin haven’t seen any infections. “The economic impact of shutting down our economy and keeping it shut down has been absolutely devastating, and it’s getting worse every day,” Manley said. Committee Democrats complained that Republicans orchestrated the hearing, extending invitations to speak only to business representatives and ignoring workers and health care officials. Rep. Christine Sinicki of Milwaukee said the plan appears designed to reduce unemployment rolls by giving people jobs knowing they won’t go to work because they’re too scared of the virus. Evers’ stay-at-home order is set to expire on May 26 but Republicans are growing impatient as the economy flounders. They’ve asked the state Supreme Court to strike the order down; a ruling that could come any day.\n\nWyoming\n\nCasper: Travel and tourism experts in Wyoming have estimated a $1 million loss in lodging tax revenue by the end of next year as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered travel plans across the country. The Natrona County Travel and Tourism Board was offered the estimate as one of three predictions for the county’s future tourism industry based on previous years data, the Casper Star-Tribune reported. Brook Kaufman, who leads Visit Casper, the marketing and promotion entity of the board, provided the board a worst, a moderate and a best-case scenario for the next fiscal year. In the worst-case model, the tourism agency could see a $1 million shortfall with an average hotel occupancy of no more than 40% before May 2021, at least 25% less than is considered for a normal summer, Kaufman said. In the best-case model, the county would lose $500,000.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/04/30"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_15", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/americas/boluarte-protests-peru-intl-latam/index.html", "title": "One week into office, Peru's new President Dina Boluarte battles to ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nOne week into her presidency, Peru’s new President Dina Boluarte is battling to contain widespread protests that erupted after the ousting of former President Pedro Castillo. She is the country’s sixth president in less than five years.\n\nBoluarte announced Tuesday the government will set up a crisis management committee as protests calling for political change continue across the country. The committee will be led by Pedro Angulo, President of the Council of Ministers of Peru, and will include other representatives including the heads of the defense, transport, interior and communication ministries among others, the presidency announced on Twitter Tuesday.\n\nTruck drivers wait as demonstrators block a highway to Lima while demanding early elections and the release of ousted leader Pedro Castillo, in Ica, Peru December 13, 2022. Sebastian Castaneda/Reuters\n\nDemonstrators continue to protest despite a government proposal to bring forward elections following the ouster of Peruvian leader Pedro Castillo, in Lima, Peru on December 13, 2022. Alessandro Cinque/Reuters\n\nCastillo has denied allegations of conspiracy and rebellion, following his impeachment and arrest last week.\n\nThe former president has been detained last week. His seven-day preventive detention order was due to end at 1:42 p.m. ET on Wednesday. In a handwritten letter posted on Twitter, Castillo called for supporters to gather at that time at the detention center in Lima where he is being held.\n\nHowever, a hearing to determine whether Castillo’s detention will be extended has been postponed to Thursday morning, said Judge Juan Carlos Checkley at a virtual court session on Wednesday. Checkley said that Castillo will remain detained until then.\n\nProtesters in Arequipa, Peru. Oswald Charca/Reuters\n\nThe military stand guard at an official building after demonstrations turned violent. Diego Ramos/AFP/Getty Images\n\nArmy deployed to the streets\n\nCastillo’s supporters have been protesting since his arrest and impeachment last week. As of Tuesday evening, national roads in at least 14 regions across the country have been blocked by protests, the National Police of Peru said in a statement.\n\nThe army has been deployed in Peru to protect public spaces across the country amid ongoing protests, according to a statement by Peruvian Defense Minister Luis Alberto Otárola on Tuesday evening.\n\n“The immediate protection by the Armed Forces of the strategic points of national assets, airports, hydroelectric plants and all that infrastructure that, due to its strategic value, serves to guarantee the life and subsistence of all Peruvians, has been ordered,” Otárola explained in a statement broadcast by Peru’s state-run media, Peru TV.\n\nCastillo's removal from power accelerated long-simmering political tensions in the country. Alessandro Cinque/Reuters\n\nThe defense minister also declared a state of emergency for the national road network.\n\n“We are going to assume control of the national road network throughout the country, to ensure the free transit of all Peruvians,” Otárola said.\n\nHe also said that a state of emergency has specifically been implemented in the southern cities of Arequipa and Ica, “so that the Armed Forces and the National Police can take control of the internal order.”\n\nHere’s what you need to know\n\nWhat has sparked Peru’s recent unrest?\n\nPeru was plunged into more political turmoil when Castillo was impeached and arrested on December 7, after he announced plans to dissolve Congress and install an emergency government ahead of a looming impeachment vote by lawmakers.\n\nBoluarte, his former vice president, has since become president, and on Monday proposed bringing general elections forward two years to April 2024 during a televised speech.\n\nCastillo’s removal from power accelerated long-simmering political tensions in the country. Since last week, demonstrations have erupted in cities across the country, sometimes marked by clashes with Peru’s security forces. Some are protesting in support of Castillo, while others want a total reset of the country with fresh general elections and a dissolution of Congress.\n\nWho is Pedro Castillo?\n\nElected in July 2021 by a narrow margin in a runoff, the former leftist leader promised “to govern with the people and for the people” but his short-lived presidency has largely focused on his own political survival.\n\nA former rural school teacher, Castillo survived two impeachment attempts in his first year as president and faces six ongoing investigations by the office of the National Prosecutor.\n\nHis government was mired in chaos since inauguration, with dozens of ministers appointed, replaced, sacked or resigned in little over a year – piling further pressure on the embattled president ahead of his ousting last week.\n\nCastillo has railed against the opposition for trying to remove him from the first day he was in office and accused Peru’s Attorney General, Patricia Benavides, of orchestrating what he called a new form of “coup d’état” against him.\n\nIn October, Benavides filed a constitutional complaint against him based on three of the six investigations her office had opened. The complaint allowed congress to carry out its own investigation against the former president.\n\nThe national prosecutor’s office has looked into a cascade of investigations on whether Castillo used his position to benefit himself, his family and closest allies by peddling influence to gain favor or preferential treatment, among other claims.\n\nCastillo has repeatedly denied all allegations and reiterated his willingness to cooperate with any investigation. He argues the allegations are a result of a witch-hunt against him and his family from groups that failed to accept his election victory.\n\nAre the protests violent?\n\nAt least seven people have died in the protests ongoing in Peru, according to a tweet from the health ministry on Wednesday.\n\nTwo minors are among those killed, Peru’s ombudsman’s press office said on Tuesday. And at least 47 individuals were hospitalized as a result of protests in the cities of Lima, Apurímac, Huancavelica and Arequipa, Peru’s Health Ministry tweeted.\n\nBoluarte on Tuesday called for calm to be restored to the country, and said that she had instructed police not to use any lethal arms against protesters.\n\n“Everyone has the right to protest but not to commit vandalism, burn hospitals, ambulances, police stations, assault airports, (these) are not normal protests, we have reached the extreme,” Boluarte added.\n\nWhat other disruption has the unrest caused?\n\nTrail and air travel across some regions of Peru has been affected by the demonstrations. Trains to and from Machu Picchu were suspended from Tuesday, rail operator PeruRail said in a statement.\n\n“We regret the inconvenience that these announcements generate for our passengers; however, they are due to situations beyond the control of our company and seek to prioritize the safety of passengers and workers,” the statement read.\n\nFlights have also been disrupted due to protests, with LATAM Airlines Peru announcing the temporary suspension of services to and from airports in the cities of Arequipa and Cuzco.\n\nProtesters attempted to storm the terminal at Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport in Cuzco on Monday, according to the Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation (CORPAC).\n\nSo far there have been no reports of injuries, arrests or damage to the airport, according to CORPAC.\n\nWhat do the demonstrators want?\n\nDemonstrators have called for a general election, the dissolution of Congress, and the creation of a new constituent assembly.\n\nFernando Tuesta Soldevilla, a professor of political science at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), told CNN the protests represented a violent show of anger against “everything that has accumulated in the last few years: increasing social and economic ruptures.”\n\nHe added that protesters were also demonstrating over social and environmental issues, on top of their “furious rejection of Congress.”\n\nHowever Peruvian lawmakers hold the key to calling new elections and they are unlikely to do so as they would be voting themselves out of a job, according to Tuesta Soldevilla.\n\nWill Boluarte’s ascendency bring stability?\n\nPeru has been racked with political instability in recent years, with many Peruvians calling for political change, according to a September poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies, which found 60% of those surveyed supported early elections to refresh both the presidency and Congress.\n\nIt is unclear if Boluarte’s ascendancy to the presidency can gain widespread political buy-in.\n\nBoluarte “does not have a recognized political career,” said Tuesta Soldevilla. “And without partisan support, political party or social organization behind her, she is weak from the beginning.”\n\n“Everyone knows when Dina Boluarte’s government began, but no one can be sure how long it will last,” he told CNN.\n\nBoluarte also doesn’t belong to a political party after she was expelled from Peru Libre due to internal disagreements. She would need to build bridges and achieve some consensus with the opposition in Congress to stay in office.", "authors": ["Claudia Rebaza Sophie Tanno", "Claudia Rebaza", "Sophie Tanno"], "publish_date": "2022/12/14"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/politics/us-haiti-convoy-attack/index.html", "title": "US embassy convoy attacked in Haiti | CNN Politics", "text": "CNN —\n\nA US embassy convoy was attacked in Haiti on Monday, according to a senior US official and a State Department spokesperson.\n\nA Haitian driver was slightly injured but no embassy staff were hurt, the official said.\n\n“Armed individuals fired shots at the Haitian National Police vehicles, US Embassy vehicles, and Haitian commercial vehicles this morning,” the State Department spokesperson said.\n\n“No embassy personnel were injured,” they said. “One Haitian commercial driver accompanying the convoy was injured with non-life-threatening injuries.”\n\n“We do not have any additional information at this time,” the spokesperson said.\n\nA security source in Haiti, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, confirmed that a US embassy convoy was attacked by the 400 Mawozo gang Monday.\n\nThe attack is the latest incident in a country overtaken by violent gangs and comes a year after the nation’s serving President Jovenel Moise was murdered. Port-au-Prince was the site of brutal gang battles this summer that saw whole neighborhoods set aflame, displacing thousands of families and trapping others in their homes, afraid to leave even in search of food and water.\n\nLate last month a Haitian politician, Eric Jean Baptiste was shot dead outside his home and the number of Haitians displaced by recent gang-related violence in the capital has tripled in the past five months, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) said last month.\n\nThe IOM report said more than 113,000 people were internally displaced from Port-au-Prince between June and August this year, with nearly 90,000 of them due to “urban violence linked to inter-gang, gang-police, and social conflicts.”\n\nCriminals still control or influence parts of the country’s most populous city, and kidnappings for ransom threaten residents’ day-to-day movements. In recent weeks, demonstrators in several cities called for Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s resignation in the face of high fuel prices, soaring inflation and unchecked crime.\n\nLast month, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned what he called an “absolutely nightmarish situation” in Haiti with gangs blocking the movement of fuel and other materials in the Port-au-Prince harbor. The country is facing a humanitarian crisis, while a cholera outbreak has also left dozens dead.\n\nGuterres has urged the international community to consider deploying forces to the country to address growing humanitarian and security crises in the country.\n\nBiden administration official are working with “capitals around the world to discuss the potential for a mission endorsed by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII,” State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said last week, but the makeup of any such mission remains unclear.\n\n“The status quo remains untenable. It remains untenable for the Haitian people. We hope to see continued improvement in the humanitarian situation. The actions of the Haitian National Police may lead to further improvements. But there continue to be longer-term challenges that an enabling force authorized by the UN Security Council would be able to help address,” Price said.", "authors": ["Kylie Atwood"], "publish_date": "2022/11/14"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/07/americas/dom-philips-missing-journalist-brazil-bruno-pereira-intl-latam/index.html", "title": "Search continues for pair missing in Amazon area known for illegal ...", "text": "São Paulo CNN —\n\nThe families of a British journalist and a Brazilian indigenous affairs expert are calling on Brazilian authorities to intensify their search efforts for the pair, who went missing in a remote part of the Brazilian Amazon this weekend.\n\nConcerns are growing over the fate of Dom Phillips and Bruno Araújo Pereira, who were first reported missing in the remote Javari Valley, in the far western part of Amazonas state on Sunday. They had reportedly received death threats just days prior.\n\nPhillips’s wife, Alessandra Sampaio, posted a video on Tuesday pleading for the federal government to step up their search operations, saying, “We still have a little bit of hope that we’ll find them.”\n\n“Even if they don’t find the love of my life alive, they have to be found, please,” she said.\n\nHome to thousands of indigenous people and about 16 uncontacted groups, the Javari Valley – the second largest official indigenous land in Brazil – is a patchwork of rivers and dense forest that makes access very difficult. The area has come under increased threat from illegal miners, loggers, hunters and international drug traffickers exploiting its vast network of rivers.\n\nPhillips is an Amazon specialist and long-time contributor for UK newspaper The Guardian. He had traveled to the region with Pereira, a staffer on leave from the Brazilian Indigenous National Foundation (FUNAI), to conduct research for a book project on conservation efforts there.\n\nOn Sunday, the men were supposed to take a two-hour trip to Atalaia do Norte, which borders the valley and Peru. According to the Coordination of the Indigenous Organization (UNIVAJA), they never arrived.\n\nPhillips and Pereira had received death threats in the week leading up to their disappearance, UNIVAJA said.\n\nWhile the Javari Valley is under government protection, it’s considered lawless, with repeated incursions by land grabbers, illegal miners, illegal hunters and illegal fisherman. It can be a hostile environment for journalists and indigenous rights activists.\n\n“In this region, violence is advancing in an increasingly uncontrolled manner in the context of the invasion of indigenous lands and lands that belong to the state, repression of the freedom of press and the work of journalists,” UNIVAJA said in a statement.\n\nIn 2018, Phillips reported on the threats posed by illegal mining and cattle ranchers to uncontacted indigenous groups there, with Pereira at the heart of that article.\n\nSurvival International, an NGO that advocates for indigenous peoples, said that Pereira had previously received “many threats” as a result of his work as an “ally of the Indigenous struggle.”\n\nIllegal activity in the Javari Valley\n\nAntenor Vaz, a consultant for the isolated indigenous peoples group Land is Life, blames the Bolsonaro administration’s funding cuts to FUNAI – Brazil’s federal government’s indigenous agency – for contributing to the proliferation of illicit activities in the protected area.\n\n“In (2019), illicit actions from narcotrafficking and golddiggers increased in a staggering manner. This was when international drug trafficking partnered with illegal mining and logging activities,” said Vaz, who previously worked at FUNAI in the Javari Valley.\n\nIn September 2019, indigenous affairs worker Maxciel Pereira dos Santos was murdered in the same area, according to Brazil’s Public Prosecutor’s Office. In a statement, a union group representing FUNAI workers cited evidence that dos Santos’ murder was retaliation for his efforts to combating illegal commercial extraction in the Javari Valley, Reuters reported at the time.\n\nPresident Jair Bolsonaro campaigned in 2018 on opening indigenous territories to economic activities, such as mining and farming. Since he has been in power, he has made good on that promise, including effectively weakening FUNAI’s power by transferring its jurisdiction from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Agriculture Ministry.\n\nBolsonaro has long argued that the natural resources of indigenous lands must be put to use for indigenous groups’ own economic welfare and that of the country. But many indigenous groups disagree with Bolsonaro’s vision of profiting from wild lands.\n\nCommenting on the disappearance on Tuesday, Bolsonaro appeared to question the choice to venture into the isolated area.\n\n“Two people alone on a boat, in a region like that, completely wild. It is an unrecommended adventure. Anything can happen, it could be an accident, it could be that they have been executed, anything could have happened,” Bolsonaro said.\n\n“We hope and pray to God that they will be found soon,” he said, adding that the military was working “very hard.”\n\n‘Escalation of violence’\n\nLate Monday, the search and rescue operation began, after a delay attributed to a bureaucratic process earlier in the day.\n\nThe Amazon Military Command said they had deployed a team of military jungle combatants and a speedboat for the search, along with the Navy, who was seen deploying in images released on Tuesday morning.\n\nThe Amazonas state security department said they sent reinforcements to the Javari Valley on Tuesday, including divers, jungle experts, firemen, detectives, military police, and environmental police.\n\nPereira’s partner, Beatriz, and his two brothers, Max and Felipe, have pleaded for search operations to be intensified, saying in a Tuesday statement that “the safety of indigenous peoples and search teams must also be guaranteed.”\n\nPhillips’s sister, Sian Phillips, said in a video that her brother “loves the country and cares deeply about the Amazon and the people there.”\n\n“We knew it was a dangerous place, but Dom believes it is possible to safeguard the nature and the livelihood of the indigenous people,” she said”", "authors": ["Camilo Rocha Marcia Reverdosa Kara Fox", "Camilo Rocha", "Marcia Reverdosa", "Kara Fox"], "publish_date": "2022/06/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/07/asia/shinzo-abe-japan-nara-shooting-intl-hnk/index.html", "title": "Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in critical condition ...", "text": "Tokyo CNN —\n\nFormer Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in critical condition and fighting for his life after being shot in the street in broad daylight while making a campaign speech in the central city of Nara, in an attack that has shocked the nation.\n\nPrime Minister Fumio Kishida said in a press conference on Friday that Abe is receiving emergency treatment at the Nara Medical University hospital, where medical staff are fighting to save him.\n\n“This is not a forgivable act,” Kishida said. “We will comprehend the situation and take appropriate measures.”\n\nAbe’s younger brother, Japan’s Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters Abe was receiving a blood transfusion. Shortly afterward, Abe’s wife arrived at the hospital to be with her husband, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported.\n\nAn official from the Nara City Fire Department earlier confirmed to CNN that Abe was in a state of cardiopulmonary arrest, a term used to describe the sudden loss of heart function and breathing.\n\nAn aerial photo shows a man believed to be former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the stretcher at Nara Medical University Hospital in Kashihara, Nara Prefecture on July 8. Shohei Izumi/The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP\n\nAbe is the former Liberal Democratic Party leader and Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, holding office from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020, before resigning due to health reasons. Since stepping down, he has remained in the public eye and regularly appears in the media to discuss current affairs.\n\nAbe was rushed to hospital via helicopter in the aftermath of the shooting. According to police, he was believed to have been shot twice, in the chest and neck, NHK reported.\n\nA suspect, identified as Tetsuya Yamagami, a local man in his 40s, was arrested and charged with attempted murder, according to NHK. It appears the suspect used a handmade gun in the attack, though the motive remains unclear. He is being held for questioning at Nara Nishi police station, NHK reported.\n\nPhotos from the scene show the weapon on the ground, wrapped in black material.\n\nCNN has not yet been able to independently verify these reports.\n\nVideo aired on NHK and images from the scene show police wrestling a man to the ground near where the former Prime Minister was standing. Another video aired by NHK shows smoke in the air.\n\nWhat appears to be a homemade weapon on the ground near where a security officer seized a suspect believed to have shot former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of Yamatosaidaiji Station on July 8, in Nara, Japan. Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images\n\nPrime Minister Kishida, who was on a tour of duty, rushed back to his office and government ministers in various parts of the country had been urged to return to Tokyo immediately, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said.\n\n“Such barbaric behavior is unacceptable for any reason and we firmly condemn it. The government will take all possible measures to deal with the situation,” Matsuno said.\n\nHow events unfolded\n\nAbe was making a speech in support of LDP candidates ahead of the upcoming Upper House elections scheduled for Sunday. He was due to head to Kyoto and Saitama prefecture, near the capital Tokyo.\n\nVideo aired by NHK captured the moments leading up to the shooting and show Abe speaking to a small crowd in the street in front of Yamatosaidaiji Station in Nara. In subsequent video two shots can be heard.\n\nIn this aerial image, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is on a stretcher to a helicopter after being shot in front of Yamatosaidaiji Station on July 8. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images\n\nThe former Prime Minister was conscious and responsive while being transported following the shooting, police sources told NHK.\n\nImages show Abe being carried on a stretcher to a helicopter.\n\nOutpouring of global concern\n\nWorld leaders sent well wishes and messages of condolence in the wake of the shooting.\n\nThe United States Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emmanuel said in a tweet early Friday, “We are all saddened and shocked by the shooting of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.”\n\n“Abe-san has been an outstanding leader of Japan and unwavering ally of the US The US Government and American people are praying for the well-being of Abe-san, his family, & people of Japan.”\n\nFormer Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks moments before being shot in front of the Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara, Japan, on Friday, July 8. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images Abe lies on the ground after being shot. Kyodo News/AP Abe is carried to a helicopter after being shot. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images A police officer detains suspect Tetsuya Yamagami after the shooting on Friday. The Asahi Shimbun/Reuters Abe's wife, Akie, arrives in Nara on Friday before heading to the hospital where her husband was transferred. Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks to the media about Abe on Friday. Masanori Genko/AP People are silhouetted against a video screen in Tokyo showing news of Abe's death. Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images Head of University Hospital Kimihiko Kichikawa, center left, and professor of emergency medicine, Hidetada Fukushima, hold a press conference in Kashihara, Japan, where Abe was confirmed dead on Friday. Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images Newspapers carrying news of Abe's death are distributed in Tokyo on Friday. Christopher Jue/Getty Images A man lays flowers at the site where Abe was shot on Friday. Osamu Kanazawa/The Yomiuri Shimbun/Reuters Media crews gather in an area near the Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara on Friday. Kyodo News/Getty Images This aerial photo shows a man believed to be Abe on a stretcher at a hospital in Kashihara on Friday. Shohei Izumi/The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP An ambulance carries Abe from the shooting site in Nara. Kazuhiko Hirano/AP Police tackle suspect Tetsuya Yamagami on Friday. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images A television screen in Tokyo's Yurakucho area shows news of Abe's shooting on Friday. Kyodo News/Getty Images People walk near the location in Nara where Abe was shot on Friday. Kyodo/Reuters This aerial photo, taken from a Kyodo News helicopter in Nara, shows the area where Abe was shot. Kyodo News/Getty Images In pictures: Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assassinated Prev Next\n\nBritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he is “utterly appalled and saddened to hear about the despicable attack on Shinzo Abe,” while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “deeply distressed by the attack on my dear friend.”\n\nAmong those sharing messages of support and concern were US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.\n\nJapan’s low gun crime\n\nAbe’s shooting has shocked Japan, which has one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world due to its extremely strict gun control laws.\n\nIn 2018, Japan only reported nine deaths from firearms, compared with 39,740 that year in the United States, according to data compiled by the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney.\n\nUnder Japan’s firearms laws, the only guns permitted for sale are shotguns and air rifles – handguns are outlawed. But getting them is a long and complicated process.\n\nNancy Snow, Japan director of the International Security Industrial Council, told CNN that Friday’s shooting will change the country “forever.”\n\n“It’s not only rare, but it’s really culturally unfathomable,” Snow said. “The Japanese people can’t imagine having a gun culture like we have in the United States. This is a speechless moment. I really feel at a loss for words. I pray for the best for the former prime minister.”", "authors": ["Helen Regan Junko Ogura Emiko Jozuka", "Helen Regan", "Junko Ogura", "Emiko Jozuka"], "publish_date": "2022/07/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/us/venezuela-protesters-us-customs-and-border-protection-pepper-balls/index.html", "title": "US federal agents fired pepper ball projectiles at Venezuelan ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nFederal agents shot pepper balls at Venezuelan migrants who were protesting along the Rio Grande River International Boundary near downtown El Paso, Texas, on Monday after an agent was injured, according to US Customs and Border Protection.\n\nThe agency issued a statement on the incident after an El Paso Times report included a 15-second video clip showing what appeared to be Border Patrol agents on the banks of the Rio Grande using projectiles to push a crowd – some of whom were holding a Venezuelan flag – back into Mexico.\n\nVenezuelan migrants run towards Mexico after crossing into the United States as US Border Patrol agent aims his weapon during a protest against new immigration policies on October 31, 2022. Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters\n\nThe incident took place around 12:20 p.m. local time (1:20 p.m. ET) when CBP said “a group of Venezuelan nationals attempted to illegally enter the United States while protesting” along the river.\n\n“One of the protesters assaulted an agent with a flag pole. A second subject threw a rock causing injury to an agent at which time agents responded by initiating crowd control measures,” the CBP statement read, adding that the crowd control measures included “the authorized less-lethal force pepperball launching system.”\n\n“The crowd then dispersed and returned to Mexico. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional responsibility will review the incident,” the statement read.\n\nA US Border Patrol agent stands guard at the US-Mexico border on October 31, 2022. Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters\n\nThe actions near the border come amid increasing tension at the US-Mexico border following the Biden administration’s new deal with Mexican authorities that subjects Venezuelans to the Trump-era public health authority known as Title 42, which allows officials to expel migrants into Mexico after they’re apprehended at the border.\n\nOfficials say the number of Venezuelans attempting to cross the border has spiked dramatically, nearly quadrupling in the past year. This is due, in part, to poor economic conditions, food shortages and limited access to health care in Venezuela. More than 7 million Venezuelans are now living as refugees or migrants outside their country, matching Ukraine in the number of displaced people and surpassing Syria, according to the United Nations.\n\nIn the US, some Venezuelan migrants were separated from family member despite having already lived in the US and began protesting along the border.\n\nNonprofits working in the El Paso area tell CNN that hundreds of Venezuelan nationals have been camping on the Mexican banks of the Rio Grande and staying in shelters in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico – which is across the border from El Paso.\n\nThe American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement condemning the use of projectiles on migrants, calling the incident “highly alarming.”\n\n“This is the latest in a long line of abuses carried out by CBP,” the ACLU tweeted. “Our government’s failed attempts at preventing people from seeking protection in the US lead to death and suffering. The Biden administration must restore a humane process for seeking asylum.”\n\nThe Texas Civil Rights Project also issued a statement stating the organization is “appalled and disgusted” by the footage.\n\n“People with the incredible courage to seek a better life deserve to be met with dignity,” the group tweeted. “@CBP and @DHSgov should be advancing humanitarian solutions that meet people with dignity and respect, rather than bullets directed at their backs.”", "authors": ["Amir Vera Rosa Flores Priscilla Alvarez Gustavo Valdes", "Amir Vera", "Rosa Flores", "Priscilla Alvarez", "Gustavo Valdes"], "publish_date": "2022/10/31"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_16", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:20", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/12/entertainment/chadwick-boseman-barack-obama-first-time-emmy-nominees/index.html", "title": "Chadwick Boseman and Barack Obama among first-time Emmy ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe late Chadwick Boseman and former President Barack Obama are among the formidable crop of first-time nominees at the 74th Emmy Awards.\n\nNominees were announced Tuesday morning for the Emmys, which honor the best television of the year. Former winners “Succession” and “Ted Lasso” predictably swept the nominations, but there were also plenty of newcomers among them.\n\nBoseman was posthumously nominated for reprising his performance as T’Challa (aka Black Panther) in the animated Disney+ series “What If?” (Norm Macdonald and Jessica Walter also scored posthumous nominations, but they had both been nominated previously, with Walter earning a statue in 1975.)\n\nObama was nominated for outstanding narrator for the Netflix documentary series “Our Great National Parks.”\n\nFilm actors Oscar Isaac, Andrew Garfield and Amanda Seyfried earned their first Emmy nods for their roles in prestige limited series “Scenes From a Marriage,” “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “The Dropout,” respectively.\n\nMelanie Lynskey also scored her first Emmy nomination for her prickly lead performance in Showtime’s breakout drama “Yellowjackets.”\n\nTV veterans Adam Scott and Sheryl Lee Ralph were finally recognized by the Television Academy this year, earning recognition for their performances in the Apple TV+ drama “Severance” and the ABC hit “Abbott Elementary,” respectively. Ralph’s costar Janelle James was also nominated for her uproarious performance in the freshman comedy, as was the show’s creator and lead actress, Quinta Brunson.\n\nStand-up comic Jerrod Carmichael made this year’s roster, too, nominated for his “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig and his confessional special, “Rothaniel.” And Jennifer Coolidge, a longtime scene-stealer, was honored for her unhinged performance in the HBO limited series “The White Lotus.”\n\nSome of these first-time nominees may turn into first-time winners on September 12, when the Emmys will be broadcast live on NBC.", "authors": ["Scottie Andrew"], "publish_date": "2022/07/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/09/12/emmys-2022-live-updates-winners/10359429002/", "title": "Emmys 2022 recap: 'Succession,' 'Ted Lasso' win best drama, comedy", "text": "HBO reigned supreme at this year’s Emmy Awards.\n\nThe cable channel and its streaming service, HBO Max, lorded over TV’s biggest night with 12 wins presented during Monday’s ceremony. The operatic “Succession,” about power plays in a billionaire’s family, walked away with the evening’s top award for best drama series, while actresses Zendaya (“Euphoria”) and Jean Smart (“Hacks”) earned trophies for the second seasons of their respective drama and comedy series.\n\nHBO's class satire \"The White Lotus\" won the prize for best limited series, while Apple TV+'s \"Ted Lasso\" scored with outstanding comedy series.\n\nHere’s a play by play of the night:\n\nEmmys 2022: The best (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and worst (dancing) moments of the night\n\nFrom Amanda Seyfried to Zendaya:The 10 best dressed celebs at 2022 Emmy Awards\n\n'Succession' creator slights King Charles III after best drama win\n\nSelma Blair triumphantly took the stage to present the last award of the night: outstanding drama series for “Succession.” “I’m so honored to be here this evening,” said the actress, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018 and earned a standing ovation.\n\nAccepting the award, \"Succession\" creator Jesse Armstrong drew parallels to the British royal family. \"It's been a big week for successions: new king in the U.K., this (award) for us,\" Armstrong said. \"Evidently a little bit more voting involved in our winning than Prince Charles.\"\n\nEmmys 2022 winners list:'Succession,' 'Ted Lasso,' 'The White Lotus' lead night\n\n'Ted Lasso' team wins again, teases Season 3\n\nFor the second year in a row, “Ted Lasso” walked away with the trophy for outstanding comedy series. “Thank you so much to everyone who makes and watches this show,” said co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis as his castmates cheered and chattered around him.\n\n“You know, they can hear everything you’re saying – this mic is super-sensitive,” Sudeikis playfully scolded them toward the end of his speech, before promising viewers more “Ted Lasso.\" “We’ll see you for Season 3 at some point.”\n\nWho is announcing the Emmys tonight? What to know about comedian Sam Jay\n\n'Squid Game' star Lee Jung-jae makes Emmy history\n\nThe South Korean actor became the first Asian actor to win lead actor in a drama series at the Emmys. He thanked the show's creator for \"making realistic problems we all face come to life\" with \"amazing visuals,\" before he switched from English to Korean to acknowledge \"everyone watching in Korea.\"\n\nThe TV icon won her fifth career Emmy for the second season of HBO Max’s “Hacks.” During her speech, Jean Smart jokingly shaded “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” star Brosnahan, who was also nominated for best lead actress in a comedy series. \"She sent this box of these unbelievable designer cookies, they were like five pounds each,” Smart recalled. \"And I thought that was so nice and classy, until I realized that she was hoping that I wouldn’t be able to fit into a single dress in Hollywood.\"\n\nKaley Cuoco talks 'love at first sight': She makes her Emmys red carpet debut with Tom Pelphrey\n\nThe \"Euphoria\" star won her second Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series for the HBO hit, in which she plays Rue, a teenager struggling with addiction. \"My greatest wish for 'Euphoria' is that it could help heal people,\" Zendaya said during her acceptance speech, dedicating the award to everyone who's \"loved a Rue\" or been one themselves. \"I'm so grateful for your stories. I carry them with me and I carry them with her.\"\n\nQuinta Brunson wins Emmy alongside 'passed out' Jimmy Kimmel\n\nJimmy Kimmel pretended to be passed-out drunk on stage as Will Arnett presented the award for outstanding writing for a comedy series to Quinta Brunson for \"Abbott Elementary.\" \"Jimmy, wake up! I won!\" Brunson said to Kimmel, stepping over his \"sleeping\" body as she walked to the microphone. The \"Abbott\" creator went on to thank her family and friends \"in case I am not back up here again,\" along with \"the most incredible man I've ever known,\" her husband.\n\nJason Sudeikis wings it with 'Ted Lasso' speech\n\n“Ted Lasso” himself, Jason Sudeikis, took home his second Emmy for best lead actor in a comedy series for the hit Apple TV+ series. The actor/comedian said that he always rolls his eyes at people at awards shows who say they didn’t expect to win. “But I really didn’t,” Sudeikis said. “It was an amazing, amazing group that I was nominated with, so I’m not overly prepared. But I did take classes at (improv comedy theater) Second City, so I’ll go for it.”\n\nJerrod Carmichael says he's 'gonna go home' during Emmy speech\n\nShirtless and wearing a white fur coat, Jerrod Carmichael accepted the award for outstanding writing for a variety special for his deeply personal \"Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel,\" in which he came out as gay. The comedian kept his speech short, telling the crowd, \"I'm gonna go home because I can't top this right now.\"\n\nMike White references ‘Survivor’ with back-to-back wins\n\n“White Lotus” creator Mike White picked up two consecutive trophies for writing and directing a limited series. White playfully referenced popular competition show “Survivor” as he accepted the latter award, saying, “The way to stay in the game is to lower your threat level.” And with these wins, “I feel like I’ve raised my threat level. I just want to stay in the game! Don’t vote me off the island, please!”\n\nLizzo calls for representation in 'very emotional' speech\n\nLizzo appeared shocked and overwhelmed as she made her way to the podium to accept the best competition series award for Amazon’s “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls.” “I’m very emotional,” the singer said through tears, thanking the show’s contestants for “the stories that they shared. They’re not that unique, they just don’t get the platform. Let’s just tell more stories!”\n\nShe went on to recall how when she was growing up, she never saw girls like herself represented onscreen: “fat like me, Black like me, beautiful like me.” She wrapped her speech by paying tribute to her late father, saying, “Daddy, I love you.”\n\n'It's about damn time':Lizzo celebrates on-screen representation in Emmys acceptance speech\n\nThe \"Mamma Mia!\" star won her first Emmy award for best actress in a limited series for Hulu's \"The Dropout,\" her captivating portrayal of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. \"It was really hard but it was the best time of my life,\" Amanda Seyfried said in her breathless speech, ending by thanking her family \"and my dog, Finn.\"\n\nJennifer Coolidge talks pre-show 'lavender bath,' dances through playoff music\n\nJennifer Coolidge was in hilarious form when she won best supporting actress in a limited series for “White Lotus.” “I took a lavender bath tonight right before the show, and it made me swell up in my dress and I’m having a hard time speaking,” Coolidge said, earning laughs. As the Emmys’ playoff music began, she initially tried to get it to stop. (“This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I’m full! I’m full!” she insisted.) But she eventually gave up talking and just started dancing along.\n\nMartin Short takes dig at Trump with 'classified White House documents' joke\n\nMartin Short delightfully presented outstanding variety talk series to HBO's \"Last Week with John Oliver,\" but not before doing a short comedy set with his \"Only Murders in the Building\" co-stars Steve Martin and Selena Gomez. \"What a beautiful audience,\" Short said. \"I wish I could box you up and take you home like classified White House documents.\"\n\n\"Thank you so much,\" Oliver said when he got on stage. \"It is a thrill to be here and to meet Steve Martin and Martin Short in the weirdest possible way.\"\n\nKenan Thompson gets emotional during 'SNL' win\n\nNBC's \"Saturday Night Live\" once again won the award for best variety sketch series, which the show's creator Lorne Michaels accepted alongside a tearful Kenan Thompson and Kate McKinnon, who recently left the series. Michaels acknowledged the challenges of putting on the show given the pandemic, but paid tribute to the cast and crew's resilience. \"There’s something in the DNA of the show,\" Michaels said. \"When it’s 11:30 on Saturday night, we show up.\"\n\n'Ted Lasso' star Brett Goldstein gets bleeped (again)\n\nBrett Goldstein took home his second Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy for “Ted Lasso.” Accepting the award, the British actor recalled the \"hardest part of being in 'Ted Lasso'\": \"trying not to ruin the take\" because he’s too busy staring at his co-stars, \"being like, ‘God, you’re good.' \" He also got bleeped out by Emmy censors while thanking his family, after jokingly promising not to curse like he did last year.\n\n'Abbott Elementary' star Sheryl Lee Ralph sings, inspires with tearful speech\n\nIt'll be tough to compete with Sheryl Lee Ralph for best acceptance speech: The \"Abbott Elementary\" star was visibly stunned and tearful as she walked to the stage to accept best supporting actress in a comedy series. She immediately broke into song, belting Dianne Reeves' \"Endangered Species\": \"I am a woman, I am an artist / And I know where my voice belongs.\"\n\nRalph then launched into a rousing and inspiring speech, earning a standing ovation as she thanked \"Abbott\" creator/co-star Quinta Brunson, as well as her husband and kids. She also dedicated her speech to \"anyone who has ever had a dream. ... I am here to tell you that this is what believing looks like, this is what striving looks like. Don't ever give up on you.\"\n\n'This is what believing looks like':Sheryl Lee Ralph schools Emmys with 'Abbott Elementary' win\n\nJulia Garner wins third Emmy for 'Ozark'\n\n\"Ozark\" star Julia Garner picked up her third Emmy Award. The young actress had her eye on the clock as she delivered a brief speech, thanking the Netflix show's creators for writing her character of Ruth. \"She's changed my life,\" Garner said. \"I just feel really grateful.\"\n\nMatthew Macfadyen is grateful for 'bonkers' role in 'Succession'\n\n\"Modern Family\" star Sofia Vergara presented the award for best supporting actor in a drama series to Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Tom Wambsgans in HBO's \"Succession.\" \"This is such a bonkers gift of a role,\" he said, before thanking \"the most supremely talented crew and cast I can imagine,\" as well as his \"darling\" wife, actress Keely Hawes.\n\nMurray Bartlett scores early win for 'White Lotus'\n\nHBO's \"The White Lotus\" picked up its first award of the night with Murray Bartlett, who won best supporting actor in a limited series. \"I’m truly honored. Thank you for giving me one of the best experiences in my life,\" Bartlett said on stage as he acknowledged the show's cast and crew, before thanking his partner, Matt, and his mom for her \"unconditional love.\"\n\nMichael Keaton thanks the 'doubters' in night's first speech\n\nThe first award of the night was presented by Oprah Winfrey to \"Dopesick\" star Michael Keaton, who took home the trophy for best actor in a limited series. \"My face hurts from all the fake smiling I have to do,\" Keaton deadpanned, before thanking his family \"for never making me feel foolish.\" He also nodded to the people who didn't believe in him throughout his career: “I've had some doubters. But you know what? We're cool.\"\n\nKenan Thompson opens the Emmys with a TV-inspired dance\n\nHost Kenan Thompson started the ceremony by walking through the crowd in a top hat, as he waxed poetic about what television means to all of us. \"If it weren't for TV, what would we do with our free time? Read a book?\" he joked. \"No one in this room has read a book in 50 years.\"\n\nThe \"SNL\" vet then joined a slew of backup dancers for a vigorous dance medley set to famous TV theme songs: spinning an umbrella on a couch in a \"Friends\" homage, and donning a long, blond wig as the \"Game of Thrones\" theme played.\n\nBarack Obama, Adele pick up early prizes\n\nA number of this year's winners were already revealed earlier this month at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Late \"Black Panther\" star Chadwick Boseman earned a posthumous prize for outstanding character voiceover performance (Disney+'s \"What If ...?\"), while former President Barack Obama picked up outstanding narrator (Netflix's \"Our Great National Parks\"). British superstar Adele also got one step closer to EGOT status (signifying an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award winner) with an Emmy win for outstanding variety special (pre-recorded) for her CBS concert special \"Adele: One Night Only.\"\n\nContributing: Ralphie Aversa, Erin Jensen and Kelly Lawler", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/television/2021/09/20/emmys-2021-queens-gambit-set-kentucky-wins-big/8366394002/", "title": "Emmys 2021: The Queen's Gambit, set in Kentucky, wins big", "text": "Checkmate.\n\n\"The Queen's Gambit,\" the Netflix mini-series based on Kentucky writer Walter Tevis' novel of the same name has captured enough 2021 Emmy Award statuettes to rival Beth Harmon's trophy case.\n\nThe mini-series, which featured actress Anya Taylor-Joy as chess prodigy Harmon, wowed critics and was nominated for 18 Emmy Awards ahead of Sunday night's show. It ended up taking home 11 awards, including the top prize for limited series at the 2021 Emmy Awards.\n\n“The one thing that no algorithm can predict, that no billion-dollar budget can manufacture, is word of mouth,” executive producer William Horberg said onstage at the 2021 Emmy Awards. “This award is for the fans who told their friends, and who became fans who told their friends, ‘Dude, you got to watch the orphan girl chess drama.'\"\n\nMore from Emmys: The best and worst moments from the 2021 Emmy Awards\n\nThe awards show aired live on CBS Sunday where \"The Queen's Gambit\" also won Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie\n\nThe nine additional Emmy Awards were awarded prior to the show. They include:\n\nOutstanding Period and/or Character makeup (non-prosthetic)\n\nOutstanding Cinematography for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie\n\nOutstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie\n\nOutstanding Music Composition for a Limited or Anthology Series, Movie or Special (Original Dramatic Score)\n\nOutstanding Production Design for a Narrative Period or Fantasy Program (One Hour or more)\n\nOutstanding Sound Mixing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie\n\nOutstanding Period Costumes\n\nOutstanding Casting for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie\n\nOutstanding Sound Editing for a Limited or Anthology Series, Movie or Special\n\nMore:Checkmate: Lexington's 21c 'The Queen's Gambit' hotel room has chess pieces on the ceiling\n\nAnyone who has watched the uber-popular Netflix miniseries, \"The Queen's Gambit,\" (more than 62 million of you and counting) know it's loaded with references to Lexington.\n\nThe Emmy Award-winning show is based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Tevis (\"The Hustler,\" “The Color of Money,” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth”). Although originally from California, the author's family moved to Kentucky when he was in grade school. After returning from the Navy, Tevis attended the University of Kentucky.\n\nThe popularity of the show — which is set in Lexington but was not filmed in the Bluegrass State — has not been lost on the city's convention and visitors bureau.\n\n“'The Queen’s Gambit' put a spotlight on Lexington and piqued people’s interest in our community at a time when we could really use a boost,” Gathan Borden, vice president of marketing at VisitLEX, previously told the Courier Journal.\n\nSeizing on that interest, VisitLEX jumped on the idea to create \"The Queen’s Gambit Guide to Lexington.\"\n\nThe self-guided driving tour includes nine locations for fans to visit and reminisce about the story of an orphan chess prodigy, Harmon, and her quest to become the world's greatest chess player while struggling with emotional problems and drug and alcohol dependency.\n\nMore:Kentucky writer Walter Tevis, author of ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ subject of KET documentary\n\nThe most unique may The Harmon Room inside the 21c Museum Hotel in Lexington. Fans are invited to book an Instagram-worthy stay in the suite, which includes chess pieces suspended from the ceiling, so you can lay back in bed and feel like you're experiencing one of Beth's drug-induced chess game hallucinations.\n\nThe Harmon Room is a time capsule of American midcentury modern design, complete with vintage accessories, nods to the show’s most memorable moments, and characters and period furniture from private collectors and local antique shop Scout.\n\nCustom wallpaper in a pattern dubbed “The Knight’s Gambit” was designed for the project by Alex K. Mason of Ferrick Mason Inc. There are even copies of Chess Review magazine and rare chess books on loan from local retailer Black Swan Books placed around the room.\n\nReach Kirby Adams at kadams@courier-journal.com or Twitter @kirbylouisville.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/09/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/23/sport/franco-harris-immaculate-reception-anniversary-ctrp/index.html", "title": "'Immaculate Reception:' In interview hours before his death, Franco ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nFifty years after the “Immaculate Reception” and just hours before his death, Franco Harris said it “blows my mind” how he pulled off arguably the most memorable play in NFL history.\n\nIn a live interview Tuesday on “Mad Dog Unleashed” on SiriusXM radio, Harris recalled December 23, 1972, when he caught a deflected pass just before it hit the ground and ran for a playoff game-winning touchdown to lead his Pittsburgh Steelers over the Oakland Raiders.\n\nHarris said his assignment was to block but he wound up going out for a pass when the fourth-down play broke down with 22 seconds left in the game.\n\n“You know what, when I watch the film I can’t remember anything of the play past just leaving the backfield,” Harris told host Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo. “But when I see the film, and I see it in real time, it just blows my mind how quick that is … And I have no idea how I reacted so quickly, and got it and kept in stride. And even looked up a little bit to try and get the lay of the land … I’m saying, ‘How did all that happen in just those few seconds?’ It didn’t make any sense. Like, I just don’t understand it.”\n\nHarris died just days before the 50th anniversary of the catch, and the Steelers had planned to retire his No. 32 jersey during halftime of their game against the Raiders on Saturday.\n\nThe NFL Network in 2019 named the Immaculate Reception the top play in the 100 years of the league.\n\nThe play was not without controversy: There were no convincing replays to determine who deflected the ball when two opposing players collided and whether the ball actually hit the ground when Harris caught it.\n\nIn the interview, Russo said some believe that the nose of the football hit the turf, “But you’re saying that’s not the case, correct?”\n\n“I have no idea, I have no idea,” Harris said. “I remember nothing. That’s what baffles me…”\n\nRusso noted Harris was “a long way away from where the ball ricocheted.” If another Steeler had touched the ball, Harris’ catch would not have been legal.\n\n“I have no recollection of seeing the ball at all,” Harris said. “I have no visual of the ball. I have no recollection. But look at … how fast it came back.”\n\nHarry Cabluck/AP\n\n‘You don’t practice stuff like this’\n\nLooking at the film, Harris says, “I’m thinking that it could only have been” Raiders defender Jack Tatum “that the ball bounced off of” before Harris made the shoestring catch. Tatum had collided with Steelers fullback Frenchy Fuqua.\n\nIn explaining how he made the play, Harris noted that he “always had great reflexes but you don’t practice stuff like this. … So it kind of blows my mind.”\n\nThe Steelers won the game 13-7 for the team’s first-ever playoff victory but lost their next game. Still, the team went on to dominate the 1970s, winning four Super Bowls.\n\nRusso, the host, opened the interview by asking, “How are you today, OK pal?” It was likely the last interview Harris did before his death was announced on Wednesday. His cause of death was not provided.\n\n“Doing great. Fantastic,” Harris said, though he was coughing here and there. “And, like as you said, 50 years ago, and, and it still feels brand new.”\n\nHarris then went on to talk about the game-winning drive, how it started off poorly and left the Steelers in a desperate spot.\n\n“So, things didn’t go too well on those first three plays, as you know. And then it gets down to fourth down. A long way to go. 22 seconds.\n\nAnd I go into the huddle and I tell myself, ‘Franco, this will probably be the last play of the season. It was a good season. Just play it till the end.’\n\nAnd (the coach) called that 66 halfback option.”\n\nHarris’ assignment was to stay in and block.\n\nHe recalled that “there wasn’t much … adrenaline” in the huddle.\n\nWe were winning the whole game and right at the end (the Raiders) scored. It seemed more of a letdown than anything.”\n\nHarris joined the Seattle Seahawks in 1984. Barry Sweet/AP\n\nRusso noted that Harris “did block well” on the play and noticed that quarterback Terry Bradshaw was scrambling under pressure from the defense.\n\n“My thought was to release to be an outlet pass,” Harris said. “And Bradshaw, being as, you know, big and as strong as he is, you know, guys trying to bring him down, he’s able to fight them off and get the ball into the air.”\n\nHarris said when the ball was in the air, “I tell myself, right, I tell myself ‘Go to the ball, go to the ball.’”\n\nHarris said that was his instinct because that was what he was taught as a running back in college, under Joe Paterno at Penn State University.\n\n“That’s what Joe preached to us all four years at Penn State. You know, always go to the ball … And so I start taking some steps to the ball and I remember nothing after that… which blows my mind, that I have no visual, no recollection of anything until I am stiff arming (Raiders defender) Jimmy Warren, going into the end zone.”\n\nSome old-time Raiders still salty\n\nHarris noted how important it was that he didn’t dive for the ball. In those days when a player hits the ground while possessing the ball, he was officially down and could not advance it.\n\n“How lucky am I that I was conscious that, you know, catch it that low without diving for it,” Harris said.\n\nHarris said that after the players collided and the ball deflected into the air, some of the Raiders started to clap and celebrate.\n\n“And the Raiders stop, just for a few seconds, and that few seconds that they stopped gave me the head start to get into the end zone.”\n\nAll these years later, when some old-time Raiders still assert that the catch wasn’t a legal catch, Harris says he pays it no mind.\n\n“As a matter of fact,” Harris said, “I feel good that they’re still sulking about that.”", "authors": ["David J. Lopez"], "publish_date": "2022/12/23"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/super-bowl/2023/02/12/super-bowl-2023-live-updates-chiefs-eagles/11218626002/", "title": "Super Bowl 2023 score: Chiefs top Eagles 38-35 with late Mahomes ...", "text": "On one leg, Patrick Mahomes finished the job. His reward, other than resting an oft-injured ankle this postseason, is a second Lombardi Trophy for the reigning NFL MVP.\n\nThe Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 in Super Bowl 57 on Sunday, the team’s second title in four seasons. A controversial holding penalty by Eagles cornerback James Bradberry gave the Chiefs a chance to run the clock down and kick a game-winning field goal with eight seconds left, which Harrison Butker nailed from 27 yards.\n\nMahomes finished 21 of 27 for 182 yards with three touchdowns. Kansas City scored a touchdown on its first three drives of the second half after trailing at halftime 24-14.\n\nEagles quarterback Jalen Hurts was 27 of 37 for 304 yards passing, but was a force on the ground. He rushed for three touchdowns (15 carries, 70 yards) and tied the game at 35 on a two-point conversion with about five minutes left.\n\nChiefs tight end Travis Kelce (six catches, 81 yards, touchdown) bested his brother, Eagles center Jason Kelce, on the game’s biggest stage, while Chiefs coach Andy Reid defeated his former team.\n\nNFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.\n\nChiefs win Super Bowl 57:Patrick Mahomes and Co. capture second title in four seasons\n\nThis is like watching Michael Jordan in his prime. Patrick Mahomes is 27. He's on a team-friendly contract. In the five seasons he has been starter, the Chiefs have made it at least to the AFC title game. As long as Mahomes is under center, this will be the standard. He won his second Super Bowl MVP days after he won his second league MVP.\n\nMahomes had his right ankle injury reaggravated late in the second quarter when Eagles linebacker T.J. Edwards fell on it as he dragged him to the turf. Ho hum. All Mahomes did after the injury was complete 13 of 14 passes for 93 yards and a pair of scores. As if that wasn't enough, with 2:55 left to play in a tie game, he outran the Eagles defense on a 26-yard scramble that set up the game-winning field goal.\n\nRead Lorenzo Reyes' full analysis of Super Bowl 57's winners and losers here.\n\nThe Philadelphia Eagles had a 10-point lead as Rihanna took center stage at halftime. In the second half, though, Philadelphia’s advantage evaporated in the desert air.\n\nThe Chiefs erased a 24-14 halftime deficit by scoring 24 points in the second half, including 17 in the fourth quarter to win 38-35 in a Super Bowl 57 thriller.\n\n“Not up to our standards. I feel like we got a little uncharacteristic on a lot of things. I got to hand it to them, they did a good job. We just didn’t come up when it mattered. We had a shot,\" Eagles defensive end Josh Sweat told USA TODAY Sports postgame.\n\nRead Tyler Dragon's full piece breaking down the Eagles' thoughts on what went wrong.\n\nA late Philadelphia Eagles penalty sent fans and social media into a frenzy, lamenting the referees and accusing the NFL of rigging Super Bowl 57.\n\nBut the player called for holding, cornerback James Bradberry, said afterward it was the correct call.\n\n“It was a holding,\" Bradberry told reporters in the locker room after losing to the Kansas City Chiefs. \"I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.\"\n\nThat didn't stop fans of the Eagles -- and ones who were neutral for the big game -- from becoming outraged when the holding call allowed the Chiefs to run out the clock Sunday and win the Super Bowl 38-35. — Chris Bumbaca\n\nRead the what referee Carl Cheffers had to say about the play.\n\nSuper Bowl champions for the second time in four seasons, the Kansas City Chiefs seem quite ready to begin game-planning for their next opponent.\n\nHistory.\n\n\"It's a whole other feeling,\" said All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce after winning ring No. 2. \"I wanted this one more than I ever wanted a game in my life. Biggest difference is it solidifies your greatness. You can get lucky once; (this) wasn't beginner's luck. We wanted it, we took it.\n\n“You can call it a dynasty – you can call it whatever you want. All I know is we’re coming back next year. ... We're trying to get another one, I can tell you that right now.\"\n\nRead Nate Davis' full piece on what the Chiefs have accomplished.\n\nFor the second time of his career, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is a Super Bowl champion and Super Bowl MVP.\n\nRead Jarrett Bell's column on Mahomes' superhero grit and how it powered the Chiefs in Super Bowl 57.\n\nFrom the opening kickoff to the game’s final play, the broadcast duo of Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen sounded more like Super Bowl veterans — crisp, informative and prepared — than the rookies they were. And Olsen distinguished himself with his assessment of the most critical play of the game.\n\nRead our full analysis of the Super Bowl 57 broadcast here.\n\nThe grass used in State Farm Stadium during Super Bowl 57 took nearly two years and more than $800,000 to prepare for Sunday, but it wasn't without faults. The playing conditions were less than pretty.\n\nPlayers from both the Eagles and Chiefs struggled to get traction on the natural grass and slipped many times. At least half a dozen Eagles players switched cleats during the first half in an attempt to get a better grip, including quarterback Jalen Hurts, who changed from Jordan 11 cleats to Jordan 1 cleats.\n\nEagles offensive lineman Jordan Mailata, who said he's \"not a grass expert,\" described the conditions as \"pretty slippery,\" similar to \"playing on a water park.\" — Cydney Henderson\n\nSuper Bowl 57 was one of the highest-scoring Super Bowl games ever played. It was a thrilling showdown that featured numerous records either broken (longest punt return) or tied (most points scored by a player, Jalen Hurts with 20).\n\nHere is a look at the highest-scoring Super Bowls.\n\nTravis Kelce was the winner of the unofficial \"Kelce Bowl,\" as his Kansas City Chiefs defeated his brother Jason's Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl 57.\n\nBut as the Chiefs celebrated their victory and Travis Kelce gave a memorable postgame interview alongside Patrick Mahomes, he made sure to see his brother following the game, as the Kelce brothers shared an embrace and briefly spoke as the confetti fell down on State Farm Stadium.\n\nJason Kelce can be heard congratulating Travis, even cracking a smile and telling him to \"go celebrate.\" Before they part, both Kelce's told each other \"I love you.\" — Jordan Mendoza\n\nThe Super Bowl, like every other NFL game, has two halves. The Philadelphia Eagles only showed up for one of them.\n\nAfter pushing the Kansas City Chiefs to the brink and hobbling Patrick Mahomes, the Eagles imploded in the second half. They were outscored, outgained, outdisciplined – outhustled – and, as a result, they're out a Lombardi Trophy.\n\nMaybe that's harsh, given the final score was 38-35 and it took the Chiefs until the closing seconds to seal the victory. But when you have a 10-point lead, all the momentum and Mahomes barely able to run off the field at halftime, that's as close to a gimme as it gets in the NFL's biggest game.\n\nRead Nancy Armour's full column here.\n\nThe Blackest, most woke Super Bowl ever — can’t believe I wrote that since this is the Republican NFL, but here we are — started by again featuring the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” this time performed by Sheryl Lee Ralph.\n\nThen Rihanna performed at halftime. Despite once saying she wouldn’t perform in the Super Bowl halftime show because of the way the NFL treated Colin Kaepernick and protesting players, she was back, and make no mistake, Rihanna is one of the Blackest, proudest performers of our time.\n\nBut wait, it gets Blacker.\n\nSinger Babyface, a generational rhythm and blues singer, sang “America the Beautiful” before the game. He’s produced dozens of R&B hits and won 12 Grammy Awards. At this point we had the Black national anthem, Rihanna performing and two Black starting quarterbacks for the first time ever. During Black History Month. This wasn’t the Super Bowl. This was Wakanda.\n\nRead MIke Freeman's full column here.\n\nThe record for the longest punt return in Super Bowl history now belongs to Kadarius Toney.\n\nToney broke several tackles on the punt return for a 65-yard return, making it the longest punt return in Super Bowl history.\n\nThe Chiefs then scored three plays later on a Patrick Mahomes pass to Skyy Moore.\n\nThere has never been a punt return for a touchdown in Super Bowl history, but there have been multiple kickoff return TDs. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nHow excited was Andy Reid to win the Super Bowl?\n\nAndy Reid, immediately after winning his second Super Bowl, could not contain his excitement.\n\nWhen Fox sideline reporter Tom Rinaldi asked Reid how happy he was, the Kansas City Chiefs coach responded with his typical jovial sense of humor.\n\n“I could kiss you right now, but I’m not going to,” Reid told Rinaldi, as both laughed after the exchange.\n\nReid led the Chiefs to their second championship in four seasons.\n\nReid credited his offensive coordinator Eric Bienemy during his postgame interview.\n\n“Eric Bienemy was tremendous down the stretch there,” Reid said, complimenting his assistant who has been passed over for head coaching jobs several times.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nJalen Hurts ties record for points in Super Bowl\n\nThe game is not over, but Jalen Hurts has tied a Super Bowl record: most points scored in the game.\n\nIn Super Bowl 51, James White accounted for 20 in the epic 28-3 comeback the New England Patriots pulled off against the Atlanta Falcons, including the game-winning touchdown in overtime.\n\nHurts has three touchdowns on the ground (one through the air) and the two-point conversion that tied the game at 35 was the equalizer with White.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nAnd we're all tied in Super Bowl 57 after Eagles score\n\nThese Eagles will not go quietly.\n\nTrailing by eight points in the fourth quarter, Jalen Hurts converted once again on third down early in the drive with a patented sneak. He found A.J Brown on the next third down for another first. Brown and Hurts connected again for 11 yards and another first.\n\nGiven plenty of time, Hurts found DeVonta Smith streaking down the left sideline on a blown coverage. Smith could not keep his balance and remain in bounds and went out at the 2-yard line, but not before picking up 45 yards. Hurts scored on the next play via a – you guessed it – quarterback sneak.\n\nHurts then tied the game on the ensuing two-point conversion attempt on a designed run to the left, breaking tackles and persevering over the goal line to even it at 35 with 5:15 left in the game.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nKansas City continues second-half domination\n\nKadarius Toney, Super Bowl MVP?\n\nToney had two of the biggest plays for the Chiefs during the fourth quarter, his latest was a 65-yard punt return - the longest in Super Bowl history - went to Philadelphia 5-yard line with 10:11 left in the game.\n\nThree plays later the Chiefs added to their fourth-quarter lead as Patrick Mahomes found receiver Skyy Moore for a 4-yard touchdown pass, and the Chiefs took a 35-27 lead with 9:22 left in the game.\n\nToney, acquired by the Chiefs during the season, is turning out to be a pivotal move that paid off in Kansas City’s favor during the biggest game of the season. His earlier 5-yard touchdown put the Chiefs ahead in the fourth quarter.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nChiefs take first lead in Super Bowl 57\n\nThe Chiefs waiting until the fourth quarter to finally go ahead of the Philadelphia Eagles.\n\nPatrick Mahomes found receiver Kadarius Toney for a walk-in 5-yard touchdown, and kicker Harrison Butker made the extra point to put Kansas City ahead 28-27 with 12:04 left in the fourth quarter.\n\nToney went in motion toward the middle of the field, but turned quickly back to the right sidelinefor a wide-open touchdown.\n\nDuring the drive, running back Isiah Pacheco (with runs of 9 and 11 yards) and receiver Juju Smith-Schuster (with four catches for 38 yards) were instrumental for Mahomes and the Chiefs.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nReplay decision helps Eagles add to lead on Chiefs\n\nJalen Hurts could not have thrown a better ball. On third-and-14 from the Kansas City 47, Hurts dropped back on the team’s first drive of the half with a three-point lead. He found tight end Dallas Goedert near the sideline between two defenders past the sticks for what appeared to be yet another third down conversion.\n\nAlthough Goedert bobbled the ball, he regained possession in time to land both feet in bounds and the call was upheld. The challenge cost Andy Reid and the Chiefs their first timeout of the second half.\n\nPhiladelphia moved the ball inside the red zone after the play but had to settle for a field goal to make it 27-21 with 1:45 left in the third quarter.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nHurt ankle, no problem for Patrick Mahomes\n\nAfter injuring his ankle on his final play of the second quarter, Mahomes started the second half, and even ran for a 14-yard gain inside the 5-yard line on the first drive of the third quarter.\n\nMahomes led the Chiefs on a touchdown drive to start the second half, which included a low pass to tight end Travis Kelce that kept their drive alive.\n\nChiefs running back Isiah Pacheco scored on a 1-yard run to help the Chiefs trim their deficit. The Eagles are holding onto a 24-21 lead after the first possession in the second half.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nRihanna shines bright in Super Bowl halftime show\n\nRihanna has already evolved into an immensely successful singer, a business mogul with a net worth of more than $1 billion and, as of last year, a mom.\n\nOn Sunday, the multihyphenate added another accomplishment to the checklist: Super Bowl halftime headliner.\n\nTaking the State Farm Stadium stage in Glendale, Arizona, with her most visible outing in years, Rihanna stormed through a vibrant production that spotlighted her flexible R&B grooves coupled with infectious pop hooks. And, of course, her distinctive fashion style.\n\nALL OF THE LIGHTS:Rihanna stuns in spectacular Super Bowl performance\n\n- Melissa Ruggieri\n\nSuper Bowl halftime stats: Patrick Mahomes held to 89 yards passing\n\nOnly once has a team lost the Super Bowl after leading by double-digits at halftime: the Atlanta Falcons before the New England Patriots staged their famous comeback from a 28-3 deficit six years ago.\n\nThe Eagles, who lead 24-14 at the break, finished the first half with a time of possession of 21:54, leaving the Chiefs with 8:06. They ran 44 plays compared to the Chiefs’ 20 and outgained them 270-128.\n\nHere are some other statistics from the first half:\n\nNotable Eagles stats\n\nThird-down efficiency: 6-for-10,\n\nJalen Hurts: 17-for-22, 183 yards, TD; 11 rushes, 63 yards, 2 TD\n\nDeVonta Smith: six catches, 55 yards\n\nA.J Brown: three catches, 74 yards, TD\n\nNotable Chiefs stats\n\nThird-down efficiency:0-for-3\n\nPatrick Mahomes: 8-for-13, 89 yards, TD\n\nIsiah Pacheco: five carries, 28 yards\n\nTravis Kelce: three catches, 60 yards, TD\n\nBolton: three tackles, fumble recovery, TD\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nEagles take 24-14 lead at halftime after late field goal\n\nIn the NFC championship game, DeVonta Smith quickly got his team to the line of scrimmage and snapped the ball after a questionable catch on the Eagles’ first drive of their victory over the San Francisco 49ers.\n\nIt did not work against the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.\n\nA replay review late in the second quarter showed Smith did not maintain control of the ball after a catch to the Kansas City 13, and it was ruled incomplete. The Eagles tried to snap the ball right away, but since there were less than two minutes in the first half, the officials in the booth called down to the field for a review.\n\nAfter the over turn, A.J. Brown, had a 22-yard catch-and-run that put Philadelphia in field goal range. Jake Elliott connected from 35 yards out as time expired in the first half, with the Eagles taking a 24-14 advantage into the locker room.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nPatrick Mahomes limps off after appearing to re-injure ankle\n\nWell, Patrick Mahomes’ injured right ankle was looking good until it wasn’t.\n\nMahomes, who was suffered a high-ankle sprain against the Jacksonville Jaguars in the divisional playoff game, scrambled on third down shortly before halftime, and his injured right foot took the brunt of the fall after he was tackled by Eagles linebacker T.J. Edwards with 1:44 left in the second quarter.\n\nMahomes limped off the field in obvious pain and was later shown in difficulty while his ankle was being evaluated by trainers on the sidelines.\n\nEarlier in the game, Mahomes appeared to run with ease like his foot was healed after a high-ankle sprain suffered last month.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nEagles back in front on another Jalen Hurts touchdown run\n\nThe Eagles entered the Super Bowl with 35 fourth-down attempts. The 36th and 37th were the most important of the season thus far.\n\nOn fourth-and-5 from the Kansas City 44, Hurts ran to daylight and converted the first fourth down of the drive with a 28-yard carry down the right sideline. Facing a fourth-and 2, the Eagles got Kansas City to jump inside the red zone to set up a first-and-goal and Hurts scored his second rushing touchdown of the game on the next play to make it 21-14 with just over two minutes left in the second quarter.\n\nThe drive was 12 plays and took 7:19 off the clock. The Eagles are dominating time of possession. They have had the ball for 20:32, while Mahomes and Kansas City have had it for 7:08.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nChiefs erase deficit with defensive touchdown after Eagles miscue\n\nThe Eagles had a seven-point lead and were in Chiefs territory once again.\n\nInstead of putting Kansas City back on its heels, they let them back in the game.\n\nFacing a thrd-and-1 from the Chiefs’ 47, right guard Isaac Seumalo jumped early and moved the Eagles back five yards. On the next play, Hurts began to run on a quarterback keeper, but he dropped the ball and Nick Bolton – the Chiefs’ leading tackler – scooped it up and scored on a 36-yard return that tied the game.\n\nIt was the first fumble Hurts lost since Week 10 against Indianapolis and the team's first turnover of the playoffs.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nA.J. Brown puts Eagles ahead with long touchdown catch\n\nThe ability to hit the big play has been a hallmark for the Eagles offense all season.\n\nIn the Super Bowl, Brown made it.\n\nOn the first play of the second quarter, Hurts had all day in the pocket to watch Brown streak down the field and into double-coverage. Hurts threw to a place anybody who could catch the ball would have to make an adjustment.\n\nJuan Thornhill and McDuffie in coverage weren’t able. Brown did, and the Eagles regain the lead 14-7d on the 45-yard completion.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nChiefs fail to take lead as Harrison Butker field goal goes 'doink'\n\nThe Chiefs moved the ball well, but settled for a field-goal attempt when facing a fourth-and-3 at the end of their second drive. Butker’s 42-yard kick drifted left and was no good after hitting the upright, keeping the score tied at 7.\n\nThe possession by the Chiefs drive featured a stellar 22-yard pass from Mahomes to Kelce, and even some trickery from Kansas City. Kelce and receiver Juju Smith-Schuster signaled to the Chiefs sidelines like they did not know a play call, then turned around after Mahomes found running back Jerick McKinnon for a 7-yard completion on the right side.\n\nMahomes nearly threw an interception on the next play, and the Chiefs’ field-goal kick miss could come back to haunt them later this game.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nEagles RB Miles Sanders sidelined after hit on game's first play\n\nOn the first play of the game, Sanders carried for a one-yard loss. Chiefs cornerback Trent McDuffie tracked him down near the sideline and delivered a large hit, knocking the ball out of bounds.\n\nSanders, a fourth-year player from Penn State, was seen shaking his hand after the play and went into the locker room before returning to the field. Boston Scott and Kenneth Gainwell handled the ball-carrying duting in his absence. Sanders returned to the field in the second quarter.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nChiefs respond quickly to tie game against Eagles\n\nThe Chiefs did not waste any time responding to the Eagles’ first score.\n\nChiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes found who else than his favorite target, tight end Travis Kelce, for a 18-yard touchdown to tie the game at 7 with 6:57 left in the first quarter.\n\nMahomes’ first pass of the game was a 20-yard completion to Kelce. More important: Mahomes’ ankle looks great, too, after he galloped for an 8-yard run during the drive.\n\nThe Chiefs got near the red zone with a 24-yard run to the left side by running back Isaiah Pacheco.\n\nKelce also celebrated his touchdown with a dance in the end zone.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nEagles jump out to early Super Bowl lead on Jalen Hurts touchdown run\n\nThat was quick.\n\nThe Eagles received the opening kickoff and drove 75 yards in 11 plays for a touchdown on the game’s first possession. Jalen Hurts found receiver DeVonta Smith on a key third down and later hit him for 23 yards to move Philadelphia into the red zone on a run-pass option that was initially snuffed out.\n\nKenneth Gainwell initially had the score, but replay review quickly confirmed his elbow was down short of the goal line. The call was Hurts’ specialty: a quarterback sneak. Behind the Eagles’ elite offensive line, Hurts plowed ahead for six points. Extra point was good and it's Philadelphia 7-0 early.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nChiefs win Super Bowl coin toss, Eagles get ball first\n\nIf you bet on the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl coin toss, congratulations.\n\nThe Chiefs called tails. And the Chiefs won the toss. They chose to defer and will kickoff to the Eagles start the game, and then get the ball to start the second half.\n\nTails breaks a two-game streak by heads, and has been the coin toss winner in seven of the last 10 Super Bowls, according to Oddsshark.com.\n\nAt +100, one would have doubled their money picking the Chiefs to win the coin toss.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nChris Stapleton, Sheryl Lee Ralph shine with Super Bowl national anthems\n\nWith nearly as much attention paid to the music as the game during the Super Bowl, the trifecta of artists who took the field Sunday prior to kickoff knew the importance of their platform.\n\nChris Stapleton, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Babyface were tapped for the honors. Ralph singer infused the Black national anthem - \"Lift Every Voice and Sing\" - with the type of gusto exhibited during her Emmy acceptance speech last fall.\n\nBabyface followed with \"America the Beautiful\" and the festivities were capped by Stapleton's rendition of the \"Star-Spangled Banner\" that showcased his vocal skills.\n\nRIGHT NOTE:Reviewing the pregame Super Bowl singing performances\n\n- Mellissa Ruggieri\n\nEagles coach Nick Sirianni, center Jason Kelce both cry during Super Bowl national anthem\n\nAs Chris Stapleton performed the national anthem before the kick of the Super Bowl, cameras found Sirianni and Kelce, both of whom had tears in their eyes.\n\nKelce spoke about tears on the big stage after the Eagles’ Super Bowl 52 victory, saying he would find himself crying in the shower in the lead-up to that game against the New England Patriots.\n\n- Chris Bumbaca\n\nDamar Hamlin introduced on field at Super Bowl 57, speaks to Fox's Michael Strahan\n\nThe NFL continues to celebrate the remarkable recovery by Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin from cardiac arrest he suffered in a Jan. 2 game.\n\nHamlin received a warm ovation from the crowd at State Farm Stadium.\n\nEarlier, on Fox's pregame show, Hamlin spoke with Michael Strahan about what he remembered when he made that fateful tackle on Bengals WR Tee Higgins.\n\nHamlin paused for nearly nine seconds.\n\n\"That's something I don't really want to get too deep into, in the detail,\" Hamlin said. \"That's something I'm still trying to work through. Why did it happen to me?\"\n\nThe full interview will air Monday morning on ABC's \"Good Morning America.\"\n\nEagles fans boo Cowboys QB Dak Prescott pregame\n\nDallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott received a rousing ovation after being recognized as the Walter Payton Man of the Year for his philanthropy and community impact.\n\nBut not the ovation you’d think one would receive for winning one of the NFL’s highest honors.\n\nEagles fans at the Super Bowl booed Prescott, because division rivalries don’t cease even for special awards.\n\nPrescott was a good sport about the reaction he received.\n\n- Safid Deen\n\nWith injured ankle, Patrick Mahomes goes for Super Bowl win No. 2\n\nThis is the third Super Bowl start for the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback. Mahomes split his previous two appearances, beating the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 54 before losing the championship game the following season against Tom Brady and the San Francisco 49ers.\n\nMahomes’ recovery from a right high-ankle sprain in the divisional playoff and his dart to the sidelines that set up a game-winning field goal to help the Chiefs beat the Bengals in the AFC championship game on Jan. 29 only added to his growing legacy.\n\nMahomes also has a chance to further separate himself from the rest of the current pack of active quarterbacks. With Brady’s retirement, Mahomes could have more rings than any other with his second championship.\n\n— Safid Deen\n\nThree keys to victory in Super Bowl 57\n\nThe pregame hype is finally dying down and the focus of Super Bowl 57 is ready to be turned to the gridiron where it belongs.\n\nBoth the Chiefs and Eagles have been the class of their respective leagues this season, so the most important thing for either team may only be the ability to execute what they already do well.\n\nHere are three keys to winning, according to USA TODAY Sports' Tyler Dragon:\n\nEagles pass rush vs. Chiefs offensive line\n\nChiefs aerial attack vs. Eagles pass defense\n\nEagles rushing offense vs. Chiefs defense\n\nSuper Bowl X-factors: Unknown to hero?\n\nThe Super Bowl is where a relative nobody can become a household name, a place where Malcolm Butler and David Tyree were transformed from obscurity to an association with football's biggest stage, forever.\n\nThe stars will attract the attention and have the most impact on Super Bowl 57. The X-factors, however – the ones the majority of the 100-plus-million viewers do not know – will also play pivotal roles in determining who lifts the Lombardi Trophy.\n\nHere are a few who could find themselves in the spotlight on Sunday, according to USA TODAY Sports' Chris Bumbaca:\n\nEagles DT Jason Hargrave\n\nEagles RB Kenneth Gainwell\n\nChiefs OT Andrew Wylie\n\nChiefs LB Nick Bolton\n\nHow do Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts stack up?\n\nThis margin isn't as wide as you might think. Jalen Hurts, 24, is a star who is going to be a problem in the NFC for a long time. He worked with Tom House this offseason and has refined his mechanics. His ability to compromise defenses with his rushing ability has made it increasingly difficult to defend Philadelphia. And, if the Chiefs use a spy to try to limit what Hurts can do out in open space, it takes away a potential defender Kansas City can use in the secondary.\n\nAll that said, Patrick Mahomes is the most gifted passer in the NFL, possibly of all time. His arm makes it so that the Chiefs can score on any given play. And while he may not rack up rushing yards, his mobility — though it may be tested Sunday by a high ankle sprain — allows him to extend plays and find receivers who can break off their routes.\n\nAdvantage: Chiefs\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nWhere Kansas City has a potential home run hitter in Isiah Pacheco, the Eagles carry significant depth in the backfield. Philadelphia’s top three running backs — Miles Sanders, Boston Scott and Kenneth Gainwell — are all capable of taking over a game. Just look at Gainwell’s production; he averaged just 3.1 rushes per game in the regular season. In the playoffs, that number has jumped to 13 per and he has responded by leading the Eagles in rushing in both the divisional and conference championship rounds. Sanders, meanwhile, has a nose for the end zone.\n\nPacheco is explosive both rushing the ball and catching it out of the backfield, but Kansas City often doesn’t give him enough touches to be a major factor. The team also activated Clyde Edwards-Helaire (ankle) off of injured reserve and he’d provide a huge boost if he’s able to play.\n\nAdvantage: Eagles\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nThis is perhaps the one position where a team has the strongest advantage over the other. A.J. Brown and Devonta Smith are both star playmakers whose different skill sets complement each other; Brown is physical and quick and can beat defenders with power and Smith is a silky route runner who is elusive in space.\n\nOn the other side, the Chiefs have navigated their first season without Tyreek Hill quite well, with Marquez Valdes-Scantling, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Kadarius Toney making plays. Still, no Kansas City wideout eclipsed 1,000 receiving yards in the regular season. Making matters worse for the Chiefs is that they are facing several nagging injuries at the position, with Mecole Hardman placed on injured reserve. Better put this way, Mahomes and the Chiefs system elevate Smith-Schuster, Valdes-Scantling and Toney, while Brown and Smith are stars who would flourish anywhere.\n\nAdvantage: Eagles\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nDallas Goedert has been a solid and steady option for Hurts. But in 14 games this season, including the playoffs, he reached the 100-yard mark only once.\n\nTravis Kelce isn’t just in the conversation for the best tight end in football — he’s already there — he’s in the conversation for the best of all time. Kelce has secured four All-Pro nominations in the last seven seasons, he’s rewriting the record book and he has become Mahomes’ preferred target and a near-unguardable player in the middle of the field.\n\nGoedert does have a clear advantage over Kelce in run blocking; because Philadelphia sets its identity on the ground, Goedert has become a key piece in the scheme. Still, Kelce is generational.\n\nAdvantage: Chiefs\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nWho are the commentators on FOX NFL Sunday's Super Bowl pregame show?\n\nAs is the case during the regular season, Fox Sports has Curt Menefee hosting its NFL Sunday pregame show, which is being broadcast live at State Farm Stadium.\n\nProviding analysis and commentary are Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Michael Strahan and Jimmy Johnson. Joining the set for the playoffs is retired NFL tight end-turned-kicker Rob Gronkowski.\n\nReporting from around the stadium: Erin Andrews, Tom Rinaldi, Charissa Thompson and Jay Glazer.\n\nStars from every industry are descending on State Farm Stadium to watch the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles.\n\nIn the stadium early was NBA star LeBron James and his wife, Savannah.\n\nEagles superfan Bradley Cooper was also in attendance ready to cheer his team to victory.\n\nRap mogul Jay Z was spotted on the sidelines taking pictures of his daughter Blue Ivy.\n\nJuJu Smith-Schuster, Travis Kelce, Fletcher Cox make fashion statements as kickoff approaches\n\nEveryone knows what the players will be wearing when Super Bowl 57 kicks off. The Chiefs will be wearing white uniforms with red pants, red numerals and yellow trim. The Eagles will be wearing green uniforms with either green or white pants.\n\nHowever, pregame fashions can be any style and color under the rainbow, as evidenced by Chiefs WR JuJu Smith-Schuster.\n\nNot to be outdone, Chiefs TE Travis Kelce.\n\nAnd then there's Eagles DT Fletcher Cox.\n\nThis is another fascinating battle, as these are two of the top units in the NFL. The Eagles, however, have the best O-line in football. Their communication and ability to work together are unrivaled. They have two of the best players at their positions, center Jason Kelce and right tackle Lane Johnson (both of whom were first-team All-Pro selections). They bore open holes in Nick Sirianni’s zone read offense and are disciplined and clean in avoiding penalties.\n\nBut where Philadelphia has two All-Pros on its offensive line, the Chiefs have a pair of second-teamers in center Creed Humphrey and left guard Joe Thuney. Orlando Brown has been excellent after moving to left tackle and, considering this is a unit that has been remade, it has done a remarkable job of keeping Mahomes clean.\n\nAdvantage: Eagles\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nThe Eagles are five sacks in the Super Bowl from breaking the record of the 1984 Bears for total sacks in the regular and postseason combined (82). Three of Philadelphia’s starting four defensive linemen, defensive tackle Javon Hargrave and defensive ends Josh Sweat and Brandon Graham notched double-digit sack totals in the regular season, as each posted 11. The other starter, defensive tackle Fletcher Cox, is one of the game’s best interior linemen and recorded seven. The unit has depth with end Robert Quinn and tackles Linval Joseph and Ndamukong Suh coming on in relief.\n\nTo be clear, the Chiefs aren’t bad, they’re just not this good. Chris Jones is a force and the best interior lineman in football and Frank Clark can disrupt the timing and rhythm of opposing offenses. Kansas City just doesn’t have the depth or wealth of star talent to match Philadelphia in this spot.\n\nAdvantage: Eagles\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nIt’s almost unfair to consider Haason Reddick as a pure linebacker, since Philadelphia loves using him in five-man fronts, rushing off the left side of the line of scrimmage — or even at defensive tackle — so his presence is frankly more of a consideration for the defensive line. With that in mind, where this Eagles defense is weakest is at the other two linebacker spots. And, considering that linebackers and safeties are among the players asked to cover tight ends, this could be a spot where the Chiefs exploit Philadelphia, using Travis Kelce.\n\nThe Chiefs unit that included Nick Bolton and Willie Gay Jr. took some time to get settled this season, but it improved after Gay returned from suspension and as the group got healthier. They have speed and excellent range, though they are sometimes caught out of position, in part because of the relative inexperience of Bolton and Gay.\n\nAdvantage: Chiefs\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nThis is another spot in which Eagles executive vice president and general manager Howie Roseman’s aggressive moves in recent seasons have paid off. The three best players on the unit — corners James Bradberry and Darius Slay and strong safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson — were all acquired via trade or free agency. Bradberry had bounced around the league but found a home in Philadelphia’s defense, earning a second-team All-Pro nod.\n\nFor the Chiefs, cornerback L’Jarius Sneed clearing concussion protocol is a welcome sight; he doesn’t shy away from contact and actually helps out quite a bit in stopping the run along the outside. Trent McDuffie is a player who has perhaps been overlooked, though he has had a huge impact as a press corner. Rounding out the starters, at safety, Justin Reid and Juan Thornhill have become capable players. The biggest issue with the Kansas City secondary is the occasional blown coverage that can lead to chunk plays.\n\nAdvantage: Eagles\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nAs far as kicking and punting goes, this becomes tricky because where the Eagles are strong with place kicker Jake Elliott, the Chiefs are stronger with punter Tommy Townsend, a first-team all-pro. Kansas City place kicker Harrison Butker had the worst season of his career, missing six field goals for a 75% conversion rate. Still, in his last three games, Butker has converted all field goals and extra points.\n\nThe Eagles may be without punter Arryn Siposs (ankle), who has said he is ready to play. He presents an upgrade, though backup Brett Kern has been solid in relief. Where the Chiefs separate themselves is with their return men. Both Isiah Pacheco and Skyy Moore are flashes of lightning who can slip through creases and flip field position.\n\nAdvantage: Chiefs\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nThe Chiefs have the wealth of experience and Andy Reid may be the best coach not named Belichick over the last three decades. Offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy should be a head coach. And defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo has kept Kansas City’s defense competitive and loves to disguise blitzes, making it difficult for young quarterbacks to read the field.\n\nThe narrative that the Eagles have had a favorable path to the Super Bowl, while accurate, shouldn’t discount the effort and work it takes to win week in and week out. Coach Nick Sirianni’s players swear by him and offensive coordinator Shane Steichen could end up as a head coach this cycle. The zone read offense the pair have assembled requires defenses to make decisions in split seconds. Defensive line coach Tracy Rocker brings decades of experience and coordinator Jonathan Gannon oversees a unit that has taken a huge stride since last season.\n\nAdvantage: Chiefs\n\n— Lorenzo Reyes\n\nChiefs unlikely to face 49ers catastrophe if Mahomes gets hurt\n\nThe NFC championship game was a cautionary tale to NFL teams, particularly those vying for a title, about the risks of having only two quarterbacks active on game day.\n\nHowever, if catastrophe befalls the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday in Super Bowl 57, they have a plethora of emergency quarterback options – so many, that it's not immediately clear who would take snaps if presumptive MVP Patrick Mahomes and his, backup, Chad Henne, were unable to go. Obviously, that would be a worst-case scenario. But at least the AFC champs might become so wildly unpredictable that it could keep them in a game – at least temporarily.\n\n— Nate Davis\n\nEx-Broncos coach helps Eagles prepare for Chiefs offense\n\nThe Philadelphia Eagles reportedly brought in some veteran experience ahead of their Super Bowl 57 appearance against the Kansas City Chiefs.\n\nAccording to reports, the Eagles hired Vic Fangio to assist with game preparations that include self-scouting and analysis. NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport reported Fangio signed a two-week contract that is expected to expire after the Super Bowl.\n\nFangio agreed to become the Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator last month.\n\n— Jaylon Thompson\n\nFathers of Super Bowl 57 QBs wreck stereotype of absent Black dad\n\nDuring Super Bowl 57 you will see more than a game. You'll see two Black quarterbacks — raised lovingly by two Black dads (and also by their moms). You will also see one more thing: a stereotype busted.\n\nIf you're looking for the story — the often repeated one, the ever-lasting one, the stereotypical one — of the Black kid who grew up impoverished and still made it. If you're looking for the same ol' story about the Black kid without a father who overcame this and that and the other thing and golly gee, goodness gracious look at him now. Well, this Super Bowl quarterbacks story is not for you.\n\n— Mike Freeman\n\nSpecial game-day deliveries for 2 Chiefs players\n\nJust playing in the big game is already memorable enough, but two members of the Kansas City Chiefs will have even more reason to remember this Super Bowl Sunday.\n\nWhile he was busy preparing to face off against the Philadelphia Eagles, Chiefs guard Nick Allegretti learned his wife Christina went into labor and delivered healthy twin girls early Sunday morning in Chicago.\n\nAt about the same time the Allegretti girls were arriving, Chiefs wide receiver Mecole Hardman was frantically tweeting that his girlfriend Chariah Gordon was also about ready to give birth.\n\nThere could also be another Super Bowl baby before long on the other sideline.\n\nEagles center Jason Kelce and his wife Kylie are also expecting a baby.\n\nAndy Reid could win second Super Bowl – against his former team\n\nReid, 64, is a no-nonsense coach who has become endearing, never too shy to be himself or make others laugh at his own expense. He proudly wears Hawaiian shirts and professes his love for a good cheeseburger. He’s also one of the most accomplished coaches.\n\nReid was the Eagles’ coach for 14 seasons (1999-2012) and did mostly everything for the franchise – six NFC East titles, five NFC title games, one Super Bowl appearance – except win it all.\n\nWhen he was fired by Philadelphia, Kansas City pounced at the opportunity to hire him, and it has been rewarded with 10 winning seasons, nine playoff berths and a Super Bowl during the 2019 season.\n\nReid has the respect and the résumé to match, and he has an opportunity to solidify his Hall of Fame career with a second Super Bowl title. To do it against his former team would be special, too.\n\nSUPER BOWL STORYLINES: Reid, Kelce brothers, Mahomes' ankle all worth watching\n\n— Safid Deen\n\nWho will perform at the Super Bowl halftime show?\n\nWhile the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles take a break from shining bright like a diamond, Rihanna will be the Super Bowl 57 halftime show performer.\n\nIt's a show that's so exciting, at least one player is hoping to catch a glimpse.\n\nThe nine-time Grammy award-winner will perform a slew of hits with (or maybe without) some surprise guests. This will be her first public performance since 2018 when she performed DJ Khaled's \"Wild Thoughts\" at the Grammys.\n\n– Victoria Hernandez\n\nWith 10 Super Bowl appearances, Tom Brady has made his mark on the game's history, setting a plethora of individual records.\n\nBrady, who made 10 Super Bowl appearances with the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerry Rice – who appeared in four Super Bowls during his career with the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders – hold multiple standards in the NFL's annual championship showcase.\n\nFrom a team perspective, Brady's New England Patriots and Rice's San Francisco 49ers figure prominently.\n\nSUPER BOWL RECORDS: Will any legendary marks be surpassed in Super Bowl 57?\n\nSUPER BOWL HISTORY: All-time results, winners, MVPs, more\n\nSUPER BOWL HIGHLIGHTS: Nate Davis' 57 greatest moments in Super Bowl lore\n\nHow 'No crush, no rush' slogan has Philadelphia Eagles defense on historic sack pace\n\nThe four-word phrase coined by defensive ends and outside linebackers coach Jeremiah Washburn means the defense has to stop the run to earn the right to rush the quarterback. Entering Super Bowl 57, the defense has lived up to its motto.\n\n“If you don’t stop the run, you can’t pass rush nobody,” Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham said. “You got to take care of business. Early on, you got to send a message and let them know what the game is gonna be. You got to be the dictators. That’s any defense that wants to win a game, you got to let them know what it’s gonna be for the day.”\n\nThe Eagles had the NFL’s second ranked defense in the regular season and the unit hasn’t given up more than seven points in each of its postseason wins leading up to Super Bowl 57. When it comes to rushing the quarterback, the Eagles are on an historic pace.\n\nThe Eagles defense has amassed 78 total sacks across the regular season and postseason, the third most in NFL history. Philadelphia is three sacks away from surpassing the 1985 Chicago Bears for the second most sacks ever and five sacks shy of eclipsing the 1984 Bears (82 sacks) for the NFL single-season record.\n\n— Tyler Dragon\n\nJoe Biden's pregame Super Bowl interview with Fox called off\n\nPresident Joe Biden won’t be giving a pregame Super Bowl interview to Fox Soul after all.\n\nPresidents in recent years have granted wide-ranging interviews to the network hosting the Super Bowl. But last week there was confusion over whether Biden would follow the tradition.\n\nWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted Friday that Biden had been looking forward to an interview on Fox Soul, a streaming sister service to the conservative Fox News. But she said the White House had been informed that the network’s parent company, Fox Corp., canceled the interview.\n\nBiden did pregame interviews with CBS in 2021 and with NBC in 2022.\n\n– Michael Collins\n\n'Superhero?' What other Chiefs say about QB Patrick Mahomes\n\nPatrick Mahomes exploded into an NFL superstar almost from the moment when he became the Kansas City Chiefs' starting quarterback in 2018, the year he also won his first MVP trophy.\n\nBut what we all see is not necessarily what Mahomes' teammates see.\n\nUSA TODAY Sports closely monitored and asked Chiefs players and coaches during the days leading up to the big game about what it's like being around their intrepid leader, and some common themes quickly emerged.\n\n— Nate Davis\n\nEagles' success starts at the top\n\nTo compare the team-building philosophies of the Philadelphia Eagles and last year's Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams, and classify them as similar would be to miss the point.\n\nThere is a difference between mortgaging the future and having a foundation for continued success in place. The Rams, quite literally, employed a “(expletive) them picks” strategy. The Eagles have a pair of first-round picks in the 2023 draft and Jalen Hurts, an MVP-level quarterback on a rookie (second-round selection) contract.\n\nLeadership starts at the top. Knowing the right time to push the chips toward the middle is essential to winning it all, and Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has given general manager Howie Roseman, who has been with the organization since 2000, the latitude – and payroll – to be aggressive.\n\nIn Super Bowl 57 against the Kansas City Chiefs, Roseman's fingerprints will be all over the field.\n\n– Chris Bumbaca\n\n'Special' Super Bowl for Black quarterbacks\n\nWhen Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts take the field Feb. 12, they will be the first two Black quarterbacks to start against each other in the Super Bowl. It’s an accomplishment both quarterbacks fully embrace.\n\n“It is history. It’s come a long way. I think there has only been (eight) African American quarterbacks to play in a Super Bowl. To be the first for something is pretty cool. I know it’ll be a good one,” Hurts, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback, told reporters Thursday. “It’s history.”\n\nThere will be eight Black quarterbacks to start in a Super Bowl once the championship game kicks off: Doug Williams, Steve McNair, Donovan McNabb, Colin Kaepernick, Russell Wilson, Cam Newton, Mahomes and Hurts.\n\n– Tyler Dragon\n\nTHE 100-YEAR LONG ROAD: Fritz Pollard paved the way for Hurts, Mahomes\n\nOPINION: Fathers of Super Bowl 57 quarterbacks wreck stereotype of absent Black dad\n\nReport: Colts target Eagles offensive coordinator as next head coach\n\nThe Indianapolis Colts have reached a decision on who they want as their next head coach – but the process will have to wait until Super Bowl 57 concludes.\n\nPhiladelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen is the Colts' top choice, and, according to ESPN, the team has already begun informing the other candidates that they are no longer being considered.\n\nSteichen, 37, has run the Eagles offense for the past two seasons. On the way to reaching the Super Bowl, Philadelphia ranked first in rushing yards and third in points per game in 2022. That would seem to mesh well with the Colts, whose offense revolves around 2021 NFL rushing champion Jonathan Taylor.\n\nIn addition, the Arizona Cardinals plan to interview Eagles defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon for their head coaching vacancy, according to NFL.com.\n\nEx-Eagles, Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil can't pick a favorite\n\nDick Vermeil led the Philadelphia Eagles to the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance. He also finished his Hall of Fame career coaching the Kansas City Chiefs.\n\nSo, in what direction is Vermeil’s allegiance flowing for Super Bowl 57?\n\n“I’ve put in my frame of mind right now, philosophically, I’m going to root for both teams to win,” Vermeil told USA TODAY Sports. “And I’ll feel very bad for the team that loses.”\n\nThe only person other than Andy Reid to have coached both the Eagles and the Chiefs, Vermeil, 86, won’t even be inside State Farm Stadium on Sunday.\n\n– Jarrett Bell\n\nSUPER BOWL RECORDS: Will any of these marks be broken in Super Bowl 57?\n\nJason or Travis? Donna Kelce has a plan for which son she'll visit first after Super Bowl 57\n\nDonna Kelce, the mother of Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, has a game plan for after Super Bowl 57.\n\nShe is going to visit the winner first.\n\nBut Donna Kelce told USA TODAY Sports that it's not about favoritism. It's logistics.\n\n\"In the Super Bowl, you only have a chance to see the winner,\" Kelce said at Super Bowl 57 Radio Row at the Phoenix Convention Center. \"The losers are immediately sent to their hotel, like go to your room.\"\n\n— Cydney Henderson\n\nSIBLING RIVALRY: Kelce brothers embrace 'enjoyable chaos'\n\nSuper Bowl expert picks\n\nComing off a pair of dominant postseason wins, the Eagles enter the game as slight favorites. However, the Chiefs seem to have more big game experience as they prepare for their third Super Bowl in the past four seasons, led by presumptive league MVP and Super Bowl 54 MVP Patrick Mahomes.\n\nOur writers offer up their predictions and how they see the game unfolding:\n\nJarrett Bell: Chiefs\n\nChiefs Chris Bumbaca: Chiefs\n\nChiefs Nate Davis: Chiefs\n\nChiefs Safid Deen: Chiefs\n\nChiefs Tyler Dragon: Chiefs\n\nChiefs Lorenzo Reyes: Eagles\n\nHere are USA TODAY Sports' expert picks for Super Bowl 57 MVP:\n\nJarrett Bell: Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes\n\nChiefs QB Patrick Mahomes Chris Bumbaca: Chiefs RB Jerick McKinnon\n\nChiefs RB Jerick McKinnon Nate Davis: Mahomes\n\nMahomes Safid Deen: Mahomes\n\nMahomes Tyler Dragon: Mahomes\n\nMahomes Lorenzo Reyes: Eagles QB Jalen Hurts\n\nWho is announcing Super Bowl 57?\n\nFOX's Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen will be the broadcasters for Super Bowl 57.\n\nRead more on how these two guys from Jersey became NFL broadcast stars.\n\nWho are the Super Bowl officials?\n\nCarl Cheffers will be the referee for Super Bowl 57. This is his third Super Bowl. He will be joined by umpire Roy Ellison, down judge Jerod Phillips, line judge Jeff Bergman, field judge John Jenkins, side judge Eugene Hall, back judge Dino Paganelli and replay official Mark Butterworth.\n\n— Jim Sergent\n\nAs Eagles' Nick Sirianni reaches Super Bowl, his brothers find success on parallel paths\n\nOver the past 20 years, Mike Sirianni has quietly become one of the top coaches in college football. He's never had a losing season. Never lost back-to-back regular-season games. His win percentage (.807) ranks sixth among active head coaches with tenures of at least 100 games, ahead of Dabo Swinney (.805) and Nick Saban (.801).\n\n\"People are like, 'You have the (sixth)-highest win percentage in college football right now,' \" he said. \"And I’m like, 'Yeah, but I’m the third-best coach in my own family.' \"\n\nThat would be behind middle brother Jay, who coached their high school alma mater to three New York state title games, winning two.\n\nAnd behind youngest brother, Nick, who will of course make his Super Bowl debut when the Philadelphia Eagles face the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday.\n\n\"In my opinion, until Nick wins a Super Bowl, Jay’s got two state championships,\" Mike said. \"So to me, I’m still voting him No. 1.\"\n\n— Tom Schad\n\nGannett may earn revenue from Tipico for audience referrals to betting services. Tipico has no influence over nor are any such revenues in any way dependent on or linked to the newsrooms or news coverage. See Tipico.com for Terms and Conditions. 21+ only. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER (NJ), 1-800-522-4700 (CO).", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/02/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2019/09/27/nfl-100-all-time-greatest-television-radio-voices-league/1587307001/", "title": "NFL 100: All-time greatest television, radio voices of the league", "text": "Thomas O'Toole and Rachel Shuster\n\nUSA TODAY\n\nSome of you hung on their every word. Others might have thrown a beer can toward the television at the sound of their voice. And still others saw the action they described only in your mind's eye as you listened to the radio.\n\nThese are the men and women who make the games or the highlights come alive through their descriptions and enthusiasm. They can be outlandish, understated or poetic, and for many of us they are indispensable parts of the NFL experience.\n\nAs the NFL celebrates its 100th season, USA TODAY selects the top 50 broadcasters in league history. They are chosen by accomplishment, reputation, longevity, significance and, admittedly, personal preference. Some you might never have heard of; others are as familiar as members of your family.\n\n1. John Facenda: Known as the “Voice of God,” he voiced over the greatest of the NFL Films productions. And we do mean voice – his was unmistakable. While he was a news anchor on Philadelphia TV from 1948 to 1973, he will forever be associated with the NFL. “He had a voice that could make a laundry list sound dramatic,” Steve Sabol of NFL Films once said. The story goes that Ed Sabol, Steve’s father, discovered Facenda at a bar in 1965 when he overheard him describing NFL Films footage that was airing on TV.\n\n2. Pat Summerall: Started doing NFL games for CBS in 1962 after retiring from a nine-year NFL career as a kicker primarily for the Chicago Cardinals and New York Giants. He eventually became network sports’ play-by-play voice of the NFL, first with analyst, close friend and former defensive back Tom Brookshier and then most famously with John Madden for 22 seasons, on CBS and then on Fox. He called a record 16 Super Bowls on TV, was named the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Pete Rozelle Radio and Television Award winner in 1994 and was CBS’ lead announcer on its PGA Tour coverage.\n\nNFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.\n\n3. John Madden: The Hall of Famer won a Super Bowl as coach of the Raiders, where he had a 75.9% winning percentage over 10 seasons, and then went into broadcasting, having his greatest success and impact with Pat Summerall. Aside from his trademark “Boom!” call, he is known for coming up with the term “turducken” for his turkey/duck/chicken extravaganza awarded to the winning team on whichever Thanksgiving Day game telecast he was working. Early in his broadcast career he was known for his Miller Lite commercials and then appealed to the younger set with his introduction of the “Madden NFL” video game series.\n\n4. Howard Cosell: He called his autobiography “I Never Played the Game,” but that did not stop him from pontificating on sports from football to boxing. He helped turn the NFL from pure sports to a combination of sports and entertainment when he signed on for the debut of “Monday Night Football” in 1970 and stayed over an entertaining but controversial career until 1983. He was the third man in the booth, unheard of at the time, alongside former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith and Hall of Famer Frank Gifford (the latter joining after a brief stay by original play-by-play announcer Keith Jackson). Cosell brought a more critical eye to the game and the players than viewers were accustomed to hearing.\n\n5. Don Meredith: The former Dallas Cowboys quarterback helped revolutionize coverage of the league when he teamed with Cosell and Gifford on “Monday Night Football” by injecting a folksy sense of humor that overshadowed a keen sense of the game — when he focused on the game. His interaction with Cosell could take the telecast off the rails, which sometimes saved the night when their byplay proved more entertaining than the game action. You knew the game was done when he started singing, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”\n\nMore:NFL's 100 greatest teams of all time: Which squad is best in league history?\n\nMore:Opinion: Greatest NFL players by uniform number: From No. 00 Jim Otto to No. 99 J.J. Watt\n\n6. Curt Gowdy: The big-game baseball and football announcer, he called nine Super Bowls, including the first and Joe Namath’s “guarantee” win for the Jets over the Colts in Super Bowl III. His was the call on the Immaculate Reception, with longtime boothmate Al DeRogatis, when Franco Harris made a deflected catch that helped the Steelers beat the Raiders in a 1972 AFC playoff game. Gowdy was the Pete Rozelle Radio and Television Award winner in 1993.\n\n7. Al Michaels: Perhaps best known for his “Do you believe in miracles?” call when the USA upset Russia in hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics, he steadied the ship on “Monday Night Football” after the Cosell era, then teamed with Madden and later Cris Collinsworth on “Sunday Night Football” for NBC starting in 2009. “Since the 1970s, Al has been at or near the peak of all network play-by-play men,” Bob Costas told USA TODAY Sports last season. “And I think now, for a sustained period of time, he has been the standard of maybe two generations.” He won the Rozelle Award in 2013.\n\n8. Dick Enberg: On NBC, he and Pro Football Hall of Famer Merlin Olsen offered a more sophisticated counterpoint to the “Boom!” bluster of Madden and Summerall. Enberg was the master craftsman of words, indicative of his background in teaching and higher education. He called 10 Super Bowls but also was legendary for announcing NCAA men’s basketball games with Al McGuire and Billy Packer, and before that was the famed announcer during UCLA’s basketball championship run under John Wooden. He won 13 Sports Emmys and was given the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Rozelle Award in 1999. He is the only person to win an Emmy as a sportscaster, a writer and a producer.\n\n9. Ray Scott: The voice of the Green Bay Packers in their dynasty years of the 1960s, then became synonymous as the voice of the NFL when the sport exploded into popular culture late in that decade. He broadcast four Super Bowls, including the first, and was the voice during the infamous Ice Bowl playoff game won by the Packers against the Dallas Cowboys in wind chills of -35 degrees. He was the 2000 Rozelle winner.\n\n10: Brent Musburger, Phyllis George, Irv Cross, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder on “The NFL Today”: This was mandatory appointment TV on Sunday afternoons ahead of the NFL slate of games, filling in notes from around the league in the pre-internet days with up-to-the-minute sideline reports and lengthy taped interviews. This crew kicked off in 1975 (Jimmy The Greek joined the next season). The show dominated its time slot for 18 years. George left in 1978 but returned in 1980 for a few years. Snyder was fired in 1988, according to The Washington Post, for telling a Washington, D.C., TV station that many blacks were superior athletes because of breeding from the time of slavery and that the only area in sports left for whites was coaching. Cross won the Rozelle Award in 2009.\n\n11. Frank Gifford: A Hall of Fame player and broadcaster, he joined “Monday Night Football” in its second season (1971) through 1997, the calming voice in the early years of the telecast, when Cosell and Meredith would stray far afield. He was a dashing player on the New York football scene for the Giants in the heydays of the 1950s and parlayed that into an NFL broadcasting career that first began at CBS. He was the color man on coverage of the first Super Bowl, working the CBS telecast of the game versus the NBC telecast that had Curt Gowdy, Paul Christman and Charlie Jones.\n\n12. Jim Nantz: Known as much for golf and college basketball, he also has called five Super Bowls for CBS and has been the mainstay of the network’s NFL coverage since becoming its lead play-by-play voice on Sundays since 2004. He is a three-time Emmy winner and five-time National Sportscaster of the Year who has been with CBS since 1985. His time of year is in the early months of the calendar, when he can be seen announcing the Super Bowl, the NCAA men's basketball tournament and The Masters. He won the Rozelle Award in 2011.\n\n13. Charlie Jones: He called football games throughout a 38-year career, mostly with NBC. An Emmy winner, he was called “one of the great pioneers of NBC Sports,” by Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, according to the Los Angeles Times. He was the 1997 Rozelle winner.\n\n14. Tom Brookshier: An all-pro defensive back with the Eagles, Brookshier teamed with Pat Summerall as CBS’ No. 1 crew for many years on NFL games. In 1981, he left for another assignment, and John Madden became Summerall’s partner.\n\n***\n\nTEAM BY TEAM:The best players in the history of each NFL franchise\n\n***\n\n15. Chris Schenkel: A 40-year career included New York Giants games starting in 1952, which put him in the booth for the famous Colts-Giants 1958 NFL championship game. He also did voice-over for the first NFL Films production and the 1962 NFL title game between the Packers and the Giants. “Chris was an unbelievable gentleman,” said legendary TV producer Don Ohlmeyer, according to the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. “He had one of the most important qualities people can have on television: They are instantly likable.\" He won the Rozelle Award in 1992.\n\n16. Lindsey Nelson: While best known for announcing baseball and college football (particularly Notre Dame), he did the NFL on CBS from 1966 to 1981 and did some Monday night games on radio. Aside from his great storytelling and Tennessee twang — Bob Costas called him “a cheerful chronicler” — Nelson could be recognized from afar by his sartorial splendor. If a jacket wasn’t garish, it wasn’t on Nelson. He was named the Rozelle winner in 1990. Appropriately, he would have been 100 this year.\n\n17. Lesley Visser: Originally a newspaper reporter, she came to prominence with her personal player stories for “The NFL Today,” and then her dogged sideline work. She won the Rozelle Award in 2006, and, according to her website, she was “the only woman to have presented the Lombardi Championship Trophy at the Super Bowl (1992, CBS); the first woman on ABC’s ‘Monday Night Football’ (1998); voted the No. 1 Female Sportscaster of All-Time by the American Sportscasters Association; voted to both the Sportscasters Hall of Fame and the Sportswriters Hall of Fame.\"\n\n18. Marty Glickman: Did play-by-play for the New York Giants from 1948 to 1971 and for the Jets from 1971 to 1979 and 1987 to 1989. The website jewishsports.net called him “one of America’s premier sports broadcasters for five decades.” He also made the 1936 Olympic track team but was withheld from competition by the U.S. for the Games in Hitler’s Germany. He was named to four Halls of Fame, including the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.\n\n19. Jack Whitaker: His network career began in 1961 at CBS, where he did play-by-play for the Eagles and hosted other shows. He also was a studio host for the CBS pregame show. Known for his golf “essays,” he won three Emmy Awards and is in the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame.20\n\n20. Al DeRogatis: The former NFL player was known mainly for his sharp analysis covering the NFL with Curt Gowdy. “In 10 years, I never had a bad moment with Curt,” he once told the Chicago Tribune. “We were just two guys trying to tell the true story of what was happening.” They were the broadcasters for the famous “Heidi” game in 1968, Super Bowl III when the Jets upset the Colts and the 1971 AFC championship game in Kansas City that went to double overtime.\n\n21. James Brown: A former basketball player at Harvard, he has been an even-keel studio host for more than 30 years, mostly with CBS. The multiple Emmy winner was named Best Studio Host of the Decade by Sports Illustrated in 2010. He won the Rozelle Award in 2016.\n\n22. Merlin Olsen: A legendary defensive lineman for the Rams' “Fearsome Foursome.” According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame site, he earned a master’s in economics in the offseasons. He partnered with Dick Enberg as NBC’s No. 1 team for AFC games. He also was an actor, best known for “Little House on the Prairie.”\n\n23. Harry Kalas: A mainstay narrator for NFL Films (while mostly known as the Phillies’ play-by-play man) and the primary voice after John Facenda. “(Facenda) was the ‘Voice of God’ and Kalas the ‘Voice of the People,’” then-NFL Films president Steve Sabol said upon Kalas’ death.\n\n24. Andrea Kremer: A multiple Emmy winner who works for NFL Network and HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” and has covered more than 25 Super Bowls. Won the Rozelle Award in 2018, joining Lesley Visser as the only female winners.\n\n25. Jack Buck: Known mainly for baseball and as the voice of the St. Louis Cardinals. He called the 1962 AFL championship game and 17 Super Bowls on radio. He began announcing the NFL on TV for CBS in 1963, and in 1967 called the Ice Bowl with Ray Scott. Buck was named the Rozelle winner in 1996.\n\n26. Bill King: The longtime voice of the Raiders, known for his catchphrase of “Holy Toledo!” According to ESPN, Raiders owner Al Davis once said, “I say this with\n\ngreat admiration and love that Bill becomes one of the people that\n\nI give the cloak of immortality. Time never stops for the great\n\nones.” Also known as the voice of the Oakland Athletics and the Golden State Warriors.\n\n27. Chris Berman: One of the early prominent personalities with ESPN, “Boomer” became most associated with the NFL through the network’s “countdown” show. He won the Rozelle Award in 2010.\n\n28. Dan Dierdorf: A Hall of Fame offensive lineman, he worked with among others Greg Gumbel and Dick Enberg. He is still doing color commentary for his alma mater Michigan’s radio network. Was the 2008 Rozelle winner.\n\n29. Paul Christman: A college and pro quarterback, he worked AFL games and did Super Bowl I with Curt Gowdy. He also worked with Ray Scott on CBS.\n\n30. Michelle Tafoya: The Emmy winner is a reporter for NBC Sports and the primary “Sunday Night Football” sideline reporter since 2011. The San Francisco Chronicle described her as “widely recognized as the best sideline reporter in sports.”\n\n31. Dick Stockton: Very versatile, doing multiple sports for more than 40 years. He spent 17 years with CBS and joined Fox in 1994. According to Fox, his analyst partners have included Roger Staubach, Hank Stram, Dan Fouts, Terry Bradshaw and Dan Dierdorf.\n\n32. Cris Collinsworth: The NFL wide receiver has worked for HBO and NBC and partners with Al Michaels and Michelle Tafoya currently on “Sunday Night Football.”\n\n33. Suzy Kolber: Has been in multiple roles at ESPN since 1999. In 2017, she was named host of “Monday Night Countdown,” ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” pregame show. She also anchors the network’s halftime and postgame coverage.\n\n34. Joe Buck: Started calling NFL games for Fox Sports in 1994 (at age 25). His calls included the Patriots’ Super Bowl comeback win over Atlanta and David Tyree’s Super Bowl helmet catch. The son of broadcast legend Jack Buck, he for some reason polarizes viewers.\n\n35. Pam Oliver: Started working for NFL on Fox in 1995 and has been a sideline reporter for 24 seasons.\n\n36. Vern Lundquist: Known mostly for college football and golf (the 16th hole at Augusta is his canvass), he worked for NFL Films and called games for CBS.\n\n37. Myron Cope: Voice of the Steelers for 35 years and credited with creating the Terrible Towel. He won the Rozelle Award in 2005.\n\n38. Don Criqui: Called network NFL games for 47 consecutive years (1967-2013) for CBS and NBC. He also called games on the radio for his alma mater, Notre Dame, from 2006 until 2017. And he won the Rozelle Award in 2003\n\n39. Terry Bradshaw: Began as a color analyst, famously with Vern Lundquist. The Hall of Fame quarterback is an entertaining part of the Fox pregame show.\n\n40. Vin Scully: Known for baseball, mostly the Los Angeles Dodgers, he did call football from 1975 to 1982 on CBS, and because of that voice and style, he belongs on a greatest list of any sport he worked. His final call in an NFL game was “The Catch” from Joe Montana to Dwight Clark to win the NFC championship. He later told the San Jose Mercury News: “When I got home, I told my family, ‘That’s a great game on which to call it a football career.’ And that was that.”\n\n41. Phil Simms: A former Giants quarterback, he works for CBS after stints as an analyst with NBC and ESPN.\n\n42. Beth Mowins: Became the first woman to do play-by-play for a nationally televised NFL game when she worked half of a “Monday Night Football” doubleheader in 2017. Also was the first woman to do play-by-play of an NFL game for CBS.\n\n43. Brad Sham: “The Voice of the Cowboys.” Need anymore be said?\n\n44. Marv Albert: Because that unmistakable voice is entertaining to listen to no matter what the sport. It seems even better on radio than on TV.\n\n45. Tony Romo: The former Cowboys’ quarterback has a small sample size but already has gained rave reviews for his insight and ability to predict plays. Talk to us for the second 100 season celebration.\n\n46. Sam Huff, Sonny Jurgensen and Frank Herzog: Two Hall of Famers and a genial play-by-play man, the team of “Sonny, Sam and Frank” called the Redskins’ Super Bowl glory years.\n\n47. Merrill Reese: He is in his 43rd season as play-by-play voice of the Philadelphia Eagles.\n\n48. Gayle Sierens: The first woman to do play-by-play on network television, handling a Chiefs-Seahawks game in 1987.\n\n49. Bob Sheppard: Also of the Yankees, he was the PA announcer for decades for the New York football Giants.\n\n50. Mel Kiper Jr.: Love him or hate him, you cannot ignore that he basically created the cottage industry of draft analysis. And he does have an unmistakable voice and rapid-fire delivery.\n\nIf you love talking football, we have the perfect spot for you. Join our Facebook Group, The Ruling Off the Field, to engage in friendly debate and conversation with fellow football fans and our NFL insiders.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/09/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2023/02/05/grammy-awards-2023-live-updates/11170771002/", "title": "Grammys 2023: Harry Styles wins album of the year, Beyoncé ...", "text": "It was a historic evening for the Beyhive and a great Grammys for those hanging in \"Harry's House.\"\n\nHarry Styles won album of the year, the biggest prize at Sunday's 65th Grammy Awards, though it was Beyoncé who made history, taking four honors and becoming the most-winning Grammy artist of all time. Music's biggest night also gave fans some nice surprises, including Bonnie Raitt taking home song of the year, Lizzo winning record of the year and jazz singer Samara Joy being named best new artist.\n\nCheck out all the winners and highlights from the Grammys, going back to the pre-show Premiere Ceremony.\n\nWinners! See which stars took home the Grammy gold\n\nBrutally honest reviews of every Grammys performance:Harry Styles, Stevie Wonder, more\n\nThe best moments of the Grammys: From Harry Styles' superfan to a stunned Lizzo\n\nHarry Styles' 'Harry's House' wins album of the year\n\nStyles gets the biggest prize of the night and hugs the superfan who announced his win. \"I've been so inspired by every artist in this category with me,\" the British singer says. \"On nights like tonight, there are no such things as 'best' in music. This is really, really kind. I'm so grateful. This doesn't happen to people like me very often.\"\n\nSamara Joy upsets Måneskin for best new artist\n\nFormer best new artist winner Olivia Rodrigo comes out to induct a fresh act into the prestigious club. And here's another shocker: It's jazz singer Samara Joy. \"I've been watching you on TV for so long,\" says a tearful, thankful Joy to her fellow artists in the audience. \"All of you inspire me for being who you are.\" (She also won the best jazz vocal album Grammy for \"Linger Awhile\" earlier in the day.)\n\nSteve Lacy has a 'Bad Habit' of breaking up big award presentations\n\nYou can't have all these major Grammys without a little sonic palette cleanser. Lacy performs his catchy hit \"Bad Habit\" with master bass player Thundercat before the night closes with best new artist and album of the year.\n\nLizzo's 'About Damn Time' snags record of the year\n\nLizzo nabs one of the best Grammy prizes. \"Let me tell you, Adele and I are having a wonderful night rooting for our friends,\" she says, dedicating the award to Prince. She felt misunderstood making positive music but \"I wanted to make the world a better place.\" She also shouts out Beyoncé: \"In the fifth grade I skipped school to see you perform. You changed my life.\"\n\nBonnie Raitt wins song of the year for 'Just Like That'\n\nWell, here's a Grammy shocker: Raitt defeats Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Harry Styles and Beyoncé for one of the night's biggest prizes. \"I'm so surprised, I don't know what to say. This is an unreal moment,\" Raitt says. \"I don't write a lot of songs but I'm proud that you appreciate this one.\"\n\nLuke Combs performs 'Going, Going, Gone'\n\nHow do you follow a stage full of rap powerhouses? It's not an easy task. But country star Combs leans on the emotion and trots out a string section for a warmhearted rendition of his hit song.\n\nAdele takes pop solo performance honors for 'Easy on Me'\n\nAdele's new best friend Dwayne Johnson is out to present the Grammy for best pop solo performance. He must be a good luck charm because she snags the victory against the likes of Bad Bunny, Lizzo, Doja Cat and Harry Styles. \"I really was just looking forward to coming tonight,\" she says, dedicating the win to her son, Angelo.\n\nDr. Dre gets own award, LL Cool J leads all-star hip-hop tribute\n\nThe rap legend says he's \"extremely moved\" to be the first recipient of the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award. That honor transitions to LL Cool J introducing a performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip hop. With The Roots in the house, the medley takes an energetic journey through rap history with songs including Grandmaster Flash's \"Flash to the Beat,\" Run-DMC's \"King of Rock,\" Salt-N-Pepa's \"My Mic Sounds Nice,\" Queen Latifah's \"U.N.I.T.Y.,\" Busta Rhymes' “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” Missy Elliott's \"Lose Control,\" Nelly's \"Hot In Herre\" and Lil Wayne's \"A Milli.\"\n\nBeyoncé takes best dance/electronic album honor, becomes all-time Grammy winner\n\n\"I'm trying to not be too emotional,\" says an overcome Beyoncé as she accepts for \"Renaissance,\" and her fourth victory of the night sets a new record for all-time wins. (Her total now stands at 32, one more than the late Hungarian conductor Georg Solti.) \"I want to thank God for protecting me\" and she also thanked her mom and dad \"for loving me and pushing me\" as well as \"the queer community for your love and for inventing this genre.\" Mary J. Blige followed up the historic moment with a performance of \"Good Morning Gorgeous.\"\n\nBreak out the pitchforks for Kim Petras and Sam Smith's 'Unholy' show\n\nMadonna, known for being a fan of the \"provocative\" and \"troublemakers\" in general, introduces Sam Smith and Kim Petras' performance of their Grammy-winning hit \"Unholy.\" Smith looks downright devilish in red leather, high-heeled boots and horns singing in the center of a group of robed, grinding demonic folks, while Petras performs in a cage surrounded by women with whips.\n\nLate musicians Loretta Lynn, Christine McVie, Takeoff earn Grammy tributes\n\nKacey Musgraves performs an acoustic version of \"Coal Miner's Daughter\" to honor Lynn in the \"In Memoriam\" portion of the night. The sounds of Jeff Beck's unmistakable guitar pepper a montage of greats who've passed in the past year, and that's followed by Quavo teaming with Maverick City Music on \"Without You\" as tribute to his Migos group member Takeoff. If that wasn't emotional enough, Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt and Mick Fleetwood finish with a tearjerking rendition of \"Songbird\" for Christine McVie.\n\nKendrick Lamar earns major rap honors with 'Mr. Morale'\n\nCardi B presents the award for best rap album to Lamar for \"Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.\" He says it was one of the \"toughest\" albums he's made, thanking his family for \"the courage and the vulnerability to share my truth and these stories (and) the fans for trusting me with these words.\"\n\nHarry Styles embraces the ol' razzle-dazzle with 'As It Was' performance\n\nHot off winning a Grammy, an ultra-glittery Harry Styles – who looks he decorated himself with tons of Christmas tinsel – dances around and sings \"As It Was\" with his band and a bunch of random people walking on a rotating stage.\n\nBad Bunny snags Grammy for best música urbana album\n\n\"I just made this album with love and passion, and when you do everything with love and passion, it's just easier,\" says Bad Bunny, accepting his honor for \"Un Verano Sin Ti\" and dedicating the Grammy win to Puerto Rico.\n\nIt's about damn time Lizzo rules the Grammy stage\n\n\"We're about to have some church up in here!\" Lizzo feels the spirit and comes to the stage to do a bit of her hit \"About Damn Time\" before launching into her empowerment anthem \"Special\" with a gold-drenched dancing gospel choir surrounding her.\n\nSam Smith, Kim Petras walk away with an 'Unholy' win\n\nBest pop duo/group performance goes to Sam Smith and Kim Petras' \"Unholy.\" \"This song has been such an incredible journey for me,\" says Petras, who receives rapturous applause when she announces she's the first transgender woman to win this category. She shouts out influences (\"I don't know if I'd be here without Madonna\") and also Smith: \"Sam, you are a true angel in my life.\"\n\nWillie Nelson wins country Grammy, Stevie Wonder leads a Motown medley\n\nA red-haired Shania Twain presents the Grammy for best country album. Willie Nelson wins for \"A Beautiful Time\" but isn't at the show. Another icon is in the house: Stevie Wonder, who leads a Motown tribute to Smokey Robinson. Wonder teams with WanMor on \"The Way You Do the Things You Do,\" duets with Robinson on \"Tears of a Clown\" – which gets a huge crowd reaction – and closes the set with \"Higher Ground\" alongside Chris Stapleton.\n\nBeyoncé wins best R&B song, ties record for most Grammy wins ever\n\nNewly minted EGOT winner Viola Davis comes out to a standing ovation. She's here to quote Aretha Franklin and give out the Grammy for best R&B song, which goes to Beyoncé for \"Cuff It.\" The win now makes her tied for biggest Grammy winner of all time, though she's still on her way to the show.\n\nHarry Styles takes home best pop vocal album\n\nThe first award of the main show goes to Harry Styles, who wins for \"Harry's House.\" \"This album from start to finish has been the greatest experience of my life,\" the singer says.\n\nBrandi Carlile arrives to unleash 'Broken Horses'\n\nAfter winning a few early Grammys, Carlile takes the stage to give a blistering performance of \"Broken Horses.\" When it comes to rockin' – at least on this night – Carlile overtakes The Rock with killer guitar riffs and growling vocals.\n\nThe Rock, meet Adele. Adele, meet The Rock.\n\nNoah walks through the crowd pointing out trivia: LL Cool J loves breakfast cereals, Cardi B loves presidents and Adele loves tea. Noah also makes a friend connection between Adele and her superfan, Dwayne Johnson. (She seems very excited by the meet-and-greet.)\n\nBad Bunny gets the Grammy show started in Latin style\n\nHost Trevor Noah kicks off the main Grammys show and introduces the opening performance by Bad Bunny. The Puerto Rican singer (aka Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio), who's looking to be the first artist to take album of the year honors for a Spanish-language record, comes through the audience to hit the stage with dancers and his band to perform hits \"El Apagón\" and \"Después de la Playa.\" Jack Harlow is one of the many music lovers dancing in the audience. \"This album is so fire it makes Trump want to learn Spanish,\" Noah jokes.\n\nMåneskin is clear favorite to win best new artist\n\nNew artist is one of the most high-profile Grammy categories of all, with winners over the years including The Beatles, Mariah Carey, Billie Eilish, Carly Simon, Adele and John Legend. Among this year's varied crop of contenders, the Italian rockers of Måneskin are expected to be victorious. Winners of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, the band played Coachella and multiple Lollapaloozas before embarking on a sold-out tour of large clubs and theaters late last year.\n\nWins by Taylor Swift, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrap up pre-show ceremony\n\nMadison Cunningham, who performed as part of the pre-show ceremony, wins best folk album for \"Revealer\" and admits, \"I'm in shock.\" Dave Chappelle's \"The Closer\" gets a Grammy for best comedy album, and a 2022 Broadway cast recording of \"Into the Woods\" is named best musical theater album.\n\nAdding to two earlier victories for \"Encanto,\" Lin-Manuel Miranda's \"We Don't Talk About Bruno\" gets best song written for visual media, while Taylor Swift's \"All Too Well: The Short Film\" takes best music video and documentary \"Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story\" wins best music film. And Jack Antonoff is named producer of the year for his work with Swift, Florence + The Machine, Diana Ross, The 1975 and the \"Minions: The Rise of Gru\" soundtrack.\n\nBonnie Raitt scores a pair of Grammys, Brandi Carlile takes Americana\n\nAaron Neville scores a Grammy for best American roots performance for \"Stompin' Ground\" with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Carlile's \"In These Silent Days\" wins best Americana album while Raitt take home a pair of awards: best Americana performance for \"Made Up My Mind\" and best roots song for \"Just Like That.\"\n\nCountry categories honor Willie Nelson, Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde\n\nNelson's \"Live Forever\" takes the honor for best country solo performance and Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde's \"Never Wanted to Be That Girl\" wins duo/group performance. \"This has transcended so many of my wildest dreams,\" Pearce says when accepting her first Grammy. And best country song goes to Matt Rogers and Ben Stennis' \"Till You Can't.\"\n\nNew artist nominee Wet Leg snags a pair of alternative honors\n\nThe British rock band – up for best new artist later in the night – wins a pair of Grammys: best alternative performance for \"Chaise Lounge\" and alternative music album for the group's self-titled debut.\n\nKendrick Lamar, Brandi Carlile, Ozzy Osbourne take home two honors each\n\nLamar's \"The Heart Part 5\" wins for best rap song and rap performance, while Carlile's \"Broken Horses\" snags best rock performance and rock song. Osbourne gets best metal performance for \"Degradation Rules\" with Tony Iommi and rock album for \"Patient Number 9.\"\n\nViola Davis officially becomes an EGOT winner, Beyoncé wins second Grammy\n\nThe actress makes history by earning her first Grammy Award, for best audio book, narration and storytelling recording for \"Finding Me.\" \"I wrote this book to honor the 6-year-old Viola, to honor her life, her joy, her trauma. It has been such a journey. I JUST EGOT!\" says Davis, adding to her Oscar, Emmy and Tony wins. And on the heels of that, Beyoncé takes best traditional R&B performance for \"Plastic Off the Sofa.\"\n\nOrchestral version of Christine McVie's 'Songbird,' Michael Bublé earn Grammy victories\n\nVince Mendoza pays tribute to the late Christine McVie when he wins for best arrangement, instrumental and vocals. \"I owe a debt of gratitude for so many of her beautiful stories and moments,\" says Mendoza, adding that he was 16 when the seminal 1977 Fleetwood Mac album \"Rumours\" was released. \"This record and this music has followed me all through my life.\" In addition, Michael Bublé's \"Higher\" conquers the best traditional pop album category.\n\nBeyoncé picks up first win of the show for best dance/electronic recording\n\n\"MJ the Musical\" Broadway star Myles Frost arrives to present the next group of honors. Best dance/electronic recording goes to Beyoncé – her first of what could be a historic day – for \"Break My Soul,\" Lizzo's \"About Damn Time\" snags the Grammy for best remixed recording (non-classical) and Harry Styles' \"Harry's House\" takes best engineered album. Plus, former The Police member Stewart Copeland's \"Divine Tides\" wins best immersive audio album.\n\nDisney's 'Encanto' begins the day with two Grammy Award wins\n\nThe first two Grammys of the day – best compilation soundtrack album for visual media and best score album – goes to Disney's animated musical \"Encanto,\" which featured songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. \"Assassin's Creed: Valhalla\" takes the victory for best score soundtrack for a video game.\n\nThis year's Grammy Awards have quite the guest list\n\nThe list of performers during the main Grammys show includes Harry Styles, Bad Bunny, Mary J. Blige, Brandi Carlile, Luke Combs, Lizzo and the \"Unholy\" duo of Sam Smith and Kim Petras.\n\nAs for presenters, first lady Jill Biden will be one of the main folks giving out hardware alongside Cardi B, James Corden, Billy Crystal, Viola Davis (who could become an EGOT during the Premiere Ceremony), Olivia Rodrigo, Shania Twain and Dwayne Johnson.\n\nWho's ready for the Grammy Awards red carpet?\n\nThe Grammys are usually a place where musicians strut their most interesting stuff. (Lady Gaga's egg entrance, anyone?) You can get a look at all this year's looks during the Recording Academy's \"Live from the Red Carpet\" livestream scheduled to begin at 6 EST/3 PST on live.grammy.com. E!'s \"Live from the Red Carpet\" special is slated to start at the same time, co-hosted by Laverne Cox and Bobby Bones, and that's preceded by a \"Live From E!: Countdown to the Grammys\" pre-show at 4 EST/1 PST.\n\nHow to watch the 65th Grammy Awards\n\nIf you like watching musicians accept trophies, the Premiere Ceremony is for you as it doles out the vast majority – 81 of 91 Grammys – of the honors. Streaming on the Recording Academy’s YouTube channel and live.grammy.com, the early event is hosted by Randy Rainbow and features performances by Blind Boys of Alabama, Samara Joy and more.\n\nOnce you've sat through that, or just want to see the major Grammys awarded, the more performance-heavy main show airs live on CBS and streams on Paramount+.\n\nRead more about this year's Grammy Awards ceremony and winners", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/02/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/11/5-generations-of-living-with-lincoln/25621381/", "title": "'Living With Lincoln' reveals 5 generations of collecting", "text": "Richard Liebson\n\nThe (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News\n\nWHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Five score and 18 years ago, Peter Kunhardt's great-grandfather began collecting photographs of Abraham Lincoln.\n\nFrederick Hill Meserve was the son of Civil War veteran William Neal Meserve, who fought for the Union Army and was wounded twice at Antietam. Years after the war, Frederick started collecting battlefield photos and pictures of prominent figures, including Lincoln, to use as illustrations for his father's diary.\n\nWhat began as a way to reconnect with his father turned into a lifelong calling, and Frederick Meserve became the foremost collector of Lincoln photographs and memorabilia in the country. His obsession with all things Lincoln was passed on to his daughter, Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, and evolved into something of a cottage industry for the family.\n\nFive generations later, \"the collection,\" as the Kunhardts call it, is the focal point of Living With Lincoln, a documentary premiering Monday on HBO.\n\n\"Everybody collects things,\" said five-time Emmy Award-winner Peter Kunhardt, who directed the film and serves as narrator. He's also Dorothy's grandson.\n\n\"In my family, they happened to collect Lincoln things,\" he said. \"They never threw anything out, and each generation continued. It's why our house was overflowing with this material.\"\n\nThat material provided the Lincoln images used for the penny, the $5 bill and even Mount Rushmore.\n\nProduced by two of his sons, Teddy and George, the film intertwines Lincoln history with Kunhardt family lore. Using home movies, photos, diaries, notebooks and the words of long gone relatives voiced by their descendants, Living With Lincoln gives viewers a different, human look at the iconic president.\n\n\"Growing up with all of this material, I think we all relate to him differently than most people do,\" Teddy Kunhardt said. \"You go to the Lincoln Memorial and he's this huge, God-like figure. \"But the reality is, he was just like us. He was a normal human being, and we're hoping this film will allow others to see him this way.\"\n\nThe film also chronicles the toll \"the glorious burden\" of preserving, maintaining and documenting the archive has taken on various Kunhardts through the decades. A few suffered from lung disease caused by being cooped up in a hoarder's delight of damp, dusty rooms filled floor to ceiling with old documents.\n\nDorothy \"Dot\" Kunhardt was so obsessed that, on trips to Lincoln's home in Springfield, Ill., she gathered spoonfuls of dirt from places she thought he may have walked on. She tracked down old men and women who were children when the Lincolns were their neighbors, even finding the family that adopted the Lincolns' dog.\n\nDespite crippling bouts of depression, Dot Kunhardt was a noted Lincoln author and scholar, but was probably better known for writing Pat the Bunny and other children's books to bring much-needed income to the family.\n\nThe film is very much a Westchester County project — it was filmed mostly in the attic of Peter Kunhardt's Chappaqua home. Oscar/Grammy/Tony award-winning composer Alan Menken, a New Rochelle native, wrote the major musical themes. The voiceover work was done at the Kessler Media studio in Katonah.\n\nGeorge Kunhart said that convincing his father to narrate the film turned out to be one of the biggest challenges in the two-year project, which premiers the day before the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination.\n\n\"Dad's a quiet, workaholic type, but we wanted this to be personal, so we we didn't let up until he agreed,\" he said. \"I think it made a real difference.\"\n\nWhile they're excited and a little nervous about the HBO premier, the Kunhardts are also dealing with the almost cathartic realization that the collection — all 73,000 items — will soon be removed from their Pleasantville offices. Earlier this month, it was announced the collection had been sold to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for an undisclosed price.\n\n\"It was a very difficult decision,\" Peter Kunhardt said, \"particularly for me and my brother, Philip. The collection has been a big part of our lives for 60 years.\"\n\nThe family will always have access to the material, and Teddy Kunhardt vows that at least one more film will be made from it.\n\n\"We realized that it's time,\" he said. \"Now the collection will be accessible to the public. That made the decision a lot easier.\"\n\nWhat's in the collection?\n\nHere's a sample of some of the items in the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation collection:\n\n1. Lincoln's life mask\n\n2. A lock of Lincoln's hair\n\n3. A photograph of Lincoln's dog, Fido\n\n4. Portraits of Lincoln's three sons\n\n5. Civil War battle maps\n\n6. Dried flowers from the Gettysburg battlefield\n\n7. An Imperial Print of Lincoln before his Gettysburg Address\n\n8. A photograph of assassin John Wilkes Booth at Lincoln's second inauguration", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/04/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/28/education-notes-plymouth-high-debut-original-play/802826001/", "title": "Education Notes: Plymouth High to debut original play", "text": "For USA TODAY NETWORK - Wisconsin\n\nPlymouth High to debut original play\n\nPlymouth High School will be presenting an original script about an unlikely high school alliance as its fall play Nov. 2-5.\n\n\"The Best Worst Day of My Life\" follows geeky Max Wilkinson (played by Justin Schmitz) and popular Amanda Wade (played by Madilyn Straub) on the worst day of their lives. The setting is Plymouth High School, the day of the big homecoming game against Sheboygan Falls, and the day before the homecoming dance. The school bully, Trip (played by Dillon Nemitz), has stolen the only copy of the screenplay Max is planning to film, while Amanda's just been dumped and humiliated by her boyfriend in front of the entire school.\n\n\"They decide to team up and help each other in hopes of turning this typical school day into the best worst day of their lives,\" said Janet DeJean Newton, director and PHS drama teacher.\n\nThe play is also filled with the traditional and somewhat stereotypical characters found in a high school: the crazy chemistry teacher (Deklan Solonika), the overly dramatic English teacher (Emma Helmer), the tyrannical gym teacher (Adam Carbaugh), the sweeter-than-sweet lunch lady (Sydney Tackes), and the boring history teacher (Matthew Klemm). The show will feature an original score of incidental music created by Canadian composer Tom Grazckowski, as well as some spontaneous dancing, and maybe even a zombie or two.\n\nThe play was written by Dick Grunert, a former student of Newton's from Cedarburg who now is a professional writer and film director/producer based in Los Angeles. He studied film/video at Columbia College in Chicago, worked as a writer on the Emmy Award-winning Cartoon Network series \"Adventure Time,\" and has written for TV shows at Sony, Fox and Warner Bros. He also has written and directed numerous short films, including \"The Trap,\" which played at over 30 film festivals.\n\nWhen he was a sophomore in 1990, he expressed an interest in writing film scripts, so Newton challenged him to write a play for Cedarburg High School. He wrote \"The Substitute\" in 1992, and the play was a huge success. Grunert also wrote a play for PHS in 2008 called \"Scenes from a Dance,\" which immediately was published and since has been produced at least 20 more times.\n\n\"He and I have talked many times about him writing another play for PHS, and last year he promised to write one for 2017,\" Newton said. \"Don't miss it!\"\n\nGrunert plans to come to PHS to see the show. He is excited to see the debut performance of his work, and he is hoping his friends from Cedarburg High School will come to Plymouth and see the show, too - and maybe even have an unofficial class reunion.\n\nPerformances will begin at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 2; Friday, Nov. 3; and Saturday, Nov. 4; with a matinee at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 5, in the school auditorium, 125 Highland Ave. General admission tickets are $6 and will be available in the PHS office and at the door.\n\nThe public is invited to stay after the Thursday night premiere for a \"talk back\" about the performance with Grunert and the student actors.\n\nTo learn more, visit www.plymouth.k12.wi.us or call 893-6911.\n\nLTC board chair elected ACCT director-at-large\n\nLakeshore Technical College Board Chair, John Lukas, has been elected as director-at-large on the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) Board. ACCT is a non-profit educational organization of governing boards, representing more than 6,500 elected and appointed trustees who govern over 1,200 community, technical, and junior colleges in the United States. Lukas was one of five candidates elected last week to the 26-member board and will serve a three-year term.\n\nThe 26-member ACCT Board of Directors consists of 15 directors elected regionally, nine directors-at-large elected by the Senate, and two directors appointed by the Chair. The two main functions of the ACCT Board involve national-level advocacy as well as trustee education to strengthen community college leadership.\n\n“I am humbled and honored to be elected to this position,” said Lukas. “As trustees, we have the responsibility to govern, advocate, set policies, and ensure that student success is the top priority of everything we do. Our work is critical to the future success of two-year colleges.”\n\nLukas has served on the LTC Board of Directors in several capacities since 2001 and has been a leader within the Wisconsin Technical College District Boards Association. He has also been an active member of the ACCT having served on the Member Communications and Education Committee, and currently serving on the Governance and Bylaws Committee. He is currently the co-owner and vice president of LDI Industries in Manitowoc, a position he has held since 1993.\n\n“John is a valued member of the LTC Board of Directors, a leader in the community, and an important advocate for education in the area,” said Dr. Paul Carlsen, LTC President. “With this appointment, John will be involved in shaping and advocating national policies benefitting and advancing the mission of technical and community colleges across the country.”\n\nLukas will serve as director-at-large on the ACCT Board of Directors through October 2020.\n\nMead Public Library to host Nov. lecture “The Evolution of Music”\n\nSheboygan Mead Public Library will host a lecture in November titled “The Evolution of Music,” which will explore the evolutionary factors that gave humans the capacity to produce and enjoy music. The talk begins at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 5, in the Rocca Room of the Mead Public Library 710 N 8th St., Sheboygan. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be given by Charles Snowdon, professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Snowdon will discuss what makes music so compelling for people and how music evolved from emotional signals in other animals. The program is part of the Wisconsin Science Festival, which is a four-day statewide celebration connecting people with science, technology, engineering, art and math. For more information, visit www.meadpl.org, email them off their website, and/or call 920-459-3400, ext. 3422.\n\n\n\n", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/10/28"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/us/2022-in-review-fast-facts/index.html", "title": "2022 In Review Fast Facts | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nHere is a look back at the events of 2022.\n\nNotable US Events\n\nJanuary 3 - The US Food and Drug Administration expands the emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine boosters to children ages 12 to 15. On January 5, the CDC updates its recommendations for the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine booster.\n\nJanuary 3 - Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO and founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos, is found guilty on four charges of defrauding investors.\n\nJanuary 7 - A 57-year-old Maryland man receives a genetically modified pig heart in a first-of-its-kind transplant surgery.\n\nJanuary 13 - The Supreme Court blocks President Joe Biden’s vaccine and testing requirement aimed at large businesses, but allows a vaccine mandate for certain health care workers to go into effect nationwide.\n\nJanuary 24 - The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Christmas Day, reaches its destination, nearly a million miles away from Earth. On July 12 the first images are shared.\n\nJanuary 27 - Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announces he plans to retire at the end of the court term. Biden commits to nominating the first Black female Supreme Court justice.\n\nJanuary 31 - Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine receives full approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for use in people ages 18 and older.\n\nJanuary 31 - NASA reveals it intends to keep operating the International Space Station until the end of 2030, after which the ISS will be crashed into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo.\n\nFebruary 2 - The Pentagon announces that Biden has formally approved the deployment of 3,000 troops to Poland, Germany and Romania. The deployments are a show of support to NATO allies feeling threatened by Russia’s military moves near Ukraine and the threat of an invasion.\n\nFebruary 2 - ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi is killed during a US counterterrorism mission in northwest Syria.\n\nFebruary 18 - Kim Potter, the former Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in April 2021, is sentenced to two years in prison.\n\nFebruary 21 - A social media platform backed by former President Donald Trump goes live. The service, a Twitter-like application known as Truth Social, is owned by Trump Media and Technology Group.\n\nFebruary 22 - US Soccer and the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) announce they have reached an agreement to end a dispute over equal pay.\n\nFebruary 25 - Biden selects Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Court, setting in motion a historic confirmation process for the first Black woman to sit on the highest court in the nation. On April 7, the Senate votes 53-47 to confirm Jackson.\n\nMarch 1 - Biden delivers his first State of the Union address.\n\nMarch 8 - Biden announces his administration is banning Russian oil, natural gas and coal imports to the US in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.\n\nMarch 8 - Florida’s Senate passes a bill that would ban certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. On March 28, Governor Ron DeSantis signs the bill, dubbed by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.\n\nMarch 10 - After a nearly 100-day lockout, Major League Baseball and the players’ union reach a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement, ending the first league work stoppage since the players went on strike during the 1994 season.\n\nMarch 21 - US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announces he has determined that the military of Myanmar committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the country’s minority Rohingya population in 2016 and 2017.\n\nMarch 29 - The FDA authorizes a second booster of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines for adults 50 and older. That same day, the CDC also endorses a second booster for the same age group.\n\nMarch 30 - After a record-breaking 355 days spent in space, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returns to earth, along with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.\n\nApril 5 - Biden nominates Adm. Linda Fagan to serve as the next commandant of the US Coast Guard. On May 11 the Senate votes to confirm Fagan, making her the first woman to lead a US armed service and the Coast Guard.\n\nApril 12 - The Bureau of Labor statistics shows the Consumer Price Index rose 8.5% for the year ended in March, hitting a high not seen since December 1981.\n\nApril 18 - A federal judge in Florida strikes down the Biden administration’s mask mandate for airplanes and other public transport methods.\n\nApril 25 - Twitter agrees to sell itself to Elon Musk in a deal valued at around $44 billion. Less than a month later, Musk announces via Twitter that the deal is temporarily on hold. On July 8, Musk moves to terminate the deal because he believes the company is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the original agreement. On July 12, Twitter files a lawsuit against Musk in an effort to force him to follow through with the deal.\n\nMay 2 - Politico publishes a draft of a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would strike down Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade on June 24, holding that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.\n\nMay 12 - Biden marks the milestone of 1 million US coronavirus deaths.\n\nMay 14 - Ten people are killed and three are injured in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, an 18-year-old White man – traveled hours to target the Tops Friendly Markets store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.\n\nMay 17 - The FDA grants emergency use authorization for a booster dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, at least five months after completion of the primary vaccine series.\n\nMay 24 - Nineteen children and two teachers are killed when an 18-year-old opens fire in a classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. This is the second-deadliest school shooting since 2012, when 26 children and adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.\n\nJune 9 - The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol holds its first prime-time hearing, presenting details of its findings and new footage of how the violence unfolded.\n\nJune 15 - The Federal Reserve raises interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point to tackle inflation that is plaguing the economy. This is the largest rate hike since 1994.\n\nJune 17 - The US FDA expands the emergency use authorizations for the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines to include children as young as 6 months. The CDC signs off on vaccinations for the same age group the following day.\n\nJune 25 - Biden signs into law the first major federal gun safety legislation passed in decades.\n\nJune 27 - The Supreme Court rules that a Washington state school district violated the First Amendment rights of a high school football coach when he lost his job after praying at the 50-yard line after games. The opinion was 6-3 along conservative-liberal ideological lines.\n\nJune 27 - Four people are dead and at least 50 injured after an Amtrak train derails in Missouri after colliding with a dump truck at a public crossing.\n\nJune 29 - Musician R. Kelly is sentenced to 30 years in prison following his conviction last year on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges stemming from his efforts over years to use his fame to ensnare victims he sexually abused.\n\nJune 30 - Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in as an associate justice to the United States Supreme Court, becoming the first Black woman to take a seat on the high court.\n\nJuly 1 - Two-time US Olympic basketball gold medalist Brittney Griner’s trial begins. She has been detained in Russia since her arrest on February 17 at a Moscow airport on drug smuggling charges. On July 7, Griner pleads guilty to drug charges. On August 4, Griner is found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. On December 8, President Biden announces that Griner has been released from Russian detention and is on her way home.\n\nJuly 4 - A gunman kills seven people and injures dozens more at a July 4th parade in Highland Park, Illinois. The suspected shooter, identified as Robert E. Crimo III, is apprehended late in the day after a manhunt. On July 5, Crimo is charged with seven counts of first-degree murder.\n\nJuly 22 - A federal jury finds former Trump adviser Steve Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack. He is sentenced to four months in prison on October 21.\n\nJuly 28 - JetBlue Airways announces it will purchase Spirit Airlines, a combination that would create America’s fifth-largest airline. The announcement comes a day after Spirit pulled the plug on a deal to merge with Frontier.\n\nJuly 28 - Widespread flooding following heavy rains leaves at least 43 dead in eastern Kentucky.\n\nAugust 1 - Biden announces the United States killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike on July 31.\n\nAugust 2 - The Senate votes to pass long-sought bipartisan legislation to expand health care benefits for millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits during their military service, sending the bill to Biden to sign into law. The final vote was 86-11. Biden signs the bill into law on August 10.\n\nAugust 8 - The FBI executes a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there. On August 26, The Justice Department releases the redacted affidavit used to obtain the search warrant. The filing shows, among other things, that the documents that may have been illegally mishandled at Mar-a-Lago contained some of America’s most sensitive secrets.\n\nAugust 12 - Author Salman Rushdie is attacked and stabbed multiple times on stage before a lecture he was scheduled to give at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. The suspect, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, is arrested.\n\nAugust 29 - Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announces the main water treatment facility in Jackson is beginning to fail, meaning it can’t produce enough water to fight fires, reliably flush toilets and meet other critical needs.\n\nAugust 31 - The FDA authorizes updated Covid-19 vaccine booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer. This is the first time updated Covid-19 vaccines have received emergency use authorization in the US. Both are bivalent vaccines that combine the companies’ original vaccine with one that targets the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sublineages.\n\nAugust 31 - Democrat Mary Peltola wins the special election to fill Alaska’s House seat for the remainder of 2022, halting former Gov. Sarah Palin’s bid at a political comeback. With her victory, the former state lawmaker flips the seat held for nearly half a century by the late GOP Rep. Don Young, and is set to become the first Alaska Native in Congress.\n\nSeptember 18 - Hurricane Fiona makes landfall on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico with severe winds of up to 85 miles per hour, causing flooding and an island-wide power outage. At least three people are killed. Fiona makes landfall in the Dominican Republic the following day killing at least two people. Fiona morphs into a post-tropical cyclone and makes landfall in Canada’s Nova Scotia on September 24. At least one person dies.\n\nSeptember 28 - Hurricane Ian makes landfall along the southwestern coast of Florida near Cayo Costa as a powerful Category 4 storm. At least 126 people are killed in storm-related incidents in central Florida. On September 30, Hurricane Ian makes landfall near Georgetown, South Carolina, as a Category 1 storm, before being downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone. Five people are killed in storm-related incidents in North Carolina, officials say.\n\nOctober 6 - Biden announces he is pardoning all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession.\n\nOctober 12 - A Connecticut jury decides far-right talk show host Alex Jones should pay eight families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims and one first responder $965 million in compensatory damages, capping a wrenching weeks-long trial that put on display the serious harm inflicted by the conspiracy theorist’s lies.\n\nOctober 13 - Nikolas Cruz avoids the death penalty after a jury recommends he be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the February 2018 massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.\n\nOctober 13 - The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack votes to subpoena Trump for documents and testimony during a high-profile public hearing.\n\nOctober 24 - Ethan Crumbley, the teen accused of killing four students and wounding seven others at Oxford High School in Michigan in 2021, pleads guilty to all 24 charges against him.\n\nOctober 28 - Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is hospitalized after he is attacked with a hammer by an intruder at the couple’s San Francisco home. The suspect, David DePape, faces multiple felony charges, including attempted homicide and assault with a deadly weapon.\n\nNovember 12 - CNN projects Democrats will keep their narrow Senate majority for the next two years, after victories in close contests in Nevada and Arizona. On November 16, CNN projects Republicans will win control of the House.\n\nNovember 15 - Former President Trump announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.\n\nNovember 16 - Artemis I takes flight after months of anticipation. Atop the rocket is the Orion spacecraft that will break away from the rocket after reaching space. After orbiting the moon, Orion will make its return trip, completing its journey in about 25 and a half days.\n\nNovember 17 - Pelosi announces she will not seek reelection to Democratic leadership, but will continue to be a member of the House. She is the first and only woman to serve as speaker.\n\nNovember 17 - The Biden administration determines that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be granted immunity in a case brought against him by the fiancée of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom the administration has said was murdered at the prince’s direction.\n\nNovember 19 - A gunman opens fire inside an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing at least five people and injuring at least 25 others. Police identify the alleged gunman as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich.\n\nNovember 22 - A gunman shoots and kills six people and injures four others inside a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. The gunman is identified as 31-year-old Andre Bing, a store manager, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.\n\nNovember 27 - The world’s largest active volcano, Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, erupts for the first time in nearly 40 years.\n\nDecember 11 - The DOJ announces former Libyan intelligence officer and alleged Pan Am Flight 103 bomb maker, Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, is in US custody.\n\nDecember 19 - The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection votes during its final public meeting to refer Trump to the Department of Justice on at least four criminal charges. Four days later the panel releases its final report recommending Trump be barred from holding office again.\n\nNotable International Events\n\nJanuary 5 - Dozens are killed and hundreds injured after protests erupt in Almaty, Kazakhstan, triggered by a fuel price increase. On January 7, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev orders security forces to “kill without warning” to crush the violent protests.\n\nJanuary 13 - Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Andrew is stripped of his military titles and charities, a day after a New York judge ruled a sexual abuse civil lawsuit against Queen Elizabeth II’s son could proceed.\n\nJanuary 15 - An underwater volcano in the South Pacific violently erupts, causing tsunamis to hit Hawaii, Japan, and Tonga’s largest island, Tongatapu – sending waves flooding into the capital.\n\nJanuary 20 - An inquest finds Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew about priests who abused children but failed to act when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, rejecting Benedict’s long-standing denials in a damning judgment.\n\nJanuary 20 - Zara Rutherford, 19, who has dual British-Belgian nationality, becomes the youngest woman to fly around the world solo.\n\nFebruary 5 - Queen Elizabeth II announces at her Platinum Jubilee that the Duchess of Cornwall will be known as Queen Camilla when Prince Charles becomes King.\n\nFebruary 7 - Canadian protesters against Covid-19 mandates impede access to the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario – the busiest international crossing in North America. Ontario’s premier declares a state of emergency on February 11. On February 13, the bridge fully reopens.\n\nFebruary 15 - Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre reach an out-of-court settlement in her sexual abuse lawsuit against him.\n\nFebruary 24 - Russia launches an invasion of Ukraine, sending troops into the ex-Soviet nation from three fronts and firing missiles on several locations near the capital, Kyiv, in a broad attack that has drawn deep condemnation from world leaders.\n\nMarch 16 - A 7.4-magnitude earthquake hits off the coast of Japan’s eastern Fukushima prefecture, killing at least four people and injuring over 100 others, and cutting power to millions of homes.\n\nMarch 21 - A China Eastern Airlines jetliner carrying 132 people crashes in the mountains in southern China’s Guangxi region, according to China’s Civil Aviation Administration. The Boeing 737 was enroute from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou when it lost contact over the city of Wuzhou.\n\nMarch 22 - Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security jail, according to Russian state-owned news agency Tass. Navalny is convicted on fraud charges by Moscow’s Lefortovo court over allegations that he stole from his Anti-Corruption Foundation.\n\nMarch 24 - North Korea fires what is believed to be its first intercontinental ballistic missile in more than four years as Western leaders gather in Brussels for a security summit.\n\nApril 3 - CNN journalists in Ukraine see at least a dozen dead in body bags piled in a mass grave in the town of Bucha, northwest of the capital. Residents say around 150 people are buried there, while the mayor said in public remarks a day earlier there could be up to 300 victims buried there.\n\nApril 10 - Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan is ousted as the country’s leader following a vote of no confidence over allegations of economic mismanagement and mishandling of the country’s foreign policy. On April 11, Pakistan’s lawmakers vote in opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif as the country’s new prime minister.\n\nMay 6 - At least 35 people are dead and at least 89 are injured after an explosion at the Hotel Saratoga in Havana, the Cuban health ministry says.\n\nMay 15 - At a joint press conference, leaders of Finland and Sweden announce their countries’ intentions to join NATO. On May 18, Finland and Sweden both hand in their official letters of application to join NATO. On June 28, NATO formalizes its invitation to Finland and Sweden to join its alliance after Turkey drops its objections the day prior. NATO members sign the protocols of accession on July 5.\n\nMay 21 - Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese is elected prime minister of Australia, ending nine years of conservative rule.\n\nJune 27 - Russia defaults on its foreign debt for the first time since the Bolshevik revolution more than a century ago.\n\nJuly 7 - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces that he is stepping down as prime minister after nearly 60 members of his government resign. Johnson says he will continue as caretaker leader while the Conservative Party launches the process of choosing a successor.\n\nJuly 8 - Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dies after being shot during a campaign speech in Nara.\n\nJuly 23 - The World Health Organization declares the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.\n\nJuly 26 - Russia announces it is planning to pull out of the International Space Station after 2024, ending its decades-long partnership with NASA at the orbiting outpost.\n\nAugust 19 - Gunmen storm the Hayat Hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia. At least 21 people are killed and more than 100 others are injured during the attack. The Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on its affiliated online sites, saying its fighters managed to take over the hotel after blasting their way into the building.\n\nSeptember 3 - Ten people are dead and 18 are injured at multiples scenes in an Indigenous community and the surrounding area in Saskatchewan following a mass stabbing. One of the suspects, Damien Sanderson, is found dead on September 5. His brother, Myles, is arrested on September 8 but dies after experiencing “medical distress.”\n\nSeptember 5 - Liz Truss is named the UK’s new prime minister — after winning the Conservative Party’s leadership contest with 57% of the votes, against opponent Rishi Sunak’s 43%.\n\nSeptember 8 - Buckingham Palace announces that Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning British monarch, has died at the age of 96. Her oldest son, Charles, becomes King Charles III.\n\nSeptember - Protests erupt across Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in a hospital three days after being apprehended in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly not abiding by the state’s hijab rules.\n\nOctober 1 - At least 125 people are dead after violence erupts during an Indonesian league soccer match, according to Indonesia’s National Police Chief in what is one of the world’s deadliest stadium disasters of all time. Supporters of Arema FC and rival Persebaya Surabaya, two of Indonesia’s biggest soccer teams, clashed in the stands after home team Arema FC was defeated 3-2 at a match in the city of Malang in East Java, police said.\n\nOctober 4 - North Korea fires a ballistic missile without warning over Japan for the first time in five years. The missile traveled over northern Japan early in the morning, and is believed to have landed in the Pacific Ocean.\n\nOctober 20 - Truss announces her intention to resign just six weeks into her term after a growing number of her own Conservative Party’s lawmakers say they can no longer support her. She will remain prime minister until her successor is chosen.\n\nOctober 25 - Rishi Sunak becomes the UK’s new prime minister, replacing Truss, the country’s shortest-serving leader of all-time. He is the third person to lead the country in seven weeks, and the fifth since 2016.\n\nOctober 29 - At least 154 people are killed and over 100 more injured in a crowd surge at packed Halloween festivities in the South Korean capital of Seoul.\n\nOctober 30 - Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is elected the next president of Brazil, defeating his rightwing rival, incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, by a razor-thin margin.\n\nNovember 13 - Israeli President Isaac Herzog asks Benjamin Netanyahu to form a new government, allowing the former prime minister to secure the country’s top job for a record sixth time and extend his record as the nation’s longest-serving leader.\n\nNovember 21 - A 5.6-magnitude earthquake hits the Cianjur region of Indonesia, killing at least 334 people and injuring more than 1,000.\n\nNovember 30 - ISIS releases an audio message confirming the death of Abu al-Hasan al-Hashmi al-Qurayshi and announcing its new leader is Abu al-Husain al-Husaini al-Quraishi.\n\nDecember 7 - Dina Boluarte becomes Peru’s first female president after a majority of 101 members in the 130-person legislative body vote to impeach former leader Pedro Castillo.\n\nAwards and Winners\n\nJanuary 9 - The 79th Annual Golden Globes are announced in an untelevised presentation.\n\nJanuary 10 - The Georgia Bulldogs defeat the Alabama Crimson Tide 33-18 in the 2022 College Football Playoff National Championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. This is Georgia’s first national title in football since the 1980 season.\n\nJanuary 17-30 - The 110th Australian Open takes place. Rafael Nadal defeates Daniil Medvedev in the men’s final, clinching a record-breaking 21st Grand Slam title. Ashleigh Barty becomes the first home Australian Open champion since 1978 after beating Danielle Collins in the women’s final.\n\nFebruary 4-20 - The 2022 Winter Olympics take place in Beijing.\n\nFebruary 5 - The NHL All-Star Game takes place at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The Metropolitan Division defeats the Central Division 5-3. Claude Giroux is named MVP.\n\nFebruary 6 - The 2022 Pro Bowl is played at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The AFC defeats the NFC 41-35, in its fifth consecutive Pro Bowl win in the traditional AFC vs. NFC format.\n\nFebruary 13 - Super Bowl LVI takes place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Rams defeat the Cincinnati Bengals, 23-20. It is just the second time in Super Bowl history a team played on its home field. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were the first team to do so, last year at Raymond James Stadium.\n\nFebruary 20 - Austin Cindric wins the 64th Annual Daytona 500.\n\nFebruary 18-20 - The 71st NBA All-Star Game takes place at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland. Team LeBron defeats Team Durant, 163-160.\n\nFebruary 26 - The 53rd NAACP Image Awards ceremony is held.\n\nFebruary 27 - The 28th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards are held.\n\nMarch 4-13 - The 2022 Paralympics take place in Beijing.\n\nMarch 15 - Brent Sass wins his first Iditarod.\n\nMarch 27 - The 94th Annual Academy Awards ceremony takes place, with Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall as hosts. The Oscars have been hostless for the past three years.\n\nApril 3 - The 64th Annual Grammy Awards, postponed for the second year in a row due to a Covid-19 surge, takes place in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.\n\nApril 3 - The South Carolina Gamecocks win their second NCAA Women’s Basketball championship in five years after defeating the Connecticut Huskies 64-49 at Target Center in Minneapolis.\n\nApril 4 - The Kansas Jayhawks complete the largest comeback in title game history to overtake the North Carolina Tar Heels 72-69 for the national championship at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. It is the program’s 4th NCAA Men’s Basketball title and first since 2008.\n\nApril 7-10 - The 86th Masters golf tournament takes place. Scottie Scheffler wins, claiming his first major title.\n\nApril 18 - The 126th Boston Marathon takes place. The winners are Evans Chebet of Kenya in the men’s division and Peres Jepchirchir of Kenya in the women’s division.\n\nMay 7 - Rich Strike wins the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby. The horse entered the race at 80-1 odds - the biggest long-shot in the 20-horse field.\n\nMay 9 - The Pulitzer Prizes are announced.\n\nMay 16-June 5 - The French Open takes place at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. Rafael Nadal defeats Casper Ruud 6-3 6-3 6-0 in the final, capturing his record-extending 14th title at the French Open.\n\nMay 17-28 - The 75th Cannes International Film Festival takes place.\n\nMay 21 - Early Voting, ridden by jockey José Ortiz, wins the 147th running of the Preakness Stakes.\n\nMay 22 - Justin Thomas wins the 104th PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is the second major of his career.\n\nMay 29 - Marcus Ericsson wins the 106th running of the Indianapolis 500. It is his first win at the track.\n\nJune 11 - Mo Donegal, trained by Todd Pletcher and ridden by jockey Irad Ortiz Jr., wins the 154th running of the Belmont Stakes.\n\nJune 12 - The 75th Annual Tony Awards take place.\n\nJune 16 - NBA Finals - The Golden State Warriors defeat the Boston Celtics, 103-90, in Game 6 to win the series 4-2.\n\nJune 18-22 - The 146th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show takes place at the Lyndhurst Estate in Tarrytown, New York. A bloodhound named Trumpet wins Best in Show.\n\nJune 19 - English golfer Matt Fitzpatrick wins the 122nd US Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Fitzpatrick clinches his first career major by edging past world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and Will Zalatoris by a single shot.\n\nJune 24 - The 49th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony takes place.\n\nJune 26 - The Colorado Avalanche defeat the Tampa Bay lightning in Game 6 to win their first Stanley Cup since 2001.\n\nJune 27-July 10 - Wimbledon takes place in London. Novak Djokovic defeats Nick Kyrgios 4-6 6-3 6-4 6-6 (7-3) in the men’s final, to win his fourth straight Wimbledon singles title and his 21st Grand Slam title overall. Elena Rybakina defeats Ons Jabeur 3-6 6-2 6-2 in the women’s final, to win her first Wimbledon title.\n\nJuly 1-24 - The 109th Tour de France takes place. Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard wins his first Tour de France title.\n\nJuly 14-17 - Cameron Smith wins the 150th Open Championship on the Old Course at St Andrews, Scotland, for his first major golf title.\n\nJuly 19 - The 92nd MLB All-Star Game takes place at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The American League defeats the National League 3-2. This is the American League’s ninth straight win.\n\nAugust 29-September 11 - The US Open Tennis Tournament takes place. Iga Swiatek defeats Ons Jabeur and 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz defeats Casper Ruud, becoming the youngest world No. 1 in the history of the ATP rankings.\n\nSeptember 12 - The 74th annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony takes place with Kenan Thompson as host.\n\nSeptember 18 - WNBA Finals - The Las Vegas Aces capture their first title in franchise history, defeating the Connecticut Sun 78-71 in Game 4.\n\nOctober 3-10 - The Nobel Prizes are announced. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to jailed Belarusian advocate Ales Bialiatski and human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine – Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties.\n\nNovember 5 - The Houston Astros win the World Series, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 4-1 in Game 6.\n\nNovember 6 - The New York Marathon takes place. Evans Chebet, the Kenyan winner of the Boston Marathon in April, wins the men’s division, and Sharon Lokedi of Kenya in the women’s division. Lokedi is the eighth athlete in history to win in New York on her marathon debut.\n\nNovember 20-December 18 - The men’s World Cup takes place in Qatar. Argentina defeats France in a penalty shootout after a 3-3 draw to win its third World Cup.\n\nDecember 10 - University of Southern California quarterback Caleb Williams is named the Heisman Trophy winner.", "authors": ["Cnn Editorial Research"], "publish_date": "2022/11/08"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_17", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2023/12/02/college-football-week-14-winners-losers-alabama-texas-playoff/71783317007/", "title": "College football Week 14 winners, losers: Alabama, Texas in playoff?", "text": "The College Football Playoff has rounded into form. But one of the most controversial decisions in the format's history is around the corner.\n\nAfter Washington topped Oregon in Friday night's Pac-12 championship game to secure one spot in the playoff field, Alabama may have followed suit with a 27-24 upset of Georgia to win the SEC.\n\nThe loss snaps Georgia's 29-game winning streak and makes it highly unlikely the Bulldogs get back to the playoff and play for the program's third national championship in a row.\n\nLater on Saturday, Florida State pulled off an ugly 16-6 win against Louisville in the ACC championship game and Michigan will swallowed Iowa to take home another Big Ten crown. That leaves the selection committee with three unbeaten teams.\n\nBut that's not to say the Seminoles are guaranteed to land in the top four. Despite the unblemished record, the committee could decide to round out the semifinals with Alabama and Texas. Nearly regardless of what the committee offers, this is set to be the most scrutinized and criticized decision in the history of the four-team format.\n\nWith that huge decision to come on Sunday, here are the winners and losers from conference championship weekend:\n\nWinners\n\nTexas\n\nQuinn Ewers threw for 452 yards and four touchdowns and Texas took care of business against Oklahoma State to complete a torrid close to the regular season. Whether that's enough depends on what happens in the ACC, leaving the Longhorns rooting hard for Louisville to beat Florida State and eliminate the Seminoles from contention. To get this close to the playoff and come up just short would be an understandable letdown, but that shouldn't take away from the bigger picture. Texas made a huge statement on Saturday and throughout the entire season: We're back and probably here to stay. Falling shy of the top four would reflect much more on the depth of teams in this year's race than on the Longhorns, who compiled a résumé that would've put them in the playoff in almost every other year of the format.\n\nNick Saban\n\nAlabama could be the playoff's second seed depending on what happens in the Big Ten. That's not the most incredible thing given what this program has achieved throughout Saban's tenure. But take a step back and think about where the Tide stood in September, after losing to Texas and struggling to put away South Florida. The incredible growth shown by this year's team starts with quarterback Jalen Milroe, who was benched in non-conference play but rebounded to rank among the best in the country during the second half of the year. Milroe started slowly against the Bulldogs but was terrific from there, finishing with 13 completions in 19 throws for 192 yards and adding 29 yards on the ground with two combined touchdowns. Looking at the entire picture, this has been the greatest in-season coaching job of Saban’s unparalleled career.\n\nMichigan\n\nThe Wolverines closed out a romp through the Big Ten with a 26-0 win against offensively inept Iowa, and while the Wolverines didn't play terrific the final score might as well have been 260-0. This should get Michigan to No. 1 in the final playoff rankings ahead of Washington, but the Huskies' strength of schedule and deeper list of wins could be enough to convince the committee to keep the Wolverines in second. In the end, where Michigan falls doesn't matter. While this will be an outstanding playoff field regardless of who joins Michigan and UW, the Wolverines have to be considered the favorite for the national championship with Georgia out of the picture.\n\nSMU\n\nSMU won 26-14 at Tulane and will be the Group of Five representative in the New Year’s Six ahead of Conference USA champion Liberty. That can be attributed to three reasons: Liberty’s pathetic strength of schedule, the well-earned reputation of the American and the Mustangs’ unbeaten march through league play after losing to Oklahoma and TCU in September. While a big day for SMU, the Green Wave didn’t just lose out on a second New Year’s Six bowl in a row but are on the verge of losing coach Willie Fritz, who is expected to replace Dana Holgorsen at Houston.\n\nBoise State\n\nEven in a down year and even without former coach Andy Avalos, who was fired last month, Boise State is still the top team and program in the Mountain West. The Broncos captured the conference championship with a convincing 44-20 win against UNLV that bolsters interim coach Spencer Danielson's case for the permanent position. Boise won all three games under Danielson — Utah State, Air Force and UNLV — to take home the Mountain West for the first time since 2019 and the fifth time overall. Quarterback Taylen Green had major struggles throughout the regular season but played his best Saturday against the Rebels, completing 12 of 15 attempts for 226 yards and two touchdowns with 90 yards and two more scores on the ground.\n\nTroy\n\nKimani Vidal ran for 233 yards and five touchdowns — yes, five touchdowns — and Troy captured a second Sun Belt championship in a row under coach Jon Sumrall with a 49-23 win against Appalachian State. While not mentioned as a major contender for one of this year's Power Five job openings, Sumrall has now compiled an overall record of 23-4 and lost only twice in conference play. After ending last season on an 11-game winning streak, the Trojans will head into the postseason having won 10 games in a row.\n\nLosers\n\nGeorgia\n\nThere's really no way to get Georgia into the playoff, ending the Bulldogs' hopes of making college football history with a third national championship in a row. There's an argument for getting them into the field, which goes something like this: Georgia is better than everyone and would beat anyone, Alabama included if they had another matchup with the Crimson Tide in the championship game. Then there's the argument for not including Georgia in the field, which would go: They didn't win the SEC and there are too many qualified Power Five champions in the mix for the Bulldogs to get the benefit of the doubt. The loss to Alabama doesn't signify the end of the dynasty by any means but there's a sense that Georgia has missed on a chance to enter college football immortality, and those chances don't come around too often.\n\nFlorida State\n\nDespite beating Louisville and completing an unbeaten season, the Seminoles could be left out of the playoff in favor of Alabama or Texas. One reason for this snub is the way FSU has looked without quarterback Jordan Travis, who has missed the past two games. Primary backup Tate Rodemaker started the close win against Florida but was replaced against Louisville by Brock Glenn, who completed 8 of 21 attempts for 55 yards but did avoid any turnovers. Where the Seminoles could get squeezed by the committee is in the discussion over which teams are most deserving of finishing in the top four and which teams are simply the best in college football. While Florida State deserves to be there as an unbeaten Power Five champion, the four best teams may simply be Michigan, Washington, Texas and Alabama.\n\nToledo\n\nToledo lost a narrow one to Illinois in non-conference play but rolled from there, and could've conceivably made the New Year's Six if not for the two teams at the top of the American Athletic. But that would've required a win against Miami (Ohio) in the MAC championship game, which wasn't in the cards. After losing 21-17 to Toledo during the regular season, the RedHawks clamped down on the Rockets' offense and harassed quarterback Dequan Finn into one of his worst games on the year. Finn hit on only 18 of 36 throws for 273 yards with a touchdown and an interception as Miami pulled off a 23-14 win for the 17th conference crown in program history.\n\nThe playoff selection committee\n\nThere will be no good, acceptable decision should Florida State beat Louisville. The options in that case are to leave out an unbeaten Power Five champion, to ignore the Longhorns’ win at Alabama earlier this season, or to leave out the Crimson Tide. The committee would be damned in any direction. While this could be made easier should Louisville win, this could shape up to be a very tough Sunday morning for the committee.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/02"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2024/01/08/michigan-washington-score-live-updates-national-championship/72118127007/", "title": "Michigan vs. Washington highlights: National championship best ...", "text": "Hail to the victors of Michigan.\n\nNobody has it better than the Wolverines, as Michigan beat the Washington Huskies, 34-13, in the College Football Playoff national championship game to win their first title since 1997.\n\nMichigan jumped out to a quick lead and didn’t look back, never trailing in the title game at NRG Stadium in Houston to capture its 12th national championship in program history.\n\nThe Michigan defense didn’t crack against a team that went into the game with a top 10 offense and the best passing offense in the country, led by Michael Penix Jr. Washington entered Monday averaging 37.6 points per game, but were held to a season-low in points, while Penix and company were never able to recover from playing-from-behind. Washington hung around for a majority of the game before the Wolverines pulled away in the fourth quarter.\n\nThe ground game led the way for the Wolverines offense, with the two-headed monster of Donovan Edwards and Blake Corum paving the way with all touchdowns for the offense. Corum ran the ball 21 times for 134 yards and two touchdowns, while Edwards had 104 yards on six rushes and two touchdowns. J.J. McCarthy played mistake free football at quarterback with 10-of-18 passes completed for 140 yards.\n\nDespite two suspensions from recruiting violations and a sign-stealing scandal, Jim Harbaugh captured his first national championship as head coach of the Wolverines and the first 15-0 season in the team’s long history. Questions will arise if this was Harbaugh’s final game with Michigan, but he and his team will celebrate the first title in 26 years in the meantime. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nJim Harbaugh NFL team fits: Chargers, Raiders top ranking\n\nWhat does Jim Harbaugh want? That will be the question on the minds of many throughout college football and the NFL as the Michigan coach weighs his options after winning the national championship with the Wolverines on Monday night. The allure of a potential return to the professional ranks is evident for a coach who has interviewed with teams in each of the last two years. With that in mind, here's our ranking of all five NFL franchises with a coaching vacancy, based on their potential fit for Harbaugh. — MIchael Middlehurst-Schwartz\n\nMichigan vs. Washington highlights\n\nMichigan won its first national football title since 1997, defeating Washington behind 303 yards rushing and a defensive effort that held Heisman Trophy runner-up Michael Penix Jr. to just one touchdown pass.\n\nJim Harbaugh has his Michigan title. So is this goodbye?\n\nMaybe no national champion in the playoff era so firmly embodied the ethos of its head coach quite like the Wolverines, who shrugged off and embraced criticism in equal measure during this incredibly tumultuous season. But all eyes are on Harbaugh and his immediate future. He hired a new agent, Don Yee, who specializes in NFL contracts. He's again interviewed for NFL openings. Harbaugh's name has come up in connection with the Los Angeles Chargers, among other teams.\n\nTo ignore the itch and come back to Michigan will come with the increasingly likely chance that Harbaugh faces more penalties for NCAA violations that have occurred under his watch. After missing six games due to suspension during the regular season, he could be sidelined again next year. Is that what he wants? Has winning a national championship satisfied what he wanted to achieve at Michigan, freeing him up to join his brother in the NFL?\n\n\"That'll check the biggest box,\" Harbaugh said of the title. Should he leave, Harbaugh will pass on a program that views itself as bigger than one coach or player — the sort of deep self-confidence that might have flowered during Harbaugh's absence. Read Paul Myerberg's full story here.\n\nWay-too-early Top 25: College football rankings for 2024 are heavy on SEC, Big Ten\n\nLet’s start talking about the 2024 college football season. Where will the Michigan Wolverines land in the USA TODAY Sports way-too-early Top 25 given the uncertainty over whether Jim Harbaugh returns for another year? Can the Huskies make another title run as members of the Big Ten? It’s a way-too-early list that’s heavy on the Big Ten and SEC. Those two powerhouse leagues make up the entire top five, nine of the top 10 and 15 of the 25 teams overall. Here’s our guess for how things will look at the end of next season.\n\nOdds for the 2024-25 championship\n\nBetting odds, according to BetMGM, to win the 2024-25 College Football Playoff national championship:\n\nGeorgia +350\n\nAlabama +550\n\nOhio State +800\n\nMichigan +900\n\nTexas +900\n\nOregon +1000\n\nMichigan deserved this title. But the silly and unnecessary scandals won't be forgotten.\n\nOn the field, the Michigan Wolverines left no doubt. So why, after it was all over, did Jim Harbaugh come into a press conference and feel compelled to say the following words: “We’re innocent.” I’m not here to tell you that Michigan’s long-awaited national title — its first outright championship since the Korean War — is tainted. The way Michigan closed out this season, beating the best college football had to offer this year under multiple clouds of uncertainty off the field, cannot be questioned. The best team won — and in the most important games, did so fair and square. But the Wolverines made it easy to be cynical about what should have been a great college football story. Read Dan Wolken's full column here.\n\nJim Harbaugh bonus for winning national championship? A cool $1 million\n\nMichigan's Jim Harbaugh led college football coach bonus totals this season with $3 million — by far the largest single-season haul since USA TODAY Sports began tracking these amounts in 2019. He picked up $1 million for the Wolverines’ win in Monday night’s CFP title game after getting $500,000 for the team playing in the Big Ten Conference championship game, $1 million for winning the Big Ten title and $500,000 for being selected to play in the CFP semifinals.\n\nThis set of bonuses was introduced into Harbaugh’s contract with Michigan after the 2020 season, when he took a roughly 50% cut in his basic annual pay from the school to $4 million after the Wolverines had gone 9-4 in 2019 and 2-4 in the pandemic-affected 2020 season.\n\nHarbaugh claimed $2.225 million in 2021, although he redirected about $1.5 million of his bonus money to members of the Michigan athletics department who had taken pandemic-related pay cuts during an 11-month stretch of 2020 and 2021 and had remained on the payroll. He picked up $2.2 million last season. Read Steve Berkowitz's full story here.\n\nNational title puts Michigan at No. 1 in college football's final NCAA Re-Rank 1-133\n\nMichigan ends the year No. 1 in the USA TODAY Sports NCAA Re-Rank 1-133 after beating Washington 34-13 for the program’s first unshared national championship since 1948. Washington comes in at No. 2, followed No. 3 Georgia, No. 4 Texas and No. 5 Alabama. Michigan was ranked No. 2 in the preseason 1-133 behind Georgia. The Huskies were ranked No. 21. The same preseason re-rank had Pittsburgh at No. 25, so it’s obviously not an exact science. See Paul Myerberg's full Re-Rank here.\n\nWhich was the best national championship team of the CFP era? We ranked all 10.\n\nThe four-team College Football Playoff period featured its share of controversy, from the inclusion of Ohio State in the debut field in 2014 to this year's exclusion of unbeaten Florida State. But by nearly every metric, the playoff has been a resounding success and one of the great advancements in the history of the sport.\n\nOn the field, the past decade has been defined by SEC dominance. Monday night marked the first time since 2014 that no SEC team had at least played for the national title. The conference won six during the four-team playoff: Alabama in 2015, 2017 and 2020, LSU in 2019, and Georgia in 2021 and 2022.\n\nThis era also saw the dramatic rise of Clemson, which unseated the Crimson Tide in 2016 and 2018. The 2018 team was the first in more than a century to go 15-0. The 12-team format will take the title race in a new and unpredictable direction. In one last look back at the past 10 years, here's how the champs of the four-team era rank among their peers.\n\nJ.J. McCarthy-Tom Brady comparisons\n\nJim Harbaugh is so full of hyperbole on a regular basis that he will sometimes say outlandish things that go largely unnoticed. But it should probably be a little bit more of a conversation piece when Michigan’s coach (who was also a great Michigan quarterback) puts current Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy in the same sentence as a former Michigan quarterback who happens to be the most accomplished football player of all-time.\n\nAnd the crazy part is he might be right – at least in the way Harbaugh is framing the argument. Though his passing statistics are rarely spectacular and may not resonate 30 years from now when people look back at this Michigan team without the proper context, McCarthy may well be at the top of the list if the Wolverines beat Washington on Monday to win the school’s first national title since 1997. Read Dan Wolken’s full column here.\n\nBlake Corum draft projection: Is he going to the NFL draft?\n\nEntering the 2023 season, Pro Football Focused projected Michigan running back Blake Corum as the second-best running back in the 2024 NFL draft.\n\nWhat Jim Harbaugh said after the CFP national championship game\n\nHow will Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh celebrate his team’s national championship? With a tattoo of course.\n\nEarlier in the season, Harbaugh had said he doesn’t have any tattoos, but would get one if his team went undefeated. Now that mission has been accomplished, he is standing by his word.\n\n\"I did say that to our players,\" Harbaugh told reporters after the game. \"I said if we go 15-0, I'm getting a tattoo. It's 15-0. I'm going to put it on my shoulder. I don't know if it's my left or right yet. I'm a right-handed quarterback, I'll probably get it on my right, and then an M too. An M that's maize and blue M.\"\n\nEven during the celebration, Harbaugh was asked about if he’d one day want to celebrate a Super Bowl victory. He didn’t want to think about it as there are rumors of him departing for the NFL after this season.\n\n\"I just want to enjoy this. I hope you give me that,\" he said. \"Can a guy have that? Does it always have to be what's next, what's the future?\"\n\nThe head coach was also asked about overcoming all the off-the-field issues that surrounded the team. Despite two suspensions, Harbaugh still claims his innocence.\n\n\"The off-the-field issues, we're innocent and we stood strong and tall because we knew we were innocent, and I'd like to point that out,\" Harbaugh said. \"And these guys are innocent. And overcome that, it wasn't that hard because we knew we were innocent.\" — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWhat Michael Penix Jr. said after the CFP national championship game\n\nA battered and bruised Michael Penix Jr. spoke postgame following Washington’s loss to Michigan in the College Football Playoff national championship game.\n\n\"I had ups and downs, but I’m thankful for it all. To meet Coach (Kalen) DeBoer at Indiana and for him to lead me here. To be playing in the biggest game in college football. We didn’t come out how I wanted it to but each and every player knows that they gave it their all. It wasn’t enough today,\" Penix said. \"Blessed to be here. Blessed to be on this team and these guys will be my brothers forever.\"\n\nThe Heisman Trophy runner-up and senior QB will be on his way to the NFL following Monday’s defeat. He’s rated as a top-five quarterback prospect on many NFL draft boards. — Tyler Dragon\n\nMichigan national championship gear, commemorative book\n\nMichigan's national championship gear is available for purchase at https://shop.collegefootballplayoff.com. A book from the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, chronicles Michigan football's dominant run to its first national championship in 26 years. Order your copy here.\n\nMichigan players collecting souvenirs\n\nIn addition to commemorative caps and shirts, Michigan players were collecting another keepsake from their College Football Playoff national championship win over Washington.\n\nPostgame video showed Wolverines players heading out of NRG Stadium with what appeared to be personalized locker room folding chairs featuring the College Football Playoff logo.\n\nWhy Jim Harbaugh should spurn the NFL, stay at Michigan and fight to get players paid\n\nIf Michigan wins the national title on Monday night, the stage will be set for a seminal moment in college sports.\n\nAll season long, and once again Saturday prior to the College Football Playoff championship game, coach Jim Harbaugh has advocated for players to share in the billions being generated by this sport. To do it with a trophy in his hand, on the night the entire country is paying attention, would be arguably the most significant stance for athletes’ rights ever taken by a prominent coach.\n\n“People come to watch the players,” Harbaugh said Saturday. “They really don't come to watch the coaches. They don't come watch the administrators. They come to watch the players. And in a world where the revenue is ever growing, the student-athletes being able to participate in that ever-growing revenue, who could argue against them?”\n\nEven now, in an era of players being able to profit off name, image and likeness, arguing for schools and the NCAA to share revenue with athletes is a bold step for a college coach. Few have had the foresight, desire or guts to do it.\n\nBut if Harbaugh believes that sincerely and isn’t merely using it as media chum to distract from his multiple imbroglios with NCAA rules, then he needs to do it by staying at Michigan and fighting the fight. It’s easy to talk. It’s a lot easier when you have one foot out the door waiting for an offer from the NFL. Read Dan Wolken’s full piece here.\n\nWhat are future national championship locations?\n\nAtlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium will host the 2025 national championship game, the first with an expanded 12-team playoff field, and Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium is scheduled to host the 2026 title game.\n\nWill Johnson named defensive player of national championship\n\nWill Johnson was named the defensive player of the national championship after Michigan beat Washington. The defensive back nabbed an interception off Michael Penix Jr. on the first play from scrimmage in the second half. The Wolverines picked off the Heisman Trophy finalist twice in the victory. — Victoria Hernandez\n\nJack Harbaugh shouts signature rally cry after Michigan's national championship\n\nJim Harbaugh couldn’t celebrate the national title win without his dad, former coach Jack Harbaugh. As the team was on the podium to claim the championship trophy, Jim Harbaugh had his dad take the mic and do his rally cry. \"Who has it better than us?\" Harbaugh said. \"Nobody!\" he, the crowd and team yelled back. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nBlake Corum named offensive player of national championship\n\nRunning back Blake Corum set the tone before kickoff that he was ready to take the reins by showing up in a cowboy-inspired outfit. The senior was named the offensive player of the national championship after finishing with 21 carries for 134 yards and two touchdowns. Corum missed the end of last season with a knee injury and was named a 2023 Comeback Player of the Year. \"This is everything I imagined,\" Corum said on the stage after beating the Washington Huskies for the title. \"… We said we had unfinished business, so I’ll leave you all with this: The business is finished!\" — Victoria Hernandez\n\nMichigan scores: Blake Corum 1-yard touchdown run\n\nWashington was given a second chance to attempt a fourth-and-13 after a chaotic play that landed incomplete and featured two offsetting penalties. Instead of converting, Michael Penix Jr. threw an interception to Michigan's Mike Sainristil, who ran it back 81 yards to the Washington 8-yard-line. Michigan handed the ball to Blake Corum, who pounded for 7 yards and then a 1-yard score to essentially finish off the Huskies. The Wolverines are up 34-13 with 3:37 on the clock. — Victoria Hernandez\n\nMichigan scores: Blake Corum 12-yard touchdown run\n\nThe Wolverines have scored their first touchdown since the first quarter. It only took Michigan five plays to go 71 yards for the score. Michigan’s touchdown drive was highlighted by a 41-yard catch and run by tight end Colston Loveland that put the team on Washington’s 30-yard line. A few plays later, running back Blake Corum broke a tackle and scampered for a 12-yard rushing touchdown to give the Wolverines a 27-13 lead with 7:09 left in the fourth quarter.\n\nMichigan has dominated Washington on the ground. The Wolverines have produced 296 rushing yards on 33 carries. Corum has a game-high 125 rushing yards. — Tyler Dragon\n\nWashington punts after 32-yard catch called back\n\nMichael Penix Jr. seemed to have redemption for overthrowing Rome Odunze in the first half when he connected with the star receiver for a 32-yard play in the fourth quarter. But the play was called back when offensive lineman Roger Rosengarten was penalized for holding. Facing second-and-20, the quarterback threw two short passes, but couldn’t move the chains and Washington punted the ball away. — Victoria Hernandez\n\nEnd of third quarter: Michigan 20, Washington 13\n\nIt’ll be a one-score game heading into the final quarter of the national championship game, with Michigan leading 20-13 with 15 minutes left to go. Both sides added a field goal in the third quarter, but it wasn’t a mostly dominant effort defensively on both sides. After both teams combined for 450 yards in the first half, both sides only got 130 yards in the third quarter.\n\nWashington will begin the fourth quarter with the ball, getting another chance to cut the deficit or tie the game. The Huskies have only headed into the fourth quarter losing once this season, when they completed a comeback to beat Arizona State in October. Michigan continues to do most of its damage rushing the ball with 273 of its 360 yards coming on the ground. Both Donovan Edwards (104 yards) and Blake Corum (103 yards) have eclipsed the century mark on the ground. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWashington, Michigan trade punts\n\nBoth teams' defenses are stepping, forcing the offenses to get off the field quickly in the middle of the third quarter. After Washington added a field goal, Michigan went three-and-out and punted the ball back to the Huskies. They couldn’t do much either, picking up one first down before punting it to Michigan. The Wolverines get the ball at their own 7-yard line with just over five minutes left in the third quarter. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWho are the national championship game referees?\n\nIt’s an ACC crew officiating the national championship game, headed by Marcus Woods. Here is the full crew:\n\nReferee: Marcus Woods\n\nMarcus Woods Umpire: Danny Worrell\n\nDanny Worrell Head linesman: Troy Gray\n\nTroy Gray Line judge: Deon Lawrence\n\nDeon Lawrence Field judge: Wayne Rundell\n\nWayne Rundell Side judge: Michael McCarthy\n\nMichael McCarthy Back judge: Michael Griffith\n\nMichael Griffith Center judge: Larry Saunders\n\nLarry Saunders Alternate: Michael Roche\n\nMichael Roche Replay official: Mark McAnaney\n\nMark McAnaney Communicator: Jeff Roberson\n\n— Jordan Mendoza\n\nWashington scores: Grady Gross 45-yard field goal\n\nIt’s back to a one-score game in Houston after Grady Gross drilled a 45-yard field goal for Washington to make it a 20-13 Michigan lead. Michael Penix Jr. was able to get back on the field after he appeared to be injured on the previous offensive drive. Two passes were able to get the Huskies to midfield and they were aided by an unnecessary roughness penalty by Makari Paige to get into Michigan territory. The Huskies were unable to pick up another first down and opted to kick a field goal. Gross is now 2-for-2 on field goals on the night. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nMichigan scores: James Turner 38-yard field goal\n\nMichigan had to settle for a field goal after forcing a turnover. The Wolverines took possession at Washington’s 32-yard line, but a couple penalties cost them a golden opportunity to go up by two touchdowns. Michigan had to settle for a 38-yard field goal by kicker James Turner to push their advantage to 20-10 with 11:55 left in the third quarter. Turner has made both his field goal attempts in the game. — Tyler Dragon\n\nDo the Michigan Wolverines have a mascot?\n\nThe Michigan Wolverines do not have a mascot. Nissan’s Heisman House commercial starring former Michigan star cornerback/wide receiver and Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson makes fun of the fact that the college football powerhouse does not, in fact, have a real life wolverine with them on game days. In fact, the Wolverine State barely has any of the fluffy, and not so friendly, animals at all. — Victoria Hernandez\n\nMichigan interception against Michael Penix to start second half\n\nWashington had a chance to tie the game out of halftime, but its momentum was taken out with Michigan’s Will Johnson picking off Michael Penix Jr. On the second play out of halftime, Penix looked to get the ball to Tybo Rogers, but the ball came out awkwardly, and Johnson was able to tip it and catch it before he hit the ground. Not only was it an interception, but Penix appeared to be injured after one of his offensive lineman stepped on his ankle. He was getting looked at on the sideline as the Michigan offense got on the field. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nNew CFP format in 2024\n\nThe College Football Playoff will expand to 12 teams during the 2024 season. Under the 12-team system, the field will be composed of the six conference champions ranked highest by the selection committee and the six highest-ranked non-conference champions. The 12-team format will allow access for at least one team from the Group of Five.\n\nAccording to the playoff, the first round of the 2024 bracket will occur during the week ending Dec. 21, at \"either the home field of the higher-seeded team or at another site designated by the higher-seeded institution.\" These games would pit seeds No. 12 and No. 5, No. 11 and No. 6, No. 10 and No. 7, and No. 9 and No. 8.\n\nThe top four highest-rated conference champions would have an open date and not play until the quarterfinals. For 2024 and 2025, the four quarterfinal and two semifinal games will be played at rotating bowl sites. In 2024, the quarterfinals will be the Fiesta, Peach, Rose and Sugar bowls, with the semifinals at the Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl. In 2025, the Cotton, Orange, Rose and Sugar will host the quarterfinals and the Fiesta Bowl and Peach Bowl will host the semifinals. The national championship games will be held on Jan. 20, 2025, in Atlanta, and Jan. 19, 2026, in Miami. — Paul Myerberg\n\nRome Odunze pronunciation\n\nWashington receiver Rome Odunze pronounces his name “ROAM oh-DUNE-zay.” — Ryan Ford, Detroit Free Press\n\nHalftime: Michigan 17, Washington 10\n\nIt was a first quarter dominated by Michigan, but Washington is still alive after getting a touchdown right before halftime to make it a one-score game.\n\nAfter Michigan jumped out to a 14-3 lead, the Wolverines were stopped in the red zone in the opening minutes of the second quarter and opted to take the three points. Washington’s offense still struggled to move the ball, including a missed wide-open catch on a fourth down, but the defense prevented Michigan from adding more points.\n\nWashington finally put together its best drive of the night in the final minutes, capping it with Michael Penix Jr. finding Jalen McMillan on fourth-and-goal for its first touchdown of the game.\n\nMichigan had 229 yards in the first quarter, but only picked up 61 yards after that. The Wolverines are still outgaining the Huskies 290-161, with 209 of those yards coming on the ground.\n\nLeading the way for Michigan is Donovan Edwards, who scored two touchdowns on his first two carries, finishing the first half with 93 yards on three carries. Blake Corum has also helped with 84 yards on eight carries.\n\nIt had been a mostly difficult first half for the Heisman Trophy runner-up, but Penix is 13 for 21 with 128 yards and a scoring toss.\n\nWashington has trailed at halftime twice this season – against Arizona State and Utah, but those were eventual wins. The Huskies will get a chance to tie the game to open the third quarter, something head coach Kalen DeBoer likes.\n\n\"We get the ball to start the third quarter. Great spot,\" he told ESPN before heading into the locker room. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nMichael Penix stats at halftime\n\nWashington QB Michael Penix is 13-of-21 passing for 128 yards and one touchdown pass after one half of action.\n\nWashington score: Jalen McMillan 3-yard touchdown catch from Michael Penix\n\nMichigan might end up regretting going for it on fourth down.\n\nAfter Michigan turned it over on downs, Washington marched down the field on a 11-play, 61-yard drive that resulted in a touchdown. Washington’s touchdown, ironically, came on fourth down.\n\nWashington needed four plays inside the 10-yard line to reach paydirt. The Huskies scored on fourth down when Michael Penix passed to running back Jalen McMillan for a 3-yard touchdown. Washington’s TD cut its deficit to 17-10 with under a minute remaining in the first half.\n\nPenix completed four passes during Washington’s touchdown drive. The Heisman Trophy runner-up has 128 passing yards and one touchdown in the first half.\n\nWashington gets the football to begin the third quarter. — Tyler Dragon\n\nJim Harbaugh surprised by brother, John Harbaugh, on sidelines\n\nIt’s typically not a good idea to bother the head coach in the national championship game.\n\nUnless you are the older brother.\n\nJohn Harbaugh snuck up on Jim Harbaugh on the sidelines to greet him, as the Ravens head coach was able to make it to Houston to see his brother coach in his first national championship game. The two embraced before the elder Harbaugh brother let his younger sibling get back to coaching. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nHalftime show national championship\n\nThere will be a halftime show for the College Football Playoff national championship.\n\nUnlike other major sporting events such as the Super Bowl or NBA All-Star game, this halftime show will not feature a chart-topping artist. Instead, the Michigan Marching Band and the University of Washington Husky Marching Band will entertain fans at Houston's NRG Stadium while their football teams debrief in the locker room.\n\nFans at home can watch the halftime show on the ESPN app via the All-22 view. — Victoria Hernandez\n\nMichigan fails fourth-down conversion\n\nThe Washington defense is hanging on, preventing Michigan from converting a fourth-down play to give its offense great field position.\n\nMichigan got into Huskies territory and faced a fourth-and-3 at the Washington 38-yard line. Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh initially sent his punting unit out, but took a timeout to send the offense back out instead.\n\nQuarterback J.J. McCarthy looked to Roman Wilson to pick up the first down, but Edefuan Ulofoshio played great coverage and broke up the pass to give Washington the ball back. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWhat does FBS stand for in college football?\n\nFBS stands for Football Bowl Subdivision, which is the highest level of college football in the country. Previously called Division I-A, FBS includes 10 conferences and 133 programs.\n\nMichigan goes three-and-out\n\nMichigan got its best field position of the day, but couldn’t capitalize on the Washington turnover-on-downs.\n\nThe Wolverines started at their own 47-yard line but couldn’t gain a yard on the drive. Blake Corum was stuffed on the opening play and J.J. McCarthy couldn’t connect with Colston Loveland or Cornelius Johnson on the following plays, a big stop for a Huskies defense that was gashed in the opening quarter.\n\nThe ensuing punt went into the end zone, so Washington will start at the 20-yard line in an attempt to cut the deficit. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nMichael Penix overthrows Rome Odunze on fourth down\n\nKalen DeBoer’s first big decision backfired.\n\nDeBoer and Washington elected to go for it on fourth-and-7 from Michigan’s 47-yard line. Michael Penix took the snap in shotgun formation and fired the football over the head of a wide open Rome Odunze.\n\nMichigan took over possession of the football at their own 47-yard line as a result.\n\nWashington did convert two first downs during the drive, but two penalties hurt the team. — Tyler Dragon\n\nMichigan score: James Turner 31-yard field goal\n\nThe Michigan offense is rolling, but a defensive stop from Washington kept the Wolverines out of the end zone.\n\nBlake Corum got the drive started with a 59-yard run on the opening play of the drive, but the Washington defense held its ground for the first time of the game, preventing the Wolverines from picking up another first down.\n\nKicker James Turner came in for a 31-yard field goal, and snuck it in through the upright to make it a 17-3 game. This is now the largest deficit Washington has faced this season, and it’ll need to match history to win this game. The largest deficit to be overcome in a CFP national championship is 14 points, done by Clemson in 2017. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nCFP national championship tickets\n\nThe cheapest ticket listed on TicketIQ on Thursday afternoon was about $1,200 while the most expensive was listed at more than $21,000, a seat near the 50-yard line. As of Monday afternoon, the cheapest ticket listed by TicketIQ was more than $3,000 and the most expensive was more than $67,000.\n\nEnd of first quarter: Michigan 14, Washington 3\n\nIt’s been all Michigan in the first quarter of the national championship game.\n\nThe Wolverines lead 14-3 and are threatening another score after the first 15 minutes of the game in which Michigan displayed its power over Washington.\n\nMichigan had two touchdown runs from Donovan Edwards on its first two drives, while Washington had a field goal on its first and punted on its second.\n\nThe running game has done a majority of the damage for the Wolverines, picking up 174 rushing yards in the opening frame. In total, Michigan has 229 yards while Washington has 74.\n\nOn the final play of the first quarter, Michigan’s Blake Corum broke free for a 59-yard run to set his team up at the Washington 20-yard line at the start of the second quarter. It was one of several big plays from Michigan, as they picked up four plays of at least 30 yards in the first quarter. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWashington punts on second drive\n\nThe Huskies failed to answer Michigan’s second touchdown.\n\nMichael Penix and Washington went three-and-out in their second series and were forced to punt the football back to Michigan down 14-3 late in the first quarter. — Tyler Dragon\n\nMichigan score: Donovan Edwards 46-yard touchdown run\n\nTwo touches, two touchdowns.\n\nDonovan Edwards is turning into a Michigan legend, as the running back had another big run for his second touchdown of the first quarter.\n\nThe junior running back found an open hole on the fourth play of Michigan’s drive and outran the Washington defenders to give the Wolverines a 14-3 lead with two minutes left in the first quarter. The quick four play, 88-yard drive was aided when J.J. McCarthy showcased his arm by finding Roman Wilson on a 37-yard pass on the second play.\n\nEdwards already has 87 yards and two touchdowns on his two carries. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWashington score: Grady Gross 25-yard field goal\n\nWashington’s 14-play opening drive stalled in the red zone.\n\nOn third-and-goal, Michal Penix’s pass to Rome Odunze sailed over the wide receiver’s head. The Huskies had to settle for a short 25-yard field goal by kicker Grady Gross that snuck between the uprights.\n\nThe Huskies trail 7-3 with under four minutes remaining in the first quarter.\n\nWashington faced some early adversity during their first possession. Starting running back Dillon Johnson reaggravated his foot injury during the series but he was able to check back into the game. — Tyler Dragon\n\nDillon Johnson injured, returns\n\nLeading up to the national championship game, all eyes were on whether Washington running back Dillon Johnson would be able to play, and if how healthy he is.\n\nBut one play in and Johnson is already in pain.\n\nOn the first offensive play for the Huskies, Johnson took the handoff for six yards when a Michigan defender fell on his left foot as he got tackled. Johnson gingerly walked to the sideline, pointing at his left ankle. He went into the injury tent looking to be in discomfort.\n\nBut the junior running back would return eight plays later, and even was the lead blocker on the play after his return. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWhat are the stickers on Michigan football helmets?\n\nJim Harbaugh brought back helmet stickers when he arrived at Michigan in 2015 and awards them for various achievements, on-field and off-field. For the 2023 season, Harbaugh introduced a new sticker, according to Michigan Live, this one bearing the acronym EUTM. It stands for “enthusiasm unknown to mankind,” Michigan Live reported.\n\nCFP national anthem singer: Fantasia Barrino\n\nIt was previously announced that Grammy-award winner Fantasia Barrino will perform the \"Star-Spangled Banner\" prior to kickoff of the College Football Playoff national championship.\n\nFantasia burst onto the scene as the third winner of the famed reality TV show \"American Idol.\" She won at just 19 years old, beating out several other soon-to-be stars including Jennifer Hudson.\n\nMost recently, Fantasia was nominated at the Golden Globes for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for her role as Celie Johnson in The Color Purple.\n\nFantasia had previously worked on Broadway as the lead in the The Color Purple between April 10, 2007 and January 6, 2008. — Jon Hoefling\n\nDonovan Edwards stats\n\nMichigan's backup running back is junior Donovan Edwards.\n\nEdwards has only rushed for more than 50 yards in one game this year (52 against Penn State), and has accumulated 393 yards and three touchdowns on the ground, while catching 30 passes for 249 yards in the passing game.\n\nMichigan score: Donovan Edwards 41-yard touchdown run\n\nMichigan has made it a habit of being physically dominating this season, and it displayed the power on the opening drive with a touchdown.\n\nThe Wolverines had no issues getting into Washington territory, but took a sack on a first down play that sent them back to the 41-yard line. On the very next play, Donovan Edwards bounced off Washington defenders and found an open lane to his left, breaking free for a 41-yard touchdown run to get the scoring started.\n\nIt was an eight play, 84-yard drive that saw Michigan pick up 66 of those yards on the ground. Now Michael Penix Jr. and company will get their chance to respond.\n\nIt was Edwards' first touchdown since the Nov. 11 matchup against Penn State. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nHas Michigan ever won a national championship?\n\nYes. It's been nearly 25 years since Michigan last claimed a national championship, last winning one in 1997. Michigan also won most of its national championship before the poll era, which began in 1936. Here’s everything you could want to know about Michigan’s championship history. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nHas Washington ever won a national championship?\n\nThe Huskies have two (1960 and 1991), but it kind of depends who you ask. In 1960, after beating Minnesota 17-7 in the Rose Bowl and finishing with a record of 10-1, Washington was named the national champion by the Helms Athletic Foundation. When the Helms Foundation eventually dissolved in 1969, much of its archives went to the Amateur Athletic Union. Want to know something even weirder about the 1960 national championship? The Huskies didn’t claim it until 2007 — and that’s when they had a trophy made for it. — Lindsay Schnell\n\nLast time Washington won a national championship?\n\nBehind legendary coach Don James, and following Washington's 34-14 thumping of Michigan in the 1991 Rose Bowl, the coaches poll (at the time administered jointly by USA TODAY and CNN) named the Huskies national champs. The Associated Press poll, on the other hand, selected the Miami Hurricanes as the No. 1 team, with the Huskies coming in at No. 2. Miami had also finished 12-0 that season, ending with a 22-0 win over Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. Because of this, Miami also claims the 1991 national championship. Some consider the 1991 Washington team one of the best college football squads of all time. — Lindsay Schnell\n\nLast time Michigan won a national championship?\n\nIt's been nearly 25 years since Michigan last claimed a national championship, last winning one in 1997. Michigan also won most of its national championship before the poll era, which began in 1936. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nCoin toss for national championship game\n\nWashington called tails and won the toss. The Huskies deferred.\n\nThe Huskies' captains were Michael Penix Jr., Rome Udunze, Edefuan Ulofoshio, with former standout defensive end Steve Emtman as a special captain. Emtman played at Washington from 1988-91 and was drafted No. 1 in the 1992 NFL draft by the Indianapolis Colts.\n\nMichigan's captains were Zak Zinter, Blake Corum, Kris Jenkins, Trevor Keegan and Mike Sainristil. Zinter suffered a season-ending injury during the Wolverines' win against Ohio State.\n\nWhat time is kickoff for the national championship game tonight?\n\nKickoff is 7:30 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 8, 2024.\n\nHow to watch Michigan vs. Washington?\n\nYou can watch or stream on ESPN. Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit on the call; Holly Rowe and Molly McGrath on the sideline, and Bill Lemonnier as rules analyst. Additionally, ESPN will offer a variety of alternative broadcasts on its other channels: Field pass with \"The Pat McAfee Show\" (ESPN2), Command Center (ESPNU), Skycast (ESPNews), Spanish language (ESPN Deportes). You can also stream on Fubo (free trial).\n\nWe occasionally recommend interesting products and services. If you make a purchase by clicking one of the links, we may earn an affiliate fee. USA TODAY Network newsrooms operate independently, and this doesn’t influence our coverage.\n\nWhere is the national championship game? Is NRG Stadium covered?\n\nThe Wolverines and the Huskies are playing at NRG Stadium in Houston. The stadium has a retractable roof.\n\nWho is favored in the national championship? What is the Michigan vs. Washington spread?\n\nThe top college football betting apps favor Michigan over Washington in the national championship game. The Wolverines are 5.5-point favorites over the Huskies, according to BetMGM college football odds. Looking to wager? Check out the best mobile sports betting apps offeringcollege football betting promos in 2023.\n\nMichigan vs. Washington predictions\n\nHere is how USA TODAY Sports' experts are predicting tonight's national championship:\n\nScooby Axson: Washington 34, Michigan 24\n\nWashington 34, Michigan 24 Jace Evans: Michigan 35, Washington 31\n\nMichigan 35, Washington 31 Paul Myerberg: Michigan 27, Washington 23\n\nMichigan 27, Washington 23 Erick Smith: Michigan 34, Washington 24\n\nMichigan 34, Washington 24 Eddie Timanus: Washington 27, Michigan 21\n\nWashington 27, Michigan 21 Dan Wolken: Michigan 27, Washington 21\n\nMichigan vs. Washington over/under\n\nThe over-under for Washington vs. Michigan is 55.5, according to BetMGM.\n\nMichigan vs. Washington moneyline\n\nMichigan is a -220 favorite on the moneyline. Meanwhile, Washington is a +180 underdog, according to BetMGM. If you’re new to sports betting, don’t worry. Our college football betting guide can help you get started. We also have tips for beginners on how to place a bet online. And USA TODAY readers can claim exclusive promos and bonus codes with these online sportsbooks and sports betting sites.\n\nMichigan Wolverines fight song lyrics\n\nLouis Elbel wrote Michigan's fight song \"The Victors” as a music student at Michigan in 1898. You can find the full lyrics here.\n\nJohn Williams composed national championship score\n\nStar Wars. Harry Potter. Jurassic Park.\n\nNow add Michigan vs. Washington to the list of credits for legendary composer John Williams.\n\nWilliams created an original score for the national championship game called \"Of Grit and Glory.\" ESPN aired the song ahead of kickoff in a video that featured space-themed cinema since the game is played in Houston, highlights from the Wolverines and Huskies, and soundbites from historic players such as Tim Tebow, Vince Young and Peter Warrick.\n\nIt set the stage for a night of drama in a galaxy not so far away. — Victoria Hernandez\n\nHead coach of Washington Huskies: Kalen DeBoer coaching history\n\nKalen DeBoer has four seasons of head coaching experience — two at Fresno State before joining Washington in 2022 — and has compiled a 37-8 (.822) record in that span.\n\nHead coach of Michigan Wolverines: Jim Harbaugh coaching record\n\nUniversity of San Diego (2004-06): 29-6\n\n29-6 Stanford (2007-10): 29-21 (.580)\n\n29-21 (.580) San Francisco 49ers (2011-14): 44-19-1 (.695), 5-3 (.625) in the playoffs\n\n44-19-1 (.695), 5-3 (.625) in the playoffs Michigan: 88-25 (.779)\n\nWashington Huskies football depth chart 2024\n\nHere’s who started for the Huskies against Texas in the Sugar Bowl. Defensive starters: CB Jabbar Muhammad, CB Elijah Jackson, DL Ulumoo Ale, DL Tuli Letuligasenoa, DL Faatui Tuitele, LB Zion Tupuola-Fetui, LB Edefuan Ulofoshio, LB Bralen Trice, LB Alphonzo Tuputala, S Dominique Hampton, S Asa Turner. Offensive starters: QB Michael Pinex Jr., RB Dillon Johnson, OL Troy Fautanu, OL Nate Kalepo, OL Parker Brailsford, OL Roger Rosengarten, OL Julius Buelow, TE Jack Westover, WR Rome Odunze, WR Ja’Lynn Polk, WR Jalen McMillan. Read Paul Myerberg on why Michael Penix is perfect for Washington after career of adversity.\n\nMichigan Wolverines football depth chart\n\nHere’s who started for the Wolverines against Alabama in the Rose Bowl. Defensive starters: DB Mike Sainristil, DB Makari Paige, DB Rod Moore, DB Josh Wallace, DB Will Johnson, DE Braiden McGregor, DE Jaylen Harrell, DL Mason Graham, DL Kris Jenkins, LB Michael Barrett, LB Junior Colson. Offensive starters: QB J.J. McCarthy, RB Blake Corum, TE Colston Loveland, TE AJ Barner, WR Roman Wilson, WR Cornelius Johnson, OL Karsen Barnhart, OL Trente Jones, OL Drake Nugent, OL LaDarius Henderson, OL Trevor Keegan. Read Dan Wolken on why Jim Harbaugh calling J.J. McCarthy the greatest Michigan QB isn't nuts.\n\nDillon Johnson stats\n\nWashington senior running back Dillon Johnson is in his lone season with Washington after transferring from Mississippi State. With the Huskies, he’s racked up 1,162 yards and 16 touchdown on 222 carries. Over his three seasons with the Bulldogs, he played in 35 games and recorded 1,198 yards and 11 touchdowns on 229 carries.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. stats\n\nThe 6-foot-3, 213-pound quarterback was 342-of-576 passing (59.4%) for 4,197 yards, 29 touchdowns with 32 picks in four years at Indiana. He has more than doubled that production in two seasons with Washington, where he’s completed 66% of his passes (698-of-1,058) for 9,289 yards, 66 TDs and 17 picks. In 2023 alone, Penix was 336-of-504 for 4,648 yards, 35 touchdowns and nine interceptions. Read Paul Myerberg on why Michael Penix is perfect for Washington after a career of adversity.\n\nWashington Huskies mascot\n\nA live mascot is living his best life at NRG Stadium.\n\nWashington has brought its own husky to the national championship game, named Dubs.\n\nThe husky at the game is actually Dubs II, taking over his predecessor Dubs I in 2019. He is the 14th live mascot for Washington and resides in Sammamish, Washington.\n\nMeanwhile, Michigan doesn’t have a live mascot, as it might be tough to have an actual wolverine on the sidelines. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWashington Huskies 2022 record\n\nWashington went 11-2 last season, its only two losses coming on the road against Pac-12 foes, UCLA and Arizona State.\n\nThe Huskies won their bowl game, the Alamo Bowl, which, ironically came against Texas, which Washington beat in this year's CFP semifinal.\n\nMichigan national championships\n\nAccording to the NCAA, the Wolverines have titles in: 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1918, 1923, 1933, 1948, 1997. Michigan says it also has won titles in 1932 and 1947. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nWashington Huskies WRs\n\nHere are all the receivers on Washington's roster: Rome Odunze, Ja’Lynn Polk, Jalen McMillan, Giles Jackson, Rashid Williams, Germie Bernard, Denzel Boston, Taeshaun Lyons, Camden Sirmon, Luke Luchini, Jake Parnagian, Mason Wheeler, Owen Coutts, Jackson Girouard, Keith Reynolds. Read Paul Myerberg on how the Huskies' offense matches up against Michigan.\n\nDillon Johnson injury: Is he playing tonight?\n\nWashington running back Dillon Johnson is expected to play tonight against Michigan, the team has said. Johnson went down in the College Football Playoff semifinal against Texas, nagging lower leg injuries leading him to being carted off the field. ESPN's Molly McGrath reported Monday afternoon that Johnson is dealing with right foot and left knee injuries.\n\n\"This is just something he's been working through for a couple months now and just played through it,\" Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer said last Wednesday. \"There's nothing as far as above and beyond what's happened in the past. Just kind of throughout the game, he'd reaggravate it and shake it off and go back out there and play.\"\n\nJohnson was seen on the sideline before the game playing catch with quarterback transfer Will Rogers.\n\nBlake Corum outfit: Michigan RB arrives in Texas style outfit\n\nEverything is bigger in Texas, including Blake Corum’s outfit.\n\nThe Michigan running back arrived at NRG Stadium sporting a classic Texas look, wearing a big black cowboy hat, white shirt, jeans and a massive belt buckle. As if the belt buckle wasn’t enough, Corum is also iced-up with a custom “BC2” chain on his neck.\n\nDo wolverines live in Michigan?\n\nWolverines are actually extremely rare in the state of Michigan. When a female wolverine was spotted in Michigan's Thumb-region (Huron County) in 2004, it was the first confirmed appearance in the state in more than 200 years.\n\nThe wolverine reportedly died sometime in late 2009 or early 2010. It was stuffed and has been on display at the Saginaw Bay Visitor Center in the Bay City State Recreation Area.\n\nMichigan vs. Washington uniforms: What uniforms will Michigan, Washington wear in CFP national championship?\n\nIt will be a contrast in colors for the national championship game with both teams going for all-color looks in Houston.\n\nAs the home team, Michigan will wear its \"big game blue\" uniforms – traditional blue and maize helmet with blue jersey and pants. The Wolverines have worn the uniform combination three times this season, all wins against Bowling Green, Indiana and Ohio State.\n\nWashington will go for an all-white uniform set, with white jersey and pants combining with the classic gold helmets. The combination has been worn twice in wins at Michigan State and at Oregon State. — Jordan Mendoza\n\nCFP championship weather\n\nWeather won't be a factor at NRG Stadium on Monday, but it could still have an effect on the College Football Playoff championship game.\n\nHouston is part of a swath of Texas and Louisiana that is under a tornado watch until 10 p.m. ET as parts of the Gulf of Mexico are hit by extreme weather. As a result, Houston's Office of Emergency Management has advised fans to get to the stadium and indoors early so as to avoid the worst of the inclement weather.\n\nBeyond the ongoing tornado watch, high winds are also expected to be a more pressing issue.\n\nNRG Stadium is an indoor stadium and neither the Houston OEM nor National Weather Service has given no indication of an imminent postponement. Things could change if weather poses a threat to fan safety. — Kevin Skiver, USA TODAY Network\n\nCollege Football Playoff semifinals\n\nRoman Wilson stats\n\nThe 6-foot Michigan senior has 735 yards and 12 touchdowns on 45 catches this season. For his career, Wilson has played in 45 games and caught 104 passes for 1,653 yards and 20 TDs. Read Tony Garcia’s feature on Wilson and other seniors for the Detroit Free Press here.\n\nJ.J. McCarthy stats, passing yards per game, rushing yards\n\nThe 6-foot-3, 202-pound quarterback has played in 39 games in three seasons for Michigan, completing 472 of 695 passes (.680) for 6,086 yards, 49 touchdowns and 11 picks. He’s also rushed for 601 yards and 10 TDs on 157 carries. In 2023 alone, McCarthy went 230-of-314 passing for 2,851 yards (203.6 yards per game), 22 touchdowns and four interceptions. He also rushed for 171 yards and three scores on 60 carries. Read Dan Wolken on why Jim Harbaugh calling J.J. McCarthy the greatest Michigan QB isn't nuts.\n\nBlake Corum stats, average rushing yards\n\nThe 5-foot-8, 213-pound senior running back has rushed for 3,603 rushing yards and 56 touchdowns in his four-year career at Michigan. In 2023 alone, he carried the ball 237 times for 1,111 yards (4.69 yards per carry, 79.36 yards per game) and 25 touchdowns.\n\nRome Odunze stats, height\n\nThe 6-foot-3, 215-pound Washington senior has caught 209 passes for 3,185 yards and 24 touchdowns in four seasons with the Huskies. In 2023 alone, he recorded 87 catches for 1,553 yards and 13 touchdowns.\n\nWill Jim Harbaugh leave Michigan for the NFL?\n\nAfter the win over Alabama in the Rose Bowl, a reporter asked Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh the big question: “There's a lot of interest in your future; I wonder if you can tell me what the chances are that the championship game might be your last one at Michigan?” Harbaugh danced away from it: “My future consists of a happy flight back to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Can't wait.\"\n\nSo, while Harbaugh isn’t talking, there is plenty of noise about his return to the NFL. So, the drum beat is there; and if this is Harbaugh’s last game, what will his legacy be at Michigan? Harbaugh has not just brought Michigan back. He has elevated the Wolverines to a new level. The Wolverines are 39-3 in the last three years. This team will finish in the top three for the third year in a row — the greatest stretch in school history. — Jeff Seidel, Detroit Free Press\n\nJim Harbaugh salary 2023: How much does he make at Michigan?\n\nJim Harbaugh's total pay for the 2023 season is $8,254,600. He has a maximum bonus amount of $3.275 million. His total earnings since going to Michigan in 2015 are $66,456,280, according to USA TODAY Sports’ database of college football coaching salaries.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. injury history\n\nOne season-ending injury is disappointing; two is heartbreaking. Incredibly, Michael Penix Jr. had to overcome four in as many years with the Indiana Hoosiers, the final two coming just as his college career seemed to be taking flight. Penix tore his ACL three games into his true freshman season in 2018, with the injury coming as he was splitting time with starter Peyton Ramsey in a close loss to Penn State. He injured his non-throwing shoulder nine games into the 2019 season, with Indiana sitting at 7-2, matching the Hoosiers' highest win total since 2007.\n\nHe put himself on the map during the COVID-19 season, tossing 14 touchdowns through five games before suffering another ACL tear in a win against Maryland. And he suffered another shoulder injury five games into the 2021 season, which saw Penix and Indiana struggle through a winless finish in Big Ten play.\n\n\"Yeah, man, those times were tough, but it just showed that I can get through anything. I can persevere and push through any hardship that comes my way,\" said Penix. \"But I'm just super blessed to be in this position now. I wouldn't change anything I've been through for anything. I feel like it's shaped me into the player and the person that I am today.\" Read Paul Myerberg's full feature on Penix here.\n\nMichigan vs. Washington national title game marks the end of college football as we know it\n\nIf Michigan wins its first outright national title since Harry Truman was president, it will be a massive perception-changer in the Midwest. But what does any of that really mean when college football is no longer a sport where regionality matters? What's the fun of comparing one conference to another when we now know the real argument is about which one makes the most money from its television contracts?\n\nSure, they’ll continue to keep score, but the most important game — the SEC vs. Big Ten — is going to continue until they finish consuming whatever parts they want from the rest of college sports. A few years ago, fans from both leagues could get into any SEC-Big Ten matchup because it was a clash of styles and ideologies. Now it’s a fight for TV windows and the scraps of other leagues that might collapse in the near future (looking at you, ACC). That’s not nearly as charming.\n\nBut on Monday, before college football goes completely corporate, we’re going to get a national champion that truly represents a conference and a region of the country. Sadly, it's the last time that will mean anything. Read Dan Wolken’s full column here.\n\nJim Harbaugh Michigan contract\n\nMichigan head coach Jim Harbaugh has reportedly had a contract extension in front of him that will make him one of the highest-paid figures in the sport. There have also been reports lately that he isn’t on board with all of the provisions in the deal, including one that would prevent him from engaging with NFL teams for at least the next year. There are also, perhaps, some contentious issues surrounding Michigan’s ability to get out of the contract if there are more significant NCAA violations found. — Dan Wolken\n\nJim Harbaugh NFL coaching career\n\nJim Harbaugh started his coaching career as an assistant coach at Western Kentucky in 1994 under his father. He was still playing in the NFL at the time, but held both jobs through the 2001 season. He then made the leap to full-time coaching in 2002, becoming the quarterbacks coach with the Oakland Raiders, a role he held for two seasons, which included a Super Bowl victory. He headed to Southern California to become the head coach of the University of San Diego, where he spent three seasons (2004-06), before helming Stanford (2007-10) and the San Francisco 49ers (2011-14). He has been at Michigan since 2015. Read Dan Wolken's column on what Harbaugh brings to college football.\n\nMichigan vs. Washington preview\n\nThe biggest factor in deciding the national championship may come down to this: Which team can dictate the flow of action on offense? Michigan will be hard to beat if running the ball effectively on first down and putting together the sort of sustained drives that would wear down the Huskies' defense. If able to get up and down the field by sharing the wealth among three of four receivers, Washington could give Michigan nightmarish flashbacks to the humbling loss to the Horned Frogs.\n\n\"Yeah, I think the aggressiveness is just who we are,\" Washington coach Kalen DeBoer said.\n\nDon't look for either team to shrink from the challenge. If ever in doubt in the first place, Michigan's physical and mental toughness has been solidified by the overtime win against the Crimson Tide. Washington's fortitude has been on display all throughout a season defined by narrow, single-possession wins. Which team blinks? Read Paul Myerberg’s full preview here.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. and what Washington teammates, Michigan rivals say about him\n\nIt's since leaving Indiana for Washington that quarterback Michael Penix Jr. has entered a new stratosphere, etching his place among the most successful quarterbacks of the decade with two seasons that stack up against the best in Pac-12 history.\n\n“He's different,\" said Washington running back Dillon Johnson.\n\nHe's \"the reason we're in the spot that we're in,\" said offensive lineman Julius Buelow.\n\n“He's that guy,\" wide receiver Rome Odunze said.\n\nPenix is special: In his production, in his unorthodox throwing motion, in his place in this record-setting offense and most of all in the way he's overcome injury, the Huskies' senior quarterback has built a name for himself that will outlast Monday night, when Washington meets Michigan in the College Football Playoff national championship game.\n\n\"He's got the 'it' factor,\" Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh said. \"He's just got it.” Read Paul Myerberg’s full feature here.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. draft projection\n\nWashington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. is a case study in perseverance after suffering season-ending injuries in each of his four years at Indiana. He's remained healthy since joining the Huskies in 2022 and made a serious run at this year's Heisman Trophy before finishing second to LSU's Jayden Daniels. Injury concerns could lead Penix to drop a bit come April's NFL draft, but he shouldn't fall far. — Paul Myerberg\n\nIs Michael Penix Jr. left-handed?\n\nYes, Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. is left-handed. Read Paul Myerberg's full feature on Penix here.\n\nJ.J. McCarthy draft projection\n\nMichigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy might be a first-round pick this spring but would be in contention to be the first quarterback off the board if he delays that draft decision another year, so the true junior will have a difficult decision to make after the national championship. He's agile, careful with the football and perhaps a little constrained by the Wolverines' offensive scheme, so McCarthy's best ball could ahead of him. — Paul Myerberg\n\nHow old is J.J. McCarthy?\n\nJ.J. McCarthy turns 21 on Jan. 20, 2024. Read Paul Myerberg on the greatest Michigan QBs ever and if McCarthy tops the list.\n\nHow will Michigan's defense fare against Michael Penix Jr.?\n\nThe Wolverines haven't faced a quarterback anywhere close to Washington QB Michael Penix Jr. The closest analog might be Maryland's Taulia Tagovailoa, who threw for 247 yards and completed 67.7% of his attempts on Nov. 18 but was undone by two interceptions in Michigan's 31-24 win. Penix is in a different class. On the biggest stage of his career, he showed why he might be the best quarterback in college football − and why Washington is poised to ride his arm to a national title. \"Man, the job's not finished,\" Penix said. \"I feel like it's definitely going to take more. I'm going to push myself to get this team more next week. And, man, we're just super excited for the opportunity for sure.\" Read Paul Myerberg's full story here.\n\nJ.J. McCarthy scouting report\n\nA good bit of faith is required in this projection — J.J. McCarthy going 13th to the Oakland Raiders. The Michigan quarterbak is hardly a finished product as a potential early first-round prospect – and he hasn't even declared his intentions for next year yet. But his athleticism and arm strength will position him to be selected far earlier than some might expect based off his production. After the failed Jimmy Garoppolo move, it's time for the Raiders to make a substantial investment in a young quarterback to develop for the long term. — Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz, in his latest NFL mock draft\n\nMichigan vs. Washington all-time record, history\n\nThe Wolverines and Huskies have played 13 times since 1953. Michigan holds the edge, 8-5.\n\nKalen DeBoer salary\n\nKalen DeBoer is in his second season with Washington and earned $4.2 million in 2023 with a max bonus of $1.25 million, according to USA TODAY Sports’ database of college football coaching salaries. In 2022, he earned $3,100,008 with a max bonus of $1.175 million.\n\nWashington vs. Michigan last game\n\nThe Huskies and Wolverines last played in on Sept. 11, 2021. Michigan won, 31-10.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2023/11/27/college-football-playoff-scenarios-path-eight-teams/71654502007/", "title": "College Football Playoff scenarios: How will the final weekend ...", "text": "There are still eight teams in the mix for the College Football Playoff and a number of ways things could unfold over the final weekend of the regular season, from ho-hum predictable to burn-it-all-down chaos.\n\nWith pivotal matchups still to come − beginning with Georgia and Alabama and a rematch of Washington and Oregon − the playoff race could eventually settle into an easy and uncontroversial top four.\n\nOr things could spiral out of control. Sharpen those pitchforks, just in case.\n\nWith the clock ticking on the regular season, these are the big questions facing the playoff and how the top four could look come Sunday:\n\nCan Ohio State get back into the playoff?\n\nA year ago, Ohio State lost to Michigan by 22 points but still backdoored into the playoff and nearly upset Georgia in the Peach Bowl. The landscape this year is dramatically different, leaving the Buckeyes with only a narrow avenue for a top-four finish − but there is a way.\n\nHere are the steps:\n\nGeorgia beats Alabama. That takes the Crimson Tide out of the equation.\n\nMichigan beats Iowa. An Iowa win would make the Buckeyes the third-place team from the Big Ten, an easy disqualifier for the committee.\n\nWashington beats Oregon. Losing the rematch would knock the Ducks out of contention.\n\nLouisville beats Florida State. This upset would be the biggest piece of the puzzle for Ohio State.\n\nOklahoma State beats Texas. This would hand the Longhorns a second loss.\n\nThis scenario would leave unbeaten Georgia, Michigan and Washington as the top three seeds. The fourth spot would then come down to five non-conference champions: one-loss teams in Ohio State and Florida State and two-loss teams in Oregon, Alabama and Texas.\n\nThe argument would then settle on the Buckeyes and Seminoles. This is a debate that would favor Ohio State, the top-ranked team in the playoff rankings for multiple weeks and the close runner-up in one of the two best leagues in the FBS.\n\nThere's even a chance that Ohio State would reach the top four if all the above occurs but Oregon beats Washington, leaving a comparison between the Buckeyes and Huskies. But that's one that might lean toward UW because of a high-quality résumé, an appearance in the conference championship game and the fact the Huskies topped the Ducks earlier in the year.\n\nMISERY INDEX: Why college football fans are Week 13's biggest losers\n\nUP AND DOWN: Winners and losers from college football's Week 13\n\nDoes Georgia get in with a loss to Alabama?\n\nIt's hard to say. For one, the Bulldogs would become the second-ranked team from the SEC, and we already know this year's field may be too jammed to include multiple teams from a single league.\n\nThere's no doubt the Bulldogs would have a case at 12-1, under one specific condition: that Michigan is the only unbeaten Power Five team at the end of the regular season.\n\nIn other words, as above, Louisville beats Florida State and Oregon beats Washington. With a win against Oklahoma State, Texas would secure a spot due in large part to this year's win against the Crimson Tide.\n\nPlugging the Wolverines, Alabama and the Longhorns into the field would leave Georgia in competition with Ohio State and one-loss teams from the Pac-12 and ACC.\n\nWe believe Georgia would be picked ahead of Ohio State; the Bulldogs were ahead in the playoff rankings when both were unbeaten and had identical records, and should then remain in front with one additional win and a division crown. The Bulldogs would also come in ahead of Florida State with room to spare.\n\nThat would leave the comparison with the one-loss winner of the Pac-12. It would be a very difficult decision: Oregon has been dominant and would have avenged an earlier loss to Washington.\n\nThis could be the most difficult choice of the four-team era. Would the committee take a Power Five champion with a résumé that warrants a top-four finish and leave the two-time defending national champions on the outside?\n\nDoes Florida State need to be nervous?\n\nNot really.\n\nEvery unbeaten Power Five team has made the playoff during the format's existence, so there's no legitimate reason for concern as long as Florida State takes care of business against Louisville.\n\nUm, almost no reason for concern. With heavyweights looming and the possibility of being compared to one-loss Georgia and Texas should Alabama win the SEC championship, the Seminoles could stand to beat Louisville with some style to prove they can thrive without Travis and to put the committee at ease.\n\nBack in 2014, Ohio State soothed the committee by dominating Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game behind third-string quarterback Cardale Jones. Florida State backup Tate Rodemaker completed 12 of 25 attempts for 134 yards in Saturday's close win against Florida, which finished with a losing record.\n\nWhat are five possible playoff fields?\n\nWhile much can change these next two weekends, here are five playoff scenarios:\n\nNo. 1 Georgia, No. 2 Michigan, No. 3 Washington, No. 4 Florida State. This is the dream scenario for the committee: four unbeaten Power Five champions and no reason for any real debate. While the unbeaten teams could hold serve in conference championship games and leave a no-doubt top four, the committee has never gotten this lucky before.\n\nNo. 1 Georgia, No. 2 Michigan, No. 3 Washington, No. 4 Texas. There's some chaos after Florida State loses to Louisville, leaving a path for Texas to claim a top-four finish. In this scenario, the Longhorns would win the debate against the second-place teams from the Big Ten and Pac-12.\n\nNo. 1 Michigan, No. 2 Washington, No. 3 Texas, No. 4 Alabama. Two Power Five unbeatens and then Texas and the Crimson Tide, with the Longhorns landing ahead because of the head-to-head tiebreaker. Georgia gets squeezed here because of the loss to Alabama in the SEC championship game and the fact that Alabama can't reach the top four without one-loss Texas also making the field.\n\nNo. 1 Georgia, No. 2 Michigan, No. 3 Oregon, No. 4 Texas. The Ducks top Washington and Louisville beats FSU, dumping the Huskies and Seminoles from the conversation. Alabama is out due to the loss to Georgia and the Longhorns easily leapfrog Ohio State thanks to one more win, the win against the Tide and the conference championship.\n\nNo. 1 Michigan, No. 2 Alabama, No. 3 Oregon, No. 4 Georgia. Michigan beats Iowa. Alabama beats Georgia. Oregon beats Washington. Louisville beats FSU. Oklahoma State beats Texas. While there's no way to get Ohio State into the top four, this would represent one of the most star-studded playoff groups in history.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/11/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/football/2023/11/29/alabama-football-college-football-playoff-georgia-sec-championship-texas-oklahoma-state/71740045007/", "title": "Alabama College Football Playoff path: Win vs. Georgia in SEC ...", "text": "Alabama enters conference championship weekend ranked No. 8 in the CFP\n\nThe Crimson Tide must beat Georgia, but also need help to make the CFP\n\nLosses by Texas and Florida State would bolster the team's chances of making the CFP\n\nNearly three full months after a Week 2 home loss to Texas set off a panic about the future of coach Nick Saban’s program — both for the rest of the 2023 season and beyond — the Alabama football team enters December in a familiar position.\n\nThe Crimson Tide heads into its SEC championship game matchup Saturday with Georgia as one of a select handful of teams still in contention for a College Football Playoff berth.\n\nREQUIRED READING:Why Pac-12 is assured of being in College Football Playoff, and the SEC isn't | Toppmeyer\n\nAlabama has reached this point point by overcoming what seemed like considerable odds after falling to the Longhorns 34-24 on Sept. 9 at Bryant-Denny Stadium. With a loss in just its second game, the Tide needed to finish the regular season undefeated to remain in the playoff conversation. It was ultimately able to do just that, winning its final 10 games, three of which came against teams currently ranked in the CFP top 25.\n\nIf it beats the No. 1 Bulldogs, it will not only claim its seventh conference championship in the past 10 years, but also will put itself in contention to make the playoff for the eighth time in the event’s 10-year history. Even so, a 12-1, SEC champion Alabama is likely to still need help to make the playoff.\n\nHow does Alabama secure what previously seemed like an improbable playoff berth? Here’s what needs to happen for the Tide to make the College Football Playoff:\n\nHow can Alabama make the playoff?\n\nBeat Georgia in the SEC championship\n\nThe first and most necessary step in the process may appear simple on paper, but it will be quite difficult to achieve on the field.\n\nGeorgia, the two-time defending national champion, is a 5.5-point favorite for the matchup according to odds from BetMGM, and has yet to lose a game this season. That has extended the Bulldogs' win streak to 29 games across three seasons. Only two of their wins this season have been decided by one possession.\n\nThere is some precedent for Alabama toppling a menacing Georgia team in Atlanta: In 2021, a Tide team with one loss — a 41-38 setback against Texas A&M — defeated an undefeated Bulldogs squad in the SEC championship game 41-24. It earned Alabama a No. 1 seed to the playoff, where it lost in a rematch against Georgia in the national championship game.\n\nA loss Saturday would eliminate whatever chance the Tide has of making the playoff. No team with more than a single loss has ever made the playoff field.\n\nREQUIRED READING:SEC football championship prediction: How can rest of conference catch Georgia, Alabama? | Adams\n\nWhat happens if Alabama beats Georgia?\n\nAn Alabama win over Georgia would be massive for the Crimson Tide's chances of making the playoff. But, by itself, it wouldn't guarantee the Crimson Tide a CFP berth. Saban and Co. would still need to clear Texas, Florida State and one of Washington or Oregon to make the postseason.\n\nIn order for Alabama to make the CFP, it would need help in the Big 12 and ACC championship games. Here's the breakdown:\n\nTexas loses to Oklahoma State\n\nAt No. 8 in the most recent playoff selection committee rankings (as well as the Coaches Poll), Alabama will need to leapfrog several teams in order to make it into the coveted top four.\n\nOne obstacle among that group looms especially large.\n\nWhile Alabama’s resume can be compared to and breathlessly debated with other one-loss teams such as Oregon and Ohio State, No. 7 Texas possess an all-powerful trump card over the Tide by virtue of its road win back in September. Virtually any discussion about the playoff candidacies of Texas and Alabama would lead back to that head-to-head matchup.\n\nIf the Longhorns lose against No. 19 Oklahoma State in Saturday’s Big 12 championship game at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, it will hand them a second defeat this season and remove them from the playoff conversation.\n\nTexas is a 14.5-point favorite in the matchup, according to odds from BetMGM.\n\nREQUIRED READING:Alabama football College Football Playoff rankings: CFP poll before SEC Championship Game\n\nFlorida State loses to Louisville\n\nThe Seminoles are undefeated, but with star quarterback Jordan Travis out for the rest of the season with an injury, they fell from No. 4 to No. 5 in the fourth set of playoff rankings before rising back to No. 4 this week after Ohio State’s loss to Michigan.\n\nEven with Travis’ injury, the Seminoles almost certainly make the field if they win the ACC championship. No undefeated Power Five champion has ever been excluded from the playoff. But a loss to Louisville in Saturday’s ACC championship game in Charlotte, North Carolina, would likely wipe out whatever remaining hopes they have.\n\nAccording to BetMGM odds, Florida State is a 2.5-point favorite against No. 14 Louisville, which finished the regular season 10-2 and owns wins over two top-25 teams (No. 17 Notre Dame and No. 19 N.C. State). The Cardinals' Rivalry Week loss to Kentucky also precludes them from making the CFP over FSU, since the defeat by the Wildcats was their second of the season.\n\nREQUIRED READING:Alabama football bowl projections: Where experts predict Crimson Tide before Georgia\n\nMichigan loses to Iowa\n\nThis result may only be so relevant to the Tide: It seems plausible that the Wolverines, like Georgia, could suffer a conference championship game loss and still make the playoff field (just as TCU did in 2022 and Georgia did in 2021).\n\nIt’s also, by far, the most unlikely outcome from conference championship weekend. The point spread for the game — Michigan is a 23.5-point favorite, according to BetMGM — is nearly six points higher than Iowa’s points-per-game average this season (18).\n\nHope for the best from the playoff selection committee\n\nIn this best-case scenario, Alabama would be one of at least six Power Five teams with fewer than two losses. The Pac-12 championship game doesn't figure into this, as the winner of the matchup will either be No. 3, 13-0 Washington or No. 5, 12-1 Oregon. Either will be well-positioned to make the playoff regardless of what else unfolds around it.\n\nBased on the most recent playoff rankings, the Tide would certainly pass Texas and Florida State, the latter of which plays in a weaker conference and has a starting quarterback sidelined for the season. It would likely do the same to No. 6 Ohio State, which is idle after failing to beat Michigan and make the Big Ten championship.\n\nIt would own a crucial head-to-head result over Georgia, though even with a win, it’s possible based on these other results that both teams could make the playoff — just as they did in 2021.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/11/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/football/2022/12/04/ohio-state-to-face-no-1-georgia-in-college-football-playoff/69698912007/", "title": "Ohio State football to face Georgia in College Football Playoff", "text": "A week after its national championship hopes looked doomed, Ohio State is in the College Football Playoff.\n\nThe Buckeyes (11-1) are the No. 4 seed and will play top-seeded and defending champion Georgia (13-0) in the CFP semifinals at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta at 8 p.m. Dec. 31.\n\nNo. 2 Michigan (13-0) and No. 3 TCU (12-1) will play in the other semifinal in the Fiesta Bowl. The Big Ten has two teams in the playoff for the first time.\n\nThe national championship game will be Jan. 9 in suburban Los Angeles.\n\n\"It’s hard to explain the range of emotions that have gone on here the last seven days,\" Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. \"I said before that it’s like a second lease on life. A couple days ago, we were on life support a little bit. Our season was. Now there's a two-game season in front of us. There's unbelievable excitement right now. Guys are just bouncing around the facility.\"\n\nOhio State vs Georgia:Buckeyes make College Football Playoff vs. Bulldogs. Here's how people are reacting\n\nOhio State in the CFP:How have the Buckeyes done in the College Football Playoff?\n\nWhen Ohio State lost to Michigan 45-23 on Nov. 26 at Ohio Stadium, the Buckeyes appeared unlikely to make the CFP. But two other contenders – Clemson and LSU – also lost that day, opening the door a crack.\n\nStill, No. 5 Ohio State needed help in this weekend’s conference championship games.\n\nHow Ohio State found its way into the CFP\n\nThe simplest path was for No. 4 Southern California to lose to Utah in the Pac-12 title game Friday night in Las Vegas, and that’s what happened. The Utes rallied from a 17-3 deficit for a 47-24 victory, aided by an injury that hampered Trojans quarterback Caleb Williams, the Heisman Trophy favorite.\n\n“You’re welcome, coach Day,” Utah coach Kyle Whittingham quipped after the game.\n\nUtah’s win was its second over USC this season. No two-loss team has ever been selected for the playoff.\n\nGeorgia, Michigan and TCU entered the weekend undefeated. Georgia routed LSU 50-30 in the Southeastern Conference championship game. Michigan pulled away from Purdue in the second half for a 43-22 win in the Big Ten title game.\n\nAn Ohio State vs Michigan rematch could happen in the CFP\n\nTCU lost in overtime to Kansas State 31-28 in the Big 12 championship. The only real drama on Sunday would be whether Ohio State would overtake the Horned Frogs for the No. 3 seed. If that happened, it would set up a semifinal matchup between Ohio State and Michigan. Imagine that.\n\nGeorgia vs Ohio State:When was Ohio State football's last game against Georgia?\n\nNow if the archrivals meet, it will have to be in the championship game. Getting there is a daunting task for Ohio State, which would have to knock off Georgia in its home state. The school’s campus in Athens is about 70 miles from Mercedes-Benz Stadium.\n\n\"Life is all about opportunity,\" Day said. \"What an unbelievable opportunity this is, going down to Atlanta playing the national champs. (Georgia coach) Kirby (Smart) has done an unbelievable job again this year. But this is all going to be about taking advantage of this opportunity, who works harder over the next month, the coaches and the players. Now we're back in control of our destiny. We weren't, and that was the hardest thing going into this past weekend.\"\n\nPeach Bowl:No. 4 Ohio State football is in the Peach Bowl against No. 1 Georgia. Here's what we know\n\nOhio State has some favorable history playing in the SEC’s backyard. The 2014 Buckeyes upset No. 1 Alabama in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on their way to winning the inaugural College Football Playoff.\n\nThe Buckeyes have been back to the CFP three times since then. The 2016 team lost 31-0 to Clemson in the semifinals at the Fiesta Bowl. The 2019 Buckeyes fell in a heartbreaker 29-23 to Clemson again in the Fiesta Bowl.\n\nOSU got its revenge against the Tigers the next year 49-28 in the Sugar Bowl before losing to Alabama 52-24 in the title game.\n\nThe Buckeyes will be an underdogs for the first time this season when they play Georgia. They probably welcome that role. They were favored to get revenge against Michigan after their loss in 2021 in Ann Arbor, and they played tight until wilting in the second half.\n\nDay said the Buckeyes have studied what went wrong against Michigan last week, particularly the big plays the defense allowed.\n\n\"You come out of The Game like we did at the end of the season and there's some regret that we don't win The Game,\" Day said. \"Now the goal is to have no regret going into this game, playing loose, playing fast, playing aggressive, and having a great month of preparation so we play with great confidence.\"\n\nOhio State has played Georgia only once. The Bulldogs defeated the Buckeyes 21-14 in the 1993 Citrus Bowl.\n\n\"We recruit a lot of the same kids, and they've got a tremendous program,\" Smart said. \"It'll be a premier matchup, which our guys love. When you make the final four, whether you're 1 through 4, it really doesn't matter.\"\n\nGet more Ohio State football news by listening to our podcasts.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/12/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2023/01/09/tcu-georgia-cfp-college-football-playoff-championship-live-updates/11017448002/", "title": "Georgia vs. TCU live updates: Georgia finishes off TCU in title game ...", "text": "USA TODAY Sports\n\nThe Georgia Bulldogs made some college football history, becoming the first FBS team in 10 years to repeat as champions with a 65-7 win over the TCU Horned Frogs in the College Football Playoff national championship game at SoFi Stadium in rainy Inglewood, California, on Monday night.\n\nThe Bulldogs also are just the ninth program in major college football to win back-to-back national championships.\n\nGeorgia quarterback Stetson Bennett set the tone for the rout, scoring on a 21-yard touchdown run early in the fourth quarter. He finished the game with six total touchdowns and earned game offensive MVP honors.\n\nUSA TODAY Sports had live updates, the latest news, analysis and scenes as Georgia and TCU clashed.\n\n—\n\nGeorgia completes repeat with dominant defeat of TCU\n\nIt was a day for the Bulldogs. From start to finish, Georgia proved too good for the Horned Frogs. Stetson Bennett powered the offense with four touchdown passes and added two rushing scores, while the defense completely shut down a prolific TCU attack to pull away in the second quarter and post the biggest victory in the 25 years of the championship game era of college football. The 65-7 victory made the Bulldogs just the ninth program to win consecutive national champions and the first since Alabama did it in 2011-2012.\n\nGeorgia has most points scored in college football championship\n\nGeorgia's 65-7 win over TCU was the largest point total and score differential in major college football championship game history, dating back to the Bowl Coalition in 1992.\n\nThe 58-point victory bested Nebraska's 62-24 win over Florida in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl for largest point differential. Nebraska's 62 points were also the most scored in a championship game until Monday night.\n\nBranson Robinson scores second touchdown to put Georgia over 60\n\nFreshman running back Branson Robinson scored in back-to-back drives for the Bulldogs, giving them 60 points for the first time this season. On this touchdown, he thundered forward for a 19-yard rush one play after TCU turned the ball over on downs. Jack Podlesny missed the extra point. Georgia 65, TCU 7\n\nGeorgia's second-team offense adds another score\n\nAfter Stetson Bennett's night was done, the Bulldogs offense kept the touchdowns coming. Freshman running back Branson Robinson punched in a 1-yard touchdown to cap off a nine-play, 54-yard drive with under 10 minutes left. Georgia 59, TCU 7\n\nThat's the night and career for Stetson Bennett\n\nWith 13:25 left in the fourth quarter and his team leading 52-7, Kirby Smart pulled his senior quarterback from the game for a curtain call. Bennett's career will end with him winning a second consecutive national championship after one of the best games of his unlikely superstar careers. He finished 18-of-25 for 304 yards and four touchdowns passing and added 39 yards rushing and two scores.\n\nStetson Bennett ties record with sixth touchdown\n\nThe Georgia quarterback reconnected with Ladd McConkey another score. This time, it was on a 14-yard strike into the left corner of the end zone. It was the fourth touchdown pass of the game for Bennett to go with his two rushing scores, which ties Joe Burrow's record for most combined touchdowns in a national championship game. Georgia 52, TCU 7.\n\nBrock Bowers scores as Georgia's lead grows\n\nStetson Bennett found his right-hand-man Bowers on a 22-yard touchdown to open scoring in the second half. The tight end leaped up against TCU's Abe Camara and secured the catch as he fell into the end zone. Bowers also grabbed a 28-yard catch to start the drive. Bennett now has three touchdowns passing and two rushing scores. Georgia 45, TCU 7.\n\nPlaying in his final college game, the Georgia quarterback couldn't have asked for a much better first half. Bennett ran for two scores and added two touchdown passes as the Bulldogs lead TCU 38-7 and appear poised to repeat as national champions. The senior was 13-of-17 for 213 yards passing and had three carries for 39 yards in the first 30 minutes.\n\nHoping to get some points before halftime, the Horned Frogs threw on third-and-18 and Max Duggan was intercepted by Javon Bullard for the second time this game. Georgia converted needed just two plays to score another touchdown with Stetson Bennett finding Adonai Mitchell for a 22-yard score. It's the second touchdown pass for Bennett to go with two touchdown runs. TCU kneels on its final possession, and halftime comes with the Bulldogs ahead 38-7.\n\nThe Bulldogs have now scored on all five drives of the first half as Kendall Milton add a 1-yard touchdown run to their tally. It's now 31-7 in favor of Georgia, and the Horned Frogs are in serious trouble late in the first half.\n\nStetson Bennett scored for the second time on a run and Georgia added another score to its lead. Bennett, who also has thrown for a score, finished off a 92-yeard drive with a 6-yard run and it's 24-7 in favor of the defending champions. The Bulldogs have scored on each of their first four drives.\n\nGeorgia reasserted their lead in the first quarter when Stetson Bennett threw the ball downfield to Ladd McConkey for a 37-yard score. Georgia 17, TCU 7\n\nOn third-and-one from the Bulldogs' two-yard line, TCU quarterback Max Duggan took the snap from shotgun, kept the ball and rushed forward virtually untouched for the two-yard score. Georgia 10, TCU 7\n\nJack Podlesny nails a 24-yard field goal. The score caps off a six-play, 27-yard drive that started in TCU territory after a fumble. It was an important stop for the Horned Frogs, who could not afford to go down two touchdowns so early in the first quarter. Georgia 10, TCU 0\n\nTCU RB Kendre Miller out\n\nThe all-conference running back, who left the Fiesta Bowl with what turned out to be a sprained MCL, warmed up with the team while wearing a brace on his right knee. Miller ranks second in the Big 12 with 6.3 yards per carry and second with 17 touchdowns.\n\nEmari Demarcado started in place of Miller against Georgia. Demarcado, who answered the call against Michigan with a career-high 150 yards and a touchdown on 8.8 yards per carry.\n\nBut the offense will also need a contribution from Duggan, who ranks third on the team with 461 yards and has taken on a larger role in recent weeks.\n\nIn the past two games, Duggan has accounted for 167 yards and three rushing scores on 5.6 yards per attempt. Even if Georgia dedicates resources to limiting Duggan's ability to escape the pocket, he'll be a huge factor as a runner inside the red zone and in short-yardage situations.\n\nGeorgia's offense has one injury to watch. Tight end Darnell Washington, a powerful blocker and key receiving target, is \"resting up and hopefully he’ll be good to go,\" coach Kirby Smart said, after he left the Peach Bowl with an ankle injury.\n\nRead Paul Myerberg's keys to the game here.\n\nDeion Sanders, Luka Doncic, LaDainian Tomlinson among celebs on sidelines\n\nDeion Sanders, the new coach at Colorado, was among the celebrities on hand for the game. Neon shined brightest, but there were others.\n\nDallas Mavericks coach Jason Kidd and NBA All-Star Luka Doncic were photographed on the sideline before kickoff.\n\nGeorgia fans were enthused to see Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, who played for the Bulldogs from 2006 to 2008. TCU fans were excited to see LaDainian Tomlinson, who played for the Horned Frogs from 1997 to 2000. He also was there to watch his nephew, Tre'Vius Hodges-Tomlinson, a standout senior cornerback who won the Jim Thorpe Award this season. New Orleans Saints quarterback Andy Dalton, who played for TCU from 2006 to 2010, also was in attendance.\n\n— Josh Peter, USA TODAY Sports\n\nGeorgia quarterback Stetson Bennett scored the first points of the game. On the Bulldogs' first possession, he faked a handoff to running back Daijun Edwards then ran to his left all the way down the field for a 21-yard touchdown. Georgia 7, TCU 0\n\nHas TCU ever won a national championship?\n\nWhile TCU is new to the College Football Playoff this season, the Horned Frogs boast a storied college football program that features three Pro Football Hall of Famers — LaDainian Tomlinson, Bob Lilly and Sammy Baugh — as well as one national championship.\n\nTCU won its lone college football national championship in 1938 under coach Dutch Meyer and Heisman Trophy winner Davey O'Brien. The Horned Frogs finished 11-0 that season, playing in the Southwest Conference, and capped the campaign with a 15-7 win over Carnegie Tech in the Sugar Bowl.\n\nCenter Ki Aldrich went on to be the No. 1 overall selection in the 1939 NFL draft by the Chicago Cardinals. TCU had three first-round picks in 1939, as O'Brien went fourth overall to the Philadelphia Eagles and tackle I.B. Hale was the No. 8 pick to Washington.\n\nRaining 'Frogs and Dogs'\n\nIt was raining Frogs and Dogs on Monday, one wise guy noted as Texas Christian Horned Frogs fans and Georgia Bulldogs fans scurried inside SoFi Stadium to escape the rain and cold before the College Football Playoff national championship game.\n\nBut hundreds of fans braved the elements during an outdoor concert about 2½ hours before kickoff, as temperatures dipped into the 50s.\n\n‘’I’m sure when they got this in L.A. the first thing they said is we’ll have good weather,’’ said John Holmes, who was wearing a Bulldogs jersey and said he had flown in from his home in Atlanta. “So it’s hilarious we have rain in Los Angeles on the day of the national championship.’’\n\nNot everybody appeared to be laughing as they attempted to dodge raindrops and puddles. Which begged the question: Would inclement weather favor the Frogs or Dogs?\n\n“I think frogs like water,’’ Tammy Walden of San Antonio said as she and a group of about 15 TCU fans hustled toward the stadium.\n\nInside the covered stadium, TCU players were warming up in the dry but breezy, chilly conditions. Those watching the teams warm up could see their own breath.\n\nOutside continued the game before the game: Get to the stadium as dry as possible.\n\nJay Southworth of Austin said he and his entourage broke out the rain ponchos they’d had for two years and had yet to use.\n\nMike Michalowicz and John Briggs sported purple wigs and soaked up rain drops and attention from other TCU fans.\n\n“Ironically, it absorbs more rain,’’ Michalowicz said of the wigs. “And as it rains harder, our heads are getting bigger, bringing about this awkward confidence that we’re going to win.’’\n\nAlthough the rain had let up when Maurice Kinsey arrived at SoFi, he still was dripping – with Georgia regalia. How did he feel about the weather?\n\n“It’s way colder where I live in Northern Virginia, so I’m not tripping,’’ he said.\n\n-- Josh Peter, USA TODAY\n\nCollege football's most well-known live mascot will watch the national championship on television this year. A trip to Los Angeles was too far for Uga X, Georgia football's beloved bulldog mascot. At 9½ years old, Uga, known as Que by his Seiler family owners, is too old to make an extended journey like he did for the 2017 Rose Bowl. — Ryne Dennis, Athens Banner-Herald\n\nBy beating TCU, Georgia would become the third program since 1957 to claim back-to-back unshared national championships, joining Nebraska (1994-95) and Alabama (2011-12). Dozens more have tried and failed to capture a second consensus title. If the Frogs are able to pull off the upset, Georgia would be added to the list of teams since 1950 that made a strong run at back-to-back crowns but came up just short. The list includes:\n\n2019 Clemson (14-1)\n\n2016 Alabama (14-1)\n\n2009 Florida (13-1)\n\n2005 Southern California (12-1; wins later vacated by NCAA sanctions)\n\n2002 Miami (Fla.) (12-1)\n\n2000 Florida State (11-2)\n\n1986 Oklahoma (11-1)\n\n1964 Texas (10-1)\n\n1957 Oklahoma (10-1)\n\n1953 Michigan State (9-1)\n\n— Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY\n\nWhich college football teams have won back-to-back national championships?\n\nJust how hard is it to do what Georgia will attempt to accomplish on Monday night, namely repeat as national champion at college football’s highest level? The short answer is that it would be quite significant. The longer answer is a bit more complicated, as is everything in this sport which struggled for over a century just to get a framework in place for crowning an undisputed national champ. Here are the schools claiming back-to-back No. 1 finishes in what is now known as the Football Bowl Subdivision.\n\nAlabama: 2011 and 2012; 1964 and 1965; 1978 and 1979\n\nOklahoma: 1974 and 1975; 1955 and 1956\n\nNebraska: 1994 and 1995; 1970 and 1971\n\nSouthern California: 2003 and 2004\n\nTexas: 1969 and 1970\n\nNotre Dame: 1946 and 1947\n\nArmy: 1944 and 1945\n\nMinnesota: 1940 and 1941\n\nRead more on the back-to-back champions here.\n\n— Eddie Timanus, USA TODAY\n\nWinning the physical battle against the Wolverines suggests TCU will be able to achieve a degree of success on the ground against Georgia.\n\nThe Horned Frogs have averaged 213.8 rushing yards in four games against ranked opponents and have topped the 200-yard mark in six games against Power Five competition. This is also one of the nation's most explosive ground games: TCU ranks second in the Bowl Subdivision in gains of 30 or more yards (18), tied for fourth in gains of 40 or more yards (11) and tied for second in gains of 50 or more yards (seven).\n\nThere is no doubt TCU will approach Georgia with a similar offensive blueprint. But the Bulldogs' run defense will be up to the challenge.\n\nRead Paul Myerberg's keys to the game here.\n\nThe Max Duggan-Stetson Bennett quarterback battle\n\nAgain and again, Stetson Bennett has defied expectations to earn a place in Georgia's pantheon of great quarterbacks. He'll be tested by the TCU pass defense, however, which has stood up to a heavy volume of attempts by creating tight windows and with an opportunistic mindset. With underappreciated team speed and unique blitz packages, the 3-3-5 scheme used by defensive coordinator Joe Gillespie could catch Bennett and Georgia off guard and set an early tone.\n\nMeanwhile, Duggan and the TCU passing game could find creases against a secondary that has struggled in recent games against LSU and the Buckeyes. But that's only if the Frogs can stamp out the Bulldogs' pass rush.\n\nRead Paul Myerberg's keys to the game here.\n\nHow can TCU stop the Georgia pass rush?\n\nThe Bulldogs stepped things up since the end of November after a largely sluggish regular season. Before facing Georgia Tech on Nov. 26, the Bulldogs had notched multiple sacks in a game just four times, with a season-high of six sacks in the convincing win against Tennessee.\n\nBut they had four sacks against the Yellow Jackets, another four sacks against LSU in the SEC championship game and four more against Ohio State. The defensive front has also been more aggressive in making plays behind the line of scrimmage, with a combined 25 tackles for loss during this three-game span — accounting for over 30% of the Bulldogs' 82 tackles for loss on the season.\n\nThe speed and athleticism was always there for the pass rush to return to this level of effectiveness. While TCU held Michigan to just one sack and three tackles for loss, the offensive line will be put to the test against Georgia.\n\nRead Paul Myerberg's keys to the game here.\n\nHow TCU can scheme to get WR Quentin Johnston involved\n\nBut if able to protect Duggan, the Horned Frogs could dig up explosive plays against a pass defense that stands as Georgia's biggest on-paper weakness. The last two games haven't been pretty: LSU threw for 502 yards, three touchdowns and two interceptions on 9.7 yards per attempt, while the Buckeyes finished with 348 yards, four touchdowns and no turnovers on 10.1 yards per throw.\n\nIn doing so, Ohio State became the first Georgia opponent to eclipse 300 yards on more than 10 yards per pass with multiple scores and no interceptions since LSU in 2013.\n\nTCU will look to spread the ball across multiple receivers. Five players have accounted for at least 22 receptions; these same five players account for 24 of the team's 33 receiving scores. But no target is more vital to the Frogs' offensive success than Quentin Johnston, one of the top receivers in the country.\n\nHe had the big play against Michigan, a 76-yard catch and run two minutes into the fourth quarter that pushed the Frogs' lead to 48-38 and erased the Wolverines' momentum. Overall, Johnston has made 59 catches for 1,066 and a team-best six touchdowns. Even facing off against Georgia, he may be the most talented player on the field Monday night.\n\nRead Paul Myerberg's keys to the game here.\n\nHow the transfer portal helped TCU's massive turnaround\n\nNever in the modern history of college football has a team as unlikely as TCU played for a national championship. In a sport where elite results typically track with elite recruiting, there is no template for a team without single recruiting class ranked in the top 20 over the last five years getting this close to a title.\n\nBut it also doesn’t seem like a coincidence.\n\nWhen the NCAA lifted pretty much all restrictions on transfers two years ago, there was a not insignificant amount of panic that free movement of players would only help the rich get richer. But with the Horned Frogs set to play Georgia in Monday night’s College Football Playoff title game, the evidence would suggest that it has in fact does more to level the playing field than anything the NCAA has tried to legislate since scholarship limitations began in 1973.\n\n“We wouldn’t be where we are had we not added (transfers),” TCU coach Sonny Dykes told the Houston Chronicle last month. “It’s a way to fix your program quickly.”\n\nContinue reading Dan Wolken's column here.\n\nHow Sonny Dykes' fearless approach has TCU on cusp of college football national title\n\nAs TCU coach Sonny Dykes prepared his team to play heavily favored Georgia, his two siblings recounted another time when he looked to be overmatched. Dykes, 5, was riding his Big Wheel down a steep hill in the family’s backyard and getting airborne on the low-riding tricycle before landing in a creek.\n\n“We dressed him up with a football helmet and shoulder pads, and Sonny just jumped on (the Big Wheel) and he took off,’’ his brother Rick Dykes told USA TODAY Sports. “First time we did it, we didn’t know how it was going to work, and hit that last hill, he was in the air and he probably covered 10 yards.\n\n“We were like, ‘Oh my god.’ And when we got down there to him, I thought he was going to be crying and upset, and he was laughing.’’\n\n“Sonny was kind of the cocky one,’’ his sister, Bebe Petree said, “and the great thing for me is to see that cockiness, that little edge that he always had. He was that way when he was a kid playing baseball. He would just rush home plate and knock the catcher off the plate and score the run.\n\n“He always had confidence and swagger.’’\n\nNow 53, Sonny Dykes is leading with that same fearlessness. It's emanating from his team, too.\n\nContinue reading this USA TODAY Sports feature on Dykes here.\n\nKirby Smart's embrace of offense, and why Georgia is better off because of it\n\nWhen Georgia plays for its second consecutive national title Monday night against TCU, head coach Kirby Smart doesn’t just accept that the game might be a shootout — he practically expects it. And over his seven years as a head coach, the Bulldogs have evolved to the point where they’re built for it.\n\n\"It’s important to me that we’re good on defense and we’re explosive on offense,” Smart said. “Do those things lend themselves to each other? They can. They do for us.”\n\nAs college football winds down another season, it’s difficult to find a matchup that would better represent the current state of the sport. — Dan Wolken, USA TODAY\n\nWhat time do Georgia and TCU kick off?\n\nThe College Football Playoff national championship game starts at 7:30 p.m. ET with kickoff scheduled for 7:45 p.m. ET.\n\nWhat TV channel is the College Football Playoff national championship on?\n\nESPN is televising the game between Georgia and TCU with Chris Fowler (play-by-play), Kirk Herbstreit (color commentator), Holly Rowe (sideline) and Molly McGrath (sideline) on the call. ESPN Deportes will also have a Spanish-language broadcast.\n\nLatest odds on CFP championship?\n\nGeorgia is a 13.5-point favorite, according to Tipico Sportsbook, which has the over/under for total points scored at 62.5.\n\nGeorgia vs. TCU expert picks and predictions\n\nScooby Axson: Georgia\n\nJace Evans: Georgia\n\nDan Wolken: Georgia\n\nErick Smith: Georgia\n\nPaul Myerberg: Georgia\n\nEddie Timanus: Georgia\n\nCheck out USA TODAY's full game predictions here.\n\nA look at Georgia, TCU's uniforms for national championship game\n\nScenes around LA in the lead-up to kickoff\n\nTrae Young rooting hard for Georgia\n\nThe Atlanta Hawks superstar shouted out the Bulldogs after his game Sunday night.\n\nListen: College Football Fix previews championship game\n\nDan Wolken and Paul Myerberg recap the fantastic semifinal matchups and look ahead to the championship game in this week's version of the College Football Fix.\n\nCatch up on our coverage of Georgia-TCU\n\nWatch Georgia's gameday hype video\n\nWatch TCU's gameday hype video", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/sec/2022/11/30/alabama-college-football-playoff-purdue-big-ten-championship-michigan/10805768002/", "title": "I've got it! Here's Alabama football path to College Football Playoff", "text": "Thirsty Alabama fans watching conference championship games from afar this weekend should consider saying these words to their bartender: “I’ll have a boilermaker, please.”\n\nA drink that doubles as a Big Ten mascot could be just the luck the Crimson Tide needs to enter the College Football Playoff picture.\n\nNo. 6 Alabama’s chaos-required Hail Mary hope of reaching the playoff may benefit from the unranked Purdue Boilermakers (8-4) beating Michigan in the Big Ten Championship – in blowout fashion.\n\nDevoted readers of this column know my stance of Alabama’s playoff résumé . In short, it lacks one.\n\nWe’ve been through this: The Tide’s best win came at No. 20 Texas, which played its backup quarterback for the final three quarters. Alabama (10-2) lost to teams with a combined five losses. It did not play the SEC’s toughest team, No. 1 Georgia, but nonetheless finished second in the conference’s weaker division.\n\nAlabama’s credentials are worthy of a New Year’s Six bowl, not the playoffs.\n\nIf No. 4 Southern Cal (11-1) stumbles Friday in the Pac-12 Championship, No. 5 Ohio State (11-1) is appropriately first in line to replace the Trojans.\n\nAs I opined Sunday, No. 1 Georgia (12-0), No. 2 Michigan (12-0) and No. 3 TCU (12-0) should become playoff qualifiers even with a conference championship game loss. Perhaps a blowout loss of epic proportion could bump the TCU, but I believe the committee will aim to preserve in the playoff field the three Power Five teams that entered conference championship weekend undefeated.\n\nSo, case closed, right?\n\nEven if USC loses to Utah, Ohio State moves in, and Alabama remains out, yes?\n\nHold on a second.\n\nCFP RANKINGS WINNERS AND LOSERS:Two of top four are locks, Ohio State rooting for Utah\n\n'THERE'S NOT A WEAKNESS':Can Purdue upset Michigan in Big Ten title game?\n\nWHO'S ON TOP?:Caleb Williams, C.J. Stroud lead college football QB rankings\n\nBOWL PROJECTIONS: Southern Cal, Michigan rise up into College Football Playoff\n\nThe slightest crack of hope may remain after something CFP selection committee Chair Boo Corrigan said following Tuesday’s rankings reveal.\n\nCorrigan was asked multiple times whether the order of the teams directly behind USC – Ohio State, Alabama and No. 7 Tennessee – was locked into place.\n\n“Not necessarily,” Corrigan said.\n\nHow so?\n\nNeither OSU, nor Alabama, nor Tennessee is playing this weekend, so under what scenario could Alabama leapfrog Ohio State and enter the playoff?\n\nWell, how’s this:\n\n1. Utah beats USC for the second time, bumping the Trojans from the playoff.\n\n2. Purdue thumps Michigan. Let’s call the final score 42-17.\n\n3. The possible playoff field: No. 1 Georgia, No. 2 TCU, No. 3 Michigan, No. 4 Alabama.\n\nWhy would Purdue trouncing Michigan matter?\n\nPart of Ohio State’s stronger résumé compared to Alabama’s hinges on the Buckeyes having just one loss – to the undefeated Wolverines. OSU also boasts a marquee win against No. 8 Penn State. The Buckeyes absolutely should be ranked ahead of Alabama, as it stands.\n\nBut in the unlikely event Purdue skunks Michigan, that worsens Ohio State’s home loss to the Wolverines, because Michigan’s standing would be weakened. And a Purdue victory would bring the Big Ten East's credentials into question.\n\nWould that be enough to elevate Alabama past Ohio State?\n\nNot in my eyes. The Crimson Tide remains strapped with two losses and lacks a signature victory.\n\nBut I’m not on the selection committee, and Corrigan’s words left the committee room to wiggle.\n\nThree and out\n\n1. If Georgia beats LSU in the SEC Championship, I’d vote for Kirby Smart as SEC coach of the year. Fifteen Bulldogs were drafted off last year’s national championship team, yet the Georgia machine continues threshing. That’s worthy of praise. Coaches of teams highly ranked in the preseason should not be disqualified from the award.\n\n2. The CFP's top five includes No. 2 Michigan, No. 4 USC and No. 5 Ohio State. That’s two Big Ten teams, plus another one bound for the league in 2024. B1G stuff. Will we hear chants “Bee-One-Gee! Bee-One-Gee!” during the playoff?\n\n3. Projecting ahead, here’s the top four of my SEC coach rankings list for 2023: 1. Kirby Smart, 2. Nick Saban, 3. Brian Kelly, No. 4 Hugh Freeze. With one hire, Auburn regained chutzpah.\n\nBlake Toppmeyer is an SEC Columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/11/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/31/sport/college-football-playoffs-2022-cec/index.html", "title": "How to watch the College Football Playoff games | CNN", "text": "CNN —\n\nDon’t have any New Year’s plans? Yes you do! The NCAA College Football Playoff games are on, and nothing says “glamor” or “party time” like eight straight hours of televised sports. Plus, the two semifinal games on December 31 will determine the match-up for the College Football Playoff Championship game on January 9, and you don’t want to miss any important lore. Here’s everything you could possibly want to know to enjoy this year’s playoffs events.\n\nSaturday, December 31:\n\nNo. 2 Michigan will face No. 3 TCU in the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona. The game starts at 4 p.m. ET on ESPN.\n\nNo. 1 Georgia will face No. 4 Ohio State in the Peach Bowl in (where else?) Atlanta. The game starts at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN.\n\nThe winners of these games will meet Monday, January 9 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California for the Championship game.\n\nAre there seriously only four teams in the playoffs?\n\nThis isn’t the World Cup, okay? The College Football Playoff structure is still relatively new (we’ll talk about that later) and while the brackets will probably expand later, four is all we get now. At least they’re easy to keep track of. Let’s meet them:\n\nNo. 1: The Georgia Bulldogs\n\nSchool: The University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia\n\nConference: SEC\n\nClaim to fame: They’re the reigning national champions, an unstoppable force, and at No. 1, are the favorites to win it all again\n\nStrength of mascot: 8/10. “Go Dawgs” has a nice ring to it (or a spooky ring, if you are, say, not a Georgia fan yet live within a 250 mile radius of the Atlanta metropolitan area). They also have a live bulldog mascot, Uga, who always looks tired and concerned. Very relatable. Would you want to fight an actual bulldog? Probably not, because that seems cruel.\n\nStrength of color combo: 10/10. You can’t go wrong with black and red, the classic colors of strength and violence.\n\nPlayer to know: Quarterback Stetson Fleming Bennett IV, whose name sounds like it was spit out by an AI trained on 19th century British peerage and characters from “Yellowstone.” Bennett was a Heisman Trophy finalist this year, the highest personal honor for a college football player. He’s also 25. College football!\n\nStetson Bennett, No. 13 of the Georgia Bulldogs. Todd Kirkland/Getty Images\n\nNo. 2: The Michigan Wolverines\n\nSchool: The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor\n\nConference: Big Ten\n\nClaim to fame: Tom Brady played there, as did current coach Jim Harbaugh.\n\nStrength of mascot: 8/10. Wolverines are described as “solitary” and “muscular” animals, which is a weird set of adjectives, but good for football purposes assuming they can build up some teamwork skills. Even the University of Michigan itself isn’t really sure why they’re called the Wolverines, which lends an air of chaotic mystery to the whole thing. Would you want to fight an actual wolverine? No, they seem very mean.\n\nStrength of color combo: 6/10. Blue and gold/yellow is another classic color combo, but it’s been done in punchier, more powerful ways. However, points for the school’s official yellow shade, which is called “Michigan Maize.”\n\nPlayer to know: Running back Blake Corum. He sufferd a meniscus tear earlier this season, and won’t be playing in the postseason. But you can still sound smart during the game by shaking your head over what a shame it is that Corum will miss the opportunity and wondering out loud whether he’ll return to Michigan when he’s all better, or head straight to the NFL draft.\n\nNo. 3: The TCU Horned Frogs\n\nSchool: Texas Christian University in Forth Worth\n\nConference: Big 12\n\nClaim to fame: I dunno\n\nStrength of mascot: 6/10. Listen, we love a unique mascot. Horned frogs? So Texas. Apparently the mascot originated from an old legend that, in the early days of the school’s football program, the football field was once covered in the little guys. Would you want to fight an actual horned frog? Of course not. One-on-one just wouldn’t be a fair fight, and going up against a whole football field’s worth would be a bit too biblical. You definitely don’t want to fight the person in the horned frog mascot costume, either. Imagine this being the last thing you saw in your earthly life:\n\nNo, please -- not the children. Ron Chenoy/USA Today Sports/Reuters\n\nStrength of color combo: 8/10. Purple is always a nice palette change, and they do some fun horned frog-inspired motifs.\n\nPlayer to know: Quentin Johnston, who’s one of the best wide receivers in the country. 247 Sports describes him as “an incredibly bouncy athlete” which makes a lot more (well, a little more) sense when you learn he also excelled at basketball and high jump.\n\nNo 4: The Ohio State Buckeyes\n\nSchool: Ohio State University in Columbus\n\nConference: Big Ten\n\nClaim to fame: They won the first College Football Playoff National Championship in 2014. They also have one of the most intense fan bases in college football, and you can identify them because they’re the ones insisting it’s “THE Ohio State.”\n\nStrength of mascot: 3/10. It’s a buckeye. A NUT, for goodness’ sake. Or a delicious regional treat, if you’re talking about the chocolate-dipped peanut butter balls. Either way, you wouldn’t ever have reason to fight a buckeye. But you’d definitely win. (Not if it was the on-field mascot, though. Brutus the Buckeye is terrifying. Not in a “titan of college sport” way, but more of a “sleep paralysis demon” way.)\n\nAAAAGH Rick Osentoski/USA Today Sports/Reuters\n\nStrength of color combo: 4/10. Technically OSU’s colors are gray and scarlet, but on the field they’re basically white and red.\n\nPlayer to know: Quarterback CJ Stroud, who’s already being touted as a top NFL draft pick for next year. He is a two-time Heisman finalist, and has collected all sorts of other accolades during his time at Ohio State.\n\nHow can there only be four teams in a playoff?\n\nThe College Football Playoff National Championship system is still fairly new. Before 2014, the college postseason system was called the Bowl Championship Series. That consisted of several postseason bowl games, with the top teams competing in the BCS National Championship game. The BCS was not popular because the method of choosing the teams to compete was frustrating and opaque. The NCAA used a few different ranking polls and computer algorithms to determine which teams played which, and where. Now, under the College Football Playoff model, things are a little bit simpler.\n\nHow are the teams picked now?\n\nIt all comes down to the discernment of Harold the Playoff Wombat. Near the end of every football season, NCAA officials visit Harold in his habitat outside of Indianapolis and present him with a display of identical, equidistant boiled eggs. Each egg bears the name of a top-ranked school and the first four eggs Harold consumes determine the teams and order of the playoff slate.\n\nVery funny. How are the teams ACTUALLY chosen?\n\nThe NCAA turns to a 13-member selection committee made up of professional college football experts. Using metrics like ranking polls, win record and schedule strength, the members vote on the four top teams.\n\nHowever, there are still a whole host of other bowl games for the top finishers in the different football conferences. So just because your team misses the playoff doesn’t meant they can’t win honor and glory in, say, the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl.\n\nWhy are they called bowl games, anyway?\n\nThe Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California -- the stadium to start the whole \"Bowl\" trend. David McNew/Getty Images\n\nIt can’t simply be because football stadium are shaped like bowls! Where would the comparisons end? The NFL Super Roomba? The College Football Playoff Bathtub?\n\n(It actually is because they’re shaped like bowls.)", "authors": ["Aj Willingham"], "publish_date": "2022/12/31"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/dan-wolken/2023/11/29/college-football-playoff-texas-longhorns-chances/71746750007/", "title": "College Football Playoff could leave Texas out in the cold", "text": "If you had told anyone at Texas back in August they would beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa, lose just once in a close game to a top-15 team and have the opportunity to win the Big 12 championship with a 12-1 record, they would have taken it with no questions asked.\n\nNot only would that have been considered one of the great seasons for any Texas team in the last 30 years, it would have easily been good enough to get the Longhorns into every previous edition of the College Football Playoff.\n\nInstead, because it happened this season, it might get them left out in the cold.\n\nAs college football playoff’s championship weekend unfolds with plenty of possibilities still on the table, this much seems clear: If all the favorites win their conference title games, Texas is likely to end up in fifth place. Nice season, Longhorns. Have a good time at the Cotton Bowl.\n\nAfter nine controversy-free years of the four-team playoff, the 10th and final edition could give us a true outrage that not only justifies expansion to 12 teams next year but also explains Texas’ urgency to leave the Big 12 behind.\n\nWhen the Longhorns move to the SEC next year, life will undoubtedly be more difficult. Knocking heads with Florida, Georgia and Texas A&M is going to be a much different experience than Kansas, Iowa State and Baylor.\n\nBut if Texas gets left out of the playoff this year, the blame won’t just go to the 75-yard drive they allowed to Oklahoma in the final 77 seconds of the Red River Rivalry. It will be the overall weakness of the Big 12 that keeps them out.\n\nAs things stand, the Longhorns have just two victories over teams ranked in the CFP’s top-25. One of them was the aforementioned 34-24 win at Alabama, which is arguably the best win anyone has had all year. The other, a 33-30 overtime win over No. 25 Kansas State, isn’t helping all that much.\n\nStill, it would historically be good enough to get into the CFP if the Longhorns take care of business Saturday against No. 18 Oklahoma State. So far this year, it’s only gotten Texas to No. 7 — one spot behind even Ohio State, which lost to Michigan last weekend. Quite simply, that tells us Texas is absolutely going to need some help.\n\nTexas coach Steve Sarkisian is saying the right things. Publicly, he’s focusing on the opportunity to win the Big 12, which the Longhorns have only done three times in the 27-year history of the conference. He also knows his team is fully capable of losing to Oklahoma State, so it would be counterproductive to engage in some preemptive lobbying.\n\n“There is no College Football Playoff talk if we don't play really good Saturday and find a way to win that game, he said this week. “If that happens, then there’s another discussion to be had. A lot of teams have to play and the dust is going to settle where it's supposed to so we’ll see what happens.”\n\nComplaining wouldn’t do much good anyway. If Georgia, Michigan, Washington and Florida State all win to make a quartet of 13-0 teams, the committee’s job will be very easy and Texas will have to accept its rotten luck.\n\nBut if any of the results go a different way, the Longhorns will rightfully be kicking and screaming if they get left out.\n\nIf Alabama beats Georgia, Texas absolutely has an argument to say: “Hey, didn’t we beat this team on their home field? And it wasn’t even particularly close in the end. Why should they jump over us?”\n\nLet’s say Oregon beats Washington on Friday night. Based on the eye test, the Ducks have arguably looked better than anyone in the country for the last several weeks. But would a 12-1 Oregon team with just two top-25 wins (Washington, Oregon State) really have a better Playoff résumé than Texas with three top-25 wins and the Alabama trump card?\n\nThough Michigan losing to Iowa is probably the most far-fetched possibility, how safe are the Wolverines really? They played nobody in the non-conference schedule, and the Big Ten was just as terrible as the Big 12 in the middle and bottom of the standings.\n\nThen there’s Florida State, a team that will once and for all expose the lie that the CFP committee picks the four “best” teams if it beats Louisville in the ACC championship game.\n\nThe Seminoles were very much on track to be a national title contender until quarterback Jordan Travis’ awful leg injury a couple weeks ago against North Alabama. But once that happened, they become a different team that almost certainly isn’t going to win a national championship and would project to be around a two-touchdown underdog to Georgia in the semifinals.\n\nDowngrading Florida State’s chances with Tate Rodemaker at quarterback isn’t a criticism of the team or the awesome job coach Mike Norvell has done to rebuild the program into a national power. It’s merely a reflection of how good Travis was and how much they’re going to miss him in a Playoff scenario. If the committee truly saw its job as picking the four best teams, it’s pretty easy to make the argument that Texas is a better team than this version of Florida State.\n\nBut when the committee gets down to it, are they really going to leave out a 13-0 team — even if all of them would pick Texas, Alabama, Ohio State or whoever to beat the Seminoles if they played on a neutral field tomorrow?\n\nNo, they're almost certainly not going to do that because taking a power conference team with a loss over a power conference team without a loss would be too controversial. For all the conspiracy theories about this committee and what metrics they care about, the end result is always quite simple: Unbeaten teams get in, even if it’s at the expense of someone with a better shot to win the national championship.\n\nThat’s why Playoff expansion had to happen. The only upset is that it took this long to potentially have a year where a truly deserving team gets left out.\n\nUnless something unexpected happens Saturday, that team is going to be Texas. Not that it was a close call for the Longhorns to seek membership in the SEC, but a playoff snub of this magnitude will be all the proof they needed that leaving the Big 12 behind was the only move to make.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/11/29"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2024/01/01/texas-washington-college-football-playoff-sugar-bowl/72043965007/", "title": "Washington fights off Texas in wild game, will face Michigan for title", "text": "Editor’s note: For the latest updates and highlights from Michigan vs. Washington in the national championship game, follow USA TODAY Sports’ live coverage.\n\nIt’s a purple reign in New Orleans.\n\nThe Washington Huskies used their high-powered offense and staved off a late rally to beat Texas, 37-31, in the Sugar Bowl and set up a date with Michigan in the College Football Playoff national championship game.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. just missed out on winning the Heisman Trophy, but he’ll take a dominant performance in the semifinal, finishing 29 for 38 with 430 yards and two passing touchdowns. Several receivers also had big days, led by Rome Odunze's 125 receiving yards on six catches and Ja’Lynn Polk hauling in five catches for 122 yards and a touchdown.\n\nThe win was Washington’s first College Football Playoff victory after losing its semifinal matchup in 2016, and advances the Huskies to their first national championship game in school history.\n\nTexas’ struggles in the third quarter proved too much to overcome; the Longhorns had only 34 yards in the third quarter, but a much-improved fourth-quarter performance made it go down to the final seconds. Texas fell 12 yards short of at least tying the game in the final play.\n\nAwaiting Washington in the national championship game is fellow undefeated team Michigan, who beat Alabama in a thrilling Rose Bowl. The title game on Monday will pit two future Big Ten rivals at NRG Stadium in Houston. Coincidentally, Washington’s last national championship came after beating Michigan in the Rose Bowl.\n\nOPINION:Michigan didn't flinch in emotional win against Alabama\n\nTexas fails to score on wild final drive\n\nIn the final seconds of the game, the Longhorns made it to the Washington 13-yard line with a chance to win after the Huskies punted the ball away, but they failed to score.\n\nQuinn Ewers completed a 41-yard pass to Jordan Whittington on the drive, then threw three incomplete passes in the red zone.\n\nOn the final play of the game with one second left, Ewers attempted to find Adonai Mitchell in the end zone but overthrew the receiver, sealing the Huskies' win.\n\nTexas gets the ball back with 45 seconds left\n\nTexas has used all of its timeouts, but it might catch a break by way of an injury.\n\nAfter getting nothing on a third-down run, Washington running back Dillon Johnson was noticeably in pain and needed assistance from trainers. The injury stopped the clock, so after the Washington punt, Texas will get the ball with 45 seconds left at their own 30-yard line after Washington had a kick-catch interference.\n\nWashington recovers onside kick\n\nThe Huskies can smell the national championship game.\n\nWashington recovered the onside kick after Texas' field goal, nearly punching their ticket to the title game against Michigan. Texas has two timeouts, so a first down would end the game.\n\nTexas makes field goal with clock winding down\n\nTime is ticking away for the Longhorns, but they closed the gap with a field goal.\n\nTexas got to Washington’s 7-yard-line, but on third and 4, Quinn Ewers’ pass fell incomplete.\n\nDown nine with 1:09 left, Texas opted to kick the field goal. Bert Auburn nailed it from 25 yards, making the score 37-31.\n\nWashington adds big field goal late in fourth quarter\n\nWashington knew it needed to add a score to prevent Texas from getting the lead, and the offense stepped up to make it a two-possession game with only a few minutes left.\n\nWashington faced a third down early in the drive that could’ve gotten Texas off the field early, but Michael Penix Jr. found Jack Westover to continue the drive. The big play came when Penix found Rome Odunze down the sideline for a 32-yard pass placed perfectly in his hands to get inside the 10-yard line.\n\nTexas prevented the Huskies from getting back in the end zone, but Grady Gross kicked a huge 27-yard field goal to make it 37-28 with just under three minutes left. Texas now needs a quick score and to get the ball back for a chance to tie or take the lead.\n\nTexas shows life with touchdown\n\nIt was a whole 23 minutes between scores, but Texas finally put points up again in the fourth quarter.\n\nQuarterback Quinn Ewers faked a handoff, then found Adonai Mitchell for a 1-yard touchdown midway through the last period.\n\nThe play capped a 10-play, 72-yard drive that ate 3:56 off the clock. Ewers had a play of 15 yards to Mitchell and another one of 38 yards to Xavier Worthy to march down the field.\n\nThe Longhorns are down 34-28.\n\nWashington offense cools down after turnover\n\nWashington had a chance to put the Sugar Bowl out of reach but could not take advantage of a Texas fumble.\n\nWhile Washington was able to get a pass-interference call down the field, it was a 15-yard penalty that kept the Huskies on their side of the field.\n\nWashington had five plays: Four were incompletions and the only completion was for no gain on third and 10.\n\nTexas gets the ball again down 34-21 with 12 minutes left.\n\nTexas fumbles ball, Washington recovers\n\nTexas might be running out of chances to get back into this one, with a fumble in Washington territory resulting in a costly mistake for the Longhorns.\n\nAfter Washington made it a 13-point game, the Longhorns quickly moved down the field as time is against them. Tight end Ja'Tavion Sanders hauled in a catch and took it 21 yards, but just as Washington defenders were about to tackle him, he lost the ball, which was recovered by the Huskies.\n\nThe referees initially ruled Sanders was down, but the play went under review and possession was awarded to Washington with just under 13 minutes left.\n\nTexas QB Quinn Ewers evaluated for head injury\n\nTexas quarterback Quinn Ewers appeared to hit the back of his head on the field.\n\nESPN reporter Katie George said he was evaluated on the sideline and told the team he was able to play.\n\nEwers remains in the game during the fourth quarter.\n\nWashington takes 34-21 lead early in fourth quarter\n\nIt’s Washington’s time to sweep the leg. But the Huskies came up just short to start the fourth quarter.\n\nWashington left guard Nate Kalepo was penalized with a false start on the first play of the quarter, resulting in a third and 10.\n\nAnd quarterback Michael Penix Jr.’s pass to Jalen McMillan sailed incomplete. Still, Washington extended its lead to 13 points thanks to a 40-yard field goal by Grady Gross.\n\nIt’s 34-21 with 14:43 left after the ensuing kickoff for Texas to keep its national-title hopes alive.\n\nEnd of third quarter: Washington holds double-digit lead over Texas\n\nIt was an all-Huskies third quarter as Washington added two scores in the frame to make it a 31-21 lead with 15 minutes to go.\n\nWashington went right down the field on its opening drive of the quarter and converted a Texas fumble into a field goal to make it a double-digit lead. Texas wasn’t able to do anything with the ball and punted, with Washington driving into Texas territory to open the quarter.\n\nMichael Penix had a phenomenal third quarter, completing 12-of-13 passes for 117 yards and a touchdown out of halftime. Texas only had 34 total yards in the third quarter.\n\nWashington gets turnover after touchdown\n\nAfter taking a 28-21 lead early in the third quarter, Washington has the ball again.\n\nTexas running back CJ Baxter was stripped on a run by Washington defensive end Bralen Trice, giving the Huskies the ball again at the Texas 33-yard line.\n\nWashington could quickly turn this into a two-score lead.\n\nWashington opens second half with touchdown\n\nIt’s a back-and-forth affair in New Orleans after Washington opened the second half with another touchdown drive to make it a 28-21 Huskies lead.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. continues to sling it across the field for Washington, accounting for 68 of the 70 yards on the eight-play drive. All six pass attempts were completions, including the 19-yard dart in-between defenders to Jalen McMillan for the score.\n\nPenix now has 311 passing yards on the day with two scoring passes.\n\nEnd of second quarter: Washington, Texas tied at the half\n\nEvery time Washington has hit a strike, Texas continues to respond.\n\nIn quick fashion, the Longhorns went 72 yards in 10 plays to score their third touchdown and make it a 21-21 game just before halftime.\n\nQB Quinn Ewers put up one of his best drives of the day to get Texas into the end zone, going 4 for 6 for 36 passing yards while picking up 26 yards on the ground, including a pivotal 21-yard gain to get Texas into the red zone. On the next play, C.J. Baxter rushed into the end zone to tie it up.\n\nHuskies retake the lead after gutsy fourth-down call\n\nHuskies head coach Kalen DeBoer is showing he isn’t afraid of anything, and this time it paid off with Washington back in the end zone to retake the lead over Texas.\n\nThe Huskies had a fourth and 1 at their own 33-yard line, and even with a failed one earlier in the quarter, DeBoer wasn’t afraid to go for it again. This time it worked with a Dillon Johnson run, and Washington moved the chains.\n\nMichael Penix Jr. then moved his team right down the field, and Penix capped it off by finding Ja'Lynn Polk, who tipped the ball up and caught it in the end zone for a 29-yard touchdown pass.\n\nPenix is continuing to air it out effectively in the first half, as he’s already 11 for 14 with 255 passing yards and the touchdown toss. Polk has also had a big day with two catches for 106 yards after catching a 77-yard pass on Washington’s opening drive.\n\nTexas can’t take advantage of Washington turnover\n\nIt wasn’t a three-and-out, but a four-and-out is just as bad.\n\nTexas was unable to make anything out of forcing Washington’s turnover on downs on the previous drive. Jaydon Blue had a 12-yard run on the first play, but two incomplete passes and a run for a loss of a yard followed.\n\nTexas quarterback Quinn Ewers was forced to throw his third-down pass earlier than preferred due to Washington’s pressure on the defensive line.\n\nNow, Washington has a chance to take a lead into the second half with 5:55 left until halftime.\n\nWashington fails fourth-down conversion\n\nThe Washington Huskies have been able to move the ball effectively in the first half, but the Longhorns have made a big stop.\n\nWashington was in the red zone when it was faced with a fourth and-1. Coach Kalen DeBoer opted to keep the offense on the field and lined up in the Wildcat with Dillon Johnson behind center.\n\nIt didn’t work, as the Longhorns' defensive line stuffed Johnson and got the ball back to keep the Huskies from re-taking the lead.\n\nByron Murphy touchdown: Texas 14, Washington 14\n\nWe’ve got a big-man touchdown!\n\nTexas quarterback Quinn Ewers completed a 17-yard pass to Jordan Whittington to the 1-yard line. And that’s when Texas called No. 90 into the game.\n\nTexas handed it off to junior defensive lineman Byron Murphy II, who scored on a 1-yard run to tie the Sugar Bowl at 14 with 10:08 left in the second quarter.\n\nFor Murphy, who is listed at 6-1, 308 pounds, it was his second touchdown this season, and the third big-man touchdown for Texas this season.\n\nWashington muffs punt deep inside its own territory\n\nThe Washington defense looked like it was starting to hold down the Texas offense, but the Longhorns now have a chance to gain momentum thanks to a muffed punt.\n\nThe Huskies forced a three-and-out for Texas, but Germie Bernard awkwardly tried to catch the ensuing Texas punt. It slipped out of his hands and the Longhorns recovered, giving Texas the ball at the Washington 22-yard line and prime position to tie it up.\n\nDillon Johnson touchdown: Washington 14, Texas 7\n\nWashington’s Dillon Johnson walked into the end zone easily for his second touchdown of the game. Washington leads Texas 14-7 as the second quarter of the Sugar Bowl is underway.\n\nIt took Washington three chances inside the 2-yard line against the Texas defense, but the Huskies punched it in to complete a 9-play, 80-yard drive to take the lead again.\n\nEnd of first quarter: Washington, Texas each score touchdown\n\nIt’s a 7-7 game after one quarter in the Sugar Bowl, with Washington and Texas showing flashes of what could be an offense-driven game.\n\nWashington scored first on its opening drive thanks to a big pass from Michael Penix Jr., while Texas responded with a score of its own on the following drive with a combination an air and ground attack. Both teams punted on their next drive, but Washington is driving toward the red zone as the second quarter begins.\n\nPenalties are already becoming a concern for the Longhorns, who have four penalties for 30 yards in the first 15 minutes.\n\nTexas responds with touchdown\n\nQuinn Ewers had a bad first drive, going 0-for-4, but a much-improved second time around led to Texas getting into the end zone to make it a 7-7 game.\n\nEwers shook off the rust from the first drive with a 31-yard pass to C.J. Baxter on the second play of the drive to get to the Washington side of the field. That’s when the running game took over, with Ewers, Baxter and Jordan Whittington doing damage on the ground to get the Longhorns to the 5-yard line. That’s when Jaydon Blue capped off the drive, powering through the goal line to tie the score in what could turn into an offensive shootout.\n\nWashington strikes first after big pass\n\nMichael Penix Jr. entered Monday with the most passing yards in the country, and he’s letting it loose early in the Sugar Bowl.\n\nPenix found Ja'Lynn Polk for a 77-yard strike that took Washington to the 2-yard line on its opening drive, and Dillon Johnson punched it in on the following play to give the Huskies an early 7-0 lead.\n\nPenix, the runner-up in the Heisman Trophy to Jayden Daniels, entered New Year’s Day with 4,218 passing yards and averages 324.5 passing yards a game. The score came after Texas punted on its opening drive.\n\nTexas, Washington bring live mascots\n\nIt’s an animal affair in the Sugar Bowl, with both Texas and Washington bringing their live mascots to the semifinal matchup.\n\nThe iconic Bevo longhorn was spotted on the sideline in his enclosure, while Washington’s Dubs was spotted checking out the Superdome. It might not be a good idea for the two mascots to link up, given what happened the last time Bevo was around a dog.\n\nAlabama exit means no SEC in championship game in 2024\n\n“It just means more” in the Southeastern Conference. But it’ll mean more to other college football fanbases nationally, knowing no SEC team will be in the College Football Playoff Championship game this year. With Alabama’s loss in the Rose Bowl earlier Monday, a 10-year streak with an SEC representative in the national title game came to an end. It will be the first time since 2014, the first year of the College Football Playoff, there will be no SEC team in the title game. Only Alabama, Georgia and LSU have represented the SEC in the CFP title game since its inception.\n\nHow can I watch the Sugar Bowl between Texas and Washington?\n\nThe Texas-Washington Sugar Bowl game can be seen on ESPN. Sean McDonough (play-by-play), Greg McElroy (analyst), Molly McGrath (sideline reporter) and Katie George (sideline reporter) will call the game for ESPN.\n\nESPN also will offer a multi-platform presentation for each College Football semifinal game.\n\nTexas vs. Washington in Sugar Bowl: Picks, predictions, odds\n\nTexas is the favorite to defeat Washington in the Sugar Bowl, according to BetMGM odds.\n\nSpread: Texas (-4)\n\nMoneyline: Texas (-185); Washington (+150)\n\nOver/under: 63.5\n\nUSA TODAY Sports’ staff picks for this game:\n\nWe occasionally recommend interesting products and services. If you make a purchase by clicking one of the links, we may earn an affiliate fee. USA TODAY operates independently, and this doesn’t influence our coverage.\n\nGannett may earn revenue from sports betting operators for audience referrals to betting services. Sports betting operators have no influence over nor are any such revenues in any way dependent on or linked to the newsrooms or news coverage. Terms apply, see operator site for Terms and Conditions. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, help is available. Call the National Council on Problem Gambling 24/7 at 1-800-GAMBLER (NJ, OH), 1-800-522-4700 (CO), 1-800-BETS-OFF (IA), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN). Must be 21 or older to gamble. Sports betting and gambling are not legal in all locations. Be sure to comply with laws applicable where you reside.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/01"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_18", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/weather/christmas-artic-winter-storm-tuesday/index.html", "title": "Polar air and a powerful winter storm put millions under winter alerts ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nFor millions of Americans across a large swath of the country, the holiday week is beginning with unrelenting below-freezing temperatures made even more miserable by heavy snow expected Tuesday and Wednesday in several central and northwestern states.\n\nA developing ‘bomb cyclone’ has prompted alerts from Washington state to Maryland that cover over 50 million people, according to the National Weather Service, and that number is expected to grow over the coming days.\n\nA ‘bomb cyclone’ is a term used by meteorologists to describe a rapidly strengthening storm. Specifically, it means a drop of 24 millibars (a term used to measure atmospheric pressure), in 24 hours. These storms frequently occur with winter nor’easters, but in this case, the bomb cyclone is expected to occur in the Plains. That’s because of the extreme temperature difference between the warm and moist air in advance of the storm and the extreme Arctic air mass moving in from Canada.\n\nThis weather phenomenon is expected to be the pressure equivalent of a category 2 hurricane as it reaches the Great Lakes, with the weather service now calling the strength of the low a “once-in-a-generation” event.\n\nMore than 40 million people are under wind chill alerts across much of the central and northwestern US, including in places slammed with blizzard conditions by a separate storm system last week. Parts of Alabama and Tennessee are also under a wind chill watch as the “feel like” temperatures are expected to plummet below zero.\n\nOn Tuesday, the sprawling weather system is delivering dangerously cold temperatures and snow to Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and most of Minnesota, where high temperatures will remain below zero, according to forecasters at the NWS.\n\nThe air feels so cold, frostbite on exposed skin can occur in under 10 minutes in most of the impacted areas, and some isolated locations in under five minutes, forecasters warn.\n\n“In addition to the brutally cold temperatures, dangerous wind chill values of 35 to 55 degrees below zero are possible into the end of the week across these areas,” the Weather Prediction Center said Monday.\n\nWind chill advisories are in place for Sioux, South Dakota, and Fargo, North Dakota, Tuesday, when the dangers of frostbite are settling in. Wind chill, which indicates what the wind feels like, will be as low as 40 degrees below zero, and in Wyoming on Wednesday night could hit a staggering 70 degrees below zero.\n\n“Starting tonight, the worst of the arctic air mass will reach our area, bringing dangerous temperatures and wind chills. Slippery roads will continue with additional accumulating snow expected Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning,” the weather service office in Glasgow, Montana, said Monday evening.\n\nDrastic temperature drops are coming. In Denver, for example, the temperature will be 50 degrees at noon on Wednesday but is expected to drop to 12 below by daybreak on Thursday. Similarly, New Yorkers will enjoy 60-degree weather on Friday in Manhattan and then see a temperature of 24 degrees as a high on Christmas Eve.\n\nSnowfall has already begun in Seattle, which is under a winter storm warning Tuesday. The storm will move east into portions of Idaho Tuesday morning and then spread out across northern and central Montana later in the afternoon.\n\nAs the storm moves east this week, it stands to make holiday travel difficult, if not dangerous, in many places, with forecasters urging people to be prepared to make changes.\n\nIn Minnesota, the weather service in the Twin Cities implored residents to be cautious of the “potentially dangerous week of weather,” with the worst of the effects in the Midwest beginning Wednesday.\n\n“The bottom line is travel will be very dangerous and could be LIFE-THREATENING later this week so be prepared to alter travel plans now!” the local weather service office said.\n\nMany local governments in the affected areas have opened warming centers in an attempt to provide relief to those who need it.\n\nSioux Falls, South Dakota, was hit last week by a massive winter storm. The city is again under winter weather alerts Tuesday. Erin Woodiel/Argus Leader/USA Today\n\nWhat’s ahead Christmas week\n\nOverall, most of the US is expected to see abnormally cold temperatures this week. In fact, more than 80% of the country, excluding Hawaii and Alaska, are forecast to see below-freezing temperatures.\n\nIn Montana, Helena and Missoula are under winter storm warnings beginning Tuesday, and Billings is under a wind chill advisory through noon Friday.\n\nThe storm is also expected to intensify as it approaches the Midwest, where the greatest impacts are forecast. Snow will begin in the region Wednesday and last through much of the Christmas weekend.\n\nIn parts of central Minnesota, several inches of fluffy snow are expected Wednesday, followed by high winds, creating the potential for blizzard conditions. A blizzard is defined as having winds of at least 35 mph along with falling or blowing snow which reduces visibility to a quarter-mile or less, for at least three hours.\n\n“By Thursday, wind gusts of 40-50 mph appear likely. With the fluffy snow in place, blizzard conditions are highly likely area wide, even in areas that typically aren’t favored for whiteout conditions,” the weather service said.\n\nKristin Jagodzinske sweeps the snow off the sidewalk in front of her shop in snowy downtown Poulsbo on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. Meegan M. Reid/Kitsap Sun/USA Today Network\n\nChicago is forecast to be one of the hardest hit cities, where a winter storm watch is in effect starting Thursday night through Friday evening. With blizzard conditions likely, holiday travel could grind to a halt for many seeking to celebrate with family and loved ones.\n\nThe city could pick up 6 to 8 inches of snow from Thursday morning through late Friday night and when combined with 55 mph winds, the weather will bring travel to a stand still. The blizzard conditions could close O’Hare airport during the peak of the storm and will likely cause the cancellations of hundreds of flights in Chicago alone.\n\n“Rapidly deteriorating conditions by late Thursday afternoon, with dangerous blizzard conditions appearing increasingly likely Thursday night into Friday,” said the weather service office in Chicago, home not only to one of the nation’s busiest airports but also long-distance train depots.\n\nSouth bracing for unseasonably cold temps\n\nMeanwhile, even southern cities unaccustomed to wintry conditions will get a brittle taste of it this holiday season, with Austin, Houston, Atlanta, and even Orlando at risk of seeing temperatures below freezing beginning midweek.\n\nIn Texas, the weather service made it a point to reassure residents this week’s unusually cold temperatures are not expected to affect the state as severely as last year’s brutal winter storms, when millions of people lost power during a weeklong extreme weather event in February 2021.\n\nHowever, water pipes will be at risk of bursting, the weather service said. A wind chill watch for Amarillo, Texas, is in effect from Wednesday night through Friday afternoon.\n\n“Outdoor pipes will be at risk due to well below freezing temps and windy conditions late this week,” the weather service in Fort Worth said. “Make sure to cover pipes and let faucets drip!”\n\nMississippi is urging residents to start bracing for what could be an extremely cold couple of days, the state’s emergency management agency said in a Facebook post Tuesday morning.\n\n“Dangerous, cold temperatures are expected this week for most of the state. Start prepping NOW,” the post said. “Wrap pipes and keep a preparedness kit in your car with extra blankets. Remember the Four P’s of Winter Weather Preparedness. People, Pets, Pipes, and Plants!”\n\nMuch of the state is under a hard freeze watch, according to the weather service. Subfreezing temperatures are expected.\n\n“A prolonged period of subfreezing temperatures may cause pipes to burst. Bitterly cold temperatures and wind chills will result in hypothermia and become life-threatening to those with prolonged exposure or without access to adequate warmth,” the weather service said.\n\nIn a post Monday, state emergency management officials reminded residents to seal windows and doors, insulate pipes and test smoke alarms.", "authors": ["Aya Elamroussi"], "publish_date": "2022/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/weather/christmas-arctic-winter-storm-thursday/index.html", "title": "More than half the US population awaits Christmas weekend under ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nNearly 177 million Americans – or more than half the US population – will await Christmas weekend under wind chill alerts as a major arctic blast plunges temperatures to dangerous levels in much of the country, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nAnd the snowiest part is yet to come as the perilous winter storm barrels east across the nation.\n\nA developing “bomb cyclone” is set to unload heavy snow and blizzard conditions especially in the Midwest on Thursday and Friday.\n\nThe cold air and storm are affecting nearly every state in some way: More than 200 million people coast-to-coast were under winter-weather alerts for snow or icy conditions Thursday evening, the weather service said.\n\nWind chill alerts are impacting people from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and from Washington state to Florida, with below-zero wind chills recorded as far south as Texas on Thursday morning and expected in the Southeast by Friday.\n\n“Life-threatening wind chills over the Great Plains (will) overspread the eastern half of the nation by Friday,” the Weather Prediction Center said – and wind chills below minus 50 degrees already have been reported in the past two days in parts of Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming.\n\nFOLLOW LIVE UPDATES\n\nSome low temperature records were set Thursday morning in the West and South, and in some cases they dropped this week with record-breaking speed: Denver International Airport saw a 37-degree plunge over one hour Wednesday, preliminarily the biggest one-hour drop recorded there, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nSnow, meanwhile, has been hitting parts of the West and is expected in the next two days across much of the country’s eastern half.\n\nA major snowstorm is shaping up for the Midwest and Great Lakes especially – with widespread light to moderate snowfall – but with powerful winds that may make for impossible travel conditions.\n\n“Heavy snowfall rates” of 1 to 2 inches per hour, “along with wind gusts of over 50 mph will result in near-zero visibility and considerable blowing and drifting of snow,” the prediction center said.\n\nThe storm is expected to become a “bomb cyclone” – a rapidly strengthening storm that drops a certain amount of pressure within 24 hours – Thursday evening into Friday, reaching the pressure equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane as it moves into the Great Lakes. This could be “a once in a generation type of event,” a forecaster in the weather service’s Buffalo office wrote Tuesday, after noting that kind of strengthening doesn’t often happen in the lower Great Lakes.\n\nA blizzard warning will be in place at 7 a.m. Friday in Buffalo and surrounding communities, where one to three feet of snow and 70 mph wind gusts are likely, according to the National Weather Service.\n\n“This is not going to be a typical storm,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said Thursday. “In fact, this could be a life-threatening storm.”\n\nAbout 2,400 flights have been canceled across the US Thursday, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware, snarling air travel amid the busy holiday season. And airlines have canceled more than 2,200 US flights scheduled for Friday.\n\nIn South Dakota, a 340-mile stretch of Interstate 90 was closed in both directions Thursday morning, from Rapid City to Sioux Falls, because of blizzard-like conditions, officials said. Near-zero visibility also led to many highway closures between Colorado and Wyoming on Wednesday.\n\nEven Florida won’t be spared, with residents of the Sunshine State expected to see sudden temperature drops Friday. Some cities in the South – including Nashville and Memphis – are expected to see snow Thursday.\n\nFlooding, meanwhile, is possible in parts of the Northeast, including Washington and Philadelphia, as rain hits the area Thursday before temperatures plummet overnight and bring a “flash freeze.”\n\nPresident Joe Biden received a briefing on the weather Thursday morning at the White House, from the National Weather Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency. He encouraged Americans to heed the warnings of local officials and to stay safe in the face of the extreme cold.\n\n“This is really a very serious weather alert here,” Biden said, adding that the White House has reached out to 26 governors in the affected regions.\n\nSnow blankets buildings in Buffalo, New York, on Wednesday, December 28. Joed Viera/AFP/Getty Images National Guard troops check on Buffalo residents on December 28. Jeffrey T. Barnes/AP A traveler searches for luggage December 28 at a Southwest Airlines baggage holding area in Denver International Airport. More than 90% of Wednesday's US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Southwest canceled more than 2,500 flights. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images People help push a car out of snow in Buffalo on Tuesday, December 27. John Normile/Getty Images Niagara Falls in New York is partially frozen on December 27. Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Travelers at Baltimore/Washington International Airport deal with the impact of canceled flights on December 27. Michael McCoy/Reuters A gas station canopy lays on its side after high winds and heavy snow in Lackawanna, New York, on December 27. The historic winter storm dumped up to 4 feet of snow on the area. John Normile/Getty Images Hundreds of unclaimed suitcases sit near the Southwest Airlines baggage claim area in Tennessee's Nashville International Airport after the airline canceled thousands of flights on December 27. Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images A street is blanketed by snow in downtown Buffalo on Monday, December 26. Gov. Kathy Hochul/Twitter/AP A person clears a snow-covered driveway in Buffalo on December 26. Faith Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A man and a boy walk across the frozen Reflecting Pool towards the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on December 26. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Firefighters carry rescue equipment as they respond to a fire on a snow-covered street in Buffalo on Sunday, December 25. Jalen Wright/The New York Times/Redux Snow blankets a neighborhood in Cheektowaga, New York, on Christmas Day. Western New York is drowning in thick \"lake effect\" snow -- which forms when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Great Lakes -- just one month after the region was slammed with a historic snowstorm. John Waller via AP A man tries to dig out his car after he got stuck in a snowdrift about a block from home in Buffalo on Saturday, December 24. Derek Gee/The Buffalo News via AP Icicles created by a sprinkler hang from an orange tree in Clermont, Florida, on December 24. Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A young holiday traveler passes the time at Detroit Wayne County Metro Airport on December 24. Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images Pedestrians deal with the cold in Chicago on December 24. Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via AP Hoak's Restaurant in Hamburg, New York, is seen covered in ice from the spray of Lake Erie on December 24. Kevin Hoak via Reuters Nissan Stadium employees clear the field in Nashville before the an NFL football game on December 24. Mark Zaleski/AP Amanda Kelly cleans off snow and ice from her car in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, December 23. Joseph Scheller/Columbus Dispatch/USA Today Network Cars drive in whiteout conditions in Orchard Park, New York, on December 23. Mark Mulville/The Buffalo News/AP Travelers sleep while lines of people pass through a security checkpoint at Denver International Airport. David Zalubowski/AP Snow-covered buildings are seen in Louisville, Kentucky. Leandro Lozada/AFP/Getty Images The waters of Lake Erie wash over the shoreline in Hamburg, New York, on December 23. John Normile/Getty Images Snow collects on a bison at the Longfield Farm in Goshen, Kentucky, on December 23. Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal/USA Today Network Volunteers welcome a homeless person to a shelter at Louisville's Broadbent Arena on December 23. Leandro Lozada/AFP/Getty Images Stones are removed from a road in Westport, Massachusetts, after a storm surge made landfall, flooding many coastal areas on December 23. Peter Pereira/The Standard-Times/AP The Louisville skyline is obscured by steam rising from the Ohio River on December 23. Matt Stone/The Louisville Courier/USA Today Network Antonio Smothers jump-starts his vehicle in Nashville on December 23. Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images Rows of headstones at the North Dakota Veterans Cemetery are blanketed by drifting snow in Mandan on Thursday, December 22. Tom Stromme/The Bismarck Tribune/AP Migrants warm themselves by a fire next to the US-Mexico border fence on December 22 in El Paso, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images Robert Arnold puts chains onto the tires of his semitrailer while he waits for the eastbound lane of I-70 to reopen in Silverthorne, Colorado, on December 22. Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty Images A musician departs following a show on Broadway in Nashville on December 22. Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images Brady Myers helps turn the Stewpot Community Services day shelter for the unhoused into an emergency overnight shelter in Jackson, Mississippi, on December 22. Barbara Gauntt/Clarion Ledger/USA Today Network Vehicles travel along Interstate 44 on December 22, in St. Louis. Jeff Roberson/AP A person walks through the snow on December 22 in downtown Minneapolis. Alex Kormann/Star Tribune/AP A clean car passes a snow-covered car in Des Moines, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall/AP Travelers walk in front of flight information screens at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on December 22. Nam Y. Huh/AP Ice collects on a window in Oklahoma City on December 22. Bryan Terry/The Oklahoman/USA Today Network Bus riders wait at a sheltered stop in Chicago on December 22. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP An accident involving a semi-tractor-trailer blocks the eastbound lanes of Interstate 80 in West Des Moines on December 22. Bryon Houlgrave/The Des Moines Register/AP Kids shovel snow off a sidewalk and driveway in Minneapolis on December 22. Abbie Parr/AP Travelers arrive for their flights at O'Hare International Airport on December 22 in Chicago. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images Mist rises above ice flows on the Yellowstone River on December 22 in Paradise Valley, Montana. William Campbell/Getty Images Students walk to school buses after early dismissal at a middle school in Wheeling, Illinois, on December 22. Nam Y. Huh/AP Miguel Salazar clears sidewalks in Denver on December 22. Hyoung Chang/Denver Post/Getty Images Travelers arrive at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport on December 21. Alex Kormann/Star Tribune/AP Salt is prepared to be loaded onto a truck at the Department of Public Works sanitation yard in Milwaukee on December 21. Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/AP Propane heaters sit next to pens at the City of Mission Animal Shelter in Mission, Texas, on December 21. Joel Martinez/The Monitor/AP Crews de-ice a Southwest Airlines plane before takeoff in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 21. Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald/AP An Iowa Department of Transportation plow clears a road in Iowa City on December 21. Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press Citizen/AP Snow covers homes in Seattle on December 20. Daniel Kim/The Seattle Times/AP In pictures: Winter storm impacts the US Prev Next\n\nWhat’s ahead for the bomb cyclone\n\n• Snow was falling early Thursday afternoon from Oklahoma to Michigan.\n\n• Snow and high winds are expected to make for terrible travel conditions from eastern Montana and the northern Plains into the Midwest and upstate New York.\n\n• Blizzard warnings – meaning snow and wind of 35 mph will frequently reduce visibility to less than a quarter of a mile for at least three hours – were in effect Thursday morning in some of those areas, including just southwest of Minneapolis, just south and east of Chicago, and western and northern Michigan.\n\n• Major cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus and Detroit are under winter storm warnings.\n\nMore on the extreme cold\n\n• Wind chill warnings, watches and advisories were in effect for more than 30 states from Washington to Florida on Thursday.\n\n• The arctic front will push south into the Gulf of Mexico and sweep off the Eastern Seaboard by late Friday, bringing cold into the Deep South.\n\n• Thursday’s daytime temperatures may stay below zero in the northern Plains and get barely above that in the central Plains.\n\n• Areas further south – Texas and the Gulf Coast – will see temperatures in the single digits and teens Thursday evening, the Storm Prediction Center said.\n\n• Officials in several southern states are warning residents to take precautions. Alabama warned Thursday and Friday would likely feature “the coldest December airmass to hit the state since 1989,” the state’s emergency management agency said. Friday’s lows in that state were expected to range from the single digits in the north to the low 20s by the Gulf of Mexico.\n\n• Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards asked residents Thursday to check on friends and family members that might have a hard time with the frigid temperatures. Lows Friday and Saturday were expected to be in the teens and 20s there.\n\n• Two locations in Wyoming set records early Thursday for the lowest temperatures ever recorded at a particular location, regardless of the date on the calendar. Those new records are minus 41 degrees in Casper, and minus 29 in Riverton.\n\n• Other locations in the West and South set record lows Thursday for temperatures on any December 22. They included several places in Montana (including minus 34 degrees in Boseman and minus 20 in East Cut Bank); Greybull, Wyoming, (minus 26); East Rapid City, South Dakota, (minus 18); Ketchikan Airport, Arkansas, (3); and three places in Washington state, including minus 20 degrees in Pullman.", "authors": ["Jason Hanna Ray Sanchez Dave Hennen", "Jason Hanna", "Ray Sanchez", "Dave Hennen"], "publish_date": "2022/12/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/30/winter-storm-warnings-updates-texas-freezing-rain/11147974002/", "title": "50 million under winter weather warnings as arctic cold moves in ...", "text": "A three-day ice accumulation that could exceed a half inch exists over parts of central Texas and Arkansas.\n\nIn the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a winter storm warning was put in place until 6 a.m. Wednesday.\n\nWind chill warnings and advisories have been issued from Oregon to Wisconsin.\n\nDENVER – Fifty million Americans were under winter weather watches and advisories Monday amid warnings of a \"prolonged and potentially significant icing event\" affecting at least 15 states.\n\nA swath of the nation from Texas to Ohio and Tennessee was bracing for days of treacherous travel conditions as an arctic cold front swept down into the southern Plains and Mid-South, the National Weather Service said. Freezing rain totals could become significant across parts of central Texas, southwest Oklahoma and central Arkansas, the weather service said.\n\n\"The interaction of an arctic air mass and moisture will set the stage for an expansive area of dangerous travel conditions early in the week,\" weather service meteorologist Craig Snell said. \"Sleet and freezing rain accumulations are likely to create widespread hazardous travel conditions for several days in a row.\"\n\nIcy developments:\n\nA three-day ice accumulation could exceed a half inch over parts of central Texas and Arkansas. Parts of Tennessee could see more than a quarter inch of ice.\n\nIn addition to the potentially hazardous travel conditions, scattered tree damage and power outages are possible, the weather service warned.\n\nIn Maine, where temperatures are expected to dip as low as minus 14 degrees this week, thousands of residents will begin receiving energy-cost-relief payments of $450.\n\nMonday's forecast calls for heavy rain and flooding in large parts of the Hawaiian islands.\n\nBITTER COLD TARGETS NATION'S MIDSECTION: Texas, Gulf Coast states could see tornadoes: Updates\n\nIcy conditions snarl travel, flight issues affect Texas\n\nMore than 1,100 flights, according to flight tracking site FlightAware, were canceled Monday as icy weather hit the U.S. Flight delays also mounted as more than 5,400 flights in or out of the U.S. were delayed.\n\nMost of the delays and cancellations are affecting Dallas Love Field and Dallas-Fort Worth International airports in Texas.\n\nA large portion of Texas, including the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is under a winter storm warning until Wednesday. The weather service warned of treacherous road conditions and told travelers to be cautious while driving.\n\n\"Dangerous travel conditions are expected during this time, with icy bridges/overpasses and surface streets,\" the weather service said Monday.\n\nDenver ties record for cold: 'It's brutal out there'\n\nIn Denver, the overnight low hit minus 10, tying the record set in 1985, according to the National Weather Service, which warned of wind chills down to minus 19 degrees at Denver International Airport on Monday, and minus 23 on the state's eastern plains.\n\n\"It's really brutal out there,\" said Andrew Karras, a Denver city park ranger.\n\nLike his colleagues, Karras was checking on unhoused people who had declined to move into emergency shelter. As estimated 2,000 people live unsheltered in Denver. While camping in city parks is illegal, rangers suspend enforcement in cold weather and instead focus on helping unhoused people with hats, gloves, blankets, snacks and handwarmers.\n\n\"We're handing out a lot of handwarmers right now. It sounds like a bit of a Band-Aid, but they can help keep people's fingers from freezing,\" Karras said. \"We don't want anyone to die from the cold. That's the most important thing right now.\"\n\nWHAT DO I DO IF MY FLIGHT IS CANCELED?'Your multitasking skills need to come through'\n\nHeavy snow in West, Great Lakes\n\nHeavy snow was forecast over parts of the western Colorado mountains. Travel could be difficult at times for some of the highest mountain passes. Farther east, lake effect snow is likely downwind of the Great Lakes early this week. The heaviest amounts of over 6 inches are possible off Lake Superior and Lake Erie.\n\nSnow was stretching lower than usual in the mountains of Southern California, and snow was falling Monday on Interstate 5 in Grapevine. The weather service said traffic was being escorted over the freeway because of hazardous conditions.\n\nThe low snow levels will likely cause travel problems Monday on Highway 14 and other major thoroughfares in parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the weather service said.\n\nWHAT IS LAKE EFFECT SNOW?Here's how it happens and how much snow it can bring with it\n\nCold front will sweep east, but NYC remains free of snow\n\nPeriods of light snow are possible throughout the interior Northeast and Mid-Atlantic as a cold front pushes through by Tuesday. The region then faces several days of temperatures well below average, with some plummeting up to 50 degrees between Thursday and Saturday. Washington, D.C., will see a low of 15 degrees on Saturday; Philadelphia will drop to 10 degrees and Boston has minus 6 degrees to look forward to this weekend.\n\nThe cold front is not expected to bring any snow to New York City, which hardly feels like a winter wonderland these days. The city has yet to get any measurable snowfall this winter, defined as at least one-tenth of an inch accumulating on the ground. Never before had New York gone so late in the winter without snow, and a second record is within its grasp.\n\nThe current 327 consecutive days without snow are just five short of the longest such stretch, which concluded in mid-December 2020, and there are no flurries in the forecast for the week, according to National Weather Service meteorologist James Tomasini.\n\n“Storm tracks and cold air have been remaining to the north and west of the area,” he said.\n\nTEMPTED TO JOKE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING IN BITTER COLD?Here's what experts say about that\n\nDallas-Fort Worth storm warning lasts into Wednesday\n\nIn the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a winter storm warning was put in place until 6 a.m. Wednesday. The weather service said mixed precipitation, primarily in the form of freezing rain and/or sleet, was expected. \"Significant impacts\" to travel may begin as early as Monday afternoon and continue through at least Tuesday night, the weather service said. Elevated surfaces such as bridges and overpasses will be the first to become icy, slick and hazardous as temperatures hover around or below freezing.\n\nThe weather service's office in Fort Worth said it had received several reports of traffic accidents by 6 a.m. Monday and repeatedly urged drivers to slow down, particularly on bridges and overpasses, which are prone to black ice.\n\nFarther south in San Antonio, driving conditions were expected to resemble those of the Metroplex later in the day.\n\n\"Those in the most impacted areas should consider completing last minute travel plans before midday today,\" the weather service office in San Antonio said. \"Icy road conditions may deteriorate rapidly this afternoon.\"\n\nWHAT IS WIND CHILL? Understanding the wind chill index and how it's calculated\n\nBitter cold blasts Midwest, Northwest\n\nThe cold air responsible for the icy forecast in the Mid-South also brought a frigid start to the workweek throughout the central U.S. and into some Western states, the weather service said. Temperatures were 20 to 30 degrees below average in some areas facing single-digit high temperatures from the central High Plains to the Upper Midwest on Monday.\n\n\"Gusty winds will also create dangerous wind chills, as low as 55 below zero in the northern Plains this morning,\" the weather service said.\n\nWind chill warnings and advisories have been issued from Oregon to Wisconsin.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/21/weather/christmas-arctic-winter-storm-wednesday-wxn/index.html", "title": "Nearly every state to be impacted by a 'once in a generation' winter ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA major winter storm and cold blast will impact nearly every state and bring what the National Weather Service is calling a “once in a generation type event” that will cripple travel on some of the busiest travel days of the year.\n\nThe strengthening storm will bring more than a foot of snow and possible blizzard conditions to the Midwest, as the weather service warns of “life-threatening” wind chills for millions.\n\nMore than 90 million people are under winter weather alerts and more than 87 million are under wind chill alerts. The alerts stretch across 37 states, dipping as far south as the Texas/Mexico border.\n\nThe number of people under winter alerts and wind chill alerts has grown to over 100 million people, or roughly a third of the US population, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nThe cold will stick around for Christmas weekend, making this the coldest Christmas in roughly 40 years for portions of the Plains and Midwest.\n\nLIVE UPDATES ON THE WINTER STORM FOR THURSDAY\n\nStorm timeline:\n\nWednesday: The storm will strengthen over the Northern Plains through the day as heavy snow falls across much of the Rockies, the Northern Plains and into the Midwest. Slick roads will lead to travel headaches and airport delays through places like Minneapolis, Omaha and Rapid City.\n\nThis system will bring 5 to 9 inches of light fluffy snow across the region, with “the highest amounts just north and west of the Twin Cities,” said the weather service office in Twin Cities. While snow will steadily fall across the region, the high winds won’t kick in until Thursday.\n\nDenver will go from a high of 47 on Wednesday to a low of minus 14 on Thursday morning. That would be the city’s coldest day in 32 years, according to the weather service.\n\nTemperatures in the Denver metro area will drop drastically once the front passes in the next couple of hours.\n\nBy sunrise, the temperature is expected to be around 10 degrees below zero and gusty north winds will create a wind chill of around minus 25. The high-temperature tomorrow will likely not make it above zero degrees.\n\nA wind chill warning is in effect as well as a winter weather advisory. Several inches of snow will also make for difficult travel late this afternoon through early Thursday.\n\nThursday: Thursday will be the most difficult day for travel. The storm will be hitting the Midwest extremely hard with heavy snow and strong winds. Western Minnesota will face not only blizzard conditions, but potentially deadly wind chills Thursday and Friday.\n\n“Whiteout conditions are expected during that time with travel becoming very difficult or impossible,” said the weather service. “This event could be life-threatening if you are stranded with wind chills in the 30 below to 45 below zero range.”\n\nChicago could also face blizzard conditions with winds gusting as high as 50 mph, with 2 to 4 inches of snow forecast.\n\n“Overall, concern continues to increase in the quick development of dangerous conditions Thursday afternoon with potentially significant impacts to the evening peak travel window,” warned the weather service office in Chicago.\n\nSnowfall early Wednesday in Glasgow, Montana. Angel Enriquez\n\nAdditionally, strong winds may knock out power lines in the Midwest, especially in areas where heavy snow fell last week and is already weighing down tree branches. This will leave millions finding a way to stay warm as temperatures plummet to well below freezing.\n\nSnow could fall as far south as Jackson, Mississippi, Memphis and Nashville in Tennessee and even Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday. Little to no accumulation is expected for most of the southern cities, however, Nashville could pick up about an inch of snow.\n\nIn anticipation of what will be a week of travel nightmares, United, American, Delta, Southwest and Jet Blue have issued travel waivers for dozens of airports across the country from the South to the Northeast, because in addition to snow covering roadways, low visibility could make air travel dangerous.\n\nAt least 1,000 flights had been canceled across the US, according to the flight tracking site Flightaware on Wednesday evening.\n\nChicago’s O’Hare International Airport leads the way, followed by Denver International and Chicago’s Midway International.\n\nCancellations at those airports could have a wider impact because they are busy hubs where travelers often change planes in order to reach other destinations. Thursday is expected to be the busiest pre-Christmas day for travel.\n\nFriday: The storm is expected to become a “bomb cyclone” Thursday evening into Friday. A bomb cyclone is when a storm rapidly intensifies – and drops 24 millibars (a term used to measure atmospheric pressure) in 24 hours.\n\nThe storm is expected to reach the pressure equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane as it reaches the Great Lakes, with the weather service describing the strength of the low a “once-in-a-generation” event.\n\n“This is a case in which snow totals may not tell the whole story. Even small snow amounts, when combined with very strong wind gusts and plummeting temperatures, can cause poor visibility and slick spots on roads. The sudden arrival of these conditions can increase the danger,” the weather service explained.\n\nThe storm will be over the Great Lakes on Friday and continuing to produce heavy snow across much of the Midwest. Portions of Michigan could pick up more than a foot of snow by Friday, making travel impossible at times.\n\nBlizzard warnings are in effect for parts of the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana and Michigan – where travel conditions will become difficult to impossible as the storm peaks Thursday into Friday. Major cities like Chicago, Kansas City, St Louis, Twin Cities and Detroit are under winter storm warnings for heavy snow and near blizzard conditions.\n\nHeavy rain will also blanket much of the I-95 corridor, adding to the travel troubles and lengthy airport delays.\n\nEven in places where the snow has ended, strong winds will continue to blow 30 to 40 mph across much of the Midwest and into the Northeast.\n\nFriday night into Saturday morning, New England will get a quick shot of snow and windy conditions.\n\nTravelers check in at Minneapolis' St. Paul Airport, Wednesday, December 21, 2022. Abbie Parr/AP\n\nLife-threatening cold\n\nPlaces that will escape the snow, won’t escape the cold. Areas from eastern Montana through the Dakotas will experience the coldest air beginning Thursday morning. Temperatures will be running 40 degrees below normal for these places. The combination of cold temperatures and windy conditions will send wind chills as low as 50 degrees below zero.\n\nRapid City will feel like 45 degrees below zero on Thursday morning. By Friday morning, Chicago’s wind chill will bottom out at 30 degrees below zero.\n\n“The dangerously cold wind chills could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 5 minutes,” warned the weather service office in Bismarck.\n\nEven the South will be dangerously cold. Nashville and Atlanta’s wind chill will drop to minus 11 on Saturday morning and Birmingham will feel like minus 5.\n\nGeorgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday declared a state of emergency due to the upcoming “historic low temperatures” across the state, with near zero or negative digit wind chills by midday on Friday.\n\nGreg Behrens, of Des Moines, Iowa, tries to stay warm as he makes his way on a snow-covered sidewalk, Wednesday, December 21, 2022, in Des Moines, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall/AP\n\nThe declaration will help “ensure that essential supplies, especially propane can be delivered for both commercial and residential needs,” the governor told reporters.\n\n“Communities across the state are about to see temperatures that they haven’t experienced in a decade or more,” Kemp said.\n\nThe state will be pretreating roads and bridges in anticipation of the inclement weather and officials urged residents to avoid travel if possible.\n\nKentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also declared a state of emergency, with wind gusts expected to reach 40 to 50 mph on Friday and minus 10 to minus 26 degrees wind chills expected on Saturday. Beshear asked residents to stay off roads and to have a backup heat source.\n\nJackson and Birmingham will both spend more than 80 hours below freezing between Friday and Monday. Houston could sit below freezing for 46 hours between Thursday and Saturday.\n\nThe cold temperatures will stay through Christmas weekend, before finally moderating next week.", "authors": ["Aya Elamroussi Jennifer Gray", "Aya Elamroussi", "Jennifer Gray"], "publish_date": "2022/12/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/08/07/severe-weather-thunderstorms-tornadoes-east-coast-monday/70541295007/", "title": "Severe weather for East Coast: 2 dead, more than 1M without power", "text": "Update: Thousands still without power Tuesday after severe storms batter the East Coast.\n\nSevere thunderstorms across the eastern United States turned deadly Monday, killing at least two people and cutting power to more than 1.1 million customers as damaging winds and large hail battered the region.\n\nDestructive weather conditions were widespread with tornado watches and warnings issued across 10 states from Tennessee to New York. Toppled trees and power lines were seen falling into roads and some homes in multiple states.\n\n“This does look to be one of the most impactful severe weather events across the Mid-Atlantic that we have had in some time,” National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Strong said during a Facebook live briefing.\n\nThe Washington, D.C., area is being hit by thunderstorms, turbulent rainfall, and gusty winds affecting the area as part of a severe weather outbreak with a rare Level 4 out of 5 ranking, according to the National Weather Service and the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang.\n\nThe district was one of many areas along the East Coast under a tornado watch Monday afternoon through 9 p.m. It's part of a wicked weather system that had a large chunk of the East Coast in its crosshairs Monday in a summer of relentless heat and pounding storms.\n\nThe weather service said more than 29.5 million people were under a tornado watch Monday afternoon.\n\nBy Monday night, more than 2,600 U.S. flights had been canceled and nearly 7,900 delayed, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. And over one million Americans are without power, according to the website PowerOutage.us.\n\n\"A severe weather outbreak is expected across parts of the eastern U.S. today with widespread and locally destructive damaging winds and tornadoes as the greatest threats, especially across the southern/central Appalachians and Mid-Atlantic States,\" according to the weather service.\n\nAt least 2 people killed amid severe weather\n\nSevere thunderstorms killed at least two people Monday.\n\nA 15-year-old boy died after a tree fell on him as he got out of the car after he arrived at his grandparent's house in Anderson, South Carolina, according to the Anderson County Office of the Coroner.\n\nIn Florence, Alabama, police said a 28-year-old man died after he was struck by lightning, WAAY-TV reported.\n\nPower outages; flights delayed due to East Coast storm\n\nElectricity is out for more than one million Americans in nine states affected by the storms, according to the website PowerOutage.US.\n\nIn North Carolina, 211,746 customers lost electricity by Monday evening. The same goes for 131,644 customers in Pennsylvania; 77,311 customers in Georgia; and 85,652 customers in Maryland who were without power late Monday.\n\nMore than 2,600 planes have also been canceled and thousands more have been delayed, according to FlightAware.\n\n\"The FAA is re-routing aircraft around the storms heading to the East Coast as much as possible,\" said the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday afternoon.\n\n'Widespread damaging winds'\n\nFrom Atlanta to Philadelphia, more than 80 million people were at risk for dangerous winds, flash flooding and isolated tornadoes, forecasters said.\n\n\"Robust southwesterly winds will transport abundant moisture up the Eastern Seaboard, providing the potential for a washout in some interior sections of the Northeast as thunderstorms produce impressive downpours,\" AccuWeather Meteorologist La Troy Thornton said.\n\nThunderstorms were already triggering localized torrential downpours and disrupting travel in parts of the central Appalachians and the Northeast on Monday morning, AccuWeather said.\n\nNOAA's Storm Prediction Center issued a moderate risk warning for severe storms across parts of the mid-Atlantic, including Baltimore and Washington, and warned of \"widespread damaging winds.\" AccuWeather said it has been at least five years since the prediction center issued that threat level for the area.\n\nWhat is the timeline for the storms?\n\nThe showers and thunderstorms that were dotting the Midwest, South and East early Monday were expected to intensify by early afternoon and roll through the evening, weather.com said. The outlet warned of destructive straight-line winds that could topple trees and spark power outages, hail, flash flooding and tornadoes.\n\nOther cities that could be thrashed by the intense system, according to AccuWeather: Pittsburgh; Cleveland; Cincinnati; Baltimore; Charleston, West Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; Huntsville, Alabama; and Raleigh, North Carolina.\n\nThe turbulent weather could plague much of the East the rest of the week as well, forecasters said.\n\n\"The pattern this week will feature frequent showers and thunderstorms, typically every other day or so, across much of the East,\" AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said. \"Even though it may not rain as much or as often as it did in July, conditions may again pose daily challenges for outdoor plans and travel.\"\n\nAnd while the DC-area storm may not become a derecho − the equivalent of an inland hurricane − it could have some \"derecho-like impacts,\" the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang said.\n\nHow hot is it?:6.5 billion people endured climate-change-driven heat in July, report says\n\nWill the extreme heat return in the mid-Atlantic?\n\nThe good news − for now − is that the stormy, wet weather should keep at bay the intense heat that engulfed the mid-Atlantic and part of the Northeast in July, forecasters said.\n\nAugust temperatures have been 3-6 degrees below the historical average from Washington, D.C., to Boston so far, AccuWeather said, but forecasters warned the heat could make a comeback.\n\n\"Heat can build during the middle to late part of August in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic as many kids return to school. This can be accompanied by high humidity and a risk for thunderstorm activity,\" AccuWeather Meteorologist Brandon Buckingham said.\n\nBut heat still has the South in its grips\n\n\"Dangerously hot daytime temperatures\" were expected across the South on Monday and Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. The record highs would persist from the Desert Southwest into Texas and extend eastward along the Gulf Coast into parts of the Southeast and Florida, the weather service said.\n\nEverything you need to know about heat:From the heat index to a heat dome to an excessive heat warning\n\nHighs could hit the upper 90s to the lower 100s with a heat index − what the temperature feels like when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature − of 105 to 115 degrees in those areas, according to the weather service. The hot temperatures, dry ground conditions, low humidity, and gusty winds would elevate the wildfire risk in the Four Corners states into Texas, the weather service said.\n\nContributing: Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/08/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/27/heat-wave-advisories-warnings-live-updates/70476188007/", "title": "Heat wave across US: Arizona county brings in coolers to store bodies", "text": "Tens of millions of Americans were under heat notices Thursday − and major metropolitan areas were set to hit temperatures not seen in years − as the crushing heat felt in the West and South began to engulf parts of the Midwest and Northeast.\n\nA \"dangerous\" heat wave will settle over cities including Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Boston from Thursday through at least Saturday, the National Weather Service said. Temperatures could creep up toward triple digits, and the \"oppressive humidity\" will make it feel more like 105 degrees. Nighttime lows will be 10 to 15 degrees hotter than usual.\n\nThe situation was bleak in Phoenix, where the Maricopa County medical examiner's office was over capacity Thursday amid a growing number of heat-related deaths, forcing officials to bring in coolers for the first time since an early pandemic wave.\n\nThe widespread coverage of intense heat this week, from Phoenix and Houston to cities such as Chicago to the East Coast, makes it the \"most widespread heat\" this summer, according to AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter.\n\n\"This week seems to us to be probably the hottest week of the summer if you spatially average that across the country,\" Porter told USA TODAY on Thursday.\n\nThe air was thick and sticky with humidity in the Washington, D.C., region Thursday morning. The nation's capital could see 100 degrees for the first time in seven years, and the city declared a hot weather emergency. Baltimore, too, is poised to hit 100 for the first time in years, AccuWeather reported.\n\nArizona county brings in coolers to store bodies amid heat deaths\n\nA relentless heat wave pummeling Arizona has brought with it a wave of heat-related deaths. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office was at 106% capacity Thursday, prompted the county to bring in coolers for the first time since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.\n\n“Maricopa County has brought in 10 refrigerated coolers to increase capacity at our Medical Examiner's Office. We have not yet had to utilize them,” Jessie Caraveo, a spokesperson for Maricopa County, told the Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network.\n\nAccording to Caraveo, a surge in deaths is normally seen during this time of year. But with a historic heatwave scorching, this year may be worse than normal. On Wednesday, a weekly heat report from Maricopa County confirmed seven new heat-associated deaths since last week; increasing the number of such deaths to 25 so far this year, with hundreds of other deaths under investigation.\n\n-Fernando Cervantes Jr., Arizona Republic\n\nWhere are Americans under heat warnings?\n\nOver 41 million Americans were under excessive heat warnings as of Thursday morning, including most of Illinois and other parts of the Midwest. Phoenix residents and parts of Southern California were also under warnings.\n\nMuch of the Midwest, from the Twin Cities to the whole state of Ohio, were under a heat advisory that covered nearly 129 million people. Also impacted: parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee.\n\nHeat advisories were in place in the Northeast as well, stretching from parts of Virginia up through Massachusetts. The New York City region and parts of northeastern New Jersey will see heat indices from 103-106 degrees Thursday and Friday, the weather service said.\n\nThe weather service in Twin Cities, Minnesota, said heat indices were expected in near or hit above 100 with serious humidity. People should wear light, loose-fitting clothing, stay hydrated, avoid strenuous activity outdoors and try to stay in air-conditioned areas, the weather service said.\n\n'GLOBAL BOILING HAS ARRIVED':July temps to smash records, maybe 120,000-year-old ones\n\nHeat isn't done with the Southwest yet\n\nRecord-breaking heat will remain a concern across the Southwestern and Central U.S. through the end of the week, the National Weather Service said.\n\n\"Widespread heat advisories are in effect through Friday evening as dangerous heat indices of 105 F to 110+ F are expected\" in areas of the Central Plains, Upper Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley, and Midwest, the weather service said.\n\nIn Phoenix on Wednesday night, the temperature fell below 90 degrees at Sky Harbor airport for the first time since the morning of July 9, the weather service there said. Still, dangerous conditions were predicted to last through at least Saturday with highs from 110-116.\n\nEl Paso reached 100 for the 41st consecutive day on Wednesday, 18 days more than the previous record, the weather service there said.\n\nBiden announces actions to protect workers in extreme heat\n\nPresident Joe Biden will meet with mayors of cities experiencing some of the most extreme heat this summer – Phoenix and San Antonio – to discuss how heat is impacting their cities, the White House announced Thursday.\n\nThe White House also said Biden has instructed the Department of Labor to issue a \"hazard alert,\" which will \"reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law.\"\n\nThe Department of Labor will give employers information on how to protect workers during inclement heat and inform workers of their rights, as well as enhance enforcement for any heat-safety violations, the White House said.\n\nNew York City opens over 500 cooling centers\n\nOfficials in New York City announced residents could beat the heat by visiting one of hundreds of cooling centers being opened around the five boroughs. The city's website lists over 500 air-conditioned public facilities, including some designated for older residents and some that will accept pets.\n\nThe city activates the network of cooling centers whenever it is under a heat advisory by the National Weather Service with a heat index of at least 95 degrees for two consecutive days or 100 for any period, according to the city's heat plan.\n\n“Heat kills more New Yorkers every year than any other kind of extreme weather event,\" Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference Thursday.\n\nAdams said the heat index will hit 105 on Thursday and be between 105 and 108 in the city on Friday, and New Yorkers should call 311 to find out where to go for a respite from the heat.\n\nWhat is a heat wave?\n\n\"It's not the heat, it's the humidity.\" That's a partly valid phrase you may have heard in the summer, but it's actually both, the weather service said. The heat index, also known as the apparent temperature, is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature, according to the weather service.\n\nA heat wave is a period of unusually hot weather that typically lasts two or more days, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. To be considered a heat wave, the temperatures have to be outside the historical averages for a given area.\n\nA couple of 95 degree summer days in Maine, for example, might be considered a heat wave, but a couple of 95 degree summer days in Death Valley would be pretty unremarkable, the weather service said.\n\nEVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HEAT:From the heat index to a heat dome to an excessive heat warning\n\n− Doyle Rice, USA TODAY\n\nWhen will this heat wave end?\n\nThe question on many Americans' minds as they slog through day after day of extreme heat is: When will this be over? It depends on where you are, according to Porter, the AccuWeather chief meteorologist.\n\nThe same weather conditions that have caused the heat dome to stretch on in the South and Southwest, an area of high pressure in the atmosphere that produces sinking air currents, is expanding into the Midwest and Northeast, but the prognosis differs by location.\n\nIt will be \"brief but impactful\" in Midwest cities such as Chicago and those in the Northeast, Porter said. That's because the jet stream – narrow bands of wind high in the atmosphere sometimes called \"rivers of air\" – will dip as we go into the weekend, bringing thunderstorms and scaling back the heat. The peak of the wave in the majority of those regions will be Friday, Porter said.\n\nAs the heat wave has expanded to the east, it's loosened its grip on some parts of the Southwest, but only slightly. Phoenix has seen a slight reprieve. Thunderstorms have helped drop temperatures a bit, which will last into the weekend.\n\nIn Houston, Porter said the heat is expected to build once again and a heat wave will likely start Sunday and last through about Aug. 8. Temperatures will hover around 100 and there will be plenty of humidity leading to a \"dangerous heat situation once again.\"\n\nHow to stay safe in a heat wave\n\nHeat is the cause of the most weather-related deaths in the United States every year. Porter calls it a \"silent killer.\"\n\nThe most at-risk populations are the very young, the elderly and people with certain underlying conditions or who take medications that make them less able to regulate body temperature, Porter said. People experiencing homelessness are also at extreme risk. He said kids playing sports or people who work outdoors are at special risk if they don't realize the dangers.\n\n\"As a heat wave goes on longer and longer, that accumulates greater heat stress on people's bodies and increases the risk for heat-related illnesses and heat-related stroke,\" he said.\n\nThe National Weather Service in Los Angeles gave residents in different environments tips for staying safe:", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/07/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/27/severe-weather-storms-weather-united-states-south/10786720002/", "title": "Severe weather 'outbreak' to impact 25 million people in southern US", "text": "A massive storm system moving into the Pacific Northwest on Sunday is predicted to bring severe weather ranging from strong winds and rain to a few tornadoes in the South, meteorologists warn, as weary travelers return home from their Thanksgiving weekend.\n\nAbout 25 million people in the south-central region of the United States will be affected by severe thunderstorms later Tuesday, according to AccuWeather. The system will likely impact portions of northeastern Texas, northwestern Louisiana, and central and eastern Arkansas first.\n\nThe National Weather Service warned of “severe storms with a threat for strong tornadoes, wind damage, and some hail will be possible Tuesday” in the Mississippi Valley.\n\n“A significant severe-weather event appears likely across parts of this region,” the weather service said on Twitter.\n\nTHANKSGIVING WEATHER: Heavy rain to blanket much of the southern U.S. on holiday weekend\n\nHow does climate change affect you?: Subscribe to the weekly Climate Point newsletter\n\nThe storm was expected to complicate Thanksgiving and Black Friday plans as heavy and steady rain already blanketed parts of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas Thursday afternoon. But there were no reports of significant travel delays during the holiday weekend.\n\nLess than 70 flights within, into, or out of the U.S. were canceled on Saturday, according to flightaware.com.\n\n\"It's a pretty strong storm system that’s pretty typical this time of year,\" National Weather Service meteorologist Gregg Gallina told USA TODAY.\n\nA severe weather \"outbreak\" is expected late Tuesday along the Mississippi River which will bring an \"enhanced risk\" and supercells, Gallina added.\n\nThe storm will shift across the mid-Mississippi Valley into the Northeast Sunday, according to the weather service.\n\nThe same storm is poised to trigger high winds in the Midwest to the Northeast. The system is forecast to form Tuesday morning and will move across Kansas with snow expected in the North as it enters the Great Lakes region Wednesday, Gallina said.\n\nDue to the colder air, snow and freeze-up in certain regions of the Midwest and Northeast may cause substantial travel delays, according to AccuWeather.\n\nThe risks of the dayslong storm on Tuesday are possible power outages and property damage due to strong wind gusts, according to AccuWeather. Wind gust is 50 to 70 mph, with the possibility of reaching up to 75 mph.\n\nThe potent system also brought snow to eastern New Mexico and western Texas, lingering through Saturday morning, according to the weather service. With a strong cold front, a storm moving into the Pacific Northwest will bring heavy snow to the Cascade Range and northern Rocky Mountains Sunday and Monday.\n\nContributing: Claire Thornton, USA TODAY", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/11/27"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/weather/weekend-atmospheric-river-storm-tornadoes-snow-flooding/index.html", "title": "Major storm to bring feet of snow, heavy rain and possible tornadoes ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nAn atmospheric river event, bringing ample amounts of moisture to the West this weekend, will gradually move across the country and bring hazardous weather to millions.\n\nThe blockbuster storm will begin in the West with heavy snow, gusty winds, and coastal flooding, then move eastward, threatening potential blizzard conditions in the Midwest and tornadoes in the South.\n\nWinter weather alerts are in place for more than 10 million people across nearly a dozen states from California to Minnesota Sunday.\n\nSnow could top out at 1 to 2 feet in the Rockies, and 3 to 5 feet in the Sierras by the end of the weekend. Heavy rain will also be notable in the West, particularly in California, where flooding concerns exist through Sunday.\n\nAn atmospheric river is a plume of moisture which streams in off the Pacific Ocean. Similar to a fire hose, it shoots moisture into one area for an extended period of time, resulting in very heavy rain or snow.\n\nMost coastal communities will pick up 1 to 3 inches of rain through the weekend, and some areas of northern and central California could receive 3 to 5 inches of rain in total. Coastal erosion and flooded roadways will be the main concerns.\n\n“Additional heavy rains may result in isolated runoff issues, especially across recent burn scars,” the Weather Prediction Center said.\n\nWind advisories and high wind warnings are also in places across several western states as gusts of 45 to 55 mph are possible.\n\nThis same storm system is forecast to track into the Rockies by Monday morning, bringing with it heavy mountain snow, before heading into the eastern half of the country.\n\n“As the system moves into the Plains early next week, a springlike storm system develops,” Chad Myers, CNN Meteorologist said. “Significant severe weather will occur in the warm air across the South and a major snow and ice event will happen in the western Great Lakes and northern Plains.”\n\nPotential blizzard conditions for the Plains and Midwest\n\nFor the northern Plains and Midwest, the threat for blizzard conditions is increasing, as significant snow, strong winds, ice and freezing rain will all be possible early next week from Colorado through Wisconsin.\n\nCNN Weather\n\n“A winter storm is expected to impact the Northern Plains Monday night through Thursday,” the National Weather Service office in Bismarck, North Dakota said. “Difficult travel conditions are expected Monday night through Wednesday night from heavy snow, reduced visibility, and drifting snow.”\n\nHeavy snow and strong winds will be the main concerns, but freezing rain and ice are also possible.\n\nIf winds are at least 35 mph and visibility is less than one quarter of a mile for at least three hours, it could result in a full-blown blizzard across the region.\n\nWidespread snow accumulations across the northern Plains and Midwest will be 4 to 8 inches, and some locations could pick up in excess of one foot through Friday of next week.\n\n“While some uncertainty persists, confidence is increasing that strong winds and significant snows will produce hazardous impacts across much of the Central/Northern Plains and into the Upper Midwest,” the prediction center said.\n\nSlick roadways and near-whiteout conditions will make travel very difficult if not impossible at times for some of these areas. Power outages will also be possible due to very strong winds.\n\nSevere storms for the South next week\n\nThe threat for severe storms is also increasing across the southern Plains and Gulf Coast region including tornadoes, large hail, and damaging winds.\n\n“While tornadoes in December are relatively uncommon when compared to the springtime, they are often more likely across portions of the Southeast and Lower Mississippi Valley, where there is often a secondary peak in the fall and winter,” Matthew Elliott, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center, told CNN.\n\nCNN Weather\n\nThe severe storm potential begins Monday night across Oklahoma and northern Texas, gradually spreading into Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi on Tuesday.\n\nSevere storms will likely continue Tuesday overnight across the Gulf Coast region. Nocturnal tornadoes are more dangerous because many people are asleep and unaware they need to be seeking a safe location.\n\nWhile the greater tornado threat exists during the day, there is still the possibility for a few rotating storms through the evening hours.\n\nBy Wednesday, the greatest threat exists for an area from New Orleans to Panama City, Florida.\n\n“The details regarding the areas most at risk from tornadoes will become clearer as the event approaches and smaller-scale trends become more evident,” Elliott said.\n\nBecause the forecast can change it is important to pay attention to developments in the coming days.", "authors": ["Allison Chinchar"], "publish_date": "2022/12/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/20/thursday-severe-weather-forecast-updates/11698424002/", "title": "Thursday forecast: Severe weather for 40M; 3 die in Oklahoma ...", "text": "Three people are dead after tornadoes struck Oklahoma and about 40 million Americans are at risk of severe weather Thursday, forecasters say, marking the second consecutive day tornado and storm watches will be in effect for the central U.S.\n\nA tornado watch was issued Thursday afternoon for portions of the upper Midwest, including the Chicago metro area. A tornado watch means weather conditions are favorable for tornadoes to form.\n\nThe Plains region has been the focal point for extreme weather throughout the week. Wednesday night, a severe storm spawned tornadoes in central Oklahoma, which also led to several injuries in addition to the deaths.\n\nFor some in the central U.S. who aren't threatened by Thursday's severe weather , the risk remains for flooding, fast-developing wildfires and even heavy snow.\n\nIn the East and South, residents will enjoy unseasonably warm temperatures. Flooding will be a concern in the East, red flag warnings will remain in the West, and precipitation should continue in the North.\n\nAmerica's 10 most endangered rivers 2023:See which waterways are most at-risk\n\nHere's what to know about the national weather forecast for Thursday:\n\n3 dead in Oklahoma after tornado\n\nThe small town of Cole, Oklahoma – home to about 600 people – was hit hard by a tornado, McClain County Deputy Sheriff Scott Gibbon told NBC's \"Today.\"\n\nOfficials responded to multiple homes with people trapped inside, he said. One person died on the scene, and another died of a \"heart-related issue\" while being transported to a hospital, he said.\n\nA third person who was injured by the tornado has also died, authorities said, but it was not clear where the person was injured.\n\nWhile Oklahomans are to some degree used to tornadoes, the devastation \"never gets easier,\" he said. \"This has been one of the most significant tornadoes that we've received in that area.\"\n\nVideo:See what tornadoes in Cole and other storms look like across Oklahoma\n\nSevere storms, tornadoes possible from Wisconsin to Texas\n\nThere is a slight risk for severe weather from the southern portion of the Plains to the Mississippi Valley through Thursday night, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nA tornado watch was issued Thursday afternoon for much of northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and portions of eastern Iowa. The watch in Illinois includes the Chicago metro area.\n\nThe possibility of severe thunderstorms, which can include hail, downpours and tornadoes, stretches from southern Wisconsin through central Texas, according to AccuWeather.\n\nAreas where severe weather is most likely Thursday include:\n\nSouthern Missouri\n\nMost of Illinois\n\nNearly all of Arkansas, including Little Rock\n\nEastern Oklahoma\n\nWestern Louisiana\n\nNortheast and central Texas, including Dallas; Severe thunderstorms could approach Houston by late Thursday night.\n\n\"Severe winds, hail, isolated tornadoes and scattered incidents of flash flooding are possible across this region through Thursday evening into Friday morning,\" the NWS said.\n\nA deadly, devastating year for tornadoes\n\nWith at least 66 people killed by tornadoes so far in 2023, according to the Storm Prediction Center, it's been an unusually deadly year for these violent storms.\n\nA March 31 storm produced tornadoes that killed at least 32 people from Arkansas to Delaware, and days later a tornado left five dead in Missouri.\n\nAt least 26 died in Mississippi and Alabama when tornadoes during a late-March storm carved a path of destruction through the Deep South.\n\nA deadly year:Historic number of tornadoes have left a path of death and destruction in 2023. Is climate change to blame?\n\nFlash floods possible in eastern Texas, Louisiana\n\nAlong with the areas at risk of severe weather in the central U.S., flash flooding is possible beginning Thursday night in:\n\nEastern Texas\n\nLouisiana\n\nArkansas\n\nNorthwest Mississippi\n\nWestern Tennessee\n\nSoutheast Arkansas\n\nWestern Kentucky\n\nSouthern Illinois\n\nSouthern Indiana\n\n\"Localized flash flooding is also a possibility from Thursday night to Friday night in urban areas and in poor drainage locations,\" AccuWeather said.\n\nRed flag warnings issued in Southwest, Midwest\n\nRed flag warnings were issued in nine states Thursday morning, including an area of the country not typically at risk for fires.\n\nNew Mexico and its surrounding areas have been on red flag warnings throughout the week, but good news may be coming soon: Thursday is the last day \"critical\" fire weather conditions are expected in the region, according to the NWS.\n\n\"Behind the dryline across the Southern High Plains, strong winds and dry/hot weather continue to pose a critical fire weather risk as forecast by the (Storm Prediction Center), across much of New Mexico and the Texas/Oklahoma Panhandles and adjacent regions of Colorado and southwest Kansas and western Oklahoma,\" the NWS said.\n\n\"Red flag warnings are posted for much of this area, any fires could rapidly spread given this dry high wind environment.\"\n\nA red flag warning was also issued for large parts of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee.\n\nWhat's a red flag warning?\n\nA red flag warning means warm temperatures, very low humidity levels and stronger winds are expected to combine to produce an increased risk of fire danger, according to the NWS.\n\nThe NWS reminds Americans to never leave a fire unattended, to extinguish all outdoor fires properly and to not throw cigarettes or matches out of a moving vehicle.\n\n\"If you are allowed to burn in your area, all burn barrels must be covered with a weighted metal cover, with holes no larger than 3/4 of an inch,\" the NWS advises.\n\nRed flag warning map\n\nHeavy snow in North Dakota, Minnesota\n\nThere's potential for heavy snowfall across northern North Dakota and Minnesota, as well as in parts of Minnesota and Washington state, beginning Thursday morning into the afternoon, as the NWS issued a winter storm watch through Friday morning.\n\n\"Rain and snow will be the initial precipitation type on Thursday before changing over to primarily snow Thursday night,\" the NWS said. \"Snow that accumulates will be heavy and wet.\"\n\nWinter storm map\n\nEast Coast heats up\n\nThe roller coaster of temperatures will continue in the East, as the region went from having warm weather to a \"major cooldown\" in less than a week. Temperatures have been on the rise in the Southeast and now the heat is extending north, with parts of Virginia expected to reach 90 degrees Thursday.\n\nHere are some of the forecast highs in the East:\n\nWashington, D.C.: 87\n\nCharlottesville, Virginia: 91\n\nNew York: 68\n\nPhiladelphia: 78\n\nCharlotte: 86\n\nAtlanta: 84\n\nUS weather watches and warnings\n\nNational weather radar\n\nFollow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/04/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2023/06/28/texas-heat-midwest-smoke-wednesday-forecast/70363209007/", "title": "Texas heatwave spreads: 110M under heat warnings, advisories ...", "text": "Along with the dismal air quality across the upper Midwest, the main weather story across the nation Wednesday was the deadly, record-breaking heat wave scorching the south-central U.S. over the past couple of weeks, killing at least 14 people. Temperatures Wednesday were forecast to approach or surpass 100 degrees from New Mexico to Mississippi.\n\n“These are unprecedented temperatures,” Webb County, Texas, medical examiner Corine Stern said this week. Eleven people have died in Webb County, Stern said. Two others died in Texas while hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park. One person died last week in Louisiana.\n\nAnd as of late Wednesday, more than 110 million Americans were under some level of heat alert from the National Weather Service. As of Wednesday evening, the alerts span thousands of miles, from California to Florida.\n\n“There may be more danger than a typical heat event, due to the longevity of near-record or record high nighttime lows and elevated heat index readings,” the National Weather Service said.\n\nMeanwhile, much of the upper Midwest continued to face smoke-filled skies Wednesday. The Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov site showed Detroit in the “hazardous” range and warned that “everyone should stay indoors and reduce activity levels.”\n\nThis followed a smoky Tuesday: Chicago and Detroit had the worst air-quality in the world on Tuesday as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted across the upper Midwest.\n\nMost of the upper Midwest will remain under an air-quality advisory through Wednesday, and as the smoke moves east, air quality is expected to reach unhealthy levels in parts of western and central New York and eastern Lake Ontario, Gov. Kathy Hochul warned.\n\nHere's a look at Wednesday's forecast.\n\nBrutal Texas heat wave set to reach Central Plains and Mississippi Valley\n\nThe heat wave will be \"life-threatening\" to those working or spending time outdoors Wednesday, the weather service warned, because of the extreme humidity.\n\nThe heat index, which is how hot it feels with humidity factored in, will be in the 110 to 120 degree range across the eastern third of Texas, along the Central Gulf Coast and north through the Lower Mississippi Valley and Lower Tennessee Valley, the weather service said.\n\nThat includes the major metro areas Dallas-Fort Worth; San Antonio; New Orleans; Little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; and Montgomery Alabama.\n\n\"Take this dangerous heat seriously,\" said Weather.com meteorologist Jon Erdman. \"Avoid any prolonged, unnecessary outdoor activity, especially in the hottest part of the day. Check on the elderly and anyone else who may be living without air conditioning.\"\n\nWhat is an excessive heat warning?\n\nAn excessive heat warning is issued by the weather service within 12 hours of the onset of extremely dangerous heat.\n\nThe general rule of thumb for such a warning is when the maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 105 degrees or higher for at least two days and nighttime air temperatures will not drop below 75 degrees. But these criteria vary across the country, especially for areas not used to extreme heat.\n\nThat's important because if you don't take precautions immediately when conditions are extreme, you may become seriously ill or even die, the weather service warned.\n\nAn excessive heat warning means some people can be seriously vulnerable to heat if precautions are not taken. Studies in Canada, Europe and the U.S. have indicated that mortality begins to increase exponentially as the heat increases or stays above a heat index of 104 degrees.\n\nWhat is a heat advisory?\n\nJust like an excessive heat warning, the weather service issues a heat advisory within 12 hours of the arrival of extremely dangerous heat conditions.\n\nA heat advisory is issued when the maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 100 degrees or higher for at least two days and nighttime air temperatures will not drop below 75 degrees. These criteria also vary across the country, especially for areas not used to dangerous heat.\n\nUS heat index map\n\nHeat, wildfires a concern in parts of California\n\nAfter a relatively cool couple of weeks across much of California, summer has kicked off with an increasingly hot weather pattern for the interior valleys of California set to start Thursday and continue into the weekend.\n\nIn Southern California, wildfire season has begun in Riverside County.\n\nA brush fire called the Juniper Fire has spread 50 acres, burning homes and leading to evacuations Tuesday afternoon in Perris, about 75 miles east of Los Angeles.\n\nSouthern California wildfire map\n\nCanadian wildfires deteriorate air quality in Midwest\n\nPoor air quality is set to continue in the Midwest, Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Valley thanks to Canadian wildfires, according to the weather service. Detroit is under an air quality advisory through Wednesday night.\n\nChicago and Detroit ranked as the two cities with the worst quality, according to IQAir’s Air Quality Index, switching back and forth between the \"unhealthy\" and \"very unhealthy\" categories through Tuesday.\n\nUS air quality map\n\nUS weather warnings and watches\n\nNational weather radar\n\nContributing: The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/06/28"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_19", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": []}
{"question_id": "20240112_20", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/09/23/tropical-storm-ophelia-warning-issued-for-delaware-new-jersey-east-coast/70922502007/", "title": "Waves, winds batter Delaware beaches as communities see coastal ...", "text": "Editor's note: This story and headlines have been updated to correctly reflect the warning for Delaware. Much of the state is under a coastal flood warning.\n\nDelaware saw a wet and windy Saturday as then-Tropical Storm Ophelia headed its way.\n\nDelaware and other parts of the East Coast were hit with rain and strong gusty winds Saturday, expected to last through the evening and into parts of Sunday. The storm is in effect from northeast North Carolina and includes parts of Maryland, Virginia and Fenwick Island as it continues northward, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nThe storm made landfall on the coast of North Carolina near Emerald Isle on Saturday morning and moved inland across the state, according to forecasters with the National Hurricane Center.\n\nAt 7:44 p.m., the center said that Ophelia had slowed to become a tropical depression, which is a weak form of a tropical storm, and all storm surge and tropical storm warnings had been discontinued.\n\nHeavy rain began early Saturday morning, with National Weather Service forecasters predicting another round later in the day. Between 2 to 3 inches of rain are expected in the Delaware area. As of 6 p.m. Saturday, Harbeson recorded the highest rainfall total across the state with 3.64 inches, according to the Delaware Environmental Observing System. Close behind were nearby areas of Stockley and Dagsboro.\n\nNew Castle County reported far less, with Newark reporting about 1.5 inches of rain as of 6 p.m. Saturday.\n\nThe worst impacts of the storm were expected along the Delaware beaches and the Jersey shore Saturday night, especially around high tide and in the hours after. Wind gusts could reach up to 60 mph, according to the weather service, which could make it more difficult for water to recede and flow back out to sea.\n\nHere's a look at what happened throughout Delaware on Saturday.\n\nWHAT TO KNOW:Ophelia causes coastal flood warning for southern Delaware, New Jersey\n\nBayside developments, mobile home parks see usual flooding\n\nWaters were slow to recede post-high tide Saturday night, leaving bayside developments with the flooding that often comes with big storm surges.\n\nNorth Drive in West Bay Park was completely flooded out as a person waded through the water toward the tiny homes set up across from the marina around 5 p.m. Saturday.\n\nLong Neck Road was also closed at Fairfield due to water on the roadway.\n\nIn the Angola area of Lewes, Bookhammer Landing Road was also flooded. There are about 40 homes beyond a sign touting Joy Beach, with Rehoboth Bay gray but visible in the distance at the end of the road.\n\nDelaware beaches swamped post-high tide\n\nHigh tide hit the Delaware beaches at 3 p.m. Saturday, but waves showed no signs of receding by 4:30 p.m.\n\nGusty winds were expected to remain in the region through the evening, which could leave the coastline facing high waters into the evening.\n\nFlooding, road closures hit Delaware beaches\n\nAbout 2 p.m. Saturday, as Delaware beaches prepped for an extremely high tide amid the storm, the parking lot at Savannah Beach in Lewes was closed and filled with sand. Police vehicles blocked the entrance to the parking lot at the beach located at the end of Savannah Road.\n\nOn Lewes Beach, waves crashed and covered the beach by 2 p.m. except for a small slice next to the jetty which was quickly disappearing.\n\nAt about 6:30 p.m., Route 1 south (Coastal Highway) was closed at the south end of Dewey Beach.\n\nHigh tide is expected to peak just before 3 p.m. Saturday.\n\nDelaware Department of Transportation traffic cameras near the Indian River Inlet did not show any Route 1 flooding as of 2:10 p.m. Saturday. One camera did show multiple onlookers braving the wind along the beach for photos.\n\nStorm tracker Delaware\n\nHere's the latest radar for where the storm is moving throughout Delaware.\n\nNational Guard mobilizing in Delaware\n\nThe Delaware National Guard was activated as a result of the storm, according to the Delaware Emergency Management Agency. They were to be in place by 1 p.m. Saturday to aid in storm response, and additional resources were standing by across the state to respond as needed.\n\nAreas of major flooding concern in the state, according to DEMA, include low-lying coastal areas in Kent County, as well as the Long Neck and Oak Orchard areas in Sussex County.\n\nClosings due to the storm\n\nThe Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control closed campgrounds in coastal areas Saturday, according to the Delaware Emergency Management Agency. Some Sussex County mobile home parks also had power shut off to prevent transformer inundation.\n\nRainfall totals across the state\n\nAs of 11 a.m. Saturday, the highest rainfall estimate over the past 24 hours was recorded in Dagsboro with 2.72 inches, according to the Delaware Environmental Observing System.\n\nThe system's data also reported the following findings during the past 24 hours:\n\nDelmar: 2.47 inches\n\nClaymont: 1.10 inches\n\nBethany Beach: 2.07 inches\n\nRehoboth Beach: 1.96 inches\n\nDover: 1.59 inches\n\nWilmington: 1.20 inches\n\nSeaford: 0.92 inches\n\nNewark: 1.48 inches\n\nHockessin: 1.29 inches\n\nStreet flooding in Bethany Beach\n\nAccuweather reports that several streets in Bethany Beach have been flooded, with some barriers being knocked down by the wind.\n\nAccuweather's Bill Wadell was live from the north side of Bethany Beach Saturday morning, standing in a street covered with water. He also shared video from before sunrise of waves and wind hammering the boardwalk in both Bethany and Rehoboth Beach.\n\nGusty winds battering Delaware beaches\n\nWinds were strongest in Lewes on Saturday morning, peaking at 64 mph as of 8 a.m., according to the National Weather Service.\n\nGusts also peaked at 58 mph in Dewey Beach Saturday morning, the weather service said.\n\nPower outages popping up across Delaware\n\nAs of Saturday morning, at least 4,000 customers have lost power in Delaware, especially in Sussex County where the majority of the outages occurred, according to poweroutage.us.\n\nLive cameras from the Delaware beaches show waves and heavy winds battering the coastline.\n\nWill the heavy rain and wind mean flooding?\n\nYes. Coastal flooding hit the area Saturday evening and was expected Sunday for the Delaware beaches and coastal New Jersey. Flooding could also affect parts of Maryland's Eastern Shore, as the storm continues to go north.\n\nDowned trees and power lines resulting in localized power outages are also possible, according to the weather service.\n\nOn Saturday, heavy rain will be accompanied by breezy temperatures near 64 degrees in the Delaware area. Rain is expected to last into Sunday, according to the NWS.\n\nWeekend forecast\n\nStrong winds are expected from mid-morning through early Saturday noon. Gusty winds of 30 to 45 mph in most parts of Delaware will continue Saturday night but not be as strong. Temperatures will drop to around 59 degrees Saturday night.\n\nThe weather service predicts rain to last through Sunday morning with northeast winds around 15 mph. However, rain is expected to taper off Sunday night.\n\nOphelia: Watch live cams from Rehoboth Boardwalk, Lewes Yacht Club\n\nThis story includes reporting by the Associated Press.\n\nAre you being impacted by the storm? Contact reporter Cameron Goodnight at cgoodnight@delawareonline.com or by calling or texting 302-324-2208. Follow him on Twitter at @CamGoodnight.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/09/23"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2023/09/27/delaware-beaches-damaged-tropical-storm-ophelia-lewes-broadkill-delaware-seashore/70963494007/", "title": "Some Delaware beaches damaged by Tropical Storm Ophelia to be ...", "text": "Lewes, Broadkill and Delaware Seashore State Park were among the beaches that fared the worst from the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia.\n\nFortunately, Lewes and Delaware Seashore are due for replenishment in the off-season. However, Broadkill has no relief scheduled, at least not yet.\n\n\"Along the Atlantic, the beach north of Indian River Inlet in Delaware Seashore State Park was hit hardest and was left in its most eroded state since Hurricane Sandy in 2012,\" said the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control's Jesse Hayden.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/09/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/09/21/delaware-weather-weekend-storm-could-bring-rain-high-winds-flooding/70917761007/", "title": "Storm moving up East Coast brings rain, possible flooding, more to ...", "text": "With the region welcoming fall in two days, it looks like Mother Nature was inspired by autumn’s arrival to give us an early look at what’s in store throughout the season.\n\nFirst up? A rainy weekend in Delaware.\n\nThe National Weather Service (NWS) warns of gusty winds, heavy rain and high surf in the Southeast and southern Mid-Atlantic on Friday and into the weekend.\n\nAs a coastal storm moves up the East Coast, flooding, heavy rainfall, a high risk of rip currents and dangerous marine conditions are also forecast.\n\nWhat will the weather be like in Delaware this weekend?\n\nFriday through Sunday, the high temperature for each Delaware county will hover around the low 70s, followed by lows in the high 50s and low 60s.\n\nRain is expected to move into the state Friday night and continue through Sunday night. Thunderstorms and rainfall amounts up to two inches are possible.\n\nOn Monday, sunny skies are expected with temperatures in the low to mid-70s by day and high 50s by night.\n\nWeather warnings to watch out for\n\nAlthough there is a low probability of widespread hazardous weather over the weekend, there are few weather impacts around the state that you may want to keep in mind.\n\nKent County residents are warned of several possible instances of flooding Friday, especially in urban and poor-drainage areas and near particularly vulnerable small creeks and streams, according to NWS.\n\nA gale watch remains in effect from Friday evening through late Saturday night for Delaware Bay waters north of East Point, New Jersey, to Slaughter Beach\n\nNortheast winds between 20 knots and 30 knots of wind are possible, along with gusts up to 35 knots and the possibility of very rough waters.\n\nWaters south of this are expected to see 20 knots to 30 knots of wind, with gusts up to 40 knots and the possibility of very rough waters.\n\nStrong winds can cause hazardous seas, which can reduce visibility and capsize or damage vessels. Mariners are advised to alter plans to avoid these hazards and remain in port, seek safe harbor, alter course or secure the vessel for severe wind and seas.\n\nBeginning on Friday, Atlantic coastal and inland portions of Sussex County are cautioned of several possible instances of flooding, especially in urban and poor-drainage areas and near particularly vulnerable small creeks and streams.\n\nGot a tip or a story idea? Contact Krys'tal Griffin at kgriffin@delawareonline.com.\n\nHow hot was this summer? We found out:Was this the hottest summer ever in Delaware? That, plus what recent temperatures mean\n\nAC too expensive? The price of comfort:Lack of cooling assistance could leave Delawareans vulnerable to swelling summer heat\n\nNatural disaster prep guides:Here's how to keep safe and tips in case of a flood, tornado or heat wave hits Delaware", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/09/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2020/08/05/tropical-storm-isaias-likely-causes-millions-worth-damages-delaware/3298489001/", "title": "Likely to cost millions: Damage from Tropical Storm Isaias only ...", "text": "All was quiet on North Shore Drive in Milford on Wednesday afternoon, save for the hum of lawnmowers and the rustling of downed branches being shoved onto a trailer hooked to the back of a local businessman’s truck.\n\nThe day before, the small neighborhood — filled with manicured lawns and waterfront homes — looked very different. It buzzed with emergency vehicles responding to the first storm-related fatality the state has seen since Hurricane Irene in 2011.\n\nNeighbors weren’t ready to talk about the woman killed on Tuesday by a falling tree branch from Tropical Storm Isaias, out of respect for the family. Another new resident wasn’t even aware of what had happened. And authorities have not yet released the woman’s name.\n\nA RECAP OF THE STORM:'All hell started breaking loose:' Isaias spawns tornadoes, kills one in Delaware on Tuesday\n\nThousands of Delawareans on Tuesday were cleaning up and assessing the damage to their homes and cars from Isaias.\n\nIt will take days to know the true extent of the storm’s damage in Delaware and elsewhere along the coast, but the Delaware Emergency Management Agency compared Tuesday's storm to Tropical Storm Henri in 2003, which led to more than $16.1 million in damages in the First State alone.\n\n“This is like the equivalent of several strong thunderstorms in a several-hour period,” said DEMA Director A.J. Schall. “It was disastrous and is a huge headache for those that are impacted.”\n\nISAIAS BY THE HOUR:Tornadoes spotted 4 times in Delaware; updated forecast; homes and cars destroyed\n\nBased on preliminary reports, Schall estimates the storm may have caused more than $20 million in damages. The final number includes damage to the dozens of homes in Dover and New Castle County, as well as a school, that is now uninhabitable; debris cleanup; and damages to utility infrastructure like downed poles and wires.\n\nIt took nearly two weeks for Isaias to journey across the Atlantic Ocean before making landfall in North Carolina late Monday night, and it never became more than a low-level Category 1 storm. Yet it still wreaked havoc on multiple coastal states and impacted millions of residents along the East Coast.\n\n“I think a lot of people think with tropical storms, ‘It’s not a hurricane; we don’t have to worry,'\" said Delaware State Climatologist Daniel Leathers. \"But there can still be huge impacts with a tropical storm of any strength, really.\"\n\nThe damage, he said, \"really highlights the potential impacts even with ‘just’ a tropical storm.”\n\n‘What else is 2020 gonna bring?’\n\nIn Middletown’s Summit Bridge Farms, a neighborhood with some of the most significant storm damage, residents dug through fallen trees Wednesday afternoon to find their belongings, which had been carried away by Isaias’ winds the day before.\n\nIf they were lucky, they found their yard decorations and deck furniture, sometimes houses away from their own. But some people had no idea where their lost items were carried when a tornado touched down in the area.\n\nThe homes were struck in a way that clearly outlined the path of the storm.\n\nA crop field behind one resident’s house showed traces of the tornado’s path before it reached the neighborhood, where homes on either side of the path were minimally damaged, some escaping without any signs of wear.\n\nBut other houses were hit hard like the home of Amy Brennan. She was home when the tornado went through, her two teenage sons asleep on the second floor.\n\nShe said she heard rumbling and yelled for the boys to come down, one of whom did. When she next looked up, her 14-year-old son, Conner, was at the top of the stairs, just as the storm started to tear the second story off her home.\n\nA SCHOOL HIT HARD:Delaware middle school condemned after taking damage from Tropical Storm Isaias\n\n\"Thank gosh it was only for a second,\" Brennan said. Conner had held tight to the railing and somehow made it down the stairs to join the family.\n\nThey're all shaken, but safe.\n\n\"I can't imagine the power of that swirling wind. ... The roof is just gone. I don't even know where it is,\" Brennan said.\n\nAs of Wednesday afternoon, State Farm, one Delaware’s largest insurance company, reported its customers had filed 590 homeowners claims, nearly five times more than the number of auto claims — 120 — it had received.\n\nBut the insurance company said Wednesday’s numbers are only preliminary and will likely increase as the days go on. The claims also don’t take into account other insurance companies that did not report their numbers.\n\nWhile State Farm’s claim numbers are remarkable just one day after Isaias swept through, the storm’s damage extended well beyond cars and homes.\n\nWinds from the tropical storm, as well as the tornadoes it produced, knocked down electrical lines, cutting power to more than 115,000 customers, Delmarva Power said.\n\nAs of 4 p.m. Wednesday, the company had restored power to all but about 8,000 customers. The power company said crews would be working “around the clock” in 12-to-16-hour shifts to get power back to the remaining customers.\n\nMore than 800 workers from as far away as Florida and Texas have joined the effort, but some of the most damaged areas in the state may not have electricity until Friday evening, the company said.\n\nDelaware emergency officials said infrastructure such as bridges and roadway structures were largely spared in the storm, though more than 20 roads in New Castle County remained closed Wednesday, long after the wind and rain subsided. Coastal impacts were minimal, with no major flooding or beach erosion reported.\n\nStill, the damage inland was extensive.\n\nState emergency officials are coordinating with county emergency agencies to assess damages and decide whether any federal assistance is needed. They also met with Federal Emergency Management Agency officials to discuss the next steps as Delaware recovers.\n\nThose damages are what led Gov. John Carney on Tuesday to issue a state of emergency to better coordinate cleanup efforts among state agencies. The designation was also set Tuesday night in case roads needed to be closed due to lingering flood risks, DEMA’s Schall said.\n\n“‘What else is 2020 gonna bring?’ is what I keep asking myself every morning when I wake up,” said Schall, adding that hurricane season runs until Nov. 30.\n\n“If there’s anything this year has taught us, it’s that people need to be prepared.”\n\nWhat Delawareans can learn\n\nTropical Storm Isaias was not the first vicious storm to hit Delaware, and it won’t be the last.\n\nIt was, however, among the most damaging the First State has seen in recent years, arguably since Superstorm Sandy slammed the region in October 2012, said Leathers.\n\n“It really did more than I think a lot of people assumed it would,” Leathers said. “It’s amazing what the path will do. If this had been 150 miles to the east, we wouldn’t be talking about many impacts here at all.”\n\nHURRICANE SEASON IS HERE:Delaware and hurricanes: What Tropical Storm Isaias reminds us about coastal risk\n\nIt wasn’t that the National Hurricane Center or National Weather Service forecasts were off on Isaias' track or expected wind and rain. In fact, predictions of how much rain and how fast winds would blow were about spot-on, Leathers said.\n\n“The thing that’s always a wild card when it comes to land-falling hurricanes is the potential for tornadoes,” he said. “It was just a matter of, this time, this was a very dynamic storm.”\n\nThough the National Weather Service issued tornado watches and warnings as soon as they detected conditions rife for producing twisters, “whether or not tornadoes are produced within a weather system is really hard to forecast that far ahead of time,” Leathers said.\n\n“It’s unusual for us — we just typically don’t see that number of tornadoes,” he said. “But we have had tornadoes before with tropical systems.”\n\nInitial reports suggested several separate tornadoes touched down in Kent and New Castle counties Tuesday, but the National Weather Service said on Wednesday it was most likely one tornado that touched down multiple times. It will take at least another day or more to make that determination.\n\nFour sightings had been reported — on Sandtown Road near Felton, along Route 13 in Smyrna, in the area of Route 8 and Bennington Street in Dover and on Gum Bush Road near Townsend. It’s not unusual for a tornado to touch down then revert to more of a funnel cloud, then touch down again somewhere else, Leathers said.\n\nNormally when a hurricane or tropical system makes landfall, they begin to weaken. Warm ocean waters are key to fueling tropical systems, and without that source, the storms often start to flounder.\n\nBut the conditions were perfect for Tropical Storm Isaias to maintain its strength on its rapid northward journey up the East Coast. An upper-level trough in the atmosphere gave the storm its fast-moving forward speed, but also helped it keep its strength. That, combined with the dynamic nature of the storm’s wind field, created the perfect recipe for tornados, Leathers said.\n\n“This particular one, even though it was never that strong from a hurricane standpoint, because of the overall meteorological situation and the path it took, it did a lot of damage from the coastal Carolinas all the way up into New England,” Leathers said. “People need to remember that: This was a tropical storm, but there were fatalities and injuries and property damage.\n\n“That’s why, if you hear a tropical storm is coming into your area, it’s important to take that seriously.”\n\nDelaware Online/The News Journal videographer Jenna Miller and intern Kry'stal Griffin contributed to this report.\n\nContact reporter Maddy Lauria at (302) 345-0608, mlauria@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @MaddyinMilford. Send story tips or ideas to Isabel Hughes at ihughes@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2785. Follow her on Twitter at @izzihughes_.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/08/05"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/25/weather/christmas-arctic-winter-storm-power-outages-sunday/index.html", "title": "Prolonged winter storm causes at least 37 deaths and leaves ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe prolonged winter storm that brought heavy snow, high winds and brutal cold to most of the US this past week has killed at least 37 people and had hundreds of thousands without power on Christmas morning.\n\nPerhaps the worst impact was around Buffalo, New York, where 43 inches of snow fell as of Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service. The snowfall and blizzard conditions made roads impassable, froze power substations and left more than a dozen people dead, Erie County officials said.\n\nThe conditions eased slightly on Sunday, allowing emergency responders to get out and see the extent of the problem.\n\n“I don’t want to say that this is going to be it because that would be a fallacy for me to say that, because we know that there are people who have been stuck in cars for more than two days,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Sunday. “There are people in homes who are below freezing temperatures.”\n\nNew York Gov. Kathy Hochul called it the “most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long storied history” due to its power and its extended length.\n\n“It’s a crisis of epic proportion,” Hochul told CNN’s Paula Reid on Sunday.\n\nOver the past week, this winter storm brought dangerously cold temperatures, blizzard conditions and coastal flooding to almost the entirety of the US, wrecking Christmas plans along the way.\n\nMore than 55 million people were under wind chill alerts Sunday morning, and freeze warnings are in effect across the South.\n\nThe blizzard conditions persisted Sunday across the Great Lakes, while frigid cold temperatures gripped the eastern two-thirds of the country.\n\nSome major cities in the Southeast, Midwest and East Coast recorded their coldest Christmas in decades. In Florida, it will be the coldest December 25 since 1983 for Miami, Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach.\n\nNew York City also saw record cold temperatures on Christmas Eve at several locations, including its JFK and LaGuardia airports. The high at Central Park was 15 degrees, marking it the second-coldest December 24 in at least 150 years, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nTemperatures are forecast to rebound later in the week with a much-welcomed warming trend with above-normal temperatures.\n\nAbout 250,000 homes and businesses in the US had no electricity service as of about 11 a.m. ET Sunday, with nearly half of those affected in Maine and New York, according to PowerOutage.us. Since the start of the storm the number of outages has at times exceeded a million customers.\n\nPower grid struggling with cold\n\nSnow blankets buildings in Buffalo, New York, on Wednesday, December 28. Joed Viera/AFP/Getty Images National Guard troops check on Buffalo residents on December 28. Jeffrey T. Barnes/AP A traveler searches for luggage December 28 at a Southwest Airlines baggage holding area in Denver International Airport. More than 90% of Wednesday's US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Southwest canceled more than 2,500 flights. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images People help push a car out of snow in Buffalo on Tuesday, December 27. John Normile/Getty Images Niagara Falls in New York is partially frozen on December 27. Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Travelers at Baltimore/Washington International Airport deal with the impact of canceled flights on December 27. Michael McCoy/Reuters A gas station canopy lays on its side after high winds and heavy snow in Lackawanna, New York, on December 27. The historic winter storm dumped up to 4 feet of snow on the area. John Normile/Getty Images Hundreds of unclaimed suitcases sit near the Southwest Airlines baggage claim area in Tennessee's Nashville International Airport after the airline canceled thousands of flights on December 27. Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images A street is blanketed by snow in downtown Buffalo on Monday, December 26. Gov. Kathy Hochul/Twitter/AP A person clears a snow-covered driveway in Buffalo on December 26. Faith Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images A man and a boy walk across the frozen Reflecting Pool towards the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on December 26. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Firefighters carry rescue equipment as they respond to a fire on a snow-covered street in Buffalo on Sunday, December 25. Jalen Wright/The New York Times/Redux Snow blankets a neighborhood in Cheektowaga, New York, on Christmas Day. Western New York is drowning in thick \"lake effect\" snow -- which forms when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Great Lakes -- just one month after the region was slammed with a historic snowstorm. John Waller via AP A man tries to dig out his car after he got stuck in a snowdrift about a block from home in Buffalo on Saturday, December 24. Derek Gee/The Buffalo News via AP Icicles created by a sprinkler hang from an orange tree in Clermont, Florida, on December 24. Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A young holiday traveler passes the time at Detroit Wayne County Metro Airport on December 24. Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images Pedestrians deal with the cold in Chicago on December 24. Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via AP Hoak's Restaurant in Hamburg, New York, is seen covered in ice from the spray of Lake Erie on December 24. Kevin Hoak via Reuters Nissan Stadium employees clear the field in Nashville before the an NFL football game on December 24. Mark Zaleski/AP Amanda Kelly cleans off snow and ice from her car in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, December 23. Joseph Scheller/Columbus Dispatch/USA Today Network Cars drive in whiteout conditions in Orchard Park, New York, on December 23. Mark Mulville/The Buffalo News/AP Travelers sleep while lines of people pass through a security checkpoint at Denver International Airport. David Zalubowski/AP Snow-covered buildings are seen in Louisville, Kentucky. Leandro Lozada/AFP/Getty Images The waters of Lake Erie wash over the shoreline in Hamburg, New York, on December 23. John Normile/Getty Images Snow collects on a bison at the Longfield Farm in Goshen, Kentucky, on December 23. Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal/USA Today Network Volunteers welcome a homeless person to a shelter at Louisville's Broadbent Arena on December 23. Leandro Lozada/AFP/Getty Images Stones are removed from a road in Westport, Massachusetts, after a storm surge made landfall, flooding many coastal areas on December 23. Peter Pereira/The Standard-Times/AP The Louisville skyline is obscured by steam rising from the Ohio River on December 23. Matt Stone/The Louisville Courier/USA Today Network Antonio Smothers jump-starts his vehicle in Nashville on December 23. Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images Rows of headstones at the North Dakota Veterans Cemetery are blanketed by drifting snow in Mandan on Thursday, December 22. Tom Stromme/The Bismarck Tribune/AP Migrants warm themselves by a fire next to the US-Mexico border fence on December 22 in El Paso, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images Robert Arnold puts chains onto the tires of his semitrailer while he waits for the eastbound lane of I-70 to reopen in Silverthorne, Colorado, on December 22. Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty Images A musician departs following a show on Broadway in Nashville on December 22. Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images Brady Myers helps turn the Stewpot Community Services day shelter for the unhoused into an emergency overnight shelter in Jackson, Mississippi, on December 22. Barbara Gauntt/Clarion Ledger/USA Today Network Vehicles travel along Interstate 44 on December 22, in St. Louis. Jeff Roberson/AP A person walks through the snow on December 22 in downtown Minneapolis. Alex Kormann/Star Tribune/AP A clean car passes a snow-covered car in Des Moines, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall/AP Travelers walk in front of flight information screens at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on December 22. Nam Y. Huh/AP Ice collects on a window in Oklahoma City on December 22. Bryan Terry/The Oklahoman/USA Today Network Bus riders wait at a sheltered stop in Chicago on December 22. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP An accident involving a semi-tractor-trailer blocks the eastbound lanes of Interstate 80 in West Des Moines on December 22. Bryon Houlgrave/The Des Moines Register/AP Kids shovel snow off a sidewalk and driveway in Minneapolis on December 22. Abbie Parr/AP Travelers arrive for their flights at O'Hare International Airport on December 22 in Chicago. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images Mist rises above ice flows on the Yellowstone River on December 22 in Paradise Valley, Montana. William Campbell/Getty Images Students walk to school buses after early dismissal at a middle school in Wheeling, Illinois, on December 22. Nam Y. Huh/AP Miguel Salazar clears sidewalks in Denver on December 22. Hyoung Chang/Denver Post/Getty Images Travelers arrive at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport on December 21. Alex Kormann/Star Tribune/AP Salt is prepared to be loaded onto a truck at the Department of Public Works sanitation yard in Milwaukee on December 21. Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/AP Propane heaters sit next to pens at the City of Mission Animal Shelter in Mission, Texas, on December 21. Joel Martinez/The Monitor/AP Crews de-ice a Southwest Airlines plane before takeoff in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 21. Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald/AP An Iowa Department of Transportation plow clears a road in Iowa City on December 21. Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press Citizen/AP Snow covers homes in Seattle on December 20. Daniel Kim/The Seattle Times/AP In pictures: Winter storm impacts the US Prev Next\n\nA power grid operator for at least 13 states in the country’s eastern half asked customers to conserve power and set thermostats lower than usual from early Saturday to 10 a.m. on Sunday because usage was straining capacity.\n\nThe operator, PJM Interconnection, serves about 65 million people in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The operator warned rolling blackouts could happen if the strain becomes too much.\n\nIn New York, utility companies Con Edison and Natural Grid US also urged customers to conserve energy, citing extreme weather conditions and increased energy demand on interstate pipelines carrying natural gas into the city.\n\nMeanwhile, a shortage of electricity in Texas prompted the US Department of Energy to declare an emergency Friday, allowing the state’s energy provider to exceed environmental emissions standards until energy usage drops.\n\nIn Jackson, Mississippi, frigid temperatures are hampering efforts to repair a large water main break late Saturday, which has caused a loss in water pressure for residents, city officials said.\n\n“We are grateful to the crews who are braving these frigid temperatures on this Christmas Eve night, while working to restore pressure to residents. Their sacrifice does not go unnoticed and is appreciated not only by this administration, but also by every resident who is affected,” the release stated.\n\nThe brutal weather conditions have also snarled travel during the busy holiday weekend, with more than 5,000 flights canceled Friday, more than 3,400 flights canceled Saturday, and more than 2,800 canceled for Christmas Day.\n\nDangerous weather conditions claim lives\n\nSnow covers a vehicle on December 24, 2022, in Hamburg, New York. John Normile/Getty Images\n\nOut of the 17 weather-related fatalities recorded across New York, 16 were in Erie County, officials said, and one was a fatal carbon monoxide poisoning reported in Niagara County, according to the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office.\n\nBlistering blizzard conditions swept the region, and Poloncarz, the county executive, said about 500 motorists found themselves stranded in their vehicles Friday night into Saturday morning, despite a county driving ban put in place during the storm.\n\nNational Guard troops had been called in to help “rescue people that are stuck in vehicles,” he said.\n\nOf the deaths reported early Sunday – with individuals ranging in age from 26 to 93 years of age – “some were found in cars and some were found actually on the street in snow banks,” Poloncarz said.\n\nTwo died in separate incidents Friday night when emergency medical personnel could not get to their homes in time for medical emergencies, Poloncarz said Saturday morning. Details about a third death, confirmed by a county spokesperson Saturday afternoon, weren’t immediately available.\n\n“The loss of two lives in Buffalo – storm related – because people were not able to get to medical attention, is again a crisis situation that unfolds before your eyes and you realize that lifesaving ambulances and emergency medical personnel cannot get to people during a blizzard situation,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Saturday.\n\nHochul said she will ask the federal government “for a declaration of emergency that’ll allow us to seek reimbursements for the extraordinary expenses of all the overtime and the fact that we brought in mutual aid from other parts of the state.”\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Powerful winter storm leaves first responders in need of rescue, official says 01:49 - Source: CNN\n\nOther storm-related deaths have been reported in the country. They include:\n\n• Colorado: Police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reported two deaths related to the cold since Thursday, with one man found near a power transformer of a building possibly looking for warmth, and another in a camp in an alleyway.\n\n• Kansas: Three people have died in weather-related traffic accidents, the Kansas Highway Patrol said Friday.\n\n• Kentucky: Three people have died in the state, officials have said, including one involving a vehicle crash in Montgomery County.\n\n• Missouri: One person died after a caravan slid off an icy road and into a frozen creek, Kansas City police said.\n\n• Ohio: Nine people have died as a result of weather-related auto crashes, including four in a Saturday morning crash on Interstate 75, when a semi tractor-trailer crossed the median and collided with an SUV and a pickup, authorities said.\n\n• Tennessee: The Tennessee Department of Health on Friday confirmed one storm-related fatality.\n\n• Wisconsin: Wisconsin State Patrol on Thursday reported one fatal crash due to winter weather.\n\nWhat to expect as the storm slowly weakens and hazardous conditions continue\n\nStrong winds behind the arctic cold front that pushed through this week will lead to lake-effect snow and blizzard conditions at times across portions of the Great Lakes on Sunday.\n\nBlizzard warnings, winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories blanket much of the Upper Midwest, Great Lakes region and Ohio Valley.\n\nAn additional 8 to 16 inches of lake-effect snow is possible.\n\nThe storm system is forecast to gradually weaken as it lifts into southeastern Canada, moving slowly during the next couple of days and pulling arctic air from Canada down into much of the eastern side of the country.\n\nThe Arctic blast will slowly moderate into Monday.\n\nThe cold temperatures combined with dangerous wind chills will create a potentially life-threatening hazard for travelers who become stranded, people who work outside, livestock and pets, according to the National Weather Service.\n\n“In some areas, being outdoors could lead to frostbite in minutes,” the Weather Service warned.\n\nAs the frigid air continues to blast the warm waters of the Great Lakes, lake-effect snows and blizzard conditions are expected to continue, but slowly become less intense.\n\nStill, strong gusty winds initially up to 60 mph accompanying the snow downwind from the Great Lakes will continue to make for extremely dangerous conditions on the road.\n\nBy Christmas night into Monday, another low pressure system coming from the Pacific will deliver the next surge of moisture toward the Pacific Northwest and then into northern California, according to the Weather Service.", "authors": ["Nouran Salahieh"], "publish_date": "2022/12/25"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2023/03/31/iowa-tornado-warning-watch-storm-updates-severe-weather-storms-friday/70069094007/", "title": "Tornado, storm damage in Iowa: Coralville, Hills among hardest hit", "text": "At least eight tornadoes were spotted across Iowa Friday as large swaths of the southeastern portion of the state reported extensive damage to homes and buildings in a massive storm front that killed more than two-dozen people across the nation.\n\nThe National Weather Service has confirmed at least eight tornadoes based on preliminary data, including a low-end EF4 that tracked from Wapello into Johnson County; five EF2 tornadoes, one in Cedar county into Clinton County, one in Clinton County, two in Johnson county and one in Des Moines County; and two tornadoes in Jackson county, one EF1 tornado that began in Jackson County before moving to Illinois and another EF0 stayed in county lines.\n\nThe total number of tornadoes is expected to rise.\n\nThe EF scale uses wind estimates based on damage and calculates 3-second gusts estimated at the point of damage, according to the NWS. EF4 tornadoes bring gusts of 166 to 200 mph; EF3, 136 to 165; EF2, 111 to 135; and EF1, 86 to 110.\n\nCoralville and Hills in Johnson County were among the towns that saw extensive damage, and part of Charlotte in Clinton County was evacuated because of a propane leak.\n\nThe Iowa storms were part of a powerful system of storms and tornadoes that tore through the South and Midwest starting Friday. By Sunday morning, the death toll nationally had risen to 26.\n\nMore:'Where are my kids going to stay?': Storm damage leaves some Coralville families homeless\n\nNWS to have official tornado count Monday; at least 40 structures damaged in Corallville and Hills\n\nNational Weather Service officials in Davenport are still working on the official tornado count, a number that will most likely be available Monday morning, the NWS said. The latest tornadoes added are the two surveyed near the town of Solon. Survey teams have preliminarily rated those both as EF2, according to NWS Quad Cities.\n\nDavid Wilson, director of Johnson County Homeland Security and Emergency, said 20 buildings and homes were damaged in Coralville, along with another 20 in Hills but believes the total will be north of 60 structures. Other numbers will be available later Sunday afternoon, he said. 118 calls were placed to 911 during the event.\n\nEF4 tornado confirmed; it tracked from Wapello to Johnson County\n\nPreliminary data has led to a low-end EF4 rating for a tornado that tracked from Wapello into Johnson County, with maximum estimated winds at about 170 mph and maximum width of 600 yards, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nMore:9 possible tornadoes tallied in eastern Iowa Friday from 'strong and unusual storm system'\n\nEF1 tornado confirmed in Bellevue\n\nPreliminary data shows an EF1 tornado crossed over Bellevue before heading over the Mississippi River, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nEF2 tornado confirmed in Clinton County\n\nThe National Weather Service confirmed an EF2 tornado touched down in Clinton County, moving northeast from Grand Mound through Charlotte.\n\nGov. Kim Reynolds signs disaster proclamation for 12 counties\n\nIowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a disaster relief proclamation on Saturday morning for 12 counties in eastern Iowa in the wake of the storm damage.\n\nThe proclamation intends to \"ease restrictions on the transportation of materials related to disaster response and repairs,\" according to a press release. Those measures include temporarily suspending restrictions on hours of service for disaster relief crews and movement of loads on highways to help in disaster recovery.\n\nThe counties included in the proclamation are Cedar, Clinton, Delaware, Des Moines, Dubuque, Grundy, Johnson, Keokuk, Linn, Mahaska, Wapello and Washington.\n\nThe Iowa Individual Assistance Grant Program is now also available for residents of those counties impacted by the disaster whose household annual income is at 200% or less than the federal poverty level. Households may receive up to $5,000 to assist in disaster recovery such as home or car repairs, food, clothing and other recovery expenses. Individuals have until May 16 to apply through the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services website.\n\nResidents of the counties of any income bracket can also receive assistance through the Disaster Case Management Program. Care is organized through local community action associations.\n\nThe proclamation is in effect from April 1 to May 1.\n\nMore:How to claim tornado relief in Iowa if your house or property has been damaged\n\nNational Weather Service warns of more severe weather next week\n\nThe National Weather Service warned that another round of severe weather could hit central and eastern Iowa on Tuesday.\n\nSoutheastern Iowa is particularly at risk of tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail, the organization wrote on Twitter.\n\nEF3 tornado confirmed near Keota\n\nPreliminary data confirms an E3 tornado touched down near Keota on Friday, according to The National Weather Service.\n\nCharlotte propane tank leak contained; one family rescued from fallen home in Clinton County\n\nOfficials quickly repaired a leak in a 10,000-gallon propane tank in northern Charlotte Friday night, which had required half of the town's residents to evacuate. Residents were able to return to their homes last night, according to Clinton County Emergency Management Coordinator Chance Kness.\n\nKness said several homes across the county were destroyed by the strong storms. He said eyewitness accounts confirmed at least one tornado touched down in the county, but his team is awaiting confirmation from the National Weather Service.\n\nEmergency personnel rescued a family of three trapped in their collapsed home north of Grand Mound last night at 6 p.m., Kness said. One of the residents was transported to Genesis Medical Center in DeWitt for their injuries, he said.\n\nKness said emergency personnel worked efficiently to survey damage and respond to calls for service in the county, thanks in large part to early warnings ahead of the storm.\n\n\"Because of the extremely early warning about the severity of this event, we had staffed our Emergency Operations Center, notified responders,\" he said. \"We're very fortunate in Clinton County to have excellent first response capabilities and great working relationships. I feel like everything went very smoothly.\"\n\nEF3 tornado confirmed outside Hedrick\n\nThe National Weather Service out of the Quad Cities confirmed preliminary data shows an EF3 tornado touched down three to five miles away from Hedrick in Keokuk County.\n\nInsulation, debris line grass on 23rd Street in Coralville\n\nDozens of community members, including Coralville Mayor Meghann Foster and Iowa City Community School District employees, lined 23rd Street in Coralville Saturday morning to help clear out debris.\n\n“We have a lot of people that want to step up and help,” Foster said.\n\nOn Ninth Street, insulation littered the grass in front of people's homes. From afar, it looked almost like snow.\n\nEF2 tornado confirmed in Johnson County\n\nThe National Weather Service based in the Quad Cities has confirmed one EF-2 tornado touched down in Johnson County Friday near Hills. Johnson County Emergency Management Coordinator Dave Wilson said there may have been up to three tornadoes that hit the county.\n\nThe tornadoes first were sighted in the southwest corner of the county, in Frytown, and made their way up through the west side of Hills, he said.\n\nIn Hills, \"about a six-block-wide area between Highway 218 and the railroad tracks\" sustained notable damage, he said. The area is made up of apartment buildings, a few individual residences and commercial storage sheds, he said.\n\nFrom there, the storm moved to the west of Iowa City over the city's landfill and ended up in Coralville, where a portion of four blocks stretching from Highway 6 to Boston Way sustained damage, he said. The storm then \"hopped up\" to Solon, Wilson said, where it damaged a new subdivision under construction and took the roof off a local hardware store and Mexican restaurant. Wilson reported \"scattered damage\" throughout smaller towns and rural areas in the county.\n\nLocal power companies helped restore power to the majority of buildings, and the county was able to reopen all roadways by midnight Friday, Wilson said.\n\nThe county helped shelter 11 individuals following the storm: Eight stayed at the Red Cross-run shelter at the Coralville Recreation Center, and three stayed in an off-site location for \"medical special needs,\" Wilson said. All three at the off-site location had departed as of 8:30 a.m.\n\nAcross the county, only two minor injuries were reported, he said, and there were no fatalities or reports of anyone trapped. Officials responded to 118 calls for service as of 8 a.m. Saturday morning, including 14 for public assistance, six for a gas line break, five for rescue and 24 for road hazards, according to data provided by Wilson.\n\nEight Johnson County residents spend night in shelter after storms destroyed homes\n\nEight Johnson County residents spent the night at the Coralville Recreation Center after a series of storms and potential tornadoes ripped through the region and destroyed their homes.\n\nMamie Kahulumbanda, her two daughters, son, husband and younger brother lost their home due to yesterday’s tornado. Her daughter, Precieuse, said they are “traumatized.”\n\n“We have nothing besides our car,” she said.\n\nAngla and Robert Manning spent the evening at a hotel last night after their home was destroyed. Angla would have been home when the tornado hit, but had to run an errand at Walmart and remained there during the storm. “It was a blessing that we weren’t home,” she said.\n\nThe Red Cross ran the shelter, which provided residents with blankets, teddy bears and hygiene bags including toothbrushes.\n\nCoralville sets up emergency shelter for those displaced after the storm\n\nThe Coralville Recreation Center at 1506 Eighth Street will serve as an emergency shelter for those who are displaced by the storm, according to Mayor Meghann Foster.\n\nRed Cross staff and volunteers will be there to assist residents at the shelter, she said.\n\n\"If anybody is interested or needs that help, they can call the Johnson County Emergency Dispatch, and they will get them connected to the right people,\" Foster said.\n\nCity of Charlotte evacuates half of the town from propane tank leak\n\nIn the wake of the storms, emergency service personnel discovered a leaking 10,000-gallon propane tank on the north side of Charlotte in Clinton County.\n\nCity Auditor and Public Information Officer Eric VanLancker said concerns over strong winds prompted the city to evacuate half of the town of just under 400 people.\n\nDavenport Hazmat is assisting the city and other emergency officials with repairing the leak, which VanLancker said the city hoped would be completed by Friday night.\n\nThose who could not shelter with other family and friends were evacuated to the Lutheran Church on the south side of the town, VanLancker said.\n\nCoralville Mayor said minor injuries reported, no fatalities\n\nCoralville Mayor Foster said minor injuries have been reported so far after an apparent tornado tore through the city and left considerable damage in its wake.\n\n\"As of right now, we're not hearing of any fatalities, which is something we are very grateful for and hopefully, that continues to be the trend that we are seeing,\" she said.\n\nShe said first responders are out helping to clear debris and ensure residents are safe and accounted for. Gas lines in certain parts of the city have been turned off as a precaution while the damage is assessed, she said.\n\nA vehicle with a light tower is being placed near the Subway on Highway 6.\n\n\"We've got quite a bit of damage in the community right now,\" she said. \"And it's really important that we're letting the first responders clear away that debris and get everything settled.\"\n\nShe said the city is working on setting up a shelter for those whose homes have been severely damaged or lost due to the tornado. More information on the shelter will be released as it becomes available, she said.\n\nHundreds help neighbors with damage in Hills\n\nHundreds of residents of Hills came out to help each other after an apparent tornado barreled through the town, ripping off roofs and leaving a trail of debris in its path.\n\nInsulation covered nearly two city blocks on the northwest side of Hills from Casey's to the edge of town, with other buildings damaged along the way.\n\nBuildings flattened, roads blocked by fallen trees in Coralville\n\nFamilies and neighbors gathered along a row of houses on 23rd Street in Coralville Friday afternoon to assess the damage from a tornado that rolled through the region.\n\nDowned trees and power lines riddled streets and driveways next to homes which sustained major damage.\n\nJust past the street, downed trees were blocking Highway 6. An apartment building off Boston Way was flattened next to a semi-truck flipped onto its back.\n\nThe branches of trees left standing were riddled with debris from nearby buildings and homes.\n\nCoralville resident Gordon Knight said he watched from the window of his basement apartment as the building's siding started flying away amid the gusting winds and heavy rainfall. Within minutes, he saw the roof of a neighboring building torn off. In the parking lot, a tree fell onto one of the resident's cars.\n\n\"I've lived in Iowa about 50 years and that's the closest I ever came to a tornado,\" he said.\n\nWhile the exterior of his apartment building sustained notable damage, he said all of the residents inside were safe and didn't suffer any injuries.\n\nDes Moines clear of severe weather, but gusty winds still expected\n\nAs of 7 p.m., there were no more severe storms forecasted for Des Moines and central Iowa Friday evening. However, the National Weather Service warned residents should still expect \"strong gusty winds\" while those up north are likely to experience snow.\n\nTornado warning issued in De Witt, Preston and Charlotte\n\nA tornado warning is in effect following an observed tornado in the regions of De Witt, Preston and Charlotte. The warning is in effect until 6:45 p.m. and there is no hail expected.\n\nTornado warning issued for Wyoming, Oxford Junction and Lost Nation\n\nA tornado was seen in the region of Wyoming, Oxford and Lost Nation. A warning is in effect in the area until 6:30 p.m., during which the region may experience up to golf-ball-sized hail.\n\nTornado warning issued for Lowden, Wheatland and Delmar\n\nAn observed tornado triggered a tornado warning in the areas around Lowden, Wheatland and Delmar. The warning is in effect until 6:15 p.m. No hail is expected in the area.\n\nTornado warning issued for Manchester, Earlville and Delhi\n\nThe National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for the regions around Manchester, Earlville and Delhi until 6:15 p.m. The region could experience quarter-sized hail.\n\nTornado warning issued for Tipton, Mechanicsville and Clarence\n\nA tornado warning is in effect for the regions around Tipton, Mechanicsville and Clarence until 5:45 p.m. Golf-ball-sized hail is possible in the region. As of 5:30 p.m., the threat was raised from an observed tornado to a \"damaging tornado.\"\n\nA further warning was issued for Clarence, Olin and Stanwood until 5:45 p.m. also described as a \"damaging tornado.\"\n\nTornado warning issued for Wilton, Durant and Bennett\n\nA tornado warning is in effect for Wilton, Durant and Bennett until 6 p.m. Pea-sized hail is possible.\n\nTornado warning issued for Anamosa, Mount Vernon and Lisbon\n\nA tornado warning is in effect in Anamosa, Mount Vernon and Lisbon until 5:45 p.m. The region could see up to golf ball-sized hail.\n\nAs of 5:40 p.m., the warning was extended to 6:15 p.m. to include the regions around Anamosa, Dyersville and Monticello.\n\nTornado warning issued for West Liberty, West Branch, Rochester\n\nThe National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for the region of West Liberty, West Branch and Rochester, just outside of Iowa City. The warning is in effect until 5:30 p.m. and the region could see ping-pong-sized hail.\n\nTornado warning issued for Fairfield, Mount Pleasant and Wayland\n\nA tornado warning in Fairfield, Mount Pleasant and Wayland is in effect until 5:30 p.m. Ping-pong-sized hail is possible.\n\nTornado warning issued for Vinton, Center Point and Urbana\n\nA tornado warning is in effect in Vinton, Center Point and Urbana until 5:30 p.m. Quarter-sized hail is possible.\n\nTornado warning issued for Waterloo and surrounding areas\n\nA tornado warning is in effect in Waterloo, Cedar Falls and Grundy Center until 5:15 p.m. Pea-sized hail is possible in the region.\n\nTornado warning issued for Washington, Kalona and Riverside\n\nA tornado warning for Washington, Kalona and Riverside is in effect until 5 p.m. The region could experience ping-pong-sized hail as storms move through.\n\nTornado warning issued for Coralville and surrounding areas\n\nThe National Weather Service declared a tornado warning for Coralville, North Liberty and Mount Vernon until 5:15 p.m. Baseball-sized hail is possible in the region.\n\nTornado warning issued for Marshalltown and surrounding areas\n\nA tornado warning is in effect for Marshalltown, Reinbeck, and Gladbrook.\n\nThe warning is in effect until 5:15 p.m. and those in the area could see up to pea-sized hail.\n\nTornado warning issued for Waverly, Parkersburg and Ackley\n\nA tornado warning is in effect for Waverly, Parkersburg and Ackley, located just east of Iowa Falls.\n\nThe warning is in effect until 5:15 p.m. and those in the area could see up to pea-sized hail.\n\nCentral Iowa no longer under severe weather threat as storms head east\n\nCentral Iowa is no longer considered to be under threat of severe weather as storms with large hail and tornadoes continue to rock parts of eastern Iowa.\n\nThe National Weather Service said storms and gusty winds may continue in central Iowa. Eastern Iowa continues to be impacted by severe weather.\n\nTornado warning issued in Benton County\n\nA tornado warning was in effect in Vinton, Garrison and Mount Auburn, all located in Benton County. The warning is radar-indicated and the region may see up to pea-sized hail.\n\nThe warning expired at 4:45 p.m.\n\nTornado warning issued in parts of Iowa, Washington Counties\n\nA tornado warning has been issued for Williamsburg, Wellman and North English located in Iowa and Washington Counties. Baseball-sized hail is possible. The warning expired at 4:45 p.m.\n\nTornado confirmed near Jefferson, Keokuk Counties\n\nA large and dangerous tornado is on the ground in Keokuk County, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nThe tornado touched down near Packwood in Jefferson County and is headed toward Hedrick and Martinsburg in Keokuk County.\n\nAll those in the area should take cover now.\n\nTornado warning issued for Tama, Toledo and Chelsea\n\nA radar-indicated tornado warning has been issued for Tama, Toledo and Chelsea, located in between Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. Pea sized hail is possible as a storm rolls through the region.\n\nThe warning expired at 4:45 p.m.\n\nA severe thunderstorm warning has also been issued for the region, including Grinnell.\n\nTornado spotted Montezuma\n\nA tornado has been spotted near Malcom and Montezuma, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nThe warning for this area was allowed to expire as storms move east.\n\nTornado confirmed near Ottumwa\n\nThe National Weather Service confirmed a tornado touched down just northeast of Ottumwa.\n\nThe tornado warning for this area has expired, but it remains under a severe thunderstorm warning.\n\nAnyone in the area should take cover now.\n\nLarge hail reported across the state\n\nStorms moving across Iowa dropped large hail. The National Weather Service reported a cell moving through Story County around 3 p.m. produced hail as large as 2 inches in diameter.\n\nWhat should you do during a tornado warning?\n\nThe weather service says it's always important to have an emergency plan in place in the event of severe weather, including designating a \"safe place\" in your home, preferably away from windows and in an interior room. Keeping supplies handy like flashlights, batteries, food, water, clothes and shoes is also recommended.\n\nMore tornado safety tips:What to do when a watch or warning is issued depends on where you are\n\nSevere thunderstorm warning issued for Des Moines metro\n\nMultiple severe thunderstorm warnings have been issued for metro counties as storms approach Des Moines.\n\nA warning until 3:45 p.m. covers Huxley, Ames, Nevada and to the north and east. Winds of up to 60 mph and 2 inch sized hail are possible.\n\nOther warnings for the Des Moines area have been allowed to expire.\n\nClick here for a map and full list of warnings across the state.\n\nWhat is the severe weather forecast for Iowa today? Is there a tornado watch too?\n\nThe National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for parts of central and eastern Iowa, including Des Moines, Ames and Iowa City. The watch encompasses an area with a population of over 5 million people and will remain in place until 8 p.m. Friday evening.\n\nA tornado watch means conditions are right for a tornado to form. Iowans should pay attention to conditions and be prepared to seek shelter.\n\nThe National Weather Service's warning states that \"this is a particularly dangerous situation.\" Meteorologist Jeff Zogg said the National Weather Service does not typically issue that type of warning unless the situation \"pose[s] a significant danger to the public.\"\n\n\"We're looking at the potential for severe weather this afternoon. Tornadoes, large hail, damaging winds. Any storms that do develop will move fairly rapidly. And there is the potential for violent long-track tornadoes too. So that's one of the reasons we put that kind of wording in there,\" he said.\n\nZogg recommended Iowans pay close attention to weather updates, such as through visiting https://www.weather.gov/dmx/, and to have a plan in place if severe weather hits their locations.\n\n\"Just be aware that any storms that do develop will intensify pretty rapidly and move fast as well,\" he said, adding Iowans should \"know where you can go for safety if threatening weather does approach your location.\"\n\nWhat's the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning?\n\nTornado watches are alerts to stay prepared and be ready to act, according to the NWS. They mean that tornadoes are possible and weather conditions \"favor thunderstorms capable of producing tornadoes.\"\n\nMore details:What is a tornado watch? Tornado warning? Here's a look at the differences\n\nA warning means imminent danger, according to the NWS. A tornado warning is issued when a tornado has been sighted or indicated by weather radar and you should seek shelter immediately.\n\nBlizzard and winter storm warnings issued for northern Iowa\n\nThe National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning in far northwest Iowa near the city of Estherville in Emmet County which will be in effect from 11 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Saturday.\n\nThe combination of rain, strong winds and colder air arriving tonight \"will produce blizzard to near blizzard conditions\" with the potential to impact travel conditions, according to NWS. The region could see between two and four inches of snow and wind gusts up to 50 mph.\n\nNWS issued a winter storm warning during the same time period for the surrounding counties, including Kossuth, Winnebago, Worth, Palo Alto, and Hancock.\n\nIn central Iowa, rain and snow could mix overnight with light snow possible through 7 a.m. Saturday. Less than a half an inch of snow is expected. Mixed rain and snowfall are possible through 7 a.m. Saturday near Iowa City.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/03/31"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2018/03/07/march-marks-peak-time-coastal-storms-noreasters-delaware/403210002/", "title": "The science behind the rain-snow line in Delaware", "text": "Delawareans use the C&D Canal as a dividing line for a lot of things, but local weather experts also often point to it as the snow-rain dividing line.\n\nThat was evident Wednesday, when a mid-week nor’easter spared most areas south of the canal the heavy, slushy snow that led to business and school closures and a low-level driving restriction in New Castle County.\n\nAs Sussex County experienced a relatively normal rainy day, New Castle County may have seen one of the state’s most significant snowfalls of the season, said State Climatologist Daniel Leathers.\n\n“It’s probably going to end up being our biggest snow of the year, and some people will hope it will be the biggest and last snow for good,” he said. “I think this will be the March storm people will remember for a while.”\n\nLeathers said this storm, nestled between last week’s intense nor’easter and another system expected late this weekend, is not all that unusual. It is a product of normal weather patterns as the seasons shift from winter into spring.\n\n“The pattern just shifted,” he said. “We don’t get a lot of snow here in March, but it’s not unprecedented to get March snowstorms. It’s not going to be as intense as the winds were last week, but with more moisture and cold air, that’s why in the north we’re getting the heavy snow and in the southern part of the state, you guys are missing it.”\n\nA dip in the jet stream over the eastern part of the United States – called a trough – set up the perfect conditions for coastal storms. With temperatures close to freezing, this storm offers a stark contrast to unusually warm temperatures seen last month.\n\nLeathers said he still needs to crunch the numbers, but it looks like February 2018 may rank in the top five warmest since record-keeping began in the late 1800s.\n\nBack-to-back coastal storms are expected this time of year. March is the month for nor’easters and mid-latitude storms created by normal fluctuations in the jet stream, said John Callahan, a climatologist at The Delaware Geological Survey. On average, Delaware sees about 33 of these storms every year.\n\n“This is a peak time for these kind of nor’easters, which I think we have to worry about more than tropical systems because they have a higher risk since they last longer and happen more frequently,” Callahan said. “They carry enormous potential for beach erosion and damage to infrastructure and communities for the flooding.”\n\nThe famous Storm of 1962, which wreaked as much havoc as a powerful hurricane, was actually a nor’easter, he said.\n\n“Nor’easters are severe for us,” he said. “About 90 percent of the coastal storms we get here are non-tropical in origin, and most of them are nor’easters.”\n\nAs temperatures teetered around freezing, New Castle County saw heavy, wet snow as large flakes moved through the atmosphere and stuck together before hitting the ground. If temperatures were much cooler and below freezing, New Castle County would have a lot more snow to clean up, Leathers said.\n\n“When snow falls, usually it has a 10-to-1 ratio of snow to water, meaning one inch of rain equals 10 inches of snow,” he said. “Because it is warm today, that ratio is a lot lower. So, there’s less snow, but it has a large amount of water in it. It’s going to stick, and you’re going to feel it when you pick up a shovel full of it.”\n\nThe First State’s geography is the reason Delaware often sees so many back-to-back coastal storms, and why weather can vary drastically from one end of the state to the other.\n\n“I-95 is kind of the perfect distance inland where, to the south and east of it you get warm air that changes snow to rain,” Leathers said. “North of there, you’re in some higher elevation, which helps lower the temperature and are further away from the ocean and can be a little colder. That’s the dividing line.”\n\nThe longer the jet stream stays in place, the longer atmospheric conditions that produce storms can linger, Callahan said.\n\n“Just like how we had the three hurricanes at one time last year – that was rare, but not unique,” he said. “These kind of events happen just because of normal weather patterns.”\n\nA few hundred feet of elevation can make all the difference between rain and snow, Leathers said. Some of northern Delaware reaches 300 feet above sea level in the Piedmont region, while the southern part of the state on the Atlantic Coastal Plain is much closer to sea level.\n\n“As you go up in elevation, you typically go down in temperature,” he said. “Just a few hundred feet in elevation can make a difference of two to three degrees. And that can make a difference of whether it falls as rain or snow.”\n\nAs the seasons transition between winter and spring and the jet stream dips over the East Coast, warm air from the ocean meets cold air to the north and west creating air flows that foster coastal storms. The bigger the difference between those two patterns, the more intense the storms, Leathers said.\n\nFor this weekend, he said Delawareans can expect a very similar storm system. Northern Delaware will be right along the rain/snow line. But it is too soon to predict exactly what will happen, he said.\n\n“We will have to wait and see how that plays out,” he said.\n\nContact reporter Maddy Lauria at (302) 345-0608, mlauria@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @MaddyinMilford.\n\nMARCH STORM COVERAGE\n\nNor'easter enters more intense afternoon phase\n\nSnow piles up in northern Delaware\n\nDelaware snow totals", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/03/07"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/04/isaias-track-forecast-radar-flooding-tornadoes-threat-tuesday/5579614002/", "title": "Isaias track, forecast, updates: Storm leaves power outages, tornadoes", "text": "Isaias spawned deadly tornadoes and dumped heavy rain as it roared up the East Coast on Tuesday after making landfall as a hurricane Monday night before weakening to a post-tropical cyclone.\n\nAt least six people have died due to the storm and more than 3 million customers across five states were without power late Tuesday night.\n\nA tornado killed two people and injured several others at a mobile home park in Bertie County, North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper said. Authorities also said three others were killed by falling trees toppled by the storm in Maryland, New York City and Delaware. Another died when her vehicle was overtaken by Pennsylvania floods and swept downstream.\n\nOther tornadoes were reported in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center said. Even without tornadoes, winds could cause significant tree damage and power outages, the National Hurricane Center said.\n\nWhat was once Hurricane Isaias was downgraded late Tuesday night to a post-tropical storm, defined by the NHC as \"a cyclone that no longer possesses sufficient tropical characteristics\" to be defined as a tropical storm. The post-tropical cyclone is forecast to dissipate over southeastern Canada on Wednesday night or Thursday.\n\nTropical storm warnings are still in place from Massachusetts to Maine, as the storm sustains max winds of near 45 mph. The NHC said in its 11 p.m. EDT advisory that \"a couple of tornadoes are possible across central and eastern Maine.\"\n\nMore than 3.7 million customers were without power, mostly in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, according to poweroutage.us. New York City’s power utility said it has seen more outages from this storm than from any storm except Superstorm Sandy in 2012.\n\nHere's what you need to know:\n\nAs of 11 p.m. EDT, the storm’s center was about 45 miles southeast of Montreal, moving northeast into Canada.\n\nScattered moderate and major river flooding is forecast across portions of the Mid-Atlantic.\n\nWhat's it like out there? These live webcams show beaches in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. 🌊\n\nThe next advisory from the National Hurricane Center will be released at 2 a.m. EDT wednesday.\n\nFor first-in-the-morning updates, sign up to get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox. This file will be updated throughout the day.\n\nNew Jersey: 1.4 million without power; tropical storm warning in effect\n\nHeavy rains were falling Tuesday across New Jersey as Tropical Storm Isaias roared to the north, leaving behind power outages and reports of tornadoes. Almost 1.4 million customers were without power, poweroutage.us said, by far the highest total of any state.\n\nThe storm was disrupting ground travel across the state at midday. New Jersey Transit’s River Line and Atlantic City rail service was suspended or delayed in some areas due to downed trees and flooding, and trees blocked lanes on the Garden State Parkway in Upper Township and the New Jersey Turnpike in Edison.\n\nGov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency.\n\nHeavy rainfall up to 6 inches was forecast to impact the state. A tornado watch was also issued Tuesday, which lasted through 4 p.m.\n\n– Nicholas Katzban, Bergen Record; Joshua Chung and Keith Schubert, Asbury Park Press\n\nFlooding, water rescues in Philadelphia\n\nThere were numerous reports of flooding in Philadelphia and its surroundings. The Schuylkill River was projected to crest early Wednesday at 15.4 feet, its highest level in more than 150 years. The river had already surged over its banks in some areas by Tuesday night.\n\nIn Montgomery County to the northwest of Philadelphia, officials said they performed more than 100 water rescues.\n\nIn northwest of the city, a 44-year-old Allentown woman was killed after high waters swept her vehicle downstream, the Lehigh County coroner’s office said.\n\nWest of Philadelphia in Delaware County, rescue workers were searching for a young person who fell or jumped into the fast-moving water of a swollen creek.\n\nAnd in Doylestown to the north, officials said four children were treated for minor injuries after high winds partially tore the roof off a day care center. About 135 children and their teachers had to be ushered out.\n\nAirlines issue flight waivers\n\nTraveling? If it's by plane, odds are good your airline is issuing flight waivers. United, American, Southwest, JetBlue and Delta have issued them in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias.\n\nA flight waiver gives travelers the option to rebook flights at no extra charge. There are typically terms and conditions, however, that prevent customers from buying flights outside of certain dates and from changing cabins unless they want to pay a fee. Travelers are urged to read airlines' fine print before rebooking.\n\n– David Oliver\n\nIsaias was a hurricane:Why do tropical weather systems cause tornadoes?\n\nAt least 2 tornadoes confirmed on Maryland Eastern Shore\n\nAt least two radar-confirmed tornadoes were reported on Maryland's Eastern Shore, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nThe first was located at 6:01 a.m. near Vienna moving north near Sharptown, Hurlock and Choptank. Social media reports indicate the tornado littered Route 50 with debris and caused damage in Mardela Springs, with photos posted to Facebook showing at least one home destroyed.\n\nA second tornado was located on radar at 7:20 a.m. just north of Girdletree heading toward Snow Hill.\n\nChesapeake Bay:What to expect if Isaias continues track over it\n\n– Brandon Holveck, Delaware News Journal\n\nD.C., Baltimore could see flooding\n\nHeavy rainfall along the East Coast will result in flash and urban flooding, some of which may be significant in North Carolina through the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast through tonight, the hurricane center said. Central and eastern North Carolina are expected to see the heaviest rainfall of 3 to 6 inches, with some areas seeing up to 8 inches. Potentially life-threatening urban flooding is possible in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and other areas along the I-95 corridor.\n\nContributing: Elinor Aspegren and Jordan Culver, USA TODAY; The Associated Press", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/08/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2023/08/20/hurricane-hilary-live-updates-storm-nears-baja-palm-springs-road-closures-state-of-emergency-declare/70635806007/", "title": "Hurricane Hilary updates: 1-10 east and west closed amid flooding", "text": "The Coachella Valley — which was under an unprecedented tropical storm warning until it was lifted around 2 a.m. Monday — is experiencing heavy flooding and other damage after Tropical Storm Hilary churned through the region on Sunday.\n\nLatest road closures across the Coachella Valley\n\nSeveral roads continue to be closed due to storm damage and flooding across the Coachella Valley, leaving significant clean-up work to allow residents to travel across the valley again.\n\n“This storm has been unlike anything our community has faced before. We want to thank our residents, businesses, and members of the community for their patience as we work to clean up downed trees and mitigate flooding. Not everything is a quick fix, but our team is doing our best to have Palm Desert up and running tomorrow,” the City of Palm Desert said in a statement on its Facebook page Sunday evening.\n\nRoad closures in Palm Desert (as of 10:30 p.m.):\n\nWashington and Harris\n\nGerald Ford in between Cook and Frank Sinatra\n\nFred Waring between Cook and Warner Trail\n\nParkview Drive\n\nMountain View Avenue\n\nRoad closures in Indio (as of 10:15 p.m.):\n\nShields Road and Avenue 46\n\nFargo Street and Indio Blvd.\n\nJefferson Street between Ave 48 and Corsica Gate\n\nJohn Nobles and Arabia Street\n\nJefferson Street and Dunbar Drive\n\nRoad closures in Coachella (as of 6 p.m):\n\nAve 48 between Van Buren & Grapefruit Blvd\n\n6th Street between Vine & Orchard\n\nFrontage Road between Calle Zamora & Ave 53\n\nAvenue 52 & Education Way\n\nAvenue 48 & Cielo Victoria Street\n\nAvenue 50 at the Whitewater Wash\n\nRoad closures in Indian Wells (as of 6 p.m.):\n\nFred Waring Drive from Cook Street to California Street\n\nRoad closures in Desert Hot Springs (as of 5 p.m.):\n\nLittle Morongo between Pierson and Mission Lakes Blvd.\n\nHacienda Ave. and Long Canyon\n\nPierson Blvd. between Little Morongo and Golden Eagle Way\n\nHacienda between Calle Amapola and Redbud\n\nDillon east of Little Morongo\n\nTwo Bunch Palms between Cholla and Cabot Rd.\n\nIndian Canyon between Mission Lakes and Pierson.\n\nPierson at Karen Ave\n\nRoad closures in Cathedral City (as of 4 p.m.):\n\nVarner Road from Date Palm Drive to Mountain View Road\n\nOrtega Road between Moreno Road and Via de Anza\n\nDinah Shore Drive between Cathedral Canyon drive and Date Palm Drive\n\nLos Gatos Road at Date Palm Drive\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nNo home delivery of Monday Desert Sun print edition\n\nDue to unsafe road conditions throughout the Coachella Valley and beyond, there will be no home delivery of the print edition of The Desert Sun on Monday. A full report of the storm and other news is available at desertsun.com. The e-edition of the newspaper is available for subscribers here.\n\n911 lines down in Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Indio\n\nAs of around 10:15 p.m., 911 lines are currently down in the cities of Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Indio, according to news releases from all three cities.\n\nIf you need emergency assistance, call the following phone numbers:\n\nPalm Springs: 760-327-1441\n\nCathedral City: 760-770-0303\n\nIndio: 760-775-3730\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nIndio declares a State of Emergency\n\nIndio City Manager Bryan Montgomery has declared a State of Emergency in the city due to the storm. The local state of emergency will last for seven days and is a required step to request state or federal assistance, according to a press release from the city. The State of Emergency will also allow the city to activate its emergency plan.\n\n“Tropical Storm Hilary has threatened local infrastructure and public health and safety, and exceeds the City’s capacity to address the impacts with its own personnel and resources,” the press release stated.\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nNational Weather Service extends flash flood warning until 11:30 p.m.\n\nThe National Weather Service has extended the flash flood warning for the Coachella Valley area until 11:30 p.m. Sunday for the area’s nine cities and surrounding unincorporated areas such as Mecca and Thousand Palms. The National Weather Service warned of “life-threatening flash flooding” caused by heavy rain.\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nInterstate 10 closed\n\nInterstate 10 is closed due to flooding, according to the California Highway Patrol. The I-10 is closed on both the east and westbound sides between Gene Autry Trail and Bob Hope Drive, with “an unknown ETA to re-open at this time.”\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nCathedral City mobile homes experience flooding\n\nAbout 60 homes at the Canyon Mobile Home Community in Cathedral City have been impacted by flooding as of Saturday evening, according to Cathedral City Councilmember Nancy Ross, who also lives in the 55 and older community of 350 homes.\n\n“On the (most impacted streets), there was in several locations at least three feet of rushing water that was like a river and had a current of its own, it’s frightening,” Ross said. “And that rushing water by nature just wanted to follow a straight path up into people’s driveways and into their garages, and so many people flooded.”\n\nRoss says damage to the roughly 60 impacted homes includes water flooded into garages or homes, and water under the mobile homes. Ross and her husband spent the afternoon checking on neighbors and attempting to keep nearby culverts clear of debris. The Cathedral City Fire Department also came to the park this afternoon to help evacuate several people out of their homes who couldn’t get past the rushing water in the road.\n\n“It’s a senior citizen mobile home park, many of our people are in their 80s. They just don’t deserve to be in such a vulnerable situation, that’s for sure,” said Ross.\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nThousands of IID customers without power\n\nOver 7,000 Imperial Irrigation District customers are currently without power, with storm-related power outages reported across the district’s eastern Coachella Valley and Imperial County service area. Between about 5:30 and 7 p.m., IID reported roughly a dozen separate power outages on its social media accounts, including 1,693 customers in El Centro, 1,107 in the Westmorland/Calipatria area, and 1,190 customers in two different areas of Indio.\n\nThe Indio outages are impacting 572 customers in the area from Madison Street to 50th Avenue and 618 customers in the area from Lingayan Avenue to Peach Street. In La Quinta, a power outage is impacting 489 customers from Medallist Drive to Jackson Street, and in Thousand Palms, 370 customers are without power between Manufacturing Road and Watt Street.\n\nA full list of outage locations and updates are available on IID’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nRed Cross shelters open in Thermal, Banning\n\nThe American Red Cross is opening several shelters in response to Hurricane Hilary. The local shelters in Imperial, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties are:\n\nDesert Mirage High School (86150 66th Ave., Thermal)\n\nBanning Community Center (789 North San Gorgonio Ave., Banning)\n\nEl Centro Community Center (375 S. 1st St., El Centro)\n\nJoshua Springs Calvary Chapel (57373 Joshua Lane, Yucca Valley)\n\nRedlands East Valley High School (31000 E. Colton Ave., Redlands)\n\n—Erin Rode\n\nNational Weather Service issues flash flood warning until 8:30 p.m.\n\nThe National Weather Service, which previously issued a flash flood warning for the Coachella Valley area until 5 p.m. Sunday, announced a flash flood warning until 8:30 p.m. for the desert's nine cities. The alert, which was sent to iPhone users directly, said to avoid travel \"unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order.\"\n\n—Niki Kottmann\n\nPalm Springs firefighters rescue people from floodwaters\n\nPalm Springs firefighters have had to go into floodwaters twice Sunday to rescue people.\n\nIn a video of one of the rescues sent by Capt. Nathan Gunkel of the city fire department, a sedan is submerged up to its tires on Ramon Road just east of Gene Autry Trail.\n\n—Paul Albani-Burgio\n\nFlooding at Eisenhower goes viral on social media\n\nEisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage is experiencing flooding at its main facility, but videos online have made it look worse than it really is, an Eisenhower spokesperson told The Desert Sun Sunday evening.\n\nImages and video posted online show flooding outside the John W. Larson Foundation Trauma Center. In one photo, an abandoned golf cart sits submerged in water.\n\nBut Lee Rice, the medical center’s public information officer, said that none of it has affected any patient care areas of the hospital.\n\n“Fortunately, it hasn’t had any impact on our patient care areas,” Rice said. “So, it’s business as usual for us.”\n\nOnline videos showed the inside of Eisenhower with a small amount of water in the back hallways, with towels on the floor to absorb the moisture.\n\nRice said that some of the flooding has merely forced Eisenhower to divert ambulances to another section of the hospital that has not experienced the effects of the ongoing rainfall that has come with Tropical Storm Hilary.\n\nEisenhower is in its slower time of year, which is typical during the summer months, Rice said. She added that it has helped Eisenhower avoid any serious challenges during the storm.\n\nEarlier Sunday, Eisenhower closed urgent care facilities in Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage and La Quinta but left Emergency Department services open and available to the community as needed.\n\n—Andrew John\n\nCenter of storm nears Coachella Valley\n\nAt 5 p.m., the National Hurricane Center reported the center of Tropical Storm Hilary was located 25 miles south-southwest of Palm Springs and moving north at 23 mph.\n\nAs Hilary moved closer to the Coachella Valley, strong winds have picked up. Palm Desert reported a peak wind gust of 46 mph at 4:20 p.m.\n\nPalm Springs International Airport had a top wind gust of 40 mph at 3:40 p.m.\n\n—Matt Solinsky\n\nDesert Sands, Palm Springs Unified schools closed Monday\n\nAll schools will be closed Monday in two of the Coachella Valley's three districts, Desert Sands Unified and Palm Springs Unified.\n\nIn Coachella Valley Unified School District, the first day of the school year will be Thursday.\n\nXavier College Preparatory High School also said it will be closed Monday, although staff will try to come to campus to assess any damage caused by the storm. The school said it is anticipating some minor damage caused by flooding and leaks.\n\nCollege of the Desert will also be closed on Monday, although classes for the new semester are not set to begin until next week. College of the Desert \"currently has a lot of water and debris on site,\" and the Palm Desert campus has also \"experienced some water intrusion in key areas.\"\n\nSchool officials are asking everyone to remain off campus, and \"no business will be conducted at any location, with the exception of COD’s Maintenance Team and Campus Safety Team, who will help assess the damage and determine any challenges to student or work spaces.\" Regular business is expected to resume on Tuesday.\n\n—Paul Albani-Burgio and Erin Rode\n\nStorm shelter at Desert Mirage High School\n\nDesert Mirage High School in Thermal is being used as a temporary storm shelter, according to the Coachella Valley Unified School District.\n\nThe shelter is open to the public and includes a dedicated reception area and a cooling zone. The district said it expects the shelter to be open until Monday or Tuesday afternoon, with more information to be sent out as the storm continues.\n\n—Paul Albani-Burgio\n\nPalm Springs declares local emergency\n\nPalm Springs City Manager Scott Stiles has declared a local emergency because of the storm, city spokesperson Amy Blaisdell said.\n\nShe said the declaration opens up access to extra resources, such as funds for repairs from storm damage and more flexibility with emergency purchases.\n\nCity law gives the manager the authority to proclaim a local emergency, but it must be ratified by the city council within seven days or it becomes invalid.\n\nMore road closures across valley\n\nMore roads are closing across the Coachella Valley as police advise residents not to drive. Closures were being announced frequently; below is only a partial list:\n\nPalm Springs: Police announced the closure of two more roads in Palm Springs. Farrell Drive was closed between Ramon Road and Mesquite Road.\n\nEl Cielo Road was also closed at Mesquite Avenue, while the Dinah Shore Bridge is closed from Palm Springs to Cathedral City. Golf Club Drive is also closed at the Whitewater Wash.\n\nIndian Canyon Drive, Gene Autry Trail and Vista Chino were already closed at the washes.\n\nCathedral City: Cathedral Canyon Drive and Dinah Shore Drive were also closed by Cathedral City Police. Los Gatos Road at Date Palm Drive was already closed.\n\nEast valley: 66th Street was closed between Van Buren Street and Jackson Street. Box Canyon Road from Interstate 10 to the All American Canal was closed in the Mecca area.\n\nEven in areas where roads weren't fully closed, conditions were treacherous. Just after 4 p.m., two of the three eastbound lanes of Highway 111 were closed due to rocks in the road at the Cathedral City-Rancho Mirage border.\n\nPalm Springs Police Lt. Gustavo Araiza advised residents to avoid travel in the city unless absolutely necessary and to drive with extreme caution if they must.\n\n“We don’t need collisions tying up resources,” he said.\n\n— Paul Albani-Burgio, Jay Calderon\n\nNewsom, Palm Springs officials discuss storm preparedness, bridge request in Sunday visit\n\nCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom stopped in Palm Springs on Sunday as Tropical Storm Hilary wrecked havoc on the Coachella Valley. He met with Palm Springs city councilmembers and staff in the city’s emergency operations center.\n\nNewsom issued a State of Emergency for much of Southern California on Saturday to support the Hilary response and recovery efforts as the state continues mobilizing and coordinating resources ahead of the storm's forecasted impacts.\n\nThe city posted photos of the visit on its Facebook page Sunday, explaining that city staff updated the governor on the city’s storm preparations while Newsom offered “whatever assistance he could provide to the city.” The post noted that Newsom had been “instrumental in bringing Oakland Urban Search and Rescue and Swift Water California OES Task Force teams to Palm Springs,\" where they were going to be used to assist with rescues during the storm.\n\nThey also discussed the city's request for an elevated bridge on North Indian Canyon Drive over the Whitewater Wash. The Coachella Valley Association of Governments has been trying to secure funding for such a bridge, which would reduce the need for rain and wind-related closures.\n\nPhotos show Newsom adding his name to the Emergency Operations Center sign-in sheet during his visit. Palm Springs Mayor Grace Garner, City Councilmember Lisa Middleton, City Manager Scott Stiles, Police Chief Andrew Mills and Fire Chief Paul Alvarado are pictured meeting with Newsom during the visit.\n\n— Paul Albani-Burgio\n\nUpdated rain totals: Palm Desert sees 1.18 inches by 2 p.m.\n\nHeavy rain has moved through the Coachella Valley and brought soaking rains that have flooded many streets and intersections. Here are the latest rain totals from the National Weather Service as of 2 p.m., with rain still falling.\n\nPalm Desert 1.18 inches\n\nCathedral Canyon 1 inch\n\nThermal airport 0.91 inches\n\nPalm Springs Airport 0.89 inches\n\nLower Tahquitz Creek 0.86 inches\n\nFlash flood, severe thunderstorm warning issued for some Coachella Valley cities\n\nThe National Weather Service in San Diego has issued Flash Flood Warnings for most of the Coachella Valley until 5 p.m. Sunday.\n\nSome locations that will experience flash flooding include Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, Indio, Coachella, Thermal, La Quinta, Mecca and the Santa Rosa Mountain.\n\nAt 1:51 p.m., doppler radar and automated rain gauges indicated heavy rain falling across the warned area. The expected rainfall rate is 0.5 to 1 inch in 1 hour. Hourly rainfall rates in Palm Desert have exceeded 0.75 inches per hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly.\n\nAt 1:40 p.m., doppler radar indicated heavy rain across the warned area. Rainfall rates of three-quarters of an inch per hour are occurring.\n\nFlash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. The weather service warns life threatening flash flooding is possible from heavy rain, particularly of creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses.\n\nMotorists should turn around, don`t drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles.\n\n— Matt Solinsky\n\nHurricane Hilary: Heavier rain, winds forecast for Palm Springs area Sunday\n\nThe Coachella Valley remains under a tropical storm warning on Sunday morning, and a flood watch is in effect until 5 p.m. on Monday. Light rain is falling at Palm Springs International — as of 8 a.m., 0.32 inches had fallen since midnight — and the temperature is a cool 78 degrees with 88% humidity and 6-mph winds out of the southwest, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nBut more rain, and heavier wind, is on the way. Thunderstorms are in the forecast throughout the day, with an additional two to four inches of rain expected in the valley, along with wind gusts of up to 40 to 50 mph. Temps are expected to top out at 86 degrees.\n\nNWS Meteorologist Adam Roser said the biggest threat in the Coachella Valley is \"definitely flash flooding.\"\n\n\"Many of the mountain roads going into the valley are very vulnerable,\" he said. \"As are any of those that go over those washes and things like that.'\n\nRoser said most of the rain will fall in heavy bands that could potentially produce 2 inches of rain an hour in the afternoon. There also remains a small chance of tornadoes in the valley, he said.\n\n\"WIth tropical storm systems, any tornadoes are usually weak and brief, but the storm prediction center does have around a 5% chance of a tornado occurring in the area,\" he said.\n\nThe rain and wind will likely be finished by the time most people are waking up on Monday morning, Roser said.\n\n— Kate Franco, Paul Albani-Burgio\n\nHow much rain has fallen so far?\n\nSo far, Tropical Storm Hilary has brought a light but steady rainfall to the Coachella Valley, but weather forecasts advise the rain should become heavier on Sunday afternoon and evening.\n\nAs of noon, official National Weather Service rain totals included 0.40 at Palm Springs International Airport, 0.46 in Thermal at the Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport, 0.46 in Thousand Palms and 0.36 in Palm Desert.\n\n—Matt Solinsky\n\nHilary makes landfall over Baja California\n\nThe now-downgraded Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall along Mexico's Baja California coast Sunday as concerns mounted over the storm causing what could be deadly flash flooding in the border city of Tijuana, Southern California and places as far north as Idaho that rarely get such heavy rain.\n\nHilary hit the coast in a sparsely populated area about 150 miles south of Ensenada.\n\nThe storm has already caused flooding in places across Mexico’s arid peninsula and threatens to unleash torrential rains on mudslide-prone Tijuana, where many improvised houses cling to steep hillsides just south of the U.S. border.\n\nForecasters warned the storm could cause extreme flooding, mudslides and even tornadoes. Parts of the U.S. Southwest could be hit with once-in-a-century rains and there is a good chance Hilary could break all-time records as the wettest known tropical cyclone to douse Nevada, Oregon and Idaho.\n\nAs of 11 a.m. Pacific time, Hilary was located about 215 miles south-southeast of San Diego, the National Hurricane Center reported. Hilary had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph and was moving northwest at 25 mph.\n\nThe Mexican cities of Ensenada and Tijuana, directly in the storm’s path, closed all beaches and opened a half-dozen shelters at sports complexes and government offices.\n\n—The Associated Press\n\nEvacuation order near Banning\n\nRiverside County has issued an evacuation order north of Banning and near the Morongo Reservation as the worst of Tropical Storm Hilary's impacts approach.\n\nThe county's emergency management department announced the order late Sunday morning for the Mias zone in the Apple/ElDorado burn scar.\n\n—City News Service\n\nSplash House says it will carry on amid storm\n\nOrganizers of Splash House said the Palm Springs pool party and music festival will go on Sunday despite Tropical Storm Hilary's expected inundation of the Coachella Valley and the rest of Southern California.\n\nEarlier in the weekend, the festival had been moved inside at the three hotels where it's held, which are miles apart.\n\n\"We're gonna keep it real with you — we're not big fans of today's projected weather,\" organizers wrote in an Instagram post about 10 a.m. Sunday. \"But we are big fans of keeping this party going safely. Let's take things inside and close out this weekend in unprecedented style!\"\n\nEvents will be at the Renaissance, Margaritaville Resort and Saguaro Palm Springs hotels between about 1 p.m. and 9 p.m., according to an online schedule.\n\n\"Shuttles with run as planned between hotels,\" the Instagram post said, without addressing the possible heavy rain — predicted to be as much as two inches an hour at times Sunday afternoon.\n\nLocal and national officials, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have advised people to stay indoors and off the roads during the storm.\n\nLater, organizers seemingly acknowledged the storm could make it hard for festival attendees from out of town to drive or fly out as scheduled. They posted a list of hotels that were offering late checkout and discounted rates for extending stays.\n\n—Eric Hartley\n\nMost flights canceled out of Palm Springs on Sunday\n\nAhead of the anticipated impacts from now Tropical Storm Hilary, a majority of airlines have canceled flights in and out of Palm Springs International Airport on Sunday.\n\nAs of 9 a.m., only five of 15 flight arrivals through 6 p.m were still scheduled. United, American and WestJet all canceled flights into the airport. Southwest Airlines canceled its entire Sunday schedule at the airport a day earlier.\n\nDelta’s flight from Salt Lake City to Palm Springs that arrives at 12:18 p.m. Sunday was one of the few still scheduled.\n\nEight of 10 evening flight arrivals into Palm Springs were still scheduled, as were several evening departures, but airport officials cautioned anyone flying to check ahead with their airline before arriving at the airport.\n\n—Matt Solinsky\n\nHurricane Hilary within striking distance of Baja early Sunday\n\nThe National Weather Center in Miami said in the most recent advisory at 2 a.m. that Hurricane Hilary was about 30 miles south of Punta Eugenia, Mexico, and 385 miles from San Diego, California. The maximum sustained wind speed remained unchanged at 85 mph while spreading “heavy rains” northward over the peninsula.\n\nMeteorologists warned that despite weakening, the storm remained treacherous. Forecasters said the storm was still expected to enter the history books as the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years, bringing flash floods, mudslides, isolated tornadoes, high winds and power outages.\n\nElizabeth Adams, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service San Diego office, said rain could fall up to 3 inches an hour across the desert and mountains surrounding the Coachella Valley and beyond from late Sunday morning into the afternoon. The intense rainfall during those hours could cause widespread and life-threatening flash floods.\n\nOne person drowned Saturday in the Mexican town of Santa Rosalia, on the peninsula’s eastern coast, when a vehicle was swept away in an overflowing stream. Rescue workers managed to save four other people, said Edith Aguilar Villavicencio, the mayor of Mulege township.\n\nIt was not immediately clear whether officials considered the fatality related to the hurricane, but video posted by local officials showed torrents of water coursing through the town’s streets.\n\nThe forecast prompted authorities to issue an evacuation advisory for Santa Catalina Island, urging residents and beachgoers to leave the tourist destination 23 miles off the coast.\n\n— The Associated Press\n\nHurricane Hilary: Storm drops 0.32 inches at Palm Springs International Sunday\n\nAs of 7 a.m. Sunday, rainfall totals since midnight were 0.32 inches at Palm Springs International Airport, 0.41 inches at the Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport in Thermal and 0.29 inches in Thousand Palms, according to the National Weather Service.\n\n— Matt Solinsky\n\nRain totals so far Sunday in Palm Springs area\n\nPreliminary precipitation data from the National Weather Service's San Diego station shows 24-hour rain totals as of 5 a.m. Sunday in the Coachella Valley vary from 0.86 inches in Thermal to 0.04 inches in Indio Hills. Palm Springs International Airport reported 0.18 inches of rain so far.\n\nThermal: 0.86 inches\n\nMorongo Valley: 0.39 inches\n\nDesert Hot Springs: 0.31 inches\n\nPalm Springs International Airport: 0.18 inches\n\nPalm Desert: 0.16 inches\n\nIndio Hills: 0.04 inches\n\n— Kate Franco\n\nRoad closures in Palm Springs, Cathedral City\n\nPalm Springs: Indian Canyon Drive, Gene Autry Trail and Vista Chino will be closed at the washes until further notice in preparation of potential flooding due to Hurricane Hilary, the Palm Springs Police Department announced late Saturday.\n\nCathedral City: Los Gatos Road at Date Palm Drive has been closed, city officials said Saturday.\n\n—Niki Kottmann\n\nGov. Gavin Newsom declares State of Emergency\n\nGov. Gavin Newsom issued a State of Emergency for much of Southern California Saturday to support the Hurricane Hilary response and recovery efforts as the state continues mobilizing and coordinating resources ahead of the storm's forecasted impacts.\n\nHeavy rainfall and high winds were expected to last through Monday. At the governor's direction, there were currently more than 7,500 boots on the ground deployed to help local communities protect Californians from the impacts of Hilary.\n\nThe governor also signed an emergency proclamation in San Diego while visiting with California National Guard troops. He met with first responders and local officials, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria. He was also in touch with federal officials, including the White House.\n\nThe Emergency Medical Services Authority has assets on standby, including California Medical Assistance Teams to augment local capacity, aid in evacuations and support medical needs in communities impacted by flooding. The EMSA was ready to assist with Ambulance Strike Teams as necessary to support local communities. The Flood Operations Center is activated and has prepositioned flood-fight materials should they be needed.\n\n—City News Service\n\nSandbag availability low, exhausted in some valley cities\n\nSand and sandbags are no longer available at local fire stations in Palm Desert as of Saturday afternoon. Instead, residents can find these resources at the Palm Desert Civic Center, 43-900 San Pablo Ave., Palm Desert.\n\nRancho Mirage ran out of sand at its distribution site at the Rancho Mirage Library & Observatory parking lot, so many people took their empty bags to a nearby empty lot to fill them with sand straight from the ground. Empty sandbags are still available for Rancho Mirage residents at Fire Station 69 at 71-751 Gerald Ford Drive. Proof of Rancho Mirage address is required.\n\nIndian Wells announced mid-afternoon on Saturday that sandbags are no longer available from that city, and residents are encouraged to seek supplies from local home improvement stores, instead.\n\n—Niki Kottmann\n\nHurricane Hilary: How experts say you should prepare\n\nTwo Palm Springs emergency officials have some advice for valley residents on how they can prepare their homes and themselves for the storm. The officials are Capt. Nathan Gunkel of the city fire department and Daniel DeSelms, Palm Springs’ emergency management coordinator.\n\nTo protect yourself:\n\nThey said residents should make sure they have enough food and water to make it through a few days, including food that can be eaten if the power goes out.\n\nThey also recommended preparing for the power outages by charging their cellphones and making sure they have flashlights and batteries on hand. DeSelms said he generally recommends using flashlights rather than candles because of the fire risks that come with candles.\n\nIn general, they said residents should be prepared to remain at home for multiple days as it will likely be unsafe to go out during the storm and roads could potentially remained closed or impassable even after it passes.\n\nGunkel recommended that residents make sure they know how to get out of their neighborhoods in the event the city does need to evacuate, keeping in mind that roads like Indian Canyon Drive and Gene Autry Road will likely be impassable. However, he said people should remember it is impossible to anticipate which other roads may be closed.\n\nTo protect your home:\n\nBoth DeSelms and Gunkel recommend residents make use of the free sandbags Palm Springs and other cities and agencies are providing, particularly if their homes have ever experienced flooding in the past. It often makes sense to place sand bags in front of the front door or other places where water might pool, Gunkel said.\n\nDeSelms also said those with leaky roofs can put a tarp over them. However, he cautioned that it is important to try to make sure the tarp will be secured enough to withstand the strong expected winds.\n\n— Paul Albani-Burgio", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/08/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/maryland/2023/09/22/tropical-storm-eastern-shore-braces-for-impact/70933324007/", "title": "Tropical storm: Eastern Shore braces for impact", "text": "As Tropical Storm Ophelia prepares to make landfall, the Delmarva Peninsula braces itself by updating storm readiness information. Here is the latest.\n\nAs of Friday, the National Hurricane Center forecasts tropical storm conditions including heavy rainfall, strong winds, flooding and storm surge across portions of the southeast coast and mid-Atlantic. Widespread 2-4 inches of rainfall is expected throughout the eastern part of region, with local amounts up to 6 or more inches possible. This could lead to flash flooding.\n\nStrong winds could lead to downed trees and power outages. Storm surge, which is the abnormal rising of water generated during a hurricane or tropical system, could reach 1 to 4 feet and inundate parts of coastal communities. High tides are likely to also exacerbate flooding. The effects from the storm are expected to last through Sunday.\n\nMore on the initial reportingTropical storm warning: High winds, heavy rains coming to Ocean City, Delmarva\n\nFEMA Region 3, which includes Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, encourages all residents to follow the instructions of their local emergency managers especially if asked to evacuate.\n\n\"By not following evacuation orders, you not only put yourself at risk, but potentially first responders as well,\" the weather service report said.\n\n“I encourage residents in Virginia, Delaware and Maryland to prepare their families and homes now should they experience the impact of this storm, especially those along the coast,” said FEMA Region 3 Regional Administrator MaryAnn Tierney. “Ensure you have emergency supplies on hand and are ready to evacuate if instructed to do so. If it is safe, check on neighbors who may require assistance. This includes individuals with children, as well as older adults and people with disabilities.”\n\nOcean City battens down the hatches\n\nThe National Weather Service's office in Wakefield, Va., has placed Ocean City under a tropical storm warning. Ocean City Emergency Services is continuing to monitor the storm.\n\nCurrently, effects of the storm are expected to be seen in the Ocean City area beginning late Friday through Saturday.\n\nWinds in excess of 40 mph are expected, with gusts reaching as high as 55 mph. Heavy rainfall is expected with rainfall totals of 3 to 6 inches. Flooding is possible, especially in the downtown area.\n\nMore on past hurricane activityWatch: Rough surf comes to Ocean City as Hurricane Lee moves north off East Coast\n\nTown of Ocean City personnel have begun completing pre-storm action items, including closing the seawall and removing items from the beach. Residents are encouraged to begin securing outdoor furniture, grills and water vessels, and prepare for power outages.\n\nSomerset County issues evacuation warning\n\n\"Due to the impending storm … and the prediction of strong sustained winds, tidal flooding and an extended period of rain, the Somerset County Commissioners and Emergency Operations Center recommend a voluntary evacuation of Smith Island and other flood-prone areas of the county,\" the county said in statement.\n\nWashington High School will be open as a shelter at 6 p.m. Friday for those that need it. Pets are allowed; bring their shot records, medications and crates if you have them.\n\nTransportation to the shelter will be provided from the following locations at 5 p.m.:\n\nCrisfield Fire Department (a stop will also be made at Marion Fire Department around 5:30 p.m.)\n\nFairmount Fire Department\n\nDeal Island Fire Department\n\nMt. Vernon Fire Department\n\nResidents should bring blankets, pillows, sleeping bags, medications and personal hygiene items. If you have special dietary needs, bring your own supplies.\n\nHighway travel impacted\n\nThe Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration is preparing for Tropical Storm Ophelia.\n\n\"According to the latest forecast, the lower Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland counties will be most affected.Forecasters are predicting several foot Chesapeake Bay tidal surges associated with the storm, which will cause flooding in low-lying shore areas within the Chesapeake Bay watershed,\" MDOT warned in a statement.\n\nThe State Highway Administration reminded motorists to avoid travel unless necessary. If you are driving during a storm, or shortly after, you might find a variety of dangerous situations. Please take extreme caution if you must go out. Here are some tips for motorists, MDOT advised.\n\nDo not try to cross a flooded road. Eighty percent of flood-related deaths occur in vehicles. “Turn Around. Don’t Drown.” Two feet of rapidly moving water can float a bus and 6 inches can knock a person off their feet;\n\nAvoid downed or damaged power and transmission wires and cables;\n\nBe cognizant of fallen trees or severely damaged brush; and\n\nKeep alert for wild animals, such as deer, that will be fleeing dangerous areas and crossing the roads.\n\nMore on IdaliaAs Hurricane Idalia bears down on Florida, what can Eastern Shore expect later in week?\n\nFor a complete listing of highway incidents on state roads in real-time, click here. Motorists in need of roadside assistance on a state highway numbered routes may dial #77 on their mobile devices.\n\nVirginia issues state of emergency\n\nOn Friday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency in advance of Tropical Storm Ophelia, which is expected to have impacts on Virginia beginning Friday.\n\nThis is an unusual storm, which has been difficult to accurately forecast, approaching large population centers with many at-risk communities, the governor's office said. Accordingly, the pre-positioning of response assets and supplies will be necessary to assist our local and state partners.\n\nThe Virginia Emergency Support Team will activate for this incident.\n\nList of closures\n\nThe following are the latest closures:\n\nThe Beach Clean Up events scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 23, are canceled due to predicted storm conditions. The event is canceled in both the Maryland and the Virginia districts as well as Assateague State Park.\n\nMore on weather patternsWhat El Niño and La Niña ocean patterns mean for hurricane season and tornadoes", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/09/22"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_21", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/lcps/2022/10/27/las-cruces-public-schools-awarded-2m-for-electric-school-buses-epa-clean-energy-zero-emission/69593344007/", "title": "Las Cruces Public Schools awarded $2M for electric school buses", "text": "LAS CRUCES − New Mexico's second-largest school district, the Las Cruces Public Schools, has been awarded nearly $2 million to purchase electric school buses under a federal rebate program.\n\nLCPS was one of five school districts in New Mexico awarded funds under the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean School Bus Program, alongside smaller rural school districts consisting of Dora Municipal Schools ($610,000), Dulce Independent Schools ($790,000), Lake Arthur Independent Schools ($790,000) and Pecos Independent Schools ($395,000). LCPS was awarded $1,975,000.\n\nLCPS school board president Ray Jaramillo said Las Crucens might not see electric school buses on their streets sooner than 2024, because of high demand for the new vehicles, but he said he was elated by the news.\n\n\"It's nice to have buses, but there’s also money for the infrastructure, and that’s going to be an exciting opportunity. It’s really the start of a program that we can see going in to the future,\" he said.\n\nProgram funds include up to $20,000 per bus for electric charging infrastructure, and districts applying for funds were advised to speak with their utility providers ahead of time about service capacity needed to charge the buses’ batteries on a regular basis.\n\nWhat was not immediately clear is how the district's transportation contractor, STS-New Mexico, would interact with the program, if at all. A spokesperson for STS indicated the purchasing would be handled entirely by the school district.\n\nSchool board member Robert Wofford, who has frequently advocated for new construction and bus fleets that are not dependent on fossil fuels, saw cause for celebration in Wednesday's announcement by the EPA.\n\n\"This is a first step toward transforming our school district into one that addresses climate change in as many ways as it can,\" he said. \"There’s no reason to buy a vehicle that’s not electric. There’s no reason to build a new school that does not sustain itself with renewable energy.\"\n\nSpeaking for himself and not on behalf of the school board, Wofford remarked, \"We’ve got a major shift in terms of economic thinking to go through in this country, to retool ourselves and be a leader with electric vehicles.\"\n\nThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency held a lottery to distribute $913 million from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the EPA says will purchase 2,463 low- or zero-emission school buses, most of them electric vehicles, in 389 school districts across the nation. In a statement, the agency said the awards include funding for infrastructure necessary for charging electric vehicles.\n\nThe selection process prioritized low-income, rural and tribal communities and the funding is delivered via rebates. The Clean School Bus Program aims to reduce air pollution and dependence on diesel engines that emit greenhouse gases and accelerate climate change. It also defrays some of the high costs of replacing older buses.\n\nDemand for awards under the Clean School Bus Program was so high, the EPA announced in September, that it nearly doubled the amount allocated for the program this year. A total of $5 billion has been committed over five years.\n\nNew Mexico's senior U.S. Senator, Democrat Martin Heinrich, celebrated the $4.56 million in rebates allocated to New Mexico school districts as a major step in scaling up zero-emission transportation.\n\n“Modernizing the vehicles that transport New Mexico's children to school — especially with clean and electric buses — will make our air cleaner and improve public health, and create important energy and fuel savings for public school districts,\" he said in a written statement. \"Electrifying our homes, buildings, and vehicles is one of the surest climate actions that we can take right now that will help secure a more equitable, healthier future for all our communities.\"\n\nHeinrich co-chairs the Bicameral Electrification Caucus, a congressional caucus consisting of House and Senate members backing a transition to electric power produced from renewable sources and technologies. Among the House members is U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M.\n\nMore education news:\n\nAlgernon D'Ammassa can be reached at 575-541-5451, adammassa@lcsun-news.com or @AlgernonWrites on Twitter.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/10/27"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2024/01/08/electric-school-buses-en-route-epa-marks-nearly-1-billion-investment/72148478007/", "title": "EPA awards nearly $1 billion for electric school buses — Delaware ...", "text": "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced some 67 grantees set to receive nearly $1 billion, for electric school buses.\n\nThe Clean School Bus Program Grants Competition, a first for the EPA under President Joe Biden, will help these selectees purchase over 2,700 clean school buses in 280 school districts serving over 7 million students across 37 states, according to Monday's announcement. About 95% of the buses will be completely electric.\n\n“Today, we are announcing nearly $1 billion to fund clean school buses across the nation,\" said Vice President Kamala Harris in the press release. \"As part of our work to tackle the climate crisis, the historic funding we are announcing today is an investment in our children, their health and their education. It also strengthens our economy by investing in American manufacturing and America’s workforce.\"\n\nThe 2024 announcement brings the program impact to $2 billion in awards, according to the press release, funding roughly 5,000 electric and low-emission school buses nationwide. The $5 billion program includes both a grant program and a rebate program, which allows selectees to receive awards before purchasing eligible buses that replace existing school buses.\n\nDelaware did not land one of Monday's grants.\n\nThe Delaware Department of Education had applied in this round, though no award was issued. And DDOE says it will be working to submit a 2023 rebate application for units not funded in the grant. The state previously saw $809,000 in EPA rebate dollars in 2022 rebates, securing four replaced buses for Colonial School District. EPA is currently accepting applications for the 2023 Clean School Bus Rebate Program until Jan. 31.\n\nYour questions, answered:What you need to know about state's new electric vehicle mandate\n\nAir pollution from older diesel engines is linked to asthma and other conditions, EPA explains in its announcement. And phasing out these engines — which disproportionately affect communities of color and Tribal communities — aims to ensure cleaner air.\n\nA barrier for many has been the question of charging stations.\n\nThe EPA says \"proactive and ongoing communication\" with key stakeholders — like school boards and local utilities — is critical to successful deployment. The agency has created a Utility Partnership Template to encourage early and engagement between applicants and utility companies, as investments continue.\n\nGrantees will work with their Regional Project Officers, according to the agency, to finalize project plans and purchase their awarded new buses and eligible infrastructure.\n\nMore:Your buyer’s guide for an electric vehicle in Delaware, including rebates and deadlines\n\nGot a story? Contact Kelly Powers at kepowers@gannett.com or (231) 622-2191, and follow her on Twitter @kpowers01.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/11/02/epa-announces-4-3m-for-new-clean-school-buses-for-wells-ogunquit-maine/69607588007/", "title": "EPA announces $4.3M for new 'clean' school buses for Wells ...", "text": "WELLS, Maine — David Cash looked at the yellow bus parked behind the crowd at Wells Junior High School and suggested to everyone its days are numbered.\n\nThe reason, Cash said, is that more than $4.3 million in federal funds is on its way to the Wells-Ogunquit Community School District to help purchase 11 new, clean, zero-emission school buses. Such funds essentially will help the district swap out its current fleet of 12 diesel-engine buses.\n\nCash is the New England regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. On Monday, he made Wells his first stop on his tour of Maine school districts that will be receiving their own slices of more than $13 million from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program.\n\nCash said the buses currently in use create pollution with “long-term impacts on our kids” and contribute to “problematic” issues related to climate change. He called the $5 billion being spent nationwide for new, “clean” school buses “tremendous.”\n\n“It’s incumbent upon us to make the right kind of choices and the right kind of investments,” he said.\n\nWOCSD is one of 13 school districts in the state that President Joe Biden announced would be part of his administration’s funding for the bus program for the current fiscal year. The funds are a part of the infrastructure bill Biden signed into law last year.\n\nWOCSD is receiving the largest share of the $13 million. The public school systems in Dayton and Winthrop are both receiving $1.58 million, according to an EPA press release.\n\nOverall, the grant funds will help with the purchases of 34 “clean” buses for school districts throughout the state.\n\nDock Square gridlockKennebunkport irked over tour buses putting brakes on traffic\n\nThe Clean School Bus Program aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money for school districts and produce cleaner air, according to the EPA. Pollution from the diesel engines of current school buses is linked to asthma and other conditions that affect the health of students, the agency added.\n\n“Phasing out these diesel engines will ensure cleaner air for students, bus drivers, and school staff working near the bus loading areas, and the communities through which the buses drive each day,” EPA spokesperson David Deegan said in the news release.\n\nThe program also aims to address the “outsized role” that the transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions play in contributing to issues of climate change, according to the EPA.\n\n“The program will also save school districts money as they upgrade school bus fleets, replacing older, heavily polluting buses with brand new clean school buses, while freeing up needed resources for schools,” the EPA said.\n\nOn Monday, Cash was joined by Maine Education Commissioner Dan Chuta, WOCSD Superintendent James Daly, state Sen. Joe Rafferty, state Rep. Tim Roche, teacher Sam Burne, and student Grady Roy, all of whom addressed the crowd.\n\nNoting the bipartisanship that produced the funds, Daly said the occasion was not a Democrat one or a Republican one, but an American one.\n\n“It is tremendous that we are going to replace 11 of our school buses,” Daly said. “What a legacy to leave our kids.”\n\nMore:Maine begins removing those naughty license plates\n\nDaly thanked Deb Coleman, of Ledgemere, the bus company that serves WOCSD, for her role in putting together the district’s application for the funding. Daly also thanked town and school officials for their support.\n\nChuta noted that means of transportation are the top emitter of carbon in the state. He spoke of the state’s commitment to reducing emissions, taking opportunities for economic growth, saving money, and improving health and environmental outcomes. The federal funds will help reduce the exposure of diesel to students and educators and will reduce the district’s operating costs, he added.\n\n“This is a win-win for the environment, and a win for students, for their drivers and our schools and also our communities,” Chuta said.\n\nRafferty thanked Daly, saying it was his leadership that “brought this opportunity to us.”\n\nRoche also praised Daly, saying he and his staff had met the challenge of getting new buses “without putting it back on the Wells taxpayers.”\n\n“But not only will this not be a burden to the Wells taxpayers, the district will eventually see savings,” Roche said. “This will also help educate our students on the importance of looking for alternatives in their energy choices.”\n\nBurne, a science teacher who supervises the junior high’s Environmental Club, said the federal grant money will provide an opportunity to discuss and create change in the community.\n\n“The addition of not one, but 11 electric school buses allows us to no longer just discuss, but see what change might actually look like here in the district of Wells and Ogunquit,” Burne said. “With this grant, the impact on the next generation here at Wells-Ogunquit Community School District starts today.”\n\nNew restaurantSmoke BBQ to spice up Kennebunk's dining scene with 'barbecue classics'\n\nRoy, of the junior high’s Environmental Club, said the removal of the current buses’ carbon emissions will benefit the community and the ecosystems in the area.\n\n“This grant can illustrate that initiatives in response to global warming can not only be advocated, but enacted ... The implementation of these zero-emission buses is a major motion towards a cleaner future.”\n\nCurrently, the EPA has selected 389 applications from school districts throughout the nation, for a total of $913 million to be awarded. According to the agency, the funds will support the purchases of 2,463 buses, 95% of which will be electric. Districts serving low-income, rural and tribal students comprise 99% of the grant applications that the government received.\n\nWOCSD and other school districts who received an award can now purchase new buses and eligible infrastructure. On Monday afternoon, Daly said he hopes the 11 new buses will be delivered to the district in time for the 2023-2024 school year.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/11/02"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/politics/spending-bill-congress-omnibus/index.html", "title": "Here's what's in the $1.7 trillion federal omnibus spending law | CNN ...", "text": "Editor’s Note: This story originally ran December 20. It has been updated to reflect the current status of the legislation.\n\nCNN —\n\nPresident Joe Biden signed into law a $1.7 trillion yearlong federal government spending package on Thursday, after the House and Senate passed it last week.\n\nThe legislation includes $772.5 billion for nondefense discretionary programs and $858 billion in defense funding. That represents an increase in spending in both areas for fiscal year 2023.\n\nThe sweeping package includes roughly $45 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine and NATO allies, an overhaul of the electoral vote-counting law, protections for pregnant workers, an enhancement to retirement savings rules and a TikTok ban on federal devices.\n\nIt also provides a boost in spending for disaster aid, college access, child care, mental health and food assistance, more support for the military and veterans and additional funds for the US Capitol Police. And the legislation contains several major Medicaid provisions, particularly one that could disenroll up to 19 million people from the nation’s health insurance program for low-income Americans.\n\nHowever, the law, which runs more than 4,000 pages, left out several measures that some lawmakers had fought to include. An expansion of the child tax credit, as well as multiple other corporate and individual tax breaks, did not make it into the final bill. Neither did legislation to allow cannabis companies to bank their cash reserves – known as the Safe Banking Act – or a bill to help Afghan evacuees in the US gain lawful permanent residency. And the spending package did not include a White House request for roughly $10 billion in additional funding for Covid-19 response.\n\nThe spending law, which will keep the government operating through September, the end of the fiscal year, is the product of lengthy negotiations between top congressional Democrats and Republicans.\n\nCongress originally passed a continuing resolution on September 30 to temporarily fund the government in fiscal year 2023, which began October 1.\n\nHere’s what’s in the law:\n\nMore aid for Ukraine: The spending law provides roughly $45 billion to help support Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against Russia’s attack.\n\nAbout $9 billion of the funding will go to Ukraine’s military to pay for a variety of things including training, weapons, logistics support and salaries. Nearly $12 billion will be used to replenish US stocks of equipment sent to Ukraine through presidential drawdown authority.\n\nAlso, the law provides $13 billion for economic support to the Ukrainian government. Other funds address humanitarian and infrastructure needs, as well as support European Command operations.\n\nEmergency disaster assistance: The law provides more than $38 billion in emergency funding to help Americans in the west and southeast affected by recent natural disasters, including tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding and wildfires. It will aid farmers, provide economic development assistance for communities, repair and reconstruct federal facilities and direct money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, among other initiatives.\n\nOverhaul of the electoral vote-counting law: A provision in the legislation aims at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, the first legislative response to the US Capitol insurrection and then-President Donald Trump’s campaign to stay in power despite his loss in 2020.\n\nThe changes overhaul the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which Trump tried to use to overturn the 2020 election.\n\nThe legislation clarifies the vice president’s role while overseeing the certification of the electoral result to be completely ceremonial. It also creates a set of stipulations designed to make it harder for there to be any confusion over the accurate slate of electors from each state.\n\nFunding for January 6 attack prosecutions: The law provides $2.6 billion for US Attorneys, which includes funding efforts “to further support prosecutions related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol and domestic terrorism cases,” according to a fact sheet from the House Appropriations Committee.\n\nThe package also gives $11.3 billion to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including for efforts to investigate extremist violence and domestic terrorism.\n\nThe funding measures are part of nearly $39 billion for the Justice Department.\n\nRetirement savings enhancements: The law contains new retirement rules that could make it easier for Americans to accumulate retirement savings – and less costly to withdraw them. Among other things, the provisions will allow penalty-free withdrawals for some emergency expenses, let employers offer matching retirement contributions for a worker’s student loan payments and increase how much older workers may save in employer retirement plans.\n\nTikTok ban from federal devices: The legislation bans TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form video app, from federal government devices.\n\nSome lawmakers have raised bipartisan concerns that China’s national security laws could force TikTok – or its parent, ByteDance – to hand over the personal data of its US users. Recently, a wave of states led by Republican governors have introduced state-level restrictions on the use of TikTok on government-owned devices.\n\nProtections for pregnant workers: The law provides pregnant workers with workplace accommodations – such as additional bathroom breaks, stools or relief from heavy lifting duties – needed for healthy pregnancies. It will prevent them from being forced to take leave or losing their jobs, as well as bar employers from denying employment opportunities to women based on their need for reasonable accommodations due to childbirth or related medical conditions. Also, another provision in the package guarantees workplace accommodations – particularly time to pump – for more nursing workers.\n\nChanges to Medicaid and other health care programs: The law phases out the requirement that prevented states from disenrolling Medicaid recipients as long as the national public health emergency was in effect in exchange for an enhanced federal match. This continuous coverage measure was enacted as part of a Covid-19 relief package passed in March 2020 and has led to a record 90 million Medicaid enrollees, many of whom may no longer meet the income requirements to qualify.\n\nUnder the law, states will be able to start evaluating Medicaid enrollees’ eligibility and terminating their coverage as of April 1. The redetermination process will take place over at least 12 months. Also, the enhanced federal Medicaid funding will phase down through December 31, 2023, though the states will have to meet certain conditions during that period.\n\nUp to 19 million people could lose their Medicaid benefits, according to estimates, though many would be eligible for other coverage.\n\nAlso, under a provision in the law, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, will offer 12 months of continuous coverage for children. This will allow the 40 million children on Medicaid and CHIP to have uninterrupted access to health care throughout the year.\n\nIn addition, the law makes permanent the option for states to offer 12 months of postpartum coverage for low-income mothers through Medicaid, rather than just 60 days. More than two dozen states, plus the District of Columbia, have implemented the measure, which was available on a temporary basis through the American Rescue Plan, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Another seven states are planning to implement the option.\n\nPlus, the package provides more money for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. The funds are intended to speed the development of new therapies, diagnostics and preventive measures, beef up public health activities and strengthen the nation’s biosecurity by accelerating development of medical countermeasures for pandemic threats and fortifying stockpiles and supply chains for drugs, masks and other supplies.\n\nIncreased support for the military and veterans: The package funds a 4.6% pay raise for troops and a 22.4% increase in support for Veteran Administration medical care, which provides health services for 7.3 million veterans.\n\nIt includes nearly $53 billion to address higher inflation and $2.7 billion – a 25% increase – to support critical services and housing assistance for veterans and their families.\n\nThe law also allocates $5 billion for the Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund, which provides additional funding to implement the landmark PACT Act that expands eligibility for health care services and benefits to veterans with conditions related to toxic exposure during their service.\n\nBeefing up nutrition assistance: The legislation establishes a permanent nationwide Summer EBT program, starting in the summer of 2024, according to Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger advocacy group. It will provide families whose children are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals with a $40 grocery benefit per child per month, indexed to inflation.\n\nIt also changes the rules governing summer meals programs in rural areas. Children will be able to take home or receive delivery of up to 10 days’ worth of meals, rather than have to consume the food at a specific site and time.\n\nThe law also helps families who have had their food stamp benefits stolen since October 1 through what’s known as “SNAP skimming.” It provides them with retroactive federal reimbursement of the funds, which criminals steal by attaching devices to point-of-sale machines or PIN pads to get card numbers and other information from electronic benefits transfer cards.\n\nHigher maximum Pell grant awards: The law increases the maximum Pell grant award by $500 to $7,395 for the coming school year. This marks the largest boost since the 2009-2010 school year. About 7 million students, many from lower-income families, receive Pell grants every year to help them afford college.\n\nHelp to pay utility bills: The package provides $5 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Combined with the $1 billion contained in the earlier continuing resolution, this is the largest regular appropriation for the program, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. Home heating and cooling costs – and the applications for federal aid in paying the bills – have soared this year.\n\nAdditional funding for the US Capitol Police: The law provides an additional $132 million for the Capitol Police for a total of nearly $735 million. It will allow the department to hire up to 137 sworn officers and 123 support and civilian personnel, bringing the force to a projected level of 2,126 sworn officers and 567 civilians.\n\nIt also gives $2 million to provide off-campus security for lawmakers in response to evolving and growing threats.\n\nMore money for child care: The legislation provides $8 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a 30% increase in funding. The grant gives financial assistance to low-income families to afford child care.\n\nAlso, Head Start will receive nearly $12 billion, an 8.6% boost. The program helps young children from low-income families prepare for school.\n\nMore resources for children’s mental health and for substance abuse: The law provides more funds to increase access to mental health services for children and schools. It also will invest more money to address the opioid epidemic and substance use disorder.\n\nInvestments in homelessness prevention and affordable housing: The legislation provides $3.6 billion for homeless assistance grants, a 13% increase. It will serve more than 1 million people experiencing homelessness.\n\nThe package also funnels nearly $6.4 billion to the Community Development Block Grant formula program and related local economic and community development projects that benefit low- and moderate income areas and people, an increase of almost $1.6 billion.\n\nPlus, it provides $1.5 billion for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which will lead to the construction of nearly 10,000 new rental and homebuyer units and maintain the record investment from the last fiscal year.\n\nMore support for the environment: The package provides an additional $576 million for the Environmental Protection Agency, bringing its funding up to $10.1 billion. It increases support for enforcement and compliance, as well as clean air, water and toxic chemical programs, after years of flat funding.\n\nIt also boosts funding for the National Park Service by 6.4%, restoring 500 of the 3,000 staff positions lost over the past decade. This is intended to help the agency handle substantial increases in visitation.\n\nPlus, the legislation provides an additional 14% in funding for wildland firefighting.\n\nWhat’s not in the law\n\nEnhanced child tax credit: A coalition of Democratic lawmakers and consumer advocates pushed hard to extend at least one provision of the enhanced child tax credit, which was in effect last year thanks to the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Their priority was to make the credit more refundable so more of the lowest-income families can qualify. Nearly 19 million kids won’t receive the full $2,000 benefit this year because their parents earn too little, according to a Tax Policy Center estimate.\n\nNew cannabis banking rules: Lawmakers considered including a provision in the spending bill that would make it easier for licensed cannabis businesses to accept credit cards – but it was left out of the legislation. Known as the Safe Banking Act, which previously passed the House, the provision would prohibit federal regulators from taking punitive measures against banks for providing services to legitimate cannabis businesses.\n\nEven though 47 states have legalized some form of marijuana, cannabis remains illegal on the federal level. That means financial institutions providing banking services to cannabis businesses are subject to criminal prosecution – leaving many legal growers and sellers locked out of the banking system.\n\nCovid-19 response: Lawmakers did not include a White House request for an additional $10 billion in funding for Covid-19, which would have been aimed at continued access to and development of vaccines and therapeutics, among other things. Earlier in the year, the Biden administration unsuccessfully pushed for $22.5 billion in extra funds.\n\nFBI headquarters: There was also no final resolution on where the new FBI headquarters will be located, a major point of contention as lawmakers from Maryland – namely House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer – pushed to bring the law enforcement agency into their state. In a deal worked through by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the General Services Administration would be required to conduct “separate and detailed consultations” with Maryland and Virginia representatives about potential sites in each of the states, according to a Senate Democratic aide.\n\nAfghan Adjustment Act: Also not included in the spending bill was the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have helped Afghan allies who run the risk of deportation from the US. It would have given those evacuees a pathway to lawful permanent residency before their temporary status, known as humanitarian parole, expires in 2023. Many congressional Republicans raised concerns about vetting and other issues, but the legislation’s supporters, including former US military leaders, argued those worries have been addressed.\n\nLegislation to extend and expand Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans who worked with the US during the war there and want to come to America is included in the spending bill.", "authors": ["Tami Luhby Katie Lobosco", "Tami Luhby", "Katie Lobosco"], "publish_date": "2022/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/politics/kamala-harris-electric-school-buses-awards-infrastructure/index.html", "title": "Harris will announce awards for electric school buses for all 50 ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nVice President Kamala Harris will announce rebate awards for school districts across the country that will support the purchase of nearly 2,500 school buses – most of which will be electric, the White House said. The funding is part of the bipartisan infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed last year.\n\nSpeaking in Seattle on Wednesday, Harris “will announce nearly $1 billion in total awards from the EPA’s Clean School Bus program to deliver 2,468 electric and low-emission buses to school districts across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and a number of tribal run or tribal serving schools,” White House senior adviser and infrastructure coordinator Mitch Landrieu told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday afternoon. “The vast majority of those buses, 95% will be purely electric.”\n\nIn 12 states, Landrieu said, the electric buses will be the first ever on the ground.\n\n“That means that Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire (are) all hitting an incredible milestone with this funding,” he said.\n\nWhile nearly all of the buses will be fully electric, a “very small number” will be powered by compressed natural gas or propane, Karl Simon, director of the Transportation and Climate Division at the Environmental Protection Agency, told reporters.\n\nSimon said the administration will award funds for charging stations but is letting local communities decide how those funds are best spent.\n\n“For each electric bus, the agency is awarding the opportunity of them spending up to $20,000 on electric vehicle infrastructure. So, we really want it to be a local conversation between the school district, the bus provider and their local utility,” Simon said.\n\nAwardees will now work with school bus dealers and manufacturers to put orders in for the new vehicles and will submit the orders to the EPA, which “will get money out very quickly,” Simon said. That process will be completed by April and then the buses will be delivered by the manufacturers “as soon as they can be.”\n\nThe announcement comes as the infrastructure law near its one-year anniversary.\n\n“We’ve put the unprecedented funding in this bill to work,” Landrieu said. “We’re pushing millions of dollars out of the door and we’re turning dirt on projects all across the country.”", "authors": ["Nikki Carvajal"], "publish_date": "2022/10/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/01/25/florida-department-environmental-protection-awarded-funds-buses/6637214001/", "title": "Florida Department of Environmental Protection awarded funds for ...", "text": "BRADENTON — A small fleet of electric school buses will be tested in Manatee County during the 2022-2023 school year following a recent grant received by the School District.\n\nThe state-funded Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Electric Bus Project will help with the purchase of three to five electric buses for Manatee County schools. The agency considers Manatee County an air quality priority area, deeming it one of 23 Florida counties eligible for the grant.\n\nIn total, DEP has $52 million to disburse for the bus project, which aims to replace 2009 or older diesel school buses with new electric battery-powered buses.\n\nJamie Warrington, director of transportation for the School District of Manatee County, said the buses will be an interesting test for next school year.\n\n“We are in the preliminary stages of this … I feel like it’s going to happen but on this small scale to start out,” Warrington said.\n\nPreviously:Dawnyelle Singleton announces candidacy for Sarasota County School board\n\nICYMI:School resumes in Sarasota and Manatee in midst of omicron surge\n\nOnce approved by board members, the $300,000 buses will be charged at the district’s fleet facility in Bradenton at a state-of-the-art charging station. Warrington says even choosing the correct electric station to power the new buses will take some discussion and research.\n\nSome stations can charge an electric bus in approximately four hours, other less expensive stations can charge a bus in eight hours.\n\n“There are a lot of factors,” Warrington said. “We don’t want a large bus to run out of charge out east with kids on board. Environmentally, this is the right thing to do, but we also want to be practical.”\n\nThough the official pulse of the board about its potential new electric bus fleet has yet to be determined, Warrington said the operations team is willing to give the electric bus project a try. Funds from the Florida DEP grant will cover 75% of the total cost of buses as well as part of the cost for the charging stations.\n\nWarrington expects a presentation to be ready for the School District of Manatee County board this spring.\n\nSamantha Gholar Weires can be reached at sgholar@gannett.com or on Twitter: @samanthagweires", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/01/25"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/07/politics/truck-and-buses-regulations-biden-administration/index.html", "title": "Biden administration rolls out new regulations and funding for ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe Biden administration is rolling out more stringent emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles like large trucks and buses and announcing more than $1.3 billion in funding to deploy more clean transportation and school buses.\n\nThe US Environmental Protection Agency is also announcing stricter standards regulating nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from heavy-duty trucks, updating the standard for the first time since 2001. In addition, the EPA said it plans to tighten greenhouse gas emissions standards for medium and heavy-duty vehicles – standards on which the agency is now accepting public comment.\n\nMuch of the Biden administration’s focus on cutting vehicle emissions has so far been on light-duty vehicles like passenger cars. Transportation emissions account for the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and light duty vehicles account for 58% of total emissions.\n\nStill, heavy-duty vehicles like big trucks and buses make up about 23% of total emissions; though there are fewer of them on the roads than smaller cars, they emit a lot of pollution and planet-warming greenhouse gases.\n\nIn addition to the new regulation, Vice President Kamala Harris held a Monday event to announce new spending on cleaner transit and school buses provided by the bipartisan infrastructure law. Harris and the Department of Transportation announced the more than $1.3 billion in 2022 funding to help states buy electric transit buses.\n\n“Imagine a future: The freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents – all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and our economy to grow – imagine that they produce zero emissions,” Harris said at the event. “We are all in the midst of a turning point.”\n\nThe administration is also rolling out $17 million for electric zero-emission and low-emission school buses. The new funding comes in addition to $7 million through the American Rescue Plan to replace older diesel school buses with electric buses in underserved communities.\n\nThe newly proposed EPA rules on NOx starting with mileage year 2027 vehicles largely focuses on cutting air pollution and improving air quality. The agency’s fact sheet states the new rules will make truck engine manufacturers build engines with better emissions controls, to help vehicles not emit so much NOx while trucks are idling or in stop-and-go traffic.\n\n“This proposed rule would ensure that the heavy-duty vehicles and engines that drive American commerce and connect people all across the country are as clean as possible, while charting to advance zero-emission vehicles in the heavy-duty fleet,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Monday.\n\nThe agency is proposing two options for its new rule; both would go into effect in 2027, but one option would implement even stronger standards in mileage year 2031. This option would bring down NOx emissions under 400,000 tons annually, compared to about 500,000 tons for the less stringent option. The current baseline is over 900,000 tons of NOx per year.\n\nBut one state regulator said the interim NOx rule is missing the bigger picture – a transition to zero-emissions trucks.\n\n“The real goal here is zero emissions vehicles, that’s really California’s more compelling priority on this,” California Air Resources Board member Daniel Sperling told CNN. “This is a transition issue really. NOx is a problem; it forms ozone, but we’ll get more NOx reduction with zero-emissions vehicles.”\n\nZero-emissions trucks are on the horizon\n\nWhile the EPA’s new rule focuses heavily on cutting nitrous oxide emissions, the trucking industry and state pollution regulators are watching for the emergence of zero-emissions trucks.\n\nThe California Air Resources Board – which sets California vehicle emissions standards – already passed its own rule requiring truck makers to sell more zero-emission trucks in the state, and other states are following.\n\nEPA’s rule does not go that far – yet.\n\nThe agency announced Monday it is looking at updating federal regulations due to “these market shifts to zero-emission technologies, which the agency did not foresee when it issued the ‘Phase 2’ GHG emission standards” for medium and heavy-duty vehicles. But the EPA is still taking comment on new greenhouse gas rules for heavy-duty vehicles, not issuing a new rule just yet.\n\nThe trucking industry has been wary of a fast shift to zero-emissions vehicles, due to the increased cost of the vehicles themselves and relative lack of charging stations for heavy-duty trucks that drive all over the country.\n\n“If they don’t feel they meet the same needs, they’re just going to keep their old trucks longer,” said Jed Mandel, president of the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association – a trade association representing engine and truck manufacturers.\n\nMandel added that while zero-emissions “technology is coming and we want it to come,” truck manufacturers also “don’t want this rule to be so stringent as to take away the investment needed for the real prize which is zero-emissions vehicles.”\n\nCalifornia setting its own standard is important because of the state’s massive economy, which has a huge influence on the national market. The Biden administration is soon poised to reinstate California’s waiver to set its own stricter vehicle emission standards – which was rolled back by the Trump administration.\n\nThe federal waiver will be a major step in the state being able to move the ball forward on zero-emissions trucks, which Sperling said will be going a step further than the federal government.\n\n“Clearly California has taken the lead, and California wants the feds to closely follow,” Sperling said, adding that is important because the majority of trucks traveling through California are out-of-state trucks that don’t have to comply with the stricter standards.\n\n“I would say California wants everyone to go forward fast” on zero-emissions vehicles, Sperling said. “If you look at political realities, the attitude is yes, we have to be the leader because the feds are not, and other states are not following fast.”", "authors": ["Ella Nilsen"], "publish_date": "2022/03/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/business/epa-heavy-truck-emissions-rule-climate/index.html", "title": "EPA finalizes tougher pollution standards for big trucks and buses ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe Biden administration on Tuesday finalized tougher pollution standards for heavy-duty vehicles like large trucks, delivery vans and buses starting with model year 2027.\n\nThe Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule is the first update to the standards since 2001. It will cut down on the smog and soot from heavy-duty trucks by requiring them to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides by nearly 50% by 2045, and will be more than 80% stronger than the current standard, the agency said.\n\nEPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement the new rule would protect public health, “especially the health of 72 million people living near truck freight routes in America, including our most vulnerable populations in historically overburdened communities.”\n\nThe agency estimated the rule will result in up to 2,900 fewer premature deaths, 18,000 fewer cases of childhood asthma and 6,700 fewer hospital admissions.\n\nIt also estimated the rule will lead to 78,000 fewer lost days of work, 1.1 million fewer lost school days for kids and an overall net benefit of $29 billion.\n\nTransportation is the largest source of planet-warming emissions in the US, with average household vehicles making up over 50% of the sector’s total emissions. Heavy-duty vehicles like big trucks and buses make up about 23%; fewer of them are on the roads, but because of their size and their fuel requirements, they contribute an outsized proportion of air pollution and planet-warming emissions.\n\nA Mack LR fully electric trash truck was parked behind the speakers’ podium during a ceremony to announce the new rules.\n\nFollowing the ceremony, Mack spokesman John Mies said the company supported long-term zero emissions goals for trucks and was also working to reduce dangerous emissions from diesel trucks. Mack is part of the Volvo Group of truck companies, which is separate from the company that makes Volvo passenger vehicles.\n\n“It’s clear that the new standard is very challenging,” Mies said in an email. “Beyond that, the rule is extremely complex, so we need time to examine it and understand what it means for our customers, our dealers and our employees.”\n\nWhile the new rule is much tougher than current standards, environmental and public health groups have called for even more stringent standards.\n\nBritt Carmon, the federal clean vehicles advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that the new rules leave more to be done and EPA should “move quickly” to transition to zero-emissions trucks.\n\n“After two decades of inaction, EPA is finally moving to cut harmful truck tailpipe pollution,” Carmon said. “But these standards fall short, and the agency missed a critical opportunity to slash soot and smog and accelerate the shift to the cleanest vehicles.”\n\nCalifornia’s new rule for heavy-duty vehicles, for example, is 90% stronger than current regulations. And earlier this year, state regulators in California critiqued EPA’s pollution rule for missing the bigger picture on the move to electric trucks.\n\nBut the agency said the rule its finalizing Tuesday is just a first step.\n\nIn spring 2023, EPA is expected to release its proposed so-called “phase 3” greenhouse gas standards for heavy duty vehicles starting in model year 2027. The agency is also expected to release new proposed light and medium-duty vehicle emissions standards for 2027 and beyond model year vehicles in the spring.\n\nRegan said these rules, in addition to climate and clean energy investments in a pair of infrastructure and climate laws already passed, “will accelerate President Biden’s ambitious agenda to overhaul the nation’s trucking fleet, deliver cleaner air, and protect people and the planet.”", "authors": ["Ella Nilsen Peter Valdes-Dapena", "Ella Nilsen", "Peter Valdes-Dapena"], "publish_date": "2022/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2019/07/29/why-these-south-mountain-students-fighting-electric-buses-pollution-clean-air/3104934002/", "title": "Why these South Mountain students are fighting for electric buses", "text": "Monica Aceves couldn’t mask her feeling of triumph.\n\n“I feel like I’m gonna cry,” she said, beaming.\n\nIt was April and Aceves had just stepped out of a school board meeting. Her senior year of high school was coming to an end and the 17-year-old had plenty on her mind: Running one last track meet with her team, the South Mountain Jaguars. Keeping her grades up before graduation. Whether to pursue college in California with the support of an athletic scholarship.\n\nBut in this precise moment, only one thing came to the forefront: one new school bus.\n\nThat evening, the school board representing Phoenix Union High School District unanimously voted to purchase its first electric school bus. The new bus, which is reserved for special-needs students, will be the first bus in the district to produce zero direct emissions.\n\nBut the district didn’t stop there. Superintendent Chad Gestson also unveiled a pilot program for acquiring more electric buses, with possible expansion into feeder districts like Roosevelt Elementary.\n\nThe board’s decision came after months of grassroots organization. Since fall 2018, a close-knit trio of high school runners — Aceves and her teammates Levin Escarcega and Erik Gómez Cruz — began campaigning for electric buses with Chispa, an environmental group that advocates for Latino communities. All three students acknowledged their track coach and Chispa member Julio Zuniga for mentoring them along the way.\n\nAir quality problems persistently plague the region: Earlier this year, the greater Phoenix area got an \"F\" for ozone and particle pollution from the American Lung Association. The organization also ranked Phoenix seventh for worst ozone pollution in the country.\n\nSchool buses make up a tiny fraction of vehicle fossil fuel emissions, but the pollution is concentrated near schools when drivers idle waiting for students to board. The emissions are especially harmful to younger children, whose lungs are still developing.\n\nWhile one less diesel bus on the road doesn’t seem like much, for many of the activists at the school board meeting that night, the new electric bus and subsequent pilot program signaled a small but crucial contribution toward improving the quality of life in south Phoenix.\n\nSome of Chispa's volunteers say Maricopa County has long allowed residents in south Phoenix’s low-income and predominantly Latino neighborhoods to absorb the type of environmental degradation that wealthier and whiter neighborhoods get to avoid.\n\n“I can be doing anything else, but I just like to help people,” Aceves said from her home, prior to the board meeting. “I like to stand up for my community because they deserve a better environment, a better place to live in.”\n\nWitnessing a teammate's asthma attack catalyzed her role in Chispa's electric school bus campaign. Escarcega and Gómez soon joined the efforts and together they showed up to school board meetings to push their cause.\n\nThey're not alone.\n\nChispa's supporters include mothers and fathers who want to improve their neighborhoods so their children can grow up in a healthier environment. There are also the educators and scientists who say the school system bears responsibility for their students' well-being, which extends beyond the classroom.\n\nDuring cross country and track seasons, athletes run outside almost every day. Escarcega described how some days it feels harder to breathe. He saw how students with asthma had different experiences than him, from running with two inhalers to selling snacks on campus to pay for medication.\n\nUltimately, they all want cleaner air for everyone.\n\nToxic facilities in minority neighborhoods\n\nSouth Phoenix doesn't have official boundary lines. First Things First, a state resource center for early childhood development, defines south Phoenix as the area that runs from 48th Street to 27th Avenue, bordered by Salt River to the north and South Mountain Park to the south.\n\nAbout 72% of children under six in south Phoenix identify as Latino and 12% of children identify as black or African American, according to census data presented by First Things First.\n\nA trip down Central Avenue, from Camelback Road to Baseline Road, shows how the landscape transforms just south of Salt River. Scrap metal yards and undeveloped dirt lots pockmark the mix of industrial and residential neighborhoods, a stark contrast to the palm trees and glossy real estate offices near Encanto Village.\n\nHistory shows numerous examples of policies that community activists say promoted institutional racism and segregation in the Valley, from racial profiling under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio to deliberately segregating minority and non-English-speaking students from white students.\n\nDiscrimination has also influenced housing development in the Phoenix area. Like other major cities across the U.S., a history of redlining in Phoenix allowed banks to deny home loans to minorities and block them from areas that make up today's prized, historic neighborhoods, such as Encanto Palmcroft, Roosevelt and Willo.\n\nA 2005 paper by Arizona State University refers to this segregation as “Sunbelt apartheid” — a system that encouraged decision-makers to “place noxious facilities in the middle of minority communities.”\n\nAfter the April school board meeting, Superintendent Gestson told the audience that Phoenix Union has an obligation as an institution to address injustice.\n\n“As we shared within our team, you don’t see high levels of pollutants in suburban communities,” Gestson said. “You don’t see companies build large factories in largely white, middle class communities. They are in our footprint and the only way for that to change is institutions like Phoenix Union to not just focus on the sustainability, but an institution that wants to take the lead in really tackling the issues that have been around for generations.”\n\nThere’s some research to support his claim. A 2015 study found that in the United States, growing concentrations of people of color appeared to “attract” new hazardous waste facilities.\n\nZooming in to just metropolitan Phoenix, a 2007 study by ASU compared Phoenix's Census data with air pollution levels and found that “Census block groups with lower neighborhood socioeconomic status, higher proportions of Latino immigrants, and higher proportions of renters are exposed to higher levels of criteria air pollutants.”\n\nMaricopa County has 10 active monitors that measure fine particle pollution. In 2018, the west Phoenix, Durango Complex and south Phoenix monitors were in the top three for highest annual average of fine particle concentration.\n\nGestson has spent nearly two decades working in minority-majority schools in low-income communities in Phoenix. A Teach for America alumnus, Gestson came to Phoenix Union in 2009 after working at Isaac and Roosevelt Elementary School Districts. All three school districts serve a mostly Hispanic student population, the majority of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.\n\nDistrict board member Stanford Prescott is a 2007 graduate from South Mountain High School and holds a bachelor's degree in sustainability from ASU, as well as a master's degree in nonprofit leadership and management. For him, addressing environmental issues means addressing inequality too.\n\n“As someone who grew up in south Phoenix, one thing I noticed was some neighborhoods are treated differently,” Prescott said. “Some neighborhoods are clean, have sidewalks and parks and speed bumps. Some do not. For me, my interest in sustainability comes from my personal experiences seeing how inequality spilled into the lived environment. How the impact of climate change has a disproportionate impact on people with low income and people without means to adapt.”\n\nHe had met with Zuniga and Chispa a couple times during the school year, and he credited the students from his alma mater, Aceves, Escarcega and Gómez, for initiating the serious push of electric buses.\n\n“Sometimes when political decisions are made, voices of students are lost,” Prescott said. “It’s important that they are included in the information process.”\n\nSo how exactly did three teenagers help persuade local officials to invest in their community’s air quality?\n\nA high school track captain took a stand\n\nIn the fall of 2018, Aceves watched her teammate double over coughing during a cross-country training at Cesar Chavez Park.\n\n“She was having an attack,” Aceves recalled. “And then she didn’t show up (to practice) for a whole week. She went to the hospital. I felt really bad because I’m the captain and I care about my team. I just felt like I had to do something.”\n\nAceves had been captain of the South Mountain High School track team for two years. She spoke about that teammate when she and Gómez formally addressed the school board on Feb. 7.\n\nFor her and other high school athletes, running wasn't just a hobby. Track and field scholarships finance opportunities for students to go to college. If the conditions students run in affect their performance, then it affects their chance at getting a scholarship, Aceves argued.\n\n\"I understand this issue might seem distant if you live and work in nicer parts of the district, but it is very well present around me and my everyday life,\" Aceves told the school board on a March 7 meeting.\n\nAceves was nervous before going up to the podium. The district holds board meetings about once a month and public speakers get up to three minutes to talk.\n\nShe had prepared a speech on her phone and read it to herself beforehand. She asked people for advice about how to approach the board members, to help her edit her speech. Now she wondered how her audience would react, if they would even care.\n\n“I try to be positive,” Aceves said. “I don’t have a lot of frustration moments. Once you start being negative, everything starts going wrong.”\n\nDuring her speech, she mentioned another runner, a male student with asthma. She described him getting harassed for selling potato chips out of his backpack at school so he could afford his inhalers, a story Zuniga affirmed.\n\nHis situation made her sad. It's not fair, Aceves said quietly in her home.\n\nHome for Aceves is a house in south Phoenix where she lives with her parents, four siblings and an energetic young bulldog. She's lived in this neighborhood for most of her life since moving from Guadalajara, Mexico.\n\nIt was in Phoenix where she began competitive running, emulating her older brother, Bryan, who also ran. The mile and the 800-meter races are her specialty.\n\nYears before that she started watching the TV series, \"Grey’s Anatomy.\" The hospital setting and fictional doctors, like her favorite character Meredith Grey, inspired her to consider a career in nursing. She likes poring over medical websites, reading about surgical procedures and how to treat injuries.\n\nHer teammate’s asthma attack wasn’t the first time she had witnessed one. Not long after moving to Phoenix, Bryan suffered his first asthma attack. Aceves was around 6 then and doesn’t remember much of the details today, just the panicked drive to the hospital as her scared mother told Bryan to relax. She remembers her big brother lying on the emergency room bed with a breathing mask on his face. A nurse gave her ice cream so she wouldn’t cry.\n\nAfter seeing her teammates run with inhalers, Aceves began reading about asthma on the internet. When her track coach Julio Zuniga told her about Chispa's campaign to fight diesel pollution, Aceves started thinking about the connection between air quality and health, specifically, how air pollution could affect not only her classmates with asthma, but also her younger siblings who have developing lungs.\n\n“I just want them to have a healthy life,” Aceves said. “I think about all the things that could happen to them.”\n\nDEADLY AIR: Pollution in Phoenix harms asthmatics\n\nEscarcega, who’s known Aceves for two years, described her as a leader both on and off the track.\n\n“She has crazy energy and she’s not afraid of anyone,” Escarcega said. “She stands up for herself and others and she’ll just do it. Whatever it is, she’ll do it.”\n\nGómez described how Aceves took her advocacy to the classroom and talked about a school project where they had to give a presentation on a global issue.\n\n“And she chose pollution,” Gómez said. “And she started talking about Chispa and then the teacher was really interested.”\n\nThat April, with graduation on the horizon, Aceves was looking forward to prom and summer. She felt proud of herself for speaking up at board meetings, but if her persistence led to real results, she would feel prouder knowing that it paid off, Aceves said.\n\nAt the time she hadn't decided yet if she wanted to leave for college in California. She was also considering South Mountain Community College and Benedictine University in Mesa. The hardest part about leaving Phoenix would be how much she would miss her family.\n\nAfter school board meetings, she liked coming home and relaying what happened to her mom, also named Monica, who waits up for her so Aceves doesn’t have to eat alone. Aceves found comfort in her support and said her mom never thought her daughter would take an interest in the environment.\n\nAceves doesn’t pretend electric vehicles don’t come with their own challenges. The upfront cost presents a hard sell to school districts with limited funding and she understands electric vehicles require additional infrastructure.\n\n“I know it’s not easy because you also have to set up stations to charge the buses,” Aceves said. “(The buses) could turn off. But in the future it’s gonna help. We’re gonna have cleaner air and people won’t be sick or breathing nasty air.”\n\nVolkswagen's scandal leads to funding\n\nThe Clean Buses for Healthy Niños campaign was born in the aftermath of the 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal. At its helm: Chispa, a nonprofit that mobilizes Latino families on environmental issues.\n\nAfter the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accused Volkswagen of manipulating emissions numbers, the automaker admitted it cheated U.S. federal emissions tests by designing cars that would fool regulators. Volkswagen installed deceptive software that affected 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide.\n\nAs a result, Volkswagen agreed to spend up to $14.73 billion to settle the cheating allegation, up to $10.03 billion to compensate customers and $4.7 billion on projects that invest in clean vehicle technology and pollution mitigation.\n\nOf that $4.7 billion, Arizona would receive $57 million in Volkswagen settlement money over 10 years. Most of that settlement goes to a plan Gov. Doug Ducey approved in 2018, the Lower-Emission School Bus Program.\n\nSchool districts, plus the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind, could apply for funding to purchase and replace buses that are more than 15 years old or have more than 100,000 miles.\n\nFAILED:Arizona school bus safety, an investigation\n\nTo qualify for funding, the school district must have 60% or more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. The district must also own the bus that's up for replacement.\n\nOlder buses tend to pollute more because they have less fuel-efficient technology and the EPA recommends buses built before 1998 should be top priority for replacement. As of April 16, 2019, Arizona school districts have won funding for 332 new buses.\n\nSeeing an opportunity from the Volkswagen settlement, Chispa launched the Clean Buses for Healthy Niños campaign in six states to encourage school districts to replace their old buses with electric ones. In Phoenix, Chispa Arizona targeted three school districts: Cartwright Elementary, Roosevelt Elementary and Phoenix Union High School.\n\nThe local chapter focused on those three districts because many of their Phoenix-based members are already active in those communities and have children who attend schools in the districts, said Laura Dent, executive director of Chispa Arizona.\n\n\"Many of our members call south Phoenix home,\" Dent said. \"These residents know and love their community and have been leaders in advocating for an improved environment. We all deserve clean energy, clean air and healthy neighborhoods.\"\n\nThe headquarters for Chispa Arizona sits in a two-story building less than half a mile down the street from the Arizona state Capitol. It neighbors the office for Puente, a migrant advocacy organization. A sign at Chispa’s entrance expresses solidarity with No Más Muertes, a humanitarian group that provides water and aid to undocumented immigrants crossing the desert.\n\nChispa's team, which communicates in a mix of Spanish and English, meets in and out of the headquarters throughout the week. Members include communications director Vianey Olivarría and promotores, which is what Chispa calls its volunteer leaders.\n\nMany of the promotores are mothers, so with affection, Dent refers to some of them as “our mamás.” This year, the promotores have covered various ground, from showing up at the Capitol in support of the Public Lands Day bill to canvassing the streets to register voters ahead of district elections.\n\nFor Chispa, there can be no environmental justice without social justice.\n\n\"Latinos and people of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change and air pollution through higher rates of respiratory illness, extreme heat, and rising utility bills,\" Olivarría said in an email statement on behalf of Chispa.\n\n\"While Latinos care deeply about environmental issues and effective solutions, we are often left out of the conversation when it comes to developing ambitious, just solutions to fighting against climate change and for healthy communities.\"\n\nYears of research also back up mounting evidence of this disproportionate burden in the United States.\n\nFrom the federal government’s National Climate Assessment, released November 2018: “Low-income communities and some communities of color are often already overburdened with poor environmental conditions and are disproportionately affected by, and less resilient to, the health impacts of climate change.”\n\nA study published in March 2019 quantified for the first time the racial gap between who causes air pollution and who breathes it. Scientists found that people who identify as white spend more money on goods and services that cause pollution than those who identify as black and Hispanic, but blacks and Hispanics experience more exposure to that pollution.\n\n“Even though minorities are contributing less to the overall problem of air pollution, they are affected by it more,” the study’s white co-author, engineer Jason Hill, told USA Today. “Is it fair (that) I create more pollution and somebody else is disproportionately affected by it?”\n\nSaving money with cleaner technology\n\nRighting inequity in Phoenix is one of the driving reasons behind the Clean Buses for Healthy Niños campaign, said Julio Zuniga, a track coach at South Mountain High School.\n\n“It’s one bus now, but it opens this door for every big institution that uses commercial vehicles to go the same route because a lot of them have the funds,” Zuniga said. “And it’s simply the right thing to do. We have the technology to have a safer and cleaner environment.”\n\nThat technology might not be accessible to poor people who can’t afford it, but it’s accessible to the institutions meant to support them, he added.\n\nJim Cummings, communicators director for Glendale Elementary, said there were three reasons his district chose to invest in new, propane-fueled buses rather than traditional diesel buses.\n\n“The first thing is about being a good neighbor,” Cummings said. “If you saw fumes from diesel buses, you would want to be better stewards of the environment.”\n\nThe second and third reasons come down to cost saving. Propane buses have less operating costs because a gallon of propane is less expensive, Cummings said. The buses also have simpler engines and are less expensive to maintain, he added.\n\nEven if propane buses have a higher price tag, the price is only slightly higher and it doesn’t take long to make up the price difference in savings later, Cummings said.\n\nIn a 2014 cost analysis, the U.S. Department of Energy found some school districts saved nearly 50% on cost per mile for fuel and maintenance when they used propane buses compared with diesel. The federal agency also found that districts could recoup the incremental cost of propane buses and fueling infrastructure in three to eight years.\n\nCartwright District confirmed that it used the state grant to purchase five 2020 diesel-powered Blue Bird buses up to $550,000 in value, according to documents provided by Dawn Mayfield, executive assistant to Zeek Ojeh, assistant superintendent at Cartwright.\n\nUpgrades like Cartwright's can also make a drastic reduction in pollution, based on calculations using the EPA's Diesel Emissions Quantifier.\n\nA 2020 diesel engine emits about 98% less fine particle pollution and 92% less nitrogen oxide, one of the gases that forms ozone pollution, than a 2000 diesel engine.\n\nRoosevelt and Phoenix Union did not confirm how they would use their grant money. Craig Pletenik, communications director for Phoenix Union, said his district is purchasing its electric bus solely from bond money.\n\nAlthough an electric school bus can save money in the long run with lower fuel and maintenance costs than a diesel bus, it's the upfront sticker price that deters districts. An electric school bus could cost twice as much as diesel school bus.\n\nThe state grant of $110,000 provides only a “very little amount” of funding and the district has already applied for an additional, federal grant under the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, Pletenik said.\n\nThe federal program selects applicants on a lottery number basis. From 2012 to 2018, only one applicant in Arizona has been selected: Marana Unified School District in 2016.\n\nIf Phoenix Union is selected for the next round, the award would cover the cost of five new electric buses, Pletenik said.\n\nHigh school students ride the school bus in fewer numbers than elementary and middle school students, he conceded. But Quintin Boyce, chief administrative officer at Roosevelt District, discussed an interest in partnering their districts up, Pletenik added.\n\nPartnerships would allow schools to share the use and cost of electric charging stations, Superintendent Gestson explained during a presentation of the electric bus pilot program.\n\n“Air pollution is the biggest concern in my neighborhood,” said Phoenix resident Herlinda Calderon. Her youngest son attends Cesar Chavez Community School, which is part of Roosevelt district, and her oldest son is studying interior design at Phoenix College.\n\nHer oldest son used to have asthma and only needs an emergency inhaler now, she said. But she remembers when he had his first asthma attack at 4 months old, before she even knew what an asthma attack looked like.\n\nHer past involvement with the Arizona DREAM Act Coalition and Chispa led Calderon to pay more attention to issues that affect immigrant communities.\n\nShe likes the idea of making a change in her neighborhood, an area plagued by too many gas stations and semi-trailer trucks. If she drives through Chandler or Ahwatukee, she doesn’t see nearly as many gas stations located near residential streets, she claimed.\n\n“If you’re going to spend money, you have to look at the root of the problem,” Calderon said. For her that means improving the air they breathe, not just providing more access to medication, she said.\n\nTaking a clean-air fight to the board\n\nIt was an abnormally windy spring day, not the most ideal conditions for a race at South Mountain High School, where a visiting school was holding its track meet.\n\nSenior Erik Gómez Cruz, 17, and sophomore Levin Escarcega, 16, took a break from volunteering at the meet to sit under a tree and go over what they planned to say the next day.\n\nThe boys had just received unexpected news.\n\nCoach Zuniga told them the next day’s school board meeting was going to be different: The board planned to vote on whether to purchase an electric school bus. From his experience, the votes were usually unanimous and went in favor of whichever item was up for consideration.\n\nStill, they had to be sure. They said it was important for them to speak up before the vote, a final show of solidarity.\n\nEscarcega attended the school board meetings, but usually didn’t go up to the podium. Public speaking made him shy. Instead Escarcega would help Aceves write her speech sometimes, and left the talking to her and Gómez while supporting them from the audience.\n\nBut on this day he opened the notes app on his iPhone to show the speech he prepared, wiping away the windblown dust on his screen. He flipped to the weather app, which is where he looked for air quality updates. There was an advisory for high air pollution that day.\n\n“Levin is just a smart kid,” Zuniga said in his office at Chispa. “He’s super nice and he’s super articulate. He loves helping people and he’s, I mean, if you just spend a day with him, he’s going to help like five different people in one day. He just does whatever he can. And I think (Clean Buses for Healthy Niños) just clicked with him.”\n\nEscarcega liked asking questions. He asked his coach questions. He asked his teachers questions, describing his AP U.S. History teacher as particularly helpful. And if she didn’t have an answer, she would find out for him.\n\nHe also kept up with the news online, which gave him both answers and more questions. Either way, he knew he wasn’t just asking questions for himself. He was asking for people like his parents, who supported his interests, but weren’t as involved because work and preparing for the arrival of his new baby siblings kept them busy.\n\n“It’s important to know what’s going on around you and what’s what, 'cause it’s affecting you and the people you love and your friends,” Escarcega said. “You have to know what’s going on and if there’s something you could do about it.”\n\nHe thinks some people don’t care about what’s going on, even if it's impacting their lives, only because they’re uninformed and don’t know it’s happening to begin with.\n\n“It’s also hard because there’s a lot of hardworking families busy working day to night and they don’t have time to do this work that I’m doing,” Escarcega added. “So that’s why I got to do it for them.”\n\nEscarcega, along with Aceves and Gómez, didn’t think it was fair that breathing in poor air made it harder for their team to run.\n\nGómez transferred from Tempe High School for the 2018-2019 school year, and in the fall began taking an interest in the electric bus campaign.\n\n“You know, as a high schooler, you’re not really taught to have that initiative to reach out,” Zuniga said. “And he did.”\n\nBut like Escarcega, Gómez also had questions. One of them was: Were electric buses really cheaper in the long run? In the beginning, he expressed doubt because didn't schools have other needs, like books and supplies?\n\n“And he’s right,” Zuniga said. “I like that he’s questioning it, that he’s doing research,” Zuniga said. “He’s not just following.”\n\nGómez began looking up different buses, comparing prices and looking at fuel costs. It’s a habit he started picking up in seventh grade, when a history teacher encouraged his curiosity, Gómez said.\n\n“I had the privilege of being involved in this group at school called teen court,” he said. “We did, like, a lot of court procedures. We’d work on cases and stuff, so that’s where I got my knowledge to do my own risk (analysis) and yeah, I do my own research a lot.”\n\nGómez said he tried to collect information from different sources and read articles from multiple news outlets to avoid bias.\n\nBoth he and Escarcega were born in and grew up in south Phoenix. Since graduating, Gómez has chosen to stay and work in Phoenix. There were still hometown issues he cared about, like advocating for solar energy. The industry could provide jobs for people and lower utility bills, Gómez thinks. He expressed disappointment that Prop 127, a renewable energy measure, failed to pass in 2018.\n\nStill, he was hopeful for the future. One bus was just the beginning.\n\n'My daughter is my cause'\n\nBlanca Abarca, a Chispa promotora, expressed dismay at the times she saw plumes of smoke blowing out of tail pipes, or volunteering at her daughter’s school field trips and finding that the air conditioning on the bus didn’t work.\n\n“Mi hija es mi causa,” Abarca said at one of her weekly Chispa committee meetings, which means \"my daughter is my cause.\" That week, she and other promotores met in a rental home, which they’ve asked The Republic not to identify. They feared retribution from the landlord, who they say would oppose any kind of political campaigning on the property, Abarca said.\n\nIn the kitchen, a pot of pozole verde simmered on the stove. On the wall, the image of Maria Magdalena seemed to gaze over them.\n\nAbarca spoke at length at the meeting and touched upon a range of topics, from light rail expansion to their children who would one day enter voting age. She lamented the struggle of recruiting immigrants, who are sympathetic to Chispa's cause, but don’t want to draw public scrutiny.\n\nAbarca has lived in south Phoenix for 18 years and her daughter Isabella went to school at Ignacio Conchos Elementary School. Her involvement with Chispa began after she spent time volunteering at her daughter’s schools, photocopying textbooks and cutting out wall decorations.\n\nShe knows parents with asthmatic children and they don’t connect air pollution to their children’s health, she said. Investing in electric buses would not only show that the school district cares, but it would open up a greater conversation about how to improve air quality for children’s health, she said.\n\nIn some instances, it can be difficult for parents to get news about what’s going on in Phoenix, especially if English isn’t their native tongue, she said with frustration. She is one of the parents who relies on the aid of translators.\n\nStacey Mortensen, the Western division director for the American Lung Association, said doctors cannot pinpoint the cause of asthma. But she’s certain of one thing: what’s in the air can worsen or trigger health problems.\n\n“If someone lives in a high-traffic area, or within five miles of a freeway, they are getting exposed to poorer air quality than somebody else,” Mortensen said.\n\nThe 2016 Arizona Asthma Burden Report cited chronic lower respiratory disease — such as asthma, emphysema and chronic bronchitis — as the third-leading cause of death in Arizona, responsible for almost 3,300 deaths a year. At least one in 10 Arizona youths, 17 years and younger, also are reported to have asthma.\n\n“Bigger particles, our body’s defense system can cough and sneeze,” Mortensen said. “Really small ones lodge in our lung. That’s a problem with somebody with lung disease or compromised lungs already.”\n\nShe’s referring to PM 2.5, particle pollutants finer than a fleck of dust, finer than the width of a single strand of hair. Vehicle emissions, smoke from wildfires and wood burning, and industrial gases form this fine particle pollution.\n\nRace gaps persist in health care access\n\nCar-centric Phoenix has a serious air pollution problem.\n\nFrom Phoenix's congested freeways and heavily trafficked roads, cars and trucks spew harmful nitrogen oxide and particle pollution into the air. On days with stagnant air, that particle pollution pools in the Valley. On long, sunny days, vehicle emissions react to form ozone pollution. Since ozone is colorless, it’s hard to tell from sight alone whether a clear day with blue skies has high ozone pollution.\n\nEPA data shows air pollution around the country, including Phoenix, has fallen since the federal Clean Air Act of 1990. But the downward trend belies a less rosy outlook: air quality gains seem to be slowing down.\n\nA study published by the National Academy of Sciences showed pollution levels from nitrogen oxide fell 7% from 2005 to 2009, but only dropped 1.7% from 2011 to 2015.\n\nWhile Phoenix can’t change its valley geography or hours of sunshine, the city can address areas where people may be disproportionately affected by air pollution.\n\nSchools are one those places. Children, whose bodies are still growing, can develop weakened lungs if they’re exposed to high levels of fine particle pollution on a daily basis, Mortensen said.\n\nThen there are the race gaps in public health. The American Lung Association declared in a 2011 report about disparities in lung health: “Compared to non-Hispanic whites, (Hispanics) are more likely to live and work in environments that make them sick and are less likely to have access to health care.” The Arizona Asthma Burden Report also noted that nationwide, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to visit the emergency department for asthma care.\n\nDIRTY AIR:Phoenix ranked 7th for worst ozone pollution in the nation\n\n“Some of it may be access to care,” Mortensen said, “if they don’t have a provider, or they are not going to a provider. Without having regular visits with a physician, they are not getting self-management information. They’re not getting prescriptions. A chronic disease takes regular management and part of that management is regularly seeing your doctor.”\n\nIf people have a hard time accessing regular check-ups, the burden will fall on emergency departments, Mortensen said.\n\nIn 2016, ASU's Cronkite News analyzed hospital emergency room admissions by zip code between 2009 and 2015. The results showed children living in some areas, like south and west Phoenix, Maryvale or neighborhoods along Interstate 17, were more likely to need urgent medical care for asthma than children living elsewhere in the Valley.\n\nAs part of its outreach, the American Lung Association targets areas in Phoenix that might have a high need for the Open Airways for School curriculum, a six-week, in-school program that teaches students about asthma and self-management.\n\nGetting access to schools presents a challenge, though, especially when schools already have many other priorities, Mortensen said.\n\n“Schools are very busy and get asked to do a lot of things,” she said. “Our programming is extra. But when I do get into a school, every time it’s a win.”\n\nMortensen described the positive feedback she received from nurses and parents by the end of each program, about children who no longer needed reminders to take their medication or a student who got his father to quit smoking because it triggered his asthma.\n\nShe said there is also another way schools can reduce pollution exposure to children with developing lungs: Reduce unnecessary idling in front of schools.\n\nWhen drivers leave their engines running without moving, it wastes fuel and pollutes the air in and around the vehicle. This can be especially harmful at elementary schools where children are shorter and breathing air closer to the tailpipe.\n\nIn a hot city like Phoenix, drivers are likely to idle to keep their air conditioning on.\n\nTrish Koman, a former EPwho co-founded the agency's Clean Bus program, said schools can get creative to reduce idling, perhaps allowing drivers to go inside the building to stay cool or planting trees for shade.\n\n\"Drivers have an outdated idea about idling, so education could be a strong component,\" Koman said, referring to the popular myth that restarting a vehicle burns more fuel than leaving it idling. In reality, idling burns more fuel than restarting the vehicle.\n\nOlder vehicles with older, less fuel-efficient technology compound the idling problem, Koman added.\n\n\"School buses are not a big source of pollution, but they are visible and close to a vulnerable population — children,\" Koman said. \"Many communities wanted to begin with school bus emissions. It's only the first step.\"\n\nSince air pollution is everywhere, it's important to reduce all sources near children — starting with local emissions, but also taking the next step toward the broader, national picture, Koman said.\n\n\"The Trump EPA admin is trying to roll back emissions standards,\" Koman said. \"If people are concerned about children's health, look at the larger Clean Air Act requirements.\"\n\nAs of June 7, 2019, the Trump administration has reversed 10 air pollution and emissions regulations, the New York Times reported. Twelve additional rollbacks are still in progress.\n\nCoach calls this a good start\n\nIt’s the day after the school board vote and Zuniga was still in high spirits. The night before, the meeting room was so packed it became standing-room only. Three high school robotics teams had qualified for the Robotics World Championships and had showed up decked in team shirts. A buzz filled the air. Chispa members took up a couple of rows behind Zuniga, his students and his family.\n\nAfter the board approved the first bus in the electric bus pilot program, the room broke out in applause and cheers. It was a night of several victories: The room would break out in cheers again later when the board presented each robotics team with a $5,000 check for their trip to competition.\n\nLater, Chispa would gather in a separate room across the hall to process their win and take group photos. Aceves, Gómez and Escarcega were speaking over each other and they couldn’t stop smiling. They were also thinking ahead already.\n\n“Now the question is: What’s next?” Escarcega said.\n\nZuniga was proud of his students, but if there’s one thing he also wants them to learn, it’s that they won’t win everything they fight for. Losses will happen too in the future, but they shouldn’t let the losses discourage them, he said.\n\nAs an immigrant rights activist, he remembers how devastating it felt when the DREAM Act failed time and time again to pass. The bill would have granted residency status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. The election of President Trump was another blow, he said.\n\nWhile a local school board decision might not make as widespread an impact as a congressional decision or national election, Zuniga thinks small decisions can create waves too.\n\n“Usually the first people, the innovators, they get a lot of push back because people can’t accept their things,” Zuniga said.\n\nA lot of people don't like change, but if one the largest school districts in Arizona can get the ball rolling, other districts will follow and it can get state officials to pay attention, Zuniga said with excitement.\n\n\"I see it as an opening, a really big door and then we’re going to get bigger things, maybe on a state level, maybe federal.\"\n\nPriscilla Totiyapungprasert is a reporter at the Arizona Republic. You can reach her at Priscilla.Totiya@azcentral.com or 602-444-8092. Follow her on Twitter: @PriscillaTotiya.\n\nEnvironmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. For more stories visit environment.azcentral.com or follow OurGrandAZ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.\n\nSubscribe to azcentral.com today to support local journalism.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/07/29"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/27/politics/biden-infrastructure-law/index.html", "title": "What Biden's infrastructure law has done so far | CNN Politics", "text": "Washington CNN —\n\nStates and local communities are ramping up plans to spend the billions of dollars provided by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed last year.\n\nThe law, enacted about 100 days ago, will provide $550 billion for new federal infrastructure investments over the next five years. Roughly a fifth of the pot will be available in 2022 for a variety of projects, including roads, bridges, rail, water systems, airports, broadband and public transit.\n\nPassed with bipartisan support, the law marks one of the biggest wins for President Joe Biden. The administration, as well as members of Congress, are eager to show off the bridges, roads and other projects the federal money will help build.\n\nThere is a massive backlog of infrastructure needs in the US awaiting funding, but it takes time to get projects off the ground. For the most part, money is still making its way to the states and local agencies for construction that could start in the spring.\n\nThe nation’s infrastructure system, which earned a C- score from the American Society of Civil Engineers last year, is in desperate need of money. About one-third of all bridges in the US need major repair work or replacement, according to a recent report from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.\n\nThe collapse of a Pittsburgh bridge earlier this year – hours before Biden was scheduled to visit the city to tout the new law – has underscored the urgency.\n\nHow much money has gone out?\n\nThe White House said Wednesday that it has made about $100 billion available through a number of programs so far.\n\nSome of the money is distributed through what’s known as formula programs, which deliver funds directly to states, and some money is available through competitive grant programs that require state and local agencies to apply.\n\nSeveral funding programs have already launched, releasing billions of funds for highways, bridges and airports.\n\nUsing the infrastructure funds to strengthen the nation’s supply chains is a big priority for the Biden administration. One of the first announcements it made was about awarding more than $241 billion in grants to 25 port projects, including building a new locomotive facility in Long Beach, California, and the construction of an off-dock container support facility in Tacoma, Washington. The administration made another nearly $450 million available in grants for port improvements this month.\n\nA formula funding program that will help states create a network of electric vehicle charging stations was opened by the departments of Transportation and Energy earlier this month. It will make $615 million available this fiscal year and is set to disburse $5 billion over five years.\n\nThe Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it will use $1 billion for the cleanup and restoration of the Great Lakes region, with $200 million allocated for this year.\n\nWhen will Americans see shovels in the ground?\n\nIt’s mostly up to the states and local agencies to decide how and when to spend the money – within the guidelines spelled out by the law.\n\n“This is not a right now kind of deal,” said Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor who was tapped by Biden to oversee the implementation of the infrastructure law.\n\nIn an interview with CNN Wednesday, Landrieu declined to outline a time frame for when Americans could see shovels in the ground.\n\n“As soon as the states are ready, they can start. The answer is going to depend on how ready they are to move,” he said.\n\nFunneling the billions of dollars to the states is a heavy lift that requires coordination from several agencies on the federal level with state-level officials. In January, Landrieu asked the states to name their own infrastructure coordinator to help ease the process. Twenty-five have done so to date, he said.\n\nThe administration has also launched an “infrastructure school” webinar series to help communities learn how to access the aid.\n\nSimple projects, like paving a highway, could be the first kind of effort a state tackles. But other more complex projects, like building a new bridge, may not start for months – if not years.\n\n“The good thing is, even if it does take a little bit longer, we’re getting started today instead of years from now,” said Elaine Nessle, executive director of the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors.\n\nMany states have projects that they have been planning for years, just waiting for increased financial assistance.\n\n“I think public agencies are ready to move forward. These projects are much more than just a twinkle in someone’s eye,” Nessle said.\n\nA congressional holdup\n\nExperts told CNN that the disbursement of the money is happening along the time frame they expected – except for one holdup.\n\nDue to a budgeting quirk, some of the money provided by the infrastructure law cannot be spent until Congress passes the fiscal year 2022 appropriations bill. The federal government is currently funded by a stopgap bill known as a continuing resolution, though lawmakers are optimistic they can come to an agreement on a full-year funding package by March 11.\n\nStill, that leaves some money “not yet spendable,” said Susan Howard, director of policy and government relations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.\n\nThat includes a portion of the funds slated for the federal highway program and public transit programs.\n\n“If we get too far down the road without a fiscal year spending package, we begin to risk projects being delayed,” Howard said.\n\nThere are other potential challenges ahead that Howard and the Biden administration are keeping an eye on. The rising costs of materials and labor could mean that the infrastructure dollars can’t be stretched as far as first expected. Not only are construction workers needed, but public agencies may also need to hire more grant writers to apply for the funds.\n\nThe White House is also working to make sure the money is used efficiently and to prevent fraud and abuse of the funds.", "authors": ["Katie Lobosco"], "publish_date": "2022/02/27"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_22", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/real-estate/2023/09/18/new-school-school-additions-and-1100-homes-planned-in-smyrna/70864823007/", "title": "New school, school additions and 1,100 homes planned in Smyrna", "text": "The Smyrna School District is planning a new school and additions to two others as the community continues to grow including two housing developments with a combined 1,135 lots.\n\nThe new fourth and fifth grade school will have a capacity of 600 students on the west side of Rabbit Chase Lane across from Sunnyside Elementary.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/09/18"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/05/05/kent-county-delaware-school-board-elections-2023-your-guide-to-candidates/70178729007/", "title": "Kent County school board elections 2023: Your guide to candidates", "text": "While often sparsely attended in past years, school board meetings in some communities are becoming more crowded and controversial with topics like in-person vs. virtual instruction, mask mandates, safety concerns, bullying, transgender policies and parents' involvement in curriculum choices.\n\nIn Kent County, residents will have the chance to choose representatives on boards during elections Tuesday, May 9, in Smyrna, Caesar Rodney and Milford school districts, while three districts don't have elections – Capital, Lake Forest and Woodbridge – because candidates were unopposed.\n\nHow do I vote in Delaware school board elections? The basics\n\nVoters must be at least 18 years old and live in the district where they are casting a ballot. Proof of ID and address will be requested, such as a driver's license, ID card or U.S. mail with street address. Being registered to vote in state and federal elections is not required, nor is having children in schools.\n\nPolls will open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., May 9, with various locations across each district. Voters can also request an absentee ballot.\n\nVOTE411League of Women Voters school board election guide\n\nCapital\n\nNo election. Incumbent candidate Sean P.M. Christiansen was unopposed for the four-year, at-large seat.\n\nDelaware's school board election guide:Who's running in New Castle County?\n\nMore:What to know about school board elections in Sussex County. Elections to be held Tuesday.\n\nCaesar Rodney, four-year term, at-large seat\n\nPolling places\n\nAllen Frear Elementary, 238 Sorghum Mill Road, Camden-Wyoming\n\nW.B. Simpson Elementary, 5 Old North Road, Wyoming\n\nW. Reily Brown Elementary, 360 Webbs Lane, Dover\n\nTawanna Prophet Brinkley, Magnolia\n\nBackground: A school counselor in the Lake Forest District for seven years, Prophet Brinkley was previously a paraprofessional at Fifer Middle School and a preschool teacher for the Early Childhood Assistance Program. She has two children who have graduated from the CR District and one attending now. She’s served as a board member at Early College High School and for four years as first vice president for the national sorority Phi Delta Kappa-Alpha Pi Chapter. She declined to give her age or political party, saying, “I am not influenced by a political party and instead am running with the focus of what is in the best interest of our students. The group that will be influencing the decisions I make are the citizens of the Caesar Rodney School District, the families and the students.”\n\nIssues: The top three factors that motivated her to run for the board are the need for equity, transparency and more parent engagement. She said the most important issues in districts across the country, not just in CR, are staff retention and safety.\n\nWhile the district referendum April 22 didn’t pass, Prophet Brinkley said she was in favor of the plan: “The referendum would have allowed the district to increase educators' salaries and make needed repairs for our schools.”\n\nAs for controversial issues such as critical race theory, parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices and transgender policies, she said she wouldn’t comment on critical race theory specifically but, “Culturally relative/culturally responsive teaching is a priority. I believe parental involvement in the district's curriculum choices should be taken into consideration. Regarding transgender policies, I believe we should treat all individuals like we would want to be treated and that is with love, respect and support.”\n\nNicole Hill, 44, Dover\n\nBackground: Hill is the Kent County coordinator for Read Aloud Delaware since March 2021, recruiting, training and coordinating volunteers to read in childcare centers and writing grant proposals to help fund the program. She worked for the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control as an environmental scientist and program manager. She has three children who attend district schools and listed her political affiliation as independent.\n\nIssues: Hill decided to run for the board because, “I am a proud CR graduate and I received an excellent education that helped to prepare me for college and the workforce. I want the same, or better, for all of the students attending CR schools.” She is concerned about the safety of students and staff and heard other parents express concerns. “As a mom of three kids that attend schools in the district and a wife of a CR teacher, I felt that I could offer a unique perspective in these areas as well as many others.”\n\nShe said the top issue is the recruitment and retention of quality educators. She favors competitive pay, expanding the search for candidates by also recruiting outside Delaware and using alternative certification programs for those with degrees other than in education. She wants to encourage students interested in becoming teachers by promoting the high school’s education pathway.\n\nAs for the district referendum that failed April 22, Hill was initially against the plan, \"but after attending one of the district meetings explaining the need for the referendum, I felt that I had a much better understanding of why it was necessary.” She said the district should improve communication with the community and explain what’s been done to cut expenses before asking for another referendum because an increase in taxes is difficult for most families, including hers. \"However, it is challenging for the district to continue to provide high-quality programs as well as recruit and maintain quality educators without adequate operating funds,” she said.\n\nOn controversial issues like critical race theory, parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices and transgender policies, Hill said, “Students should have access to a wide variety of educational resources. Schools should foster an environment that encourages the exploration of different perspectives and ideas while ensuring that materials are developmentally appropriate. I am in favor of parental involvement in the district’s curriculum choices.”\n\nSchool boards should listen to families, review the curriculum, seek expert advice, consider alternatives and communicate the decisions transparently.\n\n“All students have the right to access quality education without discrimination,” she said.\n\nEmily Phelan, 40, Magnolia\n\nBackground: An Air Force veteran, Phelan also worked as a medical receptionist and is now a Realtor. She is the Allen Frear Elementary PTA vice president with a daughter who attends the school and a stepson who graduated from the district. As for political affiliation, she said she's fiscally conservative but more libertarian in her views that political/social agendas shouldn’t be part of public school education.\n\nIssues: She was motivated to run for the board because teachers need help, students are falling behind particularly with low reading and math scores, and change is needed. She said the top issue in the district is disciplinary discrepancy. She favors examining discipline policies to make them more consistent, with more accountability and transparency. “We need to have ground rules. They need to be clear cut,\" Phelan said. \"While younger children need more guidance in what is right and wrong, by the time the older students are getting ready to go out into the world, they need to be better prepared for the consequences of their actions.”\n\nAs for the district referendum that failed April 22, Phelan said she realizes the district needs help, but she was against this referendum because she wants more transparency about how the district is spending money. She believes schools need financial help, “but this was asking too much, too fast with too little information.”\n\nOn controversial issues like critical race theory, transgender policies and parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices, Phelan said, “I’m all for parental rights in schools. More parents should be involved. That will help with accountability and teacher-parent relations. I also believe political and social agendas shouldn’t be part of school curriculum. Maybe we could have after-school programs for parents who want that for their children.”\n\nLake Forest\n\nNo election. Incumbent candidate Jordan McCloskey was unopposed for the four-year, at-large seat.\n\nMilford, four-year term, at-large seat\n\nPolling places\n\nBenjamin Banneker Elementary School, 449 North St., Milford\n\nEvelyn I. Morris Early Childhood Center, 8609 3rd St., Lincoln\n\nLulu M. Ross Elementary School, 310 Lovers Ln., Milford\n\nMilford High School, 1019 N. Walnut St., Milford\n\nDanielle W. Deinert, 34, Lincoln\n\nBackground: Deinert graduated from the Milford School District and two of her three children are enrolled in district schools. She serves as Parent Teacher Partnership president at Morris Early Childhood Center and serves on the Parent Teacher Partnership at Ross Elementary School. She coaches for the Milford Little League and Girls On The Run.\n\nDeinert has a master's degree in special education and over 10 years of experience in teaching and administration. She declined to state her political party affiliation.\n\nIssues: Deinert wants to focus on school safety, discipline, bullying, increasing family and community engagement and academic achievement.\n\nAshlee Connell, Milford\n\nThis candidate did not respond to requests for comments from Delaware Online/The News Journal.\n\nDistrict A\n\nNo election. Candidate Victor \"Butch\" Elzey III was unopposed for the four-year term.\n\nDistrict B\n\nNo election. Candidate Jennifer Massotti was unopposed for the one-year term.\n\nSmyrna, four-year term, at-large seat\n\nPolling places\n\nSmyrna Elementary, 121 S. School Lane, Smyrna\n\nSmyrna Middle School, 700 Duck Creek Parkway, Smyrna\n\nKenton Ruritan Club, 249 S. Main St., Kenton\n\nMarie Fontaine St. Pierre, 39, Smyrna\n\nBackground: A Realtor for nearly six years, Fontaine St. Pierre has a 17-year-old son who attends Smyrna High School. For four years, she's served on the town of Smyrna Board of Adjustment which rules on zoning variance requests. She’s a member of the Alpha Beta Gamma sorority at Delaware Technical Community College, the Holly’s Club and the Boys and Girls Club board. She declined to disclose her political party, advocating a neutral approach in school board elections.\n\nIssues: Fontaine St. Pierre decided to run for the board because she wants to serve as “a liaison between parents, teachers and the community, providing the best resources for our children's education, and allowing parents to have the most influence in their children's life.” She wants to recognize and prioritize instructors' interests and concerns.\n\nShe said the most important issues in the district are continuing to push for high-quality, intellectually-rigorous education to prepare students for the competitive labor market, providing safe schools, confronting bullying and cyberbullying, and expanding self-esteem initiatives for students.\n\nAs for controversial issues such as critical race theory, transgender policies and parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices, she said, “An inclusive educational system offers various advantages, including enhanced educational quality for all students and assisting students in becoming more responsive to an inclusive attitude. This could also help with behavioral issues, self-esteem, social skills, and community involvement. All students have the right to a challenging core education and outstanding instruction from well-trained educators. Students should be allowed to have an open and honest discussion about America's past, and they deserve to see themselves and the issues that impact them reflected in their classrooms and books.”\n\nShe encourages parents to attend board meetings to address issues and share comments and insights.\n\nBobbi Jo Webber, 44, Kenton\n\nBackground: A farmer for over 25 years along with her husband on their family’s farm, she has two children, a son who attends Smyrna High School and a daughter at Clayton Intermediate School. She’s volunteered for 10 years at Sunnyside Elementary and Clayton Intermediate School, running fundraisers, helping teachers in classrooms and hosting free field trips at her family’s farm. She declined to disclose her political party: “I believe that a school board election is not a political race.\"\n\nIssues: Webber wanted to run for school board to improve safety, success of students, transparency and teacher compensation. She believes teachers and staff should hold students accountable for misconduct and follow through with consequences, but also favors hiring constables “who will help pull some of that responsibility off of the teachers so that they can focus on education.” She wants the administration to notify parents “about important issues that occur in the schools – the good and the bad.” She also favors competitive pay: “We cannot lose these amazing educators we have to neighboring districts because of financial reasons.”\n\nAs for controversial issues such as critical race theory, transgender policies and parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices, she said, “In my opinion, all races and groups should be represented in our classes. Our students should be exposed to a well-rounded curriculum. Bias and unfounded opinion do not belong in the classroom.”\n\nOn transgender policies, Webber said, “I believe that students can express themselves in a way that they feel is appropriate, although personal expression cannot become a distraction for other students. I do not approve of transgender students using the locker room or rest room of their choice of gender. I feel it could develop into an unsafe and distracting situation for other students.\"\n\nIn curriculum decisions, she said parents and community members should have their opinions represented, but they also need to trust educators to make decisions that will benefit students’ education.\n\nWoodbridge\n\nNo election. Incumbent candidate Jeffrey W. Allen was unopposed for the four-year, at-large seat.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/05/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2017/01/31/smyrna-supt-debbie-wicks-retiring-after-40-years-district/97282880/", "title": "Smyrna School District Superintendent Debbie Wicks retiring", "text": "Jessica Bies\n\nThe News Journal\n\nSmyrna Superintendent Debbie Wicks will retire June 30 after serving the district for four full decades.\n\nWicks announced her retirement in December and has said she will continue to live in Smyrna, of which she is a lifelong resident.\n\nShe will step away from one of the fastest growing school districts in the state. Smyrna School District serves 5,233 students, has eight schools and 712 employees, according to the district. Enrollment has grown almost 25 percent over the past 10 years and continues to trend upward.\n\nThe school board plans on advertising for a new superintendent after its Feb. 15 organizational meeting. It will be the first time the district has had to hire a superintendent in almost two decades, according to a statement.\n\nWicks has served in that position for 19 years. Before that, she served as a special education teacher and associate principal.\n\nShe joined the district in 1967, after graduating from the University of Delaware.\n\nSTORY: DSEA president election ends in tie\n\nSTORY: Delaware bill mandates school safety measures\n\nFostering teamwork has been an important part of Wicks’ success, according to a district statement. She has overseen school remodeling and construction projects, working with district staff to provide a secure environment for students, and in 2014, oversaw a large capital referendum.\n\nWicks was also involved in the restoration of John Bassett Moore Intermediate School and the School Special Services building. In 2015, she was presented the Community Friend Award by the Twentieth Century Club of Smyrna, and in 2016, she was presented the Star of Smyrna by the Smyrna Downtown Renaissance Association, a nonprofit organization that encourages the beautification and preservation of Smyrna's Historic District.\n\n\"Working with a wonderful community, a great staff and caring students, and an excellent school board has made the 40-year journey seem short,\" Wicks said in a statement, adding that after her retirement, she plans on researching her family's history and traveling with family and friends.\n\nContact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or jbies@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2017/01/31"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/05/09/delaware-school-board-members-election-2023/70194477007/", "title": "Delaware school board election results: Here are the newest members", "text": "Tuesday brought nearly 21,000 Delawareans to the polls for elections impacting kids, schools and their communities.\n\nSchool board races in New Castle County hosted some of the heaviest competition this year, but ballots were cast across every county May 9.\n\nDelmar and Milford schools technically dominated in turnout across districts at 10% and 8% of registered voters, respectively, according to results released about 10 p.m. However, Red Clay's 4.4% carried nearly double the votes of both combined at over 4,700.\n\nAverage turnout was just under 5%.\n\nPreliminary results now reveal the latest additions to Delaware's school boards, most set to serve for four years in these new seats. The results remain unofficial until certification.\n\nNew Castle County\n\nAppoquinimink School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nTashiba Graham — Winner (970, 39.2% of the vote)\n\n(970, 39.2% of the vote) Timothy Johns (537 votes)\n\nRaymond Petkevis (966 votes)\n\nChristina School District\n\nDistrict C\n\nChristine Gilbert (1,226 votes)\n\nDouglas Danger Manley — Winner (2,298, 65.2% of vote)\n\nDistrict E\n\nY.F. Lou — Winner (2,395, 67.8% of the vote)\n\n(2,395, 67.8% of the vote) Yong Peng (1,138 votes)\n\nRead:Climate change impact is intensifying everywhere. Do you know where Delaware's risk ranks?\n\nRed Clay Consolidated School District\n\nDistrict A\n\nAje English-Wynn — Winner (2,616, 57% of the vote)\n\n(2,616, 57% of the vote) John Shulli (1,973 votes)\n\nDistrict D\n\nCarlucci Coelho (1,925 votes)\n\nJose Matthews — Winner (2,741, 58.7% of the vote)\n\nSmyrna School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nMarie Fontaine St. Pierre (161 total votes)\n\nBobbi Jo Webber — Winner (535, 76.9% of the vote)\n\nBrandywine School District\n\nIncumbent candidates Shanika Perry and Ralph Ackerman were unopposed in districts A and C, respectively.\n\nColonial School District\n\nCandidates Ronald Handy Sr. and Ja'Lisa White were unopposed in districts A and C, respectively.\n\nMEET THE CANDIDATES:School board election guide for New Castle County\n\nKent County\n\nCapital School District\n\nIncumbent Sean P.M. Christiansen was unopposed for the at-large seat.\n\nCaesar Rodney School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nTawanna Prophet Brinkley (225 votes)\n\nNicole Hill — Winner (557, 54.2% of the vote)\n\n(557, 54.2% of the vote) Emily Phelan (245 votes)\n\nLake Forest School District\n\nIncumbent candidate Jordan McCloskey was unopposed for this at-large seat.\n\nMilford School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nDanielle Deinert (822 votes)\n\nAshlee Connell — Winner (1,050, 56.1% of the vote)\n\nCandidate Victor \"Butch\" Elzey III was unopposed for District A, and Jennifer Massotti was unopposed for a one-year term in District B.\n\nMEET THE CANDIATES:Kent County school board candidate guide\n\nSussex County\n\nCape Henlopen School District\n\nDistrict A\n\nJessica A. Tyndall — Winner ( 2,516, 64.1% of the vote)\n\n( 2,516, 64.1% of the vote) Shawn L. Lovenguth (1,408 votes)\n\nDelmar School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nShane Bowden — Winner (334, 59.6% of the vote)\n\n(334, 59.6% of the vote) Dawn Turner (226)\n\nIndian River School District\n\nDistrict 2\n\nLeo J. Darmstadter III (139 votes)\n\nIvan D. Neal — Winner (266, 52.6% of the vote)\n\n(266, 52.6% of the vote) Michael Bellerose (101 votes)\n\nLaurel School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nIvy Bonk (86 votes)\n\nSabrina Isler — Winner (176, 67.2% of the vote)\n\nSeaford School District\n\nAt-large seat\n\nArmore Rice — Winner (380, 45.6% of the vote)\n\n(380, 45.6% of the vote) Stephanie Smith (311 votes)\n\nDavid Tull (142 votes)\n\nWoodbridge School District\n\nIncumbent Jeffrey Allen was unopposed for an at-large seat.\n\nMEET THE CANDIDATES:School board election guide for Sussex County", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/05/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/05/04/delaware-school-board-election-guide-know-whos-running-new-castle-de/70153801007/", "title": "Delaware school board election guide: Know who's running in New ...", "text": "Quiet, monotonous meetings once left largely unattended have become battlegrounds for political issues all across the country. Mask mandates, book bans, social justice issues and other national debates have made it to the boardroom. And districts in Delaware’s largest county have been no stranger to unruly debates, packed meetings and sharp tensions.\n\nNow, such a trend continues to trickle down to local elections.\n\nNew Castle County hosts the heaviest competition in school board races this year — as Appoquinimink, Red Clay and Christina public schools post contentious races for open seats.\n\nPushes to strip mask mandates and return to in-person learning dominated rooms in the pandemic. Other student-rights issues, like giving transgender students access to bathrooms or affirming anti-discrimination policies, have also become politically charged in New Castle’s school-board discourse.\n\nDelaware PTA expects to focus on a few major issues this election, the group told Delaware Online, like health and safety in schools, learning loss recovery, school funding and boosting family engagement. However, general opposition to social justice themes — from banning books, challenging critical race theory or other representation — are expected to appear in new packaging, members said, from discussions of a \"Parent Bill of Rights\" to concerns of \"indoctrination.”\n\nHigh learning:New plan promises experience outside the classroom will earn college credit in Delaware\n\nAll of these hot-button issues have, however, brought more eyes to school boards.\n\n\"That's a good thing,\" said Sadé Truiett, the PTA’s vice president of advocacy, back in March. \"We want people involved in our school boards, for people to really be speaking about the things that matter to our kids in our schools.\"\n\nSchool board races are considered nonpartisan, though the races have become increasingly rife with political discourse and party influence.\n\nThis year’s election comes on Tuesday, May 9. We took a look at the backgrounds of candidates across the ballot. Keep exploring this voter guide from Delaware Online/The News Journal to learn more.\n\nHow do I vote in Delaware school board elections? The basics\n\nVoters must be at least 18 years old and live in the district where they hope to cast a ballot. Proof of ID and address will be requested, which could come as a driver's license, ID card or U. S. mail with street address. Being registered to vote in state and federal elections is not required, nor is having children in schools.\n\nPolls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., May 9, with various locations across each district. Voters can also request an absentee ballot.\n\nLearn more about your district below.\n\n[Go to: Appoquinimink, Christina, Red Clay, Smyrna ]\n\nAppoquinimink School District\n\nCorrection: A previous version of this story stated ACLU-DE supported a particular candidate. It has since been changed, as the organization remains nonpartisan.\n\nAt-Large seat\n\nTashiba A. Graham, 40, Townsend\n\nBackground: Tashiba Graham is vice president of operations and innovation for a healthcare system in Pennsylvania. The mother of two has a youngest son in the Appoquinimink School District.\n\nIssues: According to Graham, the focus of her campaign is advocating for students with special needs, school safety and teacher retention. She shared her intention to introduce regular assemblies to combat bullying and violence in schools and address general mental wellness among students.\n\nGraham has stated her support for paying teachers and staff members a more competitive salary and improving incentives for new candidates while also evaluating what factors are working to keep staff members in the district. Engaging family members on resources available for students is another priority of hers.\n\nIn response to ACLU-DE voters guide questionnaire regarding national movements restricting certain curriculum material, Graham remains adamant that policies must be put in place to keep the district’s curriculum factual and comprehensive and protect the rights and inclusion of LGBTQ+ students. Graham has been supported by Appoquinimink Educational Support Professionals, First State Action Fund and more.\n\nEducation roundup:Delaware is 1 of 5 states to get $1 million for tutoring in schools\n\nTimothy W. Johns, 57, Middletown\n\nNote: This candidate did not return any requests for contribution from Delaware Online/The News Journal.\n\nBackground: Timothy Johns is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Heaven’s Gate Ministries, which he runs with his wife, Monique, in Newark. As co-founder, Johns oversees nonprofit charity work and established a leadership institute, where he has worked as an educator for 12 years. The U.S Army veteran is a father of four adult children.\n\nIssues: Johns says he's mainly concerned with bridging the achievement gap between students of different backgrounds and accessibilities, while setting students up for success in the global marketplace with leadership skills.\n\nJohns has stated during a public Q&A session that he believes conversations related to sexual orientation and gender identity are “family matters\" and should be left out of the classroom. He proposes setting up a public forum where debates about curriculum censorship can take place and be evaluated fairly.\n\nRestorative justice is another hallmark of Johns’ campaign, he told ACLU-DE in its voter guide, which includes training staff members and SROs about de-escalation techniques. He also proposes enhancing parent participation within the district by holding parent education classes focused on child development and communication.\n\nRaymond J. Petkevis, 45, Middletown\n\nBackground: Raymond Petkevis is a real estate broker for Keller Williams Realty around the Middletown area and recently started a position as Delaware’s principal broker for REAL, a virtual-based real estate company. His two children are students in Appoquinimink.\n\nIssues: Petkevis has mainly expressed concerns about violence in schools, citing outreach from community members worried about student safety. To combat this, reevaluating measures of rule enforcement and the district’s code of conduct have been suggested by the candidate.\n\nThe district’s teacher shortage and dwindling test scores are intertwined with issues related to violence in the district, according to Petkevis. In response to Citizens For Delaware Schools', he also recommended potentially soliciting funding from local developers to go toward the district’s resources and implementing financial responsibility into the curriculum for high school students.\n\nPolls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.:\n\nAlfred G. Waters Middle , 1235 Cedar Lane Road, Middletown\n\n, 1235 Cedar Lane Road, Middletown Bunker Hill Elementary , 1070 Bunker Hill Road, Middletown\n\n, 1070 Bunker Hill Road, Middletown Marion E. Proffitt Training Center , 118 S. 6th St., Odessa\n\n, 118 S. 6th St., Odessa Middletown high, 120 Silver Lake Road, Middletown\n\n120 Silver Lake Road, Middletown Old State Elementary , 580 Tony Marchio Drive, Townsend\n\n, 580 Tony Marchio Drive, Townsend Olive B. Loss Elementary , 200 Brennan Blvd., Bear\n\n, 200 Brennan Blvd., Bear Townsend Elementary, 126 Main St., Townsend\n\nFrom Kent:Caesar Rodney’s bid to raise school taxes rejected by voters\n\nChristina School District\n\nDistrict C\n\nChristine Gilbert, 54, Newark\n\nBackground: This Delaware native has lived in Newark alongside her husband of 27 years since 1997, according to her campaign website. The alumna of Red Clay Public Schools holds a bachelor's degree in dance, as well as another bachelor's degree in English and a master's in education from the University of Delaware. Gilbert is a certified teacher, with experience from K-12 special education to high school English Language Arts, though currently a stay-at-home mother to her four children. Her two daughters and two sons attended private schools in Delaware.\n\nIssues: “Let me be clear,\" wrote this candidate on her Facebook page, operating as a landing pad for other campaign materials. \"The school’s role is to educate, NOT indoctrinate. Reading, writing, mathematics (not Common Core), true history (not Critical Race Theory or whatever name they’ve morphed it to).”\n\nGilbert said plummeting test scores in the district motivate her to run, alongside hopes to boost graduation rates and college readiness. She lists safety, effectiveness, curriculum and transparency as her priorities on her website. Among top-of-mind issues, she also noted parents and guardians \"will have their voices heard.\"\n\nLearning loss concerns:What’s the cost of failing math? Well, for Delaware kids it could be $66 billion\n\nDouglas Danger Manley, 38, Newark\n\nBackground: Manley works at a cybersecurity startup as a software engineer, an industry and occupation he’s found himself in for about 17 years. The Newark resident is also a volunteer firefighter with Mill Creek Fire Company, where he’s been for the past decade. He’s now its president, after having served on the board for three years.\n\nManaging a $3-4 million budget with Mill Creek, Manley told The News Journal/Delaware Online he’s used to dealing with a fixed amount of funding from state and local governments — which leave a “need to squeeze every bit of value out of that funding as we can to provide our services.”\n\nIssues: Manley has no children, and he sees that as an asset. He says this will allow him to maintain a public-service perspective. The candidate shared his focus on supporting resources for Christina School District, sharpening communication and community engagement. He also said protecting students will be a priority, especially gay or transgender children — but he hopes the district “focuses on its mission of education and doesn't get lost in the mire” of various culture wars.\n\nDistrict E\n\nY.F. Lou, 36, Newark\n\nBackground: The single father of two children, enrolled in Christina, works with the state’s health department, where he said his work focuses on improving healthcare for the most vulnerable in long-term care facilities. He also serves as a volunteer firefighter for Aetna Hose, Hook and Ladder Company. Lou's family moved to Delaware from China when he was young, an experience the candidate believes will allow him to advocate for Christina's diverse student body, as he said in a late-March candidate forum. He attended public school in Lewes, graduated from the University of Delaware, and has been a full-time Newark resident since 2012. Lou also attended both University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health for graduate degrees.\n\nIssues: With an 8-year-old at West Park Elementary — and a 5-year-old headed there in the fall — Lou finds himself motivated by three key issues: safety, community engagement and a goal to \"broaden our students’ horizons.\"\n\nFor Lou, safety includes keeping guns out of schools, \"fostering a safe and welcoming environment for all of our students especially those most vulnerable,\" as well as monitoring environmental health and safety, such as lead. Community and stakeholder engagement, as he put it, focuses on how the pandemic created opportunities to capitalize on for information sharing and family engagement. In terms of broadening horizons, the candidate hopes to see more support of art programs to keep students \"curious and innovative.\"\n\nYong Peng, 53, Newark\n\nBackground: Peng works for the federal government as a software engineer, having previously worked for companies like Delmarva Power and Bank of America. Peng, in one candidate forum, called himself a “happy immigrant” focused on giving back to Delaware. Peng was born in China and came to the U.S. to study. The 15-year resident of Newark has a doctorate in physics, having worked in research and teaching at a few universities before his current line of work. Peng said he has also worked as a math tutor in Wilmington.\n\nIssues: Peng said he sees a “crisis in public education.” Two issues are top-of-mind for the father of two. One, he perceives too much focus on topics that are “ignoring the core curriculum,” which are reading, writing and math. He didn't elaborate. Two, he believes school policies are failing at “enhancing the parent's right to oversee their children’s education.” Peng said his daughter used to study in Christina School District, though no longer, and now he is running for the future of the community.\n\nPolling places, open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.:\n\nPulaski Elementary School , 1300 Cedar St., Wilmington\n\n, 1300 Cedar St., Wilmington The Bancroft School , 700 N. Lombard St., Wilmington\n\n, 700 N. Lombard St., Wilmington Brader Elementary School , 350 Four Seasons Parkway., Newark\n\n, 350 Four Seasons Parkway., Newark Christiana High School , 190 Salem Church Road, Newark\n\n, 190 Salem Church Road, Newark Downes Elementary School , 220 Casho Mill Road, Newark\n\n, 220 Casho Mill Road, Newark Keene Elementary School , 200 Cpl. Steven J Ballard Way, Newark\n\n, 200 Cpl. Steven J Ballard Way, Newark Maclary Elementary School , 300 St. Regis Drive, Newark\n\n, 300 St. Regis Drive, Newark Marshall Elementary School , 101 Barrett Run Drive, Newark\n\n, 101 Barrett Run Drive, Newark Mcvey Elementary School , 908 Janice Drive, Newark\n\n, 908 Janice Drive, Newark Newark High School , 750 E Delaware Ave., Newark\n\n, 750 E Delaware Ave., Newark Shue-Medill Middle School , 1500 Capitol Trail, Newark\n\n, 1500 Capitol Trail, Newark Wilson Elementary School, 14 Forge Road, Newark\n\nRed Clay Consolidated School District\n\nDistrict A\n\nAje English-Wynn, 34, Wilmington\n\nBackground: This Delaware native works as a research analyst with the city of Wilmington, within the mayor's office. Before that, English-Wynn worked in the Department of Labor as a deputy principal. This career, the candidate said, meets more than 10 years of experience in mentorship and advocacy connected to K-12 education and the community. A \"proud alumna\" of Red Clay schools herself, English-Wynn also has a young child entering the district this fall. She said the Wilmington district prepared her for later degrees from Wilmington University and Delaware State.\n\nIssues: The alumna said the impact of both \"a supportive community and quality education\" are keys to students succeeding. She noted three issues motivating her campaign: equity and access, parent engagement and support for educators.\n\nWilmington:They struggled during Ida. Now one Wilmington community is finding a better way to respond\n\nJohn Shulli, 50, Wilmington\n\nBackground: Born and raised in Wilmington, Shulli returned to his home state after 26 years in the U.S. Army and Department of Defense — 22 of which were spent overseas. He works in a civilian job on A.I. policy for the Pentagon, as well as teaches part time as a colonel in the Army Reserve. He graduated from John Dickinson High School before attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona.\n\nIssues: Shulli said he's motivated to run by the \"severe\" learning loss faced since the pandemic and highlighted in state and district's statistics. The district must, as he sees it, \"restore our children’s academic standings so they can compete in a local, regional, national and global jobs market.\"\n\nDistrict D\n\nCarlucci Coelho, 53, Wilmington\n\nBackground: Coelho said he came to the U.S. hoping to work as an artist. He has worked in real estate since 2017, as well as the nonprofit sector. He earned a two-year degree in fashion business, according to his website, alongside a parallel degree in costume and set design while studying in Portugal. Though he doesn't have kids enrolled in the district, Coelho said he's been close to the community for over 30 years. Coelho also ran for state representative as a Republican last year, but did not secure a win in District 13.\n\nIssues: Coelho stressed that he is against any kind of bullying, citing that protecting safety in schools is paramount in his platform. Another motivating issue is budgeting, making sure money is distributed \"to those schools and programs who need the most.\" He also said he supports strong academics alongside more vocational training in every school.\n\nIn other background, in response to a question for the ACLU-DE voter's guide about the teaching of U.S. history and whether students have the right to learn free of viewpoint-based censorship, Coelho said parents should have \"the choice of accepting or denying what their own kids have the right or not to read. These children have parents who have different views about life and we must respect all parents views.\" Also when running for state representative, the candidate expressed support for a failed 2022 bill aimed at barring transgender athletes to compete in school sports, saying: \"Woman sports is woman sports.\"\n\nJose Matthews, 27, Elsmere\n\nBackground: Matthews has represented District D on the Red Clay School Board since 2018. Working in the healthcare field in different capacities over the last six years, his day job is working a community liaison for Rockford Center, a community mental health organization. The incumbent lives in Elsmere with his husband, who is a teacher.\n\nIssues: Matthews said he wants to keep up his work. In his first term, he said, the board tackled many issues related to equity around the pandemic, one being transparency. He said he \"was one of the biggest supporters on the board to make sure we continue to provide a Zoom option both to watch the meetings and to participate in public comment.\" If elected, he hopes to continue to offer that access.\n\nRed Clay has fallen behind other northern New Castle County districts, Matthews said, in terms of keep up with building maintenance and competitive salaries. He plans to make that competitiveness a priority, even if it means the district's first referendum in nearly a decade. He also aims to maintain a focus on family and parent engagement.\n\nPolling places, open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.:\n\nActivity Center at Hockessin PAL , 7259 Lancaster Pike, Hockessin\n\n, 7259 Lancaster Pike, Hockessin AI DuPont High School , 50 Hillside Road, Wilmington\n\n, 50 Hillside Road, Wilmington Baltz Elementary School ,1500 Spruce Ave., Wilmington\n\n,1500 Spruce Ave., Wilmington Cab Calloway School of Arts , 100 N. DuPont Road, Wilmington\n\n, 100 N. DuPont Road, Wilmington Dickinson High School , 1801 Milltown Road, Wilmington\n\n, 1801 Milltown Road, Wilmington Forest Oak Elementary School , 55 S Meadowood Drive, Newark\n\n, 55 S Meadowood Drive, Newark Joseph E Johnson School , 2100 Gilpin Ave., Wilmington\n\n, 2100 Gilpin Ave., Wilmington Marbrook Elementary School , 2101 Centerville Road, Wilmington\n\n, 2101 Centerville Road, Wilmington McKean High School , 301 McKennans Church Road, Wilmington\n\n, 301 McKennans Church Road, Wilmington North Star Elementary School , 1340 Little Baltimore Road, Hockessin\n\n, 1340 Little Baltimore Road, Hockessin Warner Elementary School, 801 W 18th St., Wilmington\n\nSmyrna School District\n\nAt-Large seat\n\nMarie Fontaine St. Pierre, 39, Smyrna\n\nBackground: A Realtor for nearly six years, Fontaine St. Pierre has a 17-year-old son who attends Smyrna High School. For four years, she's handled zoning variance requests on the town of Smyrna's Board of Adjustment. She’s a member of the Alpha Beta Gamma sorority at Delaware Technical Community College, the Holly’s Club and the Boys and Girls Club board.\n\nIssues: Fontaine St. Pierre decided to run for the board because she wants to serve as “a liaison between parents, teachers and the community, providing the best resources for our children's education, and allowing parents to have the most influence in their children's life.” She wants to recognize and prioritize instructors' interests and concerns.\n\nShe said the most important issues in the district are continuing to push for high-quality, intellectually-rigorous education to prepare students for the competitive labor market, providing safe schools, confronting bullying and cyberbullying and expanding self-esteem initiatives for students.\n\nAs for controversial issues such as critical race theory, transgender policies and parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices, she said, “An inclusive educational system offers various advantages, including enhanced educational quality for all students and assisting students in becoming more responsive to an inclusive attitude. This could also help with behavioral issues, self-esteem, social skills, and community involvement. All students have the right to a challenging core education and outstanding instruction from well-trained educators. Students should be allowed to have an open and honest discussion about America's past, and they deserve to see themselves and the issues that impact them reflected in their classrooms and books.”\n\nShe encourages parents to attend board meetings to address issues and share comments and insights.\n\nBobbi Jo Webber, 44, Kenton\n\nBackground: A farmer for over 25 years along with her husband on their family’s farm, she has two children, a son who is a freshman at Smyrna High School and a daughter in sixth grade at Clayton Intermediate School. She’s volunteered for 10 years at Sunnyside Elementary and at Clayton Intermediate School, running fundraisers, helping teachers in classrooms and hosting free field trips at her family’s farm.\n\nIssues: Webber wanted to run for school board to improve safety, success of students, transparency and teacher compensation. She believes teachers and staff should hold students accountable for misconduct and follow through with consequences, but also favors hiring constables “who will help pull some of that responsibility off of the teachers so that they can focus on education.” She wants the administration to notify parents “about important issues that occur in the schools – the good and the bad.” She favors competitive pay: “We cannot lose these amazing educators we have to neighboring districts because of financial reasons.”\n\nIn regard to issues like critical race theory, transgender policies and parental involvement in a district’s curriculum choices, she said, “All races and groups should be represented in our classes. Our students should be exposed to a well-rounded curriculum. Bias and unfounded opinion do not belong in the classroom.”\n\nOn transgender policies, Webber said, “I believe that students can express themselves in a way that they feel is appropriate, although personal expression cannot become a distraction for other students. I do not approve of transgender students using the locker room or restroom of their choice of gender. I feel it could develop into an unsafe and distracting situation for other students.\"\n\nIn curriculum decisions, she said parents and community members should have their opinions represented, but they also need to trust educators to make decisions that will benefit students’ education.\n\nPolling places, open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.:", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/05/04"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/11/15/smyrna-planner-ridley-parkway-site-use-uncertain/19101803/", "title": "STUMP SCOTT: Smyrna planner says Ridley Parkway site use ...", "text": "Scott Broden\n\nsbroden@dnj.com\n\nSMYRNA – Sam Ridley Parkway continues to rival other roads in luring development to Rutherford County.\n\nWith this in mind, I decided this week's Stump Scott question would respond to a question from a Smyrna resident wanting to know what was coming to the northeast corner of Sam Ridley Parkway and Old Nashville Highway.\n\nSo I posed the question to Smyrna Planning Director Kevin Rigsby.\n\n\"At this time, we have not received any development plans for this property,\" Rigsby said. \"The owner is currently clearing it, but at this time there are no plans. The land is zoned C-2, which would allow for just about any commercial use, including retail, offices, restaurants, banks, hotels, etc. The total parcel size is 120 acres, but the commercial area where the clearing is taking place is around 25 acres.\n\n\"The owner is the Vestor Waldron Family Limited Partnership, and it is for sale,\" Rigsby added. \"The town would like to see a continuation of the retail development which has occurred over the last several years along Sam Ridley Parkway. This parcel is at the corner of two major streets within the town and is a prime location for further retail development.\"\n\nThe parkway, indeed, has attracted many shopping centers long after the day La Vergne High School opened off the road in 1988. Much of the parkway development took off when StoneCrest Medical arrived about a decade ago. Since then, many hotels, restaurants, banks, other medical offices and buildings for various professional services, have converged a short-drive from the hospital that's close the the the Interstate 24 interchange.\n\nMany big-box stores also have opened, including a Lowe's, Home Depot, Target and Academy. Kroger and Publix also compete as grocery stores.\n\nGiven the retail demand on Sam Ridley Parkway, Smyrna Town Manager Harry Gill Jr. convinced the Town Council to hold off excavation and grading plans to entice white-collar offices to open by the YMCA and Motlow State Community College. Gill said there's been no interest in developing the town's corporate park land for a headquarters or research and development center. He suggested the town hold off the ground work in case a retailer, such as a Costco, wanted the property.\n\nGiven holding off of attracting a white-collar office development project, it won't be surprising to see the town competing with the Vestor Waldron Family Limited Partnership land at nearby Sam Ridley and Old Nashville Highway to attract the Smryna's next big-box store.\n\nRed-light camera question\n\nThe Murfreesboro City Council decided to renew its red-light camera contract for another year on Thursday. The next day, Jim Burge of Murfreesboro asked this question:\n\n\"My research reveals that (among other cities) Houston voters voted out these cameras in 2010; Albuquerque voters did the same in 2011. Question remains: what prevents voters in Murfreesboro from having a referendum on this issue? Is there some state law, which does not allow local voters in a Tennessee municipality to vote on this? How can other cities have this option but it seemingly, has never been offered to citizens here? Appreciate any information you may provide. I suspect that many other locals would like to have the above information also.\"\n\nCouncilman Eddie Smotherman was the lone elected official in Murfreesboro to vote against renewing the red-light camera contract. He suggested that voters ought to be allowed to decide the future of red-light cameras in the future and mentioned how other cities have regjected them overwhelmingly through referendums.\n\nSmotherman was also the councilman who called for the referendum on moving the city's election date from April to August starting in 2016. Voters also overwhelming agreed that the election date should be moved. Of course, Smotherman has also talked about calling for a referendum to establish council districts for four of the six at-large seats on the council.\n\nWho knows how the voters feel about either one of these questions?\n\nWe'll see if Smotherman calls for such referendums or if he can persuade enough council members to agree.\n\nContact Scott Broden at 615-278-5158 or sbroden@dnj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Scott Broden.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2014/11/15"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/11/17/indian-river-school-district-prepares-audit-findings/94014532/", "title": "Indian River audit: Money spent on jewelry, events", "text": "Jerry Smith\n\nThe News Journal\n\nAn audit of the Indian River School District’s finances and of its chief financial officer found the district lacked formal policies and procedures for any of its financial processes the past five years.\n\nThe findings were released by the state’s Office of Auditor of Accounts during a Thursday briefing in Dover, and the final report was released simultaneously to the public via the office’s website.\n\n“I am sending a message to Indian River and everyone in the state to be careful about how you manage taxpayer money,” said Delaware’s Auditor of Accounts R. Thomas Wagner Jr. “At the end of the day, if you are the board, it is your responsibility.”\n\nAmong the processes questioned were unauthorized use of the board president’s signature stamp to approve transactions, a payroll process controlled entirely by the CFO “that severely lacked documentation and review” and an abundance of in-state meals that did not appear to meet the criteria provided by the state’s Budget and Accounting Manual.\n\nSeveral employees stated they were forced to share log-in credentials into the state’s accounting system, which is a violation of the state’s computer usage security policies, according to the audit.\n\nSeveral types of purchases were deemed inappropriate or questionable based on a lack of supporting documentation. Those included a Teacher of the Year ceremony held at Baywood Greens for approximately $7,000, Alex and Ani bracelets totaling $352 for certain district office staff and a Tiffany & Co. bracelet for $380 as a recognition gift to Superintendent Susan Bunting.\n\nIn December 2015, the auditor's office received complaints on its fraud hotline about alleged financial misconduct by district CFO Patrick Miller. The audit of the district’s $50 million annual budget began shortly after Miller was placed on leave April 24. Miller later submitted his resignation, effective June 30.\n\nSTORY: DuPont to end pension contribution for active employees\n\nSTORY: Student breathalyzers anger Smyrna parents\n\nWhen the audit was launched for the time period of July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2016, district officials did not reveal what led to Miller’s involuntary leave or the state of the audit itself. On Thursday, district grant writer David Maull said comment would be reserved until a Friday morning briefing at the district office in Selbyville.\n\nWagner said Bunting and the Indian River School District were very cooperative during the investigation.\n\n“They accepted the findings and want to fix the problems in the district,” Wagner said. “Dr. Bunting has asked for our help. I think in a year and a half from now, Indian River will be running smooth and fine. She seriously wants to fix the problems.”\n\nThe findings come less than a week before Indian River School District's referendum seeking additional local funding for school security programs, technology, textbooks, student organizations and measures related to enrollment growth.\n\nWagner waved off any suggestion the timing was political, saying people are going to think what they want.\n\n“The two don’t equate to each other. We just try to put the facts out there in a timely manner,” he said.\n\nIn the Nov. 22 referendum, the district is seeking a tax increase of 49 cents per $100 of assessed property value to raise $7.35 million in operating funds.\n\nThe district has experienced budget issues because of enrollment growth, including an increase of 296 students from last year, giving the district 10,467 students. Enrollment has grown an average of 3 to 4 percent every year since 2010.\n\nThe Indian River School District was formed in 1969 through the consolidation of several smaller districts and now is the fifth-largest district in the state. There are eight elementary schools, three middle schools, two high schools and three special service schools over 365-square miles.\n\nFurther findings from the audit revealed that Miller made a payment of $20,343 to the Indian River Volunteer Fire company, and another for $32,500 to the Boys & Girls Club of Oak Orchard/Riverdale. The CFO served as board president for both organizations.\n\nThe audit also found “the District’s processes centralized around the CFO’s review and approval of financial transactions due to the District’s complete trust in him. This blind trust resulted in the CFO’s work not being reviewed and the complete absence of policies and procedures, amongst other issues discussed in this report. Because of these deficient internal controls, an environment in which employees were intimidated and afraid to speak up or report concerns was created.”\n\nMiller also had been audited in his previous job as business manager of the Brandywine School District. He faced criminal charges as the result of that audit and resolved his legal troubles by entering a no contest plea before Superior Court Judge Carl Goldstein.\n\nSettlement of those charges came after he began his new position with the Indian River School District.\n\nReach Jerry Smith at jsmith17@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JerrySmithTNJ.\n\nEDITOR’S NOTE: Previous versions of this story had an incorrect former job for Patrick Miller. Before coming to IR, he was business manager in the Brandywine School district.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2016/11/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2015/05/12/school-board-elections-incumbents-keep-seats/27213887/", "title": "School board elections: Most incumbents keep seats", "text": "Matthew Albright\n\nThe News Journal\n\nLike most years, turnout was tiny, and most incumbents kept their seats in school board elections up and down Delaware on Tuesday, according to unofficial results from the county Departments of Elections.\n\nThere were 24 seats open across 16 school districts, but a third of those never came to a vote because some were uncontested and one saw no candidate file at all.\n\nAlmost all incumbents defeated their challengers, if they had any. Only Colonial’s Ronald Pierce lost his re-election bid, getting 93 votes to Margaret Lucille Kennedy’s 140.\n\nCompetition was fiercest in the Cape Henlopen School District. Challenger Jose Saez got 1,206 votes – the third-highest tally of any candidate in the state – but fell short of unseating Roni Posner, who brought in 1,330. Jason Bradley, who ran for a different seat on Cape Henlopen’s board, racked up the most votes of any candidate, defeating Gary Wray 1,564 to 679.\n\nBrandywine also saw relatively high turnout, with Kristin Pidgeon defeating Arthur Kirksey 1,000 to 163 and Karen Gordon beating Diana Hanby 995 to 270.\n\nThose contests saw far more voters than most, however. Only seven candidates statewide got more than 500 votes.\n\nThe most crowded field was a seat open in Appoquinimink, but Michelle Myers Wall easily surpassed the five other candidates, garnering 609 votes.\n\nSchool boards set the direction for their districts, managing multimillion-dollar budgets, hiring and firing top school leaders and signing off on major programs like Race to the Top.\n\nThey are also the bodies that choose to initiate property tax referendums, asking voters to increase taxes to fund their districts’ operations.\n\nContact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com, (302) 324-2428 or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.\n\nDELWARE SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION RESULTS\n\nBelow are the complete but unofficial results for each of the school board elections. The winner’s name is in bold. Unless otherwise noted, those elected will hold their seats for five years.\n\nNEW CASTLE COUNTY\n\nAppoquinimink\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Michelle Myers Wall: 609; Tara Greathouse: 97; Debbie Harrington: 216; Ryan Scott: 24; Joanne Christian: 117; William Weller: 26\n\nBrandywine\n\nDISTRICT B: Arthur Kirksey, III: 163; Kristin Pidgeon: 1,000\n\nDISTRICT E: Karen Gordon: 995; Diana Hornung Hanby: 270\n\nChristina\n\nDISTRICT A: George Evans (ran unopposed)\n\nColonial\n\nDISTRICT B: Ronald Pierce*: 93; Margaret Lucille Kennedy: 140\n\nDISTRICT D: No candidate\n\nRed Clay\n\nDISTRICT B: Martin Wilson Sr.*: 291; Alfred Lance Jr.: 264\n\nDISTRICT G: Catherine Thompson* (ran unopposed)\n\nKENT COUNTY\n\nCaesar Rodney\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Bill Bush* (ran unopposed)\n\nCapital\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Sharese Paylor: 325; Ralph Taylor: 336; Peter Servon: 74\n\nLake Forest\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: (One-year term) Earle Dempsey: 356; Elizabeth Brode: 176\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: (Three-year term) Austin Auren: 94; Andrea Miller*: 421\n\nMilford\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Kent DelRossi: 44; Ronald Evans Jr.: 149; Kristen Yvette Dennehy: 386\n\nSmyrna\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Christine B. Malec* (ran unopposed)\n\nSUSSEX COUNTY\n\nCape Henlopen\n\nAREA B: Jason Bradley: 1,564; Gary Wray: 679\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Roni Posner*: 1,330; Jose Saez: 1,206\n\nIndian River\n\nDISTRICT NO. 1: (Two seats) James Hudson: 154; Miguel Pirez-Fabar: 29; James Fritz Jr.*: 140\n\nDISTRICT NO. 2: Shaun Fink* (ran unopposed)\n\nDISTRICT NO. 4: Judith Teoli: 94; Gregory Goldman: 180; Charles Birely*: 410\n\nLaurel\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: David Brent Nichols*: 288; Kimberly Travis: 168\n\nSeaford\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Jeffrey Benson (ran unopposed)\n\nWoodbridge\n\nAT-LARGE SEAT: Walter P.J. Gilefski*: 138; Bernard Carr: 98\n\n* Incumbent", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2015/05/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2019/01/17/county-commission-chair-isnardi-targets-childrens-services-council-brevard-elimination/2606792002/", "title": "Isnardi targets Children's Services Council of Brevard for elimination", "text": "Brevard County Commission Chair Kristine Isnardi is targeting the Children's Services Council of Brevard for elimination.\n\nShe has placed on the agenda for Tuesday's County Commission meeting a proposal to repeal the 1990 county ordinance that created the Children's Services Council — in effect, dissolving the council.\n\nIsnardi said she has been working with County Attorney Eden Bentley to craft legislation to repeal the county ordinance that created the council.\n\nThe Children's Services Council, however, has received its own legal opinion that runs counter to Bentley's. It contends that, under Florida Statute, there would need to be a voter referendum before the Children's Services Council could be dissolved.\n\nMore:Without support of County Commission, tax for Brevard Children's Services Council dies\n\nMore:Brevard Children's Services Council seeks tax to help fund programs\n\nChildren's Services Council representatives plan to make that argument at Tuesday's County Commission meeting.\n\nThe council's mission is to provide funding for children's service in Brevard. But it has no taxing authority.\n\nIn harshly worded comments during the County Commission's Jan. 8 meeting, Isnardi called the agency \"a board in place since 1990 that's done nothing.\"\n\nOne thing that board did do last year, though, was to seek County Commission approval in July to have a voter referendum on Nov. 6 to establish a special property tax for children's services. But only one of the five county commissioners supported putting that measure on the ballot, so it did not move forward. That commissioner, Jim Barfield, no longer is on the County Commission, as he did not seek re-election in November.\n\nUnder the referendum proposal, residents would have seen a special property tax of 25 cents per $1,000 of taxable value in the first year, which would collect $8.4 million. Every year after that, residents would have seen that rate become 33 cents per $1,000 of taxable value, which would collect $11.4 million. The tax would expire, unless renewed, after 12 years.\n\nThe tax would amount to up to $66 a year for the typical homeowner.\n\nThe money would have gone toward programs that provide services to children from birth to age 3; local child care services; delinquency prevention programs for elementary and middle school students; and services for children with physical, intellectual or emotional challenges.\n\n\"I fundamentally and philosophically disagree with this indirect taxation without representation,\" Isnardi told fellow commissioners at their Jan. 8 meeting. \"If people want to donate to charity, they're going to do it on their own, and I don't think they should be forced into that, especially without oversight. This issue really bothers me.\"\n\nIn a written response to Isnardi's criticism, Children's Services Council of Brevard Vice Chair Bunny Finney said that \"while the Brevard Children’s Services Council is currently unfunded, a funded CSC would dedicate local tax dollars to care for local children, and be overseen by local experts, advocates and local elected officials. CSCs are designed to place the question of levying a tax directly before the people, and then insulate the funding from the changing preferences of partisan politicians.\"\n\nFinney contends that Isnardi is mistaken to characterize the system as “taxation without representation.”\n\n\"A CSC is, by design, a voter-approved silo of dedicated funds to provide services to children,\" Finney wrote. Florida \"legislators understood that, while it can be hard for local politicians to prioritize spending their limited general revenue tax dollars on services for children, that an informed voting public may recognize the importance and be willing to personally invest.\"\n\nShe said the 10-member council providing oversight includes three local elected officials — a county commissioner, a school board member and a judge — plus the Brevard superintendent of schools and a representative from the local office of the Department of Children and Families. The other five are recommended by the Brevard County Commission, then appointed by the governor.\n\nThere currently are 11 independent Children's Services Councils elsewhere in Florida that collect property taxes to fund programs for children.\n\nFinney said that process is \"designed specifically to make sure caring for children does not have to compete with funding roads or infrastructure.\"\n\nFinney said she is disappointed that Isnardi — a former Children's Services Council board member — brought up the issue at the Jan. 8 County Commission meeting without advance notice to the Children's Services Council.\n\nBut Isnardi indicated during the meeting that Children's Services Council supporters likely were aware of her views and knew the county attorney's office was seeking documents from the agency.\n\nShe said advocates of the Children's Services Council will have the opportunity to comment during the upcoming County Commission meeting. That meeting begins at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Building C of the Brevard County Government Center in Viera.\n\nIsnardi said she has \"no problem saying 'no.' I'm not afraid of the political fallout,\" including potential criticism, should she run for re-election in 2020.\n\nIsnardi received unanimous County Commission approval on Jan. 8 to waive what's known as \"legislative intent,\" clearing the way to put the item on the agenda for Tuesday's County Commission meeting without a delay for that extra step.\n\nIsnardi and the Children's Services Council have another legal disagreement.\n\nThe council at one of its recent meetings was discussing starting a petition initiative to place a proposed tax on the ballot — partly at the recommendation it received in July from some county commissioners. This would bypass the need to get County Commission approval to have such a referendum.\n\nBut Isnardi contends that the county charter does not allow a ballot initiative for the collection of taxes.\n\nIn her agenda item memo to fellow county commissioners, Isnardi wrote: \"If the County Commission allows the CSC to move forward with this taxing initiative, and they were successful, we would have an independent and unelected taxing authority with the power to levy a maximum taxable millage rate with zero voter recourse. Every resident that pays property taxes would see an increase in their homeowners’ taxes, with many not receiving a direct benefit.\"\n\n3 finalist for tourism chief\n\nBrevard County management has selected three finalists for Space Coast Office of Tourism executive director. They are:\n\n• Edward Caum, Collier County deputy director for tourism and sports marketing in Naples. He is the former tourism manager/public communications specialist at the Pasco County Office of Tourism Development in New Port Richey.\n\n• Peter Cranis, former head of marketing for the Coca-Cola Orlando Eye and former vice president of global consumer and convention marketing for Visit Orlando.\n\n• Susan Phillips, director of tourism promotion and strategic alliances for the St. Johns County Visitors and Convention Bureau in St. Augustine. She is the former director of marketing at the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber/Convention and Visitors Bureau in South Carolina.\n\nMore:5 candidates under consideration to become Brevard County tourism director\n\nMore:Brevard Tourist Development Council overhaul brings five new members to nine-person board\n\nThe were among five semifinalists of the position who were interviewed on Monday and Tuesday by Brevard County Manager Frank Abbate and Assistant County Manager for Community Services Jim Liesenfelt.\n\n\"We're happy with the three we have,\" Liesenfelt said.\n\nThey were selected from 15 initial applicants for the position.\n\nIn an email to members of the advisory Brevard County Tourist Development Council, Liesenfelt said they were \"three quality candidates.\"\n\nThe three will be back on Jan. 24 to meet with county commisioners and members of the Tourist Development Council. Those meetings will begin at 1 p.m. in the Florida Room in Building C of the Brevard County Government Center in Viera.\n\nAbbate subsequently will choose a candidate for the job, and will present his choice to the Brevard County Commission for confirmation.\n\nThe salary for the new tourism chief will be subject to negotiation, Liesenfelt said.\n\nWhoever is selected will succeed Eric Garvey, who left his county position July 31. Garvey moved to a private-sector job as chief operating officer of the Baugher Hotel Group, a hospitality and real estate development firm founded and operated by Bob Baugher of Cocoa Beach.\n\nGarvey's county salary was $128,546-a-year, and he was the highest-paid county department head.\n\nSince then, Office of Tourism Deputy Director Bonnie King has been serving as the agency's interim executive director. King did not apply for Garvey's job on a permanent basis, because she is scheduled to retire on June 30. She has been with the Office of Tourism since 1987.\n\nThe Office of Tourism oversees one of the key drivers of the Brevard County economy. Tourism is a $2.1 billion-a-year industry in Brevard County that is responsible for more than 26,000 jobs. Hotels, restaurants, retail stores and attractions all benefit.\n\nThe county's tourism operations are funded by a 5 percent Tourist Development Tax on hotel rooms and other short-term rentals. That tax raised a record $15.58 million in the budget year that ended Sept. 30, and is projected to raise more than $16 million in the current budget year.\n\nDelegation meeting draw big crowd\n\nTuesday's Brevard County legislative delegation meeting drew an overflow crowd to the City Council chambers at Palm Bay City Hall.\n\nAnd a change made for this year's meeting by the delegation's chair, Randy Fine of unincorporated south Brevard, may have contributed to the popularity of the event.\n\nFine changed the annual meeting this year from an afternoon to an evening session, thereby enabling more members of the public who work days to attend.\n\nIn all, more than 80 speakers addressed the two state senators and the four state representatives who represent parts of Brevard County on a range of topics — from the environment to the arts. When including the speakers who were there to make public comments on five proposed local laws that were debated, the figure topped 100.\n\nThe speakers each got two minutes to speak if they signed up in advance and one minute if they signed up the day of the meeting.\n\nAt one point, Rep. Thad Altman of Indialantic complimented Fine for holding the meeting in the evening, so more people could attend.\n\nFine said the people who had to stand outside the council chambers, and listen to the meeting on a speaker, might not think it's such a great idea. But he added: \"This is a great problem to have.\"\n\nThe meeting was supposed to run from 5 to 9 p.m. But, with so many speakers and extensive discussion on two of the proposed local laws, the meeting end time was extended twice, ultimately clocking in at 5 hours and 12 minutes.\n\nFine presided throughout the meeting — without taking a break.\n\n\"It's fantastic,\" Fine said as the meeting was wrapping up. \"So many people have so many thoughts.\"\n\nMore:State funding for lagoon will be regional, not partisan, battle, as Fine's bill gains momentum\n\nMore:Brevard's state legislators reject adding party affiliations of municipal candidates to ballot\n\nTuesday was a jam-packed day for Fine, as he appeared at an event with Gov. Ron DeSantis at 2 p.m. in Boca Raton, at which the governor discussed the state's efforts to support Israel. Fine then drove back to Palm Bay, arriving in time for his 5 p.m. legislative delegation meeting.\n\nOn deck to run the next legislative delegation meeting in Sen. Tom Wright of New Smyrna Beach, who was unanimously elected as the next chair of the all-Republican Brevard legislative delegation. The new vice chair will be Rep. Rene Plasencia of Orlando.\n\nAlthough neither lives in Brevard County, both of their districts includes northern Brevard.\n\nDave Berman is government editor at FLORIDA TODAY.\n\nHis Political Spin column runs Sundays in FLORIDA TODAY.\n\nContact Berman at 321-242-3649\n\nor dberman@floridatoday.com.\n\nTwitter: @bydaveberman\n\nFacebook: /dave.berman.54\n\nSupport local journalism: Subscribe at floridatoday.com/subscribe.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/01/17"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_23", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": []}
{"question_id": "20240112_24", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:21", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/15/delaware-ranked-1st-u-s-foreclosure-rate-data-company-finds/7218522002/", "title": "Delaware ranked 1st in U.S. for foreclosure rate, data company finds", "text": "Delaware had the highest foreclosure rate in the country this year, according to a nationwide realty data analysis.\n\nOne in every 1,705 housing units in Delaware had a foreclosure filing in the first quarter of 2021, according to the report from ATTOM Data Solutions.\n\nOf the state's three counties, Kent County saw the highest foreclosure rate at the start of this year, with one in every 1,281 housing units seeing a foreclosure filing. New Castle County saw one in every 1,691 and Sussex County saw one in every 2,094.\n\nWhile the First State ranked first in terms of its foreclosure rate this past quarter, it was 31st in the total number of foreclosure filings, according to the data.\n\nThe state had 254 filings — showing that even a small change in the small state can have a big impact on its ranking. And some state officials questioned the data.\n\nAlso, foreclosure filings were down 74% compared to this time last year when Delaware had 990 filings in the first quarter.\n\nThe state saw 268 filings in the second quarter, 123 in the third quarter and 132 in the fourth quarter, according to ATTOM Data Solutions — all significantly lower than 2019 rates, likely thanks to efforts from the state to prevent foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nNationally, the report said that foreclosures were up 9% in the first quarter compared to the end of last year, but down 78% from a year ago.\n\nIllinois ranked second with foreclosures in one in every 2,175 housing units, and Florida was third with one in every 2,237 housing units.\n\nEVICTED DURING COVID-19:Blind man wrongfully evicted from Wilmington home sues court system, landlord\n\n“The foreclosure moratorium on government-backed loans has virtually stopped foreclosure activity over the past year,” said Rick Sharga, executive vice president of RealtyTrac, an ATTOM Data Solutions company, in a statement.\n\n“But mortgage servicers have been able to begin foreclosing actions on vacant and abandoned properties, which benefits neighborhoods and communities. It’s likely that these foreclosures are causing the slight uptick we’ve seen over the past few months.”\n\nAddressing foreclosures in Delaware\n\nThe Delaware State Housing Authority launched a mortgage assistance program in August to help people struggling to make their payments during the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nThat program was paused at the end of last year because the state was unsure if the federal government would continue to help fund the program, according to Jessica Eisenbrey Welch, a spokeswoman for the Delaware State Housing Authority.\n\nThe state spent nearly $2 million to help more than 300 households, she said in an email.\n\nThe state expects more funding this year thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which is the federal stimulus package, but it's not clear when the money will be available and the state is still waiting for federal guidance, Eisenbrey Welch said.\n\nAt the end of last year, Delaware ranked 9th in the country for foreclosure rates, the data showed.\n\nDelaware is one of 20 states that have a judicial foreclosure process, and because this process tends to be longer those states typically have the highest percentage of foreclosure loans, according to Eisenbrey Welch.\n\n\"The state’s judicial foreclosure process, plus the mortgage mediation program that further extends the process to protect homeowners, tends to push up the number of loans shown as 'in foreclosure,'\" she said.\n\nDELAWARE RECOVERY:These 7 charts show exactly what happened to Delaware's economy\n\nThe Delaware Department of Justice, which manages a mediation program to help people avoid foreclosure, questioned the data report's methodology and conclusion.\n\nIn an email, DOJ spokesman Mat Marshall cited how the Mortgage Bankers Association ranked Delaware 11th in loan foreclosures last quarter in the nation.\n\n\"While our Q1 2021 participation data is not yet finalized, our preliminary figures do not show a significant change in the number of mediation-eligible foreclosure filings and certainly nothing that would give us cause to believe that Delaware moved from 11th in the nation to 1st,\" Marshall wrote.\n\nThe Department of Justice offers help for homeowners facing foreclosure.\n\nMore information can be found at https://attorneygeneral.delaware.gov/fraud/cpu/automediation or by calling (800) 220-5424.\n\nSarah Gamard covers government and politics for Delaware Online/The News Journal. Reach her at (302) 324-2281 or sgamard@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahGamard.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/15"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2022/09/22/wilmington-rents-rise-as-residents-scramble-to-find-new-homes/7954170001/", "title": "Wilmington rents rise as residents scramble to find new homes", "text": "Rent was rising at Wilmington’s South Front apartments.\n\nIt was an undeniable reality Alden Hall Larrick heard about over and over as her neighbor’s leases came up for renewal. Many had seen hikes of a couple of hundred dollars, so Larrick braced herself as she logged into the complex’s online portal in August to view her renewal offer.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/04/06/concord-mall-experts-discuss-delaware-malls-future-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/4859009002/", "title": "Concord Mall: Coronavirus may be a death blow to a struggling model", "text": "We are providing this content free as a public service to readers during the coronavirus outbreak. Please support the work we're doing by subscribing to Delaware Online.\n\nA sheet of white paper taped to the Concord Mall's glass entranceway notes the building's indefinite closure. The paper is crumpled and a piece is torn off the top left corner — the type of tear you make to get rid of a chewed stick of gum.\n\nA light shining from the corridor behind it is one of the mall's only signs of life.\n\nOn this night, every parking lot light is out. The lot's sea foam green and worn blue traffic signs have no cars to direct. The building's marquee is fixed black.\n\nThe Concord Mall, like hundreds of nonessential Delaware businesses, has been ordered closed by Gov. John Carney as part of a stay-at-home order intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus, a disease so easily transmitted officials recommend you don't leave home without a mask.\n\nNo one knows when customers will be allowed back in. But more frightening for the industry, no one knows if customers will want to come back.\n\nCORONAVIRUS IN DELAWARE: Complete coverage free from Delaware Online\n\nBefore social distancing, stay-at-home and shelter-in-place became part of our everyday vernacular, the prognosis for brick and mortar retailers was already grim.\n\nNow experts say the unprecedented shutdown will accelerate trends in the industry, most notably the shift to online shopping as customers make purchases from the safety of their homes, leading to a sooner-than-expected watershed moment for mid-sized shopping destinations such as the Concord Mall.\n\n\"This is a black swan event,\" said Venkatesh Shankar, director of research at the center for retailing studies at Texas A&M University. \"This is like a once in a century event, so nobody was prepared for this kind of damage.\n\n\"Owners will have to rethink whether malls are viable anymore.\"\n\nAt the top of the mangled printer paper is the logo for Namdar Realty Group. When the New-York based company assumed ownership of the Concord Mall three months ago, acquiring it out of foreclosure, no one predicted it would find itself in this situation — at least not this soon.\n\nAfter losing Sears, Planet Fitness and the sports memorabilia store AB Sports, roughly 3 of every 10 stores in the Concord Mall were vacant before the coronavirus hit. The mall's vacancy rate was about three times the national average, which hit an all-time high in 2019 according to most analysts.\n\nThe mall already needed an answer to the question that's dogged the retail industry for more than a decade: Why leave the house when you can order almost everything online?\n\nNow the question is more pressing than ever.\n\nTiers of shopping malls\n\nAfter being down more than 10% in March and with more losses expected in April, nationwide retail sales are projected to be down more than $150 billion, according to the retail consultancy firm GlobalData.\n\nLast week alone, nearly one million retail workers were furloughed by major brands such as Macy's and J.C. Penney. Even before the coronavirus pandemic both companies faced uncertainty, joining other mall-based retailers such as Forever 21, Charlotte Russe and Gamestop in closing dozens of locations.\n\n\"Even in the financial crisis we didn't see these kinds of declines,\" said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData.\n\nExperts believe the coronavirus pandemic will have a lasting impact on consumer habits, as more people become wary of going to crowded places. The biggest effect: online sales will grow in almost every category.\n\nA large group of shoppers will discover online alternatives and delivery services to replace their routine trips to the store during the pandemic, while already savvy online shoppers will see even less reason to shop in-person, experts say.\n\nSMALL BUSINESSES: Delaware small-business owners shut down by state brace for cold spring\n\nSome stores will reimagine how they distribute their products. To appease social distancing guidelines some stores will alter their layouts to reduce touch points.\n\nShorter-term projections, which see declines in sales almost across the board, also factor in record-high unemployment. The retail sector at large enjoyed multiple years of steady growth as unemployment rates fell to record lows.\n\nAs retail transforms on a macro level, experts say the short-term effect of the pandemic on individual properties will likely vary.\n\nTo discuss these impacts retail observers often split shopping malls into three categories:\n\nThe A-list super-regional hub: the mall at or near capacity that has repurposed lost businesses successfully and completed at least one wide-ranging redevelopment\n\nThe B-level mid-tier: the mall in need of new life after losing an anchor or two\n\nThe bottom barrel C mall: a mall that was small to begin with, but is now almost completely dark\n\nThe Christiana Mall is still Delaware's greatest draw for in- and out-of-state shoppers, and experts suggest its business will remain relatively steady. It's the A-mall.\n\n\"The flagship malls are fine,\" said Charles Lindsey, associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo School of Management. \"We all know what mall that is in our area because they’re just doing fine.\"\n\nThe Concord Mall, existing on the fringes of Christiana's orbit, is a class or more down and faces a challenging path to survival, with its anchors Macy's and J.C. Penney inching closer to bankruptcy every day their doors are closed.\n\n\"The draw that was the specialty mix is diminishing and the anchor tenants are disappearing,\" said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. \"I don’t see any sunshine in the forecast for these B, typically C malls.\"\n\nThe mall model has 'seen its best days'\n\nIn the mid-afternoon, days before officials announced Delaware's first coronavirus case, the long dimly lit Concord Mall corridor leading to Sears already looked deserted.\n\nThe fountain marking the end of the walkway was dry, safe for a few drops around its circular centerpiece. Its guts — the lights and hoses that fueled amusement for decades of children — were completely exposed.\n\nIf the signs advertising sales of 60% off weren't enough to remind you of Sears' looming closure, the gated Payless ShoeSource to its left would do the trick.\n\nThe sprawling shopping mall, anchored by department stores and bolstered by boutiques, dominated the retail landscape for decades. It brought together the disparate American downtown, while offering people a place to meet in a world that hadn't yet tethered an always-on connection.\n\nCohen said developers built too many malls during the mid-20th century, an issue later compounded by mall owners' failure to adapt. As malls became ubiquitous, Cohen said a feeling that each was the \"same old\" thing set in. These are some of the malls now struggling in overcrowded areas.\n\n\"I think the great American shopping mall has seen its best days,\" Cohen said.\n\nHOSPICE CARE: As coronavirus spreads in Delaware nursing homes, families wonder if they will be able to say goodbye\n\nMany retail experts interviewed by Delaware Online/The News Journal said a significant investment would be needed to revive the Concord Mall. Others said it's time to rethink the property, suggesting it could be converted to a fulfillment center or a data center in the short term.\n\nIn statements made since acquiring the Concord Mall, Namdar and its affiliate Mason Asset Management have assured guests and store owners of its commitment to revitalizing the mall. It floated the idea of adding \"mixed-use\" features to the property, but hasn't released any specific details.\n\nThe group has earned a reputation for rarely making significant investments and often running already troubled malls on tight budgets, according to various media reports, including a January story in the Delaware Business Times.\n\nIn response to a request for comment for this story, Namdar offered the following statement:\n\n\"The reopening plan for the Concord Mall will be centered around providing strong support and fostering stronger relationships with each of our tenants. One example of that includes running marketing campaigns on social media and our digital platforms, as many tenants will be running promotions to attract foot traffic once again.\"\n\nBetting on 'experiential retail'\n\nPrior to the coronavirus outbreak, developers pinned their hopes on \"experiential retail,\" the idea that adding businesses not traditionally found in malls like gyms, grocery stores, health care clinics and gaming centers could lure shoppers from their homes.\n\nSome took the idea to another level by adding luxury apartments or townhomes, building so-called \"live and play\" communities. Maybe you'll come out to eat and shop if the businesses are in your front yard.\n\nThe newly developed Promenade at Granite Run in Media, Pennsylvania, is close to fully leased, two years after developers knocked down almost every store in the 40-year-old Granite Run Mall and built a mixed-use center from its ashes.\n\nThe property features luxury apartments, an Edge Fitness center, an Acme supermarket and a bevy of national restaurant brands.\n\nSimilar developments have taken root at the King of Prussia Town Center next to the famous mall, and the Plymouth Meeting Mall, which features a Whole Foods, 5 Wits entertainment venue, Legoland and Edge Fitness, among other shopping destinations.\n\nIt's unclear what the future holds for these properties, as most haven't been around long enough to judge whether the additions grant the property extra staying power, but many in the industry are encouraged by their high occupancy rates.\n\nThe Concord Mall hasn't had a major renovation since 1994. Experts say it will be even more difficult for lower-tier mall owners like Namdar to to pour money into expensive redevelopments as their reserves are tapped during the pandemic.\n\n\"They will be under tremendous strain,\" Shankar said. \"In the short term it’s going to be really messy ... Those experience-type places will have to be reexamined.\"\n\nWhen asked about potential redevelopment plans in a follow-up message, Namdar said its current focus is on \"managing the impact of COVID-19.\" They said more updates on long-term plans would be available once \"we begin to regain a bit of normalcy and clarity on what things look like post-coronavirus.\"\n\nAllied Properties, a Delaware-based group that operated the mall previously, announced plans to completely redevelop the mall in 2017 but abandoned them midway through 2019.\n\nWith a high number of vacancies and the strong potential for more store closures, Lindsey described a cycle many lower-tier malls could soon find themselves in.\n\nMalls will find it difficult to transition to other uses as stores struggle, and stores will continue to struggle if malls don't find other attractions. It's a problem that is now amplified.\n\n\"This is just going to accelerate that,\" he said. \"The longer this continues, we're going to see some bankruptcies and additional store closings ... It will put pressure on malls because occupancy will go down.\"\n\nContact Brandon Holveck at bholveck@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @holveck_brandon.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/04/06"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/02/09/wilmington-east-side-honor-community-jerry-deens-delaware/9155617002/", "title": "East Side eatery honors past while working for Wilmington's future", "text": "Sunlight shone through the glass door of a building Charly \"Evol\" Bass knew well, the light kindling the warm hues of oranges and yellows that enveloped the walls of her restaurant, Jerry Deen’s.\n\nA patchwork of wooden planks, multicolored signatures and yellow neighborhood street signs covered a pillar in the middle of the establishment, complemented by the various black-and-white pictures of Bass’ parents that adorned the walls. The frigid winter air often seeped into the restaurant as patrons came inside to pick up their food, stopping often to greet Bass on their way to the counter.\n\nBehind Bass, on a sunny windowsill slightly obstructed by the drapes, sat a collage of photos showing her and a group of children she had mentored through Game Changers, a community organization focused on addressing issues within Wilmington’s neighborhoods.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/02/09"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/business/southwest-pandemic-aid-meltdown/index.html", "title": "Analysis: Southwest got billions of dollars in taxpayer aid. Why is its ...", "text": "Minneapolis CNN —\n\nWhen the coronavirus pandemic ground the transportation industry to a screeching halt in early 2020, the US government doled out more than $54 billion in aid to help pay employees and keep the systems from buckling.\n\nSouthwest Airlines received more than $7 billion from that program. But its system had two major meltdowns in the past 18 months, including this week’s massive system failure the likes of which the aviation industry has never seen.\n\nHowever, analysts say, Southwest’s service meltdown is unrelated to the taxpayer assistance the airline received in 2020. Although undoubtedly aggravating for stranded travelers, the billions of dollars taxpayers forked over to Southwest could not have been directed to solve the particular problems that caused this week’s snafu.\n\nCancelled Southwest Airlines flights are seen on the flight schedules at LaGuardia Airport, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022, in New York. The U.S. Department of Transportation says it will look into flight cancellations by Southwest that have left travelers stranded at airports across the country amid an intense winter storm. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura) Yuki Iwamura/AP\n\n[The pandemic aid] “is water under the bridge at this point,” said Robert Mann, a Port Washington, New York-based airline industry analyst. “The only distinguishing factors at this point are to what degree carriers have satisfied obligations that permit them to either return to paying dividends or return to paying higher officer salaries.”\n\nWhen air travel plunged in early 2020, the government stepped in with financial assistance to keep the airlines running. Preventing layoffs and furloughs in the transportation sector was a critical focal point as employees such as pilots are subject to training requirements and other certifications that, if lagged, could significantly disrupt air travel for a considerable time.\n\nThe Payroll Support Program, which started in March 2020 and was reupped two times in 2021, was similar in nature to the Payroll Protection Program that was meant to help smaller businesses keep employees paid and working during the pandemic.\n\nThe federal aid to airlines, which was a mix of grants and loans, came with some caveats: The airlines had to use the funds exclusively to continue paying wages, salaries and benefits to employees; and, for specific periods of time, they couldn’t conduct furloughs or layoffs; issue dividends or stock buybacks; or increase pay for executives.\n\nBy the carriers and airline unions’ accounts, the program ultimately was a success.\n\n“It worked,” Gary Kelly, Southwest’s former chief executive officer, said in December 2021 during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing to examine the impact of the PSP.\n\n“Funds received through each round of the PSP were only used for qualifying employee salaries, wages, and benefits,” he added. “We did not cut pay rates; we did not cut hours; we did not cut benefits; we did not layoff; we did not furlough. We actually raised our minimum pay to $15 per hour, effective August 1, 2021.”\n\nKelly noted that Southwest’s financially conservative approach that put it in a healthy position entering 2020, and the airline’s cost-cutting throughout the pandemic, had it on good footing for the future.\n\nBut this wasn’t a short-term event. As the pandemic spread and the virus evolved, demand bottomed out for travel, straining airlines’ operations. To save on costs, and to avoid layoffs, airlines including Southwest offered voluntary buyouts, leaves of absence and early retirement packages.\n\nEarlier this year, as Southwest and other airlines struggled with staffing shortages, two House Democrats asked the Treasury Department’s inspector general to investigate whether any of the PSP funds were used for the buyouts, which ultimately helped contribute to staffing shortages and service disruptions when demand returned.\n\nWhat caused the meltdown\n\nExperts, employees and even the CEO admit that Southwest’s mess was decades in the making.\n\nSouthwest’s meltdown this past weekend, a massive cascading wave of cancellations that stranded tens of thousands of passengers and overwhelming the airline’s internal systems, were a culmination of issues brewing for years, Captain Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association told CNN this week.\n\n“We’ve been having these issues for the past 20 months,” he told CNN. “We’ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.”\n\nMurray noted that Southwest’s ancient scheduling system hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told employees this week that the outdated scheduling system was the main culprit for the outage.\n\nSouthwest’s “point-to-point” model also didn’t help. The operational approach involves planes flying consecutive routes, picking up crews at those locations and relying on short turnaround times.\n\n“When they have cancellations in one area, it really ripples through, because they don’t necessarily have their crews and their pilots in the right positions,” said Jeff Windau, senior equity analyst of equity research for Edward Jones. “They just kind of build on from city to city to city, and when that gets disrupted, it’s very difficult to get the operations flowing smoothly again.”\n\nSouthwest acknowledged many of the concerns raised by Murray and others.\n\n“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told employees in a memo obtained by CNN. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”\n\nBailout money specifically meant to support workers\n\nThe PSP amounts were based on the carriers’ 2019 salary levels, which themselves were based on pre-pandemic flying levels. In April 2020, airline passenger traffic plummeted 96% and stayed 60% below 2019 levels in 2020, according to the US Government Accountability Office.\n\n“No carrier was operating a 2019 level of flying,” Mann said. “In fact, while saying ‘no layoffs,’ numerous carriers cut hours and related pay. Many others initiated voluntary separation agreements that paid fewer hours and salary dollars over a defined future period in exchange for early retirements or similar.”\n\nMann said that means it’s highly unlikely that any airline paid the full amount of PSP to salaries. Where did the excess PSP money go?\n\n“Could have been as simple as fuel, interest payments, other overheads,” he said. “But the idea that PSP would have paid for IT upgrades that a carrier saw no need for is not realistic.”\n\nBut Southwest will have to focus on its technology after its service meltdown.\n\n“Now that the problem has occurred, and at [the Department of Transportation] and the market’s urging, I suspect the carrier has a different view of what IT upgrades are necessary,” he said. “They’ll spend their own money now to research, develop and implement new systems.”\n\nStaffing shortages\n\nStaffing issues also contributed to both of Southwest’s recent service outages, even if it wasn’t the primary factor in the latest meltdown.\n\nSouthwest, like other airlines – and other industries – has struggled with staffing shortages amid the recovery from the pandemic.\n\n“The entire industry has been running, I won’t say running on empty, but running on reserve,” Mann said.\n\nTravelers wait at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on December 27, 2022, in Houston, Texas, after Southwest canceled approximately 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. Brandon Bell/Getty Images\n\nIn October 2021, Southwest had 7,000 fewer employees than it did pre-pandemic, according to Transportation Department data. The airline cited “inadequate staffing” following the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights during the Indigenous Peoples Day/Columbus Day weekend.\n\n“We are still not where we want to be with staffing, and in particular with our flight crews,” then-COO Mike Van de Ven said in a recorded video to employees. A transcript of the recording was shared with CNN at the time. “We simply need more staffing cushion for the unexpected in this environment and we are bringing new people on board every day,” he said.\n\nWhat’s next?\n\nSouthwest will attempt to move forward from its pitfalls under the watchful eye of the US government.\n\nThe Department of Transportation said it is investigating Southwest’s spate of cancellations and customer service delays. President Joe Biden said his administration “is working to ensure airlines are held accountable.”\n\nDemocratic Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut issued a new letter Tuesday calling on Southwest to pay up for what they say were avoidable holiday cancellations.\n\n“Southwest is planning to issue a $428 million dividend next year – the company can afford to do right by the consumers it has harmed,” they wrote. “Southwest should focus first on its customers stranded at airports and stuck on interminable hold.”\n\nUS Senator Maria Cantwell, who chaired the Senate committee hearing last year, issued a statement Tuesday pledging the panel would be looking into the causes behind Southwest Airlines cascade of flight cancellations.\n\n“The problems at Southwest Airlines over the last several days go beyond weather,” she said in a statement. “The committee will be looking into the causes of these disruptions and its impact on consumers.”\n\n– CNN’s Ted Barrett, Lauren Fox, David Goldman, and Chris Isidore contributed to this report.", "authors": ["Alicia Wallace"], "publish_date": "2022/12/28"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/03/26/wilmington-looking-almost-unknowable-hit-revenue-amid-covid-19/2880293001/", "title": "Wilmington looking at 'almost unknowable' hit to revenue amid ...", "text": "Less than two weeks ago, Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki was prepared to present a healthy picture of the city's finances – stable economic growth, a modest budget surplus and no need for tax or water rate increases in the fiscal year that starts July.\n\nSince then, the coronavirus outbreak has ravaged the restaurant and hospitality industries and numerous other businesses statewide.\n\nA record 10,700 Delawareans filed for unemployment benefits last week alone, though it's not clear what proportion live or work in Wilmington.\n\nWAS YOUR JOB AFFECTED? Find out how much your stimulus check could be\n\n\"Now, nobody knows what to expect,\" the mayor said.\n\nPurzycki nevertheless proposed Thursday evening (remotely, on the Zoom video-conference platform) a $169 million budget to the City Council on Thursday evening – with the expectation that the revenues will be significantly lower than projected.\n\nRevenue shortfalls expected\n\nOfficials will likely have to access the city's reserves to cover the difference.\n\nCity officials expect \"some erosion\" in revenues for the remaining three months of the 2020 fiscal year, he said, but \"it's 2021 where the real danger lies.\"\n\nBased on the state's March revenue estimates, the city expects next fiscal year to take in $171 million in revenues, more than 40% of which comes from the 1.25% income tax on city residents and those who work in the city.\n\nRESTAURANT INDUSTRY: Delaware restaurants trying to adjust to takeout services, some close\n\nPurzycki said he considers the state's estimates, made as the outbreak was just beginning to hit Delaware, to be optimistic.\n\nHe said he does not yet know how much city wage tax loss is expected from laid-off restaurant workers and other businesses that have shuttered. Other revenue shortfalls are expected from lost permits and fees if business and construction activity slows down, and less tax collected on hotel room bookings and property sales.\n\nExact numbers are \"almost unknowable at this point in time,\" he told the City Council.\n\nThe city will make its own revenue projections next month.\n\nHOTEL IMPACTS: Delaware hotels seek relief from state; lawmakers say it is not the priority, now\n\nStill, Purzycki said his goal is to avoid worst-case-scenario revenue assumptions that would require either city worker layoffs or tax hikes to balance the budget. In a city that largely provides only essential services to residents like police, firefighters, trash pickup and water, there's little left to cut.\n\nThe city has roughly $5 million in cash reserves available immediately and $17 million in a never-before-used \"rainy day fund\" that would require three-quarters of the City Council's approval to access.\n\n\"I don’t want to disrupt the entire government and start laying people off and slashing the government,\" he said. \"At the same time, I'm not going to be indifferent to the expenses and raise taxes for everybody. We're going to deal with whatever shortcomings, use whatever cash reserves are available, then if it's a longer-term situation, we've got to think long-term solutions.\"\n\nCity Treasurer Velda Jones-Potter also on Thursday said she's proposing the city open up the rainy day fund.\n\nSome of the administration's initiatives \"may have to give way to economic realities,\" Purzycki acknowledged.\n\nIncluded for now in the proposed budget is $1 million for the Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank, which receives and re-purposes vacant houses that don't find new owners at sheriff sale.\n\nAlso proposed are $400,000 for a program that hires residents to clean city streets, $672,000 for 20 new neighborhood security cameras and staff to monitor them and $617,000 for a new 311 city services call center.\n\nTHE PROGRAM: For ex-offenders in Wilmington, summer trash pickup is a path to employment\n\n\"Keeping cities clean is not a low-priority item,\" he said. \"We want to support the Land Bank. If we don't fix housing in these neighborhoods, we'll lose them forever. They're high priorities, but we have to live in the real world.\"\n\nThe City Council, meeting remotely, will hear budget presentations from city departments throughout April.\n\nCITY COUNCIL ON ZOOM:How to watch meetings during coronavirus outbreak\n\nCity workers fearful\n\nThe uncertain budget proposal comes after nearly two weeks of adjustments to the city government during the outbreak.\n\nIn-person services for residents are limited at the City-County Building. Many employees are working from home and roughly one-tenth of the city government workforce is on leave due to the virus, either for health reasons or to take care of children who are home amid statewide school closures.\n\nSIGNS OF HOPE: Readers spot acts of kindness during coronavirus\n\nThe city has stopped ticketing cars for both time-limited parking violations and for not paying meters. Street cleanings are suspended. Licenses and Inspections building code inspectors have generally stopped entering homes.\n\nOfficials have also halted water shutoffs and sheriff sales for residents who owe bills to the city.\n\nStill reporting to work are the city's sanitation employees, who have been increasingly vocal about safety concerns and wages as they collect residents' trash amid a pandemic. Among their demands are hazard pay for performing an essential city duty.\n\nCity contracts with several labor unions, including the ones that represent police officers, firefighters and blue-collar city workers, specify the city must pay \"premium\" overtime wages to those who still must work in the event an emergency closes the city government down.\n\nCoronavirus Q&A: How many in Delaware have been tested? Should I wash my groceries?\n\nOfficials said there's little chance of doing that during a long-term health crisis.\n\nThe city has previously had to shut down and pay premium wages for short periods of time during snowstorms. Premium wages would amount to $5 million for the first two months, said John Rago, Purzycki's deputy chief of staff for policy and communications.\n\n\"You can't close the government, that's impossible,\" Purzycki said. \"There are too many things that are necessary to continue.\"\n\nOne sanitation driver said that's of little comfort to city workers who don't have the luxury of working from home.\n\nHis department is short-staffed because several employees are on coronavirus-related leave, he told Delaware Online/The News Journal, and workers are picking up increased trash loads without masks as more city residents stay home during the outbreak.\n\nEmployees are particularly fearful, said another worker Reginald Grinnell, of coming into contact with the trash of an infected resident.\n\n\"We're going in there blind; it's just a big unknown,\" said Grinnell, who is vice president of the AFSCME Local 302, the union that represents city laborers. \"The morale is down.\"\n\nPurzycki said officials are \"working on\" providing protective gear.\n\nJeanne Kuang covers Wilmington for The News Journal. Contact her at jkuang@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2476.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/03/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/04/16/short-staffed-savannah-area-businesses-new-pandemic-crisis-tybee-island-wilmington-worker-shortage/7226488002/", "title": "The pandemic led to mass layoffs at hotels and restaurants; with ...", "text": "On a Wednesday afternoon, Angela Yeo, owner of Le Café Gourmet, tamped down coffee grounds as a worker manned the cash register in the small Parisian-style cafe.\n\nLike many businesses lately, the downtown eatery is stretching to accommodate eager customers while being severely short staffed. Yeo and her husband are working with a skeleton crew of four, which isn’t enough to keep them open for their usual seven days a week — and barely gets them through their opening hours.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/16"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2020/10/26/regional-malls-across-country-dying-delawares-could-jeopardy/3334830001/", "title": "Regional malls across the country are dying. Delaware's could be in ...", "text": "As she exits the Boscov's at the Dover Mall, Edith Moyer uses one hand to situate her mask above her nose as the other clutches a large plastic shopping bag by her side.\n\nMoyer does most of her shopping in-person — she likes to try on clothes and feel their texture, and she doesn't like the hassle of mailing items back. She has persisted through the pandemic, browsing for anniversary and birthday gifts while abiding by the mask requirements and social distancing markers of COVID-19 shopping.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/10/26"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/08/24/a-tale-two-cities-wilmington-mayoral-race/3310249001/", "title": "'A tale of two cities': Wilmington mayor will have to win over more of ...", "text": "When City Treasurer Velda Jones-Potter made her eleventh-hour entry into the Wilmington mayoral primary last month, she told the public she was heeding the call of city residents who urged her to seek the nomination.\n\nWithin Mayor Mike Purzycki’s administration, which had been in an escalating City Hall conflict with Jones-Potter, officials saw things differently.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/08/24"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2022/02/24/delawares-warehouse-boom-reaches-residential-area-near-middletown/6662857001/", "title": "Delaware's warehouse boom reaches residential area near ...", "text": "Stephanie Richers moved her young family from Wilmington to the Middletown area for a quieter life.\n\nAlmost four years ago, she handpicked a plot at the northern edge of the Bayberry community off Boyds Corner Road.\n\nIn one direction from the property, across acres of open fields, Richers spots the silos of Emerson Farms, where her family walks for ice cream. The other side of the yard backs up to a creek Richers' children play in. Sometimes they can spot a bald eagle or an owl.\n\n\"I wanted the trees. I wanted the wildlife,\" Richers said. \"I wanted that for our children.\"", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/02/24"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_25", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:22", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/food/2024/01/05/food-network-worst-cooks-in-america-delaware-dad-avi-boodram/72085156007/", "title": "One of Food Network's 'Worst Cooks in America' is a Delaware dad", "text": "There's no shame in this game: One of the \"Worst Cooks in America\" lives in Delaware.\n\nAvi Boodram who lives in Christiana, will display his apparent lack of culinary abilities on the Food Network program that begins airing at 8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 7.\n\nBoodram is one of 16 contestants competing in 'Worst Cooks in America: Spoiled Rotten,\" a seven-episode series that follows men and women as they go through a culinary \"boot camp\" led by Food Network chefs Anne Burrell and Tiffany Derry.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2019/02/27/delaware-wrestler-put-family-trauma-behind-him-attack-rigors-wrestling-navy/2597855002/", "title": "Delaware wrestler put family trauma behind him to wrestle for Navy", "text": "Thomas Ott was making his first phone call home from the Naval Academy Prep School in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 2014.\n\nHis mother, grandparents and siblings gathered at his Lewes home. It was their first time hearing Ott’s voice in weeks.\n\nOtt had been a three-time state wrestling champion at Cape Henlopen High. He was also a football and lacrosse standout, and honors student before graduating in 2014.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/02/27"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_26", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:22", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/2023/08/22/12-fun-delaware-things-to-do-before-kids-head-back-to-school/70612143007/", "title": "12 fun Delaware things to do before kids head back to school", "text": "Nobody has to remind you Labor Day is feverishly approaching, spelling the end of summer for many kids in Delaware, which also means you finally can reclaim your home.\n\nBut this doesn't mean you and your little ones can’t end this season with a bang before they strap on those backpacks.\n\nHere are 12 fun things to do with your children before Labor Day.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/08/22"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/iowa-mourns/2020/10/12/coronavirus-covid-deaths-in-iowa-lives-remembered/3477467001/", "title": "COVID-19 in Iowa has killed more than 6,100; we remember those lost", "text": "Des Moines Register\n\nThe numbers associated with Iowa’s coronavirus pandemic come regularly. They appear in our inboxes and on our feeds like clockwork, sandwiched between big box store discounts and emails from friends.\n\n4,706 positive cases one day.\n\n40 deaths another.\n\nOver 400,000 recovered to date.\n\nMore than 6,100 lost.\n\nIn the routine of it all a callus grows, a protection against what these numbers actually stand for — people.\n\nBehind these figures are storytellers and hard workers, Cubs fans and pie bakers, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. Behind these numbers are our fellow Iowans.\n\nThe Iowa Mourns project is a result of months of research to reveal the stories of neighbors and friends lost to the pandemic. In writing about them, we focused on the light of their lives instead of the darkness of their diagnoses, and sought to chronicle who they were, what they did and how they’ll be remembered.\n\nIowa Mourns was made possible by an unprecedented partnership of nine daily newspapers across Iowa’s two premier newspaper organizations — the Register, Ames Tribune, Burlington Hawk Eye and Iowa City Press-Citizen of the USA TODAY Network; and the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil, Mason City Globe Gazette, Quad-City Times, Sioux City Journal and Waterloo Courier of Lee Enterprises. Journalists from all over the state contributed, ensuring we painted a true picture of how Iowa has changed from river to river.\n\nWe remain committed to telling these stories. If you would like your loved one remembered in this way, email me at ccrowder@dmreg.com or submit their name here.\n\nTogether, we can make certain the Iowans lost will always be more than a number.\n\n— Courtney Crowder\n\nREMEMBERING:\n\nA\n\nConnie Abegglen, 74, Merrill. Loved the color red whether on clothes or cardinals.\n\nGeorge Abodeely, 83, Marion. Competed in Special Olympics.\n\nAlonzo Adams II, 95, Davenport. Creator of the Slim Jim.\n\nClifton Adams Jr., 76, Cedar Falls. Raised English springer spaniels and Brittany spaniels at Ada's Kennels.\n\nDoris Adams, 93, Riceville. Enjoyed gardening and hunting mushrooms.\n\nDuane Keith Ahrens, 83, West Des Moines. Served at least four Iowa school districts as an award-winning counselor.\n\nForrest Alcott, 65, Waterloo. Loved spending time with his great-grandchildren.\n\nGeoff Amble, 61, Cedar Falls. Often found tinkering in his garage, whether working on his Jeep or building furniture for his wife.\n\nTyler Amburgey, 29, Dubuque. A Texas native who played hockey with the Dubuque Fighting Saints.\n\nMarilyn June Andersen, 90, Center Point. Spunky with a penchant for everything leopard-print.\n\nPaul Andersen, 78, Sioux City. Active in Via de Cristo for more than 40 years, often serving as rector.\n\nAnnabelle Anderson, 79, Council Bluffs. Worked for Congressman Jim Ross Lightfoot for 12 years.\n\nEdith Elida Anderson, 95, Coralville. Proud of her Swedish heritage.\n\nJoan Anderson, 89, Quad Cities. Knit hats for newborn babies at the Bettendorf hospital.\n\nKeith Wayne Anderson, 73, Kalona. Served in Vietnam as a sergeant during the Tet Offensive.\n\nMartha Anderson, 89, Cedar Falls. Worked at the University of Northern Iowa's Rod Library for 31 years.\n\nLeora Andorf, 92, Cedar Falls. Contributed her finest homegrown plants to organizations for annual plant sales.\n\nGene Andrews, 83, Anita. Owner and editor of the Anita Tribune for half a century.\n\nMitchell Andrews, 90, Iowa City. A pianist who played solo, with orchestras and as a chamber musician across the U.S. and abroad.\n\nPatricia Androy, 58, Dunlap. Worked as a registered nurse at a nursing home.\n\nJose Andrade-Garcia, 62, Marshalltown. Was days away from retiring from JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.\n\nSiddiq Mohamed Arab, 83, Waterloo. Worked as a ship's surgeon sailing the eastern coast of Africa before becoming a pediatrician.\n\nDarla Arends, 58, Charles City. A special education instructor at Charles City High School.\n\nPeter Anthony Armatis, 54, West Des Moines. Coached his son's soccer team.\n\nJose Ayala, 44, Waterloo. Would open his Atari and VHS player to see its internal mechanics.\n\nB\n\nDavid Backus, 74, Ventura. A master bonfire builder who always shared his ice cream.\n\nLonnie Bailey, 61, Fertile. Took a family trip to the Mississippi river and apple orchards every October, rain, snow or shine.\n\nMark Bailey, 63, Fort Madison. Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nRobert Lee Bailey Jr., Oakland, 56. Ran the Las Vegas half-marathon with his youngest daughter Katelyn in 2018.\n\nJeanette Marie Baldwin, 88, Mingo. Former postmaster at the Mingo Post Office.\n\nLarry Ball Sr., 78, Des Moines. Fielded cars from 1985 to 1995 in the 410 division at Knoxville Raceway and other tracks throughout the Midwest under Ball Racing Inc.\n\nShirley Rae Barbieri, 88, Des Moines. Advocated developing more group homes for special-needs adults.\n\nTom Barnabo, 57, Des Moines. Original member of the Grand View University football program's coaching staff. Also a physical education teacher at Dowling Catholic.\n\nFaye Ann Barr, 79, Cedar Falls. Managed produce at Red Owl Food Store and IGA Supermarket.\n\nPatricia Pat Bartels, 86, Oelwein. A switchboard operator and union steward for Northwestern Bell Telephone Co.\n\nShirley Louise Barton, 75, Ankeny. Enjoyed crocheting, cross-stitching and attending stock car races.\n\nJoan Bauer, 86, Manilla. Taught Catholic classes at Sacred Heart Church for over 30 years.\n\nKenneth \"Ken\" Baxa, 77, Cedar Rapids. A devotee of country and gospel music.\n\nTheodore \"Butch\" Bean Jr., 81, Cedar Rapids. Built flag display boxes for families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.\n\nDorothy Beaton, 92, Iowa City. A world traveler who searched for faeries in the woods and walked along the Great Wall of China in her 80s.\n\nDavid Bedard, 78, La Porte City. Made his stockcar racing debut in the early 1960s driving his '57 Plymouth with \"Dirt-track Dave\" lettered on its tailfins.\n\nJack Beghtol, 92, Des Moines. Charter member of the Des Moines Ski Hawks waterskiing team known for his trick skiing.\n\nRonald \"Beans\" Behrends, 86, Monticello. Helped bring the DuTrac Credit Union to Monticello, and later worked on its board.\n\nRuthmarie Beisner, 87, Readlyn. Sang German songs for her family during the winter holidays.\n\nAylo Bell, 100, Marion. An expert seamstress known around the Coggon area for her fine alterations.\n\nDavid Belluchi, 57, Des Moines. Coached his sons and nephews at Plaza Lanes and AMF in Des Moines.\n\nDiane Bennington, 80, Cedar Rapids. Spent childhood Saturday nights roller-skating with her sister, Nancy.\n\nPatricia Berends, 84, Parkersburg. Worked at Lad's and Lassie's in Black's Dept. Store.\n\nElaine May Bergan, 91, Lake Mills. Known as the \"town historian\" for writing books on the histories of Lake Mills and Joice.\n\nGail Berggren, 85, Iowa City. An avid tennis player who won several club doubles championships.\n\nJanet Marie Besh, 80, Cedar Falls. Managed the Besh Trucking office with her family.\n\nJacqueline Lucille Biber, 89, Des Moines. Volunteered with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and at Temple B'nai Jeshurun.\n\nBrandon Biddle, 43, Tripoli. Traveled the state for bowling, even competing in the Iowa state tournament.\n\nDanny Ray Bierman, 61, Muscatine. A passionate St. Louis Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings fan.\n\nEugene Bird Sr., 85, Dubuque. Started his own business, Sign Service, with just a pick-up truck, ladder and toolbox.\n\nPhil Birk III, 83, Middle Amana. Enjoyed trains and collecting railroad memorabilia.\n\nStaci Birmes, 50, Hawarden. Loved crafting in all forms, regularly finding fun, new things to create.\n\nDiana Bixenman, 74, Le Mars. Instilled a great appreciation for cards and golf in her family.\n\nGerald Bixler, 83, West Des Moines. A Union Pacific \"railroader\" for 40 years.\n\nJohn Johnny Bjornsen, 68, Cedar Rapids. Avid cyclist and garage sale bargain hunter.\n\nJanice Blake, 79, Waterloo. Enjoyed studying the Bible, baking and crocheting.\n\nTodd Blanford, 63, Cedar Falls. Served his community as Cedar Falls Human Rights Commissioner.\n\nJuanita Blaser, 88, Cedar Falls. An avid seamstress who made countless outfits, costumes and beautiful quilts for each member of her family.\n\nDelores Block, 91, Cedar Rapids. Worked as church secretary at Bethany Lutheran Church for two decades.\n\nBernette Bloomquist, 97, Estherville. Made amazing Norwegian lefse, kringla, krumkake and rosettes.\n\nJeryle Gene Blubaugh, 88, Des Moines. Loved telling corny jokes and sharing fun history facts.\n\nMichael \"Mick\" Blubaugh, 65, Des Moines. Emceed karaoke nights at the Iowa State Fair.\n\nCarole Jeanne Blumberg, 86, Clinton. Owned and operated Clinton Tobacco and Candy.\n\nJames F. Boesen Sr., 87, Des Moines. Started family florist business after serving in the Marines.\n\nVernelle J. Bonar, 89, Treynor. A fervent cheerer at Treynor school events.\n\nDonna Boomershire, 86, Ames. Survived scarlet fever as a child.\n\nDaniel Lee Boon, 69, Rock Rapids. A car aficionado who carefully restored a 1957 Chevy police cruiser to pristine condition.\n\nRudolph Boonstra, 86, Orange City. Owned an expansive collection of classical music.\n\nBeverly Jean Bousseta, 85, Sioux Falls. Loved dancing and dining out.\n\nLee E. Bossom, 83, Blairstown. Mayor of Quasqueton for 10 years.\n\nGilbert Bovard, 93, Clear Lake. Served on the Iowa District Court bench for 22 years.\n\nDonald Bowlin, 74, Des Moines.\n\nWarren Coleman Bowlus, 90, Davenport. Served as Athletic Director for Davenport City Schools.\n\nShirley Bowman, 95, Marshalltown. Opened the Yarn Barn with her sisters to teach others to knit.\n\nMary Boyd-Doehrmann, 94, Coralville. Bowled a 189 in a single game in November 2020.\n\nRobert Boyle, 84, Dexter. Received a Quilt of Valor for his Army service in 2017.\n\nMary Ann Bradford, 91, Iowa City. Held lifelong passions for birds, dachshunds and women's rights.\n\nKenneth Eugene Bratney, 94, Urbandale. In his basement, started the Ken Bratney Co., which has branches around the country and in Argentina.\n\nRobert Brecht, 69, Keystone. A loyal fan of the Watkins Mudhens, attending games whenever possible.\n\nNorma Breitbach, 93, Charles City. Spent hours on a weekend traveling in search of the perfect crock or jar.\n\nBrenda Brewer, 60, Chariton. Remembered for her uniquely painted fingernails and delicious desserts.\n\nBill Bride, 77, Bloomfield. Involved with the area Johnny Poppers Two-Cylinder Club, riding around with his \"tractor buddies.\"\n\nDale Bright Sr., 83, Waterloo. A member of the Local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 288.\n\nMilo Brokaw, 65, Monticello. Cheered for Kevin Harvick while watching NASCAR.\n\nNancy Brokaw, 89, Monticello. Held Order of the Eastern Star membership for a half-century.\n\nCarol Bronson, 83, Council Bluffs. Enjoyed a long career at Union Pacific Railroad.\n\nDarla Eileen Brown, 54, Sioux City. Loved playing with her family members' dogs.\n\nDavid Brown, 76, Wilton. A fifth-generation farmer and true steward of the land.\n\nDonald Brown, 82, Independence. Proud 58-year member of IBEW.\n\nKyle Brown, 54, Marshalltown. Won awards for perfect attendance at TPI Composites.\n\nRichard W. Brown, 93, Des Moines. Made three cross-Atlantic trips aboard naval ships to bring troops home after World War II.\n\nJohn Pearson Brucher, 81, Cedar Rapids. Sang in the Janesville United Methodist Church choir.\n\nMarie Brumbaugh, 40, Davenport. Loved being a caregiver, both as a medical assistant and mother.\n\nBill Brunsmann, 85, Manchester. Famous for his growing his own tomatoes and making his own blood sausage.\n\nMarilyn Ann Brunsvold, 77, Mason City. Often found with a word search puzzle book nearby.\n\nTimothy Christopher Bryant, 59, Anamosa. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nTom Warren Buchacker, 77, Des Moines. A passionate fly fisherman, who tied his own flies and passed along his knowledge through Boy Scouts lessons.\n\nJoy Buchan, 93, Waterloo. Longtime art teacher at West High School in Waterloo.\n\nDouglas Doug Lee Budd, 61, Sioux City. Received a U.S. Army expert marksmanship badge for use of hand grenades.\n\nWalter Budde Jr., PhD, 95, Iowa City. World-renowned in peroxygen chemistry, especially the formation of peroxyacids and their use for the synthesis of epoxides.\n\nForrest Buffington, 80, Mason City. Loved rocks and \"anything with wheels and a motor.\"\n\nSedika Buljic, 58, Waterloo. Came to the United States as a refugee from Bosnia.\n\nJane Bullard, 87, Decorah. Never wore a bigger smile than when making fresh tracks on a snowy hike.\n\nRaymond Gayle \"Coach\" Burgett, 86, Des Moines. Coached teams at schools in Leon, Urbandale and Des Moines.\n\nPatricia Burrage, 72, Des Moines. Favorite adventures were to the Carribean and Europe.\n\nFrank Burton, 92, Des Moines. Loved jazz and classical music.\n\nRonnie Butler, 67, Montrose. Drove and competed in classic car shows.\n\nJoe Butterfield, 84, Marion. Led Marion park improvement projects, including getting the city a swimming pool, senior center, farmers market, and softball complex.\n\nBruce Byerly, 70, Marion. Lived his dream career as a model designer working for Mattel, Tomy and more toy and model companies.\n\nC\n\nJames Quinten Cahill, 91, West Branch. Wrote the Cahill Cooperative Newsletter, which covered history and current events for those connected by the Cahill surname.\n\nPaul Wesley Calhoun, 85, Atlantic. Ran a concession stand at the Vais Auction House with his wife, making popcorn with his popcorn machine.\n\nCharles Callahan, 77, Bettendorf. Worked for UPS for 33 years in New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Kansas and Nebraska.\n\nElaine Callahan, 98, Sheffield Village. Spent her time on arts and crafts projects making gifts for family and friends.\n\nJean Calligan-Salmons, 71, Sioux City. Managed her family's restaurant, Tastee Inn and Out.\n\nJanice Campell, 83, Sioux City. Retired from Farmland Insurance Companies after 25 years.\n\nCynthia Carey, 63, Council Bluffs. Worked for Physicians Mutual Insurance for 22 years.\n\nCarol Carlson, 79, Quad Cities. Spent summers boating and waterskiing at her family's Mississippi River cabin.\n\nMichael Carr, 59, Fairfield. A two-time kidney transplant recipient.\n\nLoretta Caruthers, 64, Keokuk. Loved watching television with her husband — even when they argued about programs.\n\nRuth Casteel, 95, Maquoketa. A 4-H leader who loved quilting, baking and traveling.\n\nThomas \"Snappy\" Catron, 65, Adel. Founded Snappy's Stick Fire BBQ.\n\nLouis Cauterucci, 70, Des Moines. Started his decades-long music career at the tender age of 14.\n\nRichard Allan Chamney, 65, Charles City. Could recite the lines of his favorite movie, \"The Wizard of Oz.\"\n\nDoris \"Jo\" Chandler, 93, Cedar Rapids. A fierce competitor at cards, frequently besting family members.\n\nJoe Chastain, 81, Afton. A ham radio operator and member of the Amateur Radio Relay League.\n\nJudy Chastain, 74, Afton. An active member of her community, she led the establishment of the New Afton Community Building.\n\nMarvel Chapman, 74, Des Moines. Collected Elvis Presley memorabilia.\n\nLou Christiansen, 84, Manchester. Worked on the Apollo program at Collins Radio.\n\nRodger Christensen, 92, Union. Read to children as a volunteer at Union Library.\n\nGeorge Christoffersen, 68, Missouri Valley. Absolutely loved Dunkin Donuts' hazelnut iced coffee and its chocolate cake donuts with chocolate frosting.\n\nSteven Joe \"Chromey\" Chramosta, 61, Cedar Rapids. An outdoorsman who loved to fish and hunt.\n\nMarvin Maynard Clark, 84, Carson. A collector of marbles, John Deere toys and beer steins.\n\nRuth Clark, 102, Des Moines. Gave tours of the Flynn Mansion at Living History Farms.\n\nTerri Lynn Clark, 60, West Des Moines. Loved photography, fishing and road trips.\n\nDorothy Clausen, 93, Lake View. A member of the American Legion Women’s Auxiliary for more than 50 years in Soldier and Wall Lake.\n\nElmer Clausing, 96, Parkersburg. A lifelong farmer in Bremer County.\n\nArlene Clement, 103, Washington. Loved dancing, participating in the Neighborhood Social Club, and having weekly lunches with friends.\n\nDorinda Coates, 65, Cedar Rapids. Famous for penning birthday cards to her fellow residents at Heritage Specialty Care.\n\nRoger Coe, 86, New Sharon. Loved bowling.\n\nMary A. Cole, 93, Cedar Rapids. Known for her delicious baked goods and her Schnauzers.\n\nKeith Danny Conrad, 65, Cedar Rapids. Taught Sunday school and led Ashram Group retreats.\n\nDarrin L. Cook, 57, Atlantic. Loved playing slots and keno.\n\nWillie Eva Cook, 85, Waterloo. A nurse at Allen Memorial Hospital for more than three decades.\n\nLarry \"Cookie\" Cookman, 71, Coralville. Always had a need for speed, enjoying Harley Davidson, Corvettes and NASCAR.\n\nJerome Coolidge, 60, Mason City. Always remembered a person's face, even if he forgot their name.\n\nElizabeth Coovert, 82, Fort Madison. Grew up with six siblings on a family farm at String Prairie.\n\nRebecca Copple, 86, Iowa City. Lived with her husband in Japan for two years and visited Turkey, Mexico, China and many places in Europe.\n\nReents Cordes, 73, Cedar Falls. An avid gardener.\n\nRaymundo Corral, 64, Sioux City. Worked at Tyson Fresh Meats beef plant in Dakota City, Nebraska.\n\nRoger Cory, 72, Elkhart. Served a year as Grand Chaplin of the Order of Eastern Star.\n\nAndrew Cousineau, 57, Sioux City. Loved grilling out for family get-togethers.\n\nJames Craig, 88, Pocahontas. Built and repaired clocks of all kinds.\n\nHarriet \"Joan\" Crandell, 88, Marion. Taught second and third grade, as well as opening and directing Kiddie Korner Preschool.\n\nKen Crane, 77, Atlantic. A school bus driver for Atlantic Community Schools who referred to the students as \"his kids.\"\n\nMichael Croft, 52, Perry. Moved to Utah and became an avid biker, skier, hiker and camper.\n\nJennifer Crawford, 53, West Des Moines. A special education assistant at Indian Hills Junior High School.\n\nThomas Cross, 82, Ankeny. Loved flying and obtained a pilot's license.\n\nRaymond L. Curl, 83, Washington. Worked at the Washington County Developmental Center.\n\nCynthia Curran, 73, Marion. Enjoyed listening to the \"oldies.\"\n\nIvan Current, 64, Maquoketa. Loved riding his Harley Davidson with his wife and friends.\n\nD\n\nCherie Dandurand, 53, Moville. Loved teaching about the history of ancient Egypt and Europe in the Middle Ages to her middle school students.\n\nJay S. Daniels, 92, West Des Moines. An active member of the Za-Ga-Zig Masonic Temple and Scottish Rite.\n\nAlvin Darling, 88, Decorah. Worked as a maintenance man at Luther College and as a truck driver for Featherlite.\n\nRobert \"Scott\" Darrah, 57, Council Bluffs. Loved all things Disney and often took his family on trips to Disney World.\n\nRuth David, 91, Ames. Avoided a concentration camp through the Kindertransport and came to Iowa years later.\n\nEdison James Davis, 94, State Center. Awarded the Purple Heart after getting wounded in action in Okinawa.\n\nRonald Davis Sr., 73, Perry. A Juvenile Probation Officer who loved hearing about the new lives of his former clients.\n\nDixie Deitchler, 90, Glenwood. Published poems and prose in Cappers Weekly.\n\nJohn DeMarco, 73, Coralville. Longtime football coach at Iowa City's Regina High School.\n\nMargaret \"Peggy\" Demke, 87, South Sioux City. Always cheered on the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Notre Dame Fighting Irish.\n\nPatrick Deutmeyer, 63, Manchester. Lived his whole life on his family farm, loving to quiz his grandchildren on agriculture.\n\nHoward DeVore, 78, Council Bluffs. An avid woodworker and carver, who always had several projects going at once.\n\nLarry Dewell, 83, Clarence. A 50-year member of the Eastern Star and the Masonic Lodge.\n\nDelbert Dittman, 66, Hospers. Loved older International tractors as much as the Albert City Threshing Bee he attended every year.\n\nBeverly Dixon, 83, Lucas. Kept the books for her son's business for two decades.\n\nJames Dixon, 93, Waterloo. Put himself through college working as a metallurgist at John Deere.\n\nRichard Doerr, 67, South Sioux City. Opened Dicky G's restaurant.\n\nThelma Doescher, 91, Mason City. A \"from-scratch\" baker who handwrote dozens of Christmas cards every year.\n\nHarry Delmar Donald, 87, Bennett. Served his community as a volunteer fireman and treasurer for the Bennett Fire Department for more than four decades.\n\nKadene Donlon, 46, Cedar Falls. Always looked for koala trinkets too add to her collection.\n\nDavid N. Dontje, 84, Forest City. Inducted into the Forest City Bowling Hall of Fame.\n\nShirley Doornbos, 85, Coralville. Lucky, especially when playing bingo.\n\nBetty Dorenkamp, 89, Belmond. Skilled with a butcher knife, expertly cutting corn off the cob and carving chicken for frying.\n\nPatricia Dorn, 88, Runnells. A retired nurse who loved anything about ancient Egypt.\n\nDuane Dostal, 93, Dysart. Prided himself on his corn and soybean yields, once winning second place in the state for his corn yield.\n\nRobert Dotson, 97, Urbandale. Proudly served on the USS Oconto in the Pacific Theater during WWII.\n\nHenry Earl Drake, 47, Des Moines. A diehard Oakland Raiders fan who watched games every week.\n\nGene Edward Dryer, 72, Clarinda. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nRichard Duclos, 89, Muscatine. Took a boat across the Mississippi River each day to attend grade school.\n\nAnna Dudgeon, 93, Durant. Former president of the Liedertafel Ladies.\n\nKenny Duke Jr., 87, Keosauqua. Helped students get their GED diplomas through decades of work at Indian Hills Community College.\n\nHarold Arthur Duncan, 89, Coralville. Iowa Department of Correction inmate.\n\nVerl Fredrick Duncan, 73, Hubbard. Known by family members as the \"Baby Whisperer” because he could soothe a wailing infant, having them snuggling contently within minutes.\n\nMary \"Lorraine\" Dunne, 91, Council Bluffs. Worked as director of the Lewis Central school food service program.\n\nGeorge L. Dyer Sr., 78, Ottumwa. Served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine.\n\nMarian Dyer, 87, Davenport. Worked as a secretary at Augustana College.\n\nE\n\nBob Eatock, 86, Centerville. An educator who loved musical theater and horror fiction.\n\nBonnie Ebel, 79, Cherokee. Farmed with her husband for two decades in the Mt. Olive area.\n\nJulie Ebel, 44, Hartley. Fought cancer and beat it twice.\n\nCarlene Suzanne Edwards, 68, Cedar Rapids. Member of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Marion.\n\nAbbie Irene Eichman, 36, Des Moines. Built Legos and tackled corn mazes with her husband.\n\nSandra Sue Eick, 85, Denver. Longtime employee at Denver Saving Bank.\n\nChristine Ellis, 65, Rockwell City. A crafter who always had a project, whether making flower arrangements or crocheting scarfs, blankets and dog sweaters.\n\nShirley Elsberry, 90, Waterloo. A snowbird who camped in Weslaco, Texas, every winter with her husband Chuck.\n\nFlorence \"Mary\" Emrick, 97, Iowa City. Awarded the Governor's Volunteer Award in 1999.\n\nNancy Emery, 72, Savanna.\n\nJason Englert, 38, Belmond. In his first year of teaching in the Belmond-Klemme Talented and Gifted program.\n\nKristi Jo Ernst, 66, Eldridge. Loved to spoil her children with homemade scotcheroos.\n\nGary Lee Eschen, 69, Cedar Rapids. Enjoyed making bracelets and necklaces.\n\nDorothy M. Etzen, 94, Forest City. A member of the women's American Legion Auxiliary.\n\nKathy Jo Everett, 60, Fairfax. Volunteer extraordinaire with the Fairfax Lions Club.\n\nStephen Evert, 77, Prairie du Chien. An out-patient counselor who worked in hospitals in Las Vegas, Nevada, Modesto and Sacramento, California, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin., and Des Moines.\n\nMichael Everhard, 65, Fonda. Served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam and Guam and did tours in India and Cambodia.\n\nF\n\nMary Fain, 88, Cedar Falls. A classical piano prodigy who became director of classical music and senior fine arts producer for KUNI/KHKE.\n\nShirley Farley, 83, Sioux City. Proud of her membership with Catholic Daughters of America.\n\nJohn Fellenzer, 74, Waterloo. From musician to realtor, car salesman to locksmith, a man of many trades.\n\nIsidro Fernandez, Waterloo. Left behind a wife and children.\n\nJudith Ann Fetters, 82, West Des Moines. Met her husband at a Des Moines skating rink.\n\nBarbara Finch, 104, Battle Creek. Farmed with her husband for 41 years, and went on to work another 16 at Ida County Bank.\n\nDuane Fisher, 95, Pacific Junction. Stood honor guard for President Franklin Roosevelt at Pearl Harbor.\n\nWilliam Flaherty, 80, Des Moines. Finished every sentence with \"and everything.\"\n\nRobert Michael Flanders, 63, Muscatine. A radar designer and engineer.\n\nDelores Flesner, 80, Cedar Falls. Loved reading the Waterloo Courier and Parkersburg Eclipse.\n\nDorthe J. Flick, 97, Clinton. Learned to read in a one-room schoolhouse.\n\nDoris L. Flynn, 96, Cedar Rapids. Worked in the Roosevelt Junior High cafeteria for 21 years.\n\nEstle Foster, 94, Clarinda. Relished raising his family on his Century Farm.\n\nJoseph Robert Fouts, 57, Onawa. Nicknamed \"Joe Dirt\" for starting his business with just one dump truck.\n\nEugene Fraise, 88, Fort Madison. Passionate about his community, serving as Lee County Supervisor for seven years as a state senator for 27 years.\n\nGoldie Frank, 88, Sioux City. Crocheted a baby blanket to celebrate the birth of each grand- and great-grandchild.\n\nRonald Frantz, 84, Mount Vernon. Friends and family raved about his chili and beef and barley soup.\n\nGlenn William Frazier, 81, Des Moines. Downhill skied in the snow, golfed in the sun.\n\nM. Patricia Pat Freeland, Bondurant. Advocated for building Anderson Elementary School and Bondurant High School on her family's land.\n\nMark Friedow, 71, Jefferson. Raised Poland China hogs with his grandfather and uncles.\n\nJudi Frondle, 74, Hiawatha. Enjoyed doing puzzles, painting and playing computer games.\n\nDaryl Fuller, 59, Waterloo. Loved American muscle cars.\n\nJean Fuller, 96, Mount Pleasant. Raised show horses with her husband.\n\nJudy Fuller, 76, Blue Grass. Listened to pastor Joel Osteen and shopped from the QVC network.\n\nRichard Fust, 84, Des Moines. Coached youth ice hockey for many years.\n\nG\n\nJohn Galles, 83, Kingsley. The voice of Kingsley Panthers baseball and softball teams.\n\nMarguerite Ganoe, 102, Stuart. Loved playing with her grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.\n\nJudith Garbers, 79, Keystone. Taught as a teacher for 30 years, and spent the next 20 years as a substitute teaching her former students' children.\n\nRoberta Jean Gardner, 100, Des Moines. A green thumb, who loved caring for her flower and vegetable gardens.\n\nBlas Chavarria Garcia, 48, Marshalltown. A hobby mechanic with a garage full of tools.\n\nReberiano Garcia, 60, Waterloo. Father of 10 who lost his wife to cancer in 2019.\n\nBetty Garner, 76, Sioux City. Loved to wear sparkly blouses and hats.\n\nDonna Garvey, 75, Bettendorf. Enjoyed bingo, shopping and playing with her grandchildren.\n\nTerry Geistler, 56, Osage. Volunteered his time to take residents of the Faith Lutheran Home on motorcycle rides, to family events and fishing.\n\nDuane Charles Gettler, 74, Adair. Loved telling people his favorite stories, such as the abundance of twins in his family.\n\nDavid Gierlus, 67, Iowa City. Served as a doctor at the University of Iowa and taught Respiratory Therapy at Black Hawk College.\n\nSharon Gile, 75, Creston. An avid bowler who passed her love for the sport to her children.\n\nRaymond Gill, 95, Coralville. Opened the Coralville's first dental practice in 1956.\n\nShawna Elaine Gilleland, 44, Burlington. A graduate of Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids.\n\nJames Nicholas Gillman, 93, Marshalltown. Honored for his work in veterans affairs.\n\nDarlene Catherine Goddard, 95, Iowa City. Worked in the Oral-B laboratories until 1987.\n\nLeroy Goeden, 70, Sergeant Bluff. Volunteered with the Sergeant Bluff Fire Department, EMT Service and as president of the Northeast Nebraska Handicap Group.\n\nJohn Z. Gomez, 70, Mason City. Worked as a diesel mechanic at National Byproducts.\n\nJessie Gonzales, 67, Fort Dodge. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nMary Gorsh, 84, Iowa City. Sang as a member of the Sweet Adelines for years.\n\nJoyce Gould, 63, West Des Moines. Worked in West Des Moines' human services department.\n\nRon Graf, 72, Waterloo. A farmer who so loved learning new trades that he got certified as a master electrician and a pilot.\n\nGenevieve M. Gray, 91, Evansdale. Worked at West High School in Waterloo.\n\nJeannette L. Green, 92, Davenport. Studied home economics, but excelled at chemistry.\n\nChad Greening, 48, Ankeny. An \"arm-chair manager\" with immense statistical knowledge and enthusiasm for the St. Louis Cardinals.\n\nJerry Grings, 80, Moscow. Known for his iconic black flat top.\n\nJane Gronert, 89, Cedar Rapids. Worked as a teacher's aide in Alburnett Community Schools.\n\nNorris Gronert, 90, Cedar Rapids. Earned many awards for service with Otter Creek Lions Club and American Legion of Toddville.\n\nGeorge Grubb, 68, Des Moines. A \"sweet-spirited\" man.\n\nLois Gruis, 93, Sioux City. Taught more than 100 private lessons in piano, organ and vocal music each week.\n\nJohn Grzybowski, 76, Urbandale. Loved puttering with his bonsai trees and playing video games with his sons.\n\nGary Guehrn, 76, Marengo. Loved all things tractor, including buying, selling, collecting and, most importantly, driving his Dad's restored 1950 International M.\n\nVictoria Gutierrez, 57, Des Moines. Loved spending time with family and her little dog, Chico.\n\nJason Gwin, 42, Sioux City. A collector of Superman comics who loved the DC Universe.\n\nH\n\nWilma Haberkamp, 90, Fairbank. Ran Jo's Thread and Thimble in Fairbank with her sister after retiring from teaching.\n\nDuane Hagberg, 87, Orion. Maintained a Cubs vs. Cardinals rivalry with his Heartland Health Care Center roommate, Jim Dodd.\n\nEldon Haines, 90, Quad Cities. A proud member of Plumbers and Pipefitters Local Union 25.\n\nDavid \"Doug\" Hall Jr., 80, Cedar Rapids. A professor of art at Kirkwood Community College.\n\nJames Lynn Pete Hall, 72, Wapello. Delivered meals to the elderly.\n\nMarian Hankner, 89, Waterloo. A homemaker and mother of three.\n\nPaul N. Hanson, 82, Cedar Rapids. Born in a log cabin.\n\nMarina Harbit, 88, Iowa City. Met her husband as a telephone switchboard operator at the University of Iowa.\n\nRobert Harle, 77, Kanawha. A perfectionist in the fields who farmed in Norway Township for more than 50 years.\n\nDonna Harman, 94, Waterloo. Established veterinary scholarships at Iowa State University.\n\nGlenda Harms, 58, Fort Dodge. A fierce and passionate champion for her students in the Fort Dodge public school system.\n\nMildred M. Harmon, 108, Windsor Heights. A master floral artist who decorated the Epworth United Methodist Church's altar.\n\nTherese J. Harney, 73, Iowa City. Organized Iowa City's first recreational basketball league.\n\nMarilyn Harnish, 84, Hiawatha. Worked as a licensed practical nurse until her retirement in 2000.\n\nHelen Louise Harrison, 98, Muscatine. Worked at Kelly Field supporting B-17 bomber production in San Antonio during World War II.\n\nMichael Harrington, 61, Adel. Co-owned Cool Beans Coffee Bar, serving as \"Chief Turkey Roaster.\"\n\nAnn Harris, 63, Cedar Rapids. Deeply passionate about preserving Iowa's history.\n\nGary Harris, 87, Waterloo. Managed Younkers department stores around Iowa and Minnesota.\n\nCharmeda Harrison, 91, Cedar Rapids. Enjoyed attending church and going to the Milestones senior club.\n\nHarold Haskin, 80, Denver. Made delicious lefse and maple syrup for his church family.\n\nRoy Allen Hassman, 77, Parkersburg. Enjoyed drinking coffee at Willie’s Feed Store, Sinclair Elevator and in Darwin’s shed.\n\nPaul G. Haywood, 62, Waterloo. A union pipefitter and welder for 40 years.\n\nGeraldine Hearn, 93, Marion. Owned and operated Vickroy Jewelry in Montezuma for a decade.\n\nTom Heath, 61, Iowa City. Drove a cab and worked as an accountant.\n\nMarie Heiar, 51, Dubuque. Ran a home daycare with her mother for many years.\n\nRachel Heller, 87, Grundy Center. A hard-working woman who started her career at the Grundy Center Richelieu factory.\n\nMerlyn Helm, 84, Clear Lake. The mayor of Crystal Lake for several years.\n\nMaurice Helt, 84, Burlington. A lifelong race car enthusiast, starting with a young fandom of Bob Riddle's stock car crew and races at the 34 Raceway.\n\nMark Henry, 64, Davenport. Took mission trips to Zimbabwe, Moldova and the Philippines.\n\nTom Henry, 88, Waterloo. A machinist, gauge inspector and gauge repairman at John Deere.\n\nGeraldine Gerry Marie Hearn, 93, Marion. 50-year member of the Order of Eastern Star, a Masonic organization.\n\nRichard Heggen, 72, Des Moines. Had a deep interest in vehicles, photography and good music.\n\nRoger Henn, 73, Forest City. Retired in Arkansas to fulfill his dream of golfing year-round.\n\nOwen Henning, 90, Latimer. Founded a grain handling business while running his father's construction company.\n\nManfred Joseph Hepke, 84, Manchester. Loved sharing stories about his early life in Germany.\n\nJames Dale Herbert Sr., 77, Muscatine. Worked at HON Industries and enjoyed a good casino.\n\nDavid Herndon, 61, Des Moines. A collector of toy helicopters and cars who always sported a fancy hat and belt.\n\nLucille Herndon, 91, Des Moines. Made fried chicken every Saturday night.\n\nArlyn Hesse, 87, Johnston. Loved volunteering, gardening and birdwatching.\n\nGilbert Hewett, 85, Cedar Falls. A lifelong teacher at high schools, colleges and education organizations across Iowa.\n\nFred Hickman, 78, Evansdale. Achieved the rank of lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps.\n\nJerry Hicks, 86, Sioux City. Met Babe Ruth in Sioux City when he was 7 years old.\n\nThelma M. Hidlebaugh, 93, Muscatine. Loved crafting, cooking and baking.\n\nVelma Hildebrandt, 93, Sumner. Farmed on four different farms with her husband in the 1960s.\n\nMarlan Hill, 83, Sioux City. Loved motorcycles, corvettes and horses.\n\nDavid Hindal, 64, West Des Moines. Played trumpet and French horn in the ISU Alumni Band and in pit orchestra for Urbandale Community Theatre, among others.\n\nHarold D. Hinderaker, 80, Forest City. Earned his GED and became a born-again Christian in his middle age.\n\nAnn Hinkhouse, 74, Tipton. Worked as a parish nurse for Zion Lutheran Church.\n\nMichael Hinton, 49, Cedar Rapids. A perfectionist who enjoyed playing darts.\n\nDoris Hintz, 92, Urbandale. Had a special talent for making costumes for the Urbandale 4th of July parade.\n\nClarence \"Jack\" Hird, 100, Farley. Established the Senior Citizen Meal Sites of Farley and Epworth, setting up the weekly meal service and delivering meals to people who couldn't leave the house.\n\nCarl Hoffman, 84, Cedar Rapids. Sold his family insurance business after 13 years to pursue his boyhood dream of driving an \"18-wheeler\" across the country.\n\nBenedict Howard Hofmann, 91, Iowa City. Childhood neighbors with his wife.\n\nDonald Hohnbaum, 89, West Des Moines. Put himself through law school by playing drums.\n\nSharyl Hohnecker, 70, Marion. Her Maquoketa home was known as the \"Christmas House\" because of how many lights and decorations she and her husband put up each winter.\n\nRonald Eugene Holdsworth, 62, Fort Dodge. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nLouis Holly, 86, Cedar Rapids. An active member and \"guest speaker\" at his local coffee club.\n\nScott Holtan, 62, Thor. Volunteered at Davenport's All Saints Lutheran Church food pantry every Saturday.\n\nSister Annelda Holtkamp, 102, St. Paul. Served as a nun for 77 years.\n\nDelbert Holtkamp, 82, West Burlington. Always requested lasagna at meals.\n\nWayne Holst, 81, LeClaire. Farmed all his life and drove a dump truck for 40 years.\n\nLarry Hon, 78, Des Moines. Drove the 24, 21 and 42 buses for Johnston Community Schools.\n\nIrwin \"Red\" Horsfield, 80, Epworth. Drove slowly on highways he helped build as a superintendent with Tschiggfrie Excavating.\n\nDavid Hosier, 61, West Branch. Knew he liked you if he made fun of you.\n\nAllen Lee Houang, 59, West Liberty. Immigrated to the United States in December 1981 as part of the Southeast Asian Refugee settlement program.\n\nMyron James Houghton, 78, Ankeny. Earned two bachelor's degrees, three master's and three doctorates.\n\nAdrienne Eugina Doolin Howard, 75, Cedar Rapids. Cooked soul food.\n\nThomas Howes, 74, Dubuque. A longtime fast-pitch softball catcher who had scars on his legs to prove it.\n\nMarcella Hubbard, 86, Anamosa. A member of the Anamosa Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses.\n\nDorothy Mae Hubert, 90, Salix. Wrote for the Sioux City Journal, drove school buses and sold Mary Kay cosmetics.\n\nDianne Huddleson, 63, Fort Madison. Always called the students her husband taught and coached \"our kids.\"\n\nGary Hudgens, 74, Altoona. Worked as a pressman for the Des Moines Register for more than 20 years, and retired, along with the presses, when the company automated.\n\nHarry Huebbe, 91, Baldwin. Sold hand-carved wooden toys at flea markets.\n\nRichard Hunt, 96, Cedar Falls. Traveled to the Black Hills in the summer to camp with his family.\n\nDonald Hunter III, 60, Council Bluffs. Worked as a United States Postal Carrier for more than three decades.\n\nKevin Huss, 54, Des Moines. A volunteer firefighter and EMT for the Northern Warren Fire Department.\n\nDonald Husted, 77, Davenport. Drank chocolate malts with his brother Frank as they drove around the Quad Cities in Frank's vintage Camaro.\n\nAnn Scannell Huxol, 93, Iowa City. A Scrabble enthusiast who played to win.\n\nI\n\nGayle Muggs Isaac, 71, Des Moines. Told his wife every day how much he loved her.\n\nDorothy Irene Iseminger, 93, Des Moines. Sold Avon for 30 years, earning many President's Club awards.\n\nJ\n\nPeggy Ann Jackson, 86, Des Moines. Co-owned Research Industries with her husband, Paul, hauling for Alter Metal Recycling for 30 years.\n\nKatie G. Jacobs, 96, Council Bluffs. Lived on her family farm her entire life.\n\nGloria Eileen Jacobsma, 68, Rock Rapids. Loved her family, her country, the Twins and Vikings, and eagles, two of which soared over her burial.\n\nAllan Jacobson, 89, Cedar Falls. Never missed one of his sons or grandsons' performances.\n\nJune Marie Jaehnel, 92, Des Moines. Taught piano and participated in women's circles at church.\n\nHusen Jagir, 56, Sioux City. A Sudanese refugee who worked at the Seaboard Triumph Foods plant.\n\nMargaret James, 81, Monticello. Always up to attend a Hawkeye tailgate and enjoyed following the Hawks to bowl games.\n\nJohn Steve Jansen, 74, Sioux City. Trained, bred, raced and bet on thoroughbred horses.\n\nDaryle Jass, 84, Ankeny. Tried to retire twice, but couldn't sit still.\n\nRaymond Jennings, 77, Muscatine. Taught his grandchildren the bounty of catfish ponds and how to keep their eye on the ball.\n\nChristine Jensen, 67, Des Moines. Loved to sing songs with her twin sister, Andrea.\n\nBarbara Johnsen-Earlanson, 75, Dubuque. Enthusiastically spent hours preparing meals for families and friends.\n\nAlene Johnson, 79, North Sioux City. Raised chickens and other animals on her acreage.\n\nBrian Johnson, 63, Waterloo. A pool player who made many friends through his time in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls leagues.\n\nCarroll Johnson, 81, Mason City. Always cheered on her favorite NASCAR drivers, Dale Earnhart and Dale Earnhart Jr.\n\nDuane Bud Johnson, 86, Merrill. Enjoyed his corn shelling and custom combining business.\n\nEverett Johnson, 82, Boone. Grew up surrounded by music, which eventually led to his role as executive secretary of the Iowa High School Music Association.\n\nLarry Johnson, 83, Charles City. Student council president at Harvard.\n\nLeonard Johnson, 89, Tama. Danced at the annual Meskwaki pow-wow.\n\nMark Johnson, 57, Cedar Falls. Worked for Blue Diamond in warm seasons and at Godfather's Pizza in cold.\n\nMark Johnson, 64, Maurice. Laid to rest near his family farm in rural Hinton where he can always watch over his herd.\n\nMelvin Johnson, 84, Packwood. A gifted cattleman who farmed his whole life.\n\nBarbara Jones, 56, Monticello. Sold her baked goods, including her famous monster cookies, at the Hiawatha Farmers Market.\n\nDorothy Jones, 77, Grinnell. Bought her younger sister her first tube of lipstick in seventh grade.\n\nGladys \"Jeannie\" Jones, 91, Eldridge. Hosted a WOC Radio talk show about her business on Saturday mornings.\n\nKenneth \"Kenny\" Jones, 60, Storm Lake. The ultimate fan of every Chicago sports team.\n\nRandall Jones, 63, Cedar Rapids. Brought people together with a good meal and a strong Grey Goose martini.\n\nMarie Jordan, 88, Urbandale. Survived polio, breast cancer and a few broken legs and hips.\n\nPamela Jane Juhl-Mennes, 76, Atlantic. Specialized in making soups and cakes as an amazing cook and baker.\n\nK\n\nAxel Kabeya, 35, Waterloo. Was a French interpreter at Tyson Fresh Meats after immigrating from the Congo.\n\nAlice Kauten, 73, Jesup. Taught and counseled students in New Hampton and Jesup.\n\nNicole Keller, 76, Waukee. Instrumental in taking Principal Financial Group public on the New York Stock Exchange.\n\nDavid Kelley, 64, Stratford. Spent his free time playing and listening to bluegrass.\n\nHarold \"Gary\" Keplinger, 77, Mount Ayr. Earned his doctorate in education, helping students learn math in high school, adult education and college.\n\nDonald Kerker, 90, Newhall. Toured over 30 countries with his wife while working in Germany.\n\nDarlene Kern, 94, Johnston. Died with her husband, Donald, by her side.\n\nDonald Kern, 99, Johnston. Died with his wife, Darlene, by his side.\n\nViengxay Khuninh, 69, Sioux City. Framed his certificates from 37 years at Tyson Fresh Meats.\n\nJim Killam, 70, Des Moines. Passionate about teaching, whether through church or through soccer.\n\nDoug King, 69, Mason City. Called Bompa by his grandkids.\n\nBeverly Kinnander, 87, Estherville. Worked as a cleaner for several local businesses and Fairmont Hospital.\n\nEverett Kintzel, 97, Blairstown. Farmed at his \"home place\" in Olin and Luzerne with his wife, Doris.\n\nJim Kirkendall, 75, Sloan. Took many friends and family on their first hunting and fishing trips.\n\nJerry Robert Kilpatrick, 84, Davenport. Took two mission trips to Honduras building a hospital.\n\nJames Kleppe, 79, Coralville. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nLarry Klindt, 76, Sac City. Spent free time collecting model trains and guns.\n\nElizabeth Betty Kline, 81, Iowa City. Traveled the country in a motor home.\n\nMary Kline, 93, Chariton. Moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa as a child, where she remained in rural Chariton her whole life.\n\nJack Klingborg, 83, Cherokee. An activity therapist and teacher at Cherokee Mental Health Institute.\n\nRuth Klotz, 98, Des Moines. An inspiration and mentor to two generations of women in the law in Iowa as an attorney and judge.\n\nRaymond Klyn, 94, Pella. Served as an elder and deacon at Second Christian Reformed Church.\n\nNorma J. Knight, 93, Des Moines. Loved her two great-great-grandchildren.\n\nDonald Knudsen, 87, Dike. Helped move his community forward as mayor for 44 years\n\nEllen Koch, 74, Maquoketa. Coached speech, taught drama and directed school plays as an English teacher in many Iowa school districts.\n\nJohn \"János\" Kokity, 92, Quad Cities. Member of the Over 50 Ballroom Dance Club.\n\nIrene Konecny, 89, Cedar Rapids. A 50-plus year member of Soroptimist International of Cedar Rapids.\n\nBetty Sonner Kooker, 78, Altoona. Volunteered with prison ministries.\n\nLouie Kopsas, 89, Doon. Took the train from Doon to Sioux Center on weekends to see movies as a child.\n\nMarjorie Ann Kramer, 86, Shell Rock. An avid bird watcher and skilled seamstress.\n\nMarlyn Kramer Sr., 86, Maquoketa. Worked as a powder coater in Collis Inc. in Clinton for many years.\n\nRhonda Krantz, 63, Des Moines. Fond of the mountains from her time living in Colorado.\n\nChad Kuehl, 45, Garber. Chief of the Garber Fire Department and member of the Garber City Council and Iowa Firefighters Association.\n\nHerman Kurk III, 94, South Amana. Enjoyed wandering the Iowa countryside to visit his neighbors.\n\nMichael Kurylo, 85, Bettendorf. Born in Ukraine and grew up on a German Farm alongside Allied prisoners of war during World War II until an an American flyer landed to tell them they were liberated.\n\nL\n\nEvelyn Lacock, 102, Cedar Rapids. Loved supporting her family as a classroom volunteer, carpool driver and cheerleader-in-chief.\n\nJohn Laflen, 84, Buffalo Center. Won awards for his research on the development of a new generation of erosion prediction technologies.\n\nWade Lampe, 46, Readlyn. Spent his free time outdoors or in the garage working on his family's used car collection.\n\nJerry Lang, 74, Waterloo. Started Lang's Home Maintenance.\n\nLeRoy \"Puttball\" Lanxon, 88, Cherokee. Known as \"everyman's friend, everyman's confidant and everyman's best buddy\" in Cherokee.\n\nRichard Larsen, 77, Des Moines. Loved classic cars and going to the races.\n\nTricia Larson, 55, Fort Dodge. Devoted her life to teaching at Manson Northwest Webster Elementary.\n\nSarah Latimer, 98, Iowa City. Trained in a segregated Black unit at Fort Des Moines for the Women's Auxiliary Army Corp.\n\nGeanell Shavon Latimore, 38, Des Moines. Loved books so much she would read one while listening to another.\n\nKeith Lawrence, 95, Decorah. An ISU-certified master gardener who inspired his children's love for horticulture.\n\nCloris Leachman, 94, Des Moines. An actress who won eight Primetime Emmy Awards and an Oscar.\n\nLaVirta Lee, 91, Mapleton. Cherished the Eastside Homemakers Club and the Soldier Lutheran Ladies Aid.\n\nLorne Lee, 54, Independence. Helped organize ATV trails in Buchanan County and served as president of the Trailblazers Off Road Club.\n\nStuart Lefstein, 86, Quad Cities. Successfully argued a patent law case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987.\n\nAntonia C. Leon, 94, Valley Junction. Adored her 24 nieces and nephews and her Shih Tzu, Hamilton.\n\nKay Lenox, 79, Davenport. An avid collector of Lenox figurines and ornamental pigs.\n\nWillie Levi, 73, Waterloo. Freed from a decrepit Iowa bunkhouse by a Des Moines Register investigation.\n\nFrederick William Lewis, 68, Anamosa. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nChester Franklin Lief Jr., 75, Wyoming. Enjoyed mushroom hunting.\n\nKenneth Lien, 101, Nora Springs. Awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star after being wounded in 1944 in Italy.\n\nNelda Lindhorst, 88, Council Bluffs. Worked as a Medical Transcriptionist for Mercy Hospital.\n\nBernard Bernie Lee Lindstrom, 80, Wheatland. A handyman who could fix almost anything.\n\nBill Lingle, 64, Davenport. Coached coached Friendly House basketball, travel basketball, Little League and Pony baseball, and helped form the Quad City Bronco League. the Quad City Heat baseball club and Davenport Youth Football League.\n\nPhyllis Link, 90, Estherville. Raised chickens and sold eggs from her farm in rural Swea City.\n\nPhyllis Liston, 86, Granger. Could read a 500-page book easily in two days.\n\nCindy Litwiller, 65, Fort Dodge. Helped many small businesses through her work with Professional Developers of Iowa and other economic development groups.\n\nEmma Lohmann, 97, Wheatland. Won the women's club championship at Wapsi Oaks Country Club.\n\nMary Jill Long, 79, Dubuque. Her husband stood outside her nursing home window in the rain as she died.\n\nLucy Lorence, 96, Oskaloosa. Found time for P.T.A., Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, and raising money for the debate team while working two jobs.\n\nPatricia Loter, 87, Keokuk. Enjoyed going on bus trips with friends.\n\nHelen Lowery, 97, Davenport. A part of the \"Groovy Girls,\" a women's lunch group.\n\nDwayne Lucht, 66, Council Bluffs. Worked many jobs, including remodeling homes and farming.\n\nJim Luensman, 43, Atkins. Worked as a paramedic in Monticello, North Benton and Atkins.\n\nLouis Luiken, 79, Radcliffe. Served his community as city council member and mayor.\n\nMary Lund, 59, Davenport. Loved going to concerts, especially to see Bon Jovi.\n\nE. Joe Ann Lutz, 84, Des Moines. Taught real estate ethics.\n\nEdward \"Jazzman Joe\" Lynch, 86, Ankeny. An accomplished tenor sax and harmonica player with an expertise in Traditional Dixieland Jazz.\n\nDonald Lyons, 74, Boone. Ran his family's farm while serving as a Boone County Farm Bureau agent for more than 20 years.\n\nM\n\nMaurice Maakestad, 95, Osage. A card shark who often won at 500 with wild bids.\n\nJimmie Lee Maclin, 66, Cedar Rapids. An entrepreneur who lived in Cedar Rapids for over 40 years.\n\nRandall Magee, 64, Cedar Falls. Devotedly followed Ricky \"the Rooster\" Rudd in NASCAR.\n\nJerry Parsons Mahacek, 76, Waverly. Volunteered with Iowa Missions of Mercy, a community dental clinic, after health problems forced him to retire from his practice.\n\nJeffrey Duane Mahrt, 64, Spencer. A proud, founding member and head coach of the Spencer Cardinals baseball team.\n\nBarbara Malone, 65, Dunlap. Enjoyed watching rodeos on television.\n\nArlene Duggan Maloney, 92, Cedar Rapids. Proud of her volunteer work at Whitwer Senior Center.\n\nMelvin Manternach, 87, Monticello. Proud member of \"Table of Knowledge\" at Darrell's family diner.\n\nMarilyn Louise Markman, 90, Des Moines. An artist who made beautiful painted rice paper collages.\n\nJohn Marks, 61, Urbandale. Worked as an independent contractor for the real estate division at the U.S. Postal Service.\n\nJohn Marino, 68, Clear Lake. An avid rider of both bicycles and motorcycles.\n\nGary Marple, 83, Mount Pleasant. Chief inventor and co-founder of Lessac Technologies Inc., which developed text-to-speech software for expressing a wider vocal range of emotions.\n\nBill Martin, 72, Boone. Stayed lifelong friends with people in his high school marching band, forming the Bill Martin Group to keep playing music.\n\nJose Gabriel Martinez, 58, West Liberty. Did impressions while telling stories to his family.\n\nWillene \"Willy\" Marvin, 90, Ames. Used his \"gift of gab\" to talk with anyone and everyone.\n\nBart Mason, 52, Coralville. Came back every year to his hometown of Slater to help his dad with the Fourth of July Fireworks.\n\nNancy Chilton Maxwell, 92, Des Moines. Loved playing the lottery and the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.\n\nHarry McBride, 89, Anamosa. An active member of the Iowa Funeral Directors Association, directing funerals for over 60 years.\n\nEd McCliment, 86, Iowa City. Traveled the world as a physics professor.\n\nCharline Lorraine McDermott, 86, Toddville. The best baby whisperer.\n\nWalter McDonald, 84, Nevada. Devoted his career to safety research and special projects with the Iowa Department of Transportation.\n\nKevin McDonnell, 63, Newton. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nSang Hae McDowell, 92, Davenport. Grew up under Japanese occupation of Korea.\n\nRoy McElfish, 68, Leon. Enjoyed tractor pulling competitions.\n\nTimothy Louis McGhee Jr., 48, Fort Dodge. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nChristine McGowan, 70, Washington. Treasured her four guide dogs.\n\nBarbara McGrane-Brennan, 61, Fairbank. A garage sale fanatic with a collection of blankets and stuffed animals.\n\nJames \"Bert\" McGrew, 92, Cedar Rapids. A \"numbers\" man who loved Sudoku.\n\nBeverly McGuire, 92, Cedar Rapids. Sent visitors off with a homemade jar of jam, pickles or fresh tomatoes.\n\nLucy McKenzie, 91, Des Moines. Her front yard was featured on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens magazine.\n\nEarnest McKeown, 89, Sioux City. An accomplished woodworker.\n\nClaudie Mclain, 83, Marshalltown. Could be seen walking every day, often on his way to his daily visit to the YMCA.\n\nWilliam Mclaughlin, 89, West Des Moines. Started his own engineering, urban planning and construction business in 1971.\n\nJohn McMahon, 78, Newton. Never without a story to tell about his years hunting, fishing and working in law enforcement.\n\nGarold McMeins Jr., 67, Urbandale. Volunteered at the Midwest Old Settlers and Threshers Association.\n\nJohn Allen McMurchy, 76. Charles City. A farmer and expert hay baler.\n\nJoyce McMurrin, 82, Cedar Falls. Loved playing bingo, cards, and going to the casino.\n\nTerie McNamara, 70, Waterloo. A supervisor at Osco Drug/CVS.\n\nJanice L. McNelly, 79, Cedar Falls. Served as the Iowa president of the League of Women Voters.\n\nDarlene McWhirter, 91, Traer. Learned to cook on a farm, helping her parents feed seemingly countless siblings, cousins and threshers.\n\nBetty Jean Meis, 89, Cedar Rapids. Worked at Collins Radio as a graphic artist.\n\nPhil Menke, 72, Algona. Enjoyed doing the finish carpentry in new homes.\n\nWilma Merritt, 84, Maquoketa. Enjoyed life on the farm, caring for her family, animals and plants.\n\nBarry Mertes, 65, Des Moines. A member of the VFW and Adventure Life Church in Altoona.\n\nJohn Mertz III, 60, West Bend. Loved the color green and anything John Deere.\n\nRoy Wendell Messerschmidt, 94, West Des Moines. Always looked forward to playing in the father and son golf tournament with his sons, Rick and Bill, at the Des Moines Golf and Country Club.\n\nCecelia Meyer, 90, Iowa City. Worked for 24 years at the University of Iowa College of Education.\n\nCorinne Meyer, 26, Sioux City. Loved her trips to Disney World with her family, where she met all her favorite characters.\n\nFred Meyer, 78, Wheatland. Enjoyed having coffee with friends at the Blue Grass McDonalds.\n\nRichard Meyer, 82, Davenport. Ran a wholesale grocery business.\n\nLee Mickey, 79, Cedar Falls. Retired from Cedar Falls Community School District to run a Bed and Breakfast with his wife in Vermont.\n\nMarilyn Millage, 82, Sioux City. Collected souvenir spoons and memorabilia of Mickey Mouse, her favorite character.\n\nJames \"Jim\" Lowell Miller Jr., 64, Cedar Rapids. An expert handyman and bonfire builder.\n\nEric Ridgway Miller, 83, Waterloo. Held himself and the law to high ethical standards as a lawyer and community leader.\n\nGary Miller, 64, Coralville. A reverend at Grace Fellowship Church in Iowa City.\n\nRay Miller, 43, Sioux City. Loved making people laugh.\n\nRick Miller, 62, Ankeny. Started his salesman career at age 7 by selling flowers.\n\nSherry Miller, 65, Britt. Worked side by side with her husband at Miller & Sons Golf Cars.\n\nStephen Miller, 77, Marquette. Had fun rituals with his children from Friday family nights at the YMCA to group outings to Badgers basketball and football games.\n\nLyle Minnick, 86, Kellerton. Met his wife at the Mount Ayr skating rink when he was 16 years old.\n\nJudy Minnick, 84, Kellerton. Drove go-carts and four-wheelers around the farm with her children and grandchildren.\n\nJudy Mohr, 69, Boone. Loved crocheting, crafting and playing Bingo.\n\nShirley Ann Mommsen, 83, Maquoketa. Worked as a nurse's aide at the Jackson County Public Hospital.\n\nJeffrey Mondry, 61, Mason City. Often found fixing and tending to problems for his friends and family, no matter how small.\n\nNorman Montgomery, 64, Waterloo. Led the Ferguson Field Youth Baseball Team to a city championship as a coach.\n\nOlive Morris, 100, Cedar Falls. Loved her 5 children, 16 grandchildren, 44 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.\n\nCraig Morris, 55, Shenandoah. Defeated Hodgkin's Lymphoma twice in 2013 and 2015.\n\nRichard Morris, 81, Indianola. Took over the family business, Indianola Memorial Works.\n\nPhyllis Jean Morrison, 96, Clear Lake. Percussionist in high school and college.\n\nJerry Morrow, 63, Cedar Rapids. Died less than 12 hours apart from his wife, Rosie with family saying their love was a true meaning of “until death does us apart.”\n\nRosie Morrow, 81, Cedar Rapids. Died less than 12 hours apart from her husband, Jerry with family saying their love was a true meaning of “until death does us apart.”\n\nDonald Mott, 96, Paullina. Registered for the draft as a conscientious objector and did Civilian Public Service work from 1944 to 1946 in five states.\n\nMarietta Muchow, 86, Clear Lake. Lived in Oklahoma, Texas and Iowa as her husband's career as a commercial pilot took them across the country.\n\nWanda M. Mullan, 94, Des Moines. A homemaker devoted to her husband of 73 years.\n\nPatricia \"Pat\" Craven Mulvihill, 99, Des Moines. A dancer who loved volunteering at local recitals.\n\nMark Munday, 61, Le Mars. Born the day the Dodgers won the 1959 World Series and remained a lifelong fan.\n\nTerry Munyon, 65, Kellerton. Asked his wife three times to marry him while they were growing up and each time she said no. They spent 43 years together after she asked him to marry her and he said yes.\n\nRicky Murga, 53, Quad Cities. Enjoyed Mexican art, culture and vintage automobiles.\n\nElizabeth \"Bette\" Murphy, 93, Silvis. Enjoyed her great-grandchildren's baseball games and playing euchre with friends.\n\nMelinda Mutti, 55, Pella. Taught as a substitute teacher in Knoxville and Pella schools.\n\nL. Merle Deke Myers, 90, Iowa City. Recruited at the Packwood train stop to work for the FBI.\n\nN\n\nCarla Naeve, 82, Le Mars. Loved to golf and birdwatch.\n\nLynn Charles Naibert, 83, Cedar Rapids. Married his wife six months after their first coffee date.\n\nSanford Naiditch, 97, Ankeny. Knew the Ohio State University fight song by heart.\n\nLinda Nassif, 76, Cedar Rapids. A role model to her sixth-graders at St. Pius Grade School.\n\nKenneth G. Nations Sr., 73, Wapello. Took his grandchildren to see Old Threshers Reunion.\n\nMarjorie Nearmyer, 84, Marion. A resident of Winslow House Care Center.\n\nCharlie Nehl, 38, Cedar Rapids. Iowa's state champion for \"Magic: the Gathering\" who loved spray painting, the Cubs and hosting LAN parties with friends.\n\nSister Marianne Nehus, 67, Johnston. Honored by Gov. Tom Vilsack for her service on the Disabilities Policy Council in 2006.\n\nChris Nelson, 58, Indianola. Active in the United Auto Workers, he fought for union members to receive a livable wage and be treated with dignity and respect.\n\nJoe Nelson, 88, Cedar Falls. Served as the finance officer, commander, and state chaplin at Cedar Falls AMVETS Post #49.\n\nLola Nelson, 86, Ollie. Taught Sunday school at the Ollie United Methodist Church.\n\nDwight Nernes, 76, Leon. Once sang at the Grand Ole Opry.\n\nBeth Neubaurer, 77, Ankeny. Nicknamed Gramcracker, or Cracker for short, by her older grandkids.\n\nBrent \"Ben\" Newton, 50, Fort Dodge. Studied his Native American heritage.\n\nHong Cuc Thi Nguyen, 87. Sioux City. Helped refugees from Vietnam, Bosnia and Africa resettle in Iowa.\n\nDewey Nielsen, 74, Oxford. Enjoyed visiting with campers and community members as he ran Sleepy Hollow Campground.\n\nMark Nielsen, 69, Battle Creek. From Little League T-Ball to pro-basketball, loved watching and attending sporting events.\n\nRay Buster Nielsen, 93, Des Moines. Served in the Army's Occupational Forces in Japan after World War II.\n\nRussell A. Nielsen, 96, Cedar Falls. Maintained an optometric practice for 41 years.\n\nDiane Norelius, 85, Denison. A practical joker who always joined in on the fun with her children and grandchildren.\n\nEunice North, 80, Boone. Drove the Boone County Educational Library bus.\n\nDorothy Norton, 98, Iowa City. Worked for Great Western Railroad while her husband served in World War II.\n\nEugene Norton, 89, Clive. Collected cars and repaired lawn mowers.\n\nJohn Novy, 88, Greenfield. An Iowa State Patrol trooper known as \"Big John.\"\n\nO\n\nBetty Jean O'Connor, 86, Des Moines. Started a Red Hat group and monthly card club.\n\nBradley Ohl, 64, Oelwein. Loved his annual trips to deer camp at the Circle B Ranch with family and friends.\n\nJoyce Ann Ohl, 72, Lennox. Led the Sioux City Steppers Drill Team in dancing for decades.\n\nVincent Olson, 71, Nevada. Served his community as assistant fire chief.\n\nCheryl Jean Ord, 48, Glenwood. Planted banana trees in her yard each year, bringing them inside during the cold months.\n\nJames M. Orr, 53, Charles City. Resident of Comprehensive Systems.\n\nJim Orvis, 65, Waterloo. Worked at Cedar Falls' Ice House Museum.\n\nOscar P. “Swede” Ostrom Jr, 93, Des Moines. Delighted in giving tours of his Minnesota boyhood school, which subsequently became a historical museum.\n\nMary Anne Otte, 93, Davenport. Wooed her husband at local dances.\n\nKimberly Outlaw, 55, Waterloo. Worked as an export clerk at Tysons.\n\nZachary Scott Overy, 35, North English. Passionate problem solver at Vivint Home Security and Automation.\n\nNancy Owen, 89, Des Moines. Worked at General Casualty Insurance.\n\nP\n\nDuane Palmer Sr., 92, Cedar Rapids. Repaired lawnmowers and small engines as a hobby with his best friend, Norm.\n\nStephen Palmer, 69, Des Moines. Served people with intellectual disabilities by his 20-year involvement with Special Olympics.\n\nJohn N. Paricka, 41, Waterloo. Played football for the Cedar Valley Vikings.\n\nFrank Parks, 91, Ottumwa. Former president of the ISU Parents Association.\n\nPatrick C. Parks, 85, Sergeant Bluff. Flew as an Air Force fighter pilot in Vietnam.\n\nStanley Eugene \"Stan\" Patrick, 85, Bussey. Traveled to Chicago regularly to see his favorite team, the Cubs.\n\nLesley Paulsen, 74, Des Moines. Enjoyed a good mystery novel and a strong cup of coffee.\n\nJean Smith Payne, 88, Mason City. Gave a handmade quilt to every family member.\n\nMatt Peiffer, 64, Grinnell. Loved to smoke meats for family gatherings.\n\nTim Perez, 52, Cedar Rapids. Received a kidney transplant in 2020.\n\nVicki Perez, 66, Cedar Rapids. Enjoyed going to casinos and spending time with \"the girls.\"\n\nHarry Perkins III, 73, Des Moines. Practiced in civil litigation and trial law for 45 years.\n\nNorma Jean Perry, 88, Des Moines. Spent 41 years as a foster grandparent.\n\nHarvey Louis Peters, 92, Parkersburg. Board member and volunteer at Beaver Meadows Golf and Country Club.\n\nRandy Peters, 71, Waukee. A post master in Truo.\n\nRichard Leroy Peters, 77, Coralville. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nEleanor Moody Pettit, 90, Cordova. Traveled the country with her friends but was never allowed to drive.\n\nJohn Pettit, Des Moines. Served as chief operating officer and vice president for the Iowa Barnstormers since 2008.\n\nSandra Sue Phillips, 84, Cedar Rapids. Spent her childhood traveling across the United States and Canada with her father, an entertainer and acrobat.\n\nRick Pianca, 62, Davenport. Made detailed personalized itineraries for friends and family member's vacations.\n\nLeonard Andy Anderson Pierce, 75, Ottumwa. A regular at Arabian horse shows.\n\nCleo 'Bud' Ping, 88, Sloan. Loved reading Westerns and historical novels.\n\nNorma J. Pint, 90, Davenport. Operated a local telephone company in Hanlontown.\n\nWarren Pohl, 68, Waterloo. Played electric guitar in a country-rock band.\n\nRussell Lolo Porter, 47, Cedar Rapids. Loved his friends and the staff at New Horizons and REM.\n\nScott Powell, 56, La Porte City. Piloted helicopters in the U.S. Army and National Guard for two decades.\n\nBarbara Prenosil, 101, Nevada. Worked for the Department of Environmental Quality in Iowa.\n\nGabriella Michelle Price-MacCormick, 24, Cedar Rapids. Competed in track and field, bowling and basketball skills in Iowa Special Olympics.\n\nVirginia Prince-Renner, 91, Whiting. Sang with the Women's Club Chorus and played the organ for Christy-Smith Funeral Home.\n\nRobert Probasco, 69, Des Moines. Served the U.S. Army in Germany from 1971 to 1974.\n\nSusan K. Prohaska, 65, Dysart. Ran a preschool in Evansdale.\n\nMarilyn Elizabeth Prouty, 92, Marion. The youngest supervisor ever at the Marion Telephone Co.\n\nEvon \"Gus\" Puetz, 97, Le Mars. Farmed his entire life with his family: first his father, then brother-in-law, son, and grandson.\n\nBonnie Pugsley, 95, Des Moines. Server as an elder and deacon in the Presbyterian Church.\n\nRoger Puls, 73, Grinnell. A competitive bowler in the Grinnell Bowling League.\n\nQ\n\nSeretha Quinn, 46, Eldridge. Had an infectious smile and was always willing to help those in need.\n\nR\n\nJose Dolores Guevara Ramirez, 89, Marshalltown. Made fresh lime ice cream for his Iowa grandchildren.\n\nEdwin Roy Raymond, 54, Sioux City. Enjoyed going to the Special Olympics.\n\nMarilyn Reams, 75, Des Moines. Never missed a softball game, swim meet, baseball game or soccer game for her grandchildren.\n\nMichele Recanati, 47, Oelwein. Worked with her twin sister, Cynthia, at MercyOne.\n\nRobert Ellsworth Reeder, 74, Mason City. Passed days trout fishing in the streams of northeastern Iowa with his brothers.\n\nGail Rees Jr., 78, Greeley. Spent almost every weekend at the Bandimere Speedway track with his family, winning many trophies along the way.\n\nDay Reh, 85, Waterloo. Earned his U.S. citizenship in Des Moines.\n\nGregg E. Reisinger, 75, Eldora. Owned one of the largest horse farms in Iowa, raising more than 1,700 registered horses.\n\nVirginia Renner, 91, Sioux City. Served as the first woman chair of the worship committee at Redeemer Lutheran.\n\nSusan C. “Susie” Rhum, 88, Danville. Spent 30 years working at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant.\n\nRev. Ralph Rice, 67, Sioux City. A member of the Order of the Arrow who once earned the God and Country Award.\n\nKelli Jo Richards, 57, Cedar Rapids. Loved to drive around in her Camaro.\n\nVirginia Richardson, 97, Cedar Rapids. Baptist pastor's wife and mother to eight children.\n\nJean Marie Rickelman, 89, Fort Madison. Proud to be both a farmer's daughter and a farmer's wife.\n\nLeslie Rish, 80, Mason City. Served in the Army in Virginia, Washington, South Korea and Germany.\n\nHarriett Risse, 92, Oelwein. Chosen as \"Readlyn's Old Grump\" in 2012.\n\nF. Alberta Ritter, 95, Des Moines. Spent retirement traveling by motorhome to Florida, Arizona and Texas.\n\nRonald Roberts, 81, Chariton. A sociology professor at the University of Northern Iowa for three decades.\n\nPedro Cano Rodriguez, 51, Columbus Junction. Never resisted the urge to pull pranks and crack jokes.\n\nJoan Roepke, 83, Le Mars. A huge country music fan who met Johnny Cash multiple times.\n\nBen Rogers, 67, Quad Cities. Boy Scouts of America leader in Iowa and Illinois.\n\nMary Louise \"Kitty\" Rolfes, 90, Johnston. Nicknamed for the precocious little girl in the Kitty Higgins comic strip.\n\nMinerva Rosales, 62, Le Mars.\n\nFred Roquet, 78, Mt. Auburn. Worked for John Deere and Exide Batteries.\n\nAaron Rubashkin, 92, Postville. Fled a Hasidic Jewish enclave in Russia to survive the Holocaust.\n\nHeidi Ruhrer, 63, Moville. Loved the family's summer trips to Minnesota.\n\nLoretta Faye Wenner Rundlett, 90, Vinton. Enjoyed crafting, sewing and knitting.\n\nBeverly Russell, 82, Newton. Always ordered chocolate Cokes at Bigelow’s restaurant.\n\nS\n\nDarrell Salmons, 82, Cedar Falls. A proud Cedar Falls Firefighter.\n\nBrenda Samaniego, 23, Sioux City. Special Olympics athlete for the past 11 years.\n\nJuan Jose Jauregui Samudio, 60, Storm Lake.\n\nFloyd Sanders, 86, Storm Lake. A master of Dad jokes.\n\nLyle Sannes Sr., 86, Marion. Known as the \"Road Dog\" for all of the miles he traveled for work, hunting and fishing.\n\nChris Sasina, 69, Monticello. Co-owner and production manager of Commander Buildings for 30 years.\n\nNancy Saunders, 64, Des Moines. Made great pies and enchiladas.\n\nPhillip Saunders, 80, Cedar Rapids. A firefighter for three decades.\n\nGerald Schlies, 77, Lawton. An artist who created stained glass windows.\n\nAnita Schindler, 58, Iowa City. Always wanted to help others, be they friend, family, stranger or animal.\n\nEsther Schipper, 91, Parkersburg. Taught Sunday school and catechism at Bethel Reformed Church.\n\nDonald \"Spook\" Schnackenberg, 80, Council Bluffs. A Navy veteran who retired as a boilermaker.\n\nWilliam Schroeder, 84, Johnston. Longtime chaplain for Mercy Hospital and Mercy West Lakes Hospital.\n\nMarilyn Schornack, 89, West Des Moines. Taught Sunday school, Bible school, sang in the choir at Windsor Heights Lutheran Church.\n\nPatsy Schotanus, 84, Grafton. Had a talent at connecting with young people, many of whom considered her family.\n\nRobert Schuldt, 67, Climbing Hill. Habitually surrounded by pets, big and small.\n\nEdward Schultz, 73, Muscatine. A detective and police officer for the Iowa City Police Department.\n\nShirley Ann Schultz, 86, Cedar Rapids. Loved her cat, Queenie.\n\nArthur Scott, 51, Waterloo. Rebuilt his life after serving time in prison.\n\nAlice Yvonne Sea, 84, Sioux City. Directed a traveling Children's Theatre.\n\nLois Marguerite Sedgwick, 93, Dundee. Enjoyed refinishing antiques and quilting.\n\nJackson Selk, 74, Cedar Rapids. Appointed to the Juvenile Justice Advisory Council for the state of Iowa.\n\nLarry Sellers, 85, Pleasant Hill. A volunteer coach, officer and mentor for Grandview Little League who served four generations of players for more than 60 years.\n\nGlenn A. Sels, 84, Mason City. Sketched intricate pictures of war machinery while growing up during the World War II era.\n\nJerry Selover, 86, Des Moines. Accomplished carpenter and member of Des Moines Woodworkers and Turners Club.\n\nFranklin Delano Seitzinger, 86, Sioux City. Known in the agriculture industry for wearing his \"big deal boots.\"\n\nJack Sexton, 87, Cedar Rapids. Sang and played guitar in the Dave Dighton Band for more than 30 years.\n\nMichael Sharer, 78, Marshalltown. Loved his Angus calves and cows and always enjoyed attending the Iowa Winter Beef Expo.\n\nJoyce Sharp, 95, Johnston. An avid gardener, knitter and winemaker.\n\nRetha Elizabeth Contri Sharp, 98, Johnston. Helped at poll sites during elections and loved to talk politics.\n\nGary Sharum, 68, Sioux City. Helped students beat their personal records as coach of the AZ Flames Track Club.\n\nAlexa Sheeder, 32, Davenport. Met her husband, an Army soldier, putting together a care package for troops overseas.\n\nBarbara Jean Sherman, 85, Cedar Rapids. Led three presidents through Cedar Rapids' National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library.\n\nGerald Shook, 76, Davenport. Challenged visitors to a game of chess, always played on the set handcrafted by his brother, Bill.\n\nColleen M. Shumaker, 61, Des Moines. Woke up early to celebrate St. Patrick's Day every year.\n\nCharlene Shurtz, 68, Cedar Rapids. Enjoyed spending time with her bird, Tammy.\n\nJessica Siegert, 40, Urbandale. Loved spoiling her family, friends and her adored cat, Diego.\n\nWilfred Willie Jay Sikkema, 81, Fulton. Had a \"good heart and a warm smile.\"\n\nRuthanne Silverstein, 91, Des Moines. A prolific creator of handmade clothes.\n\nRobert William Sirovy, 62, Anamosa. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nJohn Skaggs, 76, Quad Cities. Attended the Secret Service training center in Maryland.\n\nEugene Skinner, 95, Dubuque. A former president of the Iowa Bowling Association and member of the association's Hall of Fame in multiple categories.\n\nGail Slack, 91, West Des Moines. Held Minnesota Vikings tickets for 40 years.\n\nKevin Slaybaugh, 50, Guthrie Center. A faithful member of Waukee United Methodist Church, who loved visiting with the congregation and goofing around with attending kids.\n\nRobert Lee Slezak, 83, Des Moines. Loved folding laundry at the Rowley Masonic Home in Perry.\n\nLarry Smalley, 87, Tripoli. Sang in the River City Barbershop Chorus in Mason City.\n\nBill Smith, 90, Moulton. Served in an English medical base during the Korean War.\n\nRochelle Smith, 80, Des Moines. Worked as a telephone operator for U.S. West/Qwest Communications.\n\nShirley Ann Smith, 83, Ames. Could never resist stopping at an antique shop.\n\nVolney Smith, 92, Ames. Loved genealogy, reading and watching Jeopardy.\n\nVictoria Vicki Ann Snarzyk, 61, Cedar Rapids. Enjoyed swimming, fishing and gardening.\n\nBetty Laverne Sniffin, 96, Oelwein. Translated for her deaf and mute parents as a child.\n\nJudith Solecki, 65, Cedar Rapids. Loved watching Hawkeyes basketball games.\n\nHarrison Harry Solliday, 85, West Des Moines. Spread the Christian gospel in Iowa correctional facilities.\n\nLuciano Soloman, 57, Des Moines. Graduated from Colegio Cotzumalguapa in Saint Lucia, where he earned a degree in accounting.\n\nLarry Sonner, 84, Urbandale. Provided seminars and counseling for pastors and their families across Iowa.\n\nJay Elmer Spoonhaltz, 90, Des Moines. Served four years in the U.S. Navy.\n\nMary Soukup, 89, Windham. Loved when her favorite birds, Cardinals, stopped to eat from her bird feeders.\n\nBarbara Springer, 75, Sioux City. Buried on her birthday, her six children loved the days she took them to the park for fishing and fun.\n\nHarold Spurgeon, 100, Ottumwa. A triplet, joined the Navy Seabees and served in the Philippines during WWII.\n\nJoan Stabenow, 81, Waterloo. Loved taking trips to Florida, Mexico and Branson, Missouri.\n\nMelvin \"Mel\" Stahmer, 68, Coralville. Beloved union postman.\n\nLarry Stalter, 73, Iowa City. Received his medical education at the University of Iowa before opening a medical museum in Cullom, Illinois, with his wife.\n\nGlen Roger Stancliff, 79, Iowa City. Served as Andover, Illinois fire chief for more than three decades.\n\nDonald Gene Starcevich, 83, West Des Moines. An avid boater who loved exploring the Mississippi River.\n\nDwight Stearns, 64, Earlham. The first full-time transport officer for Dallas County Sheriff’s Office.\n\nTom Stephenson, 77, Norwalk. Built race cars and personal vehicles for friends and family.\n\nHenry \"Hank\" Steinwandt, 84, Mason City. Loved John Wayne Westerns.\n\nAnne Stevens, 74, Stuart. Was told she would need a ventilator and feeding tube for the rest of her life in 2018. Was able to remove both in 2019.\n\nJudy Stevens, 77, Cedar Rapids. Won awards as a successful real estate agent.\n\nGary Stevens, 82, Cedar Rapids. Loved his old Plymouth car, a 1970½ Monte Carlo.\n\nElmer \"Skip\" Stoddard, 72, Sioux City. Gave the best hugs.\n\nCarole Stohlmann, 80, Sioux City. Honored as Professional Horsewoman of the Year by the Arabian Horsemen's Association.\n\nJerry Dean Stoffregen, 79, Waverly. Worked in the banking industry for over 25 years.\n\nVera Mae Stoltze, 89, Sioux City. Played cards with friends and a good game of Yahtzee with family.\n\nLeon \"Stoney\" Stone, 83, West Des Moines. Loved to going to see the Packers play with his friend Pat.\n\nDonna Storey, 72, Waterloo. Enjoyed baking with her sister, Judy.\n\nIla Mae Storm, 98, Pisgah. Well-known for her yodeling skills.\n\nJonathan William Strain, 59, Anamosa. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nBarbara Strait, 84, Cedar Rapids. A member of Good Sam's Camping Club.\n\nDavid Streets, 70, Anamosa. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nWilliam Strothkamp, 77, Quad Cities. Started his own business because he \"never could find a boss he liked.\"\n\nNina Stull, 89, Centerville. Loved showing off her great-grandchildren to other residents in her nursing center.\n\nNathan Stupka, 48, Elkhart. An All-State pitcher for the Bomber Baseball team.\n\nDelores Sturgeon, 79, Sioux City. Taught first aid to many Cub Scouts and operated several first aid stations.\n\nDolores Suchomel, 93, Mount Vernon. Once named University of Iowa’s Mother of the Year.\n\nZola Marie Summerson, 93, Perry. Farmed with her husband until his death in 2005.\n\nRichard Sundermeyer, 78, Marion. Sang with the Older Hymns at Lutheran Church of the Resurrection.\n\nArthur Svaldi, 82, Cedar Rapids. Served on the Good Neighbor Home Society board and the Manchester Bowling League.\n\nRobert Svoboda, 50, Sioux City. Enjoyed working with his hands in the tile and construction industry.\n\nT\n\nDonald \"Bones\" Taylor, 75, Cedar Falls. Raced in his Silver 1963 Corvette Stingray at the NEITA Raceway and in Byron, Illinois.\n\nJudith Taylor, 76, Waterloo. Worked all around Waterloo's dining establishments: El Mecca Shrine Club, Washington Street Café, Allen Hospital Café, Corner Tap, Vernie's, Pinkies Tap as well as operating the Flame Room.\n\nRobert Frank Taylor, 72, Coralville. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nJanet L. Temple, 79, Newell. Ran a day care center and owned Temple Hardware.\n\nLyle Thayer, 82, Le Grand. Worked in upholstery, enjoyed hunting and fishing.\n\nJudy Thenhaus, 81, Cedar Rapids. Spent her early life as a stay-at-home mother with her children, then became a \"house mom\" at St. Luke's Hospital.\n\nRicky Thies, 60, Marion. Made shelving, a sewing table and a nativity scene as a talented woodworker.\n\nMargaret Thing, 84, Springville. Sang and played in the bell choir at Springville Methodist Church.\n\nRegina Marie Thiry, 62, Waterloo. Sewed masks for friends at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.\n\nGary Thomas, 56, Des Moines. A natural horseman with a love for blazing his own trails.\n\nRaymond “ Tom” Thomas, 78, Ankeny. A captain who worked in the Des Moines Fire Department for 36 years.\n\nSharon Thomas, 58, Davenport. Member of the Goldwing Road Riders in Davenport with her husband, Steve.\n\nDorothy \"Dot\" Thompson, 105, Seymour. Baked award-winning lemon meringue pies.\n\nRobert Bob D. Thompson, 77, Waterville. Won awards for the quality of his dairy and hog farming.\n\nRandy Tilley, 64, Granger. Always had a car or motorcycle project going in his driveway.\n\nLowell Titus, 93, Des Moines. Hitchhiked through national parks after returning from U.S. Navy service.\n\nLynda Tomkins, 62, Coralville. An animal lover who enjoyed cooking and gardening.\n\nDorothy Topping, 78, Cedar Rapids. Raised the four children of Dr. Dean and Bonnie Bemus, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.\n\nMegan Trilk, 56, Sioux City. An award-winning photographer who chronicled her children's live in pictures.\n\nCasey Tweedy, 34, Algona. Loved riding his bike, lifting weights and playing basketball.\n\nRoald Tweet, 87, Quad Cities. Beloved Augustana College English professor, Quad-City cultural icon and longtime radio personality.\n\nU\n\nJames Urbatsch, 80, Osage. Designed and fabricated much of his own farm equipment.\n\nLisa Upah, 56, Keystone. Lived just a few houses away from her daughters and grandson.\n\nV\n\nJohn A. Valukskas Jr., 76, Sioux City. Appointed International Coordinator of Carnival Ministries by St. Pope John Paul II.\n\nPhyllis Vander Sluis, 86, Primghar. Kept “Build Your Vocabulary” books next to her easy chair.\n\nHarlan James VandeZandschulp, 68, Sioux City. Traveled to Israel, Mozambique and Nigeria\n\nBen Van Hove, 86, Steamboat Rock. Enjoyed flipping pancakes for his Boat Club for Sunday breakfast gatherings.\n\nRay Allen Vanlengen, 71, Fort Dodge. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nRuth Ann Lass Van Meter, 90, DeWitt. Served as both choir director and organist for Grace Lutheran Church.\n\nRaymond Van Dyk, 91, Pella. Constructed handmade wooden toy cars for indigenous children in dozens of countries.\n\nAlice Van Hoozer, 102, Waterloo. Loved the challenge of a thousand-piece puzzle.\n\nSteven James Van Riper, 93, Coralville. Iowa Department of Corrections Inmate.\n\nJohn Van Weelden, 78, Albia. A master woodworker who crafted everything from cabinetry to custom birdhouses.\n\nRonald Versluis, 79, Cedar Falls. Worked at John Deere in Waterloo for 30 years.\n\nGale Vetter, 69, Hartley. Long-time driver on the Hartley Emergency Ambulance Rescue Team.\n\nRobert Vidimos II, 58, Ames. Shared his love for singing, slapstick movies and competitive board games with his children.\n\nDale Viers, 58, Fort Madison. Iowa Department of Corrections Inmate.\n\nDonna Vinson, 91, Oelwein. Could \"cut a rug\" with the best of them.\n\nTom Vint, 72, Marshalltown. Covered Omaha sports for the Associated Press.\n\nBernice Vogel, 94, Blairstown. Walked fields weighing corn and soybeans for customers as her husband's business partner at Pioneer Seed Corn.\n\nW\n\nDon Donny Wachal, 74, Davenport. Owned the Filling Station, an iconic Davenport bar.\n\nSusan Wagner, 54, Waverly. Avidly watched shows about current events and nature.\n\nMichael Wahl, 69, Norwalk. A gearhead who loved to drag race and street race.\n\nJohn Wait, 60, Council Bluffs. An inventor who helped create and perfect aviaton technology.\n\nCaroline Waits, 96, Centerville. Worked to provide a loving environment for her husband and six children.\n\nJeanette Wakeman, 74, Ireton. Talented at floral designs and decorating.\n\nCatherine Waldmann-Murphy, 66, Council Bluffs. Served in the Air Force for four years after high school.\n\nLaVonne \"Bonnie\" Wallace, 92, Cedar Falls. Enjoyed fishing and traveling with her husband.\n\nWilliam \"Bill\" Wallace, 90, Manchester. A Shriner who drove area families to Minneapolis’ Shiners Hospital.\n\nLeona Wallbaum, 104, Parkersburg. A faithful, active member of Bethel Lutheran Church for more than 80 years.\n\nMarilyn Jean Wallen, 86, Sioux City. Operated the Wallen Stables and Riding School for over 55 years.\n\nDaryl Walters, 71, Bettendorf. Went by the nickname Daryl Camaro.\n\nJoAnne Walther, 74, Cedar Falls. Owned and operated Grandma's Treasures antique shop.\n\nCornie Wassink, 70, Alton. A charter member of the Northwestern Athletic Hall of Fame, established endowment scholarships as Director of Planned Giving and a part of every major capital campaign at Northwestern College.\n\nAnne Weaver, 87, Des Moines. Literally went to Timbuktu just so she could say the name \"Timbuktu.\"\n\nBetty Webb, 77, Le Mars. Went all-out celebrating and decorating for the holidays.\n\nMichael Wisehart, 66, Cedar Rapids. Worked as a California Park Rangers for many years and always supported the Hawkeyes.\n\nJune Welsch, 83, Muscatine. Could be found most days at local cafes visiting with friends.\n\nRuth Welscott, 73, Mason City. Traveled across the country in an RV for 19 years finding her family roots.\n\nRita Weiden, 98, Raymond. Most remembered as a waitress at Bishop’s Cafeteria in Waterloo.\n\nRobert Wensel, 83, Sioux City. Served aboard the USS Jasper during the Bay of Pigs.\n\nElizabeth Westcott, 84, Cedar Rapids. Graduated from the John Roberts Powers Modeling School in Minneapolis.\n\nJanet Westhoff, 85, Manchester. Crocheted and quilted blankets for many charitable causes and for all her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.\n\nPaul Werger, 88, Urbandale. Former bishop of the Iowa Synod of the Lutheran Church in America.\n\nLarry Whaley, 64, Anamosa. Iowa Department of Corrections inmate.\n\nJames \"Choo-Choo\" Whetsler, 77, Rome. Beloved by many for telling stories of his long career in the railroad industry .\n\nCarroll White, 100, Ottumwa. Among first troops in Hiroshima after its bombing.\n\nDennis White, 81, Mount Pleasant. Coached little league baseball and junior bowling.\n\nJerry Wayne Wieter, 68, Muscatine. Devoted Hawkeye fan.\n\nJo Ann Wilch, 89, Cedar Rapids. Loved a good book, a glass of chardonnay, her transistor radio and Sonny Rollins.\n\nClellan Wildes, 87, Marion. A master apple pie baker and cribbage player.\n\nBonnie Wilberding, 87, Mitchell County. A fierce spirit with a penchant for witty conversations.\n\nJoseph Wilhelm, 82, Davenport. Enjoyed target shooting and deer and moose hunting.\n\nCarol Williams, 93, Ottumwa. Part of the group who pushed to equip Ottumwa with audible outdoor warning sirens.\n\nFlorence Williams, 86, Springville. Gave back to her community by volunteering with 4-H, the Springville Public Library and Meals-On-Wheels.\n\nBryce Wilson, 31, Des Moines. Played football internationally in Brazil and Hungary.\n\nSharon Rae Wilson, 73, Merrill. Always cared for her family cats as well as strays.\n\nClaude \"Sid\" Winchell Jr., 87, Atlantic. A consummate volunteer who served as mayor of Atlantic for four years.\n\nBetty Winterfeld, 87, Hawarden. The quilts she and her friends made now warm people around the world.\n\nDarleen Witzel, 46, Des Moines. A nurse who loved her St. Bernard, Tank, with all her heart.\n\nWiuca Iddi Wiuca, 36, Des Moines. Came to Iowa as a refugee in 2019, fleeing war in the Congo.\n\nMichael \"Mike\" Wolfe, 66, Allerton. Played Santa during the holidays.\n\nMax Wolfgram, 84, Manchester. Loved hunting elk in Colorado, backpacking the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and hiking the Backbone State Park in Iowa.\n\nTerry Lou Wood, 70, Waterloo. Worked at John Deere for 30 years.\n\nRobert Worth, 93, Des Moines. Attended a one-room school house, graduating as salutatorian of his class in 1945.\n\nDavid M. Worthington, 74, Des Moines. Enjoyed skiing on water and on snow.\n\nDeborah Wright, 50, Keokuk. A teacher who also wrote grants for Lee County to obtain K-9 officers.\n\nJohn Wright, 61, Des Moines. Drove buses for Southeast Polk Schools for 13 years.\n\nLarry Wright, 78, Northwood. Loved to fly the wild blue yonder in his Cessna 182.\n\nSherry Wright, 74, West Des Moines. A devout Christian known for her bright laugh.\n\nSteven Wright, 64, Solon. Elected mayor of Solon from 1980 to 1987 and retained the lifelong nickname \"Mayor Steve.\"\n\nPhyllis Wrobel, 98, Muscatine. Crafted quilts and gifts for her great-grandchildren.\n\nJames Wubbens, 56, Cedar Rapids. Married his love, Shelia, Little Brown Church in Nashua.\n\nChuck Wyatt, 83, George. A veterinarian caring for many farm animals across Iowa.\n\nY\n\nElvin \"Al\" Yoder, 77, Iowa City. Always juggled several woodworking projects.\n\nDelbert Van Young, 59, Ames. Was a ticket-taker at Hilton Coliseum.\n\nDonald Young, 83, Viola. Always ready to explore the roads on his motorcycle.\n\nWilliam Roy Young, 65, Ames. Owned and managed local JARCO Stores with his father.\n\nZ\n\nMichael Zawitowkski, 100, Des Moines. A paratrooper during World War II.\n\nFrank Zieser, 78, Walker. Helped his community by building furniture and donating it to the Sacred Heart Church every year for their church raffle and for use in the church.\n\nJune Zirkelbach, 96, Monticello. Played the organ at Scotch Grove Presbyterian Church.\n\nWinton George Znerold, 97, Windsor Heights. Was offered a semi-professional baseball contract in his youth, but couldn't accept it after being drafted in World War II.\n\nSharon Zumbrunnen, 67, Monticello. A staple at the local library, reading and working on the computer.\n\nAND THE MORE THAN 5,300 IOWANS who died before August 4, 2021.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2020/10/12"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/05/09/george-jones-mower-mural-one-bold-eagle-news-around-states/39462909/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From staff and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMontgomery: Lawmakers have voted to place statues of Rosa Parks and Helen Keller on the grounds of the state Capitol. State senators on Tuesday voted 29-0 for the bill. The legislation now goes to Gov. Kay Ivey for her signature. The bill by Rep. Laura Hall creates a Women’s Tribute Statue Commission to fund, commission and place statues of Parks and Keller on the Capitol grounds. Parks was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery city bus to a white passenger. Her arrest helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the civil rights movement. Keller, who was both deaf and blind, became a world-famous author and activist.\n\nAlaska\n\nKodiak: Many are familiar with uninvited guests unexpectedly crashing at the house, but an eagle took such a scenario to new heights. An eagle grabbed a piece of freezer-burned halibut that someone had thrown out and apparently misjudged its climb up a cliff with the 4-pound piece of fish while likely being chased by another eagle, the Kodiak Daily Mirror reports. The wrong trajectory led the eagle to smash through a front window of Stacy Studebaker’s home Saturday. “It was so unbelievably loud. My first thought was I thought an atomic bomb had dropped and the windows were blowing out,” says Studebaker, who founded the local chapter of the Audubon Society. She and a neighbor struggled to get the raptor out of her home as it dealt mayhem. Except for some blood around the beak, the eagle didn’t appear to be injured.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: Tonto National Monument, a desert park northeast of Phoenix, has been designated an International Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association. That honor is bestowed on areas worldwide that take steps to make it easier for people to enjoy the night sky without the distractions of light pollution. Achieving this designation involves retrofitting light fixtures and bulbs, acquiring data for darkness analysis, and monitoring and interpreting the importance of preserving darkness. The state is awash in dark-sky sites, including the communities of Camp Verde, Flagstaff, Fountain Hills, Oak Creek and Sedona; Grand Canyon National Park; Kartchner Caverns State Park; Oracle State Park; Petrified Forest National Park; Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument; Parashant National Monument; Tumacacori National Historical Park; Walnut Canyon National Monument; and Wupatki National Monument.\n\nArkansas\n\nFayetteville: Local leaders are considering a measure that would prevent the city from using public money to buy disposable products made with Styrofoam. The Fayetteville City Council discussed the proposal Tuesday night but took no action. The measure would also prohibit vendors, concession stands or food trucks operating on city property from using polystyrene foam, better known as Styrofoam. The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports that the proposal is set to be considered again later this month. Cities and states across the nation have been busy banning or imposing fees for single-use foam and plastic products, while a wave in the opposite direction has led some states to seek prohibitions against such bans at the local level.\n\nCalifornia\n\nBeverly Hills: A fiery debate is breaking out as people at tony hair salons, gas stations and stores weigh in on whether the city of the rich and famous should become the first in the U.S. to outlaw the sale of tobacco products everywhere except a few cigar lounges. The City Council decided Tuesday night to make some changes to the proposal, such as allowing guests in Beverly Hills’ luxury hotels to acquire cigarettes through their concierge or room service. Members indicated they plan to pass the amended measure May 21. Abstainers have said yes to the idea, and the sooner the better, while smokers protested. California already outlaws smoking in workplaces, restaurants and bars. It also has one of the highest cigarette taxes in the country – nearly $3 a pack. The proposed ordinance would ban all tobacco products from grocery stores, pharmacies, hotels and gas stations.\n\nColorado\n\nDenver: Voters narrowly made the city the first in the nation to decriminalize psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms.” Decriminalization led by a slim 51%, according to preliminary figures on Tuesday’s election released by Denver’s Election Division. As many as 1,300 votes still remain to be counted, but that figure was not enough to swing the vote the other way, division spokesman Alton Dillard said. Final results will be released May 16, he said. Organizers say their only goal in the mushroom measure is to keep people out of jail for using or possessing the drug to cope with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other conditions. The initiative effectively decriminalizes use or possession of psilocybin by people 21 and older, making it the lowest enforcement priority for police and prosecutors. It does not legalize psilocybin or permit its sale by cannabis businesses.\n\nConnecticut\n\nHartford: An effort to better market the state as a good place to live, visit and do business has cleared a key legislative hurdle. The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 113-28 for a bill requiring the Department of Economic and Community Development to come up with a marketing strategy that includes outreach to startup businesses and entrepreneurs, a new social media photo competition highlighting Connecticut’s beauty, and a campaign highlighting successful businesses. The bill, which awaits Senate action, also suggests DECD consider updating the state’s “Still Revolutionary” logo or design a new one with the help of a middle-school design competition. Other suggestions include targeting former residents between ages 30-45 and improving print marketing in airport lounges. Some Republicans opposed the bill, arguing lawmakers should simply cut taxes to attract business.\n\nDelaware\n\nDover: In an effort to better identify victims of human trafficking, hospitals across the state will start to use the same techniques, making the First State likely the first in the country to adopt a coordinated approach, health officials say. Delaware has become an attractive place for traffickers because of its place along the I-95 corridor – and critics say state officials have been slow to address the growing problem. The Delaware Healthcare Association, which represents all the hospitals in the state, announced five recommendations Wednesday that will be implemented at all hospitals within the next year: educating the entire staff about human trafficking, using a specific assessment to identify red flags, following a step-by-step process to respond to suspected trafficking, using a hospital code for trafficking victims to collect statewide data and following a memo on how best to address minors who are being trafficked.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Comedian Dave Chappelle has been chosen to receive this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The 45-year-old Chappelle shot to international stardom through his Comedy Central program, “Chappelle’s Show,” which gleefully skewered racial stereotypes and hot-button societal issues. He later made headlines for walking away from a lucrative contract over creative differences. Chappelle attended Washington’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and his first hourlong comedy special was filmed in the nation’s capital. Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter called Chappelle “a hometown hero” and said his social commentary and body of work embody Twain’s statement that “against the assault of humor, nothing can stand.” Chappelle will be presented with the award in a star-studded ceremony Oct. 29 that will be broadcast on television Jan. 6, 2020.\n\nFlorida\n\nGainesville: The lovebugs that are driving Floridians crazy right now may not be good for the finish on cars, but they are good for the environment, particularly the soil, according to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The pesky, slow-flying insects lay their eggs in places with dying vegetation, such as thatch, which is the cut grass spit out by lawn mowers. That’s where immature lovebugs, which actually are a type of fly known scientifically as plecia nearctica, live and eat. Feeding on the dead vegetation redistributes essential nutrients back into the ground, and that benefits plants and the environment. Also known as honeymoon flies, double-headed bugs and kissing bugs, the adult insects feed on plant nectar, especially sweet clover, goldenrod and Brazilian pepper.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: The state is seeking proposals to develop a Medicaid waiver that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp says will make health care more affordable and accessible. If approved by the federal government, the waiver would allow Georgia to expand Medicaid more conservatively than federal rules typically allow. The Department of Community Health asked six consulting firms Monday to submit proposals for waivers addressing Georgia’s Medicaid program and private health insurance. Officials are aiming to submit them to the federal government by the end of 2019. A bill that Kemp signed in March gave his office wide leeway to seek a waiver that reshapes the state’s health care system. Georgia is one of 14 states that haven’t fully expanded Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.\n\nHawaii\n\nHonolulu: The State Department of Health has launched a new website that provides near real-time data on the air quality following last summer’s Kilauea eruption. The site is expected to serve as an online resource, particularly in the event of future volcanic eruptions, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports. “We listened to the concerns of residents, took action to improve our air quality monitoring system, and created a one-stop, user-friendly website. We’re much more volcano-ready than we have ever been,” says Health Director Bruce Anderson. Data for the website is pulled from air quality monitoring stations at strategic locations throughout the state. Most are on the Big Island. The state upgraded and expanded its air quality monitoring system with more than $1.5 million in federal and state funds. People can access the data via an interactive air quality map.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: A planned hiking-and-biking trail connecting the popular central Idaho tourist destinations of Redfish Lake and Stanley is being challenged in federal court by the owners of Sawtooth Mountain Ranch. David Boren and Lynn Arnone filed the lawsuit last month seeking to stop a U.S. Forest Service plan to build a 4.4-mile trail for pedestrians, cyclists and horseback riders. The trail cuts across the Sawtooth Mountain Ranch. But the Sawtooth National Forest has a conservation easement deed dating to 2005 that it says allows the trail to cross the private property. The lawsuit contends the planned trail deviates from the easement and has “numerous flaws and illegalities.”\n\nIllinois\n\nChicago: Community and environmental activists are pushing for the opening of Lake Calumet on the city’s South Side to public access for recreation. Currently, a chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounds the lake, blocking public access to hundreds of acres of natural habit. Ders Anderson of Chicago-based Openlands told the Daily Southtown in Tinley Park that Lake Calumet has long been recognized for the waterfowl, bald eagles and other bird species that roost nearby. Anderson says in addition to bird-watching, walking or bicycling on trails near the water, canoeing on the shallow lake or simply relaxing would benefit residents of Chicago and nearby suburbs. About 1,500 acres around Lake Calumet are part of the Port of Chicago, controlled by the Illinois International Port District.\n\nIndiana\n\nFranklin: Researchers at Franklin College have received a record-breaking research grant to study the behavior and management of Canada geese in the state, where the migratory bird’s population is growing along with complaints. The four-year grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act includes a $250,000 award that will fund Franklin College’s contribution to the study, on which the college is partnering with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and Ball State University. It is the largest research grant ever awarded to the small college about 20 miles south of Indianapolis. Indiana’s Canada goose population is estimated around 130,000, according to the DNR, but the rise in complaints involving geese in urban areas suggests that figure may actually be higher.\n\nIowa\n\nOnawa: A new report has named this small town, known for its wide main street and its claim to the invention of the Eskimo Pie, the poorest in the state. According to 24/7 Wall Street, Onawa is the only town in Iowa where more than 1 in 4 residents lives below the poverty line. The town’s 24.9% SNAP benefit recipiency rate is more than double the 11.2% rate statewide, the report says. The town with a population of 2,849 has a median household income of $31,089 (state: $56,570), a poverty rate of 25.3% (state: 12%) and a median home value of $93,500 (state: $137,200). The population is 90% white and 8% American Indian. Onawa is most widely known for staking a claim as the town with the “widest main street in America” at 150 feet wide. It’s also known as the birthplace of the Eskimo pie, a frozen treat made of ice cream encased in a chocolate coating, reportedly invented by Chris K. Nelsen in the summer of 1919.\n\nKansas\n\nKansas City: A water park where a 10-year-old boy was decapitated isn’t hiring lifeguards, advertising or selling tickets with just weeks left before its typical Memorial Day weekend opening date, underlining speculation that it could be put up for sale. Schlitterbahn remains mum on its plans but has largely removed reference from its website about the park where Caleb Schwab was killed in 2016 when the raft he was riding on the 17-story Verruckt slide went airborne and hit a metal pole. Verruckt – German for “crazy” – never reopened and was torn down last year. Season tickets have been on sale for months for Schlitterbahn’s four Texas locations, but not the Kansas park. Speculation about a potential sale was fueled by mortgage lender EPR Properties announcing last week that Schlitterbahn is expected to pay off its approximately $190 million loan on the property soon.\n\nKentucky\n\nWalton: The high school senior who went to court over a restriction tied to chickenpox at his school has come down with the illness, his lawyer says. Christopher Wiest says Jerome Kunkel, 18, got sick last week, nearly two months after the Northern Kentucky Health Department issued its order to control an outbreak at two small parochial schools in Boone County. “He’s fine,” Wiest said. “He’s a little itchy.” In January, chickenpox broke out at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School and Assumption Academy, its high school. The schools and church in Walton are affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X, a conservative branch of Roman Catholicism that rejects Vatican II reforms. Nearly 90% of the schools’ students have religious exemptions against vaccinations. Kunkel and his classmates did not receive the vaccine because its production involves laboratory-generated cells taken from a fetus aborted in 1966.\n\nLouisiana\n\nShreveport: A display of “magic, luck and friendship” will brighten up downtown’s Shreveport Common neighborhood this fall. The FriendsWithYou artist group will install a vivid, colorful public park called Rainbow City, including more than 35 larger-than-life, vinyl, multicolored inflatable sculptures standing up to 50 feet high. Rainbow City will be unveiled in late October in the Common Park. Various interactive and entertaining experiences are programmed at the inflatable park from Oct. 26 through Dec. 7, including a Dia de los Muertos celebratory dance party, a PJs and Pancakes breakfast, a romantic movie screening under the stars, a yoga session and more. On Oct. 26, FriendsWithYou will lead a Rainbow City Parade, featuring a new inflatable character named “Gumball,” designed by Caddo Parish student Isaiah Roberts. The fourth grader’s drawing was selected from hundreds of submissions.\n\nMaine\n\nPortland: The state’s baby eel fishermen are enjoying a steady harvest and strong prices during the first season in which regulators are using new controls to stop poaching. Baby eels, called elvers, are one of the most lucrative marine resources in the U.S. on a per-pound basis, but the fishery has had problems with poaching. This year, packing and shipping of the fish is subject to more scrutiny by the Maine Marine Patrol. Fishermen are more than 90% of the way through their quota for the year, which is slightly less than 10,000 pounds. The average price is more than $2,000 per pound, which would be the third highest average on record if holds, state officials said. “For the guys who want to do the right thing and grow this fishery, they’re happy to comply,” says Jeffrey Pierce, a former state legislator who is an adviser to the Maine Elver Fishermen Association.\n\nMaryland\n\nBaltimore: Police arrested seven people Wednesday as they ended a monthlong sit-in in the lobby of an administrative building at Johns Hopkins University, where a group of protesters have demonstrated against the creation of a campus police force and the institution’s contracts with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. City police officers and firefighters “provided assistance” shortly before 5 a.m. to reopen Garland Hall, the primary administrative building, the university announced. Protesters had chained the doors shut and blocked stairwells, defying a city fire marshal’s orders to keep the entrances and exits clear. Firefighters used an electric saw to get inside. The city’s top prosecutor swiftly dismissed the idea of prosecuting them. “No one arrested, student or community member, will be prosecuted,” said Melba Saunders, spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nBoston: America’s oldest performing arts group is looking for a child who was literally wowed by a recent classical music concert. The Handel & Haydn Society had just finished its rendition of Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral” at Symphony Hall on Sunday when a youngster blurted out loudly: “WOW!” Boston classical music station WCRB-FM captured the exuberance on audio. The crowd can be heard bursting first into laughter and then into rousing applause for the child. Now the organization founded in 1815 has mounted a search for the kid it’s calling the “Wow Child” – not to reprimand him or her but to offer a chance to meet the conductor and hear the orchestra again as a guest of honor. “It was one of the most wonderful moments I’ve experienced in the concert hall,” Handel & Haydn president and CEO David Snead wrote in a letter to concertgoers asking them to share the child’s name.\n\nMichigan\n\nDetroit: A 17-foot bronze sculpture that arrived downtown last year got people talking, taking selfies and wondering what exactly it means. This week, the conversation sparked by “Waiting,” a work of art by internationally acclaimed artist Kaws, will get some fresh context, thanks to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. “Kaws: Alone Again,” which opens Friday and runs through Aug. 4, is a solo exhibition of work by Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly, who goes by the alias Kaws. The show was organized by MOCAD’s executive director Elysia Borowy-Reeder in collaboration with the contemporary art superstar. “Riffing on specific genres of pop art, figuration, deconstruction, collage and fashion, the exhibition represents an underlying irreverence and affection for our turbulent times, as well as Kaws’ agility as an artist to appropriate and transform,” MOCAD says about the exhibition.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: Mississippi River flooding in the capital this spring swamped the record for the longest period of flooding ever measured in the city. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that the river was above flood stage for 42 straight days, easily surpassing the 2001 record of 33 days. The National Weather Service says the river fell below flood stage last weekend. The city is continuing to assess and clean up riverside streets that were submerged before reopening them. All of the city’s flood plain parks, including boat launches, remain closed.\n\nMississippi\n\nOxford: The mayor is apologizing about confusion over parking meters. Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill says drivers will not be ticketed for parking at a malfunctioning meter. The Oxford Eagle reports the city put stickers on meters a couple of weeks ago warning people not to park at broken ones. The city’s parking director, Matt Davis, had also told the newspaper that citations would be issued. Parking meters are still fairly new on the town square in Oxford. Tannehill says the mayor and aldermen never voted to allow ticketing for vehicles parked at broken meters. She said Saturday on social media that if someone finds a broken meter, the city should tell that driver: “ ‘It’s your lucky day.’ ”\n\nMissouri\n\nSpringfield: An Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel has upheld a previous ruling on a city ordinance that prohibits women from showing their nipples and areolas in public, despite protests from local activists who argue the policy is discriminatory. The decision Monday is the latest in a four-year controversy that started when some women walked shirtless through downtown Springfield to protest the differing rules for men and women. Members of the City Council, who feared the scandalizing of children and moral degradation of the community, later passed an ordinance prohibiting women from showing their nipples in public. But the ACLU and local “Free the Nipple” activists sued, and a federal judge upheld the city’s ordinance in 2017. On Monday, a three-judge panel for the appeals court agreed with the lower court, citing at least eight cases during which courts upheld similar laws.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: Law enforcement officials say they’ve managed to slow an increase in violent crime rates in the state’s most populous county that’s being driven largely by methamphetamine trafficking and abuse. U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme and Montana Attorney General Tim Fox on Wednesday announced results from the first year of an initiative targeting violent criminals in Yellowstone County. They say the number of murders, robberies and aggravated assaults increased just over 1% over the past year, after surging 26% in the prior 12-month period. Alme credited the government’s Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative for helping bring federal charges against 170 defendants in Yellowstone County for drug trafficking, armed robbery and firearms offenses. Alme says a similar effort in Missoula County is also showing positive results.\n\nNebraska\n\nNiobrara: People who suffered losses when the Spencer Dam failed have gotten more bad news: State law limits the liability of the dam’s owner. That owner, Nebraska Public Power District, has said the March 14 collapse was due to a combination of high Niobrara River flows and massive chunks of ice. The home of a man who lived below the dam, Kenny Angel, was swept away. His body still has not been found. The Norfolk Daily News reports that attorney David Domina addressed a gathering of homeowners, farmers and businesspeople Monday in Niobrara. He told them state law limits the district liability to $1 million per claim per occurrence and $5 million per occurrence for all claimants. He says Knox County already is listing more than $17 million in damages.\n\nNevada\n\nSparks: The Forest Service’s rejection of a proposal to drill for oil or gas in the Ruby Mountains has become official after no one complained during the 45-day objection period. Forest Supervisor Bill Dunkelberger says the agency’s decision became final Tuesday. He says the service didn’t receive a single objection after it determined the drilling wasn’t suitable for the area and selected the “no leasing” alternative in mid-March. He says that reaffirms his belief he made the right decision for future management of more than 82 square miles of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest along the mountain range in northern Nevada’s Elko County. Dunkelberger concluded any economic benefits from the drilling would be limited compared to money the natural resources contribute to the area economy through tourism, recreation and livestock grazing.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nDurham: University of New Hampshire researchers say they’ve discovered a new strain of canine distemper virus in wild animals in New Hampshire and Vermont. Over one year, pathologists diagnosed canine distemper virus infection in eight mammals: fishers, gray foxes, a skunk, a raccoon and a mink. Pathologists found all of the animals were infected with a distinct strain of the virus that had been identified only in a single raccoon in Rhode Island in 2004. They said the identification of this strain fills a gap in the general knowledge of canine distemper virus strains circulating in North America. The strain was identified by UNH pathologists in collaboration with colleagues at Cornell University, University of Georgia, Northeast Wildlife Disease Cooperative, and state Fish and Game departments.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nNewark: Gov. Phil Murphy has signed four bills into law aimed at improving maternal health care, particularly for residents using Medicaid. The Democrat signed the measures Wednesday at University Hospital in Newark. The new laws were enacted just a day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study showing that pregnancy-related deaths are rising and that being black is a main risk factor. One measure provides for Medicaid to cover doulas. Another sets up a pilot program for perinatal care for those on Medicaid. The third bill bars early, elective deliveries that are not medically necessary for those on Medicaid and on the state’s health benefits plans. The final measure codifies a current practice by requiring perinatal risk assessment forms be filled out by Medicaid providers.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nLas Vegas: A group of college students is helping redesign the Jemez Historic Site visitor center using multimedia tools. New Mexico Highlands University announced this week that 15 of its media arts students are creating floor-to-ceiling video projections of historic images and oral histories at the Native American site. The students also are adding interactive touch-screen computer tablets that focus on artifacts and an event called “Light Among the Ruins.” Supervisory archaeologist Ethan Ortega says the students used oral histories and texts written by Jemez tribal members to create the new components. The Jemez Historic Site includes the stone remains of a 500-year-old village and the San Jose church, which dates to 1622. It’s located at Jemez Springs, about 50 miles north of Albuquerque.\n\nNew York\n\nAlbany: A new exhibit chronicling the end of one of the most turbulent decades in American history has opened to the public at the Empire State Plaza. The exhibit titled “1969” opened Wednesday at the Vietnam Memorial Gallery in the Robert Abrams Justice Building in downtown Albany. Events such as the first moon landing and Woodstock music concert occurred 50 years ago this year, while the Vietnam War raged in Southeast Asia. The exhibit includes photographs, archival footage and artifacts from the era, along with audio recordings of veterans from New York telling stories about their Vietnam experience in ’69. Nicholas Valenti, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam and is now a leader of the Vietnam Veteran chapters of New York, joined state officials at the official opening.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nDurham: Duke University has received a $5 million grant to improve the 55-acre Sarah P. Duke Gardens site on campus, which attracts about 400,000 visitors each year. University President Vincent Price said in a news release that The Duke Endowment is providing the grant for the Garden Gateway Project, a fundraising campaign. The grant brings the total raised to $16 million of the $30 million goal for the project, which will revitalize the gardens’ front entrance and fund new and improved facilities and classrooms. The plan also calls for a new performance lawn and expanded indoor event hall. The Duke Endowment is a private foundation based in Charlotte. The university, the foundation and Duke Energy are separate organizations despite sharing a name.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nMedora: Part of the scenic drive and some trails are being temporarily closed at Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s North Unit while prescribed fire projects are completed. Planned burns are used as a resource management tool. The National Park Service says one fire Thursday is to encompass about 4,300 acres, or nearly 7 square miles. There also will be a smaller fire covering 700 acres, or about a square mile. The scenic drive will be closed at the Caprock Coulee trailhead to the end of the road. Portions of the Achenbach and Caprock Coulee trails will be closed for visitor safety. Burning is expected be completed by the end of the day.\n\nOhio\n\nCincinnati: The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden is expecting two new babies this year. “Two of our giraffes are pregnant. One, Tessa, is due in June, and the other, Cece, is due in the fall,” spokeswoman Michelle Curley says. Both Tessa and Cece have given birth at the zoo before, but these will be the first giraffe calves in three years. Cece’s daughter Cora and Zoey, who was born to Jambo, made their debut in 2016. In 2014, Tessa gave birth to Nasha. Way back in 2011, Tessa gave birth to the zoo’s first baby giraffe in 26 years. According to the zoo, giraffe calves typically weigh about 125 pounds at birth and are approximately 6 feet tall.\n\nOklahoma\n\nTulsa: Fines, dues and court expenses assessed to defendants in the state have spiked since fiscal year 2007, and some criminal justice reform advocates say state and local government agencies are increasingly relying on them as an income source. Tulsa World reports that citations, fees and costs have risen 27% since 2007. State lawmakers have also imposed two administrative charges that collectively require defendants to pay an additional 25% of all fees amassed by the courts for the executive branch. Court collections have contributed to about 66% to 90% of yearly district court subsidies over that same period. Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform director Kris Steele says an impoverished person’s inability to pay either puts them in jail or leads to their return to crime in order to satisfy the debts.\n\nOregon\n\nSalem: The Legislature is considering a bill that would let farmers sue companies, such as Bayer and Syngenta, that hold patents on genetically engineered seeds if crops grown from those seeds contaminate other crops. Contamination from genetically engineered crops can make organic and conventional crops unable to be sold. GE crops also can escape their fields and become a nuisance for other farmers that is hard to eradicate. House Bill 2882 would allow landowners or tenants to seek three times actual economic damages if GE organisms, also called GMOs, are present on their land without permission. It also would allow residents to sue the corporations if GE organisms are found on land owned or occupied by a public body in the area where they live.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Three Mile Island, site of the United States’ worst nuclear power accident, will begin a planned shutdown starting June 1 now that it is clear that it will not get a financial rescue from the state, its owner said Wednesday. Exelon Corp.’s statement comes two years after the energy giant threatened to close the money-losing plant without what critics have called a bailout. The fight over Three Mile Island and Pennsylvania’s four other nuclear power plants invigorated a debate over the “zero carbon emissions” characteristics of nuclear power in the age of global warming and in one of the nation’s largest fossil fuel-producing states. Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 is licensed to operate through 2034, and shutting it down will cut its life short by 15 years. It will go offline by Sept. 30, Exelon said.\n\nRhode Island\n\nWarwick: A school district has changed its policy after facing criticism for a plan to serve students who owe lunch money sun butter and jelly sandwiches instead of a hot meal. Warwick Public Schools, which serves students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, said Wednesday that a school subcommittee recommended students get the lunch of their choice regardless of their account balance. Chairwoman Karen Bachus clarified that under the current policy students would’ve been provided the sandwich, which is also a daily choice on the school lunch menu, vegetables, fruit and milk. The district faced pushback after announcing in a Facebook post Sunday that students who owed money on paid, free or reduced lunch accounts would be served cold sandwiches until the balance is paid starting May 13.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nCharleston: The state’s largest detention center is facing a serious staffing shortage, and officials are hoping to hire those looking for work. WCIV-TV reports there are about 90 vacancies currently out of nearly 400 jobs at the Al Cannon Detention Center. Deputy PJ Skipper says the job isn’t for everyone, but it’s one that has kept her coming back every day for 23 years. She says she initially planned a short two-year stint but realized working there is a calling. She says if she can make a difference with just one inmate, she’s done her job. The sheriff’s office is holding a Career Day on Saturday. Those interested should bring a driver’s license or other ID and be ready to take tests to see if they qualify for the posts.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nKeystone: Fireworks will return to Mount Rushmore National Memorial for the Fourth of July celebration in 2020. Mount Rushmore’s fireworks were discontinued after 2009 due to concerns related to the pine beetle infestation that increased fire concerns in the Black Hills National Forest. The forest has since rebounded, and advances have been made in pyrotechnic safety. Gov. Kristi Noem, federal Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and National Park Service Deputy Director P. Daniel Smith on Tuesday announced the resumption of fireworks. Noem said the agreement came after several months of meetings and discussions.\n\nTennessee\n\nNashville: Along with classic country songs like “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” there’s a legendary tale that millions associate with George Jones – the lawn mower story. Once, during a terrible bout of binge drinking, Jones says he was left alone in his house with no booze. To stop him from driving to the liquor store, his wife had hidden all his car keys. “But she forgot about the lawn mower,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, “I Lived to Tell It All.” Jones cleaned up his act for good in 1999, living a sober life until his death in 2013, but the lawn mower legend lives on. Now, it’s been immortalized in a new mural on the side of Nashville’s Colonial Liquors, where Jones was once a frequent customer. The mural was painted by Nashville artist Shawn Catz, along with a crew of musician friends. But the cartoon design actually comes from an episode of “Tales From the Tour Bus,” an animated TV series by Mike Judge (“Beavis & Butthead,” “King of the Hill”).\n\nTexas\n\nAustin: Removal of Confederate and other historical markers would need approval from voters or state lawmakers under a bill that won initial approval from the state Senate on Tuesday. The measure would take removal powers away from local governments and other public entities who have grappled with calls to remove Confederate markers that are now facing protests over the era’s racist history. The Dallas City Council voted last year to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park, and the University of Texas in 2017 removed several statues of Lee and other Confederate figures. Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott and other top state Republicans agreed to remove a Capitol plaque that said slavery was not the underlying cause of the Civil War.\n\nUtah\n\nCedar City: Southern Utah University has secured funding for a new child development center, which officials say could fill a previously unmet need of on-campus child care. But city residents as a whole may also be struggling to find quality, affordable child care. Data suggests care in Cedar City isn’t just hard to come by but also expensive. Though finding affordable, quality child care is an issue many families and individuals face, SUU is focusing its services on students who are single mothers. Construction on the Sorenson Legacy Child and Family Development Center will begin in July, and it will be open for student use by August 2020. Kathy Wyatt, steering committee chair of the child care center and SUU’s first lady, says the center will double as a preschool, taking in children who are infants up to age 5.\n\nVermont\n\nDerby Line: U.S. officials have marked the completion of a new U.S.-Canada border crossing facility that is designed to smooth the flow of people and trade between the two countries while keeping the U.S. safe from terrorism and criminal organizations. The new $33 million facility at the northern end of Interstate 91 in the Vermont town of Derby Line replaces another facility that was built in 1965. High-tech improvements make the new facility more energy efficient, and it includes technological upgrades and larger spaces where officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection can process both people and cargo. Construction began in fall 2016. The port of entry processes about 1.1 million people a year, says Christopher Averill, the regional administrator of the General Services Administration.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: A police officer who cursed at a group of black middle schoolers and later promised to publicly apologize has rescinded the offer. Richmond police Chief William Smith tells The Richmond Times-Dispatch that the officer, whose name hasn’t been released, no longer feels he can handle the large setting. A March video shows the officer telling the Albert Hill students to “wait until your asses turn 18, then you’re mine.” Student Cameron Hilliard filmed the video and says someone outside her group yelled an obscenity directed at officers, launching the confrontation. The officer apologized to the students and their guardians last week and signed an agreement to publicly apologize at a school assembly. The chief says the officer is sorry for not being able to meet with the school.\n\nWashington\n\nOlympia: Gov. Jay Inslee, who is seeking a path to the White House on the message of climate change, signed a measure Tuesday that makes the state the fourth in the nation to establish a mandate to provide carbon-free electricity by a targeted date. The measure was among several environmental bills that Inslee signed at a park in Seattle, surrounded by climate advocates and others. The signing of the new law comes less than a week after Inslee unveiled his first major policy proposal of his presidential campaign, in which he called for the nation’s entire electrical grid and all new vehicles and buildings to be free of carbon pollution by 2030. “We are determined to build a solar and wind and electrical system where people can access clean energy and cleaner air to breathe for our kids as long as Washington state is here,” he said.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nCharleston: The U.S. government sued nearly two dozen of Gov. Jim Justice’s coal companies Tuesday to get them to pay about $4.8 million in unpaid mine safety fines. The civil lawsuit was filed by federal prosecutors on behalf of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Justice’s companies committed more than 2,000 federal Mine Health and Safety Act violations since May 2014 but have refused to pay the penalties despite multiple attempts by federal agencies to get the money, according to the lawsuit. “This is unacceptable, and, as indicated by this suit, we will hold them accountable,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: Assembly Republicans with prisons in their districts are complaining about Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ decision to grant temporary raises at only six institutions. Nineteen Republicans sent a letter Wednesday to Evers saying that the raises aren’t fair and that compensation should be addressed through the state budget. A state audit released last week found entry-level guard pay in Wisconsin was second-lowest among seven Midwestern states. Evers’ budget calls for spending an additional $23.8 million to create a pay progression system for prison workers. Days before the audit was released, Evers’ administration gave temporary raises of up to $5 an hour to workers at Columbia, Dodge, Green Bay, Taycheedah and Waupun correctional institutions as well as the Lincoln Hills youth prison. Evers spokeswoman Melissa Baldauff says Evers is trying to fix problems Republicans have ignored.\n\nWyoming\n\nLaramie: If Thomas Foulke has his way, some of the oldest domesticated crops in the world will help grow a new industry in the state. Foulke, a senior research scientist at the University of Wyoming in the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics, is leading an effort called the Wyoming First-Grains Project, which aims to develop a niche industry around growing “first grains.” He describes those as the earliest domesticated cereal crops, among them Emmer wheat, spelt, barley and einkorn. “People were making bread from wild grains before they even domesticated it,” he said. “There was something about bread and something about wheat that was really important to early humans.” In conjunction with UW research farms in Lingle, Powell and Sheridan, the First-Grains Project produced about 20 acres of spelt and Emmer wheat last year.\n\nFrom staff and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/05/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/50-states/2019/05/24/diversity-west-point-sloths-vs-snakes-sinking-island-news-around-states/39511837/", "title": "News from around our 50 states", "text": "From staff and wire reports\n\nAlabama\n\nMobile: Historical officials say researchers have located the wreck of the last ship known to bring enslaved people from Africa to the United States. A statement issued Wednesday by the Alabama Historical Commission says remains of the Gulf schooner Clotilda have been identified and verified after months of assessment. The commission’s executive director, Lisa Demetropoulos Jones, calls the discovery “an extraordinary archaeological find.” In 1860 the wooden ship illegally transported 110 people from what is now the west African nation of Benin to Mobile. The Clotilda was then taken into delta waters north of the port and burned. The captives were later freed and settled a community that’s still called Africatown.\n\nAlaska\n\nAnchorage: The Anchorage Assembly has adopted a climate action plan setting goals for the city. Alaska Public Media reported Wednesday that officials voted Tuesday to adopt the 100-page document outlining aims such as reducing carbon emissions by 80% within 30 years. The measure passed 8-2, with both Eagle River assembly members opposed. The action plan is primarily a set of nonbinding proposals to guide municipal entities toward more environmentally friendly policies. All 22 members of the public who testified at the meeting favored the measure. Many spoke about the evidence of climate change observed in their lives such as warmer winters, worsening tree pollen, invasive insect species and heightened wildfire conditions.\n\nArizona\n\nPhoenix: State lawmakers are poised to consider tripling the amount of cash they’re paid for each day they work in new legislation that emerged as their yearly session nears a close. Lawmakers in both parties appeared supportive of the change Thursday. They said rural lawmakers especially are undercompensated for their costs of traveling to and staying in Phoenix during the session. They also note that federal tax law changes eliminated the ability to write off those expenses. Lawmakers earn $24,000 a year, plus a daily expense stipend that currently is $60 for rural lawmakers and $35 for Maricopa County residents. The Senate bill introduced Thursday raises the daily rate for rural lawmakers to the federal rate of $185 a day and half that for Phoenix-area residents. The rate would adjust yearly.\n\nArkansas\n\nLittle Rock: The governor has announced 15 new Cabinet secretaries under a state agency reorganization that cut the number of departments answering directly to him. Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Wednesday said the new secretaries will begin work in July under the reorganization plan that lawmakers approved earlier this year. The plan cut the number of Cabinet-level agencies from 42. The new secretaries include Jami Cook, who will head the new Department of Public Safety that includes State Police, the Crime Lab and the Department of Emergency Management. Cook currently heads the Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training. State Department of Heritage Director Stacy Hurst will head the new Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism. State Economic Development Director Mike Preston will head the new Department of Commerce.\n\nCalifornia\n\nSacramento: The Trump administration will not immediately give $1 billion it revoked from the state’s high-speed rail project to another project, according to a legal agreement reached Wednesday between the two sides. The Federal Railroad Administration announced last week that it was revoking the money, prompting California to sue on Tuesday. Beyond the lawsuit, the state planned to seek a temporary restraining order halting the federal government from giving the money to a different rail project. The new agreement means the state won’t file the restraining order, but it does not change the status of the lawsuit. California is trying to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a venture expected to cost upward of $77 billion. The $929 million is for a segment of track already under construction in the Central Valley that must be completed by 2022.\n\nColorado\n\nHighlands Ranch: Construction workers have unearthed fossils in a Denver suburb that experts say could be from a rare horned dinosaur. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science said Monday that it is exploring the construction site near a retirement community in Highlands Ranch where a dinosaur’s lower leg bone and several ribs were found. Fossil expert Natalie Toth told KDVR-TV the fossils could be from a torosaurus – a dinosaur similar to the triceratops but differentiated by three bones. Toth says the fossils seem to be intact, so crews are hoping to uncover the entire dinosaur. The fossils are embedded in a rock layer 66 million to 68 million years old. Toth says fossils in the Denver formation are from dinosaurs that were among the last “walking around before the big extinction.”\n\nConnecticut\n\nTorrington: The local police department has reached a deal with a fugitive that would have him surrender if enough people respond to a wanted poster on social media, an agreement that at least one expert calls unethical. Jose Simms, 29, who is believed to be somewhere in New York, has seven arrest warrants and is being sought as a fugitive after failing to appear in court on charges that range from breach of peace to risk of injury to a child. Torrington police Lt. Brett Johnson posted on the department’s Facebook page Wednesday that Sims had contacted him through the social media site and agreed to turn himself in if the post containing his poster gets 15,000 likes. Johnson said he negotiated Simms down from 20,000 likes. “It will be difficult but is doable,” he wrote.\n\nDelaware\n\nRehoboth Beach: Those who love people-watching and checking out the sights and sounds of nature at the state’s beaches but can’t make it out for Memorial Day weekend – or aren’t fans of dealing with sand, sunscreen and sea creatures – have an option to get their fix online. Southern Delaware Tourism maintains a list of online live cameras available in the area, so people can tune into the shorebirds aflutter along the Delaware Bay or the Boardwalk cruisers from the comfort of their own couch. “It’s such a great tool to be able to help visually relay what a great scene it is here along the coastline,” says Scott Thomas, executive director at Southern Delaware Tourism.\n\nDistrict of Columbia\n\nWashington: Officials of the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority say part of the transit train system is set to shut down for 15 weeks, affecting an estimated 17,000 riders per day. News outlets report the six-station shutdown is set to start Saturday and will be the longest in Metro history. Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld urged affected riders on Wednesday to explore other commuting options, such as working from home or carpooling. Officials say more buses will be available. This shutdown is part of a three-year platform reconstruction project and will affect Braddock Road, King Street-Old Town, Eisenhower Avenue, Huntington, Van Dorn and Franconia-Springfield stations. This project portion is expected to cost about $200 million. The transit agency hopes to rebuild 20 station platforms by the end of 2021.\n\nFlorida\n\nOlga: With no fanfare, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has quietly closed a well-loved Caloosahatchee River beach. This week, staff will start sodding over the sand that slopes to the river at the W.P. Franklin Lock and Dam. Though the swimming area was often barricaded for high fecal bacteria levels, it was Lee County’s only official upriver swimming hole, the site of many a kid’s birthday and al fresco wedding. The Florida Department of Health in Lee County will no longer sample the water there for dangerous bacteria, spokeswoman Tammy Yzaguirre said. In rural Olga some 30 miles upriver from the Gulf, the beach is just one of its 154 miles of navigable waterway the Corps supervises between the Franklin and the St. Lucie locks.\n\nGeorgia\n\nAtlanta: Two film projects have pulled production from the state after the governor signed the so-called heartbeat bill, which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. The heartbeat can be detected as early as six weeks, before many women realize they’re pregnant. The Lionsgate comedy “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” starring Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, and director Reed Morano’s Amazon series “The Power” initially were to be shot in Georgia but now will relocate production. Morano did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday but told Time she had been scheduled to fly to Savannah to scout locations for the new TV series. She canceled after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill. The measure is set to go into effect Jan. 1.\n\nHawaii\n\nHilo: The first breeding attempt by a pair of Hawaiian crows in the wild in nearly 20 years appears to have failed. The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports officials at the Puu Makaala Natural Area Reserve did not find offspring at a nest the birds built. Researchers at the state park on the Big Island saw the crows, Manaolana and Manaiakalani, display behavior associated with egg incubation earlier this month, but then found no sign of chicks in the nest beyond the point when eggs would be expected to hatch. While the female, Manaiakalani, continues to act as though incubating, researchers say it is normal for alala – the Hawaiian name for the crows – to perch on infertile or otherwise nonviable eggs until realizing they will not hatch.\n\nIdaho\n\nBoise: Federal officials are taking public comments on a plan to build a 16.5-mile power line at an eastern Idaho nuclear site as part of a cybersecurity effort to bolster protections for the nation’s electric grid. The U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it’s taking comments through June 21 on the plan to build the power line at the 890-square-mile federal site that includes the Idaho National Laboratory. Officials say the proposed 138-kilovolt powerline will make it easier to conduct experiments at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Power Grid Test Bed. The Idaho National Laboratory contains one of the United States’ primary cybersecurity facilities that uses the existing power grid at the site for experiments to make electric grids around the U.S. more secure from potential hackers.\n\nIllinois\n\nSpringfield: The Illinois State Fair karaoke contest is returning this summer, and the winner will get to perform on the fair’s biggest stage. Organizers say nine regional county fairs will host qualifying rounds of State Fair Karaoke this summer. The top two winners from the regional contests will compete at the finale at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield on Aug. 11. The overall winner will be chosen that day. Fair Manager Kevin Gordon says it’s a great opportunity for local talent to perform on the grandstand stage. It’s also another type of free entertainment for people attending the fair. Competitors must be a solo act and at least 18. The contest is free to enter, but space is limited. Competitors are encouraged to pre-register on the fair website.\n\nIndiana\n\nIndianapolis: Quinto sleeps about 15 hours a day and covers his face with a blanket. If enough moss is in his habitat, some could grow in his fur and turn him sort of green. The 15-year-old is part of a group of two-toed sloths who are the first of the mammals ever to reside at the Indianapolis Zoo. The group will live part of the time in the new MISTery Park, one of two new permanent experiences the zoo is unveiling this Memorial Day weekend. The other, in contrast to the cuddly mammals, is “Size, Speed & Venom: Extreme Snakes,” which includes black mambas, pythons and rattlesnakes. The exhibits are different enough that the zoo is instituting a competition between the two – visitors which choose which team they’re on at the end of their visit.\n\nIowa\n\nDes Moines: The U.S. General Services Administration has released concept drawings of the approved design for the new U.S. Courthouse planned along the city’s riverfront. The GSA said in a release that the design concept for the $137 million building remains subject to minor modifications, according to budgetary, operational and security requirements. The federal courthouse is planned to be built at the former YMCA site along the riverfront. The project has been controversial, with Des Moines leaders fighting GSA’s plans to build at the site for years. Local officials have said that it won’t be in the best interest of a city that has been working to revitalize the riverfront for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.\n\nKansas\n\nScott City: The state is relying on its conservation effort to protect the lesser prairie chicken as an ecotourism attraction that is attracting birdwatchers from across the world. The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism officials are working with ranchers and tour groups to meet the high demand for areas to view the vulnerable species of grouse. The department’s outdoor content manager, Michael Pearce, says western Kansas is one of the last remaining places with a sustainable native population of lesser prairie chickens. The tourism aspect has taken off recently, and the state is trying to hand off the project to private citizens. Tour organizer Jim Millensifer says Kansas ranches have had more than 200 people from 11 countries visit for guided tours.\n\nKentucky\n\nFrankfort: The state’s Division of Waste Management is giving grants to five counties to use recycled rubber tires to repave roadways. The $502,000 in grant funding will be used for rubber-modified asphalt projects that use crumb rubber manufactured from waste tires. The grants were announced by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, which oversees the waste management division. Cabinet Secretary Charles Snavely says the grant program is valuable because it promotes the use of recycled rubber from discarded tires. The counties of Clark, Fayette, Hardin, Hopkins and Pulaski received the grants. The state’s Waste Tire Trust Fund collects a $2 fee from the sale of each new tire in the state. The funding helps manage millions of scrap tires discarded each year and develops markets for recycled tire products.\n\nLouisiana\n\nNew Orleans: Residents of an island that’s sinking into the Gulf of Mexico are working with legal representatives and case managers hoping to help them relocate. Louisiana’s Office of Community Development Executive Director Pat Forbes tells The Houma Courier that representatives have been working with Isle de Jean Charles residents for several weeks. The island has lost about 98% of its land over the past 60 years. It has 40 residents, many of whom belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw or the United Houma Indians tribes. Resettlement options include moving into a planned 150-home community or getting funding for a home elsewhere. Forbes says residents don’t have a deadline to decide, though federal funding for the project must be used by September 2022. He says construction may start on the community this year.\n\nMaine\n\nBar Harbor: The National Park Service says numerous improvements are taking place at Acadia National Park over the coming months. The service says work has begun at the Hulls Cove Visitor Center, and work is slated to begin on the Frazer Point Pier early in July. Hiking trails are also scheduled for improvements. Some work is already finished, including the rehabilitation of historic firepits at Seawall Campgrounds. Acadia National Park is one of Maine’s top tourist destinations in the summer months. It’s famous for Cadillac Mountain, the high point of the North Atlantic’s seaboard. The park service says the maintenance projects are paid for via methods including park entrance fees, federal funding and fundraising.\n\nMaryland\n\nOcean City: Two male grey seals rescued by the National Aquarium earlier this year were released Thursday at the city’s beach. Choppy waves and a windy, cloudy morning greeted the two semi-aquatic mammals as they were released from their crates. Keeping in line with the nonprofit’s 2019 theme of naming seals after influential scientists, the National Aquarium Animal Rescue Team dubbed the rescuees Edwin Hubble and George Washington Carver. Hubble was found stranded in St. Augustine, Florida – several hundred miles out of the normal range for grey seals, who usually don’t go south of North Carolina. Sea World took him in, and from there, rescuers up and down the Atlantic Coast coordinated a relay for Hubble. He eventually landed in Baltimore at the National Aquarium. Carver was found in early April just south of where he and Hubble were released Thursday.\n\nMassachusetts\n\nAmherst: A slab of rock that bears dinosaur footprints is being donated to Amherst College by authorities who seized it as part of a poaching case. Massachusetts Environmental Police turned the fossil trackway over to the school’s museum of natural history Thursday. It’s believed to bear the tracks of Eubrontes giganteous, a large dinosaur that lived about 190 million years ago. The specimen was taken as evidence in a 2004 case involving poaching in the rich fossil beds of western Massachusetts. The case led to passage of a law protecting fossils and artifacts on public land. After finishing their investigation, police offered it to Amherst’s natural history museum in February. The museum, which says it has the world’s largest collection of fossil dinosaur tracks, was glad to take it.\n\nMichigan\n\nAnn Arbor: A nonprofit tree-planting and education organization is seeking the largest trees in the state. Ann Arbor-based ReLeaf Michigan says its 14th Michigan Big Tree Hunt Contest runs through Sept. 3. Certificates and prizes will be awarded for the largest tree submitted from each of the state’s counties, for the largest tree found by someone 15 and younger and 16 and older, and for the largest eastern white pine in the state. The Michigan Big Tree Hunt was started in 1993 to celebrate the state’s beauty and gather information about its biggest trees. Contest entries provide potential state champion trees to Michigan’s Big Tree Registry as well as the National Register of Big Trees. ReLeaf Michigan partners with communities to replenish the state’s tree canopies by planting trees in public spaces.\n\nMinnesota\n\nSt. Paul: Minnesota State has agreed to pay up to $1.9million to settle a wage dispute with faculty at its two-year colleges. The Minnesota State College Faculty union has been fighting since 2010 over wage calculations for faculty who do certain jobs, such as teaching independent studies or coordinating internships. The union prevailed at arbitration in 2016 but argued the public higher education system refused to comply with that ruling. The faculty sued Minnesota State in Ramsey County District Court in December 2017, alleging unfair labor practices. Responding to that lawsuit, Minnesota State said it paid faculty in accordance with the arbitration ruling but maintained it was not required to change practices going forward. The settlement announced Wednesday brings an end to that lawsuit.\n\nMississippi\n\nJackson: Wildlife are struggling to survive as floodwaters cover some of the state’s wildlife management areas. Residents and officials say prey and predators alike are congregating wherever there are dry grounds, adding even more stress to their situation. Roger Tankesly, a Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks wildlife management area biologist for the Delta region, says seven of the state’s more popular wildlife management areas have been completely underwater since January, with some covered in 15 feet of water. David Thornton, 77, of Eagle Lake, says he’s hunted in the area for as long as he can remember. He says the deer have “eaten all the leaves they can reach,” and even raccoons are now wading through water in search for food.\n\nMissouri\n\nColumbia: Callers to a state hotline for abuse of elderly or disabled residents frequently can’t get through to anyone. Records obtained by the Columbia Missourian and KBIA radio found only about half of the 92,000 calls to the hotline last year were answered. From January through April, only about 39% of calls were answered. Data obtained through a records request shows the past decade has seen a 35% increase in reports of abuse or exploitation. The Missouri Department of Health & Senior Services added one hotline worker during that time. Jessica Sax, director of the Division of Senior & Disability Services, says the department is first addressing inefficiencies in the hotline before asking for more workers. She says the division also is studying how other states run their hotlines.\n\nMontana\n\nBillings: Renewable energy activists are urging state regulators to reject a proposal to add a charge for homeowners who generate surplus electricity from their own solar panels. Critics told the Montana Public Service Commission on Thursday that the NorthWestern Energy proposal would kill a burgeoning rooftop solar industry. Over the past two decades, about 2,300 NorthWestern customers in Montana installed their own solar panels. When they generate more electricity than a customer uses, the surplus is fed into the electric grid and earns the customer a credit on their bill in a process known as net-metering. NorthWestern spokeswoman Jo Dee Black says the new charge would ensure net-metering customers pay their fair share of service costs. Officials say the charge would be about $50 a month based on average customer demand.\n\nNebraska\n\nOmaha: The Omaha Airport Authority is preparing to move forward with a $500 million reconstruction of Eppley Airfield. The Omaha World-Herald reports the project to rebuild the terminal within five years would overhaul its concourse, airline gates, security checkpoints, ticket counters and baggage claim. The Airport Authority is working with contractors to create a preliminary design for the terminal by this fall. The plans come as Eppley Airfield sees steady passenger growth and airline investments. Airlines scheduled a record of more than 6 million seats to fly through Eppley last year. They’ve also doubled the number of nonstop flights from the airport since 2013. Officials are planning to issue long-term revenue bonds to fund the reconstruction.\n\nNevada\n\nLas Vegas: A company backed by tech billionaire Elon Musk has been granted a nearly $49 million contract to build a transit system using self-driving vehicles underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The board of directors of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved the contract Wednesday with The Boring Co., the Musk-backed enterprise based in Hawthorne, California. The company plans to construct a twin tunnel system running less than a mile long. The system will use self-driving electric vehicles capable of transporting up to 16 people. The system also will include three underground stations and a pedestrian tunnel. The company plans to start construction in September and debut the system by December 2020. The authority will reimburse the company as it completes certain stages of the project.\n\nNew Hampshire\n\nPlymouth: A new exhibit showcases the grand hotels that once were commonplace in the White Mountains. The exhibit at the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University opened last week, and a series of talks and events runs through Sept. 12. Featuring paintings, photographs and various artifacts as far back as the 1880s, as well as stories of the people who visited and worked at these gracious establishments, the exhibit explores the origins and history of the hotels. Among the highlights will be landscape paintings from residents at several of the hotels including Edward Hill and Frank Shapleigh. A special focus will be on the four surviving hotels: the Omni Mount Washington Resort, Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Eagle Mountain House & Golf Club and The Wentworth Hotel.\n\nNew Jersey\n\nSea Girt: Smoking and vaping will be banned on nearly every public beach in the state this summer under tougher new restrictions. Nonsmokers are rejoicing over the ban, which also applies to public parks. But some smokers are feeling discriminated against by the law, which took effect in January. Fines would start at $250 for a first offense and go up to $1,000 for a third offense. At least 20 Jersey shore towns had already enacted their own smoking bans before the statewide law took effect. Nationwide, more than 300 coastal communities have banned smoking on their beaches. But bans as broad as New Jersey’s are rare. The Clean Ocean Action environmental group counted more than 22,000 cigarette butts its volunteers picked up from New Jersey beaches during spring and fall cleanups last year.\n\nNew Mexico\n\nSanta Fe: The first woman to oversee the state’s multibillion-dollar mineral resources is proposing to do away with gender-specific pronouns such as “he,” “his” or “him” in agency rulebooks. Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard says the State Land Office will hold a public hearing Friday in Santa Fe on the proposed changes. Gender-specific pronouns would be replaced by more neutral or specific references. Garcia Richard says current agency rules use male pronouns throughout to refer to her position. She says it’s no surprise that some written wording has grown outdated at the 120-year-old agency. The commissioner has final say on the language changes. The State Land Office oversees energy leases across about 14,000 square miles of state trust land to help fund schools, universities and hospitals.\n\nNew York\n\nWest Point: The class of cadets preparing to jubilantly toss their caps in the air at the U.S. Military Academy’s graduation ceremony Saturday includes 34 black women, a record number that’s a sign of concerted efforts to diversify West Point’s Long Gray Line. West Point remains mostly white and mostly male. “I can show other little girls that yes, you can come to West Point. Yes, you can do something that maybe the rest of your peers aren’t actually doing. And yes, you can be different from the rest of the group,” says senior cadet Stephanie Riley, who was among the black female cadets who recently posed for pre-graduation photos in their gray uniforms, holding out ceremonial sabers. The pictures – part of a tradition for graduating cadets – were posted widely online and became a symbol of West Point’s increasing diversity.\n\nNorth Carolina\n\nRaleigh: Gov. Roy Cooper says his directive that state agencies provide paid leave for workers following a birth means parents will no longer have to choose between their career or their child. Cooper signed an executive order Thursday that offers paid parental leave to state employees in his Cabinet-level departments starting Sept. 1. That’s eight weeks of full paid leave to those who give birth and four weeks to their spouses or partners. Such paid leave is already offered by many private-sector companies. At an Executive Mansion event, Cooper said such leave has been found to increase worker productivity and improve recruitment and retention. Cooper says carrying out the order will cost $3.5 million annually, with his agencies absorbing the expenses from current funds.\n\nNorth Dakota\n\nMandan: A federal judge has granted a reprieve to the owners of a bar fighting to preserve a mural at their business. U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland granted a temporary restraining order Wednesday two days after the owners of Lonesome Dove filed a lawsuit against the city of Mandan over the mural city officials ordered removed. Bar owners Brian Berube and August “Augie” Kersten were cited for have an unpermitted, Western-themed mural on the outside of the bar. The Bismarck Tribune says Berube and Kersten were unaware of the permit, later applied and were denied because city ordinance states that “no mural may be placed on the front of the building.” The judge says “such a content-based restriction on speech as Mandan has enacted is unlikely to survive constitutional muster.” He scheduled a settlement conference for June 4.\n\nOhio\n\nAlliance: The University of Mount Union has ended its affiliation with the United Methodist Church over the denomination’s renewed bans on LGBT clergy and same-sex marriage. The Canton Repository reports the school’s president says the board of trustees considered the issue for months before voting recently to end the affiliation of more than 150 years. University President W. Richard Merriman Jr. says the school wants a diverse campus. He says it became difficult to see how the denomination’s recent actions could be reconciled with the university’s values. The General Conference of the United Methodist Church in February voted to continue prohibiting ordination of gays and lesbians and barring its clergy from presiding at same-sex weddings. The university says ending the affiliation won’t affect its curriculum.\n\nOklahoma\n\nOklahoma City: A bill that would force more school districts to return to five-day school weeks has been given final legislative approval and is heading to the governor’s desk. A top priority of Senate Republicans this year, the bill passed the House on Wednesday on a 63-32 vote. The state Department of Education says 92 of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts currently are operating on four-day school weeks. In those cases, instructional hours are extended each day to reach the required number of hours. Under the bill, schools could continue operating four-day weeks if the district meets minimum guidelines for student performance and cost savings. Supporters of the four-day school week say it helps districts save money and recruit teachers.\n\nOregon\n\nPortland: A new report says that in future years, the state’s population will mostly grow through people moving into the Beaver State rather than through new births. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis predicts the state will see deaths outnumber births sometime in the next decade. Josh Lehner, a state economist, predicts the flip will happen around 2026 or 2027. It would be the first time in Oregon’s history that deaths outnumber births. The trend is already affecting the state’s more rural counties but now is spreading statewide. As the trend continues, analysts say factors that negatively affect migration to Oregon from other states – such as housing affordability – will have a bigger impact on the economy and the size of public budgets.\n\nPennsylvania\n\nHarrisburg: Gov. Tom Wolf says preliminary statistics are pointing to a decrease in overdose deaths in the state last year, as his administration suggests the opioid crisis might be starting to wane in some parts of Pennsylvania. Wolf spoke Wednesday as he participated in a training session on how to administer a nasal spray that reverses an opioid overdose. Wolf says physicians are issuing fewer opioid prescriptions and doctor-shopping is over, thanks to a 2016 law that requires prescribers to check a state database before issuing an opioid prescription to a new patient. His administration says more robust health care outreach and law enforcement programs are paying dividends. It’s also made the anti-overdose medication naloxone regularly available at most pharmacies in Pennsylvania, at little or no cost for those with insurance.\n\nRhode Island\n\nProvidence: A poet has sued the city and a police officer, saying he was racially profiled, assaulted, harassed and falsely arrested three years ago. The Providence Journal reports Christopher Johnson, of Providence, a spoken-word artist and former state poet laureate candidate, is seeking unspecified damages and the firing of the officer. Johnson says he declined to provide his name to the officer, who pulled alongside him in a police SUV while walking home from a concert in May 2016. Johnson says he was grabbed and slammed into the vehicle so hard it left a dent. Charges against Johnson were later dismissed. A police spokeswoman says Johnson never filed a formal complaint with the department.\n\nSouth Carolina\n\nColumbia: The South Carolina State Fair this year marks its 150th anniversary of showcasing the state’s agricultural roots. The commemorative event is themed “Prize-Winning Memories” and will be held Oct. 9-20 at Columbia’s fairgrounds. WIS-TV reports the fair will present many special offerings along with traditional favorites including a free, daily big top circus; a Midway with 70+ rides; nearly 70 food stands; arts and crafts displays; pig races; livestock and agricultural exhibits; and stage shows. On July 12 as an early kick-start to the celebration, the fair will host a free outdoor screening of “The Greatest Showman.” The fair was organized in 1869 and is a self-supported, charitable organization, dedicated to preserving and promoting the state’s agricultural roots while supporting statewide education.\n\nSouth Dakota\n\nSioux Falls: The South Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will elect a new bishop next month. The election will take place during the synod assembly May 31 and June 1 at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls. Fifteen names have been pre-identified as potential candidates but will not be official nominees until their names are placed on the ballot by someone at the assembly, according to Sawyer Vanden Heuvel, director of communications for the South Dakota Synod. Any ELCA rostered minister of Word and Sacrament is eligible for the nomination, and the first ballot becomes the ballot of nominations. Nominees will be contacted and allowed to withdraw their names if they so choose by 2 p.m. Friday.\n\nTennessee\n\nMemphis: A massive new exhibition and entertainment hall is set to open at Elvis Presley’s Graceland with three museum-style exhibits, including one on the late boxing great Muhammad Ali. Graceland officials say the 80,000-square-foot Graceland Exhibition Center opens Saturday to guests visiting the Presley-themed tourist attraction in Memphis. The singer, actor and pop icon lived in the city until his death Aug. 16, 1977. Presley and Ali were known to be friends. Presley once gave Ali a custom-made robe in Las Vegas in the early 1970s. A replica of that robe is part of the Ali exhibit, along with photos of the heavyweight boxing and civil rights champion and other artifacts. Exhibits about motorcycles and the planet Earth also are scheduled to open Saturday.\n\nTexas\n\nDallas: City leaders have declared a Confederate statue surplus property and offered to sell it for a minimum $450,000 – what it cost to move the bronze artwork from public view. The Dallas City Council on Wednesday designated the statue, of Robert E. Lee and a young soldier riding horses, available for sale to the highest bidder. The 1935 sculpture by Alexander Phimister Proctor was removed from a park in September 2017 and put in storage. The statue was appraised at $950,000, which Dallas authorities say could pay for removal of the city’s Confederate War Memorial. The Dallas Landmark Commission in March approved a plan to disband the 123-year-old memorial complex, which critics say is racist and not historic. A 65-foot obelisk has stood over Pioneer Park Cemetery since 1961.\n\nUtah\n\nSalt Lake City: State and federal officials have signed an agreement to defer to the state when planning forest projects. The Salt Lake Tribune reported Wednesday that Republican Gov. Gary Herbert and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue signed the agreement Wednesday. Officials say the deal obligates the U.S. Forest Service to rely on the state’s guidance for designing, implementing and prioritizing projects intended to reduce wildfire risks and promote the health of the state’s 12,500 square miles of forest. Utah officials say they believe the agreement will build on existing programs and investments in restoring degraded forest landscapes. A Utah forest supervisor says the forest service has already prepared and authorized treatment plans on 1,563 square miles of state forest land using mechanical thinning and controlled fires.\n\nVermont\n\nMontpelier: State Attorney General T.J. Donovan says he’s filed suit against eight members of the family that owns the drug company that manufactures OxyContin, one of the drugs believed to be partly responsible for the opioid crisis. Donovan alleged Tuesday that for over two decades the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, minimized the health risks of opioids, claiming the prescription drugs were rarely the cause of abuse, addiction or death. Donovan says the Sacklers directed Purdue to promote products that were more dangerous, addictive and lucrative. Last September, the state filed suit against Purdue. In a statement released after the September lawsuit, the company said it shared Vermont’s concerns about the opioid crisis but denied Purdue acted improperly.\n\nVirginia\n\nRichmond: A large trash collector in the state will use recycling bins that are partly made from recycled trash. The Central Virginia Waste Management Authority said this week that it ordered 2,000 bins from Israeli company UBQ. The firm uses a patented process that converts municipal waste into a plastic-like composite material. UBQ said the authority is its first U.S. customer. CVWMA serves about 280,000 households in the Richmond area. Executive Director Kim Hynes said it’s testing out the bins, which she said are comprised of 25% of the UBQ material. UBQ says it creates the material by milling anything from banana peels to dirty plastics into a powder. The powder is then placed into a reaction chamber. UBQ says the process produces no greenhouse gas emissions or residual waste.\n\nWashington\n\nSeattle: State and local authorities will now be restricted from asking about people’s immigration status, adding to a West Coast wall of states with so-called sanctuary policies. Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure Tuesday implementing the new rules. They put Washington among only a handful of states, including California and Oregon, to have enacted statewide sanctuary policies and rank among the strongest statewide mandates in the nation. Police officers in Washington won’t be able to inquire about immigration status except in limited circumstances, and the state attorney general will draw up rules for courthouses, hospitals and other state government facilities aimed at limiting their use as places where federal immigration agents look for people in the country illegally. “We will not be complicit in the Trump administration’s depraved efforts to break up hard-working immigrant and refugee families,” Inslee said.\n\nWest Virginia\n\nLogan: The community is taking a stand against needle exchange programs. News outlets report Logan County commissioners voted this week to draft an ordinance that would outlaw starting a needle exchange program there. Commissioner Danny Godby says officials want to find a way to eliminate dirty needles, but they think a needle exchange would make the problem worse by adding more needles to the mix. Some communities in West Virginia and other states have approved needle exchanges to reduce the spread of infectious diseases like hepatitis and HIV and distribute educational materials about where drug addicts can seek help. A needle exchange in Charleston closed last year over concerns about increased needle litter and other issues.\n\nWisconsin\n\nMadison: The state Department of Natural Resources board is tweaking the state’s bear hunt structure for the first time since 1980. The new framework calls for six bear management zones rather than the current four. Numeric zone kill limits in DNR rules would end. The agency would instead set limits based on agricultural damage, hunter success and nuisance complaints. The changes could into effect as early as the fall of 2021. The plan called for allowing hunters to use hounds in a newly formed central Wisconsin hunting zone. The board voted 6-1 to remove those provisions, however. Opponents told the board that allowing hounds in the zone would lead to trespassing. Megan Nicholson of the Humane Society of the United States said hunting with hounds is a blight on the state.\n\nWyoming\n\nGillette: A traditional Native American horse race in the city has been postponed following cold and wet conditions in northeast Wyoming. The Gillette News Record reports the Horse Nations Indian Relay was planned for Saturday and Sunday, but rough track conditions have forced organizers to reschedule the event for Aug. 31 and Sept. 1. The sport involves racers riding without saddles to make three laps around a track. Riders finish each lap on a different horse, so they jump on to a new horse twice during each race. Four to six relay teams compete in every race. The event leads up to the Championship of Champions race in Walla Walla, Washington, in late September.\n\nFrom staff and wire reports", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2019/05/24"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_27", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:22", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/2024/01/10/ranking-nicknames-delaware-high-schools-closed/71971147007/", "title": "Ranking Delaware's high school nicknames: Some of best were at ...", "text": "There are just 61 Delaware high schools with athletic teams and they go about their sporting business with determination and diligence while enjoying the fun and camaraderie.\n\nOften, no matter what game they’re playing, athletes and the family, friends and alumni who follow them will refer to their teams not only by the school’s name but its nickname.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/2024/01/08/ranking-nicknames-delaware-high-schools-sports-teams/71963605007/", "title": "Ranking bottom 31 nicknames of Delaware high schools", "text": "There are just 61 Delaware high schools with athletic teams and they go about their sporting business with determination and diligence while enjoying the fun and camaraderie.\n\nOften, no matter what game they’re playing, athletes and the family, friends and alumni who follow them will refer to their teams not only by the school’s name but its nickname.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/08"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/2024/01/09/ranking-top-30-nicknames-delaware-high-schools/71971120007/", "title": "Ranking top 30 nicknames of Delaware high schools", "text": "There are just 61 Delaware high schools with athletic teams and they go about their sporting business with determination and diligence while enjoying the fun and camaraderie.\n\nOften, no matter what game they’re playing, athletes and the family, friends and alumni who follow them will refer to their teams not only by the school’s name but its nickname.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2024/01/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/highschool/sports-awards/2023/12/20/2024-usa-today-high-school-sports-awards-girls-swimming-watch-list/71986801007/", "title": "2024 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards Girls Swimming ...", "text": "USA TODAY\n\nThe USA TODAY High School Sports Awards is pleased to announce its inaugural watch list for 2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Girls Swimmer of the Year!\n\nThis initial list includes 50 current student-athletes who meet the nomination criteria for this year’s national Girls Swimmer of the Year award. These athletes were either nominees in last year’s national show, or athletes who were seriously considered based on season-wide performance, state championships and any other state, regional and/or national recognition.\n\nWatch last year's full show: 2023 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards\n\nHere's a little more about this year's program and how it works:\n\nThe official 2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Girls Swimming Team will be announced later this spring. All 25 final team members will be honored as nominees for national Girls Swimmer of the Year. The winner will be revealed during the fourth annual USA TODAY High School Sports Awards. Visit the event website for updates leading up to this summer's on-demand event, and to view all of the award winners from last year's show!\n\nNote: The purpose of this watch list is to track eligible nominees for this year’s national show. Athletes could be removed from this list if they no longer play for their high school team (either by choice or injury), or if their high school no longer participates in a state-sanctioned championship tournament for this sport.\n\nWho else should we be tracking for national Girls Swimmer of the Year?\n\nThis watch list is only a starting point. All student-athletes who compete for state-sanctioned interscholastic championships are eligible for our program. Player of the Year suggestions can be submitted to both roleary@usatventures.com and BFontana@usatventures.com.\n\n2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Girls Swimming Watch List:\n\nFinley Anderson — SR | Evergreen High School | Evergreen, Colorado\n\nSidney Arcella — JR | Summit High School | Summit, New Jersey\n\nAmanda Barnard — SR | Patrick Henry High School | Ashland, Virginia\n\nBrooke Beede — SR | Academy of the Holy Names | Tampa, Florida\n\nCarly Bixby — SR | Blake School | Minneapolis, Minnesota\n\nRachel Bockrath — SR | Brandywine High School | Wilmington, Delaware\n\nLilla Bognar — JR | Eastside High School | Taylors, South Carolina\n\nLynsey Bowen — JR | Carmel High School | Carmel, Indiana\n\nEmily Brown — SR | Dublin Coffman High School | Dublin, Ohio\n\nSamantha Chan — SR | Bob Jones High School | Madison, Alabama\n\nStella Chapman — SR | Pioneer High School | Ann Arbor, Michigan\n\nCampbell Chase — SR | Woodrow Wilson High School | Dallas, Texas\n\nKatie Christopherson — SR | The Westminster Schools | Atlanta, Georgia\n\nElise Clift — SR | Mansfield High School | Mansfield, Texas\n\nGeorgia Colborn — SR | The Charter School of Wilmington | Wilmington, Delaware\n\nCharlotte Crush — SO | Sacred Heart Academy | Louisville, Kentucky\n\nChristine Datovech — SR | Maggie L. Walker Governor’s SchooI | Richmond, Virginia\n\nAndrea Dworak — JR | Blake High School | Colesville, Maryland\n\nPiper Enge — SR | Mercer Island High School | Mercer Island, Washington\n\nHayden Hollingsworth — JR | Upper Arlington High School | Upper Arlington, Ohio\n\nAnnie Jia — JR | Hatboro-Horsham High School | Horsham, Pennsylvania\n\nLilly King — JR | Mount Pleasant Area High School | Mt Pleasant, Pennsylvania\n\nSkylar Knowlton — JR | St. Thomas Aquinas High School | Dover, New Hampshire\n\nMarie Landreneau — SR | St. Thomas More Catholic High School | Lafayette, Louisiana\n\nSusie Lee — SR | Bentonville High School | Bentonville, Arkansas\n\nClare Logan — SR | Westfield High School | Westfield, New Jersey\n\nHaley McDonald — JR | Sacred Heart Academy | Louisville, Kentucky\n\nAngie McKane — SR | Corning-Painted Post High School | Corning, New York\n\nMadison Mintenko — JR | Pine Creek High School | Colorado Springs, Colorado\n\nElla Mongenel — JR | Cedar Park High School | Cedar Park, Texas\n\nCamille Murray — SR | McKinney North High School | McKinney, Texas\n\nTeagan O’Dell — JR | Santa Margarita Catholic High School | Rancho Santa Margarita, California\n\nAnnam Olasewere — JR | Staples High School | Westport, Connecticut\n\nAnnika Parkhe — SR | Deerfield High School | Deerfield, Illinois\n\nErika Pelaez — SR | South Florida HEAT | Hialeah, Florida\n\nHayden Penny — SR | Eastside High School | Taylors, South Carolina\n\nEmma Reiser — SR | North Gwinnett High School | Suwanee, Georgia\n\nAddie Robillard — JR | Saint Ursula Academy | Cincinnati, Ohio\n\nAddison Sauickie — SR | Riverview High School | Sarasota, Florida\n\nHaiden Schoessel — SR | Eureka High School | Eureka, Missouri\n\nElle Scott — JR | Collegiate School | Richmond, Virginia\n\nAlex Shackell — JR | Carmel High School | Carmel, Indiana\n\nLeah Shackley — SR | Bedford High School | Bedford, Pennsylvania\n\nKatie Belle Sikes — SR | Orange High School | Hillsborough, North Carolina\n\nMolly Sweeney — SO | Carmel High School | Carmel, Indiana\n\nEmily Thompson — SR | Ridge High School | Basking Ridge, New Jersey\n\nSophia Umstead — JR | Jenison High School | Jenison, Michigan\n\nMaggie Wanezek — SR | Brookfield East High School | Brookfield, Wisconsin\n\nGracie Weyant — SR | Riverview High School | Sarasota, Florida\n\nCharlotte Wilson — SR | Cherry Creek High School | Greenwood Village, Colorado", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/football/2023/08/02/columbus-ohio-high-school-football-conferences-2023-season/70334873007/", "title": "Columbus-area high school football conferences: Which teams ...", "text": "High school football practice has just begun and the start of the season looms in two weeks, and just as rosters change from year to year, sometimes so do the leagues in which central Ohio teams compete.\n\nOne new league has formed, a few other teams will compete as independents while they look for suitable homes, and even more changes loom in seasons to come. But for now:\n\nThis is the first year for the second reiteration of the Central Buckeye League, comprised of former members of the MSL-Ohio. The previous CBL, which included such current OCC schools as Delaware Hayes and Marysville, disbanded after the 1990-91 school year. This CBL starts with eight schools, five of which will play league games in football. They will be joined in 2025 by Franklin Heights, which is leaving the OCC.\n\nHarvest Prep and KIPP Columbus are playing independent schedules.\n\nThis is the final year for the OCC as a 32-team league. Logan and Teays Valley are joining the OCC-Buckeye in 2024, when the entire conference will undergo another realignment. Teays Valley has been a member of the MSL-Buckeye since 1984.\n\nMount Vernon is playing its final season in the Ohio Cardinal Conference. The Yellow Jackets, who were one of the Ohio Capital Conference’s founding members in 1968 and left the league in 2016, will join the Licking County League in 2024.\n\nHere is a list of leagues involving central Ohio teams and their divisional alignments, where applicable:\n\nCentral Buckeye League\n\nBexley, Buckeye Valley, Columbus Academy, Ready, Whitehall\n\nNOTE: Grandview Heights and Worthington Christian will play independent schedules in football due to disparity in size between themselves and the other league schools. However, they are members of the league in all other sports, as is Columbus School for Girls.\n\nGrandview Heights:Bobcats football hopes for more success with departure from MSL-Ohio\n\nCentral Catholic League\n\nDeSales, Hartley, St. Charles, Watterson\n\nColumbus City League\n\nNorth: Beechcroft, Centennial, East, Linden-McKinley, Mifflin, Northland, Whetstone\n\nSouth: Africentric, Briggs, Eastmoor Academy, Independence, Marion-Franklin, South, Walnut Ridge, West\n\nKnox-Morrow Athletic Conference\n\nCardington, Centerburg, Danville, East Knox, Fredericktown, Galion Northmor, Mount Gilead\n\nOhio's best:The top 23 high school football players in 2023\n\nLicking County League\n\nBuckeye: Granville, Licking Heights, Licking Valley, Watkins Memorial, Zanesville\n\nCardinal: Heath, Johnstown, Lakewood, Newark Catholic, Northridge, Utica\n\nMid-State League\n\nBuckeye: Amanda-Clearcreek, Bloom-Carroll, Circleville, Fairfield Union, Hamilton Township, Liberty Union, Logan Elm, Teays Valley\n\nCardinal: Berne Union, Corning Miller, Fairfield Christian, Fisher Catholic, Grove City Christian, Millersport, Zanesville Rosecrans\n\nCoaches weigh in:Who are the best high school football players in the Columbus area?\n\nOhio Capital Conference\n\nBuckeye: Central Crossing, Groveport Madison, Lancaster, Newark, Pickerington Central, Reynoldsburg\n\nCapital: Big Walnut, Canal Winchester, Delaware, Dublin Scioto, Franklin Heights, Westerville North, Westerville South, Worthington Kilbourne\n\nCardinal: Dublin Jerome, Hilliard Darby, Marysville, Olentangy, Olentangy Berlin, Thomas Worthington\n\nCentral: Dublin Coffman, Hilliard Bradley, Hilliard Davidson, Olentangy Liberty, Olentangy Orange, Upper Arlington\n\nOhio: Gahanna Lincoln, Grove City, New Albany, Pickerington North, Westerville Central, Westland\n\nCommentary:OCC expansion hits all the right notes for Logan, Teays Valley\n\nOther central Ohio schools\n\nCentral Buckeye Conference: Jonathan Alder, London, North Union\n\nMid-Ohio Athletic Conference: Highland\n\nOhio Heritage Conference: Fairbanks, Madison-Plains, West Jefferson\n\nScioto Valley Conference: Westfall\n\ndpurpura@dispatch.com\n\n@dp_dispatch", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/08/02"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/2023/08/09/delaware-high-school-football-6-new-things-to-know-in-2023/70553290007/", "title": "Delaware high school football: 6 new things to know in 2023", "text": "Legendary Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler used to say, “Every day, you either get better or you get worse. You never stay the same.”\n\nHopefully, Delaware high school football has gotten better every day since the 2022 DIAA championship games were played Dec. 10 at Delaware Stadium.\n\nIt definitely hasn’t stayed the same.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/08/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/highschool/sports-awards/2023/12/20/2024-usa-today-high-school-sports-awards-boys-swimming-watch-list/71986570007/", "title": "2024 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards Boys Swimming ...", "text": "USA TODAY\n\nThe USA TODAY High School Sports Awards is pleased to announce its inaugural watch list for 2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Boys Swimmer of the Year!\n\nThis initial list includes 50 current student-athletes who meet the nomination criteria for this year’s national Boys Swimmer of the Year award. These athletes were either nominees in last year’s national show, or athletes who were seriously considered based on season-wide performance, state championships and any other state, regional and/or national recognition.\n\nWatch last year's full show: 2023 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards\n\nHere's a little more about this year's program and how it works:\n\nThe official 2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Boys Swimming Team will be announced later this spring. All 25 final team members will be honored as nominees for national Boys Swimmer of the Year. The winner will be revealed during the fourth annual USA TODAY High School Sports Awards. Visit the event website for updates leading up to this summer's on-demand event, and to view all of the award winners from last year's show!\n\nNote: The purpose of this watch list is to track eligible nominees for this year’s national show. Athletes could be removed from this list if they no longer play for their high school team (either by choice or injury), or if their high school no longer participates in a state-sanctioned championship tournament for this sport.\n\nWho else should we be tracking for national Boys Swimmer of the Year?\n\nThis watch list is only a starting point. All student-athletes who compete for state-sanctioned interscholastic championships are eligible for our program. Player of the Year suggestions can be submitted to both roleary@usatventures.com and BFontana@usatventures.com.\n\n2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Boys Swimming Watch List:\n\nGavin Abelende — JR | La Plata High School | La Plata, Maryland\n\nAdriano Arioti — SR | Georgetown Day School | Washington, D.C.\n\nAlexei Avakov — SR | Manchester Central High School | Manchester, New Hampshire\n\nLucca Battaglini — SR | Durham School of the Arts | Durham, North Carolina\n\nLuke Bedsole — JR | Huntsville High School | Huntsville, Alabama\n\nSimon Bermudez — SR | Flint Hill School | Oakton, Virginia\n\nJosh Bey — JR | Hinsdale Central High School | Hinsdale, Illinois\n\nWill Browne — JR | St. Anne’s-Belfield School | Charlottesville, Virginia\n\nAndy Commins — SR | Carrboro High School | Carrboro, North Carolina\n\nJohnny Crush — SR | Saint Xavier High School | Louisville, Kentucky\n\nNolan Dunkel — SR | Yorktown High School | Arlington, Virginia\n\nShane Eckler — SR | Ridley High School | Folsom, Pennsylvania\n\nP.J. Foy — SR | Thunder Mountain High School | Juneau, Alaska\n\nRyder Gentry — SR | Lawton Chiles High School | Tallahassee, Florida\n\nThomas Heilman — JR | Western Albemarle High School | Crozet, Virginia\n\nConner Hogan — SR | Hutchinson High School | Hutchinson, Minnesota\n\nJosh Howat — JR | Lake Braddock Secondary School | Burke, Virginia\n\nMarvin Johnson — JR | McCallie School | Chattanooga, Tennessee\n\nBrady Johnson — SR | West Chicago High School | West Chicago, Illinois\n\nWilliam Jost — SR | Parkway Central High School | Chesterfield, Missouri\n\nMatthew Judkins — SR | Chaminade College Prep | St. Louis, Missouri\n\nJeremy Kelly — SR | Georgetown High School | Georgetown, Texas\n\nJake Kennedy — SR | Springfield High School | Springfield, Pennsylvania\n\nPreston Kessler — JR | Indiana Area High School | Indiana, Pennsylvania\n\nNicholas Kjaerulff — SR | Creekview High School | Canton, Georgia\n\nJones Lambert — SR | Lubbock High School | Lubbock, Texas\n\nCarter Lancaster — SR | The Bolles School | Jacksonville, Florida\n\nTony Laurito — SR | Friendswood High School | Friendswood, Texas\n\nElliot Lee — SR | Daniel Hand High School | Madison, Connecticut\n\nDaniel Li — SR | San Marino High School | San Marino, California\n\nCooper Lucas — SR | Keller High School | Keller, Texas\n\nThackston McMullan — SR | St. Xavier High School | Cincinnati, Ohio\n\nMichael Mullen — SR | Gainesville High School | Gainesville, Florida\n\nGrayson Nye — SR | Middle Creek High School | Apex, North Carolina\n\nThomas Olsen — SR | Parkrose High School | Portland, Oregon\n\nKyle Peck — SR | Chancellor High School | Fredericksburg, Virginia\n\nJack Primeaux — SR | Jesuit High School | New Orleans, Louisiana\n\nTyler Quarterman — SR | Boise High School | Boise, Idaho\n\nNoah Smith — SR | Allatoona High School | Acworth, Georgia\n\nKade Snyder — SR | Patterson Mill High School | Bel Air, Maryland\n\nOwen Stevens — JR | Zeeland West High School | Zeeland, Michigan\n\nAaron Stevens — SR | Conrad Schools of Science | Wilmington, Delaware\n\nChase Swearingen — SR | Westerville Central High School | Westerville, Ohio\n\nJake Wang — SR | Conestoga High School | Berwyn, Pennsylvania\n\nKyle Wang — SR | Churchill High School | Potomac, Maryland\n\nHenry Webb — JR | The Blake School | Minneapolis, Minnesota\n\nMaximus Williamson — JR | Keller High School | Keller, Texas\n\nTy Wilmore — SR | Wilmington Friends School | Wilmington, Delaware\n\nKaii Winkler — SR | South Florida HEAT | Miami, Florida\n\nJason Zhao — JR | Indian Hill High School | Cincinnati, Ohio", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/12/20"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/highschool/sports-awards/2023/09/05/2023-2024-usa-today-high-school-sports-awards-girls-soccer-watch-list/70765413007/", "title": "2023-2024 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards Girls Soccer ...", "text": "USA TODAY\n\nThe USA TODAY High School Sports Awards is pleased to announce its watch list for 2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Girls Soccer Player of the Year!\n\nThis initial list includes 50 current student-athletes who meet the nomination criteria for this year’s national Girls Soccer Player of the Year award. These athletes were either nominees in last year’s national show, or athletes who were seriously considered based on season-wide performance, state championships and any other state, regional and/or national recognition.\n\nWatch last year's full show: 2023 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards\n\nHere's a little more about this year's program and how it works:\n\nThe official 2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Girls Soccer Team will be announced later this spring. All 25 final team members will be honored as nominees for national Girls Soccer Player of the Year. The winner will be revealed during the fourth annual USA TODAY High School Sports Awards. Visit the event website for updates leading up to this summer's on-demand event, and to view all of the award winners from last year's show!\n\nNote: The purpose of this watch list is to track eligible nominees for this year’s national show. Athletes could be removed from this list if they no longer play for their high school team (either by choice or injury), or if their high school no longer participates in a state-sanctioned championship tournament for this sport.\n\nWho else should we be tracking for national Girls Soccer Player of the Year?\n\nThis watch list is only a starting point. All student-athletes who compete for state-sanctioned interscholastic championships are eligible for our program. Player of the Year suggestions can be submitted to both roleary@usatventures.com and BFontana@usatventures.com.\n\n2023-24 USA TODAY HSSA Girls Soccer Watch List:\n\nRyleigh Acosta — SR, M | Mariner High School | Cape Coral, Florida\n\nAshlyn Anderson — SO, F | Carmel High School | Carmel, Indiana\n\nAlex Barry — SR, F | Immaculate Heart Academy | Township of Washington, New Jersey\n\nEllie Bishop — JR, F | North Kingstown High School | North Kingstown, Rhode Island\n\nGracie Brown — SR, M | Morgantown High School | Morgantown, West Virginia\n\nGabby Chan — SR, F | Albertus Magnus High School | Bardonia, New York\n\nCloe Chase — SR, M | Marist High School | Eugene, Oregon\n\nHailee Christensen — SR, F | Harrisburg High School | Harrisburg, South Dakota\n\nCarly Ann Cormack — SR, M | Punahou School | Honolulu, Hawaii\n\nLana Djuranovic — SR, M | Scarborough High School | Carly Ann Cormack, Maine\n\nEllie Felt — SR, M/F | Sunset High School | Portland, Oregon\n\nKennedy Fuller — SR, M | Carroll High School | Southlake, Texas\n\nNarissa Fults — SR, F | Norman North High School | Norman, Oklahoma\n\nFaith George — SR, F | Santa Margarita Catholic High School | Santa Margarita, California\n\nAddison Halpern — JR, F | Rutgers Preparatory School | Somerset, New Jersey\n\nJordyn Hardeman — JR, M/D | Midlothian High School | Midlothian, Texas\n\nEllie Hodsden — JR, F | Dripping Springs High School | Dripping Springs, Texas\n\nKayla Hurley — SR, M/F | Bentonville High School | Bentonville, Arkansas\n\nFaith Johnston — JR, M/F | Parkview Baptist School | Baton Rouge, Louisiana\n\nCharlotte Kohler — SR, M | St. Francis High School | Mountain View, California\n\nEmma Kucal — JR, F | Cumberland High School | Cumberland, Rhode Island\n\nAva Labocki — SR, F | Granville High School | Granville, Ohio\n\nAva Magnuson — SO, F | Sutton High School | Sutton, Massachusetts\n\nAllison Marshall — SR, F | Gretna High School | Gretna, Nebraska\n\nZoe Matthews — JR, F | Carroll Senior High School | Southlake, Texas\n\nSofia Nehro — SR, G | Skyline High School | Ann Arbor, Michigan\n\nMaddie Padelski — JR, M | Nolensville High School | Nolensville, Tennessee\n\nChloe Pecor — SR, F | Champlain Valley Union High School | Hinesburg, Vermont\n\nNevaeh Peregrina — SR, M | Ogden High School | Ogden, Utah\n\nEmerson Perrin — SR, M | Minot High School | Minot, North Dakota\n\nAlexa Pino — JR, F | St. Joseph High School | Trumbull, Connecticut\n\nGabby Riley — SR, M/F | Middletown High School | Middletown, Delaware\n\nAshley Roni — SR, F | Skyline High School | Sammamish, Washington\n\nAnna Sikorski — SR, M/F | Muskego High School | Muskego, Wisconsin\n\nSammy Smith — SR, M/F | Boise High School | Boise, Idaho\n\nAudrey Smith — SR, F | Fort Zumwalt South High School | St Peters, Missouri\n\nLiv Stott — SR, D | Bearden High School | Knoxville, Tennessee\n\nAmelia Streberger — SR, M | Grosse Pointe North High School | Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan\n\nTaylor Suarez — SR, F | Ardrey Kell High School | Charlotte, North Carolina\n\nIvy Tolbert — SR, M | Commerce High School | Commerce, Georgia\n\nPeyton Trayer — SO, G | Santa Margarita Catholic High School | Santa Margarita, California\n\nLinda Ullmark — SR, M | Nichols School | Buffalo, New York\n\nHailey Wade — SR, G | Hamilton Southeastern High School | Fishers, Indiana\n\nSolai Washington — SR, F | Chamblee High School | Chamblee, Georgia\n\nLily White — SR, M | The Benjamin School | North Palm Beach, Florida\n\nKelly White — SR, G | Boca Raton Community High School | Boca Raton, Florida\n\nJordan Whiteaker — SR, D | Dakota Ridge High School | Littleton, Colorado\n\nKami Winger — SR, D | Colgan Senior High School | Manassas, Virginia\n\nIsabella Winn — SR, M | Ridgewood High School | Ridgewood, New Jersey\n\nDesiree Zapata — SR, F | Smyrna High School | Smyrna, Delaware", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/09/05"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/2023/02/23/delaware-high-school-sports-participation-declining-pandemic-covid-athletics/69890195007/", "title": "Delaware high school sports participation declining rapidly", "text": "Sports participation has dropped 5.79 percent since 2018-19\n\nGirls sports hit hardest with a 6.40 percent decline\n\nSome sports like track and wrestling saw increased participation\n\nThe COVID-19 pandemic’s repercussions left Alexis I. du Pont High without a girls basketball team two years ago.\n\nHealth concerns, academic issues and remote learning conspired to leave the Tigers without enough players, and their season was scrapped. A.I.’s best player, Imirah Trader, joined the boys team.\n\nA.I. du Pont was able to put a girls team back on the court in 2021-22 and, with Trader leading the way, went 19-4 and won the Blue Hen Conference championship. This year, the Tigers are 21-1 and will be playing in the DIAA basketball tournament quarterfinals against Sanford on Monday, March 6.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/02/23"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/ohio-high-school/2023/11/30/ohio-high-school-boys-basketballs-top-24-players-for-2023-2024/71745078007/", "title": "Ohio high school boys basketball's top 24 players for 2023-2024", "text": "USA TODAY Network Ohio\n\nCincinnati Enquirer\n\nThe state of Ohio continues to produce high-quality high school basketball players who will put their talents on display this winter.\n\nAs a preview to this season, the high school sports staff of the USA Today Network's 21 Ohio newspapers and websites compiled a who's who of the Buckeye State's prep boys basketball players.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/11/30"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_28", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:22", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/05/03/new-stem-facility-open-camp-ken-jockety-fall-2024/9568560002/", "title": "New STEM facility will open at Camp Ken-Jockety in fall 2024", "text": "Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartland announced plans Tuesday for a $16-million facility geared toward attracting more women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers.\n\nThe STEM Leadership Center & Maker Space will be at Camp Ken-Jockety in Galloway and is part of Girl Scouts of the USA's goal of putting 2.5 million girls in the STEM pipeline by 2025.\n\nMore:High school girls grow interest in STEM careers through clubs, classes and robotics\n\n“These programs will have a tremendous impact on the growth of the central Ohio workforce for generations and this campus is going to be the epicenter of the community jewel for STEM learning and activity,” Tammy Wharton, president and CEO of Girl Scouts of Ohio's Heartland Council said during a news conference.\n\nAbout $9.45 million of the $16 million needed for the project has been raised so far.\n\nThe proposed facility would have science and technology labs, and a space to learn in-demand trade skills like welding, mechanics, and carpentry. There also would be a new greenhouse for gardening programs and a commercial kitchen for farm-to-table programming.\n\nIn addition, existing buildings and outdoor learning spaces at the Girl Scout campus would be renovated.\n\nRenovations are expected to start by the end of the year and groundbreaking for the new STEM Leadership Center will begin in spring 2023, with a projected opening date of fall 2024.\n\nThe STEM facility won’t be limited to just the Girl Scouts. Central Ohio school districts will be able to use the facility for field trips.\n\nLocal investment in STEM\n\nThis announcement comes at a time when Ohio is being hailed by some as the “Silicon Valley of the Midwest” with Intel announcing in January it will create 3,000 jobs and invest $20 billion to build two plants in Licking County that will make semiconductors.\n\n“This is about the future, and with Intel here, with Battelle, we are going to be the technology hub of the country,\" said Yvette McGee Brown, a former Girl Scout and now a lawyer at Jones Day. \"We are going to have our girls having high-paying jobs, leading teams, and setting the path for the world.\"\n\nMore:What we know about Intel factory coming to Columbus area\n\nMany Greater Columbus businesses are collaborating with the Girls Scouts to create the STEM facility.\n\nBattelle has invested $3 million, AEP has invested $2 million and Nationwide Foundation has invested $1.5 million. Other local corporations that have invested include Bath and Body Works, Cardinal Health and M/I Homes Foundation.\n\nMale-dominated field\n\nSTEM has traditionally been a male-dominated field.\n\nWomen make up 34% of the STEM workforce, according to National Girls Collaborative Project. And the numbers are even lower when it comes to certain fields in STEM. Women make up 26% of computer and math sciences and 16% of engineering.\n\n“There is a serious need for robust STEM programing to help girls learn about the jobs of the future and spark their interest and curiosity,” Wharton said. “Gender diversity is vital to having a sustainable and strong STEM in-demand workforce.”\n\nMore:Intel's Ohio project is happening, company says, as state officials finalize negotiations\n\nThere has been a slight uptick of women pursuing degrees in STEM fields at Ohio State University, but men remain the overwhelming majority.\n\nThere were about 2,130 female students representing 24% of the total enrollment, in Ohio State's College of Engineering at the undergraduate level last fall, up from 23.5% or 2,062 from fall 2016 semester.\n\nThe number of female students at the undergraduate level majoring in computer science and engineering jumped from 180 (13.5%) in 2016 to 328 (16%) last fall semester.\n\nPhysic majors, however, only saw a minor increase to 41 total female students (17%) last fall from 39 (14%) in 2017.\n\nSchool districts seeing STEM increase\n\nGreater Columbus school districts are finding more and more females interested in STEM careers.\n\nBexley started a Women in STEM club this past fall. Dublin has an engineering academy. Grandview Heights High School has a robotics team that caters to students who are interested in STEM. STEM has traditionally been a male-dominated field.\n\nAkiilah Whitfield, a freshman at Columbus Alternative High School, is excited about the new campus and the opportunities it will provide to get more females exposed to STEM.\n\n“I’m looking forward to new experiences and helping other kids find their passion in STEM,” the 14-year-old said Tuesday morning at the news conference.\n\nFilling a need\n\nA lack of representation of women in STEM careers is a big barrier to young women seeing themselves as scientists, engineers or computer scientists.\n\nIt’s important to get more diversity in STEM and eliminate barriers that prevent people from pursuing STEM careers, said Lou Von Thaer, president and CEO of Battelle.\n\nMore:Greater Columbus nearly landed $4.2 billion Foxconn project, former executive says\n\n“I just can’t wait to see what this beautiful facility is going to do and attract, excite and build that curiosity in our future generation and after they have that curiosity, give them the tools to do something with it over time,” Thaer said.\n\nLori Gillett, CEO of Corna Kokosing Construction Company, hopes the facility will help young girls feel more confident with STEM by connecting them to role models.\n\n“We will be able to provide robust, unique training and focus on in-demand stem-related jobs and engage girls in stem and leadership learning in the stem environment,\" she said.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/05/03"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/20/live-updates-joe-biden-abortion-march-tim-kaine-politics-news/11084345002/", "title": "Nikki Haley hints at 2024 run; Kaine seeks reelection - recap", "text": "While congressional Republicans start zeroing in on the Biden administration, the president prepares to meet the nation's mayors on an issue he loves to talk about: infrastructure.\n\nPresident Joe Biden speaks Friday with members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and delivers remarks on his administration's record. Elsewhere in Washington, D.C., anti-abortion activists hold their annual march.\n\nHere are some of the latest political developments:\n\nNikki Haley 2024?: The former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations hinted at a presidential run.\n\nThe former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations hinted at a presidential run. Kaine seeks reelection: Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine announced Friday he'll seek reelection in 2024.\n\nVirginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine announced Friday he'll seek reelection in 2024. Anti-abortion marches in D.C.: An anti-abortion march Friday is designed to pressure Congress into passing new legislation, but their prospects are dim because Democrats control the Senate.\n\nAn anti-abortion march Friday is designed to pressure Congress into passing new legislation, but their prospects are dim because Democrats control the Senate. Biden meets with mayors: Biden is scheduled to meet with the bipartisan group of mayors at the White House before flying home to Delaware for the weekend.\n\nBiden is scheduled to meet with the bipartisan group of mayors at the White House before flying home to Delaware for the weekend. SCOTUS can't find leaker: The Supreme Court says it is unable to find out who leaked a draft of its anti-abortion ruling last year.\n\nNikki Haley teases 2024 presidential run: 'I think I can be that leader'\n\nFormer South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, teased a potential presidential bid in 2024 this week.\n\n\"When you’re looking at a run for president, you look at two things. You first look at: ‘Does the current situation push for new leadership?’” Haley explained in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier that aired Thursday. “The second question is: 'Am I that person that could be that new leader?’”\n\n“And can I be that leader? Yes I think I can be that leader,” Haley continued.\n\nMore:'May the best woman win': Former S.C. Governor Nikki Haley hints at 2024 presidential bid:\n\nHaley’s statements come ahead of what could be an intensely competitive 2024 Republican primary. Former President Donald Trump has already announced his candidacy and is seen as the frontrunner in the race.\n\n“If I run, I’m running against Joe Biden,” Haley said. “That’s what I’m focused on because we can’t have a second term of Joe Biden.”\n\n— Ken Tran\n\nThe race for the White House:Donald Trump announces his 2024 presidential campaign as GOP debates future: recap\n\nSupreme Court: Justices questioned but did not sign affidavits in leak probe\n\nIt’s a question that's swirled around the Supreme Court since court officials released a report Thursday on the probe into last year’s leak of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade: Were the justices themselves investigated as possible leakers?\n\nThe answer, which arrived late Friday: Sort of.\n\nSupreme Court Marshal Gail Curley, who led the investigation, said in a statement that she “spoke with each of the justices” and that they “actively cooperated in this iterative process.” None of the leads she followed implicated the justices themselves or their spouses, she said.\n\nBut Curley also said the justices were not asked to sign sworn affidavits denying they had leaked the draft opinion. Other court employees did sign those affidavits. Because none of the leads implicated the justices, Curley said, “I did not believe that it was necessary to ask the justices to sign sworn affidavits.”\n\n- John Fritze\n\nMore:Supreme Court says investigators have been unable to identify leaker of draft abortion opinion\n\nBiden: Don’t ‘defund the police’\n\nWASHINGTON – President Joe Biden assured a group of mayors at the White House on Friday that his administration does not support efforts to defund the nation’s police departments.\n\n“When it comes to public safety, we know the answer is not to defund the police,” Biden said. “It’s to retain the police, to make sure there’s accountability.”\n\nBiden met with the bipartisan group of mayors at the conclusion of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting in Washington. The group’s president, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, told Biden the time has come to “bring the defund the police movement to an end in words and deeds.”\n\nBiden said police need more funding and “ancillary help,” citing major investments that some cities have made in community violence intervention programs.\n\n– Michael Collins\n\nBLM b:Biden's 'fund the police' comment draws backlash from some BLM activists,\n\nDocumentarian embedded with Proud Boys testifies in sedition trial\n\nBritish documentarian Nick Quested, who embedded with the Proud Boys ahead of the Capitol riot, testified this week in the seditious conspiracy trial of five members of the extremist group, revealing new details about their actions ahead of Jan. 6, 2021.\n\nQuested said the day he met former Proud Boys national chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and the other four members now on trial – Dec. 11, 2020 – ended on the National Mall, where Tarrio gave a “pep rally”-like speech disputing the 2020 election results and expressing a desire to resist the \"stolen election.”\n\n\"If you want a war, then you've got one,\" Quested recounted Tarrio saying in his speech.\n\nA month later on Jan. 5, 2021, Quested said he picked Tarrio up from a D.C. jail where he had been held after burning a church’s Black Lives Matter banner and then ordered out of the city. Tarrio told a group of hecklers: “I don’t need to be in D.C. to keep the fight going.”\n\nThat night, Tarrio, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and other affiliates met in a parking garage. The right-wing extremist group leaders discussed standing as a united front on Jan. 6.\n\n“It’s inevitable; it’s going to happen,\" an unidentified man with the group said, according to government video evidence. \"We just have to do it strong, fast, together.”\n\nThe video was played while the jury was not present, as defense and government counsel litigated whether the panel should see that evidence. It was decided they will not.\n\n- Ella Lee\n\nJan. 6 trial:Documentarian embedded with Proud Boys ahead of Jan. 6 testifies at trial. What he said.\n\nWH slams Florida ban of AP African American studies as 'incomprehensible'\n\nThe White House on Friday condemned Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to block an Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in Florida public schools.\n\n“It is incomprehensible,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “Let’s be clear. They didn’t block AP European history. They didn’t block our art history. They didn’t block our music history.”\n\nThe Florida Department of Education rejected adding AP African American studies to the state’s list of courses, saying it is “inexplicably contrary” to Florida law and “significantly lacks educational value” in a Jan. 12 letter to the College Board, which oversees AP courses.\n\n- Joseph Garrison\n\nDeath penalty:Gov. Hobbs, Attorney General Mayes pause death penalty in Arizona pending review process\n\nSpecial counsel looking into classified Biden documents sign of trend\n\nSpecial counsels, the prosecutors appointed to investigate potential crimes in the executive branch independent from the Justice Department, used to be rare, usually operating one at a time. But now three are running at once into inquiries of the last three administrations.\n\nRobert Hur just got started scrutinizing President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. Jack Smith is investigating former President Donald Trump’s role in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, and classified documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. And John Durham has been looking at the origins of the Russia investigation into Trump’s campaign during the Obama administration.\n\nThe inquiries are open-ended, often last years and cost millions of dollars. For a comparison, special counsel Robert Mueller spent about $16 million on his 22-month inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election while Durham has spent $7 million since October 2020 probing what led to Mueller.\n\n- Bart Jansen\n\nGeorge Santos:George Santos' college education is a myth. Is he the only one lying? We checked\n\nMore:No more white bread, American cheese under Iowa GOP proposal to limit SNAP\n\nBiden commemorates Roe anniversary\n\nWASHINGTON – President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on Friday commemorating the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and affirming his commitment to protecting reproductive rights.\n\n“The court got Roe right 50 years ago,” Biden said, calling the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion “a balanced decision with broad national consensus.”\n\nSunday marks the 50th anniversary of the ruling, which the Supreme Court overturned last summer. That decision, which held there is no right to abortion in the Constitution, shifted one of the nation’s most divisive debates back to the states. At least 13 states have banned abortion outright, while others have restricted access to the procedure.\n\nBiden used his proclamation to call again for Congress to pass legislation enshrining into federal law the right to access abortion.\n\n— Michael Collins\n\nAbortion politics:Post-Roe abortion battle draws attention to state judicial elections, new legal strategies\n\nTim Kaine announces he will run for reelection in 2024\n\nVirginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine announced he will be running for reelection, an announcement that comes as a relief for Democrats as they face a difficult map in the 2024 elections.\n\n“I am happy to announce that I will seek reelection in 2024 to keep delivering results for Virginia,” Kaine told reporters. “I’m a servant. I love Virginia. I’m proud of what I’ve done.”\n\nThirty-four Senate seats will be up for reelection in 2024 where Democrats will have to play heavy defense – 23 of those seats are currently held by Democrats.\n\n– Ken Tran\n\nThey cost millions and last years:Biden documents probe means US has 3 special counsel investigations at once. What are they?\n\nQuestions remain on Biden classified documents\n\nThe White House still has not answered key questions about classified documents found at the home and former personal office of President Joe Biden more than a week after announcing the first discovery of classified material.\n\nWhy didn’t the White House immediately disclose the existence of the documents when they were found?\n\nHave all the documents been located?\n\nHow many documents have been discovered?\n\nWhat do the documents contain?\n\nWhy were the documents taken to Biden’s personal office and residence?\n\nRevelations about his retention of the documents have turned into a White House crisis, blunting the president's momentum from the midterm elections and handing Republicans new lines of attack.\n\nComplicating matters has been the inability – or unwillingness – of the White House to provide more answers. Administration officials have said they don’t want to interfere with the Justice Department’s investigation of what happened.\n\n— Joey Garrison\n\n5 questions on the Biden documents:5 key questions we still don't know about Biden documents\n\nNikki Haley dismisses Mike Pompeo’s VP claims as ‘lies and gossip’\n\nFormer South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley dismissed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claims that she plotted to replace Mike Pence as vice president in the 2020 election.\n\n“It’s really sad when you’re having to go out there and put lies and gossip to sell a book,” Haley told Fox News. “It was gossip, it was never discussed. If somebody else discussed it, they certainly didn’t discuss it with me.”\n\nIn his new book, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love”, Pompeo accused Haley of scheming with former White House advisors Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to replace Pence, the Guardian reported after obtaining a copy of the memoir.\n\nAccording to Pompeo, Haley sidestepped Trump’s then chief of staff, John Kelly, and secured a personal meeting with Trump accompanied by Kushner and Ivanka Trump to present “a possible ‘Haley for vice-president’ option.”\n\nThe exchange is a sneak peek into what could be a heated 2024 Republican primary. Both Pompeo and Haley have suggested they will run for president in 2024.\n\n— Ken Tran\n\nPolitics news to your inbox:Sign up for USA TODAY's On Politics newsletter\n\nBiden, Trump documents expose problem: Missing classified records not uncommon\n\nThe Biden and Trump classified document revelations are very different, even though both indicate U.S. national security could have been put at risk by sensitive government documents stored in unsecured personal locations.\n\nBut both cases underscore how the U.S. system of safeguarding classified presidential documents is in urgent need of improvement, security analysts say, especially during the critical period when one administration hands over the White House keys to another.\n\nThe massive volume of records generated or used by the president, vice president and their large National Security Council staff are among the most closely held secrets in the U.S. government. Yet problems with safeguarding such documents have been known for years, if not decades. And current and former government officials, security analysts and private watchdog groups have been pushing for reforms, with little success, according to Lauren Harper, the director of Public Policy and Open Government Affairs at the non-partisan National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.\n\n— Josh Meyer\n\nBiden and Trump documents expose wider problem:Missing classified records not uncommon\n\nDonald Trump, lawyers ordered to pay nearly $1m for Clinton lawsuits\n\nA federal judge in Florida has ordered Former President Donald Trump and his attorneys to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions for a lawsuit Trump filed against Hillary Clinton and many others over claims the 2016 presidential election was rigged.\n\n“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote in his order Thursday. “\"No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.\"\n\nThe order comes as Trump, who is kicking off another run for president, is facing an array of legal troubles and criminal investigations.\n\n-- Holly Rosenkrantz\n\nAbortion highlighted in weekend marches\n\nBoth the annual Women’s March and National March for Life are set to take place this weekend on what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, establishing their very different worldviews on abortion.\n\nAnti-abortion groups will march on Washington, D.C. Friday following an assortment of events in the days leading up to the march, including exhibitions for individuals to connect with pro-life organizations and “pro-lifers” from around the country.\n\nUnlike previous years, the Women’s March is set to take place in Madison, Wisconsin, on Sunday as the state has become home to a closely watched race for the state Supreme Court.The battle for abortion rights has shifted to the state level after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.\n\n- Sarah Elbeshbishi\n\nBiden to deliver remarks to mayors before leaving for Delaware\n\nPresident Joe Biden is set to deliver remarks Friday to more than 175 mayors at the White House where he’s expected to tout federal funding for infrastructure and COVID-19 recovery efforts that’s flowed to cities during his administration.\n\nBiden’s remarks, set for 2 p.m., will celebrate “the achievements of the past 18 months,” the White House said. Mayors across the country are in Washington for the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting.\n\nThe president will also meet with a bipartisan group of mayors as some cities worry Republicans may try to take back the unspent portion of the $350 billion awarded to cities and states through the American Rescue Plan. Other mayors are expected to raise concerns about the influx of migrants on the southern border.\n\n– Joey Garrison\n\nOversight committee conservatives could spell added trouble for Biden\n\nUltra-conservative members of the Republican caucus received appointments to two influential House committees that will spearhead investigations targeting the Biden administration, including the discovery of classified documents at the president's private home and residence.\n\nAnd they've already started.\n\nRepublicans, with control of the House, can leverage their investigatory power and launch probes into the Biden administration ahead of the 2024 presidential election, specifically into his family's business dealings and the classified documents found in his Delaware home and private office in Washington.\n\n- Rachel Looker\n\nWith debt ceiling milestone reached, congressional fight comes into focus\n\nThe Treasury Department Thursday began “extraordinary measures” to pay the nation’s bills after reaching a limit on how much it's allowed to borrow, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress.\n\nWhile the United States has been in this position before, fears are rising over whether political brinkmanship will prevent the limit from being raised as it has in the past, risking an economic calamity.\n\nThe amount of time the Department can continue taking steps to avoid defaulting on the debt unless the $31.381 trillion limit is raised is uncertain, Yellen wrote in her letter to lawmakers. But the government is expected to be able to keep operating until at least June.\n\nAround the political world\n\nWomen's march:'We will not go quietly': Women's March organizes more than 650 marches nationwide for reproductive rights\n\nDebt ceiling reached:U.S. hits debt ceiling. Amid fears of debt default, Treasury begins 'extraordinary' measures\n\nAbortion opinion mystery:Supreme Court says investigators have been unable to identify leaker of draft abortion opinion", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/01/20"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/01/politics/2024-primary-calendar-iowa-dnc/index.html", "title": "Biden proposes South Carolina as first primary state in drastic shake ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nPresident Joe Biden has asked Democratic National Committee leaders to drastically reshape the 2024 presidential nominating calendar and make South Carolina the first state to host a primary, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire on the same day a week later, Georgia the following week and then Michigan, a source confirms to CNN.\n\nBiden’s preferences were announced Thursday evening at a dinner for members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee by committee co-chairs Jim Roosevelt, Jr. and Minyon Moore. The committee is set to meet Friday and Saturday in Washington and is poised to propose a new presidential nominating calendar.\n\nBiden’s expression of his preferences will play a significant role in the process. A DNC source said his elevation of South Carolina to the first-in-the-nation primary has sparked significant debate as members meet Thursday night. But with Biden’s support, this proposal is likely to ultimately gain the support of the committee, though this person emphasized that nothing is final until the votes are held.\n\nIf the DNC ultimately adopts this calendar, it would be an extraordinary shake up of the existing order and would strip Iowa of the first-in-the-nation status that it has held since 1972. Iowa has traditionally gone first, followed by New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It would also add a fifth state to the slate before Super Tuesday (the first Tuesday in March) and elevate Georgia and Michigan as early nominating states for the first time.\n\nSouth Carolina’s primary would be held on February 6, Nevada and New Hampshire would have their contests on February 13, Georgia’s primary would be on February 20 and Michigan’s would be on February 27, according to the source.\n\nBiden had also sent a letter to DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee members on Thursday laying out what he believed should be guiding principles for the committee as it discusses the calendar.\n\n“Just like my Administration, the Democratic Party has worked hard to reflect the diversity of America - but our nominating process does not,” the president’s letter reads. “For fifty years, the first month of our presidential nominating process has been a treasured part of our democratic process, but it is time to update the process for the 21st century. I am committed to working with the DNC to get this done.”\n\nThe president wrote: “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window. As I said in February 2020, you cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color - and that includes Black, Brown and Asian American & Pacific Islander voters.\n\n“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” he continued. “We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”\n\nBiden said in the letter the Democratic Party should abolish caucuses, arguing they are “inherently anti-participatory” and “restrictive.”\n\nThe Washington Post was first to report on the president’s preferred order for the nominating calendar and the letter he sent to committee members.\n\nPrioritizing more diverse battlegrounds\n\nThe DNC earlier this year approved a plan to prioritize diverse battleground states that choose to hold primaries, not caucuses, as it considers which states should hold early contests. Beyond the tumult of the 2020 caucuses, Iowa is largely White, no longer considered a battleground state and is required by state law to hold caucuses.\n\n“There’s very little support for Iowa because they don’t fit into the framework and because of the debacle of 2020. There’s a lot of emotional momentum – it’s not unanimous – but there’s a lot of emotional momentum to replace Iowa with a state that is more representative, more inclusive and instills more confidence and is a battleground state,” one DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee member told CNN.\n\nAny new proposal by the committee would have to be approved at a full DNC meeting, which will take place early next year. If a new schedule is adopted, it would be the first changes made to the Democratic nominating calendar since 2006, when Nevada and South Carolina were added as early states. It would also break with the Republican calendar, as the Republican National Committee voted earlier this year to reaffirm the early state lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, who has spearheaded Michigan’s effort to become an early-voting state, told CNN earlier on Thursday she was “feeling good” about Michigan’s chances and that she believed the state was in a “strong position” heading into the committee meeting.\n\n“The White House knows that we don’t win presidencies without the heartland,” Dingell said. “And we’ve got to have a primary system where candidates are campaigning in a heartland state that reflects the diversity of this country and that they’re testing them because that’s where we win or lose in general elections.”\n\nNevada vs. New Hampshire\n\nNevada has been making a play to move up further in the calendar and unseat New Hampshire as the first-in-the-nation primary. New Hampshire has held the first primary on the presidential nominating calendar since 1920 and that status is protected by state law.\n\nNevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, whose reelection in November was critical to allowing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate, argues her state’s diverse electorate makes it a “microcosm of the rest of the country.”\n\n“If you’re a presidential candidate and you can win in Nevada, you have a message that resonates across the country,” Cortez Masto told MSNBC earlier this month.\n\nThe Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ political arm, CHC BOLD PAC, on Wednesday announced it was backing Nevada’s application to host the first-in-the-nation primary.\n\n“The state that goes first matters, and we know that Latino voters will only become even more decisive in future election cycles when it comes to winning the White House and majorities in the House and Senate,” Reps. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Raul Ruiz of California, leaders of the CHC BOLD PAC, said in a statement.\n\nNew Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen tweeted Thursday, “NH’s First-In-The-Nation primary gives every candidate an opportunity to connect directly with engaged, informed voters in a battleground state – and Granite Staters are experts at assessing candidates & campaigns. I’m proud to support NH’s #FITN primary.”\n\nJockeying for early-state status\n\nEarlier this year, the DNC committee heard presentations from 16 states – including the four current early states – as well as Puerto Rico on their pitches on why they should become an early state or hold on to their spot. Amid pressure to boot Iowa from its top position, the Hawkeye State made its case to stay first in the calendar and proposed simplifying the caucus process.\n\nMinnesota is also among the states jockeying to join the early-state ranks. The chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Ken Martin, sent a memo to DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee members on Wednesday arguing Minnesota is “more diverse and has a stronger party infrastructure than Iowa, but unlike Michigan, it is not large enough that it would overshadow the other early primary states or make it harder and more expensive for candidates to compete in during this critical window.”\n\nBoth Michigan’s and Minnesota’s cases were bolstered after Democrats in both states won trifecta control of the governor and state legislatures in the midterms. Primary dates are generally set by law, so state parties would need cooperation from their legislatures and governors to become early-voting states. The Michigan state Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans, this week already took the step of voting to move the presidential primary up a month earlier to February.\n\nMinnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, along with other party leaders in the state, sent a letter this month to members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee pledging to passing legislation moving up the primary date if Minnesota was selected as an early state. The letter, obtained by CNN, argued Minnesota is a “highly representative approximation of the country, paired with a robust state and local party infrastructure, an engaged electorate, and a logistical and financial advantage for campaigns.”\n\nCORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the year that Iowa became the first early state in the presidential nominating calendar.", "authors": ["Abphillip Kate Sullivan", "Kate Sullivan"], "publish_date": "2022/12/01"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/28/politics/klukowski-justice/index.html", "title": "Ken Klukowski: Trump DOJ official cooperating with Justice ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nFormer Justice Department staffer Ken Klukowski, who worked with Jeffrey Clark at the agency, is cooperating in the DOJ’s January 6 criminal investigation, after investigators searched and copied his electronic records several weeks ago.\n\n“We’ve been fully cooperating both with the Department of Justice and the Select Committee, and we’ll continue with that cooperation,” Klukowski’s lawyer Ed Greim said in a statement on Thursday.\n\nThe Justice Department declined to comment.\n\nKlukowski’s proximity to Clark suggests investigators are seeking more information about the former Justice Department lawyer. Trump had sought to install Clark as attorney general in the days before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as top officials refused to go along with his vote fraud claims.\n\nLast month, federal investigators conducted a search of Clark’s home as part of the agency’s sweeping investigation into the effort to overturn the 2020 elections.\n\nThe agency has already brought two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence in front of a federal grand jury, a move that signals its probe has reached inside Trump’s White House and that investigators are looking at conduct directly related to Trump and his closest allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election.\n\nCNN reported Wednesday that former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is also cooperating with the Justice Department.\n\nBut Klukowski could provide unique insight into Clark and efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. He was at the center of an effort by Trump to get the Justice Department to falsely claim there was significant voter fraud in Georgia and other states that he lost.\n\nIn the days before January 6, Clark helped Trump devise a plan to oust then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, place himself atop the department, and have the DOJ intervene in Georgia to set aside its voting results in order to sway the state to Trump.\n\nKlukowski was subpoenaed by the House select committee last year on November 9 and was seen arriving for his deposition on December 15.\n\nThis story has been updated with additional details.", "authors": ["Katelyn Polantz"], "publish_date": "2022/07/28"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/elon-musk-population-collapse-wellness/index.html", "title": "Elon Musk thinks the population will collapse. Demographers say it's ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nBillionaire Elon Musk tweeted, not for the first time, that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Climate change is a serious problem facing the planet and experts say it’s difficult to compare problems.\n\nWhat is clear, demographers say, is that the global population is growing, despite declines in some parts of the world, and it shouldn’t be collapsing any time soon – even with birth rates at lower levels than in the past.\n\n“He’s better off making cars and engineering than at predicting the trajectory of the population,” said Joseph Chamie, a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division, who has written several books about population issues.\n\n“Yes, some countries, their population is declining, but for the world, that’s just not the case.”\n\nPopulation projections by the numbers\n\nThe world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion by mid-November of this year, according to the United Nations. The UN predicts the global population could grow to around 8.5 billion in just 8 years.\n\nBy 2080, the world’s population is expected to peak at 10.4 billion. Then there’s a 50% chance that the population will plateau or begin to decrease by 2100. More conservative models like the one published in 2020 in the Lancet anticipate the global population would be about 8.8 billion people by 2100.\n\nIt’s true that what’s driving current population growth is not a higher birth rate. What drives global population growth is that fewer people are dying young. Global life expectancy was 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of nine years since 1990. That is expected to increase to 77.2 years by 2050.\n\nGlobally, the fertility rate has not “collapsed,” nor should it, according to the UN, but it has dropped significantly.\n\nIn 1950, women typically had five births each; globally, last year, it was 2.3 births. By 2050, the UN projects a further global decline to 2.1 births per woman.\n\nIn some countries, it is lower. In the US the 1950s, it was 3.6 births per woman, it slipped to 1.6 in 2020, according to the World Bank. In Italy, it was 1.2; in Japan, it was 1.3; in China, 1.2. In January 2022, the country announced the birth rate fell for the fifth year in a row, even with the repeal of the one child policy, allowing couples to have up to three children as of 2021.\n\n“Virtually every developed country is below two, and it’s been that way for 20 or 30 years,” Chamie said. Most countries have gone through what’s called a demographic transition.\n\nThe only continent that hasn’t finished this transition, he said, is parts of Africa, where there are 15 to 20 countries where the average number of children couples have is five. But in those countries, children still face high death rates. The infant mortality rate for kids under 5 is 8 to 10 times higher than in developed regions, and maternal mortality is more than double, Chamie said.\n\nIf women in these African regions had more access to contraception, education, and health care, these problems could be addressed and the global population could decline further – but people would be better off in terms of individual health.\n\nThe ‘gold medal’ century\n\nIn terms of population growth, the 20th century was an anomaly.\n\n“That century was the most impressive demographic century ever. It had more gold medals than all the other centuries,” Charmie said.\n\nThe human population nearly quadrupled, something that had never happened before in recorded history. That’s largely because of improvements in public health.\n\nThe world has antibiotics, vaccines, public health programs and improved sanitation to thank for people living longer and more mothers and children surviving birth.\n\nWith contraception, especially in 1964, when the oral pill was widely introduced in the US, couples were now better able to determine when and how many children they had.\n\n“Contraception, the oral pill had a much more significant effect on the world than the car,” Charmie said.\n\nAs more women got an education, worked outside the home and got a later start on children in many countries with access to contraception, couples had fewer children and the population started to decline.\n\nIn 2020, the global population growth rate fell under 1% for the first time since 1950.\n\nThe picture in the US\n\nIn the US, the fertility rate is down in part due to what Ken Johnson, a senior demographer at the Casey School of Public Poilcy and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, characterized as a “significant” decline in teen births.\n\n“Most demographers would see that as a good thing,” he said.\n\nHe said the other driver was a decline in the number of births to women in their 20s. That trend has been around since 2008. People put off or decided not to have babies in part because of the recession, he said. Covid then exacerbated this trend.\n\nBetween July of 2020 and 2021, the growth rate of the US population was the lowest it’s been in probably 100 years he said.\n\n“Is it a collapse of the number of births? No, I wouldn’t say that,” Johnson said.\n\nHe said there are a few factors at play in the low US growth rate: fewer births, fewer immigrants due to Trump-era policies, and more deaths as the US population is ages. Covid-19 contributed to higher deaths, too.\n\n“It’s almost like a perfect storm if you will,” Johnson said. “Births are way down, Covid pushes deaths way up, and then immigration is quite slow, too, so it is no wonder that the population growth rate is so low when you bring all those factors together at the same time.”\n\nPreventing population problems down the road\n\nAs the population ages and birth rates decline in some areas of the globe, that could put strain on social systems.\n\nThe share of the population over age 65 will rise from 10% in 2022 to 16% in 2050. That’s twice the number of kids under age 5.\n\nGlobally, the trick to make such a population age imbalance work, is that governments will need to be proactive, the UN says. Countries with aging populations need to adapt public programs that will support this growing population of older people. That means shoring up programs like social security, pensions and establishing universal access to health care and long-term care.\n\nIn the US, William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow with Brookings Metro, said he doesn’t see the need for more couples to have more babies to address the age imbalance in the United States. Policies that would support couples that want children – affordable daycare and family leave policies, for example – could help, but that that hasn’t made a big difference in terms of fertility rates.\n\nGet CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.\n\nFertility is below the replacement rate in the US, meaning couples are having fewer than two children each, but the rate is not as low as it is in most of Europe, he said.\n\n“I don’t think in the US it’s an issue of collapse, because we can certainly open the faucet for more immigrants anytime we want to,” Frey said. “We’ll have no paucity of people who want to come through the door to immigrate here in the future. Immigrants and their children are younger than the population as a whole and so that will help to keep the population from aging as well.”", "authors": ["Jen Christensen"], "publish_date": "2022/08/30"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/politics/jan-6-committee-final-report/index.html", "title": "January 6 committee releases final report, says Trump should be ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection recommends barring former President Donald Trump from holding office again.\n\nThe recommendation is among the conclusions of the panel’s final report, a comprehensive overview of the bipartisan panel’s findings on how Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, released late Thursday evening.\n\nThe 845-page report – based on 1,000-plus interviews, documents collected including emails, texts, phone records and a year and a half of investigation – includes allegations that Trump “oversaw” the legally dubious effort to put forward fake slates of electors in seven states he lost, arguing that the evidence shows he actively worked to “transmit false Electoral College ballots to Congress and the National Archives” despite concerns among his lawyers that doing so could be unlawful.\n\nIn a symbolic move Monday, the committee in its last public meeting referred Trump to the Justice Department on at least four criminal charges, while saying in its executive summary it had evidence of possible charges of conspiring to injure or impede an officer and seditious conspiracy.\n\n“That evidence has led to an overriding and straight forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” the report states.\n\nCommittee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said on Monday that he has “every confidence that the work of this committee will help provide a road map to justice, and that the agencies and institutions responsible for ensuring justice under the law will use the information we’ve provided to aid in their work.”\n\nSpecial counsel Jack Smith is leading the Justice Department’s investigations related to Trump, including both his post-election actions and classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this year.\n\nTrump swiftly lashed out over the report on his Truth Social platform with false claims about the riot and the 2020 election. He did not address specific findings from what he called the “highly partisan” report but instead falsely blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the breakdown in security that day and resurfaced his unfounded claims of election fraud.\n\nHere’s what’s in the report:\n\nTrump and his inner circle engaged in ‘at least 200’ attempts to pressure state officials\n\nIn an effort to overturn election results in key states, Trump and his inner circle targeted election officials in “at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation,” between Election Day and the January 6 attack, according to the report.\n\nThere were 68 meetings, attempted or connected phone calls, or text messages, aimed at state or local officials, as well as 125 social media posts by Trump or senior aides targeting state officials.\n\nTrump “spearheaded outreach aimed at numerous officials in States he lost but that had GOP-led legislatures, including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona,” the report says. (He lost all of those states.)\n\nFor example, during a January 2, 2021, call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the then-president went through a “litany of false election-fraud claims” and then asked Raffensperger to deliver him a second term by “finding” just enough votes to ensure victory, according to the report.\n\nTrump infamously said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”\n\nCommittee identifies pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro as architect of fake electors plot\n\nThe January 6 committee identifies a little known pro-Trump attorney as being the original architect of the legally dubious fake electors plan: Kenneth Chesebro.\n\nConservative attorney John Eastman authored a now-infamous memo detailing step-for-step how then-Vice President Mike Pence could theoretically overturn the 2020 election results. But the committee points to Chesebro, a known associate of Eastman, as being responsible for creating the fake electors plot.\n\n“The fake elector plan emerged from a series of legal memoranda written by an outside legal advisor to the Trump Campaign: Kenneth Chesebro,” the report says.\n\nIt was previously known that Chesebro was involved in the fake electors scheme, but the committee’s conclusion about his leadership role is new.\n\nThe effort to put forward fake slates of pro-Trump electors is under scrutiny by federal and state prosecutors investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020.\n\nThe committee wrote that Chesebro sent a memo to then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after a request from Trump campaign official Boris Epshteyn about a “‘President of the Senate’ strategy,” which wrongly asserted that the vice president could pick which presidential electors to count during the joint session of Congress on January 6.\n\n“President Trump in the days immediately before January 6th, Chesebro – an attorney based in Boston and New York recruited to assist the Trump Campaign as a volunteer legal advisor – was central to the creation of the plan,” the report says. “Memos by Chesebro on November 18th, December 9th, and December 13th, as discussed below, laid the plan’s foundation.”\n\nCNN has previously asked Chesebro to comment about these topics and he has not responded.\n\nTrump WH called Eastman on the day he wrote his memo\n\nEastman reached out to speak to Trump on December 23, 2020, the same day that he drafted his initial memo on the Pence theory.\n\nEastman emailed Trump’s assistant, Molly Michael, at 1:32 p.m., according to the committee. “Is the President available for a very quick call today at some point? Just want to update him on our overall strategic thinking.”\n\nThe committee wrote that Eastman received a call from the White House switchboard, and the call lasted 23 minutes, according to Eastman’s phone records. Eastman’s two-page memo discussed various ways to ensure “President Trump is re-elected,” even though by then, he had been projected to lose the election, according to the committee.\n\nThese new details show how the committee used emails and phone records it obtained after it successfully fought in court to obtain the documents.\n\nThe committee obtained Eastman’s emails after a judge sided with the House in a lawsuit where the committee accused both Eastman and Trump of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress and to defraud the government.\n\nTrump latched onto Eastman’s theories that incorrectly claimed Pence could overturn the election, and launched a pressure campaign against Pence in the days leading up to January 6. Eastman was present at a January 4, 2021, meeting between Trump and Pence in the Oval Office where Trump tried to convince Pence he could intervene when Congress certified the Electoral College vote on January 6.\n\nJanuary 6 committee recommends barring Trump from holding office again\n\nBarring Trump from further public office is one of 11 recommendations the committee is making as a result of its investigation.\n\nThe panel zeroes in on the section of the Constitution that states an individual who has taken an oath to support the US Constitution but has “engaged in an insurrection” or given “aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution” can be disqualified from office. The former president and others have been referred by the committee to the Department of Justice for assisting or aiding an insurrection.\n\nIt calls on congressional committees of jurisdiction to create a “formal mechanism” for evaluating whether those individuals violate that section of the 14th Amendment should be barred from future federal or state office.\n\nSays lawyers should be held responsible\n\nIn addition to criminal referrals, the select committee is calling for lawyers involved in the efforts to overturn the election to be held accountable.\n\n“Those courts and bar disciplinary bodies responsible for overseeing the legal profession in the states and the District of Columbia should continue to evaluate the conduct of attorneys described in this Report” the panel writes, adding that there are specific attorneys the report identifies as having “conflicts of interests” for the Department of Justice to evaluate.\n\nThe report even calls on Congress to amend statutes and consider the severity of penalties that deter individuals from efforts to obstruct, influence or impede the Joint Session of Congress that certifies election results. It calls for statutes of federal penalties for certain types of threats against election workers to be strengthened.\n\nAlthough the panel was successful in getting more than 1,000 witnesses to testify as part of its investigation, it still had difficulty gaining cooperation from everyone it wanted to speak to. Its report recommends congressional committees of jurisdiction “develop legislation” to create “a cause of action” for the House to enforce its subpoenas in federal court.\n\nElectoral Count Act reform\n\nOne recommendation may soon become reality.\n\nThe panel calls on Congress to pass an overhaul of the 1887 Electoral Count Act aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election – the first legislative response to the insurrection and Trump’s relentless pressure campaign to stay in power.\n\nThe House and Senate have each passed their own version of the legislation.\n\nCommittee refers Trump to Justice Department\n\nA video of former President Donald Trump is shown on a screen on Capitol Hill on December 19, 2022. J. Scott Applewhite/AP\n\nThe House committee lays out a number of criminal statutes it believes were violated in the plots to stave off Trump’s defeat and says there’s evidence for criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Trump, Eastman and “others.”\n\nThe report summary first released Monday says there’s evidence to pursue Trump on multiple crimes, including obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make false statements, assisting or aiding an insurrection, conspiring to injure or impede an officer and seditious conspiracy.\n\nThe panel says it also has the evidence to refer Eastman on the obstruction charge, and it names him as a co-conspirator in other alleged criminal activity lawmakers have gathered evidence on.\n\nThe committee alluded to evidence of criminal obstruction of the House investigation but the summary does not go into detail about that evidence.\n\nTrump’s false victory declaration was ‘premeditated’\n\nThe committee outlines 17 findings from its investigation that underpin its reasoning for criminal referrals, including that Trump knew the fraud allegations he was pushing were false and continued to amplify them anyway.\n\n“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated,” the report states.\n\nThe committee also revealed emails from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, from before the 2020 presidential election that say Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome.\n\nIt notes that Trump’s top allies, including those who testified before the committee, acknowledged they found no proof to back up the former president’s claims.\n\n“Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team acknowledged that they had no definitive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the election outcome,” it adds, referring to Trump’s then-personal attorney.\n\n“For example, although Giuliani repeatedly had claimed in public that Dominion voting machines stole the election, he admitted during his Select Committee deposition that ‘I do not think the machines stole the election,’” it states.\n\nMillions of dollars were raised on false claims, but RNC showed caution to not go too far\n\nThe committee investigators describe how Trump campaign and Republican National Committee fundraising pitches containing false claims of a stolen election ultimately raised more than $250 million – but were met internally with some resistance.\n\nInvestigators describe three options that were considered for a post-election fundraising appeal by the campaign. One option, that the campaign opted against using because they knew it was false, said that Trump had won. A second unused option said the campaign was waiting on results. Ultimately, according to the committee, the Trump campaign approved a message that Democrats are going to “try to steal the election” that was written before election night.\n\nThe committee describes, based on interview with Trump campaign officials, that much of the material in the fundraising emails was based on messages said by Trump – but were not checked for accuracy before being used to ask for donations.\n\n“President Trump’s claims were treated as true and blasted to millions of people with little to no scrutiny by those tasked with ensuring accuracy,” the committee wrote.\n\nTrump campaign’s deputy director of communications and research Zach Parkinson told investigators that reviews for accuracy were limited to “questions concerning items such as time and location.”\n\nThe RNC did eventually tone down some messages, which the committee suggests shows “the RNC knew that President’s Trump’s claims about winning the election were baseless” and made “changes to fundraising copy that seemingly protected the RNC from legal exposure,” according to investigators.\n\nHouse investigators said that RNC lawyers directed copywriters not to use the term “rigged,” according to interviews conducted by the committee. The panel obtained several examples of fundraising appeals that were toned down to be accurate and less inflammatory.\n\nTrump privately called some of Sidney Powell’s election claims ‘crazy’\n\nWhite House communications director Hope Hicks told the January 6 committee that Donald Trump had laughed at one of his election lawyer’s claims about foreign powers interfering in the election, calling them “crazy,” according to the committee’s final report.\n\n“The day after the press conference, President Trump spoke by phone with Sidney Powell from the Oval Office. During the call, Powell repeated the same claims of foreign interference in the election she had made at the press conference,” the report said, referring to conspiratorial claims made by Powell, Trump’s onetime attorney, at an outlandish press conference after the 2020 election.\n\n“While she was speaking, the President muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, ‘This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’” the report says.\n\nDuring the press conference, Powell falsely claimed, among other things, that widely used voting machines from the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems featured software created “at the direction” of deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to swing his own election results, and that the company has ties to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros.\n\n“A few days later, the Trump campaign issued a statement claiming Powell was not part of the Trump campaign’s legal team. But Powell’s outlandish claims were no different from those President Trump was making himself,” the committee writes.\n\nTrump refused to act as riot unfolded\n\nPro-Trump supporters storm the US Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington. Samuel Corum/Getty Images/FILE\n\nThe committee lays out Trump’s failure to act as the riot unfolded, noting that as he watched the riot on television, he made no calls for security assistance and resisted efforts from staffers asking him to call off his supporters.\n\n“President Trump did not contact a single top national security official during the day. Not at the Pentagon, nor at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office,” the committee writes. “As Vice President Pence has confirmed, President Trump didn’t even try to reach his own Vice President to make sure that Pence was safe.”\n\nMilley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee he had this reaction to Trump, “You know, you’re the Commander in Chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”\n\nWhite House staffers, meantime, described being appalled that as the Capitol was under attack, Trump fired off a tweet criticizing Pence.\n\nHicks texted a colleague that night to say, “Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” according to the committee’s summary report.\n\n“No photographs exist of the President for the remainder of the afternoon until after 4 p.m. President Trump appears to have instructed that the White House photographer was not to take any photographs,” the committee writes, citing testimony from former White House photographer Shealah Craighead.\n\nIn the aftermath, on the evening of January 6, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale told Katrina Pierson, one of the rally organizers, that he felt guilty helping Trump win, the report states.\n\nThe events of the day, Parscale said, resulted from “a sitting president asking for civil war.”\n\nAide characterized Trump’s tone on January 6 as, ‘can you believe this sh*t?’\n\nTrump’s tone during his last known phone call on January 6 was like, “wow, can you believe this sh*t?” according to the White House aide who spoke with him that night.\n\nIn newly revealed testimony included in the January 6 committee’s final report, the aide, John McEntee, said Trump told him “[t]his is a crazy day.” The report added, “McEntee said his tone was one of “like, wow, can you believe this sh*t?”\n\nTrump did not express any sadness over the violence that had unfolded at the Capitol that day, McEntee told the panel.\n\n“I think he was shocked by, you know, it getting a little out of control, but I don’t remember sadness, specifically” McEntee said.\n\nHe wasn’t the only person with that impression about Trump’s mood.\n\nIvanka Trump, a senior White House adviser at the time, told the select committee her father was “disappointed and surprised” by the attack on the Capitol.\n\nBut when pressed by committee investigators, she could not provide any instances of the president discussing whether or not he did the right thing on January 6 or speaking about those who were injured or died that day.\n\nThis story has been updated with additional details.", "authors": ["Zachary Cohen Annie Grayer Jeremy Herb Tierney Sneed Devan Cole Geneva Sands Katelyn Polantz Hannah Rabinowitz", "Zachary Cohen", "Annie Grayer", "Jeremy Herb", "Tierney Sneed", "Devan Cole", "Geneva Sands", "Katelyn Polantz", "Hannah Rabinowitz"], "publish_date": "2022/12/22"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/politics/ron-desantis-florida-disney-republicans/index.html", "title": "As Florida targets Disney, some Republicans chafe at DeSantis ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nThe strike against Disney that brought Gov. Ron DeSantis a windfall of campaign cash and weeks of glowing coverage from conservative media has also generated something the Florida Republican rarely experiences these days: criticism from the political right.\n\nA handful of high-profile Republicans have expressed their unease with the punitive actions DeSantis took against the Walt Disney Company after its CEO spoke out against a new Florida measure restricting certain classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. A fellow Republican governor, an ally of former President Donald Trump and the single largest donor to DeSantis’ reelection campaign are among those now questioning DeSantis for retaliating against a private enterprise.\n\n“I don’t believe that government should be punitive against private businesses because we disagree with them,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a potential rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “That’s not the right approach either. And so, to me, that’s the old Republican principle of having a restrained government.”\n\nThe reaction follows a display of raw political power by DeSantis last month. The governor ordered state lawmakers to take up legislation that would eliminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special governing body that has overseen Disney’s theme parks and Orlando-area properties for half a century. The new measure — passed in 48 hours by the GOP-controlled legislature and quickly signed into law — would mean significant changes to Disney’s tax obligations, and it has clouded the future of the state’s largest private employer and the economic engine of Central Florida.\n\nRepublicans have largely cheered on DeSantis, a sign of how quickly conservative sentiment has shifted against one of the most iconic brands in the world. After DeSantis first called out Disney in March, his political committee and campaign collected a combined $7.5 million in contributions in the three weeks that followed – many of them small donations from outside Florida – making March one of his most successful months of the cycle. He received a hero’s reception in Las Vegas during a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt, when he recounted his fight with Disney before an eager crowd. Fox aired an hourlong DeSantis special last week from just outside Disney’s doorstep in Orlando, with host Laura Ingraham celebrating the governor’s “in-your-face right-leaning policy.”\n\nCracks in the coalition\n\nAmid his meteoric rise to a leading 2024 presidential contender, DeSantis has managed to unite traditional, pro-business Republicans and the party’s Trumpian wing better than any Republican over the past year. Yet, on the Disney issue, he has generated notable discontent from all corners of the GOP’s big tent.\n\nJenna Ellis, a former Trump campaign lawyer, called the new Florida law “vengeful” and pointed to statements from DeSantis and other Florida Republicans that she said made clear they had illegally retaliated against Disney’s “constitutionally protected speech.”\n\nDisney CEO Bob Chapek publicly criticized Florida lawmakers for approving the measure targeting LGBTQ topics in schools and said the company would halt political donations in the state. Walt Disney Company and its holdings typically contribute millions of dollars each cycle to Florida candidates, mostly Republicans, including a $50,000 donation to DeSantis’ reelection effort.\n\nAfter DeSantis signed the bill, Disney said in a statement that its goal was to get the law repealed or see it defeated in courts. That’s when DeSantis and Republicans got to work stripping Disney of its special district.\n\n“You kick the hornet’s nest, things come up,” state Rep. Randy Fine, the Republican sponsor of the Disney legislation, said ahead of a committee vote on his bill.\n\nThe move “troubled” Kenneth Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund owner of Citadel said Monday. Griffin is a prolific donor to Republican candidates, including DeSantis, whose campaign received $5.8 million from Griffin when he first ran for governor in 2018. Griffin made a $5 million contribution a year ago to Friends of Ron DeSantis, the governor’s eponymously named political committee. No other person has donated more to DeSantis this cycle.\n\nGriffin’s remarks came at the Milken Institute Global Conference, a gathering of business titans and influential thought leaders, where he praised DeSantis and called him “unquestionably one of the front-runners in the Republican (presidential) primary today.”\n\nBut turning to the Disney saga, Griffin said, “I don’t appreciate Gov. DeSantis going after Disney’s tax status. It can be portrayed or feel or look like retaliation. And I believe that the people who serve our nation need to rise above these moments in time in their conduct and behavior.”\n\nChristina Pushaw, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, declined to comment on the concerns raised by Republicans.\n\n“The governor’s previous remarks on the Reedy Creek issue still stand,” she said.\n\nDeSantis has said he targeted Disney because its unique status was unfair to other Florida companies that don’t operate under a special district, including neighboring theme park operators. But he has also nodded to other motivations.\n\n“Maybe this will be the wake-up call that they need to get back on track,” DeSantis said during last week’s Fox special.\n\n‘They’re going after Mickey Mouse’\n\nDemocrats who have struggled to lay a finger on DeSantis have also seized on the Republican’s war against Disney in their attempts to weaken the rising GOP star as he heads toward reelection and a potential 2024 campaign. DeSantis is the heavy favorite to win a second term in November and has amassed a $100 million campaign that has only grown while pursuing a contentious conservative agenda.\n\nAt a recent fundraiser, President Joe Biden pointed to the DeSantis-Disney episode as an example of how Republicans are “not even conservative in a traditional sense of conservative.”\n\n“It’s mean. It’s ugly. It’s the way – look what’s happening down in Florida,” Biden said. “They’re going after Mickey Mouse.”\n\nBut Democrats have more often trained their ire on another Florida Republican: Sen. Rick Scott, the head of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm. Democrats have tied Republican candidates across the country to Scott’s “Rescue America” agenda, which calls for a minimum tax for all Americans and a sunset provision for all federal laws that would require Congress to regularly reauthorize programs such as Medicare and Social Security.\n\nAnd notably, when DeSantis traveled to Nevada last month, state Democrats ran ads ahead of his arrival about Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban that the governor recently signed. His feud with Disney did not receive a mention.\n\nStill unsettled in Florida is what happens next. Reedy Creek, which is controlled by Disney, quietly pushed back last month in a notice to investors, noting that the 1967 law creating the district included a pledge by Florida to “not in any way impair the rights or remedies of the (bond) holders” and that “the dissolution of a special district government shall transfer title to all of its property to the local general purpose government, which shall also assume all indebtedness of the preexisting special district.”\n\nDemocrats have warned that the dissolution of Reedy Creek could drop a $1 billion debt bomb on Central Florida taxpayers. DeSantis and his office deny that’s a possibility and have said a plan for next steps is forthcoming. His office would not say if DeSantis was aware of Florida’s Reedy Creek debt pledge before he pushed for legislation to end the special district.\n\n“The specifics on the Reedy Creek plan have yet to be released. They will be soon,” Pushaw said. “The local residents of Orange and Osceola counties will not have to bear the burden of Disney’s debt, as the governor has stated.”\n\nFlorida Democrats have suggested DeSantis’ actions over the past two months demonstrate a Trumpian tendency to punish perceived political enemies without consideration of the consequences, and they expect that won’t sit well with voters.\n\n“You have his own words to show this is who he is,” said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic strategist in Miami. “You disagree with him, he’ll come after you. You speak out, you’ll be silenced. You exercise your right to free speech, there will be repercussions. We have to communicate that to voters.”", "authors": ["Steve Contorno"], "publish_date": "2022/05/06"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/kevin-mccarthy-interview-border-security/index.html", "title": "Exclusive: Kevin McCarthy previews Republicans' plans for the ...", "text": "McAllen, Texas CNN —\n\nHouse GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is vowing to secure the border, cut back on government spending and launch rigorous investigations into the Biden administration if Republicans win the House on Tuesday, reflecting a mix of priorities as McCarthy will be forced to contend with an increasingly hardline and pro-Trump conference that is itching to impeach President Joe Biden.\n\nIn an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with CNN, two days before the midterm elections, McCarthy outlined his plans for power, which includes tackling inflation, rising crime and border security – three issues that have become central to Republicans’ closing pitch to voters. To hammer home that message, McCarthy – who has been barnstorming the country in the run-up to the midterms – rallied here on Sunday for a trio of Hispanic GOP women who are vying to represent key districts along the southern border, a key part of the party’s strategy for winning the majority.\n\n“The first thing you’ll see is a bill to control the border first,” McCarthy told CNN, when asked for specifics about his party’s immigration plans. “You’ve got to get control over the border. You’ve had almost 2 million people just this year alone coming across.”\n\nThe Biden administration continues to rely on a Trump-era pandemic emergency rule, known as Title 42, that allows border authorities to turn migrants away at the US-Mexico border. In fiscal year 2022, amid mass migration in the Western hemisphere, US border encounters topped 2 million, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. Of those, more than 1 million were turned away under Title 42.\n\nBut McCarthy also highlighted oversight and investigations as a key priority for a GOP-led House, listing potential probes into the chaotic Afghanistan pullout, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and how the administration has dealt with parents and school board meetings. And he left the door open to launching eventual impeachment proceedings, which some of his members have already begun to call for.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Kevin McCarthy asked about impeaching Biden if GOP wins House. Hear his answer 02:29 - Source: CNN\n\n“We will never use impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy said. “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”\n\nAnd with the MAGA-wing calling to cut off funding to Ukraine while the GOP’s defense hawks vow not to abandon the country amid its war with Russia, McCarthy attempted to reaffirm his support for Ukraine while saying they would not automatically rubber stamp any additional requests for aid.\n\n“I’m very supportive of Ukraine,” McCarthy said. “I think there has to be accountability going forward. … You always need, not a blank check, but make sure the resources are going to where it is needed. And make sure Congress, and the Senate, have the ability to debate it openly.”\n\nMcCarthy declined to name how many seats he thinks Republicans will pick up on Tuesday, but said he was confident it will “be at least enough to win the majority.” McCarthy did say that, in his eyes, “anywhere over 20 is a red wave.”\n\nAnd McCarthy, who had to drop out of the speaker’s race in 2015 amid opposition from the far right House Freedom Caucus, told CNN he believes he’ll have the support this time around to secure the coveted speaker’s gavel – both from his conference and from former President Donald Trump.\n\n“I’ll believe we’ll have the votes for speaker, yes,” McCarthy said. “I think Trump will be very supportive.”\n\nMcCarthy signs a \"Make America Great Again\" hat after an event featuring south Texas Republican congressional candidates in McAllen on Sunday. Tamir Kalifa for CNN\n\nMcCarthy outlines vision for the GOP House majority\n\nOn the influx of migrants at the border, McCarthy said “there’s a number of different ways” his majority will tackle the problem, but said Republicans would not put a bill on the floor to fix the broken immigration system until the border is secure.\n\n“I think ‘Stay in Mexico’ you have to have right off the bat,” he said, referring to the controversial policy where migrants were forced to remain in Mexico while they wait for their immigration proceedings in the United States.\n\nTo help stem the flow of fentanyl coming across the border, McCarthy said “you first do a very frontal attack on China to stop the poison from coming,” and then “provide the resources that the border agents need” and “make sure that fentanyl anytime anybody who wants to move it, you can prosecute him for the death penalty.”\n\nWhen pressed for specific on his plans to fight crime, McCarthy said Republicans would fund the police, provide grants for recruiting and training, and look at how crimes are being prosecuted. And to bring down inflation and gas prices, he said they would reduce government spending and make America more energy independent, though he did not name specific bills.\n\nMost bills will be primarily messaging endeavors, unlikely to overcome the president’s veto or the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, though they would have to pass legislation to fund the government and raise the national borrowing limit at some point next year. McCarthy, however, signaled Republicans will demand spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling, teeing up a risky fiscal showdown that could lead to a disastrous debt default.\n\nMcCarthy cheers as Texas congressional candidate Monica De La Cruz is introduced during an event in McAllen on Sunday. Tamir Kalifa for CNN\n\n“If you’re going to give a person a higher limit, wouldn’t you first say you should change your behavior, so you just don’t keep raising and all the time?” he said. “You shouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna let you keep spending money.’ No household should do that.”\n\nMcCarthy acknowledged Republicans were willing to raise the debt ceiling under Trump, but said the calculus is different now because Democrats spent trillions of dollars under Biden.\n\nWhen pressed on whether he’s willing to risk a default by using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip, McCarthy insisted that wouldn’t happen: “People talk about risking it. You don’t risk a default.”\n\nWith eyes on the speakership, McCarthy vows to restore Greene’s committee assignments\n\nAside from working to recapture the majority, McCarthy has also been campaigning to win the speaker’s gavel. And a key part of that strategy has been elevating potential critics and controversial Trump allies.\n\nTo that end, McCarthy has vowed to reinstate freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to her committee assignments, despite being stripped of her assignments by Democrats last year for her inflammatory remarks.\n\nVideo Ad Feedback Kevin McCarthy reveals whether he will run for speaker if GOP wins majority 01:19 - Source: CNN\n\nMeanwhile, McCarthy reiterated his plans to boot Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, from his seat on the House Intelligence Committee.\n\nWhen asked if he has any restrictions about which committees Greene can serve, McCarthy – who will have a direct say in doling out those assignments – said “no.” Greene has previously told CNN she wants a seat on the House Oversight Committee, which will play a key role in GOP-led investigations in a majority.\n\n“She’s going to have committees to serve on, just like every other member … Members request different committees and as we go through the steering committee, we’ll look at it,” he said. “She can put through the committees she wants, just like any other member in our conference that gets elected.”\n\nGreene is not the only member who has spouted conspiracy theories or incendiary rhetoric. Most recently, some Republicans have mocked the brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, or peddled fringe conspiracy theories about the incident.\n\nAsked his message to those Republicans, McCarthy said: “What happened to Paul Pelosi is wrong, and I think we should not get into this rhetoric.”\n\nBut when pressed how he would tamp down that type of rhetoric, McCarthy pointed a finger at Democrats.\n\n“The first thing I’ll ask the president to do is not to call half the nation idiots or say things about them because they have a difference of opinion,” he said. “I think leadership matters, and I think it probably starts with the president. And it will start with the speaker as well.”\n\nAgain asked how he’ll handle members of his own party who spread dangerous conspiracy theories, McCarthy responded: “I’ve watched people on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “If I’m speaker, I’ll be the speaker for the whole House. So it won’t be looking at just Republicans. We’ll be looking at Democrats as well.”", "authors": ["Melanie Zanona Kristin Wilson", "Melanie Zanona", "Kristin Wilson"], "publish_date": "2022/11/07"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/us/kenny-deland-missing-student-france/index.html", "title": "Kenny Deland Jr: New York college student missing in France ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nA prosecutor in France has opened an investigation into the disappearance of an American college student who, his family says, has not been heard from in more than two weeks.\n\nKenny DeLand Jr.’s fellow students reported him missing on November 29, prompting the investigation, according to a statement from the prosecutor released Monday and obtained by CNN.\n\nDeland is a senior at St. John Fisher University in Rochester, New York, who has been studying at the University of Grenoble Alpes, according to his family.\n\n“The young man reportedly told several people that he had arrived in France underprepared and was having difficulty making friends,” Grenoble prosecutor Eric Vaillant said in the statement.\n\nThe school is about 75 miles southeast of Lyon in eastern France.\n\nDeLand’s parents say they have not heard from him since November 27. “We just shake our heads,” his father, Ken DeLand, Sr., told CNN affiliate WHAM. “We don’t understand why he is not reaching out to us if he was reaching out on a daily basis or every other day like he was it is just not characteristic of Kenny.”\n\nDeLand “seems to have left Grenoble voluntarily,” Vaillant said, adding the student had been seen in a Decathlon store in the town of Montélimar, about 87 miles from Grenoble, on December 3.\n\n“He also mentioned that he wanted to go to Marseille before leaving for the United States,” Vaillant said.\n\nDeLand was expected to leave France on December 15, according to the prosecutor’s statement.\n\nThe family says a missing person’s report has been filed, and bank records show DeLand last made a purchase at a store on December 3. There has been no record of his whereabouts since then, his family says.\n\nThe last time they spoke, “it was like any normal conversation that we’ve had,” his mother, Carol Laws, told CNN’s Victor Blackwell Monday afternoon. “He was looking forward to coming home for Chirstmas and starting to put the plans in place for that.”\n\nHis father, DeLand, Sr., said he was not aware that his son was not able to make friends easily. He had been traveling with friends from the study abroad program, he said.\n\nHis parents told CNN it has been difficult to get information from authorities both in the US and abroad.\n\n“I feel like I’m really not receiving any information, it’s been very difficult,” Laws said. “You know, really someone else has been stuck in the middle to do the speaking for us.”\n\nNot only is the language barrier difficult but DeLand’s father cited a French privacy act that has prevented the release of certain information.\n\nHe has been reaching out to the authorities at the embassy and authorities in France but says he hasn’t had much luck.\n\n“There’s no reciprocation of information. That privacy act prevents disclosure of information, you can give them information but they cannot give you information,” DeLand, Sr. told CNN. “I’ve called the local police departments and the same thing is in effect in the French police departments that are local to that area in which he was last seen. So, it’s very limiting.”\n\nThe US State Department is “aware of reports of a US citizen missing in France,” a department spokesperson told CNN on Monday. They did not provide further details.\n\n“When a US citizen is missing, we work closely with local authorities as they carry out their search efforts, and we share information with families however we can,” they said.\n\nTo help find him, Deland’s family has launched a website where people can send tips and information.\n\nTips have come in, DeLand, Sr. told CNN Monday, and he’s passed them on to the FBI and to the embassy, but he hasn’t heard if any of them have checked out.\n\n“I’m hoping that Interpol has gotten involved, and we’ve been interviewed by several news media stations and we’re hoping we can, with your help and the help of others, we can get the word out there.”\n\nNew York State Senator Pam Helming said Deland Jr. is a former intern of hers, and his disappearance is “worrisome.” During his stint as intern from 2019 to 2020, he “brought a positive energy with him every day. I pray that he is found safe and returns home soon to be with his family,” Helming said in a statement.\n\nSt. John Fisher University “will continue to do all it can to assist in the investigation to find Kenneth DeLand,” the school said in a statement.\n\n“University officials have stayed in close contact with the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) who is working with local law enforcement on the search, as well as Kenneth’s family to offer support to them during this time. Our campus community remains hopeful that Kenneth will be found safe and return home.”\n\nAIFS said Monday that it’s working with local officials and is in touch with the DeLand family.\n\n“We are hoping for his swift and safe return,” the institute said in a statement.", "authors": ["Andy Rose Saskya Vandoorne Allegra Goodwin", "Andy Rose", "Saskya Vandoorne", "Allegra Goodwin"], "publish_date": "2022/12/12"}, {"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court-amy-coney-barrett/index.html", "title": "Supreme Court delivers one of two legal wins for Biden's student ...", "text": "CNN —\n\nFederal courts on Thursday delivered two wins for President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a challenge to the program brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group. And on the same day, a federal district court judge rejected a separate lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states.\n\nStudent loan cancellations, worth up to $20,000 per eligible borrower, could show up on borrowers’ accounts as soon as Sunday. Lawyers for the government agreed in court documents to hold off on discharging any debt before October 23 as it faces several legal challenges.\n\nThe appeal at issue in the Supreme Court case was considered an uphill battle because lower courts had ruled that the group, the Brown County Taxpayers Association, did not have the legal right or “standing” to bring the challenge. Under normal circumstances, taxpayers don’t have a general right to sue the government over how it uses taxpayer funds.\n\nBarrett acted alone because she has jurisdiction over the lower court that ruled on the case. She declined to refer the matter to the full court. Her denial appeared as a single sentence on the court’s docket.\n\nA federal judge in Missouri, US District Judge Henry Edward Autrey, rejected the lawsuit from the GOP-led states also because the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.\n\nThe plaintiffs in that case had asked the judge to put student loan cancellation on hold until issuing a final ruling on the case. The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Missouri last month by state attorneys general from Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and South Carolina, as well as legal representatives from Iowa.\n\nThe states have filed an appeal, sending the case to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, where it is likely to face a panel of conservative judges.\n\nThe Biden administration is also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and conservative groups such as the Job Creators Network Foundation and the Cato Institute.\n\nMany of the legal challenges claim that the Biden administration does not have the legal authority to broadly cancel student loan debt.\n\nLawyers for the government argue that Congress gave the secretary of education the power to discharge debt in a 2003 law known as the HEROES Act.\n\nAlthough dismissed by one federal judge, the legal challenge filed by the six states is widely seen as one of the most formidable challenges making its way through the courts.\n\nIt is the “most plausible legal challenge to the Biden Jubilee,” said Luke Herrine, an assistant law professor at the University of Alabama who previously worked on a legal strategy pushing for student debt cancellation, in a tweet Thursday.\n\nThe Biden administration’s program\n\nBiden’s student loan forgiveness program, first announced in August, aims to deliver debt relief to millions of borrowers before federal student loan payments resume in January after a nearly three-year, pandemic-related pause.\n\nWhile the application officially opened on Monday, the Biden administration has agreed in court documents to hold off on canceling any debt until October 23. Once processing begins, most qualifying borrowers are expected to receive debt relief within weeks.\n\nUnder Biden’s plan, eligible individual borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 annually in those years will see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.\n\nIf a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness.\n\nThis headline and story have been updated with additional information.", "authors": ["Ariane De Vogue Katie Lobosco", "Ariane De Vogue", "Katie Lobosco"], "publish_date": "2022/10/20"}]}
{"question_id": "20240112_29", "search_time": "2024/01/13/03:22", "search_result": [{"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/ud/2018/08/30/delaware-play-penn-state-first-time-football-2023-2027/1143710002/", "title": "Delaware to play Penn State for first time in football in 2023, 2027", "text": "The University of Delaware will play Penn State in football in 2023 and 2027 at Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania, the two schools announced Thursday.\n\nThey will be the first meetings on the football field between two of the Northeast’s long-established winning programs – the Blue Hens of the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision and Penn State of the Football Bowl Subdivision.\n\nThe Delaware-Penn State matchups were first reported by The News Journal in May.\n\nDelaware has won six national championships — via wire-service votes for small colleges in 1946, 1963 and 1971 and 1972 and through NCAA playoffs in Division II in 1979 and Division I-AA (now FCS) in 2003.\n\nPenn State won consensus wire-service national titles in 1982 and 1986.\n\nThe Big Ten had banned its members from playing non-FBS schools in 2015, then changed the rule in 2017. Big Ten schools, which play nine league games each year, may now play FCS foes the years in which they have four home and five away Big Ten matchups.\n\nVillanova, Delaware’s Colonial Athletic Association rival, will visit Penn State in 2021 and 2025. Villanova has played Penn State, but not since 1951.\n\nMORE IN SPORTS:\n\nPenn State transfer Reeder is Blue Hens' \"heartbeat\"\n\nSmyrna's Wormley, a force up front, is Penn State-bound\n\nSix factors could make or break Blue Hens in 2018\n\nIt’ll be a huge challenge for the Blue Hens. Delaware has not defeated an FBS team since a 59-52 victory at Navy in 2007 in which Joe Flacco passed for 434 yards, third most in UD history.\n\nSince then, Delaware has lost at FBS Maryland 14-7 in 2008, Navy 35-18 in 2009, Navy 40-17 in 2011, Navy 51-7 in 2013, Pitt 62-0 in 2014, North Carolina 41-14 in 2015, Wake Forest 38-21 in 2016 and Virginia Tech 27-0 last season.\n\nDelaware does not play an FBS foe this year but goes back to Pitt in 2019 and travels to North Carolina State in 2020.\n\nVisits to FBS opponents from power-five leagues typically net about a $500,000 guaranteed payment for the visiting school. It isn’t known what Delaware will receive at Penn State.\n\nPlayers often relish the opportunity to go against higher-level opposition especially in familiar areas at well-known, packed stadiums.\n\nAs a result, the games at Penn State should serve as a valuable recruiting tool for Delaware, which gets many of its players from Pennsylvania. Second-year UD coach Danny Rocco played his first two college seasons at Penn State, his father, Frank, was a longtime Penn State football staffer, and his brother, Frank Jr., was a Nittany Lions quarterback.\n\nDelaware's 2018 roster has three Penn State transfers — linebacker Troy Reeder, offensive lineman Noah Beh and running back Andre Robinson — and 31 players from Pennsylvania.\n\nContact Kevin Tresolini at ktresolini@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @kevintresolini.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2018/08/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/football/2022/08/09/west-branch-quarterback-dru-deshields-commits-to-eastern-illinois/65392856007/", "title": "Dru DeShields verbally commits to play football at Eastern Illinois", "text": "BELOIT — Dru DeShields' dream to play football at the next level took another step when he verbally committed to Eastern Illinois University in early August.\n\nHis decision came during the preseason practice schedule prior to the start of his senior year with the West Branch Warriors.\n\nEastern Illinois, located in Charleston, is a member of the Ohio Valley Conference and competes in the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision. Its Division I status was one of the major selling points.\n\n\"It was my only D1 full ride scholarship offer,\" DeShields said. \"That was important.\"\n\nEastern Illinois has a playoff championship pedigree, capturing the 1978 Division II playoff title with a 10-9 win over Delaware. Since moving a division, the Panthers have experienced success, highlighted by a 12-2 record in 2013 when current Syracuse head coach Dino Babers was in charge of the program.\n\nNFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.\n\nIn the last three seasons, however, the Panthers struggled, posting an aggregate 3-26 record, resulting in some coaching changes. Following the 2021 season, Chris Wilkerson was hired as head coach and Joe Davis became the new offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.\n\nDavis also was the coach who recruited DeShields and his presence played a major factor in the West Branch senior selecting Eastern Illinois.\n\n\"Coach Davis was a big help during the recruiting process, especially with me, and that's (one reason) why I think (DeShields) made a good decision,\" West Branch first-year head coach Tim Cooper said. \"He also gets the chance to play for a Division I school without a veteran in the (quarterback) room.\"\n\nCooper, who was the West Branch offensive coordinator under previous head coach Ken Harris and intends on staying in that capacity, and Davis share one football commonality that made DeShields feel comfortable when examining the program.\n\n\"Coach Davis runs the same offense Coach Cooper runs at West Branch,\" DeShields added. \"I love our offense, because it's a numbers system based on creating mismatches.\"\n\nIn his first year running Cooper's spread offense, DeShields complied video game-like numbers, completing an efficient 68 percent of his passing attempts (259 of 383) for 3,654 yards and 41 touchdowns. He was more than a one-dimensional signal caller, rushing for 1,726 yards and 16 scores.\n\nA three-sport athlete who played basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring as a sophomore, DeShields started intensifying his commitment to football during his junior year, when he gave up baseball for track.\n\n\"I switched to track, even though I liked baseball and my dad (Walt) and older brothers (Kip and TJ) had also played it,\" DeShields said. \"I wanted to improve my speed for football, because I wanted to play football in college and I thought the best way to do that was running track. My dad understood and supported me.\"\n\nHis decision was rewarded. Before the 6-2, 187-pound DeShields ran track, his best time in the 40 was a 4.7. By focusing on track last spring, he cut it to 4.5, making him more attractive to college recruiters.\n\nDeShields, who also plays cornerback, was recruited as a quarterback by a university known for developing signal callers. Former National Football League head coaches Mike Shanahan (early 1970s) and Sean Payton (1983-86), along with former Dallas starter Tony Romo (1999-2002) and Jimmy Garoppolo (2010-13), who started for San Francisco the last five seasons, all played quarterback at Eastern Illinois, although Shanahan's career was cut short due to a kidney injury.\n\n\"They had successful people who went on to the NFL who played quarterback at Eastern Illinois,\" DeShields said. \"That says a lot.\"\n\nLindenwood (Mo.), Murray State, Southeast Missouri, Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech and UT Martin are Eastern Illinois' OVC rivals, and the Panthers have been ambitious with scheduling non-conference road games in the immediate future, something which impressed DeShields.\n\n\"They scheduled games at Illinois (2024), Alabama (2025), Minnesota (2026) and Kentucky (2028),\" he added. \"That tells me they're serious about turning things around and I'm excited.\"\n\nBut first, West Branch football will command his sole attention in 2022.\n\n\"That's all my focus is on, and I plan to take it one day at a time, and my decision allows me to concentrate on West Branch (football),\" DeShields said.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/08/09"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/ud/2022/09/11/hens-continue-dominance-of-dsu-but-will-it-be-good-enough-for-caa/65470211007/", "title": "Blue Hens continue dominance of Delaware State, but will it be ...", "text": "The Blue Hens met the challenge, secured the desired result and avoided the historic consequences that failure against Delaware State would invite.\n\nA 35-9 victory over the Hornets in the home opener at Delaware Stadium was, a little belatedly, worry free and typically one-sided.\n\nBut Delaware’s ongoing dominance of its First State rivals didn’t hide the fact that, with the treacherous Colonial Athletic Association schedule now looming, the Blue Hens must be better.\n\nEventual success Saturday night swung on a couple third-quarter plays – Kedrick Whitehead’s 42-yard fumble return that set up one touchdown and Marcus Yarns’ subsequent 82-yard touchdown gallop. They put the Blue Hens in command 28-3.\n\nDelaware also needed a blocked punt to take the lead for good early.\n\nFINAL STATS: Delaware 35, Delaware State 9\n\n\"I think we're going to have continue to make big plays,\" coach Ryan Carty said of what personified this win.\n\n\"That's who we're gonna have to be. That's who we want to be. That's how you win games in college football . . . We had to make some big plays and we didn't in the first half, minus the blocked punt.\"\n\nQuarterback Nolan Henderson completed 21 of 36 passes for 240 yards and three touchdowns, the second a 7-yarder on fourth-and-6 to Braden Brose four plays after Whitehead’s runback on a bobble forced by Noah Plack.\n\nHenderson later passed 27 yards to the tight end Brose for another touchdown to close the scoring with 4:51 left.\n\nThyrick Pitts caught seven passes for 94 yards, including the first UD touchdown, on a night he was targeted a dozen times. He earned the Nate Beasley Award as game MVP for the second time, having also gotten it 2019.\n\n\"It's nowhere near where we want to be,\" Pitts said of the Blue Hens' development. \"We left a lot out there today I think . . . We settled down a little bit. We made some strides from game one to game two . . . There's definitely still a lot we need to work on.\"\n\nHENS PLAY HOME OPENER:Why Delaware Stadium is the place to be Saturday night for UD-DSU football\n\nThe Blue Hens had 400 total yards against a DSU defense that was No. 1 in the MEAC last year and returned much of its personnel. The Hornets had 311 total yards but couldn't extract more then a touchdown and field goal from them.\n\nIt was the 11th meeting between the state’s lone college football teams, both members of the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision. The Blue Hens were presented the traditional First State Cup as the victor in ex-Hen QB Carty's first home game as UD coach.\n\nDelaware has won every game by a double-digit margin. Their next two scheduled meetings are in 2024 and 2025 at Delaware State.\n\nDelaware (2-0), ranked No. 10 nationally in FCS, was coming off a 14-7 win at FBS-level Navy. Delaware will open CAA play next Saturday at 1 p.m. with a tough test at 22nd-ranked Rhode Island. The Rams won 35-21 at Bryant Saturday night.\n\n\"We keep getting better,\" Carty said. \"We're cleaning things up as we go. We're still trying to figure each other out, still trying to be a football team. But I know that we played really hard.\"\n\nRECRUITING REUNION:Delaware coach's faith in starting QB rooted in failed recruiting effort years ago\n\nDelaware State (1-1) had romped 34-0 over Division II Lincoln University in its opener.\n\nThe crowd of 17,176 featured a massive student turnout, typical for opening night but a throng Delaware has had difficulty retaining on subsequent Saturdays as the season progresses.\n\nThe Hornets cut the gap to 28-9 early in the fourth quarter on Jared Lewis’ 57-yard TD heave to Rahkeem Smith. The game ended with DSU being thwarted on a goal-line stand by the Blue Hens' defense.\n\nThe Hornets struck first on the game’s opening drive as Jonathan Cardoza-Chicas tied a school record by booming a 54-yard field goal on his first career attempt for DSU. It was just the second time DSU has ever led Delaware, the other being by a 6-3 score in the 2019 game here.\n\nIt didn’t last long.\n\nDelaware was stopped on its first series, but Ben Dinkel’s punt was downed at the DSU 1. That paid dividends for the Hens, who forced a DSU punt from the end zone.\n\nMiddletown High grad Trey Austin blocked Matt Noll’s kick and Quincy Watson recovered for a touchdown with 5:39 left in the first quarter.\n\nCOLLECTING SHOES, SACKS:DSU All-MEAC lineman uses NIL rules to collect footwear for the needy\n\nThe Blue Hens then marched 70 yards on 12 plays and a roughing-the-passer penalty on their next series, culminating with Henderson’s 18-yard TD pass to Pitts. The sixth-year wideout turned around just in time to get his hands on the football on the left edge of the end zone on the first play of the second quarter. Brandon Ratcliffe’s second extra-point kick put the Hens up 14-3.\n\nBut Delaware’s next two series ended with Henderson’s pass being picked off by Jayden Estes, ending the third longest streak without an interception in UD history at 156 passes, and Ratcliffe missing a 39-yard field-goal try.\n\nDSU drove to the UD 37 on its final series of the first half but Cardoza-Chicas’s chance to tie his record on another 54-yard try was short.\n\nHave an idea for a compelling local sports story or is there an issue that needs public scrutiny? Contact Kevin Tresolini at ktresolini@delawareonline.com and follow on Twitter @kevintresolini. Support local journalism by subscribing to delawareonline.com.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/11"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/04/10/delaware-dominance-continues-football-visit-delaware-state/7062081002/", "title": "Delaware dominance continues in first football visit to Delaware State", "text": "DOVER – The location may have been unique.\n\nThe outcome was quite conventional.\n\nThe University of Delaware’s traditional football superiority over Delaware State continued Saturday night in the schools’ first-ever collision at DSU’s Alumni Stadium.\n\nThe Hornets did have moments where they held their own defensively and also blocked two punts against the visiting Blue Hens. But they also proved to be overly gracious hosts.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2021/04/10"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2023/07/17/proposed-ncaa-cost-increase-for-move-to-fbs-impacts-fcs-delaware/70411918007/", "title": "Proposed NCAA cost increase for move to FBS impacts FCS Delaware", "text": "When it comes to rising costs and inflation, it’s difficult to beat the price increase that’ll potentially be instituted by the NCAA.\n\nIt certainly could impact the University of Delaware.\n\nThe cost to move from the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision, in which Delaware dwells, to the Football Bowl Subdivision will likely climb from $5,000 to $5 million.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/07/17"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/basketball/2023/10/19/which-mens-basketball-recruits-will-be-at-ohio-state-this-weekend/71231171007/", "title": "Which men's basketball recruits will be at Ohio State this weekend?", "text": "A top-10 football showdown inside Ohio Stadium this weekend will also be a showcase recruiting event for the Ohio State men’s basketball program.\n\nAs the Buckeyes prepare for Sunday’s charity exhibition game at Dayton, they are also planning to host at least 10 recruits in the 2025 and 2026 recruiting classes before the football team hosts Penn State for a noon kickoff. The Buckeyes have two players committed for the 2024 class in Mount Pleasant (Utah) Wasatch Academy guard John “Juni” Mobley Jr. and Ottawa (Ohio) Ottawa-Glandorf wing Colin White.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/10/19"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/high-school/ohio-high-school/2023/11/30/ohio-high-school-boys-basketballs-top-24-players-for-2023-2024/71745078007/", "title": "Ohio high school boys basketball's top 24 players for 2023-2024", "text": "USA TODAY Network Ohio\n\nCincinnati Enquirer\n\nThe state of Ohio continues to produce high-quality high school basketball players who will put their talents on display this winter.\n\nAs a preview to this season, the high school sports staff of the USA Today Network's 21 Ohio newspapers and websites compiled a who's who of the Buckeye State's prep boys basketball players.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/11/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/bulldogs-extra/2022/09/21/georgia-footballs-ball-state-football-oklahoma-sooners-sec-jere-morehead-sanford-stadiu/8075611001/", "title": "Georgia football's payout to Ball State for 2023 game released", "text": "Georgia lined up its replacement game for Oklahoma in July to fill a spot on its 2023 football schedule.\n\nThe guarantee for the Mid-American Conference school to play in Sanford Stadium in Athens on Sept. 9, 2023 is $1.6 million, according to a contract obtained by the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday from Ball State via an open records request. The schools entered into the agreement effective on July 12.\n\nThe SEC announced Sept. 14 that it had directed Georgia to scrap a game with Oklahoma for that same date in 2023 because Oklahoma joining the SEC by 2025 would not allow the home-and-home series to be completed when the Sooners were to play at Georgia in 2031.\n\nMore:How Georgia football gets creative to utilize 'super freak' Brock Bowers in dynamic offense\n\nUGA president Jere Morehead signed the Ball State game contract two days before the SEC announcement. Ball State associate vice president and chief budget officer Scott Stachler signed the contract on Sept. 1.\n\nBall State receives 3,000 tickets for the game to sell and 300 complimentary tickets, per the contract.\n\nMore:What's behind Kent State's rugged schedule that includes Georgia, Oklahoma and Washington?\n\nBall State is getting $1.65 million for a game next season at Kentucky and received $1.5 million to play this month at Tennessee, according to the Muncie (Ind.) Star Press.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2022/09/21"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/uw/2023/11/30/uw-badgers-football-transfer-portal-tracker-latest-myles-burkett/71744090007/", "title": "UW Badgers football transfer portal latest: Tackett Curtis", "text": "Here's what we know about the Wisconsin Badgers players leaving the program (and those heading in) for the 2024 season. The first transfer portal window closed Jan. 2, with another window opening from April 15 to 30.\n\n2023 Badgers declared for NFL draft\n\nThe three-year standout from Fond du Lac finishes his career ninth in career rushing yards with the Badgers. He cleared 100 rushing yards in 20 games at UW.\n\nAfter four years with the Badgers, the versatile offensive lineman (who spent the 2023 season at center) announced he was submitting his name for the NFL Draft on Dec. 13, shortly after teasing that outcome when he was selected to participate in the Reese's Senior Bowl.\n\nThe Badgers' No. 1 nickel corner in 2023 announced Dec. 14 that he would not be participating in the ReliaQuest Bowl and would instead be prepping for the NFL Draft. Maitre transferred into the program from Boston College and played one year, starting nine games and playing in all 12 in the regular season. He had one interception. Maitre would not have been back in 2024 anyway, having completed eligibility.\n\nRucci, who has been with the Badgers program for five seasons, will be pursuing the NFL after appearing in the ReliaQuest Bowl. The native of Pennsylvania played in 35 games at UW, including 22 the past two seasons, and younger brother Nolan is also an offensive lineman in the program.\n\n2023 Badgers leaving Wisconsin via transfer portal\n\nBarrett spent time as the No. 2 center on the depth chart behind Tanor Bortolini when transfer Jake Renfro was sidelined by injury, though Renfro returned to health by season's end. The redshirt junior from Illinois played in nine games on special teams last year and saw the field sparingly in 2023. He'll have two years of eligibility remaining.\n\nBell will have two seasons of eligibility left after he announced he was departing the program Dec. 4. He had a productive two seasons with the Badgers, catching 69 balls for 740 yards and six touchdowns over the past two seasons.\n\nThe native of Whitefish Bay has been in the program since 2019 but has played only sparingly. His younger brother, Joe, is a Badgers offensive lineman.\n\nThe Franklin High School standout led his school to a state title and played in two games as a redshirt freshman last season. He was the lone holdover among quarterbacks on the roster from 2022, and at times, he rose as high as second on the depth chart when Braedyn Locke was pressed into starting duty. He committed to Albany on Jan. 8.\n\nDike announced Dec. 4 that he would be leaving the program and use his final year of eligibility elsewhere as a graduate transfer. The Waukesha North High School alumnus has been at Wisconsin the past four years, playing in 44 games and catching 97 passes for 1,478 yards and nine touchdowns, including six in 2022. He'll leave the program in the top 20 of receiving yards. He announced Dec. 20 he'd be transferring to Florida, where former UW quarterback Graham Mertz is expected back next season.\n\nDelavan-Darien High School alumnus has been in the program since 2020 and played in nine games over the past two years, often on special teams.\n\nJohnson played in 13 games each of the past two seasons, and he finished this year with a sack and five tackles. The native of St. Paul will have a year of eligibility remaining.\n\nThe fifth-year defensive lineman started 22 games and played in 38 for UW, entered the transfer portal Dec. 18, leaving Wisconsin thin at this position. Johnson recorded one-half sack, two tackles for loss and 18 total tackles in his final season at UW.\n\nFreshman from Pennsylvania did not see the field in 2023. He committed to the program in June of 2022 when Paul Chryst was still leading the program.\n\nHayden's younger brother was a five-star recruit out of Pennsylvania and was working his way up the depth chart; he played in three games in 2023 and three in 2022. His claim to fame at Wisconsin will be his game-deciding touchdown catch as an eligible receiver against Illinois.\n\nThe Michigan native had three sacks and a forced fumble as a senior in 2023, part of a career in which he appeared in 30 games (three interceptions, five sacks, 12½ tackles for loss). He was named honorable mention All-Big Ten and the Guaranteed Rate Bowl defensive MVP in 2022. Turner will have one year of eligibility remaining and announced Dec. 18 that he'd be landing at Michigan State.\n\nVarner transferred from Temple before the 2023 season and played just one year at Wisconsin, finishing with 1.5 tackles for loss and a fumble recovery in his redshirt junior season. Varner, a first-team All Conference choice in the American Athletic Conference before arriving at UW, wasn't able to match his on-field success that he had at Temple.\n\nMichigan recruit has been in the program the past two years and saw brief field action.\n\nThe four-star prospect from Kettle Moraine High School was a top in-state recruit in 2020, and he was part of a guard rotation early this season and saw action in 12 games, but his snaps decreased as the year went on. Played in 34 career games at Wisconsin.\n\nHeading to Wisconsin in transfer portal\n\nThe Illinois native has played in 11 games the past two years. He'll have three years of eligibility remaining.\n\nThe highly regarded linebacker recruit out of Louisiana played 12 games as a true freshman with USC this past year, recording 40 tackles (four for loss), two sacks, a forced fumble, two recoveries and one pass defended. He'll have three years of eligibility remaining with the Badgers.\n\nThe cornerback from Miami has played in 38 games over three years at Toledo and has one year of eligibility remaining. He has two career interceptions but was credited with 11 passes defended just last year and 16 for his career, plus a forced fumble.\n\nGalvan led his FCS squad in tackles with 77 in 2023 as a redshirt freshman with three years of eligibility remaining. He's a former all-state player as a high-school standout in Iowa.\n\nThe wide receiver and return specialist spent two seasons with the Spartans had 24 catches for 195 yards and three touchdowns last season. He also averaged 6.8 yards on punt returns and 17.1 yards on kickoff returns.\n\nHills, who will have one year of eligibility left, posted nine tackles for loss in 2023, with three fumble recoveries and three blocked kicks.\n\nThe 6-foot-4, 239-pound outside linebacker played 25 games at Syracuse over the last two seasons, has two years of eligibility remaining. He started all 12 games as a redshirt sophomore this season and recorded 3 ½ sacks, 7 ½ tackles for loss and 46 total tackles. It's been a bit of a journey for him after he committed Dec. 3 to the Badgers but decommitted the next day, only to re-commit Dec. 7.\n\nWith the Badgers and LSU about to face off in the ReliaQuest Bowl, McGohan announced his intention to play for Wisconsin on Dec. 14. The 6-4 freshman from Ohio played sparingly in eight games for the Tigers.\n\nThe three-year starter at Luke Fickell's former program joins Wisconsin as a graduate transfer and has appeared in 49 career games. The incumbent at UW, senior Peter Bowden, is one of several finalists for the Patrick Mannelly Award acknowledging the nation's best long snapper.\n\nThe FCS All-American and native Virginian has one year of eligibility left after recording 24½ sacks at William and Mary in his career, including 9½ this past season.\n\nHe started his career at Cincinnati under current Badgers coach Luke Fickell but then went to Arkansas, where he posted 3.5 sacks, 6.5 tackles for loss and 90 tackles overall, ranking top-five in the SEC in the latter category through the regular season. He'll have one year of eligibility left.\n\nThe junior racked up 19 touchdowns and 2,703 passing yards this season with the Hurricanes, one of his three years under center at Miami. He's thrown for 7,469 yards and 54 touchdowns overall, with 23 interceptions. He has one year of eligibility remaining.\n\nWalker, who will have one year of eligibility remaining, joins a suddenly crowded running back room that includes returnee Chez Mellusi and a trio of talented freshmen. He rushed 102 times for 513 yards and seven touchdowns this season at Oklahoma.\n\nLeaving Wisconsin for other reasons\n\nJack Pugh, tight end\n\nPugh posted Dec. 4 that he was choosing to leave football to focus on his mental health. The recruit from Ohio played in one career game, in 2022.\n\nTop 2023 contributors completing eligibility with Badgers\n\nThis list does not include players who have the option to return, unless they indicated an expectation to depart.\n\nTanner Mordecai, quarterback. Transfer from SMU served as the team's starter all season when healthy, throwing for 1,687 yards through the regular season with six touchdowns.\n\nTransfer from SMU served as the team's starter all season when healthy, throwing for 1,687 yards through the regular season with six touchdowns. Alexander Smith, cornerback. Played in 53 games at Wisconsin and recorded 2.5 tackles for loss and a sack this season.\n\nPlayed in 53 games at Wisconsin and recorded 2.5 tackles for loss and a sack this season. Michael Furtney, offensive line. Guard has been a regular on the offensive line each of the past two seasons, starting all 12 games this season.\n\nGuard has been a regular on the offensive line each of the past two seasons, starting all 12 games this season. C.J. Goetz, linebacker. Waukesha Catholic Memorial grad registered 58 games played and more than 25 tackles for loss in his career, including team-leading 11 in 2023.\n\nNotes:Kahmir Prescott (Philadelphia) a 6-1, 190 pound safety from Philadelphia who committed in April of 2023, de-committed on Dec. 7.\n\nBooker announced he was de-committing from Wisconsin June 21 and announced his intention one day later to play for UCLA instead, but he flipped back to Wisconsin on signing day, Dec. 20.\n\nAlso on June 21, cornerback Vernon Woodward III (Winter Park, Florida) announced he was de-committing from Wisconsin and pledging to Illinois instead.\n\nChicago cornerback Austin Alexander de-committed Jan. 25, 2023.\n\n2025 commitments", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/11/30"}, {"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/sooners/2023/06/15/ou-football-2024-sec-schedule-brings-excitement-challenges/70326787007/", "title": "OU football: 2024 SEC schedule brings excitement, challenges", "text": "OU lost the 2024 Southeastern Conference football scheduling derby.\n\nOr did the Sooners win?\n\nDepends on who you are and what you wanted.\n\nThe SEC announced the 2024 opponents for each school, via a one-hour show Wednesday on the SEC Network.", "authors": [], "publish_date": "2023/06/15"}]}