Sri Lanka is in chaos and its president has fled. Here's what we ...

(CNN) Sri Lanka has plunged into chaos and its president has fled to Singapore, before emailing his resignation, as questions swirl about the country's future.

Embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa arrived in Singapore on a flight from Maldives on Thursday, according to a high-ranking security source in Colombo. He had been in Maldives for just over 24 hours after fleeing Sri Lanka's commercial capital on Wednesday -- the same day he was meant to resign after he pledged to step down following huge protests against his rule at the weekend.

Singapore confirmed that Rajapaksa had landed and been allowed to enter the country on a "private visit" but had not asked for or been granted asylum.

Rajapaksa then tendered his resignation in a letter sent by email to parliamentary speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardenena, according to the speaker's office, though the office also cautioned "we cannot accept such an email at face value."

Here's what we know.

Sri Lankan protesters chant slogans after taking control of the Prime Minister's office in Colombo on July 13.

Where is the president?

Rajapaksa had been expected to resign on Wednesday, clearing the way for new leadership. Instead he and his wife boarded a military plane in the early hours of Wednesday and fled from Colombo to Maldives.

The plane had been refused permission to land in Maldives until former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed -- now speaker of the Maldivian Parliament -- intervened, according to a high-ranking security official. A spokesperson for Nasheed did not confirm or deny the intervention.

Maldives and Sri Lanka are close neighbors -- the Maldivian capital Male is just a 90-minute flight from Colombo. And Nasheed and the Rajapaksas have a history of cooperation. In 2012, amid anti-government protests in the Maldives, Nasheed and his wife sought political shelter in Sri Lanka, then led by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the current president's brother.

The Maldivian government didn't confirm Rajapaksa's presence in the country, but Sri Lankans living in Maldives took to the streets of Male anyway on Wednesday to protest his reported arrival.

Photos from the Maldives capital show a crowd of people holding the Sri Lanka flag, and signs reading: "Throw him out here" and "Dear Maldivian friends, please urge your government not to safeguard criminals."

Sri Lankans living in Maldives stage a demonstration in Male on July 13.

On Thursday, Rajapaksa left Maldives for the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, a senior military source familiar with the matter told CNN. The president left on a "Saudi flight," the source said.

CNN believes the source was referring to Saudia flight 788, which left Male at 11:30 a.m. local time Thursday. Saudia is the flag carrier of Saudi Arabia. CNN has reached out to Saudia but has not heard back.

Rajapaksa landed in Singapore later on Thursday, and its Foreign Ministry released a statement that read: "It is confirmed that Mr. Rajapaksa has been allowed entry into Singapore on a private visit. He has not asked for asylum and neither has he been granted any asylum. Singapore generally does not grant requests for asylum."

A Saudia airline Boeing 787 Dreamliner believed to be carrying Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya Rajapaksa arrives at Changi Airport in Singapore on July 14.

Is Rajapaksa still the president?

Sri Lanka's parliamentary speaker, Abeywardenena, has received an email with Rajapaksa's resignation, the speaker's office confirmed to CNN Thursday, but added that the "legality of it needs to be ascertained."

It has been shared with the relevant authorities for the verification of the same," the office said. "Once we have official confirmation and it is legally verified, we hope to make a statement regarding it tomorrow [Friday] morning."

Abeywardenena's office added that it is expecting to receive a paper copy of the letter, but that would take longer as it would be sent from Singapore.

Rajapaksa's resignation would only be considered official once the speaker receives a letter of resignation, according to the country's constitution.

A new president was set to be elected on July 20 after the resumption of parliament on July 16 -- though that timeline is now on hold.

Rajapaksa's departure is a historic moment for the island nation, which his family had ruled with an iron fist for much of the past two decades before losing the faith of their once adoring citizens.

Sri Lankan protesters occupy the prime minister's office in Colombo on July 13.

What's going on with the protests?

Colombo appeared calm on Thursday after several days of escalating protests, with a curfew declared from noon until 5 a.m. on Friday.

Last weekend's demonstrations were among the most dramatic seen so far, with protesters setting fire to Wickremesinghe's private residence in an affluent neighborhood, and swimming in Rajapaksa's private pool.

On Wednesday, hundreds of demonstrators broke into the compound of the prime minister's office in Colombo following a standoff with armed police. Protesters also entered the premises of state broadcaster Sri Lanka Rupavahini.

A protester runs for cover from a tear gas canister during a protest in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on July 13.

Photos from Wednesday show crowds of protesters crammed into the prime minister's office, waving the Sri Lankan flag and singing. Some flooded out onto the balconies and flung open windows, raising their fists at the crowd gathered below.

Police responded with tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowds. Photos show protesters covering their faces with face masks, bandannas and plastic goggles; some picked up tear gas canisters to throw back toward police.

At least 75 people were injured during the protests Wednesday, according to the National Hospital in Colombo. Many people were brought in due to tear gas inhalation, others with cuts and bruises likely from trying to jump over fences, according to a nurse at the hospital.

One police officer was seriously injured during the protests Wednesday and was rushed to hospital where he was receiving treatment, Sri Lankan police said Thursday. An army sergeant was also injured in scuffles with protesters, police added.

During this incident, protesters took a T-56 rifle and two clips of live ammunition, containing 60 rounds each, police said. Police were looking for the service weapon and ammunition to bring it back into police custody.

As the demonstrations escalated, Wickremesinghe's office declared a state of emergency -- later canceled -- and a nighttime curfew. He also appointed a committee of senior armed forces commanders to coordinate ground troops across Sri Lanka, and to "restore law and order."

What caused the crisis?

Sri Lanka, located just off the coast of India, has been rocked by ongoing protests for months over its worst financial crisis in seven decades.

The country's foreign exchange reserves plummeted to record lows, with dollars running out to pay for essential imports including food, medicine and fuel -- leaving millions unable to feed their families, fuel their cars or access basic medicine.

Frequent and largely peaceful protests have been held since March, with rising public anger over food costs, electricity cuts, and the government's handling of the crisis. Protesters have demanded the resignations of both Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe.

The crisis has been years in the making, said experts, who point to a series of government decisions that compounded external shocks.

Over the past decade, the Sri Lankan government has borrowed vast sums of money from foreign lenders to fund public services, said Murtaza Jafferjee, chair of Colombo-based think tank Advocata Institute.

This borrowing spree coincided with a series of blows to the Sri Lankan economy, from both natural disasters like monsoons and man-made catastrophes, including a government ban on chemical fertilizers that decimated farmers' harvests.

Facing a massive deficit, Rajapaksa slashed taxes in a doomed attempt to stimulate the economy. But the move backfired, instead hitting government revenue. That prompted rating agencies to downgrade Sri Lanka to near default levels, meaning the country lost access to overseas markets.

Sri Lanka then had to fall back on its foreign exchange reserves to pay off government debt, shrinking its reserves. This impacted imports of fuel and other essentials, which sent prices soaring.

Topping all that, the government in March floated the Sri Lankan rupee -- meaning its price was determined based on the demand and supply of foreign exchange markets. However, the plunging of the rupee against the US dollar only made things worse for ordinary Sri Lankans.

Sri Lanka is in an economic crisis. Here's what it's like for people on ...

Colombo, Sri Lanka (CNN) For three straight nights last week, Upul took to the streets of Sri Lanka's capital city holding a candle or a placard as he protested the country's worst economic crisis in decades.

Like his neighbors, he was frustrated by the more than 10-hour power cuts that plunged Colombo into darkness, and a shortage of gas to cook with that made it hard for his family to eat.

Then on Thursday -- the fourth night -- the protest turned violent.

Furious demonstrators hurled bricks and started fires outside Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's private residence, as police used tear gas and water cannons to break up the protests.

"People were visibly angry, shouting," said Upul, who asked only to be referred to by his last name for fear of repercussions. "Earlier (in the week) they demanded the President to step down, (on Thursday) they were yelling and calling him names."

Protesters take cover as police use tear gas to disperse them during a protest outside the Sri Lankan President's home on March 31, 2022.

For weeks, Sri Lanka has been battling its worst economic crisis since the island nation gained independence in 1948, leaving food, fuel, gas and medicine in short supply, and sending the cost of basic goods skyrocketing.

Shops have been forced to close because they can't run fridges, air conditioners or fans, and soldiers are stationed at gas stations to calm customers, who line-up for hours in the searing heat to fill their tanks. Some people have even died waiting.

But Thursday night marked an escalation in Sri Lanka's ongoing economic crisis.

Following the protests, the police imposed a curfew and the President ordered a nationwide public emergency , giving authorities powers to detain people without a warrant. On Saturday evening, Sri Lanka declared a nationwide 36-hour curfew, effectively barring protests planned on Sunday -- but protests went ahead Saturday anyway. In a statement Sunday, police said they had arrested 664 people for violating the curfew.

Meanwhile, the government is seeking financial support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and turning to regional powers that may be able to help.

But there is brewing fury inside Sri Lanka -- and experts warn the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

A Sri Lankan policeman tries to disperse protesters in Colombo, March 31, 2022.

Days spent waiting in line

For weeks, life in Sri Lanka has involved hours of queuing -- just to get basic goods needed to survive.

Our daily life has been reduced to standing in a queue. Malkanthi Silva

"Our daily life has been reduced to standing in a queue," said Malkanthi Silva, 53, as she leaned on a worn blue gas cylinder in Colombo's baking heat, where she had already been waiting for hours for the propane she needs to cook to feed her family. "When we need milk powder, there's a queue for that, if we need medication there's another queue for that."

Though the situation is now particularly acute, it's been years in the making.

"30% is misfortune. 70% is mismanagement," said Murtaza Jafferjee, chair of Colombo-based think tank Advocata Institute.

For the past decade, he said, the Sri Lankan government had borrowed vast sums of money from foreign lenders and expanded public services. As the government's borrowings grew, the economy took hits from major monsoons that hurt agricultural output in 2016 and 2017, followed by a constitutional crisis in 2018 , and the deadly Easter bombings in 2019.

Sri Lankans spend most of their day queueing for fuel and gas as the country's economic crisis worsens.

In 2019, the newly elected President Rajapaksa slashed taxes in an attempt to stimulate the economy.

"They misdiagnosed the problem and felt that they had to give a fiscal stimulus through tax cuts," Jafferjee said.

But while President Rajapaksa was new to the role, he wasn't new to government.

As defense minister under the leadership of his elder brother, Rajapaksa oversaw a 2009 military operation that ended a 26-year civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The United Nations opened an investigation last year into allegations of war crimes committed by both sides.

After winning the presidential election, Rajapaksa appointed his brother, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, as Prime Minister and filled dozens of government roles with serving or former military and intelligence personnel, according to the UN. Their younger brother, Basil Rajapaksa, was later appointed finance minister.

In 2020, the pandemic hit, bringing Sri Lanka's tourist-dependent economy shuddering to a halt as the country shut its borders and imposed lockdowns and curfews. The government was left with a large deficit.

Opposition party supporters shout slogans during a protest outside the President's office in Colombo, Tuesday, March 15, 2022.

Shanta Devarajan, an international development professor at Georgetown University and former World Bank chief economist, says the tax cuts and economic malaise hit government revenue, prompting rating agencies to downgrade Sri Lanka's credit rating to near default levels -- meaning the country lost access to overseas markets.

Sri Lanka fell back on its foreign exchange reserves to pay off government debt, shrinking its reserves from $6.9 billion in 2018 to $2.2 billion this year, according to an IMF briefing.

The cash crunch impacted imports of fuel and other essentials, and in February Sri Lanka imposed rolling power cuts to deal with the fuel crisis that had sent prices soaring, even before the global crunch that ensued as Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine

Last month, the government floated the Sri Lankan rupee, effectively devaluing it by causing the currency to plunge against the US dollar.

Jafferjee described the government's moves as a "series of blunder after blunder."

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa told CNN Saturday that the Finance Minister and his team were working around the clock to put the economy right. He said it was wrong to say the government mismanaged the economy -- instead, Covid-19 was one of the causes.

Previously, the President said he is attempting to resolve it.

"This crisis was not created by me," Rajapaksa said during an address to the nation last month.

Without gas, Sri Lankans are unable to cook food, and power cuts mean electric cookers are unusable.

An impossible situation

The unfolding situation in Sri Lanka has made it incredibly challenging to earn money -- and even getting to work can be a major obstacle for some.

Auto rickshaw driver Thushara Sampath, 35, needs fuel to work so he can feed his family. But both fuel and food are being rationed, and prices are soaring -- the cost of bread has more than doubled from 60 rupees ($0.20) to 125 rupees ($0.42), he said.

Ajith Perera, a 44-year-old auto rickshaw driver, also told CNN he can't survive on fuel rations.

"With the liter or two we receive, we cannot run hires and earn a living," said Perera, with tears in his eyes. "Leave alone looking after my mother, wife and two children, I cannot pay the installment for my taxi to the finance company," he said.

For many, it's an impossible situation -- they can't afford not to work, but they also can't afford not to join long lines for basic goods.

Kanthi Latha, 47, who sweeps roads for a living to feed her two young sons, says she quietly slips away from work to join shorter lines for food before hurrying back.

"I cannot afford to take the day off, if I do I may lose my job," said Latha.

Before the economic crisis, Sivakala Rajeeswari says her husband worked as a construction worker. But with the price of building materials spiking, people are reluctant to undertake even the most basic construction work, she said.

We've never been this poor even with all the money we saved and earned. Upul

Rajeeswari, 40, says she can still earn a living doing chores at people's homes, but for the past few days she's had no time to do anything but wait in line. "I have not had the chance to go and work anywhere," she said. "When will this misery end?"

Even members of the middle class with savings are frustrated.

Upul, the protester, earns a decent wage in a professional job, but says he still can't access essentials he needs for his family. He has enough medicine to treat everyday headaches, pain and fever for now, but he worries about running out.

His family has switched to induction cooking to cut down on the use of gas but frequent power cuts make even doing difficult.

"Neither I nor my family or every other person in Sri Lanka deserve this," he said. "We've never been this poor even with all the money we saved and earned."

Inflation is pushing the price of food higher, putting pressure on people to earn more money to cover basic costs.

What happens next

Sri Lanka is now looking for outside help to ease the economic turmoil -- the IMF, India and China.

During last month's address, President Rajapaksa said he had weighed the pros and cons of working with the IMF and had decided to pursue a bailout from the Washington-based institution -- something his government had been reluctant to do.

"We must take action to fill this deficit and increase our foreign exchange reserves. To this end, we have initiated discussions with international financial institutions as well as with our friendly countries regarding repayment of our loan installments," Rajapaksa said on March 16.

In a news conference Thursday, IMF spokesperson Gerry Rice told reporters: "The Sri Lankan authorities have expressed interest in an IMF-supported financial program.

There's a lot of hate and anger against the President and the cabinet. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu

"We plan to initiate those discussions pretty much in the coming days, and that will include during the expected visit of the finance minister of Sri Lanka to Washington for our spring meetings in April."

Sri Lanka has also requested help from China and India, with New Delhi already issuing a credit line of $1 billion, India's External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar tweeted on March 17.

But that would just be "kicking the can down the road," said Jafferjee, from the Advocata Institute. "This is prolonging the crisis."

Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Colombo-based Center for Policy Alternatives, worries people's frustration with the government could escalate.

"It's obviously going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better Saravanamuttu said. "There's a lot of hate and anger against the President and the cabinet. Government lawmakers are afraid to face constituents."

Soldiers have been deployed to gas stations to keep the peace as tensions rise.

There's still so much uncertainty around what comes next -- national consumer price inflation has almost tripled from 6.2% in September to 17.5% in February, according to the country's central bank.

"The prices of essentials are changing every day," said Silva, as she lined-up in Colombo. "The price of rice yesterday is not the price we will buy tomorrow."

Thursday's protests -- and the developments since -- also raise the possibility of worse things to come.

Upul, the protester, says he has been demonstrating on behalf of all Sri Lankans. But the new emergency rules make him worried.

"I have been taking part in these protests and even though I was injured, I was not discouraged," he said. "But now, with the new regulation, I am afraid."

Rukshana Rizwie
Iqbal Athas
Julia Hollingsworth
Malkanthi Silva
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu

Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 17 June 2022 | The Week UK

Disabled man dies at Gatwick

A disabled man left waiting on a plane died at Gatwick’s Airport after getting off without a helper. The Sun said the passenger became “the first victim of Britain’s airport chaos” after he fell to his death from an escalator. The tabloid said the man had been waiting for assistance from an EasyJet flight but became frustrated by delays, prompting him to leave the plane into the packed terminal, where the accident occurred. Gatwick said “staff shortages were not a factor in this incident” and “an investigation is under way”.

Critical race theory makes school board meetings political ground zero

When Barb Mozdzen opened last month's school board meeting in Chandler, Arizona, for public comment, she had a caveat.

While many attendees indicated they were at the meeting to discuss “critical race theory,” the topic was not actually on the agenda that day.

In fact, critical race theory wasn’t being taught in Chandler’s schools, and neither the board nor administration had discussed the possibility of implementing it into the curriculum, said Mozdzen, the board president.

In the following hour, an attendee said he saw no distinction between critical race theory and equity trainings. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk said the board was “stomping on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr." And, outside, the chair of the right-wing Patriot Party of Arizona, Steve Daniels, was arrested.

In recent weeks, protests, arrests and appearances by national activists have become the norm at school board meetings across the country. Anger is boiling over after a year and a half of virtual learning and strict COVID-19 rules in schools. Fears about critical race theory, stoked in national media and fanned by conservative think tanks and activists, have heightened tensions with schools even more.

The pitched battles, over issues ranging from racism to masks to the rights of transgender students, have often caught district leaders flatfooted. Board members, used to sleepy and ill-attended public meetings, are reeling.

A meeting room was cleared in Michigan. Shouting matches broke out in Kentucky. In Virginia, sheriff's deputies arrested and cited someone after a school board voted to end its unruly meeting. School board members in New Hampshire were compared to Nazis. A father in New York rushed to the stage to confront a board member.

“This has been building up over this past year and a half. And I think we've reached a crescendo because I think people are just tired,” said Anna Maria Chávez, executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association.

‘Children deserve to be taught’: Teachers in 22 cities are planning protests over laws restricting racism lessons in schools

‘Perfect storm of timing and misinformation’

Critical race theory is not being taught in most schools across America. It’s a decades-old legal framework for examining laws that reproduce inequalities in society.

Common misinformation about the theory ties it to Marxism, and some opponents claim it teaches white children to hate themselves.

“What critical race theory teaches, even though it's not being taught in primary schools, isn't that radical,” said Eric Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It is mainly arguing that racism and an ideology called 'white supremacy' and a historical period called 'chattel slavery' have had a significant impact on the law, meaning on the way that we function within a society.”

What is critical race theory? And why do Republicans oppose teaching it in schools?

The term began circulating more widely among conservatives in September 2020, when former President Donald Trump heard about it in a Fox News segment and issued a memo ordering the government to stop funding training for contractors on critical race theory, which he called propaganda.

In recent years, schools have also worked to teach more history from the perspective of oppressed people and sought to introduce equity initiatives that target achievement gaps among students driven by socioeconomic backgrounds. Those efforts have only increased since the racial reckoning in the U.S. that arose from the murder of George Floyd.

'On our own terms':How scholars of color are correcting the narrative of national tragedies

Additionally, about a year before the Black Lives Matter movement galvanized countless people to protest around the country, The New York Times published a series of essays called the "1619 Project," which aimed to “reframe the country's history” in the context of slavery as well as contributions from Black Americans. The project's creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay, but the project was also a frequent target of Trump.

School board conversations around race are also coming after an unprecedented year for those organizations, Chávez said. During the pandemic, boards engaged parents in new ways, hosting virtual forums and posting regularly on social media. And parents were more involved as decisions were made around COVID-19 precautions and school reopening, she said.

Now, parents feel empowered – and they're fed up.

At a school board meeting in Penfield, New York, parent Rich Tyson yelled from the audience when he noticed a school board member mocking a public commenter. The board member cursed and gestured for Tyson to come to the stage, setting off chaos that cleared the room until the meeting resumed in a virtual-only forum.

The pandemic has made many parents more aware of how school districts operate – and they don't like what they see, Tyson told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, part of the USA TODAY Network.

"It just woke us up to how decisions are made at a local level, and how many are not made at a local level," Tyson said.

Further exacerbating the issue, said Sherry Johnson, executive director of the Monroe County School Boards Association, are state decisions that then cause confusion locally.

"When guidance changes on a Friday and the expectations are to be implemented on a Monday, that’s just not enough time to communicate to the entire community – especially if you yourself don’t have clear guidance," she said. "There's this perfect storm of timing and misinformation."

More on New York:School board meetings are turning into shouting matches. Here's why

A ‘Wizard of Oz element’ to the critical race theory discussion

Raucous meetings around the country may appear to be driven by a growing group of worried families. But experts also point to well-funded conservative and libertarian think tanks using critical race theory as a catchall phrase to spook parents and gin up activism.

“There’s definitely a connection,” said Richard Gray, deputy director of the NYU Metro Center in New York City, a social justice nonprofit that works on school equity issues. “There’s a 'Wizard of Oz' element to this, where you pull back the curtain and see it isn’t just a groundswell movement of concerned parents, but a well-orchestrated political movement.”

“If you had to choose three words and put them together to heighten the most concern, this would be the trifecta,” added John Rogers, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles’ Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

"Race," for instance, prompts anxiety around broader demographic changes and the reckoning that played out after Floyd’s murder. "Critical" and "theory" imply conspiracy or controversy.

Numerous states have introduced bills that would prohibit schools from teaching "divisive," "racist" or "sexist" concepts. While they seldom mention critical race theory directly, in many cases legislators have cited it as a driving force behind the measures.

'Laws in search of problems that don’t exist':Republicans try to ban critical race theory in colleges

Newly formed right-leaning organizations such as Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education have encouraged parents to play more active roles at school board meetings. Conservative think tanks, including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation, have also increasingly focused on the issue.

Heritage Action, the foundation's 501(c)(4) lobbying arm, for example, helped organize a rally in Loudoun County, Virginia, to "stop critical race theory."

Others, like Citizens for Renewing America, a group founded by a former Trump administration official who penned the critical race theory memo, have developed toolkits and how-to's for parents. The Citizens for Renewing America guide bills itself as “an A-to-Z guide on how to stop Critical Race Theory and reclaim your local school board.”

Fox News has also mentioned “critical race theory” on its network nearly 1,300 times in the past three and a half months, according to a recent study from the left-leaning group Media Matters for America.

On social media, the phrase has increasingly gained prominence. Since the start of the year, nearly 340,000 Facebook posts on public pages and groups mentioning the phrases “critical race theory” or “school board” have garnered over 70 million interactions on the platform, according to data tracked by the social media analytics tool CrowdTangle.

Some of the posts included videos with the titles, “Mom tears apart school board over Critical Race Theory” or “Teacher TORCHES School Board to Their Faces Until They Cut Her Mic,” shared by right-wing media outlet Newsmax and conservative commentator Dan Bongino, respectively.

Often, parents who are galvanized into taking action at a school board meeting on a given issue may represent a “vocal minority” getting “far more attention than they deserve,” said Vladimir Kogan, an associate professor of political science at Ohio State University.

In Arizona, activist groups have organized parents to attend meetings all over the state, said Heidi Otero, a spokesperson for the state’s school boards association.

“You see the same exact 120 people. Many of them don’t even represent that area,” Otero said of districts like Chandler. “Where are the 50,000 parents, the families that are representative of that community?”

In May, a Scottsdale school board meeting was canceled when an unruly crowd chanted, “No more!” as members asked parents and attendees to adhere to the meeting's social distancing and mask rules.

Welcome to school boards across Arizona in 2021:Members under fire for mask use, 'critical race theory' accusations

Comment cards attendees completed to speak at the meeting included issues such as vaccines, mask mandates and transparency over curricula, including critical race theory, board President Jann-Michael Greenburg said. None of those topics were on the meeting agenda.

"This is a deliberate misinformation campaign," he told The Arizona Republic.

Another meeting in Peoria was disrupted and almost switched to a virtual format at the advice of local law enforcement present at the meeting. While the meeting continued in person, attendees condemned critical race theory for 40 minutes, saying to teach it would be to condone racism.

“It’s not like we don’t know what happens with this critical race theory, or equity, or inclusion, or any of these other flowery names that you want to call it. It doesn’t matter what you call them. … You know what it does? The exact opposite of everything they say it does,” said Angie Russo, who represented the group Purple for Parents. “It has not a thing to do with equality. It has to do with payback.”

'National political narratives' shape local rhetoric

Purple for Parents is a conservative group founded in response to teacher walkouts in 2018, and its members have been present at other Arizona meetings, including in Scottsdale, Vail and Chandler.

While the organization has its roots in state, it is listed on a map organized by the national nonprofit Parents Defending Education.

Asra Nomani, a former journalist who is the national group’s vice president for strategy and investigations, said she got interested in similar discussions in 2020 when her child’s selective high school in northern Virginia announced proposed changes to its admissions policy.

Thomas Jefferson High School, part of Fairfax County's public school board, nixed its challenging admissions exam and approved a “holistic review” process, which would take into account factors such as whether the student is in a low-income household or one that doesn’t primarily speak English.

The change sparked lawsuits and parent protests, and it inspired Nomani to connect with others in her community via a Facebook group. From there, Nomani said, the discussion grew and turned to messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. They got a website and began sharing ideas and skills with each other, such as how to file a public records request or place an op-ed in a newspaper.

“Toolkits are not like some diabolical dark money plan. They are also parents trying to effectively advocate for kids,” she said.

In March, a news release from Parents Defending Education said the group “trains parents how to put schools and officials on the spot, gain media attention, get involved with school boards and other oversight bodies, and make sure the school knows there will be consequences for indoctrination and radicalism in the classroom.”

“I believe that the school board members are gaslighting parents,” Nomani said.

In another northern Virginia county, a school board meeting turned violent after debate over critical race theory and how teachers address transgender students.

The June 22 Loudoun County meeting ended after just a few speakers made public comment. Photos on social media showed a man being held by police with a bloodied lip. One person was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and a second was cited for trespassing.

After an earlier school board meeting in June, multiple clips posted to conservative news media’s social media accounts went viral. Attendees called schools “indoctrination camps” and compared critical race theory to Marxism and the Chinese Communist Party.

The spate of school board protests have also included activism against equity initiatives.

In Troy, Michigan, the goal of equity programs is to eliminate the impact of factors such as race, "so that everyone has the same level of access to learning and growth opportunities in our district," said Cornelius Godfrey, who is leading the programs.

But at a recent school board meeting, parents worried aloud that white students would be marginalized and made to feel bad about being white if equity programs succeed.

2 concepts divide Michigan school boards:What to know about critical race theory, equity

Godfrey said he has seen parents in school board meetings refer to critical race theory as an umbrella term for equity programs, when the two are not synonymous.

"Things are a lot more nuanced and complicated than some of our detractors on the political stage would like to make them seen," he said.

‘Trump things’ shape local rhetoric

The rhetoric and much of how critical race theory has been described in conservative media mirrors what Trump said during his September 2020 speech announcing the 1776 commission to promote “patriotic education.”

'Liberal indoctrination':Donald Trump rails against modern teaching of U.S. history

The string of events that led to Trump signing the memo banning trainings on critical race theory and his later speech have been well documented. The Manhattan Institute's Christopher Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show for a segment on critical race theory, and the next morning, Rufo told The Atlantic, Trump told his chief of staff to reach out to the think-tank fellow.

In his address at the National Archives, Trump warned of “liberal indoctrination of America’s youth” and cast critical race theory as a “Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation.”

“Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools," he claimed. "Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”

This isn't the first time that national political talking points have created partisan divides in local school boards, Kogan noted.

Remember Common Core? The set of educational standards was adopted a decade ago by dozens of states, and their full or partial appeal drove local and state elections around the country.

The principles in the standards were supported by nearly two-thirds of Americans, according to an Education Next survey in 2017. But when people were asked specifically about “Common Core,” support dropped to 41%.

"We're seeing how these national political narratives are seeping into our local school board meetings," said Chávez, of the National School Boards Association.

More on New Hampshire:Markings on students at Exeter prom cause parents to complain to school board

That dynamic played out recently in Exeter, New Hampshire, where a meeting of a joint school board featured attendees calling board members Nazis, communists and Marxists, plus someone who said school officials were on par with the authoritarian state of North Korea.

The comments came after rules at the Exeter senior prom required students who were unvaccinated or could not prove vaccination status to have numbers written on their hands in Sharpie for contact tracing purposes.

Attendees of the school board meeting compared the practice of marking unvaccinated individuals to Nazi Germany, a comparison House GOP member Marjorie Taylor Greene has also invoked to criticize COVID-19 vaccination protocols.

"In 1939 when (the Nazis) put those stars on those people – 'Oh, it's just a star'; that's what they said at the time," said Lisa Mazur, a resident of Goffstown, which is not part of the school district. "Oh, it's just a Sharpie marker. That's how it starts. You branded your kids. … In World War II, we said: 'Never again.' But here we are."

It was the first in-person public meeting held by the board after New Hampshire's COVID-19 emergency orders ended.

The next night, at another school meeting, some parents spoke out in support of the district, acknowledging the difficult choices the officials have been facing amid the pandemic.

“This is a global pandemic," said Mary Ann Cappiello, a mother of a student in Stratham. "We have no blueprint for it.”

Contributing: Erin Richards and Alia Wong, USA TODAY; Taylor Seely, Joshua Bowling, Renata Cló, Paulina Pineda and Richard Ruelas, Arizona Republic; Lily Altavena, Detroit Free Press; Justin Murphy, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle; Alexander LaCasse, Portsmouth Herald; The Associated Press

Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller

Foreign investors are ditching China. Russia's war is the latest trigger

A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.

Hong Kong (CNN Business) Investors are ditching China on an unprecedented scale as a cocktail of political and business risks, and rising interest rates elsewhere, make the world's second biggest economy a less attractive place to keep their money.

China witnessed $17.5 billion worth of portfolio outflows last month, an all-time high, according to most recent data from the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The US-based trade association called this capital flight by overseas investors "unprecedented," especially as there were no similar outflows from other emerging markets during this period. The outflows included $11.2 billion in bonds, while the rest were equities.

Data from the Chinese government also showed a record bond-market retreat by foreign investors in recent months. Overseas investors offloaded a net 35 billion yuan ($5.5 billion) of Chinese government bonds in February, the largest monthly reduction on record, according to China Central Depository and Clearing. The sell-off accelerated in March, hitting a new high of 52 billion yuan ($8.1 billion).

"China's support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine was clearly the catalyst for capital to leave China," said George Magnus, an associate at the China Centre at Oxford University and former chief economist for UBS.

Geopolitical risks

"There is nervousness about China's ambiguous, but Russia-leaning stance on the Ukraine conflict, which raises worries that China could be targeted by sanctions if it helps Russia," said Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who has studied China's economy and US-China relations.

The war in Ukraine has also heightened concerns about the risk that China could increase its military force against Taiwan, triggering a massive flight of capital from the Asian island.

But geopolitical tension is not the only reason behind the exodus. The rate hike in the United States and China's strict Covid-related lockdowns have also played a role in scaring investors.

And the yuan hit a six-month low against the US dollar. The US Federal Reserve is increasing interest rates for the first time since 2018 to tame inflation, while the People's Bank of China has entered an easing cycle to bolster its faltering economy. That means China looks less attractive to investors when compared with the United States. Earlier this month, yields on China's 10-year government bond fell below US Treasury yields for the first time in 12 years.And the yuan hit a six-month low against the US dollar.

"The rise in interest rates, especially in the US, makes the nominal return associated with Chinese fixed income assets less attractive on a relative basis," Chorzempa said.

Furthermore, Beijing's unwavering commitment to its zero Covid policy has taken a massive economic toll, and increased uncertainties about future growth.

"The economy is enfeebled and being made worse by government actions and by zero Covid policies," said Magnus.

JUST WATCHED 'The city completely lost its shine': Expats vent about Shanghai's strict Covid measures Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH 'The city completely lost its shine': Expats vent about Shanghai's strict Covid measures 03:38

China's economy slowed sharply in March — consumption slumped for the first time in more than a year, while unemployment in 31 major cities surged to a record high — as escalating Covid lockdowns in Shanghai and other major cities severely hit growth and supply chains.

Some economists are even talking about the possibility of a recession this quarter, as Beijing looks determined to hold on to its zero Covid policy despite the hefty price.

A number of investment banks have slashed their forecasts for China's full-year growth in the past week. The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday cut its growth forecast for China to 4.4%, down from 4.8%, citing risks from Beijing's strict zero Covid policy. This is well below China's official forecast of around 5.5%.

Confusion about the future

With these worries mounting, some fund managers and analysts have started questioning whether they should invest in China at all.

"China is seeing deep foreign capital outflows as doubts increase regarding its basic investability," said Brock Silvers, managing director for Kaiyuan Capital, a private equity investment firm based in Shanghai.

The pandemic is not the only reason behind China's slowdown. A lot of the country's current economic pain can be traced back to the sweeping regulatory crackdown on the private sector, which was unleashed by President Xi Jinping in 2020. There are fears that the government will continue to clampdown on sectors ranging from education to technology this year.

"Global investors don't want to play regulatory guessing games or worry that tomorrow's news may deplete another otherwise attractive company or business model," Silvers said.

The speed and ferocity with which authorities have acted against private enterprise have startled even the closest China watchers.

The Nasdaq Golden Dragon index, a popular index that tracks more than 90 US-listed Chinese companies, lost 31% in the third quarter of 2021, the worst quarter on record. It then shed another 14% in the final quarter of last year. By comparison, the S&P 500 rose 0.2% and 11% respectively in the third and fourth quarters of last year. The Nasdaq Composite also surged 8% in the final quarter of 2021.

Some of the money flowing out of China may have gone into US dollar assets, while there is also "a notable switch from China to India," according to Qi Wang, chief investment officer for MegaTrust Investment in Hong Kong.

Shrinking appetite

The crackdown on the private sector has also impacted private equity funds that focus on China.

Funds that raise US dollars to invest in China only attracted $1.4 billion in the first quarter of 2022, down 70% from the previous quarter, according to Preqin, a London-based investment data firm.

A separate survey by Bain & Company showed that Greater China-focused private equity funds attracted $28 billion in new funding for the second half of last year, down 54% from the first half, as global investors are increasingly concerned about political and economic uncertainty in the Chinese market.

"Looking ahead, about 55% of respondents expect the [fundraising] situation to be more challenging in next 12 months," said Kai Zhong, a manager on the China Private Equity team at Bain & Company.

On the fence

However, while bond and equity funds may be slashing their exposure to China, there's evidence that global companies are continuing to invest in Chinese businesses.

Foreign direct investment inflows to China hit a record high of $173 billion in 2021, up 20% from the previous year, according to data from China's Ministry of Commerce.

Chorzempa noted that the record FDI came even though "the regulatory uncertainty and a darkening view among policymakers outside of China was already highly salient."

"So it is not clear whether the data from the last two months represents a paradigm shift or more of a temporary recalibration to a still very strong investment relationship, especially with Europe," he said.

According to an annual survey conducted by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China last year, only 9% of nearly 600 European companies operating in China planned on shifting any current or planned investment out of China, the lowest share on record.

Still, there are signs that some of them have become anxious about China's zero Covid policy.

Earlier this week, China's commerce minister Wang Wentao met with a few foreign chambers to discuss the impact of the country's zero Covid policy.

Jens Hildebrandt, executive director of the German Chamber of Commerce in North China, told CNN Business that the participants raised some pressing issues member companies are facing related to the Covid-containment strategy, especially in Shanghai.

An ongoing lockdown in Shanghai — a major business and manufacturing hub — has forced most businesses to shut down for weeks, threatening to disrupt key supply chains for autos and electronics. It has also made port delays worse and forced the suspension of many passenger flights, sending air freight rates soaring and putting even more pressure on global supply chains.

"The current policy with lockdowns leading to productions stops, logistic and supply chain disruptions and restrictions on the movement of people do not only pose a short-term concern, but will leave their marks on the long run," Hildebrandt said in an emailed response to CNN Business.

"As foreign companies are suffering economically, we are looking for clear signals on how the Chinese government will help to ease the burden through relief programs," he added.

USS Arizona: The men who survived

Shaun McKinnon

The Republic | azcentral.com

GRASS VALLEY, Calif.

Lou Conter is telling the story of the night his patrol bomber was shot down seven miles off the coast of New Guinea, dumping the seaplane's 10-man crew into the Pacific Ocean.

The crew was not alone in the water.

"We had 10 or 12 sharks around us all the time," Conter says. "I told the men, 'If a shark comes close, hit it in the nose with your fist as hard as you can.'"

The men stayed afloat until another plane saw the burning wreckage and tossed out a life raft. The exhausted crew dragged ashore an hour later and hid in the jungle, fearful they would be captured by Japanese soldiers. The next night, an American PT boat retrieved all 10 men.

As Conter told it, the story wasn't about punching sharks, or skulking in the jungle or chasing shadows to the waiting rescue boat. Conter was talking about survival, about coming back alive.

His time in the war started that way.

He was 20 when he escaped the burning wreckage of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. He tried to save as many injured crewmen as he could, but when the sun set on Dec. 7, 1941, he was one of just 335 sailors who did not perish.

Conter fought on through World War II, scraped past a lot of close calls, then went to Korea. After that, he started teaching U.S. troops the skills of survival, evasion, resistance and escape. He wrote a training manual whose precepts the Navy still follows. Today, he tries to pass on what he knows to students of history.

At 93, he is one of the last survivors of the attack on the Arizona. He endured what he did, he says, because that was his job. And that's what he told every soldier and airman who took his courses.

Whatever happens, find a way to survive.

Conter was stationed on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor in September 1941, when he turned 20. He and a buddy had been talking about their future in the Navy.

"Lou, let's go to flight school," Conter's buddy said one day.

"We won't get in," Conter said. "We're right-arm rates." At the time, sailors wore patches designating their rates, the enlisted expression of rank, on the right or left sleeve, depending on their assignment. Aviators most often arose from left-arm rates.

Conter had made friends with a young lady in Honolulu. Her father was an engineer and a top executive for a dredging company with a big Navy contract. Conter was at the young lady's house one day when her father received an important visitor: Admiral William Calhoun, the commander of base force for the Pacific Fleet.

Calhoun quizzed Conter about his posting, his job on the ship. Conter told the admiral he was interested in flight school, but doubted he would earn admission.

Calhoun told Conter to put in for the assignment. A few weeks later, Conter and his buddy passed a flight test at sea and on Nov. 1, they got their orders: Report to Navy flight school in Pensacola, Fla.

Two weeks later, the Arizona's captain called the two sailors in and told them the ship was headed back to Long Beach in early December. They could ride to the mainland then and leave for Florida.

Their orders were lost on the Arizona when the battleship sank on Dec. 7. Conter and his buddy waited for new instructions, but heard nothing.

In early January, Conter visited his young lady friend again and again, Admiral Calhoun was there.

"I thought you'd be in flight school," he said.

Conter told him about the lost orders. Three days later, he and his buddy were on a ship to San Francisco and then a train to Pensacola.

Conter got his wings in November 1942. He was soon flying one of the Navy's Black Cats, a squadron of long-range patrol bombers painted black for night missions.

The Black Cats flew surveillance, search and rescue, sea patrol, but they proved especially valuable for nighttime assaults and nuisance raids on Japanese submarines and ships. The planes could fly at low altitudes, then buzz upward for a bombing run, confounding enemy gunners trying to calculate speed and distance.

The crews were based on tender ships moored in secluded harbors. Conter served on the San Pablo and Half Moon. The planes took off and landed on the water; the pilots tied up to buoys near the ship.

"We'd leave at 5:30 in the evening and stay out 12 or 14 hours, then return in the morning," Conter said. "Sometimes, we'd come back, eat, then sleep on the beach."

Conter's crews flew missions across the South Pacific: New Guinea, Borneo, New Britain, the coast off Perth, Australia.

The crews learned the routines of the Japanese ships. The best time for a bombing raid was after 1 a.m., when the ship was quiet.

"We wouldn't get much fire back and by the time they sounded general quarters, we were on our way," Conter said. "Sometimes they'd get shooting at you and you'd look at the shells and they looked like they were going to hit you. Then they'd go by."

Conter's plane hadn't been out long in September 1943 when enemy bullets pierced one of their rear hatches and hit a parachute flare. The flare exploded and started a fire, which forced the plane into the water.

"Say your prayers, men, we're seven miles off shore and we're in 10, 15-foot swells," one of the officers said as the crew abandoned the plane. "I don't think we'll ever be able to swim to shore."

"Baloney," Conter replied. "Knock it off. Just stay together, hold hands and kick slowly 'cause there'll be sharks around. If a shark comes too close, hit it in the nose with your fist as hard as you can."

The men helped one another, holding up anyone who weakened. Not long after, a second plane dropped a life raft and all 10 of the crew made to shore and, the next night, back to the base.

In late 1943, Conter flew a mission to rescue more than 200 coast watchers in New Guinea. Coast watchers were military intelligence operatives who gathered information about enemy activities on islands across the South Pacific.

The planes flew up the Sepik River from the northern coast of New Guinea. The river wound through dense vegetation, leaving 15 or 20 feet of clearance on each side of the plane. If a plane crashed, crocodiles awaited in the river.

"In three days, we rescued 219 coast watchers without losing anybody," Conter said. "The Japanese were only a mile away. It was one of the biggest rescues in World War II, but no one knew about it because everything was top secret in those days."

In Korea, Conter flew 29 missions, but his work in Naval intelligence left him vulnerable if the North Koreans captured him, so he was shipped to Washington, D.C.

He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander in February 1954, the rank he held until he retired. His work turned toward survival training in a new military program called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

Conter helped establish training bases in Florida and California and in 1965, he returned to Pearl Harbor to write training materials for troops headed to Vietnam.

He had stopped at Pearl Harbor more than a decade earlier, on his way to a posting in Korea. A platform marked the wreckage of the USS Arizona. Conter and others in his group boarded a boat to go out to the platform and see his old ship.

"We got halfway there and I told them to turn around," Conter said. "I wasn't going out there. I couldn't."

In 1967, Conter retired from the Navy. More than 20 years earlier, he had earned his real estate license in California and had maintained it. He settled in Palm Springs and built a career as a real estate developer, buying up land for commercial and residential projects.

That same year, he met his wife, Valerie, in Palm Springs. Her sister knew Jack Warner, the film studio mogul, and invited Valerie to a movie premiere party Warner was hosting in Palm Springs for his latest project, "Camelot".

Conter attended the same event and was seated next to Valerie. They struck up a conversation and, after a brief courtship, married.

Today, Lou and Valerie Conter live in a two-level house at the end of a winding road on a golf course in Grass Valley, a mountain town about 60 miles outside Sacramento.

Tall pines tower over the house. Deer and rabbits wander the hillside. Golfers play through 50 yards from Conter's driveway.

"I'm going to be back out there one of these days," Conter said, his voice wistful as he watches a foursome trying to stay on the greens. Conter's doctor has sidelined him for now for health reasons, but he is certain he will return soon.

He took up golf seriously in Palm Springs and played in the Bob Hope Classic six times, once on a team with crooner Johnny Mathis. He keeps a photo from that tournament on a bookshelf in an alcove off the kitchen.

On the same bookshelf sit mementos from his time on the Arizona. Medals. Photographs. A painting of the Arizona hangs on the wall of a sitting room. He keeps a folder of newspaper clippings, magazine stories and copies of a telegram.

"Here's the one that told my mother I was missing in action on the Arizona," he says. It is dated Dec. 21, 1941.

"The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son Louis Anthony Counter quartermaster third class US Navy is missing following action in the performance of his duty."

The telegram, which misspelled Conter's last name, promises further information and asks his family not to divulge Conter's posting.

A second telegram, dated Jan. 6 reported that Conter was alive and would contact his family.

"I'd already sent word, even before the first one got there," he says. "So they knew."

Though Conter turned around the first time he ventured toward the sunken Arizona, he has been back since, to see it with other survivors.

He joined the USS Arizona Reunion Association and stays in touch with a few of the remaining survivors. One, Joe Langdell, lives about 40 miles away in Yuba City.

He keeps up with what the military does, and some of it irritates him. Discipline seems less important than it was in his day. Too many strategic decisions come down from Washington instead of from the commanders on the ground.

And he has watched with dismay the changes in survival training. He once helped design programs that sent soldiers into the wilds for days or weeks at a time. Now, some courses require less than a week of field time.

"You can't get a guy hungry in three or four days," Conter says.

But there are moments when he knows what he did meant something. His old co-pilot in the New Guinea days was asked once if he'd had survival training for the war.

"He said, 'I had survival training in the ocean. We had survival training on the job. And my co-pilot, Lou Conter, saved my life.'"

Conter stares at his hands.

"Some things," he says, "you don't know about what they'll mean until years later."

LAS VEGAS

Once a month or so, Clarendon Hetrick's phone rings with a call from Utah. On the other end of the line is an old shipmate from the USS Saratoga, the aircraft carrier where Hetrick worked as a mechanic through most of World War II.

For an hour or so, the two men talk. They catch up. They trade stories. Not war stories, usually, not unless one of them has had it out with a doctor or a pushy clerk. Just stories, the kind buddies tell each other.

"He's there anytime I call him," Hetrick says. "He's there for me. I guess he'd do anything he could for me. He's more like family than just a friend."

Hetrick, who is 91, has outlived most of the men he knew on the Saratoga. He is one of nine living survivors from the attack on the USS Arizona, the battleship he boarded in 1941 when he was 17.

He will answer questions about that December day when he escaped the burning wreckage of the Arizona, reciting as many of the details as he can remember. The new shoes he left on the deck of the sinking ship, the ones he intended to retrieve later. The shock of jumping into a harbor knowing he couldn't swim.

But he kept most of it to himself until he started meeting up with other survivors, years after he retired from the military.

"I was always wanting to learn more when I was younger," says Hetrick's younger son, Robert, who lives not far from his dad in Las Vegas. "But I had a brother in Vietnam who didn't want to talk about it at all, so I guess I realized if they want to talk, they'll talk. That was the way it was."

Hetrick shrugs, trying to get comfortable in the recliner. "It just didn't appeal to me to bring it up," he says.

Fires still burned on the broken USS Arizona the morning after the Japanese ambush. Hetrick slept on the battleship USS Tennessee, which had been moored just ahead of the Arizona along Ford Island.

The Tennessee took hits in the attack, but two of the armor piercing bombs, the kind that sunk the Arizona, failed to detonate. Debris from the Arizona showered the Tennessee's stern and started fires, but the vessel stayed afloat.

Hetrick took a motor launch to the receiving station on shore, where he and other survivors were allowed to shower and given a change of clothes. The men followed orders in a fog of wonderment and confusion.

"We didn't hear much from the outside at first," Hetrick said. "It hadn't really sunk in what had happened."

The Navy began assigning sailors to new postings. Hetrick was sent to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier. The ship remained anchored outside Pearl Harbor for most of a month as U.S. commanders planned their next move against the Japanese in the South Pacific.

One day, a Navy officer came on board and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer for an assignment in the aviation section. Hetrick thought about it. He liked the idea of working as an aircraft mechanic, so he volunteered.

"They gave me 30 minutes to get off the ship and catch a transport to San Diego for training," he said. "It didn't take me that long. I had one pair of dungarees and that was it, that and a towel and shaving gear."

The Lexington sailed out of Pearl Harbor not long after. It never returned, crippled in the Battle of the Coral Sea and scuttled by the Navy to keep the enemy from salvaging her.

After about six months of training in San Diego, Hetrick returned to Honolulu and joined the USS Saratoga, the sister ship of the Lexington. He worked on board as a mechanic for a torpedo squadron and ended up in charge of the hydraulic shop.

The Saratoga sailed across the South Pacific, to Guam, the Philippines, around New Guinea. Hetrick was on board during battles at Midway and Wake Island and for the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima early in 1945. The Saratoga was attacked by six Japanese suicide bombers within about 24 hours.

"I put on two life jackets," Hetrick said. "I told another kid if they come back again tonight, I'm leaving."

Hetrick earned a Purple Heart for wounds during one of the bombing raids.

The Saratoga had returned to Pearl Harbor by the time the Japanese surrendered. The Navy loaded 5,000 bunks on board, along with a row of portable latrines, and the Saratoga sailed to San Francisco, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge with toilet paper streamers and thousands of sailors who needed something to do.

Hetrick was still just 21 by then, but a seasoned sailor who shared little in common with the 17-year-old kid who left high school and joined the Navy on his parents' signature.

"I didn't have the slightest idea what would happen when I signed up," he said. "I decided I'd do whatever they told me to. When they said, 'grab your sea bags and let's go,' I did."

When he first arrived at Pearl Harbor, Hetrick wasn't even old enough to buy a beer until he found a place where they didn't ask questions if a guy was in a service uniform.

Now, stateside again, Hetrick reported to a Navy station in San Diego, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Jeanne. As his stint was about to end, the Navy decided to transfer him back to Pearl Harbor. He asked if Jeanne could come with him.

"They said, 'If you re-enlist, we'll send her over.' I said, 'You send her over, I'll re-enlist.' I'd been told things like that before. They wouldn't send her over so I didn't re-enlist."

But Hetrick couldn't find work, so inside of six months, he signed up for the Navy Reserve. He was sent to the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station up the coast in Orange County.

In 1949, the newly created U.S. Air Force was trying to fill it out its ranks with experienced support crews, almost begging for mechanics who knew the aircraft. Hetrick saw a new opportunity and joined.

"On the day I swore into the Air Force, I was still in my Navy uniform," he said. "Three months later, I was in Korea."

He worked his way up to crew chief on a squadron of B-26 bombers,

After 18 months overseas, he returned to Langley Field in Virginia. ("Two of us with the same rank were up for the same kind of job," he said. "He wanted the east coast, I wanted the west coast. He got the west coast and I got the east coast. So you see how that works.")

From Virginia, he went to Utah, to France and then to Albuquerque, where he retired in November 1961.

He was on his own once again, he and his young family. They moved to Modesto, Calif., where he got a job driving a produce truck in the fruit orchards.

"They paid me by the day," he said. "After 36 hours, I still hadn't put in a day. I asked the boss, 'how many hours is in a day for you?' He said, 'whatever I can get out of you.' I quit. I wasn't working for nothing."

He hired on with a farm labor contractor and within a year, he and a guy he worked with started their own business, contracting with the orchard owners to harvest crops. They covered the growing seasons: cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, grapes.

The venture was working out well. Until his partner ran off with all the money.

Hetrick recovered. He built a reputation as a guy who could bring in the harvest on time.

Around 2005, he and Jeanne moved to Bullhead City. A few years after that, they left for Las Vegas, where their son, Bob, and his family help them get around.

Las Vegas seems to like Hetrick. He was at a restaurant last summer and someone noticed his USS Arizona cap. He didn't have to pay for dinner.

Hetrick turns a rusted chunk of metal over in his hands, running his fingers along the curves and edges. It is a piece of rigging used to secure a mooring line from a ship.

From the USS Arizona.

He first visited the Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor on the 50th anniversary of the attack and has returned since.

"It gets your breath when you first see it," he says. "It's hard to explain." He thinks back. "You know, you can see where I came out of, the hatchway. There's a little air bubble. It's the same place where the oil is leaking" — oil stores aboard the ship that, even today, still seep to the surface — "that's where I got out from below."

In 2006, Hetrick returned to Pearl Harbor for the 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack. He had visited before, but this trip meant more. He brought all of his family: his wife Jeanne, his three sons and their families. And he was allowed to visit a part of the Arizona few people ever see.

During construction of the memorial, the Navy sliced off pieces of the Arizona's wreckage to make room for the structure that sits above the sunken ship today. The pieces – the largest is about as long as a bus – sit in a salvage yard on the Waipi'o Peninsula on Oahu. The Navy occasionally cuts away small bits of the wreckage for memorials.

For Hetrick, the section of mooring line links him to those final moments of the Arizona. He will tell his story if he's asked and he will remember details along the way.

"I remember hearing explosions at first," he says. "It sounded like someone shooting guns. You don't fire guns in port, so I ran out real quick to see what was happening. I saw one airplane, with a big red meatball on the side. Nobody could debate what that was, no question about it."

He remembers the crewman trying to climb a ladder to escape through a hatchway on the deck. The man told him later he had broken both his hips in one of the explosions and had survived only because Hetrick was there to urge him on.

Hetrick still likes to talk about the new shoes he bought the day before the attack in Honolulu. As he prepared to jump off the burning ship, he took the shoes off and set them on the quarterdeck.

"I left them there and hoped to get them back," he says. "I ain't seen 'em since."

He remembers when the order was given to abandon ship. He jumped into the harbor, even though he had never passed his swimming test.

"When somebody says get out of here and you're on a hundred tons of ammunition, well, you don't question it," he says. "If somebody in authority said do something back then, you didn't question it. I think that's what kept me living to this day."

He's not sure he'd have learned that lesson if he hadn't enlisted in the Navy. He says that decision was the best thing he could have done.

"I'd do it a hundred times more," he says.

PROVO, Utah

Ken Potts eases around the side of the pool table, waving toward items like a museum tour guide in a back room.

"This shows where all the ships were," he says, pointing at a map depicting Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. "There's the battleships … there's the Nevada, the Arizona, the Tennessee, the West Virginia, Maryland, the Oklahoma. The California was way down here."

He stops in front of a newspaper, the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin with the headline: "WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES"

"That's one of the first extras that was put out that day," Potts says. "I bought it at the receiving station in Pearl Harbor. It's in good shape for a paper."

Farther down the paneled wall hangs a painting of the USS Arizona, the battleship Navy recruit Potts boarded in December 1939. By 1941, he worked the cranes on the ship, a job that entailed retrieving the Arizona's small seaplanes after they landed on the water.

He points out the cranes and the locations along the ship where he would tie up the motor boats he piloted to fetch supplies and ferry sailors to and from shore. He gazes at the picture.

"They were saying, when it first started, some of the ones whose station was up here – "

He traces his finger up onto the main forward mast, to the crow's nest and the bridge. He clears his throat. "They tried to jump off. Some of 'em made it, some of 'em landed on the deck. That was the end of it."

A moment passes. He returns his attention to the cranes and the catapults that flung the seaplanes into flight.

"Once after we crossed the equator, one of the planes came back," he says. "The sea was real rough when it came in and the sharks started gathering around. They called the Marines out with rifles to protect the plane and the guys while we hauled it in."

Potts was returning to the Arizona with fresh produce when the first Japanese bombers dove into Pearl Harbor. He climbed aboard the ship, ducking to avoid bullets from the gunner planes. He helped rescue some of his shipmates. Seventy-three years later, he is one of just nine survivors of the attack on the Arizona.

He keeps the mementos from his experience – the maps, the photos, the clippings, the medals, the painting – in a room behind a door on the side wall of the living room in the house where he has lived for 54 years. He doesn't like to talk about the attack. Sometimes he can't control his emotions, so he declines speaking requests.

But he is proud of his service, of the other sailors on the Arizona. And there's a trophy in the corner the paneled room that means as much as anything else there.

A few weeks after the war started, sometime in early 1942, Potts opened a letter from his mother. Why is the FBI checking up on you, she wanted to know. Someone from the bureau had been asking questions. He heard the same stories from his grandmother and his aunts.

He didn't know what to tell them. It scared him a little. Potts was working aboard an oil tanker, making short runs out of the harbor to refuel ships anchored off the coast. In the chaotic days following the Dec. 7 ambush, the Navy wasn't letting ships into the harbor, fearful the Japanese might send in more bombers.

Finally, after a few weeks on the tanker, Potts was handed a new assignment. He would work in the port director's office, delivering sealed packets to the captains of Navy ships. Inside the packets were the captains' new orders, military secrets, classified information that required clearance to handle.

That's why the FBI was nosing around me, Potts thought.

"These captains of the ships, when they left the states, they had no idea where they were going, just that they're going via Pearl Harbor," Potts said.

He resumed one of his old jobs from the Arizona, piloting motor launches from the receiving station out to the Navy ships.

Potts was based out of the port director's office – there were two, one at the harbor, one on the ninth floor of the Aloha Tower in downtown Honolulu – but he logged most of his hours at the controls of the motor boat, a Jeep or a station wagon.

"The station wagon was for the captains of some of the ships that would come in," he said. "Not Navy ships, other ships. The Navy captain who lived on Waikiki Beach gave a lot of parties and invited these guys. I had to take them to the parties and sit there until it was over."

The parties sometimes dragged into the early morning hours.

"It was boring," Potts says. "But it was a lot better than being shot at."

He tried to keep his thoughts on the work in the office. He tried not to remember the days after the attack. The day when they assigned him and a crew of divers to a motor launch and sent them to the Arizona to remove bodies of dead sailors.

"When they dropped that bomb that made our ammunition explode, it dang near broke the ship in two, so we couldn't go anywhere forward of that," he says. "We took all the bodies we could find."

When he reaches that part of his story, he stops. He can't relive those images anymore. He describes the store of booze they pulled out of safe and the money.

"One day our boat was stacked with two dollar bills," he said. "They paid everybody in two dollar bills back then. We hauled it all back in."

Potts stayed in Honolulu until the end of the war. He finally received his orders to return to the states. He would sail to San Francisco on one of the cruise ships refitted to move troops, the Lurline, or maybe the Matsonia.

As he was packing, a buddy warned him that his possessions would be searched at the port in San Francisco. If they found anything that belonged to the Navy or hadn't been approved, they'd take it.

Potts picked up the Colt 45 he'd found on Ford Island on Dec. 7, 1941. The gun took away some of the terror he had felt from the moment he saw the first bomber, the panic he felt when he found the armories on board the ship locked. With a gun, he could defend himself. He had held on to it through the war.

But he didn't want to start his civilian life in the brig, so he left it in Honolulu.

"We got into San Francisco," he says, "and they never even opened my bags. Never would've found it."

He bought another gun in the states and he is never far from it. A pistol sits on top of his television at home. He keeps it with him when he travels. And he keeps it loaded.

"It ain't worth a damn if it ain't loaded," he says.

Potts returned to Illinois in late 1945 to await his formal discharge, hanging out in Chicago. He was still active, so would report to the Navy Pier each morning to check a list for the names of sailors who had been given duties for the day. His name never appeared and he would leave for the day.

"I came back to the pier one morning and my name was on the list to do KP work," he says. Kitchen patrol. Mess hall duty. Peeling potatoes.

"I went and found the head guy and by the time I got through explaining things to him," Potts says, "my name was never on that list again."

His mother had moved to Decatur, Ill., by then, so he followed and took a job at a hardware store. He started chatting up a regular customer, a contractor, and got a job building houses.

"What houses they built!" Potts says, shaking his head. "That lumber was so damn green then, we used to kid we had to shoot the squirrels out of it."

He wasn't happy where he was, so he loaded up his big 12-cylinder Lincoln Zephyr and headed west. He stopped in the small town of Payson, Utah.

"They said what a wonderful place it was to live, with jobs and everything, so I bought a little place up in Spanish Fork," he says, "I'm still looking for that easy money."

With his experience running cranes on the Arizona, Potts figures he could have landed a decent job at the Geneva Steel operation, but he didn't want to work shifts, so he worked as a carpenter again and eventually went into the used car business with a friend.

He moved to Provo and sold cars until 1990. He and his wife, Doris, have lived in the same house for 54 years.

The paneled room behind the door in the living room of the Provo house is filled with trophies of almost any imaginable sort. Two deer racks (his wife shot one, his son the other). Guns. Knives. A bow. An impressive collection of restaurant menus from 30 years of cross-country searches for used cars.

And in the back corner, a real trophy. It sits a little higher than most items, but not necessarily on a platform. It fit in that location. And it holds deep meaning for Potts, even though he did nothing to win it.

Potts had not returned to Honolulu in the decades since he left for San Francisco in 1945. He wasn't ready to see it all again, to sharpen the memories he'd tried to dull.

In 2006, one of his sons offered to take Potts to Hawaii for the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. He stayed on the 17th floor of a hotel on Waikiki Beach. He visited the memorial and was relieved to see the builders got it right.

"It's one of the best actual memorials I've seen," he says. "It's where the war started."

Five years later, in 2011, he got a call from the band director at Timpview High School in Provo. The marching band had been invited to fly to Pearl Harbor and perform at activities commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack.

The band members had decided they wanted to honor survivors from that day. Would Ken be willing to go as a guest of honor? The band would cover all expenses for him and Doris.

Potts was touched. He could see the band was sincere. To prepare for the trip, they were studying World War II history, attending lectures, writing research papers. They offered to perform at a gathering of Utah survivors. How could he say no?

"Talk about treating you like royalty," he says. He was able to visit the national cemetery at an area called the Punch Bowl. He watched the band perform and stood as a survivor of the Arizona, one of the sailors who lived. He went out to the floating memorial.

"I got the lay a wreath in front of the names of the fallen," he says quietly.

When he returned home, he got another call from the band director. The band had won a trophy in one of the competitions during their stay in Honolulu. They had voted. They were dedicating it to Potts and wanted him to have it.

He squeezes past the pool table, past the photos and the maps and the medals. Here is a story he will tell, a memory he will keep.

The trophy sits on a small white base that raises it above other items on a shelf. It is about three feet tall, with a carved island figure on top and the silhouette of a Hawaiian warrior on a plaque. The inscription reads "Spirit of Aloha Award, Timpview High School Marching Band."

He touches the trophy.

"It's my pride and joy."

LA MIRADA, Calif.

For 30 years, Lauren Bruner punched a clock at a manufacturing plant south of Los Angeles, a World War II veteran in a landscape crawling with them.

No one knew much about Bruner's years in the Navy, not the early years anyway. The easy stories he'd tell. The ones that gave him nightmares, the stories from the day he nearly burned to death, he kept to himself.

Yet in a place where you couldn't cross the street without running into a war vet, Bruner was not just another ex-sailor who made it home. Only 335 men survived the bombing of the USS Arizona, the mighty battleship whose loss at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, inspired a nation to go to war.

Bruner was one of them.

By 1991, the 50th anniversary of the attack, the number of living Arizona crewmen had shrunk. Survivors' groups wanted to find all of them so their stories would not be lost.

A woman from Illinois drew Bruner's name. No one among the groups knew where he was or what he was doing, but the woman persisted. She tracked him to the Los Angeles area, then started a phone search.

Finally, she located some of Bruner's tax records and found his address and telephone number.

"No one knew where the hell I was," Bruner says. "I was here all the time. When they sent me my discharge, I just stayed here."

The woman helped connect Bruner with other survivors from the Arizona and Pearl Harbor. He finally found people who understood his experience.

"I never talked about it much then," he says. "I just didn't want to. I still get to the point when I'm talking about it, first thing you know, I go to bed at night, wake up and can't sleep for a week."

Bruner, who turned 94 in November, is now one of nine living USS Arizona crewmen who survived the ship's sinking. He has been telling his story to an author, Ed McGrath, who is working on a book and a film about Bruner's escape from a collapsing tower on the ship.

The survivors' group that found him was right, he has concluded: The stories of the Arizona should not die with the men who lived them.

"The kids coming up now have never heard of it," he says, his voice tinged with sadness and dismay. "Never heard of it."

Bruner was at his battle station in an anti-aircraft gun director, a metal box on the forward mast of the Arizona, when an armor-piercing bomb ignited the ship's powder magazine. The fireball from the explosion engulfed the six men in the box and trapped them.

A sailor on the deck of the repair ship Vestal spotted the men and threw a line across. Their skin charred and falling off, the men crawled down the line to the Vestal. Bruner was the second-to-last man to leave the sinking ship.

He won't talk much about the escape, or about the men who didn't make it across. Nightmares invade his sleep when he remembers those final moments.

From the Vestal, Bruner was taken to the USS Solace, a hospital ship in the harbor. The Solace dispatched motor boats to the Arizona to rescue wounded sailors and her crew pulled others from the water.

Bruner was burned over more than two-thirds of his body. He had taken a bullet to the back of his leg as he was climbing the tower, but the burns were far worse. He stayed aboard the Solace about a month. In January, another ship took him to San Francisco to the Navy hospital on Treasure Island.

He was treated there for four months. Before the war started, a hospital stay that long would have earned a sailor a discharge, but not anymore. He knew he was near release the day an officer came by and launched into a pep talk about the war and the Navy's role in it.

"I got another ship for you," the officer said at last.

"OK," Bruner said. "What's up with this one?"

"It's a brand new destroyer, the Coghlan, DD-606," he said, "built right here in 'Frisco."

As the war with Japan intensified, the Navy was building new warships as fast as it could. And the ships needed experienced sailors.

Bruner was put in charge of the gun batteries. The ship carried four 5-inch anti-aircraft guns and six half-inch machine guns, and, initially, five 21-inch torpedo tubes. The guns used the same type of control mechanisms Bruner had mastered on the Arizona. Sight-setters and pointers would locate targets visually and determine their distance and range. An electro-mechanical computer would aim the guns.

"I had to start training the new recruits on every machine," Bruner said. "The new ones, they didn't know beans."

Bruner looked each recruit in the eyes to determine the right job, but he wasn't testing their mettle, not yet. He wanted men with eyes set in the right place on their face. He looked for what he called medium spacing. With eyes too close or two far apart, a crewman could deliver faulty readings.

The Coghlan left San Francisco in September 1942 and sailed toward Pearl Harbor for an assignment. The ship was still a day away from Honolulu when the captain received new orders. The ship was to turn around and steam toward Alaska.

The Japanese military had established strategic outposts in the Aleutian Islands and had its eye on Alaska. Japan wanted the northern Pacific to control its shipping routes and block U.S. attacks from that direction.

The Coghlan approached the Aleutians in October, as winter was pushing fall aside. The sea turned rough, tossing the ship with 40-foot swells, bouncing the vessel like a rubber ball in a washing machine.

"When we got up into the Aleutians, we started banging on the Japanese that had already landed," Bruner said. "We'd patrol at night. They were trying to replenish submarines or send smaller ships in. We'd go out and blow them up."

By winter, temperatures plunged below zero. The Coghlan's crew battled just to keep the guns free of ice as they headed toward their next target.

"We had to have two crews, a regular crew and a stand-by crew lined up waiting," Bruner said. "We'd send two guys out to knock the icicles off the guns, then they'd high-tail it back in. By the time they were back, the icicles were forming again and two more guys would go out."

The Coghlan supported Army landings and Navy bombing runs. In March, the crew turned back Japanese forces in the Battle of Komandorski.

Late in the year, after an overhaul in San Francisco, the Coghlan returned to patrol duty off the Aleutians with a half dozen other U.S. vessels. The ships encountered a Japanese fleet, two big cruisers, six destroyers, some troop ships, and engaged.

"We lit into them, started firing on them," Bruner said. "This went on for four straight hours. We got into a run-and-gun battle. One of our cruisers, the heavy cruiser, got hit and water got into the oil. They were dead in the water."

Finally, the four U.S. destroyers were ordered to mount a torpedo run.

"We took off," Bruner said, "firing just as fast as we could. We got as close as 5,000 yards, which was point-blank for those ships. We cut the torpedoes loose."

The Americans stopped the Japanese ships and wiped out some of the top officers. The Coghlan turned back, almost spent. Another five minutes, Bruner figured, and they'd have run out of ammunition.

Bruner and the Coghlan returned to Honolulu and finished out the war in the South Pacific. The ship accompanied General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines and was anchored in the harbor off Nagasaki, Japan, when the second atomic bomb exploded.

Bruner toured Nagasaki in a Jeep with other Navy officers and chief mates. A few days later, the drove through the crumbling streets of Hiroshima. The cities were in ruins. But the war was over.

"When I got back home, my doctors here wanted to know about my medical background," Bruner said. "I would tell them. They said, 'You should have been dead a long time ago.'"

He finished his stint in the Navy in Shanghai, working shore patrol the way he did back in Honolulu. He was cut loose in San Francisco and returned to Los Angeles, where he had married a girl back in late 1942.

One day, a young fellow knocked on his door.

"Hi," he said, introducing himself. "I'm planning to marry your wife's sister, but I've got to have somebody take my place at work. I wanted to know if you could do it for a couple of weeks."

Bruner thought it an odd request. He asked what the fellow did.

"I'm a painter," he said. "A brush painter."

Bruner laughs as he remembers the conversation.

"Well, I'd brushed enough paint on that damn ship, I figured I could do it," he says. "I said, 'sure, I'll take it.' I still had to wait 29 years for that guy to come back and take his brush back."

His new employer manufactured industrial refrigeration units. Bruner started as a painter, trained as a carpenter, then helped start a new sheet-metal department. Almost three decades later, he was the plant manager, second-in-command.

Three months before he would mark 30 years with the company, he was let go, bought out like a lot other older workers in those days.

By the time the woman from Illinois found him, he was ready to face his past.

Bruner lives alone , in a post-war neighborhood in the far northern edges of Orange County. Trains run close enough to hear the horns during the day, but not close enough to make them a nuisance.

An avocado tree grows in the backyard. Bruner's neighbor, who has become a close friend and a source of transportation, picks the fruit to keep it from rotting on the ground. Long a bachelor again, Bruner has also entertained lady friends from time to time.

Bruner keeps mementos of his time on the Arizona in the sitting room. Framed medals. Photos of the ship and other survivors at reunions in Honolulu. A sign over the arched door marks the room as "Captain's Quarters."

For a long time, he didn't think he would ever return to Pearl Harbor.

Now, Bruner prepares for his next trip in the Captain's Quarters. He will meet three other survivors in Hawaii for their last reunion. He looks forward to his time with the guys from his years in the Navy.

The first couple of trips back to Hawaii were difficult. The ones after that were, too.

"It never gets easy to go back," he says.

So why go back?

"To see the people I knew back in those days," he says. "They were very good days before the war. I even had a couple of dates with girls."

His mouth quirks into a smile.

"I was on a date on that Saturday night with a gal I'd been running around with," he says. He doesn't need to say which Saturday night by now. "We're were out and around. We were going to have a date the next day.

"The next day never came."

MORRIS, Okla.

Lonnie Cook was born in this rural town south of Tulsa, not long after it was founded as a stop on the Ozark and Cherokee Central Railway. Only a few hundred people lived there then. Today, the population can almost reach 1,500 when everyone is home.

Cook enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and was assigned to the USS Arizona, one of the largest battleships in the fleet with a crew that, at full complement, numbered more than 1,500.

About a year after he boarded the ship, he ran into a young recruit named Clyde Williams, a fellow from Okmulgee, Okla., a few miles down the road from Morris. All those sailors from all those places and here was a guy who was practically a neighbor.

"I was back here on leave before the war started and he was here too," Cook says. "We picked up a couple of girls and made the rounds. Then we had to go back."

Cook was a gunner's mate on the Arizona. Williams was in the Arizona's band.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Cook was changing clothes at his locker, savoring the thought of a day in Honolulu with the $60 he'd won in a craps game the night before. Williams was on deck, tuning up to play for colors, an early call after the previous day's fleet Battle of the Bands on shore.

Minutes later, the Japanese attacked and the Arizona was on fire, sinking beneath the surface.

Cook made it off alive. He returned after the war to his home along the railway in eastern Oklahoma. By then, he'd seen the world, witnessed history before it was history. His ships steamed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Africa. He fought with other sailors in the Battle of Midway and watched the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

Back on land, Cook followed welding jobs from Kentucky and Pennsylvania to New Jersey and Long Island, west to North Dakota and Wisconsin and finally to a ranch house in Salinas, Calif., where he raised a family and stayed put for almost 30 years.

But one day and one place in Cook's 94 years seem to embody all the rest, the day in December 1941 when the young sailor from Oklahoma escaped the ship that sent America to war.

Seven decades later, he is one of nine living survivors from the Arizona. His story is always in demand, though he'd just as soon not tell it in front of a lot of people. He remembers all the details and most of what happened later.

And he still likes to talk about that other young fellow from Oklahoma, the one who didn't make it home.

When he left Morris the first time in 1939 after high school, Cook wasn't sure where he'd end up. Jobs were few, so he set off for Warner, Okla, with the idea of playing football at Connors State Agricultural College.

"They told me the team was already picked," he said. "I said goodbye and left."

His mother suggested Hills Business College in Oklahoma City. He enrolled, but after a couple of weeks, the noisy streetcars and the police sirens kept him up all night.

"I went back and told my mother I wasn't going up there anymore," he said.

By April 1940, the Navy seemed like a good idea and by summer, he was on board the Arizona, stationed at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

He was assigned a battle station in the No. 3 gun turret. His job was to put the primer in the big 14-inch gun. Other crewmen would roll out the shell, use a mechanical device to ram it in, then load four bags of powder behind it. The primer went in last, before the end of the gun was sealed shut.

"From down inside, it wasn't too bad when they fired it," Cook said. "It was like a hard jolt."

Cook made it to his battle station on Dec. 7, 1941, but the Arizona was moored in a cramped harbor and couldn't have fired the big guns even in a prolonged assault. Cook and the other men stayed below deck until the smoke from a fire forced them to leave.

The bomb that shattered the Arizona's bow exploded as Cook and the others climbed out of the turret. He stepped off the deck into a motor launch as the ship was sinking.

The next morning, the Arizona was still burning as oil flowed out of her full tanks. No one seemed to be in charge on Ford Island, where Cook had spent the night. He met up with some of the guys from the turret crew and they hopped a boat to shore, where there was a call for volunteers to join the Navy's destroyers.

"We said we'd volunteer if they'd put two or three of us together on the same ship," he said. "They agreed."

Cook was assigned to the USS Patterson, then two months later, transferred to the Aylwin, a destroyer that had been moored at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 and engaged the bombers as the attack began.

In February, the Aylwin was part of a U.S. task force preparing for a raid on a Japanese base at Raubal, on the island of New Britain near Australia. Enemy patrol planes spotted the ships and the raid was canceled. As the ships turned around, a squadron of enemy bombers appeared. The ships sent up their own planes and turned back the assault.

In May 1942, the Aylwin joined a task force in the Coral Sea with the USS Lexington, one of the Navy's early aircraft carriers. On the morning of May 8, the fighting intensified as American aircraft tried to turn back the enemy planes.

Japanese torpedo bombers hit the Lexington and crippled the big ship. Explosions rocked the vessel and fires burned into the evening. The crew was evacuated and another U.S. destroyer scuttled the Lexington to keep the Japanese from capturing her.

Years later, at a reunion in Tucson, Cook learned that one of his buddies from the Arizona had been sent to the Lexington and was in the Coral Sea when the carrier was attacked. He had settled in New Mexico with his family.

Cook got the buddy's telephone number and tried to call him. The buddy wasn't home, but his son-in-law answered.

"Can you tell me what ship did he go on after the Arizona?" Cook asked.

"The Lexington," the son-in-law said.

"Was he on it when it sunk?" Cook asked.

"Yes, sir, he was."

Cook never got a chance to catch up with his buddy, but marveled at the connections he seemed to make from his short stint aboard the Arizona.

A month after the Coral Sea battle, Cook's ship was part of the American forces in the critical Battle of Midway. After that, he steamed north to Kodiak, Alaska, where other Navy ships were trying to turn back Japanese inroads throughout the strategically important Aleutian Islands.

Before the year was out, Cook was sent to gunnery school in Washington, D.C., and to the South Boston Navy Yard, where he joined the new destroyer Pringle on its shakedown cruise.

About halfway through the cruise, the Pringle was ordered to accompany the battleship Iowa to Africa, where President Roosevelt was to attend a conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Morocco.

During the conference, the Pringle sailed into the Mediterranean Sea and anchored in a river. One day, some smaller boats sailed past. One of the men started yelling.

"Is there anybody there from Oklahoma?"

There were: Cook and another crewman. The man in the boat was from Muskogee, a town about 40 miles east of Morris.

Lonnie and Marietta Cook met in Morris after the war, but the road to their home here today winds thousands of miles across the country.

Cook was discharged in 1948 in San Diego and stuck around California, where he worked as a metal finisher at Van Nuys manufacturing plant. That didn't last long and he headed back to Morris, where he met Marietta.

She likes the story of how they tied the knot. He tries to abbreviate it: "We went to California and got married."

"Tell them the rest," Marietta prompts.

"She went to California and I followed her," Lonnie says.

Marietta shakes her head. "He called me one night and said if you won't let me come to California, I found a lady who's got a new black Buick and I'm going to move to Texas."

"It was a new Mercury," Lonnie says.

"I said, 'Well, come on, then,'" Marietta says, and in 1950, they wed.

That's where the cross-country adventures begin. Cook worked in California, mostly welding jobs, until the union he belonged to called a strike. He headed east and landed in Paducah, Ky. From there, he worked jobs in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and back to New York, where he welded 20-inch gas lines going through Brooklyn.

He returned to Oklahoma again and started his own business, outfitting a one-ton Ford pickup with a winch and other equipment that let him work the oil fields. A while later, he and Marietta were on the road again, to a missile base in Sturgess, S.D., to gas lines in Wisconsin and North Dakota.

Finally, they made their way to Salinas, Calif., just inland from Monterey on the central coast. They bought a small ranch and, while Lonnie continued to work welding jobs, they grew walnuts, almonds, peaches, apples, nectarines, cherries and grapes.

"I canned 500 quarts of fruit one year," Marietta says. "I really miss it."

Lonnie finally retired from welding in 1982 and in 1994, the Cooks moved back to Morris. Lonnie had taken up trap shooting and hoped to do a little hunting back home. It turned out little was the right word. He hasn't hunted in a while, though he still reloads his own ammunition on a garage workbench.

After so many years of travel, the Cooks have settled into a more tranquil pace. They spoil their granddaughters and can now move on to a new great-granddaughter. Once a week, they motor on into Tulsa, where Marietta takes a china painting class and Lonnie wanders the aisles of sporting-goods stores.

Occasionally, they head into Okmulgee for an evening out at the One Fire, a casino operated by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Cook has returned to Pearl Harbor three times and he likes the Arizona memorial. It is respectful. He's not so fond of the crowds around Honolulu and doesn't plan to go back.

As he talks about Pearl Harbor again, other memories surface.

Cook was the gun captain on the Pringle at the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. The ship provided fire support for the Marines going ashore. Cook stood on a shelf in the gun mount with his big binoculars and watched the Marines raise the flag to mark the U.S. victory.

About a month later, Japanese suicide bombers sunk the Pringle near Okinawa.

During his voyage to Alaska, Cook remembers the flying fish, which stirred up the water like a torpedo wake. That was enough to rattle nerves on board the ship, which was at general quarters every day an hour before sundown and an hour before sunrise.

"The nights up there were already short, so I didn't get much sleep," Cook says. "That's what I'm catching up now. When she says anything, I tell her I'm catching up from the war."

A few years ago, the Cooks attended a fund-raising dinner at a local American Legion post. Cook is invited to such events occasionally and sometimes introduced as an Arizona survivor.

At this one, he was looking around the room and he saw a picture of a sailor way back in the back, in a setting arranged like a memorial. He squinted and thought about where he was.

"That must be old Clyde Williams," he thought, the Arizona band member killed at Pearl Harbor.

He walked back there. Sure enough.

It was Clyde.

ROSWELL, N.M.

His name was Cactus Jack and to his fans in southeastern New Mexico, he was the dulcet-voiced host of Sagebrush Serenade, a program of country music on KSWS radio.

He was in the studio on Valentine's Day 1955 when a nervous young man walked in. He was the opening act for country superstar Hank Snow that night at the North High School auditorium. He had a record, a new song he was trying out.

"Would you like to listen to it?" the young man asked.

Jack shrugged. "Sure, let's see it." He put the disc on a turntable and dropped the needle.

What he heard wasn't quite country music, but he liked it and he told the kid. Song's got some zip to it, he said. He agreed to play it on his show.

The song, "Hound Dog" and the singer, Elvis Presley, both went over pretty well, the way Cactus Jack remembers it.

For a lot of people, meeting Elvis and playing one of his first records on the air might sound like one of life's truly unforgettable days. But John Anderson, the Navy chief petty officer who called himself Cactus Jack on the air, had a good head start already.

He had chased Japanese soldiers along the coast of China three years before America declared war on Japan. In World War II, he fought at Guadalcanal, in the battle of the Coral Sea, at Okinawa and Iwo Jima. He fought cold and hunger on a ship nearly dead in the ocean off Alaska.

After the war, he worked as a stuntman for Orson Welles and John Wayne and helped build Alan Ladd's house in the hills outside Hollywood.

And he was aboard on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, a pivotal moment in history, but one that struck Anderson to his core. There, he lost his twin brother

"It was a bloody catastrophe, a bloody mess," he says. "I don't think I'll ever forget what I saw that day."

Anderson always talks about his brother, Delbert "Jake" Anderson, when he tells the story of his own escape from the burning ship.

He is one of nine living survivors of the Arizona and, at 97, he has amassed a lifetime of unforgettable days.

Anderson grew up in the Red River Valley of northern Minnesota, the son of a prominent local judge. He had five brothers, including Jake, and four sisters, all grouped so close in age that paying for college wasn't practical for their folks.

As a youngster, Anderson heard stories about the Navy from his uncle, a man named Ray Stokes. Uncle Ray was nearing the end of his career in 1937 when John and Jake both decided to enlist.

John was sent from training camp in Illinois to Bremerton, Wash. He was assigned briefly to the Arizona, then to the Saratoga, an aircraft carrier, then, as the Navy tinkered once more with its troop alignment, back to the Arizona.

Before the big battleship could leave Puget Sound, Anderson volunteered for another mission, joining the small Asiatic Fleet along the coast of China.

Anderson went aboard the USS Edsall, a destroyer that supported various military action at sea and ashore. Japan and China were at war again and America was trying to protect its interests without getting involved in the conflict.

"We saved people on commercial ships on the seas, we rescued missionaries in the interior of China, we shot up a bunch of pirates," Anderson said.

At Kulangsu, an international settlement on an island off the southern Chinese coast, Anderson's unit ran into the French Foreign Legion, who had been cornered by Japanese soldiers on a high ridge.

"I'd never seen so many guys with so much guts," he said. "They were holed up behind sandbags, but they never got hit."

The Edsall sailed farther north, then headed to the Philippines, where they played baseball with a group of indigenous Moros, who had fought the United States more than 20 years earlier.

"We were told to watch out for them, these guys were assassins," Anderson said. "We made friends. We left and never fired a shot at them."

In 1940, Anderson reported to the Arizona once more, joining his brother for the first time since they had enlisted. They would serve together for a little over a year.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Anderson volunteered for duty on the Macdonough, a destroyer that downed at least one of the Japanese attack planes on Dec. 7.

The ship steamed toward the Asiatic Pacific and soon Anderson was chasing Japanese forces again, only this time the United States was at war. This time the objective was clear.

That summer, the ship joined others for the invasion at Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, one of the first major assaults against Japan by the Americans. The Macdonough stayed until September, then sailed back on patrol in the Pacific.

In the spring of 1943, the Macdonough headed north toward the Aleutian Islands, where Japan was trying to establish strategic strongholds that could control shipping lanes and thwart allied attacks on the Japanese islands.

"It was rough weather, foggy, raining cold," Anderson said. "Here we are, we can't see the enemy. We can't see our own ships. Then we got hit."

The Macdonough had collided with another destroyer, the Sicard. The ship was dead in the water. The crew unloaded anything they could do without, to keep the damaged hull above the water line. They knew the oil tanker Tippecanoe was out there, but couldn't see her.

Finally, the tanker spotted the destroyer. Anderson spoke to one of the tanker's crew about towing the Macdonough. The fellow he was talking with recognized Anderson's voice and they realized they had served together on the Yangtze Patrol before Pearl Harbor.

The tanker towed them to Adak, Alaska, and from there, another ship took the crippled destroyer to San Francisco for repairs.

Over the next year, Anderson would sail across the South Pacific, joining other ships in the American assault on the Marshall Islands, Parry Island and the Palau Islands. The Macdonough pulled picket patrol often, protecting other troops and guarding against kamikaze attacks by Japanese planes.

"We made so many landings," Anderson said. "We would go in with a landing party or we furnished artillery for the landing force. Sometimes we never landed, but we kept the line, always watching out for kamikazes."

On a fall day in 1945, John Anderson teetered on the base of a church steeple 110 feet above the ground. The steeple clock chimed and a statue of an angel wielding a sword emerged from an alcove and knocked Anderson off the steeple.

"Cut!" a director yelled. A stunt coordinator helped pull Anderson from the pile of cigarette crates that had broken his fall. Anderson had finished his first day as a Hollywood stunt man.

The job wasn't what he expected in September, when he was discharged from the Navy. He had a ticket home to Minnesota, but decided to find a place to stay and come up with a plan.

As he walked past a bar, still in his Navy uniform, a fellow popped out the door and looked Anderson up and down, checking him out more closely someone would ordinarily.

"What are you looking at?" Anderson demanded to know.

"You," the fellow said. "Are you in the Navy?"

"I was," Anderson said. "I just got discharged. The war's over."

"Would you like a job?" The fellow told him to report to the front gate of Sam Goldwyn's studio in Hollywood on Monday morning. He gave Anderson the name of a contact there.

Anderson decided he had nothing to lose. After an initial run-in with the guard at the gate ("Three weeks ago, I was shooting at people and killing them and I didn't even know who they were," he growled at the guard. "You I know.") he met his contact and not long after, he was standing in for Orson Welles in a scene from the movie "The Stranger."

It turned out most of the regular stuntmen were still in the military. The studios needed tough men who could handle dangerous situations. The job paid $700.

"Next thing you know, I'm in a movie with John Wayne," Anderson says years later. "I didn't have any speaking parts, but I was working for the studio and they paid me."

He got to know Alan Ladd, who had starred in a series of war movies. When the regular stuntmen returned and the studio cut loose the subs, Ladd hired some of them to work on his house in the Holmby Hills above Los Angeles.

At nights, Anderson was taking classes in meteorology and electronics, trying to learn skills that could help him stand out among all the returning servicemen and women.

One day, he stopped for coffee at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. He felt a tap on his shoulder. He saw Gene LaRocque, a man he'd served with aboard the Macdonough.

"Are you out of the Navy, Andy?" LaRocque asked. When Anderson said he was, his old friend was incredulous. "Andy, you had 12 years of the damnedest fighting I ever saw. You're the bravest man I ever know. You can't leave the Navy."

LaRocque took Anderson to San Pedro, where his current ship was anchored. He introduced him to other officers. By the end of the day, had persuaded Anderson to sign up for the Navy Reserve. Put in eight years at least and you'll have a pension, he promised.

Anderson would serve another 23 years before finally retiring once more.

Anderson's road to the radio booth started in Hollywood, with a screen test at a studio where he had worked. He waited for the result. You have a great voice, he was told. Why not try radio?

So he did. He started on a small station, playing organ music. An administrator at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, N.M., heard Anderson and talked him into joining the school to help improve its radio station and start a television station.

Anderson picked up and moved to New Mexico. He clashed with the station manager of the radio station and finally quit. Or got fired. Or both. That led to a job in Roswell, the Sagebrush Serenade and Elvis Presley.

"They played country music because the people here loved that," Anderson says. "Some of the ships I was on had guys who liked to play the guitar, so I knew something about it. The owner said, 'give it a name and say who are. Anything you choose is fine. You're on your own, every day.'"

As Cactus Jack, Anderson made a few concessions to his seagoing past.

"I cleaned up my language," he says, admitting he deployed a salty vocabulary, even after leaving active duty. "In the service, if you didn't use nasty words, you weren't a good sailor."

A few years later, a new station owner showed Anderson his plans to start a TV station. He said he wanted Anderson to join the on-air staff. Did he know anything about meteorology?

Anderson smiled. Did he ever. Soon, he became one of the earliest TV weathermen and an evening fixture in Roswell homes, or at least those with televisions.

Not long after he returned to Pearl Harbor near the end of the war, Anderson searched out some of the battle reports from Dec. 7, 1941. He knew his brother hadn't made it off the Arizona alive, but he didn't know much else.

He found a report by a gunner's mate. The report said most of the guys in the anti-aircraft batteries, where Jake fought, were shot down early in the assault. When the fourth bomb detonated in the powder magazine, anyone left was blown over the side.

Anderson has returned to the Arizona memorial often and has taken his family there. He has met many of his old friends and shipmates. Many have since died.

"It's always a great thing for me to see them," he says. "That's what I want to remember. The things I don't want to remember was the blood."

Although he is 97, he decided he couldn't miss a final reunion this year and he bought his tickets early. He wanted one last unforgettable day.

UPDATE: John Anderson died in November 2015, less than a year after this report.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.

Donald Stratton completed the paperwork for a concealed weapons permit at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office and approached the counter to submit fingerprints.

He was still adjusting to his new life in Colorado, hundreds of miles inland from his old home in coastal California and more than a mile higher in elevation. He had turned 90 and was starting over again.

As he waited, he had a feeling he knew what would happen, but he didn't say anything. A clerk tried to complete the process, normally a routine, if messy, step to secure the permit. She returned, puzzled.

They were having trouble reading his prints, she told Stratton. It was as if he had none.

Stratton hesitated, then confirmed her suspicion. His fingers were almost smooth, lacking all but a few of the swirls that create an identity.

Stratton told her why: He had been aboard the USS Arizona when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941. He survived, but was burned badly over two-thirds of his body. Doctors treated him and he recovered, but the his fingers never healed properly.

The clerks decided they could not send Stratton away without his permit. They found a way to take prints from the edges of his fingers, enough to satisfy the law.

As he recounts the experience, he rubs his hands together, then holds them out, turning them over. He pushes his shirtsleeves up to show his arms. He motions toward his gnarled ear. He catalogs the scars and their origin.

They are the marks of a survivor, 73 years on. They are reminders of a moment in time he can never escape, a moment he sees again and again.

"Through all that, I never did lose consciousness," he says. "I knew everything that was going on."

As the USS Arizona burned and sunk into the harbor, Stratton and five other men had been trapped on an anti-aircraft gun control platform on the ship's foremast, burned in a fireball when below-deck ammunition exploded.

A sailor on the repair ship Vestal, tied up nearby, spotted them and threw them a line. The men, their charred skin peeling away, climbed hand-over-hand across the line to safety.

Stratton and other men climbed into a small boat that took them ashore. They still had to climb onto the dock and then into a truck for a short ride to a Navy hospital. The burn ward filled with the injured. The smell of burned skin filled the air. Doctors and nurses wove among gurneys, administering morphine shots and looking for the victims most in need.

Within a day or two, someone came into the ward and said a few of the wounded would be sent to California. He asked for volunteers.

"I'll go," Stratton said.

"No," the worker said. "We don't think you'd make it. Maybe next time."

"I want to go anyway," Stratton said.

"Fine," the worker said. "If you can stand up and stay up while we change the linen on this bed, we'll see about it."

Stratton climbed to his feet and, biting back the pain, he stood and when his bed was ready, he collapsed back into it. By Christmas, he was in a hospital at Mare Island near San Francisco. He stayed there for months. He weighed 92 pounds by the time he was sent to rehabilitation in Corona, Calif. Finally, the Navy gave him a medical discharge.

A year later, he felt better, so he re-enlisted. The Navy wanted to keep him in Idaho, working with new recruits at a boot camp, but he pushed for a seagoing assignment and wound up on the destroyer USS Stack as a gunner's mate.

He saw action across the South Pacific, patrolled areas where suicide bombers were attacking American destroyers. Once he was awakened by a loud noise and a flash and thought his ship was under attack.

It wasn't, but the flash was a reminder, as if he needed anything more.

Before the end of the war, he went to San Diego for gunner's mate school. He finished his training and was discharged in December 1945.

Stratton grew up in the tiny prairie town of Red Cloud, Neb., about as far away from an ocean as any place in the country. He joined the Navy because it seemed like a better environment.

"You either had a nice place aboard a ship and were high and dry or you didn't have anything," he reasoned. "In the Army you were crawling around in the mud and everything else and I didn't want to do that."

After his second discharge, he knocked around Nebraska again, working in his dad's tavern, then on a beer truck, but he grew bored. He decided to head back to the water. In California, he earned his naval seaman's license and went to work on a drilling rig offshore near Santa Barbara.

He made bargemaster on a huge drilling rig, but yearned for something more interesting, so he got a job as a tender with a commercial deep sea diving business. As a tender, he stayed on the surface, monitoring the divers working on rigs, piers, pipelines, any piece of seaside or seagoing equipment.

Stratton logged thousands of miles of travel. Nicaragua. Chile. Colombia. Kuwait. In Alaska, he helped set up platforms that could keep up with tides that rose and fell as much as 32 feet.

In his dining room in Colorado Springs, he keeps a replica of a hard diving helmet, the kind his divers used. The face plate is glass and around the bottom are screws that would secure it to the diving suit. Stratton falls easily into the memories of his years on diving boats.

"We worked with a crane barge capable of lifting 700 tons," he sys. "I motioned to crane operator what we needed, what tools to send down." He touches the diving helmet. "I ran the decompression chamber on jobs. Once, I made a dive in a two-man submarine, down in over 1,200 feet of water off Santa Barbara coast. One of the first people to do that."

For years, Stratton wore the scars from the Arizona without talking about them much. Lots of men brought home scars from World War II and Korea. The offshore diving business could leave its own kind of scars.

In 1966, 25 years after the attack, Stratton returned to Pearl Harbor with his family. In the waters off Honolulu, he confronted his memories. It was the first time Randy, his son, had seen his father cry.

In the years after, he became active in survivors' groups and started going back to Pearl Harbor more often. At the USS Arizona memorial, he became friends with a National Park Service historian and inspired a Pearl Harbor action figure that the service sold at the gift shop.

In time, he felt no anger toward the Japanese, but he couldn't forget what they did. Sometimes, Japanese pilots attended memorial ceremonies and some of the other survivors would shake their hands. Stratton could not.

"Listen, all those men down there on that ship, a thousand of them, they wouldn't do it and I don't think they'd want me to do it," he says. "We can't forget what happened there that day. We can't let it happen again."

A while back, Stratton and his wife Velma retired to Yuma and lived there about 15 years. He played a lot of golf, but missed California. They moved to Santa Maria, not far from Santa Barbara, to be near their oldest son, then to Colorado Springs to be near Randy. They will celebrate 65 years of marriage in April.

The Stratton men have taken up a more personal cause. He wants to secure a proper medal for Joe George, the sailor from the Vestal who helped rescue the six men from the gunner's control tower.

A lot of people agree that what George did was heroic, but the Navy balks at every step, in part because George disobeyed a direct order.

"He should have the Navy Cross," Stratton says. "He saved six people's lives. Joe saved six lives and he didn't get crap. He refused to cut the line no matter what. As far he was concerned he was saving lives."

In 1971, Stratton was working long hours with a diving outfit on a nuclear power plant project not far from Santa Barbara. He needed a truck to carry equipment back and forth, so he scouted out a car lot and bought a 1965 Chevrolet pickup.

He kept the truck, held on to it through repairs, engine overhauls, new paint jobs. It sits today in the carport outside his home. He still tools around town in the truck, but it's a classic now, so he drives it almost as often to car shows.

He can tell stories about his years with the diving crews, but the truck has evolved into a reminder of another time. The license plate reads USS ARIZ. A mural on a white bed cover depicts the USS Arizona and the memorial that floats above it in Pearl Harbor. It identifies Stratton as a survivor of the attack that sank the ship.

Wherever he goes on the pickup, people ask him about his experience. Yes, he'll say, he was on the Arizona and he survived. Yes, a lot of brave men died. Yes, some of them were his friends.

He still remembers the day he saw the Arizona in dry dock at Bremerton, Wash.

"It was quite a sight for an old flatlander like me to see a 35,000-ton battleship out of the water," he says. "It was a big ship with a lot of metal, I'll tell you." He owns a chunk of the ship's burned deck, a reminder he keeps in a box with a few other items.

On a recent fall afternoon, Stratton ambles down the driveway and fires up the engine. He eases the truck out of the carport, far enough to show it off. He fiddles with the radio.

"Randy, come and turn on the music box." His son reaches in the cab and queues up one of the hundreds of songs he and his daughter downloaded onto the new MP3 player.

"Lots of big band songs," Randy says, as the first bars of a brass line pour from the speakers. "The stuff he likes."

How lucky can one guy be?

I kissed her and she kissed me

Stratton's eyes brighten. A smile spreads across his face as Dean Martin's voice fills the cab.

Like a fella once said

Ain't that a kick in the head?

The smile widens. Almost imperceptibly, he sways.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The six men stared straight ahead, almost as if they were back in line, at attention. They listened for their names and their service branch. They stayed composed as their stories were told, stories of bravery, of quick thinking. Stories of survival.

Each of the six men were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes swarmed the Navy fleet in an ambush that would provoke war. On the 70th anniversary of the attack, the men had been brought to the state capitol to receive new honors.

As each name was read, Rhode Island National Guard Maj. Gen. Kevin McBride presented the man with the Rhode Island Star, one of the state's highest military honors.

World War II veterans are a special breed, Lt. Col. Denis Riel said as the men accepted the medals. Without them, Riel said, who knows where we'd be today.

McBride reached the last man, Raymond Haerry, a 20-year-old coxswain on the day of the assault. Haerry straightened in his seat as his story was told. He had escaped the USS Arizona, the battleship whose losses surpassed any other.

For Haerry, McBride had a the state's highest military honor, the Rhode Island Cross. Haerry accepted the medal, but found he could not speak. He handed the microphone to his son, Raymond Haerry, Jr., who spoke of his father's courage and resilience.

Three years later, Ray Haerry Jr. holds the cross in his hand, fighting back tears.

"I hadn't told him he was going to be individually honored that day," he says. "I had to help my father out of his seat. He stood strong and tall right in front of this general. I heard the general say, 'You're a remarkable guy.' I think it was one of the proudest days of my father's life."

His dad has never sought recognition for his service on the Arizona and barely talks about the day of the attack. He will tell his story to people he knows well and trusts, but he is 93 and the details are fading from his memory.

In 2011, he was one of six Rhode Islanders who had lived through the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only one from the Arizona. Today, he is one of nine remaining survivors from the mighty battleship.

"I do as much as I can to keep his story alive," his son says. "It's always been my fear that people are going to forget that day, that people are going to forget the sacrifice that was made that day."

Haerry ran away from home to join the Navy. He grew up in New Jersey and after high school, enrolled at MIT in Boston. He was smart enough to excel, but started cutting classes not long after the start of his first semester.

He and a buddy would sneak off campus and hop freight trains to see how far they could get. He missed enough of his classes that he was finally asked to leave. As soon as he turned 18, he enlisted in the Navy.

On the Arizona, he worked on the deck crew. He cleaned and painted day after day, but he also operated the motor boats used to ferry crew members to shore, a job that let him leave the ship periodically.

Haerry had made two runs to shore on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. It was Sunday and some of the crewmen with liberty wanted an early start. He was eating breakfast when he heard the first pops of the attack planes strafing Battleship Row.

He ran to the anti-aircraft battery, his battle station, but there was no ammunition ready. He could see the planes were flying too low for his guns anyway, but before his crew could figure out their next move, an armor-piercing bomb detonated near the powder magazine beneath the No. 2 gun turret.

Haerry felt the entire ship life out of the water. As it fell, he was thrown from the ship into the harbor. He half-swam, half-walked the 70 yards to Ford Island and manned a mounted machine gun. He spent the rest of the day retrieving bodies from the harbor.

"He remembers body parts in the water, charred burned bodies that he swam by," his son Ray, Jr., says. "Something had happened that no one could comprehend."

Haerry sailed on Navy ships through World War II and again during the Korean conflict. He spent long months on a tender, a vessel that carries equipment, parts and other supplies for ships at sea.

On one mission, Haerry's tender was tied to a larger ship as the crew delivered supplies and completed maintenance tasks. The sky began to darken and the wind grew. A storm was approaching, a big one by the looks of it.

The tender didn't want to be tied to the larger ship when the worst of the storm blew through. High winds could slam one ship into the other and sink one or both of the vessels.

Haerry held the rope that connected the ships as another crewman swung an ax to cut it. As the boat heaved, the man with the ax missed and hit Haerry's hand, nearly severing it from his wrist. He did not reach a hospital for several days, but doctors still saved his hand.

A year after World War II ended, Haerry went home for a while and married a girl he'd met not long before. He and Evelyn had their first son, Ray, Jr., in 1947.

For a while, the young family lived in Puerto Rico as Haerry, now a chief boatswain's mate, drew new assignments aboard his tender.

"He was out to sea nine months out of the year, only home for three months," Ray Jr. says. "He was very military by then, very disciplined."

After he returned from Korea, Haerry was promoted to master chief petty officer, signifying his experience and level of service. He had turned down a promotion to ensign, preferring the camaraderie of the enlisted ranks.

At his request, he was assigned to the officer candidate school in Newport, R.I. He left home at 5 every morning and took a ferry from Jamestown to the Navy base. He liked teaching and liked the chance to instill discipline.

"I've gotten letters from some of the officer candidates who had my father as an instructor," Ray Jr. says. "They said he was a tough bastard, but that's exactly what they needed."

His service on the Arizona also seemed to give him added credibility among the young sailors. They respected a guy who survived such a horrific attack.

There was a tradition at the end of training that the graduates would give the chief a silver dollar. Haerry would come home on those days with cigar boxes full of the coins.

For a long time, Haerry never talked about his experiences at Pearl Harbor. He displayed no pictures, kept no mementos that his family knew about. He would answer questions, but in short bursts of description, with no emotion.

"The only people he would talk to were either very close friends or relatives," his son says. "He'd always have to be prompted."

It took Ray Jr. years, decades to piece together his father's story. He would draw out snippets and stash them away, collecting them until he would weave the barest narrative.

As anniversaries of the attack passed, Ray Jr. would asked his dad if he wanted to visit the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Nope. He wanted to part of it. He's never been back.

"I can understand that," Ray Jr. says. "To go through that to me is incomprehensible. Nobody was expecting anything like that."

His dad will return finally at his death. Ray Jr. has arranged for his father's remains to be interred in the sunken Arizona, an honor accorded any of the sailors or Marines who survived the attack.

Three years ago, Ray Jr. received a call from a lieutenant colonel in the Rhode Island National Guard. He told Ray about the plans to honor Pearl Harbor survivors at the statehouse. One of the survivors would receive the Rhode Island Cross.

As they talked, Ray mentioned that his dad had been aboard the Arizona. That caught the lieutenant colonel's interest. He called back a few days later.

"We found our guy," he told Ray Jr.

Five years ago, Haerry moved into a nursing home, He stays in a room on the second floor. Thickets of tangled shrubs and rows of trees are visible from his window.

The nurse who checks in on him regularly likes Haerry. She prods him to move around more and to leave the room for meals. He has told her about his escape from the Arizona.

Ray Jr. seems surprised. "He told you the story?" She nods and smiles.

Haerry accepts the chocolate bars his son has brought him. He likes chocolate and is disappointed if Ray Jr. forgets it. There are a few personal photos on the table, but nothing from his years in the Navy.

Except the cap. The USS Arizona ballcap that almost every survivor owns and wears.

He doesn't want to answer questions about his war service, shrugging them off or insisting he can't remember the details anymore. But he clutches the cap and puts it on as he sits in an easy chair by the window.

"These guys were the first heroes of the war, even though the war hasn't been declared," Ray Jr. says. "I think my dad was one of the first American heroes of World War II."

He and his father chat a little. Haerry says he wants lunch delivered to his room, but the nurse says no. You need the exercise. Haerry nods and like a good sailor taking orders from the chief, he pulls himself up with a walker and shuffles off to lunch.

YUBA CITY, Calif.

Joe Langdell found a table in the wardroom of one of the ships moored in Pearl Harbor and sat down with his breakfast.

Three days had passed since Japanese bombers had punched a fiery hole in the Navy's Pacific fleet. Three days since the war started.

Crippled ships still floated around the mooring posts along Ford Island. Repair crews were already at work on the battleships that had survived. Salvage work would begin soon on others. Sailors found food and shelter wherever they could.

Langdell's ship, the USS Arizona, lay dead in the water where she sank 14 minutes into the attack. The mast and towers near the bow tilted at a sickening angle. Fire had blackened much of the structure still visible.

Langdell heard someone enter the room.

"Are there any officers from the Arizona here?" he said.

Langdell was an ensign, an entry-level officer, not yet a year in the Navy. He was nervous about volunteering for anything, but he raised his hand.

The man walked over and looked at Langdell's name tag.

"Mr. Langdell," he said, "when you're done with your breakfast, you'll report to the pier and you'll be met by a motor whale boat and a party of 20 enlisted men with sheets and pillow cases."

What is this? Langdell thought.

"You will go to the Arizona and you will take off all the bodies and body parts above the water line," the man said. "Cover the decks, anywhere you can find them up to the top of the masts."

"So that's what we did," he says, staring out at the harbor nearly seven decades later.

Langdell is one of the last nine survivors from the Arizona. At 100, he is the oldest.

He was on Ford Island when the Japanese attacked, training for new assignment. His own battle station was beneath the gun turret shattered by the last bomb to hit the Arizona. From the shore, he helped wounded men from the water, men whose bodies had been torn apart by bombs and bullets and fire.

But he could not be prepared for what he found on the charred hulk of the battleship. He still will not talk about it. His younger son believes the experience changed his dad forever.

"How could it not?" the son wonders.

Langdell says only this: "It took two days to take all the bodies. We carefully wrapped them in sheets. The body parts we put in pillow cases. We swept the decks and took the small bones. Everything was taken ashore and properly taken care of."

Langdell arrived at Pearl Harbor along a different path than many of the young sailors, who signed up for the service because they were unable to find work as civilians.

Born in 1914, seven months after the first bolts were tightened on a new battleship in Brooklyn, Langdell grew up wooded agricultural area along the Souhegan River in southern New Hampshire.

His dad operated a livery stable and a small dairy and later earned money as an auctioneer. The family sold maple syrup distilled from the trees on their farm.

After high school, Langdell enrolled at Boston University, working nights to pay for his classes, and in 1938, he earned a degree in business administration. He went to work as a junior accountant for a prominent Boston firm.

But he became restless. He signed up for a Navy program that allowed college graduates to attend officer candidate school and emerge as ensigns within three months. By early 1941, Langdell was one of the "90-day wonders" and drew his first assignment: The USS Arizona.

After Pearl Harbor, Langdell asked for a posting on one of the new destroyers the Navy was set to launch. He was soon aboard the USS Frazier, which left the shipyard at San Francisco in July 1942.

The Frazier patrolled the South Pacific at first, but in early 1943, steamed northward toward Alaska, where Japan was trying to secure positions in the Aleutian Islands.

One day in May, crewmen spotted two periscopes in the water and the Frazier opened fire. The guns hit the periscope. Using its sonar equipment, the ship fired depth charges and eventually sank the enemy submarine.

Toward the end the war, Langdell was stationed in the Philippines, at a base in Manila. Among his responsibilities was overseeing the naval officers' clubs in the area.

One morning, he was at his desk, catching up on paperwork, when he heard a vehicle screech to a halt outside. A young sailor ran in, out of breath.

"Mr. Langdell, Mr. Langdell, you've got to come here quick," he said.

"What is it?" Langdell asked.

"It's easier if you come see it," the sailor said.

They hopped in a Jeep and head up the hill toward one of the Quonset huts, the one where liquor for the officers' clubs was stored. As they walked toward it, Langdell reeled at an odor. Alcohol.

Inside, he found broken bottles scattered in a soggy soup of booze and cardboard. Someone had stacked the boxes too high and in the humid environment of the island, the cardboard had grown damp and weak.

The boxes had collapsed.

Langdell was discharged at the war's end and returned to Massachusetts, where his wife, Libby, waited.

Joe had met Elizabeth McGauhy in Chicago half a decade earlier. He was attending midshipman's school at Northwestern University. She was attending an art academy to learn dress designing. They met at a dance at the YWCA on North State Street.

They danced. They went out for coffee afterward. They continued to see each other and, when Langdell left for Hawaii, they corresponded, often.

As he prepared for his new posting on the Frazier, Langdell decided to make a move. He asked his brother, Ted, to visit Libby and see if she could cook. The report: Oh, yes, she can cook.

Joe proposed and Libby accepted. They would be married in San Francisco, before the Frazier set sail. The only question was how Langdell would send Libby word about his arrival from Pearl Harbor. The Navy censors would never allow such information in a letter.

Langdell knew Libby was friends with a skater in the Ice Follies, which was summering in San Francisco. He wrote Libby a letter and suggested it would be a good idea if Libby visited her friend on or about a particular date. Libby got the message.

They were married in an Episcopal Church on Van Ness Avenue. Langdell had borrowed a car, a Dusenburg, for the honeymoon. Libby had arranged stays north of the city. Friends told them when the left the church, keep the water on their left.

What they didn't count on was the side-street parking. Langdell took a right turn instead of a left and the newlyweds didn't realize their mistake until they stopped for gas in Gilroy, about 80 miles south of San Francisco.

The Langdells ended up honeymooning in Monterey and Carmel on the central California coast.

After the war, Langdell returned to the family auction business in Massachusetts, but after all those years in Hawaii, the Philippines and in the tropical South Seas, he couldn't readjust to the cold. He and Libby moved west to Walnut Creek east of San Francisco.

They eventually bought a home-furnishings outlet farther inland and finally built their own store in Yuba City, north of Sacramento. They ran Joe and Libby Langdell's Village Mart for more than 20 years until they retired.

Occasionally, they would close the store and hook a 33-foot trailer to a pick-up truck. They traveled around the country, meeting up with other USS Arizona survivors, with shipmates from the Frazier. Keeping the memories alive.

Langdell returned to Pearl Harbor in 1976. His oldest son had joined the Navy and his first posting was aboard the USS Ouellet, a frigate. The family visited the Arizona memorial and toured other sites near the harbor.

Before the trip, Langdell hadn't talked much about his years in the war, about his time on the Arizona. Afterward, Langdell sought out other survivors who had formed reunion organizations. He was active in those groups for many years, serving as president of one devoted to the Arizona.

As the 50th anniversary of the attack neared, Langdell got a call from a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to interview Langdell for his project. He was also interviewing a Japanese pilot named Zenji Abe, a pilot who had taken part in the raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Would Langdell agree to meet Abe on film?

The two men not only met, they took a boat to the USS Arizona memorial and laid a wreath in front of the wall with the names of the crewmen who died on the ship.

In the documentary, "The Life and Death of a Lady," Langdell and Abe speak, side by side on the memorial. Abe offered condolences and said he prayed that all their souls were at peace.

Langdell said much more.

"It is only by the grace of God that I stand here today," he said. "I witnessed your attack from Ford Island. Helpless, I watched your bomb sink the Arizona in nine minutes."

Sentiment ran high against the Japanese, he said, but also against U.S. leaders whose decisions many questioned in the aftermath. He acknowledged the wreath.

"I appreciate your thoughtfulness. It took more courage on your part to present this wreath than it did for me to accept it."

In 2006, Langdell walked along the steep shoreline of Ford Island, the Arizona memorial in the background. He told his story as his son, Ted, recorded it on video.

"The lesson I've learned from that experience is that the 1,177 men entombed on the ship right now will never know the love of a wife or the joy of grandchildren," he said. "It's just not going to happen. We all have to remember that they did not die in vain."

On Oct. 12, Langdell celebrated his 100th birthday with with his older son, John, who flew in from Spearfish, S.D. On Veteran's Day, he participated once more in a parade through Marysville, the next town over from Yuba City. But he doesn't tell his story anymore, not on his own.

Langdell lives now in a skilled nursing center. He has trouble remembering the past. He struggles to speak at times (though when he's feeling good, he likes to flirt with the nurses). He sits in his wheelchair as his son recites the narrative, keeping his father's story alive.

Photographs hang on the walls of his room. His wife, Libby, who died two years ago. His kids and grandkids. Pictures of past parades. A framed painting of the Arizona, the repair ship Vestal next to it.

He likes to wear a cap that identifies him as a veteran of the Arizona.

"Why do you like the hat, dad?" Ted asks.

"It acknowledges to people that I'm a survivor," Joe replies, his voice soft. "The hat represents the Arizona.

Ted asks him about the ship.

"The Arizona was a fighting battleship," Joe says. "One of the last ones…" He talks about going aboard the Frazier.

Langdell will return to the Arizona once more. When he dies, his remains will be interred under the No. 4 gun turret, with the men who died there and survivors who had died since.

A final tribute.

UPDATE: Joe Langdell died in February 2015, months after this report.

Delaware team brings glimmer of hope amid devastation and chaos

PORTSMOUTH, Dominica - A primary school here serves as a camp for refugees in their own city.

Since Hurricane Maria slammed the “Nature Island” with 160-mph winds on Sept. 18, eight classrooms have been shared by more than 100 people.

Clothes hang on lines stretched across campus, and naked children bathe in the open. Dogs scratch their fleas where people eat meager rations.

A father in the camp told Delaware doctors who had come to help that his 8-year-old son had endured nightmares since the storm, insisting Maria would return to kill them all.

“He used to wake up every morning to see if we died,” Portsmouth survivor Deon Dinnard said of his son.

The doctors explained that the boy suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Maria left Dominica an island of stunned inhabitants and ruined rain forests, of towns and villages isolated from one another by blocked roads and spotty communication. Schools and other buildings are used as refugee centers for an estimated 3,000 people across the island.

The lush, green forests are now void of foliage, and the island is strewn with debris fields, giving it a barren brown color.

Into this scene came the Delaware Medical Relief Team, a group of doctors, nurses and disaster zone veterans armed with all the medical supplies they could cram into a gaggle of suitcases.

Roosevelt Douglas Primary School is now home for people taking shelter there, and no one knows how long they will be there.

“For those that their houses are completely destroyed, nowhere to be seen, it’s just up in the air,” said Francillia St. Jean, who’s helped manage the makeshift shelter since the storm hit. “They don’t know if they’re going to go tomorrow, two months, three months.”

A ferry from Dominica’s southern neighbor, St. Lucia, brought the medical relief team into view of the island Thursday afternoon, and they joined other passengers staring through starboard windows — wide-eyed and slack-jawed.

The island is naked.

“The mountain range, it was entirely bare. It was brown. I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Dr. Kathy Cornelius, a Baltimore doctor who joined the team in Dominica. “It gave me a sense of the destruction the island underwent, the beating nature took. Imagine what the individuals felt.”

Roosevelt Douglas Primary is one of four shelters the medical relief team has visited since landing in Portsmouth. Darkness and a curfew limited their reach that day, but for the Delaware team’s leader, Christiana Hospital internist Dr. Reynold Agard, it was important to get started right away.

“Even if it’s just two hours, we’re ready to go,” Agard told the team’s guide.

Agard described the warm welcome the team received at the Portsmouth Beach Hotel as providence. A chance encounter with an American-born islander the day before connected him and hotel management, who put them up, fed them and took them by van from shelter to shelter.

Employees have cleaned up the hotel property, and a generator keeps the rooms lit into the night. An adjacent black sand beach is lapped by constant waves that echo in its rooms, and some of its fallen coconuts still are fresh enough to slice open for a drink.

But just beyond the hotel gates, the Portsmouth streetscape is twisted hell.

Trees are a tangle of uprooted splinters. Scattered about still-standing houses are ruined appliances and furniture and twisted metal that earlier served as roofing material.

At least 27 people died in the storm, and hundreds more were injured or since have been injured. There are reports in the villages and towns of sickness and death, especially from eastern parts of the island where help apparently has been slower to reach inland communities.

Electricity is returning in areas of Roseau and Portsmouth, the largest cities on an island with a population of about 72,000, according to an Oct. 2 report from the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency. But power poles lay strewn like fallen matchsticks across the country.

CDEMA reports that the most immediate needs are food and water, with long-term needs focused around construction and roofing materials.

“I’ve never seen total devastation like that, like the school where you see the books still in place but the roof and everything else is ripped off, like seeing the houses completely destroyed and wondering how these people are going to rebuild,” said Nicole McCarry, a Christiana nurse.

It’s worse in the inland villages where the medical team spent Friday offering care.

In the village of Paix Bouche on the island’s northern edge, the only sound ringing more commonly through the valley than the cuck-caw of roosters is the clanging of hammers on tin roofs. The village is proud of its drummers and singers, but these days what matters is its builders.

“It’s a very united village. Everybody works together,” said Paix Bouche native Emerline Anselm. “Most of them are involved in construction, so they go there and help build homes. Most of the homes that are being repaired now, they talk about the boys from Paix Bouche going to do that.”

Many didn’t return to the village Friday until the sun already was dipping down, and when they did, they made straight for the cantina in the center of town. The only drinks for sale came from an ice chest at the bottom of its steps, but the store itself was hosting Delaware’s healers.

Agard set up his first Dominican clinic here after leaving part of the team farther down the mountain in the village of Dos D’ane to do the same. But to see his first patient, he had to make a house call.

Stiff-backed and in repose on a mattress in a Paix Bouche kitchen, Agard’s patient moaned and whimpered as the doctor tried to listen to his breathing. Sometimes he feels like he wants to vomit, the man told the doctor, and he barely could keep down the biscuit he had eaten that morning.

An older man who was sick before the storm, he was the worst case the Paix Bouche clinic would encounter Friday.

The rest, some 40 walk-ins, came to have their vital signs read, their medications restocked and their minds put at ease.

“It was mostly just everyone wanting to make sure they’re doing OK,” said Beth Sargent, a Christiana nurse. “Surprisingly, most people were OK, but the people who were not had blood pressures in the 190s and 200s. Either they ran out of their medications or they never had any.”

Cynthia Joseph was healthy and felt good before she walked into the makeshift clinic, but it was more important that her 2-year-old daughter, Ciara Paul, got checked out.

“I haven’t been to the health care clinic in a long time now, but I feel good today,” Joseph said. “And everything’s OK with her so that’s good.”

But like so many others in Paix Bouche, only fragmented concrete walls of her home were left standing after the storm.

One hundred percent of the nation’s agriculture is reportedly destroyed, and the main water supplies sustained significant damage.

CDEMA reports Dominica’s roads and utility infrastructure is vulnerable to landslide and storm surge, both of which Maria brought with it.

“This sometimes leaves communities entirely cut off from the rest of the island, particularly communities with single-road access in and out of these communities,” according to a CDEMA report. “Associated impacts are felt on communications, electricity and water since most of these are placed along major road networks.”

The United States, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Venezuela and the United Kingdom all have delivered food and water to coastal drop zones, according to the report. In collaboration with regional and international partners, CDEMA deployed more than 360 response personnel to provide support in the areas of search and rescue and damage assessment.

At least 120 Jamaican soldiers deployed to the island to aid in recovery efforts, according to the CDEMA report. The Canadian ship HMCS St. John’s conducted humanitarian assistance operations in the vicinity of Marigot.

Guyana donated more than 85 tons of relief supplies to Dominica and Antigua, including water, food, tarps and chainsaws, and other nations have offered various forms of physical assistance and donations.

Expatriate Merritt Wallick has learned more about the geography of Dominica in the past three weeks than in the three years he’s lived on the island. Its once-lush forests are now only slanted sticks, and without the canopy, he can study the rocky ridges from a distance.

“Now we’ve got a dozen parrots in our yard every morning scrounging for the little bits of food they can find from the guava trees and the mango trees,” Wallick said. “It’s going to take a big toll on them.”

The former News Journal reporter and editor found Dominica in the pages of National Geographic and vacationed there. When it was time to retire, Wallick decided he didn’t want the same old routine sans a workday.

So in 2014 he and his wife, Elizabeth, decided to leave their comfortable home in Odessa for the new home the couple built on a mountaintop in Calibishie, on Dominica’s northern coast.

“We didn’t anticipate the worst storm in history,” Wallick said.

Everyone on the island underestimated Hurricane Maria, he said.

“It grew very quickly. It was tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in about 24 hours,” Wallick said. “Everybody was calmly preparing for it, and then it arrived.”

Wallick’s roof flexed half a foot in the wind, he said, and water gushed through heavy timbers.

“Just like a hose being shot in your face,” he recalled. “Every time I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got worse.”

The Wallicks emerged from their shelter to find their lime and mango trees knocked down or whittled into twigs.

While the roof heaved, it held, Wallick said, because it was fortified with metal hurricane ties holding the roof to rafters.

Still, the metal on the roof blew away, and the couple hasn’t had electricity since the storm passed Sept. 18.

RELATED:Delaware Medical Relief Team runs into problems getting supplies to Dominica

Repairs are slow. Construction materials are in short supply.

“You can’t run down to Lowes and pick up a box of nails,” he said.

Wallick, 66, knows the road ahead will be arduous. And the unspoiled beauty that brought him here is now gone — at least temporarily.

“It was so lush, and I believe it will be lush again,” Wallick said.

The former Delawarean said he likes the simplicity of life here and enjoyed watching farmers walk past his home on the way to work every morning. There are still farmers, but the farms are gone.

“Help these people,” the expatriate said of his new neighbors. “Do whatever you can.”

Dominicans will be the first to tell you they’re a resilient people accustomed to disastrous weather. Gwendolyn Magloire is one of them, and she was one the first the Delaware Medical Relief Team met in Portsmouth after leaving the hotel.

Sitting alone in her room at the Dominica Seventh Day Adventist Secondary School, one of the area’s designated shelters, she told the Delaware team right away that the day before had been her birthday, so the relief workers sang her a song as she clapped, laughed and smiled.

“How old are you now?” Magloire exclaimed, prompting the team to sing the next verse to the birthday song.

The answer is 99 and counting. But even at her age, Magloire never has seen a more powerful storm than Maria — no Dominican has.

Hurricane David ripped across Dominica in 1979 as a Category 5 storm and left a devastated island in its wake. Banana and sugarcane harvests were ruined, dealing a blow to an agricultural economy.

Earl Darius Etienne, an artist from the town of Jimmit on the southwestern coast, lived through David and through Tropical Storm Erica, which unleashed torrents of rain strong enough to send parts of the mountains tumbling down like rivers.

WEATHER:Hurricane Nate makes landfall as a Category 1 storm, expected to weaken

Neither of them blew nearly as fiercely as Maria.

“This was the most disastrous and life-threatening and terrifying storm I’ve ever seen in Dominica,” Etienne said. “This one was the mother of all hurricanes. We have never seen that in Dominica before. The noises that we heard, it was an eerie feeling.”

Hunkered down with his wife and his gallery’s curator, they bailed water as best they could throughout the storm. But he’s fortunate — or foresighted — because he built his home as a bunker, the way he said most islanders once did.

“In this modern age, we have lost our culture,” Etienne said. “We have lost the way of building houses to withstand hurricanes.”

When Maria unleashed her rains over Dos D’ane, it’s unlikely even a bunker would have saved the five lives lost there that night. The river swelled and washed away a home, sweeping it away along with everyone inside.

On Friday, an excavator peeled the remnants of a house floor from the heart of the village as a group of hapless onlookers stared.

“I lost my uncle and two of my cousins,” said Benette Remy, a representative for Dos D’ane. “Debris blocked the bridge so the water backed up and just swept the house away.”

He returned to the island only a few days ago, having evacuated to a nearby island out of harm’s way. Friends sent him pictures, but the images did not convey the sense of destruction, the despair.

“Seeing it in pictures and seeing it real, it’s two different stories,” Remy said.

The Delaware Medical Relief Team has seen only a fraction of the island and addressed only a fraction of its problems. But they didn’t come to save the world — just to be a part of that salvation.

“You might just save one life. You might save no lives,” said Rich Agard, who’s joined his family on these missions across the world. “The point is we’re coming to help and we know what we’re here for so we’re doing it.”

All types of donations can be sent to Dr. Reynold Agard’s office at 314 E. Main St., No. 103, Newark, DE 19711. Checks should be made out to “Delaware Medical Relief Team.” Retired doctors or nurses who want to volunteer may call (302) 685-0181.

Follow along with the Delaware Medical Relief Team's efforts on Twitter and interact with team members and our journalists using the hashtag #DelMedRelief.

Freak Southern storm blamed for at least 13 deaths

Larry Copeland, Doug Stanglin, Doyle Rice and Gary Strauss

USA TODAY

Arctic blast has left much of Atlanta paralyzed

National Weather Service criticized for its forecast

ATLANTA — The arctic blast crippling much of the deep South has caused at least 13 deaths and created havoc for millions, prompting six states to declare emergencies and bringing criticism on the National Weather Service for its forecasting.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, who mobilized the National Guard on Wednesday to rescue Atlanta-area motorists stranded on snarled, icebound freeways, blamed the state's early response on the Weather Service, which predicted the chaotic storm would hit farther south.

Tuesday's snowfall brought just 2.6 inches of snow to Atlanta, but it was a one-day record and enough to hamstring the region, creating nightmares for commuters, truckers, students and their families. Hundreds of flights were grounded at Hartsfield International Airport — the nation's busiest.

Deal declared a state of emergency for Georgia. Similar declarations were issued for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, At least nine people died in traffic accidents, including five in Alabama, two in North Carolina and 1 in Florida. Four people, including a three-month-old infant, were killed early Tuesday in a Mississippi mobile home fire near Fulton caused by a faulty space heater.

Some commuters in the Atlanta metro area pleaded for help via cellphones while holed up in their cars; others gave up and trudged miles to their homes. Deal said there had been "significant progress" rescuing kids stranded at schools in counties around Atlanta, but at least 2,000 remained at schools in Atlanta, Fulton, Cobb and Douglas Counties.

Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist with the University of Georgia and president of the American Meteorological Society, said neither meteorologists nor the forecast for the Atlanta area was to blame.

"The buses had a tough time getting kids home, but meteorologists should not be thrown under the bus," he said.

At 3:39 a.m. Tuesday, Marshall said the weather service issued a winter storm warning for the entire Atlanta metro area, expecting 1-2 inches of snow. "Overall, the Atlanta event was a well-forecasted and well-warned event," he said.

The weather service did say in an online briefing Tuesday morning, "Leave work early if you can to avoid the rush and wintry precipitation combination." Drivers did so, which is what led to the traffic chaos.

Deal said the weather service "had continually had modeling showing Atlanta would not be the primary area (of the storm). It would be south of Atlanta."

Politicians of weather-stricken cities and states often face harsh criticism for slow response to disasters. Deal, a Republican, faces re-election this year. He said his goal was to reach every stranded driver "and make sure we have enough shelter to get them off the roads and get them someplace warm."

Along with Deal, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed is likely to face scrutiny in the coming days over the handling of the storm.

Today meteorologist Al Roker said the traffic nightmare in Atlanta was caused by "poor planning on the mayor and governor's part." Dalton, Ga., Mayor David Pennington, who's running against Deal for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, said, "Government's primary role is to protect the people; Nathan Deal has failed miserably once again."

"I'm willing to accept whatever blame comes my way," Deal said. "And if I'm responsible for it, I'll accept that."

Reed defended his handling of the situation. "We got 1 million people out of the city of Atlanta in about 12 hours," Reed said. Moreover, the city's response was better than after "Snowmageddon 2011," the winter storm that paralyzed the Atlanta metro that year, Reed said. "Unlike the last event, when we had four pieces of equipment in Atlanta, this time we had 70 pieces of equipment, and we knew how to use it."

Reed said many of stranded motorists were on interstate highways, which are maintained by the state.

"This has been an ordeal for everyone," said Georgia Department of Transportation spokeswoman Natalie Dale. "This storm and the bitter temperatures have caused so much difficulty, discomfort and anxiety for so many Georgians. We believe roadways will be restored to some level of normalcy today but would encourage the public to remain home, preferably all day."

A police officer in suburban Atlanta helped assist the safe delivery of a baby girl on a gridlocked interstate Tuesday after snow and ice brought traffic to a crawl.

Sandy Springs Police Capt. Steve Rose told the Associated Press that a traffic officer arrived on the scene minutes before the infant.

"Fortunately he had his emergency lights on and people got out of his way," Rose said. "The delivery was pretty flawless."

Debbie Hartwig, a waitress at an Atlanta area waffle house, said she managed to keep her cool thanks in part to the kindness of strangers after 10 hours on the road.

"I'm calm," she said. "That's all you can be. People are helping each other out, people are moving cars that have spun out or had become disabled. It's been really nice. I even saw people passing out hot coffee and granola bars."

In Alabama, where the storm stranded thousands at work, school or in cars overnight, mass school and business closings remained in Birmingham and Mobile. Gov. Robert Bentley's office said rescue personnel and medics in state aircraft were flying over Jefferson and Shelby counties conducting search and rescue missions for stranded motorists.

Both the timing and the amount of snow was not accurately forecast in Birmingham. Well-known Alabama TV meteorologist James Spann of ABC 33/40 said, "In terms of human impact, yesterday's forecast 'bust' was the most significant for me since January 1982."

"I will say I have never seen this kind of impact on roads with 1 to 2 inches of snow in Alabama in my 35 years as a professional meteorologist. There was clear human suffering as a result of my bad forecast," Spann said.

Louisiana highway officials closed over 20 highways due to icy conditions, including Interstate 10. There were limited flights in and out of New Orleans' Louis Armstrong International Airport.

In South Carolina, state police reported over 800 traffic collisions since Tuesday afternoon. The Arthur Ravenel Bridge linking Charleston and Mount Pleasant on U.S. 17, as well as the bridges linking the two communities on Interstate 526 remained closed Wednesday afternoon. Bridges linking Hilton Head Island to the mainland were also closed for a time at midday Wednesday because of accidents on the icy spans.

While the storm that gripped much of the Deep South has moved into the Atlantic, there is little chance of significant melting of untreated roads and bridges until Thursday. Most residents are unaccustomed to driving in such conditions.

Jeff Cox, a Dunkin' Donuts store manager in Montgomery, AL., said he fishtailed several times in his Nissan Pathfinder going home from work.

"You feel helpless when your car is going sideways," he said. "We don't get this a lot. I don't think anybody here was really prepared. There was so much ice on the road, you were easily slipping and sliding. The South is just not equipped to have this much ice on the road."

Contributing: Talia Richman, in McLean, Va.; Associated Press

'A colossal failure': How were pro-Trump rioters able to breach ...

WASHINGTON – The violence inside the U.S. Capitol building had turned deadly by Wednesday evening, as officials announced that a woman who was shot earlier had died. At least three others were injured and taken to hospitals after rioters, many waving Trump flags and wearing Trump garb, breached security at the Capitol building and swarmed the area.

The breach prompted an evacuation of the Senate chamber and a 3 1/2-hour lockdown before officials declared the building was secure. The FBI is also investigating reports of two suspected explosive devices, though both have been rendered safe.

This series of events, which disrupted what should have been a largely ceremonial democratic process of counting state-certified Electoral College votes, was a culmination of weeks of resentment fueled by President Donald Trump's false claims that the election had been stolen from him.

The security breach also raised questions about how demonstrators managed to force their way inside the Capitol and whether there was enough law enforcement presence, especially when threats of violence brewing for days on social media should have raised red flags.

Earlier Wednesday, protesters crowded halls inside the Capitol building and climbed over chairs. Some made it inside the Senate chambers, while others sat inside lawmakers' offices. Shots and chemical irritants were fired.

"In my experience in 50 years in law enforcement, this is unprecedented," said John Magaw, a former Secret Service director.

"The coordination of security has virtually fallen apart. We are watching the deterioration of law and order in the U.S. It just becomes chaos. I don't see any sign that the current president is going to stand up and lead like presidents have led in the past," Magaw said. "Our democracy is on the edge of a cliff."

Ed Davis, former commissioner for the Boston Police Department, said law enforcement should've been better prepared.

"There has to be political will to put resources in place to stop what clearly should've been seen. … This is the result of a lack of political will to control an attempted insurrection.

"What happened here is a colossal failure, and I believe it's a colossal political failure, not on the part of the police," Davis said. "They were outnumbered and overrun."

It's unclear whether the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security were involved in coordinating a robust law enforcement response with the U.S. Capitol Police, which has jurisdiction of the area, before the protests. The federal agencies deployed a large number of agents during protests last summer in Washington and several other cities after the death of George Floyd.

CONTRAST:Police shot at BLM protesters; Capitol response seems muted in comparison

Videos on social media, which USA TODAY has not been able to independently verify, showed men in police uniforms taking selfies with and removing outdoor barriers for the rioters.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said a review of Wednesday's events "will determine what failures occurred and why."

"The plans should have anticipated the potential for what happened today," Thompson said.

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said the Justice Department has sent hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and agents to assist Capitol police. "The violence at our Nation's Capitol Building is an intolerable attack on a fundamental institution of our democracy," Rosen said in a statement.

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke late Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence and congressional leaders about the riot at the Capitol.

“We have fully activated the D.C. National Guard to assist federal and local law enforcement as they work to peacefully address the situation,” Miller said in a statement. “We are prepared to provide additional support as necessary and appropriate as requested by local authorities. Our people are sworn to defend the Constitution and our democratic form of government, and they will act accordingly.”

'Intent on causing harm'

The protesters gathered at the National Mall early on Wednesday to protest election results. During a rally, Trump urged his supporters to go to the Capitol building.

The protesters came to Capitol Hill "following the president’s remarks,” said D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee. “It was clear that the crowd was intent on causing harm to our officers by deploying chemical irritants on police to force entry into the United States Capitol.”

Wednesday afternoon, several Republican lawmakers called on Trump to strongly urge his supporters to back down. Doing so is the "last thing you'll do that matters as President," Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said on Twitter. In a video posted on Twitter, Trump urged his supporters to "go home," repeating false claims of a stolen election and telling them he loved them. He later tweeted that "these are the events and things that happen," which many criticized as condoning the riots.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said it’s premature to speculate on how or why protesters were able to swarm the Capitol.

“We won’t know until it’s over. … You don’t analyze a battle while in the middle of it,” Pasco said, adding that demonstrators breaching security at the Capitol is “a national disgrace.”

Terry Gainer, former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police who also served as the Senate’s sergeant at arms, described Wednesday’s protests as unprecedented in four decades in law enforcement.

“It’s dangerous,” Gainer said. “This is a much more hateful crowd incited by the president himself. It’s definitely something new in our business.”

Gainer said there have been breaches of perimeter fencing and barriers at the Capitol, but he wasn't aware of any mass breach of the Capitol building.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the think tank Police Executive Research Forum, said government officials are likely to look back at this and evaluate whether additional law enforcement resources might have been necessary.

"At this point, it's hard to say," Wexler said. "Most demonstrations are peaceful, but then if they suddenly turn violent like this one did, it’s difficult for the police without a massive police presence to prevent it."

National Sheriff's Association President David Mahoney said protesters' actions were "indistinguishable" from those of antifa, a loosely organized far-left movement, "or any other lawless groups who chose to destroy cities and communities."

History of violence at the Capitol

Though the rioting was unusual, there has been violence at the Capitol in past decades.

Two Capitol police officers – officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson – were killed July 24, 1998, by a gunman who made his way into the first floor of the building on the House side between the chamber and the crypt.

Five House lawmakers were shot and wounded March 1, 1954, by members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which argued for the island’s independence. The four nationalists shot indiscriminately from the gallery above the chamber’s floor and unfurled a Puerto Rican flag. All were apprehended. A bullet hole remains in a desk that is part of the House dais, a reminder of the attack.

A former Capitol police officer, William Kaiser, fired two shots at Sen. John Bricker, R-Ohio, on July 12, 1947, as he entered the subway tunnel linking the Capitol to Senate offices. Both shots missed, and Bricker jumped aboard an electric subway car to escape.

Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook and Deborah Barfield Berry

Corrections & Clarifications 2021

USA TODAY

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The following corrections & clarifications have been published on stories produced by USA TODAY's newsroom:

December 2021

Tech: A previous version of this story misstated the distance the Webb telescope will travel. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/01/01/james-webb-telescope-its-way-talking-tech-podcast/9066873002/

News: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a criminal defense attorney based in Lake Wales, Florida. Her name is Sara Jones. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/12/27/police-reform-code-of-silence-solutions/8845611002/

Opinion: A headline misstated the number of years Kendrick Fulton spent Christmas away from his mother. It has been updated. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2021/12/24/first-christmas-mom-clemency/8915529002/?gnt-cfr=1

Sports: Bills wide receiver Cole Beasley was placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list. He has said he's unvaccinated, which means he'll be out 10 days and miss Sunday's key game against the Patriots. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1473435703749062661

Sports: A previous headline on this story incorrectly referenced the manner of Vincent Jackson's death, which has not yet been announced by the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2021/12/16/vincent-jackson-former-nfl-wide-receiver-bucs-chargers-cte/8922090002/

Sports: A story in the Dec. 1 edition on Asia Durr returning to the WNBA after suffering from long-term effects of COVID-19 misstated her status for the 2022 season. She is under contract to the New York Liberty. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/wnba/2021/12/14/asia-durr-looking-forward-return-wnba-after-bout-long-covid/8892583002/

News: An earlier version of this story misstated the first name of Army Col. Gregory Fix. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/12/08/us-troops-wounded-iran-al-asad-attack-get-purple-hearts/6434992001/

Sports: A story on Tony Oliva and Minnie Minoso elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in the Dec. 7 edition misspelled the surname of Chicago Cubs star third baseman Ron Santo.

Sports: A previous version of this story incorrectly characterized the journey bobsledder Kaillie Humphries took to get to Germany in time for competition. She flew out of San Diego. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/nancy-armour/2021/12/06/bobsledder-kaillie-humphries-wins-first-two-races-us-citizen/6407020001/

Money: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated a fast-food chain was experiencing a chicken tenders shortage. The story has been updated to remove that reference. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2021/12/05/chicken-tender-shortage-why-its-happening-and-what-else-you-can-eat/8879604002/

News: The previous video incorrectly identified the names of the parents of shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2021/12/04/michigan-school-shooting-suspect-parents-arrested-after-manhunt/8867410002/

Sports: In a previous version of this story, a photo incorrectly identified Virginia football coach Bronco Mendenhall. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/acc/2021/12/02/bronco-mendenhall-virginia-college-football-coach-stepping-down/8844667002/

November 2021

Entertainment: A previous version of this story incorrectly characterized how BTS’ remarks were translated for fans. The band was joined by a professional translator. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/11/29/bts-la-concert-megan-thee-stallion-crashes-stage-butter-remix/8790082002/

News: A previous version of this article misstated the historic nature of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan's position. Lisa Jackson was the EPA’s first African American administrator from 2009 to 2013, Regan is the second.

News: This story originally said the majority of people at the Judge Rotenberg Center were Black and Latino boys and men. But it should have said they account for 33% of people there. The article also stated that students could be put in “four-point” restraints or shocked for minor infractions; the facility says it does not use “four-point” restraints and such shocks are currently used only as a last resort. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/02/electric-shock-school-senators-lean-fda-ban-devices/6235461001/

News: A front page story Friday about misconduct in the National Guard incorrectly stated when The Washington Post reported on cronyism in the New Jersey National Guard. It was in 2015. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/25/national-guard-scandals-by-state/6093566001/

News: A Nov. 24 story on page 1A about the prevalence of “vehicle ramming” incidents misspelled the name of Bruce Butterworth of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University.

Sports: In a story on the Nov. 23 Page 1C, a photo incorrectly identified the late Dallas Cowboys strength and conditioning coordinator, Markus Paul.

News: The Associated Press is replacing the story about the sale of a Miami mansion once owned by Madonna with this piece, which looks at how the tale of a German shepherd and a trust has long been used as a publicity stunt to dupe reporters. The AP fell for parts of the stunt and is removing the erroneous story. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/20/millionaire-pooch-selling-miami-villa-once-owned-madonna/8699633002/

News: A previous version of this story misstated when Social Security was passed into law and Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the name of the organization that did the study. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/13/republicans-believe-america-has-changed-for-worse-since-fifties-survey/6389895001/

News: An earlier version of this story misstated when the department called in an “EMS Task Force.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/09/astroworld-disaster-unfolded-private-medics-and-city-fire-lost-touch/6349933001/?gnt-cfr=1

Entertainment: An earlier version of this story listed an incorrect name for Edwin Galea. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/11/09/crowd-safety-and-security-heart-astroworld-investigation-travis-scott-houston/6345460001/

News: A previous version of this story misidentified Michelle Wu's background. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/11/02/2021-election-live-updates-virginia-nj-governors/6238229001/

Opinion: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the author's great-grandmother's age when she died. She was 25. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/11/01/supreme-court-texas-abortion-endanger-women/6235379001/

News: This story originally misstated the number of plaintiffs. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/28/white-supremacists-face-civil-trial-unite-right-violence/6180634001/

News: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Lt. Gen. Dana Atkins. The general is a man. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/29/women-military-pay-more-keep-their-uniforms-up-date/8574208002/

Sports: Previous versions of these columns were edited to remove the team name after it had been originally published. Due to an editing change, the team name was inserted without the author’s knowledge. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2021/10/24/braves-freddie-freeman-reaches-world-series-breaves/6165300001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2021/10/20/braves-beat-dodgers-nlcs-game-4-eddie-rosario/6114024001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2021/10/17/braves-beat-dodgers-nlcs-austin-riley/8495229002/

October 2021

News: An Oct. 28 story on Page 1A included an incorrect number of children who received the active Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in clinical trials. About 3,500 got the vaccine; 1,500 received a placebo. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/10/27/covid-vaccines-kids-5-11-what-we-know-dont-know/8554544002/

News: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of an amicus brief. The correct case is Bostock vs. Clayton County. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/10/27/lgbtq-students-these-us-colleges-worst-most-unsafe-attend/8542486002/

Entertainment: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated details about bullet casings from the incident. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/10/27/rust-shooting-santa-fe-sheriffs-alec-baldwin-live-round/8560736002/

Entertainment: A previous version of this video showed a tweet from Rosanna Arquette with a photo of a woman who was not Arquette. The video has been updated to show Arquette. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/entertainment/celebrities/2021/10/26/alec-baldwin-targeted-conservatives-after-fatal-rust-incident/8553039002/

Money: An earlier version of this story misstated the width of Amber Otto's computer monitors. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/10/25/housing-market-fatigue-has-homebuyers-putting-their-searches-hold/6107249001/

News: Princess Blanding is running as a member of the Liberation Party. A previous version of this story misstated her party identification. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/26/virginia-governors-race-mcauliffe-youngkin-dead-heat-poll-shows/6172824001/

Sports: A previous version of this story misstated the location of Suffern (New York) High School. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/lacrosse/2021/10/21/madie-nicpon-tufts-dies-20-accident/6120026001/

Sports: A previous version of this story misidentified the team that's second in the Atlantic division of the ACC. It is North Carolina State. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2021/10/21/college-football-picks-predictions-top-25-ncaa-games-week-8/8521027002/

Sports: A previous version of this story included an incorrect dateline. The game took place in Atlanta. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2021/10/23/braves-defeat-dodgers-return-world-series/6161051001/

Opinion: This column has been updated to correct the wording of the new Superman motto. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/10/21/superman-scraps-american-way/8505844002/

News: This story was updated Oct. 20 to correct the name of UCHealth, a nonprofit health care system based in Colorado. This does not affect the rating for this item. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/10/20/fact-check-hospital-requiring-covid-19-shot-transplant-patients/6036157001/

News: This story has been updated to reflect that a previous draft of the bill contained punishments of fine or detainment. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/10/18/china-law-would-punish-parents-for-kids-behavior/8510227002/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this report included a photo misidentified as Lili Bernard. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/10/14/bill-cosby-accuser-sues-alleged-1990-rape-atlantic-city-hotel/8459040002/

Sports: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the repayment terms of loans the Southeastern Conference obtained to fund a supplemental distribution to its members. Repayment to the lenders from the SEC currently is required to occur over two years – fiscal 2025 and 2026 – but the conference can request two one-year extensions, which would extend the period during which the conference would reduce planned distributions to all of the schools. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2021/10/13/power-five-public-school-athletic-programs-lost-billions-covid-pandemic/8433913002/

Twitter: A previous version of this video used imagery that does not align with USA TODAY’s standards. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1447890949758197765

News: An earlier version of this story used information from The Associated Press which incorrectly reported two earthquakes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/10/earthquakes-hawaii-tsunami-threat-geological-survey-threat/6085015001/

News: An earlier version of this newsletter incorrectly stated the number of flights canceled by Southwest Airlines. https://www.usatoday.com/story/nletter/2021/10/11/indigenous-peoples-day-southwest-airlines-nobel-prize-daily-briefing/6086834001/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this report incorrectly characterized how Pete Buttigieg and husband Chasten welcomed twins. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/10/08/pete-buttigieg-calls-parenting-twins-most-demanding-job/6059110001/

News: A previous version of this story misspelled the first name of Dr. Erroll Southers. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/07/31/biden-wants-openness-police-disciplinary-files-thats-hard-do/5422091001/

Entertainment: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the author of “Never Fall For Your Fiancée.” The author’s name is Virginia Heath. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/10/01/best-winter-rom-books-eight-perfect-hours-the-ex-hex-and-they-lived-happily-ever-after/8181751002/

News: This article has been revised by Kaiser Health News to correct an inaccuracy. Anthem has not created its own network of facilities. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/10/05/anthem-united-major-insurers-behind-payments-hospitals-covid/5997173001/

News: The Powerball number in Monday night's drawing was 15. A previous version of this story contained incorrect information. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/04/powerball-jackpot-would-8th-largest-history/5990557001/

Opinion: An earlier version of this column mischaracterized who ran in the 1968 California Democratic primary. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2021/10/03/rfk-murder-crime-devastated-nation-gov-must-deny-parole-kennedy-killer/5843300001/

News: This story was updated Oct. 1 to correct a reference to when South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its state capitol in 2015. This did not affect the rating for this claim. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/30/fact-check-local-naacp-chapters-want-stone-mountain-carvings-removed/5847370001/

September 2021

Sports: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported details of a story Eli Manning told about meeting Brett Favre. Manning, who was 17 at the time, said he left the bar because his friend wouldn't sneak in. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/media/2021/09/21/peyton-eli-manning-mnf-broadcast-viewership/5804732001/

Life: A Sept. 9 Life story about equity and inclusion on Broadway incorrectly described the parting of costume designer William Ivey Long and the musical “Diana.” Long and producers say the parting was mutual. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/2021/09/03/broadway-diversity-safety-inclusion-equity-activists-new-deal/5578162001/

News: An earlier version misspelled the last name of Joan Zitzelman. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/09/21/inside-one-womans-fight-integrate-higher-education-south/5611567001/

News: In the list of 9/11 victims' names that published Sept. 9 on Page 4D, Rodney Dickens' name was in the incorrect section. He was a passenger on Flight 77 and was killed when the plane hit the Pentagon. Also, the names of the Flight 93 passengers were erroneously listed twice.

Money: An earlier version of this story misstated which city serves as the capital of Alaska. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/09/14/unemployment-rate-cites-highest-rates-yuma-el-centro/5595292001/

News: A subheadline in this story has been updated to reflect that Aurora Fire Rescue illegally administered ketamine, according to the report. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/09/16/aurora-colorado-police-racially-biased-excessive-force-report-finds/8360938002/

Sports: A previous version of this story included a name and quote of a person who purported to be a student at Clemson and provided a pseudonym. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2021/09/16/clemson-fans-beg-tigers-fans-stop-paw-hand-gesture/8364863002/

Sports: An earlier version of this story misstated Sam Cunningham's status in 1970. He was classified as a sophomore. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2021/09/07/sam-cunningham-southern-cal-nfl-patriots-dies/5759603001/

Tech: An earlier version of this article reflected incorrect details provided about Verizon's wireless plan and misstated the AT&T pricing for iPhone 13. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2021/09/15/iphone-13-prices-best-apple-trade-deal-att-verizon-tmobile/8341445002/

News: A Sept. 15 story about the growth of multidisciplinary clinics to treat long-haul COVID-19 misstated Lisa O'Brien's relationship with Long Haul COVID Fighters. She founded support groups in several states.

Sports: A previous version of this story misstated Peyton Manning's Super Bowls. He has won two. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/seahawks/2021/09/13/ciara-met-gala-dress-russell-wilson-seahawks-jersey-number/8327284002/

News: This story has been updated to reflect that a shooting victim crashed a car into a commuter train, according to updated information from police. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/09/09/east-st-louis-shooting-suspects-crash-car-into-commuter-train/8266387002/

News: This story has been updated to reflect that Kentucky has reported 7,905 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began, through Tuesday. Two-thirds of those deaths have been in 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/09/07/us-cases-40-million-unemployment-labor-day-travel-updates/5748549001/

News: This story was updated Sept. 2 to note that President Joe Biden checked his watch multiple times at the dignified transfer event, including during the ceremony itself. The rating on this claim has been changed from partly false to missing context. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/01/fact-check-biden-checked-watch-after-ceremony-dover-air-force-base/5663427001/

News: The Department of Defense has corrected the spelling of Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, one of 13 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan on Aug. 26. Stories published on 1A and 3A Monday contained an incorrect spelling. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/29/joe-biden-meets-families-13-service-members-killed-kabul-bombing/5641896001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/27/us-service-members-killed-afghanistan-airport-attack-what-we-know/5623806001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/29/johanny-rosariopichardo-massachusetts-marine-killed-afghanistan/5639233001/?fbclid=IwAR3yJEaz-mKibzv8j0JnAiZdPsBJlrJ6pbQ3ge0vAM0mgozM1p2hRrvU1Nw https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1433094870357454853

Sports: A previous version of this story included a misidentified photo. A Mark Andrews photo is now attached. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/ravens/2021/09/06/mark-andrews-signs-four-year-contract-extension-baltimore-ravens/5749228001/

Entertainment: An article in the Sept. 1 Life section about how Hollywood is releasing films during the pandemic misstated the title of the new “Spider-Man” movie. The film is “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/08/26/cinemacon-hollywood-faces-theater-owners-over-streaming-releases/5597481001/

Social media: This post has been updated to correct the start of the Afghanistan War. https://www.facebook.com/13652355666/posts/10159692738175667

August 2021

Money: An earlier version of this story misidentified the Tesla driver. The Florida Highway Patrol report said the driver was a 26-year-old female. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2021/08/29/tesla-part-automated-drive-system-slams-into-police-car/5642789001/

News: This story was updated Aug. 25 to clarify that background checks are required at gun shows if the seller is a licensed gun dealer. This change does not affect the False rating of the claim. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/16/fact-check-new-texas-law-doesnt-change-gun-purchase-regulations/5542740001/

Social media: A previous tweet misspelled White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki's last name. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1430264723145216008

News: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated who would provide an update on evacuation efforts in Afghanistan on Aug. 25. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will provide the update. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/08/25/biden-afghanistan-remembering-aaliyah-national-parks-5-things-know-wednesday/5572238001/

News: This story originally mischaracterized the increase in armed protests. The number of armed protests increased from February to June; the proportion doubled. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/23/guns-protests-increase-likelihood-violence/8188602002/

Money: An earlier version of this article misreported the benefits amount paid to Jenna Dahlke, who said she went from getting $800 per month in benefits for her family to nothing. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/money/2021/08/17/benefit-pay-increase-stop-low-income-families-wisconsin/8154396002/

Sports: A previous version of this story misidentified Bill Freehan's health condition. He was battling dementia. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2021/08/19/bill-freehan-detroit-tigers-dies-alzheimers-disease/8193982002/

News: A previous version of this Instagram post labeled a region incorrectly. https://www.instagram.com/p/CSu9w1FNNkV/

News: An earlier version of this story misstated when the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis first wrote about the Memphis Police Department’s practice of not recording interrogations. It was in 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/08/11/memphis-false-confession-story-behind-bizarre-murder-case/8095997002/

News: An Aug. 17 story on Page 6A incorrectly described Fatima Goss Graves’ role with the National Women’s Law Center. She is its president and co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund that it administers.

News: Eagle Scout Wyatt Niemann's last name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/10/boy-scout-eagle-scout-earn-50-merit-badges-50-states/5553833001/

Sports: A headline on a story regarding Latinos in the NFL misstated Anthony Munoz's Hall of Fame status in some Aug. 6 editions. Munoz was inducted in 1998.

Sports: A previous version of this story misidentified Hakuho Sho's status. He is an active wrestler. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/08/07/sumo-olympic-sport-sports-future-looks-bright-after-tokyo-games/8029523002/

Money: An earlier version of this story misstated Shahil Shrestha’s home country, which is Nepal. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-estate/2021/08/09/remote-work-incentives-expand-smaller-cities-try-attract-talent/5478847001/

Sports: A story in the Aug. 9 edition misstated the country Emil Zatopek competed for in the 1952 Olympics. He was from Czechoslovakia. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/08/08/tokyo-olympic-track-field-athing-mu-sydney-mclaughlin/5530189001/

News: This story was updated based on new information received after publication from multiple sources. The rating on this file has been changed from False to True. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/04/fact-check-viral-image-altered-show-sexual-message-backpack/5461452001/?fbclid=IwAR3SFVVSp1vXLjYvO6lMTPEaz7WeFf8PXhYJSkuOD8z7AlD8DMZdAHkW3ZA

News: This story has been updated to fix House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's title. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/10/howard-liebengood-capitol-police-officer-dies-days-after-riot/6615758002/

News: The Associated Press has updated this story to remove an erroneous quote from Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/07/27/atlanta-spa-shooter-pleading-guilty-hopes-life-sentence/5384869001/

News: This story's headline has been updated to correct Sen. Susan Collins' comments on the Jan. 6 select committee. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/01/susan-collins-says-trump-shouldnt-testify-january-6-committee/5447261001/

July 2021

News: This story has been updated to clarify the number of COVID-19 vaccine shots administered in the U.S. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/07/30/delta-variant-new-cdc-data-why-masks-important-vaccinated-transmission/5427884001/

Sports: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the definitions of port and starboard. Port is the right side of the boat from the rower's perspective facing the stern and starboard is the left side. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/07/23/rowing-tokyo-olympics-seven-events/8070502002/

Sports: A story in the July 29 edition about the increase in the hiring of Black head coaches in the NBA misspelled the name of a San Antonio Spurs assistant coach. She is Becky Hammon. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2021/07/28/seven-hires-nba-nears-record-number-black-coaches/5374290001/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this report included an image misidentified as Dusty Hill. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/07/28/zz-top-bassist-dusty-hill-dead-72/5404890001/

Opinion: This column has been updated to reflect the timing and location of the fine for the Norwegian handball team. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/07/27/tokyo-olympics-german-gymnasts-unitards-why-not-hijabs/5385281001/

Tech: This story has been corrected to clarify the research will focus on how extremist groups raise funds. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/07/26/paypal-adl-collaborate-cutting-off-funding-hate-groups/8092628002/?Adsfa

Money: An earlier headline of this story misidentified the percentage of teenage workers in the U.S. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/07/25/work-shortage-teenagers-largest-segments-workforce/8086700002/

Money: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote to Michelle Lee, editor-in-chief of Allure, and has since been corrected. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2021/07/24/lipstick-makeup-sales-rise-target-ulta-kohls-sephora-covid-masks/7430171002/

Sports: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the location of Olympian Lee Kiefer's fencing club. She has trained with Bluegrass Fencers' Club in Lexington. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/07/25/lee-kiefer-makes-history-gold-womens-foil-tokyo-olympics/8085797002/

Money: This article has been updated to include relevant timing. The photos Troy Nicholas was seeking were taken in February 2020 and sent to him in July 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2021/07/22/jcpenney-photos-were-delayed-how-do-get-my-family-pictures/8045786002/ https://www.facebook.com/usatodaymoney/posts/4559893540701417 https://twitter.com/USATODAYmoney/status/1418616902994235394

Sports: In a previous version of this story, a photo misidentified Suni Lee. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/07/21/sunisa-lee-olympics-gymnastics-rising-star/7976840002/

News: This story has been corrected to show that the decision not to prosecute was made during the Trump administration. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/19/wilbur-ross-misled-congress-census-citizenship-question-watchdog/8017463002/

News: A July 12 story on Page 5A incorrectly stated which candidate President Donald Trump endorsed in a 2017 Alabama Senate primary. Trump endorsed Sen. Luther Strange over Rep. Mo Brooks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/11/how-much-does-trump-endorsement-help-gop-candidates/7880571002/

News: This story has been updated to reflect information provided by the Carl Sagan estate after this item initially published. The rating has been changed from False to Missing context. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/12/fact-check-quote-truth-misattributed-carl-sagan/7925859002/

News: A July 14 story on Page 2A incorrectly identified the title of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/13/michael-bender-describes-turmoil-chaos-trump-white-house-book/7948108002/

Sports: A previous version of this story misidentified Kahlil Watson's school. He went to Wake Forest (N.C.) High School. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/07/11/mlb-draft-pittsburgh-pirates-draft-louisville-catcher-henry-davis/7932887002/

News: An earlier version of this story misstated the Republican support for the proposal in the Senate. Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio. have co-sponsored the bill. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/09/joe-biden-wants-close-crack-powder-cocaine-sentencing-disparity/7842213002/

Politics: A previous version of this story mis-stated the timeline of the interactions between Newman and Greene. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/09/marjorie-taylor-greene-makes-transphobic-comments-fundraiser/7915979002/

June 2021

News: A photo caption on Page 1D on July 1 didn't make clear that "A Capitol Fourth" in Washington, D.C., was not a live event this year.

Social media: A previous tweet incorrectly described the events of a live video. Here is the updated version: https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1411715358218674180

Sports: An earlier version of this story listed the incorrect starting date for K-Zone. It launched on July 1, 2001. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nightengale/2021/07/04/buster-posey-brandon-crawford-san-francisco-giants/7853260002/

News: A Wednesday story on Page 1A about using DNA analysis to identify mass casualty victims misidentified the last name of the 1,642nd victim identified in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. He was Scott Michael Johnson. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/29/surfside-condo-collapse-dna-testing-could-key-identify-victims/7790521002/

News: This story has been updated to reflect when the National Institute of Standards and Technology was founded. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/28/miami-condo-collapse-update-missing-people-florida-building/5369756001/

News: This story was updated to correct an inaccurate statement attributed to Pakistan's foreign minister. Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the nation is shutting its border to refugees but did not make reference to the Taliban. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/06/27/after-us-leaves-afghanistan-pakistan-worry-taliban-take-over/5363611001/

Money: An earlier version of this story gave incorrect figures for the number of Americans working from home in May 2020 and May 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/06/25/return-work-labor-day-businesses-shift-mindset-employees/5310673001/

Money: A prior version of this video misspelled the name of Priyanka Chopra Jonas. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/money/2021/06/17/rebranding-victorias-secret-says-goodbye-its-angels/7732395002/

News: John Zaia, who directs the Center for Gene Therapy at City of Hope, is leading a trial of a COVID-19 vaccine for cancer patients, which was developed by colleagues there. Existing COVID-19 vaccines appear to be safe and provide about 80% protection for patients with inflammatory bowel disease. An article in the June 25 edition misstated Zaia’s role and the type of bowel condition.

News: A story on page 1D in the June 25 edition misspelled the name of Evelyn Minjares-Carrillo. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/06/25/common-app-hbcu-college-application-test-score-optional/5310479001/

News: This story was updated June 22 with a reworded claim that provides a more nuanced summary of the point made in the Facebook post being fact-checked here. Other references were updated for clarity. This does not change our rating for this post, which remains False. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/06/fact-check-post-misleads-effectiveness-j-j-covid-19-vaccine-older-adults/7466677002/

Sports: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the margin by which Ryan Crouser bested the previous world record. He beat the record by 10 inches. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/06/18/ryan-crouser-sets-world-record-mens-shot-put-us-olympic-trials/7751068002/

News: Earlier versions of these stories overestimated the number of undocumented immigrants affected by the bill discussed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/06/15/bidens-eu-meeting-california-reopening-5-things-know-tuesday/7688088002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/14/vp-kamala-harris-meet-daca-recipients-amid-immigration-uncertainty/7683960002/

News: An earlier version of this story overestimated the number of "Dreamers" who could be helped by the American Dream and Promise Act. There are are more than 3 million Dreamers among 11 million undocumented Americans. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/04/14/immigration-reform-dreamers-daca-recipients-hope-stay-us/7004644002/

Entertainment: A photo caption in a previous version of this report misidentified Amanda Kloots’ sister. Her name is Anna Kloots. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/entertainment/books/2021/06/14/amanda-kloots-gets-real-grief-shares-sign-late-nick-cordero/7597484002/

Travel: Germany’s entry requirements have been updated. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/05/19/covid-travel-restrictions-countries-fully-vaccinated-americans-europe/7284487002/

Travel: This story has been updated to reflect that though Celebrity Cruises has billed the Celebrity Millennium sailing as "fully vaccinated," some unvaccinated children are aboard the ship. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/cruises/2021/06/10/passengers-positive-covid-after-sailing-100-vaccinated-cruise/7645511002/

News: A prior version of this story misstated the name of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/10/southern-ocean-officially-recognized-fifth-ocean-national-geographic/7645212002/

Tech: A previous version of this story did not include AT&T's latest robocall-blocking security software, ActiveArmor. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/06/05/how-stop-robocalls-iphone-android-these-apps-fight-spammers/7542584002/

Life: A story on Page 1D on June 9 incorrectly stated why a patient needed emergency surgery. It was for inflamed fibroids.

Sports: A display quote accompanying a story on the Logan Paul-Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight in some editions June 4 misidentified the person who said it. The statement was made by Logan Paul.

Sports: A previous version of this story misidentified the Arizona Diamondbacks' home TV network. It is Bally Sports Arizona. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/06/02/diamondbacks-announcer-bob-brenly-mocks-marcus-stromans-durag/7503646002/

Sports: A photo caption included in a story on Michelle Wie West in the June edition misstated the number of golf tournaments she played in 2021 before the U.S. Women’s Open. She had played in three.

May 2021

News: A previous version of this video misstated that John Warner held a position in Virginia state government. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/2021/05/26/john-warner-former-virginia-senator-has-died-94-years-old/7448706002/

Sports: A column on Joe West in the May 25 edition misstated the record-setting number of games he was set to umpire in that day. It is 5,376.

News: This story has been updated to include a photo approved for use by the parent and student. A previous version included altered photos to conceal the identity of minors. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/05/23/florida-female-students-yearbook-photos-bartram-trail-high-school/5237009001/

News: This story has been updated to correct the poll's name as a Reuters/Ipsos poll. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/25/poll-quarter-americans-surveyed-say-trump-true-president/7426714002/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this report misidentified the Ford pickup truck seen in the series finale of "Last Man Standing." The vehicle is a 1956 F-100. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/05/21/last-man-standing-series-finale-recap-tim-allen-interview/5135396001/

News: A May 20 story on Page 3A contained an incorrect title for Ken Cooper. He is director of THT of New York, a New York state-certified firearms and security training academy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/05/19/andrew-brown-bodycam-video-police-civil-liberties-experts-weigh/5165158001/

Sports: The NHL playoff power rankings in the May 17 edition misstated the Minnesota Wild’s record against the Vegas Golden Knights this season. The Wild were 5-2-1 against the Knights, and one of the losses came in regulation. https://www.usatoday.com/restricted/?return=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fstory%2Fsports%2Fnhl%2F2021%2F05%2F14%2Fnhl-stanley-cup-playoffs-power-rankings%2F5016621001%2F

News: A story on Page 3A on May 18 incorrectly included Florida among the states that Joe Biden carried in the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump won Florida. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/05/15/target-joe-biden-donald-trump-gop-find-hard-hurt-his-image/5042821001/

News: A prior version of this story mischaracterized part of virologist Jesse Bloom's position. He said he can’t rule out the possibility the coronavirus was either a natural occurrence or accidentally released from a lab in China. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/05/14/covid-origins-chinese-lab-leak-animals-us-scientists-want-answers/5056422001/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this report misstated when tickets for new dates on Justin Bieber's world tour go on sale. They go on sale later this month. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2020/07/23/justin-bieber-reveals-rescheduled-world-tour-adds-new-show-dates-2021/5497174002/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this report incorrectly characterized a previous fatal shooting at the X-clusive nightclub in Shively, Kentucky, last August. Police say Ronnie T. O'Bannon is "a person of interest" in that case. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/05/11/jack-harlow-dj-charged-louisville-nightclub-shooting/5045655001/

News: This story was updated May 11 to clarify the nature of viral shedding connected to COVID-19 and the vaccines. COVID-19 vaccinated people don't shed viral particles from the vaccine, be they live virus or spike proteins. The update does not affect the "false" rating. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/07/fact-check-covid-19-vaccinated-people-dont-shed-virus/4971413001/

Social media: A previous tweet misstated the origin of the confrontations in Gaza. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1391897178038095874

News: A May 7 story on Page 1A incorrectly identified the regional locations of Wake Island and Hawaii. The islands are in the North Pacific. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/05/06/trump-navy-secretary-kenneth-braithwaite-spent-2-3-million-travel/4860333001/

News: This article has been updated to correct information provided by the Biden administration related to preschool in Missouri and child poverty in Arizona. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/06/biden-using-state-specific-data-sell-child-care-education-plan/4956903001/

News: This article was updated May 5 to detail new CDC guidelines and how previous restrictions on gatherings were set on a state level, not federally. The rating was changed from "False" to "Missing context." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/04/28/fact-check-biden-didnt-say-july-fourth-celebrations-canceled/4854599001/

April 2021

Travel: An earlier version of this story misstated from where travel will be restricted. President Joe Biden's administration plans to restrict travel from India to the United States. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/04/30/india-travel-us-restrict-flights-india-due-covid-19-surge/4892115001/

News: This article has been update to reflect and link to Arizona's 2020 election data. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/02/cindy-mccain-arizona-2020-election-audit-ludicrous/4915508001/

Travel: A previous version of this story incorrectly characterized a study of homelessness at airports. The $400,000 study is being conducted by the Transportation Research Board. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/04/18/covid-travel-and-stress-airports-step-up-mental-health-assistance/7239029002/

News: This story has been updated to reflect that additional charges were brought against the former deputy in January 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/27/accused-drug-planting-deputy-slapped-two-dozen-new-charges/4852722001/

Social media: A previous tweet of this quote misidentified the actress. https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1386504898741735427

News: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referenced the legality of machine guns in the United States. Machine guns registered with the ATF before 1986 can still be bought and sold with government approval. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/04/22/fact-check-post-missing-context-ar-15-rifles-and-mass-shootings/7039204002/

News: Elvis Presley received a polio vaccine in 1956 before performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” An April 20 article on Page 1A contained incorrect information. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/health/2021/04/19/covid-vaccine-tracker-available-widely-hesitancy/7187382002/

News: An April 14 graphic on Page 2A, comparing a Taser X26P and a Glock 17 handgun, included incorrect weights. The Taser with cartridge and battery is 1.74 pounds. The loaded Glock is 2.02 pounds. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/04/14/daunte-wright-shooting-brooklyn-center-minnesota-taser-accidental-discharge-firearm-mistake/7201753002/

News: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the name and age of 50-year-old Jasvinder Kaur based on information provided by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/16/deadly-indianapolis-fedex-shooting-what-we-know-suspect-victims/7250410002/

News: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the FedEx facility where the shooting took place on Thursday night. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/15/fedex-shooting-indianapolis-international-airport-police/7249620002/

Sports: A previous version of this story mischaracterized new revenue generated since Deion Sanders arrived at Jackson State. The school’s athletic department has generated the equivalency of $185 million in advertising and exposure, a university spokeswoman said. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/columnist/bell/2021/04/17/deion-sanders-star-power-paying-off-jackson-state-football/7266362002/

Social media: An earlier version of this social card contained an error based on information provided by the Indianapolis police. https://www.instagram.com/p/CNx4fxisroI/ https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10159375864285667 https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1383507602336718853

News: An earlier version of The Short List misidentified the race of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/04/15/adam-toledo-video-derek-chauvin-russian-sanctions-kim-potter-court-its-thursdays-news/7237902002/

News: An earlier version of this story misreported the placement of Derek Chauvin's hands as he kneeled on George Floyd. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/29/george-floyd-video-chauvin-trial-jurors-watch-9-minute-cellphone-video-his-death/7046237002/

Life: The author of a review of Fox News' "Gutfeld!" was misidentified on April 14. Bill Keveney wrote the review.

Opinion: A prior version of this column misstated where former police officer Derek Chauvin's hand was. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/04/13/how-view-george-floyds-drug-addiction-column/7199523002/

News: A prior version of this story misstated the name of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/04/13/us-navy-marines-white-supremacy-discharged/4566463001/

Travel: An earlier version of this story listed an incorrect location for The Grove Resort & Water Park, which is in Winter Garden, Florida. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/hotels/2021/04/11/floridas-best-water-parks-margaritaville-tradewinds-grove/7160444002/

News: This story was updated to reflect that Brazil was the second nation to have 4,000 COVID-19 deaths in a single day. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/04/07/brazil-covid-19-deaths-exceed-4-000-daily-variant-rages/7125324002/

News: A story on Page 3D on April 8 incorrectly described the experience of Lindsay Fox, who worked in an emergency room in Newark, New Jersey. She saw as many as 100 COVID-19 positive patients in a shift, and a refrigerated truck full of dead bodies. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/07/hillsboro-new-mexico-covid-19-vaccine-community-comes-together/7121695002/

Sports: An earlier version of this story included a UNLV opponent and score from a previous season. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/sports/ncaab/2021/04/03/final-four-how-perfect-teams-have-fared-tournament-since-1976/4834970001/

Sports: This story has been updated to correct the age of UNC Greensboro coach Wes Miller. He is 38. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2021/04/01/north-carolina-basketball-tar-heels-roy-williams-coach-candidates/4836387001/

Entertainment: A prior version of this video misidentified the cause of the heart attack of rapper DM. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/entertainment/music/2021/04/04/dmx-hospital-after-suffering-heart-attack/7082763002/

Sports: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the years Jordan Burroughs won world titles. He won in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/04/03/olympic-wrestler-jordan-burroughs-fails-make-us-team-tokyo/7080854002/

March 2021

Sports: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Shaka Smart's record as the men's basketball coach at Texas. He was 109-86. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2021/03/26/shaka-smart-marquette-basketball-coach/7013415002/

News: Since December, the U.S. has bought 200 million more doses each of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. The Trump administration ordered 100 million each in December, and the Biden administration another 100 million each in February. An article in the March 26 edition contained incorrect information.

Sports: A story about Jerry Jones and the National Medal of Honor Museum and Leadership Institute in the March 25 edition incorrectly stated the number of years that have passed since the first Medal of Honor was bestowed. It has been 158 years. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2021/03/25/cowboys-jerry-jones-national-medal-honor-museum-giving-20-million/6986461002/

News: This story has been updated to correct the name of the school where F. King Alexander was president prior to his tenure at LSU. He worked at California State University, Long Beach. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2021/03/23/oregon-state-university-president-alexander-resigns-amid-lsu-scandal/6965847002/

News: This story has been updated to reflect White House press secretary Jen Psaki's mention on Wednesday of potential executive actions related to gun control. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/24/gun-control-where-president-biden-stands-legislation-executive-orders/6989667002/

News: A prior version misstated time of police arrival and reported shooting of officer in Boulder, Colorado. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/03/23/boulder-shootings-10-killed-suspect-surrenders/6963259002/

News: An earlier version of this story misspelled Tralona Bartkowiak's first name. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/23/boulder-shooting-victims-colorado-identified-eric-talley/6964265002/

News: Marty Walsh is the first union member to head the Department of Labor in nearly 50 years. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2021/03/05/tracking-the-confirmations-of-bidens-cabinet-members/4557215001/

News: An earlier version of this story misspelled Thao Nguyen's name and where she resided during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/03/20/covid-19-college-student-newspapers-coronavirus/4503367001/

News: We clarified the Biden administration's timeline for its goal of 100 million doses in the first section of this article on March 19. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2021/03/12/when-will-everyone-be-vaccinated-for-covid-19-when-will-we-reach-us-herd-immunity-projection/6840512002/

Travel: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized California Attractions and Parks Association’s recommendations to mitigate the effects of shouting on theme park rides. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/03/16/covid-and-theme-parks-try-not-scream-rides-group-advises/4720336001/

Sports: A story on the Drew family and the NCAA Tournament in the March 17 edition misstated the year Bryce Drew hit The Shot for Valparaiso. It was 1998. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2021/03/15/scott-drew-bryce-drew-baylor-grand-canyon-ncaa-tournament/4697397001/

Social media: Previous posts incorrectly stated the new tax filing deadline date. The Internal Revenue Service has pushed the deadline to May 17. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/posts/10159299124870667 https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1372334587192471553

News: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is the first Native American to serve as a presidential Cabinet secretary. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/15/deb-haaland-confirmed-becomes-first-native-american-cabinet/4700097001/

Sports: A previous version of this story misstated North Carolina's last NCAA Tournament appearance. The Tar Heels last appeared in the tournament in 2019. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2021/03/14/march-madness-ncaa-tournament-bracket-analysis-south-region/4678604001/

News: A story that ran in Jan. 11 editions incorrectly quoted President Donald Trump during a conversation with a Georgia official based on incorrect information provided to USA TODAY. A subsequent recording of the call published by The Wall Street Journal shows Trump asked the official to look for "dishonesty." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/09/trump-phone-call-pressured-georgia-election-investigator/6610212002/

Travel: A previous version of this photo gallery had incorrect information about the height of Vermont's Decker Towers. The Burlington building is 11 floors and 124 feet tall. https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/travel/news/2021/03/11/tallest-building-in-every-state/115502164/

News: Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., is a co-sponsor of the bill to extend the application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/12/bipartisan-group-lawmakers-scramble-extend-payroll-protection-program/4665435001/

Sports: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the announcer who made racist comments during a girls high school basketball game between Norman (Oklahoma) and Midwest City. The announcer was Matt Rowan. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/03/12/announcer-directs-racist-comments-toward-norman-girls-basketball-kneeling-during-national-anthem/4666770001/

Sports: The location of the LPGA Tour's Drive On Championship in the tournament scores was misidentified in the March 8 and March 9 editions. It was held in Ocala, Florida.

Sports: A photo caption in the March 1 edition accompanying an LPGA story misidentified the Korda sister celebrating with tournament winner Nelly Korda. The sibling was Jessica Korda.

Social media: A previous version of this graphic underrepresented the number of COVID-19 vaccines delivered. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/photos/10159261339295667 https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1366927557090770945 https://www.instagram.com/p/CL8E3hiLt3H/

News: An earlier version of this story from The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the shooting victim had died. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/01/arkansas-school-shooting-student-killed-pine-bluff/6878759002/

Money: This story has been updated to reflect that this is the first time Reese's has offered a peanut butter cup without chocolate. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/03/02/reeses-peanut-butter-cups-without-chocolate-back-hershey-company/6884001002/

February 2021

News: A Feb. 24 photo on Page 1A showed a COVID-19 mobile testing clinic by the Community-University Health Care Center in Minneapolis in September. The caption incorrectly described the type of clinic.

News: This story has been updated to reflect the correct number of terrorists involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks who entered the U.S. on a student visa; it was only one. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/20/dhs-ice-sued-over-international-students-enter-us/4493742001/

News: This story has been updated to correct the years that Newsmax and OANN launched. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/21/paleologos-poll-newsmax-and-oann-out-foxing-fox/4533848001/

Sports: A previous tweet incorrectly identified the team for which David Ayres played. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1363884866618732545

News: A Page 1A story on Feb. 15 incorrectly described Sen. Bernie Sanders’ political affiliation. He is a registered independent who caucuses with Democrats.

Money: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the online brokerage firms that restricted the buying and selling of stocks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/02/18/gamestop-hearing-robinhood-reddit-ceos-testify-before-congress/6770118002/

Sports: A previous version of this story misstated Garrett Reid’s age when he passed away. He was 29. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/super-bowl/2021/02/07/britt-reid-son-chiefs-coach-andy-reid-miss-super-bowl-2021/4425667001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/chiefs/2021/02/11/britt-reid-no-longer-employed-chiefs-reports-nfl-investigating/6721965002/

Sports: A story on Jordan Spieth in some Feb. 11 editions misstated his third-round score in the Phoenix Open. He shot 10-under 61.

News: Some Feb. 10 editions misidentified the political affiliation of Kevin Madden, an independent political strategist and former adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, in a story on Page 1A.

Sports: A story on NASCAR Cup Series driver Denny Hamlin in Tuesday’s edition misstated his car number. He drives the No. 11 car. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ftw/2021/02/08/nascar-denny-hamlin-seeks-daytona-500-winning-history/115441624/

News: A previous version of this story gave the incorrect state for Rep. Rosa DeLauro. DeLauro represents Connecticut’s 3rd District. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/08/covid-19-relief-democrats-propose-3-600-per-child-tax-credit/4434504001/

Sports: A story in the Feb. 5 edition about fans who have been to every Super Bowl misstated the Super Bowl in which Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith coached against each other. It was Super Bowl 41. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2021/02/02/super-bowl-2021-five-fans-attend-55th-consecutive-game/6657265002/

News: The Missouri item in the 50 States roundup of the Feb. 4 edition included an incorrect city. Kansas City's mayor, Quinton Lucas, is seeking to ensure that Black and Hispanic residents have equal opportunities to get COVID-19 vaccinations.

Sports: A previous version of this story mischaracterized the nature of Francesca Jones' scholarship with the LTA. The support she receives benefits Jones and her current coaching team. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2021/02/08/australian-open-debut-francesca-jones/4420665001/

Entertainment: A previous version of this story misidentified a 2018 film titled “The Nightingale.” The adaptation of Kristin Hannah's book of the same name has not yet been released. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/02/02/the-four-winds-review-kristin-hannahs-epic-dust-bowl-era-novel/4345865001/

Sports: An earlier version of this story included a photo that was not of Martellus Bennett. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/mike-freeman/2021/02/04/martellus-bennett-shares-dark-important-thoughts-nfl-life/4370498001/

Entertainment: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of Fox News' segment debunking election-fraud claims involving Dominion Voting Systems machines. The network aired its segment about Dominion in November, before the company wrote a letter raising the prospect of legal action against those making or providing a platform for what it claims are defamatory statements. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/02/02/newsmax-anchor-walks-out-after-my-pillow-ceo-mike-lindell-rant/4363781001/

Travel: A federal magistrate has not granted permission for Jenny Cudd to leave the country, as indicated in a previous version of this story. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/02/02/capitol-rioter-wants-go-mexican-vacation-and-court-lets-her/4358889001/

January 2021

Entertainment: A previous version of this report incorrectly characterized the status of Rod Stewart’s plea deal. Defense lawyers say the details of the deal have been worked out, and prosecutors confirm negotiations are ongoing. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/01/29/rod-stewart-avoids-trial-reaches-plea-deal-florida-altercation/4316404001/

News: This story has been updated to reflect a change to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' official shade of red. The rating has been changed to Missing Context. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/27/fact-check-super-bowl-lv-chiefs-bucs-logos-same-primary-pantone-color/4276067001/

Travel: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized President Joe Biden’s action on rescinding the Muslim travel ban. It was a presidential proclamation. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/01/21/biden-executive-order-ends-muslim-travel-ban-donald-trump/4240420001/

News: This story has been updated to clarify that the satirical event flyer was emailed to a law student listserv on Jan. 25. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/27/fact-check-flyer-calling-capitol-riot-stanford-event-satire/4267449001/

Sports: An earlier version of this story misstated the team for which Leslie Frazier works. He is the defensive coordinator for the Buffalo Bills. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/texans/2021/01/27/houston-texans-hire-ravens-assistant-david-culley-head-coach/4288346001/

Tech: A prior version of this story misspelled Mei of “Turning Red.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/reviewedcom/2021/01/11/here-all-new-pixar-projects-coming-disney-plus/6625409002/

Sports: Earlier tweets shared reporting about the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others. It was our intent to share new reporting around the day's timeline. Our tweets came with no warning or context. We took down those tweets and regret the insensitivity of the content. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1354133575050944512

Sports: A previous version of the headline and this story misstated the Mets offer to Trevor Bauer. The offer would approach Gerrit Cole's $36 million average value on his nine-year, $324 million contract signed a year ago. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/mets/2021/01/26/trevor-bauer-mets-offer-contract/4258036001/

Video: An earlier version of this video misstated the terms of Biden's executive order, which formalizes an international COVID-19 travel testing requirement and recommends international travelers quarantine upon arrival in the U.S. https://www.usatoday.com/videos/travel/news/2021/01/25/president-biden-expected-reinstate-covid-19-travel-restrictions/6698470002/

Travel: An earlier version of this story misstated the terms of one of President Joe Biden’s executive orders, which formalizes an international COVID-19 travel testing requirement and recommends international travelers quarantine upon arrival in the U.S. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/01/24/joe-biden-covid-19-travel-restrictions-non-us-travelers/6695664002/

Sports: A column in the Jan. 18 editions about Colin Kaepernick and Martin Luther King Jr. referred to support that King showed Tommie Smith and John Carlos. It should have noted that according to news reports, Carlos met with King in early 1968 to discuss nonviolent protest. King was assassinated before the Olympics were held in Mexico City.

News: A prior version of this story misstated which company acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/16/nasa-fires-moon-rocket-test-but-engines-shut-down-early/4193701001/

News: This version corrects time of C-Span report of rioters inside Statuary Hall to 2:33. It also corrects the content of a Dec. 19 tweet from the president: "Be there, will be wild!" https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/01/06/dc-protests-capitol-riot-trump-supporters-electoral-college-stolen-election/6568305002/

News: A previous version of the headline misstated the number of known COVID-19 cases among primates. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/12/covid-gorillas-test-positive-san-diego-zoo-safari-park-california/6635869002/

Instagram: Federal authorities said Friday that there is "no direct evidence of kill and capture teams" among the Capitol rioters, walking back claims outlined in court documents that attackers sought to apprehend and "assassinate elected officials." This post has been updated to clarify the allegation. https://www.instagram.com/p/CKFFJC8srZt/

News: Due to a change in CDC reporting, this page temporarily displayed the number of total vaccine doses administered as a share of population, instead of the number of first doses administered. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2021/01/14/covid-vaccine-distribution-by-state-how-many-covid-vaccines-have-been-given-in-us-how-many-people/6599531002/

Money: A story in some Jan. 12 editions misidentified the company targeted for acquisition by Staples. The target company is Office Depot.

News: Data language on this page has been updated. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/11/10/covid-updates-iowa-schools-coronavirus-school-districts/5893590002/

Golfweek: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Phil Mickelson won the event at Tucson National. https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2021/01/13/phil-mickelson-amateur-pga-tour-win-1991/

News: In stories that ran Jan. 13 on 4A and 1D, the status of a Capitol Police officer was incorrect. No Capitol Police officers had been arrested. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, corrected his statement. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/01/13/capitol-riot-law-enforcement-failure-analysis/6601142002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/12/2-capitol-police-suspended-10-under-investigation-after-capitol-riot/6639735002/

News: An earlier version of this article listed the wrong state for Rocky Mount, Virginia. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/01/10/capitol-riot-live-updates-online-planning-more-arrests-made-videos/6614783002/

News: This version corrects time of C-Span report of rioters inside Statuary Hall to 2:33. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/01/06/dc-protests-capitol-riot-trump-supporters-electoral-college-stolen-election/6568305002/

News: A story on 1D in print editions on Jan. 6 misspelled the last name of Denison University student Davis Kleen. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/01/04/colleges-offer-classes-covid-prompts-longer-winter-break/4126710001/

News: In a previous version of this story, Brad Rukstales' residence was misstated. He lives in Illinois. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/01/07/capitol-mob-drew-trump-fans-qanon-shaman-fireman-jake-angeli-arrest/6585339002/

Travel: A Jan. 11 story on Page 6D about crowded Brazilian beaches amid the coronavirus pandemic had an incorrect byline. Mauricio Savarese and Diane Jeantet of The Associated Press reported and wrote the story. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/01/08/brazilians-packed-beaches-over-holidays-covid-deaths-hit-200-000/6592970002/

Sports: A previous version of this story included incorrect information about the first female to work in a CBS broadcast booth for an NFL game. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2021/01/10/nfl-playoff-game-nickelodeon-features-new-orleans-saints-vs-bears/6608939002/

Money: An earlier version of this story misidentified UPS as the service delaying one company's deliveries. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/01/02/small-businesses-holiday-shipping-deals-usps-fedex-ups/4087597001/

Entertainment: Tanya Roberts, who starred in the 1985 James Bond film "A View to A Kill," as well as classic TV series "Charlie's Angels" and "That '70s Show," has been hospitalized, according to her publicist Mike Pingel, who had incorrectly confirmed the actress' death Sunday. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/01/03/tanya-roberts-dies-bond-charlies-angels-70-s-show-star/4123788001/

News: This Facebook post has been edited to remove language that does not meet our standards. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday

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